“No,” Skip said. “He’s out of school now, and married.”
This boy isn’t living down in Reno, Mr. Hagopian thought. He’s just ashamed to admit why he hasn’t been in. Skip shifted about from one foot to the other, obviously ill-at-ease. He obviously wanted to leave.
“What line of work are you in?” Fred said.
Skip said, “I’m a buyer.”
“What kind of buyer?”
“For C.B.B.,” he said.
“Television?” Mr. Hagopian said.
“For Consumers’ Buying Bureau,” Skip said.
“What’s that?”
Skip said, “Something like a department store. It’s a new place down on Highway 40, between Reno and Sparks.”
With a strange look on his face, Fred said, “I know what that is. Some guy was up here telling me about it.” To his father, he said, “It’s one of those discount houses.”
At first, the old man did not understand. And then he remembered what he had heard about discount houses. “Do you want to drive the retailers out of business?” he said loudly to Skip.
Skip, turning red, said, “It’s no different from a supermarket. It buys in volume and passes the savings on to the consumer. That’s how Henry Ford operated, producing in volume.”
“It’s not the American way,” Mr. Hagopian said.
“Sure it is,” Skip said. “It means a higher standard of living because it eliminates overhead and the middleman’s costs.”
Mr. Hagopian returned to the counter. To his son he said, “Mrs. de Rouge wants some more pain pills.” He held out the bottle, and Fred accepted it. “I told her before eight.”
He did not care to talk to Skip Stevens any further. Competing with Chinese and Japs was bad enough. To him, the big new discount houses seemed worse; they pretended to be American—they had neon signs and they advertised and they had parking lots, and unless you knew what they were they did look like supermarkets. He did not know who ran them. Nobody ever saw the owners of discount houses. In fact, he himself had never even seen a discount house.
“It doesn’t cut into your business,” Skip said, following after Fred as he wrapped Mrs. de Rouge’s package. “Nobody drives five hundred miles to shop, even for major items like furniture.”
Mr. Hagopian made out a tag while his son wrapped.
Skip said, “It’s only in big cities anyhow. This town isn’t large enough. Boise might be.”
Neither Fred nor his father said anything. Fred put on his coat, got the tag from his father, and left the drugstore.
The old man busied himself with sorting different articles that had been delivered during the day. Presently the door closed after Skip Stevens.
As he drove along the unlighted residential streets of Montario, over the gravel that served as pavement, Bruce Stevens thought about old Hagopian, whom he had encountered now and again all his life. Years ago, the old man had chased him away from the comic books and out the front door of the drugstore. For months Hagopian had simmered in silence as the children, scrunched down behind the shelf of mineral oil bottles, had read Tip Top Comics and King Comics and seldom if ever bought anything. Then he had made up his mind and gone at the first child who next put in an appearance. It had been Bruce Stevens; Skip Stevens in those days, because of his bright round freckled face and reddish hair. The old man still called him “Skip.” What a heck of a world, Bruce thought, as he watched the houses. I made him sore then, and he’s still sore. It’s a wonder he didn’t call the police when I bought the box of Trojans.
But the old man’s outrage toward the idea of him working for a discount house in Reno did not bother him, because he knew how the little retailers felt; they had felt that way when the first supermarkets had opened just after World War Two. And in some respects their animosity delighted him. It proved that people were beginning to buy from discount houses, or at least were beginning to be aware of them.
It’s the coming thing, he told himself once again. Another ten years and nobody’ll think to pick up razor blades one day and soap the next; they’ll shop for everything one day of the week, in a place where they can get any kind of thing there is, from phonograph records to autos.
But then it occurred to him that he hadn’t bought his package of contraceptives back in Reno, but here in a small drugstore, at full retail price. In fact he did not even know if the discount people for whom he worked stocked contraceptives.
And a magazine, too, he realized. To hide his actual intentions. Whenever he had bought contraceptives he felt embarrassed. The clerk behind the counter always gave him a bad time. Dropping the little metal tin so people would glance over to see. Or calling from the length of the store, “Which did you ask for, Trojans or—” whatever the other brand was. Sheiks or something. Since his nineteenth year, the first year he had started carrying contraceptives around with him, he had stuck to Trojans. That’s America, he said to himself. Buy by brand. Know your product.
His trip up from Reno was to end in Boise, but passing through his home town he had decided to stop off and perhaps drop in on a girl he had gone around with, the year before. He could easily get back on the road the next morning; Boise was only fifteen miles northeast, on US Highway 95, up from Nevada. Or, if things didn’t work out, he could continue on tonight.
He was twenty-four years old. He liked his job at C.B.B., which did not pay too much—about three hundred a month—but which gave him a chance to get out on the road in his ‘55 Merc, and to meet people and bargain with them, to snoop into different establishments with the keen inner urge for discovery. And he liked his boss, Ed von Scharf, who had a big black Ronald Colman mustache and who had been a sergeant in the Marine Corps in World War Two, when Bruce had been eight years old.
And he liked living by himself in an apartment in Reno, away from his parents and away from an essentially farming-town in a potato-growing state that had lettered on its highways: DON’T BE A GUBERIF, which meant “don’t be a firebug,” and which always infuriated him when he drove onto one of them. From Reno he could get easily over the Sierras into California, or the other direction to Salt Lake City for whatever that was worth. The air in Nevada was cleaner, lacking the heavy brackish fog that rolled into Montario carrying the flies that he had stepped on and inhaled all his life.
Now, on the hood, bumpers, fenders, and windshield of his car, hundreds of those same flies lay squashed and dead. They had fouled the radiator. Their thin hairy bodies dotted his field of vision and made the finding of Peg’s house that much harder.
At last he recognized it, by the wide lawn and porch and tree. There were lights on inside. And several cars were parked nearby.
When he had parked, and was stepping up onto the porch to ring the bell, he heard unmistakable sounds of music and people from inside the house. There goes that, he said to himself as he rang.
The door flew open. Peg recognized him, gasped, raised her hands and then slid aside and drew him into the house. “What a surprise! Of all people!”
In the living room a number of persons sat about with drinks, listening to the phonograph playing Johnny Ray records. Three or four men and as many women.
“I guess I should have phoned,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You know you’re welcome,” Her face sparkled, small and round and smooth. She had on an orange blouse and a dark skirt, and her hair was fluffed up and soft-looking. To him, she seemed quite pretty, and he longed to kiss her. But several of the people had craned their necks, smiling tentatively in welcome, so he did not.
“Did you just drive in right now?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I got on the road about seven this morning. Made good time. Around seventy, mostly.”