There was a sign over the counter saying that if you could cat two Yellow Sub Nightmares, you ate free; below that, in parentheses, the codicil IF YOU PUKE YOU PAY had been added.
Ordinarily there was nothing Vic Trenton would have liked better than one of the Yellow Sub's meatball heroes, but he suspected he would get nothing from today's but a really good case of acid burn.
'Looks like we're going to lose the ball, doesn't it?' Vic said to the other man, who was regarding a Danish ham with a marked lack of enthusiasm. The other man was Roger Breakstone, and when he looked at food without enthusiasm, you knew that some sort of cataclysm was at hand. Roger weighed two hundred and seventy pounds and had no lap when he sat down. Once, when the two of them had been in bed with a kids-at-camp case of the giggles, Donna had told Vic she thought Roger's tap had been shot off in Vietnam.
'It looks piss-poor,' Roger admitted. 'It looks so fucking piss-poor you wouldn't believe it, Victor old buddy.'
'You really think making this trip will solve anything?'
'Maybe not,' Roger said, 'but we're going to lose the Sharp account for sure if we don't go. Maybe we can salvage something. Work our way back in.' He bit into his sandwich.
'Closing up for ten days is going to hurt us.'
'You think we're not hurting now?'
'Sure, we're hurting. But we've got those Book Folks spots to shoot down at Kennebunk Beach
'Lisa can handle that.'
'I'm not entirely convinced that Lisa can handle her own love-life, let along the Book Folks spots,' Vic said. 'But even supposing she can handle it, the Yor Choice Blueberries series is still hanging fire
... Casco Bank and Trust ... and you're supposed to meet with the head honcho from the Main RealtorsÀssociation-'
'Huh-uh, that's yours.'
'Fuck you it's mine,' Vic said. 'I break up every time think of those red pants and white shoes. I kept wanting to look in the closet to see if I could find the guy a sandwich board.'
'It doesn't matter, and you know it doesn't. None of them bills a tenth of what Sharp bills. What else can I say? You know Sharp and the kid are going to want to talk to both of us. Do I book you a seat or not?'
The thought of ten days, five in Boston and five in New York, gave Vic a mild case of the cold sweats. He and Roger had both worked for the Ellison Agency in New York for six years. Vic now had a home in Castle Rock. Roger and Althea Breakstone lived in neighboring Bridgton, about fifteen miles away.
For Vic, it had been a case of never even wanting to look back. He felt he had never come fully alive, had never really known what he was for, until he and Donna moved to Maine. And now he had a
morbid sense that New York had only been waiting these last three years to get him in its clutches again. The plane would skid off the runway coming in and he engulfed in a roaring firecloud of hi-test jet fuel. Or there would be a crash on the Triborough Bridge, their Checker crushed into a bleeding yellow accordion. A mugger would use his gun instead of just waving it. A gas main would explode and he would be decapitated by a manhole cover flying through the air like a deadly ninetypound Frisbee. Something. If he went back, the city would kill him.
'Rog,' he said, putting down his meatball sandwich after one small bite, 'have you ever thought that it might not be the end of the world if we did lose the Sharp account?'
'The world will go on,' Roger said, pouring a Busch down the side of a pilsner glass, 'but will we? Me, I've got seventeen years left on a twenty-year mortgage and twin girls who have their hearts set on Bridgton Academy. You've got your own mortgage, your own kid, plus that old jag sportster that's going to half-buck you to death.'
'Yes, but the local economy -'
'The local economy sucks!' Roger exclaimed violently, and set his pilsner glass down with a bang.
A party of four at the next table, three in UMP tennis shirts and one wearing a faded T-shirt with the legend DARTH VADER IS
GAY written across the front, began to applaud.
Roger waved a hand at them impatiently and leaned toward Vic.
'We're not going to make it happen doing campaigns for Yor Choice Blueberries and the Main Realtors, and you know it. If we lose the Sharp account, we're going to go under without a ripple.
On the other hand, if we can keep even a piece of Sharp over the next two years, we'll be in line for some of the Department of Tourism budget, maybe even a crack at the state lottery if they don't mismanage it into oblivion by then. juicy pies, Vic. We can
wave so long to Sharp and their crappy cereals and there's happy endings all around. The big bad wolf has to go somewhere else to get his dinner; these little piggies are home free.'
'All contingent on us being able to save something,' Vic said,
'which is about as likely as the Cleveland Indians winning the World Series this fall.'
'I think we better try, buddy.'
Vic sat silent, looking at his congealing sandwich and thinking. It was totally unfair, but he could live with unfairness. What really hurt was the whole situation's crazed absurdity. It had blown up out of a dear sky like a killer tornado that lays a zigzagging trail of destruction and then disappears. He and Roger and Ad Worx itself were apt to be numbered among the fatalities no matter what they did; he could read it on Roger's round face, which had not looked so pallidly serious since he and Althea had lost their boy, Timothy, to the crib-death syndrome when the infant was only nine days old.
Three weeks after that happened, Roger had broken down and wept, his hands plastered to his fat face in a kind of terrible hopeless sorrow that had squeezed Vic's heart into his throat. That had been bad. But the incipient panic he saw in Roger's eyes now was bad, too.
Tornadoes blew out of nowhere in the advertising business from time to time. A bit outfit like the Ellison
Agency, which billed in the millions, could withstand them. A little one like Ad Worx just couldn't. They had been carrying one basket with a lot of little eggs in it and another basket with one big egg - the Sharp account - and it now remained to be seen whether the ' big egg had been lost entirely or if it could at least be scrambled. None of it had been their fault, but ad agencies make lovely whipping boys.
Vic and Roger had teamed naturally together ever since their first joint effort at the Ellison Agency, six years ago. Vic, tall and skinny and rather quiet, had formed the perfect yin for Roger Breakstone's fat, happy, and extroverted yang. They had clicked on a personal basis and on a professional one. That first assignment had been a minor one, to submit a magazine ad campaign for United Cerebral Palsy.
They had come up with a stark black-and-white ad that showed a small boy in huge, cruel leg braces standing in foul territory by the first-base line of a Little League ballfield. A New York Mets cap was perched on his head, and his expression - Roger had always maintained that it had been the boy's expression which sold the ad
- wasn't sad at all; it was simply dreamy. Almost happy, in fact.
The copy read
Simply: BILLY BELLAMY IS NEVER GOING TO BAT
