Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson

Author:Sloan Wilson [Wilson, Sloan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781568582467
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 1973-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

21

“HOW DID IT GO TODAY?” Betsy asked when she met him at the station that night.

“Fine,” Tom said, just as he always did. There’s no point in carrying your troubles home with you, somebody had said. You’re supposed to leave them in the office.

“There’s a man named Bugala coming to see you,” she said. “He’s a contractor. He spent all morning looking at the carriage house.”

“Bugala?” Tom asked. “He’s not one of the contractors I wrote to.”

“I don’t know about that,” she replied, “but he wants to see you. And he looks to me like a man who can get things done.”

When they got back to the house, Antonio Bugala was waiting, sitting in a battered Chevrolet pickup truck. He was stocky, dark-haired, and had once been told by a girl that he looked like pictures of Napoleon as a young man. This was a compliment he had never forgotten–he much preferred it to the dubious distinction conferred upon him by his nickname, which was “Buggy.” “Buggy” Bugala had been brought up in South Bay and for the past five years had been astonishing everyone by becoming almost as successful as he had always predicted. Already, at the age of twenty-eight, Bugala was a contractor with thirty-four men, including his father, on his payroll.

Now Bugala jumped out of his pickup truck and walked cockily over to Tom. “I’m Tony Bugala,” he said. “I hear you got some building and road work to be done.”

“How did you hear about it?” Tom asked.

Bugala glanced at him sharply. There’s no use in giving this guy a lesson in business, he thought. In point of fact, Bugala had cultivated the affections of a secretary in the office of the leading contractor in South Bay, and she obligingly told him about all jobs on which her boss was asked to bid, but obviously this was a trade secret which could not be divulged.

“Friend told me,” Bugala said honestly. “Said you wanted that old barn made into a house.”

“I just want some estimates,” Tom said. “I won’t be in a position to do anything about it for some time”

“I looked at it this morning,” Bugala said. “You can’t do much with it–it’s just a shell. You could build a house from the ground up for what it would cost you to make anything out of that place.”

“Are you sure?” Betsy asked.

Bugala thought, You figure I go around discouraging business for the fun of it? Aloud he said, “There’s no basement–just a dirt floor. That stone is only a façade, and the wood under it is rotten.”

Well, there goes what we thought would be a sure initial profit, Tom thought. He said, “If we divided this land into one-acre lots, how much would it cost to run in a road that would give access to all of them?”

“You figuring on doing that?”

“I’m just looking into it.”

“You got permission from the Zoning Board?”

“I haven’t even asked. I don’t have title to the place yet.”

“Your land go to that row of pines over there?”

“That’s right.

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