Paper Moon by Jow David Brown

Author:Jow David Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub

TEN

I wish everybody in the world could be rich, at least for a little while. Oh, I’m not so dumb that I think lots of money necessarily makes folks either happier or better. All the same, there’s no doubt in my mind at all that spreading some money around would cure more human ills and miseries than penicillin. And what I do know is that when you have more money than you know what to do with, the world becomes a brighter, simpler place. I can’t explain this exactly, but it sure isn’t just the money. Money isn’t important at all when you don’t need it. Maybe it’s like the old-timey saying goes—heavy purse, light heart.

Long Boy and I didn’t waste any time in getting rich. When we left Pulaski on Saturday afternoon, neither of us thought we would start doing business with the books of receipts before Monday. But when we got to Lawrenceburg, about twenty miles away, we registered at a hotel and I sat down right away and began practicing copying John Halstead’s neat, rounded handwriting from the five genuine receipts we had. After about thirty minutes I had it down so pat that Long Boy looked at it and gave a low whistle. “It’s pert near perfect,” he said. “Why don’t we give it a try?”

“Now?” I asked.

He grinned. “Why not? Ever’thing stays open late on Saturday.”

He went down to the drugstore and bought a whole box of indelible pencils for me and a heavy marking pencil for himself. He marked the green tags while I copied out ten certificates. We made up samples and found a stocky, cheerful cotton buyer who had an office upstairs over a grain store. He tested our samples and offered us a nickel a pound. A quiet, gray-haired lady who worked in the office made us out a check for $250.96.

When we got back in the truck, we grinned at each other for a minute, and Long Boy drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Well, it’s still sort of ear…he began.

I looked at him and laughed. “Let’s!” I said.

We hurried back to the hotel and made up ten more samples. This time we found a grumpy old buyer, who had his bottom lip crammed full of snuff, in an office near the railroad station. He was an old crook and didn’t offer us but four cents a pound. Long Boy got him up to four and a half and took it. We came away with a check for $224.19.

Well—would you believe it?—we tried it one more time before we called it a day. It was almost nine o’clock when we sold our third batch of ten samples to a buyer who had his office right off the main street. I guess we might could have hit a couple more buyers if we hadn’t been tired. At least, when we called it a day, there were farmers still walking around carrying samples. Our profit for the afternoon was $721.95.

On Sunday

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