Summer 1992 Exclusions in the Policy My father got killed two times in the war. He was an eighteen-year- old bombardier and gunner with one of the B-24 squadrons based outside London, and the first telegram said his plane had gone down over France in January of 1945. There were no survivors. Then the second telegram had him dead on a different mission somewhere in Germany four months later. This worked a double hardship on my grandparents. They''d been torn up enough the first time my father died, and when they heard about the second time they didn''t know how to take it. Neither did anybody else, for that matter. The local paper had already done a big spread on him: Jimmy Vann Killed in Action.
I''ve seen the clipping. His teachers all said what a polite student he''d been, his football coach praised him for his cheerful attitude on the field, and Flaps Pittenturf from down at the Elks Lodge called him the best baritone their barbershop quartet had ever had. "Good as Bing Crosby," he said. The whole county seemed to look on my father as a favorite son, and when the bad news broke, everybody spoke up to say how tragic it was that he was gone. Then they filed him away with all the other dead boys in town. When he died the second time, nobody had anything left to say. Of course, that didn''t matter much in the long run, since he turned out not to be dead at all. In fact he was in perfect health, and when he turned up on his parents'' doorstep a few months after the war, without so much as a wrinkle in his Army Air Corps uniform and completely in the dark about both of his recent fatalities, the newspaper played it up as big as D-Day itself: Jimmy Vann Alive! It was right then, when he read his story in the paper and saw the retraction of his own glowing obituary, that my father got his calling.
The whole world, he claimed, became clear to him in that single moment, and he saw the path he was supposed to take. He rented an office above Willard''s Barber Shop just off the square, bought a new suit of clothes, and opened his own insurance agency. It was a smart business move. Sure, insurance is a pretty bland proposition--at least it always was for me, and I put in nine years at my father''s agency. But the thing is, everybody buys insurance, and if there''s something that sets you apart from the other outfits, some gimmick that makes your name come to mind before all the others, you can make a real killing. And that''s how it was for my father. When he turned up alive after being twice dead, he became the man people wanted to buy insurance from. Veterans, war widows, even the old-timers at the Elks Lodge: everybody wanted a piece of his luck.
He sold policies by the truckload. Pretty soon he got to be just about the richest SOB in the county. And that''s fine. I''ve never begrudged him his good fortune. How could I? He''s put a roof over my head my whole life. I wouldn''t be anything if it weren''t for him, and that''s the literal truth. But the thing is, his life and mine are two different cases. I never played highschool football, I never went to war, I never sang like Bing Crosby.
True enough, I have sold a lot of insurance, but even that''s more a credit to him than to me. Insurance was never my real calling-- although I''d be hard-pressed to say what is. Maybe if I''d seen all my good points written up on the obituary page, like he did, I''d have somehow figured out my best direction. But so far nothing like that''s ever happened, and lately I''ve started to worry about running out of time. I''m already thirty-three--old as Jesus. I''m underweight, with high blood pressure, and my hair falls out in clumps in a high wind. I''ve started to look old--unlike my wife, Laney, who was a perky cheerleader thirteen years ago and looks almost the same now as she did in high school. She acts the same, too.
For example, she recently acquired a new boyfriend. Steve Pitts. I used to play baseball with Steve. He was a good left-fielder. Laney''s also pregnant with a baby she won''t say much about. Well. One thing Laney didn''t know was that I no longer worked for my father. He fired me for forging his name on a backdated rider for my homeowner''s policy.
It was a good policy--dirt cheap and fairly comprehensive--but it had a proviso about notifying the company in the case of any structural improvements or built-on additions. All policies have exclusions of one kind or another, and, as a rule, the cheaper the policy the more exclusions you have to watch out for. You can always upgrade your coverage if your circumstances change, but most people forget to do that unless their insurance agent reminds them. Anyway, we did some renovation last spring, and somehow I forgot to update my policy. Then a couple of months ago a thunderstorm brought a 200-year-old oak tree down through the roof of our new family room. Smashed right through the beams and knocked out two plaster walls. The next day I got Brady Pitts--that''s Steve''s brother--to come out with his junkyard crane to lift the tree out of the house, but he ended up knocking down the third wall and splitting half the floor joists. What it came down to was a total loss, and I hadn''t bought a dime''s worth of coverage.
Laney didn''t know that part either. The third thing she didn''t know was that I''d started a new job. Instead of walking down to my father''s agency in the morning, I''d go over to Tump''s Pool Hall Café on the west side of the square, order one of Tump''s bad breakfasts, and wait for my cousin Dell to swing by and pick me up. Dell did repo work for Hometown Finance, and I was his new assistant. What we did wasn''t anything at all like selling insurance for my father. There was still some paperwork, of course, but basically my job now was to break into deadbeats'' homes and cart away whatever it was they hadn''t kept up the payments on. I didn''t even know if what we did was legal. But compared to what I was used to, it was satisfying work.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago we made a morning call on one of the old whitewashed frame houses on Hill Street on the slope above the holding pens for the cattle auctions. The whole neighborhood was in pretty sad shape--always had been, for as long as I could remember-- little cracker-box houses with blistered paint and broken-down porches. And there was the smell of the holding pens, which isn''t really a bad smell at first--sort of earthy and green--although I think it might be hard to stomach over the long haul. But there was another smell, too, mixed in with it, like a rat had died in a wall somewhere. Even in my early insurance days, when I was peddling policies door-to-door, I never bothered with the houses on Hill Street. As far as I knew, I''d never even known anybody who lived there. When we got out of Dell''s pickup, he squinted along the row of houses and then focused on one a couple of doors down from where we were parked. "That''s it, Nolan," he said.
"The one with the knocked-out window over the porch." "How do you know?" I asked him. There weren''t any numbers on the houses, and every place looked pretty much the same. The last thing I needed was to get arrested for hauling off the wrong stove and refrigerator. Dell just shrugged and pushed his ball cap lower over his face. "I know all these houses," he said. Then he reached back through the window of the pickup and took his clipboard from the front seat. He stood there a minute in the quiet street looking over the papers, then frowned and tossed the clipboard back inside the cab.
"Better watch yourself on this one," he said. "Rathburn don''t go out much anymore. We might run into him." Rathburn was a common enough name around town--the family had branches all over the county--so the name didn''t mean much to me at first. It did bother me, though, to think that we might have to deal with another human being. The repo business was hard enough with nobody home, but when the clients were there to watch you take back their stuff, you never knew what might happen. "How do you want to work it?" I asked, although I knew the answer. In my first few weeks on the job we''d made over a hundred house calls, and the drill was always the same.
Dell would wait by the back door while I knocked on the front. If somebody answered, I''d tell them what I was there for, show them a claims sheet to make it look like we had some kind of authority, and give them one last chance to cough up the cash. They never had it, of course. If it was a woman at the door, I''d explain that we''d have to take her washer, or the TV, or whatever the hell it was, and she''d let us right in. A woman won''t bolt once you''ve spoken face-to-face. The men were another story. Usually they''d tell me to wait a minute while they got the money, but then they''d lock the door and hightail it out the back. That''s when Dell would make a sort of halfhearted grab for them, not really wanting to catch anybody but just trying to keep them preoccupied enough so they''d forget to lock the back door behind them.
Dell is one stout sonofabitch, built like a grizzly, so he could put himself in harm''s way like that and come out fine. Not me, though--I don''t have the right bulk for real intimidation. That''s one reason I was the front-door man. The other reason was that most everybody knows Dell by sight, and if he came knocking, no one would ever open up at all. Anyway, Dell circled around through the neighbors'' backyards and took his post at the rear corner of the Rathburn house. When I saw he was ready, I strolled up onto the front porch and rapped on the screen door. No answer, so I knocked again, hard enough to rattle the screen in the frame, and listened for sounds inside the house. Everything was quiet, so I hopped off the side of the porch and walked back to where Dell was p.