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“No change.”
So he bought a bag of chips for a dollar and nineteen cents, then used part of the change to buy another paper.
This time he listened for each quarter to drop before pulling on the handle. When the door opened, he took three copies of the Austin American Statesman, just to get even, and left two of them on top of the machine.
Back home, he spread the classified ads out across the kitchen table. He’d told X-Ray not to ask for too much, since they only had a week. There were a number of ads for Kaira DeLeon tickets. The prices ranged from seventy-five to a hundred and ten dollars. Then he came to the one with X-Ray’s phone number.
KAIRA DELEON TKTS. $135
Close to the front. 555–3470
X-Ray answered on the second ring.
“Are you insane?” Armpit shouted.
“Yes, but it hasn’t stopped me before!”
“Did you see all the other ads in the paper?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So they’re all at least twenty-five dollars cheaper.”
“And your point is?”
“I told you to keep the price low.”
“It is low. They sold for seven hundred and fifty in Philly.”
“We’re not going to be able to sell any tickets.”
“You’re thinking east Austin,” said X-Ray. “You got to think west Austin.”
“What?”
“See, you and me, we’d buy the cheapest tickets. But that’s not how they think in west Austin. They don’t worry about money over there. They just want the best. And the ones that cost the most got to be the best, right?”
Armpit had installed enough sprinkler systems in west Austin to know that people worried about money over there just as much as they did east of I-35. Their homes might have been worth half a million dollars, but they still expected Armpit’s boss to reimburse them five bucks if Armpit accidentally stepped on a daffodil.
“Okay,” Armpit said. “Even if somebody wanted to pay a little more to be up front,” he said, “row M is not the front!”
“The ad doesn’t say it’s in the front. It says close to the front.”
“It’s not close to the front. Row F is close to the front. G maybe.”
“So then they’re close to close to the front,” said X-Ray.
“Just call the paper and tell them to lower the price,” said Armpit.
“You need to relax. I promised you I’d double your money, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”
Double or nothing, thought Armpit.
“Besides, it’ll cost another ten bucks to change the ad.”
He didn’t sleep that night, or the next night, or the night after that. X-Ray didn’t sell a single ticket over the weekend.
He wondered how he had ever let X-Ray talk him into this. Why didn’t they sell the tickets to Felix when they had the chance? Now he was out another thirty dollars for the ad in the paper, and it would cost ten more to change it.
