The Miracle Mile
By Gabriel Welsch

The Miracle Mile

On the first day of the Pittsburgh Area Nurseryman’s Trade Show, Ernie Hanes was running late. He knew it cost him money to sit in rain-washed traffic only a few miles from the conference hotel, chain-smoking and watching his low fuel light. He wished he had invested in a car phone; all he could think about was Gloria, how she’d trembled the night before, cross-legged on the nursery floor, her face a slick sheen of tears, all sound drowned out by little Ernie’s screaming. The baby was colicky, had been crying all week, so when Gloria met Ernie at the end of each day, her red eyes stared into his chest and he panged with guilt. The night before the trade show, his luggage in the car, he looked for Gloria to kiss her good-bye and found her buried in shadows, gaunt with fatigue. He knew not to leave, not to hold her, but to stay the night listening to her tired voice sing lullabies. He left in the morning.

Sweating in his new suit, he tried to keep cigarette ash from falling on the sunflower tie Gloria had bought him for the show. Among the glare of signs, reflectors, rain and headlights, the traffic shone on the Miracle Mile, along the hundreds of stores, restaurants, and parking lots lit in all colors, along the stretch once meant to bring Monroeville back after the fall in the steel market. Light traced through the rain on the glimmers of trim, the sparkles from cars as if each had been waxed only that morning, fresh from the dozen car washes along the four-lane. Ernie sat mesmerized by the headlights flashing over the water drops on Cadillacs and Jags, thinking about Gloria and hoping the Miracle Mile still held the luck its name implied.

Ernie knew every road between there and Pittsburgh, knew which parking lots led out of the Miracle Mile and onto narrow roads, to more comfortable places. For the last two years, the Pennsylvania trade show felt like a bizarre homecoming, where Ernie knew all the sights and landmarks, the stores the same as elsewhere, but imbued with the particulars of this place, so grandly rebuilt from the highway of his youth, clean pavement banked in waving fields. Now, a person couldn’t see the horizon on the Miracle Mile, signs crowding out every glimpse of sky and surrounding mountains with billboard flatness and the hazy sheen of lights left on during the day.

At Al Monzo’s Palace Inn, Ernie had to meet Frank Gerald. One of the WoodCo company’s national icons, Frank was at that moment probably starting on lunch, thinking less of Ernie for his lateness. Ernie already felt more than a little self-conscious; graduate of a third-rate business college and former waiter, Ernie only knew about mulch on paper, about numbers and logistics. He knew most important things in his life only in the abstract; he knew basically what a husband and father should do, and yet came home most days well after ten in the spring and fall. And he, unlike Frank, was not reported to smell like a cedar tree and have a leathery face that looked like bark. Ernie, a road salesman, was not legend material like Frank. By the time Ernie parked and goose-stepped over the puddles in the cracked macadam parking lot, nausea had seized him.

Ernie had heard tales from other salesmen about how Frank lived mulch, pioneered mulch products and had been a permanent feature in WoodCo since forever. Starting as a boy in a knit cap, squatting by the lever of a shivering chipper, he worked up to shouldering limbs into the machine’s mouth, and then he drove the big CAT through rows of chips, turning the piles as they aged. In his thirties, he introduced aged cedar as a mulch. In his forties, he designed mulch bags and attended trade shows, selling mulch by the truckload, looking sharp in his crested green wool coat. An inspiration to the up-and-coming of WoodCo, Frank Gerald was often sent in by top brass to rejuvenate lagging sales areas, and Ernie knew full well the import of having Frank come to his area.

Ernie went to clean up before he actually had to stand in the middle of a hotel restaurant crammed with other salesmen and firmly shake Frank’s hand. As he smoked one last menthol in the men’s room and wet-combed his hair to his scalp, he kept hearing the district manager, Collins, saying, “Hanes, your numbers are terrible. I know what rough times are like, so you try to learn all you can from Gerald.” Then Collins’ brow furrowed and he grinned like a conspirator. “That man can even change the way you think about takin’ a piss, Hanes.” Ernie would, Collins pointed out, even be rooming with Frank, to get the full benefit of the man’s mentorship. When Ernie complained, Collins said, “Frank insisted. It’s how he does things. He calls it full-contact mentoring, like football or karate or some shit. And he said it would save money.”

Ernie strode up quickly to get past the introductions and Frank said, “You Hanes?” Wide-chested and hairy, wearing a khaki shirt and navy blue Dickies, Frank webbed his hands together, his knuckles the big as acorns, dry like bark. He hadn’t ordered lunch, and the menu lay closed in front of him. Ernie’s feet were soaked from the rain and as he noticed Frank’s gaze flicker over the pressed shirt, crested jacket and wide, sunflower-patterned tie, Ernie knew he was actively disappointing Frank that very moment.

Ernie wanted to kick something; to feel like a disappointment shattered his confidence. Sales tapes taught him all he needed to know about that. You have your confidence, or you don’t sell. “Promotion with Emotion!” And, at the biggest show of the year, when WoodCo and its employees could make up to twenty-five percent of their yearly gross, you had to sell. At meetings the week before, the slogans sang in the hallways and meeting rooms. Ernie had actually started to get excited about working with Frank Gerald but, when he finally saw the man and compared the meager droop of his own shoulders to such an obvious presence, his prospects seemed grim.

“You’re late,” Frank said. “But Collins warned me you might be.”

Ernie frowned, mumbled an apology and sat. They looked at their menus.

“Well, we’ve missed the first morning, but that’s okay,” Frank said eventually. “There’s not a lot of people here yet; most are still checking in.”

Ernie nodded.

Frank ordered steak, potatoes, coffee, and pie and Ernie felt a flash of superiority, looking at the anachronism of Frank’s dinner amid the complex salads and pasta dishes passing on trays. Ernie drank water, had a cup of soup, felt meager.

“How long you been with the comp’ny?” Frank asked between bites.

“Three years and some,” Ernie said.

“Mmm.” Frank wiped his mouth and rolled up his sleeves, still chewing. “Heard you have a business degree.”

“Yeah, logistics, but . . .”

“Good to have, I suppose,” Frank said, and swabbed gravy with a roll. “Shit, I only know that it’s wood and it’s good.”

Ernie detected a false understatement, but couldn’t read Frank well enough yet to tell for sure. Customers he could read without a problem, just as he could other salesmen who knew similar tricks for seducing customers. In the most touching anecdote about the old days or one’s mother, he could pick up the crude finesse of a hard close, no matter how buried. But this false modesty, in a person who so didn’t require it, he didn’t know how to read. Slogans were the easy trick for weaker salesmen, and yet here was this figure, Mr. Mulch, rhyming and shoving food in his mouth to hide whatever facial tic it was that gave him away, that made his rhymes hollow.
•

On the convention floor, preparing to meet the earliest risers among the garden center buyers and landscape contractors, Ernie was rather surprised at how much better he fit into the crowd of salesmen than Frank did. Frank’s tie, knotted thick like a fist below his stubbly Adam’s apple, was an old weave of earth tones and bright fabric, twenty years out of date and against all the tenets of professional dress Ernie had learned years ago from a pamphlet. Frank’s neck, even with the tie, looked rooted to his shoulders like a tree stump. But despite his appearance, Frank had such authority when he spoke to customers, such an air about him, that people laughed easily and signed invoices for thousands more than Ernie had ever seen. Frank’s voice was deep enough that everything sounded like prophecy, and when he said, “Your customers will love the double-shredded hardwood because it composts real good,” it rang with the force of a heavenly proclamation.

Ernie’s voice smoothed too much, slick like a WoodCo training video. His was the type of voice that made people question him twice on prices, rudely ask what his bag commission was, check three times on a delivery date because they just didn’t trust him. By noon, Ernie had to loosen his tie because even his neck was sweating. Simple questions tripped him up. At one point, a husband and wife in the same buffalo plaid shirts and company baseball caps asked him to repeat one of his claims about WoodCo’s Midnight Mulch holding its dark color. He replied between gritted teeth, “You folks really need to come up to speed with modern mulch products.” Frank turned, grabbed Ernie’s arm, and smiled widely at the couple. His teeth seemed so big to Ernie that, for a moment, he swore Frank was wearing wooden dentures. While steadily guiding Ernie away and toward a table filled with pamphlets, Frank started in on the couple, and Ernie listened while Frank’s voice rumbled into all the others, muffled by the partitions and foam walls erected by the vendors, all bubbling around him like water, indistinct, in a strangely soothing wave of nothing.

“What Hanes means to say, folks, is that gradually, many of your customers will begin to hear good things about new mulches, and you’ll have to have them,” he grinned amicably. “All you good folks need to know is that it’s wood and it’s good.” They laughed and ordered a truckload. Frank ended the whole thing with a handshake, the seal on the cycle of rhymes. As they strolled away Frank, turning to Ernie, grinned and spread his arms to either side. “Hanes? Can you relax a little?

After two o’clock, Ernie spent the rest of the day on the convention floor filling out Frank’s paperwork while Frank hooked his thumbs in his Dickies, strutted his barrel chest around and did some serious selling. The rest of that afternoon, Ernie listened, looking for the falter in the voice, the misspeak that might reveal something. The episode from lunch had unsettled him; the salesmen he knew from training seminars and improvement tapes were the ones who used the rhymes—guys who drove old Renaults, owned one polyester sport coat and four matching shirts, and lived next to bowling alleys.

Over the years, Ernie convinced himself that an honest statement of the product would sell more than enough. He thought himself personable, if not a glad-hander, and he felt that should have done it. But people wanted the bullshit, just like the salesmen did. The slogans in training started it all—They Don’t Care How Much You Know Until They Know How Much You Care! The slippery use of sound lulled people into a buying mood. Frank seemed above the trickery, and yet the rhyme showed up a few more times, in phrases like Secure Your Bottom Line with Our Total Hardwood Line! or They’ll Come to Your Store to Buy WoodCo More! All day, salesmen strolled to the booth and talked to Ernie about Frank, asked how it was to work with him, if it was true he smelled like cedar, if he really kept blocks of different wood in his briefcase, why he was at the show. They seemed to peer at Ernie, knowing Frank was WoodCo’s emergency man, and Ernie was the emergency. It seemed everyone knew who Frank was from years past, even the snobby guys from Scott’s and Miracle Gro.

Ernie left for a smoke. The rain had ebbed to only the occasional drop so, able to leave the awning’s protection, Ernie shuffled along the side of the building. The trees there all had thin, yellow leaves, and their crowns were girdled from twine left on when they were planted. The mulch around them had long dwindled into the parking lot and washed away. It was no wonder, Ernie thought; nothing could ever grow in all this pavement. When he finished his smoke, he threw his butt in with the slimy pile by a service door, near a crowd of brooms and a stray bucket. Inside, behind glass and concrete, in a tower rising out of pavement, men with hair-pieces and polyester coats were selling every conceivable product they could to create the illusion of boundless nature and fertility in places of pavement and signs with slogans that rhyme and Ernie wondered how the hell he was ever going to make the money he and Gloria so needed.

•
In the room at the end of the day, Ernie took three ibuprofen tablets and had a glass of Old Crow when Frank offered. Cigar clamped at the corner of his mouth, Frank regarded Ernie staring through the television. “Whassa matter?”

“Mmmm,” Ernie’s head wagged. “Just off.”

Frank undid his shoelaces, bent so his stomach spread over his lap. “Well, snap out of it.”

Ernie stared at the ceiling and wondered what Gloria was doing, pictured her watching Wheel of Fortune with little Ernie clamped onto one breast, no lights on in the little house. She probably had a pizza delivered for dinner. He wondered if she worried, thought him fooling around like many of the other salesmen did, looking for hookers or barflies, renting porn films. Frank grunted at his shoes. Ernie almost laughed when he thought of asking Frank if he wanted to rent a porn film, if Frank would be surprised, react, speak, but then he figured he’d try a different tactic. He wanted to know more about Frank. “You know this is the first night I’ve ever spent away from my wife?”

Frank didn’t say anything. The bed shook each time he snapped a lace through a boot grommet.

Ernie waited a few moments, watched a raincoat on the television speculate on the rains buffeting the state, and he wondered if Gloria had remembered to check the sump pump and call someone to look at the gutters. He wondered if she worried about particular women, like Brenda from the Sommerset office who always slept with at least three salesmen per convention or trade show.

He ran his finger up the pages of sales materials stacked next to his bed, then turned to Frank. “Should we go through some of this, you think?”

“Why?” Frank said.

“You know, they instituted new spiff ideas and incentives, truckload discounts.” He coughed, tried to look serious. “We should, really, you know, familiarize ourselves.”

“That’s what accountants are for, Hanes,” Frank said. Then in staccato: “Everybody needs mulch. No one is going to not buy mulch. Mulch is a garden staple. Mulch is life to plants.” He regarded Ernie over his shoulder. “You know that.”

“Company slogan, I guess.”

“And true.”

Out the balcony window, Ernie noticed that from his height, several stories up, he could see over the lights and logos and straight away to the mountains, the only darkness in the horizon of lights, where Pittsburgh lay on the other side. He could lose himself in the lights and the rush if the mood was right. To his whisky-sweetened mind, seeing the mountain beyond this place, beyond his current concerns, gave him hope that somewhere there was real ground, not groundcover, not decorative mulch. He knew tomorrow he would make very little money, just as always. It would be another tough year. He always seemed to look for the next good year to put him ahead, over a mountain, so to speak.

Frank still wasn’t talking. Ernie pointed at the bottle while looking at Frank, Frank nodded, and so Ernie poured himself another glass of whisky. Frank was stripped down to white boxers and a T-shirt, sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing liniment into his knees. His neck and arms, deep leathery brown and rough, stood out against the pasty white and freckled flesh of the rest of him. Elliot Coleman was on the television, speaking through his teeth about heirloom pepper plants.Seeing Frank, Ernie had an image of himself strangling Collins for stranding him in a room with contact-mentoring Frank.

“You married, Frank?”

“No.”

“Ever been?”

“No.”

“Always been in the mulch business?”

“No. Fought in Korea for two years, then came back and cooked for a year in Oakland at a colored place. Then back into mulch.”

“Talk much?” Ernie muttered.

“How’s that?”

“Nothing.”

Ernie took a long swig of whisky, finishing his glass, and then sat for several moments. Frank lit his cigar and leaned against the headboard of the bed, carefully lifting each leg onto the mattress, crossing them before he relaxed.

“Say, Frank, you wanna get a stag film on the TV?”

Frank’s bottom lip curled to get a better hold on his cigar. “Hell, no,” he said.

“Well, I’m going to the lounge, see who’s around,” Ernie got up and loped to the door, nearly knocking over the whisky bottle Frank left on a table. Frank waved his glass, so Ernie poured him more whisky before he left.

•
Ernie flopped into a booth by the door. The lounge had small tables centered with red jar candles, a mirror behind the bar flanked by bottles of liquor, black vinyl chair backs and half-moon booths set into the wall, and the obligatory hotel floozy on one bar stool. Salesmen from other companies flocked around tables, trying to out-laugh each other with glib, overused phrases made funny by booze. Every man at the table nearest Ernie wore a tight suit and was balding. A guy in a Bugs Bunny T-shirt played “Margaritaville” on the stage at the end of the bar and kept nodding, yelling “Everybody sing!” while people actively ignored him.

Ernie paid five dollars for each drink he had, and as he spent the money, he did the math and worked out exactly how many diapers and ounces of formula he was getting smashed on. And up in his room sat Frank, Frank with nothing, sipping away on a cheap bottle of whisky, stingy Frank in the antiquated tie just raking in the bucks with his old boy slap on the back and voice of Solomon rationing the mulch. Frank, big fucking legend Frank, who lived for mulch and nothing else.

Ernie lurched to the phone and called Gloria on his company calling card.

“Hon? Are you a little tipsy?” Gloria asked.

Ernie snorted. “I’m just feelin’ good. Had a few drinks on the guys,” he said. “You know, I sold the most units of anybody today.”

He could hear the smile in her voice. “That’s great, Ernie.”

“Yeah, so they, you know,” he hiccuped, “they brought me to the lounge and bought me a few drinks.”

“Is this Bill and those guys?” she asked.

“Yeah, yeah it’s Bill,” he said. “Hell of a guy, Bill.”

“You keep saying we’ll have him over but it never works out,” she said. “We should really do something for him and his wife sometime.”

“Yeah.” Ernie heard the guitar player start playing “American Pie.”

“I mean, he’s so nice to you,” she said.

“Yeah,” he nodded, rubbed his forehead with his sleeve. “Hey, is the little guy still up?”

“You wanna talk to him?”

“Yeah.”

He heard her rustle and hold the phone against his son, and he could hear him gurgling and breathing while she cooed, “Say hi to Daddy! Say hi, Daddy!” and he heard the tinny sound of the guitar player’s cheap amp and the nervous laughing of the salesmen-without-wives and the vanilla smear of muzak from the lobby and the swish of elevator doors and then, when his son started to make more noises, Gloria sang a little lullaby before she got back on the phone, singing softly about billy goats and diamond rings and all the things she’d buy for baby Ernie.

•
Ernie knew he wouldn’t be able to be quiet when he returned to the room, so he figured he’d just walk in and pretend to get ready for bed. After nearly falling when he opened the door, he waited a moment before proceeding inside. He could see surprisingly well; the yellow and red from the Miracle Mile billboard shone through the room, softening the dark like plastic moonlight. Frank snored like a chipper. Ernie grabbed the newspaper, the sales book, and several pencils and locked himself in the bathroom.

Hunched over the book and sitting on the closed toilet seat, he began reworking the sales forms. It took him nearly two hours to do it, worried as he was about how shaky his handwriting would be, but by the time he finished, he successfully credited just over half of Frank’s sales to himself. He just erased the name on the first and second carbons and rewrote the top sheet. The third carbon was the customer’s, and WoodCo never saw it again. Tomorrow, Ernie would write up as many sales as he could, and still try to work a few real sales, but with each transaction, one would go to Frank and one would go to him.

The next morning, he woke to find Frank sitting in his T-shirt and boxers, smoking a cigar, reading USA Today. A tray of biscuits and a pitcher of coffee sat on the stand near his bed. “I got you some breakfast,” Frank said. “We gotta be on the floor by nine, so get ready.”

Ernie looked for the sales book, and saw it where he had left it, the pages hastily stuffed among other pamphlets and price schedules. Frank apparently hadn’t noticed the book’s disarray. Ernie’s head throbbed. He was afraid to shower, in the event that Frank might look in the sales book; but Frank wouldn’t look, he probably didn’t even care. Frank hadn’t looked at a pamphlet or price guide since they’d been there and, with the paper and a cigar to amuse him, it would be doubtful he’d look now.

When Ernie got out of the shower, it wasn’t until his tie was tied, his tack in place and his name tag set that he noticed the book was now neat and Frank was dressed in a crested jacket like his. None of the biscuits were eaten. Frank turned toward Ernie, and brushed the arms of his jacket.

Ernie could hear blood rushing in his ears and he panicked to say something. “Aren’t you going to have any biscuits?”

“Already ate.”

Ernie nodded.

“You know,” Frank said, and paused for a long moment, “I saw an old friend yesterday on the floor, a guy who works for Bing Nurseries now, growing pine trees.” He looked straight into Ernie’s face. “He offered to buy me a cup of coffee this morning,” Frank coughed, “I believe I will take him up on it.”

Frank extinguished a cigarette in the ashtray beside the sales book. Ernie’s mouth was so dry he felt as if his tongue had adhered to the roof of his mouth. “You can hold down the fort, right Hanes? Just an hour or so?”

“Yeah,” Ernie said, and as he stood in front of the mirror, he knew Frank looked at him, maybe waiting for an admission or a gesture, but Ernie now had everything to lose but wasn’t going to roll over and die yet. He found his lint brush on the table and began to clean his jacket.

Ernie listened for Frank to leave, and then stood listening to the traffic on the highway and the sounds of water running through the hotel walls. He hadn’t heard Frank take the sales book, and he wondered if the man wanted to taunt him, lord his perceptive victory over Ernie. Wow, Ernie thought, you, Frank, managed somehow to outwit a desperate drunk. Frank, he thought, will now go downstairs and eat eggs and bacon and pancakes and juice and coffee and will probably say nothing to anyone. He probably has some sort of bullshit code where this will remain between him and me, and he will delight in my humiliation.

Ernie opened the sales book, to see if Frank had changed anything, but nothing was different from the night before, except that Frank had alphabetized the account orders while Ernie had showered. Ernie’s writing seemed to vibrate on the orders and he thought of shredding them, releasing them from the balcony, letting them fly to the ground like dead leaves amid all the trash blown off the pavement fields of the Miracle Mile. He could even throw out the entire sales book, try to hit the Dumpster below his window, near the three men in faded coveralls he saw smoking there. Not speaking, blanketed by the fine drizzle of rain, they seemed angry to Ernie, sneering at passing cars. A walkie talkie crackled on one man’s belt. He switched it off and the others laughed. Even when he hated selling the most, Gloria had often consoled him by saying, “At least you’re not a janitor.” Now he looked at their faces, set and bitter, their positions no different from his own complex failure. Ernie straightened his tie and left to get to the floor on time.

•
Frank never showed up on the floor. Ernie’s handwriting was nearly illegible on the forms; for the first two hours, he had raced to fill every order he could, to beef up the commission to offset what he would surely lose when Frank returned. Customers blurred. He rushed through conversations, half-listening to industry talk and the boasts of small business owners while his mind worked what Frank might do about the fixed purchase sheets. By noon, when it was clear Frank would not be returning, Ernie began to entertain the notion that Frank may have been so disgusted that he returned to WoodCo to have Ernie terminated. For a few hours, Ernie felt directionless, unencumbered; despite his pending unemployment, he was still making money in the final hours of the trade show, piling up orders from every customer who walked up to his booth expecting Frank and instead tolerating Ernie’s abbreviated banter. When the last customers left the convention floor, Ernie again looked at the pile of orders, the ones he corrected, and the few he left for Frank, and he regretted that he had been neither smart nor brave enough to have faced Frank that morning.

He half expected Frank to be in the room when he returned, but was not surprised to find all traces of the man gone. A message light blinked on his phone and he realized he had not called Gloria at lunch. He called for the message.

Apparently, the message had been written as Frank left, and so the receptionist read it over the phone in a halting monotone while Ernie slowly sat on the edge of his bed. “Frank Gerald to Hanes. According to my personal request, it is arranged that I will meet you at the Baltimore show, and we are scheduled to be together for the rest of this season’s business period. Matters of this morning have been taken care of. Looking forward to working with you.”

Ernie set the receiver down and for a long time remained seated, smoking, his hand resting on his leg as his thigh slowly grew numb.

•
Ernie called Gloria. “How’s Ernie?” he asked.

“Good. Are you all right from last night?”

“Fine,” he said. “Look, I may be home early.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. We need to talk about me maybe doing something else for a little while.”

Gloria didn’t say anything.

“I don’t like being away from home so much.”

She sighed, but it sounded like a growl. “Ernie, you have a son just a few months old. This is not a good time.”

“I could sell water softeners with your brother,” he said.

“Get real. Jack doesn’t make any money.”

“Neither do I,” he said.

“Well, you’ll make less than that with Jack.”

He heard the baby start to cry.

“I gotta go, honey,” she said. “Please don’t do anything until we’ve had time to talk about it.”

His second call was to his home office to request an advance on the show commission. It would arrive the next day at his home, and he would tell Gloria it was a bonus check. While he hunted for another job selling something else, he would tell Gloria he was entertaining offers from businesses eager to get Ernie Hanes, and he would let her know how negotiations were going, and he would go with the highest bidder.

Only on the drive home, through the snarl of overhead wires and bent road signs, amid the sharp breeze from the stretches of pavement all under the dirty gleam of bright signs did Ernie begin to suspect that Gloria maybe knew and understood everything about what Ernie did, the lying and the embarrassment, and loved him anyway, enough to see him cheat and fail and work through doing it time and again.

Back to Contents