Chapter 8

All of us were standing around, watching the bagging machine infusing gas into the little plastic steak piece packets. Our first production run had been for forty thousand pieces. I'd argued for making a much smaller run, just to make sure everything was set up properly, and that no mistakes were made. Jim and J.C. overruled me. Both men thought my nervousness was funny.

It had been decided that I'd get the first twenty thousand pieces, and the remainder would be loaded onto the new delivery van and trucked over to Milwaukie, for Earle to place with one of his local grocery chains. I was really looking forward to that happening.

I'd noticed, early on, that customers on my direct sales route who had purchased my products at retail from one of my commercial outlets, were anxious to get in on what they now realized was a half priced bargain. As a consequence of this, my direct sales volume kept increasing, and that seemed not to have had any negative effects on the sales volume at my commercial accounts. I found this to be a pleasant happenstance.

I had to eat seven pieces of the new steak piece product to satisfy myself that there were no differences in the taste. I was very much relieved to find out that there wasn't any difference, in the flavor, the bite, or the texture. I was counting on the steak pieces to be my premiere product when I moved down to Los Angeles and started really opening up new commercial accounts.

I was happy, and I also noticed that Jim and J.C. had been waiting with slightly nervous expressions on their faces while I satisfied myself that the product had lost nothing in the location transfer. When they saw me smiling in satisfaction, they too broke out in wide grins.

"I told you there was nothing to worry about, Ralph. As long as the meat and the cure are the same, it doesn't matter much about the smoker or the drying rooms. You want to wait around here while we get the jerky jarred up for you too?"

"I need to get back up to the storage locker as soon as possible. I've got a lot of angry accounts screaming for this product. I'll probably sell all of this in the next three days. Can you deliver the jerky to me tomorrow? I'm renting the locker right next to my old one, because we're not going to have room for everything when we get caught up on standing inventory."

"Earle has been calling me everyday, wanting to know when his product will get there. He told me you've been going great guns with his new cross cut?"

"So far so good. He's only delivered to me forty five thousand pieces so far, but the product has been well received thus far. Half my stores are buying two hundred at a time of it now, and my direct sales and all my resale's have been great too. I still think your steak pieces will still out sell his, by about two to one. Nancy and I are thinking about hiring two new girls to help us out with route servicing. I've been helping her out when she needs it, but that means I haven't had time to go out to find new outlet's. I think Nancy wants to keep me from ever getting to two hundred accounts. She doesn't want us to move down to Los Angeles."

I hadn't gone into a lot of detail with Jim about the difficulty Nancy and I were having over my unshakeable commitment to moving down to Los Angeles in order to really grow the business. As far as I was concerned, that was the Mecca of beef jerky consumption. There was a lot of competition down there as well, but I now had two products that no one down there had anything that could compete with them. Pricing in Los Angeles was different too. Retailers paid eighteen dollars for a forty count jar of jerky, and twelve dollars for a thirty count canister of pepperoni. I knew I'd be able to get a lot of business by just staying with my current pricing structure.

Jim and I had looked into freight costs from PDX to LAX, and, while higher, it wasn't an insurmountable obstacle for us. I told Jim that I'd pay him for the difference in freight charges. For the steak pieces it only came to less than one third of a cent per piece. Shipping jerky and pepperoni was somewhat higher, because of the extra weight, but still easily manageable for me at the price I was buying the product from Jim for.

We hired these two girls that Nancy had known since childhood. Callie had been in a management training position for a fast food company, until she decided to quit, after breaking her engagement with her district supervisor. She was twenty three years old, about average height, and was a slim brunette with a nice sized chest. Her father was a dentist, and she had the most perfect teeth I'd ever seen on a regular person. I didn't really see that much of her, because I had Nancy do all the hiring and training. Nancy told me that Callie was a natural for this kind of work because she had a friendly personality, and was good with people. She could also add and subtract, and, as I quickly found out, she had good penmanship too. Her sales books were always neat and easy to read and understand.

The other girl was also one of her cousins, on her mother's side of the family. Victoria, was twenty five years old, and was the daughter of Nancy's Uncle George, the uncle who owned the tire store over in Portland. She had a somewhat plain looking face, short cut light brown hair, and, at five foot ten, was tall, as well as exceptionally thin. She had been an athlete in school, and from what Nancy had hinted at to me, found other girls more exciting than she did boys. I ended up spending more time with Victoria for two reasons. Victoria seemed to make Nancy nervous, and Victoria surprised all of us by having a definite aptitude for sales work. She told us she really didn't really want to be a "delivery drone", and wanted the chance to go out and create some sales herself.

I handled Victoria's training while Nancy went out searching for a third new employee. During the first two or three days of training, it became obvious to me that Victoria didn't really need any sales pointers from me. She quickly learned the product pricing, and had no problem handling any sales situations I put her in.

She already had everything she needed except for a vehicle of her own to go out and sell all by herself. She rode around in her little Vespa motor scooter, but that wasn't a vehicle she could use for high volume smoked meat sales. I was impressed enough by her potential to go out and buy her a well used truck for two thousand dollars. I made a deal with her for paying me back by telling her that I would take one dollar off of what she owed me for every jar of jerky, or fifty pieces of steak pieces or honeyed jerky that she sold. Honeyed jerky was the name we were calling Earle's new product. I said I'd take fifty cents off for each canister of pepperoni she sold. In addition, I paid her three dollars commission for selling fifty pieces of the individually wrapped products, two dollars for every jerky jar, and one fifty per pepperoni canister.

The first day she was out selling by herself, despite my explicit instructions to her not to do it, she opened up three new commercial accounts. I wanted to fire her for doing that, but Nancy convinced me not to. In addition to opening three new outlets, Victoria had made over a hundred dollars in commissions, while also paying off the first thirty eight dollars of her two thousand dollar truck loan balance. It really bothered me that she'd deliberately set out to do something that I'd expressly warned her I didn't want her doing.

"She did it because she thought you didn't believe she could open up new accounts. She wanted to prove to you that you were wrong. Vickie likes to test other people's limits anyway. Don't ever give her a dare, because she doesn't refuse dares at all. She bit the leg off a big live bull frog once, just because Art Oldham dared her to do it. She was nine years old."

"I don't like her thinking she can just do whatever she feels like doing. She's supposed to do only what we tell her she can, no more, and no less."

"You told me yourself that you hated the idea of not leaving anyone here to sell product to your direct sales customers when we go down south, and now we do have someone. Besides, with the three she opened today, and the five new ones you got, we passed the one seventy mark for commercial accounts. You were the one who told me it is a lot easier to get a route service driver than it was to get someone who could go out and create their own sales. Leave her alone for a few more weeks, and we'll see how she does out on the direct sales routes. You don't have to like everything about her. She is honest, and she works hard too."

Lydia, a woman in her late twenties was the next hire we made. Lydia was the older sister of Callie's best friend, and she really needed a job. She was a single mom, with two young children, and had been laid off when the floral shop she was managing went out of business suddenly, due to a divorce of the owners. Like she had with Callie, Nancy trained her, and took care of all her employment paperwork.

It took me another two weeks before we reached our goal of having two hundred commercial accounts. I was now ready to head south to Los Angeles.

By the time we managed to open our two hundredth commercial account, Nancy and I were grossing fifty thousand dollars a week, just from that commercial account part of the business. We were paying our two route delivery people four hundred a week each, for what usually amounted to five or six hours of work each day, Monday through Friday. We'd also gone out and purchased two brand new delivery vans, on the strongly worded advice of our new accountant, another one of Nancy's relatives, one of her many real aunts.

Victoria hadn't wanted her own new van, preferring to stay with the pick up truck I'd loaned her the money to purchase. For some reason, she started gravitating more towards me than to anyone else in our small but growing company. It became commonplace that she would give me a call, after finishing up her sales work for the day, and I would meet her at the storage yard to check her unsold product back in. We'd spend about fifteen minutes after that, balancing out her sales results and having her pay us the money we had coming from her day's effort.

She would often suggest that we stop off somewhere to have a quick beer after we were done with the check in. I found myself enjoying her company. In many ways, Victoria was similar to many of the male buddies that I'd had in the past. It was during one of these after work hours beers that she first confided in me that she had a "mad crush" on Nancy. I could see her extreme level of embarrassment plainly. It was readily apparent during the whole time she was confiding to me her strong sexual attraction to the woman I now considered my fiance.

"Are you sure I should be the one you want to be telling this to? It kind of puts me in a delicate position. I can certainly understand why you would be attracted to her, because she affects me the same way, but, I'm probably the last person who'd have any sympathy with you having this kind of an interest in her."

"I had to tell someone about it, it was driving me bonkers. You're the only one I thought of who wouldn't get all freak'ed out by my telling them this, or that wouldn't overreact that much to it."

"I don't know what advice I can possibly give you. Naturally, I'm hoping that you won't make any attempt to act on this infatuation of yours."

"I'd hardly say it was an infatuation, and besides, I've known Nancy for a lot longer than you have. If you weren't in the picture, I think I might have a real shot with her."

"Well, in the first place, I am in the picture, and in the second place, maybe you haven't noticed this yourself yet, but Nancy sometimes gets a little nervous when she's around you. I'm not sure she's entirely comfortable with the whatever vibe it is you give off when you're anywhere around her."

Victoria just laughed, asking me if I was ready for a second beer. We ordered up another round. At this point, I'd have to say I found the conversation fascinating, but not really threatening to me in any way. I knew that Nancy was very well aware of Victoria's sexual orientation. She had been the one to first tell me about it.

"I don't usually like to go around people's backs when it comes to these kinds of things. I like you, and I figured I'd lay my cards on the table, just so you couldn't claim later on that you were blind sided. I thought I'd give you fair warning of my interest in her, in case it ends up that you do go to Los Angeles soon, and Nancy decides she needs to stay up here in this area. My motto for those situations has always been: "out of sight, out of mind". If you weren't going to be around for awhile, I might try to help her cope with any feelings of loneliness she might be suffering."

Now it was my turn to laugh. It wasn't something I needed to take seriously, Victoria's interest in Nancy. She obviously was unaware of our intentions to both travel to Los Angeles together.

"You might be better advised to pick someone with your same orientation. To the best of my knowledge, Nancy is strictly hetero."

"You might be right. Most women start out believing that they are, but I won't really know if she is or not, unless and until she tells me she is herself."

We finished our beer and went our separate ways. At this point, I still didn't think there was anything to this little crush that Victoria claimed to have. I drove back to my apartment, more concerned with all I still had left to do before Nancy and I would be able to head south.

The biggest problem would be finding someone we could trust to handle the collection of the cash and check sales receipts, from Victoria, and from our two commercial route drivers. I had suggested Nancy's mom as a possible person to do this, but Nancy told me her mom was too busy with her job for the Oregon liquor board. Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of anyone else who might be willing to do this for us, and who we could also trust to represent our best interests, and not their own.

Nancy and I went out to eat after I had gotten home and washed up. Mongolian Bar-B-Que was something we both liked, so that was where we went to eat. We were both sitting down, after making our first pass through the serving line and over to the wok. I was just finishing up with relating to Nancy about the day that I'd had.

"After I checked in Victoria, we went out to get a beer. You'll never guess what she told me." I really thought Nancy had no idea that Victoria was crushing on her.

"Does she still have the hots for me?" That set me back on my heels a little. Nancy acted like this was old news to her.

"That wasn't how she phrased it, but that was really the gist of it. I told her she was barking up the wrong tree, but she told me she was determined to try to help ease your loneliness, if we ever got separated for any reason, or if I was somewhere else, temporarily, and out of the picture."

"I've been worried about if she was going to still be acting that way. Right after the second time I got raped, she started coming onto me in a very serious way. She wouldn't believe me when I told her I wasn't into that whole girl/girl thing like she was. It took me two months before she finally agreed to stop trying to be my new boyfriend. Did she tell you about those times we slept together too? She was twenty years old then, and I was either seventeen, or else just turning eighteen. I mostly wanted to just go to sleep, but she didn't want to take no for an answer. That was back in the days when I liked to tease everybody. It didn't mean anything to me. We were just playing, and then she kind of took it the wrong way. At first, I tried to let her down easy, but after I tried doing that, it sort of got a little bit out of hand. My parents and hers had to finally get involved."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"What? I never told you I hadn't kissed a few girls when I was younger. How do you think most girls learn how to flirt? With each other, that's how. I promise you it wasn't ever anything serious on my part."

"Victoria kind of has the idea that I'm going to be traveling down to Los Angeles by myself. Should I be worrying about her being right about that too?"

"No. I'm definitely going down there with you, because that was what I lost when I lost our bet. I never said I'd be staying for that long. I don't think I'm going to like being down there with all those people. You never said how long we have to stay down there. How many accounts do you plan on opening up before we can come back here?"

"As many as I can. Maybe five or ten thousand. I'm planning on us living down there, permanently. I thought you already knew that?"

Nancy was frowning at me. She almost looked like she would start crying.

"You're expecting me to stay down there with you? Forever?"

"We can come up here to visit often, at least once a month if you want. It is only a two hour flight from here to there, I think. Jim says we can use his frequent flyer freight coupons for our trips up and back. If you want to, we'll even buy a house in this area, and then spend part of our time here, and part of it back down there. We'll hire delivery people down there too, just like we're doing up here. We'd need to come up here often anyway, just to make sure everything stays okay with this part of the business. After we get things running well down there, we can divide our time between here and there."

"Okay. When you say it like that, it doesn't sound so bad. When can we buy our house up here?"

"You can start looking any time. We won't buy right away though, unless we see something just too good to pass up. Getting back to your fling with Victoria though, you were a little vague with giving me any details. Would you care to expand some, or to clarify things for me?"

"What do you want to know? We kissed, and we did a little touching, nothing serious. Why are you worried about this? It isn't like it just happened last month, or even last year."

She was being too defensive. Something wasn't out in the open yet. My poker sense was telling me that something didn't quite ring true here. I didn't want her getting too upset about any of it, but still. In all the time we'd been together, now was the first I was hearing about her and anything involving other girls. I still didn't feel like Victoria was any competition to me. Right now I was more focused on Nancy, and on the both of us not feeling any need to keep things like this from each other.