Falling Free (1989)

Barry Targan's story collection, published by the University of Illinois Press in its Illinois Short Fiction series in 1989, gathers six stories: "Caveat Emptor", "Triage", "Dominion", "Old Light", "The Editor of A" and the title story. "Caveat Emptor", first published in the Missouri Review in 1983, is set in Atlantic City during the Second World War, when the Boardwalk has become a vast military training camp and a boy named Joey Rogovin sells soldiers cigarettes, Cokes and anything else they want from his bicycle. (Open Library)

Watches

Elgin watch: In "Caveat Emptor", Officer Norman, too flat-footed to enlist and too essential to be drafted, threatens Joey for selling without a vendor's license. Joey's mentor Eddie Cribbins explains that a cop like that has to be fixed in a way that lets him go on thinking he is honest. So Joey rides back and forth across Norman's beat for four days until the policeman stops him and lifts the carrier lid to find, out of its package, a large-faced Elgin wristwatch on the new expanding band. Joey walks away; when he turns around Norman is gone, and at home the carrier is empty. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: He opened the carrier lid. On the galvanized bottom of the carrier rested, out of its package, a large-faced Elgin wristwatch with the new type of expanding band. New and bright and irresistible. Norman looked at it for a long time. (Barry Targan, Falling Free, scan cataloged as University of Illinois Press, 1989, p. 14, in "Caveat Emptor", which begins on p. 1; the line-break hyphen in "Norman" is closed up; Internet Archive scan OCR)