“Deals with the devil”

“Deals with the devil” is an expression used to frame Lawrence Crockett’s business dealings as morally tainted bargains whose apparent profits conceal a reckoning. Its force lies in the collision between ordinary commercial language and supernatural damnation: contracts, tax evasions, and financial returns become the worldly equivalent of an agreement with an infernal power.

First Appearance and Immediate Association

The expression first appears as Lawrence Crockett accompanies Larry toward the Excellent. Larry has just described Richard Straker as apparently harmless because their conversation concerned only business, but Lawrence Crockett’s private thought turns the encounter into something darker: he is thinking about “deals with the devil.” The phrase therefore does not identify a literal supernatural bargain at that moment. It registers an instinctive moral recognition that business can carry the atmosphere of corruption, danger, and hidden obligation.

That placement beside the Excellent is significant because the thought follows an outwardly routine exchange. The characters cross the street, and the social surface remains calm; beneath it, Lawrence Crockett interprets the situation through the language of damnation. The expression introduces an unseen ethical pressure into an otherwise mundane commercial world, suggesting that the danger of the town is not confined to visibly supernatural spaces.

Lawrence Crockett’s Business History

The phrase gains concrete meaning through Lawrence Crockett’s financial history. In 1965 Larry Crockett became the silent partner of Romeo Poulin, a contractor building a supermarket plaza in Auburn. Poulin’s willingness to cut corners and Larry’s skill with figures enabled them to make $750,000 apiece while reporting only a third of the money to the government. The arrangement is presented as highly satisfactory to the partners, even though the leaking roof of the supermarket stands as a material sign of the workmanship and ethics behind the profit.

From 1966 through 1968, Larry expanded through controlling interests in three Maine mobile-home businesses. He used elaborate ownership transfers to confuse tax authorities, eventually arranging matters so that he was effectively buying mobile homes from himself. To Romeo Poulin, he described the process through a sexualized “tunnel of love” metaphor involving one woman, another woman, and a return to the first. The image makes the structure appear playful and ingenious, but its underlying pattern is circular self-dealing: ownership changes disguise the same financial power rather than alter it.

The businesses prospered partly because they served people with limited alternatives. Mobile-home buyers included lower-middle-class workers unable to raise a conventional down payment and older people trying to stretch Social Security. A new six-room house had enormous appeal, while the single-level design spared elderly buyers the burden of stairs. Financing made the sale accessible at first glance: $500 down could be enough, although the remaining $9,500 was financed at 24 percent interest. The expression’s moral charge thus extends beyond tax evasion. Larry’s profits depended on contracts that appeared attainable to financially vulnerable customers while concealing a severe long-term cost.

The Metaphor of Infernal Debt

The expression returns in a sharpened form when Larry shuffles his papers and thinks, “Deals with the devil, all right, Larry thought. When you deal with him, notes come due in brimstone.” The added image transforms a general suspicion into an explicit principle. A note is both a financial instrument and a promise of repayment; “brimstone” turns the payment’s destination into hell. The sentence fuses the vocabulary of business with the vocabulary of punishment, making the account book resemble a moral ledger.

The wording also creates an ironic contrast between immediate success and eventual consequence. Larry’s arrangements have produced large profits, healthy companies, and apparently manageable risks. Yet the metaphor insists that no clever ownership shuffle can cancel obligation. The very documents Larry handles become reminders that debts may be postponed without being erased. His financial acumen can manipulate appearances, but it cannot prevent the notes from coming due.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

As a recurring expression, “Deals with the devil” broadens the novel’s supernatural vocabulary into the sphere of commerce. The phrase does not claim that every compromised transaction is literally made with the devil; instead, it supplies a moral analogy through which the narrative measures the distance between respectable business and predation. Lawrence Crockett’s dealings are legal-looking, numerically sophisticated, and socially useful in their visible results, yet the phrase exposes the hidden exchange: profit is purchased through corner-cutting, deception, and burdens placed on people with little power.

The expression also works through repetition and escalation. Its first use is a private reaction to Richard Straker’s business presence, while its later use is attached to Larry’s own documented history of tax evasion, self-dealing, and high-interest financing. The movement from suspicion to self-recognition gives the phrase structural irony. Lawrence Crockett can imagine infernal bargains when looking toward another man, but the details of his own career supply an equally persuasive earthly version.

In this way, the expression connects the novel’s ordinary systems of exploitation with its larger conception of evil. Evil need not announce itself through a monstrous body or an occult ceremony; it can circulate through paperwork, ownership structures, interest rates, and profitable arrangements that leave other people carrying the risk. “Deals with the devil” names the point at which those practices become legible as bargains whose hidden cost is not merely financial but moral.