Saturday, December 21, 2013

Foresight


Walter Hedder had been sitting at the coffee shop’s counter for nearly an hour. In that time, he’d drank five cups of thin - but very hot - black coffee and eaten a slice and a half of microwaved apple pie. The place was nearly empty, but the waitress hadn’t been around to see him in twenty minutes. He had the intuition that he was no longer a welcome customer, but still he stayed.

He was a dark haired man in his late thirties. He was clean shaven with tanned skin, and had a large, slightly flattened nose. Deep lines were etched into his narrow forehead, and his strong jaw had a cleft in its chin. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt with a modest collar and a slightly loosened gray and black striped tie. His hat sat on the counter beside his nearly empty coffee cup.

With his fork he nudged the remaining pie around its saucer before deciding he’d had enough, then he pushed the plate away and reached for the paper. He’d read all there was to read twice already, but he still had time to kill, so he went back through it. The lead article was about the President’s new policy to ensure citizens felt their privacy was being safeguarded as the country’s spy agencies collected phone and Internet data for national security reasons. “Secret police,” he said softly, beneath his breath. In a quick flash he saw another headline dated a few years in the future - “Silicon Valley CEO Charged in Dragnet Operation” - before his vision cleared and he was back in the coffee shop with today’s paper.

He laid the paper aside and looked around the room. This was the only place of its kind left in the small city’s downtown. Years ago, Walter knew, there had been several coffee shops, lunch counters and ice-cream parlors nestled amongst stores and offices, but time, the rise of the suburbs and cookie-cutter franchises had done away with all that. Those places had been gone for decades, but echoes remained. He often latched onto those echoes as he walked the city streets, allowing himself to be caught up in the past. He missed that older city. He was nostalgic for a time in which he’d never lived.

The coffee shop was painted a bright yellow. Its floor was black and white checkerboard. Large windows ran along the front of the building above a series of booths, looking out onto a street scattered with pedestrians. The booths’ benches where upholstered in red vinyl and their tables topped with a white laminate. The counter where he sat was much the same only slightly raised and lined with red-upholstered stools with low, curved backs. The coffee shop’s door was in the middle of the line of booths. In a booth on the far side of the door, sat a kid in his early twenties wearing a green hoodie embroidered with the logo for a college basketball team. Walter didn’t know which team it was, but he didn’t think it was local. The kid was hunched over in the booth staring into his phone’s glowing screen. Every few moments his thumbs would rapidly tap on the screen, then he would pause, smile or laugh, and repeat the process. At another booth - on Walter’s side of the door - sat a couple, a man and a woman each looked to be about thirty-five. They, too, were looking down at phones.

They waitress came over to him. “You doing alright?” she asked. She was young and attractive with slightly curly, dark red hair parted above her forehead and pulled back in a loose ponytail. Her skin was pale and light freckles spotted her nose and cheeks. She wore a pink and white striped uniform, barely open just enough to reveal the pale skin of her neck and upper chest, but no cleavage. “Want some more coffee, or anything?” She asked impassively enough, but Walter knew she would be happy to seem him leave. She was the only person working the afternoon shift and he knew she was hoping everyone would leave so she could close up early and meet her boyfriend at one of the bars by the river.

I wish your afternoon could be that simple, Walter thought. Doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen though. Let’s just hope after today you and I get a few more chances at lazy afternoons.

To the waitress he said, “Could I get a little decaf?”

“Sure,” she said this time letting a touch of impatience enter into her voice. She brought the orange rimmed pot over to him and poured. When the cup with half-filled Walter raised a finger and she stopped. She carried the pot back to its warmer and then walked out from behind the counter to check on the other customers.

With his right hand, Walter lifted his cup and sipped as he turned his left wrist toward himself to peek at his watch. It was impossible to know an exact time he was waiting for, but he could tell it was getting close. At the booth containing the couple the waitress was leaning in to pick up a straw paper and used napkin. A few booths back the kid was slurping coke through a straw. The scent of the coffee under his nose seemed more intense. Outside the clouds opened up allowing a patch of sun to reach the street. Very soon, Walter thought.

He rose from his stool The coffee cup still in his hand. He tightened his grip on its handle and began walking toward the exit. As he passed the couple’s booth, he saw the waitress step backward away from the table not seeing him. He approached her slowly and steadily, and reached out with his left hand to grip her shoulder. She exclaimed at the surprise touch, but it did not stop him. He pushed her down and toward the table. The man at the table yelled out and Walter saw the kid rising from his booth. Stay back, he thought, but the kid kept moving. Walter lost his grip on the waitress as she fell away from him. He glanced down to see her head narrowly miss the hard edge of the table and bounce off the padded bench as she turned to land on her back on the floor. Just then he saw the shape at the door. He quickened his step toward it and got there just as the door opened. The man was young, white, with wild, dark blonde hair launching out from his head in all directions. He wore a heavy dark green jacket with three faded stripes on the sleeve. Walter saw a muddy boot print he left on the bright red welcome mat as he stepped into the coffee shop, then he saw the hard, silver glint of the gun.

The kid hadn’t seen the gun and was still coming toward Walter. The gunman, however, didn’t know that and he began to turn toward the kid leveling the gun as he did so. “Hey!” Walter yelled. “Hey!” The gunman stopped and turned toward the sound. As soon as his face came into view, Walter flung the hot coffee and followed it quickly by bringing the cup up and into the gunman’s jaw. The gunman yelled in pain, but kept to his feet and began circling the gun around toward Walter.

At that moment the kid slammed into the gunman’s back and Walter let go of the coffee cup and lunged toward the gun, grabbing the man’s arm. The thought of rabies fluttered through his mind as he clamped his teeth down onto the back of the man’s hand causing him to once again yell out and also release his grip on the gun.

Suddenly Walter felt a pulse of pain to the back of his head and neck as the gunman’s left hand landed a blow. I hope it was enough, he thought, as the world when dark and he went down hard into the back of a counter stool.

He came to with the sound of a shot and a chorus of screams. Then he saw the body land in front of him. The three stripes loomed large before his eyes. The kid, he thought. The kid’s a hero now.  He could feel his eyes growing heavy and the world began to fade.  A hero, he thought again.  I hope he can forgive me.  

And with that he blacked out.

Monday, December 16, 2013

A Grownup Story

There's some drug use and profanity in this story.  Don't freak out.

                                                                                                     -- Andy.


Bert owns the dog.  That’s what Bert says anyway.  Of course anyone who paid even a bit of attention could tell it’s the other way around.  Still, when the dog barks, am I supposed to yell at it or at Bert ?  I guess it doesn’t matter much.  I’m sure I’d get the same result either way, so I don’t try.


I don’t know why I live where I do.  This small apartment with its thin, beige walls, its half-sized water heater and its drafty windows.  It’s just...where I live.  I moved here after college.  I moved to this city.  Got my first job.  Found this apartment.  And...  And it’s where I live.


I know I could afford better.  I’m not the junior member of the team any more.  Haven’t been for some time now.  I make enough money and could afford a bigger place.  Quieter.  I could buy a house.  Shelly at the office keeps telling me that’s the thing to do and she’s probably right.  But... What’s the point?   Moving is a pain.  And finding a place...  And I really hate the idea of mowing a lawn.  I got plenty of that as a kid...with my step-dad yelling at me the whole time.  I guess he’s not around anymore, but still I’d have to be outside.

Bert asked me in for a beer the other night...something that’s never happened in all the years we’ve been neighbors.  His dog was spending the night at the vet or something and I guess he was bored or lonely.  So I went over.  He spent a lot of the night telling me all about working at the store.  He works at one of those places they call ‘Big Box’.  You know the one, but I don’t want to say its name.  I don’t shop there.  It’s my own personal protest...you know against consumerism and that sort of thing.  I’m not really sure how effective it is.  

After the first beer he opened a small door built into his coffee table.  He has one of those coffee tables that looks like it came straight out of the late 1980’s...which I’m certain it did.  It’s got two cushions on each end for putting up your feet and a wooden surface in between for setting things...your bible, some magazines, coffee, that sort of thing...and beneath all that is a small cabinet where you might keep the t.v. remote or hide junk when guests come by.  Bert, I learned, keeps his weed in there.  He pulled out a baggie, an ashtray and an old spiral notebook that he turned over so that the rough cardboard back was facing upward.  He dumped a bud onto the notebook and started breaking it apart.  “Smoke?” he asked.

It had been a pretty long time for me, but I said ok.  My company doesn’t drug test unless you get hurt on the job and they’re trying to get out of paying medical expenses.  To be fair, I think the insurance company makes them do that.  Doesn’t matter much for me either way.  I work in the office.

Bert reached back under the coffee table and came up with a packet of rolling papers.  He pulled one free and began loading it with the crumbles of weed.  “Don’t they test at your job?” I asked.

“Shit yeah, they do,” he said without looking at me.  I watched as his fingers expertly rolled around the paper, smoothing and adjusting it here and there.  “Don’t matter to me though.  One job’s as good as another, I guess.  Plus I got a guy who’ll piss for me if I need him to.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

So we sat there smoking and just hanging out.  I didn’t have any more beer as I’m outta practice, but Bert had a few more.  We talked.  Mostly he did.  He told me his store’s general manager was a bonafide member of the klan - some sort of grand something-or-other - and once the corporate office came in and did an audit sort of thing and told him he had to promote some black people.  “He was piiiissed about that.” Bert said.  But he’d done it.  Bert told me all the black employees know he’s in the klan, but they aren’t scared of him or anything like that.  They all laugh at him.  Once, he told me, someone laid out a cross made from boxes of bedsheets in front of his office door.  Bert really busted up telling me that story.

After a while, I was feeling pretty good and I decided to tell Bert that his dog sometimes kept me awake.  He said, yeah, that dog sometimes kept him awake too.  

At one point he asked me why no women ever came by my place.  I told him I didn’t have a lot to say about it.  I’m just not all that into the dating thing.  He asked me if I was gay.  I told him no.  He said it wasn’t a thing to him if I was.  I said again that I wasn’t.  He said ok, then I should find a girl.  It would be good for me.  I told him that was probably true.

Bert asked me about my job and I started to tell him about Clark, our manager, who spends one week every year walking across the state.  He hasn’t gotten all the way yet.  Each year he has someone - his wife, I guess - drop him off at the spot he ended the last year’s walk.  He picks back up from there and walks for a week.  Camps out at night and everything.  He’s made it more than half way by now, which is something, I guess, but then again he’s been at it for 14 years.  Some of us at the office did the math once, and, honestly, I’m not so sure he’s really trying all that hard.

As I said, I started to tell Bert all that about Clark, but he cut me off to tell me about the time they’d caught an Elvis impersonator stuffing frozen dinners into a secret recess in his fat-suit.  Now that was a good story.

Time passed.  We smoked another joint.  I asked Bert what was wrong with his dog.  He said they didn’t know.  Some stomach thing.  He didn’t seem to want to talk about it very much, so I let it go.  Too personal, I guess.

He told me all about his ex-wife.  The dog had been hers and I got the impression it was the only victory he could claim in the divorce.  She had been a dancer, he said.  Not a stripper, he added right away, but a dancer.  Graceful and elegant.  To hear him tell it, she moved like a swan.  Hardly touched the ground.  “How she ended up with me, I don’t know,” he said.  “When she left, she said it was pity, but I don’t believe it.  You might feel sorry for somebody and give ‘em a throw, but you don’t marry ‘em.”  That logic seemed pretty sound to me and I told him so.

Sometime around midnight...or at least before one...I told Bert I had to call it a night.  I slipped out the door of his apartment and moved, slowly, toward my apartment’s door.  I remember thinking that any minute another neighbor would pop out and bust me for being stoned in the hallway.  I thought about the cops coming and hauling me away.  I thought about them taking Bert too and how no one would be there the next morning to pick up his dog at the vet.  It’s really quite amazing the things you think of when you’re high and it’s equally amazing how long a 15 foot walk from one apartment to another can seem.  

Eventually I got there and managed to get my keys and unlock the door without incident.  I went inside and immediately kicked over a full bag of garbage I’d set by the door to remind myself to take it to the dumpster.  I’d forgotten to do that.  Oh well, at least years of experience had taught me to tie the bag well and nothing leaked out.  I’m pretty sure I considered taking it downstairs right then and there, but couldn’t make myself open the door.

I managed to take off one shoe before I landed on the couch and fell asleep.

Bert hasn’t asked me back to his place.  The next day his dog was home and things were back to normal.  I think I’m supposed to invite him to my apartment in return, but I haven’t.  He’s a good enough guy, but it seems like a lot of trouble.  


The End.