Knuckledragger

by Rusty Barnes

  Lids heavy, I looked around the small space. Didn’t have much but what I did was mine. And compared to my life six short months ago, where all I had was what I could carry over my shoulder, I was practically a pack rat, what with a table, a chair, a hot plate and a dead plant. Undoubtedly, Better Homes and Gardens would be calling soon.

  An hour or so later, after a short nap, and with Ms. Crawley probably eyeing me from her window and Mrs. Henry still talking on the phone, I left the rooming house. It was late afternoon and the sun burned high in a blue sky with a thin layer of haze. And the pavement was a grill on low—not quite hot enough to fry an egg but enough to hear the sizzle.

  I turned right on Hastings, heading towards Main Street and what they called the Four Corners. Downtown Vancouver, where the magic happened. Not like uptown, Granville and Georgia, where the squares frolicked in their business suits and briefcases. Here if you saw a square in a suit it was because he had trouble on his mind and a wad of paycheque burning a hole in his pocket. Which, as it happened, were two things the local establishments were more than happy to ease a man of. Some gently, coaxing, one watered-down drink at a time. Some more roughly and, when the money was gone, it was out the back alley door with your pockets turned out, pants around your ankles and lipstick on your collar.

  But the Four Corners always looked so different in the daytime—exposed, embarrassed—like a starlet caught in the crossfire of paparazzi flashbulbs outside a supper club when the shades were down and the sun was up. No, it was nighttime, razzle-dazzle time, when the neon signs glowed and Hastings Street came alive and really popped.

  At my bank, the teller did this double-take like he’d seen a ghost. I contemplated going, “Boo!” but decided it was best to keep it on the level. Plus, the half-man-half-corpse security guard was sound asleep on his stool parked inside the door so I didn’t want to wake him. After depositing a few bucks for leaner times, I picked up a bottle of single malt at the liquor store, stopped in at the diner for a pastrami-on-rye to go and then headed for my rented office/broom closet. It had a trash bin view, a flickering, cobwebbed light fixture and a desk with a suspicious crimson stain on it, but the price was right. And it was mine. Also, it was conveniently located right across from the bathroom.

  The plan was to burn the rest of the day to the ground nursing a few whisky shots on their way to the grave and imagining a secretary and an expense account and big oak desk that hadn’t been used for pagan animal sacrifices. Then, over the next couple of days, I’d quickly wrap up the insurance scam thing and get another roll of film to Taffy. And if Nelson had a busted back it’d be months before he was up and sleazing around again. Enough work and a man could be back on his feet in no time. Fat city.

  As I climbed the stairs and rounded the corner to my office, I saw the new janitor for the building, an old timer with a smoker’s cough and a thousand-yard jailhouse stare, mopping down the hall. I watched him from the doorway. He was good and practiced and displayed an economy of movement. No wasted effort. No floor left untouched. Left to right. Right to left. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  I went to my desk and opened the drawer, taking out two glasses. I re-arranged the telephone on the corner of the desk just so and then took stock of the whole scene. Beauty. Just like a real gumshoe, I had an office, a telephone, booze and even a glass for a client. The janitor was now mopping in front of my door, so I asked him if I looked legit. He stopped and leaned on the mop, assessing the situation. Then, wiping his forehead with a dirty handkerchief from his back pocket, he said, “That telephone has no cord.”

  Jeez, fella, way to burst a bubble. I laughed and said not to worry about the details, but to look at the big picture. He stared at me again.

  “Looks like you belong in this neighbourhood,” he said, “that much I can say.”

  A real comedian this one. He knew as well as I did the neighbourhood was ripe with pool hustlers, abortionists, crooked lawyers and fly-by-night accountants. I told him my name was Carnegie Fitch but that most people just called me Fitch. He said his name was Jim and left it at that. I poured a finger of single malt in each glass.

  “How about a taste, Jim?” I asked.

  Jim said nothing, only stared.

  I didn’t know if he didn’t hear me or what. It was not a comfortable silence. I cleared my throat.

  Jim wiped his forehead with a dirty cloth from his back pocket. “What’s the celebration?” he asked, finally.

  “Five o’clock p.m., Jim. We made it again.”

  Jim walked slowly in the office and stood in front of the desk. He stared down at the glass. “I don’t know. That Moyer watches me like a hawk.”

  Cleveland Moyer was the building manager. He was a skinny beanpole with bad jokes, bad skin and a penchant for chewing tobacco. All in all, a powerful combination.

  “Well,” I said, “even field mice need to stay hydrated.”

  “I suppose,” said Jim, the outer edges of his smile cracking the plain exterior of his face like the tide washing up on a rocky shoreline. One could get the idea that not too many smiles had ventured that far north in a while. “Not sure I have much fight left in me, the week I’ve had.”

  I raised my glass. “Well, then, to the field mice,” I said.

  He picked up his. “To the field mice.”

  The single malt went down like it tends to—smooth start but a mule kick at the end. I poured another shot for myself and offered one to Jim, too. Seemed like the polite thing to do. Besides, I was feeling grand today and slightly fraternal towards the old guy. Looked like he could use a pal, even if it was only for a few quick belts. He nodded. I poured. And down the hatch it went. Content to nurse a third one, I poured two and kicked my feet up on the desk, leaning back in the chair.

  The florescent light hummed. The delivery truck in the alley honked its horn. The world turned.

  “Where’d you do your time?” I asked.

  Jim didn’t seem surprised by the question. A Dixieland band could’ve suddenly paraded through the room and he wouldn’t have flinched. That’s how transfixed he was by the amber surface in his glass, like the whisky was waiting to whisper hidden secrets. Then, without missing a beat, Jim said, “Did my stretch back east” and swigged that whisky down.

  The results weren’t pretty. Jim went from sober to drunk like a teenager in a hot rod went from green to red. One belt got him in the door. Two belts lit up his eyes like he was finally home after being away for years. The third belt was the one that tipped the house on its side. For a little while, I had to admit, it was amusing. Like a windup toy that dances around and you clap and laugh because it’s funny to watch. But after a while, if the toy doesn’t stop, gets verbally abusive, steals your pastrami sandwich, throws it on the floor and then grabs a bottle of whisky off the desk and starts waving it around in a threatening manner, well, it gets annoying and a little dangerous.

  “Okay, you can have that, Jim,” I said.

  “Goddamn right I can have it,” he said, already drinking from the bottle. “It’s mine.”

  “Well, not really. Sure, maybe in the eyes of the law, nine-tenths and all, but…”

  “Law don’t have nuthin’ to do with it, pipsqueak. It was here and it was mine. Here. All that time. I did it and it was here.” He took another big gulp. A trickle of whisky went down his chin. Jim didn’t mess around. He was an all-or-nothing kind of guy. I had to respect him for that. He was demons hid away or out front, on display for all to see. But I didn’t want to see anymore. I had my own demons and I didn’t want them to see how much fun Jim’s were having out of the cage. The bottle was nearly gone when I finally had enough. I tried to help him off the floor, but he slapped my hand away.

  “The hell away from me,” he said, slurring his words. “I can do it. I can find it. It’s mine. Mine.” He stumbled out the door. I heard him slapping the walls as he left. The whole time shouting, almost incoherently, “In here. In here. Don’t you understand?”

  3 />
  Bartell Rightly’s rathole rancher was in a race with the garden in the front yard as to which could go to seed faster. Crooked doors. Peeling paint. Shingles missing from the roof. And if weeds were currency, Bartell could have been a millionaire and given up on the insurance scam racket altogether. I’d flipped through the case file that Taffy provided and found this story: man gets in car accident and claims the chronic back pain and depression from said accident means he can’t work the five a.m. shift at the bakery anymore. In fact, he can’t work at all, anywhere, anytime. Only this man has a less than stellar reputation seeing as he’d been written up several times for drinking on the job and suspected, though not charged, of stealing giant bags of icing sugar. So, safe to say, Best Life was a tad suspicious of the man’s claims, which was where I came in.

  And lucky was how a house across the street and two doors down from Bartell’s rancher was a shell of its former self, abandoned and scheduled for destruction. Unlucky for me was that I spent the better part of two days there, hunched down behind the living room window with a telephoto lens, eating deli take-out, drinking lukewarm coffee and pissing into a milk jug. I waited. I watched. I earned my dough. Patience was both expected and rewarded in this line of work. I stared at the clouds. I contemplated a caterpillar’s journey across a leaf. I shot artsy pics just to tick off Taffy. And the reward for my struggle—bubkus. Bartell was a no-show. If he was out, he didn’t come home. If he was home, he didn’t leave the house. Capital “F” for Frustrating.

  So, coffee-deprived and work wired, I checked back in at my office. It was anti-climactic. There was nobody waiting and no messages. But since I had no secretary and the phone didn’t have a cord, I wasn’t all that surprised.

  On my way out, I met Moyer. He pulled into the parking lot in a brand new sled, a shiny ’57 Cadillac that looked very fresh off the lot. We traded semi-pleasantries. Then I asked after Jim. The old guy had me worried, the way he left my office the other night, drunk and raging.

  Moyer spit out a brown, sludgy goop of wet tobacco on the sidewalk because he was classy like that. “What,” he said, “you didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “That ol’ alkie jailbird stole a car and then busted up the circus.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about and said the same, so Moyer explained that a few nights back Jim fell off the wagon, hotwired a car and crashed through a circus big top in the middle of the night, causing all sorts of commotion. Then, a couple of hours later, he took a curve too fast outside Stanley Park and lost control.

  “Yeah,” Moyer said, stuffing another hunk of chew in his cheek, “they found the poor son-of-a-bitch drowned in Lost Lagoon, car all smashed up.”

  I kicked the rear right sidewall on Moyer’s Caddy.

  “What gives?” said Moyer, like I’d peed in his corn flakes.

  “Just checking your air pressure. Road safety is very important. So how’d you find out all this?”

  “Because I take an interest in my fellow man, Mr. Fitch, that’s why.” But I could tell that wasn’t the reason at all and gave him my guppy stare. And it worked. People liked to fill silences, especially born gossips like Cleveland Moyer. He spit out another brown ribbon of wet tobacco. “Okay, I got a friend at the morgue. Frankie works the night shift and fed me some dirt on it. You know since I knew him and all.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Get this: last week Frankie tells me about this guy whose wife found him dead in their attic.”

  “Doesn’t sound very exciting.”

  Moyer’s eyes opened wide. “That’s what you’d think.” He kept talking, going on about a married man in his wife’s dress, a plastic sheep doll and a poisonous brown recluse spider, but I sort of stopped paying attention. I was thinking about former jailbirds that fell off the wagon and then stole cars and accidentally drove them into manmade lakes at the entrances of big urban parks after crashing through a circus. To be honest I didn’t think much about Jim’s drunken rant at the time, thinking it was just a guy blowing off some steam. But now I had to wonder if there wasn’t something more to it than that.

  “Quite the story, right?” said Moyer when he’d explained all the salacious details.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Awkward time to get bit. So when’s the funeral?”

  “What, the guy slippin’ it to the plastic sheep?”

  “No, Jim.”

  “Oh. Tomorrow.”

  Then Moyer gave me the rest of the details on the funeral, after which I split, careful not to step in the puddles of chew goop.

  When I got home I was dog-tired. I eyed the bed. The bed eyed me back. Time to rumble. The crowd was electric. As the announcer made the introductions, I looked for the ring girl in the skimpy bathing suit and the high heels but didn’t see her. I guess she had the night off. Too bad. I stepped into the ring, stretched. Hands above my head. A twist. A few shadow punches. The bell rang. Right away, sleep took a shot, a swing-for-the-fences haymaker. And I could have dodged it, danced around a bit—duck, weave, shuffle—but why? I walked into the punch, full surrender. Didn’t even raise my hands. My head snapped back and my legs gave out. I hit the canvas, splayed out like road kill.

  The referee knelt down beside me. The referee was Jim. I stared up at him sideways. He looked sad as he counted down, “Ten, nine, eight…”

  Jim only got to five before he called it.

  Sleep won in a knockout.

  Click here to learn more about Dead Clown Blues by R. Daniel Lester.

  Back to TOC

  Here is a preview of Accidental Outlaws by Matt Phillips, published by All Due Respect, an imprint of Down & Out Books…

  “Mesa Boys”

  Part One

  “Saylor is my uncle,” Ronnie said. He pulled the tab on a tallboy. Beer suds floated to the surface. “You know, like, part of my family. He’s my mom’s brother.”

  “What’s he ever done for you?” Marl said.

  Ronnie shifted in a rusted lawn chair. He took a nervous sip from his tallboy. Next to him, Marl reclined on a black pleather couch and chewed a hand-rolled cigarette. They were out front of Marl’s prefab home talking get-rich-quick schemes. “He ain’t done shit for me.”

  “My point,” Marl said. “There it is.” They both stared westward. The sun, deep in its pendulum arc, tinted the desert purple and pink. “My favorite time of day, fucking sundown.”

  Ronnie scraped the dirt with his Vans. He was cash-strapped. They both were, but Ronnie didn’t care for this scheme. Steal from family? Shit. Still, he wondered. “What do you think we could get for that Bronco?”

  “Part it out, shit. We’d get top dollar over the internet—no questions asked either,” Marl said. “It’ll take some time, though. We part it out piece by piece. The sooner we steal the fucker, the sooner we start making money.”

  “But how much?”

  Marl shrugged. He scratched his month-long beard with dirty fingernails and yawned. “Ten Gs, probably. Over six months to a year.”

  Ronnie took another sip from his tallboy. He didn’t like the family part, but the money part sounded pretty good. Ten Gs in six months. Split that two ways and it’s still half as much as he made last year at Cheap Subs—fucking sandwich art. “Five Gs each, that’s pretty fucking good.”

  “That’s only one truck, too. This is what I see: we pull in a couple restored cars, yeah, the Bronco first. But then we see what else we find around town. Three, four cars. Shit, we milk that for a while and it’s steady money.” Marl lit his cigarette and crossed one leg over the other like he was at a business meeting or a legit sit-down. He blew smoke and eyeballed Ronnie.

  “There’s that Shelby Mustang always parked near Save Coins,” Ronnie said.

  “See, now you’re thinking. But no, not the Shelby. Too rare. We sell those parts and we’re done. Something like the Bronco, how that’s perfect is there are so many people who don’t give a shit where the parts come from. It’s an early sev
enties model. Real cherry, but a lot of people have those models. A lot of people work on them.”

  Ronnie turned this idea over in his head.

  On the one side, he needed cash and it had to come fast and soon. His professional sandwich artist position wasn’t cutting it. And Jennie, she was doing her best with the tattoo thing, but it took a while to build a regular customer base. The thing about Jennie, she was an artist. That meant she wasn’t happy doing anything else but art. Ronnie understood Jennie, so he understood that about her—he accepted it.

  On the other side, steal from family and what were you? Maybe a scumbag or a lowlife. Maybe you were those things and whatever it was that went with them. Or maybe you were desperate. Maybe you were up to your neck in hopelessness and maybe you needed a little something to keep you afloat. His uncle had insurance, he’d pull in some money from this thing too. Yeah—it was all a win from what Ronnie could see. It might be wrong, with morals and shit, but Ronnie was starting to think morals were a luxury. Shit, morals are definitely a luxury. “Fuck it,” he said.

  “There he is,” Marl said. He blew more cigarette smoke between them, leaned back into the pleather couch and smiled. “Come on over to the dark side, Ronnie. It’s sundown everywhere you look.”

  Come down these dirt roads at sixty miles-per-hour and make believe, for just a few minutes, that you’re free and everything is okay—okay? Feel the Civic del Sol slide left and right to make its way around the squared-off turns. Rattle the car’s bolts and deaden the shocks across the washboard surface. See the three prefab homes in the distance, matching puke-green paint and an above-ground pool between them. Slide to a dusty stop and switch off the radio. Take one hit from the glass pipe in the center console—just a little weed to get through the morning—and think about how you’re going to say it.