Thanks for your thoughtful observation. I’m a little disappointed in the ending too. I’ll work on it some more.
Dennis
Short Story / The Paine Street Branch Bank Massacre
Telli Trujillo bent over to look closely at the top of the display case. “Who leaves these goddamned fingerprints everywhere?” he said, his words ringing hollow in the empty room. He moved the tip of his fat index finger over the surface, scowling at the cloudy smudge it left as it smeared the marks underneath. He drew his lips into a tight pucker and looked out the front window. “Customers are dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
Eighteen months at MoPhones and Telli had lost all enthusiasm for his job. His sales results, generally acceptable his first six months, were the worst in the company for the last six months running. It was only his willingness (preference, in fact) to work early morning hours that convinced MoPhones to keep him on the payroll.
He leaned on the display case and shifted his weight. His feet slipped in their shoes, moving in the extra space there because he bought shoes several sizes too wide. He rotated his shoes once a month, like tires, so they were on the wrong feet half the time, though not at the moment. The extra space gave his feet room to breathe, he thought, and the rotation evened wear and increased shoe life. They flapped as he walked, and he felt clown-like sometimes, but overall the benefits outweighed the drawbacks.
Telli had spent the first part of this Saturday morning the way he spent the first part of every Saturday morning, writing to his mother in La Crosse. Today’s letter, ready to mail, waited in his hat in the back room. If he mailed it on the way home from work it would arrive Tuesday and she would complete the week’s segment of their dialog by calling him. He never called her, preferring the durability and low cost of letters; she never wrote, preferring the spontaneity and convenience of phone calls.
“We are, all of us, flotsam in the sea of life,” he wrote this Saturday. “The winds and the waves move us where they will, mindlessly. Only thing that matters is where you started out. We make our pathetic adjustments, an inch here, an inch there, but what difference does it make? The wise man who labors is as easily the victim of bad luck as the idle idiot is of good. Make no mistake; we’re all luck’s victims, wise or foolish, hard working or lazy.”
“Are you sure you’re getting enough iodine?” his mother would respond the following Tuesday. “I read that eighty percent of Americans don’t, and it leads to gloominess. Why take a chance with your health? It pays to be sure.”
From the back of the store came three sharp barks, Telli’s dog, Hamlet, protesting his confinement. Jasper Yapp, the store manager, told Telli not to bring the dog to work with him. “It’s against the law, you know, a dog in a business place, unless it’s a blind-eye dog.” Telli ignored these instructions, because he knew Jasper misunderstood the law, and loathed Hamlet because of his wolfish leer. Telli cultivated this look when Hamlet was a puppy by giving him dill pickles for treats. Perhaps the look came from the sour taste perpetually in Hamlet’s mouth; perhaps it came from his resentment when yet another treat (something from the refrigerator, home of mysterious things to eat and wonderful smells) turned out to be another sour, vinegary wiener. It’s impossible to tell. To Jasper, the dog looked like someone about to take his revenge on the world, probably by biting it in the ass.
Telli looked through the front door and saw his first customer of the day. Donald Duffy stood outside, hunched under the weight of his sagging backpack. He looked at his watch and adjusted the position of the pack’s straps. He tilted his head right as he moved the right strap higher on his shoulder, and repeated the process on the left. This bobbling of his head drew Telli’s attention to its size, big for his body, not freakishly big, but big enough that anybody would notice.
Donald peeked through the door from the corner of his eye and saw Telli watching him. A heavy truck rumbled by on the street, the engine noise resonating off the glass door. Donald pushed the door open.
“Cold in here, isn’t it?” Telli wiped the back of his hand across his nose as he spoke. He leaned on the counter top, his belly spreading out over the glass.
Donald lifted his backpack from his shoulders and set it on the floor next to his foot. He held the strap in his right hand, his arm stretched so the pack’s weight was on the floor. He sniffed the air. “I guess so. It’s colder outside.”
“Sure. First week in May, of course it’s brisk. Inside, though, you’d expect a little more warmth, wouldn’t you?”
Donald looked through the glass into the display case, where cell phones were displayed on two shelves. At either end were cardboard boxes stacked haphazardly, lids open, packing, cellophane, and wires falling out.
“Looking for a phone? Because that’s what we got here.”
“Yeah. I’m just looking. I thought I might get a phone to, you know…”
“Fit in with the other kids?”
“I don’t care about that. I don’t like to use the phone at home because it’s not, you know, private.”
“Can’t talk with your girl on your parent’s phone, eh?”
“It’s not that.”
“What, then?”
Donald leaned over to look into the display case.
“I’m not being nosy, understand?” Telli continued. “We got fifty different phones. If we’re going to find the right one for you I need to know what you want to do with it.”
“I’m just looking.”
“That’s fine. Everybody’s looking. We’re all looking.” Telli stood up with a groan, pushed his hands into his lower back, and thrust his belly out, stretching the fabric of his T-shirt. “If I’m going to be any help to you, I need a clue about what you want; that’s all I’m saying. If you don’t want any help, that’s fine too. Take your time. Look all you want.”
“There’s that commercial, a MoPhones commercial, where the guy calls a girl to ask if she wants to go for a ride with him. You know the one? He’s in a red convertible and he stands up on the seat and calls her from in front of her house. He’s real cool about it. She says she’ll go with him anywhere, and comes running down the steps. Do you have that phone?”
“I haven’t seen that commercial, Kid. What did the phone look like?”
“It was small and silvery.”
“Do you see it here in the display?”
“No, it’s not here. The guy in the commercial unfolded it when he used it. He took it out of his jacket, and flipped it open, like that.” Donald flipped his wrist to illustrate the smooth, confident opening of the phone. “Then he punched just one key and it rang the girl, the one in the house.”
“The phone had the flip-up ear piece and saved frequently called numbers. Some of the phones here have those features.”
“It was so cool, you know, how he whipped the phone out, flipped it open, and made the call.”
“Did you think the phone made him cool?”
Donald folded his arms across his chest but kept his eyes fixed on the phones in the case. “What do you mean?”
Telli ignored the irritation in Donald’s voice. He often missed such clues; it was one reason for his poor sales performance.
“Because we don’t sell cool here, Kid, just phones. Anybody tells you they’ll sell you cool, you’re dealing with a swindler, a fraud, a charlatan.”
“A char…”
“Charlatan. A con man.”
“I’m just looking for the phone, the one from the commercial.”
“Good, we’ve got phones like that, maybe not the little silvery one, but phones that do the same things.” Telli rubbed his hands together, cupped them over his mouth, and blew into them.
“Why don’t you put on a sweater or something?” Donald asked.
“I’ve tried that. This room feels the same when I wear a sweater, or a coat, or a coat and a sweater. Cold, but it’s not the air, it’s the room itself.”
Donald squatted to look closer through the glass. “That doesn’t make sense. If the room is cold, the air in a room is cold. It’s the same thing.”
“Most rooms, maybe; not this one. This room is cold because of history. It’s always cold. It will always be cold. I can turn the thermostat up, or wrap up like an Eskimo, won’t matter. I could pile boxes in the middle of the room and set fire to them, won’t matter. The room’s cold; that’s all.”
“What does history have to do with it?”
A truck roared by outside, rattling the store window and the sign over its top half. GET MO’ WITH YOUR MOBILE PHONE, it recommended in translucent red letters, backwards when seen from inside. “Ever hear of the Paine Street Branch Bank massacre?” Telli asked.
“What?”
“How old are you, Kid? Sixteen? Seventeen?”
“Eighteen.”
“You would have been ten, then. You read newspapers when you were ten?”
“No.”
“Me neither. If you did, you’d know about the Paine Street Branch Bank massacre.”
“I didn’t read newspapers then.”
“This building was a branch bank back then, eight years ago. This is the building where the massacre happened, right here in this store, this very room.”
“What massacre?”
Telli came out from behind the display case. He turned his shoulders as he walked, right shoulder forward, right leg forward, left shoulder, left leg. He moved his legs, thick as fire hydrants, slowly, purposefully. “Telli’s my name,” he said. He held out a fat right hand.
Donald switched the strap for his backpack to his left hand, reached out with his right. “Don,” Donald said.
“Donald,” Telli said. “Bighead Donald.” He shook Donald’s hand gently.
Donald shook back, keeping his eyes on the moving hands.
Telli swung his left arm, indicating the room around them. “This was the bank lobby. It was a Saturday morning, ten o’clock, eight years ago. There were three customers in the lobby and one teller. The branch manager was in the building, too, in the back. He wasn’t a factor.”
“This was a bank?”
“This was a tanning parlor, before MoPhones opened. Before that it was a beauty parlor, before that an insurance office. Nobody lasts long here, a year or two, just long enough to go out of business. Everybody discovers, as MoPhones is discovering now, that nobody likes to be cold.”
“So why don’t you, like, get the furnace fixed?”
“The furnace is fixed. There’s nothing wrong with the furnace. The problem is the massacre, not the furnace.”
Donald switched the backpack strap to his right hand.
“There were three customers in the bank and the teller. Two men came in with nylons pulled over their heads, two men with silver pistols. They shouted, ‘Don’t move, or you’re dead!’ Then one of them aimed his pistol directly at the teller. ‘I saw that,’ he said, and Boom! He put one bullet in the middle of the teller’s forehead. Just like that. The teller went down like one of those blown-up clowns you can box with, but he didn’t pop back up. One minute he’s thinking about where to go for lunch, and how long he’ll be stuck working Saturday mornings, and when he’ll get laid next, and Boom! The next minute he’s got a hole in his forehead the size of a quarter and a hot date with eternity. The others in the bank, the customers, heard the back of his head hit the floor like a soft melon that had rolled off the top of a refrigerator. They couldn’t see him because he was behind the counter. ‘He reached for the panic button,’ the robber said. ‘There’s a button under the counter. Every bank has one. He wanted to be a hero and there he is a hero. Anybody else want to be a hero like Mr. sneaky fingers here?’”
Donald shoved his left hand into his pocket and stepped back one step. He drew the strap to his backpack tight.
Telli folded his arms across his chest and shook his head. “Then one robber, the one who shot the teller, went behind the counter. The other one lined the customers up against the wall. ‘We don’t like heroes,’ he told them. ‘We like cowards. Are you cowards?’ The three customers were frozen in a panic; anybody would be, I suppose. There were two women and a man. Then the robber said something to himself, but right out loud so everybody heard him. He said, ‘Rule one: shift the fear in a relationship to the other party.’ Then he went right up to one of the women face-to-face and said, ‘You a coward?’ ‘What do you want from us?’ she said. ‘If you’re a coward, fine, you can live,’ he said. ‘But if you’re a hero, you die, like the teller. What are you, hero or coward?’ The woman clutched her purse against her chest like a shield. ‘Coward,’ she said.”
“The robber waved his gun back and forth. ‘Rule two,’ he said. ‘Feed the fear. Fear loves darkness, uncertainty, and surprise. Feed the fear.’ He brought out a roll of gray tape from his coat pocket and told the woman to wrap tight bands around the other customers’ heads, covering their eyes. When she was finished, he had her do the same to her own head. ‘That takes care of the dark,’ he said. ‘Uncertainty? Let’s see. I’m going to kill some of you, and some will live. I don’t know which is which yet. Okay, that takes care of the uncertainty. Now. Surprise.’ He moved close to the woman’s ear. ‘Boom!’ he shouted. She jumped back against the wall. ‘Good,’ the robber said. The woman stood frozen with her back against the wall. ‘Tell you what,’ the robber said. ‘Let’s have a test. I’m going to kill one of you in a minute. I don’t know which one yet. You tell me which one. Should it be the woman here next to you? Or the guy? Or you? You tell me which one and I’ll do it. That’ll be our test.’”
Telli walked across the room to the wall near the entrance. A cardboard cut-out stood next to the wall, a man-sized robot holding a giant, cardboard cell phone. A smile of perfectly even robot teeth played across his face. A sign (DON’T MISS OUR MAY SPECIAL) hung from a string around his neck. A colored map, showing cell phone coverage areas, hung on the wall. “It was right here. The customers were against this wall. The robber was about here.” He placed himself a few feet from the wall and spoke to the cardboard robot. “The robber stepped close to the woman and said, ‘A coward would tell me to shoot somebody else. A hero’s going to tell me she can’t tell me to kill somebody or some crap like that. So, what’s it going to be? Kill the guy? Kill the other woman? Kill you?’ At that point, the other woman said, ‘You can’t do this to people. It’s not right.’ Boom! That was that. He blasted her just like the other guy blasted the teller, except it was two shots in the chest. She slammed against the wall and was dead before her butt hit the floor. That would have been right about here.”
Telli leaned over and looked at the floor carefully.
“Jesus,” Donald said.
“Jesus wasn’t here that day. It was just robbers and customers.”
“He shot the woman right there?”
“They cleaned everything up, the bank did, or maybe the insurance company did, but probably the bank. Whatever. It was all cleaned up a long time ago. After he killed the second woman, he turned back to the first. ‘I’m not going to leave two behind,’ he said. ‘One would be okay, but not two. Who’s it going to be, you or him?’ She took a long time to answer. She was crying, not sniffing with little tears in the corners of the eyes, but big sobs and tears running down her face like a leaking faucet. ‘I have a little girl at home,’ she said. ‘I have two children,’ the other customer, the guy, said. He broke right in. ‘They’re six and eight. A boy and a girl.’ ‘There’s no one but me for my Lisa,’ the woman said. ‘I don’t know what would happen to her.’ ‘So you’re telling me to shoot this guy?’ the robber asked.”
Telli leaned close to the cutout robot and pushed his finger under the cardboard chin. “The robber put his pistol under the guy’s chin like this. ‘I have a little girl at home,’ the woman said. She was crying so you could barely make out what she was saying. ‘You’ll have to be clearer than that,’ the robber said. ‘Just say, shoot that bastard.’”
“Jesus,” Donald said. “Why didn’t the police come?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t; that’s all. They came later, but too late to do anything.”
“Why didn’t the customers jump him?”
“The robber? He had the gun.”
“It’s better than being stood up against a wall and shot.”
“Most people panic. They don’t know what to do. People need time to figure things out, and there wasn’t any time. Their eyes were taped over, so there wasn’t much they could do.”
“What happened?”
“Well, the woman said, ‘Please don’t shoot me,’ or something like that. Then the guy said, ‘I’m younger than she is, and I’ve got two kids. She only has one.’ He was crying by this time too. ‘You’re both pretty good cowards,’ the robber said. ‘It’s hard to decide.’ He stepped close to the woman and said, ‘Can’t you just say, shoot the bastard? You’ve got to be clear.’ She put her hands over her face and said, ‘Shoot the bastard.’ Then he stepped close to the guy and said, ‘What about you? Don’t you want to say, shoot the bitch? She’s telling me to shoot you. What about it?’ The guy straightened up, wiped his mouth, and said, ‘I have two kids. Shoot the bitch.’ The robber stepped back and looked at his gun. ‘You’re both good cowards,’ he said. ‘But I think for pure sniveling you got the advantage.’ He meant the guy. The woman started to say something, but he’d made up his mind. Boom! He shot her, same as the other one. Two shots in the chest.”
“Jesus, just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Right here, in this room?”
“Right here, next to the wall.” Telli poked his index finger into the chest of the cutout robot, which fell over backwards, a wave of fine dust rolling out from under it as it fell. It lay on the floor, flat against the red and white checkerboard squares, holding the cardboard cell phone toward the ceiling. “I’m not supposed to clean the floor,” Telli said. “There’s a cleaning service for that. I’m supposed to clean the display case; that’s all. So, what do you think? Was the guy a coward, like the robber said?”
Donald looked at the fallen robot. The fine dust settled back to the floor. “He did what anybody would do, I guess. He had two kids to think about.”
“What if he didn’t have any kids? What if he made that up?”
“What, to fool the robber?”
“Sure. Anybody would do the same, wouldn’t they? Say whatever they thought would keep them alive? Hell, the woman probably lied too, if she’d had her wits about her. The robber wasn’t going to ask to see what pictures she had in her wallet, was he?”
“What happened after he shot the woman?”
“The other robber came out from behind the counter. He had a canvas bag with money in it. When he was in the middle of the room, the robber who shot the customers shot him too. Two shots. Shot him dead. Then he reloaded his pistol, picked up the moneybag, and went out the door. Last thing he said to the guy who was still alive was, ‘I think those kids of yours will turn out to be fine cowards too, just like their dad.’ Then he left.”
“Jesus,” Donald said. “Where were the police?”
“They came a few minutes later. The manager in the back room hid under his desk when he heard the first gunshot, and after a while he came out and called the police, but it was too late.”
Donald dropped the strap to his backpack and shoved it against the display case with his foot.
“You see, it’s not the furnace that’s faulty in this building; it’s the history.”
“Did they catch the guy?”
“The robber? No. They didn’t have a good description, because of the nylon over his head. They had the other robber, but he was dead.”
“That’s a horrible story,” Donald said.
“Quite a history, this place.”
“But I don’t see how it makes the room cold. That was eight years ago.”
“It takes a lot more than eight years for something like that to clear out of a room. It takes forever. This room will feel this way as long as it stands. The only way to fix it would be to tear the building down and start over. Nobody’s going to sell insurance here, or hairdos, or tans, or cell phones.”
“So why do you…”
“It’s not my store, so why would I care? I work here; that’s all. MoPhones is doomed. I could see that the second day I was here. People come in, like you. They feel the chill in the air. They lose their confidence and the last thing they want is to take out their money and buy a phone. I don’t care. I work my hours, I earn my wage, and that’s that. If I were on commission, it’d be different. Maybe I’ll hang around until MoPhones goes down, and then I’ll sign up with whoever takes the building. There’ll be something in this building; the real estate’s too valuable to let it sit idle. Whatever it is, maybe I’ll sign up.”
Telli lifted the cutout robot from the floor and adjusted it to face the door. He smiled, drawing his sparse mustache into a straight line. His eyes squinted over the tops of his fat cheeks. “We got a promotion this month,” he said. “Buy a phone and you get a month’s free air time—no restrictions, on-peak, off-peak, doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t think—”
“Changed your mind about the phone? Doesn’t matter to me. I’m straight hourly, no commission.”
“Maybe I’ll look around.” Donald lifted his backpack and moved toward the door.
“Maybe you’ll want to come back another time. Sometimes we have unadvertised specials. I could keep my eyes open for you.”
Donald pushed the door open. “Sure, that would be cool.”
The local newspapers called the incident at the Paine Street Branch Bank a ‘hold-up,’ except for the sensationalizing tabloids, who used terms like ‘butchery,’ ‘slaughter,’ and even, as Telli did, ‘massacre.’ The mainstream press focused on the details they hoped would lead to capture of the surviving gunman—the money carried away in a canvas bag and the identity of the slain robber. None of the newspapers reported the mysterious chilliness in the bank lobby. In fact, no one noticed any temperature irregularities in the room before Telli hired on to do clerical work for the insurance company that moved in when the branch bank vacated.
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jhmckeogh reviewed Version 1 -
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Overall, this is a good story. I like how you frame the bank robery in the normal tellings of a telephone salesman. Couple reccommendations, almost all doing with dialogue.
1) watch out for phrase repititon ie “just like that” and more importantly “something…” The somethings are not needed.
2) read out your dialogue out loud. I feel like you waste some interactions saying nothing to propell the plot
3) the bank robbery dialogue needs to be tightened. the sentiment is okay, but once again, there’s a lot of wasted breath.
You spend a good amount of time giving telli a characterazation, but barely anything on the bank robber. Lets see a quirk, or a disability, or something that give us a window (even if its clouded, dark) into his inner machinations, soul.
Good piece. the framework is there. clean it up.
james
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VoicesInMyHead reviewed Version 1 -
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I love this piece. The character Telli is so compelling that I couldn’t stop reading. His description to Donald of the bank robbery was so captivating that I found myself wanting to get to the end. The idea of the chill in the air and how that symbolized the death and of those who past away is very powerful. The best line in the piece was when Telli said “Jesus wasn’t here this day”..I love that line because I could see his character saying those exact words. I think you have great talent. Keep up the good work.
ckbailey reviewed Version 1 -
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i really enjoyed reading this story. the writing is solid and dryly clever. telli is quite a character(especially liked that bit about him rotating his shoes like tires).
my only problem is with then ending; it just seemed to fizzle out, when i was expecting some kind of twist. not that it necessarily NEEDS a twist ending; but it does need an ending as strong as the rest of the story.
esmaril reviewed Version 1 -
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I absolutely loved this story. The way you described the bank massacre and the harsh sarcasm of the protagonist brings a certain voice to the piece that makes it very suspenseful. The only thing I didn’t like about this story is the conclusion. It would have made more sense if you had the main character (at the end) take out his wallet, look at the picture of his two children and whisper to himself, “I’m just a coward, no more no less.” Then Donald could have turned around as he left and asked, “What was that?” Telli would shake his head and reply, “Nothing. It’s just the chill. It gets to you after a while.”
jweeble reviewed Version 1 -
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This was superb! I forgot to keep track of the grammar and punctuation like I always do – just waited for the next page button to come up. Whew.
The only thing I could think of would be to maybe add at the end something like – it was almost as if he brought the temperature change with him.
Couple things (had to go back and dig for them though):
Mr. sneaky fingers [maybe Sneaky Fingers]
One run-on sentence, but I can’t find it now.
Wonderful!
Harold_P reviewed Version 1 -
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A very fast and funny writing style, dare I say even “electric?”
I believe I just did. Be wary of using too many adjectives at times, since you run the risk of slipping into tautology. For example: “the smudge it left as it smeared” is an example where two words that mean the same thing are deployed and the reader is left feeling stuffed with adjectives. Well, not stuffed but one too many… you see?
Great dialogue. Realistic but farcical in an amusing way. Oddly evocative of the Marx brothers but don’t ask me to explain that one. I liked the characters in this little hub you have created. They are engaging, well-rounded and it seems finely rendered from experience.
It has an “indie” spirit to use crude movie terminology. I felt immersed in your breezy prose and the whirligig lives of your characters.
Nice work, sir.
Harold_P
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