Short Story / The Old Con
The dishwashers in their torn t-shirts and filthy aprons, smoking by the dumpster behind the Burger King, called him the old cape verdian, behind his back. His still black hair combed in slivers, left little room between the severe part and his ear. He walked pulling the silver lever of his cane, back and forth, working a dip into his strides, most days, but he was not himself today.
Carla was working, but didn’t hear Dom’s comment about the thermostat, as he swayed to the counter, his unsteady gaze lingering on her sturdy frame. A sharp stab spread in his groin until it became a thudding spasm. A doctor told him last year words that came back to him when he felt the sharp pain spreading like spidery tentacles; ulcerated liver.
He cleared his throat, his milky gray eyes gleaming with a faint light.
“Can you spot me a coffee? Soon, I’ll be able to get my hands on a lot of money. Nobody knows but I got money stashed,” Dom said, his body warming to the temperature inside the diner.
“What nobody, you tell everybody, all the time, someone’s going to knock you upside the head and take it one day,” Carla said, dismissing him.
“You be ready,” Dom tottered, as he clutched his cane, he knew he should take a seat, but he wanted to say more, to hold her close with his words. He could not sense what she was thinking, her eyes with their low lids were cheerless and partly hidden behind thick braids.
He cleared his throat, gathering his strength as if to pry open her mind, as the pinched pressure he felt, and the overheated room seemed to fuse in him, he leaned heavily on his cane.
The door swung open and Carla greeted Shareese who had just arrived for her shift. Dom stood, hesitating, not knowing what to say as time went backward and forward without clear warning.
“Do you want anything else?” She asked. When had he begun to think so slowly, to move so slowly, to be so weak? He slumped over his cane, as he smiled flashing wet teeth.
“Well look what the cat drug in. Yeah, old man, I’m talking to you,” Roach blew in with loose dead leaves like the ghost of Father Christmas.
Dom had worked with Roach at a chemical plant after he got out of jail.
It was a day job, that lasted three weeks for Dom before he couldn’t stand the smell any longer, the constant headaches, the piss tests and eye exams. He told his parole officer he wasn’t doing shit work because he did time and quit; but Roach stayed there fifteen years. Everyone called him Roach, because he lasted so long.
“Go easy on him,” Sharesse chimed in taking the post from Carla, wiping the same section of counter. She had come in late. She was usually late for her shift, and forever gesticulating with nails she had grown out nearly six inches that curled and were the color of hooves.
His bladder, now full, sought to empty itself pushing against his full bowel lined with last nights booze and two cups of stale coffee he drank this morning. Dom doubled over in pain as he leaned on his stick to steady himself.
“Are you alright?” Shareese asked. “You don’t look so good. Here do you want some help. Carla!”
“No,” Dom looked like his organs were collapsing inside, “ …stay over there. It’s nothing….the bathroom.” Dom moved with urgency as the pain wrecked him.
He walked unsteadily towards the bathroom. He could feel Shareese and Carla looking on, just as he knew Roach would not out of respect.
He held on to the wall and waited to be buzzed into the bathroom. He bared his teeth down hard from pain, and the viscid taste of something warm and sickening as a warm dampness spread down his legs, he slumped onto the toilet seat.
II
There were a handful of customers in the Burger King for the morning rush, so there were plenty to look on as Kayo swept into the room spreading his leather jacket like a beetle that had just alighted.
“The hand is quicker than the eye. You see but you don’t see. You got a better chance here than you got in Las Vegas” Kayo always said with added charm.
Dom had watched the girls as their excitement carried like a wave through the room. It tasted like fresh fruit, a summer peach.
Then, Mrs. Jones said, “It’s a disgrace” as loud as she could. Kayo heard her and moved his game over to their table. He spread the three worn cards face up first, showing the queen, king, and joker. Then he flipped them over and deftly tossed them, one over another into the air, as the cards performed like so many circus tumblers.
“Watch the queen. Watch the queen, where did she go, where did she go. Is she in the corners or the middle card? Pick.” Kayo told his mark, sucking on a toothpick, and cutting his shifty eyes left then right as if a police cruiser were pulling up in any second.
“Don’t be a fool. I’m not wasting my money” Mrs. Jones yelled to the young man.
“I’ll give you a free chance to see if you can find the queen,” Kayo said, turning to Mrs. Jones who lifted her hand as if she smelled something foul in the air and waved her hand in front of her face. Kayo didn’t seem to acknowledge rejection so he stood there like it was the most natural stance in the world.
Then Mrs. Jones caught her breath as if she were playing a tedious game with a tireless child and reached out to touch the cards or maybe she was reaching for her coffee either way her hand was out there and she made a choice, not touching the card but letting her hand hover over it.
“Ah too bad, you lose,” Kayo said turning the Joker over and looking steely eyed at Mrs. Jones.
“That will be $20,” he said. Mrs. Jones caught her breath.
“Time has run out on the special offer. Free can’t last” Kayo said leaning in close, sticking the toothpick out holding it by the tip.
“Punk” Dom had said, filling his lungs with air, even as it was being sucked out of the room.
“We ain’t giving you a dime, don’t you have any respect for anything,” Dom spat his words out, shaking. He braced against the table, where he stood. He felt the eyes in the room shifting and resting uncomfortably on him as if he were another nuisance vying for their attention.
“Old man, you got a death wish,” Kayo said, looking around as if at the moment he wasn’t too sure of himself.
“Do you know who I am, Man, I ain’t no small time chump like you. I hit the big time.” Dom looked around the room at the petty people eating their cheap breakfasts, snotty nose kids greedily chomping down on their small meals and wondered if this were the time or the place for his last breath, if it was to be it was to be. This is how Dom wanted it to end if it was going to end, with the sun hidden behind a silk screen of clouds, a crowd seeing an old lion, still dangerous, still strong.
“I’ll catch you later,” Kayo had said, picking up the cards and exiting with his entourage.
Dom hadn’t realized he was holding his coffee cup, it was no longer warm, he tipped the tepid coffee, the reconstituted cream mixing itself in. He was shaking so bad he could barely stand, but then there came applause and cheers from around the room. He stood until it died down.
II
“Buy me breakfast this morning.” Mrs. Jones asked Dom, coiling the words around her tongue, tilting the powder blue fedora on her head to shield half her face. Her perfume something full of roses, had a physical presence. She wore her warm sienna hair, in a loose ponytail down her back. Her eyelids were painted pale blue that matched the hat, she couldn’t stop fiddling with.
“You can’t be for real. As long as I’ve known you woman…” Dom reined himself in, tapping his fingers on the table instead of speaking his mind to the woman and shaking himself free of his thoughts of them together that still replayed continually in his mind.
“I am always a lady and I dare you to say anything different.”
“Are you two fighting or flirting?” Roach said, Dom had bragged to Roach one day at work about her, about her witless husband, whom Dom liked; that was when they were strangers before they all seemed to gather on instinct. Roach slipped his two hundred pounds, gracefully into the booth. Dom huffed a little pissed he missed her dead husband.
Mrs. Jones ran her lacquered fingers along the brim of her hat.
“Is anybody at least going to buy me a cup of coffee?”
“Do you like my hat?”
Roach walked back to the counter, singing, ‘Me and Mrs. Jones’, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills.
“Woman, what do you want from me?” Dom rolled his eyes and scooted down on the bench giving her a wide berth.”
“You aren’t right in the head,” Mrs. Jones said heaving her chest with insult. Dom ignored her and directed his comments to Roach who was now in the back of the line at the breakfast rush.
“Hey, man, next time I’ll get breakfast, I got enough money stashed to buy us Champagne dreams,” Dom said. He liked the idea of being a big man and treating his friends.
“Go to hell, you ain’t never going to treat, you keeping that stash for yourself.” Roach said.
“You’re a tightwad, an old skinflint. You’re never going to spend any of that money,” Mrs. Jones said rolling the words out on her tongue like butterscotch.
“Well, your husband left you money, so you don’t have anything to worry about. Not like the rest of us,” Roach said.
“Although you don’t ever spend any of it on anything but new make up… that you really don’t need,” Dom added the words conscious of the need to soften the blow.
“Don’t tell me what to do with my money. My husband would want me to spend it how I see fit. He loved me.”
Dom could sense one of her crying fits starting.
“You been telling us about that money you hit for as long as I can remember, why you still living in that hole? Why at your old ass age you still working as a bagger at Sam’s Market? Why don’t you go get it? I don’t think no one knows the difference now, it’s just money,” Roach said returning from the counter with a tray overflowing with two orders and offering it up to Dom and Mrs. Jones. Dom waved it away.
“I told you, all that is just a cover, Man. I got to be sure, nobody follows me and the police remain clueless. None of you are going to do time for me and I’ve done enough time to last me, now until forever.”
“Sometimes they do stuff to that money so they can trace it, I saw a movie where they put paint on it. I can’t remember the name of it. It had Chuck Norris in it I think,” Mrs. Jones said, thinking, while she stirred her coffee.
“Maybe we shouldn’t see it as the man on your tail, there has to be a statute of limitations on that kind of stuff, you were twenty-one or something when you hit that Bank.“
“Do you think they’re going to let me ride around in a Rolls Royce on Uncle Sam’s dime? The cops will be on me like white on rice. If not the men in blue then the IRS. The IRS is nothing but cops in nice suits”. Dom laughed uneasily, scenes from his life rolled back and forth through his mind like a television between channels.
II
Someone opened the bathroom door and Dom felt a quickening as he tried to clear his mind. An autumn wind blew in from outside. He had felt this same wind before, the moment that had set him so firmly in time. He heard himself yelling in the face of a scared shitless bank clerk, running out into the crisp autumn sunshine; laughing.
Then the sound of a bullet hitting leather, or had he imagined that, the sound of the body as it tried to absorb the shock. He had never seen death, it had picked others, he had called on it with bravado and dared it enough, but it had always kept its distance. He ran, now, bleeding, pain, his feet slapping the pavement on an endless path through bushes, over wire fences scrambling to escape. The sound of money in a bag, fluttering like so many moths as he jumped a fence, running, his heart pounding as it was now. What had happened to the money? It was never recovered. He felt his grip loosening, his memory fading.
The money he kept now in a loose board in the back of his closet beneath his shoes, put there from his social security check every month could not make him real in his own mind. An air freshener on the wall expelled rich apple disinfectant. The smell made his stomach crawl as he recalled the last morning of his life.
II
Dom swung his walking stick back and forth tapping it against the pavement. Boston was cold this time of year; the promise of spring was still too early to be realized. He forced himself not to think about the cold and marked each step of his nimble-footed stride thinking about his money, it made him feel as if he had done something with his life, time had not been wasted it had accumulated, as his legend.
He felt in his back pocket again for his wallet, he needed to see the five and the ten stashed there, feel the crisp new bills, he always made the bank give him the newest bills, he didn’t like used money. As he crossed the street, several young men gathered in the parking lot of the Burger King around the dumpster that sat out front. He stiffened, turned up his shirt collar, and sensing the danger of young idle men, tapped his stick hard on the cement.
No one was on the street yet. Dawn was just arriving, bringing with it those suffering early morning catatonia; so many journeyed unseeing through this portion of town, even on Martin Luther King boulevard people were deaf to strife and suffering. He angled himself and dipped his shoulder to bowl right through them.
“Hey old man,” Someone yelled. He focused on the brick wall of the Burger King; his heart gave off a slight ripple.
“You got any money? I want a hamburger!” A nearly depantsed punk said, reaching in his back pocket, he pulled out a brush, pushing Dom with his elbow. Dom faced them smiling.
He was looking at Ms. Johnson’s boy, he use to play outside with a stick digging in the mud when he was six or seven. He almost hugged the boy he remembered, who reminded him so much of himself, hell his mother had said he was his, Dom had laughed in her face, even now he sneered. The wind chilled him to the bone. March was up to her usual frosty coquetry, making the leaves around him slick with dew, the wind icicle cold.
“What you laughing at? …Hey I know you, you the one who has all the money? He’s the one they say robbed a truck or something, they say he’s got a load stashed,” the boy Dom remembered as a child said.
“You punks don’t know who your messing with. I could beat the shit out of all of you.” Dom said holding the cane he carried by the neck, and shaking it.
“Hey old man, do you want to die today,” the youngest boy grinned as if he were making a joke, his eyes polished flecks of copper, darted around looking for anyone who might be on the street.
“You haven’t said nothing but a word, punk, I don’t take no shit from nobody” Dom nodded, not willing to budge. He looked around too, hoping someone were watching.
In the silence he heard seagulls hawking to one another as they scavenged the Burger King lot, then someone punched him in the stomach, he sunk to the ground reeling from the shock of the blow, when a foot contacted with his groin.
“Hey, don’t kill the old man!” Dom heard the voice, concentrated on it to keep his eyes open. What was the boy’s name, he didn’t remember. He knew his mother though, she lived in the same complex he did up the street, but they didn’t speak.
“Get up man.” Dom was helped to his feet and rough hand felt into his pockets.
“You are an original P.I.M.P, I remember you, he’s cool. Sorry man”
The young punk said, as if the past five minutes hadn’t happened, reaching out his hand, Dom took it, wanting the boy to know who he was, but it was to late for that. Why should he believe him? The boy pulled Dom into a complicated handshake that he didn’t recognize, as one hand tried to mimic the other.
A punk with a tattoo across his shoulders looked Dom up and down, sniffing at him, as if he had picked up the scent of death. The young man who had blocked his path to the doorway bowed and let him pass.
“You got a free pass, today, Man.” The boy Dom knew to be his child said. They had taken his wallet, but he didn’t say anything. He lowered his head, defeated.
They backed off, winding up the street, walking on the concrete embankment in the middle of MLK Boulevard. Every now and then they would hit a lamppost with a bat and there would be the sound of a crack like breaking pool balls, their laughter scattering like iron shavings.
The door swung open to the stall where he had collapsed. Someone straddled him looking down at his wasted body. Then a rough hand felt his jaw. Dom tried to focus.
“Man, are you still alive?” A leathery voice said. Dom knew that voice and tried to follow it, as Dom’s boy knelt beside him, supporting his head with his hand and lifting it away from the toilet, then he yelled for help.
Soon there was a crowd standing inside the bathroom door. Mrs. Jones and Roach were asking what happened and the young articulate man tried to explain that he had found Dom lying on the floor.
Dom heard the ambulance sirens, but he had to stay rigid and concentrate on the pain to help him stay conscious. He was lifted off the floor and carried to the ambulance. He grabbed the leather jacket of his son as he lay on the stretcher. Kayo stepped closer to hear what the old man had to say, but his voice was low and rasping, Kayo could not make it out. The paramedics quickly settled him and started an IV drip.
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This read like a very badly done play. The characters lacked depth and everything just seemed so bland. The only one who had some discription was Dom and even then it was a hazy one. This could be made better by some more description, also make the suroundings known and sound interesting dont just say the burger king kitchen.
Sorry to be so negative but if these changes are made I feel, it could be a great piece of work.
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THis is very well written. Introduce your characters, give us descriptions of each one. How did Dom get sick? How did he become a bum? This is an eyecathing story. I was intrigued and wondered what would happen next. Continue with this piece and add on.
You will have a great piece to publish one day. Good luck and keep up the great writing.
kudos, kudos, kudos, kudos, and excellent, witing. kudos
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