The Penalty
by Lou Gaglia
What would the manager have said if I'd walked into St. Mark's theater with my bag of once-frozen peas? Well, probably nothing, but I threw the bag out anyway before opening the theater's heavy black swinging door. I bought a large Pepsi with plenty of ice, and poured the soda part of it down the men's room sink before sitting in the back row and applying cube after cube to my aching eye. Some people entering the theater turned their heads as I dug into my cup, and I glared back at them until the lights went down and I could ice in peace. No one ever noticed me, I fumed, while I passed hundreds along the city sidewalks. But as soon as I held an ice cube to my eye, I was something to look at.
***
He'd barreled downhill my way from the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, riding along the white line that separated the wood-planked pedestrian side from the bikers' concrete. A crowd walked downhill to my right, so I didn't move and the biker didn't move either and he slammed into my raised shoulder and flew off his bike. I hurried back to help him but he was up before I reached him, pushing or punching me backward until I crashed against the iron beam with the traffic humming below. I threw my arms up to my head and he stopped.
"I'm sorry I hit you, man, but you were in my way!" he shouted, packed with muscle in a sleeveless t-shirt and over-tight shorts.
"You hit me?" I looked up to the bump already forming above my left eye.
"You can hit me back if you want."
I frowned at his rocky shoulders and enormous biceps and shook my head, "No...forget it." And I staggered ahead toward the Manhattan side, feeling the eyes of witnesses on me for the first few steps before becoming anonymous again.
***
The late 30s or 40s movie starred a city kid named Rusty, the son of Spuds Nelson, who killed people and other mugs just for fun or because they made him mad or spoke out of turn or missed their lines. Rusty was a nice kid at heart. He liked his friends and old ladies and his dad's air-headed moll, Julie. But he was dealt a bad hand at birth because his dad took him along to hits instead of to ballgames or soup lines like other dads did back in the day.
Rusty was supposed to follow in Spuds' shoeprints, because that's what a good son of a criminal did, but you could tell just by looking at the actor playing him that he didn't completely go for the idea. Still, Rusty was tough. He talked tough, like his dad, but he was wide-eyed, pent up and anxious, unlike his dad who was a grouch and didn't care about anything in the world except dough. Only Julie, Spuds' moll, could make Spuds smile, but that was only when he wanted to get a kiss out of her; and each time the moment was ruined by one of his own mugs busting in to ask a stupid question or claim to be looking for a bullet.
***
Because I was looking up, trying to see the bump above my eye, I almost ran into someone coming out of the Korean deli on Fulton Street It was crowded there at 8 A.M. but most of the crowd rushing to work was near the front counter buying newspapers or coffee. It was desolate in the back where the ice bags were.
There was still one hour before work at the bookstore, so I took my time, staring into a frozen section glass door at my swollen eye and my frowning face. A woman-one of the owners, maybe-appeared on my right, a half smile or sneer on her face, and reached down for my pockets, feeling at one before I jumped back and swatted at her hand.
"What are you doing?"
She reached for me again, but I deflected her arm harder.
"You take something?" she said. "Huh?"
"Get away from me." I stepped toward her and roared into her face, "Who do you think you are!" She smiled and blinked but didn't move, and I seethed my way past her, glaring at customers near the main counter and daring them to continue staring at me, which they didn't.
***
I got up to get some more Pepsi with ice ("Hold the Pepsi"), so I missed a bit of the movie. When I returned Spuds and his boys had figured out that an FBI agent and some newspaper guy had been pretending they were mugs, but they couldn't keep up the pretense. Rusty was there with them at their cabin hideout, looking worried, and Julie the moll looked like she had no idea what planet she was even on. Finally, after some psychological torture, Spuds shot both imposters and told Rusty to drive out of there with Julie. Maybe I was too busy icing to catch why they had to be the ones to race away. Still, they looked terribly sorry that the two stiffs had been gunned down in front of them by their beloved Spuds. Well, Rusty looked sorry anyway. Julie was looking out the window.
***
There were three square tables and a row of stools along the counter of the coffee shop on Market Street, empty now except for Nancy, her back turned near the coffee burners, busy making multiple pots which steamed lazily around her.
My fists were still clenched and my teeth were grinding, but when she turned her head to say hello I smiled and took a deep breath. She faced the coffee machines, and I watched her smooth sloping shoulders and then looked up at the clock. Eight thirty, and a half hour left to take a forty minute walk to 13th and Broadway.
"Coffee?" she said, already placing a mug of it in front of me.
"Yes." I breathed a laugh, reaching for the milk and sensing her double take.
"Oh-"
"Definitely coffee."
"What happened?"
"It smells good, thanks." And I felt at my eye and smiled. "Not a good morning so far."
She walked to the back room, calling in Chinese, probably to her mother, and I watched her go and took another deep breath, my heart slowing a bit more. I wondered if she was any more than six or seven years younger than me.
An older Chinese man entered, waited near the register for a minute, and then left.
The week before, groaning up the elevator of my building, I'd announced to a group of friendly seniors that it was my birthday.
"And it's pretty depressing," I said. "I'm thirty already."
They laughed and all wanted to trade with me. "You're just a kid," one man said.
"Are you kidding" I grumbled. "I'm half-way dead."
The woman near the buttons looked annoyed and said, "Well, that makes me all the way dead then." They all chuckled or snickered, but I scowled, not in the mood to be poked at.
"Bunch of old fogies," I muttered on the way to my apartment.
Nancy returned. She held a bag out to me. "Frozen peas work the best," she said.
"Really?"
"Hold it against your eye now, and it should be all right in about three weeks...maybe four."
"Maybe four," I repeated, taking the bag for a second but then handing it back to her. "Maybe I'll take it to go."
She took it back and put it into the freezer next to the row of morning buns resting on shelves. I asked for a bun and ate one and sipped at coffee and told her what happened on the bridge and in the deli. "What idiots," she said, turning away when customers came in, and I sighed at the interruption.
Idiots. But I'd shouldered the biker, and I'd roared into the woman's face, and I'd called a bunch of seniors old fogies and scowled at them. There was meanness all around the city, but I was mean, too-mad at the customers at the counter who were taking extra time ordering and talking to Nancy themselves. I waited, sipping coffee and glancing up at the clock (8:40) until she finished and eased her way back along the counter to me.
"We got egged this morning by a bunch of kids," she said. "And threatened by a woman. We get threatened all the time. Yesterday this woman came in, ordered a cake, and then later said it wasn't what she ordered. She threatened my mother and said she wouldn't pay."
Another customer came in, but she leaned across the counter and whispered, "People are horrible sometimes, you know? This woman said-3" The customer barked his order from near the register, and she hurried over to serve him and then returned. She drifted in front of me and moved one coffee pot to a different burner. I watched her shoulders and the back of her brown-haired head.
"She said what?" I asked.
Nancy turned, confused. "Oh!" And she leaned against the counter again. "She said she would come back and-"(she quoted with her fingers)-"put a hurting on us."
"She did?"
Nancy stood straight again. "I don't care. We just have this little coffee shop. We don't bother anyone. But she's going to put a hurting on me? Over a cake?"
I laughed as Nancy huffed back to the burners, and I looked at the clock. Ten minutes to nine.
"Do you have that bag of peas?" I asked her. "Maybe I'll use that right now."
"Sure, and I've got another for you when you leave," she said, opening the freezer.
"I'll have another coffee, too. No rush," I said.
***
I fell asleep for a bit (or maybe it was a delayed TKO from the punch to the head), and when I came to Julie was in a cabin living room trying to make some kind of cake. She cracked a bunch of eggs, fascinated by what was coming out of them. And then she mixed milk and something else into some kind of goop. She looked pretty doing it, though, even in black and white film. It made me wish she wasn't such a ditz, and that Spuds could be jailed and I could turn into a black and white character along with her, or more realistically, meet a girl like her who could make goop for me. "I'd appreciate it," I whispered to the screen.
Spuds came out of another room and tasted the goop. He wore a look on his face that said, "My moll Julie is an inexplicably stupid broad and a lousy cook, but she sure tries her best to make goop for me from time to time—even though it’s the pits."
Some of Spuds' boys barged in at that point, and Spuds yelled at them and slapped the nearest one around for a long time before asking what they wanted. The coast was all clear, they informed him, and their cabin hideout was safe. They'd only talked to one guy in town, maybe the sheriff, they bragged, who asked them what they were doing up in those parts. "Fishing for trout," they answered, "and we got a couple of big ones." Spuds and his boys all laughed and were feeling pretty good about themselves, but Julie the moll broke in with the fact that trout "hasn't never been seen in these parts and you couldn't have caught one, sillies." The boys all stood around and mulled it over, but Spuds got the gist right away and ordered them to take a window each because the law was coming.
***
I stood in the middle of the busy Astor Place island, waiting for the white "walk" sign or a break in the traffic. Jaywalking was safer there than station-to-station crossing, but I waited anyway, watching the steady "Walk" signal turn to flashing red and then to solid "Don't Walk". I felt at the bag of dripping cold peas, smiled to myself, and stepped off the curb. A roar and I jumped back the bus thundering past the whoosh the exhaust my heart hammering. And I bent over, trying to breathe again, my hands and the dripping bag of peas on my knees.
***
The shootout was violent but only lasted a few movie minutes. The feds blasted away at the window frames while Spuds and his boys ducked and blasted back. Julie and Rusty stood off to the side against a wall, seemingly safe, friends now. But Julie got plugged somewhere imaginary and was dead automatically without bleeding or suffering. Spuds looked back to see what had thudded on the floor, shrugged when he saw Julie, and went back to shooting and ducking. "What a heartless...mug," I said aloud.
Rusty stayed on the ground over the croaked Julie, and looked up in time to see another of Spuds' boys bite the cabin dust. The last mug of all got cold feet and announced to Spuds in no uncertain terms that he was quitting the mug business and giving himself up to become a carnival barker. Ticked off, Spuds shot the stinking yellow traitor in an invisible place, but during the effort he exposed his right shoulder and got himself blasted in the one spot in the movies that doesn't kill a guy.
Rusty and his gasping dad had plenty of time to have a long conversation about escape plans while the feds outside wondered why they weren't getting shot at any more. Rusty hinted to Spuds to give himself up, but Spuds had a better idea, which was to have Rusty drag his shot body feet first out back to the sedan and take off before the feds could move in. It worked. The feds hadn't thought of covering the back driveway and didn’t notice the place was empty until Spuds' pizza delivery guy came late and knocked for ten minutes without any luck.
Later, Rusty dumped the injured Spuds off road, per Spuds' instructions, and took off, drawing the feds to him to take the heat for his dear escaped dad.
***
Rob the manager was over near the art section and saw me come in but turned away. I went over to him, smiling sheepishly. "What a morning. Sorry, Rob," I said to his back, and then he turned.
"You're fired. You need to go." I stood there. "You hear me? An hour and a half late. You're done."
"Done? I got punched in the eye. Look."
He looked away.
"I've never been late before."
"You've never been late. You pushed a woman off a ladder. You-"
"That was a long time ago. She called me a nit wit-"
"I don't care how long ago it was. You always put books in the wrong spots. You read while you're supposed to be working." I looked outside. "Want me to go on?"
"I got punched," I said through clenched teeth. "Look at these peas-"
"I don't care. Don't you have a cell phone?"
"No, what for?"
Then he came close to me, and he poked his forefinger into my chest once ("Just") and then again ("leave."). On the second poke I swatted his hand away, and when he stayed close to me I stuck my leg behind his and pushed his chest and he went down hard.
He scrambled to get up, and I backed away from him, already turning. "Don't touch me." And then I was gone, out into the sunlight with him yelling from behind for Eddie to call the cops.
***
Rusty couldn't hack reform school, getting into fist fights and yelling at schoolmarms, so he went before the judge who sentenced him to a year living on a farm. The farmer himself was there at the hearing and nodded a grim howdy to him after the sentencing.
The farmer, Ted, treated Rusty like his own son, even though Rusty kept calling him a hick. Ted's Ma was nice, too. So was the farmer's girlfriend and her dad whom they all called Grandpop, played by Lionel Barrymore from Key Largo. I sat up like I was seeing an old friend.
After a while Rusty began feeling different about farm life and stopped trying to escape or steal all their money. Ma's cooking got better by the scene, and her sweet greetings to Rusty after school got sweeter. She laughed and comforted him when a petulant goose went after him whenever he turned his back and bent over. Grandpop was nice too, enrolling Rusty in a flying school because Rusty said he liked planes.
Ted the farmer, with the help of the FBI, had been planning all along to set up Spuds, using the clueless Rusty's secret newspaper message to Spuds as bait. Ted, however, felt guilty for giving up Rusty and told his girlfriend he’d rather have a gangster's kid around than the reward money that would save the farm. Meanwhile, Rusty's long talk with Grandpop about flying school and the girl next door gave him plenty to think over.
Just when Rusty had about made up his mind to be part of the family, though, Spuds showed up. He waved a gun at the entire cast and told Rusty to get his jacket. Ted argued with Spuds and seemed perfectly willing to get a belly full of lead, and Spuds seemed happy to oblige, but then Lionel Barrymore wheeled himself in and gave a big speech to Spuds about how holding a gun was the only thing that made him tough. "Well," Grandpop said off camera, "I got a gun too," and Spuds immediately plugged him. Everyone except Spuds bent over Grandpop wailing, but Rusty came out of the pile with Grandpop's gun and pointed it at his dear old dad. "Kindly leave the premises," he asked his father in so many words, "or I will be forced to shoot you full of holes." This made Spuds mad, but there was nothing he could do except call his son a yellow bellied sapsucker or something, and he ran off, only to be caught up in a hail of FBI bullets, off camera, one of which must have clipped him because the music got tremendously dramatic.
That was a happy enough ending, and I was all set to get up to leave, but things got even better in one last scene which showed Grandpop at a window perfectly healthy and Rusty a part of the family and ready to join airplane school. I caught up to the tears that insisted on streaming out of my swollen and unswollen eyes just as the lights came on.
***
The desk sergeant was laughing to another officer who'd just put something on his desk, so I stood for a while until he looked over at me, the smile still on his face.
"I pushed my boss down. He said he was going to call the police, so-"
"No, he was poking me in the chest, so I pushed him."
"So what are you doing here?"
"He said he was calling the cops, and I don't want the police to look for me and take me in. I'd rather just...come here."
"He gave you the purple eye too?"
I felt at it. "No. That was on the bridge. A biker hit me."
"You're having a good day, aren't you?" I was quiet. "What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. Am I in trouble? I pushed him down."
"Eh," he said, looking down at papers. "Heat of the moment."
"So if the police come after me..."
"Don't fight it out with them."
Another officer came by to give the desk man papers. "That's some shiner you've got there," he laughed.
"I know."
"How's the other guy?"
"Just fine," I said, and I chuckled with them.
"Go home before something else happens," the desk sergeant muttered down at his papers.
"I'm not in trouble, then? You're not going to put me away?"
"We're not sending you away," he smirked.
"Unless you send me to a farm or something," I said. "I wouldn’t mind that."
"Funny farm, maybe..."
The officer was silently busy, so I said thanks and left.
No farm life for me, no, not a chance, I thought, wandering forlorn along 4th Street all the way to Avenue A. But it was nearly four o'clock, close enough to dinner, so maybe I'd sit at Nancy's counter for more talk and coffee and iced peas. I'd watch her smooth shoulders and listen to her lilting voice and not get punched or poked or patted down. And if I were a brave enough mug, maybe I'd ask her if she made good goop.
Lou Gaglia's work has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, The Cortland Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Prick of the Spindle, and is forthcoming in The Oklahoma Review, The Brooklyer, and Hawai'i Review. His first story collection, Poor Advice, will be published by Aqueous Books in early 2014. He lives and teaches in upstate New York.
The Penalty
by Lou Gaglia
What would the manager have said if I'd walked into St. Mark's theater with my bag of once-frozen peas? Well, probably nothing, but I threw the bag out anyway before opening the theater's heavy black swinging door. I bought a large Pepsi with plenty of ice, and poured the soda part of it down the men's room sink before sitting in the back row and applying cube after cube to my aching eye. Some people entering the theater turned their heads as I dug into my cup, and I glared back at them until the lights went down and I could ice in peace. No one ever noticed me, I fumed, while I passed hundreds along the city sidewalks. But as soon as I held an ice cube to my eye, I was something to look at.
***
He'd barreled downhill my way from the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, riding along the white line that separated the wood-planked pedestrian side from the bikers' concrete. A crowd walked downhill to my right, so I didn't move and the biker didn't move either and he slammed into my raised shoulder and flew off his bike. I hurried back to help him but he was up before I reached him, pushing or punching me backward until I crashed against the iron beam with the traffic humming below. I threw my arms up to my head and he stopped.
"I'm sorry I hit you, man, but you were in my way!" he shouted, packed with muscle in a sleeveless t-shirt and over-tight shorts.
"You hit me?" I looked up to the bump already forming above my left eye.
"You can hit me back if you want."
I frowned at his rocky shoulders and enormous biceps and shook my head, "No...forget it." And I staggered ahead toward the Manhattan side, feeling the eyes of witnesses on me for the first few steps before becoming anonymous again.
***
The late 30s or 40s movie starred a city kid named Rusty, the son of Spuds Nelson, who killed people and other mugs just for fun or because they made him mad or spoke out of turn or missed their lines. Rusty was a nice kid at heart. He liked his friends and old ladies and his dad's air-headed moll, Julie. But he was dealt a bad hand at birth because his dad took him along to hits instead of to ballgames or soup lines like other dads did back in the day.
Rusty was supposed to follow in Spuds' shoeprints, because that's what a good son of a criminal did, but you could tell just by looking at the actor playing him that he didn't completely go for the idea. Still, Rusty was tough. He talked tough, like his dad, but he was wide-eyed, pent up and anxious, unlike his dad who was a grouch and didn't care about anything in the world except dough. Only Julie, Spuds' moll, could make Spuds smile, but that was only when he wanted to get a kiss out of her; and each time the moment was ruined by one of his own mugs busting in to ask a stupid question or claim to be looking for a bullet.
***
Because I was looking up, trying to see the bump above my eye, I almost ran into someone coming out of the Korean deli on Fulton Street It was crowded there at 8 A.M. but most of the crowd rushing to work was near the front counter buying newspapers or coffee. It was desolate in the back where the ice bags were.
There was still one hour before work at the bookstore, so I took my time, staring into a frozen section glass door at my swollen eye and my frowning face. A woman-one of the owners, maybe-appeared on my right, a half smile or sneer on her face, and reached down for my pockets, feeling at one before I jumped back and swatted at her hand.
"What are you doing?"
She reached for me again, but I deflected her arm harder.
"You take something?" she said. "Huh?"
"Get away from me." I stepped toward her and roared into her face, "Who do you think you are!" She smiled and blinked but didn't move, and I seethed my way past her, glaring at customers near the main counter and daring them to continue staring at me, which they didn't.
***
I got up to get some more Pepsi with ice ("Hold the Pepsi"), so I missed a bit of the movie. When I returned Spuds and his boys had figured out that an FBI agent and some newspaper guy had been pretending they were mugs, but they couldn't keep up the pretense. Rusty was there with them at their cabin hideout, looking worried, and Julie the moll looked like she had no idea what planet she was even on. Finally, after some psychological torture, Spuds shot both imposters and told Rusty to drive out of there with Julie. Maybe I was too busy icing to catch why they had to be the ones to race away. Still, they looked terribly sorry that the two stiffs had been gunned down in front of them by their beloved Spuds. Well, Rusty looked sorry anyway. Julie was looking out the window.
***
There were three square tables and a row of stools along the counter of the coffee shop on Market Street, empty now except for Nancy, her back turned near the coffee burners, busy making multiple pots which steamed lazily around her.
My fists were still clenched and my teeth were grinding, but when she turned her head to say hello I smiled and took a deep breath. She faced the coffee machines, and I watched her smooth sloping shoulders and then looked up at the clock. Eight thirty, and a half hour left to take a forty minute walk to 13th and Broadway.
"Coffee?" she said, already placing a mug of it in front of me.
"Yes." I breathed a laugh, reaching for the milk and sensing her double take.
"Oh-"
"Definitely coffee."
"What happened?"
"It smells good, thanks." And I felt at my eye and smiled. "Not a good morning so far."
She walked to the back room, calling in Chinese, probably to her mother, and I watched her go and took another deep breath, my heart slowing a bit more. I wondered if she was any more than six or seven years younger than me.
An older Chinese man entered, waited near the register for a minute, and then left.
The week before, groaning up the elevator of my building, I'd announced to a group of friendly seniors that it was my birthday.
"And it's pretty depressing," I said. "I'm thirty already."
They laughed and all wanted to trade with me. "You're just a kid," one man said.
"Are you kidding" I grumbled. "I'm half-way dead."
The woman near the buttons looked annoyed and said, "Well, that makes me all the way dead then." They all chuckled or snickered, but I scowled, not in the mood to be poked at.
"Bunch of old fogies," I muttered on the way to my apartment.
Nancy returned. She held a bag out to me. "Frozen peas work the best," she said.
"Really?"
"Hold it against your eye now, and it should be all right in about three weeks...maybe four."
"Maybe four," I repeated, taking the bag for a second but then handing it back to her. "Maybe I'll take it to go."
She took it back and put it into the freezer next to the row of morning buns resting on shelves. I asked for a bun and ate one and sipped at coffee and told her what happened on the bridge and in the deli. "What idiots," she said, turning away when customers came in, and I sighed at the interruption.
Idiots. But I'd shouldered the biker, and I'd roared into the woman's face, and I'd called a bunch of seniors old fogies and scowled at them. There was meanness all around the city, but I was mean, too-mad at the customers at the counter who were taking extra time ordering and talking to Nancy themselves. I waited, sipping coffee and glancing up at the clock (8:40) until she finished and eased her way back along the counter to me.
"We got egged this morning by a bunch of kids," she said. "And threatened by a woman. We get threatened all the time. Yesterday this woman came in, ordered a cake, and then later said it wasn't what she ordered. She threatened my mother and said she wouldn't pay."
Another customer came in, but she leaned across the counter and whispered, "People are horrible sometimes, you know? This woman said-3" The customer barked his order from near the register, and she hurried over to serve him and then returned. She drifted in front of me and moved one coffee pot to a different burner. I watched her shoulders and the back of her brown-haired head.
"She said what?" I asked.
Nancy turned, confused. "Oh!" And she leaned against the counter again. "She said she would come back and-"(she quoted with her fingers)-"put a hurting on us."
"She did?"
Nancy stood straight again. "I don't care. We just have this little coffee shop. We don't bother anyone. But she's going to put a hurting on me? Over a cake?"
I laughed as Nancy huffed back to the burners, and I looked at the clock. Ten minutes to nine.
"Do you have that bag of peas?" I asked her. "Maybe I'll use that right now."
"Sure, and I've got another for you when you leave," she said, opening the freezer.
"I'll have another coffee, too. No rush," I said.
***
I fell asleep for a bit (or maybe it was a delayed TKO from the punch to the head), and when I came to Julie was in a cabin living room trying to make some kind of cake. She cracked a bunch of eggs, fascinated by what was coming out of them. And then she mixed milk and something else into some kind of goop. She looked pretty doing it, though, even in black and white film. It made me wish she wasn't such a ditz, and that Spuds could be jailed and I could turn into a black and white character along with her, or more realistically, meet a girl like her who could make goop for me. "I'd appreciate it," I whispered to the screen.
Spuds came out of another room and tasted the goop. He wore a look on his face that said, "My moll Julie is an inexplicably stupid broad and a lousy cook, but she sure tries her best to make goop for me from time to time—even though it’s the pits."
Some of Spuds' boys barged in at that point, and Spuds yelled at them and slapped the nearest one around for a long time before asking what they wanted. The coast was all clear, they informed him, and their cabin hideout was safe. They'd only talked to one guy in town, maybe the sheriff, they bragged, who asked them what they were doing up in those parts. "Fishing for trout," they answered, "and we got a couple of big ones." Spuds and his boys all laughed and were feeling pretty good about themselves, but Julie the moll broke in with the fact that trout "hasn't never been seen in these parts and you couldn't have caught one, sillies." The boys all stood around and mulled it over, but Spuds got the gist right away and ordered them to take a window each because the law was coming.
***
I stood in the middle of the busy Astor Place island, waiting for the white "walk" sign or a break in the traffic. Jaywalking was safer there than station-to-station crossing, but I waited anyway, watching the steady "Walk" signal turn to flashing red and then to solid "Don't Walk". I felt at the bag of dripping cold peas, smiled to myself, and stepped off the curb. A roar and I jumped back the bus thundering past the whoosh the exhaust my heart hammering. And I bent over, trying to breathe again, my hands and the dripping bag of peas on my knees.
***
The shootout was violent but only lasted a few movie minutes. The feds blasted away at the window frames while Spuds and his boys ducked and blasted back. Julie and Rusty stood off to the side against a wall, seemingly safe, friends now. But Julie got plugged somewhere imaginary and was dead automatically without bleeding or suffering. Spuds looked back to see what had thudded on the floor, shrugged when he saw Julie, and went back to shooting and ducking. "What a heartless...mug," I said aloud.
Rusty stayed on the ground over the croaked Julie, and looked up in time to see another of Spuds' boys bite the cabin dust. The last mug of all got cold feet and announced to Spuds in no uncertain terms that he was quitting the mug business and giving himself up to become a carnival barker. Ticked off, Spuds shot the stinking yellow traitor in an invisible place, but during the effort he exposed his right shoulder and got himself blasted in the one spot in the movies that doesn't kill a guy.
Rusty and his gasping dad had plenty of time to have a long conversation about escape plans while the feds outside wondered why they weren't getting shot at any more. Rusty hinted to Spuds to give himself up, but Spuds had a better idea, which was to have Rusty drag his shot body feet first out back to the sedan and take off before the feds could move in. It worked. The feds hadn't thought of covering the back driveway and didn’t notice the place was empty until Spuds' pizza delivery guy came late and knocked for ten minutes without any luck.
Later, Rusty dumped the injured Spuds off road, per Spuds' instructions, and took off, drawing the feds to him to take the heat for his dear escaped dad.
***
Rob the manager was over near the art section and saw me come in but turned away. I went over to him, smiling sheepishly. "What a morning. Sorry, Rob," I said to his back, and then he turned.
"You're fired. You need to go." I stood there. "You hear me? An hour and a half late. You're done."
"Done? I got punched in the eye. Look."
He looked away.
"I've never been late before."
"You've never been late. You pushed a woman off a ladder. You-"
"That was a long time ago. She called me a nit wit-"
"I don't care how long ago it was. You always put books in the wrong spots. You read while you're supposed to be working." I looked outside. "Want me to go on?"
"I got punched," I said through clenched teeth. "Look at these peas-"
"I don't care. Don't you have a cell phone?"
"No, what for?"
Then he came close to me, and he poked his forefinger into my chest once ("Just") and then again ("leave."). On the second poke I swatted his hand away, and when he stayed close to me I stuck my leg behind his and pushed his chest and he went down hard.
He scrambled to get up, and I backed away from him, already turning. "Don't touch me." And then I was gone, out into the sunlight with him yelling from behind for Eddie to call the cops.
***
Rusty couldn't hack reform school, getting into fist fights and yelling at schoolmarms, so he went before the judge who sentenced him to a year living on a farm. The farmer himself was there at the hearing and nodded a grim howdy to him after the sentencing.
The farmer, Ted, treated Rusty like his own son, even though Rusty kept calling him a hick. Ted's Ma was nice, too. So was the farmer's girlfriend and her dad whom they all called Grandpop, played by Lionel Barrymore from Key Largo. I sat up like I was seeing an old friend.
After a while Rusty began feeling different about farm life and stopped trying to escape or steal all their money. Ma's cooking got better by the scene, and her sweet greetings to Rusty after school got sweeter. She laughed and comforted him when a petulant goose went after him whenever he turned his back and bent over. Grandpop was nice too, enrolling Rusty in a flying school because Rusty said he liked planes.
Ted the farmer, with the help of the FBI, had been planning all along to set up Spuds, using the clueless Rusty's secret newspaper message to Spuds as bait. Ted, however, felt guilty for giving up Rusty and told his girlfriend he’d rather have a gangster's kid around than the reward money that would save the farm. Meanwhile, Rusty's long talk with Grandpop about flying school and the girl next door gave him plenty to think over.
Just when Rusty had about made up his mind to be part of the family, though, Spuds showed up. He waved a gun at the entire cast and told Rusty to get his jacket. Ted argued with Spuds and seemed perfectly willing to get a belly full of lead, and Spuds seemed happy to oblige, but then Lionel Barrymore wheeled himself in and gave a big speech to Spuds about how holding a gun was the only thing that made him tough. "Well," Grandpop said off camera, "I got a gun too," and Spuds immediately plugged him. Everyone except Spuds bent over Grandpop wailing, but Rusty came out of the pile with Grandpop's gun and pointed it at his dear old dad. "Kindly leave the premises," he asked his father in so many words, "or I will be forced to shoot you full of holes." This made Spuds mad, but there was nothing he could do except call his son a yellow bellied sapsucker or something, and he ran off, only to be caught up in a hail of FBI bullets, off camera, one of which must have clipped him because the music got tremendously dramatic.
That was a happy enough ending, and I was all set to get up to leave, but things got even better in one last scene which showed Grandpop at a window perfectly healthy and Rusty a part of the family and ready to join airplane school. I caught up to the tears that insisted on streaming out of my swollen and unswollen eyes just as the lights came on.
***
The desk sergeant was laughing to another officer who'd just put something on his desk, so I stood for a while until he looked over at me, the smile still on his face.
"I pushed my boss down. He said he was going to call the police, so-"
"No, he was poking me in the chest, so I pushed him."
"So what are you doing here?"
"He said he was calling the cops, and I don't want the police to look for me and take me in. I'd rather just...come here."
"He gave you the purple eye too?"
I felt at it. "No. That was on the bridge. A biker hit me."
"You're having a good day, aren't you?" I was quiet. "What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know. Am I in trouble? I pushed him down."
"Eh," he said, looking down at papers. "Heat of the moment."
"So if the police come after me..."
"Don't fight it out with them."
Another officer came by to give the desk man papers. "That's some shiner you've got there," he laughed.
"I know."
"How's the other guy?"
"Just fine," I said, and I chuckled with them.
"Go home before something else happens," the desk sergeant muttered down at his papers.
"I'm not in trouble, then? You're not going to put me away?"
"We're not sending you away," he smirked.
"Unless you send me to a farm or something," I said. "I wouldn’t mind that."
"Funny farm, maybe..."
The officer was silently busy, so I said thanks and left.
No farm life for me, no, not a chance, I thought, wandering forlorn along 4th Street all the way to Avenue A. But it was nearly four o'clock, close enough to dinner, so maybe I'd sit at Nancy's counter for more talk and coffee and iced peas. I'd watch her smooth shoulders and listen to her lilting voice and not get punched or poked or patted down. And if I were a brave enough mug, maybe I'd ask her if she made good goop.
Lou Gaglia's work has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, The Cortland Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Prick of the Spindle, and is forthcoming in The Oklahoma Review, The Brooklyer, and Hawai'i Review. His first story collection, Poor Advice, will be published by Aqueous Books in early 2014. He lives and teaches in upstate New York.
