Exhausted, she turned off the Beta and went to bed. Somewhere in the middle of the night she awakened, she’d heard noises? In the kitchen? She listened to silence. Dreaming. Just dreaming. Stop, brain. Go to sleep. Let it lie.
Many a pickle makes a mickle. A stray rhyme from some dark place. Whatever it meant. Pickles and mickles, pickles and mickles, Uncle Willis tickles, Uncle Willis tickles pickles, Uncle Willis had me in a tight embrace...
In the morning she went back to Uncle Willis’s house, let herself in. The stair to the cellar was steep and straight down into muggy darkness, the air below smelled of mold and long-dead things. She clicked the light switch but nothing happened, the electricity had been shut off, of course. Who wants electricity in the house of a dead man?
In her handbag she carried a tiny flashlight attached to a police whistle, a whistle for use if accosted by muggers and or rapists, that was the kind of world her mother could never have managed so just as well that she’d died in childbirth in her forty-second year. (Mother, how could you, how could you have wanted a child at your age? Wasn’t I enough? Wasn’t I good enough?) She shone the pinpoint of light on the steps and on what lay at the bottom of them.
Just as well, she thought, that she couldn’t see what lay in the shadows. (“Didi, you do have such an overactive imagination! I don’t know where you get it from. Must be from your father. That’s all he did leave, bills and a baby with a wild imagination. There are no vampires in your closet, there are no monsters under your bed, there never were and there never will be. Now, go to sleep like a good girl, and maybe Uncle Willis will bring you something nice when he gets back from the railroad.”)
She found the chimney, she found the cubbyhole. Her light wasn’t bright enough, she had to put her hand in, she had to reach through the muck and the cobwebs, was that something crawling up her arm? Was that something soft and sticky and palpitating just beyond her fingers?
What she found was nothing. She took a minute to breathe deeply, then she hurried up and out.
Sitting on the countertop was a jar of pickles. Kosher dill pickles. She panicked and ran, through the little back porch, down the steps past the garbage pail (knocked that over), ran through wet sheets on the clothesline of the next yard before she stopped.
A small boy with thumb in mouth was barring her way.
A woman, a familiar woman, came out of the back of the house yelling, “Hey, what are you doing to my laundry, what are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Here, Gordon.” From the wallet in her bag she produced a bill. “Here’s the twenty dollars. My uncle owed your mother.”
The child clutched the money in grubby little fingers, the woman said, “Your uncle...?” and she fled. Back to Uncle Willis’s house. Back, picking up the garbage pail (empty, of course), onto the little porch (hooking the screen after her), into the house.
There were no pickles on the kitchen counter. No pickles at all.
For the time being.
Thanks, Uncle Willis, she said aloud. Thanks a lot. And she blew her police whistle shrill and loud for ever so long a time, and as she blew, she thought, when I get home I’ll run the Beta again, I’ll look at the day we left, I’ll make certain about the hammer and the pickles, that’s what I’ll do and I’ll see for myself and that will be that but the trouble is... the trouble is... I can’t remember the day... tweet, tweet, shriek...
Too Dumb to Steal
by Dan Sontup
Ed called me a little after nine thirty. It was Saturday night, and old Mr. Johnson had closed up at nine o’clock like he always did every night except Sunday and that was because the station wasn’t open on Sunday. A while back, I had sort of hinted that I wouldn’t mind pumping gas on a Sunday since I didn’t go anywhere anyhow, not to church like Mr. Johnson or any other place in town. But he just grunted and said there would be no work done at his station on the Sabbath, but I knew the real reason probably was because he didn’t want me handling any money when he wasn’t around to keep an eye on me.
I was lying on my bed in my room at the back of the garage, listening to country music on the radio and trying to figure where I could get some money to get my old TV fixed. I like TV, but I like country music, too, so I didn’t miss the TV too much, except maybe the Westerns with the cowboys and that other show where the girls all run around on the beach in little bathing suits.
The pay phone on the wall out in the garage rang and kept on ringing, and I finally got up and went out there and picked up the phone and said, “Hullo, Johnson’s Garage, Donald speaking,” just like Mr. Johnson had made me practice saying until I got it right so it would be okay for me to answer the phone if he was busy.
I heard some sounds, people talking and other noises, but nobody said anything into the phone. Then there was a shout in my ear: “Hiya, Donny!”
I didn’t have to hear him say any more than that, and I knew it was Ed. It wasn’t just that he was the only one who ever called me Donny — everybody else calls me plain old Don or sometimes Donald — but you could never forget a voice like Ed’s. It sounded like a man snoring while he was still wide awake. Ed snored loud when he was asleep, too. I spent every night for eight years listening to him snoring away in the bottom bunk of our cell.
“You got out, Ed?” I said.
His laugh almost busted my eardrum. “You still know how to ask dumb questions, Donny. Of course I’m out! You think maybe I had my secretary place a long-distance call from the joint?” He laughed again at his own joke. Ed did things like that a lot of the time.
I had to ask him. “You bust out, Ed?”
“Dumb question number two. What’d I tell you last year when you got out?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I told you I was gonna play it smart and work on my parole. You remember that, don’t you, Donny?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Piece of cake, that’s what it was. Talked real humble and sincere to those upstate hicks on the board, and they fell for it, ’specially since one of my buddies on the outside wrote them he had a job waiting for me.” He laughed a lot louder this time.
“I’m glad for you, Ed.”
“Sure, sure. Look, kid, I just got into town. Let’s get together. Got something important we gotta talk about.”
“Well, I don’t go out much, Ed, and—”
“You trying to tell me you don’t want me around?”
His voice was hard. I’d heard him use that hard voice before, and I was glad each time that it wasn’t me he was talking to then.
“No, Ed, ’course not. It’s just I usually just lay around here on the weekend when the garage is closed, sort of resting up for work on Monday and, well, what I mean is my boss keeps me hopping all week and I get pretty tired out and I—”
It was like he wasn’t even hearing me, just like sometimes back there in the cell. “I’m in the bus depot,” he said. “Come on down and get me.”
“I got no car, Ed.”
“You work in a garage, don’t you?”
“Sure, Ed, but we’re closed for the night and—”
“They got cars there, don’t they? I mean, cars that people leave to be fixed overnight, and maybe a tow truck, right?”
“Mr. Johnson takes the tow truck home with him, but yeah, there’s a couple of cars here now.”
“Ready to roll?”
“Yeah, I think so, but—”
“So borrow one for a while, dummy!”
“I... I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” He had that hard voice again.
“The keys are locked up in a desk drawer in the office, and the office is locked, too.”
The phone was real quiet for a long while.
“I’m sorry, Ed,” I mumbled.