Cans

[FatBaldandToothless]

Spoiler: WARNING

This is not a Christian story. I don't believe it violates forum decorum (no profanity, for example), but if you're easily offended, please don't read it.

CANS​

“Okay, here we are, Kiddo,” said the woman at the can redemption counter. “Five cents a can; two-hundred thirty-nine cans. That’s eleven ninety-five.” She counted the money out in his hands. “Don’t spend it all in one place now.”

The boy thanked her and wheeled his wagon out of the store and down the road toward home, his money folded in his front pocket, his camera hanging around his neck, his eyes criss-crossing his path, scanning the sky and the traffic and all the sources of all the noises he cared to hear. Sundays had only three months ago become the day for him to cash in his empty beer and soda cans, usually about a garbage bag full, but his haul this Sunday disappointed him a little, and briefly and without much thought he wondered if the man who collected the cans for him might have slacked a little, and what he might do about it.

He was a quiet boy, new to the suburbs, still at home in the city, or as nearly at home as he could have been, having been a boy who never really enjoyed the company he kept, if any at all. About fifteen, he was short and lanky, and looked more like twelve or thirteen, which didn’t really help him with his new peers at his new school, in whose minds he was a runt, a pipsqueak, not worth the time of day. “The photography club?” they laughed. “You? Are you even potty-trained yet?”

But he persisted, and before the year ended, the school yearbook committee had selected more of his pictures than anyone else’s. He gloated privately, but only briefly.

The school year had just ended, and he hopped on a bus to the projects to visit his grandmother, where he stayed long enough for her to tell him how much he had grown since the week before, before he told her he was going back home, though to his mind, he was already there.

The city at night. The dark alleyways and shiny low-riders. The police sirens and end-of-the-world prophets. The smashing of bottles and smell of urine. He knew where to duck and where to poke his head, for though he was just fifteen or thereabouts, he knew the way of the people on the edge and was now learning the way of the people who left them there, and lately, more importantly, he had cultivated a rapport with his camera with such deftness that he knew the magnification and aperture values he needed the very moment he needed them. His photo album was one that very quickly in the short life of his hobby made abundant and efficient use of his film. And briefly this day, while moseying to a bus stop, he passively entertained aspirations of being the photography club president his senior year, and he imagined how intolerably decent he would be to any runt or pipsqueak who would join. But that would be some two or three years away yet, while now his focus landed on the scuffling he heard in the warehouse he was passing by.

He climbed a stoop that led to a wall, slithered along a ledge to a window, poised himself to free his arms, fumbled for his camera, and caught his breath quickly, and with some effort reeled at the idea as much as, if not more than, the sight. The pitiful emptiness of a man who would do such a thing as he saw. The wretched, pitiful emptiness. He blinked a couple times and listened for the strains of the cacophony of his heartbeat. The freckle-faced boy in the warehouse, maybe ten or eleven, for some ungodly, perhaps ridiculous, reason alone in this neighborhood at this hour, red hair disheveled, waited for the man to uncover his mouth before he could even whimper. And whimper he did, but very quietly, or as quietly as he appeared willing, as the man had uttered threats and promises, and hung around just long enough to buckle up his trousers and maybe, it seemed, to convince himself that the freckle-faced boy would feel well enough to find his own way home.

The freckle-faced boy dragged himself to the bare, shadowy corner where his clothes lay, eased them on, and wobbled to his feet, struggling to breathe normally while the man watched. “You little harlot,” the man sighed as he left. “You ugly big-mouthed little harlot.”

 

[FatBaldandToothless]

CANS
(continued)​

This was all that the boy needed to see. It was all he wanted to see. He raced around the building to find the man leaving it. He caught his breath quickly again and called to him calmly, “Excuse me, Sir.”

The man turned. “What?”

“Er, yes, Sir. I’m polling the average person on the streets for Junior Career Days at school. May I ask where you work?”

“A real estate office on thirty-seventh.”

“Which office is that?” the boy asked.

The man smirked and turned to walk away. “What’s this? Summer school? You’re not taking notes, Kid. And it’s Saturday night; go home.”

The boy gave it up, suspecting that his camera might make the man suspicious, and so the next day, he developed some film, and in the days that followed, acquainted himself very well with Thirty-Seventh Street. Dental clinics, law firms, computer stores, real estate offices. An ordinary postcard. These were his new neighbors – the husbands and fathers with their annual parking passes pasted on the rear windows of their minivans and family sedans. And as briefly and passively as ever, he admired his own mother – single, successful, able to do the work of two parents by herself.

“Why are you so quiet and aloof?” she asked him once, three months ago. “Is it someone at school?”

“No, it’s just me, Mama,” he had answered off-handedly and, in retrospect, more accurately than he knew. It was the same answer he gave her this past Sunday.

On the third day of his stake-out, reading a book on a bench by the third real estate office he staked, he saw the man walk into the building, whistling, sauntering, as if to pay him and the world no mind. He followed the man as best he could, as far as he could, without him noticing, until the receptionist stopped him curtly. “Excuse me, young man. May I help you?”

The man heard her and turned, so the boy ducked around a corner to hide from him. “Uh, yes,” he stammered shortly, inching his way to the receptionist’s desk, waiting for the man to close himself in his office. “I think that man just dropped some money outside. Will you call him, please?”

“What money?” she asked. He fished in his pocket for a five-dollar bill that she reached for, but he snatched his hand away, and so she smiled obligingly and picked up the phone. “Mr. Froiland, someone is here to see you.”

When the man emerged, the boy handed him a photograph face down, the back of which he had scribbled on. “Be there at eight o’clock tonight, Mr. Froiland, please,” the boy said as genuinely politely as he thought reasonable and was conscious of, so to take every precaution he could marshal. Not even the receptionist should raise her brow.

The man nearly snickered and brushed the boy aside until he turned the picture over and saw his image, an image that seemed to take him a second or two to focus on. In another second or two, he began to lunge for the boy, who saw the man in a split second stop himself after seeing in the corner of his eye the startled look on the receptionist’s silhouette. For the man’s mind seemed one very fleetingly discomposed, and when he regained composure, he ripped the picture in two and sharply and discreetly scanned the countenance of the boy, who, during this, didn’t flinch.

“My closet is a darkroom, Sir,” the boy said. As the man angrily and shakily, and as calmly and proudly as he appeared able, fit the two pieces back together to look at the address again, the boy walked out of the building and repeated, “Eight o’clock tonight.”

And later that night, at nearly eight o’clock, as his grandmother rambled and her TV blared, the boy watched out the front window of her apartment for the man, and fidgeted with the drapes like a bandit on the lam. “Pay attention, Son,” the old lady snapped. “Can’t you hear I’m talking to you?”

“Sorry, Grandma,” he said, sitting back in his chair momentarily. “I was just watching for some friends.”

“Well, they’ll be alright without you.” She leaned her head back in her chair, but before she fell asleep, she said, “You know, your mama called me today. Wondered why you’ve been spending so much time with me these past few days.” The boy’s heart sank slightly as she continued. “I told her, ‘not on my watch, Child. No, Ma’am. Sounds to me like your young man thinks he’s a grown man,’ I said. Mm, hmm.” She eyed him reprovingly. “Of course, you don’t have an opinion about that, though, do you?”

He juggled some possible replies in his mind, but before he could share one with her, she began to snore, so he kept peering out the window, but very discreetly, keeping the lamp by his chair turned off. And when he saw a car pull up, a regular-looking car, unmodified and quiet, plain and clean, with a pale face and white hair behind the windshield, he ran for the door and met it on the street.

The man rose slowly, locked his car door, and looked around. “Froiland,” the boy called from a few paces away.

The man turned to him and, like a cheetah with a litter to feed, set upon him hard and fast around the first building, through the courtyard, and behind the complex where the boy dived through a hole in the fence and rolled back to his feet. The man tried to follow, but managed only to hang himself up, ripping his shirt and gouging his arms. He panted and cursed while the boy faced him and exhaled deeply. “Give me your pictures, you ugly little runt,” he blasted as he hung upon the fence. “I’ll kill you, I swear.”

“You’ll kill who?” The man craned his neck to see behind him two older boys who had just walked up to find out what the running was about. He didn’t answer them, but straightened his neck and slowly began to breathe easily.

“You know you can’t go anywhere,” the boy said. “I have the negatives, remember? I know who you are. Your name, your job.” He paced a couple times a total length of about a yard or two and dropped another photograph in front of the man. “Do you know who I am?” He stood still in front of the man just out of arm’s reach and decided at that moment that he had nothing new to reveal.

The man continued a moment more to hang in the hole, struggling feebly and futilely forward and back. “Never happy with your own, are you?” he scowled. He struggled again and reached for the boy, who remained out of reach. “You have it all figured out, don’t you?” he grumbled. “All in front of you.”

“Yes,” the boy said. “It’s all in front of me.”

“Something’s wrong with this kid,” the man said to the two older boys. “He takes advantage of people in his youth; what will he do when he’s older?”

The two boys shrugged their shoulders.

The man looked around: the boy in front of him, the two boys behind him, the fence all around. And he hung there. Finally, he let his head sink and asked, “What do you want?”

The boy asked the two older boys to help him climb back over the onto the property, and when they left, he gave the man the location of a vacant lot and told him what to do, and left him stuck in the fence as he shuffled off to catch a bus home and face his mother.

He spent the rest of the week at home, cleaning house, tending the yard, appeasing his mother, who had grounded him for three days anyway. Once or twice he patted himself on the back, marveling each time at how he so easily could have duped these men. First, three months ago, a prostitute’s john, a car salesman who would have done anything to save face. Now this child molester, this real estate agent who would have done anything to stay out of jail. But in the end, he wondered if he could divorce himself from the demons that planted his disinterest. “Will I be collecting cans when I get older?” he asked himself.

But, for now, the day was his. Yes, his was a mind that could connive. He yanked the cord to start the mower, and chortled to himself, and when Sunday came, he wheeled his wagon out of the garage and toward the vacant lot.

From a block away around a bend, brazen and cautious, he could see a single garbage bag under the big oak tree at the south end of the lot, and he wondered if it was Froiland who hadn’t been by yet, as mid-day was fast approaching; the car salesman should have been out of church long ago. Before he could wonder any further, he watched a familiar-looking sedan drive somewhat hastily up onto the grass and under the tree. Then it sat for a moment. It cooled off. Then Froiland jumped out, opened his trunk, threw a garbage bag on the ground, fell back in, and sped away.

The boy moseyed up to the oak tree, situated the two bags in his wagon, and ambled up the road to the store where he would redeem his cans, his camera hanging comfortably around his neck, his eyes criss-crossing his path, scanning the sky and the traffic and all the sources of all the noises he cared to hear.

 

[puttytat190]

Nice story.I like how the characters pop out at me.