The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Dave Shaw Twelve Days Out of Traction from South Dakota Review

I was twelve days out of traction in a 7-11 outside Poughkeepsie cradling Slim Jims and a six-pack of RC’s, pretending to ponder the price of a three-week-old loaf of Wonder while I was deciding how to slip on the freshly mopped floor so that the unhidden video camera behind the front counter might give me the best possible out-of-court settlement, when in comes this hoss wearing a ski mask and sombrero, waving a .22 and telling everybody freeze or we’ll be having our heads blown off. I’d just about settled on a basic ass-first prat, which would’ve been risky because sometimes they’re unbelievable when they replay it slow frame, but I didn’t really have my heart in one of those realistic, wrenching, twisting falls that actually does hurt when you land on a shoulder or something, because my left wrist and lower right leg were still casted and my back was still sore from the traction and the memory of the Honda’s bumper I had stepped into three and a half months before outside an Acme in Binghamton. Some old bat had decided to give me a love tap with the gas instead of braking and that laid me up a little longer than it should have and gave me black outs for a while and six total broken or fractured bones, not to mention fusing vertebrae numbers 7 and 8. It’s a living, or so I thought. Then into the Poughkeepsie 7-11 came the Bandit and his .22, which meant no falls for me that day with all the cops that’d be crawling around the place in a matter of minutes, all of them disturbed about missing the “Mexican Bandito” as everyone was calling him even though he had a Canadian accent, and none of them having time to fill out a report on a guy who might have permanent back pain as a result of a slip on the negligently wet floor by the Wonderbread. It was too bad because by the time Prudential would have figured out that most of my injuries were old ones, I would have turned the settlement check into small bills and gotten a new p.o. box.

Next thing I know after the Poughkeepsie 7-11, I’m thinking about retiring at the ripe old age of 41. When you think about it, there are a lot of disincentives to working your chosen profession in this country. Chief among them in my case being the occasional competition for attention with Mexican-Canadian gun-waver types, and the complete lack of benefits, too, such as health care. For instance, with the Acme run-in with the bumper the whole hospital thing came to damn near forty-seven thou, and the settlement was only for sixty, which meant I would have only netted thirteen K for three months of sucking pureed chicken out of rubber bags. I say would have, because when you don’t have health care, you learn to tiptoe out of the hospital at midnight before everything’s completely done healing and the blue suit guy drops in to see about settling up. I’m sure in the end they’ll just mail the bill to me, Earl Lester, Binghamton. Unfortunately for them, today I’m Lester Earl, Ithaca, living off sixty grand in twenties.

I do have to share some of the pie. My lawyer is any number of men named Homer Pierce. They all go by Homer Pierce because of a little joke of ours, having originated six years ago from a newspaper story about a lawyer in Utica named, you guessed it, Homer Pierce, who had been cited by the State Bar for seventeen ethics violations and only been placed on probationary status. One night in Troy while we played a little seven card with twos, fours, nines, one-eyed jacks and suicide kings wild, I and three of the eleven future Homer Pierces decided why risk inadvertently tarnishing a good lawyer’s name by using an alias other than Homer Pierce for all our lawsuits. The joke, of course, was that we knew full well there weren’t any “good” lawyers.

So far Homer Pierce has represented me on seventy-eight suits. He’s been victorious in procuring settlements in fifty-nine of these, a pretty nice rate of return for a lawyer, but you got to have someone who knows how to fall, too. Homer Pierce’s height varies from suit to suit, from 5′6″ to 6′3″, his weight from about 165 to 310. Like his size, his settlements vary, too, from the paltry $500 dust-yourself-off money to the big rips, like the Acme gastapper and the time the cop inadvertently ran into me last year on a sidewalk outside a bank in Schenectady after I had advertently gotten in his way while he was chasing a burglar, bank bells clanging and everything. The burglar, of course, was wearing a sombrero, but he wasn’t famous yet, and the police and everybody made time to pay me some attention while he got away. You should have seen me moaning about my back on that one. Homer Pierce had to do damn near nothing for the check from the bank’s insurance company. None of the Homer Pierces have any real licenses to practice anything, but they’re good at the verbal muscle game and making official looking stationery, and they’ve got a rudimentary knowledge of law which is more than is needed, I assure you. I can assure you because once in a pinch I had to be my own Homer Pierce after a tractor ran over my toe during a free tour of a dairy farm outside Herkimer.

The clincher, of course, is that in reality I am no victim and in reality I am sick to death of all the victim talk sweeping the damn country. No wonder the Mexican-Canadian has been coming down (or up) here to do all his damage. He probably thought the money would practically jump into his hands, this countryful of victims we got just waiting to give it away, and so far it practically has. Kills me, really. The way I see it, if you don’t have your own scam, that doesn’t make you a goddamn victim; it only makes you a goddamn idiot. Case in point: Newt Gingrich. Genius. And since the Poughkeepsie episode, I’ve been thinking that this is at the root of what I think will make retirement a little harder to handle — worrying about eventually feeling like the rest of the average ducks out there, blending in and not giving a damn, whining my ass away. I’d rather somebody just blow my goddamned head off if it comes to all that. Damn these back pains.

The guy who certifies my injuries as one hundred percent bona fide and worth the price of settlement is Dr. Richard Greggson, who got his degree through mail order from the Pacific Coast Institute of Medicine and Pharmacology. He’s got two diplomas because, on occasion, circumstances arise which dictate him being Greg Richardson. Essentially it’s the same service either way, although sometimes Greg Richardson will throw a free twenty-one day Valium prescription into the deal, whereas Richard Greggson, who got a Certificate of Ethics via mail while I was in the hospital waiting for the clock to tick, will usually raise objection to the pills.

Both Richard Greggson and Greg Richardson were delighted about the Acme gastapper incident because there were actual broken bones involved. The two of them have so many repros of the hospital x-rays filed away that every settlement from here on out would start negotiations at a decent five figure minimum. Neither Richard Greggson, Greg Richardson, or Homer Pierce are happy, though, about my thinking about retiring. I am the key man in our little industry.

But there have been aggravations, and not just what happened after the Bandit walked into the Poughkeepsie 7-11. For instance Homer Pierce has been acting more like a real lawyer lately, always greed greed greed, where’s my cut? never any respect for the art of the fall. I get laid up and everybody gets delusions of seriousness. I met with the original three of him in a Burger King in Spectator the day before the Poughkeepsie incident, and it was all I could do to stop myself from punching his goddamn noses in. We sat at a window table and discussed why we were not going to actually litigate anything, even though that was where the “big money” was. Our primary problem was, of course, that none of him had any kind of license to litigate jack, and unlike the field of medicine, they do actually check things like that, especially when you actually take a case to trial.

Why let that stop us? One of him snapped, his mouth full of Whopper. Nothing’s stopped us yet, blah blah blah. Yeah, said another of him, we can beat some of these bastards big.

I suggested that maybe we hadn’t been stopped by anything because we had a proven method. Then I reminded each of him of that one time when I was him in Herkimer, and it’d be just as easy to do that from now on, cut out the middle action. You could see who really needed who in his darting little eyes then. I also told him that the three of him were acting like real lawyers. To which each of him sort of looked at me like yeah, well, what’s your point?

I had in fact forgotten the point, although I began to wonder if it might have something to do with why my goddamn lawyer couldn’t have driven to visit me in the Binghamton’s County Memorial. Then all of a sudden the Arby’s next door was being robbed by a gun-toting guy in a big sombrero, and people were standing around out front like they were thinking about clapping. Then they parted for him like the Red Sea when he darted for his car. That Mexican-Canadian must not ever sleep.

Deep down I’m sure Homer Pierce knew I wasn’t going to leave him dry. There’d be too many ways for everything to fall apart if each fall was a one-man operation, and, hell, what was I going to do, go back to hustling pool? I’d had my fill of that in Niskayuna, and it was the most boring predictable depressing thing in the world. Got so bad playing dumbass Hubris-filled make-pretend sharks I had to start giving people breaks like, okay, if this asshole doesn’t act like he knew he was going to hit this shot that he’s never made before in his whole life, I won’t run the table on him; or okay, if this pretender doesn’t act pissed off after he’s missed a three banker, I won’t take all of his money. Goddamn if most of the time the assholes didn’t keep puffing out their chests and kissing away cash. It’s like the ear-benders were all caught in raccoon traps, you know, where you put a treat inside a can with a hole only big enough for a raccoon to get an unclenched paw in through and when he grabs the treat he’s stuck, not knowing all he’s got to do is let go of the treat and he can get his paw out. Raccoons don’t ever have the wherewithal to let go. Same thing hustling pool suckers in Niskayuna. I had to get out.

I’d always been good at taking a fall, ever since I used to go tumbling down the stairs just to get my father to glance up from his numbers. After a while he got so used to my careening from step to step that he’d just say, “Earl, cut it out,” without even raising his eyes. Sometimes I’d even lie in one place at the bottom of the stairway for ten or fifteen minutes, pretending I was paralyzed with my eyes stuck crossing toward my nose. Nothing, not a peep from him. My mother found me that way once and nearly had a heart attack. “Lester! Lester, speak!” I was a natural making a living doing it. That is until Poughkeepsie.

It was after I met with Homer Pierce at the Burger King that day before Poughkeepsie that I first realized I was still in quite a bit of goddamn back pain from when the damn Honda had rolled me. I was hoping to find Dr. Greg Richardson in Albany to make me feel better, but instead Dr. Richard Greggson was in, who suggested, instead of Valium, maybe a steam bath or a whirlpool might do me a world of good, and he’d also read up on some new balms which could do miracles. He said this with a straight face, even crinkling up his high forehead as if he’d been born to practice medicine all his life. I wondered if I should give him a black eye. Instead, I patiently asked him when Dr. Richardson might be back. He assured me it would not be for some time, his blue eyes dancing behind his fake non-prescription glasses. The IRS was looking for him.

The drive to Poughkeepsie was a long, unpleasant, stiff one. I thought maybe I should start making a little book to tide me over until it would be easier to do proper falls; but if you think hustling’s like setting raccoon traps, you haven’t seen anything compared to taking bets. Then whizzing toward me down two lane Route 46 came a brown Ford Escort that switched back to its side of the road just in time. The driver, of course, was wearing a sombrero. I started questioning what had happened to my work ethic.

In Poughkeepsie I got a room at a trap and went for a six-pack at the 7-11 I was going to fall in the next day. It was around 9:30, and I commented to the young greaser behind the counter that the floors could use a mopping. They do it in the mornings, he said, it wasn’t his business. Right, I said, nothing he could do. Then he asked had I heard the Bandito had hit a Safeway on the other side of town that evening and wasn’t this guy something?

“It’s a little blatant,” I said to him, feeling my jaw jut a little, “isn’t it? All this stealing with a gun?”

The greaser had no idea what I was talking about. “He’s the Bandit, man.” He said this like it answered all arguments, his eyebrows bunching into an earnest sense of purpose. He couldn’t wait to get robbed.

And, sure enough, the next day I did get to see the Bandit, man, live and in person, ruining what would have been a perfectly functional prat. When he burst into the 7-11 waving the .22, my first instinct was to try to do whatever I could to speed the whole thing up because the floor was drying fast, and I still had to discreetly nudge out of view the “Wet Floor” stand-up sign, to secure the full prize. If the warning isn’t clearly displayed, the store insurer basically has to start negotiations mid-twenties.

But the Mexican-Canadian was a bit of a showman, a charmer, taking his time with things, and all of a sudden, realizing the situation, I was feeling like the gatecrasher. He spoke slowly through the black ski mask like he was everybody’s friend, nodding the big sombrero in everybody’s directions as he spoke, peppering his phrases with “okays” and “ays” and an occasional French word.

When he said the words “heads blown off’ to the duchess behind the counter and the five or six of us scattered around the store, it was like he meant taking a quiet nap in the woods. Then all of a sudden everyone was down on the floor except for him and me.

“Please,” he said to me, “you, too.” From about ten feet away he fixed the .22 between my eyes, and I realized that the easiest, least painful way for me to get my casted self down actually would have been for me to do a nice safe fall, but I couldn’t risk getting pumped because some sudden jerky-ass landing on the linoleum startled him. “Please,” he said again, this time with a little less charm, “down.”

I struggled to get down on one knee, focusing on his faceless ski mask, big nails of pain tearing up my back, when it dawned on me he might take my slowness as defiance.

“I’ve been in an accident,” I said to him. “I’m still in pain.”

“Yes,” he said, following his outstretched .22 toward me, “I’m sure you are. Get down.”

I dropped to all fours, felt myself grimace, felt a tendon rip in the casted wrist. Then finally I was doing a dead man’s float on the cool damp linoleum, ammonia clearing a space behind my eyes. My back was spasming as he stepped over me and stood with a foot on each side of my ribs, still pointing the gun, I was sure, at my head.

I tried to talk myself through it. Told myself that that very day Homer Pierce and I would file suit against the 7-11 for having such a blatantly insecure store. Sure, a settlement was iffier, taking it that route, but the potential payout was higher. Hell, look at the trauma I was going through. Maybe we’d even litigate this one.

But I was fooling myself. Instead of thinking about a nice thick settlement check, I found myself reaching for my wallet out of my back pocket, and blindly handing it up to him. Then I slid my Rolex off the uncasted wrist and easily handed that back, too, without turning my head. Maybe it was the ammonia working me over. Everything in my body loosened up there for a moment. Hell, for a moment, even the muscles in my back relaxed.