Story Time Part 2 (of 3) - The Best-Laid Plans
This is the second of three posts containing the latest drafts of the stories I wrote for my creative writing class this spring. All are works in progress, so comments and feedback are greatly appreciated!!
“ I hope I never see you again, lad!”
The guard looks about sixty, so I’m figuring his position here at the gate is probably his final shot of authority before a forced retirement followed by another ten or twenty years of living pension check to pension check until a quiet, pathetic death in a shitty apartment. But his smile looks sincere, so maybe he doesn’t realize this yet, or maybe he just likes sitting in the guard booth all day reading Sports Illustrated.
No matter. I agree with him and keep walking, this twenty-year-old tan suit on my back and in my hand a small envelope containing all the money to my name plus bus fare into town.
It’s not even fifty dollars.
The guard that escorted me to the gate asked about my plans. I lied and told him I had a brother in the city who’d hook me up with a job. If prison taught me anything, it’s that telling people what they want to hear is the easiest way to be left alone.
Hold on. No prison stories. No prison advice, no prison lingo. I am not a prisoner.
I am a free man.
In more ways than one, I guess. My parents were both dead before I went in, and my brother, who did at one time live in the city, stopped visiting years ago. I didn’t have a wife or girl to pine for all those years, and I was never big on close friendships.
I have nothing, so I maybe I have everything.
Quite a deep thought for a first day out. Not sure I’ll be able to top that, so let’s run with it. Bus comes in ten minutes. I can ride it all night, or at least until the end of the line, whichever comes first.
When I get off that bus, I’ll have a new name. I will take my new name and I will take my less than fifty dollars and I will go to a bar. I will meet a woman. I will use my new name in my old suit and I will talk this woman into taking me home with her.
This is my plan and it will work for now.
___
My name is Don. Not really, but it’s good enough. The bus driver who dropped me off across the street from this bar was Don, but now I am. He won’t mind. The bar is pretty dead. I should have guessed as much for a Tuesday.
I’m drinking some foreign beer I’ve never heard of and scoping out the other bar patrons. There’s a group of wrinkly old men sitting at the end of the bar close to the hockey game on television. They’re just sitting there, watching their game and drinking their beers, not talking to each other or even arguing about the game. They’ve done this for years, I bet, and ran out of things to say to each other a long time ago.
There’s a couple in a booth at the back of the bar. The man has his back to me, but I can see the woman. She is attractive, I can tell, but not right now because she’s sobbing her eyes out. Not in that dramatic way I would credit to a break-up, but more depressed. Maybe he just lost his job, and he told her they’re going to have to move or some other dim verdict. Or maybe he’s going away, getting locked up. Guys inside told me all about their last days of freedom. Some lived it up while they could, most spent a quiet evening with family or friends. A few I met pulled stuff so bad, they never left state custody from the time they were arrested.
Hold on, I said I’m not doing that. I’m not a prisoner. That’s over. I am a free man.
There is another woman in the place, two stools to my right at the bar. I haven’t checked her out yet; too close for a good look. I’ve been trying to come up with something to say to her to give me a reason to look and size her up. But it’s been so long, I’m having trouble remembering how these kinds of social things are supposed to work.
Even though I can’t really set eyes on her, the glasses I can see in the corner of my eye tell me she’s been here a while. Offering to buy her next drink is probably the safest bet for an opening line, but she jumps the gun.
“Are you a cop?” She sounds older than she looks, probably a smoker, with a little boozy slur in her speech.
“No, “ I chuckle at the joke only I get.
She has muddy brown hair that falls around her shoulders. Her eyes are dark, and the left one is a little lazy, but that might be the alcohol. I can see now she’s had half a dozen of something, the glasses set scattered on the bar. Her right hand still clutches a seventh glass, half full. She’s wearing a dark dress with a modest neckline and not much in the way of decoration on it. It fits her nice in the right places. All in all, she’s attractive in a regular sort of way, like a secretary or a bank teller.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well,” she says, pointing the glass at me. The alcohol adds a little weight to her gesture and gives away her condition. “I’m a little over the legal limit and was hoping you’d handcuff me and take me away.”
Clever - she’s used this one before. I like clever, so I reward her effort with a smile.
“I’m no cop, but I sure don’t think you should be driving.”
“Would you give me a lift?” she says, with a feisty cocked eyebrow.
“It would be ungentlemanly not to, wouldn’t it?” I give her an eyebrow right back.
“Well,” she says, shutting her eyes for a few seconds, “you can’t.” She opens them again, the lazy eye now straight, and takes a sip of her drink. “My mother always told me never to take rides from strangers.”
“Your mother sounds like a pretty sharp lady. I’m Don.”
I’m not Don.
“Don, Donald, Donnie.” She takes another sip. “I’m Dinah, now we’re not strangers.” She lifts her glass in kind of a toast gesture and finishes her drink.
“Don and Dinah, we should have a morning talk show together,” I say.
She gets up from her stool and puts her purse around her shoulder. She digs in the bag for a second and slides a set of keys down the bar in my direction.
“Let’s see how the ride home goes, how bout that?”
I pick up the keys, but toss them back at her after a moment.
“Oh, I can’t take you home. My mother always told me never to give rides to strange women.”
She has a put-upon look on her face, but she’s having fun. She steps toward my stool and puts her hand on my knee. She pitches her voice low and stares at me.
“If you won’t drive me home, I’ll drive myself, get into an accident and it’ll be all your fault.” She punctuates this with a jingle of the keys in my face before she spins on a heel and starts walking, a little awkwardly, toward the door. She wants me to follow, so I do. I catch up to her at the exit.
“I can’t have that on my conscience, now can I? Let me have the keys.”
She hands me the keys and then pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her purse.
“Where are you parked?”
She lights up and takes a drag, then says, “Oh, I didn’t drive here. I live down the street. I was just trying to get you to come home with me.” We lock arms and head out the door and down the dark street.
This was going to be easier than I’d expected. I’d heard guys talk about the equality, the women’s liberation and all that, but first hand - it sure was something.
___
Dinah’s apartment is above a Vietnamese nail salon no more than two blocks from the bar. She held my arm tightly on the walk over, once in a while using it to balance. She needs about five more drinks before she passes out - judging by her size, which is not quite petite but small.
Her apartment is as regular as she is. In the living room’s a beige overstuffed couch against one of the walls. A print of some kind of modern art hangs above it, some kind of geometric pattern. I don’t get it, but I kind of like it.
“Would you like a drink, Don? I have some wine in the kitchen.”
“Sure, why don’t you bring the whole bottle, Dinah?”
She’s got unlit candles all over the place - on tables, on top of the television set, the coffee table. The place reeks like a mix of flowers and cinnamon and other smelly things I don’t know. I can see a room, probably the bedroom, just around a corner.
“I hope Riesling is okay.” She brings two glasses of wine from the kitchen, hands one to me, and sits on the sofa. Even with the candles I smell her cigarettes.
“That’s fine.” I don’t know what Riesling is and I don’t like wine, but Don does, so I drink it.
“So Don, what do you do?”
“Acquisitions.” I take a sip of my wine and hope she doesn’t follow up.
“And what does that mean?”
“Well, say some wealthy guy wants a certain kind of, I don’t know, bath tub. He hires me, and I try to find what he wants.” She seems interested, so I add, “It’s nice, and I get to travel a lot.”
“Sounds pretty good to me. Does it pay well?”
I smile and shrug a little. “It can.” I finish my glass of wine.
“Where’s the bottle? In the kitchen?” I start to get up, maybe get a chance to scope out the rest of the apartment.
“Sit, I’ll get it,” she says, getting up faster than I do. She takes my glass and leaves. From the kitchen, she calls out, “So aren’t you going to ask me what I do?”
I wasn’t.
“You stole the words right from my mouth.” I clear my throat and put on a fake formal tone, “So Dinah, what is it you do?”
She comes back with my glass and the rest of the bottle. She sits and smiles for a few seconds before, sighing, she says, “At the moment, not a damned thing.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really. I got fired today. I was a secretary for an advertising executive. He was cheating on his wife with me, she found out, so he fired me. You aren’t married, are you Don?”
“No, no. I’m quite the bachelor.”
“So that was why I was in the bar tonight. Celebrating, I guess. Celebrating my newfound freedom, if you want to look at it like that.”
“I can relate.” I can barely keep my eyes open. “This is really good wine.”
___
“Not even forty dollars, what the hell is that, Don?”
My eyes open and I’m in a different room. Dinah’s voice is screaming in my ears. I think I passed out. This is not the plan.
“What kind of big shot buyer doesn’t even have forty dollars in his pockets? Shit! This was such a waste.”
My hands are bound above my head with some kind of cord. I’m in a bed. I think this is still her apartment. Dinah is rummaging through the pockets of my twenty-year-old suit coat.
“Dinah, what’s going on?”
“You don’t even have a goddamned watch. Screw this shit, I’m out of here.”
The door slams. There’s a framed picture on the table to my left. It’s of a couple out in the woods. They’re dressed in hiking gear. Neither is Dinah.
This is not the plan. This is not Dinah’s apartment.
In a few hours, maybe a few days, the people in the picture will come here and find me on their bed. No matter what I tell them they’ll call the cops. They’ll find out there’s a warrant out for me because I never got a chance to call my parole officer.
I was a free man. For about four hours. I blew it.
Now I’m a prisoner. Again.
“ I hope I never see you again, lad!”
The guard looks about sixty, so I’m figuring his position here at the gate is probably his final shot of authority before a forced retirement followed by another ten or twenty years of living pension check to pension check until a quiet, pathetic death in a shitty apartment. But his smile looks sincere, so maybe he doesn’t realize this yet, or maybe he just likes sitting in the guard booth all day reading Sports Illustrated.
No matter. I agree with him and keep walking, this twenty-year-old tan suit on my back and in my hand a small envelope containing all the money to my name plus bus fare into town.
It’s not even fifty dollars.
The guard that escorted me to the gate asked about my plans. I lied and told him I had a brother in the city who’d hook me up with a job. If prison taught me anything, it’s that telling people what they want to hear is the easiest way to be left alone.
Hold on. No prison stories. No prison advice, no prison lingo. I am not a prisoner.
I am a free man.
In more ways than one, I guess. My parents were both dead before I went in, and my brother, who did at one time live in the city, stopped visiting years ago. I didn’t have a wife or girl to pine for all those years, and I was never big on close friendships.
I have nothing, so I maybe I have everything.
Quite a deep thought for a first day out. Not sure I’ll be able to top that, so let’s run with it. Bus comes in ten minutes. I can ride it all night, or at least until the end of the line, whichever comes first.
When I get off that bus, I’ll have a new name. I will take my new name and I will take my less than fifty dollars and I will go to a bar. I will meet a woman. I will use my new name in my old suit and I will talk this woman into taking me home with her.
This is my plan and it will work for now.
___
My name is Don. Not really, but it’s good enough. The bus driver who dropped me off across the street from this bar was Don, but now I am. He won’t mind. The bar is pretty dead. I should have guessed as much for a Tuesday.
I’m drinking some foreign beer I’ve never heard of and scoping out the other bar patrons. There’s a group of wrinkly old men sitting at the end of the bar close to the hockey game on television. They’re just sitting there, watching their game and drinking their beers, not talking to each other or even arguing about the game. They’ve done this for years, I bet, and ran out of things to say to each other a long time ago.
There’s a couple in a booth at the back of the bar. The man has his back to me, but I can see the woman. She is attractive, I can tell, but not right now because she’s sobbing her eyes out. Not in that dramatic way I would credit to a break-up, but more depressed. Maybe he just lost his job, and he told her they’re going to have to move or some other dim verdict. Or maybe he’s going away, getting locked up. Guys inside told me all about their last days of freedom. Some lived it up while they could, most spent a quiet evening with family or friends. A few I met pulled stuff so bad, they never left state custody from the time they were arrested.
Hold on, I said I’m not doing that. I’m not a prisoner. That’s over. I am a free man.
There is another woman in the place, two stools to my right at the bar. I haven’t checked her out yet; too close for a good look. I’ve been trying to come up with something to say to her to give me a reason to look and size her up. But it’s been so long, I’m having trouble remembering how these kinds of social things are supposed to work.
Even though I can’t really set eyes on her, the glasses I can see in the corner of my eye tell me she’s been here a while. Offering to buy her next drink is probably the safest bet for an opening line, but she jumps the gun.
“Are you a cop?” She sounds older than she looks, probably a smoker, with a little boozy slur in her speech.
“No, “ I chuckle at the joke only I get.
She has muddy brown hair that falls around her shoulders. Her eyes are dark, and the left one is a little lazy, but that might be the alcohol. I can see now she’s had half a dozen of something, the glasses set scattered on the bar. Her right hand still clutches a seventh glass, half full. She’s wearing a dark dress with a modest neckline and not much in the way of decoration on it. It fits her nice in the right places. All in all, she’s attractive in a regular sort of way, like a secretary or a bank teller.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well,” she says, pointing the glass at me. The alcohol adds a little weight to her gesture and gives away her condition. “I’m a little over the legal limit and was hoping you’d handcuff me and take me away.”
Clever - she’s used this one before. I like clever, so I reward her effort with a smile.
“I’m no cop, but I sure don’t think you should be driving.”
“Would you give me a lift?” she says, with a feisty cocked eyebrow.
“It would be ungentlemanly not to, wouldn’t it?” I give her an eyebrow right back.
“Well,” she says, shutting her eyes for a few seconds, “you can’t.” She opens them again, the lazy eye now straight, and takes a sip of her drink. “My mother always told me never to take rides from strangers.”
“Your mother sounds like a pretty sharp lady. I’m Don.”
I’m not Don.
“Don, Donald, Donnie.” She takes another sip. “I’m Dinah, now we’re not strangers.” She lifts her glass in kind of a toast gesture and finishes her drink.
“Don and Dinah, we should have a morning talk show together,” I say.
She gets up from her stool and puts her purse around her shoulder. She digs in the bag for a second and slides a set of keys down the bar in my direction.
“Let’s see how the ride home goes, how bout that?”
I pick up the keys, but toss them back at her after a moment.
“Oh, I can’t take you home. My mother always told me never to give rides to strange women.”
She has a put-upon look on her face, but she’s having fun. She steps toward my stool and puts her hand on my knee. She pitches her voice low and stares at me.
“If you won’t drive me home, I’ll drive myself, get into an accident and it’ll be all your fault.” She punctuates this with a jingle of the keys in my face before she spins on a heel and starts walking, a little awkwardly, toward the door. She wants me to follow, so I do. I catch up to her at the exit.
“I can’t have that on my conscience, now can I? Let me have the keys.”
She hands me the keys and then pulls a pack of cigarettes out of her purse.
“Where are you parked?”
She lights up and takes a drag, then says, “Oh, I didn’t drive here. I live down the street. I was just trying to get you to come home with me.” We lock arms and head out the door and down the dark street.
This was going to be easier than I’d expected. I’d heard guys talk about the equality, the women’s liberation and all that, but first hand - it sure was something.
___
Dinah’s apartment is above a Vietnamese nail salon no more than two blocks from the bar. She held my arm tightly on the walk over, once in a while using it to balance. She needs about five more drinks before she passes out - judging by her size, which is not quite petite but small.
Her apartment is as regular as she is. In the living room’s a beige overstuffed couch against one of the walls. A print of some kind of modern art hangs above it, some kind of geometric pattern. I don’t get it, but I kind of like it.
“Would you like a drink, Don? I have some wine in the kitchen.”
“Sure, why don’t you bring the whole bottle, Dinah?”
She’s got unlit candles all over the place - on tables, on top of the television set, the coffee table. The place reeks like a mix of flowers and cinnamon and other smelly things I don’t know. I can see a room, probably the bedroom, just around a corner.
“I hope Riesling is okay.” She brings two glasses of wine from the kitchen, hands one to me, and sits on the sofa. Even with the candles I smell her cigarettes.
“That’s fine.” I don’t know what Riesling is and I don’t like wine, but Don does, so I drink it.
“So Don, what do you do?”
“Acquisitions.” I take a sip of my wine and hope she doesn’t follow up.
“And what does that mean?”
“Well, say some wealthy guy wants a certain kind of, I don’t know, bath tub. He hires me, and I try to find what he wants.” She seems interested, so I add, “It’s nice, and I get to travel a lot.”
“Sounds pretty good to me. Does it pay well?”
I smile and shrug a little. “It can.” I finish my glass of wine.
“Where’s the bottle? In the kitchen?” I start to get up, maybe get a chance to scope out the rest of the apartment.
“Sit, I’ll get it,” she says, getting up faster than I do. She takes my glass and leaves. From the kitchen, she calls out, “So aren’t you going to ask me what I do?”
I wasn’t.
“You stole the words right from my mouth.” I clear my throat and put on a fake formal tone, “So Dinah, what is it you do?”
She comes back with my glass and the rest of the bottle. She sits and smiles for a few seconds before, sighing, she says, “At the moment, not a damned thing.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really. I got fired today. I was a secretary for an advertising executive. He was cheating on his wife with me, she found out, so he fired me. You aren’t married, are you Don?”
“No, no. I’m quite the bachelor.”
“So that was why I was in the bar tonight. Celebrating, I guess. Celebrating my newfound freedom, if you want to look at it like that.”
“I can relate.” I can barely keep my eyes open. “This is really good wine.”
___
“Not even forty dollars, what the hell is that, Don?”
My eyes open and I’m in a different room. Dinah’s voice is screaming in my ears. I think I passed out. This is not the plan.
“What kind of big shot buyer doesn’t even have forty dollars in his pockets? Shit! This was such a waste.”
My hands are bound above my head with some kind of cord. I’m in a bed. I think this is still her apartment. Dinah is rummaging through the pockets of my twenty-year-old suit coat.
“Dinah, what’s going on?”
“You don’t even have a goddamned watch. Screw this shit, I’m out of here.”
The door slams. There’s a framed picture on the table to my left. It’s of a couple out in the woods. They’re dressed in hiking gear. Neither is Dinah.
This is not the plan. This is not Dinah’s apartment.
In a few hours, maybe a few days, the people in the picture will come here and find me on their bed. No matter what I tell them they’ll call the cops. They’ll find out there’s a warrant out for me because I never got a chance to call my parole officer.
I was a free man. For about four hours. I blew it.
Now I’m a prisoner. Again.