He walked, stiff-legged in his unyielding boots, into the courthouse. He had to testify against a burglar he’d arrested six times. With luck, this time they’d put him away, flush another turdweasel from the turdweasel town.
REGGIE, YOU SON of a bitch.
Reggie hadn’t liked Agnes. “Don’t throw your life away on a broad, Jerzy,” Reggie had said. “You’re the president of the Closeout Hut.” And because Reggie was always right, Jerzy had listened. He told himself he didn’t even know Agnes that well. She worked at the drugstore a few blocks over, and they gave each other silly greeting cards and had Cokes a couple of times at lunch was all. But he’d gotten to thinking about her all the time, and then she went away, and he figured she’d left him behind, like her job at the drugstore. He never figured she cared enough to be calling or to leave a note. “She doesn’t need you anymore, Jerzy,” Reggie had said when Agnes left. “She had a change in her heart.”
Reggie, you son of a bitch.
Jerzy forced away the sound of Agnes’s voice, the way she smiled. He picked up the letter from the state. “Discrepancies,” “prosecution.” They were coming after him, Jerzy – Jerzy the president – the one who signed the sales-tax returns that didn’t tell about those fifties under the floor.
And Jerzy understood: Reggie could never have let him go off with Agnes; he needed him like the pet-store lady needed the little goldfish, something to toss to the piranhas.
Reggie, you son of a bitch.
“WHAT’S THAT SMELL?” Robison, the sergeant, blathered, loud as always, as he tossed his jacket on the pile on the coat tree.
“What smell?” Queenie said, like she didn’t know.
“Smells like a fire in here.” Robison, ever the turdweasel, wrinkled his nose toward Detective Edrow Fluett. “Edrow, you been on fire?”
Edrow stuck a foot out past his desk. “Eight bucks.”
“They’re purple.”
Edrow looked down at his feet. Sure as shit, the boots were purple. But worse, the drops the boots had left on the tile floor were purple too. The boots were running, purple, like ink.
“Turdweasel,” Edrow said.
“JERZY, YOU ALIVE up there, boy?” Reggie called from downstairs.
Jerzy was still on the floor, squeezing Agnes’s letter. All afternoon, he’d been trying to feel her in the paper. But she was gone. He looked up. Outside, the sky was black. It must be time to go to the bank. He put the letters back, replaced the floorboard, and slid back the chair mat, not much caring if Reggie heard him. He grabbed the zippered bag and went down.
“Your eyes are all watery,” Reggie said when Jerzy got to the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m getting a cold,” Jerzy said, pulling his coat off the rack.
Reggie looked at him funny but nodded as he emptied the cash register into the zippered bag. The store was almost empty now. Only a few stray boots, size mismatches, lay on the tables. Jerzy pulled on his orange knit hat (one of their top closeouts – Wonder how many secret fifties that had got?) and went out the door.
On the sidewalk, he saw the purple in the snow where the boots had bled in the slush. He wanted to kick at it, kick at the lies.
“Heard you were selling boots today, Jerzy,” the teller, a nice girl who reminded him of Agnes, said when he got to the bank.
Today she looked so much like Agnes he had to look away.
“Jerzy, you all right?” she asked when he didn’t answer.
“Lots of boots today,” Jerzy said.
“So how come no fifties, Jerzy?” Always she kidded him about there being no fifties.
Because that son of a bitch Reggie stashes them in the floor, he wanted to yell, right next to the letters he steals before people can read them. But he didn’t yell. He just took the receipt and left.
DETECTIVE EDROW FLUETT walked to his car, grateful that it was dark and people couldn’t see the purple footprints he was making in the snow. His feet were cold from the hard vinyl. When he got home, he was going to leave the boots in the middle of the kitchen floor, dripping purple, so Blanche could see what eight bucks bought at the Closeout Hut.
But as he put the key in the ignition, he remembered what he hadn’t remembered earlier. He’d forgotten to take the two soaked paper towels out of the sink. Advantage lost. Hell was coming.
“WATCH IT, JERZY!” Reggie shouted.
Jerzy hit the brakes, let the semitrailer pull ahead. The whole ride, he’d been seeing Agnes, dead Agnes, outside the windshield wipers, instead of the highway. And now he’d almost slammed into the back end of a truck.
He squeezed the steering wheel. “Who owns the Closeout Hut, Reggie?” he asked.
“What the hell kind of question is that?” Reggie said, shifting his bulk but still staring straight ahead for more trucks.
“I mean, because you’re the owner, Reg, you’re the guy who’s responsible?”
“I should have bought the whole truckload,” Reggie said around his limp cigar. The entire car smelled dead from that wet cigar.
Jerzy wanted so bad to scream at the fat face. But he didn’t; he kept his eyes on the taillights of the truck in front and spoke easy. “So why am I the president?”
“I could have sold another half-truck,” Reggie said.
Jerzy let it go. He didn’t need the bastard to tell him why Jerzy was president. Besides, more important thoughts were crowding into his head.
As they pulled in the driveway, Reggie rubbed his chest. “I think I’ll take a rest tomorrow, let you go in alone. Business will be slow.”
If his insides hadn’t been scrunching, Jerzy would have made a laugh. Slow, baloney. The Closeout Hut was going to be packed tomorrow with people angry as wasps about dissolving purple and stinky fire smells and the mildew they’d seen on their socks. Tomorrow was going to be as bad as the day after Reggie unloaded those tiny tin microwaves. Then, there’d been so many people lugging back the bitty ovens, they’d lined up outside, banging on the glass, yelling about radiation leaks from the loose-fitting doors. That day too, Reggie had stayed home, “taking a rest,” leaving it to Jerzy to point to the ALL SALES FINAL signs and tell the babushkas there was no cash in the register.
But this time it would be okay. In fact, after thinking all afternoon, Jerzy had decided he needed Reggie to stay away. And to make sure, Jerzy had pointed to the purple splotches in the snow as they walked out to Reggie’s Seville. Reggie kept moving like he didn’t see and pulled at the door to the car. But Jerzy knew he saw.
DETECTIVE EDROW FLUETT lined up the blistered shoes and the dripping boots just inside the kitchen door.
“You get a raise, so we can afford to pay for paper towels to do what a sponge mop does for free?” Blanche carped through the television noise as he passed through the front room on his way to the stairs. He said nothing, went up to sit on the edge of the bed. He peeled off his wet black socks.
“Shit,” he said. His feet were purple, like he’d spent the day soaking them in wine.
That fat turdweasel was going to hear from him tomorrow.
BECAUSE JERZY WASN’T allowed to drive the Seville unless Reggie was in it, he had to leave at six thirty the next morning. He didn’t mind. It had stopped snowing. And he needed the walk, train ride, and second walk to go over the plan. Reggie always said planning made perfect. That day, Jerzy needed perfect.
He got to the Hut at eight, taped the new banner in the window just as the first of yesterday’s customers, a short babushka, marched up. She was holding two pairs of boots by their laces, like they were fish stinking on a string. Her face was mad. But when she saw the banner, she stopped. And she smiled.