A Vagrant Story Page 2

  “You knocked their heads in … with a bat, if I recall.”

  “Well yeah, normally I wouldn’t need a weapon but there were about six of them. I didn’t see you three doing much neither … especially Henry.”

  Still nibbling on a loaf, Henry hoisted his head. “Well, it’s not like I was avoiding it. The fight was over before I noticed. I was … busy.”

  “Busy hiding!”

  “Leave it alone, Rum,” Alex said, with a cough at the end.

  “Quit mixing up the story y’old fool, as I recall I was the one who dived in on them. They had you down and I saved your ass,” Sierra said.

  “I’m not old. I’m only in my forties for Christ’s sake. And of course you’d get in there, you’re a girl. You don’t seriously think they’d put up a real fight against you. Makes sense they’d go easier on you.”

  Sierra rolled her eyes. “I doubt the drunken mob saw things from your perspective.” She bit into her bread.” Lucky bastards being able to go out on the piss like that, all that money on a bit of fun. Wish we could get cash like that. Soup and bread has its good points but with their weekend change I’d buy everything on the menu – just for one night.”

  Rum eyed her somewhat plump exterior. “You’d think you have already. From the look of you I’d say you’ve got a secret hoard somewhere.”

  “And some brand new clothes,” she continued, ignoring Rum. “If I could afford those then I probably wouldn’t be too bothered with all this.”

  “What's the point? A week and they’d be wrecked again,” Rum jested. “Besides, we’re tramps, even with cash the shops would throw us out the moment our stench caught upwind.”

  Alex raised hand to chin. “Yet we’re lucky.” The comment attracted everyone’s gaze. “In a poorer country we’d be fairly well off, being a tramp over here is better than being a village chief in Somalia.”

  A protruding silence pierced the air. If confusion had a sound it would be the blinking eyes around this table, staring forth awaiting logic behind the comment. It came upon Rum to beg a reason.

  “Yeah that’s real nice to hear. Village chief!? What the hell has that to do with anything? Forget it. You’re just a damn weirdo, always coming up with this shit. You’re only twenty-something and you act like some old man with his head half buried in books. The hell did you do before all this anyway? Bet you were crazy with the ladies.”

  In part he wasn’t sure if Rum intended to ask that as a real question, or if he was just spouting more random nonsense. Taking the latter option Alex put his head down and drifted back to silence.

  Rum snapped, “Hey weirdo, wake up, that was an actual question!”

  “What’s to know? I’ve told you before and you never believe me.”

  “Because it’s obvious as hell you made that story up.”

  “Well that’s the truth. If you don’t believe me then that’s your problem.”

  “Yeah sure, that’s all there is. It doesn’t add up.”

  Feeling out of the loop, Henry sat forward to say, “No one ever said anything to me about it.”

  “Nobody ever tells you anything. Period.”

  “Leave it out, Rum. Fine, I’ll go over it again. Maybe you can cross check it with what I’ve already told you before. I imagine you’ve some notebook for this stuff since you’re so interested.”

  “Don’t need one, got it all jogged down in my noggin,” Rum said. “Mister silent Al’ here says he was thinking about dropping out of college to work on his writing career-“

  “You were a writer?” Henry interrupted. “I love stuff like that, back before I was, y’know, not homeless, I always tried thinking up new stories for comic books. I even…”

  Rum’s knuckles tightened. His face reddened. “Why have I never hit you? I’m talking here so shut up. Anyway, so he finds this agent offering all these grand promises of fame.”

  “He charged me monthly. At that time I was living in a single room flat so it drained my pockets pretty bad. But after everything he promised … how could I not?”

  “And when the money ran dry the agent turned on him. Suddenly the masterpiece became second rate toilet paper.”

  “That might have been the case from the start. The worst part is I never found out.”

  “But the plot thickens … When our good friend Alex went to get his manuscripts back, the agent had cleared out – gone with the stories too.”

  “He could have left them for me at least. I don’t know what happened to them, or even why he took them. Maybe he did see something worth taking after all, or maybe he just wanted to give me one last dig in the stomach. It did it for me anyway. He took the money I needed to survive then stripped me of my life’s work. Things fell through from there.”

  Sierra leaned forward with interest. “Makes sense, he got ripped off. It happens.”

  “That’s not what he has a problem with,” Alex stated, in an attempt to put Rum’s point to better focus.

  “You’re damn right it’s not. Listen, I lost my job and family in an accident at work, Blondie was abandoned, and the Dud-”

  “S-stop calling me that,” Henry pleaded.

  “-Hit low when his shop or something burned down last year, and most likely he didn’t have anyone to fall back on, being a loser and all.”

  Henry murmured on the side, “I had friends. I just … didn’t want to bother them. It’s just … at that stage I was too old to hang onto people. And my parents died … then my brother went to Africa.”

  Rum feigned a punch at Henry. “I thought I told you to shut up!” He focused back on Alex. “But you, you never smelt like no outcast and your family ain’t poor. I know that college you went to and it wasn’t no chump school, I know that for sure. Now I accept you’ve been a lazy bum since the day you were born so that means mommy and daddy must have foot the bill. Why not fall back on them?”

  Alex sipped his soup. “Check it out, detective Rum leaps into action. Shame the drink rots his mind. I’ve told you before, I was an orphan most of my life – I didn’t even have foster parents. My college spree was funded by a second chance charity foundation. I don’t know, I guess they thought I was smarter than the average bug.”

  “Smart men don’t beat total strangers half to death.”

  “That was different. It was one of my first nights on the street … as a bum. I was on my own and the guy started giving me hassle. I lost it.”

  “If me and Blondie hadn’t found you, you’d probably have finished it. That was the night we met, since then I’ve always known there was something different about you. That bogus back story just confirms it.”

  “I remember that night,” Sierra said. “Alex was the first guy we ever took back to our shack. Rum was so suspicious he stayed up all night clutching a baseball bat. He’d jump a mile if Alex so much as rolled in his sleep.”

  “Pleasant days,” Alex said. “And he still doesn’t trust me.”

  “I trust you, I just don’t like you.”

  Rum frowned his distaste at Alex, who returned it in kind. The staring match brought about a sudden quite. At once they realised how loud they’d been speaking.

  A bell over the entrance rang out. Hand in hand an elderly couple entered with a titter of laughter. They stopped at once to sight the miscreants in the rear corner. The old woman’s halt settled into a slow retreat, but her husband waved a reluctant hand as if to let it slide.

  “Well, that oughta do it for us,” Rum said.

  Even though the couple ordered their food and sat down anyway, their hesitation to enter had caught the manager’s attention, and lowered his tolerance level. He remained fixated on the tramps until the next customer entered.

  It was a short, skinny middle aged man, drunk and staggering. From the way the manager greeted him he appeared to be a regular customer. From the way he grimaced at the tramps then whispered close to the manager’s ear, he might have been a valued one. Whatever he said, it looked like a marching order.

>   Almost at once the manager’s shadow fell over their table. He acted discretely at first, sweeping up crumbs and spilt soup they hadn’t yet eaten. Like a cat lashing for a rat his gaze landed upon Rum.

  “So, did you enjoy your meal? You’ve nurtured it so long I imagine it must be too much for you.” He sighed as if building to something. “I’ve been accommodating to you. You should know we don’t usually take in … your kind like this. It looks like things are about to pick up and you’re making the guests nervous. So if you wouldn’t mind…”

  Henry reacted first, pronging to his feet and stuttering apologetically to the door. Alex followed with a gentle sigh. With Sierra at his back, Rum didn’t budge.

  “Other guests?” he cried. “There’s only three people!”

  “You smell like shit!” a new voice cried from the background. “And you look like shit! Stupid bums.”

  It came from that skinny little drunk man. He sat hanging off his chair with a damning fist raised.

  Rum pushed past the manager. “You think you’re better than me you little son of a bitch!? Come here and say it to my face!”

  The words reached him. Within seconds Rum and the drunk were locked hand to hand in combat with the manager scrambling to pry them apart. Out of pure cheek Sierra piled over Rum’s back, reached over the manager, and began smacking the drunk man‘s head.

  All the while Alex and Henry watched this commotion through the open view window outside. By then the fight degraded into a display of tumbling and muffled threats. The manager’s threat came through loudest.

  “We’ve called the police. They’ll be here any minuet! They don’t side with bums so you better leave now!”

  Alex scrunched up at the words. They oozed with a familiar truth he knew all too well. When one is set against the other, police tend to side with wealth over the deprived. He found his fist tightening, mind racing with memories. He thought of charging back into the diner. He’d show them what a bum can do. His foot hardly moved an inch when he heard Rum’s voice right beside him.

  “We going?” he said, rubbing his shoulder to health.

  “You stopped fighting?”

  Sierra followed Rum. “Sure we did. No point getting arrested over it. Time we headed home anyway.”

  On her lead they strolled away from the diner, cutting through a back road to avoid any main routes. The bars had closed, and that meant swarms of drunken louts were currently en-route home. Amazing the amount of attention a bum could get simply by standing on a brightly lit sidewalk. Drink did it to them mostly. So many people would come staggering from the bars eager for fights. Bums tended to be easy targets, and old Rum tended to be an easily swayed one.

  Their back road travels came under guidance from illuminating streetlights, flickering ominously against the darkened slabs of stone they called home. This was the only time one could appreciate this dump of a city for what it truly was, a dark dump of a city.

  Any fool knew it a bad idea to thread these back roads at this time of night. Muggings were an all too common occurrence and few people could walk without fear. These tramps, however, got along just fine. The threat factor came severely reduced since the main culprit resided in their own group. Sierra had been mugging since she was ten, and since then her skills provided a major source of income. Getting money rarely proved a problem, finding a place to spend it was the tricky part.

  Sierra kicked an empty beer can along the ground. “So sick of those people, who do they think they are throwing us out like that? It’s not like they’re so special to be eating in a kip like that.”

  “Maybe we should be more lenient toward them next time,” Alex said. “If you think about it we get most of our money from people like them, one way or the other. I suppose it sort of evens things out.”

  “Like karma,” Henry added.

  “That’s nothing to do with it. It’s just how people work. They put us down because they can. They cut us so we cut them back, always repeating - nothing more. ”

  “Aye, we spent the last of our cash in there, and the cider wasn’t even worth the price. I’m drunk, but just barely. Never even got through all of it, I hate leaving drink behind.”

  “That all you think about?” Sierra asked.

  “What else should I think about, being thrown out? I don’t care anymore. Don’t tell me you’re not used to it by now?”

  “Sometimes I expect different. I suppose we’ll have to work up more cash now too. It’s so unfair. Sometimes those people make me so angry.”

  Her words died upon the hollow sound of tapping footsteps. A loan stranger came walking from a turnoff ahead. He staggered to and fro, struggling to button up his brown suede jacket. He muttered to himself with a lowered head. He crossed the road without care for traffic. There walked a man whose long hard day had finally come to an end. A man beaten into self withdrawal, a man half full on liquor to move quickly. The man had a bull’s eye on his head.

  Sierra fixated upon him, a callous little half smile present on her lips. “Poor fool. He has no idea what he looks like.”

  “What’s that?” Alex asked.

  “Fresh meat.”

  “Not again. Please don’t do it, Sierra,” Henry pleaded, settling back upon noting the greedy mark of devotion glazing in her eyes. “At least … don’t hurt him.”

  “Relax Henry, he won’t even notice.”

  Sierra ushered her friends behind a stack of bins. “Hide in here and stay low.”

  They couldn’t help but peak out to watch her bear down like a fearless hunter. She moved slowly for stealth, yet faster than the mark.

  Fluidly, Sierra planted her wrist inside the stranger’s pocket, snatching whatever she felt first. By time he could react she was already too far away.

  Henry stayed out in plain sight unlike the others who bolted behind cover on the first chance. He couldn’t help but watch this lone figure draped in shadow, his empty silence consuming the quiet of a bitter winter night. For a brief moment he looked straight at Henry who in turn stared back. The man un-flexed his shoulders and vanished down the path he walked.

  “Sorry,” Henry whispered.

  “Henry!” he heard Sierra call behind him. “You let him see you?”

  “Does it matter?” Rum said coming out of hiding. “Guys like that won’t report it anyway. Get to the good stuff already.”

  Sierra tore the wallet open, scuffling through the compartments like a rodent sniffing grease stains. “And we have … some loose change. Fuck all. Great.”

  “There’s a reason good targets aren’t this easy,” Rum said.

  “Maybe the wallet could be worth something, I don‘t know,” Sierra added.

  “Decide later. I hear standing around the scene of the crime isn’t the best way to avoid detection,“ Alex said. “Maybe it’s time we went home.”

  Home was a broody little shack in Middle Park, positioned under a Great Oak just off the central intersection. The residence itself, the thing they called a house, was nothing but a box bound together with eerily balancing planks. They acted as support beams for the flat board roof, which provided little cover from the seeping drips through the intricate design of no appeal. Rum designed it, but if he knew anything about designing he wouldn’t be homeless.

  Beyond their slender board walls, in the vastness of the park, general yelling and meaningless singing raved from the bushes to their ears. Noises like that usually indicated all the drunks were shifting their asses to the park, either that or some other bums were lucky enough to land a beer keg.

  Henry listened closely to those noises. Those somehow threatening noises that always sounded closer than they were, as though a siege-force of assholes and drinkers were taking position around this worthless little castle they called home. He tried drowning out the sounds by pushing closer to his group. They sat encircled around a small kettle fire, its smoke drifting out their curtain of a doorway, and anywhere else it could.

  Rum vented some distaste upo
n Henry. The space around was tight enough without him shoving in. At least the added body heat provided some comfort. A certain amount of warmth they’d soon need considering the sparkles of snow passing through the cracked roof – a small sign of things to come.

  Henry looked into the steel kettle set atop the flame. “H-hey … I’m all for tea but does it really have to be made from weeds and … whatever that is?” He made reference to a large black seed like object bubbling around in the water.

  “Yeah sure, let’s open that bag of Thai tea shall we? Or perhaps you’d rather I baked a biscuit for the entrée? Tea is made of plants and herbs so we made this from plants and … that.” In a sly cough the old man added, “Stupid dud. Go to sleep and quit bothering everyone.”

  Henry quickly slinked away from the argument. Redirected back to the corner of the shack, he dipped his head into a scrapped comic book he’d earlier found binned.

  Rum coughed yet again. “Hey Alex, I think I’m getting your cold.”

  Alex formed a slight grin which collapsed on the end of his words. “I don’t think you could.”

  Rum stared dryly. “Why’s that? You gonna explain or just blank out like you always do?”

  “The second one.”

  “Fuckin’ weirdo.”

  Alex made an effort to ditch Rum by acknowledging Henry. “Hey Henry, what you reading over there?”

  “Don’t ignore me, cunt.”

  Henry popped his head from the pages. “This? It’s a comic.”

  Rum massaged his own head for Henry’s lacking intelligence. The action was an otherwise un-acknowledged attempt bring attention back upon himself.

  “I meant what type of comic is it?” Alex asked again.

  “Oh, sorry … It’s just an old one I found in a bin outside a comic store. It’s called … Legion Man.”

  “I remember that, it was ok in its day, until they kept coming up with the same old predictable storylines. You know the kind: hero saves the day from the clutches of the evil villain, only to get the girl at the end for some reason or another. I suppose when an idea becomes marketable it becomes a risk to change it.”