The man’s first day at work seamlessly blends into his first month. He and Randy get along well despite their age difference, maybe the man has an old soul and Randy feels that he is spending time with a guy his age. They usually drive to a local diner before opening the shop in the morning and Randy tells the man stories about his life in Amarillo, and the man listens intently, making mental notes about the lives of real men. Randy was born in Dallas and his family was pretty well off. Randy explained that he always knew that he would be a mechanic. “My daddy had me working with him on cars since I could walk.” Randy’s older sister was a Marine and his brother was a school teacher in Dallas. He told the man that he came to Amarillo because the women in the Dallas area had run him out of east TX.
“I like women, and maybe from their point of view I don’t treat ‘em right, but if you ask me, I’m just spreading my love around.” Randy had never married or fathered any children and he said it was because he was never interested in being a family man. He liked being intimate with as many women as would let him and he said that he had built up a particular set of skills over the years that allowed him to read a woman’s body and give her exactly what she needed. But coming home to the same woman every day, he had tried that before and it did not end well.
“I don’t like jealous women. That’s slavery to me, you can’t domesticate a real man.” Randy said one morning and he often repeated it like he was convincing himself. Since he’d started work at the shop, the man had witnessed countless older women come to the shop to spend time with Randy, who had an office in a back corner of the shop that was made mostly of glass. When the women came, the man would busy himself under a car to keep his mind from the things Randy and the older women were probably doing.
The man asked Randy about the woman he’d tried to come home to everyday and he admitted, “I did love that women. Right before I moved up here, I was probably twenty-five, I met her at a concert. Her name was Bethany. Ain’t that a pretty name? She was a fine looking woman too. She played softball and she had legs up to here. Anyway, I met her at the concert and we started seeing each other on the regular. But then one day at her softball game, one of her teammates start giving me the eye, and one thing led to another.” Randy smiled half-heartedly and shook his head. “It ain’t like I liked the other girl better, matter of fact, I ain’t like her at all, it was just sex you know?”
The man didn’t know. The only girl he had ever had feelings for was April and he thought that sex only existed for married people and hell-bound sinners. But it was perplexing for him as he got to know Randy more and more; he was obviously going to hell, either for lying about his sexual exploits or for having premarital sex, but Randy was generous and kind and it made no sense to the man that God would smite him to hell. Randy made the man wonder if he had missed out on an aspect of his teen years that could have made his fantasy of holding April close and kissing her a reality.
“You gotta get yourself out there,” Randy said one morning at the diner and the man couldn’t really object. If he did fornicate, he knew that it wouldn’t be the worse thing he had ever done, and he asked Randy for advice. “I would take you out with me, but you need to go somewhere with a younger crowd. You ain’t into older women right?” The man isn’t. “Well you can find your game at the shop, talk up the next pretty young thang that come in tomorrow.”
The man nodded, resolved to try. “You know tomorrow will be a month I been working with you.”
Randy smiled proud. “We make a good team too. I know you said you ain’t got no plans to leave anytime soon, but I’m hoping this is the first of many months.” The men toasted their glasses of orange juice and headed back to the shop.
The man went to sleep that night in his small, half apartment, that was really just a small room with a twin-sized bed, a small kitchen area with a sink and hotplate, and a toilet and shower in a closet-sized room that was attached. It isn’t much, but the man is happy. He hung a wooden cross on a wall that he had found in the bathroom and he wondered if the previous occupant was a religious person. The man knelt before it every night and asked for forgiveness for the three people he’d killed in TN. He went to sleep that night, resolved to talk to a girl tomorrow.
When he wakes the next morning, the man makes his way lazily to the shop. He usually wakes much earlier than the time to open the shop, and he uses the time to organize both his and Randy’s day. Since the man has arrived and organized Randy’s books and his schedule, the shop has been much more productive than it ever was.
The man checks to see if there are any appointments on the calendar and he notices that Randy has a huge chunk of time blacked out. The man knows that means that Randy will pull the curtains on his glass office, a pretty older woman will sashay past the man and leave a cloud of flowery perfume in her wake, and Randy would be unavailable until the woman made her way from the back to the front, usually smiling from ear to ear and hair slightly less neat than it had been when she’d arrived. When it is time to open up, the man flips the sign and calls Randy, who is usually in about thirty minutes after the shop opens, which is the amount of time it takes him to shower and get presentable.
The day is mostly uneventful, but the man keeps his eye out for a girl to replace April in his heart, despite Randy’s suggestion to just keep it casual. The man doesn’t know the meaning of the word in that context. Sadly, the only women that come to the shop are either coupled or not attractive to him and before lunchtime he has all but given up.
Randy’s shop is located near a strip mall where the man usually walks to have lunch, and he heads there after putting up a sign because Randy was in the back enjoying his blackout time. The man is slightly disappointed, but hopeful that the walk will give him an opportunity to find someone. He grabs a sandwich and sits next to the big window that faces the sidewalk in front of the strip mall. He causally people watches and then he sees someone, not a girl to talk to, but someone from home, from NC. Is that Ivan, he thinks to himself, but maybe it was someone who looked like Ivan. And when he walks back to the shop after finishing his sandwich, he looks around to be sure. But then he hears a commotion at the shop, like an argument, and he jogs over to see if Randy could use some help.
Inside the office, the man finds Randy on his knees, begging for mercy. The man sees that Randy’s face is bleeding and the glass walls of his office are shattered. There is another old man there, standing in front of Randy with a bat resting on his shoulder.
“Get the fuck up,” the old man with the bat says. “Be a man and stand the fuck up.”
Randy puts a hand up and slowly rises to his feet. The man has not seen Randy cry before and it is alarming, but the man does not move.
“Please, it ain’t gotta be like this,” Randy manages.
But the old man with the bat is not interested and Randy watches him swing the bat hard and fast, and before Randy can do anything, the bat connects hard with his ribs, and Randy doubles over onto the floor breathing loudly and screaming in pain.
The man is paralyzed, flashbacks of Knoxville flood his memory, and he feels himself slowly backing away, afraid to intervene.
Back in Knoxville, Detective Young and Sandra are enjoying a nice dinner. Well, Young is, Sandra is drinking her dinner despite Young’s suggestions that she sober up with water. After her first drink, Young had pulled the waitress to the side and since then, she’s been bringing Sandra virgin drinks and Sandra doesn’t seem to mind at all.
“So it was him on the tape?” Young asks Sandra.
“He say it was, but that boy didn’t have no gun. He ain’t the type. Not like my bad ass son.” Sandra had gotten over missing her son while she enjoyed Young’s presence and now she is mostly bitter at all the trouble her son has caused her throughout the years. He wanted to be like his bum cousins, Sandra explained, that’s why he was so scared to leave Knoxville, “because he think he something he ain’t.”
“You want me to see if I can find him for you?” Young is not entirely sure why he is so interested in Sandra. At first he wanted to find out why she had lied to him about the man he’d interviewed after a recent explosion at a gas station, but maybe it was seeing her all alone, and she wasn’t hard on the eyes.
“I ain’t dragging that boy nowhere he don’t want to be. He gon’ end up just like all them other boys out there, following that stupid ass Yuri, boy. Just cause his daddy from Russia, all them dumb ass drug boys think he a crime boss or something, but if he was a boss, I think he would be somewhere other than here.”
Yuri, from Russia, Young thinks in disbelief. “How you know Yuri? They been trying to pin him for a while now. From what I hear he is something like a boss.”
“I know that boy mama. She a hood rat just like the rest of ‘em. Like I said, they think they better cause she got knocked up by some Russian, but Yuri went to school with my younger brother, and I used to know him back in the day. I ain’t even know he could talk back then, everybody thought he was dumb. But once he got older, he did whatever you gotta do to be the kind of man he is now.”
“You know if he ever kill anybody?” Young asks, almost excited. This woman could get him a huge bust.
“You want me to snitch? Listen here old man,” Sandra says and Young interrupts,
“You can call me Paul. I’m Paul Young.”
“Listen here old man Young,” Sandra says, “I ain’t no snitch.”
Check out PRL Mysteries, Old Man Young and the Bronx Avenger One-Shot Issue 2 on August 18, 2014 for the conclusion!
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