When an ex-convict gets in trouble for stealing fruits, he will do anything to avoid going to back to jail.
 |
| Image generated with OpenAI |
I was a wanted man. A miscreant, an outlaw. They wanted to find me and take me away. Lock me up for a long time probably. All because I stole some fruit from a grocery store. Sure, I stole from that store almost every day – bananas, apples, plums – stuffed them in my bag while I bought a roll of toilet paper or some other bullshit. Guess somebody was watching me on camera or something, and one day a cop was there, hiding in the shadows, waiting. Well, I ran as soon as he sprung out at me – ran and ran, ran across the bridge, had to get away. Don’t want to go back to that iron cage no more. Besides, I was just trying to feed my family – what’s a man supposed to do?
We just wanted to scare him, actually. That was the plan we agreed upon. We’ve seen this guy stealing fruit at the store day after day – who does that? And he seemed to mostly focus on older and unwanted fruit – you know, bananas with brown spots, apples that no longer had that shiny firmness to them. It was like he refrained from stealing stuff someone would really want to buy. And we appreciated that, in a way. But this went on for a few weeks, a month – you can’t have somebody stealing like that. The store isn’t a charity! If my boss ever found I hadn’t done anything about it, he’d probably fire me on the spot.
So I discussed it with Marsha, the assistant manager, who brought the footage to my attention after some do-gooder customer tipped us off, and that’s what we decided to do – scare him. He seemed like a normal guy – a little rough around the edges, a little worn down (it appeared he was some kind of laborer, always came in at the same time late in the afternoon, with paint spackles on his pants and work boots on). We weren’t sure if he was an immigrant or not, and with everything that’s going on in this country we wanted to give him a break. So I asked my buddy, Petey – an ex-cop out on disability (he’d been diagnosed with PTSD) – just to come in one day in his uniform and stand in the corner, behind the big fridge in the dairy section, and keep an eye on this guy when he did his thing, and then to, you know, kind of rush out and yell at him, put the fear of God in him and maybe even pretend to arrest him, if it came to that, but just let him go and tell him not to do it again, at least not in our store. And yeah, we thought maybe there was a chance he’d run, or create a scene, but nobody expected him to run like that!
It’s my missus, ya see – she’s always saying I got to buy this or that, we need this thing and another, but I don’t got the money for it! I do my best painting for Mic, my boss, but I got four mouths to feed, besides my own, and it just ain’t enough. Something had to give, and she always said fruit was the best thing for the kids – she makes smoothies for them – so one day I just thought I’d get some extra bananas at a five-finger discount – old mushy ones nobody in their right mind was gonna buy anyway, but you could still put in a smoothie – and it was so easy, just threw ’em in my workbag when nobody was looking, that I decided to do it again the next day. If I could’ve paid for ’em I would’ve, but I got rent, diapers, car insurance, internet – barely have enough left over for my own lunch, let alone smoothies, but that’s what Janey wanted, and she was always bitching to me about it…
We tracked him. Petey tracked him. Seemed like he missed being a real cop, walking the beat or whatever, ’cause he got real into it and took off after him – they both went tearing out of the store like two beasts in the chase, one right after the other, in front of all the customers at the register, where Marsha was. Created quite the hubbub apparently.
Petey followed him across the street and around the corner, through McClaren Square and down towards the river, where he ran over the old railroad bridge and up the hill on the other side, with Petey doing his best to keep up, but the guy was fast, work boots and all. Petey was panting and sweating in his uniform – said it was quite the thrill to be chasing after a ‘suspect’, like in days gone by – looking like a real cop (but he hadn’t loaded his gun, thank God; he’d just worn it to frighten the guy), and by the time they got to Palmer’s Road across the water – the one that snakes up that hill like a sidewinder – he just gave up, knowing he couldn’t catch him. He practically collapsed there on the sidewalk, looking up and watching the guy go higher and higher on that hill – the guy never stopped running, though he knew Petey had – until he crested it and went down the other side. And that’s when Petey turned around and came back and told me what had happened.
Well, I wasn’t taking no chances, so I didn’t stop booking even though I saw him give up at the bottom of the hill – like I said, I wasn’t going back to no cell again, come hell or high water. I knew he wasn’t gonna shoot me for shoplifting fruit or nothing – or if he did, it’d be illegal – so all I had to do was run faster than him, and I didn’t think that’d be too hard. He was a big, chunky guy and his face was the color of a beet by the time we got over that bridge, and I’m in pretty good shape – spend almost all day working on my feet.
But by the time I got to the top I was feeling it, so I finally took a break up there, when that cop was out of sight, sitting on a rock where the road started going down on the other side, and catching my breath. It took a long time – I was heaving and puffing like a fish out of water, and dying for something to drink – but when I finally stopped breathing so hard I could see there was almost nothing over there. Just a lot of trees and rocks and that empty road and a house or two down below, on the flat land near the river.
I’d never really been over there before – never had a reason to – ’cause the car bridge is farther down the river, near Bartsville, and that part of the land – I’d heard that old road used to lead to a mine that was closed way back when – was too cold and windy and rocky to do much with, so that’s why nobody was there. Before they’d put me away, Janey and I had lived in the town where we’d grown up, closer to Pittsburgh, but then she’d taken the kids and moved here to be closer to her mother, who was in a home, so I was still getting to know it.
And then I started thinking – using my noggin a little, which Janey said I didn’t do enough – that if they had cameras in the store and they knew what I looked like, and put my picture on some posters or something around town and somebody saw me and called them up at the station, and the cops found me, I’d go back up river to Turnersville – and like I said, I wasn’t doing that again. So I thought I’d just hide out there, lay low, till I could come up with a better plan – survive on my own, Robinson Crusoe style – the dude my granny used to tell me about when I was a kid, who lived all by himself on some island in the Pacific. I’d been a boy scout and all and gotten my survivalist badge, so I figured I’d be able to hack it for at least a few days – maybe more, if I could use my noggin – and that it’d be tough but at least I’d be on my own. I felt bad for Janey, and the kinds – I really did, though Janey was always bossing me around and I only saw the kids for a couple hours before they went to bed, and sometimes they looked at me like a kind of alien, after not seeing me for those five years – but what could I do? The jig was up, the fuzz had my number. Would they rather have me back in the slammer or out here in the woods? At least from here I could stop by sometime, in secret like, maybe give them something every now and then. Also I felt bad for Mic – he’d been real nice to give me that job after I got out, when Billy went off to college, and now he’d have to finish the Bellinger house by himself, which would take forever, but I hope he’d understand some day.
Nobody had seen the guy since. If I ever did see him, I wanted to tell him he wasn’t really in trouble and I’d just wanted to scare him and he could relax a little, but he didn’t show his face in Belmont after that… even his wife hasn’t heard from him apparently. A few days later some real cops came into the store with a picture of him – his name was Joey Dillinger, or ‘Joey D’ – asking if we’d seen him and that she’d filed a missing person’s report, but I didn’t say anything and I told Marsha not to, other than that he used to come into the store but hadn’t been doing that recently. It was probably lucky that none of the customers who’d been there that day were in the store when they came in – with Petey on a leave of absence and not really supposed to be wearing the uniform and whatnot, I was scared we’d get in trouble if anybody found out what really happened – but now a part of me is wondering what actually became of the guy.
Like, did he fall and break his neck on the hill up there? Have a heart attack after running all that way? Hop on a freight train out of town? It’s been seven days now and the whole thing’s starting to make me nervous – even more nervous, sometimes, than telling the police the truth – like we messed up his life irrevocably all because of this little situation with the fruit, and that maybe the punishment didn’t fit the crime and everything.
So now I’m thinking about going over there, up that hill across the tracks, on my day off, and seeing what I find – hoping I don’t find what I think I’m going to.
So I built myself a little shelter. Well, it was already partly built when I found it – a hunting shack up on the high side of the hill here, where nobody seemed to come except deer and squirrels and birds. It looked like it hadn’t been used for years – the plywood roof was rotted through and it didn’t have any doors or windows, but I fixed that easily enough – with other pieces of wood lying around and sticks and leaves and mud, stuff that wasn’t hard to find and cut up with the pocket knife I had in my work bag, along with some twine I had in there. It ain’t much, but it’s a place to sleep at night – there’s an old busted mattress in there; it still works well enough if you put something over it (like the plastic tarp I found).
The food part’s the biggest problem – ain’t much up here other than some berries, and I don’t have any weapon on me to kill animals, other than my knife, and I’m just not quick enough for that. So I had to improvise – I went down to one of them old houses I’d seen near the river and kind of checked it out and saw nobody was there. The place wasn’t abandoned – it still had furniture and books and stuff inside – so I looked around and didn’t see any cameras, and I just busted a window and went in, and found some old cans of beans and soup and took them, and yanked a blanket off the bed and got some old matches from the stove. I figured out how to get them cans open with my knife, so now I make a little fire a couple times a day near the shack and cook me up some grub – can’t say I’m ever full afterwards, but it keeps me going.
Can’t say either how long I’ll be able to stay out here like this – I definitely ain’t been sleeping well, and I’m feeling damn dirty by now (though I wash myself in the river sometimes, at night, when nobody’s around) – and I know Janey and the kids, and probably Mic, are out there looking for me, but I just can’t go back. Got to figure out what to do next – I’m thinking maybe I could climb onto one of them trains I see going by every now and then and see where it takes me, maybe get another job in some town under a fake name and all, and send money back to Janey, but I’m still working out the particulars. Reckon I could last another month or so out here at the rate I’m going – I’m lucky it’s the beginning of fall and hasn’t gotten too cold yet, or maybe I wouldn’t make it through the night. Guess I’ll just stay out here till Mother Nature says otherwise – I’m kind of liking it, in a way, what with all the quiet and trees and the view, and nobody bothering me and not working all day at something I don’t really like doing.
OK, tomorrow’s the day. It’ll be Monday, when the store’s closed, and it’s been 12 full days since Joey’s gone missing. I asked Petey if he wanted to come with me to go look for him and he agreed – I think he feels partly responsible for what happened, too.
I told him not to wear the uniform so as not to scare him, but he insisted on bringing his gun in case we do find him and he’s not so happy about it. I told him that was a bad idea but he says we’ll be in uncharted territory up on that hill and it’s better to be protected, and I guess he has a point.
The cops said they already went up there the day after his wife filed the report and they didn’t find anything. But I wonder – if he is up there – if he was able to see them driving up that long road in their cars and hide himself before they got to the top. Petey and I are going to hike it all the way, and wear our camos so we blend in more – we’re going up stealth-like, so we can take him at unawares. Then maybe we can have a little chat and clear things up so he can come back into town and see his family. Last I heard from Marsha, his wife was scrambling to find another job (she’s even thinking about applying at the store!) so his kids have enough to eat – apparently she’s just working part-time at Dollar General and it’s not making ends meet.
It’s going to be an adventure, that’s for sure. If we do find him, I’m going to offer him a year’s worth of free fruit (one item per day) to make it up to him – and I’m even going to bring a bunch of brown-spotted bananas with me as a sign of our peaceful intentions.
Damn, I’ve done it now, and I’m definitely gonna have to hop that train when it comes again, after this! Two guys came up the hill today – out of nowhere, just crested right over on foot and came down near my shack – they must have seen the smoke. One of them looked like the cop that chased me up here before – ‘cept he was dressed in regular clothes – and I got scared. I thought they’d come to take me away, and when I heard some rustling sounds farther up the hill from where the road loops around – I notice anything that ain’t normal nowadays, after being up here for so long – I hid myself behind a big fern bush off to the side of the shack, where I could still see it.
Well, them boys came loping through the forest real slow and cautious-like, dressed all in camos like they were on some hunting party, and they started calling out my name when they saw the shack, and then, when I didn’t answer – I’m not stupid – they crept up and looked inside. Then they decided to separate and look around for me – I could hear everything they were saying though they were talking in low voices – and the beefy one, the cop, came towards where I was hiding. I had a big rock with me that I’d taken from the shack, that was the perfect size for defending myself, and when he got real close – I was still as a lynx behind that little wall of green – I leapt out and nailed him on the head with it. He cried out and then hit the ground like a lead dummy. I took his gun. I heard the other guy, who I didn’t really know – though I might have seen him working at the grocery store before – sort of rustling around and panicking, yelling, “Petey! You OK? Petey!”
When he didn’t get no response, he started saying stuff to me, like he knew me – that he didn’t want to hurt me and just wanted to talk things over, but it was all garbled like and he didn’t make sense half the time – seemed like he was mighty disturbed by that scream his buddy let out.
I wasn’t gonna act like no fool and have a regular conversation with him – let him see where I was – for all I knew he had a gun on him too, like the other guy, which I’d taken from him. So I went back behind the fern and just waited, silent-like, like before.
After a while he stopped gabbing on in that frightened voice and must have just stood there, thinking about what to do next.
I was half-hoping he’d turn around and leave me alone, but I guess he wanted to be a good friend and check on his buddy – not that it would have made a difference, ’cause a stream of blood was flowing out of his head and he’d already stopped breathing. Still, about 10 minutes after he’d stopped talking, when he must have figured I’d run away or something – but I hadn’t, ’cause I wasn’t gonna let anybody go back to town and tell the cops they’d spotted me – he came walking real slow-like around the corner of the shack, and he saw the big guy’s body lying there and his face went white as a pail of milk. And right then I jumped out and pulled the trigger – hitting him in the chest.
He went down and started wheezing and heaving – blood pouring out of his midsection and coming out of his mouth a little too, and I knew I must have got an organ and he wasn’t gonna last long. He looked at me with that glaze in his eyes when I came over – I was sure I recognized him from the store then – and mouthed some words I couldn’t understand, and he stopped moving.
After that I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t really mean to kill them both – I’d only been, like, protecting myself, but I started to think maybe they hadn’t meant to take me in, ’cause he didn’t have any weapons on him but a pocket knife, and neither of them had cuffs or badges or anything.
Then I looked in the guy’s backpack and found a bunch of mushy bananas, and I knew they hadn’t come to harm me. But it was too late now, and I felt bad – real bad – and knew the life I’d had before was over… there was no going back. I grabbed one of the them bananas and ate it – the only fresh food I’d had in weeks! – and it tasted good, and made me feel a little better, I’m ashamed to say. Right then I was wishing Janey was there with her blender and could make me a smoothie, ’cause that would have tasted even better, but I didn’t think I’d ever see her or the kids or our kitchen again, and that wasn’t really something I wanted to think about, as terrible as it made me feel. So I got busy stripping the bodies (I could use the extra clothes) and putting the gun and the bananas and everything else in the backpack. Then I dragged them down to the edge of a ravine I knew and pushed them over, and packed up all my other gear and headed down to those tracks along the river – I could already see smoke in the sky over where the town lay; a train would be comin’ along soon…
