Dead Man's Money

Michael Henson

She was up in the park giving head to some old man in the front seat of his raggedy Chevy, and he was about to do the deed. His back arched, his body stiffened, his hand caressed the back of her head, he rose up two inches out of his seat.

Then everything came to a stop. All the starch went out of him. He sank back down, his hand slipped away, he wilted and he sighed.

“Come on baby,” she whispered. “You can do it for me.” But he had stopped all his rocking and moaning. He had gone limp as a sock.

She raised her head; she was puzzled. This was something new. And strange.

Then she heard the cackle.

It was a strange, brittle, crackle of a sound like paper when it’s crumpled. From her angle, she could only see the business end of him, but the strange, mocking cackle seemed to come from somewhere else, from above, or to the side, or from deep inside him. She could not tell. It scared her; she sat up and backed away so she could look him in the face.

“What’s up, honey?” she asked. “What’s the matter?” But the man would not answer. He clutched at his chest. His mouth gaped; he made little nods; he stared; he pleaded with his eyes. But he did not –could not—speak.

Oh my God, she thought.“Oh my God,” she asked him. “Are you gonna die right here?” Was this a heart attack? She tried to remember, what do you do when somebody’s having a heart attack?

“Are you okay?” she asked him. “Honey, are you okay?” He said nothing, but his eyes still pleaded. You are, she thought. You’re having a heart attack and you’re gonna die right here.

Slowly, his hands relaxed across his chest. Then she heard again the weird cackle. Where did it come from? He shivered; his hands dropped slowly to his lap. His eyes still seemed to plead, but his lids drooped, slowly, like a schoolhouse flag coming down, bit by bit, until they closed altogether. Then his head tilted forward toward his chest and he slowly slid against the car door.

She backed away, way up against the opposite door. She was afraid to even touch him. He didn’t breathe and he didn’t move. What do I do? she thought. What do I do? Was he dead? Just like that? She made herself brave and lifted his hand, then dropped it right away.

His hand fell limp as a rag.

Oh my God, she thought. Oh my God, what the fuck am I gonna do?

She had her cell phone, but who would she call anyway? 9-1-1? The police? Her mother?

If only she could call her mother.

What the fuck, she thought. Please Jesus, what the fuck am I gonna do?

There was no one around. They were in a tucked-away nook of a big park that overlooked the river. It was all woods to one side and a picnic area to the other.  It was late afternoon in mid-week. A late-November wind kicked leaves around the empty picnic benches. No one was likely to come by here, but they might. The police made regular sweeps. High school kids came here to smoke weed and make out. And the joggers didn’t care what the fuck the weather was. It was an all-right place to conduct a little quick private business, but someone was bound to come around eventually. She couldn’t stay here long . Not with this poor guy sitting next to her dead as a hammer.

A car was headed their way, slowly, so she thought it might be undercover. “Okay, darlin’,” she said to the dead man. “I gotta make like I’m talking to you, so don’t you fall down.” She raised his head and turned his shoulders so that he faced her. “Please don’t fall down,” she said.  “Please. Please. Please.”

He did not fall down, but his jaw went slack and his mouth fell open as if he really were about to speak. And his eyes, having peeped back open, still seemed to plead.

What?  She wanted to ask, What do you want?

The undercover car—if that’s what it was—rolled on by and out of sight. She was ready to get the hell out of this car. But she looked the man over one more time and realized she couldn’t leave him like he was, with his dick still hanging out. He’s probably got kids and all, she thought. Grandkids, probably, from the look of him. She did not want him to haunt her for what they might see if they found him.

Carefully, she put him back together decent. She tucked him in like a baby, pulled up his zipper, buttoned his trousers, and fastened his belt.

“Now, motherfucker,” she said. “You owe me. No one’s ever gonna know you died getting a blow job from a crackhead. So you owe me.”

To collect what she was owed, she first looked around to be sure no one was watching, then reached around him to where he kept his billfold. It took some doing, but she maneuvered it out of his pocket and opened it.

Oh holy fuck!

Her eyes went wide. The wallet was fat with bills, more than she could count. She fanned through the stack and she saw a thick wad of twenties, fifties, and even a deck of Benjamins.

“You must have hit the fucking lottery,” she said to the man. “And I was your celebration.”

All that money. It gave her a little buzz just to think of it. She could stay fucked up for a week on this much money. She could pay the rent, buy up some food and pay off her phone. She could send some money to her mother for the kids and still stay fucked up for days.

But she knew better than to take it all. Somebody would find him, sooner or later. Somebody would wonder what happened to all his lottery money or back wages or Black Lung money or whatever it was that got a man who drove an old beat-up hooptie a wad of cheese that was thick as a brick. If the billfold was empty, they would think he had been robbed and they would come looking and if they looked long enough, they would find her.

“I might be a dope fiend,” she told him, “and I might be a whore. But I ain’t stupid.”

Still, he owed her. She took out a bill, thought about it, and took another. Fair enough, she thought, for what she had been through. A couple hundred bucks for an hour’s work. She hesitated a moment more. It was a lot of money to leave behind, a lot of blow jobs on a lot of old men. No, she couldn’t let it all go like that. It was like God had put all that money in her hands and was she going to turn it down? Fuck that. His kids and his grandkids would just have to suck it. None of them was willing to do for him what she did or else he wouldn’t have to come down to the hood looking for the likes of her.

So she thumbed through the billfold again. This time, she took about half the bills and stuffed them in a wad into the pocket of her jacket. She shut up the billfold and worked it back into his pocket. She looked around once more to see if anyone was watching. Please, Jesus, she begged. Don’t let nobody come by now. Then she slipped out the door of the car and into the woods.

But which way to go?

She hardly knew where she was. The park covered many acres and it was looped through with woods and winding roads and hiking paths. She knew better than to try the roads. Too much traffic, too many cops. So she figured she could weave her way through the woods until she was back on some street she knew. Then she could hit the turf again like nothing had happened.  Just another evening on the stroll.

But first, she had to get off the hill and out of these woods. It would be dark soon. This ain’t gonna be no picnic, she thought. She was dressed for the street and not some wild place like this. She guessed that she was on a trail as she entered the woods, but it petered out quickly and she fought through briars and honeysuckle that scratched her ankles and slashed at her face until she broke free of the thickety stuff and came into a deeper, older woods.

It was as quiet in here as a chapel. She paused to catch her breath.

She was not used to walking anywhere but the streets, and these were totally the wrong shoes with their thin soles and open toes. There’s got to be a path, she thought. And as she stared into the woods a moment, there it was. Out of the maze of tree trunks, deadfalls, intersecting branches, and littered leaves, a pattern emerged, a deer trail, as if it had just formed itself right before her.

Still, it was no easy thing to follow the deer trail. She had to duck under and step over a series of branches and logs, but eventually the deer trail crossed a path laid out by the park people, a clear easy path, soft with mulch.

But which way? She had no idea where she was and which direction to turn. She guessed to the right, and she prayed, Please, Jesus, don’t let nobody come down this path, nobody walking his dog, nobody meeting her boyfriend.

Her heels kept sinking into the mulch, so she took off her shoes. The ground was cold and she began to sniffle. I’ll catch cold for sure, she thought. Or maybe bronchitis or pneumonia. And when she thought of being laid up with no way to make a living, she regretted the money she left behind in the dead man’s wallet. Winter would soon hammer down onto the streets. It would be sweet to have one of those nice down coats, all bubbled up with feathers inside and warm as toast. She could see herself work the corner in her fine, fly, warm, high-collar coat.

But she knew what would happen to her coat. She would have a slow day and she would need a hit. She would sell the coat for a nickel and her coat would go up the pipe. She would stay high for a hot minute while some other bitch walked around all warm in her coat. And she would be straight back out on the street in her little shivery thin jacket that she would never sell because nobody would want it.

So fuck the coat, she thought.

She was glad to have the thin jacket now, for it was colder in the woods than it had been on the street and colder yet, now that the day was getting late. Her bare feet were cold on this path, but at least she had her jacket.

She continued down the path until it opened on an overlook. There was nothing to mark it but a little bench, but the view was clear from off the hill. There was the river, far below, and there were the Kentucky hills on the other side. A barge tilted downstream. Here and there, houses along either shore and way up in the Kentucky hills had winked on their lights.

She stood up on the bench for a better view. Directly below her was River Road. Miniature cars and trucks barreled out toward the suburbs. And to the left, there was the pattern of dark buildings and small lights that she knew was her neighborhood.

It looked incredibly far away.

*

For an hour, two hours, she had no idea how long, she walked, scrambled, plowed through the woods and thickets, blind and scared, full of dirt and tears. The darkness had dropped on her like a predator. She lost the shoes somewhere in the thickets. She had left the path once she realized it was taking her right back to the place where she had left her poor dead trick.

She knew it when the path started to turn back uphill and she knew it for sure when she saw the lights flash through the trees. So someone had found the dead man and called the police. Their radios squawked and scratched. The trees were slashed with red and blue lights.

*

For an hour, two hours, she had no idea how long, she scrambled downhill through the dark thickets, away from the dead man and the red and blue lights. By the time she emerged at the fence line of someone’s backyard, she was scratched up in her face and ankles, her hair was strung all out of place and full of leaves and twigs. Her face was streaked with tears, dirt, and snot.

Inside the fence, a dog was raising hell and pulling at his chain. Inside the kitchen, she could see a woman fixing dinner, a big, heavy-boned woman with long, straight hair. The woman had her radio going, and she danced around her kitchen and she danced at her counter and at her stove.

She stared at the dancing woman until the woman raised her window to yell at the dog.

Then she pulled back into the woods.

*

She had to work through more thickets of tangled briar and intersecting honeysuckle until she came to a string of abandoned houses, dark and empty. She was scared, but there were no dogs to raise hell and no one to watch her come out of the woods and onto River Road.

She was used to cold and hunger. She was used to being tired. She was a street hooker, after all. She could pull long hours on nothing but coffee and cigarettes and that blessed hit off the pipe, that oh-so-blessed, blister-lip hit off that smooth glass pipe. She would have stalked straight down River Road like a soldier on a forced march but she was cold and hungry and tired like she had never been before. And she was lonely and she was depressed and she was crying for pity for the poor motherfucker who died with his pecker in her hand. And she was crying for herself, that she was ragged and cold and tired and shoeless out on River Road. She was shivering and fiending for that hit off the pipe.

The sidewalks were hard and cold and full of grit, but she slogged one slow step after another. Her feet, by now, were raw, cut up by twigs, gravel, and bits of broken glass.

I used to run barefoot all summer long, she thought. Now I can barely walk.

She walked barefoot and sore for over a mile past more of the houses with their lighted kitchens and their living rooms warmed by television, past solid blocks of abandoned shops and tenements. Trucks rolled by and shook the ground around her.

She saw no one out but a half dozen children gathered under a light by a dock. The children shouted and threw rocks into the river. They flung them far out into the water if the rocks were small, or if they were larger, straight off the dock with a great kawhoosh that made all the children scream and laugh.

She stopped by a telephone pole and listened to the voices of the children, their shouts and laughter and the great kawhoosh of the rocks in the water.

My life, she thought, is a curse.

*

She left behind the children at the dock and walked until she came within a hundred paces of her home. Another hundred steps. The block where she lived and worked was just in sight and a hundred steps would get her to her door. She could see the buildings and the lights in the buildings. She knew that the dope boys watched at their stations in front of those buildings. She had not seen them, and they had not seen her. But she could almost feel their presence. She could almost see the gold in their teeth and the gold at their necks. She could almost smell the sweat in their palms. One hundred steps and she could hand over one of her bills and a dope boy would fetch her a big yellow boulder the size of her fist.

And she could take the rest of her money and pay the bill on her phone. She could buy some shoes—good shoes—to replace the shoes she had lost. She could give her mother some money for the kids. It would feel so good. It would be so sweet.

And yet, she could not move. She knew what would happen. There would be no bills paid, no shoes, no money to give her mother. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jacket and she wiped her cheeks with the cuffs of her jacket and she trembled on the lip of the curb. Around the corner and up the street, a hundred steps from where she stood, there was food and warmth and the comfort of the pipe and yet she could not move. Something had ended and something had begun. She trembled and sobbed with her fist balled up around the dead man’s money and she did not know where to turn or whether to turn at all.

She teetered like a child on the edge of the curb. She teetered forward and she teetered back; she shivered with indecision. What now?  She thought. What the fuck do I do now?

"Dead Man's Money" was published in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the annual publication of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.  In this story, a woman teeters on the brink of a decision to seek a new life.