Chapter 6
“A thousand?! There’s no… A thousand? I, ugh,” sputtered a confused Janet to the attendant at the junkyard. She flung her arms up and began pacing back and forth letting out feral noises.
“A thousand dollars is a good price lady, honest.” The attendant turned his head to spit out a brown wad of chewing tobacco that was in his lower lip. He wiped his mouth afterwards but still had some specs of tobacco that could be identified on his blonde beard. Janet continued to rant and rave; the attendant looked up at the mountain of dishwashers in the bed of the truck in wonder.
“For 30 dishwashers? Baby, we’re talking more than a thousand!” Janet stopped moving around and began to stare down the attendant. She looked him up and down.
“Listen lady, I ain’t your baby. And quite frankly, I don’t know how and where you got this many dishwashers.”
The backseat window of Janet’s truck rolled down and the bigger of the two sons stuck his head out, “Come on Ma, let’s just take the money and get a move on.”
“Yeah, get a move on Ma,” the smaller one added.
Janet ignored her sons and began approaching the attendant. A patch on his workman’s outfit said ‘Frank’. Janet began running her finger along the circle stitching of the word ‘Frank’ and tried out a new tone.
“Listen here, Frank. What’s a woman gotta do for you to get that number up to say, I don’t know, two thousand dollars?”
He stood there looking down at Janet with a straight face.
Janet turned her head towards the truck, “Boys! Roll up those windows, this instant!” The windows of the pink truck went up.
“I am in a bit of a pickle Frank, and, well,” her voice trailed off as she began twirling her hair and giggling.
“Frank is not my name,” he was unable to finish because Janet had put her finger up to his lips.
“Shhhh…You can be whoever you want to be with me,” Janet told him. She removed her finger from his lips and began sucking on it.
Another man emerged from behind a pile of metal and called out to the man that stood before Janet, “George, do you need any assistance getting those dishwashers down?” Unlike the attendant that stood before Janet, this man was lanky, wore a flowy outfit of all linen and was clean shaven.
“Lady says she doesn’t like the offer. She is trying to get two thousand out of me,” George the attendant, told the man walking up.
Janet looked at this new man, “Hell, if your buddy here wants to help, I think a flight to Paris runs about three thousand,” she said with a smile.
“Ma’am, he’s wearing my shirt,” Frank said to Janet.
“I am his baby,” George said as Frank threw his arm around him.
Janet’s face curled up. She took a step back. She looked at the two of them as they smiled and held back laughter.
Janet turned around and walked back to her truck. She put her hand on the backseat doorhandle of her pickup. Turning back, Janet looked at them and gave a tilted nod in the direction of the car- raising her eyebrows too.
“Don’t you dare open up that door woman. $1275 for the dishwashers and you leave right now,” Frank said in stern voice.
She looked at the men for a moment before letting go of the doorhandle.
“Deal.”
Chapter 7
It was now past seven o’clock in Providence and the city was becoming as dark as my mood. The day started off with so much promise, only to be derailed by Misty.
Where was I now? I was in my head.
For the past couple of hours I had been walking around Fox Point unable to break my loop. If you would have passed by me, you would have seen an empty vessel droning past the shops that dot Ives Street. My mind kept thinking about the pages that were ripped out, Misty’s bodacious body, and if I should have dropped out of college to become a plumber; no… maybe an electrician.
I ignored my growling stomach and my aching legs and kept walking and walking and walking.
The weather was still crisp, but I had worked up quite a sweat. With each stride I could now feel my butt-cheeks sloshing back and forth in my denim. Now was the time to relent and go into a restaurant.
I stopped my stride and looked around at the eateries. First, there was a Portuguese Bakery called The Azores. It must have been that time of the month because the 14 Silva sisters who ran the place, were giving the bakery a deep clean. From the outside I could see that each sister was equipped with a rag top mop- four of them were mopping the ceiling, eight of them were mopping the floor, one was mopping the windows and the final sister appeared to be praying the rosary aloud.
Across the street from the bakery was a seafood place called The Laundromat. The exterior was reminiscent of a shack you would see on the dunes of the cape. Although the lights were on and a sign on the front door said ‘Open’, no one seemed to be inside. Which was a shame if you ask me.
That left me with the only one option, Captain Fishnets- the dive bar that I was standing out in front of. I wanted to pull out my phone and look at the reviews or to see what type of food they had, but I was too tired and walked in.
The hostess who had a grey beard, a white flowy shirt and an eye patch, greeted me as I walked inside, “Ahoy there matey, how many pirates are with you tonight?” I looked around to see that it was a pretty busy night. Small circular tables with wax candles littered the room. And by my count, there were 4 anxious servers walking around with pepper mills.
The mahogany walls were adorned with rope and pictures of whales. Old maps of Rhode Island filled in the rest- making sure there was no blank space on the walls, or a doubt of what state you were currently in.
“Just me- hey wait a minute. You’re that grey beard guy from Callous Coffee.”
“Yarg, I don’t be knowing such a place,” the hostess said. They lifted up their eyepatch and gave me a wink. “We’ve got a lot of landlubbers tonight, do you mind sitting at the singles table?” Before I could answer he took off towards the back of the restaurant.
There were a couple of “excuse me’s” and “opes” as I moved my body to get through the customers sitting at their tables. Grey Beard stood next to a single table that was by the bathroom, and pulled out a chair for me. His wrist extended and the flowy shirt retreated, revealing a tattoo of intersecting lines with the words, “Happy and Healthy”.
My hand shot out and I dug my nails into his wrist. “Why do you have this tattoo?”
“Ah,” he yelped, “Fire on the poopdeck, FIRE ON THE POOPDECK!”
The little shit began to squirm so I put my other hand over his mouth.
“Where is that place, and WHO IS MISTY?!”
The eyes of the customers felt heavy on my back. I turned to see that phones had begun to be taken out of pockets and purses- all pointed in my direction.
Turning back to Grey Beard, I whispered, “You stupid son of a bitch,” and released my grip to flee into the gender-neutral bathroom that was by my table.
“They went in there,” a muffled Grey Beard said from the other side of the bathroom door. The door handle began to rustle.
I was frantic thinking about what to do next.
A muscular and hairy hand burst through the center of the bathroom’s oak door. Wood chips flew everywhere. The muscular hand began groping for the door handle; I only had seconds to think.
The door flew open. Grey Beard and the owner of the muscular and hairy hand, stood in the threshold, looking up at the open window above the toilet.
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