Insufficient Funds

by Tom Sheehan

Her lipstick was perfect. She put the rearview mirror back in place. If David Belmont came in today he'd notice. She was sure of that. The one remark Nell had made about a smudged line had been enough for her. It would never happen again. David was a good prospect, but her mother kept saying it was all a matter of luck. "Be in the right place at the right time, honey, and his goose'll be cooked."
The car clock read 7:50 as she stepped out of it onto the parking lot. She liked this same spot for the car. The sun would be good for most of the day, and now the sun reflected like silver shots off the bank windows.

Big Mike Ludecki, guard, former Marine, smiling, opened the bank door for her. As big as a house he was. "Like clockwork, Amie. Just like clockwork." He read his wristwatch like a salute, his elbow at a perfect 90 degrees. "They should all be like you." He locked the door behind her.

She brought her tray from the vault, counted in, looked up as Nell came in the door; another new outfit showed off her shape. " 'Lo, Amie. How're things today?" Her long stride brought her past the cage and to the rear of the bank. So-perfect Nell. The looks. The shape. The clothes. Guys hanging at the edges. Nell was prettier than she was. Her mother had said, "It's not pretty, hon, it's luck, believe me. And then some." She had a way of rolling her eyes and not saying anything else, but it was as though her sentence had not been completed and you had to fill in the spaces.

A bit later Amie looked over. Nell had her first customer, the lady from the restaurant with the big deposit. The bag was up on the counter and looked heavy. Nell was particularly beautiful today, Amie thought. Then she saw the next customer get in line behind the restaurant lady. Figured, she said to herself.. His haircut was brand new, etched in place. Perhaps the hairline across the top of his ear, at his sideburns, was made with a ruler, it was so straight. The color of his complexion gathered at that line and set if off. He was not looking at her, but he had nice color in his cheeks, maybe a piece of the morning. The gray and blue ensemble he wore was tasteful, clean, pressed. One dimple stole one whole cheek. His tie was one she would have picked out. He did not look her way.

Instead, through the door, coming her way, was a very seedy looking man in his early thirties. Here goes the start of my day, she muttered in the cage. The man looked to be just above street level, his clothes in disarray, sloppy more like it. He needed a shave and promised odor. She hoped she wouldn't get sick. He signed his name to a check on the counter and pushed it towards her. His eyes were pale blue or pale green, sort of faded perhaps from a harsh personal history.

Behind the restaurant lady the other young man still had not looked her way. Leave it to Nell. She could bring them like flies. Trying to remember what her mother had said, she reached for the check.
A jolt hit her. The check was an Arthur P. Chorliss check, her renegade ex-brother-in-law. Arthur didn't have a penny in the bank, she knew that. They all knew it. But this seedy-looking character had signed Arthur's name for $25 cash. Had this man stolen the check? It looked like he sure could use $25, but not out of her pocket.

Beside her Nell was muttering about dirty money and how hard it was to handle, not always healthy for you. The good-looking guy was still in line, still not looking over at her. What a start for the day, she thought. I wonder if the dominoes are going to fall like this all day.

Her customer was expressionless on the other side of the counter, his eyes with a papery quality to them, still faint as old postage stamps or her mother's re-used Christmas wrapping paper. On the air she caught a whiff of the promised odor. She shivered.

Well, she'd take care of this one, daring to cash a check that didn't belong to him. But the joke would have been on him. Arthur Chorliss didn't have a penny to his name. Would serve him right.

At the next cage the good-looking, well-coordinated, now-handsome young man, stood easily in his place behind the lady from the restaurant. With one last look at him, Amie said to her customer, "I'm not sure there are sufficient funds for this check, sir." It hurt her to say "sir." In the same breath she pushed the alarm button under the counter.

The alarm sounded like an old klaxon. It blared a raucous, hideous noise. It bounced off the walls. The man behind the lady from the restaurant spun on his heels, leaped from his place, bumped into big Mike Ludecki. The young man fell down, a small revolver popped from one of his pockets and clattered on the floor. Mike, the Marine with three tours on a now-quiet Southeast Asian peninsula, quickly stood over him with his own .38 Special pointed down at his forehead. Mike was smiling.

There was a bit of screaming, other kinds of noise, small bedlam. The good-looking fallen man started to whimper, then went fetal on the floor. A woman three tellers down sat down on the floor when she saw the revolver on the floor, her mouth wide open, fighting for air. Nell had her hands on her hips.

When Amie looked back, the seedy-looking, somewhat-of-a-street person was gone. So was Arthur P. Chorliss' check.

There was a bit of luck. She hadn't even had time to stamp it.

__________________________________________

Mother's Living Room

by Tom Sheehan

Every so often I'd catch my mother standing in the middle of her bare living room, that pound of silence she called it, looking as if one of her children were missing. Tall, dark of hair and eye, lovely white complexion she said was a toast to Cork's clear air, where she was born, she was not one for using many gestures to express herself. Only if you stared hard, would you see a firmness tighten on her jaw, set her lips; mind made up, deed to be done. That too-silent room, that useless cubicle, would someday be filled.
She'd stop part way across that room to peer out the front window, and look over her shoulder. One would think she was being followed and had vowed to lose herself in silence, my tall, lovely, warm, obstinate mother, usually without gestures.

Late at night there had been arguments about furniture, the very need of it in the first place, an extravagance, we don't live in a barn, the almost inexhaustible supply of hand-made doilies my grandmother had crocheted for what seemed a hundred years gathering only the dust of history in old hat boxes. She rarely raised her voice, but the smooth, rhythmic engine of her purring came through the other five rooms as if she were keeping her speed steadily at five miles an hour. To a word she was intractable.
Eventually, from a salesman, a puffy new sofa, two large red-and-blue easy chairs, a coffee table and an end table made their way up three flights to our cold-water flat. My mother, an absolute magician who could put a supper meal on the table from an empty larder, produced a dark red rug from her bedroom closet, a rug none of us had seen before, and Asian for sure. Age old, elegant and delicate doilies came out of long darkness.

Her room at last shone; she shone; and Simon, the supplier, parted company with the dire challenge, "I'll be back next Saturday morning for the first payment." $2.15 a week, for life it seemed.

For the best part of a year Simon came Saturday mornings. My mother would reach into an oatmeal box where she kept change. Never once did she pay Simon his $2.15 with anything but coin. Her accounting never fazed him, and the creditable entry was posted in his little book that we all dreamed about reading someday. For a while I was obsessed with its real contents.

Simon was a challenge, though, and took noting. He never sweat or cursed a late entry, never came up three flights without pausing a dozen times. He'd smile at my mother, look in at the front room, nod his appreciation, accept her coin, and make the entry in his little book.

"Be careful how you remember Simon." Her voice was low, carrying no inflection, no tone to be deciphered. She was, acutely, a judge at warning, at guidance. "I found him. He didn't find me."
Into my young life seriousness had been incorporated.

Then Simon didn't come for two weeks. One day, after pounding on our apartment door, making all kinds of noises in his throat, a long, lanky, collector of sorts introduced his foot between the door and the stout jamb when my mother had said she had no money for him that day.

He yelled, "I know you've got money. Simon said you always paid him and you're going to pay me. I'm not coming around this hole for nothing! Now give me my money!"

On the front porch, looking down over the peaceful square, no help anywhere in sight, my survival training kicked into high gear. I tugged feverishly at each baluster of the porch railing looking for a loose weapon. None came free. My mother had begun screaming for him to leave, pushing at the other side of the door, holding the fort high on the third floor. I took one more look down to the street before I knew I'd have to catapult onto his back in a few seconds.

Suddenly my father appeared below. "Dad!" I yelled, panic in my voice, setting off the alarm, "Some guy's got his foot in the door and mom's crying."

You know what irony is, full-fledged irony? Lanky's foot was still in the door and my mother was still pushing on the other side He heard the roars of a lion three floors below him, heavy feet on the steps, the roaring ascending as if from the pit of hell itself. And he can't get his foot out from that improvident vise because my mother holds firm to her station.

Oh, he struggled then, did the lanky one. "Let go, damn you, you absolute bitch you! Let go!" and the lion is closer and the sounds are hell themselves and suddenly, in a movie, there's this madman rising from the bowels of the earth and a final roar exits the heart of Vesuvius.

"Let go, Helen!" yelled my father, his hands reaching like talons, an energy pulsing about him more terrible than electricity. Down three flights of stairs went Lanky, pummeled every step of the way, pillar to post to baluster to the final newel on the ground floor.

Lanky never came back. A few years ago, my mother, within a day of her death, placed in my hands my father's metal box whose contents I had never seen. In it I found his Marine Corps discharge creased together in gray-yellow folds, a Corps commendation, two Nicaraguan Service Medals circa Chesty Puller, a post card from Captain James Devereaux (later at Wake Island) that said, "Jim, do you remember the night Atlanta got treed?", a note from the first grade teacher in Charlestown, Miss Finn, begging my mother that we not move away until she had taught all the Sheehans, and Simon's little book, Lanky's loss no doubt, with nine blank spaces yet to be marked for coin.

About Tom Sheehan

In 2002 had two Pushcart prize nominations, a Silver Rose Award for short story, and won Eastoftheweb's nonfiction competition. His novel, "Vigilantes East," was issued earlier this year by Publish America, and he has another serialized on 3am Magazine.

tomsheehan@attbi.com