[Published originally on October 19, 2013.]
Farley was a small-time hustler and occasional thief who fancied himself a scam artist extraordinaire. His moneymaking larks were on the edge of brilliance, though more often than not their execution took a wrong step or Murphy’s Law intervened. The unexpected failures would have made another man want to don a monk’s habit and go into seclusion—but not Farley. Mr. Optimistic saw a rainbow on every street corner and was continually chasing the pot of gold that he felt was his due—if he could only get that one big break.
Over the past two weeks, Farley had put the con on half a dozen doormen, whom he had treated to steaming cups of Starbucks. He was looking for a gig as a dog walker.
Farley didn’t know squat about dogs, but he knew the difference between a Doberman and a German Shepherd. His long legs had saved the seat of his trousers more than once while beating feet away from an easy haul that turned out not so easy. And there was one thing he would take to the bank. The rich folks in the high rises don’t keep mutts. Sure, some of them looked like a cross between a Tijuana sewer rat and an alley cat, but the blood pumping through their bodies had history. He wasn’t sure if it was really blue, but he had heard it was.
Farley’s sunken, bloodshot hazel eyes widened and the sweat bubbled up on his furrowed forehead when the dogs at the ends of his tethers made a quick right turn between a florist delivery van and a Cadillac El Dorado. The park on the other side of the four-lane street was Farley’s destination, but the dogs had no intention of waiting for a pedestrian light to turn green. They’d been prisoners in their masters’ apartments all night and having been drilled that the sidewalk was off limits, they were desperate for a tree and spot of ground to relieve themselves.
The ten leather straps wrapped around Farley’s right wrist extended eight feet to the collars of the dogs. One Great Dane, two German Shepherds, one Collie, a Chow and six “little terrors,” as he called them. The big dogs were manageable, but the little terrors hadn’t stopped yapping or trying to nip his ankles since he picked them up a half-hour earlier from Neal, the doorman at the Lancaster Hotel.
He scanned the street for danger and saw a yellow cab roaring down the block in their direction. But the same moment he pulled back on the straps, the dogs caught sight of the park and surged forward...forty legs on the run and two digging in. The dogs yanked Farley’s gangly, six-foot, three-inch, one hundred and fifty-pound frame to the right, stretching his shoulder like a slinky and making it pop.
Farley stumbled and fought to regain his balance, managing a staggering leap off the sidewalk onto the street. “Shit…oh shit,” he screeched as he looked up and saw the cab gaining speed. His right knee careened off the El Dorado’s rear bumper and a bolt of lightning shot through his bony leg. Farley fumbled with the tangled straps that were now numbing his right hand and squinted through tears of pain and sweat at the approaching taxi. “Shit, oh shit.”
The dogs were picking up speed and howling like wolves at a full moon after smelling the flora beckoning them forward. Farley ignored the throbbing knee and pumped his legs one after the other—two skinny pistons moving up and down. Two, three, four steps and he caught up with the smallest of the little terrors, a Pomeranian with red and brown fur whose legs were motivating in a blur to keep up with the pack.
He shot a quick glance left and made eye contact with the devil himself, driving a yellow cab. A leather-billed cap tilted to the side of his head with tufts of hair sticking up like horns. A glowing cigar stump hung out the corner of a leering mouth on a face inviting a free ride to hell.
“Shit, oh shit.” Farley dug deep and accessed a burst of energy as he scooped up the little terror in his left hand and dove forward, landing in the middle of the pack and knocking himself out.
By mere inches the cab missed skimming off Farley’s size-fifteen Air Jordans and roared down the street howling laughter and blowing a blue cloud of cigar smoke out the window. The dogs untangled, shook off the encounter and dragged Farley’s limp body across the street, up the curb and into the park.
“Molly, stop it,” Farley whispered as his dream faded and he ascended to consciousness. “Go brush your teeth, you got dragon’s breath.” The throbbing in Farley’s head was increasing and he wasn’t in the mood for his on-again/off-again girlfriend Molly Swenson to get amorous and lick his face.
Farley cracked his left bloodshot eye, expecting to see the nicotine-stained ceiling of his one-room efficiency. When he saw the red squirrel sitting on a branch ten feet up in an oak tree, he opened the other one. “What the—” he started to say, but then flashed on what must have happened. The wet tongue teasing the right side of his long, narrow face startled Farley and he turned his head to see what it was. His pinched mouth popped open as their eyes met. Sitting next to Farley’s head, covered with disheveled Kramer locks, was the red and brown terror he’d picked up moments before the lights were turned off.
Farley sat up slowly and took inventory. Grass, bushes, trees…he was in the park. His last memory was the level-5 swan dive onto the asphalt. The starting position, the run, the take-off and the flight were commendable, but the entry left a lot to be desired. With his long, narrow fingers Farley probed the sleeves of his maroon sweatshirt then the legs of his matching sweatpants and decided that other than the swollen right knee nothing was seriously damaged or broken.
The decision to stand up and get his face out of biting range was made easy when the little terror let out a yap. Farley worked his way to his feet, an accordion opening with a few cracks and pops, then did a 360, taking in everything and nothing. His charges had vamoosed. He looked down to see the fur ball tilting his head to the side and staring back at him with two oblique dark eyes. “What are you looking at?” Farley barked. “Where’d your buddies go?”
The Pomeranian turned his head toward a path that led through the trees then back to Farley.
“Pretty smart, huh?” Farley knelt down on his good knee and extended his left hand toward the dog—ready to pull back if he saw teeth.
The Pomeranian began licking Farley’s hand.
Farley leaned forward and flipped the metal tag hanging from the dog’s thin leather collar. “‘Muffin.’ Is that your name, Muffin?”
Muffin yapped once and sat down.
“Dumb name for a dog. A girlfriend, yeah, but not a fur ball of a dog.” Farley unhooked the brown leather tether attached to the dog’s collar and stood up. “I got a problem and you’re one-tenth of the solution. The man I’m to meet guaranteed fifty dollars a pop for ten dogs. Showing up with you is worse than not showing up at all.”
Muffin studied Farley then tilted his head to the right in expectation of an explanation.
Farley stared back. “Go on, shoo, beat it. I ain’t taking you back to the high rise, so go find your homeys or a boyfriend or something. Farley turned and with a loose, awkward gait favoring his right knee headed into the park.
The aroma of the freshly baked bagels drifting out of the vent into the alley that separated Shmuel’s coffee and bakery and Sun Ying’s laundry made Farley’s stomach growl. He closed his eyes and sucked up a snoot full and thought about the last time he’d eaten—breakfast ten hours earlier. “Ah, smells good,” he said to hear a voice. The alley had gotten seriously dark since the sun went down and Farley felt nervous waiting for Neal the doorman to get off duty. He had been tempted to write the caper off as another sweet deal gone sour, but the thought of ducking the law over some missing mutts wasn’t appealing.
Farley saw the doorman passing under the streetlight by the alley entrance. “Neal, hey Neal!”
Neal stopped and peered into the darkness. He could see a faint outline that reminded him of a Halloween skeleton—only this one was wearing a track suite. “Farley, is that you? Where the hell have you been?”
Farley took a couple of steps forward and looked around to see if Neal was alone. “Yeah, it’s me.”
The streetlight’s yellow glow playing over Farley’s long face and high, protruding cheekbones would have turned Neal’s blood to ice if he hadn’t known who it was. “Jesus, you shouldn’t sneak up on a man from an alley.”
“About the dogs, it wasn’t my fault.”
“The dogs?” Neal’s forehead bunched in confusion. “Oh yeah. They showed up at the Lancaster a couple of hours after you picked them up. Not the first time, probably not the last, but when they get hungry they always show up…with or without the walker.”
Hearing the word hungry, Farley’s stomach growled again. “You see, we was getting ready to cross 4th Street to the park when a cab tried to play bumper pool with me as the cue ball. Next thing I know I wake up and the mutts are gone.”
“Yeah, they all came back except for the Pom from 29C. Muffin.”
Muffin, who was sitting further back in the gloom, yapped once when she heard her name.
“You got the Pom?”
Farley turned his head and looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, she kind of adopted me.”
“Good, you keep her.”
“No, I don’t need a mutt.”
“Farley, you don’t understand. Mrs. Wilcox nearly had a hissy when she heard it went missing.”
“Well, she can have it back.”
“Won’t work. Mr. Wilcox slipped me a twenty and told me if the dog showed up to get rid of the damn thing. ‘Throw it under a bus or in the river,’ he said.” Neal slipped his wallet out of his coat pocket and pulled a tenner out. “This is for you. Just don’t show up within a mile of the Lancaster with the Pom.”
“A sawbuck? I thought you got twenty.”
“Hey, just trying to do the Pom a favor. You don’t want the ten, I’ll find a burlap bag, a couple of bricks and send it to fish heaven.”
Farley’s boney hand shot out like a rattlesnake, grabbed the bill, then stuffed it into a pocket. “Deal.”
Neal turned and walked away from the alley. “Remember, Farley, not within a mile of the Lancaster,” he called over his shoulder then smiled as his hand patted the pocket with the fifty that Wilcox had given him.
| Copyright © 2017 by Steve Glossin |
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