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Bill Robinson, a man in a freshly washed athletic T-shirt, drawstring shorts, and running sneakers, shuffled down the alley of Skid Row like an invalid.
He stopped at the last tent on the street, bent over, and tapped three fingers on the tent flap. He waited anxiously, fidgeting with the tail of his shirt with hard, unhappy concentration. There was movement inside the tent. Then the flap unzipped, and a ghoulish woman with a baleful, lined face peered outside.
“Help you?” she said.
“Yes. Hello,” Bill stammered. The woman wore cutoff jeans and a flowered blouse with one strap drooping beneath her armpit. Her left breast, a mottled, sagging thing, was perilously close to being exposed. “I was supposed to introduce myself to the neighbors when I moved in.”
The woman unzipped her tent flap a little more. She scratched her head. “Moved in?” she said. “Don’t reckon I ever heard of any new tenants on the block.”
As she talked, Bill noticed that the woman was missing a couple of her front teeth. The rest had been yellowed with nicotine. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her tent, she lit a cigarette, making herself comfortable as she scrutinized her new neighbor.
“I’m a… I’m a…”
The woman looked up at him curiously.
“I’m a success offender,” Bill exhaled in a quiet, exhausted voice. He looked up at her hesitantly, as if afraid she’d strike him for his audacity.
“A success offender,” the woman said flatly.
“Yes,” Bill nodded rapidly. “I worked at the New York stock exchange for two decades before it happened.”
The woman narrowed her eyes with a suspicion that was not entirely unkind. She crossed her arms. “Go on,” she said.
“Er, I traded stocks,” he said, making a small, weak gesture that pointed to a certain lack of self-esteem. “I’m not going to make any excuses for what I did.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. For a moment, it seemed like his voice was about to crack. “For six and a half minutes, I was the richest man in that entire building. At least, before the cops took me away.”
“So what exactly did you do, anyways?” the woman said, stepping onto the sidewalk.
“I diversified,” Bill whispered, and hung his head in shame.
“But you couldn’t have known about the crash,” the woman said. “Nobody did. Not until it was too late.”
“Not exactly something you can explain to a judge,” Bill said, managing a wan smile that seemed to take more than a little effort.
“Well, shit,” the woman said. She took another drag of her cigarette. She squinted at him through a feather-thin cloud of lung cancer. “So they got you on the registry, huh?”
“Yes,” Bill said. He made an awkward jerking motion with his head. “That, and five years of probation. Plus I have to take my meds.”
“Meds?”
“A bottle of vodka every week for the next eight months,” Bill said. “Doctor told me it was supposed to make the ambitious urges stop.”
The woman nodded. She crushed her cigarette with the toe of her sandal. “Well, you don’t seem all that strange to me,” she said. “Must be kinda hard being lumped in with all those other weirdos, though. I mean, I knew this one kid—I think it was that Anderson boy—who lived here a couple years ago. Good kid, but you could just tell that something wasn’t right about him. He loved to go jogging on the weekends. If that wasn’t bad enough, he sometimes went out before the sun was up.
“I tried talking to that boy, but by then he was too far gone. Next thing I knew, he was running in some kind of marathon, and then he won first place and got himself in the slammer. Shoulda just stayed home and had a six-pack like everyone else. Hell, boy like him coulda used a pregnant girlfriend or two to keep him in line. Maybe even a heroin addiction, straightened him right out.”
“So what happened to him?” Bill said. In spite of his embarrassment, he couldn’t help but feel a momentary twinge of fascination.
“Oh, he hung himself in prison,” she said, matter-of-factly. She fixed a listless stare at a disheveled man pushing a bag-laden shopping cart down the sidewalk. “Guess the world just ain’t cut out for the likes of him.”
“Isn’t,” Bill said.
“Huh?”
“Sorry,” Bill said, and firmly struck his forehead with his fist. “Force of habit.”
“I’m Caroline, by the way,” the woman intoned. If she had noticed his faux pas, she chose to ignore it.
Bill stuck out his hand instinctively. Caroline wrinkled her nose. “We don’t do that here, mister.”
Bill’s hand drew back as if he’d just touched a hot stove. Caroline pulled out the squashed box of cigarettes from her jeans pocket and offered him one. Hesitantly, Bill took one. She struck a match and lit his first, then her own.
“You know, life here ain’t so bad,” she said, blowing out smoke. “I mean sure, there’s a public library down the street, but those books ain’t gonna bother you. Come to think of it, neither is Mrs. Rosenthal—she’s the town librarian—not after they stoned her husband last week for public decency, no. On the bright side, there’s a drive-by practically every night. You should see ’em, it’s like a free trip to the movies. Just be sure to duck when they whip out the AKs,” she said, emitting a high, hoarse caw that sounded vaguely like laughter.
It tapered off eventually, disintegrating into a wet, audibly painful cough. Caroline wiped her mouth with her tattered sleeve. It came away black and noxiously fresh. “Gaw-damn,” she said, staring at the bloodstain with an unsettling species of awe.
“I, uh, I should go now,” Bill said apologetically. “Thanks for taking the time to hear my story.”
Caroline gasped. “That’s no way to speak to a lady, is it?” she said, with prim, girlish irritation.
Bill frowned, concentrating on his next few words. “Um, no thanks for taking the time to—”
She gave him a warning look.
“Thanks for nothing,” Bill said.
She stared at him.
“Um, bitch,” Bill said.
“That’s better,” Caroline said, nodding to him indulgently.
Bill turned and trudged down the street. “Hey!” Caroline called, just as he was about to turn the corner. He whipped his head around, startled.
“We’re hosting a book burning this Friday,” Caroline said. “Join me. Might do you some good, being that you’re a success offender and all. Try and fit in a little, huh?”
“I’ll do that, Caroline,” Bill said, and grinned. “Fuck you, and goodbye.”
“Well, fuck you too,” Caroline said, and chuckled.
The landlady was a hunchbacked old crone who looked more witch than woman. She wore a plastic bag dress with cardboard slippers to complement her outfit, and led Bill along the line of tents until they reached a one-man Coleman sundome with a rainfly strapped over the top.
“This’ll be your home for your probationary period,” she grumbled. “Your probation officer already sent you your first batch of meds so you can adjust to your new surroundings. Oh, and one more thing—”
“Yes,” Bill said politely.
The landlady suddenly seized Bill by the shoulders and yanked him close. “Listen here, you little freak,” she hissed. “I’ve been living in this town for forty-three years. I seen you talking to Caroline, but don’t think you and her are going to be friends. She’s a good girl, and she doesn’t mix with trash the likes of you. You get close to her, God forbid you try and so much as educate her, try to acquaint her with you and your yuppie friends, and I will end you. You don’t belong here, and you never will. Get used to it. I don’t care how many books you burn. I’ll always know who you really are. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” Bill panted, squirming in her grip.
The landlady released him suddenly, causing him to stumble backwards. “Now get!” she said, spun, and trotted back across the street in a huff.
Bill ducked inside his tent, his face burning with shame. He rapidly zipped up his tent flap and switched on the electric lantern in the far corner of the tent. A glass jug of Tito’s Homemade Vodka sat next to a soiled sleeping bag, a red ribbon attached to the handle. He stared at it miserably. Eventually, he sat down on his sleeping bag. He uncapped the jug and lifted it to his lips.
A rustling noise made him jerk his head up in alarm. He set the jug down, scrambled over to his tent flap and peeked through an opening in the zipper. He let out his breath. It was just the wind. Then he noticed something else—a large, dark figure with the red dot of a cigarette ember hovering next to its face—standing on the corner of the block. It was the landlady. Bill swallowed. He cast a glance back at the jug of vodka in his tent, then back at the figure again, his gaze transforming into a strange mixture of desolation and resentment.
“Freak, my ass,” he muttered. He tore open the tent flap, grabbed the jug of vodka, and flung it outside in a sudden fit of rage. The landlady let out a harsh caw of terror as the jug shattered on the sidewalk, a bright, satisfying crash that was much louder than he had expected. She turned and fled, the red dot of her cigarette winking out as she disappeared behind the street corner. Bill peered out the flap for a long time, but the landlady did not come back.
Smiling up at the roof of his tent, he licked his lips and went to bed early.
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AUTHOR BIO:
Brandon Yu is a writer from South Florida with a passion for storytelling. His work has been published in Oyster River Pages, the Washington Square Review, the Gordon Square Review, the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and elsewhere.
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WHY WE CHOSE TO PUBLISH “Cabbage City”:
Different is what we always look for, so when author Brandon Yu sent us this piece with so much tongue-in-cheek humor set in a tongue-in-cheek dystopian future, we couldn’t resist it. At least that’s our best description of this amusing piece that otherwise eludes a meaningful description.
We especially loved the part with these lines:
“I’m a success offender.”
“So what exactly did you do, anyways?”
“I diversified.”
We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.