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Read Ebook: Rundown by Lory Robert
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Ebook has 76 lines and 4771 words, and 2 pages
RUNDOWN
BY ROBERT LORY
All panhandlers ask for dimes--but this one had a very special purpose!
The subway train announced its arrival with a screech of grating steel. The man was shoved from the car onto the platform by the eight p.m. crowd. The noise and the abrupt handling of his body brought him to awareness.
Not that he had been asleep or unconscious. Although he might have been. He didn't know for sure.
He found it hard to concentrate, but soon a sign over the platform came into focus:
WESTBORO
It meant nothing to him. The second thing he became aware of did.
Another train had replaced his, and directly in front of him was an army of people, dispassionate towards everything but its one objective--to get on.
They came at him all at once, forming a pushing, elbowing, cursing, jarring mass of humanity. He glanced off one to collide with another. He escaped the punishment by a lunge to one side which ended with a crash to the cold cement floor.
He regained some semblance of steadiness on his feet and looked at the sign. It was still Westboro. It still meant nothing to him.
He was lost.
He turned to walk, he didn't know exactly where, when he smashed into a little boy eating an apple.
The boy reacted in a strange manner.
"Leave me alone, you dirty man, you," the boy said. He dropped his apple and ran off. Scared.
The man flushed with embarrassment, but the boy's remark made him look down at himself.
He saw a dirty man. Filthy. His white shirt--it had been white once--was torn at the elbow and was covered with grime, his shoes at the toes were white where the black polish had worn completely off, his pants reflected no evidence of ever having been pressed and the right leg was ripped from the knee down.
Two girls in their teens passed and giggled.
He was aware that others had noticed him.
"Hey, lookit the bum," a fat jolly-rover called out to his three on-the-towning cronies.
"Bum," the man thought, and reached to his back pocket.
No wallet. But not long ago he had one, he was sure, because the feel of its absence was there. Somebody must have taken it, or he might have lost it. In that crowd or on the subway or before.... He couldn't remember where he had been before.
The feeling of not remembering seemed familiar, and he tried hard to think. But there was nothing static in his mind that he could hold on to. His mind wasn't blank anymore, it was a jumble. He somehow recalled he had been looking for his money. He fumbled through his other pockets.
He found a dirty handkerchief and two cents.
The feel of the coins brought everything back.
Quickly he felt his pulse. It was slower than he had ever known it to be. Sure, there were times before when ... but then the doctor always had been nearby. And this time, the most serious time of all--he looked up at the Westboro sign--he was lost. Perhaps, up on the streets, he would recognize something.
He began to take the stairs at a run, but his breath came too hard, and he walked the rest of the way to the turnstile. The arm caught tight as he started to go through and a sharp pain want through his groin.
The night lights were just ahead as he collided with a woman loaded with bundles. They spilled. "Sorry," he said, leaving her to her indignation, and at a faster pace he walked outside into the cool night air.
He had stopped walking and was leaning against the door of the Inn of Six Horses, which proudly displayed its name and namesakes in blue and white neon.
He had recognized nothing.
He had tried getting to the doctor's by cab, but no driver would listen to him without first seeing the fare, even though he assured them all that he could get it from the doctor.
A policeman had told him to move along or suffer the consequences of a thick nightstick.
A drugstore proprietor had answered his request to use the phone by threatening to call the policeman with the thick nightstick.
A dime. One dime!
He remembered his Shakespeare.
My kingdom for a ... horse? Six horses. Maybe, just maybe, at the Inn of Six Horses....
A short man at the bar, composing one half of the clientele, was calling the bartender's attention to the fact that the six horses outside outnumbered the customers.
"Go to blazes," the bartender commented on the short man's observation.
"I should," said the short one. "Then George here would be Uncas, the last of the Mohicans, riding your six old white stallions."
"How do you know they're stallions?" George said. He was lean, mean and weary, looking as if he had just returned from a hard day of peddling vacuum cleaners.
The door banged shut and three pairs of eyes focused on a dirty man.
"Here comes a touch," said Pete.
"Please," said the man, his voice shaky and weak.
"Before you go into your act, pal," Pete said, "understand this: Nobody gets nothing free here, this ain't no mission or nothing. This is a business like any place else."
"A real thriving business," mocked Shorty.
"Please, a dime, I need a dime, that's all I--"
Shorty joined in with a snort. "Maybe he wants to call his girl."
"A matter of real life and death, huh?" George said.
"Yes. Look ... here, I have two cents, you take them."
Pete looked suspiciously at the two coins. "We don't sell nothing that costs two cents."
"Sharp businessman," noted George.
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