Storytime: A Gentleman’s Bet.

April 6th, 2011

Charles Thurwood hated Wednesdays.  He was not a complex man, or one prone to thinking things through carefully, but he had carefully, loathingly found himself a modest spread of widely differing reasons to hate them so.
First, they were the middle of the week.  Waking up on a Wednesday was a reminder that, however tired you were, you were only halfway there.  And you were already tired.
Second, their name made no sense.  He’d heard once that a bunch of the days of the week were named after old Viking gods or something. Thursday as Thor’s day?  Only one letter difference.  Tuesday as Tyr’s Day?  Bigger change, but still sounded right.  Wednesday as Wotan’s day?  No goddamned way.  It was just too different-sounding, and it annoyed him to see an otherwise tidy pattern spoiled.
Third, too many bad things happened to him on them.  His dog had choked on a small tortoise on a Wednesday.  His dad and him had gotten into a fistfight on a Wednesday.  His 40th birthday had been on a Wednesday.  His wife had run off with his cousin on a Wednesday – wait, no, nevermind on that one.  Still, too many bad things.
Fourth, it was when he had to go out and check to see if any of his coyote traps had been tripped.  If you didn’t keep up on the buggers, they’d slink back in easy as you please.  It was a lot of walking, and Charles didn’t appreciate it.
Fifth, it was the name some long-ago, misbegotten moron had given to her son and Charles’s next-door neighbour.  Well, less next-door and more across-the-road.
Charles was glaring at Wednesday – on a Wednesday, of all the miserable times – as he tinkered with the gas station’s pumps.  He was an easy man to glare at; there was so much of him, you could scarcely miss.  Sometimes Charles had caught himself glaring off at Wednesday when he wasn’t even thinking about him, and then he had thought about him, and it had completely spoiled his whole day.
Wednesday grinned back from his chair in front of his store, syrupy and insolent.  Traces of his pancake breakfast glittered like golden nuggets from his beard.
“Fatass,” muttered Charles, viciously jabbing his screwdriver into the dangling guts of a pump.  It flinched.
“Spidery little jumped-up pussy,” opined Wednesday with a belch.  He extracted a sandwich from his pocket – unwrapped – and took an absent bite out of it, belching through his teeth as he chewed.  It was always the same sandwich.
“Useless, boneless, dickless slug,” hissed Charles.  He smacked the screwdriver home into a pressure point and the pump jumped sharply, then sagged in relief.
“Judgin’, whinin’, festerin’ prick,” grunted Wednesday with his mouth open, still champing at his snack.  Fragments of unidentifiable meat slithered over his tongue, leaving strange marks on it.
“FUCK OFF!” shrieked Charles, throwing his screwdriver in a vicious overhand swing.
“SHUT UP!” hollered Wednesday, surging to his feet and spitting fragments of bread this-way and that-way.
The screwdriver met the bits of bread precisely halfway between the general store and the gas station, over the centerline of the dejected-sheet-of-asphalt-passing-as-road that in its twilight years was musing dejectedly about how it could’ve been a highway.  There was a very large flash of a colour not often seen outside of the sun, a sound like a cow revving backwards, and a taste of lemons, and both implements fell uselessly apart, rebounding to the edges of their owners lots.
Charles, once more glaring in venomous silence, snapped his fingers and put the screwdriver back in his pocket.  Wednesday glowered at him over his sandwich and, with a final bite, stuffed the thing away again.
Honestly, it was practically a ritual by now.  And if there was one thing that both Charles Thurwood and Wednesday Knuckledowns could agree on, it was the importance of ritual.
On the other hand, as illustrated by the existence of outhouses, wars, and most governments, just because something was important didn’t mean you had to like it.

And it was precisely this that made the stranger’s offer so appealing.

He came down the road on a big old truck, half-vehicle and half-menhir, scarred where it wasn’t chiselled and chipped where it wasn’t scarred. It was painted post-apocalyptic rust with a hint of bruised steel, and the most amazing thing about it was that it actually ran fairly quietly, smoothly, and with as fresh a fuel efficiency as any that could be found in something its size.
He wanted gas.  Charles agreed that this was something he could provide.
“Back in a second,” said the stranger, relishing in the luxurious thirty seconds of free time allotted him by one of America’s last few non-self-serve gas stations.  He was a lanky, thoroughly-sun-seared man with a sandy, disarming sort of beard, a bristly smile, and a barking, easy-coming laugh, draped in something that could’ve been an old blanket or a jacket once upon a time.  “Sweet tooth kicked in.”
He made to go towards the general store, and hesitated at Charles’s expression.  A two-ton canary placed besides a cat couldn’t have looked more vicious.
“Problem?”
“No,” said Charles.
The stranger waited.
“No.  Not a problem.  A plague.  A bloated, blubbery plague of one inflicted on me and me alone years and years ago.  Don’t go into that building if you value your sinuses, senses, and soul.”  His face twisted farther, turning into an almost Escherian frieze of disgust.  “No, no, not a plague: a parasite.  A goddamned great leech that pretends to be a man.  Bastard sits up there and sucks away profits pretty as you please, taking money from me as sure as if he were helping himself to my wallet – which I think he’s done too.  Wouldn’t put nothing past him.  This is my land.  I was here first, and he wasn’t, the filthy squatter.  Who took up all that work of getting rid of the coyotes so’s you could leave garbage outside without it being ransacked?  Me.  Who put up signs so people knew there was a business here, not an empty road?  Me.  Who helped make that road?  Me!  Watch yourself around that bloodsucker.”
“I’ll consider myself warned,” said the stranger.
“Watch yourself in there!” yelled Charles at his retreating, vaguely-tartan back.

“A real pisser, that one is,” huffed Wednesday as he pawed through the change being exchanged for something made of 15% real milk chocolate and 85% certified optimism.
“Oh?” said the stranger politely, absently scratching a flea loose from his neck.
“Always bawlin’ and pukin’.  Tellin’ lies about me.  Talkin’ about how he was here first.  Huh, it’s a free country.  I can go where I please, and I was born in this state!  I was raised in this state!  I did more to get rid of the ky-otes than he did – the twit was trying to trap ‘em, everyone knows you’ve got to get out there with a gun and a dog and get your hands dirty – and I bring in half the business of our gas station.  People knows me, people trusts me.  He’s more of a stranger than I am, the moron!”  Wednesday recalled who he was talking to, and checked himself.  “No offence.”
“None taken.”  The stranger peeled free his dubiously brown snack and began to tear at it, swallowing without chewing.  Behind his yellow eyes, little wheels were spinning like mad.  “What’s the problem with you two?”
“He just can’t stand me, and I can say the same of ‘im.  He’s always giving me that stare, like he thinks I’m some sort of drain on ‘im just by existin’.  Hah, he’d get no business in that run-down scrapheap if it weren’t for my customers!”
“Hmm.”  The stranger scratched his (somewhat prominent) nose and thought a bit more.  “Well, sorry to stir up old wounds.  I’ll get myself back to the truck then.”

Charles looked up with an iron-clad scowl as the stranger trudged his way back.  “You again.  Huh.  That’ll be eighty-two forty-six.”
“Thank you,” said the stranger.  He pulled out his wallet, then hesitated as he prepared to hand over the money.  “Oh… before I forget.  The man in there had a message for you.”
“Eh?”  Charles’s gaze tore itself violently from the prospect of cash to fix itself with gimlet intensity on the stranger’s face, looking for traps.  “What?  What’d he say?  It was a lie and a trick, whatever it was.”
“He challenges you,” said the stranger, “to a contest.  Three days and three nights to attract more customers than he does, starting with this night.  And the loser turns over his deeds to the other and gets out of here.”
Charles stood and stared for a long, long moment.  “He’s crazy,” he said in a softly victorious tone.  “Crazy.  The stupid old evil old bastard has finally lost it.”  His feet twitched, then shook, then kicked up their heels in a mad little capering prance of joy.  “Crazy!  Hahaha, he’s lost it if he thinks he can outmatch me!  He’s sunk!  Potted!  Finished and boiled to the bone!”  He stretched bony arms to the sky and made to throttle the sun.  “You’re sunk!  Sunk, you hear me!  HAHAHAHAAHA, aahahahahahaha, HAHAH, aha!”  A coughing fit overtook him, and he grinned his way through it.  “Well you get back there stranger and you tell him I accept his challenge, twice and twice more.  And tell him to get the deeds out of whatever hole he’s been hiding them in, because he’s damned well going to need them soon!”

“A challenge, eh?” said Wednesday.  “What kind?”
“Three days and three nights,” said the stranger.  “Starting tonight.  At the third day’s end, whoever had more customers wins and gets the loser’s property.”
Wednesday’s laugh was a great rolling squishy one, like a barrel of muck being pushed down a broken flight of stairs.  “Oh, so they will, eh?  So they will!  Hah!  Hah!  Hah!”  His flesh wobbled so violently with mirth that the stranger thought for a minute that it would suffocate him.  “Numbskull!  I don’t know what’s crawled into Thurwood’s skull and died, but if he wants to mistake it for his brain, hah, more power to ‘im!  Tell the little weasel I’ll be eating my sandwiches off his pumps come the weekend!”  His mirth only grew and grew, setting the whole floor of the store ashudder.  “A challenge?  For deeds?  HAH.  HAH.  HAH!”

The stranger relayed acceptance to both parties, got in his truck, tossed his wrapper out the window, and drove off with a fare-thee-well that went more unheard than silence itself.  His two new acquaintances were already getting themselves ready – the sunset wasn’t far away.
Charles Thurwood was digging under his creaky, one-man-pallet that lurked in the back room of his gas station like a kicked dog, shoving dust bunnies out of the way with callous force and sifting through cardboard boxes.  His screwdriver was in one hand.
“Aha!” he said, and yanked out a significant one.  It was filled to the brim with odds and ends.  Some metal looped over and over in curious shapes.  A crow’s skeleton made entirely out of copper that had actually once been inside a fully working crow.  An abacus that he used to add up his bills and his taxes and his profits with only one bead left on it.
He selected some six of the smallest and fiddliest of the metal bits, dug out an old ear of corn that he’d been idly planning to make into some sort of semi-nourishing pap sooner or later, hypnotized and sacrificed a rat that had been annoying him for a while with his screwdriver, and was soon discussing slightly unusual terms with a local fertility spirit.
Wednesday Knuckledowns was opening a freezer in his basement – a shadowy, spidery place that smelled of damp and moist – and scanning through its musty, dark contents with a jaded and most professional eye.
“That’ll do,” he said, and yanked out a jar of mustard.  It glistened like liquid bone marrow as he stuck a big, silver knife into it and transferred a dollop to his sandwich, and then two more.
He took a bite, and grinned smoulderingly.  His breath eddied from him in a noxious wave, spreading its dripping, smoky layers all over and around every inch of the house.  It seeped into the wood and cracks in the mortar and it permeated solid metal.  It replaced the water in the pipes and the wires in the circuits.  The air jolted with static electricity, then stabilized itself nervously.
“That’ll do,” repeated Wednesday.  He took another bite, feeling his tongue tingle and blink against his jaw.  “That’ll do.”

Come Thursday morning the competition began in earnest.  The two contestants took their places in their chairs across the road, and gave each other rather nasty grins.
“Blubbery failure,” smiled Charles through every one of his teeth.
“Scrawny toad,” beamed Wednesday.
Soon came the cars.  Lots and lots of cars, rather more than usual.  Both men had redoubled, then retripled their standard and somewhat esoteric methods of customer attraction – sure, some of your customers would probably end up at the other guy’s place, but the more people the lower the odds that you’ll get unlucky and have three cars stop by in a day, all of them ignoring you.
The first car was a station wagon of all things, containing two tormented prisoners and their very small and loud wardens.  The adults’ eyes were harrowed and reddened, like lone survivors of a shipwreck.  Their gazes alit, somewhat numbly, upon the gas station, and as they passed near their backs straightened, their teeth whitened, their hair glossed, and their toenails self-manicured.
“Fill it up?” inquired the male prisoner.  He didn’t know where the impulse was coming from, but he was feeling too good to care about it.
“Yeah,” said the female.  She wasn’t listening that hard, preferring instead to relish the feel of vertebrae unwarped by constant tension.
They took on a full tank of gas and filled up an extra can or two, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.  As the car left the place, Charles gave Wednesday his smuggest smirk.  It would’ve driven a martyr to violence.
Wednesday simply took a bite out of his sandwich and chewed as insolently as possible.
The second car was there before they could blink, pulled down back roads and away from highways by forces beyond the rather puny ken of its young and rather stylish occupants.  They screeched to a dead halt in front of the general store, walked in, and made the mistake of breathing.  Pupils shrank to pinpoints, gazes fixed into the middle distance, and heads began to wobble.  They bought an entire rack of chocolate bars, which probably would’ve seemed like a good idea if they were capable of knowing what good, an idea, or money was at the time.
They drove off.  In half an hour they’d probably be annoyed, but by then they’d be completely unable to remember what about.  And, for some reason, violently allergic to cheese for about four days.
Wednesday waddled out to his chair again and took another bite out of his sandwich.  Charles wished him great pain and suffering.
At day’s end, more than fifty customers had meandered their way out of their way to reach the two little buildings.  Twenty had visited one, twenty the other, and five had checked in at both.
The two men exchanged hateful glances, then went inside.
“Do this for me,” whispered Charles into the ear of his copper crow’s-skeleton.  It twitched and danced in place.
“Do for ‘im,” muttered Wednesday to a jar of pickled eggs as he extracted it from his freezer.  They quivered in their confinement, then spilled out into midair, shedding drops of lethal vinegar as they sped out into the night.

On Friday, the competitors tidied up a few loose ends before resuming their seats. Charles stopped to have a whispered word with his pumps, and Wednesday hummed a jaunty little tune as he walked three times around his building counter-clockwise.  Places resumed, they watched the first car come.
It was a truck, and being so, it contained a trucker.  He was hungry, thirsty, horny, sleepy, mopey, and low on gas, and he could only do anything about three of those problems.
“Fill ‘er up,” he mumbled at Charles, who jammed the nozzle of one of his more-prepared pumps into the vehicle.  It dutifully began to overcharge, and things were going just swimmingly up until the moment when the trucker blinked twice and threw up on Charles’s shoes.
“Bathroom…” muttered the trucker.  “Bathroom….”
Charles opened his mouth to say something that probably wasn’t very nice, only to be cut off quite neatly by Wednesday loudly extended an invitation to his outhouse.  Fleet as he was made by nausea, the trucker didn’t quite make it, and left two more puddles on Charles’s asphalt before reaching the sanctuary of Wednesday’s outhouse, where he felt much, much better.  In fact, he felt a little hungry – VERY hungry – and went inside, where he bought fourteen bags of chips without thinking.  Wednesday beamed benevolently as he tore open the sour-cream-and-onion, then blinked in confusion as the trucker demanded his money back for a bag stuffed with nothing but dried and withered-smelling feathers.
The trucker walked back to the gas station, felt another wave of indigestion approaching, and left so fast that he quite forgot to pay.
Wednesday and Charles exchanged another mutual glare, fingers tightening on screwdrivers, gums peeling back to reveal teeth like rotten stumps.
“Pestilence,” said Charles, murder on his mind and regretfully so far from his options.
“Stinkin’ rat,” said Wednesday, his fists curling into shapes resembling skinned hedgehogs.
At day’s end, they had each had precisely one customer.  Every stop at the gas station ended before it began due to violent disruption of some part of someone’s digestive system, and nothing at the general store could leave the shelves without being turned into either ashes, old feathers, or dust.  The one person able to withstand both had weighed approximately five hundred pounds, and may have simply been too large for any of the various hexes and charms to permeate past his fat layer.
“Jinxing, minxing backstabbing cheater!” snarled Charles that evening as he pried out the last of the eggs from underneath his floorboards. They’d set up a nest and laid eggs of their own, which he set aflame with his spittle.  He pulled out his abacus and began to do things with it that involved numbers that were also ghosts.
“Treacherous little girl,” murmured Wednesday darkly, finding the crow-thing roosting in his attic.  It hissed at him and flapped, and he stuck out his tongue at it, sending its head spinning from its shoulders.  He crushed its remnants to powder in his hands, then snorted them up his nose.  Visions of a cardboard box under a bed slipped into his mind, a mattress above that sagged with skeletal weight every night.  He chuckled nastily, then doodled something disgusting on its underside in pickle juice.

Neither man slept well that night – Charles couldn’t get comfortable, and Wednesday was haunted by ominous, vague dreams.  Still, their hatred kept them sharp on Saturday morning, the last of the days, sharp enough to go and see about their final preparations.  Charles spoke at length to his screwdriver; Wednesday dug out an ancient, cloying bottle of sickly homebrewed wine and spilled it on his doorstep.
Down the road the cars came.  A big old pickup truck to Charles’s, a van stuffed with loud, young people with empty heads and swollen appetites to Wednesday’s.
The old man that spoke to Charles was tough, level-headed, and shrewd.  And despite all that, he was completely unable to see Charles’s screwdriver rise up from the dust below his car and shove itself to the hilt in his truck’s gas tank.  Nor did the steadily-rocketing price showing itself atop the gas pump arouse his suspicions.
The moment that the six semi-attractive, twenty-something, highly-obnoxious people stepped into Wednesday’s lair, they were snared.  The time had come, the larger and more primitive sections of their brains said, to party.
So they did.  They snatched up whole shelves of goods, they danced in the aisles, they played the rumba with their chests and pots and pans, they turned hardware tools into instruments of song and they drank whatever drink was to hand.  Wednesday demanded recompensation in a friendly sort of way, and got it without so much as a moment’s fuss because hey, it was a party, it was THE party, and it was as free of care as a thing could be.  By the time they left, not a single dollar was left in a wallet.
Back at the pumps, Charles’s tank had run dry.  The old man was still oblivious in a friendly sort of way to exactly how much money he was about to be charged.
“Visa okay?” he said nonchalantly.
Charles opened his mouth and thanked him, then told him exactly what he thought about his mother.
The old man stared.  “What was that?”
Charles apologized by speculating on his daughter’s profession.
The old man punched him flat, then got in his truck and drove off.
Meanwhile, Wednesday opened his register to count up his profits, and discovered that every bill in it was now for zero dollars.  Issued in the year nineteen-nothing, by the United States of Nowhere.  He said a word that made his wallpaper fuse itself sideways.

And so the day went.  Charles sold tank after tank of gas, and managed each time to say something that ended in a fresh bruise for himself and a retreating customer.  He tried to do nothing but smile and nod, and found himself making lewd gestures.
Wednesday hosted at least twenty parties, and received some hundred more zero-dollar-bills.  He attempted to store the money under the counter, and found that it would simply vanish.

As evening came, the two men stomped out to the middle of the road.
“You’re a cheater and a bastard and you’ve sucked my livelihood dry,” said Charles.  “How’m I supposed to make money when I can’t even finish a sentence without an insult, you festering maggot?”
Wednesday scowled, shuffling the blubber around his face.  “I could and can say the same thin’ to you, you little schemer.  How’m I supposed to make money when I can’t make money?!  You’ve RUINED me!”
“But you ruined me first, and I was here first, slimeball!”
“I was born here before you were!”
“Get off my land, lying sack of whore’s-get!” hissed Charles.  His teeth were bared, every single one showing in an expression that was to a smile what ulcers are to stomach linings.
“Over my dead body!” rumbled Wednesday.  He seemed to expand somehow; looming like a dung-beetle’s nest grown all out of proportion.
“Fine, shitheel!” said Charles, snapped his fingers and raising his screwdriver high.  It glistened with a sickly rainbow of oil.
“GOOD!” roared Wednesday, and they rushed at each other.
It was not a very good fight – the two men were both too out of shape for it – nor was it a particularly clean one – they hated each other too much for that – but it was certainly a memorable one.  Alas, by its end, there was no one around to remember it.

Some time later, the stranger came up the road again, much the same but for a few more scrapes and knocks.  The same could be said of his truck.
He looked at the store, and he looked at the gas station.  Both of them were missing down to the foundations, and the ground was scorched.  There was a large, blackened spot in the middle of the road that smelled of gasoline and sauerkraut.
“You know,” he said to nobody in particular, “you could’ve just settled it fair and square.”
There was no answer.  Some ends are harsh enough that even ghosts don’t want anything to do with them.
He barked that quick laugh of his again, and scratched away a few loose fleas from his neck.  “Have it your way.  You know, you boys had some real nice land of mine here.  It’s too bad you don’t want it anymore.”
He ambled over to his truck and left his clothes in it, then trotted away to find some lunch, tail wagging, mouth grinning, tongue dangling.

It’s not so hard to get rid of coyotes.  But if you don’t keep up on them, they’ll slink back in easy as you please.

“A Gentleman’s Bet,” copyright 2011, Jamie Proctor

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