Five Hundred Poor

by Milligan, Noah;

“It’s so good. It’s got jalapeño in the breading and gravy. You think it’s going to be too spicy and heavy, but it really isn’t. You should try it.”

  “So he shows me the comic, and it checks out. Spawn #1, great condition. Doesn’t look like it’s seen the light of day since the nineties, and even better, it’s the newsstand edition, has the barcode on the front and everything, so I ask him how much he wants for it. Know what he says?”

  “I really think you’d like it if you just gave it a chance.”

  “Twenty bucks! Can you believe that? I laughed at him, thinking he was joking at first, but he wasn’t. This guy had no idea what he had. There’s only like, maybe ten thousand of these puppies around, and he’s just like twenty bucks.”

  She made a voice like what she thought a stupid man sounded like, deep and guttural, cinching the last syllable up as if asking a question.

  “So what’d you do?” I asked.

  “I pulled up Amazon and showed him the comic store edition. Told him these only sold retail for ten or fifteen, that I could only offer him five.”

  “You did that? Really?”

  “He was pissed at first. Started cussing right there in the store. Cussing somebody named Brett, cussing the comic book, even cussing me.”

  “But he took it, didn’t he?”

  She nodded. “And I’m going to turn around and sell it for $300.”

  She smiled, proud of herself, and I returned to the menu. She chewed some unbuttered bread, taking her time before swallowing. It was crowded in the restaurant, with little room between white-clothed tables. The lighting dim. Conversations hushed.

  “So how do you like it so far?” she asked. “Your job. Is it good?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s good.”

  “Oh? Just good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s good about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just good?”

  “It’s a job.”

  “Do you like your boss? Do you like your clients? The travel? What exactly?”

  “So what are you going to order?”

  “Or maybe you just like the pay? It’s okay to like a job just because it pays well.”

  “I haven’t been paid yet.”

  “But you will,” she said. “You will. It’s just a matter of time before you make a sale.”

  She reached across the table to grab my hand, but it was too far to reach. She pulled her hand back and laid it in her lap.

  “You really should try the chicken-fried steak,” I said. “I know you’ll like it. It’s famous. Like really famous. Outside of Oklahoma even.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” she continued. “You know, it doesn’t make much sense for us to keep two places. Financially speaking. You’re always either at my place, or I’m at yours. It just makes sense, right?”

  “What does?”

  “Moving in together.”

  “Like, us? Me and you?”

  She cocked her chin to the side, mouth poised to respond, but before she could answer, the waiter came. He was a young kid, maybe early twenties, with a mustache trying too hard to make him look older. “Have any questions about the menu?”

  “No,” Callie said. “I think we’re ready.”

  “And what’ll it be?”

  “The salmon,” she said, snapping her menu shut.

  FIRST TIME I WENT OUT by myself, the temperature reached almost 110 degrees. Luckily, I didn’t have to wear a jacket or tie. I donned a simple cotton polo, some chinos, loafers without socks. Mr. Sayer encouraged us to stay pretty casual, said that clients tended to trust us more than if we constrained ourselves in suits.

  I’d always had a problem with perspiration, though. No matter the clothing, I sweated. I soaked through my polo, my underwear, my pants, everything, until visible rings stained in inadvisable places. And I stunk. Regardless of how much cologne I wore, how much deodorant I applied, how hard I blew the air conditioner, I emanated a debilitating and nauseating body odor. I’d seen doctors and dermatologists and dieticians, trying to mask or cure it, applying topical solutions and eating more pineapple, but nothing worked. Finally, I just came to expect it, and the unrelenting scowls of strangers.

  My first prospect was a rancher down in Empire, Mr. Cartwright. His place was sprawling, about three hundred acres of pasture, a couple barns, an ancient home passed down from generation to generation, from father to son since the Homestead Act.

  When I arrived, the whole family was there. Father, son, daughter, wife, aunts, uncles, grandparents, grandkids, cousins, nieces, nephews. They crawled over one another. They fed each other ham sandwiches and iced tea and hit each other over the head with hand-me-down toys. There must’ve been two dozen of the clan, all waiting, like this was some sort of family reunion rather than an estate-planning pitch.

  They bid me sit at the dining room table. The adults all joined me there, the kids remaining in the family room making a racket. Once inside, I’d hoped my sweating would come under control, cooled by the air-conditioning, but with so many bodies jam-packed into such a tight space, I couldn’t stop. It poured from me. It stung my eyes and made my vision blurry. It was so bad Mrs. Cartwright even offered to get me a fan.

  “No thank you,” I said. “I don’t want to be any trouble.”

  “No trouble,” she said. “Really. And there’s no reason to be nervous. We won’t bite.” She winked.

  “I’m sorry for the stench,” I said.

  “Can’t smell a thing,” she lied.

  “Maybe I should just freshen up a bit.”

  “That might be wise.”

  Their bathroom was small, covered in sky-blue tile and pink towels. Elephant figurines dotted the windowsill, the sink rim, even the back of the toilet. The magazine rack housed decades-old Sports Illustrated and National Geographic, and everything was in its place: toothbrushes and hand soap and towels with the family name stitched into the fabric. It reminded me of my grandmother’s home, before she’d lost her memory to Alzheimer’s and we had to stick her in an assisted-living center outside Pawhuska, and I splashed my face with cool water and kept telling myself I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.

  Back in the kitchen, I was greeted with handshakes and smiles and introductions, a glass of iced tea and questions. All types of questions.

  “You’re going to pay me $125,000 for my policy? Cash? Today?”

  “Well, it’ll be put in an escrow account. The funds will be wired to you after closing.”

  “Doesn’t matter its cash value is only $100,000?”

  “Nope.”

  “And you’ll take over all the premiums? I won’t have to pay a dime?”

  “Not one cent.”

  “So what’s the catch?”

  The catch. That was a good one. I knew what Sayer would want me to say: there wasn’t one. They had a policy they couldn’t afford or didn’t need, and we’d pay them for it. Problem was, that wasn’t always the case. There were tax consequences, estate-planning implications, debt that would no longer be able to be retired after death. There was a whole host of concerns and questions they weren’t grasping, or didn’t even know to ask. The most glaring of all: we were going to profit off of their deaths. When they died, their family would get nothing. A stranger would, a bald-headed guy they’d never meet and who only thought of them as a line item on his balance sheet. They were relying upon me to tell them those things, but it was my job not to, and soon my shirt was soaked again in perspiration.

  “Don’t worry.” Mrs. Cartwright patted me on the hand. “You’re doing just fine.”

  PART OF MY JOB WAS calling the insured to see if they were still alive. I’d leave a message, and usually they’d call me back. Still kicking, they’d say, for a minute still. Sometimes, though, I wouldn’t hear from them. I’d call two or three times over about a month’s span, and if they didn’t return my call, I’d have to go make a house visit.

  After a while, we hadn’
t heard from Mr. or Mrs. Hannahan. It was a hot day, the sun burning the cracked, red clay of Oklahoma. Thermometer only said 98 but the heat index topped 110. Despite the air-conditioning blaring in my Honda Accord, every single part of me was covered in sweat. My arms, my neck, the insides of my thighs. It was so bad I stuck to my car interior. I thought I would, at any time, start melting.

  Duncan looked exactly as it had several months prior. A sleepy town, it had more than once boomed and busted, but this past bust seemed to last longer than all the rest. Houses went unpainted, fences un-mended. The townsfolk took to just sitting. Sitting at the IGA, sitting at the high school football field, sitting on their front porches, all of them looking off into the distance.

  I knocked on the Hannahans’ front door. They had one of those old-timey brass knockers, and it felt strange using it, like I might have unknowingly slipped into a former time. There was no answer. I knocked again, this time using my fist. I checked the windows, but the blinds had been drawn shut. I tried the back door. I tried calling. Still, no answer. I rang the doorbell, but no one came to the door. There wasn’t even anything stirring on the other side.

  Walking back to the street where I’d parked, I realized that the truck and the RV were gone but the boat remained. I stopped at the mailbox. It was full, stocked with furniture catalogues and credit card applications, mostly unpaid bills: their mortgage, their second mortgage, the RV, the pontoon, all stamped red, stating Third and Final Notice, Foreclosure Proceedings. It looked like no one had taken a thing for a couple weeks, and so I called the police.

  “Come quick,” I told them. “I think we may have a problem.”

  We found Mr. Hannahan sitting in his recliner. There was no sign of Mrs. Hannahan. He had a microwavable dinner on his lap, molding. The TV was still on, tuned to the local NBC affiliate, the volume turned low, barely audible. I found this odd. If I could barely hear it, then Mr. Hannahan likely would not have been able. It appeared he hadn’t cared to hear the actors’ voices—it had been enough just to see them, living their muted lives, filling in the details as he saw fit.

  I MOVED INTO MY GIRLFRIEND’S apartment on a Saturday morning. It was unseasonably cool. A thunderstorm had moved through during the twilight hours of the morning, and the ground smelled wet and was unstable. The air felt like it vibrated, gravid with static electricity.

  There was a guy walking down the street, picking through trash cans. Every time I unloaded a box and came outside to grab another, he’d be there, elbow deep. What he was looking for, I hadn’t a clue. He didn’t look homeless. He wore a newish-looking sweatshirt, not marred with stains or dirt. His jeans fit and were devoid of fray. His boots were a bit muddy, older, but not falling apart. Clean shaven. Recent haircut. But he just kept going through all the trashcans, never taking anything out, always picking up after himself if he accidentally spilled an item. It was the strangest thing I’d seen in a while, and I couldn’t help but stop what I was doing and watch him.

  “Do you think we should call the cops?” Callie asked.

  “What?”

  She pointed at the man. “The cops. He’s freaking me out a little.”

  Maybe. But it didn’t seem necessary. He might just be looking for something he’d lost, or had been stolen from him, or perhaps, in a momentary lapse of judgment, thrown out, and now he desperately searched every trash can on the street because he couldn’t quite remember where he’d put it. That had to be it, I thought. He’d had a change of heart, and now he had to do whatever he could to get it back.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you first and foremost to my wife, Allie. This book wouldn’t have been possible without you. A special thank you to the numerous editors at the literary magazines that previously published the stories in this collection, most notably Adam Van Winkle at Cowboy Jamboree, Kelly McMasters at Windmill: The Hofstra Journal of Literature and Art, and Hila Ratzabi at Storyscape Literary Journal. Lastly, thank you to my editor and publisher, Michelle Halket, for believing in my work.

  Noah Milligan began his community banking career in 2008 in the midst of the subprime mortgage crisis. The resulting Great Recession shaped his professional and personal life as he witnessed firsthand the devastating toll it took on people from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder as they lost their homes, their retirement, and their savings. His debut novel, An Elegant Theory, was shortlisted for the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize and a finalist for Foreword Reviews 2016 Book of the year. His short fiction has appeared in Windmill: The Hofstra University Journal of Literature and Art, MAKE Literary Magazine, Cowboy Jamboree, Rathalla Review, and elsewhere.

  noahmilligan.com