The Flip (An Angel Hill novel)

by C. Dennis Moore

  Steven thought about what he had in savings and knew he could say yes to Mike right now, he could write him a check that would be good any time Mike wanted to cash it.

  He said, “Let me think about it and I’ll call you later.”

  “Cool, man,” Mike said. “But if we do this and it works, you’re out of the meat department. You’ll be working a different meat department with hot bitches galore.”

  Steven gave a halfhearted “Alright!” then said, “I got to get back. I’m off at ten, so I’ll probably just call you tomorrow or something.”

  “Ok,” Mike said. “I’m gonna give Brian a few days before I bring it to him, anyway, so just mull it over and I’ll give you a call after I talk to him.”

  “A few days? What happened to Brian?”

  “You didn’t hear? Oh. Well, I’ll let him tell it anyway, it’s his. You’ve probably got a voicemail or a text from him when you get off work.”

  “Ok, cool.” Then Steven went back inside and headed for the coolers and another several hours of freezing his ass off and trying to keep busy.

  Once that cold air hit him again, he thought it might not be such a terrible thing, getting out of here and finding a job where he could work when and where he wanted.

  He didn’t know the first thing about renovation or remodeling, but like Mike said, you hire a contractor. Did that mean he could ante up his share of the money up front, then sit at home and watch movies while the work was being done and cash the check for his share of the profits later on?

  That didn’t sound too bad at all. There might be something to this idea, after all, he thought. He would have to give it some serious consideration.

  If it failed, he was out $17,500. What else was he going to do with that money? The same thing he’d been doing with it the last fifteen plus years he’d been saving it. Nothing. He didn’t even know what he was saving it for, except the eventual deaths of his parents, and even then, why? They had life insurance, the house was close to paid off.

  If Steven had to make it on his own with his Wal-Mart paycheck, he could do it. He didn’t have any hobbies that took a lot of money, he didn’t buy cars or clothes. He had thousands of dollars sitting in the bank, doing absolutely nothing.

  Steven felt bad that Mike had been fired, but he had been telling him for years he needed to go somewhere else and get out of Booger Stink. He just thought it would happen on Mike’s terms and that he’d have a backup plan when it came.

  He hated to think of Mike out there trying unsuccessfully to find a job anywhere.

  If anyone could make this work, he believed Mike could. He had always been a born manager, and if Steven had to pick anyone he knew to lead a successful business, it would have been Mike, no question.

  What he didn’t want to happen was Mike blowing seventeen thousand dollars on something that might fail, and then still not be able to find a new job. But Mike’s a big boy, he told himself. He can do what he wants with his money. And if this works and it becomes a business, then good for everyone. Did Steven want to be the holdout that kept it from happening? Was he being guilted into saying yes? Was he guilting himself into it?

  Damn, if Cody was in deli, then who was taking care of the chicken, or the seafood? No one. Steven was, that’s who. He’d almost distracted himself into an empty meat wall. He would start with the chicken, then try to remember to take a look at the ham bunker.

  He really wished when someone needed to be pulled to fill another station that the managers would stop grabbing someone from the meat department. It always felt like this was the lowly stepchild department that always got shit on when something was going on.

  Steven was sick of it. And they hadn’t even come to tell him they were pulling Cody. If Steven hadn’t wanted to tell him he was going on break, he would have still been working on the wall and not given a second thought to anything else, assuming Cody was working on it like usual.

  This is just stupid, he thought. The stuff we have to put up with around here, it’s ridiculous. I have to get out of here and get a job somewhere that doesn’t suck.

  You could be your own boss, he thought, but this time it wasn’t Steven’s inner voice he heard in his head. This time it was Mike. And Steven was thinking that might not be such a bad idea after all. In fact, if Mike got it inspected and the place checked out okay, Steven thought he would hand over the money right then.

  He hadn’t been sold when Mike left, but the more he thought about it, the more faith he placed in his friend to make a decision that was right for him, and if it was right for Mike, could it be all bad for Steven?

  Yeah, he thought, this feels like a good move. But I won’t just be a silent partner. I want to have my share of the say in what goes on, too.

  With that, Steven stepped out into the store and saw most of the chicken breast family packs were gone.

  Chapter Two

  There were several funeral homes in St. Joe, but only one Brian knew the name of well enough to call them. He hadn’t been to a funeral since he was fifteen when his father’s mother had died, and he didn’t know where the service had been held, but every night when he got into town, drove down the Belt Highway to Frederick, heading for downtown and work, he passed the Heaton-Bowman-Smith & Sidenfaden Chapel. He knew the sign well enough, and he called them to arrange his parents’ funeral.

  The man he talked to was very nice and understanding. Brian’s parents had life insurance policies enough to cover the funerals with plenty left over to take care of Brian and his sister for a while. They wouldn’t be rolling in dough, but they wouldn’t be left with nothing, either. Brian did some figuring and realized he could probably live off the rest of it for a year or more.

  He wouldn’t, he wasn’t willing to give up what seniority he had at work, but at least he thought he could stop volunteering for weekend overtime once a month just for that little extra.

  Brian was a little upset that it took his dad dying before he could help Brian with the bills around here.

  He had taken the next week off work, so had gone to sleep a little earlier than usual. It wasn’t quite noon when he woke up this time, having had terrible dreams about his parents. He had expected that.

  He got up and went out into the living room and looked around at the empty house. He didn’t know what to do with himself.

  He supposed he should start calling friends and family. He’d gone to St. Joe yesterday and told his sister who took it about as well as he’d expected, which wasn’t very well at all. He didn’t know who else there was to call because he didn’t know many of his parents’ friends, and sure as hell didn’t know how to get hold of any of them.

  His parents were old school and had all of their friends’ phone numbers committed to memory.

  His first call that day was, once again, to Mike. He knew Steven would be at work and while most people ignored the rule about carrying their cell phones with them, Steven always left his in the car as he was supposed to. Keith was a friend, but he was more Mike’s friend than Brian’s. They’d all met at Burger King, but Keith had been more an acquaintance, really, until Mike had brought him into the group. And it had taken a little time before Brian had warmed up to him; their lifestyles had just seemed so different. Then Brian had realized that, while Keith was a dirt bag, he was still a funny guy who lived his life out loud and was committed to having fun no matter what, and Brian had begun to live vicariously through the stories Keith told.

  There was a story he’d told years ago, not long before he quit Burger King for Fett Tech after he graduated his vo-tech class, and it summed up everything about Keith perfectly, at least as far as Brian was concerned.

  Keith had been at a party one night in White Cloud across the river in Kansas, and he’d passed out on the couch. He said he woke up a while later and found someone with long black hair leaning over him, blowing him right there. The party was winding down and there weren’t many people left, but he still couldn’t believe it was happening. />
  “What did you do?” Brian had asked, flabbergasted.

  “I lifted the hair up to make sure it was a woman, then let her finish.”

  Mike had burst out laughing and Steven shook his head, but Brian said, “To make sure it was a girl?”

  “Indian reservation isn’t far from there,” Mike had said through his cackling.

  Brian understood and smiled and nodded, then said, “Sweet. Who was she?”

  Keith shrugged, then took another drink of his beer.

  “You didn’t talk to her afterward?”

  “I said thanks.”

  “That counts,” Mike said.

  “Then I passed out again and woke up in the morning.”

  “Do you know who it was?”

  Keith shook his head. “She was hot, though. If I hadn’t been so drunk, I’d have took her in the bedroom and gave it to her Angel Hill style.”

  And things like that seemed to be par for the course for Keith, Brian learned. Another time he’d met two girls in a bar and wound up, somehow, in the bathroom with them, one going down on him while the other let him take pictures of her tits. He then sent a text telling the story, along with the pictures, to the guys and they had another good laugh.

  Brian had come to depend on Keith to have a good story to tell whenever they talked, but in the end Keith was still more Mike’s friend than he had ever been Brian’s, and when faced with the question of whom to call first, it was always Mike.

  It was Mike he gave the details of his parents’ visitation to, and asked that he tell Steven and Keith. Mike said no problem and then said, “Hey, remind me in a few days I want to run something by you before I forget.”

  “What is it,” Brian asked.

  “Don’t worry about it, it’ll keep,” Mike said. “Just deal with this stuff now, you got other things to do. It’s cool, it’ll still be here later.”

  “Okay,” Brian said, and they hung up.

  Brian stared at the walls of his bedroom. It had only been a day and he figured it would be a while before he came to think of the house as his and started migrating to other parts of it. He would never take over the master bedroom, but he wouldn’t feel so bad about changing some of the furniture. He thought he could maybe sell most of what was here and use the money to buy a new couch, some chairs, maybe a new television and a surround sound system.

  Christ, he thought, they’re not even in the ground and I’m thinking about my new bachelor pad.

  He didn’t want to think about it anymore. In fact, he didn’t want to think about anything right now. His eyes burned both from lack of sleep and from the crying jags that had been hitting him off and on. He hadn’t cried in years, but he wasn’t surprised at how frequently and how powerfully the tears had been coming. Mel had called last night and they’d spent twenty minutes on the phone just crying to each other.

  He didn’t want to feel anything right now. He just wanted to shut it all out.

  He closed his bedroom door--against whom?-- opened his laptop and called up Dream Theater’s Images and Words CD. Then he leaned back on his bed, closed his eyes, and eventually drifted off to sleep.

  His parents weren’t dead. It had all been a mistake. They’d been buried alive, and Brian heard them under the ground and he went to work with a shovel to free them. He kept digging and digging, but it seemed no matter how hard he worked, he never made any headway, and he could still hear them down there, pounding away inside their caskets, crying to be let out.

  He felt like he might break his back from trying to hoist such huge mounds of dirt over his shoulder, but still, no matter how hard he worked or how big a chunk of earth he tore up, the holes never got any bigger.

  He stopped to take a breath, and looked to his left and saw his father was already out of the ground. Brian looked at him and said, “How did you get out?”

  “I was only knocked out from the wreck,” his father said, which didn’t answer Brian’s question.

  “We have to get your mother out of there,” his father said. “Stop wasting time, get to work! Dig!”

  Brian went at it again, digging until it felt like his arms would come unhinged at the shoulders and fall off, and now it seemed he’d made progress. He was about a foot into the ground by now, and this gave him hope he might make it. He just hoped he could get down there before she ran out of air or had a heart attack.

  He looked back and saw his father doing nothing but watching and Brian wanted to yell at him to help him dig, but the old man hadn’t done shit the last how many years to help out, so why start now?

  He looked down again and saw the dirt he’d scooped out was starting to fall back into the hole. Brian yelled, “Fuck!” and his father hit him in the back of the head and said, “Watch your mouth around your mother.”

  He wanted to tell the old bastard again to help him, but the words wouldn’t come out, as if they’d been locked inside his chest. He wanted to yell them, but couldn’t do it.

  Finally he tossed the shovel aside and fell to his knees and started scooping with his hands, throwing dirt everywhere just as long as he got it out of the hole. He yelled out, “Mike come help me out here, man!” and Mike was there, on his knees in the dirt, helping him, along with Steven and Keith.

  Together they made short work of the task and Brian tore open the casket and hauled his mother, gasping and covered in muck, out of the hole. He helped her up and she hugged him and he said, “I’m sorry it took so long.”

  He looked at his friends and said, “Thanks, guys, I appreciate it.”

  The guys nodded, but then were gone in a blink as things are in dreams, and it was just Brian and his parents now.

  He hugged them both, his irritation at his father forgotten, just glad to have them back now. They stank of dirt and Brian’s mother had worms in her hair, but she seemed otherwise unharmed.

  He wondered how terrible it had been down there trapped under the ground like that, but then decided he didn’t really want to know. Instead he said, “Let’s get home.”

  His mother grabbed his wrist then, and clutched him in a deathgrip.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t go there.”

  He looked down at her hand and wondered when had she grown into this haggard old woman with a hand like a claw.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “We have to get home, come on. Mel’s waiting for us, and you guys need to get dressed for dinner.”

  “No,” she repeated. “Don’t go in the house, Brian. It will kill you to stay there. You have to get out!”

  She was screeching now and Brian thought for sure her voice would bring people wondering what was going on. It didn’t matter to him they were in a cemetery at night and there were no people to be drawn by the sound. She was wailing to wake the dead.

  “Mom, come on,” he said. “We have to go.”

  “Get out of the house, Brian.”

  He tried to reach for her, but she vanished into nothing and his eyes shot open and Brian jerked with a gasp and woke up.

  He looked around, trying to acclimate himself, wondering what time is it, what day is it, where am I?

  It took him a moment to realize he was in his bedroom, and the reason he’d had trouble placing himself was because the house was so quiet. It was never this quiet. That’s because there are usually people here, he thought. Mom and Dad watching television, or one of them calling him to come and eat dinner. If his parents were up, the television was always on, so there was always noise of one kind or another when Brian woke up.

  He was going to have to get used to the quiet when he got up from now on. The empty house, the solitude, not having anyone to say good afternoon to when he woke up after a night at work.

  “This is going to take some getting used to,” he said as he reached for his phone to check the time. And the day. With Brian’s schedule, on his day’s off it was never a given when he might wake up. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d stayed up too late, fallen asleep around four in th
e evening and woken up past midnight on the next day.

  He had only slept two hours, though. Dream Theater had ended. His mother’s words kept running through his head as his brain tried to retain the dream, tried to tell him there was something important in there.

  He tried to remember it, holding tight to that brief memory of his parents, alive again, even if it was only a dream. He wondered how long this would go on, dreaming about them, and he wondered if it would hurt as much every time?

  She was saying something to him about getting out of the house.

  He had felt at times like his parents smothered him, but he had made peace with that years ago and didn’t mind anymore. Were they telling him it was okay to go out and live his life?

  He sat there in his bedroom and thought, I could go anywhere, do anything I want right now. I could go to a bar and bring a woman home and not have to explain how I still live with my parents.

  I could have a party.

  I could start hosting weekly poker games with the guys here. I wouldn’t, but I could.

  A sense of liberation washed over him, and while he felt bad about qualifying that feeling he was having with that word, it was the word that fit so what was there to feel bad about? And if he was dreaming that his mother was encouraging it, then all the better.

  He got out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom, then to the living room. His phone was clutched in his hand and he decided to call his sister and see if she wanted him to give her a ride to the funeral home tonight.

  She said yes, thanks, then Brian went into the kitchen to eat something before he left. There were several types of soup, mostly Progresso Light soups because his mother was always trying to get his father to watch his weight. Brian liked them, so he had two cans of the chicken enchilada.

  The sound of his mother shrieking in his dream was still following him and when Brian was getting dressed, grabbing his keys and his wallet and making the rounds of the house to make sure the front and back doors were locked, then heading to his car in the garage through the kitchen, he looked at the empty rooms once more and wondered if that had been what she meant after all, about getting out of the house before it killed him.