Hundred-dollar Job

by Brendan O’Donnell

(here’s a PDF if you’d rather print and read it on paper)

Spiro liked the spot but Jackie hated it, and since he always had the cards to play and the cunning to play them against her, they were back at the Spring Road intersection where the cars from the freeway had to sit and wait for the traffic light to turn green. He perched her on the curb with the sign he’d drawn the week before and he watched from the base of a light pole. Her shoulders were slumped, her long black sleeves were bunched up around her fingers, her hair was tied in a swirl held aloft by a green band. He hoped she wasn’t smiling. Sometimes she got it in her head that drivers would dole out more change if she smiled at them. One look at those teeth, though, and they’d keep driving, hip to where their money was really going. “If you really gotta smile,” he’d tell her, “keep that mouth closed. You oughtta keep that mess hidden.” Her face would fall and she’d mutter Cocksucker and then he’d tighten a fist and tell her to shut the fuck up or he’ll knock the rest of them out but each one knew the other wasn’t going anywhere any time soon. There was work to do. He fished a cigarette and lighter out of the breast pocket of his t-shirt. His arms were like old frayed ropes, veins and tattoos and dirt and bruises.

A green pickup stopped just past Jackie. The window slid down and a hand waved a bill at her. She was watching the oncoming cars and didn’t see it. Spiro zeroed in on it like a hawk spotting a mouse in a field. “Jacks! Behind you! Wake up!” He snapped and pointed. Her head flopped over her shoulder to look at him and she shrugged. “What?” she mouthed. He kept snapping and pointing and she shuffled herself around until she saw it. In the blink of an eye she transformed and she sprang at the outstretched hand, but the light had changed and the truck was already rolling. The hand compressed into a fist and ejected the crumpled dollar at the curb as the traffic shoved itself through the intersection. Spiro loped to the curbside and they looked at the dollar, twisted up like a pasta shape and getting pummeled by the car tires.

“Ah goddammit, Jacks,” Spiro muttered. He crouched on the curb as if to frog-leap onto the pavement.

“He, like, just threw it,” she said.

“He sat there waving it in your goddamn face and you didn’t even see it.” His eyes were fixed on it. There was nothing else. “Ain’t gonna be nothing left of it after this parade.”

“Sorry.”

“Pay some fucking attention next time,” he spat. The light turned yellow and three more cars sped through before it turned red, after which another car blew past. He pounced on the dollar and sprang back to the curb, popping up in front of her and snapping the bill tight between his fingers. “Look at this thing! Good as new!” He folded it and kissed it and cooed at it, “Thought I lost you there, baby!” Jackie stuck the sign between her knees and fussed with her hairband. She could have been anywhere on earth but there. He added the dollar to a small wad fished from his pocket and upon looking at the day’s take his glee mouldered into disappointment and worry. His face hardened as if remembering obligations placed on him by a deep allegiance and he snatched the sign from between her legs.

“Go sit down,” he said.

If she’d noticed that he took the sign, she didn’t care. “How much we got now?”

“Five, seven, eight. If the change ain’t fallen out your pockets again.”

Her hands dropped and she patted her thighs. Coins jingled and she grinned. She had teeth enough to take a bite of a burger and there remained enough light in her face for lewd thoughts about her to still shuffle through his mind.

“How many times I gotta tell you to sit down?”

The grin disappeared and she swayed over to the light pole and plopped down at the base. Except for her face she all but blended in with the bare dirt.

Spiro looked at the sign and wondered how well the black markered words would stand out against the filthy cardboard in the dimming daylight.

GAS MONEY

BIT TO EAT
GOD BLESS

LOST JOB

The sign itself was too small—barely the size of a newspaper—and he regretted wasting the space on the GOD BLESS. Then again, the whole sign was pure bullshit. What mattered to the drivers was whether he’d put the effort into telling some kind of story. Whether he gave them something back in exchange for whatever they’d drop into his outstretched palm. Considering what he’d had to work with, he’d given that sign everything he had to offer. The drivers would get theirs in return. Here’s a good man fallen on hard times, and a dollar given here might help fight back against the darkness in the world, even if only a little bit.

A few minutes of standing and a grey minivan pulled up alongside him. The driver rolled down his window. A pudgy, middle-aged man in a sweatshirt, kids sleeping in carseats behind him.

“Hey,” Spiro said. He spoke in a voice he used when he’d get to talk to a driver, one he thought sounded upbeat and hopeful. “Ran outta gas, just trying to get to my aunt’s, get back on my feet, you know?”

The driver waved a hand. “Money I don’t have”—he stuck his thumb over his shoulder at the sleeping children and smirked—“but what I do have I give you.” A small book materialized and landed in Spiro’s hand. “The Lord bless you indeed!” He pulled ahead and turned right on the red.

Spiro knew what it was but he looked at it anyway. POCKET NEW TESTAMENT said the gold letters on a blazing orange cover. He flipped through it in case the guy had bookmarked it with a fiver, but of course he hadn’t. This kind of thing happened every couple of days. Sometimes it was little books. Sometimes it was a business card for a soup kitchen or what sounded suspiciously like a rehab joint. Junk. He called back to Jackie, who was holding her chin in her hands looking dull. “You look bored. Why don’t you read this while you wait!” He frisbeed it at her and it skidded on the dirt by her feet. Behind her a couple miles distant stood the city skyline, sleek silver buildings overlooking the parts of town he’d later take his earnings. The daylight had a dusky cast to it and one floor of one of the towers already gleamed like it was nighttime.

He turned back to the traffic and saw a black sedan approaching. It was just like hundreds of others he’d seen at this intersection. Nothing in particular to set it apart. But Spiro couldn’t look away. His stomach quailed like he had just made eye contact with a stranger who wouldn’t look away. Reflexively he held up the sign and jiggled it in front of his chest even though he was already certain this car would stop for him.

It did. The traffic light was green. The black window rolled down and Spiro saw a normal-looking man, grey in his temples, a dignified full head of hair. Suit, tie, briefcase on the passenger seat, like a lawyer on his way home from the office. The car seemed brand-new, and water beaded on the chrome accents like it had just gone through a carwash.

“Got a job for you if you want it. You want a quick job?” said the driver.

Spiro leaned on the window. “A job?”

“You want it or not?”

“What is it?” He sniffed the new car smell.

“Hundred bucks cash. Two minute job.”

Spiro started. “A hundred?”

“Cash. Want it? Don’t have all day.”

“What I gotta do?”

“Silver Toyota will be along in a minute. Get in when he gets here.”

“That’s it?”

“He’ll tell you what to do.” The driver glanced at the green light and then arched his eyebrow at Spiro. A ten dollar bill appeared. “Want it?”

A truck approached the car and honked. Spiro snatched the money and said, “I’m in!”

“Great. Silver Toyota. One minute.” He disappeared behind the rising window and the sedan whooshed through the light.

Spiro sprang over to Jackie. She was slumped over, one hand drawing in the dirt between her feet and the other stuck in the side of her mouth as she chewed her fingernails in her molars. He flung the sign aside and snapped the ten in her face. “Get up! Look what I got! And there’s more coming!”

“What is that?”

“The fuck it looks like? Ten bucks! And that guy has a job for me. Picking us up in a minute. Get up!”

“A job? What’s the job?”

Spiro grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet. “Dunno, and that’s enough questions from you. All I know’s it’s a quick thing and there’s a hundred bucks in it for two minutes’ work!”

Jackie stopped and laughed. “A hundred? A hundred dollars? You ain’t real. You’re lying to me.”

Her jawline was an exquisite thing. The way it stood above her throat, like she’d been perfectly sculpted by an attentive craftsman, always did something to him inside. He watched her jaw move and heard her call him a liar. “Goddammit woman, don’t think I won’t leave you right here while I go get this money and party all by myself!” He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her close to him. “See where the fuck you’ll end up tonight. See whose dick’ll be in your mouth if it ain’t mine. See what happens to your tiny ass if I ain’t looking out for it.”

His words washed something out of her. He watched it leave her face. All that was left was eyes that no longer met his even though they hadn’t moved. She was his already. But a feeling like worms in his stomach writhed and ate at him from the inside out. How he hated that feeling. If he changed his tone, it would go away. “Sorry, baby. That ain’t how it is. You know it. Come party with me tonight, baby. Just come do this with me.”

She returned. Her eyes wary and searching. They found him, settled for him. He kissed her. She didn’t move. She said okay.

He led her to the curb by the wrist. “Silver Toyota’s coming. Be here any second.” He felt her silence standing by him, more of a presence than she was herself. A silver car waited for the light a couple hundred yards from where they stood. “Look, that’s it, just like he said.” He pulled off his cap and smoothed his hair behind his ears and ran his fingers over his moustache, rolling the ends into points that quickly frayed.

The silver car pulled up next to them. Cars honked. The window rolled down. A bearded man in a pea coat and wool cap snapped a cellphone closed and looked them over. He nodded at the back seat. Spiro and Jackie tumbled inside and rolled around the back seat as the driver shot through the intersection. Jackie slid to the other door and fastened her belt, leaning into the door, pressing her cheek against the window. Spiro arranged himself in the middle of the seat and leaned forward, offering his hand. “Hey, man. Spiro.” The driver nodded and checked his side mirror. Spiro closed his hand. “So what’s this job?”

“Tell you when we get there.”

“Okay, okay, that’s cool, man.” He sat back. “I’m guessing I know what line of work y’all are in.”

The driver was silent. He spun the car onto a side road.

Spiro flopped back in the seat and stretched his arms across the seatbacks. “Wouldn’t mind getting in it myself, if you’re looking for a good worker. Something regular, know what I’m sayin’?” His hand found Jackie’s hair. Her fingertips emerged from her sleeve and touched his wrist like they couldn’t decide whether to push it away or hold it right there. “I used to smuggle shit on buses. Brought a whole trash bag full of weed to New Orleans from L.A. once,” he said. “You can do that on buses pretty easy. They don’t inspect nothing on that Greydog. But usually smaller packages, taking shit here and there all over town.”

The driver did not speak. He drove mechanically, precisely. Every turn felt like a crisp right angle, every acceleration quickly met a set speed, every stop was calibrated to find an exact spot at an intersection. Machine-like, urgent. Spiro settled into his seat, one arm on Jackie, the other holding a seatbelt latch nestled in the upholstery, his eyes on the back of the driver’s head.

“Knew a guy in Kansas who cooked. I ran it into Denver for him. Fuckin’ Interstate, a hundred miles an hour,” said Spiro, finishing with a whistle.

The driver broke his silence. “And now you’re on a street corner taking a hundred-dollar job.”

Spiro smarted and his lips pruned around the curses he wanted to spit at the back of the guy’s head. His hand twisted the seatbelt latch. A hot slug of adrenaline tumbled from his chest into his stomach and smoldered. Nothing in his resumé was true, but the driver’s rejoinder certainly was. The driver braked into an intersection and scanned the cross street left and right. Spiro saw his eyes from the side. Focused, desperate. His lips moved as if in some silent recitation of descriptions and instructions he’d been ordered to match to what he was seeing along this prescribed route. As if told to by a voice in his ear, he nodded and angled the car left and accelerated; his gloved hand dropped to a digital timer on the console and wiggled it.

“Nearly there.”

Through the window on the other side of Jackie’s face Spiro saw a neighborhood of big houses and large yards and massive garages. It occurred to him that he’d expected this job, whatever it was, to take him to a quite different part of the city. The car stopped under a tree across from a big mown field with a garish kiddie playground at one end and the edge of a tall pine forest at the other.

The driver pointed across the field at the shapes of houses on the other side of it. “That one,” he said.

“What? Which one?” Spiro pressed his face against the window behind the driver. The field rose to a gentle summit in the center and obscured all but the rooflines of the houses.

“Across that field. Number 2403. If you follow that line of trees you’ll be right across the street from it.”

“Cool, cool.” Spiro rubbed his hands and got ready for the easiest hundred bucks of his life. “What do I do?”

“Knock on the door. Tell them only one thing: Lonnie Knox sent you. Hand them this. Don’t answer none of their questions. Just hand them this and get the fuck outta there. Come back through the woods.” Over his shoulder he handed Spiro a package the size of a cigar box wrapped in brown paper and masking tape. Spiro clutched it, feeling its weight. The driver flicked the timer. “Get there in the next two minutes.”

Spiro leered back at Jackie. She was crumpled in the corner of the seat pushing a knuckle into her mouth, eyes locked on the driver, as still as a spring compressed under a great weight. “What’s with you?” he chided.

“Two minutes, dipshit,” muttered the driver.

Spiro popped the door open and chanted back at Jackie, “Two minutes, baby, and it’s party time!” He slammed the door and sealed the frozen woman inside and dashed across the road.

He hewed close to the line of trees, running with his back hunched over as he cradled the package under his left arm with his right hand steadying it. The houses were enormous, the kinds of places where the people that lived in them would report someone like him skulking about. Before long pain racked his body, sharp flames searing his deepest tissues, everywhere muscle touched bone. He hadn’t had to run like this in as long as he could remember. Partway across the field he stumbled, exhausted, and when he regained his feet he only walked. The package felt too heavy for its size. A breeze touched his face and his brow felt cold with sweat. Thinking he should collect himself a little before facing whoever was in that house, he slowed his pace and wiped his forehead on his shoulder. Walking felt interminable. Two minutes. Surely it wasn’t up yet. He dug deeper and put springs in his heels to make it to the curb and crossed the street and flopped up the front steps to the door of 2403. He shoved a finger at the doorbell and waited. The bottoms of his lungs itched; his bones burned. There was a lamp by the door above his head and a bird had fastened a nest of twigs and twine and mud between the lamp casing and the brick that framed the entry. White streaks speckled the wall and led his eye down to spatters of bird filth on the floor.

The door opened. Spiro started, then shoved the package at the person who answered and started to say, “Lonnie Knox sent me,” except that he had forgotten, completely, the name of the person he was supposed to mention.

It was an older, plump woman in an apron, her black hair tied neatly in a bun behind her head, tasteful makeup gracing grandmotherly features except for a dark sinister lipstick the color of tree bark. She had flour on her hands and her apron had splats of wet dough on it. The corners of her mouth folded down as she looked at him. “He sent me,” he coughed, thumbing over his shoulder towards the silver Toyota across the field. Her eyes looked across the field as if taking something in and then returned to him. He shoved the package at her. “This is for you,” he insisted. “He sent me.”

She started to close the door, but slowly, and her eyes held his like she might give him one more chance to get this right. “Who sent you? Who drove you here?”

“I don’t got his name!” he whined.

“Tell him,” she said, “that he’s a cocksucker.” The door shut.

Spiro felt the blood drain from his face. He rammed the doorbell again and then tapped it repeatedly, frantically. He heard footsteps approaching and prepared to shove the package through the door into this woman’s arms the moment it opened.

It opened. A wall of a man stood there. “You can just hold on to that.” As Spiro’s eyes ascended the man’s chest to meet his face, the door shut and he heard the locks fasten.

“Fuck,” Spiro muttered. Get the fuck outta there. At least he remembered that much of the instructions. He dropped the package on the front step and ran back across the street into the trees. Grasping tree bark and brambles he pulled himself back to the car. The light of the day was failing and the forest that stretched away to his left was murk and darkness. His legs felt like they were full of something like hot, dry dust. He emerged from the trees across from the car and when he got to the door he heard an electronic whir unlock it and he clambered inside.

“Whew! Done!” he said in between hoarse wheezes, holding his sides and shaking his head to power through his pains. “Let’s get the fuck outta here!” He slid a hand over to Jackie’s arm. It felt like glass beneath the shirt sleeve.

“Who answered?” asked the driver.

“Some old lady.”

“She take it?”

“What? Yeah.”

“What’d she say?”

“She talked some shit.”

The driver lurched around. His eyes seized Spiro’s. “What’d she say?”

Spiro shrugged. “Called you a cocksucker,” he said, and to spite him, innocently added, “Said you can suck her big black dick.” The driver’s brow furrowed in disbelief and puzzlement. Spiro relished it. “Man, she talked some shit!”

“Black? Was this lady black?”

“No. She was just talking shit. She was white. Kinda fat. Kinda old.”

The driver looked at Spiro like he’d been speaking Greek. “That’s what she said?”

Spiro shrugged. “You wanna go ask her what she said? If it’s anything to you, she told me to fuck off, too.”

The driver grabbed Spiro’s t-shirt collar in his fist. “Let me get this straight. You gave her the package, told her Lonnie Knox sent you, then she talked that shit and told you to fuck off?”

Spiro sputtered, “Y-yeah, just like that. That’s just what happened. Then I came back here. Took two minutes, just like you said.” He held his breath. His instructions were part of some exact plan, something that was supposed to go as precisely as this guy drove across the city. Whatever he’d just told the driver was not part of this plan. Let alone what had actually happened.

The driver turned his back to them and stared out the window across the field towards 2403, his gaze fixed and uncomprehending. Spiro twirled his fingers through Jackie’s hair and looked at her. Her eyes were staring at something that wasn’t there. At least, they weren’t looking at him. He untangled his hand and thought to run his finger down her cheek.

But the driver suddenly rammed the car into gear. He zoomed down the road. His speed was wild, unplanned, out of control. The road was newly-built, a broad smooth lane of asphalt lined by pristine white curbs cutting through the tall dark trees and the clearings where new large houses would be built. At the first intersection the driver careened past the stop sign and onto the cross-road, flinging Spiro onto Jackie. He held her arm to steady himself while he searched for the lap belt. The driver ripped down every street he took, weaving between cars as he changed lanes, cutting down random side streets. As if shaking something that pursued.

At one intersection he suddenly idled instead of slicing into traffic on the other road. “Out,” he said.

Spiro looked around. “Where are we?”

“Your part of town.”

“Go on, Jackie, get on out,” Spiro said, pulling her door handle open. She swung her legs out like she was on a hinge and shuttled to the curb. Spiro positioned himself in the opening and then wrapped his forearm around the headrest of the front passenger seat. “Forgetting something?”

“Nope.”

“A hundred dollars?”

The driver locked eyes with him. “Fuckups don’t get paid.”

Spiro almost spat. “Sure they don’t. But I ain’t no fuckup. So pay me.”

The driver patted something strapped to his side under his peacoat. “You ain’t said a single true word since you got inside this car.”

Spiro held on to the headrest. “What, gonna pull a gun on me? Think that never happened to me before? Go ahead and empty it into my mouth! What the hell you think I have to live for?”

The driver’s eyes crinkled. His face broke into a laugh, a startling bark. “What, her?” He scrunched his mouth in thought, nodded, and then banged the glovebox with his knuckle. It flumped open. A roll of bills banded in a tight cylinder the size of a fat cigarette popped into his hand. He rolled down the passenger window and flicked the roll out. It bounced on the pavement and rolled into a pothole. “Get the hell out!”

Spiro launched out of the car. Behind him he heard the vehicle whip into gear and the door slam closed. By the time he reached the pothole the car was out of sight, disappeared into the city dusk. He dropped to his knees and fished through the oily water until his hand found the cylinder and brought it up from the murk so his eyes could see it. Turning to Jackie he held it up like a torch. She sat on the curb, shoving her face into her palms like someone had her by the hair and was rubbing her face in the dirt. He unbanded the bills and pulled each one out to inspect it and cradled them in his two hands and brought them to Jackie like a mother showing a father their newborn baby. Her shoulders trembled.

“What’s the matter? Why you crying baby?”

Her hands muffled her sobs and he touched her. “Look, baby, job’s done, I got this money, and now it’s party time. Ain’t no time to bitch and moan like this.”

She pulled her face out of her hands. Something in the timbre of her crying pricked him, like a nail sticking out of a smooth board. He withdrew his hand and watched her while the worms in his stomach gnawed him. They’d long ago eaten away his linings and now he felt like he was made of nothing but acid. He didn’t know what to do with this feeling. Her crying inflamed him.

He stood up and as he yelled, “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” her face rose and yelled the exact same thing right back at him and his foot caught her shin and then her ribs and then her chest as he kicked her down onto the sidewalk. He loomed over her like a bare tree about to topple in a windstorm while she curled up on her side.

“You got any idea what I had to go through for this? Bad motherfuckers in there! Real bad! And I stood tall, bitch! I did what I had to do! One of them stuck a gun in my face while they took the package! And then I had to talk that fucking caveman into getting me paid! He got his gun out, too! And all you had to do was sit there!”

She was screaming back at him. He stopped ranting long enough to hear her.

“…and if you fucked it up he was gonna shoot you and then he was gonna rape me and fucking murder me and you left me alone with hiiiim…”

She got like this sometimes. Hysterical, not really there, yelling at something that had actually happened a long time ago. He didn’t know what made her start, but he’d figured out along the way how to make her stop—otherwise she could drag on for hours in this condition.

He plopped down beside her and shuffled his legs around her and cradled her head on his bent knee while her body shook. “It’s alright baby, I got you, I got you,” he cooed, his mind already drifting to what part of the city they were in and who he might know around here.

Her face was in her wrists but she was starting to calm down. “He didn’t stop talking the whole time you were gone, saying what he’d do if you blew the job…” She trailed off.

“I got you, baby, I got you. And I got that job done and I got us a hundred bucks. Two minutes’ work, a hundred bucks. It’s all over.” Slowly she sat up and draped her arm over his neck and collected herself and started kissing him on his neck and jaw and mouth while the dusk dimmed and he watched the streetlights on the main road flicker to life.

At the Spring Road intersection the following week Spiro gave himself a break from the curb and reclined against the base of the light pole to drag on a cigarette and count the take.

That hundred hadn’t lasted long. The guys they’d found that night, friends of Jackie’s sister, saw her mouth start bubbling in the back seat of their car and rolled her out on the sidewalk by the Emergency Room and sped off into the night with Spiro looking out the rear window at the figure receding on the concrete. He’d neither seen nor her of her since; for a couple days he kept a cagey vigil near the hospital in case they released her and he’d see her when she walked out, but the waiting was wearisome and something told him there was no point to it. He never let that something keep talking, though. If it kept going, it’d show him the end, and if he looked over that, he’d topple over and fall through the earth. No, he had to get back on his feet.

He look over his crumpled winnings. The day had yielded seven dollars. He stretched his leg out to shove them back in his pocket and his heel skidded a piece of cardboard. He dragged it to himself and flicked the embedded gravel out of it. His sign. Pummeled trash. All that was left of his words from last week were GOD and LOST. Beside him sat the New Testament, its open pages stripped bare of the cover and swollen full of rain and sun and absorbing all the dirt and filth there was to see.