I am delighted to welcome dm gillis as a guest. Here, he presents a free short story, complete with swearing that would make Samuel L Jackson proud. It starts in a coffeehouse, so grab your cup, settle down and enjoy...
The Pyramid Scheme
by
dm gillis
Asher
was anemic, just a kid with dry lips and dark rings round his muddy
eyes. He’d been following me around for days, and had finally
cornered me on the patio of a coffeehouse on Hornby Street. That was
where it all began. And now that I’m in on the joke, I don’t
think the punchline could have been any different.
It
was hard times when we met. I’d wagered myself into a corner, doing
what all high stakes gamblers on a streak do, eventually – I’d
crashed. Now there was only enough money in my pocket for a latte and
a slice of chocolate cake, with a little left over.
Asher
was a ghost, by the way. He told me he’d died when he was twelve,
seventy-two years ago, 1943. But he’d never made it to the other
side, whatever that meant. He’d been following people round ever
since. I was his latest fixation. Sure, I’d tried to shake him, but
he was a tenacious little shit.
“First
I got sick,” he’d said, sitting across from me at my patio table.
“I puked for a week, and my mamma was real worried, and the doctor
came into my room and he was worried, too. I was trying real hard to
hang on because of the war. Back then everybody was dying. My brother
died in the Atlantic. I didn’t want to break my mamma’s heart,
but I died all the same. When the moment came, I sort of stepped out
of my body, and I saw myself there, on the bed with my eyes half
open. The doctor shook his head, and my mamma cried, and I just
walked away.”
Asher
was pretty convincing as a ghost, being a little less than solid, and
a little more than transparent. Bugs flew right through him, and
there he sat barefooted in the grimy pajamas he’d died in. What
else could he be?
“Who
can see you?” I nodded to the surrounding patrons. “Any of them?”
“No,”
Asher said. “Just you.”
I
spoke to him with my deactivated iPhone to my ear, to keep from
looking like I was talking to an imaginary friend.
“Just
me, why?”
“Because
I like you.”
“But
why aren’t you in Heaven, or Valhalla or some shit?”
“Ralph
says there ain’t no Heaven.”
“Who’s
Ralph?”
Asher
pointed across the street, at an unkempt crowd of semitransparent
individuals, some with serious body traumas, others just pale and
hopeless. I looked way, and took a gulp of coffee and a king size
bite of cake.
“That’s
very disturbing, Asher,” I said. “Please don’t show me shit
like that.”
He
shrugged. “Ralph is the one in the fancy suit with a hole in his
head,” he said.
I
risked another look, and saw a grinning man wearing a tuxedo. He
waved. There was a bloody hole in his head. It had to be Ralph.
“What
the hell does Ralph know about Heaven?” I said.
“He
knows a lot of stuff.”
“Such
as?”
“He
knows what horses are gonna win, place and show at Ex Park, and he
knows the lottery numbers.”
Horses
and lottery numbers; the story was taking on a compelling density. I
did some desperate arithmetic.
“The
lottery numbers,” I said. “Before they’re drawn, you mean?
How’s he know that?”
“Just
does.”
“Can
he come over?”
“He’s
kinda scary,” Asher said.
“And
you aren’t? C’mon, call him over.”
And
then there he was, Ralph. Sitting across from me, dressed to the
nines, with several spots of blood on his starched white shirt. His
gaze was fixed. Clearly he wasn’t using those decomposed eyes to
see with. Asher sat next to him.
“I
love this goddamn kid,” Ralph said, ruffling Asher’s hair. “I
knew a dame once, named Flo. She had a kid just like him. Flo did a
lot of heroin, see? So the little fella was sort of at loose ends. I
took him to see hockey games, and he ran a few errands for me.”
“Swell,”
I said. We hadn’t even been introduced, and Ralph was telling
stories.
“You
know,” he said, leaning toward me across the table, pointing at my
latte, every word a trashcan stinking exhalation, “I’d love to
have one of them Italian coffees again. Somethin’ real strong.
Somethin’ to straighten out the ol’ gonads.”
He
was up close now, his mouth a slack, post rigor mortis sneer. He had
a musty smell, and the blood on his forehead was still a little wet.
“What’s
with the glad rags?” I said.
“Pretty
sharp, eh?” He pinched the lapels and gave me a toothy yellow grin.
His gums had receded considerably. Then he brushed some confetti off
of his shoulder and swatted at a bright red streamer. “The
Commercial Drive boys got me out back of the Hotel Georgia, New
Year’s Eve, 1929. I was out back doin’ a little of the ol’
cocaine, when they came outta nowheres. Caught me flatfooted, and
pop, right through the head. Felt like someone’d got me a good one,
upside the skull.”
“Nice,”
I said. I was starting to get a little queasy. Ralph simply oozed
quease.
“Yeah,”
Ralph said. “Life is hard, innit? And then you get iced by the
wops, out back of the Hotel Georgia with a cocktail straw up yer
nose. Ha! Waddaya gonna do?”
“They
must have had a reason.”
“Oh
that,” Ralph said, sitting back and throwing up his hands. “Let’s
just say that some people can’t take a joke. So what if I had a few
longshoremen on the payroll, always good for some marketable
merchandise here and there. I had a couple of fighters, too, I gotta
admit, training outta the Astoria, took the occasional fall. And so
what if I was fixing the horses. The suckers lined up for that kinda
shit. Vancouver wasn’t much back then, but there was enough to go
round – I thought so, anyways.”
I
looked across the street again. “What’s with your crowd of
followers?”
“Them?
That’s just a little pyramid scheme of mine.”
“What
does that mean?”
Ralph
spat out a short guffaw, and slapped a knee. “Just a little joke,
innit Asher?” He gave the boy a none too gentle punch in the
shoulder.
“Yeah,
Ralph,” Asher smiled, rubbing his arm, “a joke.”
“Yeah,
sure it is,” Ralph said. “But seriously….” And here Ralph got
a little grim, as something brown dribbled out of the corner of his
mouth. “What’s this I hear about you wantin’ to play the
numbers?”
Asher
leaned over, and Ralph met him halfway. The boy whispered into his
ear.
“See?”
said Ralph. “This is why I love this kid. He’s right. I meant the
lottery. Jeeze, the more things change…, eh? The government takes
it over, and the numbers become the lottery. Same goddamn crooks,
different name. Now it’s all contractual agreements, church on
Sunday and expensive aftershave. I can’t keep up.”
“What
about them, then?” I pointed across the street again. “I still
wanna know.” The gruesome troop watched us like dogs waiting for a
bone.
“We
just sorta wander round together, nothin’ better to do. I lead the
way. I’m kind of a guide. Hell, they don’t know where they’re
goin’. Most of them’re still suffering from the same shit they
were suffering from when they were alive – broken hearts, bad
decisions, unresolved tribulations, that kinda crap. They brought it
all with ‘em to the grave, just can’t let it go.”
“I’m
sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Of
course you don’t, and it don’t matter, neither. Now tell me, do
you want help with the numbers, or not?”
The
numbers. My foot started tapping. I had debts, I couldn’t pay. Now
this spook was offering me a chance to cash-in, maybe big time. It
was too implausible. It was a hallucination. But what could it hurt
to play along?
Ralph’s
musty smell was getting worse.
“Tomorrow’s
Lotto Extreme is worth $25 million,” I said.
“That’s
a tidy sum,” Ralph said, “a tidy sum. It’d clear up some of
those gamblin’ debts. Oh man, it’d clear ‘em up with plenty of
change left over.”
“What
gambling debts? What do you know about my gambling debts?”
“Detroit
versus Montreal, the other day,” Ralph said, suddenly refined and
wise, despite the congealing drool. “That was your last bad last
call, wasn’t it? Plenty before that. You were hot once, but that
don’t ever last. You’ve worked your way down through the legit
bookies to the bottom feeders, and the bottom feeders don’t use
collection agencies, do they. I bet there’s some boys in town right
now, looking to cut off one or two of your fingers.”
“How
would you know?”
“Shit,
boyo, if I can tell you the lotto numbers, don’t you think I know
what’s what with you?”
There
was silence now. The street noise had stopped. Ralph and I sat
looking at each other like gunfighters. The one who looked away
first, lost.
I
looked away first.
“You’re
a risk taker,” Ralph said, taking a slip of crumpled paper out of
his pocket. “I appreciate that in a man.” He slid the slip of
paper across the table to me. His fingernails were black. “Takes
one to know one. I was a risk taker, too. It didn’t work out so
well for me, of course. But maybe now I can do you a favour. Maybe
it’ll make up for some of my own bad decisions.”
I
stared down at the paper. It was folded in two.
“Go
ahead, kid,” Ralph said. “Go buy a ticket. Use them numbers.
After tomorrow’s draw, everything changes.”
Ralph
was see-through, but the paper was solid. It slid across the table,
caught in a breeze. I slapped my hand down, and caught it.
“We’ll
talk later,” Ralph said, and vanished.
“Yeah,”
said Asher, “later.” He smiled then and faded.
It’s
hard to be cool standing in line, when you possess the winning
lottery numbers for a $25 million jackpot. I was snapping my fingers
like Sinatra to a song that wasn’t there. I’d written the numbers
down on the chit in a frenzy. I didn’t even know what they were.
The draw was the next day at 7:30pm Pacific Time.
Just
ahead of me, in line, two old men were discussing the physics of
trading on the stock market. It was the usual old fart drivel of
lottery line-ups.
“I
still say Gaussian models are the only way to go,” said the bald
one. “It’s definitive.”
Definitive?
Was that grammatically correct? Who gave a shit?
“And
when it doesn’t work,” said the one in the I
heart
Stephen Harper tee shirt,
“you blame chaos theory.”
“Of
course. The universe is chaotic.”
“Then
nothing’s predictable, nothing’s definitive, and that’s why
you’re living off a pension cheque. Take the lottery for
instance….”
Yeah,
take the lottery. Holly shit. My foot began tapping again, and I
checked my pocket for my last $5, the price of $25 million.
At
the counter, I handed the five over to a smiling Pakistani man who
moved like a machine, inserting my numbers into the slot, then
pulling out my ticket.
“Good
luck,” he said, handing it to me.
I
wondered how many times he said that in a week. Again, who gave a
shit? Then he said, “Do not forget to put your name, address and
signature on the back – very very important!” This guy was all
drama.
Now
I was suddenly aware of the potential of a measly piece of paper. The
ticket was nonnegotiable. Yet I trembled as I held it.
It
was getting dark and cold, but going home was out of the question.
Ralph was right, there were likely some of Philbin’s boys in town.
‘Las Vegas’ Max Philbin, that is, to whom I owed a little over a
hundred grand. He might even be in town himself, for that kind of
money. Max was a hands-on kind of guy. So I’d sleep at the bus
station, sitting up. If they gave me the bums rush, it would be a
back alley. But if all went according to plan, it would be the last
time I slept with the rats.
The
next morning I woke to a janitor running a mop over my shoes, as he
washed the floor.
“Hey,
fuck,” I yelped, jumping up. “These shoes are Allen Edmonds.”
“Then
you should give them back,” he said.
“Oh,
that’s a very funny fucking line for a janitor.”
He
smirked as I tried to kick off the slop. Then I saw Asher standing a
few feet away.
“What
the hell do you want?” I didn’t bother with the iPhone trick. Who
cared if a guy sleeping in a bus station talked to himself?
“Golly,”
Asher said, as unsuspecting people milled round him, “this sure is
a crummy part of town, even worse than when I was alive.”
“Yeah,
well that’s 2015 for you.”
“You
got the ticket, right?” he said.
“I
thought I’d finally gotten rid of you.”
“I
got nowheres else to go. What about the ticket?”
“I
got the fucking ticket, okay? What’s it to you.”
He
shrugged, but was that really a blank expression? What did he know?
It
was raining the usual shitty Vancouver rain outside. I checked my
watch. 8am, still a whole day to go. I put up my collar, and began to
walk. The watch was a limited edition TAG Heuer, purchased after a
big win at craps in Vegas. I considered pawning it, but thought any
pawnshop unworthy. I found an awning over an abandoned storefront,
and sat down. My stomach growled.
“Hungry?”
Asher said.
“Bugger
off.”
“There’s
a soup kitchen round the block.”
“Will
you just fuck off?”
“My
mamma and me got real hungry sometimes,” said Asher. “She drank a
lot of wine, and didn’t wanna do war work. We went to a soup
kitchen, the Franciscan Sisters. They gave us food and told us Jesus
loves us.”
“Yeah?
Well where’s Jesus now?”
“I
guess he’s home with the funny papers.”
“Terrific.”
The
guy ladling out the soup in the soup kitchen gave me the once over,
then a wondering look. My jacket was wet, but it was still an Armani.
“Hard
times, brother?”
“Temporary,”
I replied.
“Me
too,” he said. “But the thing about temporary, I’ve found, is
that it can last an awful long time.”
“Can
I just have some soup? Gawd, who the hell eats soup before noon
anyway?”
“You
do, bub.” He filled my bowl and handed me some bread. Then he said,
“Do yourself a favour. Do whatever you gotta. Rob a bank if you
have to. But don’t come back. You don’t belong here.”
The
soup’s main ingredients were water, salt and a piece of carrot, and
the bread was only minutes away from sprouting mould. Other patrons
avoided sitting with me. Asher watched without blinking, from a far
corner. Everyone but me ignored a tall grubby man at another table
when he stood up and screamed for several minutes. All-in-all, it was
a hideous dining experience.
As
I left the building, a woman wearing a Jesus
Rocks t-shirt handed
me a pair of dry socks. They were red, and I was wearing taupe slacks
with brown shell Cordovan loafers. It wasn’t going to work, but I
took them anyway.
“Keep
the faith, brother,” she said.
I
would, absolutely. I felt the ticket in my shirt pocket.
I
spent the rest of the day walking, my new socks soaked through. At
about 7:25, I walked into the mall and up to the lotto kiosk to watch
the numbers come in. It was the first time I’d actually looked at
the ticket to see what mine were. 2 3 5 7 11 13 17. What the fuck?
The first seven primes. My stomach knotted. What a ridiculous
combination. It would never come in, all primes in sequence. It was
impossible. I’d been played for a sucker by an apparition.
I
was about to tear the ticket up when I heard Asher say, “Don’t do
it.”
“But
this is stupid,” I said. People began looking at me. I should have
put my iPhone to my ear. “In all of the history of the universe,
something like this has never happened, and never will. I hope you
and your deceased pals had a good laugh.”
“Just
shut up and wait,” Asher said.
Shut
up? Poltergeist Jr. had just told me to shut up. The situation was
worsening by the second.
Then
the first numbers started to appear on the screen behind the counter.
First came 2. Then the second: 3. The third: 5. Holy shit! The forth:
7. This was sick. Unbelievable. The knot in my belly rapidly changed
from one kind to another. The next numbers couldn’t possibly be a
match. But they were: 11, 13 and 17.
I
checked it again and again.
“Holly
hot bloody fucking goddamn shithouse motherfucker,” I said.
A
couple of people looked over their shoulders.
“We
gotta go,” said Asher.
“I’m
stinking rich!”
“Yeah,”
he said, “but let’s get outta here. You’re attracting
attention. Someone’s gonna follow you out if you make too much
noise. I can’t protect you.”
He
was right. Some members of the normally zombie-like shopping mall
crowd were starting to look at me like they were either going to eat
my brains or hoist my ticket. I made for the exit, and walked out
onto the sidewalk.
Rain.
“You
have to call the lottery office in the morning,” Asher said. He was
walking quickly to keep up, his naked feet splashing through puddles.
“What
do I do until then?”
“Lay
low,” he said, and then vanished.
Lay
low. Hell, it’d been hours since my bowl of salty soup, and I was
freezing. I was a millionaire without a dime in my pocket, and no one
to celebrate with. My smartphone was useless, I’d spent most of the
day hiding under a bridge, and I couldn’t go home in case I ran
into a homicidal bookie. There was no lower to lay.
I
hugged the storefronts, weaving in and out of doorways and under
awnings, to stay out of the rain. Then passing Dunn’s Tailors, I
noticed that they were having a suit sale. I stopped and looked in
the window. High end worsteds, nice lines. Snappy but dignified
Italian ties. Dunn’s was my favourite tailor. It would be the first
place I stopped after I collected my purse.
A
few other guys must have shared my enthusiasm, because I was suddenly
in the company of three men.
“Nice,”
said one, looking into the window.
“Yeah
Max,” said another. “Real nice.”
Max?
It couldn’t be. What were the odds of him finding me here, now? But
then, what were the chances of a sequence of primes being a winning
lotto numbers?
“Fuck,”
I said, quiet and resigned.
“How
you doing, Lester?”
It
was, indeed, ‘Las Vegas’ Max Philbin standing next to me. Rain
streaming down his pale doughy face, illuminated in the dim store
window light. He had boozy garlicky Eau de Vart funk hovering over
him.
“I’m
just fine,” I said.
“You
really look like shit, though.”
“Thanks.”
“You
know,” Max said, “there ain’t one goddamn decent restaurant in
this whole toilet of a town.”
“You
should have called ahead,” I said. “I would have told you as
much.”
“You
know why I’m here, Lester?” said Max. “Because you owe me
money, and you’ve been avoiding me like it’s alimony.”
“You
got a cigarette?” I said. He offered me a Camel and a light. It was
mighty tasty, my first in over a twenty-four hours. “Give me until
tomorrow morning. Things have changed for me.”
“Changed
how?”
“I
won the lottery.”
“Don’t
get smart with us,” Max said, “you deadbeat son of a bitch.”
“Look,
just give me until tomorrow. Have one of your boys shadow me. Lock me
in a hotel room. Handcuff me to a chair. I tell ya, tomorrow I’ll
pay you every dime.”
“You’re
a liar, Lester,” Max said. “Which ain’t no business of mine,
normally. Shit, I’ve told some real whoppers in my time, eh boys?”
The
goons laughed and slapped Max on the back.
“But
you owe me over a hundred grand, and lies will not be tolerated. Grab
him boys.”
They
pulled me round the corner, and into the alley. Then they threw me
against a wall between two cars, and Max’s goons started kicking
and stomping the hell out of me. They were good, and they were
wearing me down. It wouldn’t be long before I received the final
crippling wallop, so I struggled to pull the ticket from my pocket,
and then held it up for all to see.
“It’s
legit,” I spit through the blood. “Check it. Use your fucking
phone and check it.”
“All
right all right,” Max said to his boys, “lay off.” He snatched
the ticket out of my hand.
“You
got blood on it,” he said.
The
goons snickered.
“Check
it,” Max said, handing it to one of them. “It don’t seem
impossible, I guess. You’ve been on one of the worst losing streaks
I’ve ever seen. It’s gotta turn round sooner or later. Why not
now?”
“It’s
turned around,” I assured him.
“Holy
shit!” said the goon with the Android. “Boss, take a look.”
Max
grabbed the phone and the ticket, and there the numbers were, on the
Lotto Extreme website.
“Twenty-five
million?” he said. “That can’t be right.”
“It
is,” I said. “I’ll call them in the morning and get the cheque.
Maybe it’ll take a couple of days. I don’t know, but I can pay
you then.”
‘Las
Vegas’ Max Philbin stood there for a moment, flicking the very
valuable piece of paper with a finger. There was a machine in his
head that could calculate changes in the fabric of circumstance as
easily as it did odds and percentages, and this calculation was an
easy one. Then he turned the ticket over, and looked.
“Nah!”
he said.
“Nah?
What does that mean, nah?”
“It
means I take the ticket, and we’re square.”
“No
way, I only owe you the hundred grand.”
“Call
the rest interest.”
“Fuck
no!”
“We
should whack him, boss,” one of the goons said. “He’ll go to
the cops, for sure.”
“And
tell ‘em what?” Max said. He held the ticket so his henchmen
could see the back of it in the yellow lamplight. “Look, the dumb
shit hasn’t put his name or nothin’ on the back. I’ll just fill
it in with my particulars, and badda-pow, I got twenty-five mill. If
we wax him now, he won’t be able to spend the rest of his life
cherishing this little moment.”
My
life hadn’t been a bad one, mostly. And if it was a mess now, it
was my own fault. But like most fuck-ups, I’d always felt a little
like the world was awfully unfair. I figured it had a hate on for me,
especially as I bled in the rain. Sure I’d made some bad bets, and
taken some lumps, but I’d always lost and taken my lumps from
better people than Max.
I
guess that’s how the idea came to me. And what could it hurt, now
that all I had to look forward to was a life of wondering, what
if? So I deciding to
follow through, and pulled back my knee until it touch my belly, and
then let it go: my foot, heel first into Max’s junk. You could have
heard him gasp and howl three blocks away, then he fell onto the
ground, screaming like a little girl.
His
gorillas were stunned. This was unforeseen.
“Boss?”
one of them said. “Wadda we do?”
In
a moment, after rolling around in the puddles, Max was able to form
the last two words I would ever hear, this side of the eternal
curtain –
“!!Shoot
him!!”
Then
I watched as both of his thugs drew and aimed. There were only a
couple of muzzle flashes, that I saw. But I guess they’d kept
shooting after that, because a few seconds later, standing over my
body, I saw that they’d reduced it to hamburger from the waist up.
Forget the open casket. They were going to sop me up and squeeze the
sponge out over my open grave; yea,
though I walk through the valley…,
drip drip fucking drip.
“Glad
you could make it, chief.” It was a familiar voice coming from
behind me. I turned round and saw Ralph, with Asher at his side.
“I
don’t get it,” I said.
“What’s
to get?” Ralph said. “Like I told ya, it’s a pyramid scheme,
the whole death by misadventure racket is. One dead guy enrolls as
many other dead guys as he can, and they enroll as many as they can.
Along the way a fella’s gotta learn how to recruit participants.”
“Enroll?
Participants?”
“Yeah,
participants,” Ralph said. He put his hand on Asher’s shoulder
and said, “My little man here recruited you. He’s one hell of a
recruiter, ain’t ya boy.”
“Yeah,
I’m okay,” Asher said with a shrug.
“He
even arranged for that Max fella to run into you,” Ralph said.
“But
why?”
“Hell,
I don’t know. It’s a lousy business model. You’re bound to be
disappointed. Everyone is. I’m the first to admit that there ain’t
no benefit to it. It’s kinda like the leaves falling in October. It
just happens.”
“So
now I’m dead,” I said. “And you used the lottery ticket as a
scam to enroll me. Why didn’t you just have me run over by a bus?”
“Ain’t
no fun in that.” Ralph laughed and clapped his hands. “Bein’
dead can get awful dull. A little bit of cabaret is always welcome.
We got you a good one, eh?”
“Go
to hell.”
“Been
there,” he said, his eyes flashing a bright fiery red. “Shit, I
even bought goddamn lakefront property.”
*
* * * * * * * *
Death
is weird. It’s like looking at the living through the bug splat on
a windshield.
I
swore the moment I heard about it, that I would never participate in
The Pyramid Scheme, but Ralph was right, death is boring. So, I’ve
caved-in, and I’m about to enroll my first participant. That’s
why I’m here in Vegas, standing out front of the MGM.
Oh,
hang on. I’ve got to go. Max Philbin just pulled up.
