Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (always you kirsty moseley .txt) 📗

“Got ’em!” Oswald finds the little Bedazzled flip-flops on the floor of the temporary closet next to her purse. She hasn’t actually used the purse in months, maybe a year. Lately, her existence lies between the margins of medical institutions and her bedroom at home. She has no opportunities anymore to dig for makeup, search for her little weed pipe, or whip out her debit card like a gunslinger. The purse is merely nostalgia to her now. This kills Oswald. “What about your nipple clamps? Your crotchless panties?”

“That’s a bad joke.”

He grins at her. “You’d miss my jokes, admit it. I wasn’t around, you’d miss ’em.”

“Actually, that’s the one thing I will not miss when I’m not around.”

His smile collapses. He swallows hard and goes over to her. Gently, carefully, he pulls back the covers and reveals her emaciated form, which is dressed in a travel robe. He tenderly slips the flip-flops on her tiny feet. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The way Oswald meticulously positions each slipper on each tiny, bony foot reveals a certain care, a concern that would rival an altar boy at high mass preparing the host for communion. “You ain’t going nowhere, you’re gonna be dancing on all of our graves.”

“Oswald, honey, you don’t have to lie.”

He stands up and looks at her. “I’m just reporting what Dr. Blume told me.”

“That’s another lie. That asshole hasn’t said a positive thing since I came to him three years ago with back pain. Oswald, just cut it out.”

Oswald feels the barricade within him cracking. He wipes his eyes and lies down on the bed next to her, the force of his weight making the high-tech gurney creak. He puts his gnarled, muscular arm—the one with the Indian headdress tattooed on the bicep—around the tiny woman. He plants a kiss on her ear. She smiles and kisses his tattoo. “It’s okay, Ozzie. I’m fine with all this.”

He swallows again and says in a small, strangled voice, “That makes one of us.”

She sits up, brushes herself off, takes a deep breath, and looks into her husband’s eyes. “I’m going home to die, and I’m okay with that, and you should be, too. Now get off me before you break the bed.”

2.

The next day, Oswald enters the laundromat’s sultry-soapy atmosphere, fighting waves of dizziness from too much weed. He pauses just inside the entrance and scans the fluorescent-drenched space for any sign of the Candy Man. At the moment, all Oswald can see through his double vision are sullen black matrons loading battered dryers with yellowed linens. Muzak drones accompaniment to the ranks of rumbling washing machines, and the air smells of soap-perfumed mildew. Oswald hears a familiar voice coming from the rear, outside the open doorway of a tiny office.

“It ain’t whatchacall rocket science, Shirley, awright?” The Candy Man is back there waving a pair of stained Lane Bryant panties that look as though they might fit a Volkswagen Bus, making a point to an obese woman in a house dress. “You put them colors in a different machine from the whites.”

The old woman snatches the panties away in a huff and shuffles back to her perch.

“And lay off the bleach!” the Candy Man calls after the matron, shaking his head. An emaciated black man in his middle years, the Candy Man wears velveteen bellbottoms and waffled sandals. His lime-green Nehru jacket is buttoned up against his wattle, and a small yarmulke sits atop his big bush of an Afro. A part-time pimp, shylock, and drug dealer, the Candy Man is the only two-bit player left in the game who is desperate enough to hire a reprobate like Oswald. The rest of the criminal world has long since written off “the Big Chief” (as Oswald is known in Mafia circles) as a basket case, a dead man walking, a besotted casualty of “the life.”

Now the Candy Man is about to turn back to his office when he pauses and does an exaggerated double take, noticing Oswald lumbering toward him. “Now lookee, lookee, lookee what the cat done dragged in. Mr. Means, I presume.”

“Afternoon, Candy.” Oswald approaches like a faltering ship about to capsize. He struggles to avoid slurring his words. “Got a minute?”

“You been hittin’ the Maddog again?”

“No... I mean, what do you mean?” Oswald stands there wavering slightly.

“You look like eighty miles of bad shit is what.”

“Can we talk for a second?”

The Candy Man gives him a non-committal shrug. “Just so long as you don’t sit down-wind—you smell like some kinda stinky-ass wet dog fur.”

The skinny pimp turns and leads Oswald into a cluttered office filled with moldering tapestries of naked Nubian goddesses and marijuana plants. Behind a massive desk stacked with homemade porn DVDs and eight-by-ten glossies of nameless C-movie starlets, hangs a row of purple grow-lights, their sickly pallor shining down through veils of smoke at rows of pot plants.

“Take a load off them dogs, Big Chief.” The Candy Man gestures convivially at a chair, setting himself down on a huge, tufted-leather swivel behind the desk.

“I’ll come straight to the point,” Oswald says, settling down on a stiff armchair. The air reeks of sweet leaf and rotten old caulk.

“Slow down, Big Chief, pop a chill for a second.” The Candy Man fishes in a drawer, then pulls out a freshly rolled doobie the size of a Kosher dill. He sparks it with a pipe lighter. The long tendril of flame dances in the pimp’s ebony pupils.

Oswald wrings his calloused hands. “The thing of it is, I need work.”

“Work, huh.” The Candy Man utters the words around the end of the joint with an existential stoicism as he sucks a rush into his lungs, the bud crackling. He exhales noxious smoke and then offers it to Oswald. “Why don’t y’all have a toke and a smile?”

Oswald takes the spliff and drags one off it. The hot smoke