Page 39 - WTP VOl. XI #1

“Thing is, I need somethin’ with room, so I can store shit.”
“And maybe hide shit, like from customs agents?” Mitch said, his self-control wavering. “Drugs? Immi- grants? Both?”
The man laughed uproariously, ending with another coughing fit.
“Oh, Mitch,” he said once he had regained control of his breath. “Mitch, Mitch, Mitch, Mitch, Mitch. You are such a walkin’ cliché. Still clueless after all these years.”
“Listen,” Mitch said, forcing himself to speak quietly. “You show up out of nowhere in the middle of the night and want me to give you my money and my—”
“Not give. Loan.”
“How can I be sure? You might not even—you say you’re Billy, but I look at you and—”
“Oh ye of little faith,” the man said, pounding his fist on the arm of the chair. He sprang from the sofa and scurried across the room until he was looming over Mitch, who recoiled into a defensive posture. The hamster skittered around the cage frantically.
But instead of a weapon, the man pulled a wallet from his pocket. Then he removed a card from the wallet and thrust it toward Mitch’s face. “See for yourself,” he said.
Mitch took the card. It was a driver’s license, issued about two years earlier.
“Like this is a fuckin’ bar an’ I gotta show ID,” the man said.
“Texas,” Mitch said, looking at the card.
“Eagle Pass,” the man said. “The Gateway City. Or is that Laredo?”
The name on the card was William Blinsky. The man in the photo did look like a somewhat older version of the Billy that Mitch had once known.
But something still didn’t add up. The man in the photo was cleanly shaved, with neatly combed hair and an unwrinkled dress shirt. He could’ve been a banker who had stopped at the license bureau on the way to work. Looking at the man in the photo, Mitch could recognize the Billy he had known in college. But it was harder to recognize the man who
now loomed over him.
And as Mitch handed back the license, he realized something else that baffled him even more. True, the clean-cut person in the photo didn’t resemble the seedy man standing before him—but the photo did remind him of someone else, someone he knew well. But he couldn’t quite place who.
The man stepped back from Mitch and leaned over to pick up something that had fallen from his wallet. Mitch’s eyes widened: it was a hundred-dollar bill.
As the man scooped it up, Mitch saw that the wallet bulged with a thick wad of bills. A fifty was on top until the man covered it with the hundred.
“Satisfied?” the man asked as he returned to the sofa.
“You wanted to borrow money from me.”
“Very good, compadre. What clued you in?”
“But you’ve got maybe thousands of dollars right in—”
“It ain’t enough, bro.” The man laughed. “It’s never enough.”
“But then I’m still not certain—”
“You still ain’t found dharma, Mitch? Still hung up on certainty? Ever occur to you that I can’t be certain ’bout you?”
Mitch was silent for a moment. He could hear the hamster burrowing among the wood shavings.
“But you tracked me down,” he said. “So you know I’m
Mitch Foster.”
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