Eighty-Sixed : Chapter 3 - Checks and Balances

Once again, Gordon was balancing his checkbook on a Friday night.

With each passing year, and each passing decade, the meaninglessness of Fridays had worsened as it was filled with the same repetitive drudgeries:

Discount tuna fish on plain white bread.  A handful of carrot sticks on disposable — but reused nevertheless — paper plates. 

Maybe a pint of chocolate ice cream if the deals were good.  This week they were not.

Running laundry - the same green shirts and the same khaki pants - through the top loading washing machine that bounced back and forth during rinse cycles. After far too many trips to the hardware store, Gordon finally got the thing to stop spilling water on the floor, but he doubted the machine would last him much longer.  The bottom corners had long rotted with brick-red rust and were now propped in place with chunks of wood salvaged from delivery pallets.  

He didn’t enjoy television and cared little for new movie releases.  He once enjoyed going to the movies on Friday nights with Marie.  

But that was long ago.

The rare occasions he actually went to the theater in the years since she died were just exercises in frustration:

People bringing toddlers to movies made for adults (but never adult movies — Gordon never went that route).  

Seats so cold that more than once Gordon stood to check if he’d sat where someone had spilled a drink. 

The stale, damp and unidentifiable smell of the lobby was masked by the wafting aroma of overpriced popcorn. 

The way his shoes stuck and smacked with a sticky clicking sound when he walked across the theater floor, the accumulation of years of spilled butter and popcorn and melted candy. 

Unflushed toilets with urine on the seats and globs of wet toilet paper, some of which had been smacked onto the ceiling and left to dry in the men’s room. 

He’d rather stay home, and so most nights he did.

But Marie had loved movies, television, books, and stories of romance and fantasy.  Even if Gordon didn’t find something funny, Marie’s laughter in theaters was contagious and Gordon would laugh despite himself. Anything with worlds where unbelievable events unfolded, transpired, and resolved within an hour or two were Marie’s place of refuge. 

So for Marie, Gordon gladly went to the movies.  Back then he wasn’t even aware of the theater’s discomforts.  He found the most enjoyment not from the films themselves but from listening to Marie over-analyze the movie afterward over a cup of decaf and a pecan waffle at Waffle House. 

“No, it wasn’t that at all!” she’d protest with her lovely tittering laugh.  

She’d brush her auburn hair behind her ear and rapidly tap her chin — onetwothreefourfive - in that absentminded manner of hers that she employed whenever she wanted to make a point while still trying to decide exactly what the point was that she was trying to make. 

Marie would talk about the various themes from movies, and her favorite quotes, constantly asking, “And do you remember when…?” for as long as Gordon would let her.

But this Friday night Gordon would be home again, as he’d been for the last forty years. 

This was his life since those endless nights watching Marie wilt like a flower as she laid in hospice with Gordon and her mother — she herself now gone for nearly twenty-five years — keeping watch as Marie’s breathing turned from short silent whispers to a vibrato rattle that purred in harsh staccato rambles, up from her lungs and puffed out of her mouth with utter lifelessness with breath that had long gone rancid. 

Marie’s last night had been a Friday night, many decades past.  And after that Friday night all those years ago, Gordon rarely did much of anything on the Friday nights to follow or any other night for that matter.

As he signed another check and ripped it out of the checkbook, a rattling noise clanged and echoed into the night.  A glass bottle, most likely, bouncing on concrete without breaking.  The sound came from his carport. Gordon shot out from his seat at the round Formica table in the kitchen corner and stood motionless, listening.

“I gotta get a gun,” Gordon whispered to himself, as he had many times before, even though he knew he couldn’t spare the money to buy one.  

In recent years, his neighbors had either retreated from their once hospitable front porches and into the questionable safety of their newly fortified homes, locked down by security systems they couldn’t afford, or had absconded their properties outright, leaving them prey to squatters, rats, and drug deals.

Up and down Maplethorpe Avenue, bars covered store windows as late-night burglaries forced one local business after another to shutter their doors for good.  Gordon had been the lone holdout, refusing to imprison the Hewing Grocery Store with such ugly adornments.  Eventually, even he succumbed to the need to protect what he and Marie had spent their lives building.

Gordon’s own parents died before Gordon even met Marie, but the modest inheritance they left their son provided the young couple with a gift that lasted their entire married life together.

The young and idealistic Hewing Newlyweds invested that gift by opening a small grocery store in the once lovely eastern side of Burkett.

“So close to the Ohio River that you can smell Ohio,” Gordon often joked. 

But it was here that Marie and Gordon dreamed about their future and all of the other surprises that awaited them.  

Hewing Grocery Store, with the name hand-painted in the storefront window, had just seven compact aisles packed with staples: Heinz Ketchup and Kellogg’s cereals, fresh produce provided by a half dozen local farmers, the small meat counter where Gordon proudly cut meat to order.  If someone needed something they didn’t have, Marie could order it, and their neighbors gladly waited.  

It was a comfortable place located in what would now be called a strip mall, with a covered walkway where they set up three round tables with chairs.  In the summers, local kids would bike to Hewing’s and buy Hershey bars and Pepsi in glass bottles and browse through the comic book rack Gordon set up by the front door.  

Many of those same kids who hung out at Hewing’s in their youth ended up getting their first jobs working at the store.  

Gordon and Marie would sneak kisses as they busily passed in the aisles.

“Excuse me, Mr. Hewing.”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Hewing.”

They scrambled throughout the store each day, directing their small, close-knit staff.  They knew the names of all their customers. 

It was pleasant, being a part of something with meaning, where locals bought what they needed to provide for their own families. 

“When we have children, they’ll never know life without the store,” Marie would daydream. “They’ll grow up always knowing this place and someday it’ll be theirs.”

But children never came.  Years later, as Marie was slowly dying, Gordon’s stomach lurched when he read the news in the Burkett Chronicle that Walmart was expanding in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.  Even worse, a new Walmart superstore location would open in Burkett by year’s end.  Zoning was already approved and construction initiated.

Gordon was so preoccupied with Marie’s declining health that he was completely unaware of these developments until happening upon the article as he kept watch at his wife’s bedside.

“Walmart is coming to town,” he told his mother-in-law when she arrived later that morning.

“I thought you already knew,” she said.

Marie died a few days later, believing that Hewing’s Market would live forever.

Now in his kitchen, Gordon slid out from behind the table and crept toward the door.  In the distance, he heard the familiar song of dogs barking.  Down by  Tylersville Road, a train pulling a long line of freight beds clattered through town.  He looked at his watch.  10 PM.  Right on time.

Gordon reached the switch by the door that led from the kitchen to the carport and flicked off the light above the kitchen table.  As he did many times each night, Gordon checked the lock on both the door handle and the deadbolt. 

Moving to the window next to the door, he carefully separated two of the slatted window blinds and squinted into the darkness of the carport and the small concrete driveway outside. 

“Nothing,” Gordon whispered.  He scanned the sidewalk and the dark houses across the street.  “Stupid.”  

It was just a cat perhaps, or a rat sifting through the contents in his overflowing recycling bucket. 

Gordon let the blinds close again and reached to turn the kitchen light back on when another even more unsettling noise came from the other side of the door.

“Shut up, man,” a voice whispered angrily.  “He’s in there.  The light was just on.”

“You shut up,” another voice responded.

“Shh.”

Gordon had to force himself to take a breath.  His lungs turned to stone.  His stomach tightened.

In the darkness, everything felt frozen.  

He flipped on the low-wattage bulb outside the door that led from the kitchen to the driveway.  There was no movement in the carport, but whoever was outside the door couldn’t be seen from Gordon’s angle.

“Get out of here!” Gordon yelled through the door.  “I have a gun!”

“Don’t move,” one of the voices whispered from outside.  

“If he had a gun he wouldn’t tell us he had a gun,” the other voice answered.

“I have a gun!” Gordon yelled again. 

“Ain’t worth it, man,” one of the voices said. 

Gordon saw the man’s shadow dart away from the door and into the light of the carport.  The other man swore and ran after his partner. 

The two figures were swallowed up by the darkness of the neighborhood that Gordon and Marie had once filled with their dreams of children, of happiness, and a brighter future of their own design.