Charity Work Part 1

Short story about a lady's unusual retirement hobby

                    
Charity Work        


    

    The old coat with the ratty faux fur collar was tossed atop the pile along with the long scarf, some heavy knit gloves minus fingers and a pair of holey, four buckle arctic boots. The customer plopped the clothes on the counter of the thrift store, and with a defiant set to her jaw and a steely glint in her eyes, hoping for some spirited haggling, said tersely,
“Twenty bucks!” which was about twenty bucks less than what the price tags added up to.
   
    The bored young  lady behind the counter reluctantly put down her copy of the “National Enquirer” next to the register, very carefully, so as to still be able to see Brad Pitt’s face smiling up at her and sorted quickly through the price tags, seeming to mentally tally them up willy-nilly, before replying brightly,
“Okie dokie hon. Want me to bag ‘em for you?”
   
     Her determined face melted into a puddle of  disappointment as she dug out her credit card. She had expected, and was pumped up for some stimulating bargaining.
      “Damn! These young kids nowadays got no fight in them, no wonder they read gossip rags and take up drugs and listen to rap and get fat!,” she thought to herself as she left the thrift store and walked out into the bright sunshine, grumbling and muttering her way down the street. Her destination was a seedy room in a run-down hotel in a bad part of town.

     Emmaline Connor was a slightly plump, proper, grey-haired lady with a face wrinkled with humor and a smile sweet as Tupelo honey. The type that little kids(and most young adults) thought of as auntie, or some variant thereof. “Em,” as she was known by close friends and relatives, having put in some thirty-odd  years as an R.N. in most of the emergency rooms and trauma units in, and around Selma, Alabama had, a few years back, hung up her scrubs.  She was not the type to sit on her duff, and  absolutely refused  to  become one with her barcalounger,
     
    She knew she had to stay busy, to keep her mind and body sharp. She always had been a fitness nut. Just didn’t feel right if she didn’t get her workout every other day. She hated fat butts on people and sure as hell was not going to let her butt become (no pun intended) her biggest asset. She decided to take up a hobby that wouldn’t only occupy her time, and keep her in shape, but would also help solve some problems that of late had become more and more an aching thorn in her side.
   
   Young lives were being shattered by the local and national drug trade. In the E.R she had seen too many lives being destroyed. Had seen too many kids addicted to crack and too many kids falling through the cracks. Just before her retirement, while treating one of the drug addicted kids she suddenly realized that while what she was doing as a nurse was all good and necessary, it simply wasn’t enough. She was only reacting to the problem and not actually preventing or eliminating it. From that moment she decided she was going to get out in front of the problem and become very…very proactive! She was determined to not stand by and passively watch this happen anymore.
  
    In the E.R.she had taken a special interest in one especially damaged young girl with the intriguing and quirky street name of“tinkle.” She had befriended her and coaxed her to go to her nephew’s rehab clinic and was amazed and delighted to see how he had brought her back from the edge of the precipice.
    
   That young girl had inspired her to not just passively treat the already damaged, but to get ahead of the curve and actively prevent the damages from happening in the first place. One way or another she was going to do something about it. Her hobby was definitely not going to be taking up knitting! Besides it would help to keep the pounds off. “You gotta’ get old , but you don’t have to carry around a big fat butt while you’re doing it.” she thought to herself.
   
    Some twelve hundred miles to the southwest, “Doc Rick,” as he was known to his mostly young charges, picked up his mail. His quick glance around the waiting room gave him a feeling of comfort and unease both at the same time. Some of the young  kids in his clinic’s waiting room looked up, smiled and shyly waved, while others, hands jammed deep into pockets, slouched, staring blankly into space, seeing nothing,…or maybe seeing too much.  Rick smiled at them all, while wincing inwardly at the appearance of the most damaged.
    
    The tall, mid-thirtyish  doctor  had opened his detox and drug rehab clinic on the sad, south side of Selma, Alabama, shortly after finishing Med school. He had been encouraged by, and provided with, a little seed money from his Aunt Emmaline, to try to help his and her old neighborhood survive the ravages of rampant and widespread use of drugs and alcohol in their old neighborhood.
   
   As was her morning ritual, “Tinkle,” his young receptionist, whose tattoos and body piercings  conjured up images of  “The Illustrated Man,”  from a vintage Ray Bradbury novel, handed him his mail. She was one of his very first success stories, and her recovery under his care was still a daily inspiration to him. He included updates about ‘Tinkle’ in the frequent  e-mails he sent to his ‘Aunt Em, ’as she had originally brought Clara (Tinkles real name) into his clinic and considered her as one of her own.
    
    This day ‘Tink’ held up high, a brown manila envelope and waved it slowly and teasingly back and forth. This had become a once a month ritual. She always held this thick manila envelope up high, and with a questioning raise of an eyebrow, (which, since it was pierced with six gold rings and one small pearl stud, didn’t raise very fast or very far) asked, in good natured teasing,
“Your lover?”
“Nope.”
“Then I can open thi…?”
“Nope,” he said,  before she could even finish. He snatched the envelope from her fingers and stalked into his office, closed the door, waited… then opened it again suddenly, as if making sure she hadn’t placed an eye to the keyhole. She raised her overladen eyebrow in disdain, gave him an irritated glower, and with a righteous sniff, started to pound her keyboard hard enough to make a few drooping heads snap to attention and make her stuffed animals do a little jig on her monitor. Before closing the door he  marveled anew at her weekly  hair color surprise. It always got a second look from him. This week’s color was florescent purple.

     Rick sat at his desk, tapped the bulky, manila envelope on his desk calendar, and thought back to a few years ago, when the first mystery envelope had arrived, marked in red ink, “Personal-For Rick’s eyes only!” Intrigued, he had opened it, only to find a second, thick envelope inside, with a short message printed on the front, which read, “Rick, I realize what you’re up against and I’m going to do what I can to help you out. These envelopes will hopefully come to you on a monthly schedule. I know you will use the contents in the most responsible manner. One condition: to ensure this relationship, I’m going to ask you to keep these donations, our secret.”
  
     His curiosity totally piqued now,  his nervous fingers slid the letter opener across the top and his jaw dropped!….With a soft plop, a thick sheaf of tightly bound, crisp, new, one hundred dollar bills slid onto his desk….Damn Sam!!
   
   At least once a month since then, regular as clockwork, this windfall continued to arrive. “Probably just chump change from some nut-case, dot-com  bazillionaire, hoping this could maybe atone for a few indiscretions made in his climb to the top,” thought Rick. “Whatever!” It was a win-win situation, and Rick wasn’t going to jeopardize it.
   
   Meanwhile, some twelve hundred miles to the northeast, on either side of a darkened store-front, sagging mesh fencing extended close up against the sidewalk. At intervals of ten feet or so were scattered cardboard, corrugated sheet metal, and blanket shelters of the homeless. Vandalized parking meters stood  like silver sentinels, standing guard over what had become staging areas for shopping carts. Circles of yellow streetlights on the cracked pavement completed the cold feel of a contemporary concentration camp.
    
    A car would pull up to the curb in front of the derelict store and sit idling for a moment. Then, from the shadows of the dark, recessed storefront, a slim young man, cap on sideways, would sidle out halfway to the curb, where he would stop.  He would look casually to the left and right, while idly fingering a heavy gold chain necklace, then  would stride quickly to the car, his head disappearing inside, only to reappear twenty seconds later.
     
    As the car would pull away, he again did his quick left and right scan before pocketing something, and like a cockroach, scuttled back into the blackness of  the storefront.  Every night at 2:30 am without fail, a long, black, six hundred series Mercedes sedan would glide to the curb, the young man with the “bling” and baggy, low riding pants would dart out like a spider, jump into the front passenger side and the dark windowed, German car would accelerate silently away.
    
    Across the street from the abandoned storefront and from behind the dirty window of an all-night, greasy spoon café, a pair of coffee brown eyes watched intently over the top of a newspaper, as the routine at the dark store-front repeated again and again, with metronomic regularity. The watcher’s eyes locked on the dealer with deadly intensity. The watcher occupied the same window booth for three consecutive nights, until the routine at the derelict store was confirmed. 
    
    Not going unnoticed by the watcher was a tired looking, thirty-going-on-fifty year old woman, with a five to six year old girl in tow, frequenting a refrigerator box shanty some seventy feet to the south of the storefront. Both mother and child appeared dirty and malnourished.
     
    At the end of the third night, the watcher rolled up the paper and smacked yet another roach flatter than a flitter, and tried to remember whether that made thirty or thirty one of the not so little buggers. A last sip of cold, bitter coffee was taken, a substantial tip left under the cracked, greasy salt shaker, the newspaper tossed into the trash, and the watcher walked out into the night.
   
     It was two A.M., the following night, and the homeless colony had settled into the troubled sleep of the lost and the losers. A thin, reedy voice, singing fractured fragments of “Mamas And Papas” oldies, slowly grew louder, as a dirty, disheveled, bag lady pushed her shopping cart, piled high with flattened cardboard boxes and crushed cans, toward the dark storefront. She stopped singing and hesitated in front of the little girl’s make-shift home for a moment, her head hanging sadly, before squaring her shoulders with a shake and turning resolutely again toward her destination.
   
    Stopping directly in front of the “Spiderman’s”(as he was known unaffectionately in this neighborhood) web/storefront/office, she stopped caterwauling and started to rummage like a deranged badger through the trash in her cart, cans and bags flying over her shoulders.  She then rose triumphantly, holding high an extreme triple-x DVD, whose cover left no doubt as to its contents.
    Even in the dim, yellowish, street light, the pusher’s eyes picked up eagerly on what the bag lady had obviously come to barter for drugs with.
    “Whatchoo got old woman?” he said, scuttling out of the darkness and sidling up to her, leaning over her to see the goods more closely.
    “ I got what you surely needin’ young dude” she said, while stealing glances right and left and putting her right hand lightly on his shoulder, subtly drawing him closer to the  DVD held high in her left hand
     
    Satisfied that his brain and eyes were riveted to the DVD, her right hand  pushed what appeared to be an innocent pink tampon firmly into the side of “Spiderman’s” neck. To say he was shocked would be an extreme understatement, as fifty thousand volts left the model C-2 Taser with as much  stopping power as a “Clint Eastwood” three fifty magnum. That Taser was one of her best buys yet on E-bay, she thought as she felt him jump and slump. The pusher dropped like a bag of rocks as sixty pulses per second of eighteen amp current caused his body to jump about like the proverbial “cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
    
    Bag lady then did a most amazing transformation into an agile, and business-like persona. She stepped deftly over his violently quivering body and into the dark storefront, where she found a small backpack, brought it into the light, gave the thick roll of hundreds inside a cursory examination, closed it, and  tossed it into her cart. From a pocket on her tattered, threadbare coat she took out a small black bag, unzipped it, and pulled out a syringe. After doing the requisite squirt to purge any air, she then, with practiced, medical expertise, injected two  hours of deep sleep into “Spiderman’s” neck.
     
    The bag lady stood, purveyed her handiwork with satisfaction, gave a low chuckle, leaned over and said “that’s what you get for calling me an old woman you pimply faced punk!” She then pushed her cart away  from the dealer’s  dark office, and started a shrill rendition of  the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” as she strolled back  the way she came. she chuckled again to herself, thinking how ‘ol  “Spidey” was probably still feeling some good vibrations himself, back there in the dark.
   
     Her singing stopped, as she paused once more in front the little girl’s cardboard home.  She dug deep into her coat pocket to pull out  a sealed envelope and slid it under the tattered blanket serving as a door. Inside were several gift cards from local food and clothing stores, and one very special one from “ToysRus.”  Her thin reedy, off -key voice launched into “Feelin Groovy,” and then slowly grew distant and finally faded away to silence as the bag lady shuffled away into the darkness.
      
    Back in Selma, as Rick leaned back in his plush chair and absentmindedly fanned the latest mystery envelope back and forth , a faint and familiar smell of lavender shook loose a chain of pleasant memories from his childhood… and a link was made.
     As an incredulous smile slowly spread across his face, he thought to himself, “Yeah, right! Retired my a*s.” Meanwhile, in yet another city, a few days later……
   
     “Aunty em” once again felt the old adrenaline rush kick in as she settled  into the duct-tape patched, seat of the window booth of yet another greasy spoon café, in yet another bad neighborhood, in yet another bad town She ordered a coffee, and raised her newspaper to just below  her coffee brown eyes and chuckled softly to herself….”Damn!”…“I thought retirement was going to be boring, but I think I’ve actually made a little dent in this God-awful drug trade, and it sure keeps the ol’ adrenaline flowing. I surely do love retirement, and I  surely do get such a feelin’ of accomplishment.”
        
    She contentedly sipped her coffee and watched over the top of her paper as yet another black Mercedes pulled up across the street and picked up a young pusher and the nights drug proceeds. Her eyes lost interest in, and drifted from the street pusher, and instead, this time, locked with deadly intensity on the dark silhouette in the back seat. “Life is good and retirement is good,” she thought, as she casually swatted another roach.
    “Long as you find a nice hobby to keep your mind occupied and you sucka, are gonna occupy my time!”

Author's Note

Spacing and all did not translate well from my word processor. Please excuse those errors/should I write a part 2, or just put Emmaline out to pasture for good?