Black Cat Weekly #26

ALLIGATORS DON’T ASK FOR PAYMENT, by Stephen Wasylyk-3

Scrape of a chair being pushed back. “Can’t be done. Commitments have been made and contracts signed. I’ll bring the papers tomorrow night. And a couple of friends. I hope you change your mind by then. Understand, I don’t have any choice. I’m just a big frog in a little pond and do what I’m told.”

“No point to trying to scare me.”

“Not trying to, Ralph. I’m saying they won’t wait to deal with your nephew six months down the road. They’ll say if that’s the way it has to be, do it now.”

“Then I wish them luck, Meisser. I always said that kid had a harder head than mine.”

The sound of a door closing. My thumb was on the off switch when my name stopped me. Ralph’s voice.

“Sanford, the only way you’ll be listening to this is if I’ve joined your mother in some heavenly choir sooner than I wanted to. She ever tell you we had the best voices in the valley? I really don’t know why they want the farm so bad, but then I haven’t studied on it, having more important things on my mind. They offered a million dollars, but hell, money means nothing to a dying man. Time does. Don’t understand why they refuse to give me my six months. One reason I wanted them was to get together with you. But if Meisser robs me of them tomorrow, you do what you think best. If you just want to take the money and go, that’s all right. I haven’t been much of an uncle, so you really don’t owe me a thing. I just hate to see them get away with something. Sorry we never got together, but the years, well, they really slip away, don’t they? My fault, but I want you to know you were never out of my thoughts.”

The recorder hummed.

I rose, pulled out a chair, placed the recorder on the table and sat staring at it, elbows propped, head in my hands, digesting what I’d heard.

No one could argue with what was on the tape. Meisser’s words might not be sufficient in a court of law perhaps, but they were clear enough. He and his friends were on a schedule that couldn’t wait six months for Ralph to die, so they’d hurried him along. Since he was going to die anyway, he hadn’t put up too much of a struggle.

I couldn’t see that a six month delay would make any difference to another housing development. Something bigger had to be involved, particularly in view of the million dollars. Like a mall or an industrial park.

I’d always considered myself easy to get along with. I’d been taught that I was never right a hundred percent of the time but neither was anyone else. Try hard enough and you could always find a middle ground. Schedule or no schedule, something could have been worked out so that Ralph could have died the way he’d wanted to. All it would have taken was a little understanding and compassion, which Meisser and his friends seemed to lack.

No fool, Ralph. Anything he could have written or said to me would have made him sound like a paranoid old man. Reading all those mystery stories, he’d have come across every plot, ploy, and scheme to turn the tables on the villain that any clever author had ever thought of, so he’d adapted one to let me know what went on. He’d made the recording so that I could hear for myself, and hidden it where only I would find it when I showed up to bury him. But I had no real evidence and no way to get any. Even if I could use that recording somehow to have the body exhumed, I could still prove nothing.

I’d also been taught that you never turn your back on a friend, which was what Meisser obviously had done, probably for money. He should have known better. A man who had marched into church and told off the entire congregation and the minister because they’d turned their backs on him would somehow make sure he had the last word.

Ralph was right when he’d said I didn’t owe him a thing. He’d simply thrown the ball to me. My choice to run with it or toss it over my shoulder and walk off the field with a million in my pocket. No question I could get them up to the figure they’d offered him.

Head in my hands, I sat there in that silent farmhouse, alone but for generations of ghosts pressing in on me and waiting to pass judgment on the last of the line.

Nothing I wanted more than to throw my head back and yell, “Hell no! I won’t do it! I’m taking the money and getting out!”

But I couldn’t, and I knew damned well I couldn’t.

Oh, I’d take the money, all right. We were proud, not stupid. But it wouldn’t end there.

The product of a matriarchal lineage where strong women had always set the standards and made the rules, sly old Ralph had known I wouldn’t ignore those ghosts. My mother would have raised me right, he’d told Wellens.

I’d grown up hearing her say, “We don’t permit anyone to tromp on us, dear. We always balance the books.”

She’d have understood but not approved the drastic way I’d balanced mine, but since I was the aggrieved party, it was my choice. Being unemployed, I’d had plenty of time to work it out so that the police questioned me only once after my ex-wife disappeared. I’d had to improvise, of course, since I had no money, but fortunately alligators don’t ask for payment.

Nor would my mother approve of how I’d eventually balance the books for tromped-upon Uncle Ralph. A million dollars would give me plenty of time to work that one out, too.

I might get Meisser to visit me in Florida next winter. No reason for him to refuse a free vacation in the Sunshine State. He had no idea I knew what he’d done to Ralph.

My ex-wife had been on the thin side—a diet dish, you might say. Meisser now…the alligators would consider him more like a really good piece of prime rib.

No point in spending money if it isn’t necessary.