The Cheapest Cigarettes

Half a pack of the cheapest cigarettes ever made and a worn leather manuscript - those are the contents of a dead man’s jeans. Gary found him wrapped around a cactus in the desert. He doesn’t know how long it takes the elements out here to strip away a man’s flesh, but the raggedy jeans and sun-bleached bones are there just the same - and those skeletal arms, still draped over the cactus as if survival could come by simply finding the only green for miles and staying put.

Gary had been in the wrong place at the right time.

The wrong place was his apartment beside the train tracks. The kitchen window above the sink with no disposal was always open because air conditioners were out of the question after a poorly supported one had fallen from a third story window and crushed his only friend (a dog) when Gary was ten. Noisy fans helped stifle the Chicago summer heat somewhat, but the truer breeze came from the passing Red Line trains.

The right time was 10:23 on a Monday morning as he stood next to the sink window for that incoming breeze. The roaring respite rapidly receded into the tiled kitchen floor, dancing specks of black, and grogginess. Gary staggered to the sink, put his head under the tap, let the water run. The source of his pain, an onyx cat carved from wood, waited for him at sink's bottom.
Had it come from the El train? The question left Gary's mind when his eyes collided with the statue's green-eyed, pupiless gaze, green out of place on a pure black body. The cat was on its back, although it looked designed to sit upright on its hind legs. Gary leaned further into the sink basin to inspect the green gaze, bracing himself with a palm over the drain before his mind slipped away.

When it returned, his bowels felt watery as if he had almost fallen off a high ledge and then regained his balance at the last moment. Actually, his denim pants were wet, and the statue now floated with face turned away along the rim of the overflowing sink. Trembling and late for his sales call shift, Gary picked up the cat and hurled it out the window.

After an soul-crushing day of cold calling, he flopped down on his floor mattress only to get a rude jab. There was surely an explanation for the statue's reappearance under his sheets, but Gary avoided both this and the statue's green gaze as he took it outside to the rickety wooden porch and placed it on his neighbor’s doorstep. The nameless neighbor already owned about eighty live cats, and she was probably too senile to notice the difference.

Only somehow the cat was sitting in the shower the next morning. Gary bagged and trashed the silent nuisance, but it was waiting for him at the foot of his mattress after his call shift. As the week wore on, he went from absentmindedly avoiding an annoyance to frantically trying to rid himself of his kitchen window curse, yet Gary could never quite bring himself to attempt destroying the statue – thoughts of shattering that green-eyed gaze brought about a queasy tingling in this throat.

By the end of the week, he had resigned himself to its existence, and that cat behaved to the extent that it stayed perched on the kitchen sink facing the window where he'd last left it. That’s when the men in sunglasses started showing up.
Sunglasses were by no means a rare fashion statement in the Chicago summer brilliance, but Gary did notice a certain type of standard-issue shades start to cluster about him – first in crowded El cars on the Friday ride to the office and then along the alleyways outside his apartment. The men wearing them didn't go around in dark suits – nothing as obvious as that – but their perfect, relaxed postures hinted at polite, indifferent violence.

On Saturday morning, Gary first thought that the cat had finally moved from its sink perch to the front door, but the stench said otherwise. The dead, mostly black cat was also positioned on its hind legs, but its eyes were mercifully closed. “Deliver The Cat” was the message written in painstakingly neat handwriting and pinned to the deceased feline's limp, front paw.

As he hurriedly threw the cat body under the train tracks and put some newspapers over the blood, Gary knew that this had to be the fault of that damn statue. He went to the sink to conquer it, confront it, and make it see eye to eye... and spaced out again. A vibration in his skull brought him back to reality – no, not a vibration but a persistent, steady knocking. Clutching the statue with the face pressed to his chest, he rose and opened the door.

“It's Sunday. Why haven't you delivered the cat?” The man in standard-issue shades didn't really wait for an answer before leveling a standard-issue pistol at Gary's forehead. Gary's shrug froze into a cringe as he resisted the urge to look cross-eyed at where the gun was pointing.
“How is it Sunday?” The man didn't bother answering the question, and Gary noticed that his features were undistinguished to the point of being boring, the sort of face designed to slip from memory.

“Dwight Fiddlegree, Casa Colina, Las Vegas. Leave now.”

“Who – what – why me? Take the damn thing. I don't know how it got here.” Gary rotated the stiff cat from his chest and held it at arm's length toward the man like an unwanted child. He looked away when he saw the green reflected on the shades.

The man in shades remained motionless as if struggling with a difficult decision. His gun arm hadn't moved, and he didn’t reach out to take the cat. Gary didn't know what to say, so he tried to remain motionless as well, but his arm holding the statue began to tremble. Minutes ticked by – Gary wondered at the sick game until his arm dropped under the weight of the statue. The man with the gun stumbled and bent backwards at the waist, an awkward limbo move.

The neighbor’s door opened a crack, and a swarm of cats came running out. Gary, still holding the statue had to spin to keep from falling down the stairs, and the man cartwheeled off the second story rail. His shades had survived the fall, but the man's neck was at an odd angle. Gary stopped looking when the man's presumably lifeless head jerked slightly, still trying to maintain eye contact with the statue.

He ran into the apartment and grabbed his car keys along with a crusty sock to slip over the cat's head.

The drive was a blur, heading West and checking for standard-issue shades in the rear view mirror until the car sputtered and died 47 miles outside of Vegas. Who was this Dwight Fiddlegree – a drug baron, a government suit, a business man? And what if the cat wouldn't leave when Gary tried to deliver it to him? Gary stared at the sock-covered cat strapped into the passenger seat before sighing, removing the sock, and letting go.
Now, these questions and past events are of no consequence to a useless skeleton with no water. Gary can't imagine why he was he was led here, but he guesses that the cactus needles now embedded in his left forearm may have had something to do with breaking the green-eyed trance. As for the contents of the dead man's jeans, the cheapest cigarettes ever made are useless without fire, which leaves the worn leather manuscript.

He unfurls the manuscript and groans at the two green ovals that take up the top half of the page. Below is madness: shaky theories, scrambled equations, disjoint musings, and scrawled coordinates. Gary, who was in the wrong place at the right time, bears witness to one who was in the right place at the wrong time.

Or maybe he’s right on time. Gary places the statue between the bony arms and the cactus. Dwight and any other green-seekers be damned. Anyone craving that gaze can share the reward with the unknown traveler.

And maybe Gary will learn to tolerate air conditioners, maybe he'll make it back to Chicago, and maybe he’ll find someone with matches along the way so he can smoke one of the cheapest cigarettes ever made.