At Stumpy’s

“There’s your muffin!” And she set the plate on the counter beside the register. No one would have been fooled into thinking it had been baked that morning but it was covered in cinnamon and sugar and it looked delicious. “That’ll be $2.85.”

Harley put a hand in his pocket but then he thought of something else. “Let me also get a glass of ice water.”

“Alrighty!”

Ice water took almost no time at all. Almost. She turned around, took a cup, and bent at the industrial ice machine beside the coffee maker. As soon as her back was turned Harley put his hand into the large vase set on the counter as a tip jar. The leafy dollars were all on top. He drew out a clutch of them, just what his fingers could touch. There was still money in the jar. It didn’t look robbed at all. When the woman turned back with his glass of ice water he was counting the bills as if they had just come from his pocket.

“Two, and three dollars.” He laid the money down for her beside the plate and folded the rest. It was nearly twenty dollars. There had been a five. It went in the front pocket of his pants. “Thank you, Miss.”

“Thank you!”

Harley was pleased with himself. He’d taken an opportunity that had been presented to him. The sum was nothing to brag about. But he’d seen the sprouting tip jar, seen that he was alone in line at the scummy little bakery, that the server was alone behind the counter. Asking for water had been some quick thinking, a little stroke of genius. If she hadn’t turned her back he’d have paid with his own money. But he’d been given a chance and he’d been smart enough to find how to take it. To Harley that was life in a nutshell.

The bakery was a 24-hour place called Stumpy’s Donuts, but there were simple sandwiches to buy, and coffee, and some Vietnamese items because of the people that owned it. Street folks came in to sleep at all hours because the owners didn’t bother them too often. So it wasn’t a very comfortable place. It smelled a bit like wet towels. Harley didn’t want to eat there. He took his muffin off the plate, wrapped it in a napkin, and went out.

Harley was at the intersection of Faust Street and Birmingham Avenue. He was in the Slab, a neighborhood so far into the dense heart of Dukeport that a fresh breeze from the bay never seemed to reach it. It had everything. Walking down the street there was a deli, a church, a carpet store, a liquor store. There were two schools, a grocery store, law offices, residential hotels, and quiet apartments. There was also a clinic. There were also two shelters. What the Slab didn’t have was wealth. And in the middle of the day an intersection like Faust and Birmingham was a gallery of human misery.

Under the carport of a motel on the corner there was an encampment of dirty tents whose owners sat together on the sidewalk with their vagabond dogs. Their shoes were lined up beside the tents. Shirts were drying over the roofs. The gutters around them reeked with urine. In the small doorways of the residential hotels the dealers stood all day. Dealers brought junkies, dazed and wasting away. Sores on their arms and faces. When they didn’t have the money to be junkies they were beggars. Everything grimy except the slick hustlers whose clothes were new but still trailed the smell of sweat and cheap soap and rude perfume. They put out items for sale on blankets on the sidewalk. They sold cell phone cords, cds, old shoes and shirts. Used miscellaneous things. Dealers argued with their patrons and women argued with their pimps and there was nothing beautiful or enviable about it except that it was a sort of hub where no one was likely to be turned away. A person could come in the morning and be greeted by familiar faces and stand all day and pretend that real money was being earned there and that progress was being made. The events of a life were happening. A person could stand against the murals outside the shabby lobby of the Lillet hotel or the Victoria next door and feel that they were a part of something.

All twenty years of Harley’s life had been in the Slab. He loved it with a strange malice. He would have burned it to the ground if he could, just to watch it rise again same as ever. Its squalor couldn’t be quashed. Its resilience impressed him. It made him feel resilient himself. Also he would have rather put a gun in his mouth than spend another twenty years there.

He had two bites from his muffin when a strange woman approached.

“That muffin is good, ah?” She had some unfamiliar accent.

“What d’you want?”

“Ah?”

He glared at her silently.

“Can I have a piece?” she added.

“Get outta here. I don’t know you.”

He turned to leave. But her hand snaked past his elbow and her index finger brushed the top of the muffin.

He spun back. “What are you doing?!”

She was licking her finger. “Cinnamon ah? It’s good. I just wanted a taste.” She was nuts. But not too nuts to be clever. She’d corrupted the whole muffin and she knew it would be hers. He’d been hustled by her. He hadn’t been on his guard. He didn’t blame anyone but himself. She lived just like him. She’d seen a thing she wanted and found a way to get it. Or almost get it. He rewarded her by pitching the muffin into the stinking gutter.