Running in Place
Fiction
Lorelei and I prepared for our morning run with a pause having coffee and gazed out the kitchen window. Neither of us spoke. Lorelei gazed a beatific glow at the patch of grass and the marker I placed to disguise the square of overturned soil, where I buried the steel box of fifty-dollar bills: “Beloved Pet Blackie. RIP. 2022.” Blackie was a real pet, a black poodle. She had been cremated and we had scattered her ashes over a nearby park — the only place she would relieve herself. The grass has grown over the plot where the money is, making it indistinguishable from the rest of the well-tended backyard.
Happiness lives there, in Blackie’s faux grave, but it is happiness just out of reach. It lives soon. It waits for the day we can retrieve it from its grave. But not yet. Not until we know it is safe. Satisfied that the plot is undisturbed and the money is still there, Lorelei sets her coffee mug on the counter.
“Are you ready?”
We start our run by going down Hyacinth Avenue and down, past the crossing at Rosewood Lane, careful that we don’t acknowledge Rosewood in any way. We act like it doesn’t exist. Not a glance down that street, no show of sudden tension. Not even a corner-of-an-eye glance. We assume the big black SUV is down there, looking for his money among the weeds, litter, and vacant lots where we found the canvas bag stuffed with neatly wrapped fifty-dollar bills. Ours is a neighborhood of used Japanese imports. A black luxury SUV with tinted windows is out of place there, an anomaly.
Lorelei saw the SUV a few days after we found the money during one of our morning runs.
“He was cruising the street real slow like he was looking for something,” she said, obviously shaken by the incident.
The vehicle appeared again, with its tinted windows and sinister presence parked on the street, like it was watching us.
“Don’t look,” I said. “Just act natural.”
This time, I was the shaken one. My voice quivered and I grew stiff with tension. I looked anything but natural.
We kept a low profile after that. The only time we looked in the direction of Blackie’s gravestone was in the mornings, through the kitchen window, as if the people who dumped the money on the roadside were watching us there, in our kitchen.
Nothing happened. No one came banging on our door. No thugs with violin cases holding rapid-fire weapons lurked nearby. We relaxed enough to test the water: we took one of the fifty dollar bills out of the stack we had withheld from the burial to a service convenience store across town. We bought gas and enough junk food to make a dent, in the fifty dollars. The cashier looked at the bill, held it up to the light, scanned it with one of those markers that tell you if it is counterfeit, and held it up to the light again. I sweated bullets and wished I had left the car engine running. Just in case.
He handed over the change and wished me a good day.
Giddy with success, we ate at Monty’s Steak House that night and paid for it with crisp, unmarked fifty-dollar bills.
Then a couple of days later, a black SUV drove slowly past our house. That ended our one-day spending spree, as well as any near-future splurges.
We waited for a sign that it was okay to dig up the cash, but no sign came. Occasionally we saw a black SUV in the neighborhood, and one day I was at the corner of Seveven-Eleven, and a big ugly brute carrying a violin case walked in. I’m not kidding. He had a jagged scar running up one side of his neck, and a snake tattoo crawling up his other side. He appeared to be made of solid muscle. Even his face was muscular.
“Know how I get to Rosewood Lane?” he asked the cashier.
I hurried away and gave up hope of digging up my backyard anytime soon.
Lorelei and I sat in our rickety lawn chairs, facing the faux grave marker.
“Have you noticed a lot of police patrols in the neighborhood?” Lorelei asked. “They claim a surge of porch piracy, but I don’t believe it.”
I had noticed but I didn’t give it any thought until then. Wasn’t it obvious? They were looking for our money.
The black SUV became a rare sight, but it continued to pass through the neighborhood about once a year, and sometimes strange, suspicious-looking men were seen on the streets or passing through.
There were some financial problems over the years: the car still needs work, the gutters need cleaning, the water heater leaks, and… and… No problem, though — we can handle the daily financial problems. We have the money.
