The Jacket

Austin stared through the neon-illuminated window at the sparsely filled tables inside. Mostly random assortments of families; overly stressed parents staring into the half-eaten burger clenched in their hands while their children squatted in the plastic booths, stuffing handfuls of cold, overly-salted fries into and around their mouths. A few booths of teenagers, each more interested in the electronic device in their hand than their food or company. One woman sat alone in the purple, plastic swivel chair of a small back corner table. Each individual item was arranged neatly on her tray and she took a bite of one after the other in a meticulously ordered pattern. He watched her, trying to imagine her life story. He decided she lived alone. It didn’t take much to see that. She had tried having roommates, but they didn’t suit her nor she them. She had been engaged once, he believed, but the guy had run off a month before the wedding leaving little more than a brief note stating that it wasn’t her it was him and that he just couldn’t go though with it. She had found out a week later that he had moved in with his business partner, a woman ten years his junior, in the next town over and they were planning on marrying in the fall. Maybe they were having a child together too. Austin decided the woman had tried to move on, going on several dates immediately after with men her mother had set her up with, sons of her bingo friends, but nothing went past a first date. She had always hoped they would call, but they never did. Since then she had kept to herself, spending nights at home with her small dog, a Yorkie, maybe a Shih Tzu, and watching obscure mystery dramas on a television she had purchased at the local thrift shop. He decided it was a sad existence. He decided she would probably kill herself before her next birthday. And, finally, he decided that he would gladly trade places with her.

Austin turned to go and bumped into the overflowing trashcan that had served as a bumper for many of the restaurant’s drive-through patrons. Crumpled napkins and crushed cardboard containers littered the ground beneath scrapes of metallic blue and yellow paint. Who is driving a yellow car, he thought, and is reckless enough to scratch it? To him, only Ferraris and other cars of that ilk came in yellow. Only flashy people with money bought yellow cars. But then again, he thought, who is driving a yellow car and stinking up the inside with odors of deep-fried oil and grilled meat? He imagined an almost-out-of-high-school, lanky boy working as a valet at the local hotel taking a visitor’s pristine new car out for a joy ride and imbibing in some midnight munchies. The teen, new to driving and even newer to manual shifting, would have stalled the car twice before making it to the drive through and then destroyed the transmission on the way back. The owner would have been livid and the boy would have been fired, leaving him desperately searching for some way to make some money before prom.

As Austin stepped around the trashcan to continue down the sidewalk, he noticed a half-eaten, half-wrapped chicken sandwich balanced precariously on the edge of the overflowing receptacle. A cup had been overturned next to it and much of the melted remains of a milkshake, strawberry he guessed, had soaked into the bun. He picked up the sandwich and rearranged it in his hands, straightening out the two bun halves, the breaded meat, and what was left of a slice of unripe tomato and an aged lettuce leaf. A couple entered the restaurant and the smell that wafted out behind them was nearly powerful enough to convince him of the deliciousness of what he held in his hand. No, he thought. He wasn’t that desperate. Yet. He unfolded the creased edges of the wrapper and reworked them around the exposed sandwich. He then pressed the parcel together in his hands and placed it in the side pocket of his oversized cargo pants. He took a deep breath and the chill of the air stung the back of his throat. It was getting late. He had to get back.

Two blocks later, he paused next to a parked car that stood alone beneath a streetlight. The light emitted a soft orange glow that encircled Austin and the car, blocking out the rest of the world. He looked around, but the street was vacant. A car pulled up to the stoplight a block away and then made a right turn away from him. Austin looked back down at the car next to him. It wasn’t all that fancy. Not yellow fancy or anything. What good would it do him though? It appeared to be totally empty too. And then, looking again, crumpled up in a heap on the front passenger’s seat, was a jacket. He leaned a little closer, almost touching his nose to the cold glass of the window. It was indeed a jacket. He couldn’t tell much about it as it was shadowed from the streetlight, but, from what he could tell, it would be warm. The ends of the sleeves seemed to show a wooly interior lining that Austin could almost feel on his exposed arms.

The streetlight above flickered for a moment, reminding Austin where he was. He looked up and down the street and saw no one heading in his direction, no one on the street at all for that matter. He was, however, surrounded by apartment buildings and he noticed several lit windows, allowing that there were observant inhabitants nearby. A crisp breeze whipped down the sidewalk, wrapping his whole upper half in goose bumps. The jacket now glowed with the warmth of a summer’s day at the beach. Or, at least, what he imagined that to be. Having grown up in the city, he had never seen a beach in person. His only impression came from a large poster in the window of a convenience store he used to pass on walks home from school. It advertised the current lottery, encouraging people to buy tickets, win, and spend the rest of their lives lounging on the shore of a private island while linen draped attendants continually filled icy cups with various adult beverages. The people in that poster looked quite happy, and warm.

He stepped forward and quickly hit his hip against the door and then jumped back. No alarm. He reached out and tapped the window with the knuckle of his middle finger. Again, no alarm. Just then, he noticed a shadow in a second-story window across the street and he quickly moved away from the car, heading down the sidewalk. It wasn’t until he got to the corner and the flashing red hand of the crosswalk stopped him that he turned back to look at the car. No one had seen him. There probably wasn’t even anyone in that window, he thought to himself. He turned and waited, watching as a car came to a stop in front of him.

A young brunette woman sat in the passenger seat. She was wrapped in a thick wool sweater and her neck was swaddled in a beautiful blue scarf. She had the visor flipped down in front of her and was applying a deep burgundy lipstick in the dim light of the mirror’s lamp. Austin watched her. He wondered what her biggest concern was. He hoped she had more to worry about than whether or not a bump in the road would ruin her perfectly lined lips. Probably not. He couldn’t see the driver, but he imagined he knew exactly who the guy was. It had to be a guy; this was a guy’s car. It was jet black with bright blue racing stripes down the side. Neon lights glowed from underneath the body and the wheels had designer rims that glistened with immaculate cleanliness. The driver would be a terribly good-looking entrepreneur who spent hours of his day at the gym and whose appearance would equal the flashiness of his car. The light turned green, the woman flipped up the visor, and the car rounded the corner. As the car sped off and Austin’s eyes followed it back, deep into the darkness of the road where it curved into the distance, he was left staring at that car parked there on the side of the road underneath the streetlight, the jacket inside silently taunting him. All he wanted, needed, was that jacket.

The apartment building he now stood next to had plenty of rocks in its front garden space. He could easily grab one of those and break the side window, take the jacket, and run. If he had a piece of paper and a pen he would have left a note. Sorry I broke your window with my baseball. Billy. But what kid was playing baseball on the sidewalk at this hour? I need this more than you, I promise. Straightforward and honest. That would work. But he had no paper and no pen and it didn’t matter what the note would have said. The owner of the car would have been pissed either way.

He stood next to the car holding a rather large rock, turning it over and over in his hand. He had tried to pick one that was small enough to discreetly hide if someone had appeared out of nowhere but big enough to actually do the necessary damage. He inched closer to the car, quickly looking back and forth along the street, worrying that any car passing by would come to a screeching halt if they saw a character like him standing there, bad intentions in his eyes. He lifted his hand that held the large stone and tapped it lightly against the window, hesitant with the fear of making enough noise to alert the neighbors. He imagined the smash of the glass echoing, bouncing among the outer walls of the apartment buildings and ringing in the ears of an overly vigilant old man who sat silently in his recliner, waiting, secretly desiring a disturbance. With the crash outside, the man, with a swiftness that contradicted his age, would remove the corded phone from its receiver and press the enlarged buttons to summon the authorities. Before Austin could reach through the shattered window to retrieve the jacket, he would be surrounded by five cop cars, and multiple officers, each spurred on by the promise of the criminal activity they longed for but lacked in this rather boring part of town. Each one would leap from their car, hands on their holstered weapons, faces bright with eager anticipation. One would have a prominent coffee stain spread down the front of his shirt, as he had spilled it pulling an urgent U-turn in order to be the first on the scene.

Tap. Nothing. Again, this time with a bit more force, he hit the rock against the window. It left behind a slight scrape on the glass, but no real damage. Austin took a deep breath and then let it out, slowly exhaling a hazy cloud into the cold night. The moment of decision hung around him. A light in the apartment building across the street went out and, bellied by the removal of one witness, Austin stepped back from the car and threw the rock at the side window, hoping that it would be a direct hit. Smash. The stone broke through the glass, bounced off the center console, and ended up in the driver’s seat. Austin, who had jumped back, pressing his body as close as possible to the wall of the adjacent building, stood holding his breath, waiting for the sirens. Nothing. He peeked out from the shadows to look up and down the street. Nothing. In front of him, the car sat quietly, a few tears of glass dripping down from the battered eye.

Placing one foot gently in front of the other, Austin worked his way up to the car door. He looked through the shattered pane to the jacket now dusted with a spray of broken glass. Once more, he looked around to make sure there was no movement on the street. His eyes darted around. He kept his head lowered so as to avoid any full-facial recognition by an audience in any of the nearby windows who would then be able to give a perfect rendering to the police sketch artist. And, with one deep breath, the first he had taken since the rock had left his hand, he grabbed the jacket from inside the car and ran.

He ran straight down the sidewalk, crossing two streets and ignoring one flashing and one solid red hand before he came to a stop in the parking lot of a large grocery store. Grasping the jacket tightly under one arm, Austin hunched over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. Both the run and the sheer fact that he had done something so criminal sent his heart racing throughout his body. It took several long minutes before he was able to pull himself together enough to stand and take in his surroundings. It was a space he knew well. The parking lot was unusually empty, sprinkled with only a handful of cars, but the harsh florescent lights which ran the length of the aisles inside spread out into the night through the long front windows of the building. Before him was his childhood and his adolescence.

He remembered going to that grocery store with his mother when he was a kid. By the front door, there had been a row of toy dispensers. You could put a quarter in the slot, turn the latch, and a toy in a tiny plastic capsule would fall out. If Austin behaved himself in the store, which he tried his best to do, his mother would give him a quarter for the toy dispenser as a reward. Austin always found it so exciting to see which one of the many toys inside he would get to take home with him. Sometimes it was a rubber bouncy ball. Other times it was a little plastic racing car. His favorite, though, was the sticky jelly hand that you could fling out against a wall or window and it would stick like a long frog’s tongue. He would play with it for hours until it would eventually lose all its stickiness and become just a long gooey string of dirt and grime. The dispensers were gone now; replaced by two large soda vending machines.

This grocery store was also where he spent a large part of his teen years working as a bag boy. After school each day and one day every-other weekend, he would spend hours at the end of the cash register lines filling stiff paper bags with the purchases of stay-at-home moms, single middle-aged men, and the elderly. Three separate groups that each had their own specific purchases. The first was always in a hurry. They would never look him directly in the eye as he filled their bag with sugar-filled cereals, fruit snacks, apple juice, boxes of Lunchables, and diet drinks. “Oh, plastic please,” they would say once he had already filled half a paper bag with their items. “Trying to save the trees you know,” they would comment to the checker with a wink, as if keeping Austin out of some big inside joke. The second group was typically slovenly dressed and passing through on their way home from one construction site or another. They stacked the conveyor belt with TV dinners, Cheez Whiz, and beer. They would never say much outside of a grunt or occasionally calling him “kid”. And the last group was slow and cranky. They would glare at him while he bagged their items, always telling him to be careful with the eggs while they shoveled fistfuls of coupons at the cashier. The work was monotonous and the paper cuts were plentiful. It wasn’t until Austin was twenty-four that he realized he’d been doing the same job for nearly a decade and that he wanted out. He left, planning on finding something better.

A noise on the far side of the parking lot drew his attention and Austin turned to see a man pushing a filled grocery cart toward the lot exit. The cart did not belong to this grocery store, nor was it filled with food. From the dim light that was coming from the side window of the store, Austin could just barely make out some of the cart’s contents. Some blankets, a backpack, and a couple plastic bags that had no clear form to help distinguish what was inside. For a while, the man just stood next to his cart, fiddling with something in one of the bags. He would occasionally laugh, hold up an object for closer inspection, and then go back to his fiddling. What was he doing, Austin wondered. He tried to focus on this particular moment in the man’s life, nothing before or after, as the larger picture was something that terrified him beyond understanding. He didn’t want to think about how just a few years ago, maybe five, ten at the most, this man was him. He didn’t want to think about how the man had lost his job and hadn’t been able to find another, how his whole life had quickly come crumbling down without any kind of net to catch his fall, and how bleak any possibility of a future looked for him. The present moment was all Austin could bare to see and even it was still pretty hard to watch.

The man began to push his cart out into the street and was nearly hit by a car turning off the main road. He quickly pulled his cart back onto the sidewalk and let out a trail of obscenities paired with a raised fist as the car sped away. He then gingerly eased his cart back into the street and started at a brisk pace, pushing his cart along the road, occasionally veering into and colliding with the curb before snaking back out into the center of the oncoming lane. Another car rounded the corner and swerved in time to miss the meandering pedestrian and his cart. It honked its horn twice before continuing on.

Austin worried that the next car to pass by would have a broken passenger side window and the driver would be on a hunt for whoever it was that caused the damage and stole his jacket. The jacket, Austin would be told as he sat in handcuffs, suffering from a growing black eye inflicted upon him by its owner, had been all over the world. The man had worn it hiking across Europe and sailing off the coast of South America. It had memories, sentimental value, and no bum was going to take it from him. “Bum,” he would say. And he would look at Austin with a mixture of cockiness and revulsion. The street was now empty, though, and Austin figured he still had a few minutes to get away, with caution. He didn’t want to wear the jacket for fear that nighttime vigilantes would spot him as the thief and come after him. Without a second thought he stuffed the jacket under his shirt and picked up his pace, heading down the street another six blocks before turning left into a narrow alleyway.

Turning the corner into the narrow lane, he saw her. She was curled up in a nook beside the large dumpster. The cardboard shelter he had made for them earlier in the day had fallen slightly to the side, slipping from the top edge of the dumpster and backwards towards the wall so that part of her body was now exposed. He could see her small Disney tennis shoes sticking out into the alley. They were too small for her, but she still wore them, the back of the shoe smashed down to let her heel stick out. She loved them. She said one day she would have beautiful shoes just like the princesses that paraded around her worn down soles. And she would dance at a beautiful ball wearing a beautiful gown. “And we will live happily ever after. The end,” she would say, smiling up at him, hope sparkling in her eyes.

Austin approached her quietly. If she was sleeping, he didn’t want to wake her. He crouched down next to her under the fallen cover. She moved, just slightly, rolling over in her sleep. Her face winced and he wondered what she was dreaming about. A few strands of her hair slid down onto her face, coming to rest on her nose. As he gently swept them back behind her ear he couldn’t help but think how much she was already looking like her mother. He missed her and knew how disappointed she would be in him.

Clara had been the only woman who truly cared for him and was the strength of their family. Without her, he had crumbled. He had promised her so much. And when he lost her, those promises were left hanging all around him, empty and lifeless. All that remained of that life, his dream, was their daughter. He looked down at the girl who had now curled into his hip, clinging to him, lost in sleep.

He sighed and pulled the jacket out from under his shirt. He carefully wrapped it around the sleeping child, tucking it in around her. He then shifted his body and pulled the chicken sandwich out of his pocket. He unwrapped it and tore it in half, one half slightly larger than the other. He balanced the smaller half on his knee while he rewrapped the larger one and tucked it into one of the jacket’s pockets. He looked at the piece of the sandwich resting on his knee. Disappointed indeed. He shoved the entire piece in his mouth and swallowed as a yellow Ferrari sped by at the end of the alley.