The Failed Ebenezer Scrooge Experiment

“Hey, toots, how’re the wieners today?”

The vendor scowls at Oleander while picking up a dog and plopping it into a white bun. She pushes it over to him and demands her two dollars with an open palm. He slides it over, but it’s all in nickels and dimes. Her scowl deepens further. He doesn’t try his line. There’s no way she’ll even react to it. She’s not worth his time or his money. A hot dog seller could never jive in his world and he wouldn’t want her to. Who knows what his friends would say. Besides, he bets her cooch smells like used hot dog water.

The sidewalk has thinned since the others have dispersed but there is a long line forming behind them. The woman cuts her eyes to Oleander, glaring at him, telling him to leave without saying a word. He smiles wolfishly at her and moves away.

He and Marcus usually take their dogs down to the little square a few blocks over. They sit on the edge of a fountain and people-watch, judging the men who dress nicer than them while silently stewing inside. Today is no different from the others.

An accident on the way to the fountain congests the road and sidewalk. Marcus pulls ahead and Oleander loses sight of him in the crowd. He turns off the main road, venturing into a dark alley, thoughtless, like a crow chasing a pinprick of something shiny. The alley is desolate.

“Got a little bitch that’s following you around,” a man’s voice booms suddenly. “ Her name starts with a B, I think. She’s an expensive gal, I think. Need any help with that.” It doesn’t seem like a question to Oleander’s ears. The man is merely stating what he will be doing, and Oleander has to go along for the ride.

He finds the man deep at the end of the alley, surrounded by the dank of the cement. The man’s lips are thick like he just popped out of a cartoon in the middle of eating a whole row of corn. He sits on his round and very considerable backside with his arms crossed. He’s wearing a hodgepodge of old clothes, but all seem to be some form of a high-end brand. A stylish bum, who’d have thought. He’s just another in the large population of homeless people that plague the city.

“Definitely need help, I think. Penny for your thoughts? Penny for your prick? Few thousand for your high, I think. Likes an expensive gal, I think. Quite in a bit of trouble, I know. Quite a lot of trouble.” Oleander doesn’t know what to say to this man with the massive presence. His voice is like the bubbling of a nice warm stew, overflowing the edges of a large pot.

“I-I don’t know what you mean,” Oleander stutters. The man shifts and rolls of belly fat peek through his shirt. His bald head glistens with sweat even with the chill in the air. Oleander is still partly turned away, hands around his collar. He wants to retreat, but, he is stunned by the man’s words and the fact that he has already guessed so much correctly. This must be some sort of set-up. Someone from the office paid this bum twenty dollars to rip him a good one.

“You know exactly what I mean, I think. A little booger sugar up the old snooter, I think.”

How could this man know about his debt? Even for all the money that he claimed to make, Oleander had almost nothing to his name. Most of it was tied up in stocks and material items. There was nothing that he could sell-off before the dealer’s deadline came. His dead-line. Death-line. End of the line. Ten thousand dollars, give or take a few hundred. Twenty-thousand that he didn’t have. And no one was willing to loan to him, because they all had their own Bernice’s and their own death-lines.

“Got a little white under there? I think it might be some chalk, or wait, maybe it’s some finishing powder. Tilt it up so I can see it better. Not too far. I don’t care for boogers.”

Oleander is speechless. He feels completely wiped out by this quick-talking bum. The words punch past him, striking the wall behind his head.

“I could help you with that, I know. Got a little green that might go well with white. Interested?”. The bum’s hands are held out in the classic car salesman pitch. His eyes are lit up and sparkling. For once, the bum has stopped talking entirely

Oleander rubs his hands down the sides of his trench coat. They come away covered in the lint from the dryer. Damn, the dry cleaner could barely do his damn job. Oh wait, he did die last week. That might be why.

“How would you know?” he asks. As if the bum will give him a straight answer.

“Does it matter, I don’t think so? I think you’re in dire need of some good ol’ brotherly love.”

He isn’t much off the mark. Oleander is approaching his dead-line, moving very quickly on his trolley of fate. By the end of the week, he might be fingerless. Fingerless if he can’t come up with the money to pay for Bernice’s love.

“All you gotta do is sign my hand, and I’ll give you all you need. Your name will go in my little black book. Nothing to worry about. Just don’t spend past your allotment” The bum sticks his hand out even further and Oleander shies away. He stares at the bum’s rough palm and can see etchings. Little lines that he could almost convince himself to believe are other signatures - if he was a man who believed in Santa Clause, but he’s not.

He pushes the man’s hand away. But the man just swings it back up, not saying anything, just grinning his wide thick grin. A thick aura of menacing energy flows suddenly off the man and Oleander’s back begins to sweat. He feels entranced, forced to move his finger forward and trace his name across the man’s palm.

He finishes his elementary school assignment, and the man draws his hand back. He smiles gently at Oleander and then winks. Oleander finally finds it within himself to flee. He turns tail and runs, followed by the sound of the man’s booming laughter.

-

It shows up in his pockets later that night. Stacks and stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, all wrapped together in those paper bands that you get at the bank. Enough money to cover his debt, twenty-thousand in total. There is even some leftover, $6,666, an odd amount that Oleander refuses to believe is ominous even when he considers the possibility of how he came into it. He’ll still have all his fingers by week’s end.

He drops the money off at a bus stop, watching nervously from a cafe as another man intercepts the duffel bag. Apparently, there’s nothing wrong with the bills. Everything comes out clear and well. And now Oleander is clear and well.

-

The killing, the dying, the grievous bodily harm, and unfortunate accidents. It begins without much thought. He spends three dollars at a gas station for a drink and a bag of chips. On his way to the office, he sees a three-car pile-up. Later on the news, the reporter drones that there were no survivors. It doesn’t matter much to Oleander. It happens all the time. It’s part of life.

Later, he spends two hundred and fifty on a new pair of shoes. A couple of days later, an entire passenger plane goes down, all of the people in it are gone. Just another fact of life.

He really begins to notice it when people in his office begin to catch sick. They begin to catch sick and then go somewhere Oleander doesn’t like to think about. Oleander doesn’t want to catch their sick. It seems like their deadlines have come up much shorter than they thought.

He whittles away the money, slowly but surely, sometimes very quickly with very little thought. And around the world, he continues to notice sudden and disturbing accidents. Many without any explanation, but these things happen, it seems typical to him. A growing sense of dread pools in the pit of his stomach whenever he watches the news. He begins to avoid it. He turns his eyes away when it’s playing in a bar. The bum’s words ring in his head. A warning. To not spend past his allotment.

He spends ten dollars on a McDonald’s meal, with the last twelve dollars he has. That night, his entire family blows up on his father’s fishing boat. The hamburger was cold when he bit into it. Two dollars left of all that money. All those lives used up without any thought. He only started to believe it once he watched the body of his young cousin being lowered into the ground. Past his allotment, safe in his dead-line, but everyone around him had already reached theirs.

He hides the last dollar, feeling as if he holds a landmine in his wallet. He just has to hide it, he tells himself. He draws a little smiley face on it, to ensure he knows the difference between this one and a normal dollar. A large weight is taken off his shoulders when he stuffs it under the cushion of his desk chair.

People have been looking at him with those big-puppy eyes, those who are left that is. The employees who replaced the old, who are uncomfortable with his dead family and dead coworkers. Marcus is one of the few who survived Oleander’s self-imposed culling. Even he is nervous around Oleander, completely afraid of what he might say or do.

As the fall days pass into winter, Oleander feels safer and safer in his knowledge about the one-dollar bill hiding under his ass. Every morning, he checks to make sure it’s still wedged in there, not being able to continue with his day until he’s sure. Time moves along its line into spring. Spring, where Oleander begins to forget.

It’s a warm day, and Marcus had already gone ahead to buy their hotdogs. He leaves his coat behind on the chair. He doesn’t check to see if the dollar is there. It hasn’t gone anywhere in three months. It isn’t running away now.

His stomach grumbles and he hurries to the elevator to meet Marcus at the hotdog stand. The last thing on his mind is the bum in the alley and the final dollar waiting to decide some unknown fate.

Oleander dodges pedestrians and moves through the crowd with his hands shoved into his pant pockets. A little tune plays in his head. He sees Marcus in the distance, handing over a couple of dollars to the girl at the stand. Passing from one hand to the other, a small smiley face stares back at him. He freezes in the middle of the street, bumping into people and receiving glares for his efforts.

Marcus turns to him and holds up the hot dogs.

“I hope you don’t mind. I found a dollar under your chair yesterday and saved it for today’s lunch. Let’s eat!”

Oleander doesn’t see the truck pop a tire and skid towards him, mind’s eye completely focused on that tiny little grinning face.