Six Stories From Supremecy

I can see him in the window across from me. I’m in my boss’s office on the sixth floor. He’s visiting his friend, Miss Adelphia James. What kind of friends they are is none of my business. The only reason I pay the least bit of attention, is that Bill Rumford Jr, had me killed. “Oh, wait a minute,” I can hear people saying… But it’s true. He didn’t have the guts to do it himself, so he got One Eyed Johnny Bishop to do it. He knew Johnny could get close to me. I don’t blame Johnny. I should have seen it coming. He was only doing what he’d been trained by life to do, survive.

Jr. and I go back a long ways, to when we were kids. He was always kind of sickly, and kids picked on him quite a bit cause they knew they could get away with it. His father, although never around, had money. His way of taking care of Jr. was getting him anything he wanted, within reason of course. But compared to what the rest of us had for fathers, we could only wish.

It was in six grade, when the harassing went from words, to actions. Calling names, went to being tripped, punched, whatever could be done without drawing too much attention, but instilling a message they wanted to instill. It was during that year that he asked me if I’d like to make a few dollars. A few dollars was like asking me what I wanted for Christmas and handing me the keys to the store. Not that I needed them by then.

I became a body guard that year, and remained in his employ until he graduated, and went off to some college. I didn’t see him for quite a few years. I can’t say things went from bad to worse for me, as they actually went from worse to well…they didn’t improve. 

I ended up living in my car when Lilly, my girl friend, told me she couldn’t afford to keep both me and the dog. I was living on the street when Jr. came by. 

I didn’t recognize him at first. He’d grown, not only in height, but had put on quite the innertube. “How you doing, old buddy,” he says, like we’d been friends. I guess we were kind of friends. I kept him from getting beat up and he kept me out of juvenile detention. Worked until he left for college.

He asked if I needed a job. I hadn’t really thought much about getting a real job. I helped out some people I knew from time to time when they needed someone to keep an eye out for trouble, mostly the cops.

He slips me a fifty, and says to stop by the house when I had a chance, like when I wasn’t too busy living in my car. I went over there the following morning, and he tells me he needs someone to watch his back. He wanted me to resume where he’d left off. His body being much larger than it had been, I said I could use a little more money than he had been used to giving me. We agreed on an equitable rate for body guards, and then he threw in the bit about me being a chauffeur as well. He wanted to know if I knew how to drive. Apparently he hadn’t been keeping an eye on the local papers. Someone had managed to outrun the cops on several occasions. Burglars were doing well at the time; what can I say.

I worked for him for about six years, before I got knifed by a snake in the grass who I believed, was a better person than he turned out to be. 

Jr. was a politician. Turns out not a very good one, but well connected, and that means more than knowing what you are doing. I helped him out of few scrapes with unionizers, and business people who said he wasn’t providing enough of what they was paying for. 

Jr. got promoted, you could say. He went to Washington D.C. where crimes are bought and sold under another name, democracy. I assumed it meant everyone had an equal opportunity to take whatever they could carry, and get away with it.

He told me he wouldn’t be needing me any longer, as he would need someone who better fit in with the establishment. I could take a hint, and even though I had a suit, I let it go. 

Things however didn’t go well for Jr. It seems some dutiful reporter found his antics, not only humorous, but illegal. Jr. found himself, up a creek without a canoe, so he came back home. 

To make a long story even longer, he got involved with some scrupulous people who believed reform was the way to success. Well not reform for the sake of reform, but just talking about reform as a way of bringing integrity back to the government. If Jr. was good at one thing, it was pretending he’d been disadvantaged by an unscrupulous competitor who was tied to some communist agenda to make everyone equal, no matter the cost.

While Jr. had been away, I’d caught the attention of one Rudolph Whitehall. He was the opposite of Jr. in that, he genuinely cared about people. 

Rudy, as he asked me to call him, had a heart the size of Newark, but the street smarts of a kid lost in the men’s’ room. He was raw meat and those that were coming for him were the same vultures that have been picking at the bones of honest working people for millennium. My association with Rudy made me the enemy, in Jr’s eyes. When Rudy started his campaign for the House of Representatives, he became a thorn in the rear pocket of Jr.  Jr. and his people were intent on winning at any cost. I ended up being part of that cost. 

Intimidation often backfires when placed under the spotlight of an influential newspaper. After a series of fights that broke out at campaign rallies and the eventual demise of me, Jr. found himself indicted on racketeering charges and forced to leave the winners circle to his classmate of several decades past, Rudolph Whitehall. He had been in sixth grade as well.

I don’t know enough about what is supposed to happen when you are dead, but it sure was different than what I imagined. I saw myself lying in the alley. A knife sticking out of my back, and yet I didn’t feel a thing. 

I got to spend some time catching up on the neighborhood gossip. I found Rudy sitting at his desk, half passed out from sorrow, the other half from some spiked drink provided by an anonymous friend as a gift. I can’t say he was surprised to see me, he seemed at first not to notice; but when he did! 

He asked only one thing of me after the shock wore off, which I would have done without his asking. “Find Jr. and remind him what it was like for him back in sixth grade.”

I knocked on Jr’s door, and he to my surprise, he answered. No longer afraid of the boogie man I supposed, or apparently anyone. He looked around, not seeing anyone he was about to shut the door when I said, "Hi, old buddy. How you doin?"

He unlike Rudy couldn’t see me, so I went to his study and made myself comfortable. One thing lead to another and I found he could hear me, even if he couldn’t see me. He, I believe, thought I was his conscience, so I decided to be. He ranted and raved and begged himself for forgiveness. I kept asking him over and over, “why?” 

I guess after you stop believing you are invincible, not really a God in your own right, your mind begins looking for a place to run to, where you can hide and become someone else. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I played the usual parlor games, spin the bottle, turn the lights off and on, that kind of thing. He finally had enough of himself and ran out of the house.

I gave him a head start, just to see what he was up to. He went to his office, well, his girlfriend Adelphia’s place. I was surprised she let him in. It usually required an appointment. I watched from Rudy’s office as he downed a half a bottle of something, and in animated fashion attempted to explain to his friend that he was being followed by a ghost, and not of Christmas’s past. 

She led him to the balcony, bottle in hand. She pushed him into a chair, and then went inside and locked the door. His face turned a squeamish pink as he stood up, looking like he’d lost his last friend.  And he was going to ask her to be his alibi, for the night in question.

He spent a few seconds contemplating, no doubt his future, before removing his socks for some reason, and climbing up onto the parapet that surrounded the balcony. He teetered on the edge for a short time before he lost his balance, as opposed to finding the courage to faith leap into believing it was all a bad dream.

He was surprised to see me swimming along beside him. He remembered he had the bottle, and I assume in his clumsiness he misjudged his offering, which I misconstrued as an attempt to hit me with it. I smiled in retaliation, and finished the bottle.

He beat me to the limousine parked below the balcony. The presiding head of the National Endowment for the Genetically Superior, were having their annual meeting in the ball room some six stories below Rudolph’s office. It remained silent, until the unmistakable noise of one William Rumford Jr, met the roof of the limousine, and echoed upwards towards the open window in Rudy’s office, settling with the confidence of sweet revenge. 

It so happened that Jr. went to meet his maker with an old acquaintance of his. One Jacoby Mortimer, head of the supremacists movement, and future hope of the Patriots Agenda, a new media outlet for information that had been sized to fit the consumptive needs, of fellow patriots.  Mortimer's limousine had been parked illegally in a handicap zone awaiting the entourage of reporters he had summoned from the newly formed, Gypsy News Inc, to record for posterity his entrance into the race, for the House of Representatives.