On Debts of the Soul

It was a beautiful day for a funeral. Not that dreary, rainy, gray cliché kind of day. The sun was shining, a few thick clouds drifting high above. Not too hot, not too cold, that goldilocks kind of day. 

The funeral hadn’t been cheap. Nothing ever was. Your whole life, your debt just grows and grows like ivy on the side of a suburban office building. Then you die. Too bad your debt doesn’t die with you. It just gets passed down to the poor schmuck you passed your bad habits down to.

Used to be you could hold all the money you had in your hand or stuff it under your mattress. It was physical–real. Now? A couple pixels in an app to let you know how much of the made up stuff you have to your name. Now? Money’s only real to the people that don’t have it. Now? The only people still using cash still use nine millimeters as a conversational point.

People like Dee.

Dee stood in front of the gravestone feeling angry. Pops had cancer. It wasn’t that that took him out though. Just some drunk driving home from the bar. Pops always said he had shit for luck. Still spent every night at the tables, getting in the red with the wrong people though.

Lucky in life or lucky in cards, Pops liked to say, and my friend, you just got dealt a royal flush.

Looking back on it all, one could see why Pops thought he had shit luck. Now it just seemed like no luck.

His father was never a smart man, never one for thinking through a decision. Dee shouldn’t have been surprised when one of the three people who’d shown up to the funeral passed him a slip of paper. A bill.

Not for the funeral. The car had covered that. And the TV. And the dog. No, the bill was for that debt. Gambling, numbers, drugs: the kind of things that the poor think will drag them from poverty while covertly putting them further into it.

Dee shook his head, he shouldn’t be surprised. He wasn’t really angry at Pops, he’d never lied about who he was, never promised to make anything better for Dee. He was angry because he knew what he had to do. Just the way things went.

***

That bill had an address, a pretty damn nice house waited when Dee’s cab pulled up to it. The kind with the big windows and long driveway filled with more than a lemon. One with hedges and a towering manicured tree and a green grass yard without a single yellow patch. Dee double-checked the address and paid the cabbie before he got out.

A tough in a suit leaned against guard shack watching him.

“This the Deville place?” Dee asked.

The guard didn’t respond, just kept staring at him with an expression hidden behind dark sunglasses. Dee headed up to the house. The front door had one of those gilded knockers, not even a doorbell or buzzer. It looked like it was polished, so Dee knocked with a fist instead of using the device. Didn’t seem polite to dirty it.

The door swung open and a woman in a sundress smiled at him. “You must be Frankie’s kid! Vince said you’d be coming by, you look just like your father.”

Dee looked down at himself, he’d only ever seen his father in stained button-downs and frayed Hawaiin shirts. He himself was wearing a suit he’d used the last of his cash to rent from a store.

“Ms. Deville?” Dee asked, and she nodded. “Is–uh–you look lovely. Is Mr. Deville in?”

“Of course darling, Vince is on house arrest while the lawyers sort out his indictment. He’s out back in the sunroom, come on in.” And she turned, leading the way. Dee followed, closing the door behind him.

The interior was a maze of rugs, wood, and expensive looking things. Vince was indeed in the sunroom, sitting in a lounger chair, reading The Last Don and sipping on a cup of coffee.

While other bosses might’ve had those bodies that showed they could afford to eat well, Vince had a body that seemed to show he cared about how long he could stick around and enjoy the fruits of his people’s labors.

Ms. Deville gestured to the seat across from Vince and scurried away with a soft promise of a cup of coffee. Dee sat down. He watched Vince for a moment and went to speak, but as soon as he opened his mouth, Vince held up a finger.

The boss finished reading, dogeared his page and looked up at Dee. “I’m surprised to see you so soon, kid. Your father always did his best to avoid these sorts of interactions.”

“Pops wasn’t the best about doing what had to be done in a difficult situation.”

“And you are?”

Dee took a breath, he’d rehearsed the speech in the cab on the way over. “Look Mr. Deville, I’m not going to be able to pay back that money.”

He stopped as Mrs. Deville brought him a cup of coffee with an encouraging smile before returning to the house. When she was gone, he continued, “I could make payments, but with my record, I’d be lucky to get a factory job bringing in a couple hundred a week. We’d all be dead and gone before I got even a quarter of it back to you. With the interest? Forget about it.”

“Instead of paying you back for what my Pops owed you, let me make you money.”

Vince just looked at him, with the cold, unreadable eyes that Dee had grown up around, watching his Pops get sharked at the tables. He seemed to come to some decision though and sighed, “Look, kid, I don’t owe you nothing, but are you sure you know what you’re saying?”

“I know you got caught up in that ATM thing–and we appreciated that, it’s why you got a notice instead of a visit from Sal–but if I let you in to earn for me, you’re gonna be mine. Forever. You come into this, there ain’t no takebacks. No early retirement. I’ll let you keep enough to stay alive, but the rest is mine, until you die or get cuffed up or the debt is settled.”

Dee nodded, “And the alternative is I work labor until I die, hoping nothing happens and I never miss a payment or come up short and get that visit.”

“I mean,” Vince shrugged, “is that not better than selling your soul?”

“Was it for you?”

Vince had a big-bellied laugh at that, “Of course not! Look at this place,” he swung a hand around the sunroom, then sobered up to a frown, leaning forward, “When I got into this business, it was a different time. We talked about honor and brotherhood and silence. Now? Even then. There’s no honor in what we do for our money.”

“All due respect, Mr. Deville, not a whole lot of honor in digging through the butcher’s scraps for dinner.” Dee said.

“You know, you’re a lot different than your old man. Tell you what, I’ll let you into this thing we got, but I’ll give you an out when your account is paid up.”

 “I want to stay in and earn for myself when the debt’s settled.”

Vince cracked a smile and whipped up a mock salute before extending his hand. Dee reached out and shook it.

***

“Where’s the fucking money?” Dee’s fist slammed into the dealer’s face with a meaty sound and one of the razor blades in the dealer’s mouth sliced through his cheek and slashed against Dee’s knuckles.

The dealer threw up blood on the floor while Dee stepped back, examining his hand.

“I donth hath i’.” The dealer slurred through his savaged mouth, “I smoth i’ all.” Tears and snot and blood mixed together in a disgusting soup on the man’s face.

Dee looked up from his bleeding hand at the dealer then over to Sal who was sitting on a couch flipping through a magazine. The big man looked up and gave a quick nod before returning to his tabloid.

Dee had to hold the gun with his left hand because his right was slick with blood and aching. The dealer tried to stand, but Dee kicked him in the chest and sent him sprawling, begging at his feet.

As always, two years of these moments under his belt, he remembered walking to Sunday school, holding his mother’s hand. She’d been a good woman, full of hope, too damn good for his Pops.

She’d left. Why she didn’t take Dee, well maybe she didn’t have much hope in him. She was probably right, he figured.

So he leveled his gun at the dealer and squeezed the trigger.