Don't Mess with Barbara Taylor

I think this is the worst place to be in. There are no calendars; I don’t know what today is. No clocks; what time is it? There are no menus; I’ve been eating the same food since I got here. I can’t sleep; the lights are on all of the time. There is no privacy; anybody can see what I am doing. This place is really driving me mad.

“I hate this place! Jail sucks!”

“What are you in for?” asks John, the other guy in my cell.

“I’m not sure why I’m here. It started out because I was hungry and went out to get something to eat.”

“And they arrested you for that?”

“No, of course not. But you don’t know the whole story.”

I could not tell him all of it, because I did not know it all. At that time, I did not know that many people thought Barbara Taylor was the nicest woman in Sharpeville. Almost everybody knew her. She had been walking downtown on the Monday morning when I was arrested, and she had just left St. James Church, where she and a small group of parishioners had been counting the money put in Sunday’s collection basket. Next, Barbara planned to go one block away to the Hope House, a shelter for women who were the sufferers of domestic abuse, to ask if they needed her to help clean the office. And before she returned to her apartment for lunch, she wanted to stop at the public library to prune the rose bushes she had planted out front.

She believed there was always something to do or someone to help. She was an attractive 72-year-old woman, and she dressed up when she went out for these chores, because she liked to look nice. So that morning she brushed her long silver hair, put on a light summertime dress, and wore comfortable shoes for walking. She did not have far to go, every place she went was nearby, but she knew she was getting old and she did not want to have sore feet when she returned to her apartment. Her eyes were blue and her eyeglasses had thin silver frames. An umbrella she carried if there was rain that morning. And always, she toted a very large brown leather handbag, because she liked to have everything with her that she needed: snacks, books, her fat wallet, the morning mail, her cosmetics, her comb and brush, an extra pair of shoes, a large bottle of drinking water, as well as anything else that would fit in it. Some people, if they could be believed, said she carried a puppy in it too.

I was able to tell John, my cellmate, that I had been downtown that Monday, and because it was close to lunchtime, I had decided to go into Nick’s Full Eclipse Bar & Grill for a cold beer and a toasted cheese sandwich. I brushed my dark hair away from my eyes and tried to neaten my short beard before going into Nick’s. I felt hungry. I was about to cross East Main Street when I saw Barbara walking on the sidewalk. She was coming from the public library. However, it was not Barbara that I noticed. It was her bulging handbag that had my attention.

It looked like a prize to me, something I had to have, and I could not live without it. Anything that big had to have something good in it. Hopefully, a lot of cash, I prayed. I could imagine tens and twenties and fifties falling out of the huge handbag when I turned it upside down. And some expensive jewelry in it would be good too, I hoped. When I got into Nick’s, I would be able to buy a pitcher of beer and a steak sandwich and have money left over. I could not believe how lucky I was that day. I wanted her handbag!

This was going to be easy, I contemplated. Her handbag was loosely strapped across her left shoulder. All I thought I had to do was run from behind her and snatch it and keep on running. It would happen so fast, she would not realize that I had it until I turned into the alley behind Nick’s and disappeared. I laughed. It would be like taking a handoff from the hands of a quarterback and dashing toward the goal line with the football and scoring a touchdown. I looked around. There was no one else on the sidewalk. There were no cars passing by. It was a perfect opportunity! This was the moment. I needed to do it quickly. But I had to stop laughing.

“Something tells me that it didn’t work out like that,” said John.

“Not at all,” I told him. “That’s why I’m here.”

“I think I’ve seen Barbara Taylor,” John said. “I think I know who she is.”

Barbara was not as old and slow as I had thought she would be. Maybe she heard my footsteps behind her. It could have been her instinct. But I did not surprise her. She was holding tightly to her handbag by then.

“Give it to me!” I yelled as she pulled one way and I pulled the other.

“No!” she exclaimed. “Get out of here, right now!”

“Not without your bag, old lady.”

“Who’s an old lady?” And she started swinging her umbrella at me.

“Stop it!” I screamed. I might have thought she was old and slow, but her umbrella hurt every time she hit me with it and she was not turning loose of her handbag.

“You’re a terrible young man,” she reprimanded me. “You ought to be doing something good with your life, instead of attacking someone that you call an old lady.”

Damn, I thought. It was heavy. I wondered what could be in her handbag that could weigh so much. There had to be more than money in it. That was about when the bottle of water fell out and burst on the sidewalk.

I slipped and fell down. It was a perfect opportunity for Barbara.

“Quit kicking me!” I screamed as I rolled around on the sidewalk. “You’re starting to make me mad!”

“I’m already mad,” she told me. Then she kicked me again. “You’ve made me so mad that I can’t stop kicking you! I’m going to kick you until your little butt turns black and blue.” And she kicked me again and again. “Where’s your mother, young man? Do you think she would like to see you like this? While trying to take a bag away from an old lady!”

She was hitting me with her umbrella and kicking me with her shoes when people began to come out to the sidewalk to see what was going on. Nick, in his Nick’s Full Eclipse Bar & Grill apron, came out too. There were at least a half dozen people watching her beat me. They were amazed. They had never seen Barbara like this. They had only seen her when she was doing good things in the town. They had seen her cleaning windows at the Hope House and calling out bingo numbers at the nursing home on Friday nights and serving plates of food at the home for the homeless and taking out the trash at the center for senior citizens, but never, ever, anything like this. Two or three of them had to pull her off of me.

I got up and tried to brush myself off. I wiped my wet dark hair away from my eyes. I felt my chin as if she, in her anger, might have pulled the beard off my face. But I could not run away. There were people standing around me that would not let me go.

I sat on my cot in the jail cell and looked at John who was sitting on the other cot.

“I was hungry and wanted to eat,” I said. “She just got in my way.”

“Do you know what I’d tell you?” asked John.

“No, what?”

“Don’t mess with Barbara Taylor!” he told me.

“I know that now. I know it!”