Pay Dirt by Elizabeth Crocket

He remembered it clearly. In grade 8 English class, the teacher had asked them to fill in the blank at the end of the sentence and write a paragraph or two about it.

“In my next life I will have more _____.” He had worked harder on that than anything in school before. Johnny looked at the red words on the paper in front of him, his lips moving slightly as he read them again.

“In my next life I will have more of everything. I won’t have just a half a bowl of cereal in the morning for breakfast. I’ll have shampoo and toothpaste to last till the last day of the week. I’ll have enough money to help buy my mama a house. I’ll have enough money to get a lawyer good enough to keep my daddy in jail where he belongs.” It was the first and last A+ he would ever receive.

Johnny learned then to speak from the heart to get what he wanted. He left school and got a job the next week. When Mr. Neil asked him why he should hire him, Johnny reached in his pocket and pulled out the paper with the A+ on it. Mr. Neil took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, looking like he had seen too many papers just like this one.

“What time ya gonna be here tomorrow, kid?”

Johnny grinned and jumped up to shake his hand. “How’s 6:00?”

“Hell, we don’t even open till 11:00. You ever washed dishes before?”

Johnny nodded. “Wash ‘em every night so my mama don’t have to when she gets home from work.”

Johnny was standing outside shivering in his best shirt that was too small for him, when Mr. Neil drove up at 10:45. He started a routine when he was handed his first earnings, putting half the cash in his mama’s hand Friday morning, and the other half in a big jar in his bedroom. He put the paper with the A+ on it in the jar too, just to remind him what he was working seven days a week for.

Two days after Johnny’s sixteenth birthday he arrived home to the unmistakable sound of his father’s gravelly voice telling his mama he was a changed man.

Johnny threw his keys on the nearest table. “What the hell you doin’ here?”

Johnny’s dad’s eyes always reminded him of a snake he saw down near the creek once. “Just came to see you and your mama, and get what’s owed me, that’s all.”

For the first time Johnny towered over his daddy. His voice was as deep as any man’s. “We don’t want you here.”

Johnny’s mom stepped between them. “It’s okay, Johnny. Daddy just needs some help getting set up again.”

Johnny watched the corners of his daddy’s tobacco stained lips turn up, before he smirked. “That’ll be an awful cold day in hell before that’s gonna happen.”

Johnny’s mama walked to his bedroom, and came out holding the big jar. He hadn’t seen her hands shake so bad since the last time the bastard was here.

Johnny grabbed the jar from her and held it as tightly as if it were pure gold. “Ain’t no way that dirt bag is getting his dirty paws on our money.”

Her head hanging low, Johnny’s mom began to weep. “But I owe him, Johnny. He’ll never leave me alone till I pay him what I owe him.”

As Johnny’s dad grabbed for the jar, Johnny hit him in the head with it, using the force of every muscle he had developed over three years of scrubbing pots and pans till they shone like sunshine through a church window.

Blood sprayed like a garden hose all over Johnny, as his mom dialed the phone for help. Johnny stood over his dad motionless, watching him take his last breath.

The policeman who arrived first had been there before. He looked at the blood on Johnny’s hands and snorted. “The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree, now does it Junior?”

Johnny could hear his mother’s pleas to the policeman piercing a trail behind him as they led him away in handcuffs.

The next day Johnny’s mom came to visit him in the very same cell his daddy had been in many times before. Clutching the money and the note, she told Johnny she was going to go open an account for him at the bank on Main Street.

“That money’s for you, mama. All I want is the paper with it.”

After his mama left, Johnny read it again. He was glad that at least he’d have a full size breakfast, and shampoo and toothpaste every day of the week. His mama had enough for a little down payment on a house, and he wouldn’t need a lawyer at all now.

Elizabeth Crocket's chapbook "Not Like Fred and Ginger" published by Red Moon Press, was shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. She has had short fiction published in RKVRY online journal, Ascent Aspirations, Horror Bound and many more. Her poetry was published in Penny Ante Feud, The Mastodon Dentist and numerous haiku and haibun journals, including Mayfly, Modern Haiku and Frogpond.

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