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Murphy Lives
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Murphy Lives |
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broker6 Member
since 1999-11-07
Posts 132Bellevue, NE, Sarpy |
2,652 words MURPHY LIVES by Richard J. Budig "So," Murphy said, "my buddy slipped his own clip into the gun, jacked a round into the chamber, stuck it in the guys face, and said, 'This is a stick up!'" Murphy was half leaning, half laying across an entire display case in my pawnshop, looking like a walrus with his low slung brow sloping away from his oversized mustache, and his big belly draped over and down the side of the case. He was whiling away the morning with tales that seemed to me like stories from the other side of reality. The guy in question -- Murphy's buddy -- carried a loaded clip for a certain model .45 semi-automatic pistol in his pocket. He would haunt sporting goods stores that weren't too big or too busy. When he spotted his favorite pistol in the shop's case and noticed the clerk was alone, he would ask to see the gun. It took only a second to thumb the clip release button, drop the empty clip to the floor, slam his loaded clip into the butt of the gun, jack in a live round, and, according to Murphy's, "Go to work." Murphy loved to tell his stories. You could see him going back in his mind as he recounted these adventures. He enjoyed the intensely strained consternation on the face of the sporting goods store clerk. You could see it, because Murphy would play all the parts. At that particular moment, as Murphy held the floor, my consternation level was a tad high, too. I had just bought this pawnshop. All this was new to me . . . guys standing around putting fine points on armed robbery, food stamp scams, and check cashing schemes, to name a few. But a .45 like the one his buddy used was too tame for Murphy. Murphy used to prowl little towns in northern California, looking for small saving and loan offices. He struck during the noon hour when the "big kids" were out to lunch, leaving one of the office girls minding the store. "I carried a sawed-off double-barreled 12 gauge under my coat," he said, almost singing it, as his cold, blue eyes looked inward and back in time. One day, he walked into a little savings and loan office, made a quick visual check, and, exposing his double-barreled shotgun, announced the stickup to the young girl minding the desk. "It was always so easy," he said. "Those little girls didn't want to get hurt. They'd do anything you told them. Besides, they're taught to give you the money. I was waving that gun around, telling her what I wanted, and all of a sudden, I hear someone saying something like, 'What the hell is going on out there?'" Murphy said he didn't notice a hallway along the wall that led to offices at the back of the building. The words he heard came from the hallway and were followed seconds later a male employee who hadn’t gone to lunch with the other guys that day. "He was a big mother," Murphy said, holding his hand above his head. "Came steaming out of that hall, yelling his head off." Murphy paused, going over it again in his mind. When Murphy came back from his memory, he answered the question on my mind . . . " . . . Dropped him. Just swung and let both barrels go. Cut his legs off," Murphy said. Over the years, it is this part of the story, or stories like this that I hear from guys like Murphy that baffles me. Not the horrible part. Man's inhumanity is legendary. It's how coolly they talk about it, with that hint of pride and cool distance. "Dropped him . . . cut his legs off . . . " he said, like it was all in a day's work. I can remember in my early days when I started working in ad agencies, wondering if I'd ever feel comfortable having coffee with the guy who owned the business. And now, here I stood, having coffee with a guy who'd cut your legs off for a few bucks and a fast ride out of town. In those early pawnshop days, it was such a new and scary world for me that I often tucked a chrome-plated Smith & Wesson .38 in a shoulder holster under a little vest that I wore to cover the weapon. As Murphy rode though old trails in his mind, I crossed my arms so I could feel the reassuring bulk of that gun under my arm. " . . . Yeah, one of his legs was just hanging on by a thread, and the other was really chewed up," Murphy was saying. "I heard later, when I was in the joint, that he lost both legs." His eyes took another vacation. He went back through time, to prison again. "That's why I got such a big sentence," he sighed. He thought a moment, and then added, "They really went hard on me." Murphy did 14 years for shooting the legs off of another human being, and he figured he had it hard. Anyone who has suffered a gunshot wound knows better. You live with that moment etched forever in your memory. Amazing things occur the moment a bullet enters your body. Time slows. You see the entrance wound appear. Next, the dark blood wells from the wound. And surprisingly, there is a lack of pain. There is an overwhelming sense of disbelief . . . that it happened . . . that a part of your body has no feeling and that it doesn't work any more. You remember the time of day, the way the light from the sun came through the window, and the smell of the place where you were when it happened. Later, when the wound tingles, or it suddenly goes numb, or it aches, it all comes back again . . . the sound of the explosion, the blast against your body. You stop for a moment and try to remember. Did that really happen, you wonder. But you know it did. You'll always know. "But," Murphy said, glancing up, as though looking through the ceiling, "I've cleaned up my act." His glance upward was aimed at a flop house that used to be next door to my pawnshop, above the piano store. At least it was until the bimbo in the fuzzy hat burned the place out. The bimbo in the fuzzy hat was Cryin' Marvin's wife. But that's another story. When Murphy first came to town, he lived in his car along the street where my pawnshop was located. He just kind of fell in love with this neighborhood, he said. I remember wondering exactly what it was he found enchanting about it. A block to the west were the railroad yards and a place called "hobo jungle." The creatures who drifted up out of the jungle after dark were from another world . . . Murphy’s world, perhaps. And just around the corner, in those days, was the Open Door Mission where the more discerning, or desperate, depending on your point of view, took refuge. (Discerning because the food was better than down in the jungle, or desperate because, at the Mission, you didn't get fed without a sermon.) On the corner was a place called Marie's Oasis Bar. It was run by a little Latvian named George Zemunksy who could beat up a wino with one hand while drawing a beer with the other. Finally, there was the Adult Cinema smack in the middle of the block, complete with magazines, videos, "sexual appliances" and a movie arcade that took quarters faster than parking meters. It was open 24 hours a day, and in a university town like Lincoln, NE, with the campus just six blocks away, the late night parade into that place is legendary. So, after he got a job at a hotel just down the street as a back up cook and dishwasher, Murphy moved into Wino Heights, also called Losers Leap, above the piano store. Murphy's version of his ensuing success was that he had been chosen manager of the place due to his outstanding character, steadfast honesty, and devotion to old fashioned business principles. In truth, it was between him and the Cryin' Marvins, Wino Heights' only other steady tenants. At that particular point in time, Cryin' Marvin's wife had taken to drinking again. When she drank, she spent most of her time beating up on Marvin, or chasing him down the street. Marvin would escape into Maries Oasis Bar where he sat at the bar crying. Still, Wino Heights did a fair business renting rooms by the night to a raggedy bunch of hobos and other strangers if they could scratch up the two or three dollars for the night's lodging. Some of them used to carry titles like Dr. or Attorney-at-Law behind their names. It wasn't long before Murphy was operating a side business. He would volunteer to close the kitchen at the hotel on Friday night, and he'd come home laden with leftovers which he sold to tenants over the weekend. He also sold warm beer. In a short time, Wino Heights had an added star in its word-of-mouth listing: Gourmet. "Some of it gets pretty green by Sunday night, but those winos don't know the difference," Murphy assured me. In no time, Murphy's diligence began to show in his more affluent approach to shopping in the stereo and TV sections of my pawnshop. Murphy upgraded everything -- TV, stereo and a telephone answering machine. "Yeah, I had a phone put in, Dick," he said, and then, with a wink, "You know. Gotta take care of business." After listening to his story of a double amputation with a 12 gauge shotgun, I didn't ask what business he was talking about. And, taking Winston Churchill at his word about being magnanimous in victory, Murphy gave his old 200-lb., 15-year-old television to a 92-pound encephalitic wino who came within an inch of losing both the television and his life wrestling that monster downstairs to street level where he was planning to hitchhike to Denver -- with the TV. "He said no one had ever given him anything that nice before," Murphy said, a tone of self-righteous reverence in his voice. Touching or not, the television was still on the curb the next morning and the skinny wino was gone. Murphy toyed with the idea of hauling it upstairs again. He figured he could rent it out for a buck a night. “But it’s too big to shove around,” he lamented. He finally sold it to someone on the street for 10 dollars. It was about this time, as Murphy approached the zenith of his rise to local entrepreneur, that we thought we'd lost him to a truckload of walnuts that crash landed on top of his old car. I don't know why, but Murphy never gave up the habit of occasionally sleeping in his car, which he kept parked in front of my pawnshop. I took a bit of comfort from this, thinking that if anyone attempted to get into my shop by the front door, and if this was one of the nights Murphy was sleeping in his car, he might wake up and chase them away. In my early days in this business, it was my habit to come down to the shop around midmorning on Sundays just to make sure everything was okay. The approach to my shop was over a long railroad viaduct -- right over the local rail yard and over the top of Lincoln’s hobo jungle. As I cruised down the bridge, approaching a stop light, with my shop just beyond, the damnedest sight greeted me. There, in the middle of a circle of people -- mostly transients from the Open Door Mission -- was a large truck trailer laying on its side, smack on top of Murphy's car. The car had been squashed down to a height of about 18 inches. I parked and got over there. "When did this happen?" I asked someone. "Just a few minutes ago," was the reply. "The trucker was turning the corner when the load shifted." I looked again at Murphy's car, and at the transient to whom I'd just spoken. He knew what was on my mind . . . Murphy. "I don't know," he shook his head, "No one's seen him. He could be in his car." Those who were handling things knew that, too. They began unloading the trailer with help volunteered from the ranks of transients. I helped too. It gave me a queasy feeling, walking at an odd angle inside the tipped trailer, tromping along the top of Murphy's car, thinking he may be in it. I was struck, as I sweat alongside these transients at how hard and continuously they could work. Without instruction, they set up a chain, and began passing boxes down the line. In no time, out on the sidewalk, a square of boxes began to grow. Soon it was as tall as a man, 8 or 10 feet wide and about 25 feet long. More than once, the thought struck me that the man handing boxes to me might have a Ph.D. behind his name. And another thought struck me. Maybe going for it, really trying to get a load of nuts off an unknown human being made more sense to this guy than standing in a classroom somewhere talking about whether man deserved to be saved. Here, in this hot trailer on a Sunday morning, with the possibility of a man of questionable value just inches below us, no one asked whether Murphy was worth saving. We just put our shoulders to it and got those nuts out of there. Someone came and asked if he could use the phone in my place, and I said "Yes," happy to take a break from the furious pace. That's when I saw Murphy, standing in the back of the crowd, sipping a warm beer, smoking a cigarette. He was smiling. He made shushing motions at me as I made my way down the skewed ramp, but hefting ten or twelve tons of nuts in little or no time takes the fun out of that game. "How long you been there?" I demanded. "I just woke up," he said, tossing his head upward toward the rooming house. "All this damned noise woke me up. Man, look at my car . . . " Word got around quickly. "Murphy lives." The pace slowed, but not much. Basically, they just kept on working. I'm not sure why, but this event changed something in Murphy. He collected some insurance money for his ruined car, and it wasn't long before he bought a nifty old Chrysler Imperial, which he slept in every now and then. One morning, a few weeks later, I came to work a couple of hours early. Shortly thereafter, I saw Murphy loading his car with obvious haste. Then, without a wave, he climbed in and left. A couple of days later, the police were asking questions. It seems that as manager of Wino Heights, Murphy had been fastidious about collecting the rent, but not in turning it over. He also cleaned out the personal belonging of every wealthy wino who had a room there that night. I remember somehow I wasn't surprised. And yet, I was let down, too. I'd put something into Murphy. Not much, maybe. A lot of sweat, to be sure. But, when you think about it, that's something. When you give your all to save a man's life, even when the odds are against you, that counts for something. Maybe not to Murphy. But within myself . . . it counted. 30-30 |
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Dusk Treader
Moderator
Senior Member
since 1999-06-18
Posts 1187St. Paul, MN |
Great story here, Broker. Quite a few different things to think on, and written quite well. Enjoyed from start to finish, (especially the extremely vivid paragraph on being shot)  "Pointing Fingers to Defend" - Gravity Kills - "Guilty" |
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Christopher
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-08-02
Posts 8296Purgatorial Incarceration |
Welcome to Passions In Prose! And a great tale to begin with... gory but cohesive...just the kind I like! |
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merlynh Member
since 1999-09-26
Posts 411deer park, wa |
2,652 words very well used. I often wondered whether or not to post some of my stuff I've worked on for months that are about as long and some three times the words. The thought that no one who's really into writer would read them. Makes me feel it would be a waste of all the work I've put into them. Well I read yours. This written very good. Me being someone who's working toward writing novels. I feel your getting closer then I am. My guess would be that you work at a pawn shop, because I've known people who have in the past. No matter, you have a talent for writing. |
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