A story by Stanton Fink
Image: Untitled by Stanton Fink
“Yoyoyoyo yo YOOOO, EL EX IZZZIN DA HOOOOOZ!!!!”
His grand entrance finished, the burly bottle blonde in a loose tanktop lithely dodged the various food, dishes, and cups of hot coffee the other diner patrons started throwing at him. “Don’t get strung out by the way that I look!” El Ex realized he’d have to get serious as he swatted away one, then two flying chairs. “Don’t judge a book by its cover; I’m not much of a man by the light of day…” A screaming man in a tweed suit charged at the former highschool fullback, only for the little tweed-clad warrior to find himself effortlessly heaved across the diner counter. “But by night, I’m one-” El Ex promptly ceased his battle gyrations the moment he noticed a pistol poking into his pect cleavage.
“I thought we told you to never come back,” the pistol-wielding waitress stated. El Ex put his big hands up and smiled sheepishly.
“Easy, easy, sweet thing,” he bleated. “I’m just here to pick up my kid.”
The waitress snarled as she slowly cocked her pistol.
“What is going on out there?” Gus, the ogreish cook bellowed from within the kitchen. He stomped into the dining room and made murderous eye contact with El Ex. The cook stomped over to the waitress, snatched her pistol out of her petite hands, and tapped the pistol into El Ex’s nosebridge. “Why are you back here?”
“Easy, easy, Gus,” El Ex cooed. “Your good man El Ex is here to pick up his good boy and make things square.”
“Why should we believe you?” the waitress demanded.
El Ex dipped his big hand into his Bermuda pocket to retrieve a small roll of bills.
“Cause my ten friends Ben can vouch for me.” Then handsome highschool dropout flashed bright teeth. The ogreish cook plucked the roll out of El Ex’s hand, counted the money, and reluctantly pulled the pistol away. Gus frowned uncomfortably as he dug his thick fingers underneath his hairnet and into his steel-colored hair. He handed the pistol back to his coworker as he stomped back into the kitchen.
Gus slowly walked towards a whimpering, sniffling, eight year old boy in overalls washing dishes in the sink, the cook’s craggy scowl softening into a grimace of concern as he approached. Gus waggled his hands in agonized hesitation, then inhaled.
“Hey, kid, uh, Roxy,” Gus hemmed. The boy stopped, still holding a platter as he turned to look at the cook with hot, tear-shimmering eyes. “Yer dad’s here.” The boy shuddered as he dropped the platter back into the sink with a splashing clank. “If ya don’t wanna go, y-you could stay with us.”
“No.” More hot tears raced down Roxy’s red cheeks. The boy pulled off his rubber gloves, then tossed them and his paper toque into the study water. “I…have to go with him.”
Gus tucked the little roll of bills into the boy’s pocket, then patted the boy’s dark brown hair.
“Don’t let your dad see this. If you need a place to stay, or hide, come back to us, please.”
“Thank you.” With that, Roxy shuffled out of the diner kitchen and into the dining room, as if a personalized gallows, and not his father, with open bronzed arms awaited him.
“Ey yo, Rox, how’s m’boy?” El Ex cheerily asked as he scrubbed his weeping son’s face clean of tears, snot, and kitchen grime with a fistful of his tanktop. “You bein’ good, kid?”
Gus’ face contracted back into an ogre’s wrathful mask even as the waitress kept her eye on the wannabe beachbum.
“Your son worked off your tab, Goldie,” Gus said. “You should be grateful that Roxy’s hard work is the only thin stopping us from making him an orphan.”
“Tha- that’s m’boy,” El Ex demurely stammered. He gathered his sniffling, sulking son up into his big arms, and skittered out the front door and through the diner’s parking lot. El Ex hurried across the street to open the driver’s side door of a creaky blue van. Firmly ensconced in the driver’s seat, El Ex started his van’s motor. Ten minutes down the street, El Ex finally opened his mouth again. “Soooooo… Did ya get it, kiddo?”
“Here,” Roxy said as he waved a crumbled piece of paper in his father’s youthful face. “I found it fifteen minutes after you left.”
El Ex beamed as he tossed their wadded booty onto the front passenger seat.
“That’s m’boy, doin’ his daddy proud.” Roxy shoved his roll of pity blood money into his father’s face, next. “Thanks, kiddo.”
“You were supposed to come back for me after two hours.” Roxy snapped.
“Yeah, about that, sorry, kiddo. I… I had trouble… getting the money. Then I needed to get gas, too.”
“How does gas take six days to get?”
El Ex sighed angrily as he finally let himself frown.
“Kid, you’re just like my Uncle Oguz. Stop it, okay? Missions’ complete thanks to you, we’re safe. Dad’s proud of you and we are going to celebrate with the Daimyo Platter at Sushi Shogun once we cash in our prize. So please chill, please?” El Ex tapped a big finger into his son’s milk-chocolate-colored hair. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Roxy sighed.
“Only thing that went wrong was your old man fubarrin’ the time frame, but that’s fixed.” Roxy sighed again. “Y’know why I didn’t finish high school?”
“‘Cause you knocked Mommy up?”
“Besides that, Smarty Farty,” El Ex laughed. “Actually, before that” When I was in school, I was the best, I was the smartest, I was in clubs, I was captain of the football time when I was a freshman. Heck, I was even your Ma’s tutor.” The large young man draped his big right arm across his son’s tiny chest. “You’d think my family would be proud of the town’s first wrestling chess champ, but they were always tellin’ me ‘Aleksandr, sen gaty ýalta, iş tap!” Roxy wrapped his arms around his father’s triceps. “My dad was the worst. Even worse than than my blabbermouth uncle, Oguz.” Roxy squirmed slightly, unaccustomed to his father’s rueful tone. “When he wasn’t punching me for being lippy, he was always tellin’ me ‘Bizi utandyrma. Meni utandyrma. Sen mydama meni utandyrýarsyň, samsyk masgarabaz.’ Me embarrass him? Ha!”
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah, the day after I won the state championship, Dad got fired for picking another fight at work, then drank himself to death during dinner. After the funeral, yer Ma convinced me to skip the wake and leave town with her.”
“Daddy, what’s a wake?”
“It’s a party, a sad party you have at a funeral.”
“Doesn’t sound fun.”
El Ex smirked.
“All you can do at a wake is cry, eat, and gossip while pretending to cry.” El Ex tsked.
“Just like that daycare you stuck me in last month.”
“Yeah, sorry ‘bout that, kid.”
The van turned into the parking lot of a strip mall, and parked in front of a laundromat. As father and son got out of that creaky blue van, father reached back in to retrieve their precious wad of crumpled paper Roxy went through so much trouble to make. El Ex straightened it out with a few sweeps of his big hand, and made a wickedly satisfied smirk as he confirmed its authenticity in the bright sunlight. That done, and El Ex made sure he had the pity blood money back in his other pocket, father and son entered the laundromat.
Fast-O-Mat was exactly as Roxy expected. A bunch of flickering fluorescent lights illuminating a bunch of bored, boring people either feeding washing machines money and dirty laundry, or sitting around, listening to the dull, rumbling cadenza of synchronized spin cycles. The boy faked a sneeze to stop himself from chiding himself out loud.
“Ey, could I borrow this a bit?” El Ex asked as he snagged a grungy gray sweater out of some biker grampa’s laundry basket. Bike Grampa gave an inaudible shrug-grunt of obvious consenting approval. “Thanks, manly man.”
“Daddy!” Roxy whined as his father swaddled him in that filthy sweater reekning of menthol, cigar smoke and marijuana liniment. “It’s 75 degrees!”
“I can’t have the brains of Team Ex El catching cold again.” El Ex stood up straight, returned smirking Biker Grampa’s thumb’s up with one of his own, and gave his now-thoroughly armored son an affirming pat on the back. Ex El inhaled sharply, his generic grin straightening into a pained grimace. “The last time I was dumb enough to let people know I let you catch a cold on my watch, I thought yer Ma’s parole officer was going to pistol-whip me to death. Come on.”
Father and sweater-swaddled son continued down the aisle of washing machines, rounded a corner into another aisle of washing machines, and made their winding way to the far corner of Fast-O-Mat. El Ex pulled out a plastic chair, parked his meaty derriere in it, parked his son on his expansive lap, and got their treasure wad of paper out of his Bermuda shorts pocket. Then they waited. Roxy almost fell asleep by the time a quintet of Chinese businessmen with tattooed throats showed up. El Ex jiggled his son awake.
“Good afternoon, Misters Nurnazarov,” one businessman said. El Ex smiled wide.
“Here y’go, Mr. Zao,” El Ex replied as he handed that first businessman the treasure paper. One of Mr. Zao’s cohorts sneered incredulously, leading the other three cohorts to start a surly chatter of disbelief. El Ex rose from his plastic chair, his big hand clenched around his son’s little hand as Roxy slid off of his father’s lap. “It’s the real deal, gentlemen, Safecracker Junior here, stole it out of Gus Anderton’s wall safe without anyone but us knowin’.” El Ex gave Roxy’s little hand a knowing, comforting yank.
“How do we know this is genuine?” another businessman snapped, tapping at Roxy’s pencil scribbled notes.
El Ex let go of Roxy’s hand as he brought the tip of his Roman nose within a centimeter of the accusing businessman’s cornea.
“Are you calling my son, Rock Hudson Nurnazarov the Third, a liar?” The businessman sputtered in indignant disgust. “Are you saying I’m some sort of bonebrain dunce who’d raise a son to lie to his own father?”
Roxy pulled his head inside of his new sweater. As much as his father’s saccharin surfer schtick sickened him, he was terrified of seeing his father actually angry.
Mr. Zao placed a hand on El Ex’s heaving chest, and another hand on his indignant associate’s shoulder.
“Calm down, calm down,” Mr. Zao urged. He turned towards the Nurnazarovs. “My deepest apologies, both on my part, and on behalf of my overly cautious coworkers. They are, unfortunately, unappreciative of eccentricity of whimsical work ethics. Mr. Zao then turned back to glower at his scowling cohorts. Mr. Zao elbowed his accusatory friend hard, forcing the man to reluctantly produce a full paper bag from his coat. “The rest of your retainer, as promised.”
Mollified, El Ex daintily accepted the bag, pretending it was a peace offering as he placed it into his sweater-hidden son’s waiting hands. The fifth businessman put a loose fist to his giggling mouth in an attempt to stifle a loud snigger.
The next thing the sniggering triad member knew, he was screaming as El Ex helped him fly over two rows of washing machines. Mr. Zao spread his arms to hold back his surviving, infuriated cohorts.
Mr. Zao frowned, then recomposed himself. “Good day, Misters Nurnazarov, we’ll call you later when we need your services again.”
The deal completed, El Ex snatched their bag of money out of Roxy’s trembling hands, then shucked the boy of that filthy sweater.
“Hey, Dana Carvey, we’re going to Sushi Shogon, not Sweater Town.” El Ex took his son’s small hand and herded the boy out of Fast-O-Mat, but not before returning Biker Grampa his stinky sweater, and shooting the struggling Mr. Zao a quick “Bye.”
Back at the creaky blue van, Roxy hopped into the front passenger seat, heedless of his father’s sudden, momentary crestfalling.
This work was featured in issue #14