Distinguishing Features Part 6/8

And there they sat, Austin and Matt, at a small, ultimately sturdy table on which lay all of the possessions they had been carrying. They were having a conversation with Officer Winters. Jack was off being tended to by a medic, but he was fine. He had survived the five-block march to the station. In front of Matt there was a Porsche key-fob with three keys on it, all to doors, along with his wallet with his ID placed on top. Before Austin were the same particulars, but his key ring was unadorned. There were also two fortune cookies there. Jack entered heavy-casual escorted by an officer, and announced the obvious to everyone.

            “I’m okay. This wasn’t done to me. I punched myself. Odd as it sounds, it’s true.”

            Perhaps he wasn’t all that alright. His right cheek was red and shiny with salve and so was his hand. The medic had to do something, you see. Winters nodded to a chair and Jack sat at the table. He and Austin then held the same sardonic, miffed, mild expressions. Jack’s spot on the table was decorated in the same manner as that of his other partners in crime. There was a set of keys, coin change, a wallet, a joint, and a small notebook without pen.

            The door opened and another in uniform entered with a six-pack of bottled water, napkins and paper party plates that indicated through their design that they were from a youth group eschewing everything bad. The officer placed the items down, reached to the center of the table- into one of the three plastic bags there- and helped himself to a cinnamon cake donut. He nodded to the solemn group and left the room.

            Officer Winters slid water and plates to our sad three.

            “Tuck in. We gotta finish this.”

            Jack sat back while the rest grabbed the crushed and sticky donuts. He reached out and fingered the joint.

            “I was hopin’ to work up an appetite first.”

            Winters pondered how to separate a frosted éclair and a long john.

            “Sorry, old chap. Smoke-free zone.”

            He then shrugged and put the entire wad on his plate. The doorknob clicked. Winters gestured to Jack, who slipped the joint back into that tiny pocket. Austin reached to his possessions with an inquisitive look to Winters, and the Night Chief entered ignoring the fact that the three perpetrators were now shimmying around in their chairs, putting things into their pockets. His eyes seemed to be only for what was in the center of the action. He tugged on the rims of the plastic bags, prospecting for the tastiest. He looked to Austin.

            “You were the neutralizer in that chase.”

            Austin rattled his noggin in surprise.

            “Ah. Maybe you were. I did my part.”

            “You played for Milly.”

            “Left field.”

            The chief snapped his fingers.

            “There ya go! Always appreciate the help.”

            The Chief scanned the others- Matt, then Jack with only a flicker of recognition. He’d noted Matt’s shirt and lipped to himself:

            “…Parry Pounders…”

All that was heard was a soft, kissy, percussive pair of ‘P’s. Jack had considered internship and had spoken to him five years previously. But if the Chief recognized him from that, he didn’t show it. If he knew the reason why the three were there, he didn’t show it. He could trust his subordinates and you know that he had more on his mind. What the Chief did display was an appetite. He reached into a bag and extracted a large nugget of joy. For the record, it was, of the three extant, The most desirable double frosted chocolate cake donut of the entire haul. Now it was there in his hairy hand. He mumbled something about ‘the good ol’ days’ around a bite, nodded to Winters and departed.

A psychic sigh was heard by all as Jack leaned forward and inspected the bags. He plucked out 2/3 of a squished blueberry muffin with raspberry glaze (unintended). Winters chuckled around his éclair.

But, dear reader, do not shed a tear for our heroes. They had their old-school vitamin-fortified wheat and were then satisfied. During their (short) internment they were exposed to beneficial UV rays through the full-spectrum bulbs shining in that interrogation room, needed, since it had become more dangerous to venture out during daylight hours. The three had failed miserably. But they would have their day, and it didn’t have to happen in court.

            More officers filtered in and out during the donut buffet. Then cafeteria workers, maintenance, janitorial staff, and some oddball nicknamed ‘Smitty’. It could have been worse for the young men if charged. They could have been assigned to the ‘fire crew’ out west, to maintain order in the cities peripheral to the ‘ceded territories’, or they could have been packed off to Antarctica, a sentence that had lost all cachet since there had been a crack-down on people mailing penguins back home.

            Instead, they choked down a donut or three and chatted. Most in the buffet line didn’t know exactly why they were there. Some thanked the nice young men for the treats they brought, and, dammit, they were nice young men. Jack hadn’t eluded the police. The donuts saw to that. And this was at a time when people realized that things weren’t going to cut it. They needed food. Jack, Austin and Matt hadn’t meant to share, except among themselves. But even Officer Winters knew that the mild humiliation they suffered didn’t come from having to cast their sharing net wider.

            So, they were nice young men. They just didn’t feel too good right then.

            If they’d been at home, they would’ve eaten more, but, as it was, over the course of an hour they and the visitors ate every one of the donuts. Then Winters told the three that they were free to go.

           Jack and Austin were good boys. They had known each other since they were six and as their attitudes converged in adulthood they were bad together at twenty six. They’d been promising in their youth, and it was Austin who went strangely wrong when he was fourteen. That was after he was run over by canvassers on mountain bikes.

            He was walking home from school minding his own business when a canvasser clipped him from behind. These canvassers had invested in those bikes and helmets and lights and backpacks and safety flags and were set on changing the world one smile at a time. That was their cause and they were apologetic and helpful and knew enough to call an ambulance right away.

            Scraped and bruised, life changed for Austin. He was now a member of the ‘Smile Brigade’, which had presented a petition to the legislature proposing a pro-smile resolution. Adult Austin, when questioned about the wording, would just shrug and say:

            “I dunno. Something about smiling.”

            There had been a problem, you see. As a member of the ‘Smile Brigade’, Austin had been ‘phoning it in’. He hadn’t taken initiative and he clearly wasn’t developing leader follower leader skill sets at a pace equal to the rest of his cohort. Nor did he smile much. And he was complaining about pain in his right arm at just the wrong time. The smile resolution was now threatened with shelving.

            Being fourteen, Austin rallied in his own way. His arm was now in a splint and sling, but he was smiling more. Sort of. Bit of a grimace. Meanwhile, the Smile Resolution went down in flames due to gridlock.

            When queried about that experience later, Austin revealed little, summing it up in a pithy statement:

            “A law is a law but a good sausage is a wurst.”

Now, Jack was plodding along during that period. He was doing well in school and clubs. Austin was considered a ‘bad influence’. Then as an adult, Jack soon had a few college semesters under his belt. He worked toward a degree in Business Administration, but saw that more and more things were being taken away. So, he took courses in Criminal Justice and made it as far as his first Junior semester before concluding that a lot of things that were being taken away were being taken away in a legal manner. It was around this time that Jack and Austin’s attitudes matched fully again. Jack began to dabble in realty. He became expert in things that he had previously vowed not to practice. He also became very good at explaining why he wouldn’t involve himself in things that he didn’t want to do. He became the master of his own ennui. When he declared that land could only be owned to a certain degree, his Platinum Realty Club Mentor recommended therapy. His therapist recommended drugs. Jack chose Notstalgia instead.

            He made argumentative cartwheels when suggestions were made that he was anti-social. To that he would quickly agree; according to the common usage of the word, it applied to him. Which would lead to the ‘then don’t you think…’ gambit of the interlocutor, suggesting more tolerance on his part, to which he would respond:

            “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

            With the more cerebral he would counter by asking if they thought that he was clinically anti-social. Of course they would answer in the positive. Usually they were in a bar and they were having an argument, after all. Then he would say that he found that upsetting, thus he couldn’t be anti-social in the clinical sense. The only one who could traipse unscathed through Jack’s tangled web was the irrepressible Julie. She could find the pro in any anti and the one time that Jack brought up his life philosophy with her she leaned close, yet drew a line, declaring that he wasn’t anti-social, he was ‘Jack’.

            Since Jack’s cynicism had developed later, it was harder to crack than that of his friend Austin’s. The two had found themselves through dumpster-diving and drone-downing. Sullen pranksters, they were. When Austin introduced Jack to the grey side, it was when they took a big ol’ stencil and spray paint and set off on a mission to deface one of the few billboards still serving downtown, one that read: ‘Focus on the Future by Increasing Personal Flexibility’. They climbed up and modified it, tagging ‘In Bed’ at the end.

            Then they skittered back down and looked up, admiring their work. Jack felt as good as the one time he sold a four bedroom split-foyer home by mistake. He’d told the couple that he was showing it to that he thought it may be ‘above their means’, and they hopped on that statement as a selling point. He earned 5,000, a plasticine plaque (silver level!), and, as a bonus, the feeling that the sale had left virtually no karma footprint. But he knew then that the streak wouldn’t last. His life wasn’t some old movie.