Grundish & Askew Read Free Page B

where the residents were on vacation or gone for the weekend, Grundish would squat in an opportune dwelling for a day or two. He would sometimes invite Askew along. They would order pay-per-view porn. They would gorge themselves on the best food in the freezer and the most expensive liquor in the house. Grundish might take one or two nice items that he liked. If there was an expensive suit, he would take it and wear it a couple of times and then give it to a homeless person. When he was done with a house, he would find the photo albums or something else of obvious sentimental value and set it out on the kitchen counter with a note saying something like
this is all that matters.
    Grundish was good at his career. But he still got caught sometimes. Whenever he did, the victims would testify at his sentencing that he made them reconsider what really mattered in their lives. They always asked the judge to be lenient. As a result, Grundish never served a sentence of more than a year. Each time he was sent up, Grundish got more ink: a soaring eagle across his back...
FUCK
on the knuckles of his left hand,
KILL
on the knuckles of his right...a rose and a dagger on the palm of his hand [5] ...
born to lose
on his neck...a fire-breathing dragon on his right forearm.
    During his final stint in the joint, Grundish made himself a promise. He was never going back to prison. It’s not that he made an oath to do no wrong. He simply decided that maybe Askew always had the right idea: just don’t get caught. So on the day that he was granted parole for the last time, Grundish made a vow never to get caught with his figurative pants down again.

3
     
    The apple core flies through the air as if in slow motion. Grundish’s reflexes, catlike and precise, react well before his brain gathers what is happening. With the fruit refuse hurtling its way on a collision course with his head, Grundish leaps back and swats the gnarled
malus sylvestris
with his arrow-shaped
HOMES NOW AVAILABLE
sign. Once the offending apple is sauced with a powerful slap of the sign, Grundish’s mind catches up with his body and takes account of the incident.
They just threw an apple at me. I’m going to fuck up those rich little brats one of these days
, he thinks, wiping the apple sauce on the grass. This time he got a good look at the driver, with his stringy blond hair and skeevy little mustache. The image is securely filed away in a subfolder of his brain labeled
Payback
.
    It is a recurring event. The hulking, tattooed, fur-faced ex-con standing on the street corner, earning minimum wage as a human billboard, holding down an honest job. And that minivan full of kids drives by and bombards him with rotting food products and verbal taunts. Sometimes they shout “loooo-zer” at him. Sometimes it is just loud laughing. It doesn’t matter on what street corner the advertising agency places him. It doesn’t matter if his arrow-sign is encouraging people to check out great housing bargains or two-for-one pizza deals. The minivan always tracks him down. Grundish often fantasizes about that van breaking down right in front of him; he can visualize himself snapping their skinny necks, one at a time, and leaving behind a pile of smirking, pimple-faced corpses.
    For Grundish, every day is enough of a struggle without a hoard of punk teenagers mocking his lot in life. It’s not like when he was a kid Grundish aspired to stand on a street corner with an arrow-shaped sign, trying to entice the traffic to turn and check out condominiums which he himself could never afford. No, Grundish didn’t really aspire to anything as a youngster. Consequently, he found himself almost ready to turn thirty and working a job that the day-laborers turned up their noses at. But at least he wasn’t in prison.
    “Don’t you just hate punk kids?” asks the unmistakable raspy voice behind Grundish. “I do. Hell, I’ll probably be supervising some of those delinquents one of these days. So