The streetlights cast a strange yellow orange glow on the streets at the corner of Fort Meyer and Nash. There were no taxis in sight. A carfull of drunk twenty-something girls drove by in a sports utility vehicle on their way home form Georgetown. One of the girls, many Twinkies past a two piece bathing suit, rolled down the window and stuck her head out screaming "Oh, baby!" She laughed and banged her head on the window as she pulled it back in. The driver, enjoying this enormous wit, swerved hard to the left to avoid running up on the curb. Garner didn't seem to notice them at all. He waited for a couple more minutes and then decided to walk home. The walk would do him good. He needed time to sort a few things out.
Thirty years ago today, Sarah Bullis had checked into Mercy Hospital, an exclusive private hospital on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina to deliver a baby and a serious blow to the financial solvency of the hospital.
It was a sleepy, warm spring day when Harold Bullis pulled their late model Cadillac into the Emergency Room driveway, bouncing one tire up onto the painted curb. The staff ran out immediately to help Sarah out of the car. She was gasping and wailing and generally unnerving the staff as they helped her on to the gurney and wheeled her toward the delivery room. Harold ran along side suggesting ways in which the staff could be more attentive and generally adding to the confusion of the situation. Despite Sarah's current state, the Bullis's were wearing matching tennis outfits that had never been ruffled by anything so base as actually breaking a sweat on the tennis court. Both outfits were complimented by matching white cashmere sweaters worn Gatsby style over their shoulders. The staff was used to dealing with these spoiled, old money, Southern aristocrats but the Bullis's performance made them a little more off balance than usual.
As the good people of Mercy Hospital focused on Sarah, Harold quickly examined them with the eye of a chess master studying a chessboard. Only their moves were not defined by legal rules. The moves that these people would make were defined by their feelings and experiences, and they would fall into predictable patterns. The confidence game was like a judo of motivations. The con used the propensities, the fears and the desires, of the marks to pull them off balance and defeat them. Usually the mark would not even acknowledge the scam. Either they didn't know or wouldn't say, because to acknowledge the con they would have to look more deeply into themselves than they could comfortably allow. As Harold Bullis looked them over, he finalized his plans.
In the world of Harold and Sarah Bullis, there were marks and there were grifters. The marks and grifters were two separate species as different as humans and great apes. The marks lived in a world of comfortable illusions. A world in which they did not dare to acknowledge their most primal of instincts. The denial of their instincts forced the marks to become naïve and deluded about life. It kept them from letting their thoughts wonder to the darker side of their own characters. Being unfamiliar with their own dark sides they were unable to see the dark side in others. The grifters, on the other hand, embraced their dark side. They acknowledged their primal instincts and set out to satisfy them at the expense of the marks. The marks could no more see the true character of the grifter than they could look into the sun. It would blind them, scare them or make them turn away. And the grifters felt no compassion for the marks. The marks lived in a pathetic world of self-denial. They got what they deserved and the grifters greatly enjoyed giving it to them.
"Watch that wall!" Harold barked in an accent that was practiced to convey several hundred years of Southern breeding.
"What is the matter with these people?" pleaded Sarah, as though she was being wheeled down the hall by an angry mob determined to destroy her.
Nonetheless, the delivery was without event. Garner Bullis was brought into the world and Sarah enjoyed the finest pampering that old money, or at least old money appearances, could buy. And in the subtlest ways imaginable, she found fault with everything the hospital did.
On the fifth day, Harold Bullis came to visit his wife, in the late afternoon, wearing a pin striped double-breasted suit with spats and carrying a small leather overnight bag. He was going out of town on over night business, he explained, and wanted to see his wife before he left. A half an hour later he left with Sarah's best wishes and Garner wrapped in a blanket inside the overnight bag.
When the nurse returned to pick up Garner and take him back to the nursery, Sarah looked at her in utter amazement, a look she had a great deal of practice producing.
"Why, the other nurse came and got him not more than fifteen minutes ago," she explained with an edge in her voice suggesting that she might loose her temper or her sanity at any moment. "I hope you haven't lost him."
Well, indeed, the hospital was to find out that they had lost him. Sarah was hysterical and inconsolable. She left the hospital immediately, leaving any further interactions with that snake pit of incompetence to her lawyer.
After a thorough investigation, the hospital traced the missing (now stolen) baby to a part time day nurse named Betty Williams. Betty had only been working for the hospital for a few weeks. She had left early the day that Garner disappeared and had never shown up again. The hospital lawyers pleaded with the Bullis's to understand that these things happen sometimes and that the hospital should not be held completely responsible. The Bullis's found it in their hearts to forgive the negligence of the hospital only after several million dollars in settlement exchanged hands.
Had the hospital been more cynical, they might have noticed the family resemblance between Betty Williams and Sarah Williams Bullis. But such a terrible thought would never occur to them. After the incidence, they changed their personnel policy so that they would not hire a nurse until after the references were fully checked out. They then rested with the false sense of security that such a thing would never happen again.
Garner Bullis grew up among the smoke and mirrors of a family who believed that marks deserve to loose their money. It was the natural order of things. You were a taker or you were taken. And the Bullis clan had no respect whatsoever for the taken. While other kids were learning to play Fish or War or Old Maid, Garner was learning how to play Three Card Monte. Mastering the con was as important to the Bullis family as getting into the right college was to others. And whatever you could gain from having gone to the right college, the grifter could take away.
Garner was a quick study and was routinely pulling short cons by the age of ten. He had that innocent boyish look and had learned how to use it. But he also had occasional twinges of conscious. One day after cheating a drug store owner out of change for a twenty, he asked his mother,
"Mommy, does the guy at the cash register have to pay back the money when the drawer is short?"
"Of course he does sweetheart," his mother responded, "but its his own fault. He should have been more careful."
She smiled that warm reassuring smile that mothers use when they pass their values on to their offspring. Garner smiled back, but he still wasn't sure that it was the guy's fault. A little voice inside somewhere was trying to speak to him but he just didn't understand what it was saying.
Over the years, Garner had mastered all the basic cons and had even invented a few of his own. The little voice became more and more unintelligible, and eventually mute. Instead he began getting poking pains in his chest. He imagined a little red devil with a small pitchfork poking him from inside his rib cage. It didn't hurt so much as make him restless and uneasy. Whenever this happened he would shrug his shoulder in a rough figure eight and the little poking pain would subside.
As he got older, he moved away from cons that targeted individuals and focused on those where corporations had to pay. The little red devil didn't seem to mind when he took on wealthy companies so he became the master of the slip and fall grocery store scam. And he could have made a good living had the last scam not gone sour. Now he was bungling little things and beginning to loose his confidence. At least he had Rose. But there was always danger in caring about somebody so he wasn't even sure if that was such a good thing.
Garner had walked across the Key Bridge, down the Whitehearst Freeway and was now approaching Washington Circle as he came out of his reverie. It was after 3:00 am and his shirt was sticking to him.
He thought about his recent string of bad luck and tried to find a reason why things were going to wrong for him lately. Maybe some cosmic force was repaying him for all the scams he pulled. But, Garner was the predator, the aggressor, the man in charge of every situation. He shouldn't feel bad about it. It was his way of life. His way of life. But lately, in his darkest moments he felt used and unclean, as though life was having its way with him.