It was, finally, his last day and he was sitting in a holding cell with a variety of low life detainees, each somewhere in the process of coming or going. It was an unseasonably hot day and the air in the cell was close and stagnant. On a bench perpendicular to Garner sat William Baxter, known to one and all as Bad Billy.
Bad Billy Baxter was about six and a half feet tall, weighing over three hundred pounds. He was wearing bib overalls and a thermal underwear shirt with the sleeves cut off, unevenly, around the elbows. He boots were laced up and tied about halfway up leaving the tongues sticking out and the tops mashed down and spread out. He was sleeping it off in the holding cell and every time he breathed, the sins of the night before engulfed the still air of the cell and made Garner's eyes water. Garner would have moved, but the other benches were occupied by equally as undesirable people and at least Garner knew Baxter from his many appearances in the cellblock for drunkenness and disturbing the peace.
Baxter was snoring so violently that Garner thought he might bring down the walls of the cell as he inhaled. At one point, after a particularly loud inhalation, Baxter made eating noises with his mouth, farted, and went back to snoring loudly again. A few minutes later, after a long inhalation punctuated with halting gags and some horrible gurgling strangling noises, Baxter went into a coughing fit during which Garner thought the man might very well cough himself inside out. The convulsive coughing woke the man up and he sat there dumbly getting his bearing on the situation and staring directly at Garner.
"So, here we are again," said Bad Billy breaking the silence as the knowledge of his situation descended upon him.
"Yeah, here we are," Garner agreed, "but you are on your way in and I am on my way out."
"In, out, what difference does it make," Baxter chuckled, "you'll be back again."
"No I won't," Garner snapped, "I'm never coming back here."
"I used to say that to," Baxter agreed, looking as philosophical as he might ever get in his bib overalls and open top boots, "but you can't change who you are. People like us are meant to be in and out of jail. It's just who we are."
"What do you mean, it's just who we are," asked Garner somewhat prickled over this assertion.
"Look at it this way," Baxter began with a far away look in his eyes, "when a farmer plants a row of corn, ever now and then he drops a kernel in the ditch rather than the mound. Now that kernel, in the ditch, will live or die and the farmer may decide whether to pull it or let it grow. But neither the corn nor the farmer can move it from the ditch up to the mound no matter how healthy it might be."
"What does that have to do with me?" asked Garner with genuine incredulity. He had no idea what the point of this silly story was.
"You are who you are and there is nothing you nor anybody else can do to change it."
"Farmers haven't planted corn by hand for a hundred and fifty years," Garner observed tersely. "How could you possibly know what happens to the corn that lands in the ditch?"
"I think you are just avoiding the true message of the story," Baxter confided as though he were a pastor counseling a member of his congregation.
"Well, whatever the message is, it has nothing to do with me," Garner snapped.
Unfazed, Baxter continued, "the hardest thing for us to look at," he offered, "is our true selves." With that he leaned to one side and produced a long shrieking fart. Thhhwwwaaaaaaaat! It sound like a duck call with multiple crescendos and smelled like something had crawled up his ass and died. He settled back down again and faced Garner regaining his solemnity as though nothing had happened and waited for Garner to acknowledge the reality of his worthlessness. In the still air of the cell it took a while for Baxter's contribution to the atmosphere to drift over to Garner's bench.
"My God, Billy," Garner exclaimed, "you smell worse than death itself! You must be completely rotten on the inside."
Baxter humbly nodded, acknowledging his rottenness, as though he was setting an example that Garner should follow. At that moment, the guard called Garner's name.
"Hey Bullis, we got your release paperwork done. Just sign a few things and you're outta here."
It didn't come a moment too soon. "You're wrong, Billy," Garner claimed as he got up and headed for the cell door. "You're wrong! I'll never be back here." With that he walked out vowing to himself to never look back on, nor repeat, the mistakes that brought him here.
Fortunately, Garner had purchased a used car when he arrived in Gary, because as soon as he was released from the county jail, he went straight over to the impound lot and retrieved his car. He filled it with gas and headed for Interstate Route 65, which would take him Southeast, almost as the bird flies, to his parent's home in Charleston, South Carolina. It was a long boring drive, taking the better part of fifteen hours and passing through such side road attractions as Lexington, Kentucky and Knoxville, Tennessee. It was long and it was boring, but it gave him time to think. And that was exactly what he needed to do.
Two things occurred to Garner that occupied his mind for most of the trip. First, he realized that his means of making a living, his stock in trade, was not going to hold up in the future. Short cons were not profitable enough and long cons were getting too risky.
The Ponzi scheme fiasco had caused him to doubt his own intuition about marks and victims. The problem there was that he had to manage the expectations of a crowd which was a whole lot more difficult than managing the expectations of individuals one on one. So he resolved that future schemes had to involve individual interactions where damage control could always be limited to managing the expectations of a single person.
Second, he realized from the Food Lion foul up that technology was becoming his enemy. Databases and cameras and networks were all conspiring to make it very difficult for him to make his humble living. Somehow, all that technology that was being used against him had to be turned around and used in his favor. But Garner didn't even own a computer. And he had no idea how he might be able to use all these new technologies to his benefit.
It was all very depressing and he even toyed with the idea of going straight. But everything that Garner knew dealt with pulling scams and it was very unlikely that anyone would want to hire him to scam people. He was, after all, a career criminal. And just like anyone else, making a career change was a really scary proposition.
By now, Garner was on Interstate 26 heading into Charleston with a large dark cloud hanging over him when he spied a pancake house along the road and decided to stop for something to eat. "There's nothing like a big stack of buckwheat pancakes and some country sausage to make the world a nicer place to be," he thought to himself. Besides it was well past dinnertime and he knew there wouldn't be much to eat at his parent's house.
As he looked over the menu, an infectiously cheerful waitress came over to see if he wanted coffee. He had conned the waitresses at this restaurant before with a standard scam. He would order food that cost about six dollars. He would then lay down three one-dollar bills. The waitress would pick up the money and take it to the cash register. When she returned saying that the bill was six dollars and he had only give her three, he would claim to have put down eight dollars; a five and three ones.
"You must have dropped the five." He would say as though they were on the same team trying to discover the mistake.
"Why would you give me eight dollars for a six dollar bill?" the waitress would inquire.
"Well, because the service here is even better than the pancakes," Garner would reply trying to look a little guilty about over tipping.
At this point the waitress would soften but still be a little suspicious. Garner would then empty his wallet showing only a single dollar and a receipt showing that he had just purchased something before coming into the pancake house, from which he had gotten nine dollars in change.
"All I have left is another dollar," Garner would claim, "you can have that if you want it."
At this point the waitress would dismiss the issue thinking that she had dropped the five or the cook who was running the cash register had pocketed it. Garner also noticed that more often than not, the waitress would just tear up the ticket and pocket the three dollars for her tip. It wasn't the kind of con that would ever return any real money, but it was necessary for the working grifter to stay in practice and this was just another one of those little routines that kept him sharp.
But now, Garner had little interest in pulling a con for six dollars. This was partly because he was reflecting deeply on whether or not he wanted continue in this life and partly because he did feel like taking advantage of this waitress. She was different some how. She seemed to inhabit a world of one, a world of carefree easiness, a world of small jokes that only she found funny, but her buoyant laughter would nearly always bring others around.
She took his order and just as she was turning to leave he asked, "What's you name?"
"Rose Miller," she said smiling with a twinkle of mischief in her eye. "And I get off at 2:00 am, and I don't need a ride home, and I don't need any body to take me away from all this." With this she laughed as though she had anticipated and dispatched every question he might have. Then she smiled and winked at him before turning back towards the kitchen to place his order. Garner sat there having no idea what to do.
Over then next month or so, Garner ate so frequently at the pancake house that he was beginning to despise pancakes. He flirted with Rose and she flirted back, but nothing ever seemed to come out of it. None of the opening lines he tried would ever catch.
"Do you go out very much," he asked one day trying to approach the subject of asking her out.
"Enough to keep life interesting, but not enough to make people talk," was her glib replied. With that she would wink at him and turn away, but seemed oblivious to what he was attempting.
Finally, one day in frustration, he remarked, "if I eat any more pancakes, I'm going to have to get bigger pants. What does it take to get you to go out with a guy?"
"Why don't you just ask?" she replied.
Of course, Garner had tried to work her into his confidence in every way he knew how, but she seemed oblivious to his tricks. It had never occurred to him to just come right out and ask her. He did, now. And they started seeing each other on a fairly regular basis.
Rose was studying Information Systems at the University of South Carolina. Garner spent his days reading up on the stuff that Rose talked about so easily and didn't feel like he would ever understand it all. As with all complex topics, you feel like you will never understand it and then one day you cannot remember what was ever so confusing about it. And that day would come, for Garner, but not just yet.
When Garner arrived to pick her up for their Friday night date, he found Rose jumping up and down and dancing around her house.
"Well," said Garner, "you certainly seem to be in a good mood today. Did you win the lottery or something?"
"Better than that," she exclaimed, "I was accepted in graduate school."
"Graduate school?" Garner replied. He was having enough trouble trying to keep up with all this computer stuff she was doing at USC. Graduate school was a little more than he could take.
"Yes," she spouted, "I've been accepted into graduate school at Foggy Bottom University."
"Foggy Bottom?" Garner was too taken back by the whole thing to utter more than a couple words.
"Yes," she continued, "Foggy Bottom University. It's in Washington DC."
"Washington, DC?" Garner continued unable to break out of his developing pattern of two word responses. Garner felt rejected. Washington DC was a long way from South Carolina. Granted they didn't have any formal relationship, but they had been dating. And he thought everything had been going pretty well. He was surprised and a little hurt that she could be so happy to leave him and go so far away.
Rose noticed his somber expression and said, "Well don't look so rejected. You can come with me if you want."
It sounded like she was walking down to the drug store and offering to let him tag along. He thought that there should some how be more. On the other hand, Rose was the only thing of interest happening in his life right now and his prospects of anything ever happening for him in Charleston, South Carolina were remote at best.
"What the hell," he replied. "It could be an adventure. It could even get me out of this rut that I am in."
Little did he know on how many levels that would be true.