Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

Don’t let the children come to harm. Bellow, “Stop!” from your window before they rush into the street. Shift to park, leap from the cab with your change dispenser jangling like a tambourine from your belt. Around to the tailgate, position yourself street-side with every sense attuned to traffic and children — even as orders are placed, even as prices tally in your mind — Banana Fudge Bomb Pop $1, Mississippi Mud $1...0, Strawberry eclair $1, Sponge Bob $1.75. Never let the children jaunt blindly away from a purchase, oblivious to passing cars. Grab them if you must, but only as a last resort.

Be warned; at first your sleep will be plagued by the mental echoes of the bell you clang. Two weeks of training with Gregor, stopping hourly at gas stations for coffee and All Sport, more Marlboros. He’ll flick his cigarettes into an ash pile on the floorboard beside the gearshift. A farm bell will be attached just above a hole drilled into the cab roof, through which a leather shoelace dangles, tied overhead to the bell yoke. Pull the strap, and the clapper knolls the bell.

“Not like that,” Gregor will say; he’ll pluck the strap from your fingers. “You sound like a funeral dirge. Make happy sounds like so—” His own fingers will flick, and the bell will tinkle sweet and cool. “Don’t ring without thinking. Rhythm, then silence — like suspense. Wait, ring here where the houses make echo, you see?”

Stand with Gregor behind the truck with the exhaust pipe puttering heat at your shins. In six days of work you’ll have tanned six shades darker. Your legs will pulse with awakened muscles while Gregor scrutinizes your latest sale, his wiry eyebrows drooping. “You take their money like a beggar — snatch, snatch. No subtlety. The money is not the objective, it is the afterthought. Make them believe this. Take the money as if you are refusing the money, like so. Understand? They are sheep — the people — all of them sheep. You tell them what to buy. Not with words; with your body. Use your shoulder to hide pictures of the cheap ice cream. Cheap Creamsicles. Forget Creamsicles. Your fingers swipe across the stickers and lead their eyes toward expensive items, see?”

Gregor will point toward an elderly woman across the street brushing pine needles from her driveway with a broom — even as dozens more needles dive onto the blacktop behind her. “Do you see her? All the time they do these things with no meaning,” Gregor will explain. “They thrash around in little plastic pools. They eat swine carcasses outside with buzzing flies. They drag children around on leashes — I have seen it. They sneak through the cornfields at night to pillage my coolers, like animals.”

Keep the larger bills buried in a sack beneath the driver’s seat. Drive with both hands on the wheel and never let your mind drift, even late at night when you’re exhausted from twelve hours’ work and your high beams light the black knotty trees encroaching on the road, even when silhouettes seem to lurch from the woods toward your open window and you want nothing but to drift off to sleep.

Watch for deer eyes gleaming. Realize this is the hardest you’ve ever worked. Some mornings you’ll pray for a rainstorm cancellation, but hours later under starlight and after a full shift you’ll smell like soil and breathe like wind; you’ll have traversed a stretch of Earth and conquered its native peoples.

Gregor will wait on his porch, slumped at a picnic table forking spinach from a can into his mouth, his cigarette butts piled in an aluminum ashtray. Overhead a bug zapper will glow purple and sizzle with tiny deaths. Seated at the table, separate bills by denomination and stuff your coins into paper rolls. Collect pennies in soup bowls. Gregor will estimate your earnings on sight. On poor days his anger will mount like an instant heatwave.

“You have lost your customers, see? This money is crap. They run away and never return. What can I do now that you have failed?” A mosquito will pierce his upper lip, but you will say nothing as it gorges. “I take two weeks training for you but still you understand nothing!”

Nights when the money piles higher, he’ll grin from one corner of his mouth and help count the profits. He’ll talk and reveal that thirty years ago he became a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia, a student revolutionary of the Prague Spring just before Russian tanks rolled into Wenceslas Square and battered the human face of socialism. “Our First Secretary Dubcek, they kidnapped him to Moscow and broke him, understand? They tied their ropes to him and made him their Communist puppet. The people of Czechoslovakia — they bow to Hitler, they bow to Stalin, they bow to everything because they have no spine to hold them up. So I take my spine and leave.”

Gregor will keep the pistol on the bench beside him. When he hears rustling outside the porch windows he’ll grab his weapon and burst through the screen door. The screen will snap behind him like a mousetrap.