Lockers

Image by Björn Schrempp from Pixabay

This is my entry to The 31 Sentence Contest Round 11 by @tristancarax. It is a contest based on creating a story with 31 sentences exactly, and each sentence has a set number of words allowed. For more information on joining the challenge see this post:

Lockers

I was fourteen then. I had an afterschool job at a junkyard in my hometown and it was owned by a guy named Amos. Amos was a shifty kind of guy; we liked that. He’d talk. He’d make up a nickname for every kid that worked for him.

Probably the most famous kid’s nickname in the whole local area was one made up by Amos, but that kid had never worked for him.

The kid broke in at night, found a car with gas, and crawled underneath to get the gas. He then punctured the tank, wanting to drain the gas into the can that he’d brought. The gas flowed; he couldn’t see. What happened is graphic, but still kinda funny.

In order to collect the gas that was coming out of the tank, since he couldn’t see to line the can up to the stream, he reached then, for his lighter. Errors have consequences.

I’m sure I don’t have to go into the gory details, but the kid was very lucky to escape with minor burns.

He’d never live-down that nickname, but his family members, including his siblings, would regularly lash out at anyone they’d hear talking about or even mentioning “Gas Man.” So naturally, we kids working for Amos would taunt them mercilessly by repeating it over and over.

I’d laugh but I didn’t taunt much, because it was so stupid, and it was really unimaginable that someone could be that dumb.

Amos was married, but the talk around town was that Amos would go out “catting around” every night, and his wife, in like manner, pursued female catting around activities. We thought that was weird. No one would ever ask Amos about it however; I guess because we kinda respected him, though as to why, I couldn’t even begin to say.

Amos talked out the side of his mouth, with a snarky “Godfatherish” tone, which made him seem like a mobster, and this was several years before the Godfather movie premiered. It was also quite difficult to tell when Amos was being serious sometimes. Sometimes we couldn’t even tell if he was angry or calm.

It was nice to have money to spend on sodas and candy and chips, though soon I’d spend money on cigarettes. Maturing? Nah, they were easy to get; the store owner didn’t care about our ages. We just thought she was so cool to sell them to us with no idea how awful that was.

We’d keep our cigarettes in an old set of lockers Amos had in his office. He said, out the side of his mouth, he’d gotten them when an old school was demolished because they’d be building a new one. The lockers were lying on the curb. Most were empty but some had lots of stuff.

There were some books too, and one book said on the cover that it’s “the oldest book in the world,” and I always wondered how they knew that.

_{Lockers © free-reign 2020}