Penny’s Pass the Story - Part Four

Penny’s Pass the Story - Part Four

Jake Marindina utterly loathed his boss, Sheriff Milton. Every single aspect of his character and appearance filled him with hatred and disgust, and he could never understand how such a slob of a man had ever been promoted to the rank of Sheriff. Somebody in the town must have liked him or, more likely, feared him. He’d been married three times which meant that there were three poor women in the town who, at some point, had agreed to sleep with him. He must have paid them handsomely, but where had he got the money?

He was extremely proud of the fact that he could call himself Deputy Marindina, as stated on the badge he was presented with on the day he graduated from the Police Academy. His family were proud of him too, as to become the holder of such a qualification wasn’t easy for a man of Afro-Caribbean descent. His parents had been poor but hard-working, and they’d ensured that he had a good upbringing during which he took his studies seriously. So accepting his new post in the affluent, predominantly white, middle-class hamlet of Mornington Heights was seen as rising a rung or two up the social ladder. It was a nice place but he felt out of place there, and it wasn’t just the colour of his skin that made him feel that way. It was safe to say that everyone there knew everyone else while he was finding it difficult to get to know anyone at all. They all knew each other but some knew more than others about the ins and outs of Mornington Heights life and the skeletons that hid in shop-bought MDF cupboards.

Sheriff Milton knew everybody. He was an odious sort but people seemed to want to be close to him, as if he had some strange power over them. Jake couldn’t understand How this man could be so popular amongst the community. He would have described him as a redneck had psoriasis not made his neck crusty and a yellowy white. How could they respect a man whose head was so fat that he couldn’t wear his sheriff’s hat without it falling from its precarious perch every ten minutes. And there was something about his handling of the case of Amos Snodgrass’s mysterious disappearance that made Jake deeply suspicious. He often wished that Milton would win a couple of million on the Powerball lottery, resign his position, and fuck off to Florida to retire in luxury. He even wished that it had been Milton who had found the suitcase full of money abandoned on the riverbank.

***

Jenny Padget had been married for six and a half years, even though for most of that time her husband, Sidney ‘Page Boy’ Paget had been banged up in a Federal Prison in one of those cold, faraway states that nobody ever went to, especially to visit a cold-criminal spouse. For a long time he had been making big money and Jenny had grown accustomed to the lifestyle it provided, but unfortunately a teller at the bank on the main street had noticed that some of the money was too big. Most of his fifty-dollar bills were almost half an inch too big. Sheriff Milton had got involved and the crafty counterfeiter had been carted off in chains to the other side of the country. 

She had two children, a daughter named Jenny after herself, and a son called Oliver after her husband’s cousin who lived across the street. To diffuse the ambiguity about who young Jenny’s father might be she had told her neighbours that her oldest child was from her previous marriage. She hated the name Oliver but had been told a few days before the christening that if she gave that name to her son she would always be ‘looked after’. Jenny, Sidney and ‘Uncle’ Oliver had all moved into the street at the same time, offering only sketchy explanations of where they had come from, and why.

The male population of the neighbourhood had always referred to her as ‘that cute looking mom’ as they’d always been too awestruck by her breasts (which she usually tried to hide behind folded arms) to attempt to make conversation with her or even learn what she was called. Had it not been for their fixations with her upper torso they might have noticed that she had little else about her that could be described as cute. Her most attractive features were the work of masters of modern surgical techniques, in particular her nose which she’d had reduced as it had previously been such an effort to look down one so long at her awful nosey neighbours.

Every aspect of her mysterious life and the vaguely answered questions were analysed at length by the local gossip mongers. Where had she come from? Why had Uncle Oliver arrived at the same time? Why was there such a stark contrast in the appearance of her two children? Young Jenny had distinctive red hair and the purest white skin, young olive-skinned Oliver with his dark hair could have been from the Middle East, and nobody could even guess at Jenny the mother’s original looks because she’d had so many adjustments made to them. And where had the money come from to pay for all the surgery? And while she was at it, why hadn’t she done something about her scrawny neck?

***

Gideon Milton had been elevated to the position of Sheriff of Mornington Heights in the same week that he had paid off to the bank the loan on his house and bought a brand-new Toyota SW20 MR2. He had been happy for a while until he heard passers-by referring to his car as a poor man’s Ferrari. One day, he promised himself confidently, he’d have the cash to buy a rich man’s Ferrari, whatever that was.

As a young man he'd dreamt of success in a challenging career in the Police Department but things had turned out to be easier than he had anticipated. The world beyond Mornington Heights viewed the hamlet as a sleepy sort of place where nothing much happened, especially crime, and that was largely down to him. It was often said that everyone knew everyone else, and he knew everyone and everything about them. Knowing that he was fully aware of all their sordid little secrets was enough for him to be able to keep the people in line. He kept a particularly watchful eye on the Padget family, or the Padget group of people that he had come to see them as on the grounds that nobody could be sure that cute Jenny with the scrawny neck was really the mom or that any of them were related to each other at all. Before he had mysteriously disappeared, old Amos Snodgrass had shown more interest in them than most, but when it came to sharing what he knew, he refused to spill the beans or even pierce a small hole in the top of the beans can.

So with a shortage of crime to keep him busy, the Sheriff filled most of his days wedged into his recliner with mounds of greasy processed meat products on his lap whilst watching soft porn on generally unheard-of TV channels. He’d been married three times. It had been easy to find a wife in that part of the world where living was easy. His poor man’s Ferrari was seen as a poor man’s babe magnet and with it he attracted poor babes who each had a fascination for the cash he had stashed away. They could just about tolerate his laziness, obesity and flatulence but the perpetual pornography always finished them off round about the time a first wedding anniversary was due. Eventually he realised that he hated being married as the advantage of having his clothes washed and ironed were outweighed by the disadvantage of having to endure the constant nagging about his slovenliness which he couldn’t be bothered listening to. He’d become bored of women, even the saucy ones that appeared daily on his private TV channels. There was a limit to the number of twirling tassels a grown man could handle, or fumble with.

About a week after his third wife walked out on him he found a note on the kitchen counter. In it she (he couldn’t remember her name) had explained that she was leaving him because she was sick of seeing his food-stained uniform bulge at the seams as his grotesque body came close to bursting out, and she was angry that he never paid any attention to her. This was good news to him because for two or three days he’d been wondering where she was as the stack of dirty dishes in the sink was taller than usual and umpteen empty pizza boxes lay on the floor as if vomited out by the engorged waste bin.     

He had wanted to tell her that Deputy Marindina’s clothes also struggled to contain the body within, but after a period of deep thought he realised that it was his assistant’s ripped muscles that were stretching the fabric of his police uniform shirt and not just flabbiness. In the precinct’s locker room, at the end of a long shift, he had once accidentally rubbed his arm against the young cop’s. He was surprised at how such a strong and powerful-looking limb could be covered with flesh so warm and soft. He was surprised at how nice it had felt. He was surprised at the strength of his desire to be with beautiful young Jake. Milton always had enough cash hidden away to live comfortably but if he could get his hands on a suitcase full of money he could say goodbye to the humdrum life of a provincial officer of the law, resign his position, and retire in luxury having taken Marindina with him as his sexy plaything.

***

Before he disappeared, members of the hamlet’s population had always looked upon Amos Snodgrass with suspicion. Many would describe him as an introverted hermit kind of a man but he was always eager to talk to the cute moms in the afternoons as they picked up their children from Hawthorne Elementary. There was something a bit creepy about him that would always cause them to give him a wide berth, apart from Jenny Padget who would giggle like a schoolgirl when he spoke to her and sometimes she’d even unfold the arms that perpetually shielded her breasts from the gaze of the other men. Nobody could understand why she got on so well with him. He was another resident considered to have adequate funds in the bank but, with his distinctive red hair and pure white skin, he wasn’t much to look at.

He would occasionally invite her to spend an evening with him at his house and together they’d listen to scratchy old vinyl records of traditional Yiddish folk songs and smoke the dried Night Rot that he kept hidden in a small silk purse dyed a deep indigo. She worried that she was developing an addiction to his strange herb but the last time she had gone to visit him she had seen through the half-closed curtains of his lounge window that Snoddy’s friends were over again from Israel and they were celebrating the Feast of the Passover. She usually enjoyed ancient rituals borne from old world cultures and religions but on this occasion she saw that on the oriental rug he'd boasted as being his prize possession, there was a sheep that appeared to be in a great deal of discomfort. Horrified, she ran home and from that day onwards she never returned, and she regretted having Amos the Shepherd of Teqoa tattooed on the surgically stretched skin of her right buttock. Nobody had ever seen this indelible mark on her flesh apart from Snodgrass himself, Gideon Milton and some sailors.

She knew she’d have to go back there eventually as she needed the money to have work done on her scrawny neck, but would he be there?

Image: Jenny Padget’s right buttock.

Click below to find links to other instalments of Penny’s Pass the Story.

Penny’s Pass the Story - The Full Picnic