Free All Gone by Stephen Dixon Page A

another unidentified man thrown in the same day? Of course not.
    It doesn’t have to be the same day. It takes time to get decomposed. In fact, it couldn’t’ve been the same day.
    How long you think it takes?
    Days. Maybe two weeks. Badly decomposed, three. That’s when they threw Jackie in. Shot, took his clothes off, boom, in the water. Today’s Thursday? Then three weeks today. It’s him. So what are we going to do about it?
    What do you mean? Nothing. It’s done. Jackie’s dead. I knew about it. Now I read about it. I was only telling you, thinking maybe you knew and if you did, then who from? And if you didn’t, that you’d probably be interested.
    You mind my making an anonymous call to this paper so his wife could know?
    Jackie not coming home for three weeks, she knows. So will everyone else in time.
    How? He’s unidentified and decomposed. And no clothes you say. Nothing at all?
    Stripped clean. Wrist watch. Socks. Even his gold star.
    I don’t know why they didn’t say nude in the newspaper, but all right. Did he also have no fingerprints on when you people threw him in?
    I didn’t throw anybody in. Neither do I know who did. I just know some people who know who did and why and how it went. Gambling debts. But in bad, and loans. Things like that. Worse. Taking on additional big debts with another group and not paying off the first one a dime before he did and then telling both groups to go eat it. Now if he’d just been in deep with the first people and told them to eat it, they would’ve only broken his arm. But taking on two big debts way way over his head and telling them both to eat it and then going to another city to take on a third, well that was too much. The first two met and, with the third’s approval, decided to dump him. As for your fingerprints, I guess not. Why bother, for they’d also have to kick out all his teeth and fill in his chin cleft and scars. Besides, they didn’t want to make it impossible for him to be identified.
    Then you’ll have to explain to me. Why only take off his clothes and in other words only go halfway with his unidentification when they know Jackie has a record and will eventually be identified? Time to give them a cover or get the people who did it away?
    No. They thought it’d be a good lesson to whoever might think he can beat out on two big debts to two vaguely related groups and to tell them both to go eat it besides.
    But how these people who are supposed to get the lesson supposed to find out it’s a lesson and then one meant for them? By reading of an unidentified decomposed man found floating in the bay who could’ve gotten there through some long sleepwalk? How did the groups even know it was going to make the paper, nothing as the article was. And if they did, that it’d even be read?
    Whisper and word got passed around starting a month ago. Jackie’s betting. Jackie’s welshing. Jackie’s in very steep. Jackie won’t cough up a note for them and told both of them to eat it raw. Jackie could get a leg broke talking and acting that way. If anyone’s a pal of Jackie’s, give him the word? Jackie’s missing. Hey, anybody see Jackie or hear from him the last few days? Then, body found. Man. Hmm, bay you say? Tomorrow or the next day we’ll read he’d been shot with a small-caliber bullet so close and clean that it almost got lost behind the back hairs of his head. Everybody will know who it is and what for. As for the newspaper, that’s not the important thing. If it didn’t get in, someone would phone them. What’s more important is that the people this lesson’s directed to get to know it slow.
    These groups never seemed that clever to me to plan it so smooth.
    Listen, we’re no psychologists and know little about the subject, but in what these groups do and their customers, they are. They haven’t studied it but