Free Garbage by Stephen Dixon Page A

you?”
    â€œI’m hardly the one in the hospital plus incarcerated, but I feel terrific today. I adore snow.” And suddenly to me “Quick, Shaney, what’s your name?”
    â€œMy what?”
    â€œName, quick, your name.”
    â€œShaney Elborn Fleet.”
    â€œQuick, what do you do and where and all that?”
    â€œOwn a bar. Barowner. Ten to one. Tend one too. I do. One twenty-three East 5th Street, postal code forgot. Mitchell’s Bar and G. B and Grill. Bar and Grest, Rest, please—these questions hurt my head. And will you please stop whistling?” I say to the next bed. “It’s a nice tune and you whistle well but it’s killing me.”
    â€œEver you say, pal.”
    â€œNo, you’re all right,” she says. “Quick response, natural verbal confusion, though what you said made sense. But your three ex-cellmates say they didn’t touch you. That while they slept you must have rolled off your bunk to the floor because you weren’t familiar with upstairs sleeping, and no one could find the pipe or comparable solid instrument.”
    â€œForget what I said of the guard. I just wanted to know if he knew anything. But the police won’t prosecute?”
    â€œYou have some proof?”
    â€œMy head. What the doctors said. For why they think a pipe?”
    â€œType of skull gash. No fist did it. Broke the skin and a bit of bone and was caused not by your head hitting something but something hitting it. Sixteen stitches. That’s what your turban’s all about. Concussion they’ll only know when—”
    â€œBecause they’re after me those bastards and word in, they did, got the, to the jail to nail me, get me, that’s it, has to be, that sonofabitch whoever did it, so what the hell else is new? Don’t you see, and excuse me for my cursing and muddledness, but they’re all from the same group.”
    â€œWho? You claiming the pipe, apartment fire and reason for your delivering that street beating are all related to the garbage can company you complained about in the police report I read?
    You have to have something backing you better than wild charges or that company will nail you for defamation of everything and then you’ll really go to jail and pay. Because as I said before. Well, I don’t know if I said it but I’ll say it now. I’m not saying you’re a fabricator, Mr. Fleet. Or that anything you said happened to you couldn’t have in this city individually or even as you stated be intertwined. But so far you’ve no case. One, there’s no bludgeoning weapon, so maybe the forensic medic was mistaken and your head did roll off your bed and hit a shoe we’ll say or your own elbow on the floor and made that gash like a pipe might make. Two, three men in your cell are prepared to swear that none of them brained you or at least neither of them witnessed it. And three, it’s not as if you’re a prison guard who got piped, so who’s really that concerned? Be realistic. To most people, judges or otherwise, what occurs in a prison cell is your own fault for getting in there, even if how you got in turns out to be an error of the police or court. And four, that man on the street you beat up says he won’t reveal his name and address for fear his wife will find out he was in town with his mistress that day when he told her he was to be a hundred miles from here on business. That’s why he won’t press charges against you, which when you think of it could make sense. And five, if that fire was deliberately started, then it was an arsonist’s dream job. Forgive me for butting in more than I was appointed to. But if you—pipe story aside, which might have been a personal affair between you and one or all of your ex-cellmates and so not something they want to disclose—have any doubt you’re telling the truth about this Stovin’s group or