Johnny Quits Pacing

Johnny Eddy was a nervous, almost spastic guy. Still under age thirty, he had thinning red hair, fiery pink skin and pale blue eyes that relentlessly darted side to side as if he were being pursued. If he was, no one knew by whom, or by what. Johnny constantly paced in tiny circles with a cell phone pressed to his ear, pausing only long enough to open a package of Goody Powders and pour it into his mouth. He was a real Barney Fife without the good humor or bravado.

Old man Coffman reluctantly hired Eddy to work in his video rental store, mostly because Johnny worked cheap and he was willing to work oddball hours. Strangely, though Johnny was no “people person,” store traffic increase dramatically after he was hired. Stranger still, business didn’t increase at all. Sales actually decreased.

One day Johnny came to work with his arm in a cast held up by a sling around his neck. “What happened?” Coffman asked.

“You can’t get blood out of a turnip,” Johnny replied and started sorting through returned movies.

A week later Johnny didn’t show up for work. After he missed three days Coffman got worried and walked the two blocks to his one room apartment over the Pour House Tap. Not getting an answer to his knock Coffman turned the knob. The door opened. Johnny was laying on a cot. His face was purple, his nose smashed flat and his leg was twisted at an impossible angle. “I don’t suppose you could loan me twenty grand,” Johnny moaned through broken teeth.

“Sorry,” Coffman said, “I ain’t got it.”

A week after that Johnny made the front page of the newspaper. There was a grainy photo of his broken body lying in the gutter outside the Pour House.