(these first two stories are the first and second of a series as told by the fictional narrator Roland Horst---the other stories are unrelated))

                  THE MAN WHO READ YESTERDAY’S NEWSPAPER

                                               a short story

                                                       by

                                               Patrick Breheny

     You want to hear the story I promised about the man who read yesterday’s newspaper? Well, okay. No, this aint about you, just because you’re too stingy to buy a paper. I said he was like you, not he was you. You aint never DONE nothin’, ‘cept read that old newspaper.

     Name was Dwight Drubb. He‘d had a farm over near Edgemont, ‘bout twenty minutes from Cleaverdale, and was retired as only a farmer can be, still growing a crop garden, getting a little social security. Wife gone, kids grown, already middle aged themselves, and long ago moved away from the farm.

     So he had the café for social life, Elmer Porter’s The Grub Stop in Edgemont, “Best Coffee In Edgemont, Best In The World” their sign proclaimed. Most big rigs were on the fast track north to south, Interstate 5, but a few still came along California 99. There were no other towns either way from Edgemont for quite a piece, so if they didn’t have business in Cleaverdale itself, a lot of those drivers did stop for a spot of the word’s greatest coffee and their feed-your-face dinner specials. Didn’t have much choice.

     Those were vagabonds who might never be on Highway 99 again, though. The only two regular truckers were local  food delivery and occasional livestock transport guys, Sims and Lou Bob,  who usually worked at night and were in the café  in the mornings, then hung around until 11:00 AM or so, when they went home to bed.

     Also there every morning was “Big Ray” Johnson, the accountant and insurance salesman, and of course Alicia the waitress, who bought the morning paper from the vending box outside because Elmer her boss paid for it, to have a house paper for the customers. Dolly, Alicia’s scrawny little mutt, was in there too, in violation of sanitation laws, but what there was of law enforcement in Edgemore was Don the sheriff, in there part of the day himself, and not about to give his good old gal pal Alicia a hard time about Dolly. Dog stayed.

     Here’s how that solitary newspaper originally got passed around, before Dwight Drubb retired and joined them mornings. Alicia read it, then Ray Johnson hogged it. Sims and Lou Bob waited for it, then when it was relinquished, shared it. Later, when Sheriff Don came by, he would read it, and then anybody else all day who wanted to read it could. And at the end of the line, Dolly the mutt got it, rolled up in butcher paper, to gnaw on, just as if it might have some marrow inside.

     Until Dwight retired. Dwight wanted to read a newspaper in the morning, and if today’s was tied up, he’d read yesterday’s. He asked Alicia to let Dolly wait for her treat. Now all that meant was that Dolly missed one time of getting that rolled up paper, and after that started getting it much earlier, as soon as Dwight was through.

     You might think, being that Dolly didn’t read, only chewed, that she wouldn’t really know what had happened, but somehow that mongrel instinct sensed it. Every morning after, when Dwight came into the café, Dolly yapped and snarled at him, then kept it up all the time he read.

     Alicia thought that hilarious, that Dolly could figure it out and become vindictive. One day, she gave Dwight the old newspaper and said, “You better hurry up. She’s as impatient as Sims and Lou Bob waiting for Ray Johnson to let go of today’s paper.”

     Which of course was only a good thing to say if you wanted to provoke people, but it was out there, and Lou Bob didn’t let it pass.

     “Ray, ARE you reading that whole paper at once? Maybe if you’re on the news section, you can pass over the sports page.”

     That was the first time anybody challenged Big Ray about the paper. He said, “There’s a box outside. Don’t you have a quarter?”

     “Don’t you?”

      The issue of who had a quarter and who didn’t, that had nothing to do with quarters, had both men standing. Ray Johnson was a white collar guy, but under that button down shirt and tie, he was 6’4” and 275 lbs, at least fifty pounds heavier and three inches taller than Lou Bob. Sims, however, could lend another 250 lbs and 6’2” to that side of the equation, and Ray Johnson was interested in keeping his advantage.

     “This is man to man, or you’re no man,” he said. 

     “Fair enough, then,” Lou Bob said, and picked up his catsup bottle to put things a little more equal. Sims stood up too, to get between them, maybe try to talk them out of it. Dwight ignored them completely, as he had Dolly, and read his yesterday’s newspaper.

     As if she wasn’t responsible for it, Alicia said, from her side of the counter, “Will you two stop it? Fighting over a paper.”

     In the way that the ridiculous sometimes has of pointing out reason, both men seemed to understand simultaneously that they’d been had by the waitress. How to save face, though? Well, there was Dwight, and Sims, not a combatant himself, saw a way out for his sidekick.

     “Give Lou Bob that sports page, Dwight,” Sims said, as though that logical solution was always so obvious it should have been done long ago, and this whole fuss was nothing but Dwight’s doing.

     “This here’s yesterday’s paper,” Dwight protested.

     “No matter. Lou Bob only read half of it.”

     “That’s Ray’s fault.”

     Seeing they were getting back to that dangerous notion, Sims said,

     “No s’not. You have it now, don’t you.?”

     So Dwight, who WAS on the front section anyway, gave the sports page to Lou Bob in the interest of peacekeeping, wondering if he could get anything out of a two day old paper, and what would Dolly have to say about that, Grrrr….?

     After that they just couldn’t let it be. They had themselves an amusement park Fun House now at The Grub Stop, laughs every day with old Dwight and his yesterday’s newspaper. Couldn’t the old coot buy one, even with his social security? Sure, they could too, but that would only induce their new fruit to spoil on the vine.

     It moved on to egg stains and sniggers, with Alicia saying, “You know, Dwight, when a paper sits around all day in a restaurant, it gets some wear and tear on it, not to mention food”

     Dwight couldn’t help but notice Sims elbow at counter level going over to buddy Lou Bob’s rib cage.

      Lou Bob said, “A quarter a day keeps the bad news away,” and then, like he’d invented the phrase, or at least was a comical genius for remembering it at that very moment, added, “Cause no news is good news.”

     He and Sims, two grown men, after all, near fell off their stools.

     The next day there were more than egg stains, there were coffee spills too, and Alicia said, “Might just be you won’t have to order food at all with that newspaper, Dwight.”

     Sims said, “Dolly’ll chew his leg clear off Dwight eats that paper,” and this time grown man Lou Bob slid so much of the seat of his size 46 britches across the stool he fell off the rim, cutting wind as he lunged.

     Alicia shouted, “Eighty six! No more coffee for ‘im.”

     They had themselves a great time, and Dwight put up with it until the third day, when something that looked suspiciously like it came from that opening under Dolly’s tail was on the paper. Dwight had no appetite for news that morning. He read the menu with his breakfast, and thought maybe they knew they’d gone too far too. They were somber, their wisecracks weren’t coming. They just---well, nothing seemed funny to them that day. He wondered if they were feeling guilty. Was that possible?

     He had an explanation momentarily for their moroseness, because they of course had been reading current news, and were through quickly today. Dwight got the paper early, and when he saw it, all it said was---three lines, like this, see, watch my finger--

                                               A-BOMB

                                            Everybody Dead

                                              World Ends

     There was no text following the headline. There was presumably nobody left to write anything anymore, nobody to read it, except those at The Grub Stop. It had to be a joke, of course, a gag newspaper with a custom headline.

     There was nothing to see out the café windows. Black contact paper covered them. Okay, an elaborate nasty joke, one with the energy and preparation of a surprise birthday or bon voyage party.

      Dwight had driven to the café, but maybe that memory was the real delusion. Why hadn’t they just told him? Well, wouldn’t these infected fowl want to see his shock when they’d gotten over theirs?

     Hoping he was just playing along, summonsing as much feigned sarcasm as he could, he asked Alicia,

     “So, is this dump Heaven?”

     “Oh no!” Alicia yowled …

     Whazit? Yowl IS a word. It’s a hybrid of yell and howl. Don’t care about no dictionary. Yowl is a mutated sound. When somebody yowls they sound like a carrot growing out of a tomato would look. When Alicia laughed, she yowled.

     Getting back, Alicia yowled and said,    

     “Oh no-o!” (a little longer on the no like that), then she continued “This surely aint Heaven.”

     Lou Bob said to Dwight, “Don’t know what you did, but we’re here for what we did to you, among other things.”

     “Mostly for being the kind of people who’d do those things,” Don the sheriff said, in his soft spoken voice, on the side of justice. Dwight wondered what he’d done.

     Sims said, “There was a guy here named Pete before you came, gave everybody the reason why. Coming back  He’ll fill you in on the why, but what really matters now is the THAT and not the WHY.”

     Ray Johnson said in a kind tone, “Dwight, there’s a special second edition today. Do you want to see it?”

     It was like a Guinness record, if only there was somebody to keep records still. Big Ray Johnson, the newspaper hog, giving a paper to Dwight. But it’s too late for remorse, Ray, Dwight thought. No reason to be nice now.

     Presumably Ray was through reading it anyway, because this one also had only

headlines and no story---again three lines, like this, look, I’ll point. It read,

                                                NUCLEAR WINTER

                                               All Hell To Freeze Over

                                              Snowballs Have A Chance

     “Got your long johns ready, Dwight?” Alicia cackled AND yowled, with a deranged hyena laugh that went on and on until he was not only afraid he would have to listen to it forever, but he’d also be ridiculed by Sims and Lou Bob, bullied by Ray Johnson and eternally growled at by Dolly the mutt.

     But if they so enjoyed tormenting Dwight, what would be their punishment? Well, they seemed to truly dislike him---what else was what they were doing but a form of haterd?--- so maybe it was just that they’d have to put up with him too.

     Huh? Yeah, you can bring me a beersky. Try to kinda set it down without interrupting, though.

     So now, when Pete did come, he was a guy with long hair and a beard, wearing some type of white hospital gown garment that made Dwight think maybe one of the homeless from Main Street in Cleaverdale had gotten himself onto a locked ward somehow, then managed to escape during the apocalypse. He was carrying a steno pad with him.

     And soon’s he come in the door, Alicia offered him a free breakfast. He declined, told her food wouldn’t be too important anymore, and she smiled with as much charm as she could summons, which really wasn’t much, and said,

    “You’re so cute. I’d go anywhere with you.”

    Ray Johnson interrupted to remind her, “When he left here before, you said he was filthy hippy scum.”

     ”You lying ton of bacon fat and egg yolks, Ray Johnson,” says she, “Why he’s the cutest hippy fella’ I’ve ever seen. Looks like St. Joseph hisself.”

     “That’d be Peter”, Lou Bob reprimanded, and nodded his head devoutly as he said the name.

       “You only reserve that kind of piety for the Big One,” his good friend Sims chastised, “And she’s just trying to flatter the good Peter here by comparing him to the earthly father of the Son.”

     Ray Johnson saw all this theology-to-my-advantage quibbling as an opportunity to   get worldly practical.

     “You know,” he said to Pete, “You and me could be good friends. I got me a BMW, and a couple if houses hidden away in Fresno nobody ever did hear about, especially the tax man.”

     Pete replied, “Yes, I know all about those things,” but he started writing in his steno pad, so maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was just a good cop---the most experienced, you would think--- letting a criminal trap himself up.

     “Render unto Caesar, right?” Ray advocated.

     “Right,” Pete agreed, “Only you didn’t.”

     Ray leered. “I know lots of pretty girls too,”

     “Haven’t had much interest in that these last couple of thousand years.”

     Ray leapt on that like he’d found the jailhouse key. “But you HAD once?”

     “I was just a human too”

     “Faced the same temptations, he means,” Don of the badge said, by way of unnecessary explanation.  Dwight wondered again what he was doing there.

     Seeing bribery was getting him nowhere, Ray tried the one thing that had always worked for him---bullying. Might be a lawman present, but he weren’t protecting nobody no way anyhow.

      “Why don’t you just go on your way, then?” said Ray. “Get the hell out of here before I throw you out.”

     “There will be no throwing me out, Raymond Snerd Johnson.”

      Now Ray really knew all along there was nothing he could do but back down. He was almost near tears and started to blubber,

     “I’m so humiliated at the mention of that name. Snerd!. My demented great uncle. It was a dirty trick of fate. The most I’ve ever used voluntarily was Raymond S. Johnson.”

     Dwight, seeing Ray Johnson almost weeping, and feeling he’d never done anything himself, considered that to be the chance for his own interjection. He got enough courage up to whimper,

     “What’s my offense?”                                                                                                                                                               

     “Oh, now, Dwight….”

     Yeah, right,.see, even St. Peter was patronizing him.                                                                               

     “Now, Dwight,” he said, “That’s a private matter for each person, isn’t it?  Do you really want to know?”

      “Yes indeed.”

      “Okay, then let’s you and me step into the No More Chances room and I’ll tell you.”

      Losing a good bit of nerve now, Dwight wailed,

      “Where’s that?”

      “Why just right here in the back room, Dwight.”

     So, head down to show humility and respect, Dwight followed him into the rear of the restaurant, where the staples and pots and sinks and roaches were. Exactly one moment after Pete shut the door, he yanked it open again, and there’s the whole pack of them, including Dolly, with their ears to the wood.

     “There’s an  INTENSITY to the punishments,” Peter told them, and they all backed off again. Maybe Dolly thought there was even a doggie hell she could go to. 

        Once he closed the door a second time, Dwight whined, real urgently, like a kid had to suddenly go to the bathroom,

      “What did I do?”

     “NOW you’re impatient,” Pete said. “A bit late, don’t you think?”

     “What do you mean?” he gasped, so breathless Pete could hardly hear him.

     “Why, Dwight! You were so patient God Himself was revolted.”

     “But,” Dwight said, all lawyer now---yeah, of course because he thought he had to be ---“’Patience is a virtue’”

     “Yes,” Peter agreed, “And ‘All things in moderation.’”

     “ I thought it was my cross to bear.”

     “Oh, you’re just full of those sayings. How about ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’”

     “Huh?”

     “Your cross was to overcome it.”

     “I didn’t know.”

     “You were supposed to.”

     “Can I have another chance?”

     “Ah-ha-ha” It was the first time Pete laughed, and he did it just like that: Ah-ha-ha!

     “Ah-ha-ha, That’s what they all ask. Remember this room here is called No More Chances.”

      “Alicia calls it the pantry.”

     “The pantry? This dank storage room?”

     He opened the steno pad and began writing again. Dwight felt like he’d testified against her. Another violation for her to account for. A lie. And what if she had only been heading for Purgatory, and this had pushed her tally over the line, sent her down?

     Dwight stopped Pete’s writing mid-stroke when he asked,

      “Can I have an appeal?”

      Pete said, “God’s really busy, Mr. Drubb.”

     “That’s unfair.”

     “Unfair? Whatever made you think it would be fair? Has anything ever been fair? Was life fair? Have these people been fair? God is biz-zee. Wars, earthquakes, famines, don’t let it rain at the picnic, can I have a girlfriend?, whine, whine, whine.

You think I can just walk in and make an appointment to talk about Dwight Drubb? He’ll say, ‘Who named him that?’, and when I tell Him He did, He’s just gonna get mad at me. You think my job is easy? Never mind. I just give reports and try to stay out of the way. He has a temper.”

     “Is this hell?”

     “No, this aint hell. I went along with all their groveling in there to give back in kind what they gave to you. I just can’t find any of you listed anywhere. Not a single one of you did anything, good, bad or indifferent. Couldn’t some of you done something?”

     “You didn’t know about Ray’s BMW and houses?”

     “Nope. That’s what they mean about a criminal always going back to the scene of the crime. It’s metaphorical.”

     “It’s what?” asked Dwight, alarmed

     “Never mind.,” said Peter. Yeah, Dwight thought it had that sound like “diabolical” or “infernal” One of those “ical”s or “als”.

     “How’d you know Ray’s middle name was Snerd?” Dwight asked.

     “Alicia told me,” 

     “Well, how’d she know?”

     “Saw it on his driver’s license and wanted to inform to her advantage, I guess.”

     Then he considered that, and wrote more about her in his notebook. Dwight was afraid to tell him he’d seen Ray Johnson’s license and it said Samuel for middle name. Dwight had enough to worry about for himself without the problems of Raymond  Samuel (a.k.a.“Snerd”)  Johnson or Alicia, the Witch of Canines.

     He petitioned, “If as you say, I didn’t do anything, can I go Up?”

     “You can’t go anywhere until I get this all sorted out.”

     “When would that be?”

     “Oh, in eternal time, could be a few millenniums, and, well, when you procrastinate, you never know.”

     “Is there anything I can do?”

     “Well, I’ve pretty much decided about that bunch, so maybe if you’d just do what you always should have done…”

     “Which is?”

     “Why, Dwight, you know.”

     “What?”

     “Give them their sentences.”

     “What are their sentences?”

      “Dwight!”

     “How do I do it?”

     “Walk right in there and tell them all to go to hell.”

     “Can I say it came from you?”

     “You cannot. Apologize while you’re doing it! It has to come from you.”

     “I can’t.”

     “Okay. Well, I’ll wait. I have time.”

     “Where will I go while you wait?”

     And Pete naturally pointed to the front of the restaurant.

     “It’s hard to do,” said Dwight.

     “You asked for a second chance, but if you’d rather stay here…”

     So Dwight considered his alternatives, his option of remaining with his persecutors, and of course there really wasn’t any choice he had, was there? He sought some strength inside himself, stood as straight as he thought a marine would, held his breath, and marched into the cafe.

     When the batch of them saw his new comportment---and maybe they’d been listening again---they cowered away toward that black window.

     That gave Dwight the steel he needed.

     “You dirty, stinking jokers,” he said. “Lou Bob and Sims do it with those farm animals they drive around…”

     “We just deliver them,” Lou Bob protested.

     “In the middle of the night?”

     “We drop them off in the early morning after our routes.”

     “Oh yeah? Why’s it take two of you? One’s in the back. And as for Ray Johnson,  

 HIS pecker is so small he can’t find it and wets his pants every time he pees. You ever notice that moisture there?”

     “Man my size sweats,” Ray said.

     “Man your size pees his pants. Alicia is the result of a mating between Bigfoot and a female gorilla, and I think Sheriff Don  must have came to us here to be the Edgemont Police Department after he failed the written test for the U.S. Army.  So why don’t you all go to hell?”

     And then the most incredible event in all of Dwight Drubb’s life occurred.

     They started clapping.

     Alicia said, “That pooch doo is just pumpkin, Dwight.” She was laughing. And not at him. She’d a been laughing with if he was laughing.

     Lou Bob, alleged Romeo of the truck pen, said, “We wanted you to stand up to us”

     “But now that you did, you were so MEAN!” Ray said.

     Had he hurt Ray’s feelings? Dwight wondered, was there any truth to what he said about any of them?  He’d actually always thought that wetness on Ray was splash water from the restroom basin.

     “Dwight was just compensating,” Sheriff Don said quietly.

      Yes, Dwight thought, but he wondered how Don felt about just being pronounced an imbecile, how Alicia took being more or less called King Kong’s daughter, and of Lou Bob and Sims, which was a cattle man, and which sheep?

       Just then Dolly barked at him, and Dwight stamped his foot at her. Dolly ran under Alicia’s legs, and Alicia yowled. Only this time the yowl was on Dolly.

     Dwight was trying to figure it out. He’d just damned these people, insulted them, and they were all congratulating and applauding him.

     Yeah, way it is sometimes, aint it.

     And then, with one simple sentence, Sims, rumored bovine gigolo, explained everything.

     He said, “We rented out St. Peter here from the Cleaverdale Little Theatre.”

     Well, Dwight thought, they missed an avocation too. Splendid performances they’d all just given. Improvising, at that.  Should be right down there in the lights of  Cleaverdale for the next try-outs.

     “We have another newspaper for you,” Ray the hog said, and, accompanied by one more explosion of cheering, presented Dwight with a new, creaseless, contrasted, fully printed newspaper that had sharp headlines and bold columns.

     Now what do you think that paper was?

     Wasn’t that day’s Cleaverdale Herald..

     Not the day before’s either.

     No, not one Dolly chewed on. New!

     Not the L.A. Times OR The New York Times.

     God grant you sense, what would Dwight Drubb want with the Wall Street Journal?

     Yes, he WOULD read the Enquirer, but weren’t it.

     Y’all give up?    

     Sure about that? You sure?

     Okay then.

     It was tomorrow’s paper.

     What was the headline? Only Dwight knew and he aint tellin’. Wouldn’t we all like to know tomorrow’s. That winning lottery number too. Defeat the purpose of a newspaper.

     Yes, that was then and this is now, but Dwight never told anybody.

     Oh, you think I’m holdin’ out on you?  You think I know ‘cause I’m just makin’ this all up. You sound like those people think the rasslin’ aint  real.

     Now listen, fellas---and nice to see some of the women here this time. Yeah, you can bring the little un’s. I’ll try to avoid topics like Ray Johnson's pecker and, shall we say, animal husbandry. Listen, you know that motel downtown Cleaverdale that just has a sign says MOTEL? Ever wonder about that? A motel without a name? What goes on there? What kind of people stay in a motel with no name?  Why doesn’t it have a name?

     Whazit, Mae? You say some fella’s might bring their domesticated beasts there after they’ve courted them all evening, sat beside them at the drive-in in the back of a pick-up truck? Yeah, kinda, “Want some popcorn, dear?” “Baaa.”

     Well, maybe. We’ll see. Next time, folks, okay? Motel Without A Name. No, not today.  I don’t know when it’ll be, just whenever.

      Have to think it up? No, I’m just plain wore out talking now, so you’ll have to wait.

       Yeah, see you then.

       Make it up! You have to believe, that’s all.

       Okay then.  Bye to all. See you next time.

copyright, all rights reserved by Patrick breheny