All Due Respect Issue #2 Read Online Free Page B

the bags had been stuffed full of adult diapers, now left to fester in the sun. The flies were audible and Tommy thought about Myers again. The day was hot and the soil was damp with septic tank leaching. The place was a mess but he needed a spot to hide until he figured out what to do. He looked for any eyes that might have found them but the high concrete wall went around the entire perimeter of the yard. All he could see between the wall and the clouds was someone’s roof-mounted TV dish. Sirens whined in the distance.
    Tommy stepped toward the woman, his feet squishing through the yard. He eyed her as he got close and saw she was coated in gray dirt and dust. Her hair was white, very fine and thinning, and her red scalp was a sun-baked landscape of cracking skin covered in a wispy forest of fine white hair. The skin around the sides of her nose was picked raw and scabbed. Her skin looked like a set of oversized clothes and her cheeks hung loose and sad like an old dog’s.
    “Come on home, Clarence. See what I got.” The woman smiled and turned back to the house, shuffling through the dirt and damp.
    “Yeah,” Tommy said as he took a last look into the sky and followed the woman through the door. “Let’s see what you got.”
    What she had was a fucking mess inside her home. The adult diapers were not relegated to the yard or even bags necessarily. Tommy shuffled through the waste like the old woman did. He looked around the shithole. His mom was no housekeeper, but the place he was in, it was nothing but a receptacle for garbage. The smell was warm and rank, like fast food nacho cheese rotting in cat piss, blanketed beneath the rot and decay of dead animals. But Tommy forgot the smell when he saw the safe, an old Diebold out of Canton, Ohio. It was half buried beneath a mound of diapers and caked-on shit.
    “What’s in here?” Tommy said.
    “You’ll see,” she said. “You’ll see what I got.”
    Tommy followed her further into the house, followed along narrow paths among the mountains of trash and stuff and things. Stacks of phone books were piled to the ceiling. And there were cats, dozens of them watching from any available perch, tracking his movement like posted sentries. The woman sat and patted the couch, inviting Tommy to join her. He cleared a collection of empty cat food cans from the end cushion and sat.
    “What’s this bullshit?” he asked, pointing at the TV. A nun stood in front of a painting of some people in an old soda shop, mouthing words soundlessly.
    “ Price is Right ,” the lady said.
    “This isn’t Price is Right , you old dummy.”
    The woman looked at Tommy, smiling. “I’m so glad you’re back, Clarence. Didn’t know if you would be.”
    “Lady, I’m not Clarence.”
    “Have you eaten?”
    Tommy looked around and laughed. “You crazy you think I’d eat anything in this place. Tell me what’s in the safe?”
    “Money,” she said as she bit into the sandwich. The lettuce crunched and Tommy felt the cool green crispness in his own mouth, tasted the cash.
    “You got the combo?”
    The woman said nothing. She hummed tunelessly and turned her attention to the nun on TV.
    “Fuck it,” Tommy said, standing. The woman nodded, but did not look away from the TV. She took a potato chip from her plate and crunched. Tommy shook his head as he went back to the safe. He kicked at the surrounding mound of diapers, releasing the festering stink in an invisible cloud. He breathed through his mouth and continued to kick away the pile.
    “Stop, Clarence. Stop hurting my toys!”
    She stood in the arched entryway to the TV room. Her teeth were clenched and her face was bunched in a furious pucker that cracked the scabs around her nose. Then she smiled again as she stared at Tommy.
    “I got something for you. Come sit on my lap. I got something for you.”
    “Lady,” Tommy said, dusting off a phrase of his father’s, “you’re bat shit.”
    “Clarence! You ort not talk like