Play Dead (Part 17)

I’m fixing to play dead (Part 17).

Here I was holed-up in a cheap motel on the south side of Atlanta with my old friend Leon at 4:30 in the morning. I use the word “old” not to represent a long period of time, but rather as a description of his age. However, as old as he was, Leon was far from being feeble, and he had fished me out of a wet ditch in Birmingham after I had walked away from that plane crash in which everybody on board had died, including myself.

Except I wasn’t really dead. It was just that everybody, except Leon, thought I was and I was using the falsehood that everyone on that plane had been killed as a catalyst to enable me to enact my plan of playing dead.

And now I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing after just minutes before having sneaked into my former home and securing some clothes, and most importantly, the old suitcase stuffed full of fifty-dollar bills totaling up to 600,000 dollars, which was nestled right up beside my bed so I could touch it.

At the moment, however, I desperately wanted to get some sleep, but the problem was that Leon had been drinking a lot of coffee, was wound up tighter than a two-dollar clock and he wanted to talk.

“I wish Louise was here with me,” he muttered with a tone of loneliness in his voice as he propped up a pillow on his headboard. “She likes motels.”

“Leon,” I moaned, “can’t we just go to sleep? You can do without Louise for one night. Didn’t you go for 25 years without seeing a woman while you was in prison?”

“Lord, no, Sonny Boy! I got married to two different women while I was in the pen.”

I was awake now. I sat up and inquired, “Leon, how in the world did you get married in prison?”

“By the Prison Chaplain performing the necessary ceremony.”

“No–no, I mean how did you find a woman while you was in prison?”

Leon chuckled before he said, “Oh, that was easy. You just get the names of dead men out of the obituaries from the newspapers that was about six months old, and then find the address in the phone books. Everything you needed was available in the prison library. The next step was to start writing letters to the lonely widows. If you sent out a hundred, the return rate was about ten percent.”

I was fascinated with his story and listened intently as he returned to it. “That’s right, and out of those ten, one of them would fall for you. If you was good, that is, and I was darn good.”

“What did you say when you wrote to them?” I asked him.

“In the first letter you tell them that you knew their dead husband a long time ago. You get enough details from the obits to cover that. You tell them what a wonderful man he was, then go on to tell them your own sad story, including how innocent and lonely you are. From then on you narrow your target down to one of them, depending on the degree of response. It takes a certain type of woman, but they are out there, the ones who love convicts, the ones who are obsessed just thinking there’s a man locked away behind bars and stone pining away day and night just over her.”

After I told Leon that I was truly amazed by that story he continued, “Hey, you get yourself locked away for 25 years and you’ll amaze yourself with what you can think of and actually get done.”

Although I wanted to hear more of Leon’s story my eyes wouldn’t allow it. I could stay awake no longer. I felt myself floating away toward the bliss of sleep. The sound of Leon’s voice seemed to be coming from far, far away. Just before I crossed that final line between wakefulness and unconsciousness I reached out and touched the old suitcase, stroked it lovingly with my fingertips, and thought, “Good night, old friend.” Then I went to sleep.

I woke up slowly with that contented feeling which always follows a deep and restful sleep. The room wasn’t dark, but it was shadowy with a little stream of sunlight coming through a small crack in the drapes, which told me that it was well after daylight.

For a little while I lay there relishing the feel of a real bed, thankful that I wasn’t still lying in a wet ditch, or in Leon’s smelly bed or on his stale couch.

The first thing I did, even before I turned over was to reach out to stroke my old friend, the suitcase, but my hand felt nothing, nothing but empty space!

A feeling of cold terror stole over me as I realized I could be fixing to be in deeper trouble than I was already.