Play Dead (Part 8)

I’m fixing to play dead (Part 8).

I was feeling a lot better about Leon after he gave my money back and apologized for taking it in the first place, and I began to understand why he would go through the pockets of an unconscious person lying in a ditch beside the road smelling strongly of alcohol, which I couldn’t explain to him presently, that the odor came from the refreshment cart exploding next to me before the plane crashed.

The facts were that here I was presumed dead with everyone else on the plane, and that I wanted to stay that way, dead I mean.

However, a dead man who was actually alive, could not possibly survive and get a new start in life without any credit cards, no ID and the small amount of cash I had in my possession. I couldn’t buy an airline ticket or even rent a car without any ID.

This idea of disappearing and starting over had actually been bouncing around in my mind for a long time, and I had been saving up for. The insertion of the government Office of Circumlocution into my business, the VegX Corporation, which I knew would destroy it, was only the catalyst that encouraged me to do it now. And being the unpublicized lone survivor of the plane crash was the act of fate which was going to enable me to initiate my plan.

I had the means to do it, too, but unfortunately those means were back in Atlanta, and here I was stuck in a trailer park somewhere outside of Birmingham, with Leon as my only means of proceeding with the plan.

When I say I had the means, I refer to the exact time of the plan forming in my mind 14 years ago when my Uncle Virgil had died and left me the five acres of land surrounding his trailer right after I had graduated from high school. The property had been right smack in the middle of where a developer wanted to build a shopping mall.

Without the knowledge of anyone else I had taken the first offer of a half-million dollars and placed it all into a medium-risk mutual fund. Then, eight years ago I began withdrawing $5,000 each month, which I converted to cash. The result was that my fund was down to $153,000, but I now had $600,000 in fifty-dollar bills, a total of 12,000 of them, fifty to a bundle, 240 bundles. Not a good investment, but I wanted the ready cash.

Each month as I added another bundle I would tell myself, “Now this is enough, you can do it now,” but I never did.

At first I kept the cash hidden in the back of a filing cabinet in my office, but as the size of the stash grew, my hiding places had to change. I was constantly imagining ingenious places to hide it. I thought of burying it, but realized I didn’t want to be digging it up every month. I envisioned secret panels in the walls, trap doors under the carpet and even considered a safety deposit box, but ultimately decided I had to have it handy when I did execute my plan.

After the filing cabinet I transferred the cash to a shoe box, then an old briefcase, and finally an old tweed Oleg Cassini suitcase I had found abandoned in the basement. From then on I had kept the money in that old suitcase on the top shelf of my bedroom closet with a Braves Baseball cap positioned precisely on top of it so I could tell if anyone had molested it. Of course no one did because no one would suspect that an old suitcase which the Good Will wouldn’t even want would be stuffed full of cash.

Furthermore, no sane person would keep that amount of cash just lying on a shelf in a closet; that is unless that someone had a plan, which I did, and every time I opened my closet door that old suitcase beaconed to me. If it could have spoken I knew it would be saying, “There’s enough in me, it’s time, let’s go.”

Now, I desperately needed this old man to help me get my hands on that suitcase without being seen.

“What I’ve got in mind, Leon, is having you assist me for a few days.”

He swirled the contents of his glass around, took a sip, smacked his lips and said, “Assist you at what? I can’t be caught doing nothing illegal, ‘cause I got a record.”

I thought about what he said and figured what I was doing was pretty close to being illegal, however, as long as he didn’t know anything about it then he would be an innocent participant. “You don’t have to worry about that. Will that truck of yours get us to Atlanta?”

“Oh, yeah, she’s sound. I drove her to Biloxi and back right after I got my last social security check. When do you want to be fixing to go?”