Conman Bob

The name’s Bob. But some folks also know me as Frank Pulley, Bill Butler, Gregor McGregor, Dr. Martin Stans and so on and so forth. I planned on livin’ my life like a decent chap in our wee dirt-road town in Nashville,Tennessee. But then one day my Ma says to me, she says, “Bob, don’t go runnin’ after that Daisy. You a cobbler’s son and unless the Lord think it fine to send us over some miracle, that’s all you’ll ever be.” Daisy was the prettiest girl in my school. Her Pop was the editor of the local gazette and her Ma had the prettiest linen and the freshest cakes, they said. My Pop was old, wrinkly and hunchbacked, and he was missing half his left index finger ‘cuz he nailed it in to a heel once. The only linen my Ma had she used as curtains for the sitting room. So Daisy and I could never be. Another time my Ma caught me sewing a pair of ballet slippers for Daisy and she said to me, she said, “Bob, you ever try running after a lad on a cycle? I said “No Ma, I never try doin’ that.” So she says “Bob, if you try running after a lad on a cycle, sooner or later you gonna trip and fall. Even if you wearin’ the best shoes. So just keep your head down and don’t look around and stick to your shoes, Bob.” I’d’ve listened to my Ma ‘cept I knew the ol’ story about Mammy. Mammy was my old man’s Ma, and all the while I was growin’ up, all my folks would say, “Bob, you gone on your Mammy.” She was the only lady in our town who’d ever spent time in prison. One fine day in the summer of 1817 when she’d been young, she decided to be more than just a poor man’s poor daughter. She stitched her some odd lookin’ clothes and made up an odd sounding language and went about town till all the folks were beside themselves with wonder, trying to make head or tail of this exotic lookin’ lady. She’d made a deal with her suitor, my Pappy, to act as her translator after which she’d give him her hand. So Pappy told the town folks, “this here lady’s the princess of an island in the Indian Ocean and she got kidnapped by pirates and only just managed to escape by jumpin’ in the Atlantic and swimmin’ for life.” The town folk couldn’t get ‘nuff of it. For a whole year, she fooled all the folks around her and got invited to all the fine houses with their fine feasts and their fine hosts and listened to their fine music and went ridin’ with them on their fine horses to their estates and all the while she had a dandy ol’ time. So when my Ma told me I’d never be more than a cobbler’s son, I told myself, I said, “Bob, the world ‘dun seem to be made of folks any brighter than you. ‘Fact, most seem dumb as shit. So what’s the harm if you fool ‘em just a little? If they fall in to the trap then they deserve it; it ain’t your fault they didn’t think to grab some of the smarts ‘fore their mamapopped ‘em out. I’ll tell you something though: I never started out crooked. Instead, I did what most lads my age did to prove some’n to themselves and their folks: I joined the army in ’49, aged nineteen. It didn’t take me much long to realize that being brave and fightin’ fair and doin’ good was like bein’ gifted a brand new pair of black leather Bostonians which were a size shorter: when you’d wear ‘em, folks’d praise you and you’d feel pretty darn good about yourself, but you’d have to bear a whole lot of pain to get there. So when it happened the first time, we wasfightin’ the Korean War, and I was in the trenches with a dozen other soldiers and a medic. One second the medic was bent over my leg tryin’ to stitch up a bullet graze wound, and the next second he was sprawled on the ground, brains blown out and all. I felt like I owed him a gesture of camaraderie so I reached over and yanked the dog tag from around his neck and flung it around mine.Casper Roberts, it said.Then the lot of us went back to emptying magazines at the enemy lines. Not much later on, a lad who looked like he was gonna shit his pants came slippin’ and slidin’ and stumblin’ in to our trench and yelled in between gasps of breath that they needed the medic in the eastern trench STAT ‘cuz one of the boys was shot. He waited for a second and when no medic leapt forward, he panicked and began flailin’ his arms and beatin’ the ground and cursing at us for not hearin’ what he’d said. In the middle of his fit, he stopped dead and stared for moment at the medic’s dog tag around my neck. Next thing I knew, I was being yanked out of my crouching position and being dragged face down along the mud, and then falling down on my ass in another trench, then hauled back up and tossed in front of a lad who looked like he was about to croak. Blood was coming out of where I figured’d be his liver. The dying boy looked at me and barely managed to choke out a “please”. I looked at the lad and I said to myself “Bob, this boy here’s gonna be goin’ up to the Lord any minute so you might as well do him good in his last moments. Somebody to my right handed me a scalpel and I took it in my hand and flipped it over in my fingers a few times till I could get a good grip on it. I told myself, I said “Bob, this ain’t much different than Ma cookin’ her stuffed chicken roast. You remember how she does it; you’ve watched her plenty times. She just makes a wee slit, gets her hand in there and takes out all the stuff inside, and then stitches it back up. Just take a breath and do it like Ma does. And so I did and the poor lad lived till dawn and then died. But I got to do ‘bout a dozen other surgeries: each time I’d cut ‘em up, take somethin’ out or stitch somethin’ up, and then tell the other lads to give the poor chap a whole lot of penicillin. The last surgery I did before the lot of us got flown back home was on a lad by the name of Bryan Fitch. A chunk of his right leg’d been blown off by shrapnel and I was patching it up and the whole time the lad was bawlin’ like a baby. So I said to him, I said “why you cryin’ yourself to death; we’re all goin’ home in a few days, and then you could buy yourself a prosthetic and you’d be able to walk around just fine”. But he just wailed harder at that so I asked him again what the devil’d gotten in to him and he told me nothing could make him happy now ‘cuz he had nothing to go back home to; his wife’d sent him a letter and she’d told him she ‘dun love him no more and that she’d married the neighbor and they lived happily together in Fitch’s home now, and then she’d comforted him by tellin’ him even if he had no home no more, he could always walk in to mine and be blown up and then he’d be a martyr. And then Fitch said something that got me thinkin’. He was blowin’ his nose on the handkerchief I’d given him when he howled that he’d have gotten back to both the wife and the new chap if only he had an attorney. So I stopped for a moment and I said to myself, I said “Bob, this here is it; you been beatin’ yourself all your life for being a cobbler’s boy, and truth is, you ain’t got big ‘nuff balls to be shootin’ guns and killin’ folks. So why don’t you try somethin’ else? Whaddya say to attorney? So I told Fitch when we was flyin’ back home on the Boeing C-135that I’d been a lawyer for three years of my life ‘fore I’d decided to serve a higher purpose and defend my country. I told him I’d get him back his house and his lass ‘slong as he could drag his wife to court and sling some mud on her. Fitch agreed and the trial began. I confess with pride that it didn’t take me very long to get the son of a gun new husband out of the picture. All I had to do was get some lads to burn any and all his identification documents, and forge a completely new set, which was then neatly put, along with the medic’s dog tag I’d taken, back from where the originals had been taken. I then got me a warrant from the judge, and had some state authorities run a background check on our Sun Of A Gun, and all of a sudden, Sun Of A Gun was being arrested on charges of “Desertion From Active Duty” as a medic while other brave souls had battled it out on Korean land. The now husband-less Wife Of Fitch found herself alone with nowhere to go ‘cept for right back in to Fitch’s arms, which is exactly where she went. Fitch said he owed me his life and as much as he wanted to pay me handsomely for the service I’d done him, he didn’t have the means to do it, and that all he could give me was his tailor’s card. “Stanley’s Stitching”, it said, and I was supposed to go to this Stanley lad and get me a free custom-made suit stitched. So I decided to go to Stanley, but ‘efore that I said to myself, I said, “Bob, look here now, ‘stime to move on and graze somewhere else.” So ‘efore I stepped up to door of Stanley’s Stitching, I got me a black wig, an Italian accent, a resume that said I’d worked with Salvatore Ferragamo, the famous Italian house of fashion for five years, and the name of Francesco Lorenzo for myself. On a fine Sunday mornin’, Fransesco Lorenzo walked in to Stanley’s Stitching, introduced himself to Stanley, gave the reference of Bryan Fitch and told him the Italian fashion houses had particularly sought out Mr, Stanley as their representative in the fashionably inept world of America. That lad Stanley gushed and reddened and spluttered like a fool, and then offered me to the post of Manager for his shop. I asked him what he was gonna be if I became Manager, and he bowed his head reverently and said he’d be honoured to serve as Assistant Manager. And that’s ‘bout how I got the fad for polka dotted men’s suits goin’ like a horny stud on a bitch. But pretty soon, that lost its thrill and I realized I’d been playin’ it too safe. So I decided on doin’ something bigger and bolder. I’d walk the streets, tryin’ to spot me some exciting new project but wherever I turned, I saw folks with trusting little useless faces. One such day, I strolled in to a small book shop and picked up the first paperback I saw on the shelf. The cover said “Leo Tolstoy - Anna Kerenina”. There was a man and a woman on it, and they seemed to be sharin’ one of those romantic, gazin’ in to each other’s eyes moments. I flipped the book over and read the summary; there was some funny soundin’ names on there. Under the summary, in big yellow print, it said “Pocket Books”. And the office of Pocket Books is exactly where I found myself next with the same copy of Anna wachamacallum. In my custom-made suit, I demanded to be shown in to the Editor in Chief’s office, and the pretty lass at the reception desk was quick ‘bout makin’ it happen. I walked in to Jack Goodman’s office, flung the book on to his desk, and demanded how he, Jack Goodman, Editor in Chief of America’s finest publishing house could allow such treason to go on under his very nose. The Goodman lad seemed to be tryin’ to collect himself and size me up at the same time, and after a moment’s pause he stammered: “P-Pardon me, sir?” So I let him have it: I told him, I said, “What treachery you partake by publishing books of those Russian bastards? For shame, sir! You sell yourself cheap to the enemy. What have you to say for yourself? Goodman indignantly retorted, “It’s one of the finest books ever written, sir!” So I said to him, I said, “Finest?! Have you even bothered to read it? It lacks substance! The characters are lifeless! There’s isn’t an ounce’s worth of profundity in it! If I had to write it, I’d write the whole goddamn thing in half the amount of pages, and make it even better! You’re in deep waters sir; I’d say if you didn’t hire someone with a better eye in the next hour, who knows what other felony your ineptitude may lead you to commit.” John Goodman turned out to be a pretty decent fella to have as Co-Editor. ‘Bout not too long ago, I decided it was ‘bout time I write to my Ma and come clean and tell her I wasn’t the sergeant battalion she thought I was and had been for the past year an’ half. I wrote to her, I said “Ma, remember when I was a shoddy lass and you told me I’d never be much else? Well, I’m gon’ tell you just where all your son’s been.” So I told herand a few weeks later I got a letter in reply and my Ma’d said, “Bob, it says in the Bible, it says ‘And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles’, and this here what you tell me ain’t nothing short of a miracle, I say, as the Lord is my witness.” I’d stick ‘round and tell you about the time I was Carl Mathews, the child care specialist and Scott Moody, the sheriff’s deputy, and Jones Dean, the civil engineer, and Dr. Peter Bedford, the cancer researcher, but my two ‘o clock’s waitin’ on me: I got a baby to baptize.