Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

(into which Gerbil moved six months ago). A beat-up table fan rattles and oscillates and pushes stale air around the cluttered room.

“Gonna make those bag-boys at the Piggly Wiggly drool when they get a load of this,” Gerbil ventures, adjusting her magnifying glasses. She wears surgical gloves and a halter-top over her slender torso, moist with sweat. It’s summer in Iowa, and the heat is brutal. The atmosphere in the room—which is lined with posters of bleeding sacred hearts, iron crosses, skulls and crossbones, busts of Jesus, and Betty Boop-style Amazons such as Pamela Anderson and Bettie Page—is as thick as a roux, a mixture of sweat, incense, patchouli oil, rubbing alcohol and India ink.

The fat gal chuckles. “Yeah, I figure they’re gonna stare at my big-ass titties anyway.”

Gerbil nods, the needle buzzing. “Might as well give ’em something else to look at once in a while.”

“Damn straight.”

Gerbil pauses to refill the ink reservoir. “Which reminds me of something my old man—”

A shrill voice from outside the back door cuts off Gerbil’s words.

“GERBIL!”

Sighing, setting down the needle, Gerbil peels off her rubber gloves. “Speak of the devil.”

She tells the heavyset woman not to go anywhere, and she marches out of the room.

“Hold your hemorrhoids, I’m coming!” She crosses the cracked linoleum of the little kitchenette and bangs through the back door, the screen slamming.

The high afternoon sun blazes down on the backyard, a postage stamp-sized plot of measly grass and spindly maples. A tall post-hole fence keeps the prying gaze of neighbors away, and a bald patch of hard-packed dirt along the back edge of the property stands as evidence of the basketball hoop—rusty and missing its netting—mounted off the roof of a one-car garage.

Oswald is lying supine and shirtless on a woven chaise lounge in the center of the yard, working on his tan. He holds a cardboard reflector around the base of his neck, and wears gigantic Jackie-O sunglasses. Most of his wounds are healed. His hair has grown back above his ear. His massive, bare belly, protruding from the top of his cargo shorts, resembles a small island nation infested with an outbreak of thick black hair. “Hey, kiddio,” he says as Gerbil approaches. “Did you happen to remember to pick up that twelve-pack of Old Milwaukee Lite I asked you to pick up?”

Gerbil stands over the chaise, gazing down at him, nonplussed, hands on her hips. “For this you interrupt a session and drag me out here?”

“I didn’t want to waste a trip inside if we didn’t have any.”

“God forbid you should move your fat ass.”

“Hey, is that any way to talk to your father?”

“Oh please.”

“Besides... I’m conserving my energy for the trial tomorrow,” he says with a smirk.

The reality is, over the last six months—in the three separate Grand Jury testimonies, which Oswald has provided in The United States v. Anthony Michaelangelo Ferri—Oswald has expended very little energy. His appearances take less than a day out of his life, travel included. He flies in relative luxury on an Air Force turbo-prop plane equipped for military brass and government VIPs—portal to portal, from the safe house in Iowa to the courthouse in Chicago, in less than two hours—and he’s usually home for dinner. Plus, the appearances are practically stress-free. Oswald has zero fear of reprisals, and he would love to see the old cocker Anthony Ferri sent up the river for about six lifetimes.

Oswald couldn’t care less about being a rat. Rats are noble creatures. Rats have beautiful shiny coats and they keep our sanitation canals clean and they’re very family-oriented animals.

“And since when do you drink ‘Lite’ anything?” Gerbil is shaking her head now with a sneer on her face. “The only Lite you’ve ever seen is when you set your farts on fire.”

“Nice.” He looks askance at her. “You got a mouth on you—you know that?”

She gives him a demur smile. “Learned everything I know from my dear old dad.”

Oswald watches her turn tail and head back into the bungalow.

“It’s okay, I was going in anyway,” he calls after her and levers himself out of his chaise lounge. He rises to his feet, stretches his bullish neck, and looks at the house. The clapboard needs a new coat of paint. Some of the shingles are coming off. Maybe it’s time to do a little home repair. It’s not a bad place, though. Small but tidy. Cozy. Just right for Oswald and his wayward daughter.

It’s all part of the sweet deal Oswald made with the Feds. In return for turning state’s evidence, he got a new name and a plumb spot in the Witness Protection Program. Once he got set up, it didn’t take long for him to secretly contact Gerbil and apologize for all his sins and give her the new address. He knew he was violating one of the cardinal rules of the Federal Witness Security Program—maybe even jeopardizing his safety—but he didn’t care. He owed it to her. He owed it to himself. And besides, a week after he moved in, he found a redneck bartender down the road who sold black-market assault weapons out of his back room to survivalists and right-wing crazies across the Midwest.

Just last month Oswald picked up a nifty new Colt M4 Commando and a Russian A-K 47 with extra magazines—a great bargain at $1,500 for the pair—and the guy was nice enough to throw in three boxes of .450 Nitro hollow-points and two suppressors free of charge. Oswald also bought a pair of Sig-Saur nine-millimeter semi-autos at a sporting goods store using a credit card and ID he found inside a lady’s purse at the Dollar Tree. He currently has all the hardware stashed in his basement crawlspace, but has plans to build a quick-release panel under his bed whenever he gets around to his home improvements.

With a sigh he ambles across the lawn to the rear screen door.

Before going inside, he pauses.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees the neighbor lady from two