OLD MOVIES
By Jesse Binger

The knock comes hard like a punch to the guts.
Sam wobbles out of the easy seat. Honeymooners repeats filling the room.
His eye glides to the peephole. What he sees jars him back.
Like instinct, Sam reaches to his waistband.
Empty. Fuck.

Gave them all away. Smart guy now, huh? Eddie and Bobby would be laughing their way to the whorehouse telling stories about him. Dumb Sam.
But there’s another option. There always is. He tiptoes back to the living room.
Ralph’s waving his hands on the TV, ready to send skinny Ed Norton to the moon.
Sam sits back down. Same worn easy seat. Mom’s.
She’d rest her arthritic joints and bones, sipping Lemondrop tea, eating those dreadful-looking prunes while he’d rummage through the little house for something.
Her foot cream. Vicks Vapor Rub. Coca Cola syrup.

Pounding on the glass now. The window. Guy means business.
Reynaldo Doraldo. Cuban. Tall as a stick, walked hunched-over like he was Frankenstein, but don’t let it fool you. Rey took out twenty.
Maybe thirty? Men who owed money to Tommy Costello. Men with families. Hunting cabins. Wives who took the time to make pot roast and Shepherd’s pie every week.
Men that now lived six foot under. Lived. Almost made Sam giggle. They ain’t nothing more than worm food now.
And him?
Might be next.

He pulls out his cellphone. Dials. And not 9-1-1. Guys like him didn’t call numbers like that.
We put ourselves in these messes, might as well be the ones to dig ourselves out.

“Talk to me,” Eddie answers with his usual swagger.

“Eddie.”

“Sam.”

“Rey Doraldo. Thought he was in Sing Sing?”

“Sing Sing? You thought wrong.”

“He’s out?”

“Out like a light.” Eddie’s analogies never made much sense.

Sam pauses. Takes a deep breath. Then lets it rip.

“Does he….know?”

Silence.

That hard pounding on the door again. Stronger. Not like a knock. More like someone’s ready to club that slab of metal down. Make mincemeat of it.

“Eddie, you still there?”

“I hear he’s looking for you, Sam.”
Then just static. And the phone clicks dead.
Think. Think. Think.

Now Sam is digging through desk drawers. Cabinets. Tossing old shirts and socks to the ground.
Gotta be something in there, right? Old man like him, we even forget we parked the car in the driveway.
A piece. Just one. Don’t even have to be loaded.
Well. Yeah, it kinda did.

Then he sees it. The blade. Sharper than Bobby’s barbs when he’s roasting one of the guys at the racetrack.
Eight inches of pure unadulterated killing.
So Sam grabs it. Stuffs it in his belt loop, being a bit careful as to not slice his wiener in pieces.
Didn’t matter much. Since Doris passed, it got less work than those guys still servicing VCRs.

VCR. You know he still has one. Fuck them DVDs. He went the laserdisc route. Sixty frisbee-like paperweights now sitting in a closet.
The pounding again. Hard. Then soft. Hard. Then soft. Damn Rey trying everything. Like he was punching something out in morse code.
Sam’s got no choice now. Sixty-eight years on this earth and he’d never go out like a punk.

So he wobbles back down the hall.
Stops in front of the door.
Reaches out. Pulls it open.
Rey.
Taller. Bigger. Scarier hunk of meat than he even remembered. Hands shaking, head nodding up and down like he finally hit the lottery.
Maybe for him, this was.

“Sammy Stone,” he says in that raspy lisp of his.

“Rey Doraldo,” Sam says. “Long time.”

Sam’s hand goes down to his belt. He’s gripping handle. Ready. Waiting.

“Got something for you,” Rey says, “Been waiting twenty years for this.”

Rey’s hand goes into his leather overcoat. Sam’s got the knife halfway out, the blade tickling his abdomen.

“Scarface. Your favorite, right?”

Then Sam sees it. The black and white cover. Pacino in his white suit.

“Still got that VCR of yours?”


Jesse Binger is a fiction writer from New Jersey whose work explores broken people, moral compromise, and quiet acts of redemption. His debut novel The Penitent Hours is currently on submission. His short stories are published or forthcoming at Bending Genres, Bristol Noir, Close to the Bone, Revolution John, Pistol Jim Press, Underbelly Press, Yellow Mama, Villain Era and Literary Garage