Noblesse Oblige

by Jeff Baker

(A Bryce Going Story)

I was working in a little diner on the outside of town when I found the money.

Corley’s Burgers was about the size of a couple of single-wide trailers fixed together at a big right angle, with the kitchen in the other trailer behind the counter.

The dining room had a row of tables with metal cushioned chairs on one side and cushioned seats built into the wall on the other. Napkin dispensers and ketchup on every table. They made an effort to make the place more homey, with several big potted plants and multi-colored curtains on the windows and pictures on the wall of outdoor scenes.

I bussed tables, vacuumed the floors and washed dishes. Stuff I’d done before. Polly, the owner had started as a waitress ten years earlier back in the ‘60s and she was nice but firm. You did your job right things were okay.

Polly was tall and lean with brown hair streaked with grey. She liked me and if she didn’t believe the story I gave; that my name was Bryce Going, that I wound up in town after an argument with my girlfriend where she tossed me out of the car on the highway and I was twenty years old without any I. D., she never questioned it.

I was glad, especially the part about the girlfriend. She may have caught me glancing at the backside of Robbie, the regular dishwasher once but she didn’t say anything. And she paid me in cash which was nice. The town wasn’t big and I was renting a beat-up old trailer from someone. Not really furnished but it had heat and a toilet so I didn’t complain. For a closeted Gay kid whose parents had bailed on him and was avoiding a boys home by pretending to be in his twenties I was doing okay.

Burgers and coffee were our most popular item, emphasis on the coffee. We had our regulars, a lot of them truck drivers who stopped for lunch (we closed at seven in the evening) and a handful of people from town who spent the afternoon shooting the breeze and ordering coffee refills for their table.

Mr. Mortonson was one of them. He looked seventy-ish, had long grey hair hanging down from a bald spot and usually wore a green overcoat and slippers. I talked to him a few times; he asked me a couple of questions when I was cleaning off the table next to his and was generally pretty nice. He asked if I was going to the community college in the nearby town and I told him no, I’d dropped out of High School. Which I guess I had, although I’d never thought of it that way before.

He even tipped me once as he was leaving; pressing a dollar bill into my hand and telling me he’d had a few lean times too.

“Noblesse Oblige” he said with a grin as he walked out the door.

Believe me, I thanked him and saved the dollar.

The store was closed and I was sweeping up and cleaning off the tables when I found a funny-looking coin in one of the booth seats in the crevasse where stuff usually wound up.

It was the size of a quarter but it didn’t look or feel like any quarter. There were symbols on one side that I couldn’t read and the other side had an engraving of a face with a long beard. The coin was worn as if from years of rubbing and the beard looked stringy almost like a squid’s tentacles.

Polly had left to make the night deposit at the bank. I was glad Victor the cook had gone with her. He was big and intimidating and he had a gun that we weren’t supposed to know about.

As I grabbed the little wastebasket behind the counter I glanced out the window. It had been cloudy all day but the sky was clearing and I could see the full Moon.

I dumped the wastebasket into the trash bag I was carrying and I heard a rustle from across the room. I looked up. Nobody. I walked over to the trash can by the front door and I heard the rustle again.

I glanced up.

The potted plants were moving.

I was never sure what they were, some kind of fern or some tall kind of grass. But they were all waving, like in a breeze. They were waving in unison. I walked over, feeling for a breeze, maybe the air conditioner had come on.

One of the plants reached out and grabbed my wrist with a long leafy tendril.

I screamed and jumped back.

The plants wobbled and shuddered in their pots and a couple of them started wobbling towards me. I yelled again and was going to run but I tripped and fell. With a clink, the coin fell out of my shirt pocket and lay there on the faded carpet. It glinted with a glow all its own, a glow like the full Moon.

The wobbling plants were advancing on me. I managed to pull myself up and ran for the door. I almost screamed again; Mr. Mortonson was standing there in the big glass door an anxious look on his face. He pointed at the door handle and I opened the door, intending to run out but he brushed past me and grabbed the coin and held it up in front of the advancing plants and began to mutter or chant.

I couldn’t catch what he said but part of it said like “Aye-Aye,” and “You-Hoo Flagging.”

The plants wobbled back to where they had been and suddenly I KNEW they were just plants again.

Mortonson pocketed the coin and smiled apologetically.

“They won’t bother you again,” he said. “It was a bad day for me to bring this outside,” he patted his pocket with the coin in it. “But I forgot. I’m old.”

He shrugged and headed for the door.

He turned around and smiled again. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

“But what?” I started to ask.

He put a finger to his lips. “Noblesse Oblige,” he said and walked out the door.

I finished cleaning up and considered quitting, all the while keeping an eye on the plants.

—end—