“Here he comes.” Pete’s piece of shit car could be heard coming up the hill. That poor little motor grunting and groaning it’s way up. The only way to really describe it was out of shape. Like hearing a fat man wheeze after walking up some stairs. Unhealthy. The kind of sound that you didn’t have to be a mechanic to know meant trouble. Of course once you saw it the smoke pouring out of the tailpipe let you know for sure. Pete didn’t care. Hell, when you saw the way he treated his own body you were amazed that toxic waste didn’t pour out of the machine he drove. He didn’t care about himself and screw everything else. He even made a point not to recycle the empty bottles even though the dumpster for that was right next to the regular one. Actually, now that Tim thought about it, Pete would throw regular trash into the recycling dumpster sometimes. Maybe he just didn’t pay attention. It was possible that he didn’t even know that one of them was for recycling. It was just like with people. Pete had a kind of tunnel vision, he guessed, that allowed him to ignore the details. If it wasn’t on his mind he just filtered it out.
It was kind of a nice trait, Tim thought. Useful at times, to be sure.

Pete pulled in like a maniac. They were sure every time that he would smash in to the car in the space to his right. He always managed to pull the wheel just in time, though. They couldn’t tell if he was lucky or good. Opinions varied. Anyway, the car jerked to a halt and Pete was out before the engine had stopped sputtering. Pete had a way of almost bouncing out of that fucking contraption like he’d been tossed out by an ejection seat right onto his feet. He almost always looked surprised, wide-eyed and head jerking back and forth.
Anyway, he grabbed a box out of the back and began stacking things on it with his free hand. Carton of smokes, pack of cheap cigars, and something in a brown paper bag. The mystery bag, as it had come to be known. Brown and wrinkled. They figured it was drugs without really caring too much. He had it about once a month, always on a payday. They didn’t bet on him or anyone out of curiosity, people’s business was their own. They bet because they were bored. So they didn’t care about the bag; they couldn’t bet on it.

“Damn, McCormack’s!” Paul had declared as soon as Pete had shut his door.
“Fucking right, McCormack’s.” Tim was relieved. At least he knew now that Paul wasn’t cheating again. Whiskey River my ass, Tim thought.
Paul went back inside for more beers. Buying more could wait a while.

“Have you ever seen the inside of his apartment?” Tim asked him when he got back.
“No. Eugene saw it once. Remember when he was selling those mushrooms and he knocked on everyone’s door to ask them?”
“Sure.” Tim remembered. The tenants here were all fairly cool and not only allowed that kind of thing but encouraged it, as sometimes they needed a little something just like everyone else.
“Well, Gene went in there that night and said the place was wild.” Paul drank a little beer and looked at the closed blinds in Pete’s window. “He said Pete has five TV’s and none of them work. And all the boxes he’s ever brought home are still in there. All over the place. He never throws them away I guess. Gene said that the apartment was like half it’s normal size due to all the clutter.”
“Hell man, that place ain’t too big to begin with.” Pete lived in one of the four efficiencies in the building. The guy must have paid nothing for rent, but for a good reason. Of course, how much room could a guy like that need?
“Gene said that there were shelves and shelves of records and books all along one wall. Must’ve been a thousand books in there. Gene said it was like a library or something.”
“Yea, I hear that music all the fucking time. He’s got some wild shit.” Tim was right. Pete blasted it, too. The guy probably had the best blues collection in town. “Bum’s library, though.” Tim added.
“You been to a fucking library lately? All it is is fucking bums staying out of the sun. No one goes to the fucking library anymore.”
“Yea, I guess.” Tim ceded the point but still wondered about the place. “Hey, did he get the guys name when he was there?”
“Nope. I wish he had.” They both really wanted to talk to this guy, but they were both afraid a little and hardly even said hello. “He said Pete only said three words the whole time.” Paul dumped out the last sip of beer. “He got Gene high though.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. Just lit a joint while Gene was talking and passed it. No big deal, you know? He didn’t buy any mushrooms though.” Paul lit a smoke. “Maybe he was broke that week, maybe he don’t do mushrooms.”
“Wild.” Tim just shook his head about that. Pete couldn’t have known Gene from Adam except that he lived in the same building and he just lit a joint like that. Of course from what they’d seen, Pete didn’t really mind jail. “That guy’s something else.”
“You got that right.” Good or bad, Pete was something else. Paul figured he was ok, just a little different. Hell, probably the only reason Pete hadn’t been evicted yet was because everyone was so curious about him. No one had the balls to even knock on his door except for Gene, though.

“You want to go again?” Tim asked him.
“Well, what’s the bet?” It didn’t really matter to Paul; he was just killing time.
“Cops, ambulance, or other for a bottle of tequila? ” The cops or the E.M.S. almost always showed up on payday. Sometimes the cops took him away and sometimes an ambulance did and sometimes they left him alone. It was a good way to waste time. Waiting for the flashing lights.
It was the noise that brought the police. The neighbors were all pretty decent but screaming and cussing and loud music at two or three in the morning was a little unreasonable. Pete had some pretty wild women over sometimes and they sure loved to fight. One of his women had busted a bottle over his head once and split his forehead right down the middle. It was the neighbors still who called the police and when they knocked on Pete’s door he answered still bleeding pretty badly. It was ambulance that night. For him. She got the backseat of the squad car. Pete didn’t press charges or anything; she’d come at one of the cops when they were helping Pete. “Don’t you touch my man!” she screamed as she came at him. Pete, despite all the blood, laughed about it. “Crazy bitch.” He told the cops. “Do what you want with her.”
“Fuck you, you bastard!” she screamed at Pete.
“I don’t even remember your name, you whore!” Pete yelled back.
“It’s FUCK YOU!” And she was gone.

The neighbors all put up with it for the show they got though. They would stand outside and watch him leave and shake their heads. Fucking hypocrites. Probably the kind of people who complained about how awful a TV show was (too much sex, violence, etc…) but still watched every week. Maybe they didn’t complain to the landlord because they could feel so much better about themselves with Pete around. Who knows?
Paul and Tim never called the cops though. Hell, that would be cheating.

“Cops. He had a pretty wild look in his eyes today.” Paul was bullshitting, but what the hell. And maybe there was something to it. Pete had been gone for a while last week and the longer he was gone the wilder he got.
“All right. I’ll take the medics.” Tim figured the odds were against him, but barely. The odds were better than betting on nothing for sure though. Anyway, it was Paul’s turn to bet first.
“It’s a bet.” Paul dumped the last sip of his hot beer on the ground and left to buy a new case. He couldn’t wait too long, he might miss something.
He threw his empty can in the regular dumpster on his way out.
“That one’s for you, Pete.”