you drank your scotch and whored around and drove your big car into town. you danced to popular music but it was not your own music, it might as well have been the wind. you were no smooth goliath standing there flashing your teeth, but a staggering scarecrow looking after someone else's weeds. you were the one flipping the coin hiking up your britches asking, "hey, what's in it for me?" and the kids with the marbles and the snot-stained sleeves looked at you curiously like you'd come from the moon and eyed the gold chain of your pocketwatch like birds chasing a silver sliver of tinsel. and when the con-man flipped shut his cigarette lighter and leaned against the door jamb and the children scattered, one of them dropped a buttery marble that clicked faster and faster on the pavement. there was no epic battle fought that day; no stories to chronicle the way you turned your back to him and unhooked the watch chain from your belt loop and hid it in your pocket and then slunk away and got into your car and drove off with the wind blowing through the radio while the dirty kids watched the con-man amble over and pick up the marble and toss it up and snatch it sideways in his fist and when he put it into his pocket one of the little faces hidden in the bushes turned red and another scarecrow was born, another sleepwalker swaying in the wind stabbing blindly at the birds.


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