The Myth of Wile E

A Little Bit Slow on the Draw

Despite the cost of goat milk, I managed to bank enough savings in the Mason jar to pay off my final tax bill, which was now $43.57—wait, make that $44.22. I arrived in town on the afternoon of the deadline, Mason jar in hand. I walked down Main Street like a gunslinger arriving for a showdown. The street was deserted. Fast food bags tumbled by in the dust. The post office loomed before me like the OK Corral. I was just in the nick of time.

Except. Except . . . I'd forgotten one very small, very big problem.

The thing is, I couldn't mail the tax people my jar of coins. No way could I afford the postage on a jar full of coins.

So I stopped into the bank and asked about turning the coins into a nice lightweight check. But the bank wouldn't give me a bank check, because I didn't have an account. And the bank would not let me open an account, because I didn't have a hundred dollars. "Try the post office," they said.

So I stopped into the post office. The post office would sell me a money order. But they wouldn't take my jar of coins. "You expect me to count all that?" said the man behind the counter.

"I already counted it," I told him. "It's $45.55."

"Oh, you already counted it. Great! I'll take your word for it, then," he said.

I smiled.

Then he shouted over my shoulder, "Next!"

There was silence, except for the slow click of the giant clock on the wall.

I looked behind me. There was no one else in the post office. I looked back at the man behind the counter.

The man behind the counter kept staring at the front door, not blinking, like a saloon-keeper waiting for an outlaw to stride in.

So I went back to the bank.

The bank dumped my Mason jar into a machine that chugged and clanked as (I assume) a team of clever trained rats sorted the coins inside. (Well, you explain how it works.)

The bank gave me back a few portraits of little green men, keeping two dollars and two dimes as a service fee. It was only fair, I guess. The clever rats had to be paid. Cheese did not come free.

But I was going to come up short.

Luckily it just so happened that I was at a bank. Lending money was the very thing banks were for, or so I'd heard. So I asked them to loan me, say, five dollars, just until the end of the week or so. Or even three dollars.

They said they didn't make loans that small.

"How much would I have to borrow?" I said.

"At least $1,000."

"Tell you what," I said. "If you lend me $1,000, I can pay you back $995 right this minute. How many loans are 99.5 percent paid off the very first day?"

They asked me where I was currently employed.

I explained that I was in the poetry business, and also the recycling business. "It's a real growth industry," I said. ". . . The second one, I mean."

They asked if I had any recent pay stubs.

"Yes," I said, and uncrumpled a receipt I'd gotten at the dump. It was a little curl of paper from an adding machine, with a column of faint purple letters adding up to $1.85.

But for some reason the bank people said No. They explained that they could only give loans to customers who didn't really need them. This seemed to me like a strange way of doing business. But on the plus side, when I asked, they gave me a lollipop.

I moseyed back to the post office, pushing open the door and then standing just inside the doorway, a silhouetted shadow against the low sun. The man behind the counter looked up. Our eyes locked. I chewed on the lollipop stick. The clock ticked, ticked, ticked. I felt a bead of sweat wander down my forehead. Doo-di-doo-di-dooo, wah wah wah.

"You gonna come in or you gonna let all the air out?" the man behind the counter said.

I strode into the post office, imaginary spurs jangling on my imaginary cowboy boots. The man behind the counter wiped an imaginary glass with an imaginary rag.

By any chance did you happen to see my debt come this way? I wanted to say. About yea big? But tricky, because every time you look at him, he's a little bigger? And every time you think you've caught up with him, he's a little farther away?

I handed over the little green portraits to the man behind the counter. The man behind the counter handed back a money order. Again, a little was apparently lost in translation. Like about five percent.

I turned away from the counter, and found myself face to face with my debt.

The debt and I sized each other up.

The debt said, Draw. But it was just too fast for me.

The debt said, Reach for the stars.

I tried . . . but my reach exceeded my grasp.

So, in the end, I sent the tax people a money order for $42.10, and an IOU for $2.12, and left town like a gunfighter all out of bullets.