Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

We’d seen Sig Scarr, and Tartan his dog, leaving Sharky’s a few times, late at night; Sig stumbling and seeming not to see us. Torstein watched him go with sad eyes. I think he’d hoped Sig would retire, maybe give up the booze. But instead, it appeared, he had gone ahead with his operation to crack the bad cop he had in his sights, try to get him to roll on any others.

He’d told us Detective Waverling might come snooping around, but we hadn’t seen him.

Summer faded into fall. Angel was gone to rehab. Sully was happy living with Maggie, Tawny and Mari. Lucky guy. And Maggie had bought the condo next door to hers. It was empty then, but I had an idea what she had in mind ... it seemed that she liked taking in strays. Tawny and Marigold had been good company for her, and she liked playing Mommy with Sully, too. Whether Sully liked it, I’m not sure.

In one way, for him it was great to have a home to go to at the end of the day where there was sure to be a real dinner that he didn’t have to make out of jam and bread himself. But in another way ... Maggie wasn’t to be gotten around as easily as Angel! She made him take a bath every day, put his shoes and clothes in the closet, do any homework he had before he could come out and play with us on the street. He didn’t have much homework in first grade, granted. But he was learning to read. Tawny and Mari practiced their Story Hour routines on him, and that helped him a lot to figure out which sounds went with what letters.

Ferdy was happy about this time because my dad and step-mom had made a big donation. My mom had died a few years back. And the reason my dad gave the fish market to me and Pete was, he fell in love with this rich widow, and after they got married, he didn’t need the income from the fish market. His new wife was really a nice lady; she had a lot of class. After we sold the fish market and started spending our time with Torstein, my dad and she had come out and met Torstein, and took him to dinner with me and Pete.

My step-mom, she liked Torstein, I could tell that. She took some sunflower seeds from him, and she smiled at him a lot. After that, whenever she and my dad came around, she gave Torstein money. The first few times, he turned right around and gave the money to someone else — to some bum for food, to some single mom to pay her electric bill, whatever it was. Step-mom got wise then, and she’d give the money to Ferdy, and tell him to be sure that Torstein got something nice, like new shoes, or hopefully, a new coat.

Usually, though, the money just went into the treasury, and eventually Torstein gave it to the Humane Society, or to Food for the Poor. That was one of his favorites. They always said they could feed kids in Haiti for a nickel or something insane like that, and it tickled Torstein to think how many kids he was feeding with $50 or $100. Torstein would never admit he was generous — he said he was greedy, greedy for that great buzz he got by making someone else happy. That was his addiction, he said, to give joy to someone else. If you had to have an addiction, that was a pretty good one. In a way, I think he infected all of us with that addiction, because the more time you spent with him, the more you found yourself giving away ...

We’d just given away a lot of coats to poor kids on the block where Sully and Angel lived. It was surprising how many kids ran around without coats in the winter, and not that far from downtown — families living in the projects; I guess there were a lot of single moms and maybe some of them were addicts like Angel. I don’t know. I know their kids were delighted to get new coats. Bruiser had gotten a deal on them, if you can believe it, from one of the businesses he used to strong arm!

He’d been quietly going around to the businesses where he used to do collections, and apologizing. For months now, he’d been doing it. He would tell them it had been a cruel way to earn a living, and he was sorry. This one old Jewish guy, for whatever reason, had been so touched by Bruiser’s apology, he’d sort of befriended the Big Guy. Bruiser would go to his warehouse a couple times a week and have coffee with him. The guy was a clothing supplier, and he’d cooked up this deal with Bruiser to get these children’s coats at next to nothing in cost.

It wasn’t nothing, it was next to nothing, and Ferdy didn’t even like the “next to nothing” part, but he had gone along with it. We’d gone together into the projects and gave the coats away to any kid who wanted one. It really was a buzz, to see how happy it made the kids. My dad had come to help give the coats away, and when his wife came to pick him up, she was impressed, and gave Ferdy back every dime we’d spent on the coats.

So Ferdy was happy. Torstein was happy because he’d had a major generosity fix. Maggie was happy because she’d scored a coat for Sully, and Sully was happy because his life was good these days. It was about 7:30, and getting dark, and we saw Sig walking toward us, hunched over, stumbling a little. With Sig, you never knew, he could be drunk already ... but Torstein went running to him, holding out his hands to him, and the rest of us followed.

He was holding Tartan, the dog, cradled up against his side. That’s why he was hunched over. Tartan was wriggling like a wild thing to get out of his hands and go to Sully, but Sig wouldn’t let go of him. And Sig was crying. That’s why he’d stumbled. As we got closer, I could see that Tartan’s front leg was in a bright blue cast, all the way up to his shoulder.

Torstein took Tartan out of Sig’s arms and handed him to Sully, then put his hands on Sig’s shoulders. “What happened?” he asked.

Sig looked up at him with wild eyes, and pulled a crumpled paper from his pocket. On it there was a message scrawled, “He has three more. Back off.”