Staggerfly by Joyce Melton

Staggerfly

By Joyce Melton

I dreamed this whole thing a few months ago. It was a movie-like dream with shot angles and scene cuts. It didn’t seem like a full-length movie so maybe it was an episode of a TV show. Kind of like the old Alfred Hitchcock show. It was done in an odd style, much like the blaxploitation pics of the 1970s but with a film noir slant. And yet, it has cellphones in the story.

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Staggerfly is an old black conman, played by someone who looked a lot like Robert Guillame back in the nineties. He gathers a bunch of conmen together in the back of a bar. Most of the successful black con artists in East St. Louis along with a few white and Hispanic ones are there. He offers to sell them a red phone that he says has the phone numbers and addresses of all of his old marks, thousands of them.

“And as you gentlemen know, there ain’t no mark like an old mark,” he says and they murmur and chuckle agreement.

He wants to auction the phone off but they laugh at him for trying to con them.

He offers to demonstrate, calls someone off the phone call list and works a con on them right on the phone. When he hangs up he says, “The check is in the mail,” and he laughs with all the old conmen. He does a couple more phone cons, including one getting someone to show up at the bar with cash.

“If the phone is so good, why are you selling?” they ask while waiting to see if the mark actually shows up with money.

“I’m dying,” says Staggerfly. “I ain’t gonna have time to work the phone like I should. Fact is, I been workin’ the phone for most of the last two years and I’m tired. I’ll sell it and take my last vacation before my long nap.”

They all laugh again because Staggerfly is known to be lazy, never working till he’s broke.

“It’s the truth, you are a suspicious bunch.” He complains that they are too suspicious several times.

“Why do you need this money, ‘Fly?” one of them asks him again. “Don’t try to con me with the idea of a vacation.”

At this, Staggerfly introduces a young woman. “This is Hazel, I’m selling the phone to put her through college,” he says. She is a light-skinned black woman about twenty with dark blond kinky hair and hazel eyes.

“She your daughter?”

“Do I look fool enough to have ever had kids? She’s my grandniece and my only living relative.”

“Why don’t you just give her the phone?”

“She is developmentally disabled, can’t lie for shit. Ain’t that right, Hazel?” he says.

Hazel shows her dimples and says, “If you say so, Unca ‘Fly.”

They wrangle some more and there are a few bids but nothing large.

Hardly anyone is convinced by the idea of the phone.

Staggerfly looks at his watch and says, “Gentlemen, I have got not much time left, why don’t you all form a syndicate and share the phone. Each of you could have it for a day or a week or whatever you want.”

They wrangle about this idea for a bit but cannot come to an agreement.

Suddenly a big burly white guy comes in the door and everyone gets quiet when he bellows out, “Staggerfly!”

“Run Unca Fly!” Hazel screams trying to get in front of the man but he knocks her down and stalks up to old man.

“Where do you want it?” the guy asks.

‘Fly opens his coat and bares his chest. “Right in the heart,” he says, not trying to get away.

The white guy pulls out a pistol and shoots ‘Fly in the chest. Blood gouts out of his back and across the room a glass shatters. Everyone dives for cover as the white guy runs out of the room.

Hazel sobs over Staggerfly’s body. The bartender stalks over and says, “Get him out of here. Someone will have heard the shot and called the cops.” Two men turn ‘Fly over and drag him toward a back room while the barman begins cleaning up the blood.

Hazel weeps and weeps.

The men begin to try to leave but she screams at them. “He told you he was gonna die!” They look embarrassed. She stands up with the red phone and says, “Now how much am I bid for Staggerfly’s phone?”

This time they manage to form a syndicate and come up with $40,000 cash. “That won’t even get me a semester,” she protests. So they get together and make it up to $57,250. “Books cost more than that,” she sneers, but they really are tapped out.

Everyone hears sirens in the distance.

Hazel grabs the money, hands over the phone and runs out the back door while the men begin squabbling over who gets the phone first.

Outside in the alley, Hazel climbs into a big car driven by the white guy shooter. Whose name is apparently Junior. Staggerfly is in the back seat changing out of his clothes.

“When the squib exploded in the back of my coat, I think I got scalded by the hot fake blood,” ‘Fly complains.

“Sorry about that. Where to, Unc?” asks the white guy.

“South Philly,” says Staggerfly. He pulls a blue phone out of one of his new pockets. “They’re some mighty suspicious folks in that neighborhood. They’ll never believe me without your convincer.”

Everyone laughs and Junior drives away. Hazel flips a switch on the dash and the distant siren that has been playing cuts off with a burp.

“When you told them I couldn’t lie, I almost busted up,” says Hazel.

“You didn’t lie,” he says. “You just didn’t tell them the truth.”

They laugh again and disappear into the night.

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Image credit: André Cros - This photograph is part of the Fonds André Cros, preserved by the city archives of Toulouse and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license by the deliberation n°27.3 of June 23rd, 2017 of the Town Council of the City of Toulouse. Cropped and lettered.