Good Deeds and Bad Intentions Read online

  Good Deeds and Bad Intentions

  A Bunny McGarry Short Story

  Caimh McDonnell

  Contents

  Author’s note on language

  1. Twas The Night Before Christmas

  2. A Walk in the Park

  3. Smile – It Confuses People

  4. The Man Comes Around

  5. No Good Deed

  6. Like the Fella Once Said…

  7. Christmas at Bernie’s

  8. Gifts of All Kinds

  9. In the Absence of Chimneys

  10. I Love the Smell of Eggnog in the Morning

  Free Stuff

  Also by Caimh McDonnell

  Copyright © 2018 by McFori Ink

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Caimh McDonnell

  Visit my website at www.WhiteHairedirishman.com

  First edition: December 2018

  ISBN: 978-1-912897-04-9

  Created with Vellum

  Author’s note on language

  Dear North Americans,

  Please note, as the author and the main character of this story are both from Ireland, it is written in the version of English that is standard there. So color is spelt colour, offense is spelt offence etc. We apologise for any offence/offense this may cause but while the author is of course terrified of you, you will have to accept the fact that you are nowhere near as scary as his Irish mammy. She used to chase him around the house with a spelling book and she frankly doesn’t give a rat’s arse how you think a word is spelt. She’s a lovely woman in general but she doesn’t mess around when it comes to spellings, so no negotiations shall be entered into. Sorry!

  Twas The Night Before Christmas

  “You ain’t nothing but bull.”

  Bunny looked down to see a face, scrunched up with anger, glowering up at him from between pigtails. He wasn’t exactly a leading expert on children, but he reckoned the girl was eight or nine at most.

  “Excuse me?” said Bunny, trying to give what he hoped was a winning smile.

  The girl pointed up at him. “You heard me. Ain’t no such thing as Santa, and this whole thing is a scam! A straight-up scam!”

  Bunny glanced around and noticed that they were getting noticed by passers-by. Seventh Avenue had no shortage of foot traffic, and while he had come to appreciate just how good most people were at ignoring anything going on around them, a little girl standing on the sidewalk hollering at Santa Claus on Christmas Eve was the kind of thing that’d pique the interest of all but the most insular of New Yorkers.

  “Are you OK, little girl?”

  “Don’t you ‘little girl’ me. I’m sick of all this nonsense. You’re fake. I bet even that belly is fake.”

  She poked Bunny in what was very definitely his real belly.

  “Ouch! Go easy, would ye? That’s all me.”

  “Oh. Well then you should lose some weight.”

  “Thanks for the advice. And before you rip it off my face, this beard is mine too.” He gave it a tug to emphasise his point. None of these facts seemed to do anything to take the angry wind out of the little girl’s sails.

  “None of that makes you Santa Claus. You’re just some fat old guy with a beard!”

  Bunny looked around, hoping to see a parent, but while several people were now paying attention, none of them had that parental air about them. “Jesus, love, is your charm school on a day off or something?”

  She wrinkled her nose and wafted her hand in front of it. “And you smell of booze. I know that smell.”

  Bunny tried to smile. “Santa has been out here all day in the freezing cold, ringing this bell, raising money for the homeless…” He pointed at the bucket next to him, which contained mostly coins. “And he may have taken a little nip of something to take the edge off.”

  “Stop calling yourself Santa. You ain’t Santa.”

  Bunny scratched his beard. She had him there. He wasn’t the real Santa. In fact, he wasn’t even the real fake Santa – that guy was in a bar down the block getting wasted. Bunny had needed an excuse to stand around on this street corner and not look suspicious. This had seemed like a good idea at the time. It turned out the other guy was doing this as part of his community service for a public urination citation, and he’d been more than happy to be liberated from his bell-ringing responsibilities.

  “OK,” said Bunny, lowering his voice and leaning down to look at the little girl. “You’re absolutely right, sweetheart – I’m not ‘the’ Santa. I’m a friend of his, and he let me borrow his suit so I could raise money for charity to help homeless people have a nice Christmas.”

  “So you’re a friend of Santa?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK, then explain this: there are, like, two billion children in the world – how is he delivering presents to all of them?”

  “Well,” said Bunny, “his reindeer can fly, and—”

  “Yeah,” she interrupted, “but to visit every house, they’d have to be clocking at least 650 miles per second. At that speed, reindeers are gonna spontaneously combust. BOOM!” She threw her arms out in an extravagant gesture to emphasis the violence of this untimely end. “I googled it in the library at school. The top speed of a reindeer is fifteen miles per hour. Per hour! They reach 650 miles per second and Santa’s hurtling towards the earth with a face full of fried reindeer, and that’s gonna leave a big old fat-white-guy-sized crater. That’s science! You can’t argue with science.”

  “Right,” said Bunny. “Well, that’s very impressive. You know a lot about science, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I like science. Science don’t lie to you, unlike everybody else.” She pointed around them. “Look at all this. Spirit of goodwill? It’s all rich people buying other rich people fancy things.”

  Despite the cold weather, Bunny was sweating. Down the block, amidst the throng of tourists, last-minute shoppers and pickpockets, he could see two members of the NYPD looking in his direction.

  “So, are you going to be a scientist when you grow up?”

  The little girl folded her arms and narrowed her eyes. “I’d like to be, but I ain’t gonna be. I looked that up too. To do science, you gotta go to college. That costs a lot of money, and I’m an orphan. Where am I gonna get that kind of money? Ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Oh,” said Bunny.

  “Yeah,” said the girl. “I’m gonna end up in some crappy job where I don’t get to use my brain. I’ll probably end up standing on a street corner ringing a bell.”

  “Ouch.”

  “No offence,” she said, with the air of someone who was aware she had an inadvertent tendency to cause an awful lot of it. “I saw some comedian guy on TV talking about how angry the staff are at the DMV. I bet that’s because they couldn’t afford to be scientists either. Life ain’t fair.” She nodded – agreeing with herself emphatically.

  Bunny was floundering. The little girl had a relentless line of argument, which he was having a hard time countering. “Santa’s reindeer are magic?” He could hear the disbelief in his own voice as he said it. He knew it was futile, but he felt the need to at least attempt it anyway.

  “Oh, please,” said the little girl, throwing her arms up in disgust. “If Santa has all this magic at his f
ingertips, what’s he doing with it? Take a look around – world needs a hero, not some fat dude who works one day a year.”

  “Annabelle Watson!” The shout came from a large, sweaty white woman who was rushing down the sidewalk towards them, her face a mix of panic, relief and outrage. “There you are!”

  The little girl looked back at the woman. “What? I wasn’t doing nothing.”

  “You weren’t doing anything,” said the woman, almost on automatic.

  “See, you agree with me.”

  “No, I…”

  The lady reached them, her breathing now heavy and laboured. “You most certainly were doing something, and you know it was something you weren’t supposed to.”

  “Make up your mind,” said the little girl, just quietly enough to not be heard.

  “What was the one thing I said before we left Saint Augustine’s this morning?”

  “Pee now as we can’t—”

  “Not that! I said don’t wander off. And what did you do, missy? You wandered off. We will be having some serious words about this when we get back.”

  The woman leaned down and took Annabelle’s hand, and then she looked up at Bunny, her face full of apology. “I am sorry, sir. I hope she wasn’t a bother?”

  “Oh no, not at all. We were just having a nice chat.”

  She gave a tight smile. “Thank you. She’s a smart child, but she is a handful.”

  “But Mrs Tandy—”

  “Not another word, missy. Not one word. Well, at least you got to meet Santa.”

  Annabelle pointed at Bunny with her free hand. “He ain’t Santa; he’s just some fat dude in a suit.”

  “Annabelle!” Mrs Tandy exclaimed, her voice full of genuine outrage. She looked at Bunny. “I do apologise, sir.”

  Bunny waved it away. “Ah, don’t worry about it. She speaks her mind – not enough of it about.”

  Mrs Tandy leaned in. “I’m sorry – she’s acting out. We brought all the children into Manhattan on a day trip. Danelli’s department store gives us a free visit with Father Christmas on Christmas Eve – you know, as a PR thing. The kids really look forward to it.”

  “Ah, right,” said Bunny. “That’s nice of them.”

  “Yes, it would have been, only we turned up to find out they’d bumped us. Some NBA team is in town to play a game tomorrow and they brought their kids to see Santa instead.”

  “Oh,” said Bunny.

  “Yes. The PR woman said orphans at Christmas were a bit depressing. They’d rather have Santa taking free throws with millionaires.” Despite giving it some effort, Mrs Tandy failed to keep the anger from her voice. “We load twenty-seven kids onto the subway from Queens because the home’s bus has broken down – again – only to get here and find that. Not exactly the most Christian thing, is it?”

  “No,” agreed Bunny, “’tis an absolute disgrace.”

  “Yes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the woman gave us discount vouchers for toys, like that’s some kind of a thing. Giving orphans money off on toys – might as well be giving me free parking for my Ferrari. I don’t know how some people—”

  Mrs Tandy’s cell phone interrupted her. She fished it out of her pocket with her free hand. “Hey, Samantha… Yes, I found her. We’ll meet you over by the station… What? Anthony needs to go again? You’d think with all that crying, he’d be tapped out. OK, I’ll be back over in a second.”

  She hung up the phone.

  “Come on, Annabelle, we have to be getting back. Say goodbye to the nice man.”

  Annabelle shot a begrudging nod in Bunny’s direction.

  Mrs Tandy shook her head again. “A merry Christmas to you, sir.”

  Bunny nodded. “And to you too,” he said, raising his voice, as the duo were already hurrying back down the sidewalk.

  Bunny watched them go, Mrs Tandy weaving in and out of the torrent of pedestrian traffic, a truculent Annabelle dragged in her wake. He stood transfixed for a full minute, until, from the corner of his eye, he saw an object arc its way into the bucket that dangled from the stand beside him.

  His hand shot out on instinct, and grabbed the source of the object around the throat: a blond guy in his mid twenties, wearing a suede jacket and a smug grin – although the grin didn’t survive a coarse hand wrapping itself around his body’s primary avenue for oxygen consumption.

  “What the—”

  The rest of the sentence was lost as Bunny tightened his grip. The tosser found himself eye to eye with Father Christmas, whose right eye glowered at him while the left seemed to be gazing off in an entirely different direction. “’Tis the most magical time of the year, fella. And to prove that, a couple of miracles are about to happen. In particular, the soda can you just tossed into the bucket – which you know is there to collect money for the homeless – is going to magically transform itself into all the cash in your wallet.”

  The guy went to push Bunny away, but this resulted in a firm grip being applied to his right wrist, sending pain shooting up his arm. He gave a strangled yelp.

  “And if that miracle does happen,” continued Bunny, “then the other miracle will be you walking away from here with the same number of bollocks as you came with. Are we clear?”

  Five minutes and an ostentatious donation of two hundred bucks later, Bunny was back to ringing his bell and trying not to attract attention. Then he saw Helena Martinez step out of the side door of the theatre where she worked, just as she had done for the last three days. Everything around her wasn’t the same though. You’d have had to know what to look for to see it, especially in the Christmas rush of people moving in all directions. Still, Bunny knew what to look for. He hadn’t been watching Helena Martinez so much as he’d been waiting to see who else was watching Helena Martinez. A large man with a shaven head, who, despite the just above freezing weather, was only wearing a black hoodie, walked quickly out of a nearby coffee shop and, with his eyes fixed on her, followed her down the street.

  Bunny took the burner phone out of the pocket and hit speed dial.

  “We got a bite.”

  A Walk in the Park

  Helena checked the bench was clean and then sat down. In reality, it really was far too cold to be sitting in Central Park eating her lunch, but she didn’t care. Even as a kid, she had weirdly loved the cold weather. Everyone else longed for summer, but not her. There was something about that bite in the air that made her feel alive. And so it was that, at the same time every day, rain allowing, she would nip out of the theatre and hurry the three blocks up to Central Park, so she could sit there in the closest thing you could find to peace and quiet on the Island of Manhattan. When Helena was a child, her momma had often joked that, seeing as she loved the cold and the quiet so much, she should go live in Alaska with the penguins. Helena had known there weren’t any penguins in Alaska outside of a zoo, but she hadn’t corrected her momma, as then she would have had to admit that she had not only looked it up but studied it in embarrassing detail. Everyone else dreamed of Hollywood; she was the little girl who had gone to bed every night dreaming of Alaska. She’d grown into a woman who had never even left New York. With a sigh, she pulled the package of sandwiches she had brought from home out of her bag and unwrapped it. A few pigeons swooped down as she did so. She recognised the one with the unusual white and brown markings – he was a regular who knew she was an easy mark.

  She was halfway through her second sandwich when a red-headed woman sat down at the other end of the bench. Helena let out an involuntary yelp of surprise. The woman held out a hand.

  “Pardon me, honey – didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  Helena blushed. “Oh no, not at all. Sorry. I was engrossed in feeding the birds.”

  The woman nodded. “I can see that. They sure do love you.”

  Helena gave a polite laugh. “They love anybody with bread. Not many people sit around feeding them this time of year.”

  The redhead gave a warm laugh and hugged her arms around herself. �
�Ain’t that the truth. Too damn cold. I’m from Texas – we don’t keep our iceboxes this frosty.”

  Helena smiled in response.

  “Still,” continued the woman, “sitting here, we got more space around us than you get anywhere else in Manhattan, huh?”

  Helena nodded. “That’s why I come here.”

  “Yeah,” said the woman with a nod. “It’s broad daylight and we’ve got plenty of wide-open ground around us. I want you to remember that.”

  Helena’s head whipped around to look at the woman.

  “Oh gee, I’m sorry. That came out wrong. Didn’t mean to sound quite so stalkery. Apologies.” The redhead held her hands up. “I’m kinda new to this.”

  “New to what exactly?”

  The woman gave her a smile. “I promise you, I’m here as a friend. Relax, Helena.”

  Helena sat up ramrod straight. “How do you know my name?”

  “That’s what I’m here to explain. My name is Cheryl, and I want to help you.”

  “I don’t need help.”

  Cheryl nodded. “I’m afraid you do. Try not to look, but there’s a big, muscly dude with a shaven head over on the far side there, on the left, at the treeline. He followed you here.”

  Helena tried to look casual as she looked around. She could see the man now, staring over at them.

  “Oh God.” She said it to herself as much as anything.

  “It’s OK,” said Cheryl.

  “It’s not. You don’t understand.”

  “I do. I really do. You think that man has something to do with your ex-husband, and you’re right – he does.”

  Helena grabbed her bag, ready to stand and run.

  “Wait, wait – please. Just give me sixty seconds. I swear to you, honey, I’m here to help.”