Immeasurable

Leon sat in the suit, in the chair, in the waiting room, feeling just about as uncomfortable as he had ever been.

His hair – ‘dirty blonde’, some called it – was cropped short on the back and sides, revealing the odd scar here and there. More dotted his hands and otherwise-fresh face, too, translucent little trails with stories to match. But not this story.

This story starts with a man in a suit too big and a room too small, ever one step behind a bit of merciless luck.

And the notebook. That’s where it really started.

With a worn little notebook, black and edged with faded gold and a silk ribbon of the same colour nestled between the pages. Plenty of pages had been torn out, but one in particular had become a source of great interest to Leon over recent weeks. He had brought it along to the interview even, holding it in his clammy hands and thumbing its edges semi-consciously while he waited. The owner of the notebook popped into Leon’s head like a genie from a bottle, and half a wry smile curved his lips at the thought.

“Leon Stanton?” a curt voice burst the daydream in an instant.

“Yes,” said Leon, that odd mix of eagerness and anxiety rising him fast to his feet.

A middle-aged woman clothed entirely in purple stood at the open door. She had perplexingly thin features set into a full, flabby face, with beady little scrutinizers for eyes and plum pursed lips. She lingered in the doorway just long enough for Leon to decide he didn’t like her, a thought he tried to throttle, only for a worse one to take its place – she didn’t like him either. He left his hope at the threshold and followed her through the door.

* * * * *

A bottle of beer accompanied Leon on the short walk back to the hostel, the fizzy bitterness drowning the futility of the whole thing.

He and the recruiting agent had both been explicitly aware that no recruiting would be taking place, and they’d volleyed questions and answers across the barricade of the desk in what Leon imagined must’ve been record time. It was done within a couple of minutes, and Leon found himself back out on the dirty street in the chilly October air.

Every day of the eight months Leon had spent in jail, he had longed for life outside. It was crowded and noisy inside, privacy a distant memory, hostile strangers everywhere. The company was bad and the food decidedly worse, and the unyielding routine was utterly maddening. But worst of all was the sheer, mind-numbing boredom. Leon couldn’t wait to leave all that behind, to finally be free.

A week out alone in the government-secured hostel had seen freedom’s façade drip away like cold fat, and Leon felt as trapped as ever. Wary of the prospect of going back inside, he hadn’t contacted any of his acquaintances, let alone taken any of his old work. And the boredom had seemingly jumped ship with him, followed him all the way out the gates and into the lonely little room he now called home. The fact boredom still drenched him in all its profoundly dull glory filled Leon with a dread so deep he dared not look its way.

Leon slammed the door to his room back at the hostel and slumped onto the unforgiving bed, pulling two more bottles of beer out of the oversized jacket’s pockets and smiling as he cracked one open, the cap echoing a tinkle as it hit the floor of the empty room.

He had paid for one beer, slipping the others into his jacket whilst the tired supermarket worker gave directions on how to find quinoa to an earnest-faced Leon. It was a stunt that accounted for most of the bottles littering the room. Now there was something Leon was good at. He wasn’t completely successful, of course. It’s what landed him with his recent eight-month stretch, after all.

Most of Leon’s work involved alleviating huge construction sites of their supplies of equipment and materials, and it largely went unnoticed by site managers, or simply got written off as petty loss. The construction contracts were worth such eye-watering amounts of money, exceeding the true cost of the job’s labour and materials some many times over, that it was of no consequence for a few thousand dollars worth of stuff to disappear. It really felt like victimless crime – it wasn’t like he was breaking into people’s homes and stealing their hard-earned flat-screen TV’s. It is said that there is no honour among thieves, and perhaps it’s true, but there was definitely a kind of code for the successful ones, even if it was borne largely out of necessity and damage control.

People sometimes paid Leon to steal specific things, and he took the jobs as much for the fun of practising his art as he did for the money. He was good at it, he enjoyed it, and he was well-respected by those he dealt with and who understood the slickness of his craft – what more could a man want from his means of making money? And for the sheer volume of work he had undertaken, it had only landed him in serious trouble a couple of times. They were excellent odds.

Leon took another long gulp of beer and let bubbles of rose-tinted pride mist his mind. Why had he been wasting time feeling sorry for himself?

It was the first prison sentence he’d received, after all, and it had only been so lengthy because the construction giant Leon had stolen from on this occasion also happened to secure many contracts building prisons. They’d built much of the prison Leon had ended up in. The irony certainly wasn’t lost on him, and it had often made him chuckle. Leon shook the misery from himself and grinned at the now glaringly obvious answer to his recent woes – he needed to get back doing what he did best. He was a thief, and a good thief at that.

And he had a possible job waiting for him, in that little black notebook. It would mean stealing from an individual, something Leon tended to avoid. But he had an unfounded yet deep contempt for the man in question, and a mix of that and the lager swilling through his veins quickly settled any doubt about the ethics of the matter.

Leon pulled out the notebook and found the page. There, in black capital letters, were the words that had intrigued and tantalised him a thousand times over, “LITTLE SHED, BIG BARN… 30 STEPS FROM DOOR, LEFT, 40 STEPS… UNDER ROCK, 2 FEET”

Leon mulled it over in his mind, excited butterflies in his belly, thinking about the notebook’s owner, Neil.

Neil was possibly the strangest man Leon had ever encountered. He was the kind of man who somehow didn’t fit in with anything, including his own life. They had spent three months in jail together when he had been moved into Leon’s cell. He was a very tall man with enormous hands and long finger-nails, and he always wore his grey hair in a lank ponytail. His movements and speech were slow and deliberate, and clever grey eyes peeked out from under wildly bushy eyebrows, always full of an emotion Leon couldn’t place. It was like a twinkling mischief, but there was something darker about it. He was an intelligent man, a fact he didn’t flaunt, but there was an air of smugness about him that Leon found deeply perplexing and irritating in equal measure. Neil hadn’t spoken much, but Leon had remembered everything he had said through the kind of attentive listening only love or hate can inspire in a man.

And Leon had his notebook. Leon sneered at the thought, and recalled some of the facts as he geared himself up for the task.

Neil owned a small farm on the outskirts of the city. Leon knew the place – he’d stolen a load of cast iron from there a few years previously, a fact he hadn’t shared with Neil, who had been convicted of fiddling the business earnings. Fraud usually involved a hefty sentence, but Neil had convinced the judge the errors had happened through genuine accident rather than intent, a story he had maintained to Leon the couple of times the subject had come up. Leon didn’t believe it for a second, though Neil did seem more believable than most who professed their innocence of their crimes.

Leon suspected Neil had probably, like himself, gotten away with far more than the crime he was convicted of, and Leon was sure he was secretly a very rich man. He was too clever in all the right ways for it not to be so. And Leon was also sure that this notebook of his, which he had found under the bunk when Neil had suddenly been released, held directions to some kind of stash on his land. He seemed the type. There was something a bit unconventional and rustic about Neil. And Leon knew farmers – most of them didn’t trust banks and only ever dealt in cash, which they kept under their mattresses or in secret holes in the ground.

Leon downed the rest of his lager, far more drunk than he cared to admit. He changed out of the uncomfortable suit and out of the uncomfortable life. It felt good to finally drop the pretence. Feeling more determined and confident than he had in weeks, Leon pocketed the notebook and staggered out into the night.

* * * * *

With only the looming moon as his witness, Leon stood outside the little shed by the big barn at the farm. Armed with alcoholic courage and a shovel that luck had placed leaning against the shed, Leon followed the directions of the notebook as precisely as any drunk man could. He took large wobbly strides to account for Neil’s long legs, a stupid and victorious grin plastered on his face as he made his way to the spot.

Leon laughed to himself when he reached it, and began to dig. Neil’s smug face swam before him as he clumsily plunged the shovel into the ground and discarded the earth, his eyes gleaming with the thought of the great wad of cash waiting for him beneath his feet.

“Not gonna be so smug now, are you, Neil?” Leon muttered gleefully as he dug, excitement building with every shovel of soil thrown aside.

In his drunken and dogged determination, Leon hadn’t noticed or cared that lights had flickered on when he’d broken through the wire fencing, and sent dogs in the distance barking their alarm. The first Leon knew of any of it was when the sirens of the police cars pierced the cold night air as they piled outside the premises. It was far too late.

* * * * *

Leon’s head swam as he sat on the steps outside the court house in the cold bright sun, trying in vain to make sense of it all.

Neil was one of those men almost entirely transformed by a suit and a shave, and had sounded utterly respectable as he politely addressed the court. Leon should’ve been overjoyed to escape another prison sentence. He was assured by the judge this was only so as he hadn’t successfully stolen anything. But those words rang over and over in his ears, “The court orders Mr. Stanton to pay the defendant the sum of $20,000, by way of compensation for loss of livestock and vandalism to…”

Several sheep had apparently died of shock due to the break-in. Neil’s surprise at the mention of the money he was entitled to had him slowly turn to face Leon in the docks, mustering the smuggest smile it was humanly possible to form. Leon was sure, in his numb rage, that image would never leave him.