Last Can of Tuna by Mike Lukas

The dog kept barking at the sliding glass doors that led to the back patio, and the persistent noise interrupted Herbert’s spiraling train of thought.

“Knock it off, boy. You’re driving me nuts.”

Herbert was annoyed, but not at his dog; it was his empty fridge that was pissing him off. And his empty cupboards and empty gas tank and checking account, all down to nothing, save a single can of tuna that sat on the otherwise bare kitchen counter. He sat alone at his dining room table sipping orange Kool-Aid for breakfast, surrounded by stacks of bills that nagged at him like hungry ducks demanding bread he didn’t have.

Herbert had been raised to always pay what he owed.

And he’d done that his entire life. But lately his military pension had been stretched too thin to take care of business. Food and hospital bills and funeral expenses and such. His wife would kill him if she saw how disorganized and behind he’d let things get, but she was gone now, passed away months ago from lung cancer, so there was little she could do about it now.

Still with the barking.

“Goddammit, Rocket, what is it?”

Herbert was dressed in what he had slept in, a loose T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and now he also had on his old blue slippers. He got up from his chair, walked into the family room, and pulled aside the rear drapes to take a better look out back at what had caught his pup’s attention.

Soon as he spotted it his first instinct was to call the cops.

It was a body. One he recognized.

“Son of a bitch.”

Herbert could tell it was his friend and neighbor, Clyde, who lay face down on the gray cement patio, his head surrounded by a puddle of red. Clyde had on his favorite outfit: his ancient, checkered bathrobe, loose sweatpants, and leather sandals. From the looks of it, he had been carrying two cups of coffee on his way to Herbert’s to share the morning. That had become a daily habit for the two ex-marines. Looked like Clyde must have tripped and struck his head on the sharp edge of the metal grill, and that was enough to kill the tough son of a bitch.

Just in case, Herbert went out and felt for a pulse. Nothing. Just a lingering smell of Aqua Velva.

“Clyde, you clumsy son of a bitch.”

Herbert stepped back inside to dial 911 and to get a blanket to cover his friend. Clyde’s accidental death wasn’t much of a shock to Herbert compared to all the casualties he’d already witnessed in battle in Vietnam. And in his wife’s hospice room.

Still, he’d miss his neighbor. The morning coffee breaks, and the way Clyde would say “Roger that” and “Ten-four” to whatever Herbert brought up. He’d also miss the way Clyde had kept things simple and predictable, like how he used powdered creamer in their coffees every morning, and how he did most of his shopping at thrift stores and bought two-day old donuts for half off, and how he used his house number as his go-to password so he wouldn’t forget. And Rocket would surely miss Clyde’s aggressive belly rubs and endless ball tosses in the back yard.

Herbert reached for the phone on the kitchen table, in the middle of all the bills, then stopped.

Clyde had lived on his own next door. He might be a guy who had a few dollars lying around the house. At first, the thought of robbing his dead buddy made Herbert wince, but then he thought, What the hell, I did the same thing plenty of times back in the war. Spoils of victory, Captain Haskins had called it. “Fuck ’em,” Haskins had told the men. “They’re dead now. What do they care?”

Herbert stopped his pacing for a moment to lay an old blanket over most of Clyde’s body.

None of the neighbors had shown up yet, it being too early for any of them to wander into their own backyards, where they might notice the corpse next door.

Unlucky son of a bitch.

Knowing Clyde, he wouldn’t object to any spoils of war. It’s not like he had any kids or a wife or siblings who would get any of his belongings anyway. Like Herbert, Clyde had been a loner, probably why they had gotten along so well. And as sure as his friend was dead, any money Clyde did have stashed away in that house would go straight to whichever cops found it first.

The hell with it, Herbert finally decided.

He pulled open the sliding glass door again, stepped back out onto the patio, and fished out a set of keys from his dead friend’s bathrobe pocket. The dog growled at that and started barking again.

“Hush, that’s enough, boy. Clyde would be fine with this.”

Herbert walked through his backyard right as the early morning sun peeked over the row of identical rooftops in the quiet suburb. He crossed over onto Clyde’s property and keyed his way into the back door of his house. A cloud of foul air hit his face, like he’d cracked open an abandoned gym locker. It reeked of moldy onions and coffee, with a heavy undertone of urine.

Herbert found a light switch in the kitchen and flicked it on.

There were pots and pans and dirty dishes on every counter and overfilling the sink. The living room and dining room were both crammed with cardboard boxes and piles of garbage and broken furniture. In every room junk had been stacked wall to wall, with only a narrow pathway left open. Beyond the piles, several built in bookshelves held dozens of knickknacks, mostly a variety of porcelain frog figurines.

“Clyde, you frog-collecting son of a bitch.”

Herbert spotted an unopened Hershey bar resting on the arm of a newspaper-covered La-Z-Boy and pocketed it. He went down the hallway past a bathroom that smelled like a broken sewer and into Clyde’s bedroom, which similarly reeked. He switched on the overhead light and looked under the mattress that was covered in a tangle of yellowed sheets. He checked in the dresser drawers and in the nightstand next to the bed. Nothing.

Herbert leaned into the closet, and the smell of black coffee, smoke, and sweaty armpits hit him. He went through the various pockets of the sagging coats and jackets and blue jeans and found about eleven dollars in loose bills and coins. He folded up those spoils of victory and shoved them in his pocket next to the chocolate bar, imagining his dead friend floating nearby, watching his place being looted.

“Roger that,” he’d be saying. “Ten-four on those spoils of victory.”

Herbert knelt down and checked the insides of Clyde’s shoes for hidden treasure.

That’s when he saw the safe.

It was made of black-painted metal and built into the base of the wall, hidden behind a pair of tattered military boots. The safe was about a foot and a half across, with a keypad on its front. That would normally be a problem, except Herbert knew Clyde well enough to know that he hated complicated and unpredictable things. After some searching, he found an old water bill lying among the hoarded junk, and he typed Clyde’s house number—1-5-2-7-9—on the safe’s keypad.

Its thick door clicked open.

Inside were a dozen wrapped stacks of hundred-dollar bills. There was also a loaded pistol with extra ammo and a few stock certificates. Clyde’s passport and wallet were in there, too, as were three gold bars and a dark felt sack filled with about fifty uncut diamonds.

“Clyde, you rich son of a bitch.”

Herbert stuffed everything but the passport into one of his dead friend’s pillowcases and then sealed up the safe again. He arranged the boots and shoes and clothes back where he had found them. Herbert even wiped off any fingerprints he might have left. Then he closed and locked the back door.

Through both back yards, he carried the heavy pillowcase over his shoulder like a suburban Santa. Herbert’s head was filled with positive thoughts of how quickly a man’s fortunes can change. This morning he’d woken up broke, and now, an hour later, his financial problems were solved. At one point, he believed he saw a quick flitter of curtains at his nosy next-door neighbor Mrs. Hardwick’s house, but he chalked it up to the morning breeze.

Back on his own patio, Herbert stepped over Clyde again.

Sticking out from under the blanket, his friend’s stiffened fingers still gripped the handles of the two shattered coffee mugs he’d been carrying. Herbert thought of their morning bull sessions that usually got heated but never angry. He’d miss starting his days like that, talking with someone who understood what it felt like to serve in combat.

“Fear has a peculiar smell to it,” Clyde had said once.

“Yeah,” Herbert had said. “Like rotten cabbage. Worse than the smell of death.”

“Roger that,” Clyde had said, nodding. “Most men aren’t meant to see and do what needs to get done to win a battle.”

“Let alone survive.”

“Ten-four.”

Herbert bent over and returned the keys to Clyde’s bathrobe pocket, then patted his old friend gently on the back of his blanket-covered head.

“Thanks, you old son of a bitch. You really came through for me, marine. Oorah.”

Herbert went inside the house. He hid his spoils of victory in the guest bedroom closet inside an old suitcase that he covered with folded quilts.

Back in the kitchen, he dialed 911.

“What’s your emergency?”

Herbert sucked in a lungful of air. “It’s my friend Clyde. There’s been an accident, and I think he’s dead.”

“Stay right there. I’ve already got someone on the way.”

Herbert hung up the phone. He heard the wail of a distant siren and was impressed by the fast response. He started folding up and filing away all the overdue bills. For the first time in a long while he felt like everything was going to be all right.

Then Herbert fed Rocket a bowlful of tuna, the last can he had.

* * *

“Yes, ma’am, my full name is Mrs. Eleanor Francis Hardwick. Well, I’m a next door neighbor. His backyard and our backyard touch. Mm-hmm. I saw the whole thing. Huh? Yes, I hear them getting closer, that was certainly quick. I’ll be here. Sure, I’d be happy to talk with them. Believe me.”