Unfinished others

sketches:

                                                                           THE BAT

                                                                   By Jeffrey B. Smith

               The Bat trembled. He peeped down through the grate at her as he had for the last several mornings. She was busy at her morning toilet and he savored it. Today she seemed to be taking an extraordinarily long time as she lathered and lingered and shaved herself in the huge tub.

               That’s good, he thought to himself, for tonight I will have you and, I want you as close to perfect as you can make yourself for me.  And she was close to perfect already.

               He had seen her across the room at the Restaurant in the Hotel of San Diego where he kept a massive suite. He studied her from afar. Their eyes, from across the room, met for an instant as she stood, the man she was with making a gentlemanly display of helping her with her chair. The Bat noted she was perfectly capable of completing the task herself, capable of that and a lot more.

                On long statuesque legs that appeared to have been sculpted from some sort of unblemished honey -toned marble, she strode gracefully out of the room and cast an unfocused look in his direction. The Bat started. The candlelight revealed flashes of incandescent jade flecking eyes of carmelized amber. He’d not seen eyes like that in centuries.

               He watched her from behind. She floated on glossy black stiletto heels with a natural grace unfamiliar to the mass of common women who often seemed to balance on them only by maintaining an awkward studied concentration. The heels were perfect, he noted, for they tilted her pelvis at just the perfect receptive angle.

               Her hair was black, healthy, and in spite of its ebony depths, radiant. Coursing over her shoulders and down her back and onto the little black dress that fit perfectly to her ideal proportions, the overall impression given was of a field of black from her crown to hem. And that hem was itself was strategically located to reveal just enough of the upper inner thigh for an arresting effect . 

               He was certain she studied him too, peripherally, on her exit.

               He knew she would be his.

               All thoughts of the redhead he was dining with left him in that instant. She could be gathered up later. She may be one for his collection, soon she would be on the yacht with the others he had assembled.  The frictions that so amused him were in full fester back on board. Soon they would again leave for exotic ports of call while he manipulated them, all beauties of his own careful selection. At sea he would use them at his leisure, watch them from his secret vents and passages. With money you could always find someone to build anything you desired. And desire is all he was.   

               And though he had desired this little redhead, a photographic artist, he could have her at his leisure. Maybe she would make it to the end of the cruise, maybe not. He liked to surprise himself. Soon one or two would be gone, assumed by the others to have left the cruise, disgruntled, at the last port of call. He would murmur something to one of them in a moment of intimacy and it would spread among the remainders like a contagion.

               And the newly departed would not be much missed by the others, who by the time of her uncomfortable departure would’ve been the sole object of his attentions and thus the enemy of the rest.

               However, their target never would make that port. An exhausted husk, her devoured and dessicated body would flutter like an autumn leave to the ocean floor, unceremoniously heaved form one of the secreted disposal ports he had cleverly designed into his custom mega yacht.

               He looked at the earnest redhead, she was speaking about opening her own gallery. He had been studying her mouth and lips while she spoke. He cared nothing for the content but was absorbed entirely with her mouth and tongue and lips, calculating how he would get her to use them in the ways that would bring him the most pleasures. Maybe showing interest in her gallery dream?

                Across the foyer the lady, who was just now being helped into a soft black leather jacket, a blazer type affair which diminished in no way her spectacular features, had now captured him.

                “I’m sorry,” he murmured intimately as he slipped her a card, “I just now recalled, I have an important call to make, it may take a few minutes. Please excuse me..” Reaching into his jacket he extracted his phone. He stooped and kissed her lips gently, offering a quick slash of tongue, which she found strangely thrilling. A chill ran through her body.

               He smiled at her kindly, “Here, I’ll meet you later in my suite. Make yourself as comfortable as you can. I do so apologize.”

               She fingered the card and then drew it close to her. Her eyes darted in the direction where the exquisite brunette had just been.  She sensed something, was it some kind of deep jealousy? Was that woman a connection to his quick exit? She put these thoughts aside.

               She would stay in his suite for a couple of days before she returned to the arts colony. She would wonder about him for the rest of her days. She suspected his disappearance had something to do with that black haired bitch who sashayed out of the restaurant that night, or, maybe not. Perhaps it was something to do with herself? Some sort of inadequacy? She would replay that evening in her mind, recalling every detail of it and never coming to terms with the event.

               At any rate it was still quite a few days for her. She wore his robes, used his spa, drank his champagnes and liquors, snorted his coke. She puffed his cigars and had a brief intense fling in a laundry room with her masseuse.

               Eventually she had tired of it all and walked out the crystalline revolving door. The doorman knew her by name. She got a kick out of that. She had come that close.

               But The Bat had a short attention span. The red head was expendable and replaceable by any number of others, just as attractive, just as desperate for his attentions. Strange, so many of the real beauties were such easy prey. It was if their very desirability was a too heavy burden. He had often found that hilarious.

                Now, however, his attention was focused on the brunette. She was an exemplary specimen and his hungers rose in him like a tropical fever. He desired her completely.

               While the couple awaited the valet to bring the man’s car, The Bat donned his own leather jacket, black too, it was at the ready on his Ducati Monster, an 1100 Evo, waiting in his own personal, private, parking nook. He spun the engine to life and gloried in its machinery. He loved a well wrought machine. He had a special run of twenty of these identical bikes custom made for himself at the factory in Bologna. High performance to the peak of today’s technological limits, the machine was the very extension of his physiology.

               And his was a singular physiology. Honed over the centuries, a master at every form of martial arts, nearly indestructible, he was perhaps the most formidable creature on the planet. Thus he was exceptionally well suited to his business, which, if he had actually reflected upon it, was killing and death.

               He revved the machine lightly as he swiveled his neck around, hunching his shoulders, loosening up. He listened, across the hedges and the drive to the small talk the couple was making. He tuned his senses to their register.

               The man, obsequious, was clearly feeling a bit at a disadvantage with the woman. Perhaps it was the fact that he was slightly younger than her, and she a fraction taller than him as well. The Bat detected a bit of insecurity in a man who was unaccustomed to that position. His conversation seemed to be focused on, in a studiedly off hand fashion, revealing his good taste in everything material.

               The woman, and The Bat was having a hard time decoding her, was feigning interest with just enough disinterest to make the man uneasy. Was this thinly veiled feigned interest calculated on her part to manipulate the man into his sorry display? Or was it just plain honest nonchalant indifference?

               The Bat was idly curious, observing from nearly a half block away. Regardless of their calculations, The Bat was in the hunt now and all their machinations would soon be moot.

               The man’s car arrived. A Mercedes 300SL. Not a bad car The Bat allowed - but not the 300 AMG - which made this car a shade pitiful. German cars, The Bat sneered. Well engineered for sure, solid performers but, no pinache, no spirit, no style. In his stable The Bat had only Italian cars, Ferrari’s, Lamborghinis, and a Maserati here or there.  All sprinkled around the world to be at his disposal. (He forgot about an Aston Martin DBS Coupe he had stowed in New Zealand.)  Nothing compared to a Ferrari’s engine screaming behind one’s shoulders, the world rushing at the windscreen like a tsunami. Besides, if one had the money, keeping Italian cars in tune was no deterrent whatsoever. German cars were for the poseur who could never afford the maintanence involved with Italian marques.

               The car merged into the street.  The bat let a few cars pass and then he pulled out of the garage. He switched off his lights, he did not require them.  He followed a block behind, knifing through the traffic, startling the dull occupants of nondescript cars rolling towards their own miserable destinies.

               The bat laughed, a deep gutteral rumble that escalated to a fevered howl of delight. His nostrils dialated to funnel the night air into his lungs and he swilled the night through a gaping grin. He swaggered through the throngs on the bike, winding and shifting and leaning it at impossible degrees.  Long elegant wheelies and broadside sweeps, the back end stepping out as he arced through busy intersections, vehicles swerving and skidding about him in shocked surprise, he heard a collision behind him and laughed some more. He roared into the night.

               He relished it all, the speed, the chase, his soon to be sated appetites. He wailed into the wind and effortlessly dodged, at 60 miles per hour, airborne insects he sensed a half block ahead. He did not wish to have a stain on him.

               He was the last of his kind and he was certain of it. There had been thirteen and, even though he himself had called for The Conclave, he could only, dimly, recall the others.

               Except for Otto. He sometimes had inexplicable feelings of nostalgia, or something like that, for dear old Otto. It had been several centuries now. Otto the insatiable. Loved the Bavarian women, Otto. Oh, they would go on binges in the night. Otto would gorge nearly to the point of insensibility. In one night nearly an entire convent, and just the two of them.

               But in the spirit of The Conclave, he had bid Otto a solemn good bye. Otto was looking a bit dejected, his vest again too tight over his expanding girth as The Bat had turned towards the mountains that day to leave. But  upon looking back once he saw Otto brighten a little, framed in the door of the cottage. For over the crest of the hill, on the road to the village, a wagon was approaching. Over the cart a healthy halo of blonde hair was wafting on the breeze, a promising aspect.. The Bat caught a glimpse of Otto licking his lips.

               The Conclave was a brilliant idea, he had often prided himself in it.

               “We must disperse,” he had announced to the other thirteen, “We must, for our own survival, remove ourselves from each other. There will be those out there,” he had gestured towards the arched doorway, robes depended gracefully from his muscled arm, “Who will devine the authors of their loss and, make no mistake, once aroused in numbers, they will pursue us and will find a way to contain us.”

               “But,” he had reasoned, “If was go to the winds we can have our pleasures, where the concentration of activities in aggregate, will not be as apparent as those of a solitary agent.”

               “And,” from this point forward, “Not one of our favors must be left alive. Death to every feeding. By infecting rather than killing, we will seal each our own fate. Competition cannot improve our breed. We are the pinnacle!”

               The agreement was unanimous that night. They were young and full of their new power and jealous to preserve their advantages.

               They would nearly be unanimous later, when, confiding to twelve of the others, he had marshaled them to fall upon and dispatch Aakhep. The Bat had found him to be awkward and often slightly disheveled. Not a credit to his kind. Besides Aarkhep had, at court, once laughed at The Bat.

               So there was 13, now only one. He had last seen one of his brotheren in a shady outdoor café in Rio, perhaps  a 100 years, or more, ago. There sat Darius. It so startled The Bat that he was nearly rendered mute. Darius nodded at the dark beauty who was serving. The Bat was there for the very same reason.

               Darius had mouth the words, “She’s mine,” and grinned. The bat had doffed his top hat. For an instant their gazes locked, it was understood then between them. They were the last of the breed.

               Within 12 hours The bat was on a steamer for the U.S.A.  Chicago, a fine World’s Fair was promised to get under way there very soon. It would bring the best and brightest to that forlorn place and The Bat wished to be there to have his choice among them.

               Shortly thereafter he had the queer sensation that Darius too had met his demise.  What became of Darius and the rest, he could only guess. Discovery of some sort. Not paying attention, they, he supposed. A slip of some kind. Poor planning, not taking their time perhaps. The Bat knew how to take his time.  He knew how to  evaluate risk, he knew how to use his senses to his own prosperity.

               On the bike that night, his senses  were fully heightened and nothing that could be noted escaped him. Up ahead, maybe a half mile, a rat poked his nose out from an alley. He admired its wary smarts. It ducked back as he screamed by.

               Soon the downtown was behind them. Residential neighborhoods and cul de sacs were more the landscape now. Quiet residences back away from the street. He had to back off, he kept closing on the Mercedes. What an oaf this driver was, he would kill him with a blow to the larynx and then have his time with the woman.

               No matter the physical attributes of the man, they were never a match for a  pale, 6 foot , 3 inch, pale, naked man materializing out of nearly then air at their flank. He would drop him like an anvil through ether. He would be stone dead before he hit the hardwood.

               Then he would descend upon the woman. He might let it be difficult. He shivered with excitement. He was in his element in a world that offered him his elements in an inexhaustible bounty.

               The Mercedes had turned into a shadowed lane that curved towards a modest sized but well designed, conceptually well wrought, Craftsman style bungalow situated nicely into the landscape. Perfect.

               He switched off the ignition and glided a block or more to a stop at the cub. There was nobody about, nobody to see. He focused his attention at the bungalow and the couple. To his astonishment she was not inviting the man in. She demurred to the mans barely concealed frustration, something about a presentation in the morning, fatigue, the usual.

               The Bat exhalted in this turn of events. Had they went inside together he would’ve been pressured to gain entry and dispatch the man before he despoiled the woman in some way. And the Bat liked to take his time.

               The man returned to the car after a promised rendezvous was negotiated for a later date. It did not matter, the woman would not be there.

               The man in the Mercedes, on his slow modulated exit down the drive, revealing none of his frustration to the woman who might be watching but as not, had flipped open his phone and left a message, “Honey, yeah, doesn’t look like I’ll be back ‘till sometime next week. Things are in a real mess down here, I don’t know what the hell Rod has been up to….I’ll tell you about it in the morning. Give Meghan a kiss and tell her daddy loves her.”

               The Mercedes turned onto the street towards downtown. The Bat watched it. Another call was made as it sped off, the man now rowing inexpertly through the gear box. “Trudie, hi, this is Chip. Yeah, I just got into town, I was wondering if I might be…..”

               The Bat smiled, he thought differently about him now, it would’ve been a shame to kill a fellow like that. He admired him until he heard him miss the revs on a downshift at the lights a mile away. No, on second thought, he deserved killing.

               He turned his attention to the woman. She was moving about the house.  He entered the hedges and approached the bungalow. He was trembling with anticipation, if not hunger. He had last fed, or “had a drink” as he liked to laugh to himself, when? He never could recall them afterwards, he wasn’t acutely hungry though, so it must’ve been relatively recently. He began to undress, he admired his slim shadow in the moonlight. He looked up at the moon, over his shoulder. He had an idea then. He would make this one special, like he did every so often. In a few nights his senses would be ever more heightened, the night would come when his stoked appetite and the elements would coincide to bring him the ultimate pleasures.

               He donned his jacket again. He made a call and roared back into the night. He brought the Ducati to life.

               A driver was already waiting with a nondescript Chevy that screamed anonymity. A bag, as ordered was in the backseat. He gave the driver an address.

                                                                           SALTY’S

3-31-03

I drive for Andy’s, Andy’s Chips. It used to be Salty’s but in the 80’s that name fell out of favor so they renamed it Andy’s after Salty’s wife. Well, his name wasn’t Salty, it was Ernest Kannisto but he called his chips Salty’s and everyone started calling him that., He came form up by New York Mills and got into the potato business I guess and started in the chip business after WW II and it took off. Well it didn’t really take off like a rocket but more like a plane you could say. Andy’s hold their own here in the upper midwest  and I like them. I buy them myself, in fact I think they are the best potato chip on the market and they are a good outfit to work for. I have run into many guys who don’t buy the product they stock, beer guys mostly, who can’t stand the sight off another Budwieser but gladly drink a Miller for instance. I can understand that, I once worked in a hospital and I would’ve had serious reservations about any of my loved ones going there. It sure helps a guy in his job when he doesn’t despise handling the product, so to speak.           

They call them Andy’s Chips now because of the owner. Ernie, the aforementioned Salty, was married, up until his death, to Andrea Kannisto, (sorry I don’t know her maiden name), and when it was deemed that Salty wasn’t shedding a very healthy light on the company, they named it Andy’s. Shrewdly they  did not change the package and they hardly missed a beat.  

I met Andy once at a big 50^th anniversary picnic up near headquarters there in Moorehead. They had a big tent set up and all of us drivers and other workers were invited and it was fun. She was sitting at a table in the shade and shook our hands. Seemed like a gracious older woman, enjoying the attention. I have heard rumors though that you wouldn’t want to cross her. I doubt I’ll ever have the chance.

I decided to start writing this today because I was pondering things. I do that a lot behind the wheel. It is such a time of solitutde, riding out there between these Minnesota small towns. Even though the spaces are filling up more and more,  there still is miles between them. I have been thinking, it is an interesting time to be alive, I suppose life is interesting whenever it is being lived. At least that is the way it is supposed to be I would trust. Yet, when I am gone, and that is a sure thing, I will be gone, not a whiff of me will be left to show. Oh sure, my kids and subsequent generations will bear witness, and my gravestone too, but what will be left of me? This guy who travels these roads and looks through this windshield and thinks these not too profound thoughts…I know it isn’t much but it still will be all gone someday.

I have no illusions that what I think or say is in any way lofty. I can’t pretend to be that. But I don’t see anybody else out there recording what it’s like to be middle aged and content in the opening round of the 21^st century and not accomplishing too much more than just trying to be satisfied. Seems like the most we hear about is those who aren’t satisified, up there on quests or those who are terribly dissatisfied, whatever. A guy just doing his job and making ends meet and staying of the radar screens does not, by definition, make the news. Yet we are still here, maybe thousands of us and one of us should tell about himself, not claiming to talk for everyone but just capturing what happens.

Today the war lingers on. If your are interested in the war, look in a history book. It is beyond me, and probably just about everybody, to tell you why there is a war. I am opposed to it. I think our leaders are making a mistake. I am trouble about it every hour of the day. Yet I am not fanatically opposed, just sad about it mostly . Get us out of there is all I can think. I don’t believe we can solve these problems. I don’t believe liberty seeds can grow in that earth yet.

As you can see, I am not able to offer a profound conclusion to these world events. The waters are to deep for me to navigate with style.

Today was mild, what little snow we have is melting and the field’s puddled furrow reflect a crystal blue sky. The air is heavy with spring promise. The dogs are out running around, nose to the ground, grinning, tails like antennae, signaling their joy. It as still light when I returned my truck. When I got home and looked up, looked into that black velvet sky, nearly purple with the color of infinity, I had to sadly say goodbye to Orion, the winter watchman. He is leaving for another season. Sorry to see that familiar sky depart. I suppose it is more familiar because those constellations are so striking. But I wonder, could it be that they are so familiar because we have so much dark all winter and these constellations keep us company over those frigid dark hours. Even though I bid them a adeui now, I already can imagine the portent I’ll feel when I first glimpse, not because I anxious for it either, The Palidies on the rise in very Late August some very early morning..  

            

Here’s one I forgot about, don’t even have a name for it. It all comes back to me right now. Hmmmm

Am I depressed? He wondered, not for the first time. He thought back upon what a psychologist had once said in a lecture. “Depression is anger turned on oneself.”

And then, not again for the first time, he asked himself, Am I angry at myself?

Maybe, but not THIS much. If depression was the absence of happiness, well, then, maybe that would be a better description of the way he felt.

He could find little joy, anymore, in any direction he looked.

And he looked over at the desk. Papers, papers, piles of them, requiring attention, signing, consideration, his attention. Another night alone here in the office, then dinner alone, and when he wasn’t alone, he was usually surrounded by way too many people, strangers mostly.

I guess I’m lonely, maybe that’s it, he concluded.

Now even his friend, his oldest and dearest friend, - not to mention his wife, Mona, of course – his goddam Chief of Staff, for chrissakes, was acting all strange on him. Really strange, and not just the usual exasperation because I won’t commit to reelection either, he brooded. That was already an old, but becoming more intense, argument. Something else was bothering Deke, something he couldn’t penetrate.

This now only compounded the president’s nondescript anxieties. What in the hell was Baker going to California for? Just walked in this office here and said he needed a few days off. Refused to go further than that and turned on his heel and headed for the jet.

I’m usually quick on my feet, the president thought, but this really caught me off my game. I’m slowing down , he lamented. What’s going on? A job offer? Was Governor Rose offering him a job? It was no secret she had presidential aspirations and David Baker would know how to get that job done.

It caught him so off guard that all he could mumble was “Why, yes…”

He wanted to ask but Deacon Dave Baker had that look on his face, a look of stubborn resolve that President Whitney recognized from way back, from the backfield itself actually, nearing the end zone in the waning seconds of some high school football game, their little Essex, Minnesota visiting underdog high school football team about to dash some miscalculating bigger town’s  team’s postseason ambitions. A look of resolve he also recognized across the wings of their saber jets, over Korea, again when some long ago fricasseed MIG pilot miscalculated their combined determinations.

He had mentioned something about Mona too. Some kind of little remark. He thought about Mona, where was she tonight? What had she said this morning? He checked his planner. Leaving for North Dakota, about now actually, he looked up at the clock, for an International Peace Garden rededication. Be back day after tomorrow. At least she got around. It takes a lot of effort to get the president on the road. He envied her that, but he was aware she as chafing under the constant security and constant scrutiny.

It was a gradual awareness that had been dawning on him: The job of President sure was a lousy one. Even when things were going good, like they were now. Just the usual strifes in the world, no big conflicts, economy popping right along, his popularity steady if not rising. A reelection bid, in 2 years, would carry him into the 1980’s and to further prosperity and posterity by all indications. He wasn’t interested. He longed for a simpler time. But felt he was being swept on a wanton wave of complexity, thrusting him onwards, unstoppable, inexorable, unforgiving and ultimately destructive.

When was the last time I was happy on the job? The same answer as always greeted him, with another tumultuous wave, this one bearing nostalgia: back in my dad’s mill, Essex Feedmill, serving the public, Feeling the rhythms of the conversations, the tempo of real life, the cadence of the country. He loved serving the public, he longed for that. That’s what this job was supposed to be about but he couldn’t quite tell who he was serving here.

 He was shocked to find he suddenly missed his wife. It wasn’t that they didn’t see much of each other, well, okay, they didn’t really, he had to admit it. Old Deacon Baker’s remark had hit a nerve somehow. He just missed her. No that was not quite right, he needed her, more than missed her.

Something wasn’t right there either, though, and that usually was solid. Now it seemed when he was near her, near anyone for that matter, but most unfortunately around Mona, he couldn’t be, well, fully with her anyone anymore. It waas like he couldn’t get though his own self somehow. Tangled up some way in distractions, he was losing his grip on…experiences, on his life.

He sighed, looked up at the clock again. Replacing his glasses onto the slight bridge of his nose, he sat down tiredly at the huge desk and bent to the squared stack of papers piled there. He’d work another hour. He punched a button on the phone. He was put through immediately to the White House kitchen. He’d dine in front of the T.V. again, just him and Snowball, the First Kitten…was Rockford on tonight? He hoped so.

The chef answered. “Do you think I could have a ham dinner?” asked Presindent of the United States.

“Deacon” Dave Baker strode up to the private jet. A Diplomatic Corps Lear, it would  deposit him in L.A. about 0100. He was uncomfortably conscious of the taxpayer’s money, always. Well tonight that money might be wasted, it might too late already. He boarded the ship and was relieved to see his guest was not there yet. It would be just the two of them riding in this black dart shot across the country tonight. And he was not looking  forward to the company either.

One of “Anvil” Whitney’s rules was about to be bent. Only 2 passengers flying in this expensive bird.. Even years ago when he was a flegling congressman, Anvil had always drilled it into the staff, “Taxpayer’s Money,” making them carpool, turning off the lights, save scrap paper.  Alvin ran a clean ship.

But that ship was entering uncharted waters now and was, most likely, hellbound for destruction. And he had the photos right here in the briefcase that were gonna do it. Perhaps the hottest shots since the Cuban Missile Crises. He shuddered sliightly.

The First Lady had summoned him to her office that very morning.

“Dave,” she said, unsettling him with the gravity of her manner. She turned up the radio as she put a finger to her lips, pointing generally overhead to the ever present, assumed recorders.

 “Something bad,” she started, “It’s real bad….”

(3.) Baker took his seat and pulled down the shade. He didn’t feel like looking out on the world tonight. He glanced at his watch and at that very instant felt the plane tremble as his invited visitor, right on time ,he noted, boarded the steps.

The Maximum Lawman’s eyes swept the interior of the jet. Satisfied he approached Baker’s seat, stooping.

Under usual conditions Baker would’ve stood to greet the stranger but it was clumsy to do so in the cramped quarters of the Lear and, he caught some sort of subtle signal from the man telling him formalities were unnecessary. 

He offered his hand, “Agent Percy. Thank you for coming on such short notice.”

The man shook his hand and briefly met his eye. “Not a problem sir.”

Baker felt the man’s reply somehow indicated that he was just following orders. That he had no choice in the matter and had no illusions that he was punched in and on the job so to speak, and further, that pleasantries were a distraction.

Baker nodded to the seat across the isle, the man sat, looked forward. “You can call me Deke, if you want to.” He kind of trailed off, feeling uncomfortable, unbalanced in this man’s presence. “Call me Deke” sounded corny, forced, unnatural. He regretted it.

“Yes sir.” The man replied, still looking forward.

Baker depressed a button on his armrest and nearly immediately he heard the turbines begin to spool up. The flight deck door opened, a young officer emerged, secured the boarding door and disappeared into the cockpit again, affording just a glimpse of the darkness within, spangled with dozens of dimly lit instruments.

Baker wished once again that he was up there in the comfort of a jet cockpit. What was he doing sitting here? The jet began to roll.

He turned to the man, studying him just a minute. Hair short, not perfect. Clothing comfortable, almost fine, fit well to his body but unremarkable. In fact, everything about the man was unremarkable. Intentionally forgettable, the man would go unnoticed in a crowd and would be difficult to recall as an individual. This nondescript appearance was just one of the weapons in this dangerous man’s arsenal, Baker knew.

He’d been around the type before, deadly, analytical, calculating. He knew there must be humanity down there somewhere, at least he hoped there was, but here, now, was a tool for the government to deploy. A tool as lethal, and devoted, as a nuclear submarine.

“I want you to…” Baker paused as he handed the man the briefcase, “To look at these photos. Then I’ll brief you.”

The man took the case without comment, he snapped the clasps smartly and brought out the 8X10 glossies. Baker caught a glimpse of the black and white images there and involuntarily turned away.

He had sat down in her office realizing the First Lady was upset. Her hands were trembling, “I received these in the mail yesterday…actually they were mailed to my sister for me…” she rolled her eyes, “These assholes open everything around here. My sister is cool, she got it to me, unopened but.” She inhaled, there was a choked sound to it, “You better have a look.”

She pushed a manilla envelope across the desk to him. He tipped it up and removed the photos.

He was aghast, “Ramona! What in the devil!”

“Deke,” she sighed and stood up, “It only happened the one time. I swear, gaddam it, only the once. Ever.”

Mona the Mouth they had called her. She could always lace together the language. That thought, combined with the pictures in his lap caused him to feel a strange sense of loss; he mourned the affect this day would forever have on gauzy memories going back to academy days and double dating, an entire innocent past now made instantly obsolete by these shocking photographs.

He looked down, quickly shuffling through them. She is so very beautiful, he thought again, always a striking woman. He licked his lips involuntarily and then suddenly chided himself: what are you thinking? But, he was, after all, a man.

“I spoke at that Yosemite reopening this spring.” She took another deep breath, “Ripley and I go back along way, you know, Stanford actually. He spoke too that day,” she sighed, “His wife couldn’t make it and, he got in touch with me, suggested a picnic, for just an hour or two, some precious time away from these goddam fishbowls we live in.”

He looked up at her, he was aware his mouth was hanging open. What is she telling me, why am I here? He wanted to excuse himself and run down the hallway.

“I don’t think either of us had planned this.” She nodded at the pictures again, “Really, Deke, I swear. It just happened. It just happened. I’ve felt awful ever since and then…then these arrived.” She shook her head and slumped against the wall.

He searched for something to say. “Well, who took these pictures then?”

She turned. “How the hell do I know? We were 10 miles of bad road form anywhere and here’s some guy in the woods with a telephoto? Jesus Deke, he’s asking for a hundred grand.”

Oh my God, it was all dawning on him now, now it was his turn to slump. He looked up at her, “And why am I here, you should be discussing this with your husband.”

“Don’t go lecturing me on what I SHOULD do Deke, I’m sorry, but I don’t need that from you right now, ‘cause you’re not gonna tell me anything I don’t already know. I am gonna tell him, sometime when we can be alone for god sake. Not around this fuckin’ birdcage. We go to the lake next week, that’s when. But, Deke, I’m asking for your help. That’s why you’re here. You love him almost as much as I do. If, if this bastard goes to the papers, like he says, it’ll crush Al. When I stop thinking about my sorry self, I think about him. Deke, he’s already burdened so, what this will do to him, I don’t want to know.”

“Don’t underestimate the man.” Deke said.

“Deke, forgive me for saying it, but fuck all your bromides. Okay?”

Deke half smiled, ruefully, and looked down again at the pictures. Wow. He looked up again, too quickly.

She tilted her head, “What?”

Now what to say? “I didn’t know you smoked.” He flushed, what kind of a dumb ass remark was that?

“I don’t,” she said sadly and turned to the window, “I just needed something to do with my hands, you know… afterwards.”

Then it was Deke’s turn to not know what to do with his hands.

Agent Percy riffled through the stack of photos, at least the first half dozen or so, glanced at the cash, and was silent for a moment.

“Sir, correct me if I’m in error. There is one hundred thousand dollars here. It is for blackmail, to keep the photos out of the press. I believe it to be most likely the second installment, and, the blackmail threat is against the man in the photo, the movie actor, Ripley Rose, real name, if I recall, is Erwin Stang or something like that. Rose can’t cover a hundred grand and is now putting the pressure on the first lady. The incident in the photo occurred May 7^th in the Yosemite region of California. It was the only episode of infidelity, at least during the Whitney presidency. She will be telling the President about this but would like at all costs to keep this out of the public eye and you’ve been asked by her to handle this transaction because of your long term friendship with both the President and the First Lady. You have suspicions that this effort may be futile and are beginning now to make contingency plans and, the First Lady is modest about these photos.” He fingered the scissor cuts that had excised the most intimate portions from the images.

Baker was stunned, “Good Lord, how do you know all that? Is our security that good - or bad, can you guys snoop on everything? And, pardon me, but why would an operative down at Langley, like yourself, be privy to such confidential matters, let alone, a potential issue of National security?”

“Nothing of the sort, sir,” He cleared his throat, becoming slightly more animated, which wasn’t much because of his general bored air of detachment, “I’m a detective, sir, I deduced these things. First, I can estimate sums at a glance and one hundred thousand is nice round number, doable for Mr Rose, at least to the blackmailer’s estimate. Second installment? Usually blackmailers start low to test the waters, get the victim’s attention, measure sincerity and so forth. If the blackmailer had gone after the First Lady, YOU wouldn’t be involved like this and, neither would a lowly ‘operative’ like myself. The entire force of the U.S. Government would be mobilized. Clearly, as an old friend, she went to you for help, Ripley does not have enough cash to cover this demand…although his wife would, but that is another matter. Whereas, the First Lady is rather wealthy. Further, as I recall from the newspapers, Mr Rose appeared at the function with the First Lady in early May, and, I recall they are old aquaintances, high school or college,” He frowned and squeezed his eyes, “Stanford! Yes Stanford. And,” More conspiratorily now, “Rumor has it #2 slipped her detail for a few hours that afternoon. Nothing definite mind you, but heads nearly rolled in the Secret Service, and would’ve if she hadn’t intervened.’

“Now by all accounts, the First Couple have a close, tender actually, relationship, or at least did have,” he nodded down at the photos, “and it is my bet she will tell him about this from a sense of guilt, but moreso, duty, and renewed commitment.”

He continued, “You, like the First Lady, go way back and your devotion to this President is legendary and would therefore be anxious to protect him from the embarrassment and the public emasculation he would suffer should these reach the papers. And, you’re clever enough to be making plans for the fallout in advance should your efforts fail.”

“And,” concluding, with the faintest hint of a smirk, “The First Lady, who is thought in some circles to be a bit of a free spirit, not quite a loose canon, would nevertheless be modest about the graphic nature of these photos. He again flicked the irregular edges of the hastily edited photographs.

“Now correct me where I’m wrong.” The smirk disappeared to be replaced by a dreadful sobriety, “I need to know, so I can do my best job to help you sir.”

My God, Baker thought, what a smartass, but, he admitted, this guy was just what he needed on his side tonight.

“You got one thing wrong,” Baker said quietly.

“Really?” agent Percy raised a brow and sat up slightly, curious, “What’s that?”

“About the cutting. Of the pictures. You got that wrong.”

“Who did it then?’ Percy looked at the photos quizzically.

Baker murmured, “I did.”

(#4)

"Sid, wake up! You gotta look at my ass! Sid! Really, wake up this is big! I figured it out...we're rich! I think."

Sid just about leaped out of the bed. He covered his eyes next, groaning. She hit the ights on her entrance and he had been dreaming about something...something. he was covered with a little film of sweat again. What was it?

"Sid, get the flashilight maybe and a pen maybe too!" She was nude, bent over the side of their bed, her big tattoed titties swinging just in front of his face.

They still looked pretty good, he mused, but give them another 5 years, tops, and they will be sagging like all the other tattoed cows out on the street.

Tattoed Cows. That would be a great name for a band. He was constantly coming up with good names for rock and roll bands. He was going to have a band someday. Might have to wright that one down. He was gonna learn how to play guitar and start a band, someday.

He reached for his pack, shook out a cigarette and looked at her. He raised a brow. He thought, I'm gonna kill her. Someday. He could see it, the wire around her neck, twisting it, twisting it and her bucking like a tattoed cow.

Got to stop thinking those thoughts, he reminded himself. They get you into trouble. you've done good. Nearly 2 years and not in the joint once.But the thoughts were coming back, and more often.

He snapped his lighter shut, took a drag, exhaling, "What the fuck are you talking about?'

"My ass! See? Look. Brandy put it on my ass. You know, I got hight that one night and let her do a practice on my ass. Down there where there was some open space," She looked back over her shoulder and pulled up on a buttock. I can't see it good, besides in the mirror it's backwards and hard to make out."

"What?" he shrugged, frustrated, "What? I mean, are you talkin' about?"

"So I got a little high, and," she giggled a little bit, "You know someitmes I like it when it hurts and , believe me, it hurts when Brandy lays one on ya."

"Anyhow, she was gonna get married, you know, leave, sudden like? Well she asks is she could do a little tat on me to leave a message for the picture guy. Said he asked her to play one of his friggin' games, hide and seek type shit. Well she hid this stuff for him somewhere and she put the clue right here on my ass! She forgetes shit, so this was a way to to forget it? God he's a weird fuckin' guy." She shook her head.

"Picture guy?" Sid shook his head.

"Yeah, you know, the guy that liked to take our pictures. He did the ones of me. Getting the fireskull. You know, for my spread in Illustrated Girlie?"

He took another drag and looked at the ceiling. Good God, here we go with her fuckin' spread again.

"Well he was in the shop today, excited like, dressed up all to the 9's. Wanted to see Brandy, bad. Flo told him she had run off and got married."

"Then he gets really revved and all excited, asking if she lefta key or something, anything for him?"

"Flo looked at me and at Zoey. Knowbody kenw anything about a fuckin' key. So then he just laughs and shrugs it off and says, well someone might stop by someday and if they want the goods...their gonna have to track down Brand, and he really laughed at that, like it was really a big joke on soemone."

The whole time I'm thinking about my ass and I don't say a fuckin' word because this, I know is part of it. Well he asks Zoey if she'd like to do a little modeling for him tonight and pulls out a hundred. A hundred! And says it'll be some street action stuff, kinda like what

Pepper did a few weeks ago."

"Jesus, I heard that and I just about shit! Pepper had to do some Marilyns on Euclid Street, and the taxi driver gives her this package she was supposed to carry, she thought it felt like money, see? She handed it off to some guy below, down in the dark, you know, and he never said a thing, never even shown up a light or nothin'. The guy just disappears, she stands there a while and then just gets back in the cab."

"Remember when that guy comes up, kinda a private eye type and asks Flo and Pepper all those questions about it? I told you about that, didn I? Said he saw he doin that thing the night before. Asked ehr a ll about it. Really poked around the office, pushed Flo around a little and she didn't say shit. It takes more than that dick to waltz her around on anything."

"Flo thought it might've been about dope, but now I figured it out..the picture dude. He 's back today like I said and duded out in the nice duds, flashing cash. Hired Zoey to do another thing tonight. Another payoff, I bet! Something to do with my ass and what Brandy put there. Brandy did a few jobs for him, he likes to photo that stuff, The work is progress, Maybe even on Pepper, " she paused, the shrugged, "Anyways I think he liked to photograph the pain, got off on it a little, you know?"

She laughd, " Brandy would be the one to ask for if you watned a picture of pain. Now look at my ass!"

He peered down with the light, "Looks like a bird with numbers under it." He squinted, pulling the fold apart to lessen the shadow. "Looks like R41386..oh, wait, up here, above the little bird, it's almost hidden in the dragon's tail. There's a 76."

"Write it down. write it down, draw the bird. Just lke it is!"

"Oky stop wiggling.He's a pretty fuckin bad artist." He put the flashlight in his mouth and started drawing.

One of the teachers that came through the joint told him he had good line quality. He was inspired to art for a while after that, drew all kinds of pictures for a while:guitars, choppers, blades. Got lot of respect from the other 'mates there too. But always he ended up drawing coathangers, they kept coing back to him. Coathangers with long shadows, like they were in bright lights. The other guys got a kick out of it, hell they all called him "The Wire" Even though the drawings were great, he didn't like them much. Spooked him.

They sat on the bed looking down at his drawing. Tammy suddenly pointed at the bird. "Look! It's an Eagle....Eagle Banks! Get it? Is there one on 76th? I think so, maybe 75th but Brandy gets that kiind fo shit fucked up....it's a safety deposit box! Thre is something in there that soembody si willing to pay for....we gotta get it, Sid. I know it's worth a fortune. Gotta be. all this running around and action: picture guy's game, the gumshoe dude, picture guy all shook up and then laughing, money jsut dripping off him.....Brandy's got the key and you got to get it for us. The stuff, whatever it is, is in a safety deposit box in the fauckin' Eagle Bank on 75th..or 76th, or is it 77th, on the corner there you know?"

He nodded. He was begining to think she was on to something.

"How am I gonna find Brandy?"

She smiled and winked. She stooped over and rummaged through her jeans and pulled out a scrap of paper. "I copied her address out of Flo's roller file deal. Flow is sappy that way, she had a soft spot for Brandy." She shook her head, "Brandy tried really hard but I think Flo was happy to see her go."

"Whadya think?"

He looked at the scrap, "Looks like I'm goin' ta Howie's Repair in Harvest City...Washington?" Sounded like a long way to go.

"Get going, right now. Get down to the Greyhound. I'll give you some moeny, hurry, I got a feeling that private eye guy will be back, maybe even tomorrow after Zoey does her trick."

He decided he wouldn't kill her. He wouldn't be back. He shoved the address and his drawing into the pocket of his cutoffs. he thought aboutt Brandy. A little scrawny, wirey thing. Wirey. Again, wire.

He smiled. He might be mixing business with pleasure on this trip to bumfuck Washington.

Let’s Review:

Brandi- recently newlywed to Larry. (I called him Dave at first.) Brandi moved wit him to a small town in Washington. She is an erstwhile part time hooker and fulltime tatooist wannabe. Devoted to her man and her craft but more succesful with the former.



We’ll learn more about Larry later.



President Whitney – discouraged, depressed, lost a sense of purpose I suppose. Feels a strange foreboding and rightfully so.



First lady Mona (Ramona) Whitney –Willful, independent and feeling very much remorse about a recnet spur of the moment tryst with Movie Star and former classmate Ripley Rose, husband of Governor Rose of Ca, a potential political rival of the President. A bad mistake, someone took pictures and she is now paying blackmail aimed at Rip Rose regarding the negatives.



Dave Baker, Decaon Dave Baker, Deke- Presidential Chief of Staff. Confused, conflicted, drawn into the web by Mona, now on his way to California to meet with MR Rose and deliver Mona’s ransom money. Has great loyalty to the President and now is irretrievably tossed into a horrible place by Mona’s deciet, no way to honor his loyalty to his friend, high school buddy, teammate, and air force wingman in Korea, President Whitney.



Agent Percy, the Maximum Lawman – Working off the record, on special assignment now to catcht he blackmailer and put this to rest. A background shrouded in mystery and diversion, Baker does not even know the name of the division of what clandestine agency Percy works for.

Flo – don’t know if we’ll meet her but she runs a “model agency” Usually a call girl agency but they do model sometimes for porno movies, mags etc. Just legitimate enough to stay out of the papers, Brandi worked there. The agency includes a tatoo parlor, psychics and so on. Flo if not a bit maternal with her employees is loyal to them.

Tammy – One of Flo’s “models”. Has problems, is masochistic and chemically dependent and nearly covered in tattoos, one of them on her rear end placed there by Brandi before her precipitous departure. Tammy is cunning enough to have divined the tattoo is important and points to something valuable, very valuable.

Pepper – A facelss streetwalker who delivered the first installment of blackamil money, $100,000.

Zoey – Another call girl/model who has been hired by “picture guy”  to deliver the next installment: $100,000. I don’t think we’ll go anywhere with her.

Syd – Ex con, temporarily nonpracticing homocidal maniac and beginning to heat up. Boyfriend of Tammy. On his way to visit Brandi in Washington.

 There  are lots of others we are to meet, I don’t know how to plug them all in but they are there and that is it. I needed this to familiarize myself with this bunch. Time to start making more stuff up now:

Short Stories

CHISAGO COUNTY PRESS 10/28/1993

SCRIBES CORNER,  page 6

                                                                               

                                                                                                    THE MEAN WITCH

                                                                                                         By Jeff Smith

                    Carly struggled, but the greasy ribbons of gut only writhed tighter about her wrists and ankles. The bands were alive, a mindless sort of life imbued them by the wicked and treacherous witch.

                    The witch turned towards Carly and cackled. At the sound of her voice the leathery restraints trembled and pulsated on Carly’s aching limbs.

                    She hissed, “Oh, you’ll know pain my little one. Agony and pain.”

                    Carly sobbed and the witch suddenly bloated up huge, so that she towered over the child. As Carly whimpered the witch grew until the cave was nearly filled with her rancid bulk.

                    Her raspy voice thundered: “And terror! Yes! Yes! Terror!.” She embraced herself and bellowed out cascades of self-indulgent laughter, each peal echoing and reverberating through the most remote and trackless reaches of that wretched cavern.

                    Carly began to cough and instantly the witch was small again. Directly in front of Carly, she stooped down and peered into Carly’s eyes. With eyebrows arched, and head cocked so that Carly would be eye to eye with the witch’s good eye – not the gray and mottled one – the witch belched a moist blast of cadaverous stench into Carly’s face. Carly turned her head and shivered, crying now abjectly.

                    The witch, now aroused to new heights, threw herself down upon the ground at Carly’s feet and began to slink about on all fours purring and arching her back like a cat. Curious, Carly paused amid her tears, for only an instant, and the witch roared causing the little girl to again cower in her bonds.

                    The witch tittered and sprang to her feet. Giving Carly a sinful wink, she screeched, “Time to eat!”

                    She pointed a crooked finger at the wood stoked beneath a large suspended cauldron and, with a crack, fire engulfed the fuel.

                    Menacingly she approached Carly, the dancing flames casting thirsty shadows on her corrugated face. “You know,” she quipped, “I feel like an appetizer, maybe I’ll start with your tender little fingers!”

                    She rubbed her dry hands together greedily and her cratered tongue darted across her bluish lips.

                    Now it must be told here that Carly, in spite of her young age, had, through many hours of dedicated practice, become quite an accomplished pianist.

                    Upon hearing the witch’s reference to her fingers, Carly had been instantly filled with rage and indignation. She stuck out her own little pink tongue and as she did she noticed the bands loosen about her wrists.

                    Without hesitating she snarled at the witch, “If you want my fingers, well here they are!!” and she poked the witch in the good eye. (The bad one was just too gross.)

                    The witch shrieked and stumbled back a step. The strands were now loose about her feet so Carly fetched a might kick to the witch’s knee. It snapped like a twig and she collapsed in agony.

                    No longer a prisoner to the fear which all tyrants use to control their victims, Carly scooped up the witch like a sack of old leaves and pitched her into the fire. There was a brief flurry of movement, a tiny howl and then, except for a puff of putrid smoke, the witch vaporized entirely.

                    It surprised Carly that a monster of the witch’s stature could meet such a pathetic and anticlimactic end.

                    She turned, snatched the witch’s old broom and snapped it over her knee. She tossed it into the flames where it popped and crackled in a rather ordinary way.

                    Carly shrugged and, gently brushing her hands said, “Nobody messes with my fingers.”

                                                                                                             The End

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

CHISAGO COUNTY PRESS, 10/31/91

SCRIBE’S CORNER, page 4

                                                                          The Catacombs of Yucatan

                                                                                  By Jeffrey Smith

                    Richie had never meant to go into that cave, but he had to now. His dog, Dusty, was down in there. He stooped to light the lantern.

                    Nobody had been in there for years. Nobody even went close to it anymore. Even the owner of this land now lived in Florida and the old souvenir shop near the road was a pile of debris – a victim of some forgotten and fierce summer thunderstorm.

                    Richie didn’t like this place. None of the kids from around Black Hammer ever played or explored here. It wasn’t their parents’ stern warning that kept them out – parental cautions were often an invitation to forbidden pleasures.

                    No, what kept them away were the things their parents didn’t say; troubled allusions and vague mutterings about tourists, an entire family from Iowa, who were lost down there in the 1930’s, shortly after this attraction had opened. And, a whispered legend about the young constable who, after searching in vain for that family, returned to the surface as a white haired, bulging-eyed, gibbering idiot.

                    Even area farmers pastured their sheep and other livestock away from the cave. There had been too many lost animals over the years, probably victims of one of the yet to be discovered sinkholes common to the Driftless Region.

                    It gave Richie the creeps just to bicycle past this place and, when Dusty chased up that rabbit, it was with a sense of dread that he wheeled down the fading track to the cave’s entrance in their pursuit.

                    His hesitation had been costly. For by the time he drew near he managed only a glimpse of Dusty wriggling through a gap in the boards which had sealed the cave since that unfortunate constable stumbled out there over 20 years before.

                    He heard Dusty’s excited barking for several minutes it seemed. At fist, they boomed, and then echoed as if there were a thousand Dusty’s down there. Eventually the sounds became tiny, feeble, and then, disappeared altogether.

                    He had pried off boards, creating an opening he could squeeze through. Shivering in the dark, he’d called and called and hollered until he was hoarse. His voice ricocheted into the depths and sometimes would boom back at him. It sounded frightened. He would need a light.

                    After frantically pedaling home, he had made off with his pa’s lantern. More of a challenge was obtaining the matches. He had to appear nonchalant while his mother insisted he have some cookies and milk. He finessed the matches when his mother went to the clothesline.

                    Finally he was back and breathless. The lantern sputtered and lit. Pausing outside, he considered the cave. The entrance; with its few missing boards looking like toothless gaps in a frown of unspeakable sorrow, sent a shudder through him. Richie was losing courage.

                    But, Richie’s dog was his best true friend. It was inconceivable when pa had let him keep Dusty. He knew his pa would never enter the  cave ‘for just a dog” and would probably never let him get another. In any event, he was sure to get a whipping if his father found out about his being in here.

                    He looked up at the weathered, faded sign. He read it aloud, “The Catacombs of Yucatan,” and wondered what in the dickens that could mean.

                    “If it was me lost in there,” he vowed, “Dusty would come and get me.” He stepped inside.

                    Several yards ahead a mist and rotting stairway descended into the depths of the cavern. Carefully, in the flickering light of the lantern, he inched forward. Clutching the now flimsy railing with his freehand, he tested every timber. It was painfully slow going.

                    Once, after many steps, he craned his neck back to see the opening he had made in the entrance. Viewed from below through this constricting tunnel it looked like a tiny blue sliver of light and seemed impossibly distant.

                    Down he went, fighting cloying spider webs and the cold. He reached the foot of the steps and followed the narrow, slimy corridor forward. Onward and down, he stopped occasionally to venture into side chambers with signs that identified them as “The Cathedral” or  “the Dungeon.”

                    Calling for Dusty, sometimes his voice would boom out and reverberate, returning to him sounding taut and hysterical. Other times, depending on the cave, his calls would sound puny and muffled – as if the best he could squeeze out was a squeak.

                    Frightened and alone, he plumbed the depths of that cave, He crept over spongy catwalks where, in the blackness below, he could hear cascading water and again a long forgotten sign would proclaim “Niagara of the North” or “Ghost Falls.”

                    He followed the ancient knob-and –curl electrical wires, stung overhead to illuminate the god forsaken hole for former paying customers.

                    He had lost hope by the time the wiring curved up and out of sight, perhaps to a now corroded bank of floodlights. He had reached the end of the line. A sagging railing surrounded the platform from whish, as one final sign read, “The Catacombs of Yucatan’ could be viewed.

                    Holding his lantern aloft he saw, in every direction, openings, fissures and tunnels, reaching out like black tentacles.

                    He bellowed one last throat torturing “ Dusteee!” Fragmented echoes returned and rebounded into a deathly quiet.

                    A single whimper disturbed the oppressive silence.

                    “Dusty!” Richie whirled and plugged off the walkway, following the sound into a crevice to his left, Now slipping though mud and clay, he could easily see tracks left by his big dog.

                    Following the trail, he stooped through an opening into a cavern. With the lantern held overhead, he viewed this new room with astonishment. The walls, as far up as his lantern could illuminate, were swathed in webs. Huge, thick mats of webbing extended everywhere and swirled upwards out of sight.

                    A  slight movement caught his attention. There, hopelessly bond in a tangle mass of web, was his dog. With sides heaving and his snout covered with foam, the young animal was exhausted and spent from his fruitless attempts at escaping from the sticky net.

                    Setting his lantern down, Richie noticed something else. The floor in there was covered with a layer of bones. Picked as clan as matchsticks, they provided a shifting and uneven carpet underfoot.

                    Kneeling beside his friend, he scratched an exposed ear. The dog whimpered again and managed a feeble was of its tail, despite the binding webs.

                    “Hang on Dusty,” he said  dragging out his knife, he began sawing at the tough strands.

                                                                                                    **********

                    Like some kind of sinister telephone operator, the huge arthropod tended to a network of unimaginable complexity and sophistication.

                    She was the last of her kind. But what she lacked in family and kin, she made up for in size, cunning and malevolence.

                    It was her unquenchable appetite that had sustained her for these centuries. A hunger which consumed her being and manifested itself in the utter devastation of any creature unfortunate enough to invade her domain.

                    That same appetite, now aroused, had alerted her to some remote disturbance in the system she had so painstakingly constructed. Delicately she scampered to the side. Yes, here the minute frequencies and vibrations were a bit more distinct. She traipsed several miles to the east and down. Oh, it was far distant, but her instincts told her is was definitely a matter requiring her immediate attention and it felt as if damage was being done to her network.

                    Rage welled up inside her. Fury and hunger spurred her. Bolting along her ancient thoroughfares, arcing over blind escarpments and ripping along the side of chasms, she was a belligerent wisp, a gossamer juggernaut.

                                                                                                    **********

                    Nearly exhausted, he had finally managed to free Dusty. Dusty was played out for sure, the way it looked, and might need to be carried. But first, he’d have  to saw his own his way out of the web – for his own foot had become entangled in the sticky stuff while freeing Dusty.

                    While he worked he wondered why there weren’t any spiders around, seeing how webs stretched out in every direction. Just then Dusty growled, a deep menacing rumble from somewhere deep and ancient inside the animal. Dusty was looking overhead and Ritchie, following the dog’s pointed gaze, saw her descending as quietly and quickly as a paratrooper commando from above.

                    Scrambling through the shamble of bones, he chose a weapon: a stout blade – like club. )Actually it was the femur form the father of that long-departed family form Mason City, who had disappeared down here in 1937.)  He brandished it in front of himself.

                    Purposefully, without hesitation, the spider advanced…..black and huge and hairy, easily the size of a pony. It minced tis way across the scattered bones, airy like a ballerina. Certain of her prey, she raised two legs like pinchers.

                    A grey shape lunged out the gloom. Snapping and snarling it severed a leg from the spider as effortlessly as if it was an articulated crystal stem.

                    Coiled and crouching, teeth exposed in a vicious growl, Dusty leapt again towards the now unsteady creature.

                    This time , however, she was prepared and caught him in midair and hurled him, thrashing, to the floor.

                    With one leg pinning the whining dog below her, the spider slowly lowering herself towards his thrashing dog. Richie desperately pummeled her and raked his club uselessly across her back. Still, her scissoring, serrated jaws descended.

                    In a final act of despair, Richie seized his pa’s lantern and hurled it at the spider. The lantern shattered, gushed kerosene over the monster, setting it ablaze.

                    The creature twirled and spun, canting onto its side and flailing its legs wildly. It reared up like a bronco, now a pillar of flames, and flung itself against a sheet of web.

                    It ascended upwards then, like a meteor, at an astonishing rate, each singular footfall igniting other patches of the web. The ratcheting fireball disappeared into the upper reaches of the cave leaving a path of fire in its wake.

                    The cavern was ablaze and filling with choking smoke. Dusty was on his feet, wobbly, but at Richie’s side. As Richie stooped to ecape the inferno he glimpsed a fluttering movement near his foot.

                    The rabbit, wild eyes, struggled in a wad of web. As the flames danced towards it, Richie grasped the trembling mass, tore it free and, following Dusty, dove back through the crevice.

                    Smoke soon obscured what little light escaped through the openings behind them. Without the lantern, Richie soon found himself in pitch darkness.

                    He soon lost his footing, as well as his directions, and began crawling through the muck on the cave’s floor. Thinking of the many catacombs, the rotting catwalks over chasms, and the endless steps, Richie began to sob.

                    A familiar snout nuzzled him. Grasping Dusty’s collar, his dog began to lead him to the surface.

                    It was an agonizing journey in that total darkness, he bashed his head several times on overhanging rocks and outcroppings. He stumbled on through, grasping both the rabbit and the dog’s collar and Dusty never wavered.

                    Choking, they finally reached the greasy stairway and the final grueling ascent. With their protesting lungs burning form the thickening smoke, they finally clattered into the boards which had sealed the cave entrance.

                    Squeezing through the gap he had made, Richie realized it was night. He collapsed in the sweet fresh air beneath a sky full of stars which burned with an intensity, the likes of which he’d never again witness. Dusty was licking his face.

                                                                                                    **********

                    Smoke continued to belch out of the Catacombs of Yucatan for nearly six weeks that summer. Smoke filled caves as distant as Harmony and Cherry Grove. Many undiscovered sinkholes were revealed during that time due to the telltale wisps and smoked issued from fissure in exposed rock on hillsides as far away as Hop Hollow, Peacock Ridge and Cabbage Ridge. Even storm sewers in  downtown Caledonia had smoke curling up through their grates.

                    Water wells in the regions were spoiled with a smoky taste for awhile. Indian Spring and other springs in the area carried bits of soot and ash.

                    No one noticed a decline in the number of lost livestock. The pattern had been too random and widespread.

                    What was noticeable, however, was the demise of many mature trees in the area. It seems trees, sometime an entire grove, would topple for no reason, exposing charred an absent root systems.

                    The local residents were fearful of volcanoes. A  university professor was summoned form his visit with relative near Brownsville down on the Mississippi. He dispelled fears of volcanic activity.

                    However, he was reluctant to enter the catacomb and pronounced the smoke’s appearance as being related to “An unexplained phenomenon.”

                    A nearby evangelist seized upon the smoke as a handy and visible example for the proximity of eternal damnation by claiming is was generated by “The embers of hell itself.”

                    If Richie would’ve heard that one, he might’ve agreed.

                                                                                                    **********

                    Nearly 10 years after the last of those subterranean fires had smoldered and died, Richard found himself outside of a large institutional appearing building on the campus of the Regional State Hospital.

                    For almost a decade he had made very pointed, yet discreet interrogation of his parents, their friend and other in his community.                   Upon entering the building he was shown to a stooped old man. In the corner he sat alone in a wicker wheelchair. Long hair, unkempt, grew to his shoulders. The hair was, without exception, totally white.

                    After several unsuccessful attempt at engaging the patient in conversation, Richard leaned over and whispered into his ear: “I was down there, I saw it. I killed it.”

                    As he straightened up to leave, the old man’s trembling hand shot out and grasped Richard’s arm.

                    Richard looked down, there were a tears in the old constable’s eye.

                                                                                                    The End

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                                                   SIX WEEKS

Martin pulled over. He was sweating. Goddamn it was hot in the car. He fiddled with the wheel on the center of the dash. The radio blasted to life, some Hispanic female shrieked unintelligible lyrics over a pounding dance beat.

He fumbled with it, squinting. Suddenly a cold blast of air blessed his face. He tried to turn on the dome light and a disembodied voice said, “One half mile, take a right at the signal.”

“Son of a bitch!” He almost took out his gun. He was gonna shoot that son of a bitchin’ god damn spool in the center of its unblinking eye.

Again he asked himself, “What’s so bad about a switch? Huh? How about a goddamn knob.? Or a lever? What in THE hell was so bad with that?” He was getting agitated. “Someday I’m gonna blow that bitch right back to Bavaria.”

“And,” he added sourly, “If I had the time, I’d go after the bastard who thought you were a good idea in the first place.”

The voice repeated its directions. He took a deep breath, no need to settle the score now. He had done it one better already tonight. Just drove down the alley, right on cue, Trent Kelso came around the corner of his garage lugging his recycling. He looked up. Did he recognize the car? Probably. So what? He got the message. Right between the eyes. He dropped like an anvil through ether. It made no difference to Martin whether old Trent recognized him or not. Martin wasn’t out to gloat, just get the job done.

He fished a little black leather book out of the inside packet of his sport coat. He opened it and adjusted his glasses. He crossed Trent Kelso off the list. He smiled briefly and then frowned.

He recalled the day clearly, once again. Had thought about it a lot over the last year. He had left the dealership that day after a long lesson with the late Trent Kelso. He thought of one more question and returned. Trent, good old Trent – he’d sold him his last 3 BMW’s – had his back to him, was talking to the kid from the detail shop. Martin paused when he heard his name mentioned., “The good Dr Goldberg, can’t figure out his iDrive system,” he snorted, ( HE SNORTED!!! the bastard) “Don’t think he ever will….I tell you Evan,  doctors are a car salesman’s dream, “ he took a long pull from his Coke, “They aint as smart as they think they are.”

Martin slipped out of the dealership with his face burning. He pulled out his little book and entered Trent’s name there. The late Trent Kelso, BMW salesman of the month, eight times in 2004!

He got the idea for his little book one day at lunch when a drug detail man had idly mentioned adding a  balky receptionist to his “Dying of Cancer List.”

“What’s that?” Martin had asked, curious.

“Well”, the patronizing rep replied out of the side of his mouth, “If one of you guys ever give me 3 months to live, I’m gonna shoot all the people that were a pain in the ass to me.” He laughed and Martin joined him. The first interesting thing a drug rep had ever told him.

That night Martin had started his own list. Over the years it had been a comfort to him.

He replaced the book and attempted to turn off the dome. “Right at the next signal’ blurted out again, sounding just a bit nervous to Martin’s ear.

He cruised through the city, picked up his cell phone and dialed a number he had impressed into his brain. Always do your homework. Just like with the now 3 eyed salesman of the month. It had taken him just a week. Garbage night, Tuesday. Come home to the little lady, take out the trash.

A young sounding female answered, “Dr Friedman’s service.”

“Yes, this is Dr. Abe Weinstien at Mount Sinai Myrtlewood E.D. I need to speak with Dr Friedman.”

Without pause the young lady said, “Please give me your number and I’ll have him call you right away.”

“I’d rather have you put me through to him,” he paused, “I have Pamella Anderson here in the ED and it is kind of urgent…”

“I understand,”  she replied with expert understanding. “Hold the line.”

A few moments passed. Martin practicing his best Abe Wienstien. So fortunate Ben was on call on a Tuesday evening.

A voice came on the line, “Abe, how are you? What can I do for you?”

Martin started, “Well, Ben,  it’s probably nothing really,” he cleared his throat. “I can most likely just patch her and have her come see you in the morning but...just thought I’d run it by you…”

“What is it?” Ben asked solicitously.

“Well Pamela Anderson, she is one of your patients, right?”

“Certainly. What happened?’

“Well, she was doing something with her nails, using an adhesive, Poison Control says its just a sort of jazzed up super glue, well anyway, she got some in her eyes..”

Ben exclaimed, “Dear God!” A little too emphatically, Martin noticed.

Martin smiled, tried to fake a sigh, not convincingly, but it was lost anyway on Ben, “Yeah, I know, well I got her under the slit lamp here and her corneas look like the craters on the moon, I’d usually do the standard, you know, eye patches, a bead of antibiotic, see you in the morning?”

“I know, but Abe, this could be more serious than it appears, I’ll be right down.”

Martin was following Ben’s Mercedes within ten minutes. At the first light he pulled up and motioned for Ben to roll his window down. Ben recognized him, and did it, obviously surprised. Martin looked up and down the empty boulevard and then shot him in the face. The late opthalmologist slumped sideways and the Mercedes shot forward, engine screaming it arced through the intersection , leapt over the distant curb and plunged into the dark, a drop of God knows how far in this L.A. Canyon neighborhood. Martin hung a left and heard a muffled thud. He noticed a faint flash in the darkness behind.

He got home and crossed Ben’s name off the list. The bastard. Had come up to Martin at the Foundation Gala, swirled his martini and said, “Sorry about that lawsuit,” He extended his head back and rolled it around in an act of physical nonchalance, hand plunged into his side pocket, the son of a bitch, “I hope you don’t take it personally...it’s only business Martin.” 

Business? Business?! It had been the talk of the office for a day or two, Martin just knew it, although no one ever mentioned it to him. Martin that night had given him his best Oh Shucks shrug and swirled his own drink. Some kind of tropical thing that made him want to puke. He wanted to poke the little umbrella right into the eye of that preening opthalmalogist.

Sue me about the outcome on your daughter’s crooked toes? I worked like hell on those claws you call toes. All the specialties and all the surgeons in the world would never make a silk purse out of Ben Wiesman’s club footed, buck toothed, crosseyed, honknosed redheaded daughter. Hell, even old Ben himself couldn’t straighten her eyes out…completely. The late old Ben.

Martin crossed the foyer into the dining room and then the kitchen. He listened to the usual messages and then, his wife, sounding tired but happy. “We’re doing fine, honey, wish you were here with us…only 6 weeks and we’ll all be together!”

He smiled at that. He thought of them, all the way across the country. Spending time with her folks in Fort Lauderdale. Six weeks.

“Six weeks” the consulting oncologist had told him. Martin didn’t even have to ask. Martin had known. Even a podiatrist knows something about cancer. No one ever gives a podiatrist credit. He had sent his family off to Florida knowing it. Had read all the books before he even visited his internist. The biopsy, according to the oncologist, revealed, “An especially aggressive, rare form of gastric Ca, er, ah , cancer. Very, rare Dr. Goldberg, I mean, Martin.”

It only had confirmed what Martin had been suspecting for months now. The heartburn, the gnawing pain, the dyspepsia, bloating, anorexia.

“Get your things in order,” the oncologist had advised. Martin only half heard it. He was thinking about his little black book.

Martin crossed the glittering expanse of kitchen and headed for his bathroom. Instinctively he reached for his antacids. He paused, funny, not much burn tonight, think I can get by without ‘em.

For a change he was taking deliberate action, taking control, for maybe the first time in his beleaguered life and it felt good. Damn good, he mused. He gave himself a kind of giddy thumbs up in the medicine chest mirror.

He pulled onto the searing black asphalt of Vista Manor at 2 in the afternoon. He’d driven 130 miles into the arid interior of southern California, past Joshua trees and miles of windmills spinning electricity to the insatiable appetites back along the coast. He got out of his car and nearly swooned in the shimmering heat. He looked around. What vista? he thought as he looked around. Not unless you count the back side of a strip mall as a vista. At least the front of the place had a manor façade, big columns, fancy  lights hanging in the portico. Martin noted however, that extending in a V behind this manor mirage there stretched rather ordinary, metal prefab arms, like some sort of high output supercharged chicken hatchery.

He crossed the plush carpet to the directory. Just like he learned on Google last night, there it was: Herbert Clark. Mister Clark to a student like Martin. “Coach” to the ascendant jocks who made high school such a misery.

Good old Herb Clark. Always anxious to use Martin as an example. An example of how not to dribble, how not to block, how not to throw a goddam softball, let alone catch it. With his classmates laughing and the jocks sneering, the humiliation was complete.

Dribble a basketball? What? Bouncing a ball and running at the same time? That was supposed to be valuable, laudable, worthwhile? It looks ridiculous even when experts do it. The cromagnon miscreants absolutely shivered with glee whenever “Coach” would choose Martin to demonstrate something oh so important, like catching a grounder. In his mitt. Mitt? Jesus Christ.

Room 188. He walked down a long hallway approaching an intersection, not really comfortable with the smell in there. Some kind of nurses station was at the cross roads ahead. He heard voices, bits of laughter. The hallways were empty except for far in the distance a lone stooped old women appeared to be ramming her wheelchair, again and again, into an apparently locked exit.

Motion caught the corner of his eye. An old man was poised on the pinnacle of a railing that ran along his bed. Martin was about to shout but the old man pitched over the fence and landed on a thin mat placed along his bed. Sounded like a bag of bones hitting floor. A shrill alarm sounded ahead. So that’s what the mat was, Martin figured, an alarm. Well, that’s good, attention will be drawn away from me with all that racket.

He kept walking, trying to shake the sound the old man’s impact had made. He recalled hearing a pro wrestler once say in a radio tell-all interview that a good body slam doesn’t hurt when it is just one “Smack!” on the mat, all the body parts hitting simultaneously. But when there are multiple “Smacks!” it hurts. This particular slam had a sound to it that, Martin figured, Coach Clark would’ve cherished as an example of how not to do a body slam. His only regret would’ve been that Martin was not the subject.

Still, ahead, no one materialized into the hallway. No concerned nurses or aides. He walked past the station. No one looked up. The alarm squalled but no one paid it any mind, no one paid Martin any mind either. That’s good, he thought.

He paused outside 188. He strode in. He was shocked to see what remained of the once tyrannical nemesis he had known. A scrawny man laid, skeletal, on a rumpled bed.

It was him though. Could tell by the crew cut. The bastard. Crew cut all white now, thin, but still a remnant redneck exclamation point on an otherwise pathetic creature.

Martin was slightly taken aback. Old Clark was decrepit. He would’ve turned around and walked out, feeling his job would certainly be done for him, and soon, but, a flash caught his vision. There it was. Hanging on the crummy little corkboard. A whistle. Silver, dull and worn at the edges. Under it someone had pinned a recipe card with a loving “Coach” neatly penciled on it. That did it.

Martin looked around. No one. Herb’s roommate snored with a death rattle himself.

Martin said “Hey! Coach?”

The old man’s crusted eyes fluttered. Martin Grabbed a pillow and pushed it down on coach’s face, hard, so hard he could almost feel the bed frame. Coach’s hands did not lift off the bed. Palms down, he did not struggle.

Martin did not care, he was taking care of business. It didn’t matter to him a bit if Coach had recognized him, fought him, felt pain or fear. Coach was just another name on a list.

Martin straightened his tie and walked out, past the nurse station. The siren shrieked, a phone was ringing too. He couldn’t resist looking at them in disbelief. No one raised an eye. They continued with their banter. Martin understood. Shift change. One of them was snapping her bubble gum. They would all have made his list, if he had someone that he cared about in this wretched place.

He cast a glance into the room where the old man had dashed to the floor. There was a dark smear of blood across the mat/alarm. The old man had wormed his way under his bed. His skinny legs were protruding and appeared to be jerking a spasm of some sort. Convulsion, Martin concluded  as he crossed the elegant lobby. Idly he wondered, how are they gonna drag him out of there?

It was a long hot drive into the sun. He got back home and headed for the medicine chest. Again he reached for the Prilosec but, he was surprised, he didn’t need any. He felt hungry for a change too. He shrugged. Palmed a few Tylenol’s for his headache.

He punched the answering machine, “This is Dr. Reynolds. I need to see you.”

Martin wheeled into the gastroenterologist’s shady lot. The palm trees made a nice border along the lane and secluded parking lot. He wanted only to stop here today for a moment and thank Reynolds, not so much to hear what he had to say. Dr. Reynolds was the only guy who just went right to the biopsy, his fool internist wanted to rule out this and that and order such and such a study, exam, or test. Tests? Dammit, Martin knew what was wrong, he had suspected, hell, knew, from the start but…nobody listens to a podiatrist. Treat him like a goddam child, explaining things ever so painstakingly, like he was a moron.

Reynolds was different. Had this place here. Did what Martin wanted, none of this screwing around chasing expensive frivolities. He knew the message of last night meant that the oncologists had probably contacted Reynolds again, offering some more false hope, a possible excruciating procedure, a tedious treatment, or a clinical trial perhaps, some new toxic potion they wanted to pour down him. No way, he had but 3 weeks left and had never felt so alive.

“These six weeks are what I was born for!” He had exclaimed this morning, giving himself another thumbs up in the bathroom mirror.

 But he was resigned, the ride was coming to an end. Today he’d screwed up. The problem was, this morning, tellers saw him. Customers saw him. They heard the booms he supposed, even though he had a rag over the muzzle. Witnesses now.

A certain officious little banker. Late banker, well ventilated, who had, so many years ago, took Liselle’s and his application fee and then, grinning all the time, told them they did not qualify for a mortgage on that bungalow on Yucca Court.. A bungalow? On Yucca Court?

He had to humble himself and ask Liselle’s father for the down payment. Her dad had been kind when Martin had told him about it, “Pricks like that, you gotta prove ya don’t need the money before they’ll loan it to ya.”

But he didn’t loan Martin the money either. “Bungalow’s not worth it.” Later Martin saw that both the banker and his father in law were right, but the banker had grinned. He acted like he thought he was cute or something. Well he’s cute, Martin thought, now with about 3 new holes in his big bald forehead. Strange, Martin didn’t recall him being bald before. Same guy though.

But all those screams in the bank lobby this morning…

He sighed and got out of the car.

He was escorted into Dr. Reynold’s plush office and not for the first time did Martin reflect on his own little cubbyhole at the medical center.

“Cubbyhole.” That’s what Eli Roth had laughed and called it when he came to meet Martin one day before golf. Martin was irritated by that remark, coming from a damn lawyer. So irritated he lost the round to Eli that afternoon. Never played with him again, imagine losing to a fat plug like Roth. He made a mental note to add him to the list, if he wasn’t there already.

Owen Reynolds entered his office and shook Maritn’s hand. “Thank you for coming down this morning, Martin.” He laughed a little and nodded reflectively, “Well, let’s see, I don’t know where to begin.”

Martin thought back with satisfaction on his productive morning. Sure, the banker will probably turn out to be a bust, but he celebrated inside as he crossed off 2 other names from the list before him.

First, a retired alderman. (He’d declined to support Martin’s request for a garage setback variance.) He made the mistake of jogging alone every morning. Just like clockwork.

Then the guy at the gun shop. Martin smiled, profoundly gratified.  Smart ass. Just 3 weeks ago Martin had come in wanting to buy his gun.

The guy asked what kind. Martin had never owned a gun before, he had no idea what kind. Martin had said, “I don’t know, how about one of those little ones, like James Bond has?”

The guy was quiet for a minute, studying Martin, looked like he might say something or laugh. “Walther PPK? Sure I can sell you one of those.”

He turned and slid a drawer full of different guns out from a cabinet behind him. With his back to Martin he said, “I can sell you the gun, 007, but you’re gonna have to go down to the dime store for the decoder ring and the license to kill.”

He turned to face Martin and his smile evaporated. 

A big guy at the end of the counter must not have seen Martin’s expression because he slapped the counter top and nearly choked on the meat stick he was gnawing on.

Martin whirled and glared at him. The guy never noticed and he returned to the assembly of the shotgun or rifle or whatever it was that he just moments before disassembled.

Martin took inventory of him. Big, jowly redneck. Wearing cammo. It was almost time for Martin to laugh. Hell, there wasn’t even so much as a green blade of grass around here for blocks, let alone a leaf. Obviously the man sported the cammo just to be noticed. If he would’ve craved a disguise in this neighborhood, he would’ve been better served if his jacket were of a cinder block pattern with scattered spray paint scrawlings all over it.

Both men would make Martin’s book, the latter, as “Big fat cammo redneck..”

This morning “Gun shop guy” was not smiling. Martin had came in, first customer of the day. The man looked up at him, dimly recognizing him from somewhere, “What can I for do you?”

Martin beamed, “Got it.”

The man looked at him curiously, tilted his head a bit, “What’s that?”

 Martin slapped his hand on the counter just like the “Big fat cammo redneck” had done about 3 weeks before.

Martin removed his hand and the man looked down puzzled at the little black book there on the countertop . On the front was printed “Glaxo” in gold letters.

The man looked up at Martin, “What?” he said, shaking his head, confused.

“License to kill!” Martin yelled.

The man saw the little automatic in Martin’s hand and quickly bent sideways as if reaching for the floor. Martin shot him in the ear.

Martin wriggled up, clawed his way over the top of the counter so he could look down at the man.. He was sprawled there, motionless. Martin noticed the man had a little gun strapped to his leg, above his ankle. Huh, so that’s what he was reaching for, Martin concluded, stupid ass place to keep a gun, especially when you really needed one. His own expert opinion on the man’s gunmanship startled him. Martin shook his head, he was getting good at this gun business. He wished “Big fat cammo redneck” would’ve walked in just then.

His attention was drawn back to Dr. Reynolds, he heard something about biopsies. Reynolds was saying, “I pity the poor doctor who is right now having a conversation with the patient whose biopsy was switched with yours, Martin. As well as you can probably all too well understand how that unfortunate patient must feel.”

Martin tried to focus, had he said something about gastric reflux? GERD? He looked down, he blinked, rubbed his eyes. Reynolds was facing the window, hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head and laughing, “You’re a lucky man, Martin. You’ve been given a new lease here.”

“What a mistake,” he continued, marveling, “I trust you know how it is. Same biopsy, same symptoms. Similar names, same pathologist, lab etc. it happens. I apologize for this. I only hope this good news will erase the memory of what you’ve been going through these last few weeks.” He added that last part, hopefully, defensively. Martin thought about why. Because Martin might want to conduct business on him? Nothing personal?

Well it was personal now. Somehow there were 3 holes in Reynold’s back. It looked like it was sizzling in there, smoke came out too. Then blood. Dr Reynolds was hurled against the window so hard it cracked. Martin was surprised, he looked down at his hand. Yes, the gun was there. He felt vaguely uneasy, Reynolds wasn’t on the list.

Somehow he was at his car. Sirens were on the way, approaching. Just one more thing left to do  now. He slammed the door.

The police surrounded the car and waited. Dispatch had told them a caller from inside the doctor’s office had reported seeing a muzzle flash from within the vehicle, heard a muffled report. The cops could see Martin in there, he wasn’t moving. They finally approached the car, slowly, weapons trained on the motionless shape inside. When they finally flung open the car door they discovered that there was a bullet hole in the center of Martin’s……dashboard.

Martin stared down at the paper the screw had given him. It was from his attorney. Detached, he read it again:

I am informing you that your wish has been granted. The mandatory appeals have been exhausted and I shall field no further appeals on your behalf. As per your request all possible delays and stays have been waived. I hope you know our firm gave your defense our best efforts.

Execution, by lethal injection, is scheduled for 12:01 AM, on third of November, next….

It went on about his family, estate etc, just a bunch of talk. He looked up at the calendar over the Screw’s desk. The third? Let’s see, from today that gives me, exactly…. six weeks.

He picked up his little black book. He had been making very many revisions and additions to it. He considered the law firm, no, they did their best. Who else did he know? The screws? The bastards. But they were just doing their job, he only put the names in his book of those who did him wrong of their own volition.

It made him feel good, this book. He considered and then wrote in it again adding the names of a couple of the cons who gang raped him in the Paint Shop. And how about that kid back in camp? What was his name? The guy who put the Ex Lax in his cocoa?

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CHISAGO COUNTY PRESS 11/5/92

SCRIBES CORNER, page 11

                   

                                                                               

                                                                                      Beyond The Raspberry Patch

                                                                                                  By Jeff Smith

                    These things all became fact for me one day in Mr. Stanwyck’s berry patch. True, I’d never given them much thought before that time but, everything became clear that morning, or rather, things became less clear. I think.

                    You see, since that time there has been, for me, no longer any distinct black or white, good or bad. That morning I began to feel convinced that there are many shades in between, and that what most folks think is good may be just a lighter tint of evil.

                    So, anyhow, I was about eleven years old when Mr. Stanwyck brought me out to his berry patch that summer morning.  Ma and us kids relied heavily on various odd jobs the well-to-do people around town would give us. It was a good deal for them because we were hard workers and, I suspect, it helped them feel less guilty about their own good fortunes.

                    My Stanwyck was a bigshot in town. But he liked to come across as some kind of gentleman farmer or something too. He liked to sport big cowboy hats, the boots, big belt buckle – the whole westerner get-up. And although he never got his hands dirty, he preferred to think of himself as a hobby farmer: he had well tended livestock, crops and fancy farm machinery.

                    This was my second year picking Mr. Stanwiyck’s berries. Actually they were for Mrs. Stanwyck, she was a sort of homemaker wiz, winning ribbons for her preserves and writing cute little cookbooks and all.

                    The patch was Mr. Stanwyck’s “private stock.” Ever since he picked up this land through some forgotten default, it had produced remarkable yields.

                    That morning, as we rode out in his new pickup, he was taking, again, great pains in telling me how important those berries were, and how they had to be picked just so, and how, in a way, it was a great honor for me to be picking such special berries, in such a special patch, for such special people.

                    He was wasting his air, you know. By that time, I’d picked more berries in my life than he had ever seen. And I would’ve taken the same care whether I was picking them for a king or a bum like Stanwyck. I was beginning to realize, even then, the more important a person is, or thinks he is, the more likely they are to believe their own baloney.

                    We got out to the patch and I was following along, carrying the pails and mostly agreeing with Mr. Stanwyck at the proper times, when he stopped suddenly.

                    “Well I’ll be!” He drawled, he liked to use a southern kind of drawl, whenever he remembered to put out the effort, even though he was from Michigan.

                    He as looking down and I could see a dead crow, a big one, on the path.

                    “Well I’ll declare,” he said as he squinted towards the berry patch, “Ever since that scarecrow was struck by lightning, he must just be plain scaring these crows to death.”

                    I followed his gaze and saw a large scarecrow sagging on its cross in the center of the berry patch. It did look singed, and for just an instant, I thought I caught a whiff of smoke – like the smell you get when an electric motor is overworked. It sent a chill right through me.

                    “I just can’t believe it,” he went on, more to himself now then to me, “I had Trevor out here with the shotgun, paid him fifty cents a crow, cost me nearly forty dollars by the time he lost interest in it, and now I’m finding twice as many dead crows.”

                    Fifty cents a crow! A small fortune. I could just see Stanwyck’s son, the smirking little Trevor, turning his nose up at a plum job like that.

                    I looked back down at the crow. Its claws were pointed up as if it were pleading with the heavens, and its head was face down with its beak buried in the dust. No matter what old Stanwyck thought, that bird had not died of fright. He kicked the bird off the path with his shiny boot. Soon, after further unnecessary instructions, Mr. Stanwyck left me to my work.

                    It’s funny, but I never much hated a task like berry picking. My mind would be off in its own imagination somewhere while I watched my hands, like they were on T.V., doing the work.

                    As I was picking, something in the plants snagged my shirt sleeve. I pulled my arm back and whatever was caught on my shirt came along with it. Suddenly, returning rudely from my day dreams, I saw the talons of another dead crow were tangled in my sleeve. Frantically I flapped my arm in front of me. The crow came loose and spun slowly though the air, with its head lolling about sickeningly, and struck me across the face. Its body felt greasy and oddly empty – like a husk. I spit on the ground and staggered about wiping my face and mouth and my shirtsleeves.

                    I thought I heard a sharp laugh behind me and I whirled bout. There was nobody there, just the charred scarecrow hanging in the haze. I shuddered and looked back down at the crow. Maggots crawled out of its open beak.

                    My hands were trembling as I returned to my work. I was scared and jumpy. Several times, thinking I heard something in back of me, I’d twirl around and find just the deserted patch, butterflies fluttering in the sun.

                    I had worked my way towards the center of the patch and had begun to settle down when I heard a sharp cracking sound in back of me. At that instant I had a glimpse of a quick motion. Before I could even turn around, a large crow fell from the sky and landed at my feet. It spasmed and died, its head twisted at an unnatural angle.

                    Screaming, I jumped backwards and the scarecrow grabbed me. He wrapped his legs around my chest and, by bending his knees, pulled me up off the ground. He hooked one sooty arm across my chest and with the other arm across my throat, he began squeezing. I fought as best I could, kicking and digging my elbows into him, but it was no use. My air was being squeezed out of me and I couldn’t draw any in.

                    Through my coarse shirt the scarecrows body felt stiff and, like the crow that had earlier slapped across my face, he felt strangely hollow. His leather face was alongside my head and he whispered, “Listen punk, ya wanna live don’t cha? Ya help old scarecrow out and I’ll let ya go.”

                    His grip momentarily tightened and he went on, “…now punk, you promise to help and I won’t hurt ya no more…understand?”

                    He loosened his grip a bit more and I gave him a weak nod.

                    “Now is it a promise I hear or do ya die up here in my little embrace?”

                    I croaked a little “yes,” I would help him, and for an instant he tightened his grip. Things began to grow dim for me, and suddenly I began to feel peaceful and really didn’t care anymore.

                    He threw me to the ground.

                    I lay there on my belly, vomiting in the dust.

                    From above me the scarecrow taunted, “Kid, c’mon kid. I didn’t hurt ya THAT bad. Ya wanna see pain? I’ll show ya pain...”

                    Then his voice became smoother, more soothing, “I’m sorry if I hurt ya, kid. I didn’t mean ta – I just wanted ta get your attention is all. Now, c’mon, roll over an talk to me kid. Please?”

                    Slowly I rolled over onto my elbows. I was lying in his shadow, he was dark against the sun. His motions were jerky and he kept craning his head back, attempting to look behind himself, around the burnt post that suspended him, trying, it seemed, to look into the woods whish rose up like a wall beyond the berry patch.

                    “Now,” he said, “That’s better. I really do enjoy your companionship. It has been quite some times since I had any intelligent company around here. But, if you must know the truth, I am in a bit of a hurry, and, although I hate to bring this up, and I trust you will forgive me, there is the small matter of, as you recall, the promise you so recently made to me?”

                    As he continued a crow swooped low overhead. His arm shot up and, without interrupting his conversation, he plucked the bird from the sky. Grasping it by its head, he swiftly twirled the bird’s body through a quick circle. There was an abrupt and stifled squawk followed by a sudden snap. He tossed the body back over his shoulder in the direction of the woods.

                    “Do I need to remind you of what happens to little boys who fail to keep their promises?” he asked. Again, nervously, he craned his neck around to look at the woods.  I heard him answer himself, under his breath, “They end up being scarecrows.”

                    Several crows were now circling about the trees and he grabbed another one that came within range. Snaring the head he gave its body a quick twirl. He tossed its body aside.

                    “Listen,” he said, “I can tell you’re a hard worker. You wouldn’t believe how hard I’ve been working. All day in this miserable heat, my back aches so hanging here, the crows don’t rest and….” He hung his head a bit and sobbed a little, “You wouldn’t believe the nights.”

                    More crows were joining the others and he snatched two more from the sky, one with each hand. He cranked them impatiently.

                    Stabbing a gloved fingertip towards me he roared. “Listen punk, ya promised. Now get me offa this blasted tree!”

                    I jumped to my feet and, before I knew what I was doing, I began untwisting the wires and the staples that held him to the post.

                    In between pulling crows from the sky, he’d hook an arm back and point with a ragged glove, “There’s something in back there, I just can’t..…reach. Hurry!”

                    Now the sound of caws was filling the air as more crows were taking wing above the woods. Nervously the scarecrow kept craning his head backwards over my shoulder as I worked behind him. A fevered automaton, he was furiously snatching crows from the air, mechanically wringing them, and tossing their bodies aside.

                    Finally I undid the last clasp of wire and the scarecrow collapsed to the ground as if he were a pile of rags. I was about to poke at him with my shoe when he sprang up like one of those creepy marionettes on T.V.

                    “Thanks, punk.” He grated to me and began brushing himself off in a kind of dignified way.

                    He stooped then and grabbing my shirt he pulled me up close.

                    “Listen punk,” he hissed into my face, and in the deep shadow of his straw hat I could see his eyes and they looked like the clinker coals my brother and I used for eyes on the snowmen we’d build, “Never trust a crow, they watch, they see and they keep accounts.”

                    By now the air was filled with the cawing of thousands of crows. The scarecrow took off running then, in long, loose, loping, strides – each footfall sending up a puff of dust – and as he ran he kept right on plucking crows from the sky.

                    He looked back over his shoulder, a frantic glance. I turned and, following his gaze towards the woods, I saw an angry black mass of hundreds and thousands of crows boiling up into the air.

                    At last he lost his footing and pitched forward. Then he began to crawl on all fours, as the black crow bodies festered over him. He shrieked and I began to run towards him. Something lit on my shoulder. A large crow perched there. It dug its claws and cocked its head. I looked into its beady eyes.

                    I saw everything in those eyes and I’ve never seen so far. My way of seeing was forever changed then. And although I’ve paid attention and peered closely into the eyes of many a crow since, the vision has never been the same.

                    When I eventually looked back at the scarecrow I saw only a frenzied mound of crows. He arched up once, trembled and, finally, collapsed.

                    Mr. Stanwyck found me sitting on my empty bucket in the center of his devastated berry patch. If I had been older, or wiser, I would’ve kept my mouth shut, but I told him everything.

                    Naturally, he was furious. He not only thought I was lying, but thought I was crazy besides. He made it rough on me ever after. You see when you wear the mark of someone as powerful as Mr. Stanwyck, in a small town like that, well, you can’t outlive it.

                    Mrs. Stanwyck was so concerned about me she led the charge to help me out.  Eventually they put me in a hospital with lots of other kids. You should have heard some of the ideas those kids had!

                    When I got back home again things were, of course, never the same. It seems an element of trust was somehow lacking.

                    One thing did not change, though. It seems that for all those years, no matter where I went, there’d be crows watching. They are everywhere: in the distance, along the road, or outside the window. And how they talk.

                    Even in the dead of winter, when I’d be shoveling snow, I’d look up and see them on those naked branches, right out in the teeth of the wind. How do they survive?

                    It came as no surprise to me when they discovered the bodies.  Mr. Stanwyck and his simpering son Trevor, found one morning, in the cab of Trevor’s new pickup.

                    Of course the sheriff wasn’t convinced that so much brutal injury could be caused by just driving into a flock of crows.

                    Although I can name dozens who could’ve had a motive, it seems the obvious suspect was apprehended.

                    And I can still hear the crows, even through the skimpy windows in the block. And I see them perched upon the wall when they walk me in the yard.

                    The crows keep telling me to wait and see. Just watch and take account. Soon I’m going to get my own jolt and then, who knows, maybe I’ll end up in your own garden or berry patch.

                                                                                                    The End

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THE COACH AND EDDIE SACHS

                        by

                Jeffrey B. Smith

                                                           

            The colored flags hung motionless against the hazy Indiana sky. Below them, in the immense grandstands that tower over the main straight of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, hundreds of thousands of race fans were equally motionless. Each was poised with an ear cocked towards the loudspeakers, and every face was turned northward where in an instant the combatants would roar into view around turn four. As the 1961 Indy 500 neared its climax not a single fan in that entire gargantuan venue was seated, because out there on the track two men were battling fatigue, fraying tires and each other.   

            A.J. Foyt Jr. and Eddie Sachs thundered down the main straight side by side in their snarling open wheeled roadsters. Neither had ever won at Indy and neither felt they would be denied today. Each lap, as they reached the yard wide stripe of bricks that was the finish line, Foyt would inch by Sachs. About  half of the crowd would roar their approval and then, suddenly, hush as the loudspeaker would announce that Sachs had again passed Foyt in the short chute between turns one and two. Then the other half of the crowd would exult and again, just as suddenly quiet, as ears strained to hear the announcer follow the duo's progress down the backstretch.

            Many in that assembled crowd had seen some of the real legends circle this huge two and one half mile oval: Louis Meyer, Billy Vukovich, and the great Wilbur Shaw - to name a few.  But nobody had ever witnessed a contest like the one going on before them now.

            Eddie Sachs was nearly exhausted. As he exited turn four he allowed himself to relax a bit, trying to rest his overwrought neck muscles now that the cornering G's had lifted. He scanned the pit wall for his message board but  realized he wouldn't be able to spot it. The wall was now cluttered with all the other crews who had abandoned their own pits to watch this battle. Easing up a fraction, he could sense A.J. coming up on his right flank and for now that is what he wanted. He dearly wished A.J. would take this bite and choke on it. But somehow, to Eddie's dismay, his rival would survive turn one, his car twitching and nervous. Worse yet, Eddie now was beginning to have difficulty reeling him in on the chute. Eddie began to have sickening doubts about who was actually baiting whom. His own car, which had been pushing slightly, had danced sideways after lifting in turn three. Worse, he was sure Foyt had seen it. He had been praying his better grip would allow him to come off turn four hot on the lap that really mattered, and beat Foyt to the finish. But now his tires were as threadbare as Foyt's.

Off turn three and again the nauseating feel as his car 's rear end did a deadly fandango. Struggling through four he now sensed Foyt had gained and this time would make his attempt early in the straight. Now Eddie could not afford to lift that fraction. They both were driving beyond the limits of their machinery and nearly beyond the limits of human endurance. 

            Even though he managed to hold off  Foyt for the length of the entire main straight and through turn four, and in spite of the delight this generated in his fans,  Eddie knew his race that day was lost. And it wasn't because of the cords he could now plainly see on his right rear tire, or his dwindling fuel supply, or even because his car was becoming dangerously high strung. Rather, Eddie had made one mistake that, more than anything, would cost him the race. When A.J had edged alongside Eddie on that final pass attempt, for some reason Eddie had stole a glance at his opponent. There, on the face of A. J. Foyt was a look  that dissolved any diminishing hopes of victory Eddie had still possessed. He had never seen anything like it before, it was a look of such totality, such finality. It was a look of grim determination.

            "Grim determination," Joe spoke with reverence as  he downshifted and braked without sliding the dirt bike. He tried to practice the look. Eddie Sachs was hot on his tail as he made the transition from the gravel road to the blacktop. He pulled a wheelie and ran the little Yamaha through its gears. By the time he screamed across the river bridge, the imagined finish line, Eddie Sachs was fading. A.J. Foyt Jr. had just scored the first of his unprecedented four  victories at the Indianapolis Speedway. Joe waved to the fans and then, quickly, dropped his hand to the handlebars. He downshifted, hit the brakes and missed the field road he wanted to take. He accelerated through the ditch and with a graceful airborne flourish lit on the field road, and gave the throttle a twist. Irritated at himself for missing the turn, he muttered the line coined by Eddie Sachs, "If you can't win...be spectacular."                    

             Eddie would live up to that saying. He never won the Indy 500.  And certainly the photograph of Eddie's finish, the picture Joe had so closely studied  in one of  the school library’s racing books, was spectacular. The caption said it was something called a "conflagration." Eddie and the rookie Dave Macdonald burned up in that wall of fire on the opening lap of The 500 in 1964. Joe wondered if the flaming tire soaring high above the fireball was thrown from Eddie's car. A.J. Foyt would go on to win that race too.

            Joe wound the cycle up and speed shifted to high. He was flying along the fence line now, his long blonde hair swept straight back. Steve McQueen was now occupying his mind. The great McQueen, a real life motorcycle racer, ripping along  a fence on the big cycle, looking for a place to jump out and escape. Joe had never actually seen The Great Escape but had seen that motorcycle part many times when they advertised the film on TV. He had flown over many a fence reenacting that jump, reliving that escape.

            Joe's father heard the approaching whine and looked up. He lifted his hat and scratched his head. Leaning against the fence post, he followed Joe's progress by the blue plume of the dirtbike's exhaust. His son sure could ride that thing. He could drive anything.  Seemed that ever since he could walk he was able to operate machinery. The kid was good with tools too, but he worried about Joe. Even though he was capable in school, Joe was by no means a scholar. He didn't want Joe to end up with the kind of life where every day was a new struggle to make ends meet, the kind of a job where you had to make the kids pull the family's weight too.

            As Joe pulled up his father noticed the cycle was getting kind of small under Joe. He'd need a new one. If things went well this summer maybe they could afford a new one for him next fall. Of course it would have to be a secondhand motorcycle.

            Joe slewed the motorcycle in a graceful arc, slicing sideways with his boot on the ground. The rear wheel kicked up a divot of grass that landed neatly just short of his father's feet.

            "Hi Dad," he said as he reached down to switch off the bike.

            Joe's dad always marveled at his son's placid exterior. He wondered what was going on inside the boy. He could never recall him complaining about anything. Lord knows, he thought, I've given him plenty to complain about. It hurt, having to ask your kid to work around the place every day of his young life. Somewhere at this moment other kids were playing ball, shooting baskets, or just watching cartoons for heaven's sake. His kid had never been on a team, never even been on a real vacation.

            "How'd school go today?" He asked it even though he knew Joe rarely said anything about school. The question was an icebreaker, to stall for just a moment before he asked his boy to go pick the rocks on the forty.     

            "Okay." Joe said flatly. But really it had been another day of torture. He had never felt at home in school. As he got older he just felt more awkward. And nowhere was that awkwardness more apparent than in Phy Ed class. All of it struck him as being too ridiculous. Why make a kid like him, who never had any interest in ball games endure that silliness? He could not envision a time in his life where he would want to hit a little ball with a stick, or bounce a ball and run at the same time, or tackle someone.  Why couldn't he just spend that wasted hour in the library where he could read and dream?

            But the futility of it all was not the worst part. The worst part for Joe was the humiliation, being the last one chosen for the team and then the embarrassment when he would go on to  fulfill his teammate’s suspicions of his ineptitude. Last winter there was a time when the other team served the volleyball to Joe…every time… for an entire game. No other player, save for the server and himself, touched the ball - unless they were hit by the errant returns Joe attempted. Each time he would muff it, or miss it,or ricochet it off to the side. At first there was laughter, then there was just silence as the opponent, an athlete, kept dropping the ball right down on Joe. Joe only got one satisfying return. That was when he imagined the ball to be the fat head of Coach Bartz. He punched it mightily and it soared over the opposing team and crashed off the backboard behind them.

            “Whoa,” coach Bartz had exclaimed, “You do got something in ya after all. Big farm kids like you oughta be more aggressive.”

              The coach had laced his fingertips behind his back and paced the gym reflectively. “Men,” he intoned in a voice of quiet authority, “The reason I permitted this sorry display to continue was for the important lesson it teaches.”  He turned his profile now to the kids in their baggy gymshorts. (People had often complimented the coach on his ruggedly cleft chin. He frequently jutted it out dramatically for emphasis. Or, on the sidelines, the prominence served equally  well to epitomize stoic resignation in defeat and humble magnanimity in times of  victory. Unbeknownst to Coach Bartz, though, was the fact that the chin was now being overshadowed by his ponderous gut .) He continued,  “And that important lesson is that in athletic competition, as in life, you must find your adversary’s weakness and exploit it to your every advantage.”

            It seemed to Joe that he was always a too handy example for just such homilies by Coach Bartz. Joe squeezed on the clutch lever and thought back to earlier in the day. The coach had them playing football, even though it was May. He liked to “Tune up” his players after the long winter and he could scout any new prospects that a few months growth and hormones might’ve made viable candidates for his team in the next fall’s campaign.

            Today the bigger lesson was timing. Coach Bartz had Joe run, full tilt, for twenty yards down the sidelines at which time the varsity quarterback would deliver the ball over Joe’s shoulder where Joe was to catch it. Joe had dutifully enough ran the twenty yards and, concentrating on not breaking stride as he was earlier admonished,  turned slightly to catch the ball. The football drilled him squarely in the face and sent him sprawling.

            “Whoa” the coach quipped, “Son, you gotta catch that with your hands, not your face.”  

            The rest of the guys were rolling on the grass, breaking up in laughter as Joe returned to the group.

            The coach had blown his ever present whistle for attention. He spread his feet apart and cocked his head a bit, staring off into the distance as he apparently pondered one of life’s great truths. (Actually he was letting the nitro tablet, which he had slipped into his mouth after he blew the whistle, dissolve under his tongue.)

            “Men,” he tugged at his collar and stretched his neck, jutting out his chin, “what we just witnessed was how trust is necessary for all relationships to be successful, whether they are on the field or in life in general. When one party drops the ball, and doesn’t live up to the other’s expectations, we see failure.”

           

Joe realized his father was now staring at him. He had been rubbing his sore cheek as he thought back on his school day.  His father seemed to be detecting his son’s troubled thoughts and Joe didn’t really want to confess his shame.

            “So, what do you need me to do?”  Joe asked quickly. He dropped his hand from his tender cheek and twisted the throttle.

            His father paused, curious about the fleeting blush that had passed over his son’s face. He lamented the fact that fathers and sons could be strangers in some ways.

            “Well Joe,” he hated to ask it, but had to, “Would you and your sister finish picking the rocks on the forty?”

            “Sure thing.” Joe began to twist the key and flipped out the kick starter on his bike.

            “Why don’t you use the Allis?” his father asked.  “It could stand a little limbering up, we’re going to be using it hard in a couple of weeks.”

            This seemed to perk up the boy a bit. The Allis was the farm’s most important possession. It was a turbo diesel and Joe loved it. He had actually learned to speed shift it , after a fashion, when his dad was not in sight or earshot. Joe’s father didn’t have the heart to ask the boy to perform this thankless duty on the primitive old John Deere.

            He watched his son speed off along the edge of the pasture and join up with the distant fence line. Soon he was just a glint, a whine and an occasional puff of blue smoke. Joe’s father rubbed his low back and then turned to the pick-up. Withdrawing a fence post he thought to himself how he would dearly love to put electric fence around this pasture. Maybe in the fall, if everything goes well this summer.

            Joe retraced his route back to the farm. As he sped along he dreamed about a better world. He wished there could be a class where a guy could learn to race instead of hit a ball with a stick. After all being a race car driver or a motorcycle racer, or even a movie stuntman, was a career too and  just how likely was it that any of  these jocks would become pros anyhow?. Why couldn’t there be a school with a real race track, not that stupid flat oval that encircled the football field? The cornering apexes were all wrong, you couldn’t drift a tricycle around the thing. He snorted. He could not believe someone would build a track and the only races held there were on foot.

            He backed up the tractor to the hay wagon. Joe dropped the pin through the tongue and hollered for his sister. He climbed up onto the seat of the big orange machine. He wondered why there couldn’t    be even one subject where he could show his skills and interests . He longed for the day when he would give old blubber Bartz a lesson or two, maybe exploit a weakness Joe had observed in his oppressor. Maybe this was one dream he could make come true.

            Joe notched the tractor into gear and in an instant he was Tommy Ivo, squinting  through his goggles at the Christmas Tree. The yellow lights were descending the mast to the green that would hopefully send him the quarter mile to a championship in Top Fuel Dragsters.  From the corner of his eye he could see the flashes of flame jetting from the headers of the huge mill shuddering before his opponent. Don Garlits, the Big Daddy himself, was also focusing on the lights but was not aware of  Ivo. He was only aware of the Christmas tree and his own determination.

            Green! The stack on the Allis  Chalmers belched black smoke and the big tires pawed the farmyard. From the corner of HIS eye Joe spied his sister tumble backwards on the hayrack. Her feet flew upwards, straight up in the air, and the cat she was holding went clawing its way across her tummy, its ears flat.

            About the time Joe was toppling his sister in his flaming barnyard burnout, Coach Johnny Bartz was hanging out the window of a brand new 1972 Ford LTD. He was screaming for his life.

            “Help” he bellowed, “Get me out of here! Please, help me, please!”        

             In front of the bank, Martin O’Neil the banker and Waldo Karbo the newspaper editor looked up from their conversation.  They laughed and shook their heads as the LTD slowly rolled by on Mainstreet.  Johnny was sure a joker.

            Johnny  Bartz was a bonafide hometown hero. He had returned after putting Graniteville on the map when he played in the Big Ten.  A linebacker for the U of M Gophers, he played  in the glory days of the early 0’s and he had made a trip to the Rosebowl. He came back to a career of coaching in his boyhood hometown. Johnny could’ve made it in the pros too, everyone agreed, but there wasn’t much of a future there in those days. That was before football’s marriage to TV brought unimaginable salaries to all professional athletes.

            He had no regrets about that. Frankly, he wanted to come home. He had a hometown girl who became his wife and his only ambition was to coach football. Had some success at it too, conference titles three times in the sixties.   

            He pulled himself back into the car. His student, Debbie, was giggling at his theatrics. He stole a glance at those long legs, just a peek though.  Making a policy of keeping his hands to himself, he didn’t want to end up selling seedcorn like Coach Bobby Gadaski down there in Foley. But my, these girls were wearing their skirts short these days. Sometimes, he reflected, the good old days weren’t as good as you would like to believe.

This Driver’s Education was a nice sideline. Especially when you had a cute girl like Debbie here chauffeuring you about. Her daddy was the Ford Dealer in town, Roger Kent, and she needed more time behind the wheel about as much as she needed another 3 inches on her  heels.  And those heels seemed to be her biggest challenge today, learning to drive without getting  them stuck under the pedals. Well, Johnny couldn’t help her with that problem.          

Johnny was having a good time. A beautiful day, the girl seemed to think he was funny, and he was riding in a brand new car. This was his last student of the afternoon and his new golf spikes were in at Heenan’s Sporting Goods in St. Cloud.

He looked over at Debbie. “How many lessons do you have left?” he asked.

She snapped her gum. “Only one, next Saturday morning.” She made it sound sad and seemed to bat those long eyelashes a bit.

“Well,” he allowed, “I think you could use a little cloverleaf experience. Let’s go to St. Cloud.”

He leaned back in the seat and tugged at his collar. Man, he could use a smoke. He never lit up with a student in the car though. Not only was it against the rules, it didn’t look good. Except when he was with one of his athletes. Then he could use it as a pulpit from which he could admonish the young man on some of the negative aspects of smoking: the cost, the burned holes in clothing and furniture, how some people seemed to think it smelled bad and how it could rob others of their wind. Naturally Johnny had never witnessed a decline in his wind but he could see how it could affect others, especially those who were not “athletically inclined.” 

Maybe he could grab a quick puff in Heenan’s while she waited in the car. He popped a nitro instead. Johnny looked at the bottle. He thought maybe old Hennig, the pharmacist, had sold him a stale batch. It was funny with these things, some of them just didn’t have the same pop. 

He did seem to be using more of them lately. Maybe he should go back to that doctor in Minneapolis, that Cardiopedist or whatever he was. Kind of a smarty pants. “John,” he had said, (And it bugged Johnny whenever someone called him “John”. It made him feel like he was a kid..) “You got to cut back on the smoking and lose some of that weight. Exercise regularly and take the medicine and you can better your odds for a long and happy life.’

            Well, Johnny thought, I take my medicine and I’m smoking these new, safer cigarettes. (Even though you have to suck mightily on them, at least they are a 100 millimeters long. Finally found a use for that stupid metric system.) And I’ll be getting plenty of exercise now that golf’s starting up again. He made a mental note to use the golfcart less this season.

As they drove past the golf course they saw Lenny Jaye raking a trap. Johnny hung out the window and waved, blowing his whistle. Lenny paused, leaning on his rake he laughed and shook his head.

Joe knelt behind the car in the dark. He shivered. Even though it was May it was still cold in the dark of the night. He tried to calm his breathing down as he listened. He was winded, he had ditched his dirtbike about a mile down the road and ran the rest of the way. Little did he know that at that moment nearly every cop in the county was very actively engaged in quelling a brawl at a bar in Bowlus. He had walked his bike a mile or more from the farm before he started it, he’d have to repeat that when he returned home, not to mention the fact that he had just ran the mile or so from where his dirtbike was lying in the weeds. He sighed, he was going to have to cover this same ground tomorrow on his bicycle. In about 5 hours from now. He didn’t think he’d get much sleep tonight.

He poked his head up over the trunk. Nobody in sight, just an empty parking lot in the pools of light from the blue security lamps. He stood up and there was nothing to be heard save for the faraway wail of a train’s horn somewhere, maybe  rumbling through distant Royalton. He was thankful the powers that be had decided to build the new school out in the country. Sneaking through town would’ve been too disorienting for someone accustomed to the nighttime sounds of the country.

 He moved around to the front of the car and again looked in every direction.  Popping the hood he looked inside, he peered into the dark and then lit his flashlight.

            He gasped. What a lovely sight it was. A 390 cubic inch Ford V-8. He was relieved to see the big four barrel carburetor sitting like a fat jewel on top of that gorgeous motor. This was basically the same car as the Troopers were using now. It did have dual exhaust but Joe doubted the suspension was as stiff as what the State Patrol piloted. He would have to remember that, he’d also have to remember that the brakes would probably be prone to fading if pushed very hard. Thank goodness, he thought, these dealers like to get a decent car back after the school used them for 2 years. Not some worthless 6 cylinder Granada or something. The resale would be better on a car like this. Well, maybe not this particular car.

            He paused a few moments savoring the machinery. Once more he turned, looked, and listened. Then he reached for his tools.

            Johnny Bartz groaned, rolled over and slapped the clattering alarm. He squinted at the window and it looked to be a beautiful Saturday morning. He despised these Saturday morning driving lessons but the pay was needed. Coaching in a small town was not a path to wealth.

            His wife had fried some eggs for him and when he got downstairs he gobbled them down between  gulps of black coffee. Slipping his whistle over his head, he grabbed his clipboard and dashed for his car.  These early Saturday lessons began at 7, and were designed for those kids who had after school jobs or had to  work on the farm.

            Being a labor man, he was dubious about all the free labor provided by these kids to the family farms. Seemed to Johnny like they were keeping a lot of guys who could use the jobs out of work. To Johnny, a lot of these farms were forced labor where children were harnessed to do a man’s work. Besides, he saw some promising athletes become muscle-bound and clumsy, strong as horses but developed in a way that left them worthless on the football field.

            He got in his car feeling vaguely like he was forgetting something.

            “Ramjets!” he said, pounding the steering wheel. Ramjets were his nitro pills. He named them after the cartoon hero his kids used to watch on TV. The cartoon guy would take these Atomic Energy Pills whenever he got into trouble. Johnny didn’t like that show. He was happy when they took it off TV. It seemed to him the show sort of poked fun of the real super heroes like Captain America and Superman.

            He hesitated, he hated to go through all the trouble of  getting out of the car again and walking to the house. But then again, he was teeing off at one and he might need the little pills if the competition heated up. He sighed, slipped his big gut past the steering wheel and plodded back to the house.

           

            Joe pedaled his bicycle doggedly. He needed to get there before the coach showed up. He didn’t want the coach to blunder upon some of his modifications. As he rounded the corner of the school he was relieved to see the LTD exactly as he left it four hours before. And there was no sign of Coach Bartz either. He slid his bicycle to a stop and laid it on the grass along the sidewalk. He leaned against the car and waited.

            Coach Bartz wheeled into the school parking lot grousing to himself about the dumb idea of building a school out in the country. As he approached the kid he stole a glance at his clipboard. The kid’s name was Joe, he’d try to remember that. He looked up at the kid again as he parked. The kid did look familiar, must’ve had him in Phy Ed at one time or another.

            The kid seemed kind of aloof, leaning there with his long blond hair he reminded Johnny of that movie actor, Steve McQueen.  Especially now that the actor had grown his hair long like all the other goofballs running around. The world was getting crazy.

            He got out of the car and lumbered towards Joe. He took one last long drag on his cigarette. It would have to last awhile, Joe here probably wouldn’t grasp his antismoking lecture if he did light up and neither would his 7:30, 8, or 8:30 students. Maybe little Debbie Kent, his 9:30, could use a little more cloverleaf experience and  then he could stop by Heenan’s for his golf shoes…and a couple of smokes. The jerks at the warehouse had sent brown ones, he had ordered white.

            He crushed out his cigarette and finally exhaled.  He unlocked the LTD’s passenger side door and    tossed the keys across to Joe and said, a split second later, “Here.”

            Johnny was not surprised to see the kid drop the keys onto the pavement. As he lowered his rear into the car he thought: I betcha he wouldn’t drop it if it was a bale of hay. By the time he had his feet swung into the car, the kid had the engine fired up.

            “Whoa,” Johnny said. These farm kids were all alike. Just because they bomb around in dusty pickups all day they think they can drive like Mario Granitelli or something. Time to clip this barn swallow’s wings a bit.

            “Before you even start the car, you have to do your homework. You got to adjust  the seat, adjust the mirrors, and put on your seat belt.” At this he looked down and the kid did have his seatbelt on already. Well there’s a first, he thought.

            He continued, “And before you even start this car you put your foot on the…” He stopped. Joe was revving the engine and grinning at him. The picture didn’t fit. The kid should be cooling his jets now, not racing his motor.      

            The kid said, “I did my homework last night. Johnny.” He tromped the gas pedal. The big car shot forward. It left a patch of black amid the jumble of black marks which bore mute testimony to the fact that teenagers sometimes borrow dad’s car for transportation to school.

            Johnny was hurled back onto his seat and his head snapped against the headrest angering him immensely. Glaring at Joe, ( This kid was in serious trouble.) he stomped on his “Idiot Anchor” - the brake for the instructor’s use that extended over to the passenger footwell. The pedal slammed freely against the floor without any resistance. The car continued to accelerate, unabated.

            Dumbfounded, Johnny looked down at his foot and the pedal in complete disbelief. He lifted his foot and the pedal sprang back up to its normal position. Johnny stomped on it again, with both feet now, and the pedal still offered no resistance. He began to mash the pedal repeatedly, pumping it so furiously that to Joe he looked like the world’s largest toddler having a tantrum. 

            By the time the coach had convinced himself the brake would not work the car had made a wide curve through the parking lot. Like a two ton pendulum, Joe swung the big car in an arc, drifting it sideways from the school’s approach onto the county road. Fishtailing slightly he again had the throttle to the floor and the big four barrel was gulping lustily.   

            The coach righted himself after the turn and grabbed for the dashboard. The car was literally shrieking down the road. He lunged for the wheel. Joe lifted momentarily and the car’s tail began to slide to the left. Joe stabbed the accelerator again as the car began to swing right. The next swing would bring the back end around and somehow the coach sensed this and released.

            “See that?” Joe asked, “Trailing throttle oversteer! You could really wrack us up there Johnny, don’t drop the ball there on me now, will ya?” He looked down, “Whoa, you better put on that seat belt, there’s all kinds of maniacs out here on the public roads.”

            Joe detected the coaches frenzied glance at the ignition key. “Don’t think about it Johnny, you’ll lock the wheel and then we’ll be cooked here. C’mon man, if we don’t have trust, we’ll have failure.”

            Johnny was snarling. “You’re dead kid, stop this car right now because your joyride is…” The car slowed a bit,  Johnny looked forward just as the car hit the railroad crossing. Suddenly the windshield was filled with a view of a bright, blue, springtime morning sky. Then the car came heavily to earth. It bounced again, sending a shower of sparks into its slipstream and then settled. Johnny was lofted into the headliner roughly, crunching his teeth together with a loud, audible crack. The car began swinging side to side again and the kid was jousting with the wheel. Joe was feathering the gas and the brake, and Johnny was dimly aware of the kid’s footwork, he noticed the kid’s right heel was on the brake and  his right toes were on the gas pedal.  Who ever heard of driving like that?

            “Shoulda had on that seat belt Johnny.” The kid was panting a bit. Again the car was picking up speed, hurtling past the landscape and gathering in road at a crazy pace. Johnny looked down, he was sitting on the seatbelt, he tilted his ample rear end and freed it. He was fumbling with it as he felt that weightless feeling of nearly going airborne again. They had just crested a long hill and Joe was slowing a bit now.

            Joe, looking far ahead, noted another vehicle pulling into a driveway. Beyond that driveway the road dropped into a series of curves along the river. Joe knew this stretch well and he was setting up those turns in his mind. The last thing he needed now was another car pulling out in front of them. Joe dropped back to seventy or so, he didn’t want to arouse suspicion. There was someone getting out of the car, it was the approach to the golf course.            

            Johnny saw this too and began clawing at the crank for the window. He leaned out the window and blew his whistle with all his might, causing a large snake of a vein to pop out on his forehead.

            Lenny Jaye was struggling with the padlock on the gate. He had vowed to replace it for several years now but it seemed to always open just when he was about to fetch a hammer, saw, or his 357 magnum. The whistling startled him and he jumped, he whirled around as the car cruised by. There was Johnny hanging out the window and flapping his arms. Lenny waved and shook his head. This time he didn’t smile. That Johnny could be annoying, seemed to like being the center of attention.

            Once beyond the golf course,  Joe hammered the gas pedal again. Descending towards the river and picking up speed, the coach turned towards Joe and said: “Look, kid, I don’t know what you’re doing here but if you don’t…”

            At that moment Joe screamed and put a hand in front of his face. The coach again spun forward and saw the car was approaching the first of the curves along the river. The river could be seen, calm and glistening through the bright green embryonic leaves of May. Johnny again tromped on his passenger brake as Joe slowed the car without locking the brakes. For an instant the Left flank seemed to drift over the opposite shoulder of the road, it felt as if the car was going to go over, and the coach clutched  at the dash and convulsed the word “No.”

But Joe again punched the gas and shot the car towards the next curve. The curves would become tighter now as the road drained down to the bridge. The coach turned to the kid and said, “All right, all right kid, what do you want, huh? Look, I giv..” and suddenly it felt as if Haystack Calhoun was standing on Johnny’s throat.

He tugged at his collar. Gasping and clutching he reached in his pocket for the nitros. His pants were tight, he fumbled with the seatbelt and forced it open. He tried to jam a hand down his pocket.

Joe was now sweeping the car through the turns, collecting a bit of oversteer with a flick of the wheel, and then again accelerating to the next turn. Johnny, fumbling, unscrewed the tiny brown bottle as the car pitched and  the tires shrieked. Grasping and trembling. Johnny tilted the bottle.

“Look out!” screamed Joe, again amazing himself at how convincing it sounded, and he jabbed at the brakes. Johnny leapt, tossing the bottle in the air. Again Joe was mashing the gas and the car was arcing towards the upcoming curve. 

Johnny pinched at a few of the remaining tablets that he still clutched in his hand and poked them into his mouth. The tablets were already melting. His palms, in fact his entire body, was now clad in a sheen of cold perspiration. In lunatic terror he thought: melts in your hands not in your mouth. He didn’t have enough spit to work the tablets under his tongue.

            It was too late anyhow. That last cigarette had begun a little spasm in one of the arteries of his heart. The fear had further clenched that vessel and now the rough edges on gobs of sediment in that narrow channel were forming bloodclots on their downstream surfaces. Just when his heart muscle needed more fuel the pipeline was being choked by heredity, nicotine, lifestyle and fear. Without the fuel that area of his heart was dying.     

            This one wouldn’t be like his last heart attack. The one he had tromping back from the duckblind one fine fall Sunday morning. Although part of his heart died that time, it was more like losing a keyboard player from a band. The loss was noted for a refrain or two but the music kept playing and Johnny’s heart kept on dancing. But today the drummer would die. Not only would  his heart lose Charlie Watts, the zone of starving  muscle would give birth to a thousand Keith Moons with a couple of dozen Ginger Bakers thrown in. And all of them would be playing different songs.

            Johnny’s heart did a chugging Charleston, flew into a frantic Funky Chicken, then broke down into a bad Boogaloo before finally writhing into The Worm. Johnny slumped to the side and caught a last fading glimpse of the kid. The kid had a strange look on his face. The coach thought, in a distracted way, it was a look of grim determination. 

            Joe roared across the bridge. The girders of the old overhead trestle fanned the sky into blurry frames of blue. Climbing out of the valley, still winging through the turns, he now started to contend with traffic. He blew past a pickup and then a bulk milk truck and met a tractor. Nearing Little Falls he met a just off-duty sheriff’s deputy, beat and beleaguered from a bad night at a Bowlus barfight. The deputy thought twice about giving chase, but duty overtook fatigue and he spun around and hit the siren.

             

            In the end Joe was right, the brakes did fade. He struck the hospital with much more force than he had intended. It was about 19 miles from Graniteville to the hospital in Little Falls and the clock in the Emergency Room read 7:12 AM when it clattered to the floor following the impact. (A record for the Graniteville to Little Falls run.) In the darkened Central Supply Room a row of I.V. flasks were flung off a shelf and smashed against the opposite wall, mingling Normal Saline, D5W and Ringer’s Lactate into a splintery sticky pool. The concussion caused weary nurses, huddled in report on the other side of the building, to leap up and shout, “Oh dear!”

            The collision broke several of Joe’s ribs, a wrist, an elbow and dislocated a shoulder. Johnny, who had removed his seatbelt to get his pills, was vaulted into the headliner just above the windshield. His head struck with such force that the impact left a large bowl-shaped dent in the roof, popping out the windshield on that side of the car. (Witnesses later claimed they could detect a vague suggestion of his facial features in the impression.). This fractured his skull and his cervical spine in multiple areas and would’ve killed him, if he hadn’t been dead already.

            Johnny’s body slammed back into the seat.  Joe looked over at him and said, “Whoa, buddy, you shoulda caught that one with your hands, not your face.”

            Joe was returning to Graniteville and the bleachers were full at the Johnny Bartz Memorial  Field. The governor and the other various officials and dignitaries, who gather whenever a TV crew was present, were seated on the stage; leaning into each other, smiling and nodding and being conspicuous. A brand new  1995 Ford Mustang convertible was burbling slowly onto the field under the bright late May sky.  Seated on the boot that covered the retracted top was Joe, waving, smiling and pointing to familiar faces in the crowd. The red Mustang was an Official Pace Car and was part of Joe’s purse for winning that year’s Indianapolis 500 . (In a dead heat with Emerson Fitipaldi and Nigel Mansell, no less.) The car  prowled below a banner which read: “The City of Graniteville Proudly Welcomes Home the Winningest Race Driver in History: Joe Mills”.  Other banners stirred in the gentle breeze, checkered flags welcoming race fans.

            The big banner was not an idle claim either. Their small-town boy had made good. The first driver in history to win championships in Formula One, NASCAR Winston Cup, and Indy Cars. He had successfully campaigned in motocross and Superbikes and had won at Le Mans. Secretly he was testing a top fuel dragster and was about to announce an attempt at the NHRA top fuel title.

            Joe had been the local hero since the last parade given here in his honor. That had been 23 years ago and that last celebration was a forlorn affair. Banners that day had proclaimed: “The City of Graniteville Proudly Welcomes Home the Boy Who Tried to Save His Coach.” The town was a kind town and its people tried to salve the loss of a beloved coach through a humble recognition of the kid’s heroic efforts at saving their icon. The tragedy had again put Graniteville on the map for a week or so, correspondents called to interview Joe, and  an AP photograph of a somber kid in traction ran in papers across the nation.

            Since then the town had followed Joe’s exploits and cherished his success. They forgave him for his divorce of Debbie Kent, they realized she found her happiness in a real home and children back here in Graniteville. (In fact, she had married the son of Coach Bartz, the mayor, the same guy driving Joe’s Mustang right now. Joe had to smile at that irony.)  And the town understood when Joe married the Dutch high fashion model he had met in Monaco during his Formula One days.  It was the kind of marriage that could survive the career strains felt by Joe, and the model too for that matter.        

            Today, though, Joe was giving back to Graniteville. He would be dedicating the Joe Mills School of the Motor Arts.  Behind these very grandstands Joe’s lifelong dream was taking shape. Joe’s commitment, connections, and vision, not to mention the involvement of his sponsors, had wrought a complex here that was unique in all the world. Students of design were already at work in some of the studios here, sculpting not only what might be the next generation of minivan but also what might become the next airfoil shape on an Indy Car. Chauffeurs, police forces and body guards were learning defensive driving techniques and antiterrorist tactics.  Artists from Italy were in residence for the summer, revealing the beauty found in an automotive line. This fall Japanese electronic experts, along with American audio engineers would be conducting research and seminars on  car sound. Emerging Eastern Bloc and Pacific Rim nations were investing in the design and manufacturing complexes and reaping the benefits of  the international crosspollenization while inventing their own fledgling automobile related industries. American firms were realizing tax benefits from moving some of their own research and testing to this new facility, and also getting the chance to observe and indoctrinate young engineers for their own needs later. As a magnet for high schools across the country, students of  auto related disciplines were able to experience intense involvement in their chosen fields, ranging from body work to engine modification, while meeting their other high school requirement next door in good old Graniteville High.           

            Towering over the expanding complex, and even the gigantic  wind tunnel, was the frame of the enormous grandstand which was now under construction. (Being built with the help of students of race course design.) A  multiple use facility, with off road courses, drag strip, road course and super oval, it would soon host major sanctioned race events while training students in pit teamwork, track safety, and crowd management. An infield medical facility was planned, to instruct teams from racecourses around the world in the latest in trauma management and to also study the human physiology under race conditions as well as examining the psychology of competition in general. A Racers in Residence would bring some of the sport’s brightest stars here for intense professional level workshops on race technique and strategy.

            The town of Graniteville was experiencing an economic boom with housing and lodging and the other service industries required by an international campus of this scope.

             Joe looked out across Memorial Field. Under the blue sky, with the tender spring grass now underfoot and the gentle breeze of home caressing him, it was his proudest moment. A tear formed in the corner of his eye.

The Superintendent of Schools, Stanley Blackburn, turned to Joe and spoke, “Well Joe, I guess you’ll have to fix it. Better wait until after Wally drops by to take a few pictures for the paper. He’s on his way.”

The superintendent sighed and shook his head sadly, “I just can’t understand it. Every year we go through this. What kind of a misfit could do such a thing? I’d think that  sooner or later whoever is responsible for this, this, this defacement would tire of it… or just grow up.”

Joe looked up, following  the superintendent’s gaze. Above them the sign that proudly announced this place as being Johnny Bartz Memorial Field had been vandalized. The “t” had been repainted in a very professional way . It had been replaced with an “f”. Last year the “tz’ had been replaced with an “fy”. Joe shrugged in an indifferent way.

The superintendent turned  and looked at the man standing there beside him. He laid a hand on Joe’s shoulder and said,  “You of all people, having to fix this every year, it must be terribly difficult for you.”

“Yeah, it is.” Joe looked down.

“I promise you Joe, next year we’ll catch this culprit and that’ll put an end to it.” But that vow had been made before and the criminal had always evaded capture.

Joe watched as Mr. Blackburn walked back to his Park Avenue. He got in and drove off. Joe looked back up at the violated sign. He admired his handiwork. Sometimes he would change the “B” to an “F”. He admitted that there was a deep vein to be mined when it came to Johnny Bartz. Lately he had  restricted himself to just painting though. One year he had cut off the supports for the sign, using the school’s own torch on a foggy May night, and had not fully appreciated the tension building in the steel as it twisted. It released with a deafening “twang” and one of the legs missed his head by less than a foot. He had burnt up the sign once too, but these more radical efforts always resulted in more work for himself, patching it up or welding it up or whatever. He never did mind the repainting. Next year he might use electric lights, Christmas lights or something.

Soon Old Karbo pulled up in his rusty Cavalier. He got to his feet and began fiddling with the adjustments on his camera. “Cops find any clues?” he asked Joe.

“Guess not.” Joe replied, taking off his cap and scratching his head.

“Well,” Karbo said, squinting up at the sign, “This year I can print a picture at least. Some years this clown gets too racy.”

“I guess I’ll go and get the paint and stuff. ” Joe muttered as he shuffled towards the school’s tractor. He was thinking: I know just where it’s at too.

He climbed onto the seat of the Cub Cadet. It was a hydrostatic drive, much to the chagrin of Joe. He longed for the straight stick on the school’s old  Simplicity garden tractor. (As he had loathed the switch to an automatic on the schoolbus he drove.)  Joe was convinced that on the old  Simplicity he could cover the same ground faster than he could with the new hydrostatic. To Joe an automatic just had no soul. But Leo Von Raschke was on the schoolboard and he had insisted the district be up to date on the latest technology and the best place to get that new technology was on the Cub Cadet available at Von Raschke’s Implement.

Joe waved to Wally and fired up the tractor. He headed back towards the district shop to get the ladder and paints from where he had left them on Friday night. He pushed on the lever and slid the throttle open wide.

The tractor pawed at the turf and sprang forward. Joe grasped the wheel and steeled himself for battle. It was 1970 and  the legendary Parnelli Jones was thundering back onto the track after his last pit stop. His Boss Mustang  was ragged, its body rendered and stove in from the intense jousting it had endured that day. But its heart was still pure and strong. A Championship was at stake and somewhere on that roadcourse Mark Donahue was waiting in a battered AMX.

                                                            THE END

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Sioux Falls Northern Plains Sentinel

Editor, Sundays Outdoors Section

Re: Fantastic Fish Tales Contest

Dear Sirs,

               I found the following story while I was sorting through some of my brother Louis’s personal effects. My wife read the article about your contest and we both felt this tale would certainly qualify. I know it probably exceeds your suggested word total but I could not find it in myself to edit it. (I did take the liberty of copying it to type from his original script and also to correct some spelling errors.)

               My younger brother saw fit to take his own life shortly after last Christmas. He was nearly 15 years my junior and I think we both believed we had little in common – apart from family that is. I sadly realize that I did not know him all that well. I had found him a bit remote, reflective, almost somber. It comes as an unfortunate surprise for me to now find, through his manuscripts and journals, that he was possessed of a kind, expansive nature and a keen wit.

               That is not to say that he was given to flights of fancy, however. Frankly I do not know what to make of this story. Being a part of the family I do share some of the memories mentioned herein, for instance the old man and his fireside yarns at the resort. However, as you will see, I have no way of verifying the actual events that happened to my younger brothers on their last day of fishing together in 1966.

               But, just the same, in all honesty, I think I will elect to stay home on opening weekends that coincide with Mother’s Day.

                                                                                                         Best regards,

                                                                                                                        Dr. Henrik Voldersdyke M.D.

                                                                                                                        Edgerton, MN.  2-21-‘01

                                             `              SHELTER ISLAND BABY

               “You know Louie, lets not tell anyone about this.” Danny whispered.

 I met his eye and nodded. It was the sort of statement a big brother makes that is actually a command but feels more like a mutual consent.

               We looked at the water and then looked at each other and then looked back at the water again.

I wondered what his reasons were for keeping this silent. At first I thought it was the typical fisherman’s coy code of secrecy, an already forming plan for him to return to these waters for another secret conquest. I also suspected that perhaps he wanted to keep this incredible event quiet because nobody would believe it anyway and the telling of it would make us look like fools.

I never got a chance to ask him his reason. Within 3 months his flame would flicker out on a rice paddy in some weirdly alien place called Viet Nam.

It was the last day of our annual vacation at Higgin’s Resort, (now Norway Point) on Pelican Lake, the big Pelican Lake, the one at Orr. Danny and I were fishing Dutchman style. At least Danny was fishing; I was just running the motor and enjoying time spent alone with my spit polished big brother.

I call it Dutchman style fishing because I have observed that most of the practitioners of this style of fishing were indeed “Hollanders”, specifically my entire extended family. I certainly would never lay claim to this type of fishing as an ethnic domain. I am sure many others employ it and I noticed the style would propagate through the resort as those “Crazy Dutchmen” would be the only ones tying up to the dock in the evening with full stringers. It was not uncommon to see furtive cane poles leaning up against many other cabins by the end of the week.

I suppose it wasn’t the most sporting type of fishing. Often a fish would be hauled in caught by the tail or the back of the head. Really it was more like harvesting fish, but when you had a limited budget, limited time, and seemingly unlimited mouths to feed, it was effective.

The accoutrements were simple: A long bamboo cane pole, 45 pound test braided line, a huge spoon or buck tail, a stout gaff, and a heavy stringer. And, in case you hooked a monster: a ball peen hammer and a gunnysack. A big muskie, or even a huge northern pike, was a formidable adversary inside a small boat. I recall my father handing me the burlap once as he was about to land a muskie on Leech, “Louie, you cover his head up with that sack now. He’ll think he’s hiding and it’ll quiet him down a good bit….then you hand me that ballpeen.”

Danny and I were trolling that day at the usual pace, one that nearly causes that big spoon to plane. Suddenly I sensed him tense up. He’d had a strike. Instead of reacting with a jerk, he reacted with the kind of discipline necessary to this type of fishing: allowing his pole to slide back towards the stern. Following his line of sight, I turned my head to the side and saw the huge swirl on the surface. Then came a burnished flash, down deep, like submerged lightening. Danny’s pole was nearly pointed straight back alongside me as we waited. The Scott Atwater screwed us forward inexorably.

I was about to turn for another pass when his line snapped taut and his bamboo pole was bent acutely. Now here is where the heroic part of this sort of fishing is manifested. Knowing full well there is probably a once in a lifetime fish down there; it is extremely difficult not to haul back on that cane. Stalwart as ever, my brother let it go.

That pole shot out over the surface like a cruise missile and we were off on our own version of the Nantucket sleigh ride. We followed that pole up and down the north shoreline. Sometimes the fish, having found a hitherto unknown deep spot, would dive leaving just a few inches of the butt above the surface, rotating there quietly, alongside our boat. Then it would tear off again and so would we in its wake, the pole looking like some type of liberated compass needle, quivering on a heading of its own. Twice that fish took the entire pole under. That is no small feat if you have ever tried to keep one totally submerged lengthwise. We would wait in quiet panic, holding our breaths, fearing we would lose it.

But it was a calm day, the kind of sultry, brassy, August doldrum “that drives pike wild.” Had there been seas that day we would’ve never heard the “ploop” the pole made as its end finally surfaced, this time directly astern. I peered, with more than a little apprehension, over the transom. Slowly, gracefully, the entire pole emerged and floated there mutely.

I nodded at my brother and pointed down. He deftly joined me at the stern and leaning over, he gently grasped the pole. Indicating to me with a tilt of his head, I clambered forward, amidships, and got things ready. I pulled out the sack, hooked the hammer through an oarlock and I hefted the mighty gaff. I stood there poised, one foot on the seat, like a mad freshwater Ahab, coiling, focusing on my thrust and silently breathing to myself, “Don’t let me screw this up.”

Danny maneuvered the line up alongside. I brought the gaff back a fraction. Then came the coppery flash again. Oh my God it’s big. I hope it is entirely spent. Danny edged it closer, slowly, easy now, get ready.  I took a deep breath, this was it.

“No!” Danny shouted. I nearly did a full pirouette and he grabbed my shoulder, steadying me. He pointed, “Look!”

It wasn’t a fish. It was a man. Clearly it was not a fish. Danny’s line had been cut, probably sawed off by the pointed triangular teeth exposed in the thing’s slash of a mouth as it sneered or smiled or grimaced up at us. He held the line in one tiny claw-like hand at his side. It appeared as if some sort of membrane had fused his arms to the trunk of his body.  Likewise, his legs were conjoined. His feet were unnaturally long and flat and flexible, as if they had never borne the weight of gravity but instead had been melded by the forces of hydrodynamics.

He undulated in the water there, panting a bit, the edge of that wide mouth just above the surface. His head, and so his face, was like the blade of an axe. Through adaptation and necessity his eyes had migrated more to the sides of his head and his nose was pointed so it could just crease the surface for his respiration. Save for wisps on his elongated skull and random remnants on his chest and genitals, he was nearly totally hairless.

With what seemed like disgust he let go of the line. He floated there awhile, slowly arcing back and forth. Danny and I were speechless.

His eye arrested me and I could not break its spell. Large and flat, nearly entirely iris with very little white at all, the pupil was widely dilated and it was fixed on me.

I have heard it said that a human cannot look an animal directly in the eye because a beast has no soul. I have always thought that perhaps the reason some cannot look an animal in the eye is because they have no soul themselves. I routinely look my dog in the eye and in it I can see mirth, impatience, anger, determination, fear, a wide range of identifiable emotions. There is a spirit there, if not a soul.

But there is something else there. It is a rift I see. It is a mutual awareness that between our total understandings there lies a cleft that cannot be breached. It is the boundary between man awareness and animal awareness.

No such divide existed here between that fishboy and I. His gaze bore down upon me heavily, carrying an intensity and a depth of understanding that felt like physical weight. It was a look of contempt and rage and despair, and maybe most of all, in the end, it was a look of longing.

Curling, he lifted his head totally out of the water. He regarded us, and then, startling us both, he uttered the most plaintive cry imaginable. Clearly human in origin, its timbre was such that gooseflesh blossomed on my skin and a gasp erupted from my throat. It was the sound of an infant, hungry or otherwise in need of its mother’s affection. But it was also a cry wrought by long unused and unpracticed vocal instruments, a keening rasp that still haunts.

He circled the boat once, paused, inspired a long whistling draught of air through his extended nose and then he dove like a dart for the depths, leaving a whirl, a swirling eddy on the placid surface, a perfect vortex in his wake.

A person would think that having borne witness to such events, a fellow might return to them and often ponder their significance. I suppose I did at first, but the traumas inflicted by the learning of my brother’s death have somehow intruded upon most of my memories prior to his departure for the war. And no memories are so deeply affected as those surrounding the times spent together with Daniel. Those times are cherished keepsakes. Although rare and beautiful, sometimes looking directly at them can smite the heart’s eye. The handling of such rarified elements can levy a toll that is often too extravagant to afford.

Yet sometimes a memory can come crashing to the surface unbidden, like a muskellunge from the deep arrowing towards an innocent duckling bobbing in the sun.

So why tonight, at this late hour, do I permit myself the sweet discomfort of recalling that event of 33 years ago? Why do I sit here, on the eve of my uncle Gerritt’s funeral, looking at this grainy photo in an old psychology textbook?

In my defense I can honestly say my brother’s tragic death prohibited me from making the connection I stumbled upon tonight, a connection that would seem so obvious to anyone else. It was my uncle Gerritt’s death, and me laying there awake tonight trying to learn what his life had to teach me, that caused me to bolt upright with a dawning comprehension. This revelation would lead me to shuffle down here to the basement, beneath a swinging bulb, to an old carton and this dusty volume.

               Tonight, as I thought of my late uncle, my memory was drawn back again to Pelican Lake and Higgin’s Resort. It was our week at the lake, probably about 2-3 years before my adventure with brother Danny would occur.

I was making my way back to the cabin one night concerned about my 10:30PM curfew. I hated to leave my playmates behind at the campfire on the point, but showing contempt for the rules would surely merit consequences.

               I was just stepping out of the woods near the fish cleaning house, where the feeble advance of the yellow bug light was a mockery to the unassailable dark of the northwood’s night. I paused, the men were cleaning fish and my uncle Gerritt was addressing Old Leo, the fishing guide, outboard repairer, beach groomer, lawn mower, toilet paper bringer, boat steadier, dock greeter, story teller, local historian and all around handy man at the resort. Tonight Leo was performing the fish-cleaning role of his long, but often enviable, job description.

“You know Leo,” my uncle was saying in that nearly incessant whine of his, “I don’t mind if you like to spook the kids a little with that myth about the baby crying at Shelter Island…and some of that other stuff.”

He paused, and after a quick look at his brothers, he then damned the torpedoes and sailed on, “That kind of tall tale is all in good fun, I suppose.  But I don’t think telling our children about the dead whore they found drifting out there in that boat years ago would be the sort of thing I’d want them to hear.”

Gerritt raised his chin and sniffed, “The wages of sin is death, that’s what I say.”

 Nodding in self-affirmation he again peered over Leo’s shoulder at his big brothers, as if to seek some type of consensus. But they had suddenly became intensely absorbed with the cleaning of fish, as if they were extracting priceless pearls from those fillets. My father cleared his throat. Uncle Gerritt was the kid brother, the only one who had moved to the city, and he always made the kind of noise you didn’t want to hear.

               “Thank you Cousin Gary.” I whispered to myself. Gerritt’s own son had just taught us the meaning of the word whore. Gary had held court that night at the fire and expounded upon his vast knowledge of the ways of “worldly women,” and where to find them in Sioux Falls.

               Leo did not respond for a moment. He just put down his knife and reached into his khaki shirt pocket. Extracting a pack of Lucky Strikes, he shook one out into his lips and returned the pack in the kind of practiced motion that revealed a lifetime’s devotion to the act.

               It became very quiet. I could hear the bell jingle up at the lodge as someone passed though the door. The insistent whir of the Lure-A-Light, which Higgin’s Resort boasted, was magnified to my ears.

               Leo drug a match along the table and the flare of it revealed his face, which had been in the shadow of his Pure Oil cap. He was looking at Uncle Gerritt with an expression that was, as far as I was concerned, foreign to his face.

 I had known Leo for as long as I could remember and it was true that sometimes he would join us at the campfire, with a bottle of Hamm’s, and tell us tales. Some of them were real beauties too: the Goat Girl and her pyrotechnic ways, The Baby crying at Shelter Island, and of course the one about Leveque’s Hand still scooting around out there on the bottom of the lake. That one always got the kids to look uneasily over their shoulders, and sometimes I would swim all afternoon without putting my feet on the bottom, much.

But the familiar twinkle had left Leo’s eyes now and his mouth twisted down as if he had tasted something offal. He exhaled a billow of smoke that hung in the humid air like a hive in front of his face. He fanned at it and looked down at the cigarette with disdain, as if he was surprised to see it there between his fingers.

His eyes locked on my uncle’s and I was thinking, “Oh boy, he’s finally gonna get it now, come on Leo let him have it, give it to him for not letting us swim for 2 precious hours after we eat.”

               “Well, mister,” Leo began as Uncle Gerritt backed up against the screen a little, “My good book tells me that it is dangerous to judge what is in the heart of another. And when it comes to that final payday, the wages we each draw will be tallied ONLY by that master who cuts the check.”

               Leo tilted his head to the side, his gaze not wavering, “Have you ever seen a baby get born?”

               My uncle quickly shook his head, blinking.

               Leo continued, “Well my last one, Loretta, was the only one born in the hospital. The rest were born at home and I’ll tell you,” he paused, nodding slightly as if confirming some recollection, “It makes one heck of a mess. There is blood and human fluids that gush all over the place.”

               Gerritt swallowed still looking into Leo’s face.

               “I found that girl, you’re so-called “whore,” out on the lake that day and she wasn’t drifting either.” Leo continued, pointing now in the direction of the lake, “She was tied up to my dock out there on Shelter Island.”

               “I have a duck hunting shack there and I go out there sometimes,” he said, “And one morning I see this boat at my dock. So as I get closer I see there is blood all over everything and then, when I clamber out onto the dock, I see her body there in the bottom of the boat.”

               Leo’s words were becoming more forceful now, “She had went out there, you see, to have that child in my little shack. But something went wrong, really wrong, there was too much blood. And you know what?”

Uncle Gerritt shook his head again, quickly.

               “Your harlot even brought a pail and rags with her and she tried to clean up the shack. The best she could anyways. She even put the afterbirth in the pail.”

               Leo looked down now, “But something went wrong, like I said, and she knew it. She tried to make it back to the boat; I followed the trial of blood. I think she stumbled. It looked to me like she tumbled into the boat and she died there reaching over the side like she was trying to get something out of the water. The bloodied baby blanket was half in the water too. I think she dropped her baby over the side when she fell, and she died reaching for it.”

               Then Leo squared his shoulders and pointed a finger at my uncle. “I myself have heard a baby crying out there at Shelter Island. And it is the sort of sound a man would never want to hear again. Now your calling it a myth calls me a liar. I have lived 75 years and no man has called me that to my face yet, sir,” he poked at my uncle, “And I am not about to let someone like you be the first.”

               My uncle shriveled back further, crossing his arms about his chest, grasping himself in some sort of pitiful embrace. He turned his head to the side and closed his eyes tightly.

               “Here it comes, “ I thought to myself, but just then my Uncle Frank stepped forward and gently grasped Leo’s arm. He looked down at Leo and said quietly, “You know, my good book puts a lot of stock into forgiveness, Leo. It says a man should turn his other cheek.”

               The Dutch, except for my Uncle Gerritt of course, are not overly demonstrable about their faith. They live a certain way to be sure, a lifestyle that could aggravate others, but they aren’t much for Bible thumping or grand piety. But one thing is certain: you can never trump them when it came to Good Bookisms.

               So here I am tonight looking again at this photograph in my old psychology text. I have not seen it since my college days but it has always been with me it seems. Never far from my consciousness, I have thought of it often. There was something about it, there still is, that was familiar and disturbing. Even though the picture is of poor quality, the shadows too dark and the light too bright, the portrait still reveals much to me.

               In it a boy squats on his haunches. A coarse blanket or robe covers what appear to be bony shoulders. His knuckles rest on the rocky ground and his head is hunched forward, jaw partly agape as if panting. His hair is wild and even though his brow is heavy, it cannot afford enough shadow to quench the galvanic charge generated by that piercing gaze.

               Tonight I know that it was the look in those eyes that resonated within me years ago back there in my classroom in Brookings. It modulated an air of indifferent understanding upon a thick wave of what, to me, seemed an accusatory inquiry. The frequency once disturbed by locking eyes with the pikeboy, or pikeman, was again excited by the gaze of the boy in the photo. Although I failed to identify that source when I was making my pitiful college psychology report on “Nature vs. Nurture,” the connection is now bridged, the crystals vibrate in tune and the signal is finally received.

               The text below the picture reads in part: “In 1911 a hunter in the Transylvanian Alps near the city of Sibiu in what is now modern day Romania was said to have captured this boy. The hunter claimed the boy was running with a group of wolves. It was asserted the boy, “Lycan,” as he was called by the peasants there, had been adopted by the wolf pack shortly after birth. A country physician who examined the boy said he did not walk erect, but rather, preferred to “Scamper on all fours like an animal.” He claimed the boy fed himself as a dog would and uttered only canine-like vocalizations. Unfortunately the boy died in transport to the University in Bucharest where an objective evaluation had been proposed.

On every continent folk tales have been identified which support similar myths. Whether it is tigers in SE Asia, leopards in West Africa, or jaguars in South America that perform the nurturing, the appeal of these legends seems to be universal among primitive societies. Why do you think it might be important for aboriginal cultures to construct these”…… And so on.

              

               So now I wonder, did that lonely girl who gave birth on Shelter Island accidentally drop her child into the lake when she returned to the boat?  Or, as her death posture might suggest, did she hand her child over the side? Did she find one last desperate hope for her newborn there? Would not a newborn so recently suspended within the womb’s waters be at least familiar with a buoyant environment? Can anyone know the maternal instincts of such a beautiful and noble creature as the Northern Pike?

                                                                                                                         Louis Voldersdyke

                                                                                                                         Ivanhoe, MN

                                                                                                                         8-15-99

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CHISAGO COUNTY PRESS, 10/26/89

SCRIBE’S CORNER, pg. 1 – B Section

                                                                                                    On The Ice

                                                                                               by Jeffrey B. Smith

                    Leroy had felt like this, exactly like this, once before. Though that was nearly 45 years ago and he (deliberately) had not thought about it much since then, he was feeling the same way now.        

                    That time long ago, he’d been lying in a foxhole in Germany. Like now it had been dark as death and just as silent. And like now he’d had an overpowering urge to bolt -– to just flat- out light–out. He had kept that desire at bay, 45 years ago, and morning had come.

                    That is just what he intended to do now. Wait it out. Morning will come, and there was no way he was going to go out there on the ice tonight. Because, like in Germany, he sensed there was nowhere to run – except to a certain death. At least now he was in familiar, even comfortable, surroundings.

                    Again he stood up and scratched a hole in the frost on the window pane. He squinted through towards where Charlie had been fishing. Nothing had changed. Charlie’s lantern stood there faithfully, still set upon an overturned bucket and still casting a yellow circle on the ice. The other bucket, the one Charlie had been sitting on, was still waiting for Charlie’s return.

                    But maybe something had changed. The lantern’s light seemed to be diminishing, as if it were slowly being strangled by the dark. And he could no longer discern that shape he had seen before. It had been out there on the ice just beyond the fringe of lantern light. Leroy had desperately attempted to explain that shape to himself, tried to account for it somehow, but it was useless. And he refused to honor his suspicions.

                    He put his cheek to the glass, trying to see the shoreline. No lights.  Even out here, six miles on these mudflats, one could easily see the highway traffic and lights on shore Now  there wasn’t a trace of even that big strobe beacon at Tiny’s where they drove on. Even through crummy weather you cold see that baby. It reminded Leroy of someone taking flashbulb pictures over and over again. It left stains on you eyeballs if you looked at it directly and, he thought, it made the people leaving the tavern, or just walking across the parking lot, look like they were in one of those old-time flickery movies.

                    He craned a look up at the sky and the stars were blotted out too. It was crystal clear when they had driven on. It was like a huge dark fist was slowly clenching about him.

                    He looked towards Charlie’s spot. Charlie rarely surrendered to the comforts of Leroy’s fishhouse. Only the most adverse conditions could drive Charlie inside. And there were few nights that would keep the two of them off the lake. Their movements were closely monitored by other fisherman and, in some circles, Leroy and Charlie enjoyed an almost legendary status.

                    A splintering crack came slicing in from the far distance. One of those rending shifts in the living ice that bear rifle out of the distance high pitched and then thunder by like a hell-bound train. The kind that gives first-time fishermen the bug-eyed jitters out here on the big lake. It ripped by Leroy’s fishhouse shattering and receding into the silent stretches of that trackless slab.

                    “You old fool,” Leroy muttered to himself.

                    He sat down heavily upon his own upturned bucket and, from years of habit, scanned his lines. “No!” he gasped. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and clenched his fists upon his thighs. He was NOT going to look down there again.

                    Really he had no lines left to check. One line was a tangled mess at his feet. It had remained that way since his last fish. A big eelpout, that one. He was finessing the hook out when Jupe went crazy on him. Leroy always fiddled with hook removal, even on the eelpouts, which had an inimitable way of swallowing a hook to the depths of their loathsome souls.

                    Charlie, on the other hand, had a different method. He’s step one boot on the fish’s tail while pulling on the line. The, with his other huge sorrel, he’d stomp mightily upon the midsection of the fish and his hook would appear (Along with just about everything else that was inside the fish) on the ice.

                    “The oooonly way to fly!” was his patented refrain after this maneuver, and Leroy would keep a secret record of Charlie’s action by that familiar jingle.

                    Well, Jupe had gone crazy, barking and feverishly scratching at the door while Leroy fumbled with that disgusting eelpout. When he had freed his hook, he booted the door open and Jupe charged out on the ice. He had looked over at Charlie’s spot and was about to belt out his standard line, “Stackin’ ‘em up like cordwood!” (Indeed, there was truth to that statement. If an aerial spy photograph could be taken of any area the two of them had been working, it would reveal a patch of ice littered with the remains of discarded rough fish fanning out in spokes from the holes they had used.)

                    Leroy’s words had caught in his throat, however. Charlie had vanished but it’s what happened to Jupe that left Leroy mute. Old Jupe had shrieked, there was a crushing, crunching thump and then all was silence and dark.

                    Leroy had turned in Jupe’s direction but, except for this own shadow in the pale square of light spilling through the  open doorway, there was nothing to be seen. Transfixed, eyes wide, ears ringing, he had stood there, nostrils flaring tiny clouds of vapor into the still air.

                    The eelpout, still in his grip, writhed suddenly and Leroy looked down at it with horror, as if it were something that had materialized in his hand from some foreign and bizarre dimension. He threw it down and retreated into the fishhouse.

                    Then too he had looked automatically at the remaining line. He watched as the float toppled onto its side like a felled redwood. When he later braved an inspection, he found the line had been severed at a point just below the foot of the hole, at the bottom level of the ice. He then had managed a look down into the hole and, even though it was just a glance, he saw an ominous reddish glow down in the depths below.

                    For a while he called for both Charlie and Jupe. At first he felt slightly self-conscious of his own voice hollering like a kid for his ma Then he began sounding more desperate and helpless, so he quit.

                    He couldn’t guess how long ago that had been. He leaned back against the damp wall. He needed to relax a little. He had light, he had a full pig of gas out there and he was warm. He could wait it out.

                    The walleye in the pail below him gave one final flop. Leroy shot to his feet. Realizing the walleye, he dropped back down to the bucket. Icy drops of sweat trickled down his sides, so cold it made Leroy jump again. His heart was slamming against his chest.

                    After his breathing had nearly returned to normal he heard a small tinkling sound form his fishing hole. A thin, filamentary wire was poking through the skin of ice that was forming on the surface. IT telescoped upwards for several inches and paused. Leroy’s stove sputtered and went out.

                    A fish house gets cold very quickly. After all, it’s just a plywood shack perched on an immense ice cube. Instantly Leroy was on his knees fumbling with the valve and his lighter. He couldn’t produce even a spark. He snatched at the wooden matches and they wouldn’t light either. It didn’t matter much now anyway because the flow of gas had dwindled to nothing.

                    He would have to make a run for the pick-up. He stood and scratched at the frost on the window again. No trace of Charlie’s lantern now; all was dark. The candles were flickering. He reached for his choppers as the candles fizzled out. He grabbed his heavy steel chisel instead. It was becoming noticeably colder in there now. Leroy paused at the door.

                    “That’s it!’ he said and he crashed thorough the door. He made about thee strides and they were on him, encircling him. He could see them illuminated by the dim red glow leaking though the ice. Their mouths moved with that same stupid rhythmic motion Leroy had always despised. The largest one, their leader, was bigger than Leroy and clearly a powerful creature. It was addressing Leroy.

                    It’s words formed in Leroy’s mind and were delivered in Leroy’s very own voice. “We’ve been waiting, Leroy,” it said, “We’ve been waiting to get you out on the ice.”

                    As Leroy went down something else crossed his mind. Although this is not the exact thought it was roughly the equivalent of, “Invasion of the Enemy Eelpouts?”

                    The next morning Runty found their stiff bodies out there on the ice. A frozen geyser of viscera had jetted out form the gaping , dislocated jaws of Leroy, Charlie and Jupiter.

                    Runty had come to plow the road, a ritual he compulsively performed daily. He was one of Tiny’s sons. He was “the simple one.” Although he would never qualify for a driver’s license, he was a regular demon with a snowplow. He single handedly kept the resort and its miles of toll roads on the lake open. Sometimes he’d have roads out there that were four lanes wide. If the ice was right, and you wanted to, you could dive 80 miles per hour on one of his thoroughfares.

                    That particular morning, Runty told the deputy, “Looked like somethin’ stomped on ‘em.” 

                                                                                                   The End

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PUBLSHISHED IN THE CHSIAGO COUNTY PRESS/June 9, 1988                                                                                          

SCRIBE’S CORNER, page 3

                                                                                The One in the Woods

                                                                                 By JEFFREY B. SMITH

                    Already too may years ago, I worked as an orderly in my hometown hospital. One morning I was delegated, probably by some relieved and reprieved R.N., the duty of sanitizing an old bachelor who had been brought in by the ambulance. (Mine was not a coveted task. Once I pulled a similar hermit’s boot off and major portions of his gangrenous toes and foot came with it. The stench was truly wretched.)

                    The old man, on this particular morning, was in pretty bad shape. Not only was he suffering from exposure, he was feverish, combative and his hygiene left a lot to be desired. He also had two curiously parallel cuts, quite purulent, streaking across his frail chest and abdomen.                

                    First, I should explain a bit about his region where the old man lived. It’s a genuine wilderness that stretches, more of less, from southwest of Onamia near Hillman, eastwards around the great lake Mille Lacs and the sweeps into a broad arc that nearly reaches to Duluth. Sure there are  few miserable towns here and the, but except for a railroad track or two, a few lonesome highways and maybe some tentative township roads, there’s nothing much worthwhile up there.

                    Also this area seems, judging from the patients we had, to have a disproportionate number of odd characters eking out existences there.

                    For example, there was one lady who was unquestionably psychotic. She would give detailed descriptions of unfathomably unappealing events, such as canning summertime suckers, and then, without warning, would break into the most moving Shakespearean soliloquy. Quite unique. Meanwhile, her husband would be out in the parking lot stealing employee block heater extension cords.

                    And there was one old man who spoke with a great deal of authority and familiarity about Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and yet, lived in an abandoned camper.

                    There was also, in that area, squalid intermarried and incestuous families. Every once in awhile on Main Street, you’d catch a glimpse of grim and pathetic mutant children packed into again station wagons, peering out like overwrought aliens in derelict and dilapidated spaceships. Disturbing, but tolerated – I guess it as just out of everyone’s jurisdiction.

                    So it seemed that this area was a sanctuary for those who were uncomfortable with the mainstream. Or perhaps it was the other way around. At any rate, I was about to find out that other things, not just eccentric or unacceptable people, found refuge out there as well.

                    As I dabbed at he old man’s wounds, I asked how he got them. Since he had been distant and mute, I was surprised when this brought a response.

                    “The Mutamar,” he hissed.

                    “the what?” I asked, stunned.

                    He became impatient, “The Clacker! The Clacker!” He repeated urgently and then began opposing grubby and neglected fingernail against his thumbnails, forcefully and frantically, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.

                    The old man would say no more, end even though I suspected he was disoriented, I was real interested. I had consumed and catalogued many stories like it in the past.

                    Like the guy who once told me of how a blue light hung and hovered below the railway trestle while he was spearing pike at the river dam one night.

                    Or the time two different and distinct fishermen, in the span of about two weeks, told me they would never again venture out upon Mayhew Lake. Thy both mentioned “swirls and things,” but their troubled expressions led me to think that this was more than unexplained currents.

                    I have driven by Mayhew Lake several times since and I admit I can’t ever quite get a clear view of it. True, the roads are a distance from the lake, but there’s something about that lake that’s unyielding; no matter what the weather conditions or the time of day, its surface remains curiously impenetrable.

                    The next day, I went in to see the old man again. I asked about “the creature” and he became quite agitated.

                    “Little mind,” he sneered, and stabbing a shaky finger towards me shrieked, “A foolish consistency, that’s the Hobgoblin!” gobs of spit hung on his quivering jaw.

                    With that he curled up and turned himself, slowly and painfully, towards the wall. He as chilling badly and I noticed that his wounds were already necrotic, putrefied mounds of suppurating flesh. I will always regret my juvenile invasion of his privacy – a shameful intrusion. He died that night.

                    One November night, several years later, my wife and I would make a visit to her sister. My sister-in-law lived up in Onamia with her man, Ron. We brought our new baby along for their approval.

                    After a largely obligatory endorsement of our child, Ron began heading me towards the porch. He was always restless around the house and had, clearly, other plans for the night. After mumbling something about “checking our deer hunting spots,” we were headed for the door.

                    We left them there adoring my kid. I felt sheepish though, something to do with the knowing looks from the women. See, we all knew what chaotic twists a night out with Ron could take. None of us, however, could’ve imagined the twists this night held in store for Ron and I.

                    Ron had himself a big V-8 Cherokee. He used it for “cash jobs,” like plowing snow. It sported a menacing looking brush bar on the front, full time four wheel drive and huge all terrain tires. Truly a righteous piece of American iron.

                    As we cruised out of the cruelly intimate Onamia city limits, Ron hooked a big arm behind my seat and snagged a twelve-pack of Red White and Blue up between us. So it would be a night of “road drinkin’. At least we would be patriotic about it.”

                    The Marshall Tucker Band as chugging on the 8-track and the twelve pack was half gone when we rumbled past Koski’s Store. The fluorescents were still on in the store and the neons were lit in the tavern. A row of used farm implements and a gas pump separated the place from the blacktop. A few pickups and a flatbed were out front.

                    Koski’s Store always loomed larger than life in my consciousness. A frontier outpost, a mythical place where we heard, as children, that kids our own age drove around in pickups and, rumor had it, around July Fourth you could buy fireworks. Later we’d hear that juveniles, again our own age, could by beer there.

                    We had inflicted damage on the remainder of that twelve-pack by the time we reached an area remote enough to hold the promise of “deer sign.” I suspected this would probably mean looking for the reflections of deer eyes in our headlights. This would then somehow correlate with the number of deer available to be blasted to death on some frigid morning later in the month.

                    Ron wheeled into a little road, no more than a trail. It appeared to be an old logging trail, an outfit form Milaca sporadically logged these regions, and soon we were scrambling over branches, rocks and piles of slash.

                    He as getting into it too. All pursuit of deer has now evaporated in the light of “doin’ some four-wheelin’.” He was downshifting and lurching over what seemed to me, insurmountable obstacles.

                    We were beyond the edge of the logged area and gradually were arcing back towards it, when we heard the unmistakable screech of a blowout. Our progress became instantly more strained and we ground to a halt.

                    As you may have suspected, Ron as an abusive guy. He was abuse to his equipment, his body, I suspect my sister-in-law and most of al, to the English language. I always considered my speech profane and usually felt quite accomplished in the swearing arena, but Ron could often leave me humble.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Continued on page 4.

His permutations and juxtapositions were beyond profanity. He had it propelled beyond a science, beyond an art,  you might say he had plumbed an entirely new dimension.

                    With just such an original oath, he fished a feeble flashlight out of the glove box and slid the lug wrench out from under his seat. (I hate to even speculate just why he kept it there.) The left rear hub had a jagged log spiked into it. The log, in turn, was jammed against a couple of trees. The valve stem was mashed into oblivion. He commandeered a hatchet, (I think he kept most of his possession in that truck0, and began hacking away at the log.

                    I occupied myself with lowering the spare, blindly. It’s dark up there in the woods on an overcast November night. Beside no glow from the Twin Cities contaminating the sky, there’s also no intrusion from those obscene blue yard lights. (“SECURITY LIGHTS” I head Ron scoff once, “Best thing ever invented. You can see just what you want to rip off. Hell, you can practically waltz right up to the gas barrel. And, it they do come out, YOU can see THEM.”)

                    I lowered the pare and with great difficulty, got the jack set and began hosing the vehicle into the air. Ron slid off the flat and I lugged the spare over to him.

                    “Listen,” he whispered hoarsely. In the frail light I could see his hands were trembling.

                    “I got a real bad feeling,” he stammered and dropped the lug nuts.

                    “What are you talking ab-,” but he cut me off. “Shut up! Listen!” he demanded.

                    I did.

                    It was still, not a whisper of sound. It was as silent s ever could be conceived. A total and omnipresent quiet. With it came to me an overpowering sense of dread. A crippling promise of impending doo. There was no denying that we were on the brink of something. Something dire.

                    “Let’s get that wheel on,” I said, surprised at my own control.

                    Ron squatted down and lofted the wheel onto the hub – a wheel that I could barely drag over to him – as I groped around in the grass for the lug nuts. I think that’s when it began.

                    CLACK…CLACK…CLACK. It began loudly and it remained at that same steady volume. And it was close too.

                    Then I realized, then I knew.

                    “Ron, put those on! Quick, I’ll hold the light.”

                    CLACK…CLACK…CLACK…CLACK.

                    I don’t think it was big, maybe about as big as your mother. But it had mass, density, inertia…whatever physicists want to call it. And what it lacked in size it made up for in intensity. A pure undiluted aura of menace it projected, a complete encompassing malevolence and rancor. Ron dropped the first nut I handed him and he began fumbling in the dark for it.

                    “Here!” I passed him another.

                    CALCK…CLACK…CLACK…CLACK.

                    It was not moving fast, but its progress was undeniable. Brush and trees and branches were crackling as if a locomotive was bearing down upon us in the woods. Its motion, not dramatic, was inexorable. Relentless. Ron was fiddling with the tire iron.

                    “Finger ‘em!” I yelled and poked another nut at him. I was doing a poor job at holding the light steady.

                                       

                                                            Watch for the conclusion of “The One in the Woods” next week  in Scribe’s Corner.

PUBLSHISHED IN THE CHSIAGEO COUNTY PRESS/June 16, 1988                                                                                      

SCRIBE’S CORNER, page 3

                                                                                The One in the Woods

                                                                                  By JEFFREY B. SMITH

Part II of a two-part story.

                    Now the sound that was really terrifying me was not coming from the atrocity in the woods behind us, but instead, it was coming from Ron. He wasn’t really crying or whimpering. It was more like bawling sobs with each rapid exhalation. It was a piriful and tragic sound and ultimately more disquieting that the sound in the woods.

                    CLACKCLACKCLACKCLACKCLACK. It was deafening now.

                    We had three nuts fingered onto the lugs and the behind us sounded like some crazed Geiger counter approaching ground zero.

“Drive!” I screamed and dropped the light. By the time I reached my door he had that V-8 fired up. Before I was in my seat, he was lunging the Jeep forward. It came off the jack and there was a sickeningly shrill screech. I had my door shut but could not get settled in my seat, the truck was pitching madly. I managed one last look back and saw the flashlight shining up towards the branches and then something dark blocked it from my view.

                    Now it was Ron’s time to shine and it was a virtuoso performance. Craning forward over the steering wheel, elbows out and jacking fiercely back and forth at the wheel, nearly braining me with the lug wrench he was still clutching. He dropped it with his first upshift.

                    He punched a hole in that crummy woods. By sheer dead reckoning, he somehow had us back on the trail. Outrageous shuddering, opposite-lock powerslides and then, with full throttle blast-offs, our headlights would be illuminating naked branches against a night sky, this would be followed by full windshield vies of the ground coming up to meet us. I swear I could see every pebble.

                    Like the tools, the tapes, the empties and everything else that wasn’t bolted down, I was crashing about that cabin.  Once, after I had myself strapped in, I witnessed my feet doing a mad fandango under the dash, totally beyond my control.

                    Finally, with a series of elegant fishtails, we were thundering down the township road. Bellowing into the night, we’d swing through country crossroads and he’d be heel and toe braking, downshifting and blipping the gas like he was driving a Countach.

                    I’ve seen, and taken part in some great drives, but this display will always be outstanding It was powerful and yet sensitive, majestic, awesome and inspired. It made me want to cheer and weep. It was epic. I hope those who appreciate opera, ballet, or any form of human achievement, may have just such a performance to cherish. The ride alone would’ve made that night remarkable and we weren’t even done with the night – yet.

                    When we made the county road he stopped. Grabbing the lug wrench he said, “Gotta tighten those lugs.”

                    I joined him back here. Given all the jouncing, all the adrenalin, and not to mention, all the beer, I felt a powerful need for a different relief. He joined mat the roadside.

                    As we stood there by the ditch he said, “It was real…wasn’t it?”

                    “Yeah, it was real.” I agreed.

                    “The we both know it,” he said, “and let’s not go telling anyone about this. I don’t think no one will believe us and those that would, why hell, they won’t be the kinda folks we want to hang around with anyway.”

                    I had to admit he was right. Already, in my mind, I had begun organizing expeditions and preparing interview but now, after hearing Ron, I began to picture those sleazy tabloids at the check-out with their headline blaring things like, “I saw Elvis on a U.F. O.!” or “We Feed Bigfoot!” – I decided to keep my mouth shut. Besides, Ron lived up there.

                    Ron began to grieve for his lost “spoker” wheel. He lamented the passing of the flashlight, hatchet, and the jack especially, and vowed to retrieve them “come hunting season.”

                    We started back towards the Jeep when he stopped, pointing to the tailgate he whined, “Look at that, would ya?”

                    Two parallel scratches dug across the end gate. Beginning near the center of the window, they swiped down towards the bumper below the left rear tail light, they even etched into the glass.

                    We had come that close.

                    “Geez, now I gotta get that fixed too,“  he grumbled. Ron was beginning to get annoyed.

                    We wheeled into the parking log at Koski’s. A pickup and the flatbed remained. Silently we sat down at the bar. The darkened store was through a big doorway to our right. I could see murky rows of canned good, a row of boots on the floor and lined up like terracotta soldiers, a rack of overalls. The air was stale, with a damp subliminal Copenhagen undercurrent. The floor squeaked when anyone moved and an A.M. radio was crackling out tinny polkas, trying desperately to pick up the signal from Little Falls.

                    “Two beers please.” My voice sounded distant, disconnected.

                    Koski brought the beer and Ron stopped him.

                    “C’mon, don’t you got anything stronger than this?” Ron smiled reassuringly and tossed a crumpled ten on the bar. He had a peculiar talent for perceiving these things.

                    Koski eyed us for a few seconds, shrugged and reached under the bar. He set a nearly-full fifth of Old Log Cabin in front of us. He then snatched up the ten, stuffed in into his shirt pocket, turned and went to rejoin he friend at the end of the bar. He snapped off that irksome radio as he walked by it, the station was signing off in a sheet of static.

                    “Looks like we’re havin’ pancakes tonight,” he muttered into my ear.

                    We drained the beers and silently began drinking the warm Log Cabin from beer glasses. We stared at the back bar with it’s rows of Unbreakable Combs, greasy Slim Jims, unfortunate Blind Robins and the undisputed champion of barroom cuisine: Pickled Turkey gizzards.

                    In barroom wagers I’ve eaten them; rubbery goiters bobbing in a bilious broth. (Come to think of it, barroom wagers must constitute the majority of their sales.) They remind me of that unlucky calf fetus in the jar at the back of Biology Class. You can almost catch faint whiff of formaldehyde.

                    I had, for an instant, the image of the toothless woman conspiratorially sharing with me her secret recipe for canned suckers. I shuddered

                    A blazer pulled up at the gas pump. The driver came In to pay for the gas.

                    “Hey Buck!” he said to Koski, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Guess what, I just saw,  a bear at the 4-H wayside! A good one too.”

                    Without missing a beat, in a move that was pure Ron, he blurted, “Huh, you shoulda seen what we just seen back there in the woods.”

                    I  was stunned but had no time  to respond because that big guy in the corner was on his feet and snarling, “Why don’t you mind your own business…hippie?”

                    This guy was big malicious looking brute. Imagine a hayseed, hirsute, maniacal Merlin Olson run amok.

                    Ron tensed and slowly and deliberately turned around on his stool. He got to his feet and faced the man, I noticed he was holding on to the bottle -  he never let go of the bottle when he was drinking in public.

                    Calm, almost serene, came his reply, “I’ll decide just what business is……Hillbilly.”

                    Again silence. Again a feeling of impending doom. A quiet with the peace. A stillness that promised only damage.

                    Well. Blazer, he took a step backwards, I was aware of Buck Koski slowly slipping his hand below the bar while he began to edge towards the cash register The two men faced each other. It seemed as if giant unseen levers were ratcheting already straining coils inside each man and the next notch would explode the overwound mechanism, releasing a fast reservoir of violent destructive energies.

                    Then came a sound. Not the sound of destruction, but the sound of… salvation. A booming, clapped-out Chevy Nova came slewing into he parking lot. The unmistakable thud of Deep Purple could clearly be heard, sound to me, at that time, more like “Amazing Grace.”

                    I seized upon the minor distraction. “Mister,” I began, my voice way to shrill, “I promise you that my friend here and me didn’t see anything tonight and….if we did, I guarantee that we have forgotten it.”

                    I didn’t know what he was trying to hide; maybe a still, or a chop shop, or perhaps a pile of deer carcasses whose previous inhabitants were now employed in someone’s “Homestyle Sausage” at the local markets. Whatever it was, I felt it just couldn’t justify consummating these preliminaries.

                     I continued, “I’ll be happy to buy a round if we can just forge tit.”

                    Buck Koski slapped the bar, “There’s a winner!” he beamed, hopefully. He began to filling a pitcher for the big man.

                    Blazer mumbled something and sidled out the door. Slopping beer over the sides, Koski brought he pitcher over and set it on the guy’s table. The big man grunted and slumped down in his chair.

                    The punks form the  Nova, two scruffy guys and a forlorn, mousy looking girl, came swaggering in.

                    “Hey, this guy’s buying around!’ buck hollered to them They nodded vaguely at me and laid claim to a freebee. That’s a pretty cut-rate way of  selling a few beers I though as I paid up.

                    We hung out there a respectable amount of time, but I wanted to get out. Ron was visibly irritable. The punks were slamming out a too-noisy game of pool and Merlin Olson, over there in the corner, seemed uneasy. Finally, Ron grabbed the bottle and said, “Let’s go.” We did.

                    As I climbed in to the Jeep he said, “Hold on a minute,” and grabbed the lug wrench. Again a sinking feeling, but he just squatted beside the Nova. Soon he tossed three lug nuts in to me and started up the Jeep. He backed out and stopped behind the Nova.

                    “I forgot!” he slapped the wheel, “I need a jack.” Leaving the engine idling and his door open, he stooped over the Nova. He jammed the tire iron into the trunk and began prying mightily. With a n abbreviated groan ad s shower of rust, the trunk yielded and sprung open. He rummaged around for awhile and fished out a jack, a chain, and a star wrench. He tossed them behind his seat and climbed in.

                    “Dirty hick bumpkins,” he growled and we tore out of there.

                    Yeah, Ron could be pretty disgusting. A redneck you might say. But it was just that antisocial flair that made him interesting to be around, infrequently. We had some laughs.

                    We saw each other a few times since that night, but never discussed it much. He never did repaint that scratch on the tailgate and I was happy about that. He did replace the spoker wheel, it never did match the others and I never asked why he didn’t retrieve the original. He decided to go hunting down a Dalbo that year, something about “corn fed deer,” as I recall.

                    Anyway, he “lit out” eventually, in the direction of Gillette, I believe. Never heard form him again and, unless he makes some sort of astounding conversion, I’m confident that I never will. I hope he can find a refuge, somewhere, that can be comfortable with his particular eccentricities.

                    So I do feel some guilt when I read, or hear about someone, perhaps a hunter, disappearing or being lost up there.  I tell myself that strange things can happen when you are off your stomping grounds. Although official explanations claim the victim was unfamiliar with the region or inexperienced, I suspect otherwise.

                    I also suspect something else. Something that’s been nagging at me since that night. I believe that big grizzled man at Koski’s was guarding more than just an illicit backwoods enterprise. Call it coincidence, but I think it’s thicker. You see that night, after the confrontation, he was edgy. And he had a particularly vexing habit of clicking his nail against the table.

                                                                                                 The End

                                                          

                   

                    Jeffrey B. Smith, 33, has lived in the Chisago Lakes Area for 10 years and currently resides in Chisago City. He enjoys, ‘Hearing and telling stories, rock and roll and above all, my wife, my son and my daughter.” 

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CHISAGO COUNTY PRESS

B Section, page 1 – Thursday, October 27, 1988             

                                                                                The Shafer Slosher

                                                                               By  JEFFREY B. SMITH

                   

                    I had always wanted to believe in ghosts. I’d enjoy hearing people tell of their experiences with haunted houses, ghosts or even U.F.O.’s. But no matter how good the story, I’d end up skeptical because of the storytellers themselves. They always seemed a bit wigged-out, you know?

                    However, I now am certain that perfectly sane people have experienced ‘unexplained phenomena.” It’s just that we don’t like touting it around to the guys in the car pool or the crowd at the tavern. To dwell on these experiences too much would invite doubt about that very sanity. You see, for me, it wad a deep and intense personal experience. It shook me and changed my perception of reality, and the perception of myself.

                    Back in my hippie day I rented a run-down farmhouse out there near Shafer. I waned a place where I could raise some plants, play my guitars (loud) and generally do what I please. It lasted about four days.

                    Back in my hippie days I rented a run down farm house out there near Shafer. I wanted a place where I could raise some plants, play my records (loud) and generally do what I pleased. It lasted about 4 days.

                    One night, after working the second shift at the plant, I settled into my chair for some late night T.V. Before I had cracked open my beer I heard something upstairs. Although I had been alone up there a few minutes before there was no denying that someone, or something, was there now. A slow gritty, dusty kind of scraping sound was coming from up there. As if  a scaly something of considerable bulk was sliding along the floor. The sound stopped only to be followed by the familiar squeak of the bathtub taps being slowly opened and then, the rush of water.

                    Maybe I should’ve run but I was rooted. I sat rigid in my chair, my blind gaze was fixed on the T.V. but all my senses were trained upon the sounds above my head. I would not leave the familiar comfort of my chair to run out into the night. Nor was there any way I would go up there and pull on that light.

                    The water kept running and soon I could hear slapping-like splashing in the tub. As if something with fins, or flippers, was beginning to frolic up there. Occasionally I’d hear loud, large waves of water slop onto the floor. The slippery squeak of flesh contacting the tub surface was followed by a gush of water spraying down above me, as if something was wallowing in my tub. These deluges would be interspersed with periods of gentle, rhythmic wave-like sloshing. And above all this there were gross, sloppy, slobbering snorts and snuffles as if a giant snorkel was siphoning.

                    Well, I never saw the author of those sounds. I did not move from my chair. Not even when the water began cascading down the steps and my socks became wet. Not even when my body was shaking uncontrollably – and it wasn’t from the chill. No, I vaguely recall ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS concluding to be followed by an old movie, something about John Forsythe in a T.V. studio, I think. Then came a scratchy rendition of THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER flowed by a shrill test pattern. Then an eternity of static broken, finally, by that test pattern, and again, that pathetic version of the national anthem. I didn’t even move when a goateed professor attempted to teach me Latin. (That should’ve made anyone move out.) No, even though the noises stopped towards morning, I didn’t get up until it was broad daylight and High Downs was conducting CONCENTRATION. I stood right up and walked out to the mailbox. My hand was aching, I looked down, my unopened beer can was dimpled form my fingertips.

                    Well, I loaded up all mu possessions, except for what I left in the bathroom, (I never even looked in there – not even out of the corner of my eye.) and was out of there by sundown. Walked right out on tow months rent.

                    I moved in with a buddy in his trailer near Almelund – until his old lady kicked me out. It was nice to be able to explain all the nighttime sounds I heard there in his trailer.

                    All in all, I’m proud of myself. I sleep well. I’m not afraid of the dark. I don’t agonize over that night. I accept it as just another unexplainable event in a lifetime that is rarely defined by logic.

                    And yet, when I come home at night from those rare second shifts and I shower before bed, I still hesitate before sliding that shower curtain back.

                                                                                                The End

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