“Here I am,” says his imperative argument in an undertone, “eighty-seven frigging years old, my knees gone to hell and back, my gut talking about all the beer I’ve sailed my life across, barrels of it talking to me all at once, and this little kid out in front of my house crying his head off. This little kid, this little shaver, one of the ones we did our thing for, our future.
Continue reading “Beau Geste Murtaugh, Veteran of Wars by Tom Sheehan”
Silas Tully, enjoying early sun and early coffee, heading into another quiet and lonely day, dropped his newspaper and picked up the phone on the first ring. Old pal Jud Haley said, “Si, something screwy down here at Butch and Tony’s. I think my car’s been stolen but nobody wants to believe me. Damn it all, Si, the car they’re about to fix is not my car.”
Oracle Park has one tree. It’s a little non-fruiting cherry that seems nervous because cherry trees usually grow in numbers. They typically line parkways and chatter amongst themselves like a backstage gaggle of pink-clad chorus girls. By itself, however, a cherry tree seems fretful. Now, a lone wolf oak is expected—for it has a greedy nature that sucks up the best of the soil and hastens the death of the grass around it. But not the cherry; they are used to sharing resources as though they are swapping garters and smoking off the same cigarette. One suspects that without intervention the little cherry in Oracle Park may die of anxiety, or from overdosing on too much sunshine and minerals. If this one survives, it will most likely grow to cast an uneasy shadow.
“Hey babe, what tie should I wear with this shirt?” I asked, draping a solid pink tie and then a diagonal-striped black and blue one from the collar of my black dress shirt.
There near the edge of a cliff overlooking a broad open area of grassland outside the town of Wall, South Dakota stands Eleanor’s house. It is a huge wooden structure built in the 1940s and one of the few houses built along the ridge looking toward the Badlands and along the road leading from Wall to the Badlands National Park. It is a weather beaten house, with the remnants of the bright white paint that covered it peeling from the weather-worn wood, and a single slightly tilted chimney of red brick sticking up at mid-roof. There is a wrap around porch, the back of which I was told offers an amazing view of the pink, the beige and purple layers of the Badlands formations miles away, and the ability to see antelope, coyotes and even a few buffalo that roam freely through the tall prairie grass below in summer and a blanket of drifting snow in winter. In the front of the house, leading from the porch to the gravel path that leads from the driveway to the house is a ramp that was built to accommodate Eleanor’s husband who had, later in his years, become unable to navigate the stairs.
Three of us for dozens of years were tight as a fist. No one could break us up, and a few had tried that on a few futile occasions, even when we gentlemen were fly fishing on one or more of the local streams, dawn afloat, May alive after a harsh winter and a tough early spring. Patterns were set betwixt us, like specialties of the house or garage or personal workshop, toil and turn at obstacles and unfinished tasks were before us who by each one’s choice in life’s work had brought the gifts of ideas and applicable and talented hands to extend those gifts. For each one of us possessed odd and different talents in electrical, mechanical and brute strength applications and peculiar other interests like coin and stamp collecting, scrap book organization and minimal, but touching artwork by a loving touch, family interest passed down from a parent or an older sibling.
Crazy Ed Mahoney went out the back door on Monday to urinate in his garden. He believed, incorrectly, that he was saving on his water bill. His neighbors had given up on changing his ways. After seeing him in the act a few times, they learned not to look in the direction of his backyard at 7am, 1pm and 4pm when Ed would urinate like clockwork. Whatever else was wrong with Ed, he had an excellent prostate.
That morning, a May Saturday, when Fernando “Fred” Norstrand first put on the police uniform, solid blue deep as a line of defense, bright buttons shining gold-like running down the front straight as ideas cemented in his mind, his wife stood in the bathroom doorway in open admiration of the new spectacle. He had only recently taken off a Navy uniform, discharged from service because of injury. They loved each other that morning with a new and silent abandon, their baby son still asleep, the day already lopsided in their favor, and the man of the house about to start a new job. He had been appointed as a special policeman of the town, assigned to the lone local theater to keep the kids in line, Saturday being the toughest start of all; popcorn, noise, kids away from parental control, let loose from their homes, very different from the few homes he’d visited during Pacific duty and the home he had grown up in.
“Good luck.” Peter kisses the top of my head and walks out the door, turning his key in the lock. I sip my coffee, curled up in the leather chair by the window. Finally, the house is quiet. If I prayed anymore, I would pray. The job would mean more stability. Peter hadn’t wanted me to work when we married, but we are past that as an option. As much as I want to be excited for a new start, doubt rolls in and blankets everything. I’m not qualified for the position. I have to go through the motions to show him I’m trying. I hate wasting time. I drain the cold remnants of my cup and allow for one slow, arching stretch.
“’Don’t move’? ‘Stay put’? Best mark thy lollipop-hole, Mouthy Munchkin, lest I break a ruby slipper off in your—”
Last Words, Wicked Witch of the East (Harriet Shelby’s Epitaph)
Continue reading “The Crossed Star of Bethlehem by Irene Allison”
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