May 2007

Archive for May, 2007

Amos, Molly, and a Mayan Fertility Goddess

Posted in Amos Pepperell, Molly Pepperell on May 31, 2007| Leave a Comment »

He found Molly in the upstairs bedroom she had transformed into something she grandly called a “studio”. She spent most of her time in there these days making weird little clay figures and oil paintings of mountains with big holes in them and cornfields with razor-sharp talons for tassels that blood dripped from the end of. He wasn’t terrible fond of that room. Just this moment she was bent over the table working on the clay figure of an enormously fat woman with conical breasts twice the size of its head.

“What the hell is that?”

“What?” she asked without lifting her head from her work.

“That…thing…you’re messing with.”

“Fertility goddess,” she said, cutting a nipple into one of the cones with her Exacto knife. “Mayan.”

“Little late for a thing like that to do you any good, ain’t it?”

“Very funny. Did you want something, Amos, or did you just come up here to make what little is left of my life as miserable as possible?”

“They’re down there.”

“Who’s down where?” She was working on the vulva with intense concentration, her knife making little curvy cuts between the figure’s legs. He had to look away.

“Them surveyors from the State. I think they’re measuring the boundary between our land and the State Forest. They’re going to build that goddamn road, Molly, that’s what they’re going to do, and I think we ought to put up a fight.”

(more…)

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Amos

Posted in Amos Pepperell on May 30, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Amos Pepperell stood on the brow of the ridge overlooking his north field at the two men with the transit. He knew why they were there, so he scowled at them. “Bastards.”

Across the field from them, behind some bushes, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye, then a glint of reflection from glass. Someone else was watching them, apparently through binoculars, and hiding. Amos chuckled. He could pretty well guess who that was: Juliette Rose. Of course she would be tracking them, probably taking pictures for the Wilbur Snoop. Annie liked to have pictures for the front page.

Amos turned back down the ridge toward the hollow where his house anchored the shore of a small but lively stream. It wasn’t very deep, that stream, but it burbled and giggled and bounced over the rocks of its bed like a kid playing cowboys and Indians on his birthday. Amos dearly loved that stream, and it hurt him like a tumor to know that it would be destroyed when they built that goddamn road. Might be it was time for him and Juliette Rose to have a little talk.

Mostly he had little truck with Juliette. A beautiful woman, no question, but a king-size pain-in-the-ass, too. An activist, one of those do-gooders who ran around trying to fix what sensible folk knew couldn’t be fixed. Usually they caused more trouble than they were worth but there were times – and this looked like being one of them – when they could come in mighty handy. Might be he ought to wander over to the Wilbur General Store some one of these afternoons when he knew she hung out there and mention the possibility of working together. Damned if he’d just sit back and watch it happen.

Course, there was the money to consider. The State had offered a nice price for his land, more than fair, and he was getting on – 78 his next birthday. Time he started thinking about protecting his future, his and Molly’s, something to cushion their retirement when it came time to quit, say in another ten years or so when he couldn’t work the farm no more. A little extra cash – a lot extra, actually – would be useful about then. Maybe they could even go to Florida where it was warm all the time, so they said. He’d never been to Florida.

Speaking of Molly, might be he ought to mention what he was thinking to her. She’d probably have a thing or two to say about it, but he wasn’t going to let her talk him out of it this time. His mind was set. The State was going to get a fight this time and that’s all there was to it.

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In the Bushes

Posted in Juliette Rose, Robert Pepperell, Jr on May 29, 2007| Leave a Comment »

In the undergrowth down by the Brewer’s River, Juliette Rose was hunkered face-down with her camera lens sticking through a fiddlehead fern as she took surreptitious pictures of two guys, a length of tape, and what looked like a telescope. You may be asking yourself why. Certainly the young man hunkered next to her was.

“What are we doing here?” he whispered.

“Gathering evidence,” Juliette whispered back. “Sshh.”

There was a silence before the next question occurred to him. “Evidence of what?”

Juliette took her face away from the camera just long enough to glare. “Sshh,” she said fiercely. “You want them to know we’re here?”

Again there was a silence. The young man, whose name was Robert, did not have the kind of brain that struck like lightning but the kind of brain that would remain after it had been struck by lightning. Still, though its wheels ground slowly, they ground exceeding fine. “Why shouldn’t they? It’s not illegal to take pictures.”

Juliette considered Robert’s skull and wondered idly exactly how many foot-pounds of torque she would have to exert to depress it precisely one-half inch and if this was the moment for the experiment to begin. “Shut…Up,” she hissed. At least she hissed the first word (“up” is kind of a hard word to hiss) but her meaning was clear enough.

Robert shut up. He might have been a little too solid above the neck for genius or even competence but he wasn’t stupid. Juliette was the loveliest woman he had ever known but that lithe little body hid a left hook with the kick of a seriously pissed-off Missouri mule and he had no particular desire to become its target, not this afternoon anyway. It was not a good day to die. Or get conked.

(more…)

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In the Road

Posted in Cas Girard, Nikki Malone on May 28, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Cas stood in front of the Band House with the pack hanging from his shoulder. He had come on an impulse originating from no known source two days ago after a chance meeting with Nikki on the street the week before and a casual invitation she probably forgot about three seconds after it was out of her mouth. It was just now dawning on him, as he stood on the road in front of the house, that an open-handed welcome was far from certain.

He hadn’t really known Nikki in high school. It was more like he’d known of her. They ran in different circles, Nikki with the freaks and Cas in his own, solitary, one-man merry-go-round. She hadn’t even recognized him the other day, he saw now as he thought back on it, and her invitation to visit was more carelessly thrown off than the typical “We must get together one of these days” you get from a Charleston Junior Leaguer who would drop dead of shock if you actually showed up. Of course she hadn’t meant it. What made him think she had?

Another monumentally asinine decision. As if he hadn’t made enough of those for four or five normal lifetimes. Was he going for a record?

He was just about to shoulder his pack and start back down the mountain when three new thoughts struck him: it would be dark soon, he was fifteen miles from the nearest motel and a hundred from his apartment, and he didn’t have any money.

“Oh, shit,” he said, stabbing a toe in the sand next to the road. His friends would think he was crazy.

If he had friends.

If they could think.

Frozen with embarrassment and confusion, he might have stood there all night for lack of a viable option but he was saved when the front door opened and Nikki appeared behind the screen.

“Cas?”

She was the most beautiful girl he had ever almost sort-of known, and even with a screen in front of her she was like something out of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Shortish, blonde, with a charmingly pug nose and a body built for comfort and soft in all the right places without over-doing it, Nikki was the kind you dreamed about when you really dared to dream big.

“Cas? That you?” She swung open the screen door and stepped out onto the front porch. “I’ll be damned. Well, don’t just stand there, come on in.”

Gripping his heart in a hammerlock, he did.

And so it began.

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George

Posted in Cas Girard, George Henderson on May 27, 2007| Leave a Comment »

George Henderson, 60, single and free-wheeling as a loose gyroscope, barreled up the same road a little later in a truck that had seen its better days many days ago but refused to die out of sheer stubbornness, not a little like George himself. It huffed, it wheezed, it threw bales of black smoke from out its tailpipe and made noises with its engine that suggested Armageddon was just around the corner. It was a truck that would have been comfortable with the fiery end of the world, feeling that it had found its home at last. George loved that truck. Mostly he liked to drive it down the road at night without lights or brakes (neither worked), accelerator pushed to the floor. He said it made him feel alive.

George was a consultant, and consequently not all there.

This particular afternoon George was on his way home from a consulting gig during which he had told the CEO of a large insurance company to lighten up enough to stop and smell the flowers.

“What flowers?” the executive had asked.

“Any flowers,” George replied.

“Roses? Can I smell roses? I used to like roses.”

“Sure. Go smell roses. Roses are good.”

“Or maybe I should smell gladiolas. Maybe that would be better. My mother likes gladiolas.”

“Gladiolas are fine. Anything. The point is–”

A junior exec wanna-be with a sense of humor uncharacteristic of the breed interrupted, “Might I suggest chrysanthemums, sir? The market is very big in chrysanthemums just now.”

“Is it?” the CEO said thoughtfully.

“Up three points just this afternoon, sir.”

But the CEO found in very short order that he couldn’t pronounce “chrysanthemums” with any reliable expectation of success and went back to roses. George, sick of the whole discussion, finally took the CEO aside.

“I’m going to let you in on a secret very few people know,” he whispered in the Chairman’s ear. “Rose thorns have shown a great ability to heal the deepest psychic wounds when shoved so deep inside the nose that they puncture the nasal cavity.”

“Really?” the CEO answered, and turned to his secretary…um, sorry, assistant. “Make a note of that,” he said without visible irony. Solemnly, efficiently, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary routine of an executive secretary, she did.

Fifteen minutes later that same powerful corporate officer handed George a check with quite a few zeros on it considering it was for only a couple of hours’ work and slapped him on the back. “Best investment I ever made,” he said. “Since I hired you our stock has risen thirteen per cent. Keep it up.” George put the check in his pocket and thought again what a wonderful country it was that would allow loonies like this to run huge corporations.

(more…)

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Arrival

Posted in Brother Armitage, Cas Girard on May 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »

On the way up the hill he saw a monk in full costume standing in a rowboat scattering chunks of bread on the still water of a pond. The monk, who was dressed in a long brown burlap robe tied around the waist by what looked like a frayed electrical cord, was a short, fat, bald man with rimless spectacles and a smile as goofy as a five-year-old with a puppy. Cas didn’t know what to make of it, but then Cas didn’t know what to make of much of anything these days and so he closed his eyes and walked on by. It might have been a hallucination or a dream or a miracle, or it might have been real. Cas was having a hard time telling the difference. He was unripe, you might say, a green snigger on the tail of a dying star, and his world was ending when strictly and technically speaking it hadn’t really started. That kind of thing is bound to depress a person. It gives one an overwhelming urge to approach perfect strangers and ask in a quivering voice “Are you God?” prepared to believe any answer they give you. Or at least that’s how it affected Cas.

Which helps explain (though not really) what he was doing on a long, winding road to the summit of a Berkshire mountain on which a small town called Wilbur sat like a cat dozing in the sun with one eye cracked for attacking butterflies: some insane belief that he could hide there from the voices in his head and the doubts in his heart. Not very smart, since everybody knows the worst place in the world to hide from Those Things is in a slow, tiny, unemployed town full of people who have nothing better to do than devote their lives to digging out Those Things and parading them down Main Street during Old Home Days for the general amusement of the idle. Of course, the answer to the riddle is obvious – Cas wasn’t very smart. Not yet, anyway.

Or very observant. For instance, he completely missed the phaser stare with which the monk followed him as he walked away up the road, a stare that could have melted glass, a stare that saw everything or nothing and understood how little difference there was between them, the kind of stare that was hard to miss even when it came from behind. Cas, dulled by confusion, missed it anyway. Good thing, too.

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