Mike Sutton's Blog: For prose apply within., page 4
March 30, 2011
The Healer
A number was scrawled in gold ink on the small slip of paper that the gloved hand slid across the table. A one with a half dozen zeros trailing behind. Two commas, no dots. This number, it represented six tenths of his liquid assets. Over half of what he had in the bank.
Hugh sat quietly and licked his lips for a moment. “that is a lot of money you're demanding of us.” His wife wailed. The Healer only shrugged. Was that a shrug? Perhaps it was laughing silently. His fist clenched around the slip of paper and he started to sputter. “Blackmail. Just because you think that we can afford it, you're gouging us...” His wife's keening grew louder bringing him up short. It was a lot of money, but what it would buy was worth the price. Even for twice that sum. “You'll get your money.” He whispered. His head fell into his hands and he began to sob.
The small, shrouded form sitting at the table across from him nodded and slid over a file. Hugh didn't read it. He just opened the file and signed on the dotted line and slid the packet of papers back over to the Psychic. He knew what he was getting into, he had done his research on the freak of nature that sat before him.
Relief and anger mixed. The Healer. Hugh had read all about the creature sitting across from him. He had spent dozens of hours in research before entering his plea. Nobody had seen Its face. Never. Was the Healer a man or woman? The color of its skin and hair? Nobody knew. Did it have hair. There were some, at the very fringe, who said that the Healer was from a different galaxy and had set down on our lonely backwater for reasons of its own. All that they knew for certain was that the Healer was small, about the size of a child. That didn't seem to make any of this better.
Many millions believed IT to be the second coming of Christ. Only twisted to reflect a world so focused on the material and driven by greed. Some of the world's churches had embraced the enigma wrapped in the black robes, and taught that this was Christ's new teachings, to trade services for money. Greed was the new Love. The Healer could command millions from Its patrons, and often did.
The rest of humanity's self-described Shepherds had denounced the creature. Though only after IT had turned away from their embrace. They called the Healer the Devil Incarnate.
And they were all right. As far as Hugh could tell.
The Healer would charge what the market could bear. For some the fee was as simple as a meal. For those like him, the cost was much IT required vast wealth. No matter, the price was always dear.
None of this mattered to him as he ordered the check to be drawn. What mattered was that IT was The Healer. IT could mend broken bodies and nurse the barest spark of life back to a blazing bonfire once more. And if IT didn't? No, that wasn't an option. Not for one million dollars it wasn't.
Hugh sat quietly and licked his lips for a moment. “that is a lot of money you're demanding of us.” His wife wailed. The Healer only shrugged. Was that a shrug? Perhaps it was laughing silently. His fist clenched around the slip of paper and he started to sputter. “Blackmail. Just because you think that we can afford it, you're gouging us...” His wife's keening grew louder bringing him up short. It was a lot of money, but what it would buy was worth the price. Even for twice that sum. “You'll get your money.” He whispered. His head fell into his hands and he began to sob.
The small, shrouded form sitting at the table across from him nodded and slid over a file. Hugh didn't read it. He just opened the file and signed on the dotted line and slid the packet of papers back over to the Psychic. He knew what he was getting into, he had done his research on the freak of nature that sat before him.
Relief and anger mixed. The Healer. Hugh had read all about the creature sitting across from him. He had spent dozens of hours in research before entering his plea. Nobody had seen Its face. Never. Was the Healer a man or woman? The color of its skin and hair? Nobody knew. Did it have hair. There were some, at the very fringe, who said that the Healer was from a different galaxy and had set down on our lonely backwater for reasons of its own. All that they knew for certain was that the Healer was small, about the size of a child. That didn't seem to make any of this better.
Many millions believed IT to be the second coming of Christ. Only twisted to reflect a world so focused on the material and driven by greed. Some of the world's churches had embraced the enigma wrapped in the black robes, and taught that this was Christ's new teachings, to trade services for money. Greed was the new Love. The Healer could command millions from Its patrons, and often did.
The rest of humanity's self-described Shepherds had denounced the creature. Though only after IT had turned away from their embrace. They called the Healer the Devil Incarnate.
And they were all right. As far as Hugh could tell.
The Healer would charge what the market could bear. For some the fee was as simple as a meal. For those like him, the cost was much IT required vast wealth. No matter, the price was always dear.
None of this mattered to him as he ordered the check to be drawn. What mattered was that IT was The Healer. IT could mend broken bodies and nurse the barest spark of life back to a blazing bonfire once more. And if IT didn't? No, that wasn't an option. Not for one million dollars it wasn't.
March 22, 2011
Last charge of the 8legs brigade
It had a deathwish. Must of. Else it wouldn't have come back.
All told the spider was about the size of one of my fingernails, one of those jumping spiders with the freakishly long forelegs. Capable of launching itself forward, several times its own body-length when prey is found. Not big, but huge for a jumping spider here-abouts. Hell, pretty big for any spider here abouts.
Not a bad boy like a tarantula, one of those big hairy jobs the size of small dogs that roam the countryside from Arizona to the southernmost tip of the Amazon rain-forest. The kind of nightmare-arachnid that aunts the recesses of our mind. With those long legs that move so steadily and carefully.
Only two or three poisonous spiders make their home within the borders of the United States, and most of those keep well out of the northern climes where I tend to make my own home (not a coincidence that).
I was reclining, and reading a book, as I often do. When there it was, strolling merrily across my chest. Sightseeing. And this is the spot of spaghetti sauce that won't ever come out. And on your right is a rather noticeable hole. He seemed to be having a grand old time.
Until I noticed him.
Right then and there, I invented a new word. A masterful weaving of vowels, jumbling them all together in a crumpled bit of string while skipping by the consonants. The word, or maybe phrase, doesn't translate well into English and is difficult to define in any language. The word exists, completely without context, standing on its own, like the name of an Elder God. Only to be summoned again when the moons of Jupiter align, or something primitive and hair appears on one's person rather suddenly.
My hand acted on its own accord, and the spider went flying, landing about two feet away as I arched my back as if in either the throws of ecstasy or agony, as my ass tried to escape into orbit.
He, or she, or maybe it, just stared at me for several long moments, observing my reaction, measuring my soul and placing it on the scales of balance to see how I stacked up to the rest of humanity. That was before I found something to sweep it away. Further away.
Spiders are helpful creatures. They feed on insects, which can also be helpful, thus making spiders slightly less I'm a little confused in that respect, but unless they're the brown hairy variety I tend to let them go on about their business. For those that fall within the latter category, I keep a copy of the novel “The Baker's Boy” on hand to strike them down on first glimpse, wielding the block of wood pulp like Mjollnir the Hammer of Thor.
They might be a common house spider, or the dreaded Brown Recluse. I'll never know, because sorting crushed carcases out in genus and class is rather a difficult task. I know this because I've employed Arachnids Bane profitably on several occasions prior, most notably when one of those swift footed brownies came running down my wall, while I was reading oddly enough, and then just stopped. I squealed and abandoned the field, only to return with my secret weapon.
Arrogant bastard didn't move. As Captain Obvious, I feel that it is my duty to point out that it is the last mistake is always the one that gets you in the end. A pity I was too late for Hairy McWolfspider.
BLAM! The little grubber disappeared into the nether-realm, which I found out later, much to my great surprise, was actually my rust colored shag carpet. Does that make me some sort of speciesiest? Was this the spider equivalent of Rosa Parks? Standing up against a million years of human oppression, where our species dared to tell them where they could walk! A one arachnid protest against our insane homicidal rages and countless centuries of pointless genocide! Spider-Power!
So I let the little guy live. Why not? Go eat bugs my friend. And don't walk across my person. We're cool. I'll be sitting here, doing my thing, and you go off and be a spider and what-ever.
That was it and all. I went back to reading my book.
That wasn't all.
I don't know what flickers through the neuron paths of a spider. Certainly they aren't the brightest bulbs on the tree, though they seem to outshine Biblical Literalists by a few dozen watts. There can't be much going on behind the eyes. Just saying, they don't seem to be overly introspective creatures who live the examined life.
They seem to just live on a whim.
All of a sudden, upon the pages of the sixth volume of Jordan, there was a large gray spider leaping about like a five year old on speed. Have you seen a Daffy Duck cartoon? It was a lot like that. The little bastard even had the 'woohoos' down pat. Was it a celebration? I don't know. I was too busy throwing my book to stand by and watch.
This time I was articulate in my mother language. And without running on forever. I limited myself to a word. Fuck. It's a wonderful all purpose device that encompasses both the good and bad in life. Here you're getting laid, there the girl's biker boyfriend is knocking your teeth in. The word is wonderfully context based, switching meanings to fill in those awkward chinks in one's vocabulary.
There was no sign of the trespasser when I picked up the door-stopper of a novel. Until I tapped it on the floor to loosen any debris, and out it popped, dropping to the carpet.
He actually had the audacity to sit and stare at me. Like he was taunting me. Two – four – six – eight – gotta stop the arachnid hate!
“That's right bitch, I just came back.” He might have said as I set my book aside. “You scream like a little girl. Who's your daddy? You punk. Yeah.” I flicked him across the room.
For several long minutes I thought about letting him go. Certainly there wouldn't be a third encounter. Unimaginable. But then, there shouldn't have been a second meeting. The little bastard was messing with me.
He landed in a corner, and was still there when I returned and invited him into my literary circle by giving him my impression of the Baker's Boy.
All told the spider was about the size of one of my fingernails, one of those jumping spiders with the freakishly long forelegs. Capable of launching itself forward, several times its own body-length when prey is found. Not big, but huge for a jumping spider here-abouts. Hell, pretty big for any spider here abouts.
Not a bad boy like a tarantula, one of those big hairy jobs the size of small dogs that roam the countryside from Arizona to the southernmost tip of the Amazon rain-forest. The kind of nightmare-arachnid that aunts the recesses of our mind. With those long legs that move so steadily and carefully.
Only two or three poisonous spiders make their home within the borders of the United States, and most of those keep well out of the northern climes where I tend to make my own home (not a coincidence that).
I was reclining, and reading a book, as I often do. When there it was, strolling merrily across my chest. Sightseeing. And this is the spot of spaghetti sauce that won't ever come out. And on your right is a rather noticeable hole. He seemed to be having a grand old time.
Until I noticed him.
Right then and there, I invented a new word. A masterful weaving of vowels, jumbling them all together in a crumpled bit of string while skipping by the consonants. The word, or maybe phrase, doesn't translate well into English and is difficult to define in any language. The word exists, completely without context, standing on its own, like the name of an Elder God. Only to be summoned again when the moons of Jupiter align, or something primitive and hair appears on one's person rather suddenly.
My hand acted on its own accord, and the spider went flying, landing about two feet away as I arched my back as if in either the throws of ecstasy or agony, as my ass tried to escape into orbit.
He, or she, or maybe it, just stared at me for several long moments, observing my reaction, measuring my soul and placing it on the scales of balance to see how I stacked up to the rest of humanity. That was before I found something to sweep it away. Further away.
Spiders are helpful creatures. They feed on insects, which can also be helpful, thus making spiders slightly less I'm a little confused in that respect, but unless they're the brown hairy variety I tend to let them go on about their business. For those that fall within the latter category, I keep a copy of the novel “The Baker's Boy” on hand to strike them down on first glimpse, wielding the block of wood pulp like Mjollnir the Hammer of Thor.
They might be a common house spider, or the dreaded Brown Recluse. I'll never know, because sorting crushed carcases out in genus and class is rather a difficult task. I know this because I've employed Arachnids Bane profitably on several occasions prior, most notably when one of those swift footed brownies came running down my wall, while I was reading oddly enough, and then just stopped. I squealed and abandoned the field, only to return with my secret weapon.
Arrogant bastard didn't move. As Captain Obvious, I feel that it is my duty to point out that it is the last mistake is always the one that gets you in the end. A pity I was too late for Hairy McWolfspider.
BLAM! The little grubber disappeared into the nether-realm, which I found out later, much to my great surprise, was actually my rust colored shag carpet. Does that make me some sort of speciesiest? Was this the spider equivalent of Rosa Parks? Standing up against a million years of human oppression, where our species dared to tell them where they could walk! A one arachnid protest against our insane homicidal rages and countless centuries of pointless genocide! Spider-Power!
So I let the little guy live. Why not? Go eat bugs my friend. And don't walk across my person. We're cool. I'll be sitting here, doing my thing, and you go off and be a spider and what-ever.
That was it and all. I went back to reading my book.
That wasn't all.
I don't know what flickers through the neuron paths of a spider. Certainly they aren't the brightest bulbs on the tree, though they seem to outshine Biblical Literalists by a few dozen watts. There can't be much going on behind the eyes. Just saying, they don't seem to be overly introspective creatures who live the examined life.
They seem to just live on a whim.
All of a sudden, upon the pages of the sixth volume of Jordan, there was a large gray spider leaping about like a five year old on speed. Have you seen a Daffy Duck cartoon? It was a lot like that. The little bastard even had the 'woohoos' down pat. Was it a celebration? I don't know. I was too busy throwing my book to stand by and watch.
This time I was articulate in my mother language. And without running on forever. I limited myself to a word. Fuck. It's a wonderful all purpose device that encompasses both the good and bad in life. Here you're getting laid, there the girl's biker boyfriend is knocking your teeth in. The word is wonderfully context based, switching meanings to fill in those awkward chinks in one's vocabulary.
There was no sign of the trespasser when I picked up the door-stopper of a novel. Until I tapped it on the floor to loosen any debris, and out it popped, dropping to the carpet.
He actually had the audacity to sit and stare at me. Like he was taunting me. Two – four – six – eight – gotta stop the arachnid hate!
“That's right bitch, I just came back.” He might have said as I set my book aside. “You scream like a little girl. Who's your daddy? You punk. Yeah.” I flicked him across the room.
For several long minutes I thought about letting him go. Certainly there wouldn't be a third encounter. Unimaginable. But then, there shouldn't have been a second meeting. The little bastard was messing with me.
He landed in a corner, and was still there when I returned and invited him into my literary circle by giving him my impression of the Baker's Boy.
March 13, 2011
Salmon Fishing on the Kenai
The three pairs of hip-waiters made a special style of music as the men wearing them slumped along the trail along the edge of the river bank. Slush-clump. The boots might have been the rhythm section of some funky new orchestra. Slush-clump. While the river drove along, forcing through a melody.
The kid nearly felt like snapping his fingers along with the tune that only he seemed to be able to hear as he raced to catch up with his father and their friend Steve. Slush-clump, clump, clump. And there went the rhythm, shattered by an act of pointless haste. The kid knew where they were all going, no point in running there. Three miles along a backwoods trail made for a long walk and running would only make things worse as he stumbled over roots and rocks as his fishing rod got caught on branches.
Watch the ground, watch the sky, watch for animals as they walk or lie.
The world around him was too busy as the flies followed him like a cloud of steamy breath on a icy winter day. Just one more distraction between the kid and the roots, rocks and bears that threatened to reach up and grab him. Three miles was a long damn way to walk.
The father and Steve stopped at a nice overlook for a moment to wait for the kid to catch back up.
"There's a couple of em right now." Steve said, pointing vaguely at a spot in the river that only looked like a swirling blur of blue-green water to the kid. His eyes had been growing worse over the last few months. He of course had failed to mention the change. "Do you see them this time?" The kid admitted that he didn't and Steve climbed down the bank and waded out into the turquoise current. With a flick of his wrist and a wave of his arm he dragged a rather surprised sockeye salmon out of the icy embrace of the Alaskan river and onto the bank. His was a special gift. He seemed to possess a strange sixth sense for locating fish, a talent he would often show off.
Steven loved to find a group of strangers, people who looked like they had been in a spot damn near the entire day. People who weren't having so much as a smidgeon of luck. Steve would stop, wade in, and in minutes he would pull out a salmon. Usually he just released it and then kept on walking. Smiling as his hosts cursed and scrambled as they tried to figure out how he had done it.
"A little gamey isn't it?" The boy's father asked as Steve held up the five pounds of living rot. The red salmon was already well into it's fresh water change that came with the end of its short existence as its body turned, well, red. A bright firetruck red, with a green snout. The first was unsavory and effectively a member of the walking dead.
Steve released the fish it back into the river. They state had imposed a three Sockeye per person per day limit all along the river for the season. Steve didn't want to waste a single slot on a fish that was so unsavory.
"Well, at least we know that they're still running." He said as he fastened the hook back onto one of the eyes of his fishing rod and scrambled back up the bank. "Even if that one was a fair bit on the gamey side of things."
"Enough of this, our spot is just a little farther on." The father said, and marking his words, he set off further down the trail, changing the rhythm yet again. Steve and the kid jogged to catch up. The kid lost himself in the dance again, evading rocks and fanning away the clouds of flies. Watch for bears and moose. Slush-clump.
They halted.
"Here we are." The father said with a grin that could be called boyish as he stated the obvious. Their favorite little spot on the river. The three men dropped their packs and took a seat on a log that had a decade or more before been a sizable cottonwood tree. There was nothing to say or do really, they just enjoyed the view for a few minutes after the long hike. The view alone was worth it. Three hours of driving followed by three miles of hiking.
The river like the lake that fed it, was a shade of blue, or maybe green, that changed before the eye as it rolled over the valley floor. The water looked so inviting on a warm and sunny day. Until you dipped in so much as the toenail on your smallest digit. After you recoiled in a mixture of fear, shock and pain, the illusion would melt away with than the glacial ice that fed the river.
A small island that was packed with trees breached the current about fifteen or so feet from the far bank. The island was a verdant speck in the middle of the channel. It was about fifty feet wide and a hundred or so long and cleaved the river like the wing of an aircraft. In a summer that was either abnormally wet or hot the river would easily swallow the little ribbon of land. The kid loved to explore the tiny isle, stomping up and down it's insignificant length and width, poking and prodding at the river in search for easier prey.
Off in the distance, a hundred miles or more. A line of mountains were painted into the background. They were framed by the forrest and the sky, with big white clouds drifting through the light blue . The kid found it so very easy just to sit and admire the scenery for hours at a time. It was one of those days that would make an entire trip worth all the time and money for travelers and sightseers from afar off.
Now though there was work to be done. The kid picked up his fishing rod and waded out into the current, unhooking the long colorful coho fly from one of the eyes on the rod and letting it swing loose.. The general technique was simple and easy to get a hang of. You cast the line upstream and then let it drift along the bottom with the current, reeling the line to take up the slack. You could feel the fly bouncing on the bottom of the river. When it stopped, you set the hook.
The kid found a spot on a exposed ridge of smooth river-stones and sat down. Time passed, as he enjoyed the sun, wind and repetition of the work. Cast-drift-reel was his new rhythm, replacing the slush-clump of his stomping boots.
Boom. His first hit of the day. The kid leaped to his feet as the line raced down river. The fish at the other end must have been as surprised as the kid himself by the suddenness of the hook appearing in its mouth. The kid then did as he was taught. Pull back on the rod and drag the fish forward, release and take up the slack. Repeat.
For five minutes he battled the mighty coho and then it was gone.
"Looks like you lost it." Steve said as the kid reeled in his empty line. "Don't worry, that one was really starting to turn, you wouldn't have wanted to keep it anyways." The kid sat back down.
A hundred casts with a hundred misses later and the kid was feeling restless. The island was calling to him. Come explore me, it was saying. He decided to listen and follow. Using the pole as a probe, he made his way across the river one step at a time, trying to avoid the holes and a quick slip into a cold bath. With a few creative steps and a vague clue how he was going to get back across, the kid took his first step onto the island.
He felt like a polar bear version of Tom Sawyer as he slogged along the length of the island following a muddy path that ran the length. An inept Tom Sawyer without the innate raft building skills. The little island was a disappointment, it merely looked like the rest of the forrest. The only high point was when he reached the far end. There he found a pool of deep water where a giant trout was hiding from the day. Later he would claim that the fish was at least the size of his leg. Maybe he wasn't very far off. Or maybe the water exaggerated the true size of the fish for him.
With another corner of the world explored and conquered, the kid headed back as a hero.
"Ready for lunch?" The father asked as the kid pulled himself up to the top of the bank.
"Sure. I'll take ham if any are left." A joke. They only had ham. They only ever brought ham. Ham sandwiches and the fudge striped cookies by Keebler. Sort of a tradition going back the breadth of a few years, started one after a successful day of ice fishing and carried on to that very day. The two of them sat down on the bank and ate in silence as they watched Steve slowly work an eddy. With the kind of lazy patience of a man who had already already finished his work for the day, so everything else afterwards was just for fun.
A grunting sound was coming from behind them. The kid turned around and peered into the brush as he tried to locate the source of the strange noise. It sounded similar to the noise that a hog might make, but so far as he knew there weren't any hogs living feral in the entire state.
"Dad, what was that sound?"
"You heard it too?"
"Of course I heard it. Do you know what it was?"
"That was a bear."
"What?"
"A bear, they're all over the place here. You're lucky that you didn't run into one while you were playing on the island."
"A bear?"
"Yep."
The kid fell silent, and went back to listening to the river as he watched twelve different directions at once for any more unexpected and unwelcome visitors. He had never given bears much thought, sure he had watched out for them, should one have stumbled across the path in front of him, but they were sort of abstract. Bears in his mind were sort of like the Soviets across the Bearing Straight. They were supposed to be dangerous, he heard all about them, but he had never actually seen one up close. The kid tried to stay calm like his father. Nothing to worry about. Animals wouldn't bother you if you didn't bother them. He tried holding onto that thought like a prayer. He wouldn't bother nothing.
That was when Steve started yelling, "Ya bear! Ya bear! Git! Git outta here bear!"
"What was that?" The kid squeaked.
"A bear just came out of the woods in front of me. He was going to climb down in the river. Took off when he heard me though." Steve said as his line drifted down stream between casts. He took a step up river and pulled his line back in, snapped it back, and placed it into the river once again.
"I'm ready to go."
"What?"
"Now. Lets, up and move back toward that direction with the camper and the food and where the bears aren't so much at." He started babbling as he packed his gear and made wild gestures with his arms back towards the direction of their camp. The general and inescapable point was that he was ready to get out of there immediately.
"Well Steve, are you ready to get out of here?"
"Sure. We can head back up toward the lodge and get dinner, and maybe hit Quartz for a while."
"Good idea. It's been a long time since we picked out some Dollys."
"Well, good luck with that. They upped the size restrictions for the fish to twenty-four inches. So it's likely we won't be keeping anything we catch. Still, I hear that the population has come back with a vengeance."
"Oh well. It isn't about the keeping." The father said as he shouldered his pack and headed back towards the campground. The kid followed, watching the brush closely, more closely than he should have, as he stumbled along at his his father's heels. Sometimes on his father's heels. The peculiar sound of the hip-waiters forgotten.
Three miles down and three miles back, with hours wading in the river between the two hikes. Each step was agony by the time the kid made it back to their camping spot. His boots flew off in two different directions as he sat down at the picnic table. There would be no more fishing that day. Only dinner and then rest. All in all, it had been a good day.
The kid nearly felt like snapping his fingers along with the tune that only he seemed to be able to hear as he raced to catch up with his father and their friend Steve. Slush-clump, clump, clump. And there went the rhythm, shattered by an act of pointless haste. The kid knew where they were all going, no point in running there. Three miles along a backwoods trail made for a long walk and running would only make things worse as he stumbled over roots and rocks as his fishing rod got caught on branches.
Watch the ground, watch the sky, watch for animals as they walk or lie.
The world around him was too busy as the flies followed him like a cloud of steamy breath on a icy winter day. Just one more distraction between the kid and the roots, rocks and bears that threatened to reach up and grab him. Three miles was a long damn way to walk.
The father and Steve stopped at a nice overlook for a moment to wait for the kid to catch back up.
"There's a couple of em right now." Steve said, pointing vaguely at a spot in the river that only looked like a swirling blur of blue-green water to the kid. His eyes had been growing worse over the last few months. He of course had failed to mention the change. "Do you see them this time?" The kid admitted that he didn't and Steve climbed down the bank and waded out into the turquoise current. With a flick of his wrist and a wave of his arm he dragged a rather surprised sockeye salmon out of the icy embrace of the Alaskan river and onto the bank. His was a special gift. He seemed to possess a strange sixth sense for locating fish, a talent he would often show off.
Steven loved to find a group of strangers, people who looked like they had been in a spot damn near the entire day. People who weren't having so much as a smidgeon of luck. Steve would stop, wade in, and in minutes he would pull out a salmon. Usually he just released it and then kept on walking. Smiling as his hosts cursed and scrambled as they tried to figure out how he had done it.
"A little gamey isn't it?" The boy's father asked as Steve held up the five pounds of living rot. The red salmon was already well into it's fresh water change that came with the end of its short existence as its body turned, well, red. A bright firetruck red, with a green snout. The first was unsavory and effectively a member of the walking dead.
Steve released the fish it back into the river. They state had imposed a three Sockeye per person per day limit all along the river for the season. Steve didn't want to waste a single slot on a fish that was so unsavory.
"Well, at least we know that they're still running." He said as he fastened the hook back onto one of the eyes of his fishing rod and scrambled back up the bank. "Even if that one was a fair bit on the gamey side of things."
"Enough of this, our spot is just a little farther on." The father said, and marking his words, he set off further down the trail, changing the rhythm yet again. Steve and the kid jogged to catch up. The kid lost himself in the dance again, evading rocks and fanning away the clouds of flies. Watch for bears and moose. Slush-clump.
They halted.
"Here we are." The father said with a grin that could be called boyish as he stated the obvious. Their favorite little spot on the river. The three men dropped their packs and took a seat on a log that had a decade or more before been a sizable cottonwood tree. There was nothing to say or do really, they just enjoyed the view for a few minutes after the long hike. The view alone was worth it. Three hours of driving followed by three miles of hiking.
The river like the lake that fed it, was a shade of blue, or maybe green, that changed before the eye as it rolled over the valley floor. The water looked so inviting on a warm and sunny day. Until you dipped in so much as the toenail on your smallest digit. After you recoiled in a mixture of fear, shock and pain, the illusion would melt away with than the glacial ice that fed the river.
A small island that was packed with trees breached the current about fifteen or so feet from the far bank. The island was a verdant speck in the middle of the channel. It was about fifty feet wide and a hundred or so long and cleaved the river like the wing of an aircraft. In a summer that was either abnormally wet or hot the river would easily swallow the little ribbon of land. The kid loved to explore the tiny isle, stomping up and down it's insignificant length and width, poking and prodding at the river in search for easier prey.
Off in the distance, a hundred miles or more. A line of mountains were painted into the background. They were framed by the forrest and the sky, with big white clouds drifting through the light blue . The kid found it so very easy just to sit and admire the scenery for hours at a time. It was one of those days that would make an entire trip worth all the time and money for travelers and sightseers from afar off.
Now though there was work to be done. The kid picked up his fishing rod and waded out into the current, unhooking the long colorful coho fly from one of the eyes on the rod and letting it swing loose.. The general technique was simple and easy to get a hang of. You cast the line upstream and then let it drift along the bottom with the current, reeling the line to take up the slack. You could feel the fly bouncing on the bottom of the river. When it stopped, you set the hook.
The kid found a spot on a exposed ridge of smooth river-stones and sat down. Time passed, as he enjoyed the sun, wind and repetition of the work. Cast-drift-reel was his new rhythm, replacing the slush-clump of his stomping boots.
Boom. His first hit of the day. The kid leaped to his feet as the line raced down river. The fish at the other end must have been as surprised as the kid himself by the suddenness of the hook appearing in its mouth. The kid then did as he was taught. Pull back on the rod and drag the fish forward, release and take up the slack. Repeat.
For five minutes he battled the mighty coho and then it was gone.
"Looks like you lost it." Steve said as the kid reeled in his empty line. "Don't worry, that one was really starting to turn, you wouldn't have wanted to keep it anyways." The kid sat back down.
A hundred casts with a hundred misses later and the kid was feeling restless. The island was calling to him. Come explore me, it was saying. He decided to listen and follow. Using the pole as a probe, he made his way across the river one step at a time, trying to avoid the holes and a quick slip into a cold bath. With a few creative steps and a vague clue how he was going to get back across, the kid took his first step onto the island.
He felt like a polar bear version of Tom Sawyer as he slogged along the length of the island following a muddy path that ran the length. An inept Tom Sawyer without the innate raft building skills. The little island was a disappointment, it merely looked like the rest of the forrest. The only high point was when he reached the far end. There he found a pool of deep water where a giant trout was hiding from the day. Later he would claim that the fish was at least the size of his leg. Maybe he wasn't very far off. Or maybe the water exaggerated the true size of the fish for him.
With another corner of the world explored and conquered, the kid headed back as a hero.
"Ready for lunch?" The father asked as the kid pulled himself up to the top of the bank.
"Sure. I'll take ham if any are left." A joke. They only had ham. They only ever brought ham. Ham sandwiches and the fudge striped cookies by Keebler. Sort of a tradition going back the breadth of a few years, started one after a successful day of ice fishing and carried on to that very day. The two of them sat down on the bank and ate in silence as they watched Steve slowly work an eddy. With the kind of lazy patience of a man who had already already finished his work for the day, so everything else afterwards was just for fun.
A grunting sound was coming from behind them. The kid turned around and peered into the brush as he tried to locate the source of the strange noise. It sounded similar to the noise that a hog might make, but so far as he knew there weren't any hogs living feral in the entire state.
"Dad, what was that sound?"
"You heard it too?"
"Of course I heard it. Do you know what it was?"
"That was a bear."
"What?"
"A bear, they're all over the place here. You're lucky that you didn't run into one while you were playing on the island."
"A bear?"
"Yep."
The kid fell silent, and went back to listening to the river as he watched twelve different directions at once for any more unexpected and unwelcome visitors. He had never given bears much thought, sure he had watched out for them, should one have stumbled across the path in front of him, but they were sort of abstract. Bears in his mind were sort of like the Soviets across the Bearing Straight. They were supposed to be dangerous, he heard all about them, but he had never actually seen one up close. The kid tried to stay calm like his father. Nothing to worry about. Animals wouldn't bother you if you didn't bother them. He tried holding onto that thought like a prayer. He wouldn't bother nothing.
That was when Steve started yelling, "Ya bear! Ya bear! Git! Git outta here bear!"
"What was that?" The kid squeaked.
"A bear just came out of the woods in front of me. He was going to climb down in the river. Took off when he heard me though." Steve said as his line drifted down stream between casts. He took a step up river and pulled his line back in, snapped it back, and placed it into the river once again.
"I'm ready to go."
"What?"
"Now. Lets, up and move back toward that direction with the camper and the food and where the bears aren't so much at." He started babbling as he packed his gear and made wild gestures with his arms back towards the direction of their camp. The general and inescapable point was that he was ready to get out of there immediately.
"Well Steve, are you ready to get out of here?"
"Sure. We can head back up toward the lodge and get dinner, and maybe hit Quartz for a while."
"Good idea. It's been a long time since we picked out some Dollys."
"Well, good luck with that. They upped the size restrictions for the fish to twenty-four inches. So it's likely we won't be keeping anything we catch. Still, I hear that the population has come back with a vengeance."
"Oh well. It isn't about the keeping." The father said as he shouldered his pack and headed back towards the campground. The kid followed, watching the brush closely, more closely than he should have, as he stumbled along at his his father's heels. Sometimes on his father's heels. The peculiar sound of the hip-waiters forgotten.
Three miles down and three miles back, with hours wading in the river between the two hikes. Each step was agony by the time the kid made it back to their camping spot. His boots flew off in two different directions as he sat down at the picnic table. There would be no more fishing that day. Only dinner and then rest. All in all, it had been a good day.
March 4, 2011
A Game in the Woods
The cabin was isolated. That was what Anna so loved about the place. Miles from anywhere and anyone. They didn't even have cell phone service. Just the cabin out on the lake, and only a handful of neighbors to pay them any mind. A little piece of paradise, her grandfather always called it.
The first true week of spring had come at last and the sky was sparkling blue even as the wind retained the snakebite sting of the tail end of winter. The calendar might suggest that the first day of spring was the twenty-first of March, each and every year. Nonsense, as any resident of the North could well tell you. Spring only arrived when enough snow melted that you could finally reach your camp once more. Some years the weather cooperated with the calendar and others it didn't.
Winter was gone, mostly, and spring had arrived, mostly. This was the time of year when winter might utter a death roar and cover the land with a foot of snow as it died and made way for summer's warm embrace.
With the beginning of the new year came celebration. For Anna and her family, the new year arrived with the thaw and not before. The back roads were clear, mostly, and they could once again return to their lakefront property out in the woods.
Winter had not been kind to the property, and at least two different storms had roared through, pummeling the old cabin. Nothing serious, but it took Anna and her siblings a week's worth of hard work to clean everything up in time for their weekend welcome back party. A week of eating the traditional pasties and succumbing to such unpleasant tortures as cleaning out the privy. When all was said and done, her brother and sister went home, leaving Anna by herself to wait for her friends to arrive.
Anna lay back in big brown couch in the living room/dining room/den/parlor, as her friends began to arrive for the weekend debauchery. The small cabin had been a converted church at one time in it's long existence - oh the irony! A small one room building dragged from camp to camp to house divine service for the lumberjacks - men who lived wild lives and who no doubt needed as much spiritual assistance as they could get their hands on in order to come square with their God. Some sort of cosmic balance sheet.
Her great grandfather had purchased the old church and set it down on his property next to the lake. And like that it went from a house of worship to the wonder-funland of a small family. Strange how things worked out in the end. She wondered if even God himself had seen that one coming. In the beginning, the building had only been made up of one large room, but over the coming generations, as the clan grew, they extended it until there were three bedrooms and a screened in porch that looked out onto the lake. The cabin was rustic but comfortable, with more than enough room to house anyone who wished to stay over for the weekend. All in relative comfort (that of course was relative to sleeping outside in the wind and rain).
The cabin had been furnished eclectically, which was a polite way of saying that it had long been a dumping ground for all of the worn, but still serviceable, furniture no longer wanted at their homes in town. The same went for everything else within the walls of the house, down to the twenty year old Zenith television and the dictionary wedged in underneath in place of the missing leg. Books and board games and dishes and silverware. It had all come from somewhere else, and mashed together to give the camp a old homey feel, like visiting someone's grandmother's home.
If you managed to ignore the other half of the cabin's adornments.
For generations, the men of her family enjoyed the tradition of deer camp. That magical time of year(for them) when they got together out in the woods, imbibed much alcohol, and tried to kill a deer. All without getting lost and freezing to death, or shooting one of their friends. As a result of the other half of the camp's history, the walls of the cabin were lined with the proud remnants of trophies long forgotten. From the stuffed bear head over the fire place to the antlers that adorned the space over every doorway like a sculpted bust of Janus.
Guns too. The walls nearly oozed testosterone.
At least until her grandmother had arrived. Then the balance had shifted to something more feminine, frilly and infested with doilies. Her grandmother had come from more civilized climes and had tendencies towards almost a neurotic level of extreme girlyness at times. Thankfully, before she and her siblings were ever born, the balance had shifted back to a happy medium. Sans the doilies.
"I suppose we should get this party rolling!" Anna said a half hour after the last car pulled in, bringing Stacey and Ellen. Seven of her friends had decided to rough the weather and come on out. Three men and four women - herself not included. With twenty invitations and a dozen maybes in response, they were looking fairly good.
"Well? What shall we do first?" Asked her friend Jim as he leaned over the couch and pointed at the bottle of Five O'clock in his left hand.
"Gee, I don't know. Shall we drink?"
"Capital idea babe." Yelled her other friend James from across the room. Jim and James - the only two men present, they were long time friends and roommates cursed with the same name - began prying open bottles, almost at random and mixing the house cocktail for Ellen since it was her first time out at a camp party.
The house cocktail - another tradition, albeit a relatively new one - was best not contemplated for too long. Even so much a whiff of it's pungent aroma was enough to make some unfortunate souls - Anna sadly included - nauseous as they recalled their own experience with the mad cap, even insane, mixture of querulous booze. All to be drunk as quickly as humanly possible, meaning that it was a long and painful experience not soon forgotten.
Ellen was making good headway with her drink the first blast of wind from the oncoming the storm shook the cabin. Howling like the wolf from the story as it tried to blow her house down. For a moment the lights flickered and the party stopped, as seven half drunk students looked around at the walls and waited for them to collapse.
And then the first gust passed - the lights calmed down, and the kids started urging Ellen onward towards acceptance, glory and finally hangover. With some possible stops at nudity, loud uncontrolled laughter and uncoordinated attempts at dancing in between. Ellen would be well on her way to social lubrication to help her be at ease with a bunch of strangers. Ellen was her partner in Chem Lab, a girl from Detroit who fell in love with natural beauty here in the wilds of the north. She first encountered the woods during a class trip and arranged to come back for college. She was intelligent - proof enough that she eased Anna through their nearly incomprehensible lab-work in chemistry - and sweet, extremely shy and so very out of her element. She loved the beauty of the surrounding wilderness, but she was a city girl through and through. A strange match, since Anna was a local. Anna and her friends adopted Ellen and tried to teach her the ways of the north. Which involved drinking beer and using the sauna.
Ellen was now rather accomplished at both skills. But she was still a lightweight. Two beers were enough to get her drunk. The entire cocktail would knock her on her ass for most of the night. Good thing they had the entire weekend to play.
As darkness came, the storm seemed to spring up, rattling the windows in their frames with each violent gust.
"Wish I had known that this was coming." Anna complained as she looked out the window at the rippling forest.
Jane joined her at the window and put her arm around Anna's shoulder. Anna returned the gesture, glad for the companionship and the warmth. "They've been predicting it for the last four or five days babe."
"Too bad I've been out here working on the camp. Would have been nice if someone told me."
"What for? So you could cancel the party?"
"No, I can't cancel the party. I just would have figured on more things to do inside. Brought more movies, you know. Some of those old VHS tapes were on their way out when they were brought to camp. A few years roasting through the summer and freezing through the winter couldn't have been much of a favor for them. Really though, who wants to see the Adventures of Gumby anyway?"
"Me! I do!" James yelled, punching his fist into the air.
"Do what?" Jim asked.
"Forrest Gump. We're watching Forrest Gump! I love that movie."
Stacey yelled at him. "Not Forrest Gump you deaf idiot, Gumby."
"Gumby? You mean that green clay guy? Who the hell would want to watch that crap for? Screw that."
"Hey, I brought this along just in case it rained and its raining," Stacey slurred her words as she pulled a battered box out from her backpack. It was an Ouija board. "I've always wanted to try it. I got this one from Vinnies for like fifty cents a month ago."
James picked up the box, looked at it for a moment and then said, "Vinnies? You have to be kidding."
"Why? Yeah I got it at Vinnies." Stacey was beginning to get that pouty look on her face - the one that screamed 'no sex for you' loud enough for even the newcomer Ellen to hear it. But James seemed to ignore it. Damnedest thing how he could do it, since they had been dating for two years and she seemed to wear that look quite often when he was near by.
"They're a Catholic charity. Why would they be selling Ouija boards? Isn't that against one of their rules?" James shook his head.
"No," Jim said, "They sell pretty much anything they can get their hands on. Beggars can't be choosers after all. Really though, it's a stupid game for suckers."
"Well," Jane asked as she put down her beer glaring at the boys, "what do we need to play your game?"
"I think we just need the game itself. I looked inside and everything is there. But we might also want to set the mood too."
James sighed. "What sort of mood do we need to set?"
"Something mysterious. I brought candles too, just in case." Stacey opened her bag and yes indeed she did bring candles. All shapes and sizes. "We can light them all and put them around the room and turn off the lights."
"I'm going to grab another drink," said James. "Anyone else want one?"
"I'll take one," Jim answered, "if we're going to do this, I'll need something to help me through it. Vodka, straight." How he could stomach straight Five O'clock was a secret that Anna hadn't learned yet. She did know that switched to peer booze when he was in a dark mood. Anna and Stacey walked around setting out the candles and making sure that each and every one had some object underneath to catch the wax - something fireproof of course - though Stacey was drunk enough to suggest sheets of paper at first.
They all gathered around the table with the board set between them. Jim kept on about how stupid the whole thing was, so Stacey set him to playing secretary instead and pushed him off to one side away from the table. The rules required this, and Stacey read them aloud to silence a protesting Jim - "No non-believers in the circle, they disrupt the energy!"
Jim turned the lights off and the room was bathed with the warm glow of candle light. Romantic, sexy and spooky. All in one. Anna began to feel a little excitement rise within her.
James suddenly stood up and walked to the door. "Before we start, I gotta empty the snake something bad."
"Ditto!" Said half of the room, as they scurried out into the windy night, jostling one another for the best place in line out at the privy. Anna had a vague notion that it would be better to wait inside just in case it started to rain - but that notion passed and she sat back to enjoy her buzz, saving her seat for when the game began despite the fact that tradition meant that nobody could steal a seat of the host. Rank had its privileges. There she sat drifting in and out. Dozing a little. She hadn't realized how tired she was.
Boom! Anna shrieked and jumped from her seat and spun around as a huge noise flooded through the room.
The door!
She ran to the door and found that one of her friends had left it unfastened - giving it to the tender mercies of the wind. No damage done, if she ignored the fact that she almost wet her pants. Anna stood for a moment, staring outside as the wind drove large snow flakes by the door. She decided then and there that she didn't really need to use the privy just yet.
"It's snowing again. This place is crazy." Ellen sat down next to Anna and rubbed her arms to warm herself. Melt water dripped from her hair onto the floor.
"That happens some times. Even all the way into late May. Usually when a storm comes down out of Canada. The snow never stays around for very long though, and we rarely get too much. So we should be OK." Anna leaned sleepily against her friend, unsure how much longer she would be awake. It had been a long day, and the addition of alcohol to the equation didn't help much. She decided that she would goto the privy after all, and then retire for the night.
She fell asleep to the sound of her friends talking and arguing around the table. Who would they contact? President Lincoln? Ghandi? Madonna? Madonna's still alive you idiot, she just put another album out a couple years ago! Oh. Is it any good? Stop pushing! Stop pushing! You're supposed to let it move on it's own! I'm not pushing! Yes you are! Yeah, there's no way that anything out there would spell 'James is sexy'! They sounded like they were having fun, and Anna felt suddenly happy that they were there and full of love for these people. Then sleep came.
Something was jostling she shoulder. There was a breathless squeal in her ear. "Anna! Anna! Wake up!"
"Wazzit? Wajyawant?" She asked through a sleep laden haze. The jostling became more violent and the voice more intense. Finally Anna opened one eye, only to be blinded by what seemed like the noon day sun being focused on her face. "Gah! What do you want Ellen?"
Ellen's voice dropped down to a whisper. "There's something out there Anna. Something moving around out there." She pointed the flashlight towards the front door.
"It's probably a deer. They're all over around here. Come by the house all the time."
"No, it's not a deer. I've seen deer before, that wasn't a deer." Her tone became more high pitched with the flow of each and every syllable, until Anna could barely understand what she was saying.
"Ok, one of the neighbor's dogs, or a coyote."
"Not a dog. It had red eyes Anna! Red eyes. They glowed." She began crying. "And it looked at me. It stared at me. Right at me."
Red eyes? Anna had never heard of an animal with red eyes. How much had Ellen had to drink? The night was fuzzy and Anna could hardly keep up with her own tab. Ellen had finished the cocktail, but everything after that was indistinct. "Please Anna." Ellen begged. She didn't sound drunk. Sloppily drunk at least.
She sounded terrified.
Anna rolled out of bed, or at least she tried, only to find that she was lying sideways across the bed. She pushed herself up to her hands a knees and slid down off of the bed to stand next to her friend.
"What the hell is wrong?" She asked, still feeling a little groggy from drink and sleep. Anna squinted, looking around.
"I went outside to pee a few minutes ago. And when I got back i heard something." She pointed at the door, her hands wrapped around the flashlight in a stranglehold. Her voice dropped to a whisper, "Then I saw it."
"You're not fucking with me are you? James and Jim really like to play practical jokes, it's probably them."
"No. They're both asleep on the couches in the living room."
"James is sleeping on a couch?"
"Stacey didn't want company tonight. He started acting really stupid after the game got started. It laughed Anna."
"The couch?"
"No, the thing outside. It looked at me and then it cackled."
"Cackled?"
"Yes, it laughed. Then it said 'hello Ellen'." Anna only looked at her, she could think of little else to do. Ellen began whimpering. Then in a broken whisper, "It knows my name Anna, it knows my name."
The candles had all either burned out or had been blown out before everyone finally stumbled off to their beds, leaving the entire room in the dark. Anna pushed Ellen ahead of her, out towards the living room table. She still had no idea what was going on, or what Ellen was talking about. Just a dream she suspected, or she would have if Ellen had any sort of imagination.
She looked over at Ellen, who was taking baby-steps towards the table. A chill ran down her spine.
Anna ran her eyes down the page, a long column of text, spelled out one letter at a time as if it were written by a child just learning his letters. Defiantly Jim, his handwriting had always been terrible. Writing one letter at a time would make a bad situation become even worse.
h a h a h a
h e r e
n o t t e l l i n g
m a y b e
No
Yes
Down to the last line: i d l o v e t o m e e t y o u a l l i l l b e b y l a t e r. The last line
I'd love to meet you all, I'll be by later.
That was the last thing written on the page. Anna read through the entire page and tried to figure out what what questions had been asked. "Who the hell did you guys find? What did you do last night? What does this mean?" Anna asked
"He said that he had died here on this land and that he was related to your family. That it was buried on the property somewhere, and had been murdered."
"What else did it say? That there was treasure or something."
"Yeah. It did. It told us all sorts of horrible things about your family. And funny things too. James was laughing and laughing."
Horrible things about her family? James laughing? He would be the one to talk, his family was one of the most wild and eccentric in the entire county. His grandfather was a convicted murder, killed his own wife. "What else happened?"
Her voice dropped down to a whisper. "James said that he would like to see it, and asked if it would come for a visit."
"Here I am Ellen, it said, here I am." She sobbed once, her entire body shaking. The entire time her voice never rose above a whisper.
Anna walked over and kicked the couch that James was sleeping on, trying to rouse him from his blessed unconsciousness. He grunted, drooled a bit and then rolled over and continued sawing wood. Jim was no better. They had always been heavy sleepers after a night of drinking - sometimes that worked in Anna's favor, and other times it didn't. Too bad she wasn't in the mood to dip their hands in warm water.
Where were the men when you needed one? The wind seemed to have died down some, but the snow was still coming down, harder now that even before, and Anna didn't really want to go outside to search for Ellen's phantom friend. Especially if Ellen was having herself a royal melt down. The Cocktail sometimes addled people's brains.
She flashed the light through the door, out into the darkness of her yard, spraying the light across the tree-trunks with the wave of an arm. Nothing was there.
Something was there.
It moved. Fast. Charging through the beam of light as if the mere touch burned its flesh. Anna, swung her arm through the air and tried to track the thing. Was it a deer? Or a coyote that she had startled with her sudden appearance? Some harmless creature there picking through the garbage? Maybe a bear even? They were known to come in from time to time. Bear were fast. But they weren't grey colored. Not usually. That thing would have been a small bear.
There. Out of the corner of her vision. Two points of glowing lights stood hovering shoulder-high in the darkness. They swayed back and forth and then latched onto her own. Slipping in towards her soul. That was no... words failed her. She didn't know what it was. A hideous cackle. Anna shivered and jumped back inside, slamming the door behind her, shaking the house. Nobody stirred.
"Did you see it?"
"I think so. What was it?" A glimpse, that was all. Even now her mind was trying to convince her that she had seen a deer, or some other harmless forest creature.
"Was it..." Ellen sat down in a chair by the table. Her breathing was ragged as her eyes darted around the room, as if she were a rabbit searching for a hole to bolt down.
"I don't know. The gun!" Anna reached up and took the old double barrel shotgun down off the the wall, tradition held that it hung on that wall. It had been her grandfather's favorite weapon, he brought down numerous deer with it and counted it lucky. Even a wolf once, or so he claimed. Anna could use that luck now.
She checked the chambers.
Empty.
Anna cursed. Ellen sobbed and sat down in a corner and tucked her knees underneath her chin. She searched the mantel for shells. None. There were always shells on the mantel, for as long as she could remember. Tradition failed. Her first impulse was to throw the weapon down and scream, to empty her lungs of air. She came a hairs breath from doing so.
Instead, she replaced the weapon and joined Ellen to think.
What did they do?
What the hell did they do? The minutes ticked by as Anna sat pressed against Ellen in their corner. Neither dared to speak and barely to breathe. It was dark, and so quiet. If she closed her eyes, maybe she could convince herself that it had all been a wild dream. Maybe she was just hallucinating the entire experience.
A scream tore through the silence, an animal dying. Horribly. Ellen began crying in earnest, a river of tears and a storm of weeping.
Silence again.
"It lied to us Anna. When we were talking to it. It lied to us, and now here it is."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. It said it was your relative. But it lied."
Then the scratching came. On the walls.
Around the house.
And the laughter. It was driving her mad. Chills ran down her back with each outburst.
There was a clicking sound on the windows. First one and then the next.
Around the house.
*Ellen, you smell so sweet. Come out and talk to me some more.* Laughter.
Ellen covered her ears and buried her face. "No! Go away! Leave us alone."
Cackling. The laughter sounded like bones being ground up, while someone ran their finger nails across the chalk board. *We'll return later my sweets*
Dawn arrived. Spreading her rosy fingers as Homer might say, the poet, not the Simpson. Anna shook Ellen awake and they in turn woke everyone else in the house. Nobody else had stirred. Anna would have guessed that they had not lost so much as a wink of sleep, enveloped as they were in a protective cocoon of whiskey and dreams.
Anna stood up slowly, her muscles ached. She walked to the nearest window. The storm had dropped a foot of snow on the ground outside.
Outside, by her car, there was a shredded, half-eaten deer carcass lying in a puddle of blood, half buried in the snow.
The tires on her car had been slashed.
The tires on the other vehicles had been slashed.
There were gouges torn out of the siding all around the house.
No tracks. Just the pure driven snow.
"Oh." Ellen whispered.
"What the hell did you guys do?" Anna asked. She wanted to cry.
The snow was pristine and white and glittered in the morning sunlight. A foot of snow. Heavy and wet. They were five miles to the nearest road. A two lane dirt track that was never plowed. Ten miles further to the highway. Fifteen miles to safety.
"What the hell did you do?"
The cabin was isolated. That was what Anna hated about the place. Only a handful of neighbors and no cell phone service to call for help.
The first true week of spring had come at last and the sky was sparkling blue even as the wind retained the snakebite sting of the tail end of winter. The calendar might suggest that the first day of spring was the twenty-first of March, each and every year. Nonsense, as any resident of the North could well tell you. Spring only arrived when enough snow melted that you could finally reach your camp once more. Some years the weather cooperated with the calendar and others it didn't.
Winter was gone, mostly, and spring had arrived, mostly. This was the time of year when winter might utter a death roar and cover the land with a foot of snow as it died and made way for summer's warm embrace.
With the beginning of the new year came celebration. For Anna and her family, the new year arrived with the thaw and not before. The back roads were clear, mostly, and they could once again return to their lakefront property out in the woods.
Winter had not been kind to the property, and at least two different storms had roared through, pummeling the old cabin. Nothing serious, but it took Anna and her siblings a week's worth of hard work to clean everything up in time for their weekend welcome back party. A week of eating the traditional pasties and succumbing to such unpleasant tortures as cleaning out the privy. When all was said and done, her brother and sister went home, leaving Anna by herself to wait for her friends to arrive.
Anna lay back in big brown couch in the living room/dining room/den/parlor, as her friends began to arrive for the weekend debauchery. The small cabin had been a converted church at one time in it's long existence - oh the irony! A small one room building dragged from camp to camp to house divine service for the lumberjacks - men who lived wild lives and who no doubt needed as much spiritual assistance as they could get their hands on in order to come square with their God. Some sort of cosmic balance sheet.
Her great grandfather had purchased the old church and set it down on his property next to the lake. And like that it went from a house of worship to the wonder-funland of a small family. Strange how things worked out in the end. She wondered if even God himself had seen that one coming. In the beginning, the building had only been made up of one large room, but over the coming generations, as the clan grew, they extended it until there were three bedrooms and a screened in porch that looked out onto the lake. The cabin was rustic but comfortable, with more than enough room to house anyone who wished to stay over for the weekend. All in relative comfort (that of course was relative to sleeping outside in the wind and rain).
The cabin had been furnished eclectically, which was a polite way of saying that it had long been a dumping ground for all of the worn, but still serviceable, furniture no longer wanted at their homes in town. The same went for everything else within the walls of the house, down to the twenty year old Zenith television and the dictionary wedged in underneath in place of the missing leg. Books and board games and dishes and silverware. It had all come from somewhere else, and mashed together to give the camp a old homey feel, like visiting someone's grandmother's home.
If you managed to ignore the other half of the cabin's adornments.
For generations, the men of her family enjoyed the tradition of deer camp. That magical time of year(for them) when they got together out in the woods, imbibed much alcohol, and tried to kill a deer. All without getting lost and freezing to death, or shooting one of their friends. As a result of the other half of the camp's history, the walls of the cabin were lined with the proud remnants of trophies long forgotten. From the stuffed bear head over the fire place to the antlers that adorned the space over every doorway like a sculpted bust of Janus.
Guns too. The walls nearly oozed testosterone.
At least until her grandmother had arrived. Then the balance had shifted to something more feminine, frilly and infested with doilies. Her grandmother had come from more civilized climes and had tendencies towards almost a neurotic level of extreme girlyness at times. Thankfully, before she and her siblings were ever born, the balance had shifted back to a happy medium. Sans the doilies.
"I suppose we should get this party rolling!" Anna said a half hour after the last car pulled in, bringing Stacey and Ellen. Seven of her friends had decided to rough the weather and come on out. Three men and four women - herself not included. With twenty invitations and a dozen maybes in response, they were looking fairly good.
"Well? What shall we do first?" Asked her friend Jim as he leaned over the couch and pointed at the bottle of Five O'clock in his left hand.
"Gee, I don't know. Shall we drink?"
"Capital idea babe." Yelled her other friend James from across the room. Jim and James - the only two men present, they were long time friends and roommates cursed with the same name - began prying open bottles, almost at random and mixing the house cocktail for Ellen since it was her first time out at a camp party.
The house cocktail - another tradition, albeit a relatively new one - was best not contemplated for too long. Even so much a whiff of it's pungent aroma was enough to make some unfortunate souls - Anna sadly included - nauseous as they recalled their own experience with the mad cap, even insane, mixture of querulous booze. All to be drunk as quickly as humanly possible, meaning that it was a long and painful experience not soon forgotten.
Ellen was making good headway with her drink the first blast of wind from the oncoming the storm shook the cabin. Howling like the wolf from the story as it tried to blow her house down. For a moment the lights flickered and the party stopped, as seven half drunk students looked around at the walls and waited for them to collapse.
And then the first gust passed - the lights calmed down, and the kids started urging Ellen onward towards acceptance, glory and finally hangover. With some possible stops at nudity, loud uncontrolled laughter and uncoordinated attempts at dancing in between. Ellen would be well on her way to social lubrication to help her be at ease with a bunch of strangers. Ellen was her partner in Chem Lab, a girl from Detroit who fell in love with natural beauty here in the wilds of the north. She first encountered the woods during a class trip and arranged to come back for college. She was intelligent - proof enough that she eased Anna through their nearly incomprehensible lab-work in chemistry - and sweet, extremely shy and so very out of her element. She loved the beauty of the surrounding wilderness, but she was a city girl through and through. A strange match, since Anna was a local. Anna and her friends adopted Ellen and tried to teach her the ways of the north. Which involved drinking beer and using the sauna.
Ellen was now rather accomplished at both skills. But she was still a lightweight. Two beers were enough to get her drunk. The entire cocktail would knock her on her ass for most of the night. Good thing they had the entire weekend to play.
As darkness came, the storm seemed to spring up, rattling the windows in their frames with each violent gust.
"Wish I had known that this was coming." Anna complained as she looked out the window at the rippling forest.
Jane joined her at the window and put her arm around Anna's shoulder. Anna returned the gesture, glad for the companionship and the warmth. "They've been predicting it for the last four or five days babe."
"Too bad I've been out here working on the camp. Would have been nice if someone told me."
"What for? So you could cancel the party?"
"No, I can't cancel the party. I just would have figured on more things to do inside. Brought more movies, you know. Some of those old VHS tapes were on their way out when they were brought to camp. A few years roasting through the summer and freezing through the winter couldn't have been much of a favor for them. Really though, who wants to see the Adventures of Gumby anyway?"
"Me! I do!" James yelled, punching his fist into the air.
"Do what?" Jim asked.
"Forrest Gump. We're watching Forrest Gump! I love that movie."
Stacey yelled at him. "Not Forrest Gump you deaf idiot, Gumby."
"Gumby? You mean that green clay guy? Who the hell would want to watch that crap for? Screw that."
"Hey, I brought this along just in case it rained and its raining," Stacey slurred her words as she pulled a battered box out from her backpack. It was an Ouija board. "I've always wanted to try it. I got this one from Vinnies for like fifty cents a month ago."
James picked up the box, looked at it for a moment and then said, "Vinnies? You have to be kidding."
"Why? Yeah I got it at Vinnies." Stacey was beginning to get that pouty look on her face - the one that screamed 'no sex for you' loud enough for even the newcomer Ellen to hear it. But James seemed to ignore it. Damnedest thing how he could do it, since they had been dating for two years and she seemed to wear that look quite often when he was near by.
"They're a Catholic charity. Why would they be selling Ouija boards? Isn't that against one of their rules?" James shook his head.
"No," Jim said, "They sell pretty much anything they can get their hands on. Beggars can't be choosers after all. Really though, it's a stupid game for suckers."
"Well," Jane asked as she put down her beer glaring at the boys, "what do we need to play your game?"
"I think we just need the game itself. I looked inside and everything is there. But we might also want to set the mood too."
James sighed. "What sort of mood do we need to set?"
"Something mysterious. I brought candles too, just in case." Stacey opened her bag and yes indeed she did bring candles. All shapes and sizes. "We can light them all and put them around the room and turn off the lights."
"I'm going to grab another drink," said James. "Anyone else want one?"
"I'll take one," Jim answered, "if we're going to do this, I'll need something to help me through it. Vodka, straight." How he could stomach straight Five O'clock was a secret that Anna hadn't learned yet. She did know that switched to peer booze when he was in a dark mood. Anna and Stacey walked around setting out the candles and making sure that each and every one had some object underneath to catch the wax - something fireproof of course - though Stacey was drunk enough to suggest sheets of paper at first.
They all gathered around the table with the board set between them. Jim kept on about how stupid the whole thing was, so Stacey set him to playing secretary instead and pushed him off to one side away from the table. The rules required this, and Stacey read them aloud to silence a protesting Jim - "No non-believers in the circle, they disrupt the energy!"
Jim turned the lights off and the room was bathed with the warm glow of candle light. Romantic, sexy and spooky. All in one. Anna began to feel a little excitement rise within her.
James suddenly stood up and walked to the door. "Before we start, I gotta empty the snake something bad."
"Ditto!" Said half of the room, as they scurried out into the windy night, jostling one another for the best place in line out at the privy. Anna had a vague notion that it would be better to wait inside just in case it started to rain - but that notion passed and she sat back to enjoy her buzz, saving her seat for when the game began despite the fact that tradition meant that nobody could steal a seat of the host. Rank had its privileges. There she sat drifting in and out. Dozing a little. She hadn't realized how tired she was.
Boom! Anna shrieked and jumped from her seat and spun around as a huge noise flooded through the room.
The door!
She ran to the door and found that one of her friends had left it unfastened - giving it to the tender mercies of the wind. No damage done, if she ignored the fact that she almost wet her pants. Anna stood for a moment, staring outside as the wind drove large snow flakes by the door. She decided then and there that she didn't really need to use the privy just yet.
"It's snowing again. This place is crazy." Ellen sat down next to Anna and rubbed her arms to warm herself. Melt water dripped from her hair onto the floor.
"That happens some times. Even all the way into late May. Usually when a storm comes down out of Canada. The snow never stays around for very long though, and we rarely get too much. So we should be OK." Anna leaned sleepily against her friend, unsure how much longer she would be awake. It had been a long day, and the addition of alcohol to the equation didn't help much. She decided that she would goto the privy after all, and then retire for the night.
She fell asleep to the sound of her friends talking and arguing around the table. Who would they contact? President Lincoln? Ghandi? Madonna? Madonna's still alive you idiot, she just put another album out a couple years ago! Oh. Is it any good? Stop pushing! Stop pushing! You're supposed to let it move on it's own! I'm not pushing! Yes you are! Yeah, there's no way that anything out there would spell 'James is sexy'! They sounded like they were having fun, and Anna felt suddenly happy that they were there and full of love for these people. Then sleep came.
Something was jostling she shoulder. There was a breathless squeal in her ear. "Anna! Anna! Wake up!"
"Wazzit? Wajyawant?" She asked through a sleep laden haze. The jostling became more violent and the voice more intense. Finally Anna opened one eye, only to be blinded by what seemed like the noon day sun being focused on her face. "Gah! What do you want Ellen?"
Ellen's voice dropped down to a whisper. "There's something out there Anna. Something moving around out there." She pointed the flashlight towards the front door.
"It's probably a deer. They're all over around here. Come by the house all the time."
"No, it's not a deer. I've seen deer before, that wasn't a deer." Her tone became more high pitched with the flow of each and every syllable, until Anna could barely understand what she was saying.
"Ok, one of the neighbor's dogs, or a coyote."
"Not a dog. It had red eyes Anna! Red eyes. They glowed." She began crying. "And it looked at me. It stared at me. Right at me."
Red eyes? Anna had never heard of an animal with red eyes. How much had Ellen had to drink? The night was fuzzy and Anna could hardly keep up with her own tab. Ellen had finished the cocktail, but everything after that was indistinct. "Please Anna." Ellen begged. She didn't sound drunk. Sloppily drunk at least.
She sounded terrified.
Anna rolled out of bed, or at least she tried, only to find that she was lying sideways across the bed. She pushed herself up to her hands a knees and slid down off of the bed to stand next to her friend.
"What the hell is wrong?" She asked, still feeling a little groggy from drink and sleep. Anna squinted, looking around.
"I went outside to pee a few minutes ago. And when I got back i heard something." She pointed at the door, her hands wrapped around the flashlight in a stranglehold. Her voice dropped to a whisper, "Then I saw it."
"You're not fucking with me are you? James and Jim really like to play practical jokes, it's probably them."
"No. They're both asleep on the couches in the living room."
"James is sleeping on a couch?"
"Stacey didn't want company tonight. He started acting really stupid after the game got started. It laughed Anna."
"The couch?"
"No, the thing outside. It looked at me and then it cackled."
"Cackled?"
"Yes, it laughed. Then it said 'hello Ellen'." Anna only looked at her, she could think of little else to do. Ellen began whimpering. Then in a broken whisper, "It knows my name Anna, it knows my name."
The candles had all either burned out or had been blown out before everyone finally stumbled off to their beds, leaving the entire room in the dark. Anna pushed Ellen ahead of her, out towards the living room table. She still had no idea what was going on, or what Ellen was talking about. Just a dream she suspected, or she would have if Ellen had any sort of imagination.
She looked over at Ellen, who was taking baby-steps towards the table. A chill ran down her spine.
Anna ran her eyes down the page, a long column of text, spelled out one letter at a time as if it were written by a child just learning his letters. Defiantly Jim, his handwriting had always been terrible. Writing one letter at a time would make a bad situation become even worse.
h a h a h a
h e r e
n o t t e l l i n g
m a y b e
No
Yes
Down to the last line: i d l o v e t o m e e t y o u a l l i l l b e b y l a t e r. The last line
I'd love to meet you all, I'll be by later.
That was the last thing written on the page. Anna read through the entire page and tried to figure out what what questions had been asked. "Who the hell did you guys find? What did you do last night? What does this mean?" Anna asked
"He said that he had died here on this land and that he was related to your family. That it was buried on the property somewhere, and had been murdered."
"What else did it say? That there was treasure or something."
"Yeah. It did. It told us all sorts of horrible things about your family. And funny things too. James was laughing and laughing."
Horrible things about her family? James laughing? He would be the one to talk, his family was one of the most wild and eccentric in the entire county. His grandfather was a convicted murder, killed his own wife. "What else happened?"
Her voice dropped down to a whisper. "James said that he would like to see it, and asked if it would come for a visit."
"Here I am Ellen, it said, here I am." She sobbed once, her entire body shaking. The entire time her voice never rose above a whisper.
Anna walked over and kicked the couch that James was sleeping on, trying to rouse him from his blessed unconsciousness. He grunted, drooled a bit and then rolled over and continued sawing wood. Jim was no better. They had always been heavy sleepers after a night of drinking - sometimes that worked in Anna's favor, and other times it didn't. Too bad she wasn't in the mood to dip their hands in warm water.
Where were the men when you needed one? The wind seemed to have died down some, but the snow was still coming down, harder now that even before, and Anna didn't really want to go outside to search for Ellen's phantom friend. Especially if Ellen was having herself a royal melt down. The Cocktail sometimes addled people's brains.
She flashed the light through the door, out into the darkness of her yard, spraying the light across the tree-trunks with the wave of an arm. Nothing was there.
Something was there.
It moved. Fast. Charging through the beam of light as if the mere touch burned its flesh. Anna, swung her arm through the air and tried to track the thing. Was it a deer? Or a coyote that she had startled with her sudden appearance? Some harmless creature there picking through the garbage? Maybe a bear even? They were known to come in from time to time. Bear were fast. But they weren't grey colored. Not usually. That thing would have been a small bear.
There. Out of the corner of her vision. Two points of glowing lights stood hovering shoulder-high in the darkness. They swayed back and forth and then latched onto her own. Slipping in towards her soul. That was no... words failed her. She didn't know what it was. A hideous cackle. Anna shivered and jumped back inside, slamming the door behind her, shaking the house. Nobody stirred.
"Did you see it?"
"I think so. What was it?" A glimpse, that was all. Even now her mind was trying to convince her that she had seen a deer, or some other harmless forest creature.
"Was it..." Ellen sat down in a chair by the table. Her breathing was ragged as her eyes darted around the room, as if she were a rabbit searching for a hole to bolt down.
"I don't know. The gun!" Anna reached up and took the old double barrel shotgun down off the the wall, tradition held that it hung on that wall. It had been her grandfather's favorite weapon, he brought down numerous deer with it and counted it lucky. Even a wolf once, or so he claimed. Anna could use that luck now.
She checked the chambers.
Empty.
Anna cursed. Ellen sobbed and sat down in a corner and tucked her knees underneath her chin. She searched the mantel for shells. None. There were always shells on the mantel, for as long as she could remember. Tradition failed. Her first impulse was to throw the weapon down and scream, to empty her lungs of air. She came a hairs breath from doing so.
Instead, she replaced the weapon and joined Ellen to think.
What did they do?
What the hell did they do? The minutes ticked by as Anna sat pressed against Ellen in their corner. Neither dared to speak and barely to breathe. It was dark, and so quiet. If she closed her eyes, maybe she could convince herself that it had all been a wild dream. Maybe she was just hallucinating the entire experience.
A scream tore through the silence, an animal dying. Horribly. Ellen began crying in earnest, a river of tears and a storm of weeping.
Silence again.
"It lied to us Anna. When we were talking to it. It lied to us, and now here it is."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. It said it was your relative. But it lied."
Then the scratching came. On the walls.
Around the house.
And the laughter. It was driving her mad. Chills ran down her back with each outburst.
There was a clicking sound on the windows. First one and then the next.
Around the house.
*Ellen, you smell so sweet. Come out and talk to me some more.* Laughter.
Ellen covered her ears and buried her face. "No! Go away! Leave us alone."
Cackling. The laughter sounded like bones being ground up, while someone ran their finger nails across the chalk board. *We'll return later my sweets*
Dawn arrived. Spreading her rosy fingers as Homer might say, the poet, not the Simpson. Anna shook Ellen awake and they in turn woke everyone else in the house. Nobody else had stirred. Anna would have guessed that they had not lost so much as a wink of sleep, enveloped as they were in a protective cocoon of whiskey and dreams.
Anna stood up slowly, her muscles ached. She walked to the nearest window. The storm had dropped a foot of snow on the ground outside.
Outside, by her car, there was a shredded, half-eaten deer carcass lying in a puddle of blood, half buried in the snow.
The tires on her car had been slashed.
The tires on the other vehicles had been slashed.
There were gouges torn out of the siding all around the house.
No tracks. Just the pure driven snow.
"Oh." Ellen whispered.
"What the hell did you guys do?" Anna asked. She wanted to cry.
The snow was pristine and white and glittered in the morning sunlight. A foot of snow. Heavy and wet. They were five miles to the nearest road. A two lane dirt track that was never plowed. Ten miles further to the highway. Fifteen miles to safety.
"What the hell did you do?"
The cabin was isolated. That was what Anna hated about the place. Only a handful of neighbors and no cell phone service to call for help.
February 25, 2011
LoneWolf Buccaneers
"Target sighted, five points off the larboard bow!" The first mate yelled as he slid down the mast and planted his feet onto the deck. "You see her yet Captain Wolf?"
The Wolf of the High Seas peered through the spyglass. The giant cruise ship was like a drifting cloud that was wreathed in the flames of the setting sun as it wallowed across the horizon. "Aye. Looks like a fine prize for the likes of us. Fine work Mr. Gnome." Captain Wolf dropped the telescope and began bellowing orders. Michael Roy, Cross-eyed Jones, El Diablo Perro! Raise the sail, make course to intercept, man your battle-stations! With a flurry of hands and feet the Wretched Wanderer seized the wind and was flying towards her quarry.
A crescent moon was passing Jupiter by as WW and her crew came into the shadow of the enormous floating resort hotel. Five stories up, it towered over their heads. Golden light streamed over the railings, trailing with it the sound of laughter and merriment. Captain Lone Wolf caught the scent of roasted beef. His mouth began to water. Oh, it had been many long months since he had tasted the fresh flesh of a cow. His luck was in. Tonight would be special indeed. "DoggRobber, I will need my finest attire for this night. A man should look his best when the Lady comes a knocking on his keel."
With DoggRobber's assistance, the Captain arrayed himself in the magnificent splendor of his finest red coat and favorite wide brimmed hat. The coat was a bit worn, times had been lean over the last months. The hat with the white ostrich plumes that jetted out of the band, only a few were missing. Then the Captain strapped on his cutlass and returned to the deck where his men stood waiting. They too had dressed for the occasion, as well as they could manage.
"Grapple that vessel, prepare for boarding!" Captain Lone Wolf called as the Wretch bumped gently against the white-painted steel hull of the drifting colossus. "Mr. Gnome reconnoiter and report!"
Mr Gnome scaled the rope like a man possessed, letting the silent boat below disappear into the night. He too had smelled the fare and his stomach urged him on. Aboard ship the deck was clear. Music, laughter and the sounds of people dining drifted on from deep in the ship.
Mr. Gnome gave the signal and the rest of the crew were on deck before the heartbeat passed. "Captain, I think that they're having a party yonder that way!" Mr. Gnome said as he took point and walked into the light. Captain and crew were with him, lock-step, weapons drawn as they sauntered towards the dining hall.
A orchestra was humming out Mozart, or Beethoven, or one of those other highfalutin chordmongers. A ditty that minded one to think of angels prancing about on clouds. The Captain stopped for a moment and nodded along with the tune as he scanned the room. Chandeliers hung from steel beams, casting glittering light onto the crowd below.
DoggRobber took that moment to react to the vases of flowers that lined the wall. The enormous sneeze drew all eyes to the crew as they stood in the doorway gawking at the spectacle.
The tables laden with Haves, in their evening finery, turned towards him and stared. Captain Wolf bowed to them, sweeping his hat from his head and across his chest. He then raised his hand and addressed the hall in his finest voice. "Greetings ladies and gents, I am Captain Winston Leonidas Augustus LoneWolf of the Wretched Wanderer and dreaded scourge of the shipping lanes. My lads and I will be relieving you of some of this wonderful bounty that you have set in store. Don't worry! We're not overly greedy! And if you play along well with us, we'll be gentlemanly to a fault!"
"Lads, keep an eye on them! Mr Gnome, you're with me! Let us get our feast aboard the Wretch!"
Mr Gnome saluted as he tried to swallow the handful of mashed potatoes that he had shoved into his mouth. "Aye aye Captain!" He meant to say. "Pthhbt Captain," and a mouthful of spuds was all that came out.
Captain Lone Wolf took a pan in each hand and sauntered back out onto the deck, Mr. Gnome at his heels. And, using the special magic sailors have mastered in the art of weaving and tying rope, they lowered their take down the the Wretch. Five more times they returned to the galley, each time to clapping and cheers by the waiting diners as they hauled off armfuls of vittles. Each time halting the Captain in his tracks. Until with one final bow and a kiss for a beautiful girl, he left them for good, in search of greater plunder.
The Swells laughed and clapped. Whispering to one another, "What a fine performer they got for us this evening to clear away the left-over food. I so do love the theater! Certainly this was a fine act and he was quite talented!" And "Do you think that the funny little man in the raggedy jacket performs at children's parties? I certainly did love the voices that he did."
Later on they would accuse the liner's crew when some of their valuables came up missing.
The Wolf of the High Seas peered through the spyglass. The giant cruise ship was like a drifting cloud that was wreathed in the flames of the setting sun as it wallowed across the horizon. "Aye. Looks like a fine prize for the likes of us. Fine work Mr. Gnome." Captain Wolf dropped the telescope and began bellowing orders. Michael Roy, Cross-eyed Jones, El Diablo Perro! Raise the sail, make course to intercept, man your battle-stations! With a flurry of hands and feet the Wretched Wanderer seized the wind and was flying towards her quarry.
A crescent moon was passing Jupiter by as WW and her crew came into the shadow of the enormous floating resort hotel. Five stories up, it towered over their heads. Golden light streamed over the railings, trailing with it the sound of laughter and merriment. Captain Lone Wolf caught the scent of roasted beef. His mouth began to water. Oh, it had been many long months since he had tasted the fresh flesh of a cow. His luck was in. Tonight would be special indeed. "DoggRobber, I will need my finest attire for this night. A man should look his best when the Lady comes a knocking on his keel."
With DoggRobber's assistance, the Captain arrayed himself in the magnificent splendor of his finest red coat and favorite wide brimmed hat. The coat was a bit worn, times had been lean over the last months. The hat with the white ostrich plumes that jetted out of the band, only a few were missing. Then the Captain strapped on his cutlass and returned to the deck where his men stood waiting. They too had dressed for the occasion, as well as they could manage.
"Grapple that vessel, prepare for boarding!" Captain Lone Wolf called as the Wretch bumped gently against the white-painted steel hull of the drifting colossus. "Mr. Gnome reconnoiter and report!"
Mr Gnome scaled the rope like a man possessed, letting the silent boat below disappear into the night. He too had smelled the fare and his stomach urged him on. Aboard ship the deck was clear. Music, laughter and the sounds of people dining drifted on from deep in the ship.
Mr. Gnome gave the signal and the rest of the crew were on deck before the heartbeat passed. "Captain, I think that they're having a party yonder that way!" Mr. Gnome said as he took point and walked into the light. Captain and crew were with him, lock-step, weapons drawn as they sauntered towards the dining hall.
A orchestra was humming out Mozart, or Beethoven, or one of those other highfalutin chordmongers. A ditty that minded one to think of angels prancing about on clouds. The Captain stopped for a moment and nodded along with the tune as he scanned the room. Chandeliers hung from steel beams, casting glittering light onto the crowd below.
DoggRobber took that moment to react to the vases of flowers that lined the wall. The enormous sneeze drew all eyes to the crew as they stood in the doorway gawking at the spectacle.
The tables laden with Haves, in their evening finery, turned towards him and stared. Captain Wolf bowed to them, sweeping his hat from his head and across his chest. He then raised his hand and addressed the hall in his finest voice. "Greetings ladies and gents, I am Captain Winston Leonidas Augustus LoneWolf of the Wretched Wanderer and dreaded scourge of the shipping lanes. My lads and I will be relieving you of some of this wonderful bounty that you have set in store. Don't worry! We're not overly greedy! And if you play along well with us, we'll be gentlemanly to a fault!"
"Lads, keep an eye on them! Mr Gnome, you're with me! Let us get our feast aboard the Wretch!"
Mr Gnome saluted as he tried to swallow the handful of mashed potatoes that he had shoved into his mouth. "Aye aye Captain!" He meant to say. "Pthhbt Captain," and a mouthful of spuds was all that came out.
Captain Lone Wolf took a pan in each hand and sauntered back out onto the deck, Mr. Gnome at his heels. And, using the special magic sailors have mastered in the art of weaving and tying rope, they lowered their take down the the Wretch. Five more times they returned to the galley, each time to clapping and cheers by the waiting diners as they hauled off armfuls of vittles. Each time halting the Captain in his tracks. Until with one final bow and a kiss for a beautiful girl, he left them for good, in search of greater plunder.
The Swells laughed and clapped. Whispering to one another, "What a fine performer they got for us this evening to clear away the left-over food. I so do love the theater! Certainly this was a fine act and he was quite talented!" And "Do you think that the funny little man in the raggedy jacket performs at children's parties? I certainly did love the voices that he did."
Later on they would accuse the liner's crew when some of their valuables came up missing.
February 16, 2011
Febtober the 16th.
"Fuck this!" I exclaimed aloud as I crumpled up the slip of paper with the note I had been writing. This shit hasn't worked yet. No more than talking straight to her.
I tossed the paper onto the overflowing pile atop the garbage, and wove my way through the warzone that used to be my living room. Only to stop short when my large toe found the keg that was buried in what looked like my clothes. Why were my clothes sitting out in the living room? Why were they on top of a keg? How many people did the bitch have over last night that they needed a keg? She had said a 'small gathering of friends'.
Just outside the door to my room I stepped in something wet, and slimy. Judging by the aroma, I was standing a substance that had at one time been housed in a person's stomach. That was the good news. Then I opened the door to my room. And realized that I would be sleeping on the couch until I could do a thorough cleaning. My hands clenched and if I were a fair bit dimmer, I would have punched a wall.
So I let the rage go. It slipped away slowly a bit at a time as I began to search for my cat. I found him stranded in the top shelf in my closet. Two days without food or water. Or a litter box. My shirts were ruined.
The rage began rising once more. I was going to murder the bitch. Twenty years in a super-max. It might be worth it. Maybe a good lawyer could get him off... she was always late with her half of the rent. She threw loud parties. She never pitched in to clean up her own damn messes. She just let the filth accumulate. He might get off a murder rap... Might.
Then it hit me. What would my cat do? So I went back out into the living room and checked the Keg. Still a little left. I could feel the grin spreading on my face as I filled my first glass. A few hours later there was a shriek, I woke up and rolled off the couch. "What's up?" I asked groggily. "How was the party?"
"Somebody pissed all over my room." I feigned stupidity and shrugged, it was a life skill. Yeah, somebody did.
I tossed the paper onto the overflowing pile atop the garbage, and wove my way through the warzone that used to be my living room. Only to stop short when my large toe found the keg that was buried in what looked like my clothes. Why were my clothes sitting out in the living room? Why were they on top of a keg? How many people did the bitch have over last night that they needed a keg? She had said a 'small gathering of friends'.
Just outside the door to my room I stepped in something wet, and slimy. Judging by the aroma, I was standing a substance that had at one time been housed in a person's stomach. That was the good news. Then I opened the door to my room. And realized that I would be sleeping on the couch until I could do a thorough cleaning. My hands clenched and if I were a fair bit dimmer, I would have punched a wall.
So I let the rage go. It slipped away slowly a bit at a time as I began to search for my cat. I found him stranded in the top shelf in my closet. Two days without food or water. Or a litter box. My shirts were ruined.
The rage began rising once more. I was going to murder the bitch. Twenty years in a super-max. It might be worth it. Maybe a good lawyer could get him off... she was always late with her half of the rent. She threw loud parties. She never pitched in to clean up her own damn messes. She just let the filth accumulate. He might get off a murder rap... Might.
Then it hit me. What would my cat do? So I went back out into the living room and checked the Keg. Still a little left. I could feel the grin spreading on my face as I filled my first glass. A few hours later there was a shriek, I woke up and rolled off the couch. "What's up?" I asked groggily. "How was the party?"
"Somebody pissed all over my room." I feigned stupidity and shrugged, it was a life skill. Yeah, somebody did.
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