Behind the Green Curtain: Ch. 4

This chapter's a bit of a game changer, friends. Well worth the wait. So, what's with the rabbits? A couple years ago I traveled to San Diego to visit my dad, and I managed to escape from his apartment long enough to stroll through this wooded area that was nearby. I wanted to take the evening air and finish a bottle of Old Crow in piece. After several perambulations around the place, I had finished the bottle and was feeling very drowsy. It being a pleasant night, I decided to nap al fresco on a bed of wilted palm leaves. Very soon I fell into a deep, dark sleep. In my dreams there was nothing but darkness, but I could discern a form moving about in the dark. It was none other than the black outline of The Nightwatchman on his nightly patrol through the unending moonless prairies of a nonexistent wilderness. At first, he seemed very far away but that was only an illusion. He was suddenly very close to me, and I was looking into his starving, steel colored eyes. He grabbed me by the shoulders and shouted "Wake up!" I came to and saw a troop of forty to fifty cottontail rabbits, of varying colors, standing on their hind legs and looking right at me. Just before I thought they were going to pounce on me and devour me, they all disappeared into the labrynthine manzanita. It just goes to show you, friends and neighbors. Be careful when you fall asleep in a strange place. You never can tell what The Nightwatchman will have waiting for you when you wake up...

4.

We traveled for almost two hours more. Deb fed me updates on which way we were heading and I tried to write it all down in my notepad along with the time so that we could keep our story straight for Gail, and maybe the cops if it came to that. That’s hard to do when you’re balled up behind the passenger seat and you can’t move or see anything:

7:10: Drove over the I-95 bridge bearing east towards Brooklyn.
8:00: Still east on I-95. Approaching Commonwealth, Normandy Village.
8:30: Outside of city limits. Approx. 30 miles SW of the Osceola Forest.
9:00: East on I-10. Near Baldwin, Mattox.

It was a long drive. Either these guys had made a deal with backwoods, hillbilly moonshiners or they were taking the money camping with them. The sun had set. Deb switched on the headlights and the dash lit up bright red. I decided it was dark enough to climb up in the passenger seat without getting spotted and blowing her tail, but I still kept low. At 9:15 they exited the freeway and headed down a state road. My concern was that if the streets got too secluded it would be easier for them to spot our tail. I told Deb to ease off a little bit. The streetlights, ranch houses, and convenience stores started to vanish and the tangled oak and Spanish moss began to take over. The truck flipped a right and bounced over a cattle guard onto a dirt road.
“Drive past the road that they turned on and then turn around. We’ll keep following them with our headlights off,” I said to Deb. She drove past the road a couple hundred feet, then she flipped a hard U into the other lane, cutting off a Dodge van that was probably full of girl scouts.
“Jesus,” I said, buckling my seat belt. We got on the dirt road and she killed the lights. The red taillights from the truck could be seen a few hundred yards ahead like some creature’s red eyes staring through the mossy oak and the gathering fog. The road narrowed and I could hear the saw palmetto branches slapping against the side of the car. We had to keep at a good speed to keep up with the truck that was kicking up a cloud of dust ahead of us. Between the winding road, the fog, the dust, and Deb’s lead foot, the road was becoming less than safe to travel on with the lights off. Ahead I could see the truck’s brake light on. It looked like they were stopping.
“Pull over and park the car before they see us,” I whispered to Deb. “We’ll have to bring the equipment a ways on foot and set it up near them. Quiet, quiet, quiet.”
She pulled over sharply and the Trans Am lurched headfirst into a soft shoulder filled with mud. We’d never get it out, but there wasn’t any time to think about that. Deb jumped out to get the stuff out of the backseat. I reached into the glove box and pulled out a pint of Jim Beam that I stuffed into the back of my waistband next to my .38. It was shaping up to be a long night and I didn’t want to get thirsty. I stepped out of the car and got my good loafers into the mud. I got the reel-to-reel and the microphones out of the back. Deb got the camera and her laptop to take notes of everything that we were going to listen in on. We tramped through gnarly branches and swamp water well away from the road to avoid getting seen by the marks. The full moon cast crazy shapes onto the forest floor. The steady drone of the insects was thankfully deafening enough to drown out the sound of our shoes slurping through the mud. Out here, it doesn’t take long for you to sweat through your clothes and after that you’re moving in slow motion. Then, the mosquitoes get what’s left of you.
Through a break in the bushes I could see de Ramos’s truck in the weedy parking lot of what looked like a motel. An old neon sign stood unlit by the road’s entrance, “The Nightshade Motel,” written in squiggly, indefinable letters. The place looked long since abandoned. There was no light in the long, cracked window where the manager’s office would be. A dog-eared “CLOSED” sign was in the corner. The moonlight washed over the lime green paint on the concrete and the room windows looked cracked and covered in dust. No lights were on in the windows. This could have been any number of “adult” motels that dot the back roads of the South, complete with vibrating beds, porn DVDs, and complimentary massage oils. Not to mention the on-site companionship. Usually girls fresh out of high-school on the mob payroll who turn tricks for truck drivers in exchange for free blow and the occasional black eye. Maybe, that’s the kind of outfit an independent contractor like Derek de Ramos can get ahead in. Except that Derek and his buddies weren’t looking to flop with any Nightshade cooze tonight. Nobody had done that here in a long time. If that money wasn’t going to disappear in the thongs of motel gutter wenches, then I wonder what else he had in mind.
The three men got out of the truck with the black bag. They opened up the door to one of the rooms without a key and a light turned on in the window behind the off-white drapes. A troop of rabbits appeared on the edge of the parking lot. They all stood up and sniffed the air furiously, their eyes in the moonlight like tiny, smoldering embers.
“What the hell is going on here?” Deb said. “We have to get closer to these guys without getting spotted.” Through the bushes, I could see the motel had rooms in the back of the building as well as in front.
“If we can get into the room behind them, then maybe we can hear them through the wall,” I said. We snuck out into the broad moonlight and hustled over to the rooms back of the motel. Room 9 was directly behind the room the men were in. If we could get into that room hopefully we could find a way to record what they were saying through the walls. Four brown rabbits scurried away from the battered door as we approached. “What are you doing?” Deb said as I started working on the door with a little screwdriver that I kept on my key chain.
“What’s the matter Deb? This pale moonlight isn’t romantic enough to get you in the mood for a little B&E?” She looked just a little guilty, but I knew that she wanted the straight dope on de Ramos just as much as I did. I ran the screwdriver along the runner until I could feel the lock catch and then unlatch. I opened the door slowly then groped in the dark for a light switch before turning on a lamp that was on an end table.
“Gross,” Deb said. The room looked like it hadn’t been redone in 30 years. It had that anonymous, airless smell typical of old motel rooms. There was false wood paneling on the walls, big orange lamps with tall cylindrical lamp shades, and a bad painting over the king-sized, coin-operated bed. There was an old TV with big, luminescent dials and a VCR. Stacked on top were faded VHS porno tapes with obvious titles. The painting was of a 10-point buck standing on a wind-swept, paint globbed hill with lifeless, coal black eyes that stared back at me without the customary points of light painted into the corners of the eyes. A chill rushed through me like rabbits running over my grave.
I could hear the men murmuring in the room next to us. Time to roll. A central heating vent was over the table on the far wall. Maybe, if the vent communicated into the next room I could get the cover off and feed a microphone through the vent to record what they were saying. It had worked for me in the past. “Let’s move,” I said to Deb. Quickly, she pulled the reel-to-reel out of it’s case and started up the word processor while I took the cover off of the vent with the screwdriver. We fed the microphone in, plugged in our big headphones into the machine, and flicked the record switch on. There was a crackle and then we could hear the TV channels being flicked through in the next room. The sound was coming in loud and clear. Deb pumped her fist in victory and got ready to transcribe.

Man 1: When are these guys gonna get here?

Man 2: Said they were about twenty minutes away.

Man 1: Hope they get here soon. Ain’t shit on TV, homes.

Man 3: This is the most fucking work I’ve seen you do all week. Give me that fucking remote.

I could hear Sportscenter on, and the lighting of cigarettes or cigars. Somebody popped the cap on a bottle. The baseball scores came on and nobody talked. This felt like a different scene from the one I saw at the Shark Tank. If de Ramos was the third man in the room, and I believed he was, he sounded tense, edgy. A big deal was about to go down and he wasn’t going to rest easy until it happened. If that black bag was money, it looked awfully heavy. De Ramos was probably going to buy his product wholesale all in one shot. It had to be about dope. Had to be. Nothing but drugs would bring him out to an abandoned motel in the middle of the swamp. My palms started to sweat listening to the TV go on and on. I suddenly really wanted this de Ramos guy to go down. It was nothing personal. He seemed like a nice enough guy, but prisons had a lot of nice guys, too.
There was a knock on the door. I could hear de Ramos’s guys falling all over each other to answer. “Derek de Ramos,” came a drawling, backwoods voice on the other end of the door. The sound of two maybe three new sets of boots walking into the room.
“This is a long way to drive for a quick trade. You Florida boys got the heaviest, dampest weather I ever did see. Some say South is South, but this here Florida is wet and muggy to beat any Georgia weather, I declare.”
“You bring the package?” Derek asked, wanting the show back on the road.
“Got it in my truck,” said the man. “You got the money?”
It sounded like the duffel bag got slung onto the bed and someone unzipped it.
“Hundred thousand. Unmarked, nonconsecutive. Secured through our Cayman Island partners. That’s real green.” de Ramos said.
“It surely is,” said the man, appropriately laconic. He lit a cigarette and took a drag. “I’ve never seen so much of it all in one place before. Your boss must be real interested in this little gewgaw. Frankly, I can’t tell why.”
“What is it?” de Ramos asked, easing up now that the money was out.
“I was hoping to hell that you could tell me that,” said the man. “Ain’t nothing but this little black box we found on the back of this cigarette truck that we borrowed. Ain’t got no opening, ain’t got no writing on it. Got a matte like finish on it, doesn’t shine back at you at all. Looks like it could weigh forty, fifty pounds, but when you pick it up it feels as light as any ol’ empty cardboard box. Damndest thing I ever did see. We found it and word seemed to get around in an awful hurry. Not long after, your boss called my boss and gave us a great deal. Too great even. We’re happy to take your money, but I’d just as soon part with it for less. It ain’t got no use no how, so far as I can tell.”
“It can’t be killed,” said one of the other Southerners, in a deep gravelly voice.
“Well, that is true,” said the talkative one. “We thought we’d shoot at it awhile to see if we could get it to open, and also just to pass the time a spell. My Remington ten gauge didn’t budge it, and I was right up next to it. Same as my SKS, my AK-47, my .386 deer rifle, a whole mess of those M-80 fireworks the kids had around the house, my wife’s bird gun, it didn’t matter. The fuckin’ thing didn’t have but one fuckin’ scratch on it after all that firepower. We even had a good ol’ boy with an M-60 mounted on his jeep take a whack at ‘er and it didn’t do shit.”
“It can’t be killed,” said another Southerner.
“It can’t be killed,” repeated the talkative one. “Like I said, I don’t mind bein’ rid of the thing. I just want to know what it is ‘cuz I’m the curious type sumbitch. Did your boss say anything about it? Is it a safe? I’ll just bet that it’s a safe.”
“I don’t know what is,” de Ramos said. “My boss didn’t tell me. When I asked him he got pissed, so I backed off.”
“Well, it’s your money,” said the talkative one. “Hell, it don’t matter. So long’s I’m rid of the fuckin’, cussed, bloody gewgaw. As you can see it’s had a bit of an atrophying effect on the minds of my associates. I’m a bit long in the tooth myself, knowing that the thing is nearby. Can’t get a lick of sleep. It’s like I can feel it watching me, almost. ‘Course I got a prostate ain’t worth a damn anymore. Try as I might, I can’t get to piss like I used to could…”
“Let’s get a look at it, eh?” de Ramos interrupted.
“It’s your party,” said the other man. The door opened and I could hear the door of a car opening and shutting.
“There you go,” said the Southerner, shuffling back in.
“What’s this wooden box? I thought it was black,” said de Ramos.
“Nah, it’s inside of that. It’s a cherry wood cabinet I made special for it. I figured since you were paying so much for it, I’d give you something to keep it in. Besides, it sort of… needs something to keep it in.”
“Nice,” de Ramos said, sounding genuine. I could hear the clasps on the wooden box snap and the lid creaked open. There was a long pause. No one said anything.
“My god,” came an indefinable voice, “What is it?”

Suddenly, tires squealed in the parking lot. I could hear them without the microphone. Another car had pulled up and they weren’t being quiet about it. Then, a loud pulsing noise filled de Ramos’s room and I flung my headphones off and hit the floor just as I heard the sound of bullets slapping into human bodies and punching through the walls into our own room. I could hear them thumping into the bed and the side tables, carrying that cordite smell with them. Deb screamed. There was a few more rapid pulses, like someone finishing the job, and then the shooting stopped.
I looked over the other side of the bed and saw Deb lying on the ground with her headphones half off and sucking big gulps of air. She was holding a spot on her calf that was wringing out bright gushes of blood. My pulse was jacked but I stopped the shaking long enough to grab the camera and wheel around to the other side of the motel. I had to get a good look at the shooters. I got a mental flash of Deb getting out of the hospital, looking at the pictures I took of them, and pointing them out to the jury when we would testify in court and send every one of these fuckers to the chair. I hid behind a bush and killed the flash on the camera, hoping to Christ that the moonlight would be enough. Two white males, late twenties-early thirties, wearing black hooded sweatshirts and black gloves loaded a maybe 2’x 3’ sized cherry wood box into a late model, black, Cadillac Escalade truck. In the passenger seat, a white male, mid to late sixties, watched them load up with the window down. He took a huff on what looked like an oxygen mask before rolling up the tinted window. That was something. The truck tore down the road. Snap, snap, snap. I got it all. I couldn’t make the license plate from where I was at, but I was hoping it would wash up in the pictures. Deb was running out of time. I ran back to the room and put my hand on her shoulder. She was breathing heavy, and the blood was getting worse.
I leaned in and whispered, “They’re dead already, girl. Dead. I promise you.”
Through a mist of adrenaline I called 911 with maybe half a bar’s reception on my cell phone. Told them to send an ambulance right away for a gunshot wound. The girl dispatcher on the other end sounded scared. I told her that they didn’t need to rush to help the six other victims of a mass murder in the other room. They would just need to get their pictures taken before getting hauled to the county morgue.

Behind the Green Curtain: Ch. 3

So, the working title of this story is going to be Behind the Green Curtain. I'm not sure what green curtains have to do with the story, but I thought it had a good noir sound to it. Towards the end of Raymond Chandler's Lady in the Lake, Marlowe is sapped from behind by an attacker hiding behind a green curtain. "Never trust a green curtain again," he thinks after coming to and discovering a dead body near him. All previous posts for this story now include the title, Behind the Green Curtain. Let the Darwinian ritual begin...

3.

The rest of the morning went by without incident. We got a couple more calls about the Letourney case but no other new business. My buzz wore off. We were getting close to Derek’s lunch time so I started packing the car. My MG was too flashy for stakeout work. We had this big, maroon 90’s Trans Am that we used for surveillance jobs. It had the big seats, power everything, all that you needed to sit for hours and hours and watch nothing happen. I brought my Nikon with extra film, the microphones, binoculars, and this old, gigantic reel-to-reel that we sometimes used for recording. It came in handy only if I could find any place to hide the damn thing where the marks couldn’t see or hear it recording them, and that was hard to do. Deb went home and changed into some skinny jeans and flats with a t-shirt. When she got back she put on the big headphones that went with the reel-to-reel and turned some dials to test it out, even though she didn’t really need to. She held the big earphones against her head, then pushed her glasses up her nose.
“It’s like I’m a cop in some Steve McQueen movie,” she said.
Kids these days. I went to Wendy’s and got us some sandwiches. I’ll bet I was about as hungry as Derek was by now. We were running late and the traffic on Carson was unusually bad, so we got to The Shark Tank around 2:15. We made Derek’s truck with the D LUXE plates right away. It wasn’t hard. It was jacked up twelve feet in the air and it had custom shocks, big tires, a loud tail pipe, KC lights, all that. There was even a long antenna that was probably attached to a CB in the cab. That took me back to the 70’s. All told, that truck had to have costed just over 60k. It looked like Derek had gotten redneck rich off of independent contracting, whatever that was. He could afford to pump the gas for that beast to take him to a fairly swank place like The Shark Tank every day, so he must be doing alright. We waited.
“I’m starving,” Deb said, pulling the foil off of her Chicken Grill. I tore into my Western Bacon. The Montezuma’s Revenge had given me a real yen for Western Bacon. The Shark Tank was one of those Southern, fifties style, bossanova, clambake looking places that still get built in Jacksonville from time to time. It was a big place with these high, triangular walls of white stone placed irregularly. There were a lot of young palms and flowers by the front door. There was a big red wedge sticking out of the side of the building that held an old style neon sign that you could see from space. Like an old drive-up diner, except the burgers cost sixteen dollars. Still, whoever built it had taste. It didn’t look quite like a straight knock-off of the In-N-Out Burgers that they have out west.
We still waited. I finished my burger and my Coke and French fries and I threw my trash into the back seat where it could keep some old wrappers from Burger King company. These stakeouts can be hard on the waistline, and I was living proof of that. Deb ate like I did most days but was still skinny as a pencil, the cute kid. She had her eyes glued to the entrance like a good scout. I took some exterior photos of the restaurant, just to be thorough. And we waited. A half an hour turned into an hour. An hour turned into an hour and a half, two and a half hours. It was an awfully long lunch for a guy who was supposed to be busy independent contracting. Maybe, the restaurant was where he did most of his business. Maybe, the restaurant was his business. If so, what did independent contracting have to do with any of it? If I sat there in the car any longer I could convince myself de Ramos was running the world out of The Shark Tank Grill. I was getting antsy. I got out of the car. I never was any good at stakeouts.
“What are you doing? You’ll blow our cover,” said Deb, getting out with me. I made my way to the entrance. Too bad I already ate. I’d have gone for a steak just then.
“App, you’re compromising the investigation.”
I stopped. “Debra, it’s been two and a half hours. If that guy’s cheating on his wife he’s doing it inside this restaurant. Now c’mon, let’s go see what we can get for happy hour.” I pushed open the heavy plate glass door and went into the chilled entryway. The restaurant was barely lit except for a strange blue-green glow that came from the fish tanks that they had instead of walls. Inside these tanks were schools of weird colored fish darting through these brightly painted coral and these crazy underwater carnivorous plants. Among the rocks lumbered two massive prehistoric sharks. One with jagged protruding teeth and lifeless, glass-like eyes, the other a battle scarred hammerhead that looked like he took down a few gulf coast fisher men before being incarcerated in this cheesy restaurant. I wondered how they got the big fish to keep from eating the little ones. Maybe, they just let it happen. Maybe, they just stocked the tanks every week and let the old Darwinian ritual take it’s course. Dinner and a show. Thrill to the savage underwater ballet of death, as live fish tear each other to shreds! Half priced chicken finger baskets for the kids. Finally, a waitress arrived.
“Two?”
“We’ll sit at the bar, please,” I said. She vanished, happy to leave us to our own devices.
“The lady and I will have Singapore Slings. Easy on the club soda, but go a little more on the cherry brandy,” I said to the bartender. He looked at me a moment.
“How ‘bout gin and tonics?” he suggested. I conceded.
“We’re gonna get spotted and it’s gonna come back to bite us in the ass,” Deb said.
“Deb, we look like tourists out to photograph Jacksonville’s aqueous fauna in it’s native habitat,” I said, pointing to the Nikon still strapped to my neck. “Relax and watch the little fishies swim. Salud.” We clinked our glasses.
“This place is deserted,” she said. “We didn’t get a picture of the guy, but I don’t see anyone else here besides us.”
“Very peculiar,” I said, rubbing the stubble on my chin. The place was deserted all right. Too late for lunch and too early for dinner. Nothing but two nosy tourists to keep the help busy.
“I’m gonna go find the men’s,” I said. I made my way back towards the kitchen and I went through the swinging doors. Loud Mexican music, and all the cooks and dishwashers stop what they’re doing to watch me walk on through. I go down a narrow flight of stairs that’s lit up by a loud red light like the inside of a submarine at the battle of Midway. I go through the door at the bottom. Inside, two Hispanic males, heavy built, with black collared shirts and grey Stetsons stand over a card table counting up a big pile of money, I mean a huge mountain of cash, bigger than a sleepy restaurant on Carson St. could do in a week. A third guy had his Tony Llamas up on an oak desk and he’s smoking a robusto that smells Cuban. Definitely, the supervisor type.
“Lo siento. Sabes, donde esta el bano?” I ask. The guy with his feet on the desk flashes a smile, gold tooth winking back at me. “Back out the kitchen and down the hall to the left, amigo,” he says. “Habla usted Ingles?”
“Gracias,” I say, heading back up the stairs with my tail wagging behind me. I sit next to Deb and put on a big grin.
“Have fun in the bathroom?” she says with one of her barf-out looks.
“I went downstairs and a guy who might be de Ramos was counting up a big pile of money with his two pals.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she says. “They saw you? This is divorce work, App. We stay low and wait for the big reveal. That’s how we close cases and get paid. That’s what you told me, like, on my first day.”
“Deb, did you know you’re a beautiful young lady?”
“I’m serious. If he sees you following him in the car he’s gonna get suspicious and then we’re screwed.”
That quieted me down a bit. I guess I hadn’t thought this one through. If he did see us it could put the kibosh on the whole deal. He’d make us for dime store dicks in a minute if he sees my face in his rearview and Deb next to me taking snapshots of his plates. But what about the money? Granted, if Derek flopped with the other woman tonight, we’d get Gail the evidence and that would close the deal. We’d never find out what was really going on in that basement during slow hours at The Shark Tank Grill. I hoped to god that we could string this out another day or so, just to get a little deeper on this thing. Maybe, the money down there was legit, but my gut told me no. And my gut could be very persistent. If de Ramos had dirt on him I had to find out what kind and who with. Anything else was just divorce work.
Staying any longer in the restaurant was goofy. If those guys came upstairs they’d get a better look at me and make Deb. Then we’d really be screwed. I killed the rest of the ice water they called gin and tonic, and we paid the bartender and headed back to the car.
“Hide in the backseat, so he can’t see you when he comes out,” Deb said, and I obeyed. The backseat smelled like old burgers which wasn’t half-bad. Idly, I thought about how great another Western Bacon would be right now.
“Three males in cowboy hats and black shirts,” Deb said.
“That’s them,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on. I can’t see. What are they doing? Where are they going?”
“They’re going near the truck. Yep, they’re climbing into de Ramos’s vehicle. The guy driving is probably him. They’ve got a big black duffel bag with them.”
“Holy shit, that’s gotta be the money,” I said. “Where are they taking the money? If it’s restaurant money it would get picked up by the courier service in the morning and taken to the bank. Something else is going on here.”
“Yeah, they’re doing something with it. Otherwise, they’d just leave it in the safe in the basement.” Deb said, finally getting curious. We lurched over the curb and started to tail the truck.
“Don’t get too close to them Deb. Can you take any pictures of the truck? Here, take the camera.”
Deb drove like a maniac while trying to wield the giant Nikon in a discreet way. I knew she was steady, though. Her pictures always came out good. She was getting into it now. Her hands were tight on the wheel and her jaw was clenched in concentration. It was as close to a chase as you get in this business, and Deb was loving it. Hanging on for dear life in the backseat, I thought about how it was for me back when I was first starting out. Weaving in and out of civilian traffic trying to get that one scoop, that one sliver of a lead. Twenty years of that sure gets burned away in a hurry. Then, you’re in the backseat rolling around like so much fast-food trash.

Behind the Green Curtain: Ch. 2

Here's chapter two of a story that started on the previous post. I still can't think of a name for the novel, so I'll just put a label up that has the main character's name. For those of you that couldn't follow the dialogue for chapter one because of the author's annoying "style," this chapter has quotation marks for all of the dialogue...

2.

Monday morning I got into the office at a quarter to ten. Debra was at her desk finishing up an e-mail. She’s a fair skinned girl with a shorter, more sensible hairdo and eyeglasses one-size too large. She was dressier today than she normally was. She had on the white blouse with the little frills down her little bust, high-waisted slate skirt with the big buttons and those ribbed stockings that knew how to show off her legs. I leaned over the particle board desk and whispered to her, “You keeping it warm for me, Deb?”
“You’re late,” she said. “Keeping what warm?”
“The coffee,” I said, walking into the other room and throwing my stuff onto the brown sofa where the customers sat. I went to the ancient commercial machine that brewed the coffee and poured myself a cup. Then I sat behind my desk and opened the racing form. White Rabbit was in the third race today and it rained a little last night. Deb walked in.
“Florida Star called. They want a statement on the Letourney case,”
I waved my hand at her. “We’re not ready to talk about that yet. After his arraignment we can discuss where and when we did the surveillance. In the meantime, we have to protect our client. If the paper just needs background on the case, have them call Jacksonville metro.” I figured that she’d already done that, but I told her anyway. I lit up a Chesterfield.
“Any new business?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“There’s never any walk-ins before lunch,” she said, turning to go back to the front room. My office shared a wall with a thirty-year-old CPA. I could hear him mumbling some figures into his phone, stopping now and again to shuffle through some papers. Deb was my girl, but she helped the accountant out sometimes just as a courtesy. Lately, she was helping him a lot just to stay busy, because this was our slow season. Lately, there had been a few slow seasons. His fax machine beeped.
“Stop smoking in there,” she called from her desk. I was through with my third cup and ready to call it a day when she came in and asked me if I could take in a client. I shrugged my shoulders and put out my smoke.
“Send him in,”
“Her,” said Deb.
In walked six feet of my kind of woman: big, raven colored hair, broad hipped and ample busted. She had on jeans and calf-high leather boots with spike heels, not that she needed to be any taller. She had on a red vinyl jacket and a tight black top that flattered her enough, not that she needed any flattering, either. Hell, she was every guy’s kind of woman. It was enough to get me to take my feet off of my desk.
“How can I help ya,” I managed to say. She reached over my desk and gave me a firm handshake.
“Gail de Ramos. How do you say your name?” she asked pointing to the “private investigator” name plate that I had on my desk.
“It’s Appalachia,” I said. “Appalachia Cruz.”
“Is that Mexican?” she asked, like we both just got off of the same boat.
“Puerto Rican. My mom was half-white and she gave me that name because we lived in Tennessee when I was a kid, and she loved the mountains.”
“I saw your name when I was looking through the internet and I thought ‘what an unusual name?’ I’m gonna call on him.”
“Well, we’re glad that you did. How can I help you Ms. de Ramos?”
I gestured to the couch and she took a seat.
“It’s my husband, Derek?” she said, pausing a moment to look at the ceiling, letting the tears well up. I knew right away what this about, because it always happened this way. It was going to be the kind of case that I’d have wrapped up by the end of the week. Some guys don’t touch divorce work, but it’s all regular business to me. These people need just as much help and anonymity as the next joker, and who was I turn up my nose? Those tears were all a lot of easy money to me. I had long since run out of any money that was easy.
“I know that he’s seeing another woman,” she said. “He thinks I’m some kind of idiot, but I’m not. I can tell when something’s going on. A wife knows. Christ, we’ve been married for eleven years in June. Here, we’ve got two school-aged kids at home and he’s out sneaking around with some whore behind my back. Well, I don’t let people do that to me.”
“Ms. De Ramos,” I said. “Why don’t you talk to him? Let him know that you know what’s happening and that you want it to stop. Tell him that you want him to be honest. After eleven years you deserve that much.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “He’s a cheater, and I won’t be cheated on. Besides, I know that if I tried to talk to him about it, he’ll hit me or worse. He’s done it before, and I wouldn’t put it past him to do it again. I want a divorce, but I want to make sure that his children get the kind of future that they deserve. I want them to be protected.”
She started crying even more now. They always do when they start to talk about getting the right kind of money from a divorce. Still, I came over to her and handed her a box of tissues and I rubbed her back just a little. She smelled great.
“There, there Ms. de Ramos,” I said. “These things are hard on everybody. Having kids in the house only makes it worse. it’s not a good environment for them. Let us help you. We’re gonna help you through this…”
After a minute of this she wiped her eyes.
“I want to catch the miserable bastard in the act, she said. I want to find out exactly what happens and what he says when he’s with this other whore. I want to nail his ass to the wall.”
“If we’re talking around the clock surveillance here, Ms. de Ramos, I must warn you that this kind of thing can be very hard on your bank account.”
“I don’t care about that,” she said. “I have my own money. I want to make sure I have everything that I need when I get my day in court. I want a solid case, with no cops.”
This was just another trophy wife with a chip on her shoulder that showed up all too often in this line of work. A smarter me would’ve said no, would’ve told her to go home, call her sister, take a hot bath. Then, when this Derek gets home tell him that she no longer wants any part of this marriage. He’d get mad, sure. If he wanted to get physical make sure escape was easy, just have your bags packed and storm out of the house. Then, spend the night at her mother’s. Experience told me that 99% of these kinds of problems got solved with just that sort of sensible approach. Chances were good that it wouldn’t really help anyone in court to have me sneak around dingy motels, taking dirty pictures. I could only confirm what people already knew about each other. All of the animosity between them would come out in the courtroom anyway and any judge, worth his salt or not, could tell which party was more guilty than the other just by the way that they talked to each other. So why get an investigator involved?
But, as Gail sat there on my couch and told me her story through her stagy little sobs I knew that I’d do anything to help her out. It wasn’t about the money. For me, the job stopped being about money long ago. Maybe I fell for her a little bit that morning. Maybe I was soft. Maybe I was stupid. Either way, I was too hungover and tired and broke to tell the difference. So, what else was left but to get out and hit the old ball?
“Ms. de Ramos, it sounds like you have a very clear cut case for infidelity. Now what we want to do is catch him in the act with this other woman. We get the right kind of surveillance early on and it will go a long way in helping you with your case and you’ll get the kind of closure that you deserve. Will he be at home tonight or will he be away?”
“He said that he was going out to The Whiskey Mill tonight with the guys after work, but I know that he’s meeting her,” she said.
“In that case we’ll want to start keeping an eye on him right away. We can put a tail on him this afternoon and track him to where he’s really going tonight. We won’t be in touch with you, but you’ll get a full report tomorrow morning with photographic evidence of all of his activities for the evening. Where does your husband work, Ms. de Ramos?
She paused a moment. “He’s an independent contractor so his work is all over the place. He always eats at The Shark Tank Grill on Carson Street for lunch, though. He does that every day at two o’clock, no matter what. Does that help you?”
“Certainly does, that gives us plenty of time to find him at the restaurant and then follow him from there. What kind of car does he drive?”
“He drives a brand-new, black, Ford F-150. You can’t miss it. The license plate says D LUXE.”
“That’s a good start,” I said. “We’d like to begin today if it’s alright with you. We’ll start at The Shark Tank Grill and we’ll follow from there. Even if he doesn’t meet with this other woman that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something like that going on, so we’ll want to keep an eye on him until we’re sure. You’ll be given detailed updates on everything that happens and the ball will be in your court as far as how you want to act on that information. Now, if you’ve got more time I’d like to get all of your details down so Debra can start entering you into our database. Let me show you a table of the kind of billable hours you’re going to be looking at…”
She went through all of the motions and agreed to pay for whatever I put in front of her. She said that she trusted me, said that I came highly recommended, which I guessed meant that I had a nice looking name out of a handful of private detectives on some phone book website. This was very little work for the right kind of money. If all went well, Derek de Ramos didn’t have a cheating bone in his body and would turn out to be just a good ol’ boy who’d rather get drunk with his buddies than tuck his kids in at night. That way, Gail would only get more suspicious and want more surveillance. The billable hours would come rolling in until she decided Derek wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Then, she’d call off the dogs after reviewing my weekly statements. I knew that things never worked out that way but this time I hoped that they did. For her sake and mine.
I got everything that I needed to make the case and then I stood up and stuck my hand out again for another one of her hearty handshakes. She put her arms around me, pressing her big boobs up against my chest. I was buried in her hairsprayed hair and I could hear the squeaking of her vinyl jacket.
“Thank you so much for helping me Mr. Cruz. I know that with your help I can go back to living a normal life. If there’s anything that you need, just call me… Anything.”
After she left I gave her information to Deb and I told her that she didn’t have to look at people’s W-2 forms all afternoon if she wanted.
“Finally a case,” she said. “I thought I was gonna get cabin fever if I spent another day in here.”
“This might be an all-nighter, Deb. I hope you don’t have any plans, but if you do we can work something out.”
She shrugged. “I’ll have to cancel my date with Mr. Miniwhiskers. He’ll just have to watch reality TV and eat strawberry ice cream without me, then.”
I laughed and went back to my desk feeling like a king. A couple more cases like this for the month and I wouldn’t have to wash the office owner’s Mercedes to make the rest of the rent after payroll. Things were shaping up. I got the bag of Montezuma’s Revenge out of my drawer and I rolled up a reasonable sized joint. I flicked on the RCA I had in the corner and the CD got started. It was Louie, Louie; the Toots and the Maytals version. I sparked the joint and took a good pull, and I put my feet up on the desk to let it lay me back a little bit. It was good shit.
The CPA walked in, in his square-john skinny tie, big glasses, and collegiate hair.
“How’s it going, Mr. Cruz?”
“Never better,” I said, holding smoke in my lungs.
“Well, there’s no smoking in here, so…”

Behind the Green Curtain: Ch. 1

So, this is a currently untitled story that I'm working on right now that I hope to keep building into a complete novel. This is the first chapter, but I've written more. In weeks to come I may post subsequent chapters if I think that there's enough interest. It's meant to be a new take on a kind of Maltese Falcon-ish detective novel. Take a look and tell me what you all think. Who the hell came up with the phrase "Great American Novel," anyway?...

1.

It was another Saturday night at King Harrod’s up near the Georgia border and I wasn’t winning any. The nickel slot crowd would hang around my table long enough to see me lose my shirt, then they’d lose interest and move on to dine on other more serious gamblers. No matter what magic spells I tried to breathe into the cherry red dice I never came out ahead. I would curse the miserable bastards that had the game loaded from the very beginning and retreated to the bar repeatedly to lick my wounds. I pushed away some vinyl palm fronds that hung over the long under-lit bar and hunched over it feeling sorry myself. Tim the bartender would come over rubbing a glass with a dirty rag.
Tough break, he said automatically. If you need anything, I’ll take care of it. Maybe give you a shot in the arm?
I nodded my head staring into the walnut counter top like a real sad sack, and another gin and tonic appeared in front of me. I gobbled it down and thought about what a good idea it would be to get up to my room, splash some cold water on my face and get some sleep. Just forget this whole night ever happened. Losing was just part of the whole thing, and now it was my turn. Now it was time to gather up what little I had and just call it the cost of doing business. I still had that option, but I could also tell that tonight wasn’t the night for teary goodbyes. I had driven an hour and a half. The MG purred like a kitten on a bowl full of cream the whole way. The air actually felt a little cooler than a hundred degrees, the humidity had retreated a little bit. The insects had gorged themselves on just enough of your blood and were now fast asleep. The stars were being whipped through the sky by the warm winds of fortune. It was a magical evening. I could keep it that way with just a little more luck.
Tim was still buying me drinks so I drained another gin and tonic before making my way heroically back to the tables. I reeled away from the bar and could now feel the tiny fingers of the spongy red carpet under my white alligator loafers. The drinks were taking effect now and it didn’t look pretty. The small money weekenders were away from their posts at the gas pumps and waffle houses where they gained little and lost more. They wandered gelatinously from one noisemaking gewgaw to another exhaling Bud Light, cheap cigarettes, and bad perfume. They lurked in the aisles not knowing what to do with themselves. Pausing only to sink their fangs into each other’s necks and feast on each other’s remains. This was the night where the Legion of the Black Lagoon arose from their watery cells to guzzle free booze and cannibalize the weakest among them. I could feel them all watching me. This was no way to start a winning streak. I would need some help. I made my way through the coin operated jungle and into the restaurant where they had the floor show. The girl that they had on now got me real interested in a big way. The light came up and she walked through the blue velvet curtain all covered in these white feathery boas and fans. Everything was covered up but her long pale legs and white satin pumps. A husky voice like raw silk emerged from somewhere within the feathers. I hustled up to the front row with all of the other slobs and lit up a cigarette. The waiter came by with some pink drinks that had fruit dangling out of them and I handed him a crumpled up bill.
The girl’s voice started roiling somewhere within the nest of white feathers and with each passing note, the fans and boas would be pulled away from her long white body, revealing more and more skin. Everything about her was white except her deep red lips and dark brown eyes. As I watched her in the darkness I imagined her on my arm at the craps table. She’d give me a smile and blow a kiss to the dice in my hand and they would jump off of the boards, landing me big money every time. As morning approached somewhere beyond the borders of the casino’s perpetual daytime I would gather up all of my chips into one big pile and the girl would look me deep in the eyes while I pulled her closer, closer.
Her song was winding down now and it was almost time for the big finish. She brushed the last remaining feather fan around her chest and then threw it away as her voice went into the final crescendo. Simultaneously, the lights went out completely, but you could still see the outline of her perfect, curvy figure in the dark while she belted out the last note. Then she disappeared behind the curtain. The lights came back on and the crowd went nuts. You could hear guys whistling and banging the backs of their chairs. They’d waited their whole lives for something like this and now they were going to tear the place apart. I sucked down what was left of the whiskey flavored fruit salad they gave me and I got up to make my way to the backstage. I had to get this girl to help me win. Just this one last thing was all I needed to get me ahead.
Sir, there’s no smoking in here, said one of the waiter’s while I was pushing through the swinging doors that led to the back of the stage.
Sorry about that. I’m going back there to say hello to an old friend, I said, dropping my butt into one of the potted plants.
I’m afraid there’s no guests allowed backstage, said the little flunky in a red vest.
Well, I’m no guest the young lady’s expecting me, I said flinging my whole body weight into the red vinyl padded swinging door and hurrying down the hallway. I took another right down a narrow little stairway that I knew had to lead into the girl’s dressing room. I went through a heavy black curtain and she was there unclasping one of her big dangling earrings.
She turned around to look at me and her big, round, perfect breasts stared right back at me. Sobriety hit me like a cold bucket of water. I had a made a terrible mistake. This could only end badly.
What the fuck are you doing in here? she said. Who are you?
Two giant men seized me on either side like an octopus in a movie. They pulled me out of the dressing room and showed me to another guard who was waiting outside. I knew the guy. he was a big black kid named Reggie who’d been working steady at King Harrod’s for a couple of years now. Reggie had a heart of gold and would never hurt a fly.
Good to see you again, Mr. Cruz, he said to me.
Hiya, Reggie. How’s the wife? I said. He nodded.
Sorry bout this, man.
He pulled back and slugged me full on the jaw with his big fist, but I knew that he could’ve done a lot worse. I fell like a bundle of dirty laundry into the arms of the two other guys. There was darkness. I could see the girl looking angrily at me like I was something small and scaly that had slithered into her dressing room. I could see the mad face of the craps dealer lording over the crowd.
SNAKE EYES. No help for the gentleman in the white hat, he howled. The fluorescent lit, chain-smoking zombies all around him cheering and laughing.
I came to and I was slunk into a wing-backed chair in some spacious mahogany paneled office upstairs. An old clock ticked immensely somewhere. The side of my face was numb and my head felt like a box of dancing hammers. Across a massive desk full of handsomely bound ledgers and fountain pen sets sticking up at rakish angles sat Paul Blackbench, the owner of King Herrod’s. He finished writing what he was writing in his book before carefully placing his pen into its little holder and looking up at me.
Hello, App. Had a late night, haven’t we?
‘Lo Paul, I said rubbing my temples. It’s either a late night or a very early morning.
I guess the tables aren’t treating you well. These things happen to the best of us. I like it whenever you come out to see us, App. I try to get you everything that you need, make sure that you’re well taken care of.
Thanks, I said, hearing my swollen jaw click as I tried to close it.
Crystal said that you tried to rape her. Said that you looked like you had a knife, but she didn’t seem sure.
The jaw was starting to swell up now but I managed a smile.
Crystal’s alright. No, I wasn’t trying to rape her. I saw her act and I decided I was a big fan, wanted to see if I could get her autograph.
You wanted to get her autograph, he said very slowly.
I need more money, I said, figuring now was as good a time as any.
Paul looked at me for a moment and then let out a long weary sigh. He got up from his wine-colored executive chair and made his way over to the high window at the side of the office. He gazed sadly out into the blackness. He looked out somewhere beyond the acres of parking lot and the highway. He had made sure that they were built by securing all of the no-bid contracts in this part of Florida. All of them won by weeks and months of pumping the right hands and leaving all of the right palms good and greasy; playing golf with politicians and letting them play slap and tickle with his girls whenever they came to his town. He looked out somewhere beyond into the southern Georgia woods. A prehistoric frontier full of faceless, tooth gnashing abominations, a land of unspeakable horror. He looked out over all that he had built and finally despaired. Heavy lies the crown, indeed.
He said, when I was a boy in Arkansas we spent a lot time camping. We’d do that whenever it wasn’t raining buckets and the roads weren’t washed out. We’d just go up in the woods, my brothers, and my uncles, and my pa. We’d never take a thing with us but our guns and our sleeping rolls. We’d get ground squirrel, pheasant. Even caught a razorback hog a time or two. We’d cook that over a fire and my uncles and my pa would pass the jug around and tell all kinds of stories. I don’t know how we did it. We lived, all eight of us, in that little one room shack and it never bothered me. It bothered me later, but it didn’t bother me then.
He stood there a moment looking sad. He stuck his hands in his pockets. I could hear the loose change jingling around in there. He walked over to his chair again and sat down.
How much did you need? he asked.
Three thousand dollars, I said.
He opened up a large book that had pages of oversized blank checks in it. He took out his pen and wrote the three thousand dollars out to me, and then he took out a piece of silk cloth and pressed away the wet ink. Then, he tore the check out and handed it to me.
Care for a drink? he asked.
I thought he’d never say so.
Don’t get up I can make one myself. What’ll you have? I said standing up. The blood rushed out of my head and I could feel the floor rising up to get me. I stumbled once, and then fell with all of my weight onto the little liquor caddy that was in the corner. Decanters of scotch and rye spilled onto the bearskin rig, glasses shattered, ice went everywhere. I didn’t know my own strength. Reggie opened up the door.
Everything’s alright Reggie, Paul said, helping me up. Can you please go find someone to help us clean up in here?
I leaned heavily onto Paul. Sorry about the mess, I said thickly.
He sat me back in the chair and opened up a cabinet behind his desk. He poured us two glasses from his own private reserve. I drank mine down in two gulps. I had taken up enough of the man’s time.
Well, it’s been swell, but I’d better be off. Thanks for everything, Paul. Come over to my place and I’ll let you break a couple of dishes, just for old time’s sake.
Paul gave a small laugh and helped me out of the chair. He made sure I was steady to walk this time. He held onto my shoulders and looked me into the eyes.
It’s nice to have friends in Jacksonville, App. Maybe, I can call you up next time I need something?
I nodded my head vaguely. He patted my shoulders and steered me out the door.
Get some sleep, huh? he said.

Who I Was and Where I Came From

So, I've taken a couple of months off from blog posting to work on some creative projects. This is a 99.9% true story from back when I was a kid in Sandy, Utah. It's mostly a hodge podge of events that happened in grade school. Hopefully, it gives you an idea of what things were like back then. See for yourself:

Recess

Mike Peterson and I usually played near the big storm grate just behind the batting fence and the swing sets. We were playing Chronicles of Kings. Today we slew a phalanx of orcs. They surprised us in a mountain pass. They were sent to steal back the sacred sword which we recovered from the ruins of Ashtoran, but having the sacred sword made them easier for us to kill, which they, being orcs, hadn’t thought about. A phalanx of orcs wasn’t as big as a horde of orcs, but still. Then we were attacked by a swarm of bees and we ended up starting this float trip thing that involved rafts and aquatic monsters. It was a good story. The idea was to create this epic story that would get expanded with each recess. We were both excited about the rafting thing. We never thought about sea monsters before. It was a good angle.
We were next to the tall metal swing sets that flanked this big triangle area full of pea gravel. There was a jungle gym, monkey bars, parallel bars, the whole thing. There used to be a slide but that got taken out and we never figured out why. The rest of the big yard was just grass with a couple of stands that would’ve been soccer goals if there had any nets. All of the Red Rover kids and the Crack the Whip kids and the Smear the Queer kids were usually over there. I was never a Red Rover kid, but I was sometimes a Crack the Whip kid or a Smear the Queer kid. I’d gotten ahead in Crack the Whip but I never really caught on to Smear the Queer. You picked a kid that nobody liked and you just chased him around. It was mean and we knew that, so we tried to limit how often the game got played. This was before Mrs. Moss said that we couldn’t play it at all any more. Somebody had complained. It was an open secret that Paul Lefferts usually got picked for the queer, so we naturally assumed that he was the whistleblower. But, now Lefferts was targeted even more because now he was a squealer on top of being smelly and always talking with his outdoor voice. I never thought that Lefferts’s mom had thought that through. Now, that this had happened I kind of felt sorry for the guy.
We’re not going to play Smear the Blank any more, Mrs. Moss said.
“Blank” meant that queer was a bad word. I had no idea and I felt instantly ashamed. This was a couple of weeks ago.
Let’s play Sewer Theater, I said to Mike. Sewer Theater was this game I made up where one guy would yell through the big sewer grate near the batting fence and the sound would come through another storm drain that was near the tether ball poles. The idea was to make up a story and yell it through the grate loud enough so that the other guy could hear it. You’d make up part of a story and then the guy on the other end would make up another part so, in the end, you would have a full story before recess was over. I usually made up a lot of sound effects to go with the story, but Mike said that he couldn’t hear them very well through the grate. This just meant I needed to improve the sound effects to compensate for the echo in the drain pipe.
That’s a stupid game, Mike said.
The game had it’s flaws, but I thought calling it stupid was a little off base. We were trying to make memorable narratives here, and Mike wasn’t being very collaborative. Besides, I was the leader of the two of us, and he was just a sidekick. I came up with the big ideas and Mike was there to provide color, charm, embellishment. That was the dynamic that we agreed upon. What was the point of having somebody who had all of the great ideas if no one was there to follow him? The leader needed someone he could rely on to get him out of all of the tough scrapes he got himself into. I had said that Batman would be dead without Robin and without Chewbacca, Han Solo would have no idea how to fly the Millennium Falcon. Mike agreed. We discussed it months ago and he said that he didn’t mind the sidekick role and that he liked the idea.
You’re stupid, I said, shoving him to the ground.
He was smaller than me, so it was a little cheap, but Batman would’ve done the same thing. A leader commands respect.
Jerk, Mike said.
The bell rang. We got all clustered together and pushed our way through the big swinging brown doors that took us into our classrooms. I stood right behind Michelle Perry. I could almost smell that lemony smell in her hair. Michelle was blonde and her hair was pulled to the sides and banded with elastics that had these clear marble things on them. She had pronounced cheek bones and when she smiled her mouth was full of perfect white teeth. She was stunning; second only to Susan Hunter who I was desperately in love with but told no one. It was my secret, this great love. The first day I saw her was on Halloween. She was dressed in these medieval clothes with a golden princess crown and a little plastic sword. She had thick brown hair.
What are you? I asked.
I’m a warrior, she said.
I vowed that day never to tell anyone about her, and I promised to think about her all of the time. I did talk about how I felt about other girls, but not Susan. She was special, while the other girls: Michelle Perry, Roseangel Martinson, Madison Graves, and Emily Fichtner, were just conventionally pretty. I still crushed on them too, but not as intensely. One summer, I pulled Bradley Gumble under this boat that was parked in a neighbor’s drive and told him that all of these girls could never be had by any man. They were all being held captive by some horrible malevolent power similar to the dark side of the force in Star Wars. Only one man could break the spell of this power and then these girls would give themselves totally and unspeakably to that man, effectively becoming his slaves.
What can we do? he said.
He was stunned by this realization. I had told him the big secret. We spent the rest of the afternoon planning how we would each break the spell and become this one man who had absolute power over all of the pretty girls. So far, nothing had worked.
When we were all inside after recess we got to work on this project that involved cutting out pieces of paper and gluing them to colored pieces of cardstock. I always hated these kinds of art projects. I didn’t care about cutting things up in creative ways and gluing them onto whatever we had laying around. That was more of a girl thing. All I wanted to do was doodle in the notepad that I kept in the cubby tray under my desk. I coasted on this cut-and-paste job. I’d cut out one piece and then take a trip to the drinking fountain, cut out another and then go to the crayon bin pretending that I was searching for a peach colored crayon. This ate up enough time.
Our teacher, Mrs. Dehaven, was now standing in the front of the room. She wore a long, brown dress and today her hair was curled and her lipstick was this dark, autumnal looking shade. I remembered hugging her earlier in the year. There was this warm smell that she had. There was a softness in the way that she hugged you. She was wearing these pearl earrings and she started pointing to the board with this long stick using these swift, exacting strokes. It was easy to look at her while she was doing all of this. I probably looked like I was paying attention.
Michael, she said. Did you understand that you have to cut your paper out evenly on both sides so that when you unfold it, you’ll have a leaf shape? I said yes, but she looked like she didn’t believe me.
Then, there was computer class. On good days you could play Oregon Trail. In Oregon Trail, you were trying to get a wagon train to migrate west without the whole group dying of malaria or running out of water or food. This game was nearly impossible and if you played it the right way it was still not very interesting. The only thing worth doing was to buy only guns and bullets at the general store before your wagon trip began. Then you could hunt these animals that ran across the screen with incredible quickness. The game ended early this way because your wagon would break down and you didn’t buy any spare parts at the beginning of the game because you blew it all on guns and bullets. Your whole group died of malaria and you’d lose, but nobody cared. Trying to shoot these impossible to kill coyotes and jackrabbits was the only fun part of the game.
Computers was taught by Mr. France, an overweight guy in his forties with a white beard, who wore pleated grey Dockers with big, white New Balance walking shoes. If you did something wrong he’d call you an idiot and then explain to the class what an idiot was and how you fit really well into his nuanced, intricate definition of an idiot. That day, I was waving my hand in front of the flashing green computer screen so that my hand turned into this mesmerizing green blur if I waved fast enough. This kept me occupied for awhile.
Did you hear me? he said. I turned around to look at him like I had just been awakened from a decade long coma.
Idiot, he said.
After that, we ate lunch. There were pigs in a blanket and mashed potatoes and gravy. Pig in a blanket day was my favorite. They were really good with lots of ketchup that came in these little white cups at the end of the lunch line. I washed all of that down with a little carton of Viva chocolate milk. It used to be that you could never get chocolate milk, only regular, but now they had it all of time so everybody was drinking it. The only kid that didn’t drink chocolate milk was Caleb Beckstead. Caleb said that he didn’t like the taste of chocolate milk and that his mom told him that he was allergic to chocolate milk, but not regular milk. Caleb always wore his glasses at an angle over his nose so that the lenses pointed down at his desk. He said that this was the only way that he could see anything, and that wearing his glasses normally actually made his vision worse than if he wasn’t wearing glasses at all.
I wanted to eat lunch in a hurry, because we had recess right after that. I went through all of the brown halls with the glaring fluorescent lights and the weird orange carpets and I went out the door. Mike was waiting for me at the storm grate.
Hi, I said. Listen, I’m really sorry about earlier. We don’t have to play Sewer Theater anymore. I guess I can’t even hear you all of that well on the other side, so it’s no big deal. Sorry, I pushed you. That was really mean.
Yeah, I don’t want to be the side kick anymore, he said. You came up with Sewer Theater, but we both worked on Chronicles of Kings, and you, me, and Eric Stonehocker all came up with Aliens vs. Predator, because we all read the comic books. I think nobody should be the leader, because we don’t need one. Let’s just all play together, and come up with good stuff.
I said that was a good idea. We did our ritual handshake that involved snaps and fist bumps, and all of that. Nobody knew how to do that but us. Then, Matt Matthews came over to us. He was at least six feet tall with a mouth full of big even teeth and a messy haircut.
Gentlemen, he said in his courtly way. What’re you two doing this fine afternoon? We explained that we were all done with the orcs and the bees and that now we were doing this raft-sea monster thing.
There should be a kraken, he said. We agreed that krakens were cool, but that a kraken was really more of a giant, boss monster that we would have to defeat after fighting a bunch of smaller, less powerful water monsters.
What about piranhas? Matt said. We wrote Matt in as a wayfaring pirate who would show us all of the valuable sea routes for three bags of gold. I ended up destroying the piranhas with the sacred sword, while Mike shot them out of the air with his bow and arrow. Matt had magical thunderbolt so he used that to blast the piranhas off of our little raft.
We forgot to fight the kraken, Mike said.
Next recess, I said. The bell rang.

A Weekend of Successes!

Well, this last weekend, the in-laws and I all took a trip down to St. George to stay at my brother-in-law's swanky timeshare condo. Swanky because I'm on vacation and I'm not in a tent and there's TV. Deluxe! St. George is like Salt Lake's spoiled little sister that isn't as successful as Salt Lake, yet still acts like a totally spoiled brat (only with more golf courses and strip malls). It's the most luxurious thing that's within a day's drive from the city that isn't Vegas or Twin Falls.

I ended up having to go into work early, so we got going a little later than I thought we would, but we still made good time, cruising fast over central Utah's flat, unremarkable prairies. People do well in St. George. The town is surrounded by some picturesque bluffs and boasts a mostly warm climate year round. The landscape is populated with newly built condos, timeshares, hotels and motels by the freeway, cookie-cutter family-friendly restaurants and shops, and sprawling spas probably housing celebrities from LA convalescing from their massively expensive drug addictions, guarded by high adobe walls and dangerous desert plants and patrolled by robotic, night-vision equipped, dobermans. I got to thinking about the real-estate crisis and I wondered how many tracts of houses, maybe whole neighborhoods, stood there brand new and deserted like one of those a-bomb test site facade cities that they built in the 50s. No, nothing of the sort. Business is booming in St. George. I saw a lot of construction on nice looking tax shelters that were probably already bought up by all the nice looking people. Swells, I mean.

Well, today we were the swells. Except, that when we drove up to the brand-new spic and span timeshare development, we found out that my brother-in-law and his family hadn't yet arrived to let us into the place. Good grief! Travel weary, I pulled myself out of the car and into one of the management's buildings to find a place to pee and get a drink of water. Inside, was a burly looking man in his early thirties with a backwards hat and a Minnesota Vikings shirt. This was the weekend of the big annual cross-town football game where The University of Utah would be hosting some little religious school based out of Provo. I had my bright red Utah sweatshirt on and this husky individual approached me and poked a finger into my chest. "You think Utah's gonna win that game?" he asked. "I know so," I said, "BYU's quarterback is used to having a cushy time slot when he's in the pocket, but our pass rush will make short work of that."
"Bullshit!" shouted the hulking neanderthal, his cordiality vanishing like one of the creatine shakes he wolfed down probably twenty times a day. "I used to play football for Vanderbuilt and the CFL. Now, I'm a sportswriter for CBS and I've got a blog and I live in the presidential suite at this here timeshare and who are YOU, buddy." I introduced myself. He kept talking. Talking about himself, his many adventures. I felt suddenly very tired.

Then, he kidnapped me. And he kidnapped my wife and my sister-in-law and he forced us to keep him company up in his hot-shot little presidential suite. He got all het-up on about all the football things he's ever done and football thoughts he's ever had. He was one of those hopelessly extroverted people that always tells you more than you would ever want to know. "I come up here to get away from the wife," he said, clenching and unclenching his massive fists. "Sometimes, I can't stand it when she's around," he confessed to me. I shifted my feet a little. "Maybe, you should see a therapist?" I said.

It was a nightmare. But Amanda was having a great time. She was swept away by this mysterious, psychotic barbarian that lived in the desert. Later, that night, she said that we should go over to his suite AGAIN and maybe see if he had any beer and maybe sit in his hot-tub. Who IS this woman? I can only imagine how that night would've turned out if we had done that. I'd probably watch him crush 57 beers on his forehead and then he'd force feed me Keystone Light until I threw up. Maybe, after that, he would confide to me about his broken marriage and broken dreams. Maybe, he'd cry. Maybe, he'd try to hug me. Thank god, it didn't come to that.

Fortunately, we weren't detained by him for very long. We all beat a hasty exit and went out and got a bite to eat. In a couple of hours the rest of the fam-damily arrived and the requisite commotion for everything got underway. People moving up and down stairs, carrying bags, bargaining, goofing, talking a mile a minute, kids tearing the whole damn place apart. But that all settles down. The evening ended with the kids going to bed, and the grown-ups and teenagers playing board games. Amanda busted out the good bottle of wine like the stand-up dame that she is. I don't know how I'd live without her.

Most of Amanda's brothers and sisters don't drink, but I swear to god they get secretly drunk sometimes. I had a little buzz on and I'm trying to understand this damn crazy game that everybody's playing. They kept giving these answers out that are either secret inside jokes, or they're non-secret outside jokes that I just don't get. They all get very giddy and elated. Naturally high, these people. Maybe we had a gas leak or something, who knows?

The next day we fooled around at the swimming pool and played table tennis in the rec room before going over to a sports bar to watch the big game. St. George, as far as I can tell, is cougar country. But BYU fans are the same everywhere. They're pretty quiet and tend not to cheer very loud for their team. That much happiness can't be moral, can it? The Heavenly Father would probably expect them to guide themselves out of the risky behaviors that are the results of too much mirth and excitement. It could lead to horseplay, and that can lead to harder things. Like dancing. Anyway, I'd be pretty quiet if I was a BYU fan that day, too. Utah put a hurt on the cougs and all of the steroidal maniac's predictions were proved dismally wrong thanks to the Ute's excellent pass rush and stellar defensive backs. Checkmate, random unstable stranger!

The next morning I received a pretty upsetting phone call. My cousin, a troubled fifteen year old living with my father's brother in Illinois, had been killed in a car accident the night before. The last time I saw him was when my grandmother passed away in 2001 and my family made a trip out to Minnesota to pay our respects. He was only eight years old then; cheerful, athletic, exuberant. Everything good about an eight year old boy. I had always thought that some time later down the line I'd see him again. He'd be older and taller. He'd be shy instead of excited to see his older cousin who he hadn't seen in years. He would be starting high school. He'd have a girlfriend, maybe. He'd still play baseball, but more seriously, thinking about his future. I really thought that was a cinch to happen someday. It was a safe inevitability. I just took it for granted.

Later that day, we all got into Amanda's mom's mini-van and went about forty miles east into Zion's National Park. It was a beautiful time to be there. The leaves were turning yellow and red. The sun was just setting over the towering rocks. Everybody else was playing around me, but I started moving inward. It wasn't just about my cousin, but about what a fight it is to be alive anyway. I'm still pretty young and I know for sure that I haven't done everything that I want to do yet. Really, I don't know how to get it done without pulling pieces out of it one at a time. Until, one day I'm sitting in a rocking chair having gotten the whole thing done and over with, and there I am. I don't know how anybody does it. Does anybody really get what they're after, or is it all about the fight to get that thing. Maybe, that's the only thing that really resonates; that's all that matters. I don't know.

I looked up at the tall cliffs; the dying sun casting red onto the towering, indestructible monuments around me. And I thought, as I often do, about ancient people maybe discovering this place. Maybe, a man in the bygone past looked up at the same red rocks that I saw. Maybe, like me, he was filled with fear and wonder. He thought about the menace that nature was, and what a struggle it was just to buy the air to breathe and the food to eat. But that nothing could be more powerful than that instinct to breathe and to eat. And it just didn't matter. The needs of one person, or even very many people, just didn't matter to the secret, evil machinations of nature. At that moment, I knew that I was just as much a man against nature as he was so long ago. And, slowly, carefully, I was walking into the same fire that lent those rocks their beautiful, momentary glow.