Stories included in this collection first appeared in Gallery, Chrysalis Reader,
Aethlon, Belletrist Review, Potpourri, Orange Coast, and Lake Effect

_________________________________

 

The Girl in the Red `Vette

    The night I chased the girl in the red `Vette, I was seventeen, already failing college, and about a year short of joining the Marines. It was 1962, October I think, certainly early autumn — Detroit's good season, a brief, red-orange sunset before the bare, gray night of winter — and new car time back when new cars mattered.

 

Outside Mombasa

   I stand in a black dress beside the orchid draped coffin of my father. Although the hilltop cemetery overlooks teeming Djakarta, my thoughts escape to Kenya, and I am puzzled. World and time remove this canopied breach in the Djakarta soil from the cobbled pavement of London where my father and I began our journey, a journey upon which Kenya had been but a lay‑by. Why, then, should images intrude of roads diverging outside Mombasa?  Kenyan Federal Road One, 400 kilometres of gently sloping grassland to Nairobi, a day‑traveler’s play at safari. And Highway Two — lesser traveled.

 

He Rarely Thought of Her At All

He opened his eyes on bars of sunshine — yellow-white stripes that seemed oddly bright, as if some extraordinary pressure had squeezed the sunlight between his drawn blind slats. He had dreamed of her again. A lucid dream. A lingering dream. A tinted dream, its images suffused with the honeyed light of a solar eclipse.

He frowned. Dreams were alien. Dreaming disquieted his dreamless, melancholic heart. But what could he do? Dreams could no more be checked than the golden sparks of dust animated by sunbeams penetrating his blinds. And besides, he reasoned, he rarely thought of her while awake.

 

Grunion Hunt

Relinquishing city lights, Pete and Mara crested the sea cliff and faced a black expanse of ocean. A hot, offshore wind — a Santa Ana — beat against their backs, whipped their hair, fluttered their clothes. Mara stopped to knot her baggy, tropical blouse beneath her breasts. Impatiently, Pete scuffed a sandal against a tuft of dry grass and coaxed her forward. Single file, they picked their way down a rock-strewn path toward a vague crescent of sand one-hundred feet below.

 

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

    Hidden behind drawn blinds, a naked man and woman sprawled across a rickety bed. A crooked web of sunlight, woven by the blinds, criss-crossed the rumpled sheets. A muffled garble of Spanish words and music filtered through the shared wall.

    "The walls here might as well be paper," said the man. "We make too much noise."

    "You think that old lech cares?"

    "He lives here. We're hourly."

 

Father's Day

Bubbling to say words he had waited since dawn to say, John Henry shoved aside his drawing the moment he heard Father trudging downstairs. John Henry loved breakfast with Father. He loved Father's morning smell of Ivory soap and Listerine, his morning cheeks, pink and razor-softened, his gleaming, wet, black hair slicked perfectly into place. Returning from work late each night, Father gave scratchy kisses. Limp hair sprawled across his forehead and his breath smelled of whiskey and cigar smoke. On the good side, however, Father did laugh more at night. He told silly jokes, did card tricks, and sometimes sang songs or played games until he fell asleep in his TV chair.

 

Gift of the Maggie

    Won't he be surprised? Maggie thought as she tiptoed across the darkened bedroom where her husband lay snoring. She carried a silver breakfast tray upon which sat a pristine newspaper, a coffeepot, and an oversized mug. Fixed to the mug handle by a dollop of melted wax was a small candle.

 

Tattoos

    He had always felt a tide inside himself, a restless coming and going, a surging and a slacking, a current, an undertow drawing him away from his father's still Kansas farm. Otis' blood rebelled at bondage to beaten dirt, a rebellion incited long ago when first he saw Uncle Luke and Luke had shown him the sea serpent.

 

Friends

    A freezing wind flapped loose scarves and hunched the shoulders of bundled people trudging past the restaurant window. Inside —  insulated by the glass —  a bearish man slurped his after-dinner coffee.

    "Ouch! Hot!"

    His delicate companion rat-ta-tat-tatted her fingers against the snow white table cloth.

    "Men!" she huffed.

 

Rhapsody

    Sasha called. Empathy was Greek to her and, sure enough, she said nothing about my play folding. She called because she had finished her shoot, and Hagop from Detroit, the buyer or whatever, was what Sasha dubbed an ‘artiste collector’, one of those Leyden-jar people who store the jolt they get rubbing shoulders with painters, musicians, writers … that ilk. Sasha was casting me as a struggling writer. And Richie B. — an old live-in with whom she could occasionally manage civil words — was playing at Guignol's. Shouting over the club noise, Sasha begged me to meet her there. Two 'artistes' wouldn't generate much of a charge, but, probably, Hagop wasn’t much a whatever. 

 

End Zone

"Find my boy, Mr. Pinel. Please."

    Richard Manning flicked his trembling cigarette fretfully against the lip of a half-filled Styrofoam cup.

    "I'm just an investigator, Dr. Manning, and runaways are iffy. Mostly they come home on their own, but it's easy enough to hide if you're motivated. And Ricky's what? Eighteen? You can't force him back. Not in California."

    He drowned the cigarette in the cup and rubbed the dark hollows of his eyes with his palms. "I know that. It's just ... I want a second chance."

    Great. All he wanted was a second chance. I slumped in the hard-back chair next to Manning's desk and considered taking up smoking again myself. Manning was a psychiatrist, after all, and should have known about second chances.

 

True Believer

    The pew of barstools was empty save for Socks, a daytime regular whose immediate excuse was the sweltering summer heat outside. Lost in thought or, maybe just lost, Socks rotated his beer mug while muttering to himself. His litany was a soothing sound, like white noise. Mind at peace, I polished glasses and waited for the evening congregation to assemble. Behind me, an arch of colored bottles rose like a stained glass window.

 

And All Ye Need

    Hugging a heavy filing carton, Cates elbowed open the door to a small laboratory and –- like an eager bridegroom  — barged across the threshold. 

    "I made it!" he crowed, waltzing his carton around a marble-top workbench. "My own lab! The National Academy!"

    He dropped the carton on a battered, wooden desk, then reeled from desk to sink to workbench, drumming a ruffle, spritzing water, goosing the gas taps.

    "BI..IG mistake, Blumford!" he shouted, shaking a fist at the ceiling. "Lured to your web, am I? Right where you want me, am I? HA! First I'll show you, and then — "

    He began to shadow box.

    "Duck Darwin! Look alive Louis Pasteur 'cause John Cates is in the ring. Doctor John Cates." He grabbed a chalk stub to scrawl it across a blackboard. "Doctor John Cates 'P' 'H' dot capital 'D'!"

    "Wow! My wagon is hitched to a rocket!" said a voice.

 

Okay, I'm interested. Let's go get the whole enchilada