Chapter 13 - Talking with D

The cool man walked into the room and pushed the door smoothly and slowly closed behind him.  The curtains were open and the window was full of orange and pinks and purples as the sun slid behind the world.  The lights were off but the shape in the bed could be seen clearly enough.  An old man sat inclined to a sitting position.  "Well, D.  Bet you didn't think you'd be seeing me again.  I didn't expect to come again.  But here I am."

"What brings you back?  You just like seeing me this way?"  The shadows from the fleeing sun and the advancing night kept the older man's face in shadow.

"No.  No.  You like this...  It just makes me sad.  Its why I don't come to see you more often.  I would prefer to remember you in your prime.  When you were a force to be reckoned with."

"Back before you ruined me you mean."

"Now that's harsh, D.  I didn't do this to you.  My mama did.  Or Ginger, on her orders.  Or the people he hired on her orders.  Any of those folks are easier to blame than me - when you think about it."

"Thinking ain't so easy for me now. Easy to blame you though.  You set it all to play."

The cool man sat down in the chair at the foot of the bed and he leaned back against the not quite soft enough cushions you only found in hospitals or old folks homes.  The shadows now hid his face too.  He smiled.  "But we had our moment though, didn't we?  We took every dime they had that night at my Mama's table.  EVERY dime.  And thanks to it looking like you won it all off of me, my mama never got around to making me give any of the cash back.  That was my seed money, D.  That was the big lump of cash that I have just kept growing.  That was my first step out from under Mama's thumb.  I owe you for that Diamond.  I really do."

"Hahahahahahahaha.  Your mama had to have figured something out or I wouldn't be sitting here like this.  Drooling on myself."

"Yeah.  Took her a while though.  Don't get me wrong.  She probably figured out that I had used you as a Judas goat.  The minute Ginger told her that you had busted me - that must have smelled funny to her.  And she probably appreciated how ballsy a play it had been.  That would have tickled her.  For a while.  Buuuutttt...."

The cool man crossed his legs and shook his head.  "But she must have started wondering.  'how could the boy have been sure Diamond would keep his part of the bargain,'  That's like her.  Even when everything is said and done, she has to know.  How did this all fit together?  How did a teenage boy get a grown man to play his part?  How did a teenage boy get a grown man to give him an incredibly large sum of money?  Unfortunately for you, she figured it out.  Sorry for that."

"You ain't sorry for nothing.  Not one little bit of it.  Part of you wanted this to happen to me.  Part of you hated yourself for what YOU did to get away from her."  Drool dripped from the older man's chin.

The cool man smiled.  "We do this every time I come here.  Not why I came though,"  He watched the drool pool on the breast of the old man's pajama top.  He made no move to wipe it up.

"The reason I am here is that its moving fast now.  Real fast.  Almost too fast.  I found the Farfenelli girl.  Married her.  I know.  But I think I actually love her."

"Found my brother.  He is just as scary as I think Mama ever wanted him to be.  Makes me nervous and I don't get nervous.  But here is a wrinkle - he has found the twins.  The Rusoff twins.  They don't seem to know a thing about the money but...  Its an unknown and they are incredibly intimidating too.  My brother with those two working together would give my mother and Ginger pause.  And then you throw in that red head that works for them.  I can't tell if she is sleeping with my brother or just wants to be sleeping with him, but she makes the Rusoff twins... nervous, maybe.  I don't think anything scares them exactly."

"A couple of more pieces have to be set up jussst right, and then...  the dominoes will all fall.  It is working out better than I could have hoped.  And that is making me...  nervous."

"So you come here to see me.  Why?  It is not like I am going to offer you any advice you haven't thought of already."

The cool man laughed.  A little too loudly.  A nurse walked in.  "Sir, I'm sorry, but visiting hours ended a couple of hours ago."

"Oh, I know.  I just like sitting here and keeping him company.  Could I stay just a little while longer?"

The nurse looked at him in his nice suit and his perfectly tied tie.  The laughter here of all places had offended her - it was so disrespectful.  But he was a handsome man and as he leaned forward in the chair the last bit of orange sunlight caught the earnestness of his eyes.  She was about to let him stay until she turned around and saw the drool on the patient's chin and chest.  Who sits there laughing while a brain damaged old man drools on himself?  "No sir.  I am afraid you will need to leave."

The cool man stood and smiled at the nurse and nodded his goodbye to her.  In his head he said, "So long D.  It was good seeing you again."

"Go to hell," he imagined the silent old man saying.

End Chapter Thirteen

Stray Thoughts - Yet Again

Warning Signs:

Driving through Wilmington yesterday and wound up in a less than reputable neighborhood.   My subconscious pushed down heavily on the foot poised above the accelerator.  Cilla pointed out the yellow sign that read, "Caution: Deaf Child."

"How mean that little brat gotta be they put up a sign like that?"

She hit me.  Weren't no sign for that.

Shouting for "Free Bird"

If you have not sat in a bar in front of a live band in the South (with a capital "S") and shouted out "Free Bird" when they called out for requests, then...

Well...

What are you waiting for?

Margartita's Before 11am

We were walking through the beach town/tourist trap that is Rehoboth Beach today. It is only an hour away from our home and sports a board walk like I have only ever seen on TV and the dirty sand the brown water that I remember from the South Georgia and north Florida coasts.  We walked by a restaurant and an older woman came out as we studied their posted menu.

"Yes, yes we are open.  Don't look at the sign.  Our sign, our pretty 'letric sign is already finito." she said with an accent that was not of the Northeast or the Southern drawl that I sported.  "But our cook - our cook is authentic," and my mind wandered to thoughts of a fake cook and Jerry Lewis in the lead role only to be eclipsed by Lucille Ball - Lucy as a fake cook with Ethel tasting the horrors coming off the stove.  "Our cook is from XXXXX, Mexico and all of our food is homemade," here at the restaurant my mind filled in as it made my lips smile at the older woman.  "We don't buy our salsa, we don't buy our tortillas," you damn thieves my mind snorted through laughter which made me smile all the broader at the old woman.  "You'll love our food.  It is real.  It is Mexican food.  Wonderful."

And it was.  And my mind relaxed under the influence of tequila and Cointreau and salt and lime.  And I smiled at Cilla as the alcohol - just the right amount of alcohol - made me smile at the fortune that put her across from me at a little table at a beach in Delaware eating authentic cuisine from a cook from XXXXX, Mexico.

Pick Your Moments

Went to the beach this morning.  I am still a FAT guy with all caps.  But I am down 15 pounds since we came back from vacation.  And a beach means sun.  And dark fat is better than pale fat.  Everybody knows that.

Today at the beach they were having the Mid-Atlantic Life Guards Competition.

Not a lotta fat on those no-shirt-wearing-abs-like-molten-rock-frozen-in-place ^%*&^%*&^%*&^%.

Shoulda found a nice museum.  Never heard of a Mid-Atlantic Curator's Competition.

Mom is an Artist

Some of you who remember the bulletin boards she used to make for various elementary school teachers before she went back to school and became a teacher herself,  know what an artist my mom was.  But it is better than that.  She took an art class in college and even she, her harshest critic, had to admit (and later waffle on the fact) that she had real talent.  She used to find these old dead trees.  Dead trees that most people ignore.  But dead trees that had shadows dancing so slowly around them.  The shadows moved like molasses on a cold morning as the sun effortlessly, all but unnoticeably, shuffled across the horizon.  That slow, almost unnoticed shuffle?  My mom captured that in drawings on white paper with black pencil.

I can't pass a dead tree on the highway now without seeing the dance and hearing the medley of sunlight and darkness and commenting on it.  I am lucky that Cilla shares an eye for this tiny bit of artistic madness.

Here is the picture she took when I pulled to the side of the road just outside San Antonio.  A framed version is being delivered this week to Mom to commemorate her birthday tomorrow.

 I never saw the beauty in something like this.  Not until my mother showed me a drawing of a dead tree that I had passed for years traveling from Nicholls to Douglas on highway 32 in Georgia.  Of all the indelible ways Carolyn has touched my life, this was the easiest to put in a frame and present as a gift.

Jason Isbell - An Anachronism

Isbell is a singer of what my Daddy would recognize as country music.  He is something different in today's world.  An anachronism is something that does not fit with the times that it is presented.  Like Lincoln talking on a cell phone.

Isbell makes music where the lyrics are important.  Words ain't been important in music - at least country music - for at least a decade.  You can make an argument that words are important in hip hop but if the dance beat ain't there, I still don't know if you have a leg to stand on.

Pick out your favorite alcohol and your favorite friends and sit out in the dark of the night by a fire and listen to Jason Isbell sing misfortune and loss and love.  Its worth it even if you can't afford the good beer.

Drunk on a Friday

I drove away from my last class at Valdosta State University and the summer heat was something less than oppressive, so I "rolled" down my windows with the press of a button.  I stopped for gas while still in Valdosta and on a lark bought a beer - a 24 ounce can - and sipped it while driving just above the speed limit on my way to Douglas.  Hootie and the Blowfish were captured on the CD in the radio and played whatever I wanted at the least of my whims.

I had finished the 24 oz and had flung the empty from the open window as my hair was whipped around with the wind and the music.  I stopped at the next store I saw and bought another beer - this time of a smaller size - my concession to caution.  And continued at speed to my destination singing along with the energy of the hot air that whipped through the cab of the truck.

I ran out again and slung the remains out the window and stopped again and bought again and ran down the road drinking again.

Singing.  I never sing.  Well.  In church I sing.  Loud and proud.  A joyful noise is a delight to the Lord.  If I have been drinking quickly, I sing.  If I am alone in my truck with the windows down, I sing long and loud until the traffic lights take away my anonymity.

This day, all three converged.  I was in my truck flying down the highway with the hot summer air whipping my hair around, I was soon beyond drunk from my continuous stops for one can of beer, and God had to be with me to keep me from killing myself or worse - some of you.

I drank and drove and sang until I was passing by the Huddle House in Douglas and saw my Mom's car.  I shot across two lanes and flicked a blinker on at the last minute and shot into the parking lot of the Huddle House with the suddenness of the Millennium Falcon coming out of hyper space.

I walked into the restaurant and saw my parents before they saw me.  I remember thinking that this was not a normal reality.  Everything was moving just off of normal.  I had never interacted with my parents when one of us was drunk.  At least not since I was four and Dad had given up drinking.  But this was the first time MY reality was just a bit off from theirs.

I sat down across from my father who was withered from heart disease and would be gone from this earth in less than two years.  I kissed my mother on the cheek unexpectedly - for both of us - as she was lifting her coffee to her lips.

My dad asked if I had to work today.  This was a strange question. My shift did not start until 4pm.  It was barely 1pm.  I told him no.  I did not have to work today.

Why not he asked.  Because I have decided to call in sick.  That's why.

He suddenly needed to go the the bathroom.  I remember thinking that was strange.  He seldom had sudden needs for the bathroom.

I should have noticed then but only notice now that I am writing this.  He was working with a partner.

"You're drunk;" my mother stated without any real anger - but a disturbing weariness.

"What?"

"You have been drinking."

"Well.  A little," I answered.

"You are drunk."

"Okay.  A litlle bit of a whole lot, " I smiled.

"Ray, you could kill somebody... or yourself."  Interesting the way that got phrased, I remember thinking.

"Okay, okay, can I just have a moment?  Can I just take a second before you get loud and I get loud and we replay our greatest hits of angry at one another?  Because that ain't why I stopped."

She turned from me and sipped her coffee.  And sipped it again as the silence settled, slowly.

My fault.  I had not expected silence.  Have you met my mum?

"You answered my questions.  The ones about baby's and love and sex.  You answered them.  You took me to every baseball practice I ever went to and drove me to practice football with the Douglas Demons.  You coached that t-ball team of Jason's when they had stacked the other team with all the best players and you were left with the rejects, I have been able to ask you or tell you anything for over 23 years now.  You had those notes sent home from teachers and you asked me to explain them.  You didn't accuse - you asked for an explanation.  I noticed that.  I suppose that is what I want to tell you.  I noticed.  I remember every single time you took me practice, helped me with math homework when I hated needing help and punished whoever helped,  I remember you taking me to baseball practice and watching while I never came close to hitting anything.  I remember you helping me pick out my tux for the Prom.  That's my point.  I noticed.  I have always noticed.  I have not missed a single second of a single moment where you demonstrated that you loved me.  You think I never noticed.  But I noticed every single one of 'em"

She took another sip of her coffee and I noticed her eyes were wet.  I kissed her again on the cheek.

"I just had to be drunk off my ass before I could admit any of that to you.  I am sure a shrink will say that is all your fault."

"Go to Hell, " she replied.  "And be careful on your way home."

"Love you."

"Love you too."

And I drove home just below the speed limit.

Chapter 12 - Was That So Hard?

The young man smiled at his aunt.  She frowned back.  His uncle had wisely held his face in the same neutral position one would expect to find at a funeral or a child's baptism or a perfunctory bowel movement.  He did not get the scolding look that the boy did and somehow seemed smug about it without ever showing it.  The young man walked with his elders into the old wooden house with the screen door eeeeeek and bammm! signaling their entrance.

They had come here to see a dead man.  Well.  A dying man.  They, the older two, had known the old man in his youth and vitality.  He was old then too.  One of those who frowned at everything.  Color photography was wasted on this misery of existence.  He never saw the vibrancy in life.  And viewed those that saw the reds and blues and yellows and greens of the world as frivolous.  They knew his first wife.  And his second.  And his third.  They had not yet met his fourth.  

The young man child walked into the old wooden house with the door banging behind him and felt the hairs on the back of his neck standing up.  He had no knowledge.  No awareness.  No experience.  But.  His body knew.  His body was aware.  His body contracted every follicle across every inch of skin.  Hair, everywhere, stood at attention.  Only on his neck, did he notice.

They walked through the house silently.  A young voice, not tired or ironic, we are back here.  

The older ones greeted the husk in the bed.  They ignored the young voice.  His fourth.  They paid her no mind.  He saw her.  He never quite realized that he stared.  He closed his mouth quickly when he found himself wondering how long it had been open.  He saw her eyes - green.  He saw her lips - pink, red.  He saw her shoulders - soft and round.  He saw her neck - graceful.

He shook himself back to the world when he realized that he had forgotten his uncle and his aunt and the corpse in waiting.  They had disappeared.  They had not existed while he stared at that spot where her neck disappeared into the shadows of her brown hair.  He knew he had to leave.  He had no control here.  How long had he been here?  How long had his eyes been on her neck?  Her legs?  Her breasts?  Her eyes?

How long has she been looking at him?  What is that look on her face?  Why are the old ones still talking at the corpse in waiting?  How are they not aware of this?

He got up.  He walked away.   Eeeeeeeeeek and Bammmm! goes the screen door.  He is walking down the the dirt road.  He is walking away.  The hair on the back of his neck is not going down.   Behind him, without looking,  he hears the announcement:  Eeeeeeeeeek and Bammmmm!

He keeps walking.  Down the road.  Down the dirt road.  The pines are towering erect on either side of the road.  The ditches run with water trailing from the hills.  He walks on.  

He sees the straw raked up in a pile.  The straw fallen from the towering pines raked into a pile in the ditch, just above the water running down from the hills.  He stops there and waits.  He has no experience.  None.  But he waits.  By the straw.  Under the pines.  With the sounds of the rushing water like hushed whispers.

She finds him quickly enough.  She is older.  Experienced as much as the old man could teach before his old age and cold nature could subdue him.  She kisses him first.

He lays her down in the ditch, in the straw, just above the water and under the shade of the pines.  They strip each other of the clothes they have and hands and mouths find the most vulnerable with care and tenderness that neither of them have known before.  They grow hungrier and bolder.  More daring in their desire.  They are experienced together in moments.  Desire does not have to spoken or even fully thought.  An inhalation.  A look.  A fingernail trailing...and a muscle tightens.   She pulls his hair and it hurts in all the best ways.   He holds her down and she knows she is powerless except in the most important of ways.

It is over.  She is tucking her shirt back into her skirt and walking back to the house owned by the soon to be corpse.  He stands in the middle of the road thoroughly ...  untucked.   He has a certainty that he has not had before.  His aunt will not be able to cower him with a look ever again.  He knows who his wife will be once the corpse is finally a corpse.  His is going to marry this Wetta who he first loved in a straw bed in a ditch on the side of a dirt road.  He is going to marry her.  And he is going to remind her every day of the passion shared this day on the side of a dirt road.  He is going to marry her. 

He smiles to himself.  He smiles as a man with confidence.  She thought this was just a small pleasure in her life.  A sideline.  A brief respite from the horror of her ancient husband leaving this world.  But he knows.  This moment was special.  This moment was life changing.  This moment was larger than she could have ever imagined.

EEEeeeeekkkkk.    and   Bammmmmmm!

2 Corinthians 1: 3-4

I picked my daddy up.  I had to kind of toss him up a bit - like you see in the movies when the hero picks up someone.  I had him in my arms and tossed him up to shift his weight on my arms.  He was not conscious.  There was dried blood from his left nostril and it had pooled at his left ear.

My mom had yelled his name.  Nothing else.  Or maybe she had yelled other things.  I just remember her yelling his name.  There was terror in it.  I ran to their bedroom.  I saw him.  I picked him up.  I carried him to the living room and sat him up on the couch as he seemed to come back to consciousness.  The ambulance drivers got there soon after that.  

Called them ambulance drivers.  Not E.M.T.'s.  I call them that now because that is what I thought then.  Simple.  Primitive thought.  An ambulance in our yard.  It got there because of ambulance drivers.  That was as complicated as my thought got. 

It turned out to have been a seizure.  But I carried my father.  He had lost weight following his first heart attack.  His second had prompted surgery and inaction.  His arms no longer held their power that I remembered from my youth.  I had heard stories about those arms.

The sawmill was a constant in my life.  My father and his friend Ralph bought a sawmill in Nicholls, Ga.  My daddy moved us there to live in a trailer on the yard of the sawmill.  My earliest playground had massive saws and log trucks and stray dogs and sand that smelled of diesel fuel. 

The mill moved to Douglas and years later while a teenager I worked there during my summers.  I remember Kevin Bullock telling stories of my daddy.  Kevin started at the mill as the log turn at the head saw.  My daddy ran the head saw and as it cut parts off the log, the log has to be turned.  Kevin did that.

Unless the log was too big.  Too heavy.  Too unwieldy.    Then it would be left to my father.  Kevin described the veins that popped out.  He was not discreet or modest.  He did tell one bit that I will tell here -my father bit down on his own tongue.  I had seen him do that too often to doubt the veracity of the lewd tale of how my father had flipped the largest, most onerous logs.  His arms were powers.   

I picked up my daddy.  I carried him to the living room.  Ha!  That name. 

As the heart disease took more and more from him, I held out my arm to allow him to steady himself as he walked.  I lifted him up to help him dress.  I bent down to my knees to remove his shoes.  

Later in my life I found my life - Priscilla.  I am coming to love her family.  The easiest of them to love was her Uncle Billy.  A kind old man.  Jovial.  I met him briefly before we were married.  He was the uncle that every movie ever gave us.

I was with his family days before he died.  We came to visit him on one of those horribly optimistic "Good Days".  His eldest daughter had moved back home for a few weeks to help care for him.  As more and more family gathered, she asked me to help her dress her father and get him into the chair to wheel him out to spend time with everyone.

Interesting choice of me.  I was the only male.  I was also a stranger to her.  Dressing him caused him pain.  His pain, caused her pain.  I knew that look whether I ever saw it on my face or not.

A week later we were in the family area at the hospice center.  His three children were trying to decide how they could take their father home to die.  I sat quietly for a bit.  I smiled.  "You want to take him home.  You know you will feel guilty if you don't do SOMETHING.  But the something you want to do, you can't do.  On one of his best days, one that you, yourself, said was a good day, you could not dress him if I had not been there.

I talked a bit about how my daddy died.  Or how he lived till he died.  And how we lived with him.  I told them to leave him with the people at the hospice.  They would see to his care.  They, his children, would see to his soul.  Be there.   Everyday, I said.  But let them care for him. You love him.  

I told them how helpless they would feel.  And that it was alright.  They were helpless.  Be at his side as often as you can.  When he is there - when he is with you - talk.  Talk about ancient history or yesterday.  Talk about what he remembers.  Ask the questions about his childhood or his adolescence or the day he met your mother. Don't waste time sitting here trying to figure out how to take him home.  That is beyond you.  That ain't your fear talking. This is from a man who walked too many miles in your shoes.  This is froma man who  spent years wondering why he was on that road.  I am here to tell you - comfort your father.  Don't cater to the things you think you ought to do.  

2 Corinthians 1: 3-4  " 3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God."

My cousin was diagnosed with breast cancer.  I never knew her from my childhood.  I met her in a funny way.  She was waiting on her interview at Walmart DC 6010 years ago while I worked there.  She was waiting in personnel.  I was in personnel for some reason and running my mouth as those of you who know me would expect.  

From behind me she asked, "Are you Ray?" she asked.  I liked her voice before I turned around.  I was in my early twenties.  I liked most any female voice sight unseen back then.  I answered that I was.  In a cool way.  I am sure it was in a cool way.

"Are you Ray Mancil?"  I had had dreams like this.  Are you Ray Mancil, the man who could run the two man cut off saw at the sawmill by himself?  Are you Ray Mancil who could name every secret identity of every Marvel and DC comics superhero EVER!  Are you Ray Mancil with what Nightline and 60 Minutes refer to as the largest ever measured male... Well.  This is a family blog.  

I answered yes.  She said I might know her brother.  As a pick up line, this absolutely sucked.  But she was cute.  And blond.  That bought patience.

Who is your brother I asked.

"Micah Japuntich,"  Oh.  Oh.  GOD.  The evil of that.  I am a PROUD SOUTHERN man.  But not that Southern.  But just that proud.

"OH.  Then we are COUSINS."

I love that story.  Even when I recite it in my head.  I can remember the trailer home paneling in the old Walmart offices in Douglas, Ga.

Facebook is miracle and curse.  I have a grand niece I have not seen but for Facebook.  Miracle.  I first heard about my cousin Aimee's battle with cancer on Facebook   Curse?

I promised and lied about shaving my head.  Her brothers shaved their heads with her and I wanted to too.  But then I realized it would be an intrusion.  I decided it would be a lie and let them be the THREE in the picture.  

I prayed for her.  I asked you all to pray for her.  I asked even those of you who don't pray to pray.  I promised to owe you one.

She has two you kids.  She has a loving husband that I like and that I surmise doesn't approve of me.  At least I hope he doesn't.  I love the idea in my own head of being the black sheep.  But why did she have to deal with cancer?

Her father, my cousin, a man that might as well be brother to my mother had a tumor on his kidney.  It was large and as I type this they only know it was cancer.  They don't know how much a bully the cancer was and so they don't know what kind of treatment is in store for my cousin.

My cousin - the father of the girl and her brother who told me my DAD had died.  My cousin - the father of the children who were all bald on the same day.  My cousin who served two tours in Vietnam and then was a preacher.  My cousin who did things in Iraq where he had to fly out of Indianapolis while I lived in Indy - taxi service to James Bond.  

My mother loves this man like a brother.  I love his children like long lost siblings that I never abused in childhood.  My wife and I count the days until we can again drink good beer and wine with his son and daughter-in-law.  

Her father faces terror.  A veteran of Vietnam.  Facing terror.  And the mother of two of this grand children, the slight girl that he protected from the monsters under her bed, his little girl - she takes his hand.  She tells the former minister that this is how the LORD OUR GOD LEADS US THROUGH THE VALLEY OF DEATH WITH NO FEAR.

2 Corinthians 1: 3-4  " 3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God."

The world is not easy.  It is not pleasant.  But the tested among us shine.  They provide light on the path.  I was a poor, poor reflection.  But I was mentioned by Cilla's cousin as a "sweet man".  I am not.  I was then.

The world is not easy.  What lesson will a father learn from the comfort offered by his youngest child?  His little girl?  And I am the ultimate optimist.  What lesson will he one day teach from this time?

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ..."

Untouched

Good wine with a good steak with a potato baked for an hour with sour cream and scallions and butter and salt and fresh cracked pepper.  A soft kiss on lips that you can tell are trembling against the want that dances in the blood that gives them their color.  A smile.  From her.  The feel of the corner of your mouth going up.  A smile.  But at her.  Or something she said.

Hot water.  Painful.  But just barely painful.  Your skin going pink.  Sweating under the steam of the shower stinging you into wakefulness.  Hard to breath but clean.  Turn the water off and just begin to sweat.  Run your hand through your hair and feel the formerly hot water cool on your back as it races past your most naked parts and down your legs so cold that it leaves a trace of goose bumps.

Goose bumps.   Goose bumps while living so far south that you had never seen geese.  But as you exhale you see the world.  Blues and greens and yellows and browns leap out at you from the things that are unchanged from the day that God himself traced a finger over them.   The absence of color screams at you from the time before the Almighty cleared His throat.

The steak tastes of char and blood.  The potato tastes of scallion and butter and cream gone to sour.  Salt.  The almost bitterness of wine finds the blood and evaporates as it is swallowed.  Again.  Again.  Again.  Yet another bite.

Inhale.  The noise of the modern.  Everyone doing everything.  And no farther than the time it takes thumb and forefinger to find phone.  The sun peaks in from the corner that is not guarded by sunglasses.  She holds your hand and you step lively - never betraying the future that you can't see.   The glare clears.  Ferris Wheels and roller coasters dance out before you.  Laughter. Loudly.  What else can you do?

Kiss her.  And then...  But...  She kisses...  Kiss her.  Kiss her.  Hold her tight.  Feel her breath on your neck.  Hold her.  Try not to melt as she melts into you.  Her breath coming up to tickle your ear.  Smiling.   Her teeth just on bottom of your left ear.  Pulling back.  Smiling in shock and awesome confusion.   Biting your own lip as she clicks her teeth together in threat / promise.

The last breath of winter trying to move the curtain dramatically.  Failing.  The cold of the early spring trying to masquerade as the rebirth of life.  Failing.  Life - carrying on.  Simply.  Her fingers intertwine with mine.  I kneel to the flowers.  I inhale.   I am rewarded with the smells of my youth.  I am mortal.  This earth is mortal.  My love is mortal.  This time is untouched.  She smiles at me and I take yet another sip of wine.  Her glass sits untouched.

Chapter 11 - Children of Housekeepers

Ginger stood silently while his employer finished loading dishes into the dish washer.  He brushed his right hand over his close cropped red hair and exhaled slowly.  He marveled at her.  No one would have thought anything strange about hiring a housekeeper.  She made enough money, legitimate money.  No one would ever have suspected anything funny about her having a housekeeper.  But she didn't want one.

They had argued about it once.  To the extent their relationship allowed argument, he had argued  about it.  She talked about the one time when she was a little girl and the Lady of the house had her pearls go missing.  They were only missing for a couple of hours.  But somewhere in those hours the Lady had looked at her mother and she, a girl of five, had seen the look.  She had wondered if she had known what that look meant at five years old.

Or.

 Or had she merely filed that image - that memory - away.  Was it years later when she understood what that look meant?  As she remembers it now, she can't pull the indignity and scorn away from that look driven at her mother the housekeeper.  

He had sat quietly at that recollection.  She was connecting dots from her memory to her reasons for not hiring a maid that he could not see.  He was smart enough to sit quietly through the parts he didn't understand.  She had told him that his willingness to allow a silence to fall was one of the things she loved about him.  She saw it in play when she was telling this story of pearls and smiled at him.  "I never want to be the kind of person who simply misplaces something and demeans another with just a look.  Having someone at my beck and call in my own home?   That could do that to me.  Know your weaknesses, Ginger, and take steps against them."

That had closed the conversation on that day.  But Ginger's mother had been a maid too.  That money had but bread on their table when he was a child.  He asked her about that.  Her weaknesses denying a livelihood to others.  She had bit her lip and sat silently for a time.  "Interesting" was all she had said.

A week later Ginger was put in charge of finding four young ladies who were looking for work cleaning homes.  They were each given the homes of three widows of limited means.  Ms. Wetta picked up the tab for all 12 homes to be cleaned.  Ginger had smiled at her when she had given him the assignment.  None of the bosses in London would have ever spent money in this way.  He did some digging.  The widows were of police officers, firemen, and such.  He smiled.  There must be an angle, he thought.

It was going well until two of the widows began to complain of things going missing from their homes, their purses.  Ginger was tasked with searching their homes for the missing items - older women could make the mistakes of the elderly, after all.  He was discreet.  They never knew he had been in their homes.

 He was next tasked with searching the home and the person of the young woman accused.  He found the things she had not pawned yet and then worked his way out from her home to each pawnshop along the way. She had gone to all the trouble of going to pawn shop that was the fourth farthest from her house.

He made his report to Ms. Wetta.  She asked him to tell her about the girl.   He laid it out as best he knew it and then answered her follow up questions.  The girl was from a lower middle class family.  Not much in the way of luxuries but not hurting either.  She had made good grades in the school but the family had made no provision for college.  She sang in her church choir but did not get any solos.  She liked to dance.  She would go to the bars in Houston and two step with the 10 gallon hats she found there.  Pretty girl but not strikingly so.  

Ms. Wetta nodded to all of this and finally inhaled deeply and exhaled as the judgment had been reached.  "Crush her left ankle.  She never walks again without a limp, Ginger.  If she ever again takes a step without a limp, you go back and crush it again.  Am I understood?"

"Yes ma'am," he answered with a clear voice.  He had tried once, in shock of one these coldly delivered pronouncements, to simply nod his head.  She had not allowed that.  Clarity did not allow that.

 "Ginger?"  He paused and waited for whatever was to come next,"She can keep the job as long as the things are returned to the widow.  Have one of the other girls cover for her while she recovers."

But that was years ago.  Today he stood quietly while she finally finished the last dish.  "So he got into the game the way we expected, eh?"

"Yes, ma'am," he answered as he took his seat across from her at the kitchen table.  "I barked at him pretty good but he let it roll off him.  Even made a joke about the little window being an 'affectation.'"

"Never use a ten cent word when you can wedge in a five dollar one, that's my boy."

They both smiled at that.  Ginger went on to tell the tale of how the boy and Clay Diamond had stripped a small fortune off the others at the table before turning on one another.

Ms. Wetta sat and listened closely and never again interrupted him except to offer him a cup of tea, which he refused.  She sat back down with her own cup of coffee.  Ginger had not seen any tea but was certain, based on her offer, that if he had said he had wanted tea, it would have appeared.

At the end of the story she sat back in her chair and lifted the coffee cup to her lips and having never taken a sip, sat it back down.  "Diamond busted him?"  Ginger nodded.  She shook her head.  Actually sipped her coffee and shook her head again.  "He let Clay Diamond take every single cent?"

"He needed a lesson in humility, you said so.  That's why you let this play out.  It will do him some good," Ginger volunteered.

Ms. Wetta sipped her coffee.  She smiled as she looked into the dark black liquid.  And then she laughed.  She laughed long and loud and hard.  "What the hell, he earned it.  He truly earned it."  And she laughed even louder as Ginger sat quietly.

End Chapter 11

Chapter 10 - Welcome to Houston

The martini was icy cold.  So cold that the gin and vermouth felt like oil on his tongue.  He was quite comfortably and satisfactorily drunk.  He looked out of the great huge windows and could not see a single plane that he knew was grounded out there in the dark and the gloom and the wet - somewhere.  Every single person who had told him to not even bother going to the airport today had been right.  There was just no way under the sun - hell, there wasn't even any sun - that his flight was going to leave today.

But it was not a total waste.  He had met Henry and Henry had made him the best martini he had ever had.  He could not at this moment remember which of the several martinis had been the best martini he had ever had, but he was sure that Henry had made it.  Why did Henry keep saying Jeremy every time he called him Henry?

He could not take time to worry about that now.  He was in a charming conversation with a local that was just fascinating.  The man knew the best places in town to play cards or get laid or get drunk.  He was the one who had introduced him to Henry in the first place.  Why had he called Henry Jeremy?

It was after several martini's and a captivating story about how the stranger's mistress had been shot by a jealous boyfriend and how that boyfriend had been beaten beyond recognition when the Texan had turned to him and asked, "Don't I know you?"  It had sounded much more like, "Dawn't Ah know Yew?" but the English to Texan translation center of his brain was apparently still working.   He turned and smiled at the gentleman who had paid for more than half their drinks. "I do don't I?  Have I seen you on TV or something?"  And that was all it had taken to form a beautiful friendship over fantastic martinis.

"You may very well have, my good man."

"Well I'll be...   You're that lawyer, ain'tcha?  The one representin' that guy in Chicago that stole all that Wallstreet money."

"Well, sir, I used to represent him.  Until about 3:22 in the morning this past Tuesday."

"Oh hell, that's right.  I heard about his heart attach.  Sad.  Man that old, under that kind of stress.  And word was you was going to get him off."

"Oh hell, yeah.  The S.E.C had no idea what hit 'em.  Best they could have hoped for after I got done with their star witness was a mistrial and they knew it.  I caught the poor bastard up so many times the jury wasn't sure if they believed him when he stated his name for the record."  This was followed by a cackling laugh and then a hacking cough.

The other man shook his head and took a sip from whatever he was drinking from a tall collins glass.  "Damn.  That's sad.  To have the stress and strain of a trial kill ya.  And him with that young wife of his expecting.  How old is she?"

He sipped his latest favorite martini and winked at Henry and said,"Twenty-two.  And every attribute that you have ever admired on television or in the papers is completely and totally hers.  Nothing store bought on our Mrs. Russoff.  No sirree.  That's all hers.  And near as any gossip I have ever heard, those twins she is carrying in that new great big belly are the sole responsibility of my 78 year old deceased client.  She is apparently a faithful and true gold digger and he is - was - a miracle of modern science.  TO FATHERHOOD AT 78 YEARS OLD!"  He sloshed his drink in the air and the other man smiled at him while gently shaking gin and vermouth from his left arm while hefting his own drink.

"To an innocent man," he said as he lifted his collins glass.  This was met with even more violent laughter and  a truly disturbing coughing fit.  The martini was forgotten as he coughed so hard he gagged.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then wiped his spittle covered hand on his tailored slacks.  "Innocent?  Innocent?  Oh God.  He wasn't innocent!  He was guilty as sin!  He stole every damn bit of that money and more that the Feds had no freaking clue about!  Innocent!  Ha!  Henry, I've lost my damn drink.  Hit me man."

He never noticed how Jeremy the bartender looked at the man with the collins glass and waited for a subtle nod before he ever reached for the gin.  "Guilty?  Really?  He took all those millions from all those people and those companies  Really?"

"Geez, man.  That's just the money on the actual - above - the -table - books.  My client, my poor little Russian emigre' of a client, Osip Dmitrii Russoff was old school mafia.  Went semi-legit way back in 50's.  Used to say he was following the Kennedy model to respectability.  But he kept some of the ties. SOOoooo,  when he starts making millions for legit outfits, it was only a matter of time before his friends with the crooked noses wanted a taste.  Only they didn't know it was a great big ole house of cards.  And he was either too scared and too ballsy to tell 'em."

He paused to sip his latest martini.  "Henry,"

"Jeremy"

"...that just might be the best damn martini I have ever had it my whole damn life."

The man with the collins glass smiled.  "He swindled the mob?"

"'THE'?  'the'?  He swindled every damn mob there was.  Early on it was the Italians and the Irish and the Jews.  And then it was the Jamaicans, the Russians, the Crips, the Bloods, the Mexicans, the Columbians.  You name a poor, mistreated minority group in this country that had a self hating criminal element that abused their own people, and Osip Dmitrii took 'em for millions - billions maybe.  And was smart enough to get away with it."

"How?"  This was met with more laughter.  And coughing.

"Any time he had to make a payment to anybody that he couldn't cover, all of a sudden a gang war would break out or somebody would turn state's evidence or something would happen that would just completely wreck the operation in question.  Sometimes it didn't even cost him a dime.  He would just tell one group what he saw the last time he was with one of the other groups.  Hell, sometimes it would even be the truth.  The old bastard was a master at it."

"The whole trial, all of it, I wouldn't be surprised if the old coot hadn't set it up as an out.  Make himself too hot for the boys but not hot enough to get convicted.  God knows he was never worried a single step of the trial.  Never met a damn soul as self-assured as old Osip Dmitrii."

The man with the collins glass smiled and shook his head.  "If he had it all planned out that well, why did he need you?  No offense,"  he added as he saw the beginnings of a hurt look on the other man's face.

"None taken.  I was a prop.  I was stage dressing.  I am building a name for myself, ya know,in certain circles.  He was my biggest case, by far, ya know,  but I had gotten other guys off, or, at least, reduced sentences.  Settled some cases that looked like federal time was coming for my clients.  But I'm good at what I do.  It would be plausible.   I could get him off if he had been in any actual trouble.  But the more I think about it, I wonder if the prosecutor or even the damn judge was on his payroll."

"A crooked judge?  That's a hell of an accusation."

"Just the martini talking.  Speaking of which," and he picked up his martini, " to Osip Dmitrii Russoff, the guilty bastard!"

The man with the collins glass raised it for the toast but then asked, "Hey, isn't all this, what do you call it, attorney - client privilege?"

The man with the martini laughed long and hard and wound up coughing again.  "Look mister, no disrespect, but we are basically alone in an airport bar drunk off our asses and I'm the currently-famous-because-of-the-latest-crime-of-the-century attorney John Farfenelli.  If you went outside right now and tried to tell anybody any of this, what do you think the chances are that anybody would believe you?"

"Oh, I don't know.  It has been my experience over the years that even if they shouldn't, most people believe the word of a sitting county magistrate."

"What now?"

"We have not been properly introduced, Mr. Farfenelli.  My name is His Honor Bentley Amos Bradshaw, elected Magistrate for Harris County, TX.  Welcome to Houston."

End Chapter 10

Chapter 9 - My Brother the Problem

Joey Suka sat and sipped his vodka alone in the little office at the back of the club and could tell by the lack of laughs that someone was bombing on stage.  The man with the gun came in and sat down across from him.  He did not speak.  That was normal.  It used to unnerve Joey - him coming in and sitting quietly.  It stopped unnerving him when he began to think that was the whole point.  Now the man with the gun smiled at him.  And that unnerved the hell out of him.

"Vhat?  Vhat do you vant?"

"Please.  Do you even know what the word 'suka' means in Russian?"

"Is vone ov de most feared criminal organizations in Russia dating back to the Great Patriotic War."

"Don't you mean 'Var'?  As in 'Var Var 2'?  Isn't 'the Great Patriotic War' what WWII was called by the Russians?"

Joey sipped his vodka.  The lie was on the tip of his tongue.  Maybe the vodka washed it away.  "I know full well what 'suka' means in Russian.  It means 'bitch'.  Stalin freed prisoners who were willing to fight the Germans in World War Two.  When they went back to prison they were everybody's bitches just like they were for Stalin.  Until they banded together and killed any and every single person who looked at them funny."

The truth had an invigorating quality. Or maybe it was the vodka.  "I liked the story.  Taking the insult and making it a badge of honor.  Forming one of the most feared criminal organizations in the world and having the audacity to call yourselves by the insult everyone else threw at you - embracing the term 'bitch.'"

The man with the gun got up and fixed himself a glass of vodka with two cubes of ice.  He took a sip and you could see an idea come to mind, "Do you even like vodka?"

Joey smiled.  "I hate the stuff.  I hate the stupid accents and I hate what I do."

"Then why do it?"

"Have you ever looked in Jamie's eyes?  I mean, really had a moment to look my brother in the eyes?  There's nothing there.  Nothing really there.  Like he doesn't even have a soul.  An empty shell.  Who looks exactly like me."

The man with the gun squinted.  It was an answer.  But it didn't answer anything.

"He killed his first human being when we were 13 years old.  Not a bully or a self defense kind of thing.  Lured an eleven year old boy into the woods and killed him.  And not quickly.  He hurt the boy.  Explored.  It looked like someone trying to figure out a how a clock works by removing all the gears.  Just a whole lot more blood."

The man with the gun sipped his vodka.

"By the time we were sixteen I got him to focus on bullies and the abusive. Mostly.  At nineteen I gave up.  I couldn't control him, I thought.  I decided to kill him.  I wasn't into knives or guns.  I was just big.  And strong.  So.  I decided to beat him to death."

"I hit him.  And I hit him again.  I remember the look on his face.  Surprise.  And I hit him again and again. I cried.  I mean, great big snot bubbles kinda crying while I am just whaling on him.  It didn't even register at the time that he wasn't fighting back.  I just beat him until I was exhausted.  But he wasn't dead.  I couldn't kill him.  I loved him.  I couldn't understand him.  Or forgive him.  But I loved him."

"Everyone who's died and suffered since has done so because I loved my brother too much to kill him.  That's why I got us into this business.  He gets his jollies with people who come the closest to deserving it.  And who knows, with so many thugs and scum bags with automatic weapons, maybe one of them gets lucky one day."

"I learned something from beating him so badly.  I learned how important it was to him that we were identical.  I should have noticed.  Mother never tried to dress us alike.  But there are all these pictures of us as kids in exactly the same outfits."

"Maybe that should have been a warning.  I never saw it that way.  Until he came at me with a billy club once he got out of the hospital.  It was methodical.  Didn't seem that way at the time.  Just seemed like I was getting my ass kicked.  No.  That's too flippant.  I thought he was going to kill me."

"He beat me systematically.  Bruise for bruise, broken bone for broken bone.  You see this scar?  We both have it.  His was because of a ring I used to wear on this finger.  Mine was because of an exacto knife.  He beat me down and then sat on me, with his knees on my shoulders and his left hand forcing my head to one side, carved the same scar under my right eye with an exacto knife.  He pulled the skin from his carving with a pair of tweezers."

"So.  We had to match.  We had to match.  That was an advantage.  A small one.  But an advantage.  It took me years to figure out."

"So I tested it.   We had to speak in wediculous wussian accents.  We became grotesquely fat bastards because I could do that to him. I could do that to him and he could do nothing back.  I did my best to embarrass him.  To humiliate him.  I can't kill him.  But I can make his life miserable."

"But...what kind of life..."



"What kind of life did that leave you?"

"I haven't had a life since I was thirteen years old."

End Chapter Nine

Chapter 8 - No Laughing Matter

Jamie Suka stood at the back of the club twirling around his shot glass of vodka.  He did not like vodka.  But scary Russians drank vodka - ALRIGHT JOEY - not red wine or lambic beers or those fruity drinks with the umbrellas.  So.  Jamie stood at the back of the club and twirled the shot glass around and round with the vodka somehow maintaining within the glass.  The comedian was not getting many laughs.  Some.  But not many.

The comedian stood perfectly still.  "Who am I?"  he asked the crowd.  "Michael J. Fox break dancing."  Groans.  A couple of boos.  Muffled laughter.  Jamie smiling from ear to ear.

"You think he's funny?"

It was the flowing red hair that had pressed the ceramic razor against his throat.  The flowing red hair had come the closest of anyone other than Joey to ending his life.  But unlike Joey, she had not smelled of fear.  She had smelled of vanilla and chamomile.  The blade, once the flowing red hair had removed it from his throat and placed it under his nose, had smelled like something else altogether.  The blade had smelled of his sweat and something... else.

He looked at her and his nostrils flared in the memory.  The hair, the red hair, the flowing red hair trailed down over her shoulder and came to a rest on the breast of her leather jacket.  Other men would have noticed the tar black jeans and how they ran recklessly over her curves.  Jamie could not take his eyes away from the flowing red hair.  "He is funny enough.  Smart.  Too smart for most of them here.  Too honest to."

"You think making fun of someone with a disease is funny?"

"You were offended?"  He did not wait for a reply.  "Do you know someone who suffers?  Is that why suffering is not funny to you?  Or do you care just too damn much?"

"I had an uncle with Parkinson's.  It brought a very strong man low."

Jamie looked at the flowing red hair and imagined, no, knew he was not the first to be captured by that image.  The shaking uncle had offered protection.  Until the shaking had proven too great an impediment.  He wondered how soon after the shaking uncle had been rendered ineffective before she had found blades.  He picked up the shot between his thumb and forefinger and downed the vodka violently.  No need to let her see how much she had let him see.

"You know," he said, "Most of the time, when someone accuses someone of going too far, of being obscene or inappropriate, the response is to condemn the accuser of not having a sense of humor.  I think differently.  I think the person who is offended is such a caring person, such a loving person, that they cannot find humor in the suffering of their fellow man.  It is a sign of deep empathy that the pain of others registers so personally for them."

The flowing red hair stood before him in what could only be awe.  She had not expected such depth from him.  She turned her head slightly to the left and reached out and cupped his right elbow with her right hand.

 He so enjoyed the look on her face as he said, "But I see the humor in everything."

End Chapter Eight

Chapter 7 - Assumptions

The yellow tape flickered in the fans that shifted hot air violently from one side of the large, saw dust strewn room to the other.  The glare from the portable workmen lights only increased as the sun sped down over the horizon.  Saw horses were stacked against a far wall as the police officers and technicians gathered in front of the half removed center wall of the room.

The wall had separated a rather expansive kitchen from an even larger dining area that led to a surprisingly small study.  The workmen had been challenged with removing the center wall to create an open view of the dining area so the kitchen could see the diners in the next room.  The workmen had been sitting around sipping coffee for  roughly an hour after the uniformed police had finished all their questions about the two large, clear plastic bags found in the wall.  The plastic was especially thick and sealed air tight against the whole of the world.

The two bags each held a body.  One body held a gun in its right hand.  The other was the body of a woman.  A woman with her head shaved bare.

The two detectives had finally arrived and dipped below the yellow tape and kicked up sawdust as they walked across the room.  The older, slender detective growled for the fans to be turned off and spat out a bit of dust for all the trouble of opening his mouth.  His younger, slightly plumper partner shook his head at the gruffness and the spittle and stepped up to the wall that almost wasn't any more.

"Not a damn bit of odor in the air.  The bags seemed to be sealed.  Air tight.  Some sort of melting done to the edges.  When the coroner cuts them open, I really don't want to be there."

The older man came up and ran his index finger and his thumb around the edges of the bag that held the woman.  "Huh"

The younger man waited.  It had taken him weeks to learn to be patient after those grumpy, "Huh's".  Ask the obvious question and the old man would clam up.  Doubt himself to the point of not wanting to say it out loud.  But keep quiet.  Be almost dismissive and he would hav

"That jacket.  Men haven't worn that style in 20 years.  Bet if you check the label, it will be a custom job out someplace in Italy or somewhere."

The younger man looked at the jacket with its single button on the front and the way it tapered to the waist.  He knew the best way to get more out of the older man was to appear skeptical.  But it was honest this time.  High fashion?  From 20 years ago?

"My first wife was a seamstress in Malaysia before she came to this country.  She was something of an expert on fashion and the quality of fashion.  Some of it rubbed off."

The younger man looked again at the older man's leather shoes and for the first time wondered if they might NOT be cheap knock offs.

"We need to find out who owned this house twenty of so years ago.  The new owners obviously have nothing to do with it or they wouldn't have hired these folks to knock the wall down.  Well, unless they were extremely stupid.  Or they could be really smart and are counting on us to not look at them.  Who knows."

Ah.  Have to get him out of that rabbit hole.  Brilliant man, but he was so open minded that he sometimes could not close it around the obvious.  He was so paranoid about his own assumptions leading him past the truth.  Get the facts.  Reel him back in with the facts.  A few taps on his hand held and his jaw dropped open.

"What?" asked the older man.

"Holy shi..."

"Language, John."

"This house, twenty years ago, this house was owned by Giovanni Farfenelli.  And then his estate."

Both detectives stood silent and just looked at each other.  It was left to one of the uniformed officers to state the obvious, "Are you saying we might have found the missing Farfenelli heiress? The one who has been missing for 18 years?  The one that supposedly took all that money?"

End Chapter 7

Chapter 6 - Never Argue

He blinked his eyes, smirked, exhaled, and reached for his Scotch.  The smirk became a smile as he saw the slight tremor in his hand just before it closed around the glass.  He inhaled deeply, raised his glass, actually laughed out loud, and then finished his drink.   He sat it back down and did not react at all as his hand slowly, gracefully returned to the arm of his chair.

The alcohol began to hum a soft, sweet hymn through the lower basin of his mind.  The tremor, the laugh, hell, the fear, had been a welcome surprise.  At the very wrong end of the gun he was fifteen years old again.  But this time he had not whimpered for his mother.  

The gun had been too real.  Metal.  Dark.  Oily. The light had actually danced into rainbows as it ran from sleek, gleaming metal.  But the shadows had loved him.  The Gun.  He had called him the Gun.  He had a name.  He knew his parents had talked about him when they thought he had not been able to listen.  And he had a name.  But he had called him, simply, the Gun.  

The Gun had been too real.  Cold.  Dark.  Brooding.  The shadows had caressed him.  He had served drinks while slipping under the light - becoming the shadow and the obstruction all in one.  "Is that how people see me?" he wondered.  He knew he never inspired that kind of fear.   But the...mystique.  The hesitancy to interrupt, the reverence.  That seemed like the memories one found in a mirror.

He heard her key turn in the lock.  "Hi, honey! You're home!" he called out.  He sat there and waited while she turned out of her coat.  She walked into the study, saw his empty glass and he saw the hesitation.  His kiss could wait.  She turned and grabbed the bottle of bourbon and poured herself a drink and then grabbed the Scotch for him.

She sipped her bourbon and bent down to kiss him softly on the lips.  She smiled as she pulled away.  She always smiled just after a kiss.  She had tasted of bourbon.  "Well, you're alive.  That much of your plan seems to have worked out."

She settled into chair so recently occupied by the man with the gun and crossed her legs.  He couldn't see her feet from this angle but knew that one of her pumps would be dangling from her toes having lost purchase on her heal.  With her perfectly swept back blonde hair and the tan skirt that outlined her figure with a black top unbuttoned almost to the limit of good taste and a rock glass of bourbon - she was temptation.

She was not beautiful.  Something with the nose being a little too... something.   If you found yourself looking closely enough to find the imperfections in her features, you found yourself lost.  For while you would never have defined her as beautiful, you would have been caught up in desire.  She was lust, temptation.  It inspired his pet name for her.

He had learned to resist beauty and sex and money and power.  He had never thought to steel himself against intelligence.  Fortunately for him, she hadn't either.  He was making a fortune on the periphery of her social scene.  People with more money than sense, almost always the ones who had inherited the fortune rather than the ones who had earned it, were too happy to invest with him.  Some of those investments had even been legitimate.  And profitable.  And he was working his way up to bigger and bigger fish when he had been introduced to the heiress of the Farfenelli fortune.

She watched him for almost a year playing his games and hopping from bed to bed with the daughters and wives and mistresses of men with fortunes enough to crush him if they ever found out.  But they trusted him.  They all liked him.  She could not figure out why.  Whatever spell he cast, however he engendered such trust, it failed to work on her.  She disliked him almost immediately.

And then, one night at one party, over drinks of course, they talked.  She told him that she thought he was a fraud.  He said of course he was.  She told him that she thought he was out to make as much money as he could off of the insipid and arrogant.  He said of course he was.  She pointed out that he was basically a whore for every bit of silicone and plastic and hair extended trollop that subsisted on the arms of billionaire cuckolds and fools.  He sipped the last of his Scotch.

"I have had far too much to drink and I am trying to pick a fight with you, but you just aren't going to commit, are you?"

He smiled at her.  She had not seen that smile before.  She wondered how many of the women here had seen that smile.

"I learned long ago to never argue with a woman smarter than me."  He smiled again and this time seemed to notice her noticing his smile and quickly sipped his drink.

''Why did you do that?"

"What?"

"Cover your smile with a rock glass of mostly Scotch flavored ice?  Don't think there was even a sip left in there."

He looked at her and then at his glass and then smirked.  She was strangely certain that no one else here, male or female, had seen that smirk before.  It was... awkward.  It was embarrassed.  She felt the tip of her tongue touch her upper lip as she realized that smirk was... honest.  And she was acutely aware that he had seen her wet her lips and blushed slightly as she knew he would misread this.

He looked down at his drink.  He looked her in the eyes, "How many guys have tried to kiss you after you wet your lips like that?"

She found herself laughing and just managed to wave her left hand in the air - the hell if she was going to sweep her hair back over that one - charming - comment.  With her right hand she lifted her glass of bourbon to her lips and too late realized that it was basically just ice.

They both laughed at that.

They often laughed.  Mostly at themselves.  As she sat across from him with one shoe dangling from her toes, they were not smiling.  "What was he like?"

"He is smart.  Smart enough to not let on how smart he is.  Calculating.  Cold.  A killer.  If the dollars hadn't been so preposterously big, he would have shot me on general principle."

That hung in the air.  They had talked over and over again about how much of the truth to tell the man with the gun.  One train of thought was to keep the dollars reasonable.  Believable.  The truth, the actual amounts, was literally ridiculous.  They had finally decided to not decide.  He would make the call based on what he found with the man and the gun here in the room.

"The truth was so stupid, I had to be telling the truth.  If it had been reasonable, he would have smelled a con and I would have an additional nostril."

He hid his smile behind his glass of Scotch.  She did nothing to hide her disdain at his gallows humor.

"How much does he know?  You played the brother card..."

"He knew we were brothers.  Or he knew I would say we were brothers.  He knew the story about Junior shooting his mother.  Don't know if he believed that either."

"He is smart"

"Told you."

"Does he really pretend to work for the Russians?"

"Calls them the Neckless.  And yes, he maintains that appearance."

She sips her bourbon.  He notices just a bit of her lipstick at the edge of her glass.  She exhales deeply and looks over the books on the shelves just to his left.   The tip of her tongue finds her upper lip.  She frowns.

He looks down at his Scotch.  He looks over at the bottles of liquor just over her right shoulder.  He drinks deeply and realizes through the numbness of his lips that he is most certainly drunk.

"I love you," he says to her.

"Of course you do."

End Chapter Six

Chapter 5 - The Neckless

Joseph "Joey" Suka and his brother James "Jamie" Suka spent twenty years speaking with their best idea of a Russian accent to Italians and Mexicans and Jamaicans and Crips and Bloods and various others.  Joey had explained to Jamie that Russians were scary.  Being scary could be profitable.  People paid debts to scary people.  People changed testimony for scary people.  People paid for protection from scary people.  And Joey explained that while anyone could snap fingers or break knee caps or effectively place an ice pick in a liver, Russians were especially scary.

Nobody, not the Italians, the Mexicans, the Jamaicans, the Crips, or the Bloods thought they were Russian.   But the story of how they brought back Anthony "Chicklets" Abato's teeth, all of them, to Giovanni Oddi made them scary.  When they mailed pieces of Andrew "Chopper" Nocerino to every other person on the witness list against Paulie Schmidt made them scary.  What they did to "Nuts" Pagono made them scary as hell.

They were ridiculous, but absolutely lethal.  And scary.  That made them valuable.  That meant they were well fed.  That meant they eventually had no necks.  Just heads popped up six feet above the ground on round mounds of surprisingly muscular flesh.  Six feet six inches of 322 pounds of twin - TWIN - terror.  They saw the world in black and white and left it in red.

If the client wanted someone to disappear, then the Suka brothers were a waste of money.  They could DO that, but...

If you wanted something done that involved a cleaver and a blow torch, the Suka brothers and their "moose and squirrel" fake Russian accents were a sound investment.

Brutality.

People paid good money for brutality.

But for good money, people wanted results.  Proof.  Driving around (never flying) with proof was risky.  But people paid really good money for risk.

But there is a funny thing about risk.  The first time you sneak out of your parents' house at one in the morning, it is nerve racking.  The 33rd time you do it, it is just climbing out your bedroom window at one in the morning.

The first time you drive around the greater Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex with a dismembered body in your trunk it is terrifying.  The 33rd time you do it, you stop for chicken fried steak at your favorite chicken fried steak place.  And then you curse in broken Russian when you find your car stolen.  All your plans for the intestines of Jimmy "Spaghetti" Spinnetti gone with your favorite cleaver and your vintage copy of James Agee's A Death in the Family.

For the first time in ages the twin terrors were afraid.  They knew they amounted to middle management at best.  Consultants maybe would be an even better description.  If their Caddie turned up with Spaghetti in it and a cleaver and fingerprints and a certain ledger that even Jamie didn't know about, then both twins were sure to be expedited death penalty candidates in the extremely mortal state of Texas.  Either by the citizens of the Lone Star State or the members of the Detroit Men's Swim Club.

That was when they met the young black man from Houston with a gun.  He never showed them the gun.  They never needed to see it.  He knew it was there and so did they.  The way he walked right up to them but stayed just out of reach.  The way he kept the hip with the gun nestled against it away from them.  The way...  Joey was the one to notice this but once he said it out loud to Jamie it made sense.. the way his right hand looked empty, incomplete without a gun in it, spoke a violent dialect that these two violent men could understand all to well.

Things for the Suka's changed almost immediately after that.  The car turned up.  And the body was undisturbed.  It was so convenient that Jamie thought the man with the gun must have stolen the car or at least arranged it.  But the man with the gun made no demands on them.  He just did them a favor.  A favor that kept them out of hot water with the state of Texas and more importantly, the Detroit Men's Swim Club.

Things changed for the Suka twins after that.  They still took freelance assignments and still made fear a fog, a film that settled over the ones meant to be afraid.  But they added book making to their duties once they took out a bookie that had cheated the Swim Club of their proper cut.  There was a drug dealer that had decided to testify about his bosses.  Did you know that testify comes from the root word testes?  The twins or the man with the gun apparently did.  And so the Suka's entered the drug trade as on of the most secure networks imaginable.

They developed a reputation for over paying their help.  People chocked it up to them remembering what it was like to be lower down the ladder.  But if you worked for the twins, and you were good at your job, and you kept your mouth shut, you could make a lot of money.

The first time that reputation paid off for them was when the Redhead came to work for them.  She was beautiful.  Not pretty.  Pretty implied an innocence.  Pretty you could look away from.  You could not take your eyes off of the redhead.  For a hired killer that would seem to be a handicap.

But you would stand there with your mouth open and your hands limp and ... other parts of you forgetting the definition of the word "limp".  The fact that she got in to see them without an appointment was one testament to her caliber.  The ceramic straight razor that she had brought with her was another. She held it first against where Jamie's throat should have been and then teasingly against his nose when the man with the gun had shown her his properly adorned right hand.

She made a gift of the razor to Jamie whose pupils were still a bit dilated.  She smiled at Joey and his nostrils flared.  She turned to the man with the gun and pinched her lips together against the smile that wanted to blossom there.

"So you are the brains behind these two 'wild and crazy guys,' huh?"

End Chapter Five

Chapter 4 - Tells

The red head drove.  The rain was falling harder and harder and the road could barely be seen.  Her attention seemed to be solely directed at the road.  He knew better.  She never took her eyes off the road but he had absolute confidence that she did not miss a single move he made.  She had taught him how to do it.  But she was still the best.  It looked like the road was her sole focus.

He looked up to the roof of the car.  He closed his eyes.  She asked, "What's wrong?"  He smiled without ever opening his eyes.

She never asked the question again.  She drove through the rain a bit too fast for safety or comfort.  He did not love her.  He didn't.  Really.  But she was exactly the woman he would have loved.  She was smarter than him.  More pragmatic and conversely and illogically more honorable.  She was predictable in a way that made you only more disconcerted.  If you knew her, really knew her, you feared her, at least a little.  She scared him just a bit.  He treasured the fear she had allowed him to feel.

"You let him live."  The rain changed directions, working with the wind to make a fool of gravity so that it seemed perfectly normal for droplets to run parallel to the car.  She did not slow a bit.  He inhaled deeply Slow down, you are driving too fast, he never actually said.

She sped up a barely detectable mile per hour.  You have ignored me twice and I am getting a little pissed about that, she never actually responded.  They stayed that way for an uncomfortable number of minutes with her driving the route to his home more by memory than sight.  They stayed that way in a mild state of bitterness that only two old lovers can.

"I let him live," he responded without really answering.  It was a surrender on his part without giving up anything.  She had taught him that too.  She eased off the pedal - all the way back to her original speed that had unnerved him in the first place.  And so they danced.

"Money is not an issue," she replied.  Not "you have money" or "we have money" - she twirled away from him.

"Money enough to never,ever think of money again is always an issue."   His reply - a sweeping bow and an outstretched hand.

"A con man who has studied you for at least 3 years..."

"Seven according to him..."

"For three years... has promised you a fortune.  There is a joke there about Nigerian royalty."

He smiles again without looking at her.  "He either means for me to share in it with him or he means for me to take the fall for it while he makes away with the money.  I don't know yet."

She moves her head to the left.  Really, only a slight tilt to the left - a centimeter or two, barely enough to shift her hair.  But her hand, her right hand, came up and swept a strand of sunset red hair back over her ear.  IF her lips had pinched just a bit - charmed.  The lips did not pinch.  If she had followed the hair sweep with a deep inhalation - pissed.  Just the chin and the hair - vague disappointment and a little annoyed.  The fact that he had left such a dedicated, knowledgeable threat with the original number of holes annoyed the pragmatist.

"Our cut," OUR CUT - OURS - MINE and YOURS - YOURS AND MINE , "would be roughly 2 Billion."

The car fish tailed and she tucked her head hard to the left with a deep gasp and fought the road and the wet for control again.  She then peaked at him under red bangs that flirted over her green eyes and she bit her lower lip just slightly.

End Chapter Four

Stray Thoughts - Entry 138

It Just Clicks.  Or, It Doesn't

I don't know why some things are funny to me or how my mind puts things together.  I have told Cilla before when she has asked, "How did you get from here all the way to there?"  And it is amazing how that works and connects so quickly.  And then there are other times when I am telling a story and there is a word I need to finish the story and I cannot think of that word to save my life.  I will stand there with Cilla and just wait.  And wait.  And wait for the right word to show up.  With others, I have to just find the best word that will do and stammer it out.  But I am still disappointed that the best version of that thought or sentence didn't get out there.

Southeast Asian Poultry

Was watching a cooking show that was featuring chicken wings.   The host then had a college professor come out with a few varieties of live chickens. The professor pointed out that all varieties of chicken originated in the jungles of Southeast Asia.  That was fascinating to me.  When you think of wild jungle creatures, is chicken the first thing that comes to mind?

And then I started laughing.  Cilla looked at me and knew better than to ask the question.  So I answered it anyway.  "I was just thinking - dude is holding a Vietnamese Jungle Chicken.  Doesn't that sound like a racial epithet?  Like, if you called someone at work a 'Vietnamese Jungle Chicken,' you could get fired."

For the rest of the day when either of us did something stupid or frustrating we called each other a Vietnamese Jungle Chicken.

Lost 60 Pounds in 2013

Lost 60 pounds in 2013 and was sporadically good at running.  The goal this year is to lose around 60 more.  I wanted to lose 100 pounds in 2013 and was making pretty good progress for most of the year when I changed jobs and moved across the country.  Lost another 15 pounds once we got here and then flattened out with the stress of the new job.

I only HAD to work 3 days a week.  But I came in on a couple of my days off just because... just because.  There are so many things that happen during the day of a work week that are unplanned, that I have always felt that you needed a day or so with no responsibilities to focus on admin and anything else you could do ahead of time or after the fact.

Work just dominated every piece of energy we had.  I went from running 6 days a week for an hour each day, to doing almost nothing.  And it was much more the emotional drain than a physical one really.  It was very much a case of "I only have so much CONCERN to go around.  I have my God, my wife, my work, and then the Braves got that last little bit."

I needed something mindless and effortless and sports are perfect for that and baseball is the best because it ALWAYS on.  Having to go out and work out and plan my workouts - it just wasn't mindless enough.  My plan is to get a baseline workout routine set up that is just that - routine.  I can always add things to keep my interest up, but also have this healthy thing that is no mental stress at all either.

Things are better for me at work now.  I can not only see a light at the end of the tunnel, I am growing more and more confident that it is not an oncoming train.  That, in the words of convicted felon Martha Stewart, is a good thing.

I Can Name Every County in Delaware

Sussex, Kent, and New Castle.

That's it.  All THREE of them.  Uno, Dos, Tres, ain't no Cuatro.

I Need a Church

I need a church.  I need believers singing hymns in honor of Christ's sacrifice and teachers teaching me things about the love of God that I don't know or that I need reminding about.  I need fellow believers who serve one another and MORE IMPORTANTLY serve others.  Serving others, being the mild, soft spoken ones that provide food to the hungry, clothes to the cold, and shelter to the homeless - those are the people that win people to Christ.

I am not mild.  I am not soft spoken.  Loving is not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of me.  I am selfish and bombastic and loud.  But I love you.  To the extent that Christ has changed me from the sinner I was to the saved sinner I am, I love you.  I look at you sometimes and I forget how unlovable I am and how He loved me anyway.  That is why I need a Church.  To remind me that I must serve.  I must serve because I am blessed.

But I also need a church to allow me to humble myself before God and Christ.  If you are able to keep in mind how perfect God is and that the God of the whole universe is just fascinated with you as an individual, it becomes hard to get too down on yourself.  If you are reminded of all the pain and brutality that Christ faced on our behalf, it gets harder to be overwhelmed with the trivial inconveniences of our modern lives.  If you understand that someone without blame at all sacrificed himself to spare you, it gets harder to hold a grudge against those folks who wrong you.

I need that in my life.

No Domino's or Pizza Hut or Papa John's

One tidbit that might be interesting to some of you is that while my weight loss program kind of stalled a month or so after getting up here to Delaware, it did not do so because of franchised pizza places.  Pizza has been my guilty pleasure for ages now.  It is the perfect FAT SLOB RAY food.  You don't even have to leave the house to get it!  They will bring it to you.  The internet even allows you to order without dealing with live humans.  The only shame you have to deal with is when your 30 hot wings and extra large Dominator or Pepperoni Lover Deep Dish pizza gets to the house is the delivery guy.  And there is no judgement in his eyes at all - unless you stiff him on the tip.

But I have not had pizza from a national franchise since we got up here.  It has been too easy and too tasty to pick up, dine in, or have delivered pizza made by people that have an inordinate number of vowels in their last names.  Since I have gotten to Delaware, I have had more pizzas prepared by guys named Vinnie that they had guys named Vinnie on the Sopranos.

And pizzas with the best ingredient almost always being the crust.  A crust that has an audible "crack" as you first bite into it but then has an incredible chewy quality that follows.  I had never ordered a plain cheese pizza before I got here.  And even though that is what I have ordered a few times now, I have never gotten a plain cheese pizza.  I have had that magical crust with tomato sauce that has never seen the inside of can married to cheese that in some cases had been made earlier that day - cheese made all the richer by bubbling for just a few moments in a wood fired, brick or stone oven.

It is so good that it is almost unfair when we release the cook to add fresh basil or pepperoni or roasted broccoli with bacon or ...  Well, you get the idea.  The two places we go have family working behind the counter, in the kitchen, or in the garden growing a lot of what we find on the pizzas.  I should have stuck to the seafood places.  Might have made it to a hundred pounds lost this past year if I had.

An Evil Man Was Nice

Many years ago when I was at my worst the city of Houston provided me a place to stay for the night.  Part of me wants to list all the ways I was worse. But a young woman in the church I attended a year or so after Houston's hospitality department catered to my excess taught me different.  She was giving her testimony and refrained from listing all the depraved things she had done before Christ found her wandering and wondering on that road to Damascus.

You could tell it was not shame that kept her from sharing - at least I could.  I knew she spoke the truth when she said she did not want to "honor the wrong things."  I knew it was true because I have sat with others talking of our sins and the hazards from those sins and I have felt that perverse pride when my depravity was greater than theirs.  So, I won't be listing all the ways I was worse.  Just understand that as bad as I am now, with the benefit of Jesus Himself sanding away the rougher, coarser edges, at one time, I was worse.

But the night that Houston kept me as a guest...  I had been drinking.  I had spent hours drinking.  I had gone from club to club with an extremely seductive young woman and her friends who really, really LOVED...  my money.  At the last club she and her friends had gotten thrown out.  I had not.

 I had found an even more attractive woman who also LOVED my money but not only laughed at my jokes, but seemed to actually GET the jokes.  That told me she was smarter than the other one.  Maybe she was not smart enough to get the jokes, to actually think they were funny - I will never know.  But she was smart enough to make me think that she did in the moment.  That was far smarter than the other one.  If I am going to be played, I at least want to be played well.

At some point a friend of her boyfriend showed up and started asking loud questions.  He had had so much alcohol that he could not get my hearing to understand him properly.  Or I was so drunk I could not get him to speak clearly.  Or something like that.  Time to go.

I will skip over some really good parts to save them for another time.  But I wound up in a large concrete room with concrete benches and exposed toilets and a solid steel door with a shuttered window that only opened from the outside.  And I was not alone.  I was with drug addicts - some blissfully within the grasp of their chosen oblivion of self and others horrified to find themselves confined once again to their own minds, their own selves with no means of leaving behind the one person they hated the most.  I was with other drunks - most dressed as lower middle class laborers who had not yet made it home from just a few beers with the guys and a few of us dressed rather nicely from an evening with the girls and one obnoxious fellow in a tuxedo who had lost his bow tie the same as all of us had lost our shoe laces and belts.  I was with drug dealers - some of whom appeared to have been smart enough to not actually use their own product and others whom I would have put with the drug addicts until I heard their charges read later that night.  Of course the homeless and the mentally disturbed were there - arguably the most comfortable of the lot with the wind and the rain incapable of finding them in this grey on gray purgatory.

They fed us that night.  Two pieces of bologna, two pieces of bread, a piece of cheese, a granola bar with blueberries all in a plastic bag.  There was nothing to drink served with it.  I did not complain.  I was working diligently to perfect my impersonation of concrete.  As my hangover started to progress throughout the night, it actually helped by graying my complexion.  I watched the elders of this urban tribe of the concrete room empty the contents of the plastic bag and then fill that with water from the water fountains that were mounted above each toilet.  I went to the fountain and drank and drank in an effort to hold off the worst effects of the hangover that I knew was coming.

A couple of hours later an ancient black man, skinny to the point that I could have identified specific bones if I had paid enough attention in biology, woke up and was hungry.  He had missed the meal.  He asked several around him when they were going to feed us and most of them did not answer him - conversation was not a popular pass time.  Finally someone told him that they had served the food and gone.

"I am hungry," was all he said before he started crying.  Not loud sobs or wails or anything so dramatic.  Just a hungry man with no hope in the world crying at the latest example of how the world was beyond his ability.  He cried.  I turned my head away while noticing that others were turning just as I was.  He cried softly and barely audibly.  He cried.

A young black man, shorter than me by a couple of inches but in shape, sleek looking, like a runner, put his arm around the much taller, much older man.  "C'mon, let's find you some food Pops."

The younger man was a drug dealer.  I knew this because we had already been before the judge and had our charges read.  He was a drug dealer who had been arrested selling to an undercover cop.  He was a drug dealer who was arrested in possession of an unregistered firearm.  He was a drug dealer who had not looked away from a crying, helpless, hungry old man.

They walked together among the rest of us, slowly as the old man shuffled his feet, and the younger man would ask, "Yo, man, you gonna eat that bread?"  "Hey, pahtnuh, you gonna eat that granola shit?"

They walked among us until the young man had put together a meal for the older man from the things that others had not wanted.  He then took his own old plastic bag and filled it full of water for the older man.  He even asked,"You don't mind drinking after me, do ya, Pops?"  And of course the old man didn't.

It is hard to look like concrete with tears in your eyes.  I don't know that young man's name.  I have no idea if he was convicted or how his life turned out.  I know based on the charges read that he sold crack and meth, that he traded in misery.  I know he carried a gun.  He might have rationalized that he needed the gun to protect his drugs and money, but that is just another way of saying that he was willing to kill someone over crack and meth.  Those actions are evil.

But on that night, in that place, he was nice to an old man who was hungry and hopeless and helpless.  On that night when I looked away, he put his arm around a hurting human being and offered comfort.  He saw misery and hopelessness and he took action.  On that night, in that moment, he was the better man.