Life in a Handbasket

Long rays of the summer sun roused the soldiers of Fox Troop, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment. The history of the unit designation had escaped Army headquarters in New Delhi where the unit had formed last year. To Captain Kirian Long Eagle, his command had nothing at all to do with Custer's ill-fated expedition save a common unit guidon. With 200 million cavalry soldiers spread over two continents in search of survivors from the Great Plagues, Army HQ could not look up the history of every unit. The unexpected humor of a descendent of Native American tribes commanding a cavalry troop 3 centuries after Longhair's demise didn't escape Kirian's notice either.

Asia recovered first for no reason that anyone could determine. The plagues arrived there last and finished first. Maybe the viruses got tired. Kirian didn't know. He only knew that the plagues died out almost as fast as they killed, and then the survivors began gathering first in what remained of China, India, and Vietnam. No race was spared the devastation, all lost 80 percent or more of their numbers. The melting pot of the Americas didn't seem to help survival rates, but it didn't hurt either. The wars after the plague swept through, on the other hand, did send the continents of the New World back into the Stone Age, or maybe the Canned Good Age, if the stories from back east could be believed.

Kirian's troop of 75 troopers, 3 command lieutenants, and the troop sergeant major trailed by a caravan of a dozen wagons with about 30 civilian personnel and his auxiliary Army specialists began preparations for morning chow and routine chores. The horses were fed first in cavalry tradition while the cooks set out the human food. Kirian insisted on a seated meal for morning and evening chow to prevent an us/them mentality from creeping in to the command. Civilian or Army, his men and women were on their own for the most part in the vast landscape of what had once been western Nebraska and northeastern Colorado in the old United States. An emergency medevac could be had, but only for, well, an emergency. And Kirian's command training specified a very narrow interpretation of what constituted an emergency. Survivors of the great plagues were a healthy lot; no one old or prone to illness had made it to a hospital in those dark times. Emergencies generally came from carrying out their orders.

Far easier to obtain was an air evac transport for life, any life. Kirian's orders, like those of every command was to find life from the old world, that is the pre-plague way of things. Cats, dogs, cattle, rabbits, and other domesticated animals came after only one thing, surviving humans. And there were more than anyone expected. Hidden in the remains of towns and cities, having learned in the wars to stay low and feral, the people lived and bred. After several generations their solo and small-group survival skills on their turf were formidable. In short, they were bloody hard to find, and some defended their way of life with sudden and effective ambush.

Small tribes of humans gradually roamed the plains on foot or horse, with occasional and unconfirmed sightings of old automotive vehicles, searching for the next town to settle in until the resources, mostly canned foods, were exhausted. Air and satellite surveys showed that small-scale battles between tribes were increasing as tribes grew and no one bothered to restock the shelves of the local grocery. So, the cavalry came armed and armored, for rifles and shotguns of bygone days could kill, and the Army memorial wall back in Vietnam sprouted new names too often for the Twelve Council too keep their job in the next election.

Enough musing on the current world circumstance, Kirian thought. He needed to get his horse fed and watered, check its armor and see to his personal equipment. Kirian didn't believe in delegating what he saw as his personal responsibility. His officers and the Sgt. Major lived without assistants as well, and his unit soldiers appreciated it. Scanning the perimeter, he noted that 1st Squad had the guard duty. The troops patrolled on horse in full armor just below the ridgeline, with dismounted troopers over the ridge in passive scanning positions. One wagon with its heavy weapons stood on alert, floating over the plain gently on its antigrav thrusters, its heavy draft horses seeking out the good prairie grass. Kirian slept better when he woke up to a tight and alert guard. He turned back to the camp to see last night's duty officer, ComLt. Samuel Byrd approaching.

"Anything last night, Sam?"

"No, sir. I am thinking it has been too quiet for too long." Sam Byrd came from the New Harvard class of '74 on the island of Formosa. They didn't use no contractions or bad speech there, Kirian thought while keeping the smile off his face.

"You are correct, Sam. We searched six empty towns in the last two weeks. There must be a tribe operating nearby, even if we haven't caught up with them yet."

"We did a project in school trying to figure how long it would take a tribe of average size to empty a town of all consumable goods, sir. If one tribe moved through those towns since the plague time, they will be in the next town or the one after that by our calculations."

"Assuming an average size, one tribe, and no hoarding or destruction before the plagues completed of course."

"Yes, sir. Those variable were difficult to account for in a classroom so far away," Birdie admitted. Sam Byrd had not gained entrance to New Harvard through a well-connected relative, he had the intelligence to succeed there and to make a good officer, but leadership didn't always come to the intelligent. One had only to watch the two biologists sent on the expedition to see that.

After Sam left to see to his squad, Kirian finished his personal chores and walked to the mess tent for the daybreak meal. He saw the two biologists engaged in another of their endless debates. The troopers had nicknamed them Hogan and Klink after two colonels on some ancient televideo show they watched on the satellite link. Kirian didn't know which warranted each name, but knew them as Dr. Shelbourne and Dr. Kaltzenbrunner, although oil and water might be more apt. The funny thing was, the two older men looked quite a bit alike, perhaps that was the start of their shared animosity. Whatever the start, though both men obviously knew a lot and put on a show of their intelligence at every opportunity, both were entirely unqualified to lead a horse to water.

The biologists tried to order Kirian's troopers to do their bidding, and were completely ignored. They tried to order Kirian to order his troopers to do their bidding, and were told the way of things in his command. They got no further with F Troop's officers, and almost lost their miserable lives when they approached Sgt. Major Applewhite one evening as the career Army man stood duty as officer of the guard. Finally, the scientists called their civilian boss back in Hanoi, and were told that if Captain Tall Eagle saw fit to leave them out on the plains for insubordination, the corporation would be happy to stop their paychecks. The men then tried to take out their need for dominance of some sort on their small crew of biological techs, only to have Kirian notice and step in before both of his trained biologists ended up murdered one night. They fell back to bickering constantly with each other in an effort to win unwinnable arguments. Kirian gave his well-worn senior NCO a look one morning as the unit got underway, and that was all it took.

Sgt. Major Applewhite took the two scientists mid-argument, handed each an unloaded sidearm, and put them on point for the search of the next town. Kirian formed his command behind them in the usual way, and waited. Slowly it dawned on the scientists that just maybe they had annoyed F Troop a bit more than enough. The town turned out to be empty of life, and the loud arguments and other nonsense had ceased. The scientists still bickered, but with less volume and mostly in the privacy of their portable lab shelter. Kirian didn't know what they would do if a trooper ever came upon something to argue about, such as a small animal to have shipped back home.

A sign on the town border read Lodgepole, in the state of Nebraska, if Kirian recalled correctly. The search of this town would not take long, Kirian saw perhaps a dozen houses south of the old rail lines and three times that amount to the north. The increased rainfall since the plagues made searches of some older houses a moot point, the trees had completed demolition of them some decades past. The old roads held up fairly well, but they too were succumbing to the growth of weeds. Some weeds grew so tall in the valleys where streams ran all year now that Kirian's command went kilometers out of the way to approach some towns. 3rd Squad spread out to encircle the town, 2nd Squad went south of the tracks, 1st Squad to the north according to the duty roster. Kirian saw the wagons spread out with turrets manned and ready, one wagon slowly moved along the main highway through town. His unit was getting good at this, Kirian noted. Right at this point was usually the time in the video stories back home that something went badly wrong, he thought.

Nothing happened. A ritual that Kirian implemented after the search of the second town began. The entire unit came to a standstill, and every third trooper took off the protective scanner helmet typically worn at all times when on duty. Kirian didn't trust the audio receptors for some reason he could not yet explain. The listening pause went for five minutes at each town. This time, a trooper heard something in the last house on the north side of the tracks. The squad commander quickly implemented a detailed search of the house with four troopers. Kirian reconfigured the other squads for ambush protection. If they had found a stash, any tribe who felt strong enough would attack to protect what was theirs.

No attack came, but ComLt. Byrd called the biology team up. A life? Kirian ordered a perimeter defensive spread. Diamond formations of four troopers from 2nd and 3rd Squads took off at full gallop for the high ground to the south and north of the town. His wagons increased their altitude and went fully tactical, but the area proved resolutely empty of enemies. Kirian shrugged and went to see what Sam had found.

Kirian still had his helmet in hand, so he heard the sound that had caught the trooper's attention. A faint mewling sound, cats, or probably kittens, if Kirian's training was accurate. Sure enough, in an old handbasket lay a litter of six kittens perhaps born two or three weeks ago. The mother cat lay a few feet from the basket, obviously dead. Kirian saw more than one problem. His troopers felt what Kirian felt, the urge to hold and stroke the tiny things. He knew the purr of a kitten could comfort most humans. It was time for an emergency call.

"Emergency call, captain?" his comm trooper, Corporal Thomas, appeared at Kirian's side.

"Yes, better do an actual. Someone up the chain may want to confirm with me.

"What about the biologist recommendation, skipper?" Sgt. Major Applewhite asked over Kirian's shoulder.

Kirian turned to find the biologists rolling around outside the house beating on each other and yelling various animal names, none of which were correct.

"We've been low-bid, gents. Send them back with the transport," Kirian turned to the communicator. "Request a meat re-supply and then give it to me."

"Kittens!" the speaker on Cpl. Thomas commpack bellowed for all to hear. Kirian grinned. This had gone straight to Brigade command, none other than the boisterous General Douglas Simmons. "Put your actual on, son."

"Yes, sir, this is F Troop actual," Kirian responded through his head set. "The biologists are useless, and I'm shipping them back, but I can confirm from personal experience this is a litter of six kittens, the mother is dead, sir." Kirian's grandmother had one of three known feline breeding stations, but due to government restrictions he had seldom visited.

"Excellent! Emergency air evac is on the way. If that's Hogan and Klink you're sending back, I'll have the air crew drop them somewhere over the Atlantic. Look for a special package on your resupply, Kirian. Simmons out!"

"Beer, sir. We'll have to be careful with that out here," Sgt. Major Applewhite said.

Kirian knew that, but appreciated the reminder just the same. The troop was way beyond the civilized frontier, which had only reached the Appalachians last year. "Looks like we'll be camped out here for a few days of reward time. Bring the officers up. Cpl. Thomas, get the biologists ready for transport; giver their kits to the bio techs, we'll keep them. Sgt. Major take some troopers from 1st Squad and find the most defensible place for a camp-over."

Troopers moved swiftly to carry out Kirian's orders. The bio techs moved to secure the kittens in a special transport container where they would be safe for the trip back east. Kirian saw the techs - how the same government division could send out a team of techs so competent and a team of biologists so incompetent made no sense, but there it was - had already rigged up eye droppers with goat's milk to feed the hungry kittens. The transport signaled inbound in one hour. The general was pulling out the stops on this evac, probably a reroute from a dying trooper medevac. Another day in the New World.

Bucky Denzil

School Days

You may not believe it, but I used to have that manual dexterity and coordination stuff the young ‘uns talk about. Today I watched the school kids walk down the street to attend the first day of the new school year and I rejoiced for them. The students appeared unlikely to participate in their own rejoicing, so I did it for them. With me being some 50 or so years past my graduation, I find I kind of like the thought of school. Not for myself of course, but for everyone under the age of about 25 or 30. Keeps ‘em out of trouble that 10 or 12 hours of school each day, it surely does.

I remember back in the day - you might think way back in the day - we didn’t have much of what they call homework. We didn’t have a lot of things kids have nowadays like cell phones, IPods, computers, motorized scooters, and britches that ride to school way down on yer bum. I have no idea how these kids can afford so much, but I also know that I never carried so much to school either. Perhaps the powers that be in our government have decided to raise a generation of pack mules. I hope they will be well-paid pack mules, these kids need a lot of stuff it seems.

My first memorable purchase happened when I saved up for months the earnings from my paper route to buy a watch. Not a fancy watch with the dials and digital windows and such like you can see in the catalogs today, but a basic Timex jewelry store watch. One of my better purchases too; the thing lasted for years. Over the course of my life, it seems that almost all of my best buys came when I saved up for the purchase. The credit card nuttiness that came along later caught me up in it too, but none of those purchases went quite so well.

The ease of plopping down the plastic may be why I did so poorly on choosing the right stuff later in my life, or maybe every manufactured thing went down in reliability and durability across the board; I don’t know. However, I’ll stick with taking the responsibility; credit card buying came too easily and too fast, maybe I didn’t put the thought and effort into the buy like I did when I had to wait for months or years to save up the money. Me ‘n the wife paid cash like that for our first house too.

That old house lasted for decades and we made not a single payment with interest to any bank. That sounds good to you now, but I must confess that we paid in many other ways just the same. The house required refinishing pretty much inside and out. The foundation cracked and leaked, the garage had too many hiding places for mice, and the dry wood of both sucked up enough paint to cover a stadium. We may not have lived under bank payments, but we surely did put in a lot of labor. I suppose if you added up the labor even at minimum wage we might have been ahead to just pay the bank on a newer house and enjoy more time at leisure. Ah well, once you have made the decision you are pretty much in it for life Not many young couples can afford to buy an old house with cash and a new house with a mortgage to compare the two lifestyles and costs over 50 years or so.

Well, I reckon I had better get on with it before you fall over from listening to this old feller go on about his life and wisdom. Least I think I acquired a little wisdom over the years; I guess you will have to be the judge of that.

I guess you could say this story begins in my 7th grade year during a PhysEd class. Kids like to shorten up words for faster communication, kind of a predecessor of that Tweety thing they do now I suppose, so we pronounced Physical Education by the diminutive fizz-ed. Up to one particular day, I jumped into the field hockey scrums, called that because we lacked any real hockey players so all the pretend players ended up in the middle of the field swinging sticks this way and that after the ball. This time, however, a boy who would be a good friend later in life whacked me one above the eye with his hockey stick. Not on purpose mind you, just one of those things that can happen when a group of boys gets together with potential weapons in hand.

The game stopped right there and I had to be taken down to the doctor’s office for stiches. Ol’ Doc Winston, not his real name of course but a nickname that came from the brand he smoked, checked to see if the Novocain had taken by bouncing a needle up and down on my forehead while asking if I felt ‘that’. It was at this point I seem to recall my mother fleeing the exam room. She told me later what the Doc had been doing. These days the Doc’s method would probably bring a lawsuit, back then it was just a good test to make sure the patient was ready for a few stiches.

After my wounded head had recovered, like about the next year I think, I jumped back into field hockey when the season rolled around again. But this time, I thought the player who got to wear the mask and padding might have a pretty good thing going. You might say that was the first time I got pushed into a different occupation. Several of those kinds of pushing would occur throughout my life, but for some reason at the ripe age of 96, I decided to stop getting pushed.

Why would an old man suddenly decide such a thing? You might ask. Well, I can tell you: it’s ‘cus old folks is crazy. I don’t mean mentally unbalanced, though there are a few of those down at the senior center, but because I had nothing left to lose. My wife had passed a few years ago and I was too old for the kids and grandkids to worry with anymore. The church still sent the bus around for me each Sunday, but I got the impression they wouldn’t be too put out if I didn’t get on it. I reckon my ‘giving’ isn’t quite up to what it once was, even if I am giving more of what I have now than I ever did. ‘Course it didn’t help when the wife and I got mad over one of the new guys deciding to publish the annual giving in the church bulletin to increase the take. We kind of figured that what a family gives should be between the man of the house and the Man Above, not the congregation in general.

Since old Pastor Hopkins had retired some years ago, the fire and brimstone had gone out of the church. The new guys who punched their tickets toward a position at one of the mega-churches down in the cities came and went every year, and not a one of them could keep me awake through a half-hour sermon, much less the two hours that Pastor Jack could belt out every now and again. I figure that Jesus is about done with me in this life and since I since I am more than ready to be with Him, I got nothing left to worry about. Come to think of it, the only bus I’ve seen in a few months has been that school bus. Guess the church got done with me after all.

The kids boarded the bus with their packs. Back in the day only soldiers carried the big back breakers, now even little kids get to. Look how far we’ve come. I waved in the general direction of the bus, but no one pays much attention to the old man of our little town. As the last of the mothers left for work in their Superbans and Toho’s and Yayhoo’s and such, I noticed a man going from door to door. This wouldn’t have been at all unusual back when the wife and me had first bought our house. Door-to-door salesmen were the Internet portal of the day. A family bought most stuff they needed from the local brick-n-mortar retailers, a bit from the mail order outfits, and the rest from the nice young men with the well-worn soles. Even the tract pushers have pretty much knocked off the door knockin’ by now though, almost no one stays at home during the day. Well, ‘cept for the occasional old fart like me, and I don’t always make it to the door in time to answer.

This fellow did something odd though. I got out the binoculars, because that is what I generally do after everyone is gone to work and school, and sure enough, the man was trying door knobs and peering in front windows. I dialed the 911 right away.

The dispatcher told me that some rep for a roofing contractor had a door-to-door permit for our little town today, but a deputy would check on him when they got around to it. Yes, even at my age I can tell a brush-off from a believer. I watched the man for a while longer, but he never once looked at a roof and I could see most of our little town from our front bay window. Call me old and slow if you like, but when the man found a house unlocked and went on in, I thought that there just might be a better than average chance that he was up to no good.

Grabbing a hogleg from the gun cabinet, I strapped a gun belt on and shoved cold iron into a holster… then I went back and took them off. I really couldn’t hold a revolver very steady anymore, hadn’t been able to for about ten years or so as a matter of fact, and a belt full of big cartridges gets mighty heavy on an old feller like me. Instead I picked up a lighter shotgun with a short barrel and loaded a few rounds of buckshot. I didn’t even have to carry it as my little scooter had a scabbard on the side. My shooting club had made a few minor adjustments to our gear as we all grew past even the silver and golden stages and got on to the seriously old stage of life.

The scooter had a full charge. Not too surprising since I only used it to go down the driveway for the mail each day, gots to get me magazines you know, and that was about it. The man had vanished around the corner at the bottom of the second street of our four, but I had a good idea which house he would be trying right about now. I slammed the scooter into gear feeling somehow that it would have been a bigger thrill with more than one forward gear to choose from, and roared off down the driveway. The scooter made the little whining noise it always did; the roaring came from me. I had inadvertently left my foot off the side and smacked it on the left side garage door track as I exited at quite a bit less than Mach 1.

I tried my best to rub my knee and ankle and foot and pretty much everything else that hurt, but we didn’t have all day. The man was surely coming up the near side of Oak Street by now and I had an idea about what he might be up to.

Unlike me, most of the folks in town got bills and credit card statements each month and put them in a desk organizer of some sort to keep straight. I had learned my lesson about the plastic years ago and even the big power company had decided that they would carry me in my few remaining months or years. This man with the roofing contractor permit was going in each house and grabbing some means to steal their identities; the crime of choice for most any gang or mafia these days.

Passing the green lawns and lovely landscaping of our little bedroom community, I kept an eye out for my quarry. Plenty of time for that as my scooter didn’t exactly break the speeding laws; I had time to take notes on what landscaping device or method worked aesthetically and what didn’t, at least in my old opinion. My landscaping consisted mainly of grass bordered by grass. My lawn is one of the greener lawns though. The klawn comes every week or so to spray various chemicals on the grass to make it green and keep the weeds out. I call him a ‘klawn’ because that’s what it says on the side of his little tanker trailer. He laughs even though the joke has grown stale, his real name is Kevin, and shares a Bible verse or two with me over coffee while his summer help runs the mower and trimmer over my lawn.

Kevin is one of the few folks I see on a regular basis. I would call him, but I know that his lawn business takes him to Jemville, about 50 miles away, today.

Whew, with the wind practically screaming in my ears, I round the corner at the end of Elm Street, the one I live at the top of, and reach up to turn down my hearing aid - must be the fresh batteries. There, the wind noise subsides to the light breeze that it should be as the scooter finally completes turn one. I turn up Oak; you can’t claim any wild imagination went into our street names – Birch, Elm, Oak, and Maple – those are the wild and crazy north-south streets of our little suburbian nightmare. The cross streets are even crazier: One, Two, Three, and the highway. At least we don’t have a bunch of inappropriate and overblown names like some housing developments do off the bigger town where most everyone works.

I have noticed that towns far from any ocean or mountain range like to throw in names like: Pacific Palisades, Atlantic Avenue, Sierra Boulevard, and other pretentious names to make the owners look good when filling out those forms on the Internet. “Yes, Grandma, we moved into a 2,000 square foot ranch deluxe on Woodland Lake Drive in Avalon Hills!” Translation: they moved into a 1970’s vintage one-level home with an attached garage in a town on the prairie with a name bigger than the town itself.

See it all the time. Oh! The man is up the street only four houses, he must have found a couple more unlocked, as I round the next corner. Hiyo, Silver! We charge into the fray…

Probably be a few minutes before I get up to the fifth or sixth house where he will surely be by the time ‘Silver’ gets up there. We are going uphill now and the speed has dropped off to a fraction of Mach that I am too old to calculate. What else did you want me to talk about as my meeting with destiny approaches? I think a butterfly just passed me; I really should get the old scooter checked out one of these days. I would stop to check to make sure I loaded the shotgun, but the thief might die of old age before I can get there if I do that.

I pull up to the sixth house and see that the door is open in the front. Hoisting my shotgun to port arms, or as close as I can get what with my arthritic shoulder and all, I move to take him in the back kitchen. I know it’s the back kitchen because they built all of these houses below mine on the same floor plan.

The wife and I sold ‘em the land back in ’88 or thereabouts and the developer who named the streets also decided to offer a choice of floor plans: on one side of the street we’ll do it this way, on the other side we’ll turn it around the other way. The developer finished the project on budget, but sheesh you never seen so much dull in your life. The town didn’t start to look decent until people moved in and exercised a little imagination in their painting and landscaping. Underneath you can still see that the houses all look the same. In fact the first victims, I mean visitors, to the town had to keep checking the house numbers and street names against the addresses to avoid losing their relatives in the fog of sameness.

The thief is rooting around in the bedroom while I gaze in wonder at the television screen. Wouldn’t it be fun to watch the Huskers on that screen! I might have to get me one of those if Jesus doesn’t call for me before I get back to the house. Kevin would help me order one from one of them amazons with the web site.

I rack a shell into the chamber of my shotgun and even with my hearing aid turned down I can hear the panic back in the bedroom. I think the thief did not expect anyone here at this time of the day. One of the occupational hazards of being a suburban daytime thief, I guess.

In the bedroom, I find the thief passed out in front of the desk, and much to my relief he is both unarmed and caught in the act if you will. The homeowner’s papers are scattered about the bed and he has set aside a pile of invoices and statements for his nefarious plan. I see in his satchel a pile of similar papers all neatly separated into bundles with addresses and names on the outside. He must be one of those thieves who are paid to break in and collect the goods, but does not do the actual identity theft. I can see how well it must work too.

He chooses only houses that are left unsecured. Takes only a few of the papers while disturbing nothing else, and gets away with the goods. The people come home, think that they have lost or misplaced their invoices, order replacements or make payments online, and then have a good old fashioned row over who messed up the record keeping that month. Meanwhile the organization behind this stalwart fellow begin taking small withdrawals from checking accounts and making small charges to the credit cards; nothing that would raise a big red flag right away, and they can do it for months or years in some cases before the accounts are closed.

Shaking my head at the ingenuity of it all, I go back out to the scooter and bring my winch cable in; like I said: a few modifications. I notice that someone has left the trailer hooked up to my scooter; I might have got here a lot faster if I had noticed that back at home. Oh well, the trailer will work to haul my swashbuckling little thief back home.

In the bedroom, I run the cable around my hero’s tootsies and key the remote. The thief gets a couple well-deserved thumps on the cranium as the winch drags him across the porch and down the stairs. Darn those winches anyway, rough customers them! It takes me a few tries to get the thief rolled up onto the trailer even with the backend tilted down, but we are on our way back home in short order. Make that short order plus as I back up a ways to go back and shut up the house we just left. In the bedroom, I put their papers back in the pile and leave a polite note on their computer screen saver about how naughty that porn stuff is. Bet the house gets locked up tomorrow!

The thief has not gone anywhere; do you think that winch was too rough on him? Nah, he’ll survive! Onward, Silver, off to the home on the range, to bring the bad guy to justice, to right the wrongs, to believe once more in the American way… to make a beeline for the potty when I get back; should’ve stopped to go before I took off so fast like that.

Hope that truck driver is all right. I’ll admit that it isn’t every day you see some geezer cross the highway on a scooter with a trailer. I think the young lady might have broken her neck whipping it around like that; she must think I’m cute or somethin’.

Cute and harmless anyway, I realize that I am well into the harmless years, and that young women will sometimes take notice of old grandfather fellows like my dashing self. I back the scooter and trailer into the garage and plug in the scooter to the charger. I make my way with some urgency to the bathroom and do my business there. Thank the Lord that I ain’t like ol’ Wilkerson. He flew planes for years and years and got used to holding his water so much that finally it wouldn’t come at all. The poor old guy has to put a catheter up his you-know-what four times a day to empty the pot.

One of those big televisions would look pretty good here; I write a note to myself and leave it on the refrigerator for Kevin’s next visit. I sit down in my favorite chair and fire up my DVR to watch the Husker game from last weekend. Something nags at the back of my mind though and I almost forget the game when a groan from the garage ‘bout makes my poor old heart stop.

Having watched my last mutt die some years prior, I almost wet my drawers when I see that someone has left a man in my scooter trailer. I hope I didn’t hit him so hard that he flew over the scooter and landed in the trailer! That hardly seems possible when I think of how fast that scooter can go. I untie the winch cable from his legs and he begins to come around. Some papers spill out of his satchel and suddenly I remember what the man had been up to. Good thing I ain’t old yet else I might have forgotten entirely!

I invite the young fellow into my kitchen and we sit down for some coffee and sweet rolls, along with the lesson from 1 Peter. I almost forget that note I had left about the big television when I notice the young man is ready to spill his guts; no doubt something in my keen questioning has left him defenseless and open to repentance. He signs the confession.

Young Carston, the deputy stands him up and snaps the cuffs on ‘im. Now where did he come from?

“Good job, Mort!” the deputy says to me. “Good coffee and rolls too; he won’t be eating quite so well where he is going.”

“Thanks, Deputy,” I try desperately to catch up with events. “Glad to be of service.”

“Oh, here’s your shotgun,” the deputy hands me ol’ Bess, my big 12 gauge Remington loaded for bear with buckshot and slugs. “It’s a good thing you had your name inscribed on the receiver. The Johnson’s down there on Oak were a little surprised to find a shotgun on the bedroom floor!”

“Yeah, must have left it there when I hooked up this young fellow,” I stand up proudly to receive his congratulations.

“I know, you’ve said that four times already,” the deputy deflates my old chest back down to its former size. “Now Mort, you give those guns to your kids like I told you last time, or next time I’ll have to take them all and send you to the home! As County Sheriff I have to make sure the community is safe from forgetful old geezers with guns. What if the Johnson children had got home first and started fooling around with that shotgun? One of them might have been hurt by that birdshot you had in your little .410 there!”

Birdshot? When did young Carston become Sheriff? When did ol’ Bess get downsized like that? Maybe I had better call my boys and have them come over and get those guns after all. I write a note and put it on the fridge over the television one. Thank God for my big Amana memory aid!

Open Windows

Glancing across the street, I see something that makes me stop for a moment: the nice house, the two-story home with the new roof of black slate tiles, has all of the windows standing open; it’s ninety-some degrees outside, the warmest day this week and all of the windows are open on the west side. The sun passed the zenith a couple of hours ago, that home will soon be hotter than you-know-what. Are they nuts?

Then I stop to wonder what kind of stink must have occurred to make folks leave their house wide open to the August heat. Did a kid drop a bottle of that doe urine that hunters use to attract deer during the hunting season? Happened to us out at the warehouses where I used to work back in the day. Stuff could evacuate a place faster than tear gas, and it’s perfectly legal to use too! Maybe someone left the fresh fish out on the counter overnight? Truth is I don’t know, but it is my business to look into the strange and unusual in the neighborhood; the community association pays us to do just that.

From the list on the wall, I look up the numbers for the family. Contact numbers the boss calls ‘em, phone and cell numbers for me to pester the folks at their workplaces. The boss don’ never call, he has that phone-phobia, same as a lot of folks have, especially men. I have it too, but must put it aside on the job when the boss tells me to call folks. It isn’t like there is anyone else in the guard shack for me to delegate a phone call.

The numbers produce no response. The family is out of town or out of touch, but now I have to leave my air-conditioned office, get in the scorching hot security vehicle and go check. I realize that it sounds stupid to drive across the street. By the time I get the Jeep started and well before the a/c kicks in, I’ll be there. The startup is a waste of fuel too at a time when this country needs me to waste gas about as much as Hitler needed a bar mitzvah back in his day. That ain’t a very good simile of course, a good bar mitzvah might have done little Adolph a world of good in his growing years, you never know.

I check the Weather Channel web site, and yup, the town shows 95° with a dew point of 44° and humidity at 17%, comfortable actually. The boss won’t likely get out of his cool house on a day like this, so I take the chance and save the country a few cups of gasoline for future generations. The gated community I work for is dead quiet in the afternoon. The children are inside playing their video games as the final days of their summer break tick away right underneath them.

Their parents, both wife and husband in most cases, are at work. Making good salaries that will be eaten up by deductions and payment plans. The toys purchased by the payment plans line the alley parking stalls all over the community. I get to see them each night on patrols. Bass boats, ski boats, luxury campers, ATV’s, snowmobiles on trailers, and Harley’s for the annual trip to Sturgis, all add up to several millions of dollars’ worth of stuff that gets used maybe once or twice a year. Yet they all go to work in Corporameia, that dreadful village of corporate minions out to destroy each other and squeeze every last drop of blood and sweat from the employees. I know because I used to be there with them.

As I walk around the house, I see that every window on all sides of the house is open, though all of the blinds and curtains are pulled down allowing me no way to look inside. I also think back to those ten years of moving up the ladder after starting at the very bottom.

I don’t have to worry about that in my current position. The boss isn’t going anywhere as the Community Association hires the lowest bidder for the security job and no bid will get lower than the boss’s. The big national firms like Pinkerton’s and Wackenhut can’t match our costs because the boss provides no benefits, no retirement plan, and not very much of himself. Markus, Frenny, and I trade off working afternoons and nights. The boss takes the position each weekday morning for two or three hours until everyone he needs to wave at has gone to work. The weekend mornings are left open because no one in this very self-righteous and hypocritically-proper community wants us to see the results of the Friday and Saturday night Bacchanalias that take place without fail at one house or another. That takes away the only interesting shifts; we get to work the others.

I get to read a lot on my shifts because the boss doesn’t want us to be anywhere without the security vehicle and keeps a tight lid on the fuel budget, which means the vehicle doesn’t move much and therefore neither do we. I have taken to hiding a bicycle behind the security office and making patrols around the neighborhood that way. They have a very nice trail that winds through the woods behind all of the homes for some 8 miles. They all paid for it when they bought the homes, but no one uses it. They have exercise toys inside the homes for that kind of thing. The maids keep the equipment dusted so that claims of workouts can be made. I’m not sure why that is important, but it seems to be. In spite of this, the people of this neighborhood are in good shape; probably from all the ‘running around’ they do on each other. Sorry, bad pun there. Along with the dust-free exercise equipment, the families all maintain gym and golf club memberships. No one can see and visualize your naked body when you work out at home, you see, and of course you don’t get to do the same to the other guy’s wife from a home gym in the basement. Of course, in the summer that all changes as the backyard pools are cleaned and filled.

In the summer time we are not allowed to patrol behind the homes. As I have mentioned, I take the bike trail anyway, and I know why they don’t want us going behind the homes while the pools are in use. Swimming seems to be the last thing on these people’s minds. I could make a fortune with a digital camera and a few contacts in the blackmail trade, but unlike the people I guard for a living, I’m not that given to courting Mammon, or money as we call that old demon. After that first trip, I learned to keep my eyeballs in the boat as they say at the Academy.

Years ago, I gained acceptance to the Naval Academy in Annapolis. The plebes there all learn to eat while staring down at the plates only. This is a form of eye discipline that comes in handy when living in officer country on the bases later in life, just as it does in this community. That way a junior officer doesn’t have to worry about which back door the captain of the vessel in port is visiting while his wife is at work. Keep your eyes in the boat and you avoid seeing a lot of sin. Not that playing the blind monkey part makes the sin go away of course. Keeping the eyeballs in the boat does help when meeting Frenny though.

Frenny is a college kid and only works one night a week; we have never heard his real name. Markus and I each work three nights. Fortunately, Frenny is a lazy kid as most of us were at that age and does not violate the behind the homes rule. He also has the advantage of being homely enough that none of the rich-kid daughters have any fantasies about the young security guard. Markus and I could both serve, but to carry out such a thing would involve long jail terms and sex offender registration should we be caught. The ‘child’ would not be harmed emotionally, the children raised in this neighborhood passed that point years ago with what they have grown up with.

Like me, Markus served his country, he for somewhat longer than I. Markus retired as a chief warrant officer after 22 years in the Army. At just over 40, he has a lot of life left in him and is too wise to mess it up with one of the kids in this neighborhood. I served 8 years and left as a captain from the Marine Corps after an IED in Iraq gave me a few extra scars and a medical discharge. Both of us get payments from the government for our service, but a man has to do something with his time. I would like to think that I too am wise enough to stay away from the physically attractive gals around these parts. Since that first bike ride on that first summer evening last June, I can swear on a Bible that I haven’t looked in the backyards. A man just doesn’t want those images playing in his mind if he wants to keep his heart pure, that much I can tell you.

I completed my first partial circuit of the house and did notice a smell wafting out the leeward side of the home, but not one that I could identify. (The inevitable privacy fence kept me from going the whole circle around the house.) Freshly killed human bodies have a distinctive smell that I could recall from my days in Fallujah, but this was not that smell, thank God. The smell could come from something like a dead rat, and in this neighborhood I could see why the family would want no trace of it to linger. However, that same reason would prompt the family to call the very plain white vans from ServiceMaster’s division that no one talks about around here. The division that discreetly cleans up the bodily fluids from the fights that didn’t happen in this neighborhood; or cleans up the mess from the orgies that the local religious leaders are sure wouldn’t take place in ‘that’ gated community.

Markus and I have seen the vans a lot; we even know a few of the drivers by their first names and can talk about their family members by name too. The vans service the neighborhood for a stiff fee (Sorry, another bad pun there.) and the drivers and crew keep their mouths shut, at least until their kids are through college. Nope, Markus and I never see those vans either. If the mess is particularly bad and the vans leave late, as one did this evening from that city councilman’s house up yonder way, we mark it down as a delivery from Ollie’s Overnight Freight and leave it at that. The boss knows about Ollie and his overnight deliveries, and will tag on an extra charge of his own.

I’ll say this for the boss; though he may not lead by example of long hours and hard work he does share the bonus money equally. Some months the vans are here so much that we make more in bonus money than we do in our regular paychecks. In spite of my bad pun, I have always assumed that the vans take away no bodies from these little clean-ups. The police are never called to these things, but for all I know they receive something extra as well. The house is quiet; the neighborhood is still, and the boss has stayed away just like I thought. I am about to knock on the door when another plain white van honks to be let out of the gate. A quick jog, the day is quite comfortable even at 95°, the dry days of August have arrived at last, and I sign for another delivery from Ollie. Busy fellow that Ollie; this summer must be some kind of record for him.

I checked the office real quick to make sure that no one has called, but all is quiet just as it usually is in this neck of the woods. Still, something is creeping me out about this house. I strap on my Beretta M9 and a magazine pouch. Not standard issue for the job, the boss won’t spring for the bonding and insurance that goes with firearms. If the balloon ever went up in this neighborhood we could go into any of the homes and find all manner of fine rifles and shotguns to defend the walls with; some of them even get taken out and used once each fall. A fellow down at the end of Palisade Avenue even showed Markus and I his collection of legal machine guns and told us how to get at them should we need to. I surely do hope we never need that much firepower around here.

Markus and I have become good friends on this job and often work the nights together even though we don’t have to and don’t get paid extra for doing it. Come to think of it that is a fine idea. I go back to the office and call Markus as the first of the ‘working’ folk start coming home. I don’t have to let them in or out, a sensor under the road is tripped by a sender on their vehicles and the gates open automatically. I do keep an eye out for duress situations, but these folks are not quite up to that level of wealth.

“Hey bud! What’s going on out in the land of modest wealth and immoderate sin?” Markus has picked up the shop number from his Caller ID display.

“Funny you should ask, I just signed ‘Ollie’ out again. Mark, you see anything odd about that house across the road here last night?” I ask him.

“Yeah, all the windows were open all night, even though it got down to the low 50’s, and I didn’t see any cars leave in the morning,” Markus reports. “I asked Frenny, but you know him, he didn’t see anything. For all I know the house has been that way since your last day.”

This was Tuesday, Markus had Monday, Frenny Sunday, and my last day had been Saturday, and I didn’t notice anything odd on that day, but then again Saturday had been pleasant both day and night.

“You would ask about it though, because that house gave me the heebie-jeebies for some reason yesterday, Joe,” Markus continued.

“Yes, I got that same feeling right now,” I said. “You want to come up while I go knock on the door?”

“Sure, be right there!”

I knew that ‘right there’ meant at least an hour, Markus and the rest of us too for that matter, couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhoods close to this one. But I also knew that he would drop whatever he was doing, probably working on those infernal RC airplanes of his, and be here as quickly as his 2011 Dodge Challenger 392 SRT8 in Green with Envy (the actual color choice on the order form!) could make it without getting yet another speeding ticket. Markus had a weakness for a fast car, and this car was his latest fling.

My passion is my Hummer, kind of a thing from my Marine days. They wouldn’t let me drive them back then; the company commander always had a driver from the enlisted ranks. Rank may have its privileges in the military, but getting to drive the Humvees wasn’t one of them. I have one of the diesel H1s, not those wimpy H2’s or H3’s. I realize that it’s a terrible guzzler of precious fossil fuel so I try to make up for that by driving it as much as possible.

Captain Joseph Fellowman is my official handle on the medical papers at the VA, and yes the last name of my birth did cause the first classmen at the Academy to exercise their humor a bit. Markus would be Chief Warrant Officer Markus DeLapage, pronounced mostly in the French way though his New Orleans forbears had managed to mangle it a bit like the old commandant’s name, LeJeune, had been. I guess we are supposed to call my old base Luh-jern now instead of Leh-june as we said it back in the day. I have an hour or so to think of ridiculous issues like that before Markus arrives.

I kept an eye on the house as the residents returned from their day jobs to start their summer evenings by the pool, or in the pool, or in each other… sorry about that, got carried away there.

As the incoming traffic slows, and right about 50 minutes later Markus rumbles in and parks next to my Hummer. As I look at the two vehicles, I kind of realize why the boss might be reluctant to give us a raise. How many security guard shacks have two vehicles like these parked outside?

“Evening there, Joe!” Markus is cheerful as usual, and armed for bear, which ain’t.

“Got one for me?” I ask. He reaches back into his car and hands over one of his Winchester Marine model shotguns, fully loaded with buckshot and slugs if I know Markus. The model is not named for my former service branch, but for use in a saltwater environment. The guns gleam with stainless steel set off by the black polyurethane stock. Markus also carries a Beretta M9; old habits die hard it seems.

I look up and down the road, the houses look dark and curtains are still drawn to block out the late evening sun. The temperature will drop quite a bit soon. Tolan City isn’t in the desert, but the area is dry enough that the day and night temps can differ by as much as 50 degrees in late August. I look because I don’t want the residents to see us both armed for bear and going over to one of ‘their’ houses, and then leap to the conclusion that those two crazy vets are going to knock over their little community. Like everyone else, they watch the latest Hollywood fair and sure as Osama bin Laden is gone from this earth; some studio has put out a movie with a PTSD suffering vet going postal at some point in the recent past.

Markus has finished his survey as well; Army or Marines, we sooner or later learn to think alike in the ground forces. Not that ‘Flyboy Jones’ as I call Markus when he is being ornery had to spend much time walking the sands of Iraq. He flew the Apache for the Army, blowing up stuff from the air in a heavily armed and armored warhorse. Wonder if he could get ahold of one for tonight? This house is still creeping me out.

Markus nods his head as though understanding my feeling. Most likely he does at that.

I jack a round into the chamber just before Markus does the same. We watch the movies too, but we know that it doesn’t do any good to chamber a round when the enemy is already shooting. Across the street, I go to the door and wait while Markus makes another quick check of the backside of the house. Markus is tall enough to look over the six-foot privacy fence, the height limit according to the 40-page covenant the owners all sign. The privacy fence limit is absurd in any case; they all stare over at the neighbors from their second and third story rear balconies. Nothing has changed out back, so I knock on the door which to my surprise swings open. I move off to the side and bring out a flashlight. The evening sun shines in enough that we can see nothing to either side of the entryway that it illuminates. Markus shines his light to the right across me, and I do the opposite. I see a body lying on the floor, but it has too many matching legs to be a human. The family dog has passed.

Markus looks at me and we trade sides with our flashlight beams. There is a dead dog on his side too. From what I can see, the dog on his side looks almost desiccated. The weekend didn’t do that. What is going on here? Against my better judgment, I don’t call the cops right now, but go inside with Markus backing me up. We both turn off our cell phones and security radios. Inside, I break to the right and begin searching with my light; Markus I know will be doing the same to the left.

Dust is what I see the most; this house has not been used as a home for some time. How could we have missed that? The answer is that we didn’t. Vehicles have been coming and going at regular hours for months, perhaps years, or at least as far back as I can recall. We meet on the back side of the first floor in the kitchen. Normal appliances, normal furniture, but all covered in dust. Footprints in the dust go downstairs, but none go up. I cover those stairs while I signal to Markus to take a quick swing around the second floor.

He whispers to me when he returns, “the same as this floor,” by which I take it that I would find normal bedrooms and baths all covered in dust.

We descend the stairs.

The basement is different. There is no dust. We can see the entire basement from the bottom of the stair. My first guess would be that someone has turned the place into a game processing station. Stainless steel counters, grinders, walk-in freezers, but no ranges, ovens, or deep fryers. They didn’t cook down here, but they did process meat. Markus turns and covers me while I look in the freezers, or he turns so that he doesn’t have to see what we fear. I don’t know which. Ah, well, rank has its privileges I guess.

No corpses stare at me from the freezers, human or otherwise. The shelves are bare, but the freezers are running. This makes some sense as the hunting seasons will be getting underway shortly. Perhaps the meat has been consumed. Later I will desperately wish this thought had not crossed my brain.

We return to the ground floor and head out back to the garage/shop building the houses are allowed to have behind the pool and below the wooded hills surrounding the community.

We do the same procedure as we did at the front door of the house, but this time there are no dead mutts. The garage has an unusual inner door though. Once again those fears creep up on me. Markus reaches over and pats me on the back. This time we go in touching so that we don’t startle each other and fire off a round. The sense of creepiness comes from this place. I cannot tell what is making my hair stand on end. In a movie this would be the moment the scary music would start.

“Would you please stop humming that music!” I bark at Markus in a whisper.

“Sorry, it seemed kind of appropriate,” Markus whispers back.

I throw open the door.

The room is divided into two. A cool room separated by plastic see-through strips to keep the cool air in, and a loading dock with a van parked in the bay. Pallets of canned goods are ready to be shipped. I see the labels of several popular canned meats and entrées. We walk in a crouch over to the cool room.

Dog carcasses, skinned and hanging from the racks, hundreds of them, greet our eyes as we scan the room. Markus steps back and makes a mess all over the clean floor. I feel a strong urge to do the same. No one is here. It’s a good thing. Markus and I might have dropped the muzzles and lit ‘em up at that moment.

Outside I pause to do to an innocent bush what Markus just did to the floor. We make no jokes at each other’s expense; this doesn’t seem the moment for it. I begin to wonder where the bonuses are coming from, and suspect why there have been so many plain white vans this summer.

“Guess you better call in the cops, Joe,” Markus tells me. “I’m not sure I can speak straight to ‘em right now.”

“I know what you mean,” I say. “Do you suppose the boss is in on this?”

“Nah, he’s dumb, but not that dumb,” Markus looks around the neighborhood. “Like you and me, he probably figured this bunch was just behaving worse than usual. I know it’s easy to think that about the folks in this neighborhood.”

I agreed with his assessment and I dialed the number for the local cop shop. Didn’t look like an emergency. The vans that left earlier in the day, when no guard was on duty, were probably making their deliveries now and would be back in the morning as usual. The vans we saw leave late this evening were probably the service vans, the real ones. The boss would see vans coming in and would make his little notes for charges by which house they went to; the night guard would see only some of them going out, but since the boss didn’t talk to us much, we had never compared the numbers. Someone had set up one foul operation just across the street from us.

After the cops arrived to bust the place, performed their forensic NCIS thing, and then set up a little meeting for the owners, I walked back to the office and quietly removed all the cans from one of the cupboards. Better that the kid didn’t know what we had been eating.

The Value of the Given Word

Two men walked down a hallway in an upscale apartment building. The men wore suits of an American cut, less than immaculate, but well dressed. Taciturn by nature, the men eschewed polite banter. They kept watch without appearing intrusive to the few people passing by. A tenant in apartment 5b saw them through her peephole and put them down as employees of a corporation requiring the suit and tie, a legal firm perhaps, one with an older gentleman as the CEO. The men did not wear sunglasses inside, because such things made no sense outside of Hollywood or a spy novel.

Glimpses of shoulder harnesses for firearms did not go unnoticed by the pedestrian traffic. The men made little attempt to hide the hardware, but did not advertise either. At the door of the last apartment in the hall, Harris, a black man wearing the grey pinstripe, knocked softly and waited. Burton, the Caucasian of the pair wearing the navy suit, stood patiently but watchfully off to the side.

No answer came in response to the summons. Harris raised an eyebrow and knocked once more. After a few seconds, the men drew their pistols and let themselves into the apartment with a key Harris pulled from a pocket with his off hand. The door opened on a neat apartment with no human occupant in sight.

A search confirmed the unoccupied state.

“What do you think?” Burton produced a ring of keys and small plastic tabs with numbers imprinted on them.

“Unknown, check the usual place.”

Burton unlocked the dial to a small safe embedded in the concrete wall of the lesser bedroom.

The only two-bedroom apartment in the building, the building manager would occupy this space by design. However, the owner hired a manager with a family of six children and in a gesture not in keeping with most building owners in the city, gave them a 4-bedroom suite on the ground floor. This apartment let for half the going rate to the man Burton and Harris expected to find waiting for them at the appointed time. The man had never before missed his meeting.

“Not here. Beginning search procedure.”

“Got it. Gun safe in the bedroom closet.”

“The package is intact?”

“Yes, fully marked and ready for transport.”

“Why the gun safe?”

“We may never know, Mr. Burton. Calling it in.”

Harris pulled a basic cell phone from his suit pocket and pressed a single button. “Subject not present, package recovered. Returning to base,” Harris paused to listen. “Roger that.”

“Cleansing?”

“No, he’s there!” For the first time that afternoon, Harris looked surprised, for him a rare display of emotional pyrotechnics.

“Return home?”

“Yes, with all due speed.”

The man missing his appointment staggered into the bottom level of a classy, but at this time closed, nightclub on the city’s Left Bank, an attempt to capture the cache of the Paris district of the same name. He fell rather than sat into a booth in front of a largish man, a football player a few years out of his retirement from the NFL. He carried a dirty, but otherwise respectable briefcase tightly clasped to his chest.

The big man looked with concern on his colleague.

“I have it all. All of it,” he babbled. “You don’t have to send them. I recovered all of it.”

“Harris and Burton are there now, Carson.”

“You didn’t have to! I’m good to my word. I don’t know what happened to the regular package, but I got all of it back! Every dollar, you can count!” He banged the briefcase on the table. A few corners of the bills inside showed in the crack of the case, as though packed in a great hurry.

The big man opened the case and looked at the disorganized mess of currency inside.

“Mr. Bean! Run this through the counter, please.”

A man walked out of an office a few yards away, took the case without a word and returned to the same office.

“Why did you not wait?”

Carson Keane, the runt-sized, plain looking man now lying in the booth almost fell asleep before he could answer.

“I haven’t slept since last Tuesday. I lost the package, all of it. I don’t know how, but it wasn’t there when I checked. The product was gone and the money too. I went out on my own and made back every dollar. I’ve worked non-stop to make it up to you. My word is all I have and I won’t diminish its value.”

“Carson, are you in some kind of trouble?”

“No, not now, the money is all there!”

Bean returned to the table with a slip of paper.

“Carson, you have almost $6,000 too much here. There is no need for the extra amount.”

“I…I, may have lost count. I’m not even sure what day it is. But, just keep it. Don’t send them to kill me!”

“Carson, we are not the Mafia, and you are not some kind of dope dealer. Why are you acting this way? Harris and Burton meet you each month at the appointed time to escort you here. They are armed to protect you, not to hurt you.”

“But, I lost the package! My word has no value if you cannot trust me.”

“Harris found the package in your gun safe, Carson. Why did you store it there instead of the safe we provide?”

“I don’t know…” and with that admission, Carson Keane did the honorable thing, he passed out on the bench.

Harris and Burton arrived in the nightclub in a more dignified manner. The men brought their package over to the boss.

“What happened to him?” Burton asked.

“Panic. He spent the last week making up for money he never lost. Did you see anything missing in his apartment?”

Harris and Burton looked at each other for a moment, picturing the apartment search in their minds.

“The books, boss. He sold his rare books to make up the package shortfall.”

“We’ll never get those back. Those folks don’t let nothin’ go unless they want to,” the boss craned his neck toward the office. “Bean!”

The requested man appeared once more without a word.

“Take this money to our bank. Invest it for Carson in something he can’t touch for a while, on your way out call Dr. Peetz and ask her to stop by.”

Bean left as silently as he arrived the first two times.

“I’m quiet, but I swear that man has never spoken in his life,” Burton remarked.

“Oh, he talks. I hired him because he does so little of it. I like to talk and I like quiet people around me,” the boss said as he leaned back in the booth.

“May I speak, boss,” Harris asked meekly.

“Of course you can talk! I already got Carson acting like I’m some kind of Don Corleone. Don’t you start!”

“Boss, your theatrics are getting out of hand. You got us going to the sales reps like some kind of duo from Pulp Fiction. Is it any wonder that Carson panicked?”

“He got his money from the bank a little late one evening, and went to the wrong safe. You want them to pay in cash and you pay us to escort them here so no one robs them. We look like some kind of drug dealers,” Burton complained.

“We are drug dealers!” the boss protested. “Just legitimate ones… and I like to put on a show.”

Burton poked Harris and nodded toward the door. A job was a job and these days not a sure thing. If the boss wanted to run his licensed pharmacy like some sort of movie drug kingpin, who were they to complain.

Such a Nice Couple

The wife had spent a bit of time staring across the alley at our neighbor’s house. You know the one, the house in the neighborhood that is just a little bigger than the others with a few more toys scattered about the property. Not kid toys to be sure, but the big boy’s toys that get used only once or twice a year. The giant 5th-wheel camper with three pullouts, the fishing boat powerful enough to pull two skiers; that’s the kind of toys, I mean. That house where the prosperous couple with no children live.

They didn’t grow up wealthy or have some hefty inheritance as far as I know. Instead they both work in good jobs at the corporate headquarters of our local big employer. You know that one too; that big employer that most little towns look for, court, and marry for life. Although sometimes the marriage ends in divorce and the factory or plant moves over to China or Mexico and leaves everyone in the bread lines. Loyalty isn’t what it was back before the big depression. A company can look out for only its own self just as a man might do.

The one, Jen, likes the short form of the name, works in accounting. The other, Jamison, tends to the long form of his name and works as a division manager for Big Employer. We don’t know exactly what they earn of course, but the signs point to plenty and to spare, which may be why the wife suddenly called down a curse on them this afternoon.

No, not a voodoo sort of thing like those folks do down in the Mississippi Delta, but a more subtle and expensive sort of curse: She wanted us to pray for them to be blessed with a baby. A baby? Whoa there, doggies! How mean can you get?

I guess that would be a little bit of hypocrisy on my part. After all Mabel, that’s the wife, and me had a couple or four or five of our own as I seem to recall. I like to kid around, because us old folks can do that. I even remember the kids’ names four days out of every six. Mabel has to help me sometimes; I can’t always separate the greats from the grands when they all come over to visit me in the home. Wait until you get to 96 and see if you can sort ‘em all out as well as you did back in the good old days.

The evening is fine and I decide to dance with Mabel to the music on the sound system. It’s getting kind of hard to find our music anymore. Thank God for the satellite receiver; I don’t believe two old folks like us could cut a waltz to this hip-hop thing they do now. Fortunately, I have a CD player with my new stereo system. We can buy CDs of all the old greats we listened to back in our day. The grandkids are starting to enter college, except for one or two in the military, and we tend to laugh at our children. Not the little squiggly kind of laugh like that cartoon fellow on the television set does either, but the big bwaa-ha-ha kind of evil laugh that the best bad guys do. Now the kids get to see how much it costs to put someone through college like we did.

“I see that Junior’s kid landed with Colonel Crowe’s old outfit,” I call out to the wife.

“Yes, Michael called after it came on the news last week,” she hollers from the kitchen. “He figured they must be the unit landing down there since they left just a couple of weeks ago.”

She is confused again, calling the kid by my name when I know that it’s Junior. We’ll get it straightened out when we dance together to the radio this Friday night. There are still a few stations on the AM dial that play ‘our’ music. Ah, the band music of those days.

The kids made it through the Depression mostly because they had not been conceived by that time. My dad had a good job, a necessary job, and he had done nothing to misplace it. They like to ‘lose’ jobs nowadays, like you can lose your car keys or something. He had to take a big pay cut, most everyone with a job did, because the company sales went way down for a few years, but he kept the position. He and mom tightened their belts and brought us kids into the living room to do the same thing to us. Misery loves a companion after all! My mother tightened her belt so much that I thought her top half was going to pop off and roll down the stairs. Times were tough for everyone, but we made it all right. As the Depression faded into frugal memories, the kids got their jobs back or got new ones and moved off to have children of their own.

The wife and I got to have some fun again, for a little while after our wedding, until someone went and decided to hold a big war. According to the papers everyone got involved too. Our country had fighting going on all over the planet once old Hirohito decided the war just couldn’t go on without us any longer, like it had been doing. The frugal times didn’t come back quite so much, but we had to give up all our metal junk and had rationing. You might think rationing sounded bad, but we had all just endured years of depression. The rations seemed almost like a time of high living and general plenty to most of us. Of course at that time we didn’t know how much better it was going to get here in the 1950’s.

Now the couple across the way there didn’t have to grow up during the depression. So I doubt know they know what penny-wise is. They can live on less, they just choose not to. It’s all a part of this new prosperity we are enjoying after the big wars. I guess the second one over in Korea wasn’t a big one as some people call it, a World War, but just a police action or some such. I don’t know of any police that went over there, but a lot of young men did just like their older brothers did a few years earlier. For some reason, the two wars left us in good shape financially, as a country I mean. I was too old to fight in either one.

Heck, the wife likes to remind me that I was too old for the First World War, although it seemed to be a European kind of ‘world’ war from what I could tell. I must admit though that I seemed to get old at about the right time. Living out your 80’s during a time of national prosperity is pretty good timing, praise the Lord God Almighty! The old folks who spent their last years in the Great Depression had it pretty tough at times. When the family cannot afford to keep a fellow and he is too old to go back to work or stand in a bread line, then I guess he does what a few of them did: let the good Lord know that now is a good time to come home and sit down to wait for it. Jesus told John that suffering would come, and boy it surely does at times!

As a bit of a historical piece myself, I have seen the great changes in the land. I remember the days of outhouses and chamber pots, cooking in wood stoves, and eating everything on our plates since there was no way to keep it. Now we have airplanes and cars, refrigerators and gas ranges, radio sets and television sets, and this telephone that the wife is using to fire up the ol’ prayer chain. I guess she really does want to inflict a little bundle of financial damage on that couple!

I wonder if she remembers how much those kids cost us. Could be that her memory is fading like mine is. Don’t tell her I said that though; she thinks her memory is just fine even though she called the firstborn son by my name the other day. I done told her that his name is Junior, everyone knows that!

Speaking of kids, I wonder if those folks across the alley know how to go about makin’ some. Not sure that I can help them with it now. As I recall, it started out as an inexpensive and mostly fun sort of hobby that somehow got completely out of hand along the way. After the fifth kid came out, I began to wonder if we might not be doing it wrong. I asked the pastor about that, but he seemed to think that the kids would keep on coming until God saw fit to stop ‘em. I talked to the Lord about that and he seemed to agree with me that five was perhaps a bit more than enough. The wife claims I just got too old, but who’s going to believe someone that hangs stretchy brown stockings all around our tub so that a man just about hangs himself each time he takes a bath?

Uh, oh, the phone calls are finished. I make a break for the back door, but I fail to get enough steam up and get caught before I can make my escape. That’s one problem with having a wife 30 years or so younger than me; I try to run but she can catch me every time. She’s 53 and still quick.

“Where you going in such a hurry?” she asks.

“I was a goin’ to see if those folks wanted a baby before you get ‘em one with your prayer chain and all, young lady,” I know enough not to say ‘old’ anywhere near her.

“I spoke to Jen yesterday, dear,” she says. “They have been trying for years, but still no baby.”

“Aha, they just know how to do it right. I knew we were doing something wrong back in the day!”

“We did everything right, my love,” the wife gets in a good one. “Just think how many kids we would have if you hadn’t gone off to those wars.”

“Wars! I was too old for the wars. I have grandkids in school!”

“We shouldn’t have got started so early in our marriage if you didn’t want kids in college already,” she says while leaning into my chest. She knows I still like that even at my advanced age.

“We didn’t start that early,” I complain.

“Bosh! You couldn’t wait,” she tells me. “We didn’t even make it twenty miles out of town before you pulled into a motel. You called that resort in San Diego and told them to hold our room until the next day.”

“An old man would never do such a thing!” I correct her, must be those memory problems of hers again.

“Oh poo! The twins were born nine months to the day after our honeymoon…” she pauses, “You haven’t been telling folks that you’re 80 again, have you?” she smacks me one on the chest. “You’re 44 and I’m 37, and it is NOT too late for us to have another child!”

While we straighten this out, we dance to our music on a new record player with two speakers. What a marvel of technology!

“But I have scars; I must be really old to have scars there,” I try to set her straight, but she won’t have it.

“You have scars ‘there’ because you didn’t keep your fanny down like that nice Sgt. Fisher told you to in boot camp, my love,” she sets me straight instead.

Indeed, I had served in the Pacific with 2/8, that’s 2nd Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment for you civilian fellers. The ‘old man’ Major (later Lt. Col.) Henry Crowe had led us through Betio and Iwo, and then I had been called back to go over to Korea just a few years later. I never told the wife, but the resort where we spent our 20th anniversary had been close to Camp Pendleton so that I could report in to Sgt. Fisher and let him know that his training didn’t take.

Actually, the wounding of my poor buttocks had been a mistake on the sniper’s part. I had been temporarily assigned to the Army to ferret out a supply thief and had a desk job in a tent for a spell. I don’t know what happened on his end, but I got up suddenly, for no reason that I can recall, from my chair at the desk in the rear, and got it, well, in the rear, instead of in my cranium. The boys on the perimeter had taken care of the sniper, but my war was finished. The armistice got signed before I even left the MASH unit.

A couple of jovial doctors by the name of Pierce and Honeycutt had a grand old time with me and my wound. I can’t say that I blame them; it isn’t every day you get a Marine with hole in both butt cheeks. Their little joke about running the still through my rear end and putting a spigot on my hip got a little old, but I can’t help that it still makes me laugh. Sorry about the bad pun there.

“So you say this is just a nice couple trying to have a baby and we should pray for them?” I ask the wife.

“Yes, very nice,” she says.

“Noticeably insincere, cunningly evasive… that kind of nice?” I know this is going to get me in trouble.

“Nooo,” she laughs. “Where did you come up with that awful thing?”

“Pierce and Honeycutt, of course,” I admit.

“I think we better put that spigot on your hip to keep you out of trouble, love,” she isn’t supposed to know about that!

“Have you been writing to that mean ol’ Hawkeye again?”

“Yes, and he spills the beans every time he writes,” she confesses.

“I thought he died last year?” I said, confused that Pierce would still be writing letters to us after his death.

“Hawkeye isn’t dead, dear. It’s 1959, we had our anniversary last year in San Diego, and you brought me to meet that nice Sgt. Major Fisher and his lovely wife,” she straightens me out again. “We danced at the 1st Marine Division Ball on Camp Pendleton, and you proposed to me again.”

“Did you accept again,” I asked mischievously.

“I said that I would think it over,” she pokes fun at me and laughs as we dance to the record playing.

The sound of the music is good, coming as it does from the jukebox I got at the auction with my back pay. The war is finally over for me and my wonderful wife met me at the dock in San Diego with our children, all five of them bouncing around and making a ruckus ten times their size. Little John is four this year; I have missed a lot of his growing up. The twins, Michael Jr. and Mary Ann are seven already. Mark in the middle is 6, and Millicent is 5 as we somehow managed to have them almost exactly one year apart each time until the war came late in ’42.

Six months after my return, I suddenly realized that we had made that most common of parental blunders and named all of our kids with the same first letter.

“Good heavens! How you do come up with stuff!” My wife-to-be gazes in wonder at me, “Did you see all that from just one kiss?”

“I saw our lifetime ahead of us, darling one,” I say. “You know we have all of it to live after the wedding.”

“June 25, 1938,” she sighs. “A date that will live in my memory to the end, dearest love.”

--------------

“What did the old guy want, love?” Jen asks.

“He misses his wife terribly, I think. He wanted to tell us that we can’t have kids because we are greedy,” James replies.

“Are you greedy?”

“Yes, greedy for you, dear one!”

“James.”

“Yes, Jenson.”

“You would think even an old guy could see that we can’t have kids in the way he means because we are both men,” Jenson says.

“I agree, my love,” James looks at the old man holding no one, dancing in his kitchen to a music only he can hear. “He sure does cut those old dances though. You have to give him that!”