Sunday

Sunday
By
James Strauss

The boy sat on the sand atop the low rocks, staring down into clear lapping water. He carefully lowered his small hand down until it was just beneath the surface. He waited. There it was again. A solid thrumming vibration. It lasted for a few seconds before it was gone. The boy pulled his hand out, and then carefully wiped it on his “T” shirt. The shirt had been a gift from his grandfather on his eighth birthday. In big red letters on the front it said ‘NEVER ON SUNDAY…” which only made sense because of his name. When he’d been a child, the boy and his twin had been called ‘two scoops of an ice cream Sundae’ by someone. His brother had been Ice Cream for a while after, and he’d been Sundae. Nobody called his brother Ice Cream anymore, but the Sundae nickname had never gone away. He finger signed to people that his name was Peter, but they called him Sunday in spite of his communications. The confection had somehow changed to the day of the week, over time.
He watched a dark shape flow through the beautiful lagoon. It swam underwater most of the way. Occasionally there would be a flourish at the surface, and then it would continue moving back and forth across the lagoon, under the surface.
Peter was not afraid. He knew they would come back for him. It was his own fault, being left on the island. The boat had been crammed with families, with kids all over the place, and his father had one room while his mother had another. The vacation plan had been made that way because his parents were getting a divorce. Peter had stayed in his Dad’s cabin, but not really. It was too hard to not cry about what was happening to his family, and most of the kids aboard played and slept all over the boat, anyway. Plus he was a twin. He could understand how they had not missed him. He was used to it, being both a twin and deaf. He lived in his own world his mother said, in spite of her having taught him to read lips and use sign language years before. His brother had not gotten sick when he was a baby so he could hear just fine, whatever hearing really was. Peter understood hearing, just as he could remember never having ‘heard’ anything, but he couldn’t understand what it was like. People could feel vibrations with their ears like Peter could see with his eyes. He knew that it must be really neat to ‘hear’ but he also didn’t feel bad about being deaf. Peter noticed things other people didn’t, like the vibrations in the water. The dark moving shape in the lagoon was talking to Peter. He knew it. He just didn’t know what the animal was or what it was saying.
The sun wasn’t very hot and he had a tan, so he stayed by the lagoon. He wasn’t going to make the mistake of crawling into the thick undergrowth that ran like band across the length of Green Island. Doing that had caused him to be left behind. Peter knew the boat would come back. He was just afraid that they wouldn’t remember what island they’d left him on. The boat had made many stops the day before. It was on a special excursion up into the unexplored northern islands of the Hawaiian chain.
The night hadn’t been so bad. Peter loved Hawaii. It was warm and the soft winds and rough sand were wonderful. The water was so clean he wished he could drink it. But he knew better. Being thirsty was no excuse for drinking seawater his Dad had repeated to him when he’d tasted it a couple of times. But there was no fresh water on Green Island, not that Peter had found, and he couldn’t go back into the bushes, unless it was just the edge to relieve himself. He knew he needed water. He was hungry but his Dad had once told him that a survivor of a shipwreck, not too far from the island he was on, had gone over a month without anything to eat. The boat would be back long before a month went by, Peter just knew.
He stuck his hand back in the water. The moving animal ‘talked’ to him right away. Peter signaled hello back by folding his right thumb into his palm and then waving outward under the water. He pulled his hand out quickly when the thing swam toward him. It was so big. Peter cringed away from the water, wondering if the sea animal could come up onto the sand and get him. But it didn’t.
It was a dolphin. The boy had seen them on television and once at Sea Life Park on the island of Oahu. It was bigger than he thought it should be, but then he’d never seen one up close. The dolphin stuck its head out of the water, half of its body really, and then vibrated wildly at Peter. It backed up and sank as it vibrated. It did the same thing, over and over again.
“What do you want?” Peter signed, using both hands, but the dolphin didn’t change what it was doing, or the vibration it was sending.
“I don’t understand,” he signed in resignation. After awhile the animal left to swim in circles, before returning.
The afternoon came and went. Peter grew thirstier. He knew the heat and wind were drying him out but he didn’t know what to do about it. He felt so alone and tired. The dolphin was all he had. At the park people had been swimming with the dolphins. They had all looked so happy, but his Dad had said he was too young when he’d asked to try it. Before the sun began to set Peter made a decision. Waving hello with his right hand under the water, he moved off the rocks to stand in the lagoon. The water was only up to his waist. He shivered as the dolphin approached. Then he lurched backward in fear when it brushed against his right knee as it passed.
Peter slapped the surface of the water. The dolphin swam quickly to the other side of the lagoon where it could not be seen. Peter watched for many minutes, but the animal did not come up for breath. Peter began to worry that it might somehow be gone, although the lagoon was closed in by a reef and didn’t seem to have a way out.
All of a sudden, from nowhere, the dolphin swam rapidly by the boy, leaped through the air and landed on the sand atop the rocks. It vibrated rapidly, bobbing its head up and down while craning around to stare at the boy with one big eye. A sizeable fish fell from its mouth, flopping onto the sand. With a few twisting shifts of its great bulk the dolphin jerked itself off the sand and fell with a huge splash back into the lagoon, where it disappeared with a multi-colored flashing of reflected light.
Peter climbed to where the fish lay, still moving, as if it was trying to imitate the dolphin’s escape maneuver. The fish was bitten almost in half. Peter’s salivary glands filled his mouth with liquid. He was terribly hungry. The meat of the fish looked just like the sushi his Dad had introduced him to at Nick’s Fish Market on Oahu. The chef there had really liked Peter. He’d liked him even better when Peter kept asking for more of his small chunks of wrapped Ahi and raw crab bits.
He waited for the fish to stop moving. Then he poked it several times. Satisfied, Peter grasped the back part of the fish, separated it from the front, and then washed it thoroughly in the water of the lagoon. Finally, and very gingerly, he held it up in both hands. He took a bite of its flesh. Once he began he could not stop. He chewed, clawed, and then scraped pieces of the flesh free of skin, bone and other stuff on the inside.
He didn’t sit until he was done. His little stomach swooped outward like a beach ball when he finally lay down to watch the sun set. Peter made sure the top of the fish was near his foot when he closed his eyes, but his last thoughts before sleep took him were about the dolphin. It had given him a fish to eat and it had provided him with company. His last thought was about how he might be able to teach the dolphin sign language, even though the animal had only flippers, not hands and fingers.
Another day passed. Another fish was provided by the dolphin. During the long daylight hours Peter learned to swim with the rapidly moving animal. Actually, he didn’t swim. He held onto the dolphin by grasping one fin firmly with both of his small hands. The dolphin took him around the lagoon many times. Somehow it knew just how fast it could go without him being forced from it by the pressure generated by their speed. Peter’s face hurt from grinning while on the rides. In spite of his tan he was sunburned, but he was no longer dehydrated or hungry. Somehow, he realized, the fish the dolphin provided had enough water in it to keep him from being too thirsty.
The lagoon was a closed in body of water. Riding on the dolphin had proved that. Peter realized that the animal was trapped inside the lagoon. There was no way out. A storm must have somehow thrown the animal high enough to go over the reef.
“Maybe you got left behind like me,” Peter signed, when he was once more sitting in the sand by the side of the pool. The dolphin floated contentedly nearby, poking its head out of the water every once and awhile. Peter liked signing underwater. He’d never done that before becoming friends with the dolphin.
The helicopter came on the morning of the third day. There was no warning, except the dolphin raced away for no reason and disappeared into the deepest part of the lagoon. He felt the awful presence of the machine before he saw it. Peter's whole universe shook wildly, and then the sand around formed into a tornado and spun madly about him. Peter cowered, wrapping his arms about his body, burying himself in what was left of the beach.
He peeked out under his arm when the pain and shaking began to subside. The big monster of a helicopter filled his field of vision between the lagoon and the thick band of vegetation. The giant rotor on top of the thing continued to spin, but generated no more wind. A man in a helmet and rough looking green uniform walked out from the helicopter.
He held out one hand to Peter.
“You must be Sunday,” he said, confidently.
Peter read his lips easily, and then nodded, thinking that it was not a good time to correct the man about his name.
The man motioned with one hand for Peter to approach. Peter shook his head. He stood and pointed at the lagoon. The man said something back toward the helicopter that Peter could not understand, and then turned to face the boy again.
“I know you can’t hear me,” he mouthed the words, slowly. “We know about the dolphin. We could see it from the air. We’ll come back and get it out of the lagoon after you come with us.”
The big smiling man held out his hand.
Peter shook his head as before, and pointed at the lagoon, as before.
The helicopter pilot thought for a moment, the lower part of his forehead, revealed under his helmet, wrinkling into a deep frown.
“I’m an officer in the United States Marine Corps. Have you heard of the Marine Corps?” the man asked.
Peter nodded his head vigorously, smiling for the first time.
“I promise you, on the word of the United States Marine Corps, that we’ll come back and get your dolphin out. Is that good enough?”
Peter thought for a few moments before taking the man’s hand with his own. With his right he signed with a bent thumb toward the lagoon to say goodbye, then patted his mouth and gestured outward to thank the animal for all it had given him.
From the door of the departing helicopter Peter looked down upon the lagoon. The dolphin was a visible blur near its center. Instinctively, the boy looked at the side of the pilot's helmet. Without looking back, the pilot raised his fist, then let his thumb slowly rise up into the air.
Peter smiled down toward the swimming dolphin as the helicopter flew him away.



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Herschel

Herschel
By
James Strauss

The ground didn’t seem wet at all from six feet higher up. But Tom wasn’t that high up from it anymore. Instead, he was on it, moving slowly through the forest in short scrabbling bursts. He rested the right side of his face against the surface. He felt the sharp prick of pine needles, but he made no move to brush them away. The needles were damp, like everything else a millimeter, or so, beneath the ground cover. He fleetingly thought about how much the surface changed entirely along such short distances. Leaves and small broken branches in one area, and then smooth prickly needles and cones just a little further on. The reality of his situation came crashing back as pain surged upward from his damaged thigh. The condition and appearance of the flora had been much more interesting to think about before. Before he’d been shot. Before he’d been forced to flee by crawling along weakly on this stomach. Before his life, little left that there might be, changed forever.
The leg burned, like it was caught inside some horrid oven. The bullet had taken him in the thigh as he’d turned to run. It had gone clean through, leaving a small hole in the front and a larger one in the back. Tom knew that if it hadn’t gone straight through he wouldn’t have survived as long as he had. He also knew, in spite of tying the wound off with a severed strap from his backpack, that he was leaving a trail of blood for his pursuers. He could do nothing about that, except to keep moving.
“Please God, get me through this. Don’t let them find me,” he gasped out, surging forward another ten or twelve feet, dragging the damaged limb along. The three men after him were hunters. It wasn’t likely in the least that they’d somehow fail to be able to track down a bleeding man who couldn’t walk, much less run.
Tom dug both hands deep into the needles before him, in preparation for making another lurch forward.
“How about a little help here Lord,” he said out loud, his face pressed against the earth. He looked up slowly to get his bearings or find a place to hide, before moving. A bear stared back at him.
The bear was about the size of one of those small pick-up trucks made by the Japanese. The bear grunted. Steam seemed to come out both of its nostrils. Its head was no more than two feet from Tom’s own. They stared at one another until Tom buried his face back in the pine needles.
“Thank you Lord,” he whispered, “very painful but very quick. He closed his eyes to wait for the end. In and out he breathed, his chest heaving atop the wet ground. He counted to sixteen. One full minute. He brought his head up, and then squinted through narrow slits to see if the bear was still there, which it was. With a great grunt the bear sat down, its head rising up to six or seven feet above Tom’s own. Tom sniffed the things fur, it was so close. He was surprised that it smelled like pine and berries. The bear leaned down and sniffed back. Tom almost choked in fear.
“Okay,” he said, “you smell just fine. I know I smell like blood. So what are you going to do? You’re a predator and I’m the prey. Well?”
The bear regarded him, its body facing away. First one big black eye looked into Tom’s own, then the bear turned its head so the other could do the same. Tom was trying to come to terms with what he knew of bears, for the move seemed totally unbearlike, when the cub stuck its head around the big bear’s stomach.
The thing stared at him too, resting its jaw comfortably on its mother’s stomach.
“Oh great,” Tom muttered in resignation, “a mother bear with her cub. I’ve heard about this. Can things get any worse?” He turned his head up to try to peer between the branches of the trees toward where he knew God had to be watching and laughing.
The cub raised itself up and eased around the monster bear’s bulk. It trotted on all fours over to Tom. It sat down by his face, and then stretched out a front paw, pushing it once against Tom’s head.
“Human,” Tom said, weakly, but unable to keep from smiling. “The enemy.
Destroyer of forests, worlds and even bears,” he went on quietly. The cub stared down, and then pushed Tom’s head a few more times.
A distant sound came through the silent forest. Tom wondered if it was easier to hear because he was so close to the ground. He made out the sound of a human voice.
“There’s big trouble coming this way,” he warned the bears, but the big bear had already come to full alert. Moving so fast it was hard for Tom to comprehend, the huge animal pushed him aside with one great paw, then slid its cub up against the base trunk of the full grown pine. It then ran directly toward the direction from which the sounds had come.
Tom groaned in pain. He had been thrown a good ten feet he figured, and the process of travel had not been gentle. He curled into a ball, trying to somehow minimize the agonizing pain in his thigh. He rocked back and forth, grasping his upper leg firmly with both hands. The bear cub mewled at him plaintively.
“Great, just great,” Tom intoned, when he could get out words, “I get to babysit you until your Mom comes back to eat the stored meat. Helluva deal.”
The cub left the trunk of the tree and ambled to his side. It sat next to him and began to lick the blood from his suppurating thigh wound.
“Now I’m being consumed by a bear cub,” Tom forced out between grated teeth. “My epitaph is not going to be very macho,” he said. The cub stopped licking, and then curled up to force its way under his arm.
Tom let the little animal have its way. He was powerless to do much of anything accept deal with the pain, he knew.
“I was a Marine once, you know,” he said to the cub. “I coulda taken you with one paw tied behind my back,” he tried, quoting from The Wizard of Oz. The cub was unmoved by the humor, closing its eyes to nap.
Three loud cracks penetrated the forest, followed by a human scream. The cub pressed itself deeper into Tom’s side, but did not open its eyes. Instinctively, Tom hugged the bear closer. He then waited and watched. The forest had become still, once again. Minutes passed before there was sound. A soft wind preceded the breaking of boughs and flying of broken branches.
There was no stealth in the huge mother bear’s return. When she stopped and fell to the earth the ground seemed to bounce and move. The bear lay on her side, both eyes boring into Toms. A long groan issued up from her lungs. Tom could tell that the bear was laboring badly. A trickle of blood began to stream from the side of her great muzzle. Tom shifted uncomfortably. The cub remained under his arm with its eyes closed.
“Sorry,” Tom said, looking into the big mother bear’s soulful eyes.
“I was fishing by the side of the lake back there. Another fisherman was out in a boat, about a quarter mile offshore. Three hunters came to the edge of the water, laughing and making all kinds of noise. They were drinking. One fella said to the other two that he bet he could hit the guy way out in the boat. The others said he couldn’t do it. I just stood nearby, my rod over the water. The one guy put his rifle up. Way up he pointed the thing. Then he fired. It seemed like so long before the man in the boat fell sideways into the water. I stood frozen. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen. Then the hunter’s spotted me. And now here we are.”
Tom stared into the bear’s eyes for any glint of understanding, knowing he would find none. He wondered why he had had to say what he’d said. The big bear blinked slowly once, which caused Tom to physically wince. Red froth came from both of the bear’s nostrils.
“They got you in the lights. Lung shot. You can’t survive that out here in the wild,” Tom remarked, wondering why he could not stop talking to the animal.
The sound of breaking branches and human voices came over the rise in the direction the bear had come back from. The sounds awakened the cub, but he didn’t move from Tom’s grasp.
“If you could do something about those clowns there, then I’d be happy to care for your cub,” Tom said, tentatively, like he was bargaining with the devil.
“What do you think?” he said up to the broken sky above him, reflecting for a few seconds about how he had never spoken to bears or God before in his life, and yet, in only a short period of time such conversation seemed completely normal.
More and closer sounds came from the closing hunters. The great mother bear lurched to her feet, twisting around as she came up. Tom saw at least four bloody holes in her fur. She glanced briefly over toward Tom and the cub, and then took off straight into the bracken before her, toward where the sounds were coming from. In seconds there were more shots, then a scream, and another longer scream. And then there was silence. No birds, no wind, not even a whisper of sound could be heard. Tom clutched the cub closer to him. The cub did not resist.
The normal sounds of the forest returned slowly. Tom waited with the cub but nothing happened. After awhile, he disengaged himself from the small bear, and then fashioned a crutch by breaking small branches from a larger one. Using the pine for balance he got himself erect and found he could limp. With great pain, but he could get by.
It took a long hour to reach the place he’d left the rover. The cub followed along, exploring here and there but always returning to his side. It took another half hour to reach the bait shop in the small town.
He got out of the car, and then leaned against the side to gather his energy.
The cub stared through the back window into his eyes. It sat on the seat, both paws up against the pad under the window, as if it was a small thick and well furred human. He smiled at the animal, shaking his head, before limping badly into the store.
A young man greeted him from behind the counter. Tom used the counter to for support, relieving his agony a bit.
“What happened to you mister?” the young man asked, leaning out to take in Tom’s bloody thigh and filthy exterior.
“I don’t really know,” Tom told him, “some trouble back at the lake with the fishing. I need two gallons of milk, the whole stuff, and some baby bottles with the junk it takes to use them.”
The boy ran enthusiastically to gather up the items. While he was gathering Tom pulled a first aid kit off a nearby shelf along with some extra tape and bandages.
“What’s the milk for?” the kid asked, once he had returned and finished bagging all the items. “You gotta baby with you?”
“Ah, no,” Tom said, not having thought about being asked such a question. “I got a pet. Of sorts. Kinda like a cat, a big cat, but not a cat, if you know what I mean.”
“A pet? Milk for your pet cat? What’s its name?” the boy asked.
Tom stared at the boy, taking in his open and honest appearance. A nametag was centered along the middle of the top of his crisply clean apron. The boy’s name was Herschel Stanton.
“Herschel,” Tom blurted out, his face suddenly breaking into a faint smile. “Its name is Herschel.”
“Herschel?” the boy repeated, in question and with a bit of awe, “that’s my name too.” He fingered his nametag when he said the words.
Tom gathered the plastic bags holding all the gear in his left hand, put the crutch carefully under his right arm and started for the door. He could see the bear through the glass of the door and the rover. It sat as before, confidently expecting his return.
“Hey mister,” the kid at the counter said. “Where’d you get the name for your pet? Did you read my name tag?”
Tom didn’t turn back, but his smile became bigger as he made his way.
“Nope. Got the name from God,” he said over his shoulder.

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The Spider

The Spider
By
James Strauss

They had left two days before. Lynn’s job was to care for the house while everyone was gone. It was an easy task, or series of tasks, unless something went wrong. The generator ran all by itself, fueled by two huge tanks of diesel in the garage. It was barely audible. In fact, unless she thought about it, she didn’t hear it at all. If the generator quit, there was nothing to be done. Lynn was not mechanical. Not in the least.
Her husband and son had gone after their daughter. Both Tom and Mike were mechanically talented, in almost every area. The basement was nothing more than a series of specialty shops covering such mysterious areas as electronics, electric, and plumbing. All areas that Lynn did not even want to think about. She worried about them though. She briefly thought back to the days, not long ago when, if something in the house failed, she could simply call some expert and have that person come fix whatever the problem was.
The freeze had changed everything. One day everything had simply stopped. The electricity had gone off, never to come back on. The gas to the oven and range had quit. And people had gone into some sort of cave mentality. Almost everyone stayed home, unless they had to get something really bad. What television they could get told of a temporary downturn brought about by energy shortages and economic failure of the banks and insurance companies. There was hope if one watched television, which they didn’t do much because the generator only produced enough electricity for necessities. They could watch some television during the day because no lights had to be on.
Her husband and son would be back with their daughter by the end of the day, which was half gone. All Lynn had to do was get through another four or five hours. She stared out the window on the front room, the library, and sipped from a cup of coffee. It was her seventh so far. She knew she was wired, which explained why her hand shook so badly when she brought the cup to her lips. She spilled small drops, time after time.
Their home was situated in the country, about five miles from any other town. Farms surrounded them, which wasn’t pleasant when the farmers fertilized their fields in the spring. But spring had passed. Her husband said the house was perfectly placed for the trouble they were in. Her husband was paranoid. He called it hyper vigilance though. Desert Storm had done that, followed by Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lynn looked down the drive to the circular cul de sac down the gentle hill.
The cul de sac was there so other lots could be built on, but nobody had yet to attempt that. A stream ran along one side of the house, paralleling the driveway.
With the pines they had planted a few years ago, and the open areas of grass, now too long because the John Deere took too much fuel to run, it was a beautiful scene. She sipped more coffee, and then gently patted the table with a kitchen towel after a few drops fell. She sighed, holding the cup out over the sprawling canvas in front of the window.
Her husband had thrown the canvas over their gun. Before the gun they had had a beautiful table with a custom chess set laid out upon it. Before the gun the front window had never been opened. It flipped up on hinges, operated by a single lever on the far wall side. Lynn had never liked the window but her husband had told her that you couldn’t fire a gun from a house very easily, unless you have an open field of fire. She’d just shaken her head, at the time, and then ignored the strange construction effort.
Lynn had had one lesson with the gun, and it had not been pleasant. They couldn’t even shoot it, her husband said, because the bullets were too hard to get and too expensive to buy. She’d tried to absorb the lesson but her mind had strayed. Guns were boring and useless, in her opinion. But they seemed to always make men happy. She ignored guns as best she could, without letting on that she felt nothing in regard to them. Lynn had learned when she was young that it was better to act interested in such things as hunting, fishing, sports cars and guns rather than let men know how she really felt.
It was two o’clock exactly when they drove up. Lynn had just come back from the kitchen with another cup of the Hawaiian Kona coffee, her favorite. She’d sat down and wondered what things were like out in Hawaii and if she’d ever see the place again.
She heard the cars drive up before she saw them. Two pick-up trucks and some sort of military looking S.U.V. She new instantly that it was not her family returning. Her husband would have driven over the fields nearby, just as he had left. Driving over the field saved almost half a mile when headed for town.
The S.U.V. led the two pick-up trucks in making slow circles around and around the cul de sac. Lynn sat frozen, the coffee cup in her hand, half way down to the table. She stared. She felt no fear, only open curiosity. She questioned herself. Should she go to the door or open the window and yell out? Or do nothing? She decided to do nothing. Foreboding began to form in the pit of her stomach when the vehicles stopped and nobody got out. She heard the motors die, one after another.
Lynn could not see through the windows of any of the vehicles. It was like they had special dark coverings over them. Slowly, she placed the coffee cup on the flat arm of her chair. Still, she didn’t move, her eyes glued to the three trucks. The S.U.V. was dull black while the pickups were red and silver. None of them looked new. They looked intimidating and threatening. Fear began to work its way up her body. Lynn’s shoulders began to shake. She worked on controlling her breathing, which was close to becoming panicky gasps.
The window of the S.U.V. slid half way down. A man held one hand to his mouth and yelled.
“We’re coming in. You have a generator. We can hear it. You have fuel, food and things we need to survive. Don’t attempt to stop us.” The man’s hand dropped enough for Lynn to see a large white face sporting a full beard.
She stood, and then ran to the side window. There was no old Range Rover
coming over the rise or through the fields. Her husband was not coming to her rescue. She let a long breath out feeling tears run down her cheek. It was better that her family was not driving right into the situation and she realized it. She moved to the front door of the house just adjacent to the library. She opened the door fully.
“Don’t come up here,” she screamed, her voice coming out broken and ragged with fear. “I’ve got a gun.” She slammed the door, leaning against its cold surface. She relocked the deadbolt, knowing that the small metal device was just about useless against what was down at the end of her driveway.
Lynn walked shakily back into the library over to the far wall. With both hands she pulled smoothly on the overly large window lever. For the only time in her memory the long horizontal window eased open. She pushed down until it was angled upward, leaving a nine-foot gash along the full width of the library wall.
She heard laughing. The two pickups had lowered their own windows and the men were talking.
“She’s got a gun. The lady’s got a gun. Not a man to be found. What kind of idiots would go off and leave a MILF like that alone.” It went on and on. Instinctively, Lynn knew that the men were talking to build their own sense of
confidence. She also knew that she was in deadly danger.
“We’ll see your gun and raise you,” the same voice said, as had spoken the first time. Suddenly great explosions issued forth from the trucks. Lynn dropped to the floor, unaware that the move had been automatic until her face rested against the hardwood. She watched chunks of the front door fly backward into the hall. Her anniversary door. The special carved door had been her husband’s gift to her earlier in the year. It took minutes for the shooting to stop. Lynn knew that there was nothing left of the front door. There was no barrier between her and the men in the vehicles. She also knew that that fact would be readily apparent to them.
Lynn crawled to the stereo cabinet, pulled a pair of Bose earphones from between some CD boxes and put them on. She began to turn but then stopped. Turning back she hit the ‘on’ button to the amplifier, punched in the numbers one one four on the CD player panel and plugged the hanging cord into the machine.
The canvas lay before her as before, with a few coffee stains atop its gray surface. She pulled it off and pushed it aside. The spider sat in front of her, looking hideous and evil. She went to the back of it. The thing had three metal legs, a great protruding antenna and a metal belt hanging off its left side. The metal belt was filled with pointy rounds of different colors. Plain polished brass, brass with red tips and then brass with black tips. Those were the only colors the insect displayed.
Lynn sat behind the thing, like her husband had showed her. She gently pressed her hands around the two wooden handles at the back, while her thumbs fell, almost by themselves, onto the tips of a centrally mounted metal butterfly. She looked out over the thing’s snout. The men in the vehicles were still carrying on through open windows. She couldn’t really see any of them, however.
“It fires from an open bolt,” she said out loud, releasing her right hand from the wooden peg-like hold to grab another lever along the side. Lynn pulled the lever all the way back, and then let it go. The sound of a very solid metallic whack somehow made her feel better.
“I have a gun,” she screamed out through the open window again.
“You already said that,” a deep male voice boomed back, so loud that there was no problem hearing the words right through the Bose earphones.
Lynn shivered. The sound of the man’s voice was so frightening. She felt malevolent violence roll right up through the grass and into the library with her.
“I hope this works,” she whispered, putting both of her thumbs back on the butterfly lever. She looked with one eye through the back sight.
“You look through the little hole and out over the front bar,” she said to herself, squinting with her left eye until the side of the S.U.V. filled her vision.
She waited. She didn’t know what she was waiting for. Pachelbel’s Canon in D began to play in her earphones. The tone poem began to double up as it continued. She loved that part.
There was a distinctive click from in front of her. Through the Pachelbel Lynn identified the sound as that of a car door opening. She pressed down on the butterfly with both fingers.
The gun began to fire. It moved on its own in little jumps. Lynn fought to hold it down and get the barrel pointed the right way. There was gray dust everywhere and bright flashes in front of her. She could barely see anything, but she held down on the butterfly tips. The gun seemed to sweep back and forth of its own accord.
And then there was only Pachelbel. Lynn sat inside a thick gray cloud, the smell of cordite so strong that her nose seemed permanently wrinkled. Shell casings were all over the library, along with a vast number of clip-like things. The last strains of the Canon played out. Lynn removed the earphones and set them at her side. Suddenly her legs ached and her hands hurt. She remembered holding the wooden handles very hard.
The gray cloud was smoke she realized. She could still see nothing. Gingerly she rose to her feet, being careful not to touch the spider. It sat smoking on the floor
“I don’t know how to reload you,” she said to the thing, looking around the room for ammunition but not seeing any. She went to the hall, stepping over the parts of front door that lay strewn in her path. She went all the way to the back of the house. She opened windows along the back wall, and then went to the kitchen.
A cold cup of coffee sat on the counter next to the coffeemaker. She picked it up.
The library was clear of smoke. She could see out the window. The trucks sat as before. Lynn squinted. Looking very hard and carefully she thought she could make out holes in the sides of the trucks, but she wasn’t sure. She drank cold coffee.
She had no idea how long she sat drinking the coffee in very small sips. She noted that her hand did not shake at all, and she was surprised by that.
The Rover made its presence known before she heard it. Across the front yard grass it flew, straight to the top of the driveway. Doors opened and slammed.
Her husband was there, and her son, and her daughter. Lynn did not get up.
“I don’t know where the ammunition is,” she said to all three of them.
“We’ve got to reload the spider. I’m not sure that the bullets didn’t bounce off those trucks. Those men haven’t said anything since though.”
“Oh Mom,” her daughter said, kneeling among the brass cases and spent clips, trying to pry the empty coffee cup from her hand.
“That was a hundred rounds,” her husband mused, staring out toward where the trucks sat silent and unmoving, “and that’s a fifty caliber Browning machine gun, not a spider,” he went on. “Those black tipped rounds were armor piercing. They didn’t bounce off. They probably moved on, right over into the next county.”
“Well, you better go down there and talk to those men. They’re probably pretty mad, but you need to reload the spider first,” Lynn said, finally letting her daughter have the cup.
“Yeah, I guess I better see to that,” her husband responded, unable to suppress a small smile.

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Head

Head

By

James Strauss

Zack prepared himself for the confrontation. Winter had been hard. So very hard. He had not really been ready for that kind of cold. He’d thought he was ready, but it was the wind off that lake that nearly did him in. He’d been saved by the boathouse. But everything was over. The owner of the big house up at the end of the old runway, which led directly down to the boathouse, had come back early. Zack looked over at the electric barbecue grill, which had kept the small space, occupied by himself, the cat and a wooden Streblo boat, warm.
The cat, a feral gray thing, drifted in right after Christmas. One morning Zack awakened to the loud cracking sounds of thick lake ice breaking up and discovered a heavy weight on his small chest. He opened his eyes, terrified. Two hazel eyes stared into his own, inches away, unblinking. It had taken many moments to generate enough courage to move. The cat, however, did not hurt him. Instead it leaped away and disappeared, not to reappear until Zack was once again asleep.
A week passed before they confronted one another, and then come to terms. Zack fed the thing, let it sleep on him, and was allowed no closer than three feet from it. In return, Zack got nothing. Except company. And that was enough.
The wooden boat had the name ‘Big Al’ on it’s stern. Streblo was inset along the side of its hull in small metal letters. Zack liked the name, although he thought it a dumb name for a boat. So the cat became Streblo.
“We’ve got to go Streblo,” he said.
Streblo regarded the eight-year-old boy, from his place draped over the bow of the boat, one paw and tail hanging over each side. It flicked its tail once.
“Well, I have to go anyway. That man up there is waiting. I can’t cross the lake. The ice broke up. I can’t go along either shore. It’s too open.” The boy took a break from gathering his small canvas pack of goods to peak through one of the windows facing up toward the big house. A huge man sat on a chair, staring down the brown grass runway. The man had approached moments earlier, knocked on his own boathouse door, and then yelled through it. His instructions had been clear. Whoever was in the boathouse could get his or her things together and be up at the house in half an hour or the police would be coming.
Zack didn’t have a watch, but he knew how long half an hour was. He delayed the coming confrontation because of the heat. He would miss the heated space. He’d miss the storehouse of canned foods he’d yet to go through completely (the canned chicken soup was his favorite), but most of all he’d miss the cat.
He put his pack on, adjusting the straps. The pack was heavy because it was topped off with a load of sardines and crackers, which were Zack’s favorites after the soup. He squared his small shoulders, leaned to balance the pack, and then turned to approach the cat. Amazingly, the animal did not shy away when he breached the normal three-foot perimeter. Zack held out his left hand. Streblo sniffed it. One brief pat on top of the head was allowed before the animal disappeared under the blocked-up boat. Zack smiled to himself, staring down in surprise at his uninjured hand.
“You take care, Streblo,” he murmured out into the remaining space of the boathouse, before going to the door and stepping outside. Slowly and carefully, he closed the door behind him, once again thinking about how the cat got in and out without using the door. It was an unsolved mystery. Zack had been up and down the Eastern side of the lake, checking out boathouses. He’d found just about everything imaginable but never another cat. Most animals did not do well in weather colder than twenty below zero. It had been a cold hard winter.
The dead grass of the runway was wet and soggy. The incline was gentle but steady, so he was breathing heavily when he walked up to the huge sitting man. He had to take his pack off to rest. He made a big deal about unstrapping the thing, more to hide his nervousness than because he was tired. The big man said nothing. Zack noted his calm face, totally devoid of expression. He knew that that was not good. Finally he readied himself by straightening his thin body and throwing his small shoulders back.
“How old are you?” the man asked, his eyes slitting slightly as he got out the question. Zack stared into twin black pools. He knew that his usual lies were not going to work on the man.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have that number for you right now,” he answered, in as flat a tone as the man had used.
The man brought one large hand up to massage his jaw. Several seconds passed. Neither the man nor the boy blinked during their passage.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that answer before,” the man said, his voice evidencing disbelief. “And I thought I’d heard it all,” he went on. “I’m an attorney. A great attorney, for Christ’s sake, and some little kid waltzes up and gives me an answer I’ve never heard before. I don’t have that number available right now? Wow!” The man’s hand dropped back to his side.
“Who the hell are you, anyway?” the attorney inquired.
“My name is Zack, and I’m no little kid,” Zack responded.
“Well, I take that back then,” the big man said. “So you’re a minor runaway with an invented name. Why Zack?” he asked.
“What’s your name?” Zack countered, then added, after a small delay “Sir.”
“I’ll ask the questions. You’re trespassing on private property and doing I don’t know how much damage to my boathouse,” the big man replied.
Zack said nothing. He could not keep from staring straight into the big man’s hypnotic eyes.
“Jerry. Name’s Jerry. And this house used to belong to the governor. He died so I got hold of it.” The man glanced behind him, as if to assure himself that the house was his and still there.
“I can’t call you Jerry, sir,” Zack said.
“Why not? Oh, I get it. You have manners. Common burglar living off my land for nothing, but having high-class manners. I don’t believe it. Strain. Mr. Strain, like in a strained knee. You can call me Mr. Strain.”
“Why do you weigh so much?” Zack asked.
“Well you little…” the big man began, then sighed deeply before going on. “I’ve lost sixty pounds. I used to be fat. Now I’m just hefty.”
“Like in the bag?” Zack asked.
The big man started to laugh.
“Have you ever heard of Joey Bishop? How do you deliver those lines with such a straight face? Hefty bag. I’ve gotta tell my wife that one. In the mean time, what am I going to do with you?”
“I’ll just go home on my own,” Zack asked, hopefully.
“I wonder how long you’ve been down there,” Mr. Strain mused, his voice barely audible. “All winter? And what kind of price does that portend?”
“Portend?” Zack asked, blinking his eyes a few times.
“Doesn’t matter,” the attorney waved his ‘hefty’ hand. “What matters is what happens to you. What do you want? You wanna go home to a home you don’t have? You want to run to somewhere else until it warms up? Or you wanna stay in the boathouse for awhile?” He stared at Zack when he was finished, with his cold black eyes. Unblinking. Waiting.
Zack tried to think deeply about what he’d heard. He couldn’t believe that the man might be giving him a chance to stay. Adults did not give chances for much, he had observed during his hard eight years.
“What the hell is that?” the attorney said, in a low voice, his arm raised with pointing finger.
Zack whipped around. A gray object raced toward him, jinking right, then left, before arriving to crouch next to him. The cat had stopped just over three feet from the boy, his normal distance of comfort, but his eyes were riveted on the attorney.
“That’s Streblo, my cat,” Zack said, acting as if the wild animal was his domestic pet.
“Streblo? You named that mangy thing Streblo? After my expensive boat?”
the attorney asked, in disbelief.
“Big Al’s a bad name,” Zack answered as best he could, hoping that Streblo would not attack or do something dumb. The offer for staying in the boathouse might be withdrawn for any reason he knew. Adults could not be depended upon, almost at all.
“Don’t tell my wife,” Mr Strain said. “Big Al was her Dad. It was his boat. Now hers. I don’t know about that cat. He doesn’t look like anybody’s anything, but if you want him then he’s all yours.”
Zack almost said thank you, but stopped himself. Nobody owned Streblo, so the cat wasn’t Mr. Strain’s to give away. Zack had been around. Adults constantly gave away stuff that wasn’t theirs. They were much stingier with their own stuff.
“You wanna stay in that boathouse until we come up for the summer, well, you gotta do something for me,” Mr. Strain stated, his right index finger turned inward to point at his own chest.
“What do you want?” the boy asked, his voice guarded.
“Hell, I don’t know. I’m bored. Stuck in this goddamned inherited pigsty for the weekend. You come up with something. I’ll be in the house later, drinking fine Malbec wine. When you think of something, knock. If you don’t then goodbye, to you and that feral fellow traveler of yours,” the attorney finished by rising slowly from his chair.
“C’mon,” whispered Zack to the cat, grabbing his pack with both hands, and then turning to run back down the overgrown airstrip.
“Surprise me,” the big man yelled after him, “nobody surprises me anymore,” he said, his voice beginning to fade behind the running boy, “I’m sorry, I don’t have that number for you,” was the last thing Zack heard before he got out of range.
Streblo reclaimed his spot across the bow of the wooden boat. Zack broke open a can of Campbell’s soup. He ate it cold, tossing the noodles down by tipping the can up and tapping the bottom with his fingers, once the yellow liquid was gone.
“I think that’s the strangest man I’ve ever met, Streblo,” Zack said up to the sprawling cat. He opened a can of sardines, and then placed it carefully up by the animals paw. Streblo just looked at him.
“I know, you’ll get it later,” the boy said wistfully, “It’d kill you to actually accept something when I gave it to you.”
Streblo’s tail swept down once, before returning to the top of the boat.
The boy sighed.
Zack peered out the side window of the boathouse. He had to think. What could the big unhappy man living in the big unhappy house possibly want? He tried to look around the concrete statue to see more of the broken lake ice. Then his eyes were drawn back to the statue. The thing was bigger than a human, except it lacked a head. Only the body, in flowing stone robes, stood facing out toward the lake.
Something nagged at the edges of the boy’s mind.
“I think I have it,” he yelled so excitedly at Streblo that the cat jumped up to all fours, before settling down to eat sardines straight from the open tin.
Zack hurriedly emptied his pack, then immediately raced to the boathouse door and was gone. Dragging the empty pack with one hand he ran the distance to four boathouses down the lake. When he got there he stopped behind some pines to wait. Slowly he checked out the entire area for movement, but there was none. He approached the structure. The door was closed, as he had left it a week before.
Zack turned the knob. The door was unlocked.
Once inside he searched the shelves until he found the big yellow pail he’d remembered. Pulling it from the low shelf he set it on the concrete floor and removed its contents. Inside the pail was a large concrete head. Carefully, the boy placed the object into his pack, and then returned the pail where he’d found it.
The head was heavy. Zack had to strap the pack to his back. He could not run with the weight so he walked bent over all the way back to the statue. He looked up at the headless figure. He knew that he wasn’t strong enough to put the head back up on it. Even if he could, he realized, he had no way to make it stay.
Part of the boathouse stuck out into the lake. It was the part that some service would come along and erect a wooden pier out from, Zack knew. But it was still too early in the season for that. At the end of the concrete he removed his pack, then rolled the head out as gently as he could. He set it up on the flat part of the broken neck so it faced the boathouse, then he tossed his pack inside the boathouse door before running all the way back up to the house.
Zack didn’t knock. He saw the big man sitting at a table inside, through the back door glass. The man was drinking his Malbec from a dark bottle, not even using a glass. Zack sighed. He’d seen adults drink like that before and it made him uncomfortable. He went inside, closing the door behind him.
“I have it,” he said to the man, who seemed to take no note of him.
“Have what?” the attorney asked, taking another great swig from the open bottle, dribbling a little rivulet of red down onto his white shirt.
“The surprise,” Zack answered.
“You are one piece of work, you know that boy?” the attorney said, not making the question a question at all. Zack said nothing.
“Well, where is it?” the man asked.
“You gotta come down to the boathouse,” Zack answered, “I mean, if you can.”
“Ha, come down to the boathouse. You think I’m infirm or something. I’m just big, not disabled. C’mon,” Mr. Strain said, as he laboriously rose from his chair.
Zack followed the big waddling man through the house into the attached garage. The man hit a switch and the place lit up, while a garage door started to go up.
“Here we go,” the attorney said, slipping into, and taking up the whole front seat, of an electric golf cart.
Gingerly, Zack moved behind him, sitting in the middle of the back seat, but holding on to the sides with both hands. The cart lurched forward. The trip down to the boathouse took only seconds it seemed. The silent cart appeared to float over the dead grass.
The cart stopped right beside the door.
“Well?” the big man asked, turning to face the boy.
“There, at the end of the stone,” Zack pointed.
The man looked, and then did a double take before removing himself more quickly form the car than Zack would have believed if he had not seen it. The man got to the stone outcrop before Zack.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he breathed, “you found my head.”
Zack stood next to Mr. Strain, but was as shocked as the man was when a fast moving gray object raced by both of them. Adroitly and smoothly, as it the move had been choreographed and practiced many times, Streblo ran out along the concrete, performed a short leap, touched the stone head with two front paws and then returned, running back through the open boathouse door.
The head tumbled into the water with a splash.
“Oh no,” the big man yelled. Zack raced to the end of the concrete, knelt down and peered into the water. The ice had moved out from the nearer shore areas. He could see straight down though the clear flat liquid. The head lay with its face staring back up at him through four feet of water. Zack’s eyes widened.
“It’s you,” he said, transfixed by the head under the water. “It really is your head,” he went on, before turning to look up at the attorney. “Why is it your head?’ he asked the man.
Zack watched the man’s features soften for the first time since he’d met him.
“I just liked the idea,” the big man said, looking away.
Zack stared first at the headless statue, then down into the water. He thought about what the man had said, and then turned to look back up at the house.
“The house is the governor’s, even though he’s dead,” Zack intoned. “The boat is your wife’s boat, still with her dad’s name on it. None of this is yours. You put your face on the statue to make it all yours,” he said. The words had all come out of him of their own accord. He was as surprised to hear them as was the attorney.
“No. It wasn’t that. It could not have been that,” the big man said, still looking out across the lake.
“I’ll jump in the water and get your head,” Zack offered, moving to take off his coat. He was working on taking his shoes off when the man spoke.
“No. Leave it. It kind of looks better down there, don’t you think?”
Zack walked back over to the edge of the concrete to stand next to the big man.
“I like your real head,” Zack said, softly.
“Me too,” the big man said, after a moment, still staring down. “You, and that mangy cat, can stay as long as you want

Algiers

Algiers
By
James Strauss

He said he’d been in Algeria. Algiers, Algeria. I’d asked him how a country could have a city named the same thing as the country, but he’d ignored me. He was smoking an ugly smelling foreign cigarette, and wearing a pair of pants that were bloused into shiny black combat boots. Paratrooper boots.
“Why are you smoking those here? And why are you wearing those boots?” I’d asked him, as we were standing in the foyer of an expensive restaurant right under a no smoking sign.
“Can’t stop. Was there,” he blew out a big puff of obnoxious white smoke,
“It was bad. I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop. The cigarettes, the boots, they make me feel right.” He’d stared at me, the smoke between us fading slowly away, before finishing our discussion with a question. “I’m alright,” he asked in a deep French accent, and then stared for seconds before going on, “Aren’t I?”
I’d been a child when that had happened. I’d never forgotten that man, nor the haunted look of his deep black eyes. But it was the tone of his voice that had indelibly burned everything else into my young mind. It had been a dark tone of pathos driven despair. The tone had riveted my attention, like the deep single play of a very low piano note.
Although I’d not forgotten that time, I also had never associated with it.
I looked down at my boots. Desert boots. The new cool ones. The one’s with inserts. Not like the old French Paratrooper boots. His had been polished to a high shine.
My desert boots would never know the touch of anything except a brush. They were the most comfortable things I’d ever worn on my feet, which was why I always wore them. Sitting alone on the park bench, my long legs sprawled out before me, I breathed out slowly, watching smoke play down over my body and feet. I ground out the cigarette, not even half done, on the stone handle of the bench support.
It’d been years since the war. The wars. First Vietnam, then Desert Storm, and finally Afghanistan, with some little inconsequential actions in between. I’d been tested several times for post traumatic stress. I didn’t have it. Not even a touch of it.
But I could not get the Algerian-serving Foreign Legionnaire from my mind.
Had that old guy from Algeria killed any of his own men? Out of pure necessity?
Because they were too badly wounded to get Medivac’d in time, or because they were going to kill the commanding officer for their opinion of his poor leadership (the C.O. being him)? Had that guy been shot, knifed and fragged? Had that guy spent a full year in the hospital, being told he would likely die at any moment, being force-fed with morphine until informed he was an addict, and then delivered back to his family wherein they walked right by him at the airport because he was a mere shadow of what he once had been?
No, I would have bet not. The poor son-of-a-bitch probably had seen some people killed, their guts left drying in the sun. The French Two-Rep bastard had probably shot a few people and then had them ask him why he had done that while they died in front of him. Not exactly tough stuff. Not normal stuff, but not that bad, in the scheme of such things, either. French Paratroopers of the Legion were notoriously emotional anyway. They fought at the drop of a hat, or Kepi in their case, at the least insult, not like Marines at all. United States Marines could take it. Whatever it was. Oooorah, was the expression. It said it all. One Marine to another. One Marine against the world. Fuck the Army of One thing. It was Marine Corps. All the way, up the hill, and on to the next one.
A film was out called The Hurt Locker. What a joke. Who the hell is dumb enough, in the modern world, to try to defuse bombs? Nobody. Blow the fuckers in place and move on. Done all the time. You don’t need idiots wearing dog collars and armor to do it for you. Just place the composition ‘B’ and move out. Boom. Problem over.
The movie should have been made with Marines, and it should have been called Troub City. The City of Hurt. The City of Pain. The place where real Marines spent time, knowing that they were cutting years from the sentence they would have to spend in purgatory. Then going out and screwing every woman they could find, in order to balance the books.
I shifted uncomfortably on the bench, looking down at my watch.
I had twenty minutes before I went on. I was going to give a speech in front of a thousand people, about life. About truth, lies, justice and mythology. I’d become a published author of thriller novels. And here I was sitting on a park bench looking out over the Santa Fe downtown plaza, wearing an expensive suit, desert combat boots and smoking a cigarette. Smoking was totally stupid, with what was known about lung cancer and all, and I knew it. The boots were so out of place with the suit, and the occasion, that they didn’t even bear consideration.
I field-stripped the cigarette. I tossed its remnants into the warm winds of autumn. They flitted away across the newly sodded grass surface. I was wearing the boots and smoking because those things made me feel right. I closed my eyes, trying to keep my world from spinning about me.
I felt the wind sweep across my body, then die out to sudden stillness. I saw myself standing in a foyer, looking down at a little boy.
“I’m alright, aren’t I?” I whispered, but the boy just looked back at me in silence, his eyes large, his body motionless.

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Intense

Intense

By

James Strauss

Six years old is not old, or so they told her all the time. When the nurse came out it was the first thing she asked.
“How old are you, my dear?” she said, bending down over her.
“I’m eight, and my name isn’t dear. It’s Alice,” six-year-old Alice lied up into the woman’s unsmiling face. The woman wrote something on her clipboard, and then sniffed.
“Where are your parents?” she asked in a demanding manner, her large black eyebrows coming together above her nose.
“You’ve got my Dad inside there,” Alice pointed at the green double doors the nurse had come into the waiting room through. “My Mom’s coming from work.”
“Yes, I know about your Dad, but who’s taking care of you?” the nurse inquired, with one of her dark eyebrows arching up above the other.
“You are, until Mom get’s here. My babysitter just dropped me off,” Alice lied again, with a fake smile plastered across her little face. Alice knew that it was unlikely that the nurse would know she lived only half a mile away and had walked herself. The police officer who’d left the message on their home machine said that her Dad was in the emergency room at the hospital. He didn’t know that Alice was home alone. Her parents had schooled her well about how all outsider’s would feel if someone only six years old was left alone, even if was because they didn’t have enough money for daycare. They called it being a latchkey kid. Alice liked being a latchkey kid. And she loved her parents. And Winston.
“You can’t have a cat in here,” the nurse said, spotting Winston under one of the cloth-covered chairs.
“Not my cat,” Alice said, ignoring the small beast, which had stuck its furry head out to peer up at the severe looking nurse.
“Fine,” the nurse said, “then I’m calling animal control and having him removed.” The nurse walked back through the doors. Alice had not lied about that. Winston was her father’s cat, not hers. Winston adored only one human on the planet, and that was her Dad. He had raised such a ruckus at home when she was about to leave for the hospital that she had had to let him out. Then he’d followed her. Like he knew. Alice didn’t tell anyone that she talked to the cat. And she believed that he talked back. The words he missed, Alice filled in.
“She doesn’t mean it. She was just trying to get me to admit that I’m a latchkey kid and that you’re mine,” Alice said quietly, toward the bottom of the chair.
Winston meowed once, then slunk back as some people walked by.
“Oh bother. You don’t mean that. We don’t even know her,” Alice said to him, trying to stick one hand under the chair to pet him. He scratched her, lightly. She yelped softly, pulling her hand back, as if in terror. She knew from long experience that Winston loved to terrify people.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Alice asked the cat. But Winston said nothing. People walked in and out of the waiting room. Nobody stayed for long.
Alice listened to their conversations, while making believe she was watching the television. Words scrolled across the bottom of the flat screen, but Alice couldn’t read yet.
“Intense thing,” she heard, distinctly. “They took him to that intense unit. He’s in pretty bad shape, but he’ll recover. They do a pretty good job here with the intense thing.”
Alice stared at the television while she thought. She didn’t know what the intense thing was, but it must be pretty good for someone in trouble.
More people came and went. Every once and awhile Winston would stick his head back out to view them, and then quickly retreat. Several people tried to pet him but Alice warned them off.
“Winston scratches. He’s here for rabies,” she told them, her face held to its most serious pose.
The petter’s pulled back and retreated without further comment. Some stared at Alice as if she was the one who had the disease. Alice didn’t know what Rabies was but her Dad had warned her about it many times when she wanted to pet a stray dog or a wild cat herself.
Three whole television shows later the strict looking nurse came back out. She didn’t have her clipboard with her this time.
“I’m sorry dear, but you’re father has been hurt in a traffic accident. You’re Mom called us and will be here shortly. Do you want anything to drink?” She said, her sweet tone faked, her smile unpleasant.
Alice looked up at the nurse, like she was from another planet. “My name is Alice, not dear, and why would I want something to drink? Will that help my Dad? Can I see him? Is he back there somewhere?” Alice pointed to the green doors.
Winston reached one paw out and slashed the nurse’s ankle with a single claw. Alice saw the move out of the corner of her eye and tried to head it off, but was too late. The nurse screamed, leaned down and grabbed her ankle with one hand.
“That animal just attacked me,” she yelled, her face screwed up in pain.
A man appeared instantly, seemingly from nowhere. He loomed over both Alice and the nurse.
“I’d have that looked at right away if I was you,” the man said in a flat voice.
“I heard that cat is in here to get some kind of rabies shot,” he finished, then walked away.
“Rabies?” the nurse said, her eyes growing wide, “Rabies? What’s this about Rabies? That cat has Rabies?”
“Ah, I don’t know him,” Alice said, smiling sickly, as Winston stuck his tail out and wrapped it around her small right leg.
The nurse turned and limped back through the double doors, slumped over and trying to nurture her ankle with one hand while she moved as quickly as she could.
“That was just plain dumb,” Alice hissed down at the cat, who’d retreated once more to the wall at the back of the chair.
Winston meowed three times in quick succession, and then purred loud enough for Alice to hear.
“I don’t care whether or not she’s mean, and I don’t care if she doesn’t like us. You can’t go around scratching people just because they deserve it.”
Winston continued to purr loudly from his retreat.
The double doors opened again. A tall woman wearing white coat came through. She held a clipboard like the nurse’s. She stopped to look around, until she spotted Alice.
“You’re John Martin’s little girl?” she asked with a bright smile.
“No, my name is Alice,” Alice responded, instantly.
Winston’s purring silenced.
The door at the other end of the waiting room slammed open with a bang. A young woman crashed through, limping, carrying a high heel in one hand, trying to run, but not doing it well. She dragged a large purse along as she limped.
“Mom,” Alice breathed, rolling her eyes. Alice’s mother was always histrionic, even for the most mundane of things. Alice sat down in the chair above Winston, as the doctor turned to the arriving woman.
In a heartbeat Winston moved from under the chair into Alice’s lap. Alice sat frozen. In all her years the cat had only ever sat in the lap of one person, and that person was her Dad. The cat wasn’t purring. Winston looked up at the doctor. Alice followed his eyes with her own, feeling a sense of bottomless fear.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news Mrs. Martin,” the doctor began.
Alice’s heart sank. She felt tears beginning to form from somewhere deep down inside her. She felt that Winston knew something terrible and that everything good in life was somehow going to change terribly.
“You’re husband has been badly hurt,” the doctor began, “and he’s in intensive care….”
That was all Alice heard before burying her face deep into Winston’s fur. The cat did not move, but he began to purr again.
“The intense thing,” Alice whispered to Winston, her mouth right next to the cat’s ear, “Dad’s going to be alright. They do real good intense here.”

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U 459

U 459
By James Strauss
Holder didn’t engage the man because he had a kid with him, not that the son-of-a-bitch didn’t deserve to be properly encountered in spite of the child. Coffee shops suck in Boston. They aren’t the warm fuzzy places that dot Seattle’s landscape, where people are running around, talking and generally being friendly. No, the Boston Common coffee shop, in what they call the North End, is a cold place where riff-raff gather in numbers. Unemployed young people, looking for some place to hang other than home, low life Irish annealing themselves for the day against terrible hangovers from the night before, and Italian would-be Soprano actors filling the shop every morning.
Holder had come in, set up his Mac on a window facing counter, waited for a cheap small coffee, and then come back to do a bit of work. He hadn’t noticed the creep until he tried to wedge into his corner space. The guy pressed him against the wall, making it appear accidental. No “sorry,” or anything like that came from his lips, however. Holder ignored him by simply sliding along the wall until he was onto his stool.
The guy got on his cell phone. His loud talking was irritating. Then the clown moved Holder’s coffee. Actually picked it up and moved it with one idle hand while he talked. Holder stared, but again did nothing. He was a professional, after all. A professional killer of refined distinction. He didn’t kill people in the United States. That was home and the statute of limitations never ends in the USA for murder. He’d had never killed U.S. citizens abroad either, except when the situation had truly merited it.
Being a hit man was easier if the people you killed really needed the killing pretty badly. If they did then it was merely a process of conversion. Moving meat to fertilizer, he’d once told a would-be friend, but the man hadn’t gotten the humor.
In short, Holder was an International Pro. He wasn’t proud of it because there was nobody to be proud to. He simply knew what he was, and he knew he was really good at it.
The loudmouth cell phone creep got louder. He did it by moving to sit sideways on his own stool. Holder sighed, hands frozen over the keys of his laptop.
He decided to fight fire with fire. For months he’d been searching for a ringtone download for his iPhone. The score from the television show Magnum P.I. Holder loved Magnum. The producer’s of Magnum had done a great job of portraying post traumatic stress. Holder had been in the Nam and had the syndrome. Not that he jumped from loud noises or woke screaming from bad dreams.
Holder starting scanning ringtones from the internet. Slowly, listening to different tune, he turned up the volume. Soon the laptop was singing away, completely drowning out the voice of his obnoxious neighbor. Holder was about to smile to himself over handling the situation so well when the guy punched him on the shoulder. Holder twisted his head instantly, in shocked surprise. The blow had only marginally hurt so he didn’t react further.
“Hey, turn that damn thing down,” the creep said, “I can’t hear my cell phone.”
Holder couldn’t believe his ears. He moved to rub the offended shoulder while looking in to the other man’s eyes.
“I turned it up because of your phone,” he replied to the man, his voice flat and level, while his hand massaged his shoulder. “It’s rude to talk in here on a cell phone.”
The guy ignored him, saying some more idiot things into his phone. Holder appraised him. The guy was not much more than a kid, maybe twenty-seven or eight, he guessed. Good build. Not too tall. Thin-waisted. He’d be quick, most probably, if athletic, and his appearance was fairly fierce. Big black eyebrows penciled thick above his eyes. His facial planes were Slavic with the kind of jaw muscles that bulged, and moved constantly. He glanced into Holder’s eyes with a derisive expression. Holder saw himself in the guy’s eyes. Old. Short. Weak, with clothing way too delicate to indicate any kind of threat.
“Turn it down,” the guy said, flipping his phone closed and dumping it hard onto the counter, so that it struck Holder’s laptop.
Holder liked his Mac. A lot. He looked down at it, his arms having dropped to his sides.
“No, I don’t think so,” he responded softly to the man’s demand, pushing the offending cell phone a few inches away from the Mac with his left index finger.
“Fine, asshole,” the man said, his voice going up in scale and volume, “let’s go outside and settle this.” He climbed off his stool, retrieving the small phone with one hand while grabbing for a coat draped over the back with his other. He bumped into Holder again.
This time Holder was ready, with his shoulder out protecting the .410 Public Defender. He didn’t want the young predator to have any idea that his harmless seeming ‘prey’ was armed.
Holder congratulated himself on his choice of weaponry. Only hours before he’d sat in his hotel room considering. There was no mission, as he was between jobs. He’d decided to go out among the citizenry with a five shot Taurus revolver. It fired only four-ten shotgun shells. Holder had loaded birdshot rounds. At close range the little pistol could not miss, and the birdshot would scar and disfigure rather than kill. There was just no sense having wild-eyed Boston Police personnel angrily in pursuit of some murderer. Not if the object of their intent was Holder, anyway.
Holder let the clown get out the door before he made his own preparations. He looked through the glass at the unsuspecting young man, who was once again on his cell phone.
“What the hell is it with this new generation?” he whispered to himself, stepping down from the stool. He was packing the laptop up and getting his coat on before the unintended question was answered.
“You going to hurt my dad?” a nearby voice asked.
Holder looked around, and then down in front of him. A child was wedged in between the nasty young man’s stool and the front wall. He was under the overhanging counter. Nearly invisible. The words of question had come over the top of the man’s vacated stool.
“You going to hurt my dad?” the boy said again, this time thumping his chest with his clenched fist when he spoke. Holder stared down at the young boy, squinting, and then bending a little closer. He noted that the boy’s eyes were huge pools of deep shiny brown. When the child blinked he did so with lashes almost an inch long.
“Ahhhh,” Holder said, snapping his glance up to keep track of the pacing man on the other side of the coffee shop window.
“U,” the boy said, more loudly, striking his own chest again.
` “You?” Holder asked, his eyebrows coming together in question.
“U,” the little boy repeated patiently, his tone indicating exasperation.
“U is a letter of the alphabet,” the boy thumped himself again, “see?” he inquired.
Automatically, Holder’s hand struck his own chest weakly, in imitation. Then he did a double take. The boy was trying to teach him how to talk.
“I know how to talk,” he said to the little boy.
“Oh,” the boy answered, this time making an ‘O’ with the index finger and thumb of his right hand.
Holder laughed. He couldn’t help himself. The kid was so damned cute, and so serious.
“Are you going to hurt my dad?” the boy repeated, not smiling back at him.
“I don’t know,” Holder said, realizing that he was telling the truth. He didn’t tell the truth very often. He didn’t have anyone in his life to tell the truth to.
“My dad is mean to people,” the boy went on, no longer signing with his hand.
Holder nodded, his gaze still going back and forth between the man outside and his son under the counter.
“Why do you suppose that is?” Holder asked.
The boy stared, without responding. Holder enjoyed watching him. He could see the little boy’s mind work. Holder knew that ‘suppose’ was not a word that a little boy was likely to know. Not even a smart little boy.
“My Mom said that he had a hard childhood,” the boy answered. Holder was impressed that that the boy had chosen to simply ignore the big word he didn’t know. The kid was very smart. And funny, even though he probably didn’t know that.
“Where’s your mom?” Holder inquired.
“Dead. She got sick, went to the hospital and died. My dad said she got sick from Roughie, so he put Roughie down.” The boy’s eyes seemed to grow bigger as he talked.
“Roughie was your dog?” Holder asked, pulling his eyes from the boy’s with effort.
“Is my dog. He’s down, not dead. Mom’s dead.” the boy answered, his voice more forceful. “Are you going to hurt my dad?” he repeated, when Holder did not speak.
“I’m old,” Holder said, after a time. “Your dad’s young. He’s tough. I’m weak. Why would you think I could hurt your dad?” Holder asked, wanting to get as far away from the word ‘down’ as he could.
“Statue,” the boy said, his answer coming instantly.
“What?” Holder asked, the boy again making him feel like he was a complete idiot.
“Statue of Michael, the angel, in church,” the little boy said, making both hands flap at his shoulders behind the stool.
“What’s that to do with me?” Holder asked, not understanding.
“The angel’s hard. I touched him. He’s cold. He’s strong. He’s not alive. Like you.” The boy thumped his chest once, when he said the word ‘you,’ as before.
Holder drew back from the stool. He felt a cold draft, although he knew there wasn’t one.
“Do you want me to hurt your dad?” He asked, his voice feeling a strain he didn’t understand, and wasn’t comfortable with.
The boy didn’t answer, instead producing a sheaf of papers stapled together. He plopped them on top of the stool before him, as if tired of holding them.
“What’s that,” Holder asked, staring down at the rows of print on the many pages.
“Text. My dad has to learn text for his job. I’m helping him,” the boy answered.
“Text? For his cell phone? You can read?” Holder asked the questions one after another, his voice registering amazement. “I need to learn to text too. Life is passing me by,” Holder went on.
He picked up the sheaf of papers, and then idly flipped through them, his eyes still keeping track of the man outside, pacing and talking into his cell phone.
“Of course I can read. I’m five,” the little boy answered. “You can have that, if you want,” he pointed at the papers. “Dad’s got another more at home. We use flash cards too.”
“What does your dad do?” Holder asked, absently, while he scrolled through
the list of text acronyms.
“He’s trying to get a new job. He has to learn to text to get it,” the little boy answered.
“What’d he do before?” Holder asked
“He was a…., he took care of animals,” the boy finally got out.
“You father was a veterinarian?” Holder said, more to himself than the boy, “Jesus Christ.”
He watched the boy’s father pace back and forth outside. He watched him walk right into the side of a pedestrian. The contact was brief but apparent. The man he’d run into stopped. He swung back. He was wearing a black leather coat with a black turtleneck sweater under it. All of a sudden he was not alone. It was like he’d been cloned. Four men stood around the boy’s father. Holder watched the argument grow rapidly more heated. Unwittingly, the boy’s father had run into one of the little mafia don’s who inhabited the North End. There were teams of the macho scruffy creeps all around. Holder avoided them carefully.
As if sensing what was going on behind him, the boy climbed out from under the counter, got onto the stool and stared out.
“My dad’s in trouble again. I think those men are going to hurt him before you do.”
Holder watched the situation deteriorate. The men encircled the boy’s father. At any moment the pushing and shoving would begin, Holder knew, which a brutal beating would follow.
“Do you want me to help him?” Holder said to the boy’s back, surprising himself. The words came out without any volition on Holder’s part. He shifted his gaze back to the developing scene in front of them. Everyone had disappeared off the street on both sides, as if they had things of vital business to do elsewhere.
“It’s really none of my business,” Holder said, after another minute.
“I don’t have a Mom. I need dad to get Roughie back up,” the little boy said, not looking at Holder.
Holder stretched, extending his shoulders out, and then pulling them back in. He felt familiar heat flow through his body, as if somebody had poured hot water into an opening at the top of his torso. He carefully folded the texting papers before putting them into his coat pocket with his right hand. That same hand traveled casually up to the left side of his chest. A very faint snap came from under his arm.
“For Roughie, then,” he whispered softly, not looking at the boy.
Once outside he rested his rip-stop nylon case against the side of the building, and then walked over to the only gathering on the street. The four tough looking men were bouncing the boy’s father around, from one to another, as if he was a large rag doll. The man still clutched the offending cell phone tightly in his right hand.
“I say, what seems to be going on here?” Holder said, very loudly, as he walked up. Then he laughed out loud, allowing some of his personality to flow out before him in a strange joyous wave. He knew by experience that he would draw the group’s full attention.
“Well, what have we got here?” the biggest of the men said, shoving the boy’s dad to land in a heap at Holder’s feet. Holder helped him up, the smile never leaving his face, and his eyes never leaving those of the leather coated leader. Smoothly, he brought the younger man’s head close to his chest, letting the coat fall slightly open. The man’s eyes bulged as he caught sight of the nasty looking revolver, only inches from his nose.
“Your son needs you inside,” Holden said, then pushed him on his way toward the coffee shop entrance.
“Some kind of aging tough guy?” the leather-coated North Ender began, an evil smile coming to his face, “Think your Lloyd Bridges or somebody.”
“Bridges is dead. You oughta know that. I think he died like this.”
Holder reached in, disengaged the Taurus from its high riding holster, and then dropped his filled hand down at a forty-five degree angle to the ground.
“This thing’s called a Public Defender. Never shot it before. Carries only shotgun rounds. Got double ought buck loaded just now. If I was you guys, I’d move on up the street.” The smile was suddenly gone from Holder’s face. He thought briefly of the Archangel the boy had mentioned. He thought about being cold hard and dead.
“You brought a gun to our neighborhood?” the lead Italian hood said, “You crazy? We live here? You’re a dead man.”
“Maybe that’s true,” Holder said. “I waited a respectful time, since your local, but I also lied. The gun’s only loaded with birdshot.” He fired three quick rounds into the concrete among the men, making sure to hold the muzzle down. As expected, the birdshot rebounded from the hard surface, scattering as it bounced, before hitting them in the legs. The effect was like that of a flock of birds taking off. They ran screaming, limping and dragging themselves as best they could.
Holder watched them run for a few seconds before holstering the weapon. His ears rang terribly from the muzzle blasts at such close range. He turned back to the coffee shop and recovered his laptop bag from against the wall. When he leaned down he saw the boy, clutching his father tightly. The man seemed to be crying.
The boy pulled away, and then thumped himself once on the chest. With his right hand he signaled with his fingers. Four fingers, then five fingers, and then nine with both hands out.
Holder sat alone in his room back at the Battery Park hotel, staring out to the wintered Coast Guard ships across the slip from his window. He looked down to examine the list of text acronyms the boy had given him. Four Five Nine, in numbers, was among the first items at the top of the list. Holder laughed.
“I love you,” Holder interpreted, thumping himself on the chest for the ‘you.’ The boy’s text message was clear.
“Sorry about Roughie,” he murmured, the smile slowly leaving his face, his gaze returning to the frozen tableau beyond.

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