A small story that I've been working on:
Little story I'm working on.
Monkey See
Chapter One
The phone rang. I hated telephones.
Some folk disagreed, but I believed that telephoning someone not bound to you by ties of close friendship or blood was tantamount to stepping into their home uninvited. There were times that it might have been desirable and acceptable for a stranger or casual acquaintance to call—however the telephone was only for pressing business. It was never proper to call for idle chitchat.
If you called, I expected the first thing out of your mouth to be an apology for intruding on my solitude, followed closely by an explanation of what you felt was so urgent.
It was Gary. Gary wasn’t exactly a friend.
Gary’s mother was Nigerian and her father was half Chinese and half Jamaican. Gary wasn’t so much black as she was almost indigo. She was six three and I don’t think that she weighed over one-seventy.
She was sixteen and she always dressed in loose oversized jeans and hoodies and most folks took her for a boy. She was what my father called a “shikepoke”—tall and rail thin. It had nothing to do with her race—or considering her mixed parentage, her lack of race.
Gary lived in the small trailer park a half-mile down the road. She rarely went to school. She spent most of her time online and she was good enough at programming to keep her in spending money.
Back in those days, you could go to Kaintuck and meet any number of big heavy-set women with raven colored hair, blue contacts, radiant smiles and perfect Kentucky accents.
If it mattered to you or if you were simply curious, the only way to know for sure was to whisper:
“Cuál es tu nombre?” in her ear. If she answered in excellent Español odds were that she was a Latina. I suppose the Latinas are still around, but I imagine that blue contacts are far harder to come by nowadays.
Yeah, some Southern Indianians have a drawl that most think sounds Southern, but it is distinct from a Kentucky accent.
{And a pox on the stupid word “Hoosier”!}
In the same vein if you couldn’t see Gary, she sounded white—not that I cared how she sounded.
Gary liked first person shooters. That led her into laser tag. That led to paintball—which is where I met her. Paintball led her to read up on survivalism and prepping. Somebody pointed her at me and I acquired a fervid tagalong.
I was only a couple months away from turning twenty and I had very little in common with Gary. I had no particular interest in having a friend of any kind, but there you have it.
“Are you watching CNN?” Gary asked.
“No, I’m talking to you over the infernal squawk-box,” I replied.
“Turn the news on. I’ll be there shortly,” she commanded.
About a half hour later Gary opened the door without bothering to knock and walked in and plopped her bony ass down beside me on the couch. She had a duffle bag and a small ALICE pack with her.
No way that I can give a moment-by-moment account of how I gathered the news over the course of the next few hours.
Suffice it to say that three bombs went off within minutes of each other in New York City. One was within sight of the Empire State Building and the other two were in Harlem. Within thirty minutes or less, a single bomb was set off in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, DC, Atlanta and Miami. Except for the Empire State Bomb they were all set off in the ghettos.
There “just happened” to be someone filming something else in the area and they actually got not one but two of the explosions recorded. Several folks were filming within thirty seconds of the blast. Most of the recordings were promptly loaded online where they went instantly viral.
The government had folks on the scene very quickly. They had their verdict in within a couple hours. Each bomb had an unusually large quantity of plastic explosive wrapped all around with two to four hundred pounds of very finely powdered metal.
They weren’t dirty bombs. They were faux dirty bombs meant to cause panic—quite apart from mangling scores of folk with the jumbo blasts.
Problem was, by the time that the government gave the “all clear” the internet as well as a number of hoodwinked television and radio stations had been telling anyone in the same zip code as the bombs to evacuate as quickly as possible before they got a lethal dose of radiation.
Many folks in the ghettos decided that the government meant to segregate, isolate and then write them off. They rioted, looted and burned—but this time they had a built-in incentive to take their show out into the wealthier neighborhoods instead of burning their own homes down.
The various governors called out the National Guard and they were especially brutal this time around, but folks still poured out of the ghettos and housing projects.
At 11:00pm I ordered several pizzas. If this was the end of the world, as we knew it, then I wanted to commemorate it and the cold pizza leftovers would be filling food to eat on the go if we bugged out.
By 1:00am I was coming to the conclusion that the terrorists had been inventive, but the country wasn’t going to descend into complete disorder and chaos.
Maybe it was the release of tension, but I started clowning with Gary.
You know how most folks part their hair on the left? Some few part it on the right. Gary had let her hair grow between the two part lines, but shaved it on each side. So essentially she had a rather wide flat Mohawk.
“Gary,” I’d told her, “That Mohawk is ugly. You should either let all your hair grow in or shave it all. A lot of black women look nice with a shaved head.”
“If I shaved it in the dead of Winter I’d catch cold because I’m not used to it, but if you’ll wait until Spring I’ll shave it for you.”
It wasn’t until later that I got to wondering why she’d shave her head—or do anything else “for me”.
Today she’d come in wearing the navy blue sock hat that she often wore and she hadn’t removed it with her jacket.
I snatched the hat off her head and lo and behold, her head was as clean-shaven as a shiny chocolate Easter egg. So of course I wanted to run my hand over it to see if it was as smooth as it looked. We got to wrestling on the couch and then my father walked in and caught us clowning.
“I want to talk to you for a moment,” he said while pointing to his study.
“Excuse us,” he said to Gary.
When we were behind closed doors, he turned on me.
“Son, I’m going to ask you one more time and I want you to level with me. Are you gay?”
I choked down the frustration.
“How many times do I have to tell you? Gary is a girl! Not that us wrestling around on the couch had any sexual aspect to it.
“You wouldn’t wonder about my sexual orientation if you caught me wrestling with Markie,” I said.
I walked to the door in a near rage.
“Gary, can you come in here please? I’ve told this silly old codger a dozen time’s, but he can’t seem to hear me.
“He thinks that you’re a boy and that I’ve turned gay.
“Will you please tell him that you’re a girl?”
I said, “tell” not “show”, but she promptly stood to attention like an SS trooper and dropped her pants. I couldn’t help but note that she’d apparently decided to get her money’s worth from her straight razor before I hastily averted my eyes.
I saw her pull up her pants in my peripheral vision and I grabbed her upper arm and steered her back to the front room.
“Damned nation! I didn’t see that coming. Let me go make sure that he’s okay. I want to talk to you some more. Seriously, will you be here?”
“I’ll be here,” she promised.
When I was back in the study, with my father I asked him, “What in the Hell is wrong with you? You don’t listen to me.”
“Honest to God, I don’t remember you telling me that creature was a girl.”
“Well she is a girl and I’ve probably hurt her feelings while being mad at you. I was going to try to be diplomatic, but now I’m just going to say it: if we decide to bug out, Gary is coming with us.”
“Son, are you dating that tall skinny hairless black girl?”
“If I am, you will repeat to yourself over and over and over again like it is a mantra:
“’It is better than having a gay son. It is better than having a gay son.’
“And you won’t say anything else to her to hurt her feelings.”
“Dew, come look at this,” Gary called.
She turned her eyes upon me as I walked back into the front room.
“Number one: get off that straight backed chair and sit beside me on the couch.
“Number two: quit acting as if your feelings were hurt.
“You have a boy’s name. You choose to hide your form and wear your hair in ambiguous styles so it isn’t surprising if folks aren’t sure if you’re a male or female.
“Get over it,” I said.
“Never mind that. Look at the TV,” Gary said.
The data came in in bits and pieces. I’ll give a brief summation.
In each of the bombed cities the terrorists set buildings burning. Arsonists are hard to catch because they recon their targets very carefully. These arsonists were working as teams. They brought in unusual amounts of accelerants—far more than a lone arsonist could ordinarily bring.
In several attacks, they also picked areas where a fire might spread and they set timed-delayed incendiaries along the fire’s probable line of propagation—just to speed things up a bit.
Then when the firemen showed up they had sniper teams in place to snipe at the firemen.
Military snipers are almost as hard to catch as arsonists because a professional doesn’t engage without at least one avenue of retreat. Also, he will wait until the odds are in his favor. Professionals usually work in teams of two—a sniper and a spotter. Isolated crazies are generally lone wolfs. They tend to be mediocre shots and little ability to plan and little patience.
The terrorists showed excellent marksmanship inside three hundred yards. They not only had spotters but also five to ten armed men on each team to watch the shooter and the sniper’s backs and cover their retreat. Once they had two or three police to their credit for a given team they’d beat a strategic retreat.
By dawn there were over ninety dead firefighters and almost thirty laws slain—not counting the wounded and the uninvolved bystanders—In New York City alone.
Daddy and I had decided to head out well before the Sun rose over the East Coast. The terrorists seemed to have a multi–level strategy. There was no reason to declare martial law in Indiana or Kentucky…yet.
It was better to didi mau before there was.
************ *************** ****************************
Father put in a call to my cousins Man and Markie to head down to the fishing camp with us. There is strength in numbers don’t you know?
Man was over twenty years older than me. That used to cause many of the little peckerwoods in my neighborhood all sorts of brain cramps.
“Don’t you mean that he’s your uncle?”
“No, he’s my cousin,” I’d insist.
A few years later, I’d have tried to diagram a kinship chart—not that the little drooling cretins would have even tried to look at a kinship chart long enough to have any hope of understanding.
I remember a cousin on the other side of my family—cousin Jennifer.
Jennifer had gotten the idea from somewhere that because she was thirty years older than me that she could boss me around. I told her straight out: if she was my aunt then she would outrank me. Since she was a cousin, she was no better than me.
Once she threatened to whip me with a switch.
“That will be after the fight and win or lose, I guarantee you’ll long remember it,” I told her.
My father told me to do what Jennifer told me—within reason. I told him flat out that I wasn’t going to. She was just a cousin. He’d tell me one more time to obey Jennifer and one more time I’d refuse. He’d just shake his head and let it drop.
Understand, my father was fairly strict and he didn’t tolerate much backtalk. I was more obedient than most children and eager to please.
My defiance was very uncharacteristic. It was something that I felt very strongly about though. His acceptance of my defiance was also uncharacteristic. I suspect that it was largely because Jennifer was a horse’s ass.
Besides, there wasn’t enough slapping and whipping in the whole World to force me to passively accept what I perceived as an injustice.
Man was different though. He took me to see movies and hunting and fishing.
Daddy would always say:
“You do what Man tells you to.”
“He’s just a cousin.”
“I know, but he won’t try to boss you around, but you do need to follow his lead on most things. Okay?”
“Okay.”
My father had been an avid hunter and fisherman in his day as well as a very good IPSC Shooter. He didn’t have a slew of guns, but what he did have was the very best.
Tate, who lived down the street, had also been a hunter and fisherman. He had a genuine German Luger and a whole closet full of long guns.
If you were at Tate’s house and the topic turned to Sgt Alvin York, he’d bring out an old 1903A3 Springfield and a parkerized 1911A1. Mention Audie Murphy—he had a .30 Carbine and a Garand. Talk about the Kennedy assassination—he had
an Eye-Talian Carcano.
He had Enfields, 7x57 Mausers, 8mm Mausers, Arisakas—all kinds of stuff.
He liked to read Louis L’Amour and biographies of the old time hunters and scouts here and in Africa—“Aff—Er—Goan—Ee—Uh” as we hillbillies deliberately and consistently mispronounced it.
My father read little and he hated all fiction with a white-hot passion. It as all “Bullshit” he declared.
When I was eleven he forbid me to read any more science fiction until further notice, because he worried that I wasn’t watching enough television.
Even on the tube, he denounced fiction and had a scathing contempt for SF and Phantasy—though he sometimes let me watch it.
Tate had a four hundred pound termagant for a wife and seemed rather henpecked. Since both he and my father had been avid outdoorsmen until after they married, I suspected that women worked some foul anti-hunting mind-control on men.
I promised myself at the age of ten or eleven that I’d never chase women so that a woman couldn’t turn me into a neutered domestic house pet.
Later I kinda wanted to have a girlfriend and maybe have a family someday—but as is often the case, God only honors your first vow and not the repentance afterward.
My father often told me what a grand and glorious experience hunting and fishing were. He took me hunting once and fishing three times. I remember each numinous trip in psychedelic detail precisely because it was so rare.
He’d always tell me:
“Now not next weekend—but the weekend after that—we’re going fishing (or hunting.)”
Something would invariably come up so that we couldn’t go.
Looking back, I think that’s why he always planned two weeks ahead—to give some trip–destroying something time to manifest. I don’t think that he did it intentionally though.
Little story I'm working on.
Monkey See
Chapter One
The phone rang. I hated telephones.
Some folk disagreed, but I believed that telephoning someone not bound to you by ties of close friendship or blood was tantamount to stepping into their home uninvited. There were times that it might have been desirable and acceptable for a stranger or casual acquaintance to call—however the telephone was only for pressing business. It was never proper to call for idle chitchat.
If you called, I expected the first thing out of your mouth to be an apology for intruding on my solitude, followed closely by an explanation of what you felt was so urgent.
It was Gary. Gary wasn’t exactly a friend.
Gary’s mother was Nigerian and her father was half Chinese and half Jamaican. Gary wasn’t so much black as she was almost indigo. She was six three and I don’t think that she weighed over one-seventy.
She was sixteen and she always dressed in loose oversized jeans and hoodies and most folks took her for a boy. She was what my father called a “shikepoke”—tall and rail thin. It had nothing to do with her race—or considering her mixed parentage, her lack of race.
Gary lived in the small trailer park a half-mile down the road. She rarely went to school. She spent most of her time online and she was good enough at programming to keep her in spending money.
Back in those days, you could go to Kaintuck and meet any number of big heavy-set women with raven colored hair, blue contacts, radiant smiles and perfect Kentucky accents.
If it mattered to you or if you were simply curious, the only way to know for sure was to whisper:
“Cuál es tu nombre?” in her ear. If she answered in excellent Español odds were that she was a Latina. I suppose the Latinas are still around, but I imagine that blue contacts are far harder to come by nowadays.
Yeah, some Southern Indianians have a drawl that most think sounds Southern, but it is distinct from a Kentucky accent.
{And a pox on the stupid word “Hoosier”!}
In the same vein if you couldn’t see Gary, she sounded white—not that I cared how she sounded.
Gary liked first person shooters. That led her into laser tag. That led to paintball—which is where I met her. Paintball led her to read up on survivalism and prepping. Somebody pointed her at me and I acquired a fervid tagalong.
I was only a couple months away from turning twenty and I had very little in common with Gary. I had no particular interest in having a friend of any kind, but there you have it.
“Are you watching CNN?” Gary asked.
“No, I’m talking to you over the infernal squawk-box,” I replied.
“Turn the news on. I’ll be there shortly,” she commanded.
About a half hour later Gary opened the door without bothering to knock and walked in and plopped her bony ass down beside me on the couch. She had a duffle bag and a small ALICE pack with her.
No way that I can give a moment-by-moment account of how I gathered the news over the course of the next few hours.
Suffice it to say that three bombs went off within minutes of each other in New York City. One was within sight of the Empire State Building and the other two were in Harlem. Within thirty minutes or less, a single bomb was set off in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, DC, Atlanta and Miami. Except for the Empire State Bomb they were all set off in the ghettos.
There “just happened” to be someone filming something else in the area and they actually got not one but two of the explosions recorded. Several folks were filming within thirty seconds of the blast. Most of the recordings were promptly loaded online where they went instantly viral.
The government had folks on the scene very quickly. They had their verdict in within a couple hours. Each bomb had an unusually large quantity of plastic explosive wrapped all around with two to four hundred pounds of very finely powdered metal.
They weren’t dirty bombs. They were faux dirty bombs meant to cause panic—quite apart from mangling scores of folk with the jumbo blasts.
Problem was, by the time that the government gave the “all clear” the internet as well as a number of hoodwinked television and radio stations had been telling anyone in the same zip code as the bombs to evacuate as quickly as possible before they got a lethal dose of radiation.
Many folks in the ghettos decided that the government meant to segregate, isolate and then write them off. They rioted, looted and burned—but this time they had a built-in incentive to take their show out into the wealthier neighborhoods instead of burning their own homes down.
The various governors called out the National Guard and they were especially brutal this time around, but folks still poured out of the ghettos and housing projects.
At 11:00pm I ordered several pizzas. If this was the end of the world, as we knew it, then I wanted to commemorate it and the cold pizza leftovers would be filling food to eat on the go if we bugged out.
By 1:00am I was coming to the conclusion that the terrorists had been inventive, but the country wasn’t going to descend into complete disorder and chaos.
Maybe it was the release of tension, but I started clowning with Gary.
You know how most folks part their hair on the left? Some few part it on the right. Gary had let her hair grow between the two part lines, but shaved it on each side. So essentially she had a rather wide flat Mohawk.
“Gary,” I’d told her, “That Mohawk is ugly. You should either let all your hair grow in or shave it all. A lot of black women look nice with a shaved head.”
“If I shaved it in the dead of Winter I’d catch cold because I’m not used to it, but if you’ll wait until Spring I’ll shave it for you.”
It wasn’t until later that I got to wondering why she’d shave her head—or do anything else “for me”.
Today she’d come in wearing the navy blue sock hat that she often wore and she hadn’t removed it with her jacket.
I snatched the hat off her head and lo and behold, her head was as clean-shaven as a shiny chocolate Easter egg. So of course I wanted to run my hand over it to see if it was as smooth as it looked. We got to wrestling on the couch and then my father walked in and caught us clowning.
“I want to talk to you for a moment,” he said while pointing to his study.
“Excuse us,” he said to Gary.
When we were behind closed doors, he turned on me.
“Son, I’m going to ask you one more time and I want you to level with me. Are you gay?”
I choked down the frustration.
“How many times do I have to tell you? Gary is a girl! Not that us wrestling around on the couch had any sexual aspect to it.
“You wouldn’t wonder about my sexual orientation if you caught me wrestling with Markie,” I said.
I walked to the door in a near rage.
“Gary, can you come in here please? I’ve told this silly old codger a dozen time’s, but he can’t seem to hear me.
“He thinks that you’re a boy and that I’ve turned gay.
“Will you please tell him that you’re a girl?”
I said, “tell” not “show”, but she promptly stood to attention like an SS trooper and dropped her pants. I couldn’t help but note that she’d apparently decided to get her money’s worth from her straight razor before I hastily averted my eyes.
I saw her pull up her pants in my peripheral vision and I grabbed her upper arm and steered her back to the front room.
“Damned nation! I didn’t see that coming. Let me go make sure that he’s okay. I want to talk to you some more. Seriously, will you be here?”
“I’ll be here,” she promised.
When I was back in the study, with my father I asked him, “What in the Hell is wrong with you? You don’t listen to me.”
“Honest to God, I don’t remember you telling me that creature was a girl.”
“Well she is a girl and I’ve probably hurt her feelings while being mad at you. I was going to try to be diplomatic, but now I’m just going to say it: if we decide to bug out, Gary is coming with us.”
“Son, are you dating that tall skinny hairless black girl?”
“If I am, you will repeat to yourself over and over and over again like it is a mantra:
“’It is better than having a gay son. It is better than having a gay son.’
“And you won’t say anything else to her to hurt her feelings.”
“Dew, come look at this,” Gary called.
She turned her eyes upon me as I walked back into the front room.
“Number one: get off that straight backed chair and sit beside me on the couch.
“Number two: quit acting as if your feelings were hurt.
“You have a boy’s name. You choose to hide your form and wear your hair in ambiguous styles so it isn’t surprising if folks aren’t sure if you’re a male or female.
“Get over it,” I said.
“Never mind that. Look at the TV,” Gary said.
The data came in in bits and pieces. I’ll give a brief summation.
In each of the bombed cities the terrorists set buildings burning. Arsonists are hard to catch because they recon their targets very carefully. These arsonists were working as teams. They brought in unusual amounts of accelerants—far more than a lone arsonist could ordinarily bring.
In several attacks, they also picked areas where a fire might spread and they set timed-delayed incendiaries along the fire’s probable line of propagation—just to speed things up a bit.
Then when the firemen showed up they had sniper teams in place to snipe at the firemen.
Military snipers are almost as hard to catch as arsonists because a professional doesn’t engage without at least one avenue of retreat. Also, he will wait until the odds are in his favor. Professionals usually work in teams of two—a sniper and a spotter. Isolated crazies are generally lone wolfs. They tend to be mediocre shots and little ability to plan and little patience.
The terrorists showed excellent marksmanship inside three hundred yards. They not only had spotters but also five to ten armed men on each team to watch the shooter and the sniper’s backs and cover their retreat. Once they had two or three police to their credit for a given team they’d beat a strategic retreat.
By dawn there were over ninety dead firefighters and almost thirty laws slain—not counting the wounded and the uninvolved bystanders—In New York City alone.
Daddy and I had decided to head out well before the Sun rose over the East Coast. The terrorists seemed to have a multi–level strategy. There was no reason to declare martial law in Indiana or Kentucky…yet.
It was better to didi mau before there was.
************ *************** ****************************
Father put in a call to my cousins Man and Markie to head down to the fishing camp with us. There is strength in numbers don’t you know?
Man was over twenty years older than me. That used to cause many of the little peckerwoods in my neighborhood all sorts of brain cramps.
“Don’t you mean that he’s your uncle?”
“No, he’s my cousin,” I’d insist.
A few years later, I’d have tried to diagram a kinship chart—not that the little drooling cretins would have even tried to look at a kinship chart long enough to have any hope of understanding.
I remember a cousin on the other side of my family—cousin Jennifer.
Jennifer had gotten the idea from somewhere that because she was thirty years older than me that she could boss me around. I told her straight out: if she was my aunt then she would outrank me. Since she was a cousin, she was no better than me.
Once she threatened to whip me with a switch.
“That will be after the fight and win or lose, I guarantee you’ll long remember it,” I told her.
My father told me to do what Jennifer told me—within reason. I told him flat out that I wasn’t going to. She was just a cousin. He’d tell me one more time to obey Jennifer and one more time I’d refuse. He’d just shake his head and let it drop.
Understand, my father was fairly strict and he didn’t tolerate much backtalk. I was more obedient than most children and eager to please.
My defiance was very uncharacteristic. It was something that I felt very strongly about though. His acceptance of my defiance was also uncharacteristic. I suspect that it was largely because Jennifer was a horse’s ass.
Besides, there wasn’t enough slapping and whipping in the whole World to force me to passively accept what I perceived as an injustice.
Man was different though. He took me to see movies and hunting and fishing.
Daddy would always say:
“You do what Man tells you to.”
“He’s just a cousin.”
“I know, but he won’t try to boss you around, but you do need to follow his lead on most things. Okay?”
“Okay.”
My father had been an avid hunter and fisherman in his day as well as a very good IPSC Shooter. He didn’t have a slew of guns, but what he did have was the very best.
Tate, who lived down the street, had also been a hunter and fisherman. He had a genuine German Luger and a whole closet full of long guns.
If you were at Tate’s house and the topic turned to Sgt Alvin York, he’d bring out an old 1903A3 Springfield and a parkerized 1911A1. Mention Audie Murphy—he had a .30 Carbine and a Garand. Talk about the Kennedy assassination—he had
an Eye-Talian Carcano.
He had Enfields, 7x57 Mausers, 8mm Mausers, Arisakas—all kinds of stuff.
He liked to read Louis L’Amour and biographies of the old time hunters and scouts here and in Africa—“Aff—Er—Goan—Ee—Uh” as we hillbillies deliberately and consistently mispronounced it.
My father read little and he hated all fiction with a white-hot passion. It as all “Bullshit” he declared.
When I was eleven he forbid me to read any more science fiction until further notice, because he worried that I wasn’t watching enough television.
Even on the tube, he denounced fiction and had a scathing contempt for SF and Phantasy—though he sometimes let me watch it.
Tate had a four hundred pound termagant for a wife and seemed rather henpecked. Since both he and my father had been avid outdoorsmen until after they married, I suspected that women worked some foul anti-hunting mind-control on men.
I promised myself at the age of ten or eleven that I’d never chase women so that a woman couldn’t turn me into a neutered domestic house pet.
Later I kinda wanted to have a girlfriend and maybe have a family someday—but as is often the case, God only honors your first vow and not the repentance afterward.
My father often told me what a grand and glorious experience hunting and fishing were. He took me hunting once and fishing three times. I remember each numinous trip in psychedelic detail precisely because it was so rare.
He’d always tell me:
“Now not next weekend—but the weekend after that—we’re going fishing (or hunting.)”
Something would invariably come up so that we couldn’t go.
Looking back, I think that’s why he always planned two weeks ahead—to give some trip–destroying something time to manifest. I don’t think that he did it intentionally though.
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