Murray
Dawes was sad but silent as the sheriff’s deputies put him in the cell in the
county lock-up. Other men would protest
their innocence of being a serial murderer and sex offender. Murray was accused of being the infamous
“Teddy Bear Killer” who molested and murdered young boys all across the
Midwest. Murray was in fact not quite
right in the head. Something was off
enough to make him constantly silent as the stones on an Iowan hillside in
winter. But just because he was silent
and mentally unique, it didn’t explain how he could end up accused of terrible
crimes when he was totally innocent. He
had, in truth, only been guilty of rescuing the last boy-victim of the real
killer. And because he wouldn’t answer
any questions from anybody, and the boy-victim was in shock and couldn’t talk,
he stood a very real chance of taking the whole of the blame. Well, I wasn’t about to stand for it. I would find some way to tell them all the
truth. My name is Zearlop. I am Murray’s ventriloquist’s puppet. And I know the truth that’s inside his
muddled head.
I
also know you will probably say this is totally unbelievable, that an inanimate
object… or, rather, a puppet who is animated by others, cannot be the narrator
of a story. You are right, of
course. I can’t possibly be the author
of this tale. I am a modified sock
puppet of a zebra with mechanically blinking eyes and mechanically enhanced
mouth movements. My head is full of
cotton stuffing and old newspapers. But
I was cleverly put together by two geniuses, and given life by another.
You
have to understand; the human mind is like a great complex Labyrinth where no
man has ever mastered every single corridor.
Sometimes the most beautifully complex minds become lost or trapped in a
dead-end corridor, never to find the light outside again.
But
sometimes a special mind that was meant for special things is helped to find
the light again… shown a trap door or a secret exit by another who has mastered
at least a portion of the great, overly-complex dungeon.
And
sometimes it is possible to slip past the Minotaur who guards the secrets of
the Labyrinth and keeps us all from unlocking the magic.
My story, the story I mean to tell you even if you
don’t believe I am capable of telling it because I am a mechanical sock puppet
of a zebra, begins with a fool. The
fool’s name is Murray Dawes. That’s
right, Mumbling Murray Dawes, the feeb, the spaz, the Special-Ed idiot, son of
Elmer and Ethel Dawes, the nephew of Harker Dawes, and the only human being in
the universe who had more in common with potatoes than he did with other
people. Yes, I promise I will explain
that last one later in the story.
The next day Valerie had a chance to hang out with Pidney
and Mary again, so she took it. She road
into town on the school bus after school with Danny Murphy. They didn’t actually talk about anything the
whole way. Anticipation is often better
than the real thing. And it wasn’t often
that Mary and Pid were both off directly after school. Pidney had no football practice that
afternoon, and Mary canceled whatever school meetings she had planned that day
in order to come back to Norwall with him after school. The four Pirates were supposed to meet in the
Library for Pirate business.
“There’s Mary and Pid,” said Danny pointing as he and Val
stepped off Milo’s school bus.
“Yeah, but who is that?” Valerie asked, pointing at a
mysterious cloaked figure standing behind the tree by the Library door. She was instantly reminded of the cloaked man
she had seen the day they got the Tiki idol.
“Hey, Pidney!” Danny shouted, “who is that near you behind
that tree?”
Pidney was holding the door of his step-dad’s old 70’s
Lincoln Mercury to help Mary get out.
Mary carried a tall stack of books.
They had driven home from the high school in Belle City together.
“What man? Where?” The figure moved out of sight behind the
large fluffy pine tree.
“Look behind the tree!” shouted Valerie.
Pid walked around to where he could see behind the tree. He looked back at Valerie and Danny and shrugged. “Nobody here that I can see,” he said.
“You guys need to see what we found in the high school
library,” said Mary waving them to come towards the Library building.
Valerie looked at Danny.
He shrugged. They both walked
toward the Library.
“I found some old high school yearbooks in the library,”
said Mary. “We can use them to get an
idea what Captain Dettbarn used to look like.
He’s kinda hard to describe any other way.”
“And there’s a book about the ship, Mary Celeste. It tells about the old ghost ship, not the
Captain’s ship, but I still think it is important,” said Pidney.
Valerie and Danny walked across the street from the bus stop
to join the two high school kids.
“Here’s the 1962 Belle City Bronco yearbook,” said Mary,
handing the black-bound thin book of pictures to Valerie. “The Captain is in the Junior Class in that
one. He had a beard then, just like the
one he had on his face the last time I saw him.”
Valerie opened to the page of Junior portraits and ran her
finger over the C’s and D’s until she got to Dettbarn. He was kind of a dumpy fat boy even then,
with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a derfy smile that showed his crooked
teeth. He had a rather ratty looking
beard, which was perfect for a rodent-like face, that, while it didn’t look
like a rat, it did look an awful lot like the face of a woodchuck, or some kind
of short-toothed beaver.
“He’s kinda funny looking,” Val said to herself, but loud
enough for all to hear.
“Now, see here! I
take exception to that remark!” said a cloaked and hatted figure stepping out
of the shadow of the evergreen tree by the door.
“Who…?” croaked Mary, leaping away from the figure and
towards Pidney.
“Help me…!” squawked Danny as he awkwardly leaped into
Pidney’s arms, the football muscles catching hold of the smaller boy easily.
“Don’t you get mad at me!” said Valerie hotly. “It is not like I was talking to you… whoever
you are!” She lunged toward the
stranger, grabbing his yachting cap and yanking it off his head.
But where the head was supposed to be… nothing at all was there except a pair of thick bifocal glasses hanging in the air like they were weightless in outer space.
Valerie looked at the glasses, and then down at the yearbook
picture still in her other hand. Yes, it
was an updated version of the same style of thick glasses.
“Erm… Captain Dettbarn. It’s you!”
“Uncle Noah?” Mary said.
“What happened to your head?”
“Oh, um… it’s still there, Mary dear. Head-hunters didn’t eat it or anything. I am just the victim of a curse. A curse that makes my body completely
invisible.” He removed the cloak to
reveal a free-standing pair of pants, a short-sleeved red-and-white-striped
shirt, and empty neckerchief, and floating white gloves that didn’t seem to be
properly attached to the invisible dumpy body wearing the sailor’s clothes.
“Er, uh… sir?” asked Pidney, “What is all this purple smoke
coming out from behind the pine tree? It
has a funky smell, like burning sugar or something.”
“Well, I hate to say it, but that is an indicator that the
witchdoctor himself is watching us at the moment from somewhere not too far
away. That purple smoke always seems to
come around right before some evil magic happens.”
“Oh, that’s not good.
Maybe we better go inside the library before anything bad can
happen.” Mary was looking around the
street for signs of the evil witchdoctor.
Pidney put Danny on the ground and both boys headed up the
Public Library steps.
“Um, uh… Pretty girl, can I have my hat back. I want to go in the library in disguise. No sense in scaring the librarian.”
Valerie frowned at the invisible man as she handed him back
the hat and the disembodied gloves placed it back on top of his invisible
rodent-like head.
“Let’s
go inside the Library,” said Mary. “We
have things to talk about and questions to ask… Lots and lots of questions to
ask.”
Mom loved to cook.
She could do wondrous things with a casserole. In fact, her Tater Tot casserole was such a
hit that it had spread to households all over the county and people from as far
away as Illinois were writing her letters to get the secret recipe. It wasn’t such a secret. Browned and loose ground beef, Campbell’s
Cream of Mushroom soup, Tater Tots from Ore-Ida, and real cheddar cheese went
into her magical casserole. But friends
of friends and family were practically rabid about wanting to get their hands
on the special secret recipe. They
didn’t realize until she told them that the recipe came from the label of a Campbell’s
soup can to begin with.
So the house smelled wonderful because Uncle Dash and
Valerie’s cousin Stacey were coming to dinner.
Stacy was college age now, and Valerie looked up to
her. She was smart and independent, and
she knew how to dress up like a fashion model whenever there was an excuse to
do it. As Val and Stacy set the table,
the two had a brief moment or two to catch up on cousin stuff.
“I hear the Pirates are re-forming,” Stacy said. “And they tell me you are going to be one of
them?”
“Well, yeah… so?”
“Don’t bring it up tonight.
Daddy will get mad. I mean, more
mad than he already is.”
“Uncle Dash is mad?” Valerie was slightly taken by surprise. Uncle Dash was the kind of guy who was always laughing, always joking. Valerie had relied on his sense of humor and mature wisdom her whole life long. She believed he was even wiser than Daddy Kyle. He was a farmer. He had the wisdom of the Earth.
“Your Uncle Dash is mad at me,” said Stacey.
“Why would he be mad at you?”
“I told him a secret today.
One I have to tell everybody sooner or later.”
“Really? Tell me.”
Stacey was obviously biting her own lower lip for some
reason. Why would she do that? It didn’t really make sense to Val. There were tears in her cousin’s eyes.
“I mean it, Stacey. I love you. You cantell me.”
“Well, I…” Before
Stacey could spill it, the adults came into the room.
“Really,” Uncle Dash said with a frown on his face, “We
could sell that sixty acres southwest of town and the big pasture along the
Iowa River. That would give us enough
money to at least bargain for more time… maybe another growing season.”
“But, Dash, that’s all your land. This is my debt. I can’t let you sacrifice from your share. It should be some of my land.” Kyle sat down at the head of the table with a defeated-seeming kerplunk. Valerie knew her dad’s basic onomatopoeias, the sound-words of his soul, and kerplunk was definitely not a good one.
“But it is some of the less-valuable land I am offering to
sell. All of your land is better, and we
should be trying to keep all of it.”
“Yeah, well… I still don’t want you to make sacrifices to
pay my debts.”
Uncle Dash took the seat next to Daddy Kyle where Valerie
would’ve sat if they didn’t have company.
Mom came in carrying a big casserole dish full of
steaming-hot tater-tot casserole. She
proudly set her work of art down in the middle of the dining room table. “Stacey, will you help me get the peas and
the mashed potatoes?” Mom said. Then she
dashed back out to the kitchen.
“You’re my brother, Kyle.
You have to let me help you. And
it is all family land. We have to work
together, even though we divided the farms when Dad died. It is all one large farm, really.”
“Well, yeah, but…”
That conversation died too as Mom and Stacey brought the
rest of the supper to the table, and Mom insisted that everybody sit down and
eat. Valerie said Grace and food was
passed all around. Everybody at the
table had a farmer’s healthy appetite, and soon mouths were too full to
talk. Conversation was suspended for the
more important thing… at least until all were stuffed and satisfied.
“It’s a shame that Patricia couldn’t come with you this
evening, Dash,” Mom said.
“She was sorry to miss it, but she really wasn’t feeling
well. She needed to take some medicine
and go to bed. Which reminds me… Stacey has some new she needs to share with
everyone in the family.”
Stacey looked at her father with a distinctly angry expression.
“Well, you may as well tell them.”
Stacey’s glare at Uncle Dash made Valerie suddenly worried for
her cousin. What could be wrong?
“I’m… not going to college anymore.”
“Oh, Stacey!” Mom said.
“Why not?”
“Well, I’m…”
The pause was unbearable.
“I’m pregnant.”
Stunned silence followed.
Uncle Dash’s face was so sad it almost made Valerie burst into tears. Stacey did cry, and that was almost worse.
“How, I mean… who?”
Daddy didn’t know what to say. He
was kinda tongue-tied, right up until the answer hit him square in the
memory. “Not the Toad! Oh, Stacey!”
“His name is Brom, not Toad.
I don’t know why everyone needs to call him that.” Stacey’s tears were replaced almost instantly
with fury.
“It’s the way he drives.
He reminds everyone of Toad in the Disney movie Wind in the Willows. You
know how recklessly he roars about in that yellow Ford Mustang of his.” Uncle Dash was very direct and
soft-spoken. It was an argument Valerie
had overheard before.
“He also has a big mouth like a frog,” said Valerie timidly.
“Oh, Val…” Stacey
shot her a wounded look. Whose side was
she supposed to be on, anyway?
“Well, I have to say, it isn’t such a big surprise. You have been in love with that boy for a
while now, haven’t you, Stacey?” Daddy Kyle said.
“Yes, I love him with all of my heart.”
“Is he going to do the right thing by you?” Mom asked.
“He’s willing to marry me… if Daddy doesn’t forbid it.”
“Dash, you can’t forbid it,” said Daddy Kyle. “That’s no way to start off a life… for
Stacey or Brom either one.”
“You would take their side, wouldn’t you,” Uncle Dash said
harshly. “You know, as my little brother,
it wouldn’t kill you to take my side once in a while.”
Daddy stared straight at his plate. His mouth was a tense and very straight
line. “Stacey would be good for
Brom. As Mrs. Brown, she’s bound to
settle him down at least a little bit.
Like the way Julie settled me down.
You remember what a wild kid I was, right?”
“We haven’t decided how it’s going to be, yet,” Dash said
calmly. “There is a lot to be decided
yet.”
“You really can’t decide for her, you know,” Daddy Kyle
said.
Uncle Dash got angry at that. “How would you feel if it were Valerie in
this situation? Maybe with somebody like
that Murphy kid… or Richard Martin’s little rag boy?”
“It’s not the same.
Valerie is still too young to be a mother.”
“And Stacey isn’t?”
“Kyle, Dash, please!” said Mom, “don’t discuss this in front
of the girls. They can hear everything,
and I don’t think it helps anybody to hear you two argue about this.”
It was quiet for a few moments, but a very tense quiet.
“Julie is right, Dash,” Daddy said. “Why don’t you and I go for a drive in your
pickup, and the girls can spend some time together here.”
“We have a lot to talk about, Kyle. But it won’t do a lick of good if you don’t
listen more than you talk.”
The two brothers glared at each other. But they were family, and too much alike not
to smash heads together like a couple of rams in springtime. So they both went out and got in Uncle Dash’s
Chevy pickup and drove on into town.
“Headed for Martin’s Bar and Grill,” said Stacey, blowing a
stray hair out of her eyes to show disgust.
Valerie wordlessly snaked her thin young arms around her
beloved cousin and gave her a distressed and tearful squeeze.
“It will all get worked out for the best,” said Mom in her
most comforting voice.
“I hope so,” Stacey said.
Then after a long pause she repeated, “I hope so.”
Some writers make tons of money for sharing their made-up fantasy worlds. Steven King, JK Rowlings, and James Patterson have made it to the limelight where few authors ever stand. Some of us get by on smaller rewards.
Me, I intend to give myself some grins by sending a copy of my book Snow Babies to a girl who was in my class in grade school, and I may have had a huge crush on her at some point in that past. And because of me being a lazy writer, this post consists mostly of the letter I am sending with the book.
Dear Valerie,
Remember me? I have
lived more of my life in Texas now than I did in Iowa, but my heart is still living
in Iowa. The part of me that turns into
fiction books has always been an Iowan.
You are probably wondering why I am sending you a copy of this
book. Well, to be honest, I owe it to
you. You are the person out of everyone
I have ever known that the main character is named after. This is not a best seller and may never make
much money. But this copy represents the
share of this book that I owe to you.
If you are worried that I am writing stories about you, don’t
be. The character of Valerie Clarke is
based on a student that I taught for two school years. She did remind me of you in some minor ways. But the girl in this book is really based on the
story of Sofia’s girlhood as I came to know about it. I would like to tell you a little bit about
her.
Sofie was, just like the character in the book, short a
parent. It was a struggle for her to be
the cheerful, aggressively positive girl that she was. She was in my largest class of seventh
graders when she was 13, a rather rowdy group of mostly Hispanic kids. She loved almost every story we read in
class. She enjoyed every group activity
and task we did in class, often leading the group she was in, and even
sometimes disciplining misbehavior that I hadn’t called the student out for,
simply because she felt they should be appreciating my class more.
By the time she was an eighth grader, she had developed a
large crush on me. The year before I
married my wife, she actually asked me to wait for her to grow up and marry her
instead. It wasn’t the kind of love that
gets a teacher fired and put in prison.
Really, she was looking at me as the father-figure she needed in her
life. Telling you that fact reveals which
character in the story actually most resembles me, if you decide you actually
want to read this book.
The book is a comedy about a blizzard. But like any good comedy, it will try to make you love characters enough that parts of it will make you cry as much it makes you laugh. It is a book I submitted to the 2014 YA Novel contest called the Rosetti Award Competition from Chaunticleer Reviews. It didn’t win, but it was a finalist. So there is some reason to believe it is not a bad book.
Of all the people I feel compelled to share this book with, your name is at the top of the list. Partly because I borrowed your name to write it with. But also, because of the fact that Valerie in the book, and in other books I have written about her, is often known as, “The most beautiful girl ever born in Norwall (Rowan), Iowa.” It was something the boys in the Rowan school said about you in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. I don’t know if I am telling you something you didn’t already know or not, but it explains your connection to this story. And why I felt the need to give you a copy of this book.
Read it if you want.
Share it, if you want. Use it to
put a voodoo curse on me if that’s what you want. But I hope you enjoy it and understand that
you do have some part in the fact that it now exists.
The meeting at the library hadn’t happened on the day
originally planned because Alice Stewart sometimes had to close the library
when things came up. Her daughter,
Alicia, was a single mother raising a child alone, and some days the library
simply had to be closed when the baby developed a mysterious cough and had to
go see a doctor in Belle City. All of
this was explained to Mary, Pidney, and Valerie, and apologized for, by Val’s
Aunt Alice as they arrived at the finally open Norwall library on Main
Street. The library was a thing of some
pride to several Norwall families, the Clarkes and the Stewarts and the Duffys
prominent among them because they had raised the money and remodeled the old
butcher shop and bought all the books.
The place was a literary miracle for the small town, as most towns of
that size did not have anything equivalent to it.
“I swear to you, Valerie,” said Aunt Alice, “I will make it
up to you for having to put you off for a couple of days. I will certainly help you three find whatever
important research you are looking for.”
“I think we are looking for Tiki idols, Auntie,” said
Valerie.
“Show her, Pid,” said Mary.
Pidney sat the backpack on the librarian’s desk and opened
it. He pulled out Valerie’s ugly little
wooden man and sat it down on the desk.
“I know a book that might help,” said Aunt Alice. She went directly to a shelf that contained
the 200’s from the Dewey Decimal system and pulled down a large old book called
Treasury of Maori Folklore by A.W. Reed. It had “Tiki” listed on a number of pages in
the index. So Aunt Alice handed the book
to Pidney who soon found a picture that somewhat resembled the ugly little wooden
man.
“It says on this page that Tiki was the very first man,”
read Pidney. “Apparently he found the
first woman in a pond… somebody called Marikoriko… they became the first
parents of all men.”
“Well, he’s found in most Polynesian cultures as a large
piece of wood carved in the shape of a man.
And, um…” Pidney’s voice trailed
away.
“What, Pid?” asked Mary.
“Well, um…”
“Let me see,” said Valerie.
She grabbed the book out of Pidney’s hands. The picture of a Tiki idol in the book seemed
to wink at her as she tracked down the page to find where Pid was reading. “Oh, here it is…” Val began to giggle almost uncontrollably.
“What?” said Mary.
“Read it aloud.”
“In New Zealand, some Maoris contend that Tiki represents
the penis of Tane, the god of forests and birds. He is strongly associated with the
procreative act.” She read that and then
broke down into a laughing fit. One of
those painfully embarrassing laughing fits that happen when something is entirely
too personal to talk about with the boy you have a crush on and you can’t help
but nervously laugh.
Pidney, red as the ripe tomatoes in Mrs. Clarke’s vegetable
garden, wandered over towards the encyclopedias and began looking at the volumes
of Collier’s.
“What else does it say?” asked Mary.
“It says that in the Cook Islands, at Rarotonga, Tiki is
credited with being the guardian of Avaiki the Underworld. Magical idols of Tiki can be given
offerings to smooth the way for those who fear they are dying. The idol maker is said to have magical powers
and can in some cases bring the idol to life as a servant by chanting and
touching the painted tattoos on the idol’s body in the correct order.”
“You’re kidding,” Mary said.
“No, really! It says it
right here.” Valerie pointed to the
disputed passage and Mary read it for herself.
“Well, it does say that.
But it doesn’t have any mention of the proper chant to use or anything.”
“This ugly thing does appear to have painted tattoos,” said
Aunt Alice, looking at the idol’s protruding buttocks and arched back. “Swirly patterns with little spots in the
center like bull’s-eyes.”
“What was Captain Dettbarn’s ship called?” Pidney asked.
Mary looked over at the Polack who was thumbing through the
“M” volume of Colliers’ Encyclopedia.
“The Reefer Mary Celeste. Why,
Pid?”
“This encyclopedia says it was a ghost ship.”
“A ghost ship?” gasped Valerie.
“Good heavens!” swore Aunt Alice.
“What does it say?” asked Mary in a skeptical voice.
“It says the Mary Celeste was an American merchant
brigantine that was found sailing near the Azores on December 4th,
1872. No crew was aboard. A lifeboat was missing. And they never found any trace of the
crew. Not the Captain, either. Captain Briggs, his wife, and their infant
daughter, Sofia simply vanished at sea and were never heard from again.”
“Pidney, that was a sailing ship more than a hundred years
ago. That was the Brigantine Mary
Celeste. Not the Reefer Mary Celeste. Captain
Dettbarn’s ship was a modern cargo ship with refrigerated cargo capacity. They are not the same ship.”
“Oh,” Pidney said softly.
He closed the book.
The ladies all got a chuckle at Pidney’s expense. But Valerie noticed that Pidney was still
uneasy about the spooky connection. She
thought it was something that might later prove to be significant after all. At least to Pid.
I am now approaching the end of a manuscript that completes a journey that began forty years ago. The novel is built from my own experiences as a survival of childhood sexual assault. But it is not about sex. It is about communicating when speaking to others. The main character is autistic and unable to speak aloud to others. Because he does not talk, people treat him as a moron, a possessor of vast levels of stupidity. But he is really quite bright.
The narrator of the story is a zebra sock puppet that the main character uses as a ventriloquist’s dummy. Either he is miraculously able to talk when using the zebra puppet, or the puppet is magically alive and independently intelligent.
To further build on the idea of how difficult it can be to communicate, the main character has an adopted little brother who can’t hear because of ear damage from child abuse. He can read lips and use sign language, but his communication abilities are limited to a best friend who knows sign language and can hear and speak normally too. He can write messages, but he doesn’t write or spell well. And when the serial killer moves in and kidnaps the boy’s best friend, the difficulties of communicating with others hits a critical level.
I have, as of this writing, written within a hundred words of 30,000. I have passed the climax, the parts that make me cry and the parts that make me cheer. It will be done before I reach 35,000. If finishing a novel is like giving birth to a child, then the baby is nine tenths delivered already. All that is left is the sweating, the recovering, and the clean-up. Oh, yes, and the baby novel’s first squall and cry.
Canto Fourteen – Log
Book of the Reefer Mary Celeste
Valerie opened the book to the page Mary had indicated with
the red paper book mark.
“That’s the spot where the story seems to begin,” said
Mary. “The part before that ‘s all cargo
manifests and navigational data.”
“Okay,” said Valerie, “Then here goes;” She began to read
aloud.
We were sailing southwest from the
Republic of Palau in Micronesia where we had taken on supplies at the big
island of Koror. It was September of
1979. The seas were calm, although the
first mate was tracking a big storm that could potentially turn in our
way. We were supposed to deliver the
refrigerated meat and vegetables in our hold to Pinoy Proud Food Markets of Manila by the beginning of
October. There were supposed to be
bananas too, but we had made the mistake of putting the bananas in the freezer
and frozen bananas become just the right shade of poo-poo color to make them
unmarketable. So the crew had been eating
a lot of frozen banana pops. Doc
Johnson, whom we call Doc because he knows a lot of useful stuff was worried
that we might inadvertently cause hyperkalemic death among the crew, which
worried me a bit, but since no one else seemed to know what the heck
hyperkalemic meant, we were okay with eating that many frozen bananas, but I
was later led to wonder if, in fact, the whole hyperkalemic death thing might
be the source of hallucinations.
It was a valid worry as it turned
out. Because that September, in the
early morning on Monday, September 10th, Kooky Smith first saw the
mermaid.
“Wow!” said Danny Murphy, “a real mermaid?”
“Well, that’s the debate, isn’t it?” said Mary. “The story starts to get stranger and
stranger. And he even says it might be
because they ate too many frozen bananas.”
“Does it say what the mermaid looked like?” asked Pidney.
Valerie looked carefully at the block of text ahead written
in Captain Dettbarn’s goofy wrong-way-leaning handwritten letters.
“Um, yes, let me read that part.”
Chinooki was a naked woman from the
waist upwards, with comely breasts and long pinkish-white hair. Her skin was a kind of fish-belly-looking
silver and her dark red eyes looked brown most of the time, but glowed like
fire at night.
“Gonga!” said Danny, a word he often used to express both
surprise and admiration at the same moment.
Pidney, however, was blushing a cherry red that covered most
of his crew-cut head and neck.
“Chinooki?” asked Mary, “What kind of name is that?”
“It sounds kinda fishy,” said Valerie. “Like Chinook salmon.”
“Or maybe Chinese,” suggested Danny.
They all turned and looked at Danny.
“What? They call
Chinese people Chinks, right?”
“Polite people don’t,” suggested Mary.
“Read more about what happened,” Pidney asked Valerie.
Kooky said that he saw her the
first time off the starboard rail, swimming with her head and shoulders raised
out of the water. He thought she was
some kind of shipwreck survivor, but when he hailed her to offer help, she
waved at him and smiled, then dove and showed him her fish tail.
Of course, no one believed
him. Sea stories like that get told all
the time, and Kooky liked to drink… sometimes even on duty. We all knew he was quite capable of seeing
things that weren’t real.
But the second time she was spotted,
Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones were also on deck, and when Kooky shouted they
immediately came to the rail and saw her too.
Now, Bob was like Kooky in a lot of ways, so we woulda thought he was
making it up too, or just backing Kooky’s kooky story for yucks and
kippers. But Chuck was well known for
both sobriety and honesty. He was the
man I trusted to keep the ship’s books because I knew he’d never cheat any of
us out of a single penny we were due.
And he’d sooner cut off his own hand than tell a lie.
“We have ta catch her and bring her
aboard,” Kooky said.
“You gonna eat her?” Bob asked.
“Are you daft, man? I don’t want to hurt her,” Kooky said. “She’s beautiful. I want to catch her and keep her.”
“Be wary,” Chuck said. “If she’s not a natural creature, then she’s
some kind of unnatural menace sort of thing.
Bringing her on board this ship might be the last thing we ever do in
this life.”
“Well, I for one, would very much
like to see this real mermaid,” I said.
I would later come to regret those words more than any I had ever said
before in my whole life.
The four young Pirates all looked at each other, and all
four of them shivered at once. Valerie
could certainly read out loud in a way that would scare you out of your under
pants.
A Paffooney used in the act of promoting Snow Babies this week.
This week, April 1st through 5th, I created a promotion in which my novel Snow Babies is available for free in e-book format. This is supposed to put the book out there and make people want to read it. I hope I can learn how to use this promotional thingie better than I have for the first time.
I tried to get people to buy it by putting out ads like this, self-created, that had a link to the purchase page on Amazon.
It looks better on Twitter or Facebook than it does here.
I posted it daily on Facebook, Twitter, here on WordPress, and through individual emails and direct messages. So far this week, I have given away four free copies and sold three paperbacks. The paperbacks were bought by me, two of them to give away to specific people, and one that my sister bought before I could send her one. I also intend to send one as a surprise to the girl from my grade school class that the main character on the cover is named after. I am hoping that she and her daughters and granddaughters will read it and love it rather than burn it.
I made a connection over Twitter with Prince Hamdan Mohammed of Saudi Arabia over it, a surprise to me to say the least, though I have no reason to believe that he even accepted the free copy of my book.
But that’s the sum of my promotional results it seems. I may have earned $5 in royalties this week. I may have bargained for one positive review. I have a Saudi Prince for a pen-pal. And my literary work will probably remain in obscurity until long after I am dead, if it even splashes then.
Mom had a point about Conrad Doble. Every single time Valerie was in the same
room with him, he looked at her with a look that meant… Well, it seemed that way. She made very sure that she was never alone
in the same room with him. She almost
wished some times that Mary Philips wasn’t so accepting and was willing to just
kick the old slime-bucket out of the Norwall Pirates. But he was a link to the old Pirates. Valerie’s cousin Brent had led a group of
Pirates that included Milt Morgan, Andrew Doble, Eddie Campbell, Todd Niland,
and King Leer when he was the littlest pimple-head in the gang. Doble even claimed there were times when the
Cobble Sisters, Sherry and Shelly, were considered Pirates too, but it was
difficult to believe Conrad Doble because he always added random x-rated
details to the stories whenever girls were talked about. But this particular time, when Valerie had
been invited to the Philips’ house to discuss the Pirates, Doble was not even
invited.
In the basement of Mary’s house, Dagwood Philips, her
father, had built a comfortable family room.
It was heated by a Franklin stove that Dag had put in with his own
carpentry skills and ingenuity.
“This is a really nice room,” Valerie said.
“Thanks,” said Mary.
“Pidney’s mother Julianna calls it our make-out room. She says it’s where Pidney and I kiss so much
we give each other kissing disease.”
Valerie was shocked.
“You kiss a lot here?”
“No,” said Pidney.
“My mother is always joking about it.
She says that if I know a girl as pretty and smart as Mary, then why am
I not already proposing? Why am I
always saying that she is just my best friend?
She is my best friend.”
That was a relief to Valerie whose inner little
jealousy-fairy had suddenly been shouting in the back of her mind somewhere
until Pidney had said that one perfect thing.
“Your Mom has a thing about mononucleosis, too,” said Mary.
“That’s true. She had
it when she was a teenager in Poland.
She claimed she got it from kissing a boy too much.”
“Does that kind of joking bother your Dad?” Valerie asked.
“Of course not,” said Pidney. “When Mom tells the story, it was Dad that
gave her the disease. They both had it
at the same time.”
Valerie laughed, even though it was not funny.
Danny Murphy plumped down the big leather-bound album that he
had brought to the meeting. It stirred
up clouds of dust from the second-hand coffee table where he plumped it. It was fat with added pages, being one of
those loose-leaf albums held together by a decorative cord, one you could add
extra pages to.
“What’s that?” asked Valerie.
“That is the Sacred
Big Book of Pirate Secrets,” said Mary.
“I asked Danny to keep it for us until we needed it to look at.”
“What kind of secrets?” asked Pidney.
“The secret kind,” said Danny Murphy. “All of the Pirates wrote down things they
thought were important, wise, or… maybe wicked.”
“Did you read some of it?” Mary asked.
“I did,” said Danny.
“In several places in there, different Pirates wrote that seeing Sherry
Cobble naked was a very good thing.”
Pidney was suddenly blushing furiously. “Sherry Cobble? Isn’t that Brent’s…?”
“His ex-wife,” said Valerie.
“She was a nudist even back then.
I guess they all saw her when…”
“Yeah,” said Mary.
“About that. I got that book from
my brother Branch. Not everything in
there is necessarily put there by the original Pirates. My brother likes to tell funny stories.”
“He wrote down all the Pirate stories, didn’t he?” asked
Danny.
“Yes, he has a very big imagination.”
“Still,” said Danny, “it is written in different
handwritings. And I think Brent Clarke
signed his name to one of the naked-Sherry comments. And there’s a lot of other dumb stuff and
cool stuff in there as well.”
“Anything in there about Tiki idols and talking cats?” asked
Valerie with a laugh.
“Not yet,” answered Danny.
“I think that’s gonna be for us to write.”
“Is Ray coming today?” asked Pidney.
“He said he couldn’t.
It’s just the four of us,” said Mary.
“But we have more than just this silly thing to look at. Here’s the log book we talked about.”
She plumped the leather-bound volume down on the table next
to the Pirate book. It had an anchor
symbol embossed in gold on the front cover.
And the title, Log of the Reefer
Mary Celeste.
“Wowsers!” said Danny.
“Can we read it now?”
“I thought Valerie and I might read parts of it out loud,” said Mary. “There are parts of this that just beg to be read out loud. And Valerie’s Aunt is a librarian after all.”
“Honey, I’m not trying to be mean to you or anything,”
Valerie’s Mom said so that Valerie was clearly meant to understand that she was
about to be very mean, but she wasn’t trying to. “You have to tell us where you are going and
what you are doing… and who you are doing it with.”
“Oh, Mom. I’m not a
baby anymore! You need to trust me.”
“I do trust you. I
just don’t trust everyone you’ve been hanging around with in town.”
“You don’t trust Mary Philips?”
“Oh, I trust Mary fine, I…”
“Is it Pidney you don’t trust? He’s a football hero, you know.”
“Pidney is fine too, I…”
“Ray Zeffer? You
don’t like Ray Zeffer?”
“I’m sure he’s a fine young man, but…”
“Then you don’t like Danny?
He’s practically my best friend.
He ain’t a girl like Jane and Wanda, or my cousin Stacy, but I can
actually talk to Danny!”
“Valerie Elaine Clarke!
You are jumping to conclusions again.
You need to let me talk.”
Mom looked out the kitchen window at the table in the yard
where Daddy Kyle and Uncle Dash were in serious discussion. It was farm talk. But it did seem an awful lot like older
brother, Dash Clarke, was seriously lecturing younger brother, Kyle Clarke, about
something that was seriously upsetting to both men. Was that worry on Mom’s face? Valerie wasn’t sure whether it was worry for
Valerie, or worry for Daddy Kyle. But
she was sure it was worry-wart levels of worrying.
“You do realize,” Mom said, “that Conrad Doble is a lot
older than you are.”
“Yes, Mom, I know.”
“And you know he was in trouble with the law? He was involved in that whole wolf-dog thing
when those attack dogs killed poor old Mrs. White.”
“Yes, I know. But I
don’t even like creepy old King Leer. I
try to stay away from him.”
“He’s a part of that club thing that Mary Philips is stirring
up again.”
“You mean the Pirates?
We are a 4-H Club softball team, Mom.
They want me to play second base.”
“It’s a long time before summer softball comes around. And you don’t understand what it was like
before when those Pirates were making trouble in the 70’s.”
“Mom, Brent was the leader of the Pirates then.”
“Well, yes. And your
cousin is a fine young man now. But the
Pirates tell such weird stories and get into such weird situations.”
“Werewolves and an undead Chinese wizard, huh?”
“Now, you know I don’t believe any of those stories were
true. It’s just that…”
“You know that Torrie Brownfield had that hair disease that
made hair grow all over his body. He was
an awful lot like a werewolf!”
“Okay, but that’s not what I’m trying to say right now. That Doble boy is not trustworthy. He is capable of some very bad things. Maybe even drugs.”
“Believe me, I know, Mom.
But I can take care of myself.
And Pidney and Ray have both told King Leer to leave me alone or they
would beat the snot out of him.”
Valerie’s Mom gave a brief chuckle. “Pidney could do it too,” she said. “Doble would be black and blue all over. I have great respect for Pidney Breslow’s
football muscles. It’s just that…”
“I know. When a girl
reaches a certain age… You know I had
this talk with Daddy too.”
“Yes, well…”
At that moment, Daddy Kyle and Uncle Dash came storming in
to the kitchen, the screen door making a sound almost like a gunshot as it
slammed closed behind Uncle Dash.
“That goddam agent lied to me, Dash!” Kyle shouted. “He promised me more time, and now he doesn’t
even admit what he actually said to me before.
He shook my hand on it!”
“But he’s a government man, Kyle! You should’ve known better than to trust the
goddam FHA like that. They wanted a
chance to foreclose from the very start!”
Mom’s eyes were large and frightened as she looked at Daddy
Kyle for answers, and Valerie was sure her own eyes were also.
“Kyle?” Mom
sputtered, “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, it’s the goddam FHA… er,” Kyle looked at both Mom and
Valerie and appeared to finally register the big scared eyes. “Um, it is something we should discuss
later. Not in front of the Princess.”
Uncle Dash suddenly quieted himself as well. “Yeah, um… we’re not done yet, Kyle. But I promised Dad I would look after all of
it before he died. I am not going to go
back on my word. We’ll find a way. I just wish you hadn’t accepted those last
two loans.”
“It takes money to farm, Dash. You know I didn’t plan on the hail or the
combine breaking down so soon.”
“Hell, I know you didn’t, Kyle. We will find a way.”
Uncle Dash looked grim.
Daddy Kyle looked sad. Valerie
walked up to him and hugged him around the middle. She didn’t know why, but she knew it was a
very important thing to do just then.
And Mom was looking at her and nodding ever so slightly. Not everything Valerie did was wrong.
