Five Beats Four (4)

“Hey freak what’s with the hand prints”?

“You wouldn’t understand, you ignorant lush. Get your beer and please get out. I have work to do”.

L.C. stooped down sticking his head into the refrigerator and spoke. His voice muffled by distance and the carrot he had stuck in his mouth.

“Oh yeah that’s right, your work”. Kerry could detect the mocking tone, in spite of his full mouth. Kerry brought his hand to his fore head and massaged patience into his brain.  The frige door slammed shut with the clanging of glass condiment bottles in protest.

L.C. had finished off the carrot like a mule consuming its prodding snack dangling in front of its face. He took the bottle of Spaten beer and laid the cap against the counter. With a quick slap he popped the bottle top off, leaving a slight gouge in the counter top. The cap fell to the floor with a hollow metallic ping sound. He tipped his head back and drank deeply from the German beer.

From Kerry’s post at the front door he could see clearly L.C.’s Adam’s apple bounce as he drank. He watched L.C. as he began to walk back into the living room still drinking. The whites of L.C.’s eyes looked to floor in straining quick glances, making sure to traverse the room without spilling a precious drop. He finished the bottle off and set the beer on the coffee table, without using a coaster. He knew this game well. He loved to get under Kerry’s skin with untidiness. He sat down on the couch and let out a loud burp. Smacking his lips L.C. looked to watch Kerry squirm. Before L.C. could react Kerry had closed the distance from the front door to the couch quickly and silently. Kerry grabbed L.C.’s arm and yanked. “Get up shit bag”.  L.C. arose enough to get his teeth on Kerry’s hand and bit hard enough to make him let go. As Kerry pulled his hand back L.C. quickly kicked at Kerry’s gut. Kerry deflected the foot with his fore arm and threw a straight right hand jab into L.C.’s nose. L.C. let out a cry that sounded like a cat being thrown into a wall.

Cupping his nose with both hands L.C. whined “you shit head, what’d you do that for”? The way he said “for” came out sounding like “furrrr”.

Kerry pulled L.C. off the couch by his leg, slamming L.C.’s ass on to the hard wood floor.

Talking as he was being dragged across the floor his muffled complaints made Kerry smile in satisfaction.

“I’m going to tell your brother”.

“Go ahead; if he has a problem with it I’ll kick his ass too”!

Kerry dragged L.C. out on to the front porch. On his way inside he stepped on L.C.’s supple beer gut. As the door closed behind Kerry heard the sad threats of how L.C. was going to get his second round in, he was going tell his brother everything.  

Five Beats Four (3)

The smoky glass was blotted out with the outline of a scraggly figure standing in front of the eastern sunrise light. Kerry felt his eyes getting dry, realizing that he hadn’t closed his eyes in the seconds he had been staring at the outline. He quickly closed them and forced them open again thinking that the outline would be gone. A voice from the other side of the door, the voice was nasal and sarcastic “Hey tard open the door”. It was L.C.; L.C. was an anagram for Lance Coummer. L.C. thought it made him sound more tough and manly. Kerry pressed his teeth together and made his left jaw bone pop. “Hurry up Kerry; If you like I’ll count for ya.” L.C. started to count in his best mexicano impression. “Uno, dos, tress” Kerry interrupted him with his real counting and taping on the door handle, loudly. At the end L.C. sang an operatic “ALIVVVE”. Kerry opened the door and L.C. pushed passed him, with his hands made into finger guns. Kerry could smell L.C.’s lanky twenty something scruff stank of body odor.

“L.C. isn’t it a little early for your bum ass to be up”?

L.C. was shuffling his oversized flip flops across the living room floor, making a bee line for the refrigerator. He stopped at the frig with his dirty nail bitten hand on the handle.   

“Very good Mr. Homo” L.C. interrupted himself “do you get the reference of Sherlock”?

“Now I do”.

Opening the refrigerator door, he bent over to survey the land of cold condiments and left over’s.

“Yeah my mom woke me up to go job hunting, I told her I needed to come over here because she didn’t get me the beer I asked for on the grocery list”. L.C. stood up to lean on the containers door and looked at Kerry across the room. Kerry was still standing with the front door open. He didn’t want to close the front door; he knew it would bring mockery from his loser neighbor.

L.C., leaning on the frig door pointed at Kerry with a carrot stick. “Your little bro gets the good top shelf brew”.  L.C. looked around the kitchen and saw the windows and sliding glass door all had smeared hand prints on the window panes. “Hey freak, what with the hand prints”?           

  

                       

Five Beats Four (PART 2)

Zac walked to the front door and stopped with his hand on the door handle. He could hear Kerry in the office clicking away on the keys as he worked. Zac’s mouth opened to say “bye you crazy shit house rat, have a nice day”. His lips couldn’t form the negative words he felt for his sick brother. A sigh escaped instead.

In the office the keys on the board silenced from work. “Be careful Zac”. Kerry’s voice was solemn but purposeful coming from the office. At the door Zac turned the knob of the door and pulled it open, replying “yeah you bet, don’t forget Sara is coming over tonight”. As Zac pushed the door back in to it’s thresh hold he could hear Kerry’s reply “the house will be ready”.

Walking to his car Zac kicked the front tire of his little Honda accord and forced words through his clenched teeth “why can’t he just be a little bit normal”? He grabbed for the keys that were hanging from his pocket when he quickly shoved the little jagged slivers of metal into their place in his room. He pressed the button on his car key to unlock his car and heard the locks pop out of their security. He opened the driver’s side door and stood waiting for the taping sounds on the door. Within seconds he could hear a metallic beating and counted softly to himself in sync with his brother behind the closed door. Zac in the drive way at his vehicle and Kerry behind the front door both said to no one “five, still alive”.

Inside Kerry lay his right ear against the door, listening to his little brother’s engine grow faint in the morning air.  Sliding both his hands on the door frame, Kerry pushed himself away from the locked entrance. He turned to go back to his office just ten simple steps to his work at home computer desk top. He stopped mid step as he heard sloppy scuffling steps outside on the driveway. They were growing closer as the sound seemed to be on the front porch. The smoky glass was blotted out with the outline of a scraggly figure standing in front of the eastern sunrises light.

Kerry & Zac

I hate to end this section this way but I want to keep them short and easy to read. I just ask for your trust. Thank you, Courtney and Jess. Jess, I don’t think you have ever sounded lame. Thanks for the support!      

Pictures are not mine. The Photo of the little boy with the bloody nose id from Sally Mann's Immediate Family.                  

  

                       

Five beats four.

I figured I would start a short story series. So heres the start a new story of mine. 

Somewhere in the house an alarm was beeping. Zac rolled over in his bed fumbling for his alarm clock. Finding his clock radio he read the digital screen 5:00 a.m. It wasn’t his clock that was sounding; it was coming from down the hall. Zac crawled out of his bed; his thin short frame shivered against the early morning coolness and rubbed his feet into the carpet. Sitting on the edge of his disheveled bed he ran his fingers through his short cropped hair and scratched his unkempt beard. Sighing he lifted himself off the bed pulling his boxers out of the crack of his ass. Walking to his bed room door he opened the door slowly and was meet with more sounding from the alarm.

Stumbling down the hall the sound grew. He came to the bedroom door of his older brothers room Kerry. Leaning against the door jamb he stuck his head into the room.”Kerry what the hell man, turn that fuc..” Zac didn’t finish his sentence, squinting through sleepy eyes he could see his brother’s bed was still made. At the side of the made bed he saw the alarm clock blinking to the rhythm of the sound escaping out of the clock’s speaker. Zac walked into the room mumbling curses for his brother’s absentmindedness. He walked to the bed and let himself fall belly first on to well made beds comforter top. Raising his hand high, he brought it down with a firm fist and shut off the squawking box.

Lying on the bed he heard a thump back down the hall coming from his room. He pushed himself off the bed, bringing with him the comforter. He wrapped the comforter around his frame and made the seemingly long cold morning walk back to his room.

At his closet door he could hear snoring on the other side. He reached to open the door but his hand stopped in mid air. Zac took several steps back, taking a deep breath he yelled “KERRY”! From inside the closet came the sounds of bumping and hard rustling. Zac slid the closet door open and out fell his older brother Kerry in a heap. “What the hell are you doing in my closet Kerry”?

Kerry rolled over on his back and looked into the eyes of his little bro with embarrassed concern. “I told you Zac, I have to watch over you. You’re my little bro. I have to keep you safe”. Kerry moved to set himself up, when he felt Zach’s foot kick him back to the floor. At that moment the kick knocked something out Kerry’s hands. It slid across the floor, near the foot of Zac’s bed. Zac walked over and picked up the object. It was a silver pie server from their mom’s china cabinet. The edges had been severely sharpened. “Dam Kerry! What did you do to mom’s pie cutter”?

Getting up from the floor Kerry stood taller than his young brother, at least six inches taller.

“I told you Zach I have to protect you; I can’t defend you if I don’t have a weapon”.

"From what? Your crazy"!

"I told you Zachery, I dont know what it is. But I know something is coming"!

"Get the hell out of my room, I have to get ready for work".  At Zac's bed side his alarm shrieks. Kerry turns to leave the room, only to stop with his hand on the wall light switch. Kerry flips the togle switch off and on counting out loud "1,2,3,4,5 still alive". 

******************************************I'm trying to keep these short as I know we all have other things to do.

More to come next week I hope i have caught your interst. Thank you for your time.     

                       

The Owl and the Offering.

I want to talk about being out in nature. Being surrounded by nothing but trees and one’s own thoughts; the forest during the day offers great colors and conversations of chirping birds and loud squirrels. Walking down a path that has been treaded by man and animal, over the months of use it’s easy to find your way. The forest at night is entirely a different story. The same path you were walking during the day takes on an eerie feeling at night. The birds are sleeping and the squirrels are snuggled tight in the crooks and elbows of great trees. The forest’s only sounds are that of sporadic rustles in the leaves and possible snapping of twigs under foot with the occasional hoot of an owl.         

The first time I went deer hunting I was with my great Grandpa, who was nearly a full blooded Indian. Not the one with the dot, but the one with the feathers. At four in the morning he and I walked into the woods with our rifles. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my pimpled face, I didn’t need to. Gramps knew those woods like the back of his hand. As we approached our trail to enter the wall of oak and walnut trees, he told me to hold on a sec. I took a knee and acted brave in the cold November morning air. He pulled from his pocket an old Crown Royal cloth bag, all purple and gold lining. The purple looked dam near black in the early hours of morning. He handed the bag to me and told me to pick a branch and to hang the bag from it. I asked him “why”? He talked about the spirit of the owl and how it’s job, in his belief, is to take the spirit of the deer if we kill one to the other side. In the cloth bag was tobacco, a payment/ offering to the owl. The tobacco was vanilla scented, still to this day when I smell someone smoking a vanilla cigarette, pipe, or dog rocket (cigar) I think about that morning. I picked a branch and tied the little tobacco bag tightly to it. I reached into my pocket for a stick of gum and stripped the gum of its silver wrapper paper and put in my mouth. The silvery paper fell to the ground as I tried to catch up with Gramps.  Gramps walked ahead of me in the night air, he was so quite in the woods. It was as if he was floating above the dead leaves, he was so damn quiet. I couldn’t afford to lose him in the dark wood.  

We came to the top of a ridge, the only way I knew it was a ridge in the dark, my foot steps on crunching leaves were echoing off the other side of the small valley. I was very happy he was there or I would have fallen off.  We came to a small bluff that sat at the top of the clearing. On the bluff was a green and white moss that felt like an old quilt. We lay down just as the sun began to rise out of the east. The bottom of the valley faced east and we lay on the north ridge on top. Gramps had a feeling the deer were using the valley for cover. He was right like most of the time on the topic of hunting. Three deer came running from the west in a hurry; they didn’t even stop to smell the air.

I started to lift my rifle and Gramps quietly touched my arm. I let the rifle settle back to the moss covered rock. It seemed liked hours past when a six point buck came galloping in to the valley. It stopped directly in front of us and began to sniff the ground. I looked to Gramps and he winked. I lifted my rifle and sited the cross hairs of my scope on the front shoulder just behind the shoulder bone and squeezed the trigger.

We climbed down the sloped bluffs ground and hiked to where the buck laid lifeless. Above us an owl screeched and landed on a branch of a dead sycamore. Gramps looked up towards the owl and nodded his brown leathery face and spoke words I didn’t understand.

We worked together dragging my trophy deer out of the woods, getting up the bluff was the hardest. After, it was easy going, it looked as though we were on the same path we took to get to the moss covered bluff, but I wasn’t sure. We came out of the clearing of trees and Gramps told me to wait at the base of a walnut tree, so he could go and get the truck we had parked on the other side of a hill, “there was no sense in us working harder than what we had to” he said..

As he disappeared over the top of the hill I began to walk the tree line looking for the purple Crown Royal bag filled with the tobacco offering.  I never found the bag, the one thing I did find was the silver wrapping paper of my gum.

Still to this day when I go hunting I bring a Crown Royal bag filled with vanilla smoking tobacco stuffed inside and tie it to a tree branch for the Owl.