Chapter 12: THE STAY-AT-HOME

“Timothy!”

No doubt about it. His father’s voice can still send chills up and down the teenager’s spine and literally make the young man shiver. Timothy assumes it will take a long time for that reflex action to cease and desist. He’s determined, though, that it will.

“Timothy!”

Timothy stretches to press the volume button on the kitchen television’s remote control.

A lot of the local morning news, now louder, is devoted to the abduction and recovery of Timothy’s classmate Trish Remoth. Her assailant is thought to be a pervert … a madman … a druggie … maybe, even, a cult of druggies … or … when you come right down to it … no one is really sure; not even — it seems — Trish Remoth.

“Timothy!”

The momentary levitation of morning-breakfast PopTart within toaster slot, hot at cooking completion, almost cancelled that last holler from the bedroom across the kitchen, across the living room, and down the hall.

PopTart eaten, glass of milk drunk, Timothy fills a quart jar with tap water and grabs a box of cereal from the countertop.

He goes into his father's bedroom.

“About damned time!” Gyle Ranlin accuses his son from the bed.Timothy avoids his father’s reach and puts the quart of water on a bedside nightstand.

“What’s the problem?” Timothy asks. “The school bus is going to be here any minute.”

“What do you mean, what’s the bloody problem?” Gyle accuses.Timothy steps back, takes a good look at the way his father is locked in by the bed’s metal frame having been bent up and over to secure the man’s shins ever-so tightly to the mattress.

“This will really have to wait until I get back from school,” Timothy says. “In the meantime, here’s something to eat.” He tosses the box of cereal into bed with his father. Some of the box contents spill and look like bugs scattering among the rumpled blankets and sheets.

“Gregory won’t like this,” his father warns.

“Gregory is even older than you are. If he wants to keep in the game being played, he must rely on young people like me. I thought he already made that perfectly clear.”

Timothy leaves his fettered father and catches the school bus.On board, Jack Plenoc takes the seat next to him.

“Suppose you heard about Trish Remoth?” Jack says.

“I wonder if there’s anyone in Flicker who hasn’t.”

“I hear she was raped.”

Jack is a jackass! “I heard she wasn’t.”

At school, Timothy looks for Melissa Remoth. It’s harder to find her than it once was. The new building complex is large. Within the last year, there’s been more than a doubling of the student body.

He expects to find her in a crowd of curiosity seekers asking about her sister. He’s surprised to find her alone at her locker.

“Melissa,” he says. If not exactly on frequent speaking terms, they’ve shared classes together. Frankly, he’s surprised how cute she is. Before, his whole world centered on his father, he didn’t exactly have time to notice girls.

“Timothy,” she says. “Gril, right?”

“Can we talk for a minute?”

She checks her wristwatch.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything more about what happened to my sister than what you’ve already heard on the news.”

“Actually, it’s not your sister I want to talk to you about but a certain girl in blue, with a blue candle.”

Melissa is obviously surprised but not nearly as surprised as Timothy would have expected.
She tilts her head slightly to one side. Her pretty blue eyes narrow as if to get a better look at him.

“Why is it, I wonder,” she says, “that I was led to believe you’d be Native American?”


Copyright 2009 W. MALTESE

Chapter 9: LONG DISTANCES TRAVELED

Cooper Loor senses that it’s about time he must officially start his day.

Actually his last name is Loo, not Loor. He’s unofficially changed to the latter — with his schools’ (and there have been many) cooperation. His mother’s permission came first, finally followed by his father’s. His mother won his father over after three years of Cooper being non-stop taunted in elementary schools, “Hey, Cooper, English Pooper.” Cooper was always amazed by how quickly school children, world-wide, could pick up on the British word, loo, for toilet, when a good harassing was in the offing.

Originally, Madison Loo argued that all of the schoolyard bullying would merely help his son build character. Madison felt himself a better man for his early-on having had the gumption and fortitude to carry on. He wore Loo proudly on the nameplates of his crisp military uniform, his desk, and his door. As a colonel in the United States Air Force, he never heard the derogatory chants that were still performed, only now too far behind his back for him to notice.

In time, because Madison loved his wife and his son, the latter a pretty poor specimen at the time the name change was proposed, he had decided what was asked would temporarily be okay.

Even though Cooper, by now a teenager blossomed into a stellar example of physical fitness and a powerhouse to be reckoned within high-school sports, still keeps the “r” on the end of his last name. His reasoning is that it’s become a preventative from his having to beat the crap out of any of his wise-ass fellow schoolmates; most of whom he rightly figures he can, by this point, dominate in any fair bout of fisticuffs.

Cooper’s muscular right arm stretches from beneath his bed’s comforter. His large easily-can-palm-a-basketball right hand softly slaps the alarm button before the wail of the time-to-get-up siren can interrupt the dimness and stillness of the morning air.

He gets up, showers, dresses, and heads downstairs to the kitchen. Along the way, he passes his parents’ room. His mother sleeps — alone — in a big king-sized bed.

Just because Cooper’s father called last night to say that “circumstances” would keep him at the Air Force base’s officer barracks for the night, doesn’t mean that this latest stationing will see him renege on his promise that he’ll be spending more time with his wife and son. It will take him time to settle in as the official Air Force liaison between Fort Rockpoint and the expanding town of Flicker. There is a lot for him to catch up on.

Relationship between base and town isn’t as good as it was when Flicker was merely a wide spot in the road, and the adjoining Fort Rockpoint was pretty much otherwise isolated within a wide stretch of central Washington State wilderness. Since an extensive underground water system has been discovered, two new housing projects are nearly completed and two more are on the drawing boards. Even a Walmart is insinuated to be in Flicker’s future.

Whatever it is that originally prompted the government to build its air-force base smack-dab in the middle of once-desolate scrublands, and Cooper doesn’t have a clue, it obviously makes his father (and Lt. Col. Loo’s military superiors) nervous to have the immediately adjoining area suddenly filling with civilians.

All of that, though, is his father’s problem to work out. Cooper’s main concern for the moment is getting himself breakfast. The rest of the day he’ll spend trying to fit into yet another school that already has its own groups and cliques and social clubs established well before his arrival. Luckily, he’s grown expertise at fitting in.

Turning toward the refrigerator, Cooper has a good view through one kitchen window to the bleak vista that’s drying (despite suddenly lots of available water) front lawn punctuated by vast expanse of wasteland extending to the horizon.

This time, though, he’s brought up short by the unbelievable sight of an apparently unconscious and disheveled Trish Remoth sprawled unceremoniously in the immediate foreground.

Copyright 2009 W. MALTESE