MAMA'S BOY (Part 4 - Conclusion)

ProetryPlace Blog 21                MAMA’S BOY (conclusion)

(parts 1-3 published as blogs 18, 19 & 20)

    Masters Private Contracting: Painting, Building, Landscaping. The sign on his decrepit truck was faded and hard to read, like its owner. Nevertheless, his friendly manner and honest face were assets in convincing strangers to trust him with almost any small job that required a general handyman. His work was competent, and word-of-mouth recommendations secured a steady stream of odd jobs throughout the suburban neighborhoods, as well as occasional impromptu female companionship.

    Because he worked throughout the city and its suburbs, it was not unusual for him to not remember when or why he had been at one particular site or another. Still, his memory had been quirky lately.

    Jim frowned and squinted curiously in his rear view mirror. What’s there? Is something back there? A dull headache crossed his forehead. He relaxed his tight grip on the wheel, seeking to will his inner peace to remain, hoping the headache would not become what he had come to call the bloody, black monster. It could disable him with pain.

    When the monster did come without warning to possess him, he was powerless to resist. He would have tried or done anything—anything for relief. He could not predict

the monster’s coming, always in the truck. He could not defray or delay the crippling, controlling pain. Still more distressing, he could not remember his escape from it. He would have bartered his soul to be rid of it. Perhaps he had.

  Memory was like a heavy black shroud, yielding to his mental probes, deforming but not opening to reveal its contents. He feared stripping back the shroud lest the bloody black monster might lie within. Where are you from? What do you want from me? Fear of the monster enslaved him, fear of the pain that threatened to crush his temples when the monster seized his head, fear of the blood-red veil that blinded his eyes after—after . . . ?

  That is when he begged for release, before the blackness descended where memory could not reach. He could only pray for the blessed lapse into oblivion. Later, he found himself parked in the truck, an awareness of the world around him slowly dawning. He wondered how he had arrived at this strange place. He knew only that the pain was gone and that something was very wrong.

  Now, driving west, the bright sun attacked his eyes. Jim’s thoughts lept back into his childhood: Little League, late afternoon, retreating back, back, back into left field chasing the high fly ball, then the blinding sun in his eyes, the ball falling, not fielded, at his feet.

  “I did try, Mom!”

  “You should have had it, Jimmy.”

  “But . . . the sun . . . .”

  Masters knew the monster was with him now, in the truck. He swerved sharply, setting off a dissonant chorus of automobile horns while he crossed two lanes of traffic, seeking the nearest off-ramp. Just let me find a place to park and rest a little.

    He eased the truck into a corner slot near the exit of an unfamiliar strip mall. His flannel shirt was drenched with sweat. Jim cranked down the truck window and waited, weary, his head resting on the steering wheel. Long shadows of late afternoon softened and faded into the dim light of dusk. He shivered with a cold fear while he raised his eyes and watched the steady flow of vehicles to and from the lot, customers entering and exiting the lighted storefronts.

  The monster touched him now. He’d known it would, of course.

  Masters stepped down from the truck while the ferocious pain took command of his mind and body. He reached behind the seat. No one observed him open the long, slim package. He held the small caliber Winchester bolt-action close to his side returning to the driver’s seat. He mumbled a promise of appeasement. “I’ll do it.”

    He selected a convenient human target in the rifle’s scope and fired. One deadly shot. The target, a young woman in a brightly flowered dress, crumpled to the ground.

    The monster whispered, “Good boy,” and laughed with relief while hot tears fell from his eyes.

The end

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - 0     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

ProetryPlace Blog 20               MAMA’S BOY (part three)

    Nora didn’t bother with a note when she finally left Morris and Jimmy for the pleasure of another man. What could she say, really? For all her dreams of glamour, life with them was just too mundane to bear.

    Neither father nor son spoke of her again after the third day of her absence. Jimmy had pounded and shaken his father, demanding, “Where’s Mama?”

    “Damned if I know or care,” his father replied, not bothering to look at his son.

    Morris Masters was a small man in almost every way. He worked second shift at the factory after graduating from high school and rarely encountered the office staff. He had worked there almost two years when he first met Nora Hembein, the new clerk in accounts and records, when he stopped by the office with a question about his Labor Day overtime pay. She treated him as coldly as yesterday’s gravy, and he determined at once to marry her.

    He confided to Hank, his one good buddy. “I am going to ask Nora out—you know, the looker in the office.”

    Hank laughed at him. “She’s out every night with a different guy. You ain’t got . . . “

    “You’ll see. Bet you a sawbuck.”

    Three weeks later, Hank forked over a ten spot to a grinning Morris Masters and listened to his tale of triumph.

    “I spent half a week’s pay for tickets to see Led Zeppelin, that new rock band. Seemed like she was about to laugh in my face until I showed her the tickets—front row, center!”

    After the concert, still aglow with images of Jimmy Page in her mind and numbed by the swigs of Southern Comfort Morris kept pushing on her from a silver flask, Nora had capitulated to his back seat advances. What the hell, why not. Give the poor sucker a break.”

    The next day Mory applied for and was granted first shift work in the shop. He needed to see his conquest regularly. He gave up his lunch break to visit her in the office break-room. He brought her flowers, sweets and small gifts. She accepted these with pleasure and satisfaction although reluctantly, not wanting the others to recognize any special relationship between them.

    Nora never accepted his pleas for a second date.  Then one day she whispered in his ear, “I’m pregnant.”

    Morris and Nora were married on a cold and dark December afternoon. Mory was as proud and as tall as he had ever been. Nora, detached and dreamy, was pulled, surprised, from her reverie by the JP asking, “Will you, Nora, take this man . . . ?”

    She had been thinking: Jimmy. We’ll call the baby Jimmy. And he will have long hair and play guitar Yes, Jimmy.

    When Nora left Jimmy and Mory ten years later to fend for themselves, Mory seemed to shrink even smaller than his paunchy five foot five and one half inches. He had started drinking seriously years earlier in the sham marriage. He managed to keep his factory job another year after Nora left, then handouts and unemployment checks provided meager subsistence—enough for a daily fifth of rot-gut and little else.

    “Dad. Dad! Wake up for chrissake. You puked on your shirt. Clean up. Go to bed.”

    Young Jim became the parent of his father. He dropped out of school. He took odd jobs with any tradesman who needed an extra pair of unskilled, low-paid hands. And one day, not long after he turned 16, he discovered his father and the few dollars he had socked away in his bureau drawer were gone.

To be concluded

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - 0     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

Mama's Boy - Part 2

ProetryPlace Blog 19             

    MAMA’S BOY (End of Part One)

    His smile and inner tranquility were gone—pushed suddenly and brutally aside.

MAMA’S BOY (part two)

  Masters was unmarried and unattached, a loner since childhood. On his tenth birthday his mother walked out on him and his father. His father followed suit six years later, and Jim had not heard of them or from them since. The Marines had taught him how to fight and kill until they found he had lied about his age and drummed him out. The rare people in his life now didn’t get close to him. Men ignored him or disdained him. The women, prostitutes or desperate one-nighters, never saw him twice.

    As a young student, Jimmy Masters fought frustration and endured the ridicule of classmates. His bright, intuitive child’s mind was not a match for the “book learning” his teachers demanded. No rescuer appeared to share his lonely battle.

    Jimmy held the schoolbook out towards his mother and pleaded, “Mom, I don’t get this.”

    “Read the book again, Jimmy. It’ll come to you.”

    “No Mom, I really don’t get it!”

    “Damn it, Jim! Would you stop! Don’t you see I am busy with my hair and nails?”

    Nora Masters watched her small son shuffle from the room. She knew he would not cry and almost laughed with relief when she heard the book slam against the wall and thud to the floor. For a moment before she turned back to the vanity mirror, she felt a twinge of regret. Little shit. He’ll get over it. He’ll be fine, she reassured herself.

    She watched the woman in the mirror brush her shoulder-length auburn hair and expertly apply eye shadow and bright red lipstick. Satisfied at last, she rose and quickly turned to her closet to select which dress she would wear for her date tonight.  

    Can’t still be here when Mory gets home, she thought.

    Jimmy sat at the kitchen table, staring at the book page until it blurred and finally went blank. He watched his mother brush into the room. He pretended to read until she nudged

his shoulder and handed him a scribbled note. Heat up the tuna casserole in the fridge for supper when your father comes home. I will be out late.

    “Now you’ve got my note, Jimmy. No excuse to forget.”

    Even before the note, her brightly flowered dress and painted face had told him that she would be leaving, leaving him alone again. He rose to embrace her. “Please, Mama, don’t go,” he whispered, knowing even then she would not change her mind and stay.

    Nora Masters pushed her son away. “Jimmy, don’t. You’ll mess me up with your huggin’ and kissin’. Now do your homework.” She hurried to the door and left without a backward glance.

    Alone, Jimmy pulled the dish of leftovers from the refrigerator and spilled its contents on the kitchen floor. He dropped his mother’s note onto the mess and mashed it with his foot. He left a trail of tuna footprints leading to his bedroom. By the time his father returned, drunk or sober, he hoped to be asleep. Only in sleep would the pain leave him.

    “Fuck you,” he said, “fuck you,” and punched the pillow while hot tears fell from his eyes. “Fuck you. Fuck you!”

    To be continued.

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - 0     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

Mama's Boy

ProetryPlace Blog 18

    With the change of seasons upon us, the gradual transmutation from summer’s green to the dappled hues of autumn, ProetryPlace will undergo a temporary transition into the fiction genre, call it transition fiction. This is the first fiction I have featured here, except for my very short “Hope’s Legacy” included in Blog 15 several weeks ago.

    Mama’s Boy will appear as a four-part series. The first line of the story is “Jim Masters felt good, really good.” The last line is “The monster . . . laughed with relief as hot tears fell from his eyes.”

MAMA’S BOY (part one)

    Jim Masters felt good, really good.

    “Hey, Rug Rats!” He grinned and waved through the cracked windshield of his aged and rusted pickup. Two little faces laughed and smiled at him from the rear window of a school bus. Children were not offended by the irregular stained teeth that filled his broad smile. They didn’t find anything menacing about him.

  Children liked Jim instinctively. They often smiled at him in passing, even instigated small conversations. Not so with adults. Although his deeply lined face appeared open and cheerful to a casual glance, up close and friendly he triggered a sense of coldness, even menace. Maybe it was the eyes, shaded under the frayed bill of his sweat-stained baseball cap. Maybe they found the pain they saw deep within too much to tolerate.

  The bus turned off, but Jim continued, smiling, flooded with a sense of relief and imbued with a peaceful solitude. He drove with no real destination in mind, somewhere in the suburbs of the city. He had not been aware of his exact location until the approaching intersection stirred some vague recognition—an Eastern Collateral Bank, a Sammy’s Pizza, a small strip mall and the red, white and blue badges warning that the interstate was near.

  Feeling a sudden compulsion to escape the scene, he jammed the wheel to the right, swerved in time to avoid the black sedan next to him and hit the on-ramp doing 50. His smile and his inner tranquility were gone—pushed suddenly and brutally aside.

To be continued

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - 0     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

ProetryPlaceBlog 17

A Conversation with Hank the Hungry Hummingbird

    I have been trying unsuccessfully to get a decent photo of hummingbirds at our feeders all summer. They flutter, fight and fly, amusing us with their avian acrobatics, but they do not pose. Resting only microseconds to feed, they remain otherwise in constant, blurred motion.

     I can show you photos of goldfinch, cardinals, doves, nuthatches, chickadees, etcetera and etc., even pigeons, crows and hawks , swans, cormorants, herons and brightly feathered parrots, but hummingbirds are supremely elusive  and camera shy. I have even kept my camera on the kitchen table, so I could grab a quick shot of them just outside the bay window—to no avail.

    It seems the darling little devils have a sixth or seventh sense when it comes to cameras. Not only do they refuse to pose, but invariably speed away before I am able to get the camera to my eye. Put the lens cap on again and there they are, dancing their erratic, elusive maneuvers, teasing and tempting me to try another blurry shot while they pause to probe for nectar at the feeder with their slender beaks.

    Last night just before dusk, I went out on the deck to fill the feeder suspended there on the rail. Even before I had the flowery base unscrewed from the reservoir, this brazen little green fellow showed up, hovering just inches in front of my face. I almost dropped the feeder. I expected he was just as startled as I and would immediately fly away. He did not.

    I was not quite sure of the proper form of address for hummingbirds, although I thought small talk would be appropriate. I said, “Hey, Mr. Brazen, how ya doin’?”

    No answer.

    I rested the empty base on the railing, and he darted over and poked his long, pointed yellow beak in to catch a snack before bedtime. No luck. Surely he will leave now, I thought, disappointed or disgusted. He did not.

    As I poured sugar-water into the reservoir he bobbed up, down and around my hands trying to get a sample or maybe just closely supervise the operation. Several times he came up directly in front of my nose and looked at me as if to say, “Hurry up, Mac, don’t you see I’m starving?” or “Hey man, mine’s longer than yours.”

    I said, “Mr. Brazen, you are one brave or famished hummingbird.”

    He moved an inch or two horizontally to the left and answered, “Whrrr,” with his invisible wings.

    I said, “Mind if I call you Hank, Mr. Brazen—you know H. B. for humming-bird?”

    Hank dropped an inch and whispered, “Whrrr.”

    My hands were occupied, so I could not extend one to him to see if he might light for a moment on my open palm or maybe shake a wing.  I completed the filling, totally enthralled by this little miracle of nature that chose to confront me, eyeball to eyeball. We continued our conversation.

    I asked, “Where are you snowbirds planning to spend the winter?”

    He backed off a foot or so, in an apparent huff, and retorted, “Whrr! (up), whrr! (down), whrrrr! (forwards), which I took to mean, “Less talk and more action, PLEASE!”

    I quickly reassembled the feeder, reached up high to suspend it from the support and stepped back to observe Hank’s next move.  Of course, I did not have a camera to even contemplate capturing the moment, but it did not matter. Hank had retired for the night.

    This may be the last time I have to fill the feeders this season. All the birds seem especially voracious at this time, socking in some extra nourishment to sustain their migrations and possible sparse winters.

    The hummingbirds will be among the first to leave. After we have missed their antics outside our window for a couple of weeks, I will empty and clean the feeders for storage where they will remain, out of sight and out of mind until next spring. Not so for Hank.

    Hank Brazen will not store a moment’s recollection of our brief encounter in his hummingbird brain as his miniature wings carry him southward, mile after mile, but I will remember Hank the hungry hummingbird throughout all the winters of my life.  

    Bon Voyage, Hank. I wish you all the best on your journey.

Richard Allen Anderson     < ; - )     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com