Patchwork People Chapter II The Good Man Hard to Find
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Patchwork People XX: Glass Houses free porn video
XX. Glass houses.
To the sadly uninitiated, a bicycle is simply a convenient means of
transportation, low-tech, eco-friendly, inexpensive, ultra-democratic.
For the fitness conscious, it's a superior form of practical exercise:
you could get your aerobic workout and run errands at the same time. For
others, the bicycle endures as the conveyance of childhood
memories--tricycle, Big Wheels, training wheels, scraped knees and paper
routes. However to someone like Walt, a bicycle was all these things and
so much more. It was magical, mythological, it was Zen on two wheels.
For one thing, there was the beautiful simplicity of the machine itself.
Since it's invention, there had been refinements and novelties, but the
basic design and the guiding principle of a bicycle's operation had
remained all but unchanged. In a rare case of mechanical serendipity, the
bicycle had been conceived perfectly from the start. Little could be done
to improve upon it. That was because the "magic" of a bicycle was
dependent on the special, irreducible intimacy between man and machine
that was virtually unique to cycling. They were two halves of a whole.
The cyclist was a modern version of a mythological hybrid, a kind of
centaur on tires.
These were the kinds of things that Walt could explain if he had half a
mind to do so. He preferred to spend his time riding.
This morning he was taking the tandem out for an early morning test ride.
He'd gotten the bicycle operational, replacing the flywheel, rear
handlebar, and frayed cables. He'd mounted new, fatter tires for a
smoother ride. He'd changed the severely worn brake pads, both front and
rear. But there was still a lot of fine tuning to do before the tandem
was ready for prime time and that was just mechanically. Cosmetically, he
hadn't even begun to map out a plan to touch up all the scratches, nicks,
and dings the bike had endured. The tandem had spent a long time
neglected at the back of the garage of its previous grieving owner.
Taking a turn at medium speed, Walt touched the gear shift with his thumb
and pedaled harder, listening carefully to the fall and set of the chain
as the tandem shifted up a notch. He frowned. Some lag and drop, a hard
clink in what should have been a seamless operation. He'd have to work
that out.
Still, all considered, the ride wasn't bad. Walt made a few additional
mental notes and then relaxed his attention to simply enjoy the ride.
You noticed things on a bicycle that you didn't when driving a car. The
peculiar bend of a particular tree sparkling with leaves, a certain queer
slant of light off a pond, a rusted oil drum where stray cats had made a
makeshift home. You were more a part of the world around you. You noticed
things like the grade of a road, the lay of the land. In a car you could
drive through a neighborhood a thousand times and if you were asked you
might off-handedly say the landscape was flat. On a bicycle, however, you
would notice that it wasn't flat at all. You'd feel the strain of every
incline, even the subtlest, in your muscles; every downhill would feel
like a gift, a stretch of grace.
This was the zen of a bicycle. It opened up you up to an experience of
intimacy, sympathy, and gratitude with and for the world around you.
Walt turned another corner and headed down Penhollow Road, a long smooth
decline. He let the tandem cost. Trees whooshed past. Green lawns. White
sidewalks. Cars in driveways. An old man, bending to pick up a newspaper,
looked up, did a double-take at the biker dude on a tandem. The elderly
stranger gave a tentative wave. You didn't see too many tandems. They
generally made people smile. Why was that? Because they were a reminder
of what we all hoped for, perhaps: a partner in crime with whom we could
pedal our way up the hills of life, and with whom we could enjoy the
long, exhilarating reward of the occasional downhill glide. There was
something undeniably sexual about a tandem, too, but in an innocent,
unthreatening, playful sense. Something a little comical, too. Perhaps,
in the end, a tandem bicycle reminded us of the sweet, touching absurdity
of the human condition.
At the corner of Penhollow, Walt made a long looping right turn and
started down the road that would eventually lead to the center of town.
The sun was a little higher by now and he could feel the heat of another
late summer day beginning to build. He could hardly wait for the day when
he would feel Marcia's presence on the seat behind him, the intimate pump
of her legs as they rode together towards the home he imagined them
sharing.
"Hey Walt, you better turn around! I think you must have lost your
partner!"
Walt looked up to see Ed Devlin at the service station, checking the
pumps. He had a big grin on his sunburned face, his baseball cap pushed
back on his red high forehead.
Walt gave him a perfunctory salute and pedaled a little faster, watching
the street he knew so well, the houses and shops shuffling by him like
when you shuffled a deck of cards, watching the suits flash past your
thumbs, a single card standing out every so often in the blur of images.
Walt imagined that the faster he pedaled the closer he got, not only to
the cycle shop, but to the life he'd been imagining for so long it no
longer seemed a dream, but as real, even more real, than the syrupy
scenery flowing on either side of his helmeted head. It had, for so long,
seemed impossible that he would ever be truly happy, but now, suddenly,
the impossible thing was in sight, just ahead.
He had only one last hill to climb--a tough one, but that was how it was
supposed to be. He had to somehow get Marcia to believe in the happy
ending that he saw at the end of the road. In cycling parlance, they
might have called this obstacle Heartbreak Hill, the one that broke even
the most conditioned cyclist. And like every cyclist worth his or her
salt, Walt was damned determined it wasn't going to break him.
It was the sort of summer morning beautiful precisely because it
announces the imminent end of summer. The air was cool, crisp, and
refreshing, a welcome relief after a week of high humidity. Grace had cut
some late-blooming hyacinth from her garden to display in the Blue Cat.
Friday was usually their busiest day in the summer. Busy, of course,
being a relative term. There always seemed to be a few extra window
shoppers strolling Front Street, workers taking long-lunches or leaving
work early to get a start on the summer weekend, visitors passing through
from nearby towns. There was something a little more festive in the
atmosphere on a summer Friday than any other day of the week, a sense of
excited anticipation that was irresistible, even if the weekend never
quite lived up to its imagined promise.
Sunlight on the windows, that's what it looked like at first, random
squiggly patterns, blinding and white, a solar graffiti. Grace hardly
gave any thought at first to what seemed nothing more than a transitory,
optical illusion. Until she was standing directly in front of the door,
key in hand, and found herself drawn to reinterpret the scrawl of spray
paint with which someone had used to cover her windows with hatred.
Grace stood stock-still on the sidewalk, the bouquet of hyacinths at her
side, her free hand covering her mouth. She wanted anger, moral
indignation, defiance, and, most of all, courage. These emotions would
all be useful, even necessary, in the days ahead, but what Grace really
wanted right then was for this not to have happened at all.
"Oh no," she whispered, when she took her hand away to reach for the cell
phone she almost never used, buried at the bottom of her handbag. "Oh no,
no, no..."
It was significant that the first and only person she even considered
calling was Walt. Not the police, who would have to be called eventually.
Her fingers were already punching his number and his customarily gruff
"good morning" already in her ear before she'd been quite aware of what
she'd done, who she called, or what she'd planned to say.
"Grace. What's the matter. Is something wrong?"
"Walt, you've got to come down to the Blue Cat as quickly as you can."
"Grace, what's wrong?"
"Please Walt. I can't explain. Just come. Please."
Walt rode up on his bicycle within five minutes. He'd pedaled like the
devil was on his rear tire to get there. Now he stood on the sidewalk
beside Grace looking at the defaced window. He could feel the anger
stirring inside him, the beast he'd never banish entirely, but that he
thought he'd locked away for good. It didn't scare him now but it would
later: to know how willing he might be to use the key to let the beast
within him out.
"Why would someone do this?" Grace asked.
"Stupidity and small-mindedness. Those are the usual suspects."
"Do you think anyone has seen it yet?"
Walt took his gaze away from the violated window to look up and down the
street. It was still early. None of the stores were open yet. The barber
shop would open first, at seven, but that was still a good half-hour off.
Every once in a while a car passed, but the fouled window wouldn't have
attracted undue attention from anyone driving by at this hour. Had anyone
noticed, they would likely have called the police, who would have been on
the scene by now.
"We can't let Marcia see this," Walt said.
"Goodness no."
"Call her. Tell her...I don't know, tell her anything. Just get her to
come in a little later than usual. Until I can get this cleaned up."
"We'll have to call the police in any event."
"No," Walt said instinctively. "I don't want this to get out. I'll handle
it."
Grace caught the tone in Walt's voice. She laid her hand gently on his
tattooed forearm and took it away against instinctively. It was electric
with a bad energy.
"No Walt. That's not the way. Leave it to the police. It's their job."
"I don't want her to know a thing about this."
"I don't think it's possible to keep it from her Walt. She doesn't have
to see it, but she should know about it."
"Why for crissakes?"
"Because you can't hide the world from her. I know you want to protect
her, but you can't shut her away in a tower; it'll never work. And you
can't protect her either if you're in prison again. Let the police do
what they have to do."
"Cops," Walt spat out the word. "You know what I think of cops."
Grace nodded. "Yes. I do and I understand why you feel the way you do.
But we've got to call them. They've got to be aware of the potential
threat. It's important that this is on record."
Walt stood there fuming, looking as if he were debating the issue, but he
knew from the start that Grace was right.
"Okay," he said, grudgingly. "Call them. But call Marcia, first. In the
meantime, I'm going to get some boards to cover these windows until I can
get them scrubbed clean."
He was still angry, but, with a plan in place and work to do, some of
that anger dissipating. Grace felt a measure of relief in that. She would
need Walt's help. She knew that she was taking a chance that she'd light
the fuse to something explosive in him when she called. But there was no
one else who would have had the same instinct as she did to protect
Marcia.
"Thank you Walt. We'll get through this. All three of us. I just know we
will."
Walt laid a big arm over Grace's fragile, bony shoulders. He pulled her
close, his eyes never leaving the hateful message scrawled across the
window.
"Of course we will," he said.
Inside, though, he wasn't so sure.
Marcia insisted on seeing the window when she arrived. Walt had already
put up sheets of plywood and was in the process of scrubbing the glass
clean with various powerful solvents. The police had been there and gone;
they'd filled out a crime report, made the appropriate noises of
sympathy, promised they'd do what they could to find whoever was
responsible.
The mayor was even roused and informed. He offered his assurances as
well. It was, after all, a hate crime and bad for the image of the town.
Perhaps they could resolve the issue to everyone's satisfaction without a
great deal of publicity? That would suit all the parties just fine, Grace
assured him.
The fact that Grace happened to know the chief of police since he was a
little boy in shorts and that she belonged to the same garden club as his
mother was an added assurance of official cooperation. Nonetheless, Walt
was far from entirely satisfied. He'd had to be dissuaded all over again
from pursuing his original plan, which was to do some independent
investigating.
"Independent investigating" being a euphemism for something Grace
shuddered to imagine in practice.
Walt tried to talk Marcia out of seeing the window altogether. Just
ignorant bullshit, he called it. But Marcia insisted.
"I have a right to see what I'm up against here."
He was about to continue his objections, but Grace chimed in, agreeing
with Marcia. She reiterated her earlier argument that, painful as it was,
Marcia had a right to know. Outnumbered, Walt removed one of the plywood
panels to reveal a section of window that he hadn't yet cleaned. He
wasn't happy about it; that you could see by the way he yanked nails out
of the wood. Grace clasped Marcia's hand in support, not knowing how
she'd react.
Marcia stiffened for a moment.
It was a shock to see the vehemence of what was written there. You could
expect it, you could assume it, but to see it was something else again.
It was something visceral, like a kick in the stomach.
"It's just ignorance," Grace said squeezing her hand. "Just childish
stupidity. You can't take someone like that seriously."
But Marcia knew that was wrong. You had to take intolerance seriously,
especially when paired with ignorance. Together, ignorance and
intolerance had a long history of evil. You didn't have to go any further
than the daily paper to read the latest grim headlines that intolerance
and stupidity had made in virtually every corner of the world.
"Whoever did this is just a bigoted coward," Grace suggested. She
squeezed again Marcia's hand, which had gone colder, second by second,
with a chilling certainty. "Don't let this get to you. That's the only
way whoever did this can win at this game."
Whoever did this?
Marcia realized now that from the moment Walt removed the plywood panel
and she saw the hateful words all but spit in white paint across the
glass that she had no doubt who'd written them. It couldn't have been any
plainer if the girl had signed the work herself.
Marcia hurried home.
Phoebe's bedroom door was still shut tight. Behind it, no sound but that
of the television cackling away as usual above the hum of the portable
air conditioner--an aural mosaic that, just out of earshot, made no
sense, but almost seemed to.
Marcia stood at Phoebe's door for a beat, listening, and then knocked
softly.
"Phoebe?" she called.
Nothing.
The air conditioner and television were set too high and too loud. Even
if she were awake, Phoebe might not have heard her knocking. Marcia could
feel the cold seeping out from under the door, winding itself around her
ankles.
"Phoebe," Marcia called louder, knocked louder, too, rapping her knuckles
sharply against the door.
No answer.
She was about to turn away, when she realized the absurdity of allowing
herself to be so easily defeated. This is ridiculous. This is my house,
she told herself. I'm her parent, dammit. I have the right. I love her.
Before she could talk herself out of such a bold move, before the usual
doubts seeped back, Marcia called Phoebe's name one last time and then
announced "I'm coming in!"
Even then, she held back a moment, giving Phoebe
one last opportunity to answer. What would Claire do? What would Walt do?
What would any normal parent do? Bad questions, all three. I'm not Walt
or Claire or even a normal parent. Oh to hell with it, she swore at
herself, turned the knob, and threw open the door.
Invading Phoebe's privacy.
Entering unasked.
"Now look Phoebe," she started, ready to explain, to apologize, and
instead fell silent. She was looking in the general direction of the bed
where she expected to find Phoebe still sleeping under a mound of piled
sheets.
But Phoebe was gone.
Her clothes, her bag, everything--she took all of it and cleared out. She
probably left in the dark hours before dawn after Marcia had finally
dozed off following another largely sleepless night. Marcia was
explaining all this to Walt and Grace after rushing back to the Blue Cat.
The most urgent matter at hand: what to do next. But as they debated the
issue, it soon became clear that none of them knew what do to. Marcia
sensed precious time ticking away.
"We had another fight last night," she said, briefly recounting what
she'd already told Grace on the porch the night before. "I tried to
explain a few things that I thought Phoebe ought to know. I suspected it
might be the wrong thing to do at the time. Now I know it was." She
turned to Grace. "I knew I should have just kept my mouth shut."
Grace laid a sympathetic hand on hers. "You can't blame yourself," she
said, as Marcia might have predicted. She was hardly convinced.
Walt was more practical. "Trying to rewrite what's happened isn't going
to help at this point. What's done is done. You can second-guess yourself
from now to eternity. My bet is that this was going to come to a head
pretty much the same way no matter what you said or didn't say."
"Do we have any idea where she might be heading?" Grace asked. "Back
home, maybe?"
"I could check the bus schedules," Marcia said.
"And I could try to beat her to the next stop on the route," Walt
suggested. "Depending on when she left this morning, she might not have
gotten too far yet."
It was the best idea anyone had come up with so far. But Marcia had no
idea whether Phoebe had decided to return home, had headed back to
school, or had lit out for parts unknown. The police, it was decided
unanimously, would not enter the equation. At least not for now. It was
doubtful they would be of any help at this point, anyway. Phoebe was too
old to warrant priority as a runaway minor, not to mention the fact that
she was only visiting Hope Crossing and she hadn't even been "missing"
for any more than six hours at the most.
At every turn, they seemed to encounter another dead-end.
The brainstorming session continued between Grace and Walt, but Marcia
fell silent. If she heard any of it, she gave no indication. She was
staring sightlessly into the middle-distance, thinking, in spite of what
Walt had said, of all the ways she might have handled the situation
better. She never should have had children in the first place. That would
have nipped the problem in the bud, wouldn't it have? She should have
stood her ground. She should never have caved in to Claire and agreed to
the adoption. Their marriage was falling apart even then and Marcia was
having a nervous breakdown. What an act of desperation, lunacy, really,
adopting a child had been. Marcia had tried to talk Claire out of it, but
Claire, being Claire, had been impossible to stop.
But if it had been an act of lunacy to adopt, hadn't it also been an act
of hope, too? Hope, no matter how desperate. Misguided, yes, but one
might also read in it Claire's last-ditch desperate attempt to save their
collapsing marriage. In that sense, it hadn't been only Marcia's weakness
that caused her to agree in the end to adopt, but her unwillingness to
crush out Claire's hope for them once and for all. As always, she'd
wanted to please Claire, but even more, she hadn't wanted to hurt her.
Yet all Marcia had done was to put off the inevitable and compound the
inevitable hurt.
Each of them doing the worst thing they could under the circumstances
with the best of intentions.
How they had loved each other! Marcia had all but forgotten. Even then,
even at the end, they had loved each other.
And Phoebe, what was she but living proof: their wayward love-child.
* * * * *
Author note: I plan to publish "Patchwork People" in its entirety in
weekly installments here on Fictionmania. In the meantime, the complete
novel is currently available as an Amazon Kindle ebook for $2.99.
For more of my writings, drawings, erotica, and photos please visit my
blog Bad Pussy
sissyforlife(dot)blogspot(dot)com.
Sherry
- 28.12.2022
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