The Grim ReaperChapter 10 Romance
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I didn’t stay too late up at the lake, just long enough to satisfy Kelly’s urges. Mine, too, to be honest about it. Regardless, I got home and crawled onto the bed with a groan. I would rest a moment and change out of my clothes.
I woke up with Jack pushing my shoulder. “Come on, bro, you’re going to be late!”
I was as stiff as a board. “Go away!”
He pushed me again. “Get your ass up or Mom’s going to find you still sleeping in your clothes!”
“You’re such a little asshole,” I told him. “Why our parents decided to waste time with you I will never know.” I swatted at the arm pushing me. Just moving my arm hurt.
“Up!”
I rolled upright slowly and swung at him, but he danced out of the way. I muttered a few things and stood up. I wandered off to the bathroom and brushed my teeth and showered. As I headed back to the bedroom to change, I ran across my father in the hallway. “I’ve seen bodies down out Melnick’s that looked more alive than you.” Melnick’s was a large funeral home on the corner of Matucket and Peachtree.
“They probably felt more alive than I do,” I replied.
“You going to live?” he asked, smiling.
“My bumps and bruises have bumps and bruises.”
“Get dressed and get downstairs. We’re leaving in a few minutes.”
Unsympathetic bastard! I groaned and got some clothes on and went down to find my family waiting for me. Jack decided to push his luck. “It’s about time we sent over the professionals. After that lame performance the JV is going to have to show you how to do it right.”
I grabbed him and put him in a headlock and marched his ass out the door. Mom laughed and Dad said, “Don’t hurt him until after the game.”
We went over to East Matucket High but found a change. Coach Halifax had the junior varsity team suit up at home. He had heard how the locker room had been trashed before we got there and decided not to chance it. Meanwhile, I found Earl Ray and he handed me a copy of the Times-Dispatch. Earl Ray had a younger brother on the JV, too, as did several of my teammates. I saw most of the team there, along with our girlfriends, and we all gathered around.
The headline read ‘Underdog Pioneers Slaughter Warriors!’ and there was a big picture of Speed Demon scampering across the goal line. I read a couple of paragraphs, but Earl Ray nudged me and said, “It gets better! Read down at the bottom!” He tapped the page and pointed to a small article beneath the story about the game. ‘ Pioneer Team Nothing But Thugs and Goons Claim Warrior Parents!’
I read the little story and looked up to find Earl Ray and Brax grinning at me. “I’ve never been a goon before,” commented Brax.
Earl Ray laughed, and I went back to reading. It seemed that several of the Warrior’s parents had decided that we must have cheated or something to have managed to beat the mighty Warriors of East Matucket. Their sons were fine and upstanding young lads, and we were nothing but barbarian riffraff. That phrase was quoted, along with a memorable line from Candace Holden, mother of my favorite enemy. ‘ They’re nothing but goons over at that school, thugs and goons!’
I looked up at Brax. “You’re nothing but an assistant goon, like me. Earl Ray is the head goon.”
Earl Ray laughed. “My mother must be so proud right now.”
I nodded. “The thugs must be the offensive line. We’ll have to check with Speed and Russ.”
Brax looked at me. “Do you think she could actually sue us?”
There was a section where Mrs. Holden was demanding an investigation and a lawsuit over our behavior. That had been responded to by the District Attorney, who had also been at the game. ’This was nothing but a good, tough game of football. If the refs didn’t have a problem, I don’t have a problem.’ I shook my head. “No, that’s total bullshit,” I said.
I went back to the main story. A couple of paragraphs detailed the damages. Randy Holden had three broken ribs from when I had put him down, and he was out for the rest of the season. The two linemen that had gotten their bells rung by Moose and Bull were alright, with minor concussions. They had been released and sent home with their parents. The wide receiver Earl Ray had gone through had a broken arm and was out for the season, too. Several other Warriors had sprained ankles and wrists that would limit them for part of the season. The Warriors had started the game as the prohibitive favorite for the region, and maybe the state championship. Now they would be lucky to have a winning season.
The Pioneers had their share of misery and woe. Barry Sanders and Vin Greelo both were listed as sprained ankles and would probably be out for several weeks. Neither were with us at the school, but when we got over to East Matucket, Vin materialized, hobbling around on crutches, a giant smile on his face. We all cheered him and helped him up into the stands. “Hey, am I a thug or am I a goon?” he asked us.
“You’re a goon. The offense was the thugs,” Earl Ray pronounced. Vin was a third-string end and had sprained his ankle taking down the Warrior tight end at the end of the game and stripping the ball from him. That had set up the next play, which resulted in a Speed Demon rushing touchdown.
“Cool!” He turned to his girlfriend, Denise Whitlock, and said, “I’m officially a goon!”
“Trust me, you were a goon before, too,” she said. We all got a good laugh out of that.
I looked over at Kelly, who had found me at East Matucket. “Was I a goon before?”
“You were worse.”
I snorted and we kept busting each other’s chops until the game started. The junior varsity wasn’t quite as dominating as the varsity was, but the JV Pioneers decided to behave like their big brothers and trash the Warriors. It was interesting on a different level, too. The rest of the goons and I were grouped together, and we were looking at our replacements in a year or two. One JV Pioneer of note was named Jack ‘the Ripper’ Reaper. Earl Ray looked at me and said, “Grim, you’d better watch your ass! That boy’s looking to take your job!”
I shook my head. Jack the Ripper was two years younger than me but already looked like he was at least my size and speed and had managed three sacks by halftime. “I think he’s looking for both our jobs.”
“Not my problem. I graduate this year. You’d better step it up, though, or he’ll have your job and you’ll be back on the JV squad!”
“Shit!” was my only reply. Earl Ray was right, too. Jack looked tough out there as a middle linebacker. If he kept playing at this level, he was going to make it to the varsity his sophomore year.
After the game was over, Jack was in trouble again. Marty Halifax gave him a big kiss on the sideline, and the next thing we all heard was Marty’s dad yelling, “RIPPER! THAT’S A PDA! GIVE ME A LAP!” Jack laughed and gave Marty a second kiss and headed for the goal posts. Now he had a second lap to run. The boy was a glutton for punishment!
Even Coach Summers couldn’t believe Jack was chasing Coach Halifax’s daughter. He was on the sidelines with a few of us, and he looked at me and asked, “Your brother have a death wish or something?”
“Hey, Coach, we told him!” I looked over at the stands where his family was. He had some young daughters in middle school. “You know, it’s going to happen to you, too. You’ve got three girls! What happens when they decide to become cheerleaders and date football players?”
“Shut up, Reaper, or you’ll be doing laps, too!” he groused.
I just laughed and got out of the line of fire.
Monday morning it just got crazier. Our separation of the team into the offensive thugs and the defensive goons got out, and everybody on the team was being called a thug or a goon. At lunch the team got called down to the locker room, where Mrs. Hollister came down and congratulated us and introduced a guy who looked familiar. It turned out to be Brad Dillon, the sportscaster from Channel 9. They wanted to do some interviews with us. A cameraman was there with a fancy camera on his shoulder. That sounded a lot more interesting than the mystery meat in the cafeteria and could probably get us out of a class or two.
It was Dax Vercolo who gave us our name, during the interview. He said we were the ‘Goon Squad’ and we promised to live up to our name. He also told them our motto of eat-’em-alive-and-shit-out-the-bones, but no way was that going to make it onto the air!
Then Brad grabbed me and Earl Ray and asked us what we thought of our new nickname. Earl Ray said, “I love it!”
Brad looked at me. I said, “I think it’s great. My mother was worried I’d never amount to much, but now I can tell her I’m a goon!” Off camera the place was going nuts at that.
There were a few other interviews, notably with Russ and Speed, and then we got sent on our way. Coach warned us not to get our hopes up, and that ninety percent of what we said would be cut. Still, it was pretty cool.
I made sure to get home in time for dinner and to watch the news. Coach was right, in that most things were cut down to tiny pieces. Our new name was given, along with a modified version of our motto. That was cleaned up to become “Eat-’em-alive-and-spit-out-the-bones!” Then he closed with my interview, and my comment about Mom being proud of me. Mom laughed so hard she was crying, and my father and brothers were just rolling on the floor.
That Friday, East Cobb was playing at Matucket. By then the Booster Club had managed to make a breakaway banner with our motto on it. That was modified again, so that it became, “EAT ‘EM ALIVE AND S*IT OUT THE BONES !” I was surprised Mrs. Hollister let them get away with that. In any case, we ran out onto the field through our banner, and then ran through East Cobb like shit through a goose. On Monday, September 10, theTimes-Dispatch called our style of play ‘ violent, brutal, and ruthless.’ For a bunch of testosterone-loaded high school kids, that was just music to our ears!
Things changed the next morning. Things changed for all of us. We were in our first period classes. For me that was English Eleven. At about quarter-of-nine, there seemed to be a lot of commotion coming from the hallway, and most of us were looking at each other. A minute later Mrs. Hollister came over the intercom and announced that an airplane had just crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. Mrs. Dicksley, our teacher just slumped down into her chair and stared, which I thought was weird. A few minutes later, a second announcement came on that the other tower had been hit, and Mrs. Dicksley just collapsed.
Marcy Davenport grabbed Mrs. Dicksley before she fell to the floor, and then she looked around wildly for help. I was in the second row, and I got to her at the same time Lew Freeport got there. Lew was a little shit of a guy, so I picked up Mrs. Dicksley and told him to get the door. He went ahead of me, and we got Mrs. Dicksley down to the nurse’s office, where I found a line ahead of me. Most were kids, almost completely girls, crying and moaning. Mrs. Dicksley was completely out of it, though, so we were able to barge through and lay her out on a cot.
That was when I first saw what was going on. Nurse Toussaint had a small television in her office, and I stared as the images of jetliners hitting the buildings played over and over. Then another plane hit the Pentagon. The world was coming apart around us. I was still there watching at 9:59 when the first tower collapsed. Around me in the room I heard people screaming and crying, and a couple of people retching. Me? I just felt numb all over.
I wandered out of the room and went outside, to just stare up at the sky. What the hell was happening? Were there other planes crashing into stuff? Why would people do such a thing? I just stayed there, sitting on the grass until one of the teachers came around and rounded up all of us who had gone outside. Nobody was paying any attention to the classes. You might be in a classroom, but mostly you were listening to somebody’s radio. All afterschool activities were cancelled, including practice.
I rode the bus home, and I wasn’t the only one who was numb. Some of the kids were still crying and holding each other. By then we knew that some Arab nutjobs were responsible, but not who they were or why they did it. I guess Allah wants everybody to die. I heard that several guys got in a car and drove down to the Matucket County Office Building, where the services had a recruiting station, and tried to enlist. There was already a line ahead of them. Eventually an officer came out and told them that it was appreciated, but it would be best if they came back after they graduated from high school and handed out a few flyers and brochures to them.
President Bush got on television that night and told us all to go about our business. Stopping in terror would be giving into the terrorists, and we couldn’t allow that. Those might not have been his exact words, but that was his meaning. On Wednesday we went back to school. Mrs. Dicksley was out, and I heard from Marcy Davenport that Mrs. Dicksley’s father worked in the World Trade Center, way up high, on one of the top floors. He hadn’t made it out. I just nodded. Kelly said that her father had called from London; he had several friends who hadn’t made it out, either.
We began practicing again, but it was bleak for a couple of days. We only had Wednesday and Thursday to get ready for our next game, and Coach Summers was not pleased with us. We were doing a lot of pushups and laps when he thought we were slacking off. We picked up the pace, but the game that Friday was not a raucous and happy occasion. We won, but the celebration was muted. Too much had happened that week.
Dad told me that it must have been like this with his grandparents listening to the news on the morning of December 7th, 1941, as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “This’ll be as big as that was, history-wise,” he told me.
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I never really passed out, but I wasn’t in a mood to keep talking. The immediate threat was contained, and since I was trapped under a tree and wounded, I wasn’t going to wander around the battlefield. After a few minutes I began to hear sirens, both police and fire department; I wouldn’t be alone for long. I twisted my head to the left but couldn’t see to the end of the driveway out on Lakeside Drive. I did see flashing lights approaching, and the sirens went silent. Moments later I heard a...
Grandpa was right about some of what he had said. I googled ‘medal of honor procedure’ later and it turned out there was a huge process involved in giving the Medal of Honor. Once the recommendation worked its way up from Battalion to Brigade and then to Division, it landed at the Pentagon. At least two boards in the Human Resources Command had to approve it, and then it went before the Chief of Staff, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of...
Thursday morning was an exercise in controlled chaos. I had time to do a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon, which could be a bit of a luxury. I tried to cook a nice family breakfast on weekends but shift work with the MPD meant I frequently missed weekends. At least three of us ate well. Seamus only ate Froot Loops; he was almost three and was still a knucklehead in the Terrible Twos. After breakfast Kelly put Riley and me to work cleaning the house. Seamus, on the other...
Captain Crowley simply congratulated me on making it through SWAT and then told me that I needed to call CBS in New York. He gave me a phone number and told me to let him know what was going on. For my mind, I was basically done with publicity. The Army had mustered me out a second time, so they couldn’t order me back to New York, and if 60 Minutes wanted to do something on the MPD, they had to come to us in any case. The call went smoothly. Now that I was home from the Academy, CBS felt...
Mom went back to work down in the ER the next morning, which I found a blessing. I mean, I loved my mother, but she was driving me completely nuts hanging around the room with me. She still dropped in at lunchtime, but I could handle that. Otherwise, I had her bring in a few books from home that I could read holding up with my left hand. Kelly came over after school on Tuesday. She had worked out an arrangement to take a different bus over to the hospital, and then either Mom would take her...
Friday started out like most other days. We got Riley off to school on the bus, and Kelly loaded Seamus in the Sienna to take to day care at Matucket State. The big difference was that we dug out all the luggage. While she was at class, I packed all my formal stuff in a hanging bag, with the rest in a suitcase. As soon as Kelly and Seamus came home, she grabbed her stuff out of the closet and told me to start packing, while she packed everything for the kids. It became a mad rush, since I...
Friday, February 16, 2001 School had just started again after the winter break. I was hanging out after lunch with some friends near the south stairwell lockers, with Tilly next to me, when Terry Watson muttered, “Holy shit!” as he looked at something behind me. I turned around and didn’t see anything unusual, at least not at first. What I did see looked like a bunch of girls hugging. Then I saw one of the girls turn around and come over towards us. She was slim, about my height, with...
Jack managed to finagle a ride home with a couple of cheerleaders who were juniors. I have no idea if he got anything more from them than a lift home, and I didn’t want to know. One of these days my brother’s love life was going to bite him in the ass. Some girl was going to find him with another girl, and there would be hell to pay. Hopefully she wouldn’t be carrying a weapon when that happened. The Sports Section headline Saturday morning was “UNDERDOG PIONEERS CRUSH WARRIORS!” I had no...
I knew what the citation said; whether I believed it was a different question. It didn’t matter much. I stood there, kept my mouth shut, and looked straight ahead. The President put the ribbon around my neck, and everybody saluted and applauded. He gave me a whispered, ‘At ease.’, and I was able to break position and shake his hand in thanks. That was the end of the official ceremony, and it was time for a meet-and-greet. Mister and Mrs. Obama escorted me down off the stage and over to where...
Police work was vastly different from military life. One of the biggest differences was that the U.S. Army was quite monolithic, in the sense that everybody trained and fought the same way. Every infantryman trained at Fort Benning. Every helicopter crewman trained at Fort Rucker. Every medic trained at Fort Sam Houston. You get the idea. The same could be said at any camp or fort in the country. Everybody did things the same. There’s a reason they called it the ‘big green machine.’ It made...
Saturday, October 24, 2009 My schedule that week was the night shift, Tuesday to Friday, and then I would have off, Saturday to Tuesday. That worked out well, since Saturday was my parents’ anniversary, and both Kelly and I would have the day off. I would be able to sleep late and then we could go over to the house later. Since it was their Silver Anniversary, the plan was for Bobbie Joe, Kelly, and me to take the parental units out to a nice dinner. Jack and Teresa couldn’t be there, of...
That was basically the end of the craziness. From Chicago we flew home for a long weekend. Monday, we flew back to New York, and I went on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which proved interesting. Stewart was on the liberal side of the spectrum, but he always showed a lot of respect to the soldiers even as he crucified the politicians who got us into Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the interview was the standard questions, but at the end he asked me something nobody else had asked. Stewart:...
It looked like almost the entire platoon had arrived, led by Lieutenant Southerland. They rolled up to the front gate, actually driving over various body parts as they did so and stopped. The crashed Apache blocked the way in. The first guys to come inside the compound simply stood there and stared at the carnage, though a couple of guys tossed their cookies. Eventually somebody noticed I was standing there and Southerland and another couple of guys ran over to me. “Sergeant Reaper! Sergeant...
Our first game of the season was at the end of the month, the last Friday of August, the 30th. It was a home game with North Cobb High, from up in Kennesaw. They were from a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, and North Cobb was a big school, certainly bigger than us. That was important in high school football, since the more students you had, the more likely you’ll be able to find better players. I commented on that to Kelly once, and she said something about Gaussian distributions and standard...
Things moved along through the summer. At times it seemed as if for every step we took forward we were taking two steps back. Still, some good things happened. Our new Auto Theft Division made a major arrest mid-June. They grabbed a few cars out of the impound yard and fitted them with GPS trackers and allowed them to be stolen. That generated enough information to get warrants on a pair of ‘chop shops’, garages where stolen cars could be taken and stripped for parts. Lieutenant Dupree of...
October 2007 - December 2007 Mid-October, about when it became obvious that I was going to stick it out and go to the academy, Tim Hungerford showed up at the rickety-bench-with-delusions-of-grandeur that I called my desk. He had a packet of paperwork with him. “Take a break,” he ordered. “You need to look this stuff over.” I looked at him. “Why? What is it?” “It’s the packet from the academy.” “Ah!” I nodded at that. “Let’s take a look. You’ve been through this, right?” Tim nodded....
January 2008 - March 2008 When I went back to work, I let Captain Carson know about meeting the Gorsky family, and that I was sure that a lawsuit was on the way. Both he and Lieutenant Brownell quizzed me on what I had told the Gorskys and I swore six ways from Sunday that I hadn’t said anything that could be construed as an admission of guilt. Their general feeling was that we would be named in the suit, but we could dump any responsibility onto the Sheriff’s office, since they ran the jail...
March to May, 2002 Mom was not at all amused by my thinking. All through dinner, which Kelly and I nuked in the microwave to warm up, she badgered me about why I was joining the Army. I pretty much gave her the same reasons as I gave my girlfriend. Dad mostly just sat there and listened. He insisted that they had to meet Sergeant Donaldson, and that I was not doing anything until after I got out of school. Eventually I could escape, and I took Kelly out and we went over to the mall, to do...
Friday, September 1, 2017 “Gentlemen, I have had it. I hereby resign my position as a member of the human race. There is no possible way I share any genetic material with what I had to put up with today.” So saying, I settled myself onto a barstool in the center of the bar at the Cherokee Grill. Around me my fellow police officers laughed. Mack Waterhouse, the owner of the bar and a former MPD lieutenant, came over and smiled. “Feel free to tell your friendly bartender what your problem is,...
We slept in the next morning, and I informed Kelly that she needed to pass an audition like I had done with her. How was I to know that she wasn’t a demanding wife? What if she was only interested in me for my body, and not my mind? That got me a smart-ass comment from her, “Really? You want to go there? Grim, you need to stick with your body! Your mind ain’t going to cut it!” That earned her a sharp smack on the ass, and I tickled her until she shrieked and begged me to stop. That led to her...