I created this site initially as a blog to share some flash fiction, but with the release of my short story series and the corresponding Chapter One blog where I share other people’s defining moments or “chapter one,” the site has taken on a life of its own!
So enjoy reading the contributing author bios (you’ll find them to the right under “Categories Schmategories”) and my flash fiction too, of course! And check out Chapter One if you have 1.49 USD and an hour to spare (it’s a quick read and only two short stories so far. It will be updated as new stories are published).
And yes, my own story is contained in the stories in these posts – in bits and pieces. I’ll never tell you when something is truly about me, but you can form your own impressions based on your guesses. Isn’t that how the world works anyway?
Please reach out with any questions or feel free to leave a comment. And thanks for reading!
Hi again, Mary – - Thanks so much for you enthusiasm for my work. I’m sending you a Chapter Two, for two of them, this one for A Reason to Tremble…another will follow.
Thanks again,
Bob
CHAPTER 2
ANGUISH
Jason shivered again. Could Emily really be dying? No, he thought, no! But he could tell the damage had been serious; if she lived, she’d probably never be the same again. She wasn’t even his child, but she might as well have been. She’d been the centerpiece of his life these past ten years.
Dizziness overwhelmed him, the shock of the accident now fully on him. He staggered to the power pole, caught it with both hands, hugged it as he slid slowly downward. He barely felt the pole’s splinters as they jabbed his hands and cheek. His feet tangled in the remains of Emily’s bicycle. A handlebar caught his rib cage, and one of the ribs gave. He rolled over to relieve the stabbing pain and, atop the grotesque pile of steel and plastic, he looked skyward.
As he took in the cloud-laden sky, he felt strangely warm. Jungle warm. Off somewhere in the distance, beyond the pain, he heard the sharp, intermittent sound of automatic weapons. He heard screams from the wounded, the yelling and chaos of battle. The acrid smell of smoke and feces and blood was overwhelming. His left hand fumbled along the side of his blue jeans, where the Viet Cong grenade had shattered his left hip. He felt for the gaping hole in his flesh, the hole that was still there in his dreams, the hole his buddy Leo had pulled together and strapped with a battle dressing as they’d wailed into the din of battle.
Somewhere beyond the streetlights, he saw streams of tracers overhead and heard the dull thump of mortar rounds as they walked slowly toward him. “Medic!” he yelled, “I’m hit!” He began to shake. An odd thought: maybe the shaking would clear the anguish he felt – surely the same agony Emily had felt during the moment of impact.
“No no no no…home…gotta link up. No, go home…don’t die…oh, God ohgodohgod…Emily! Where’s Emily? Gotta get her outta here. Sarge! Need a medic over here! Oh, it hurts!” He licked sweat from his lips.
His vision seemed to clear a little. He glanced left, then right. Moonlight found its way through the grove of rubber trees where he lay off Highway 13, just south of An Loc. He reached for his rifle, found only concrete. A beer truck rumbled by on the other side of Claiborne, heading toward Athens and the University of Georgia.
He sat up on the mangled bike, head in his hands. He knew what to do. The psychiatrist had told him to breathe deeply. He breathed. Close your eyes, the doctor had said, blank out your mind. Just focus on your breathing. He focused. The terror slowly subsided. Breathe. Breathe. Breathebreathebreathe. Slow down. Gotta take long breaths – long, slow breaths. Long. Slow. Breaths. He breathed, slowly.
His surroundings had quieted, the street a landscape painting. The emotional aspect of his pain had eased, but now his whole body ached. He peered into the dank night. The mortars and tracers and rubber trees were gone. Breathe, Jason. He breathed. As he did so, he relaxed, ever so slowly.
Then pain erupted again. He closed his eyes. Memories of that April day in 1972 rolled through him like a news clip, the highway into An Loc beneath him. Incoming choppers – dustoffs, they called these ungainly aircraft – landed on the road, maybe twenty meters away. Soldiers began loading body bags. The platoon’s machine gunner glanced to Jason as he zipped up the bag holding Leo’s remains. The film clip reversed – Jason could once again make out his friend running through the trees for a medic. Then the sense of helplessness at the incoming mortar round’s mournful howl. He watched the blaze of metal shards lift Leo and fling him into the rubber grove. He remembered the horror of having his own stretcher placed on a pile of body bags in the chopper. “Leo, I’m sorry,” he heard himself cry again. There are no sensibilities to the business of war, but to stack the living and the dead in this way was an insanity he still couldn’t bear.
Then the road to An Loc transformed. It widened and separated, silhouetted by Georgia pines. Once again, the State Patrol cars and ambulance screeched in, lights flashing, followed by the crackle of static on the nearest cruiser’s radio. His brother Pat appeared from out of nowhere, twenty years old again, trying to tell sixteen year-old Jason that their mother and father were dead.
They’d been driving in separate cars to a high school football game in Chamblee and, for some still unexplained reason, their parents’ car had sped ahead, veered across two lanes of traffic, and smashed into a bridge column. The policeman said they didn’t suffer, Pat had told Jason in the steely manner he always assumed in moments of loss or adversity. Jason could still see the grief in Pat’s eyes, the anger in the set of his jaw. He’d clutched Pat that night, clinging to him as if he were a baby. What’re we gonna do, Pat? he’d cried. We’ll be all right, Pat had said. I’ll think of something.
Pat had indeed thought of something. He’d quit college and taken a job in Athens, some twenty miles away. The job had allowed the two brothers to remain solvent and stay in the family home for the months leading up to Jason’s graduation from high school. Eventually, Pat had returned to the University of Georgia and finished his degree in business administration. He’d married Yvonne Baker, his high school sweetheart, soon thereafter, and had gone to work for the Stark’s Restaurant chain.
Jason had been drafted the summer after his graduation, and three months later, fate had set him down in the dust and noise of Tan Son Nhut airport in the Republic of Vietnam. He’d returned from ‘Nam after only five months in-country, had kept an apartment in Decatur for a short while, near the Veteran’s Administration hospital. His physical rehabilitation had been brief. But the mental part, the depressions, the nightmares, the delusions, had continued to dog him. Even now, a part of him remained in that place, refusing to come home. Pat and Von had had a spare room in their apartment, so he’d moved in with them. He was still with them twelve years later, when they’d bought back the old Shane home, and for the next twelve years, until Von had announced she was pregnant with Emily. He’d thought Pat would have wanted him to move then, but he hadn’t, and Jason was still with them now.
Once again, he took in the street – Claiborne Boulevard, the town of Hope. He breathed deeply. He rose slowly, stood on shaky legs. His body had atrophied over those first years, and his strength had waned for a while, his legs no longer the strong, sturdy legs that had led him to the high school state championship in the mile run. Recently, though, he’d regained some of his strength, and he’d gained back some of his weight. But this trauma, he thought, Emily’s death, would surely set his rehabilitation back. The leg below the damaged hip now went numb and folded, and he had to clutch a street sign for support.
He shook the leg, stamped the foot until feeling returned. Good. It would support him now. He took a few unsteady steps and then a deep breath before limping back home.
Here’s one for the other book you have a first chapter for – - A Place of Belonging
Thanks mucho,
Bob
Chapter 2
Clarkesville, Georgia
Stephen Banks sat sideways in his restaurant chair, one leg over the other. He had the outdoorsman’s look and smell of old leather. A semicircle of bristles had formed beneath his angular chin as he studied the Friday Atlanta Constitution’s front page. He stopped his reading for a moment, took a fork in one large, chapped hand, and stirred his grits and eggs together. His boots were mud spattered, as were the pant legs of his camo hunting clothes. Someone had brushed against his jacket, managing to pull it halfway off the chair back, and passing shoes were quietly soiling one sleeve. He glanced at his watch. Almost eleven a.m. He returned to his reading.
Sonny Bidwell, Clarkesville’s deputy sheriff and that morning’s hunting partner, sat across the table. He unbuttoned his ammunition vest, pressed his gray flannel-clad belly against the table, and forked the last wedge of his pancake stack. After finishing it, he sighed and leaned back, coffee mug resting on his stomach. He reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette. Noticing a nearby waitress’ hard stare, he worked the cigarette back into its pack and sipped his coffee.
Beyond the Omelette Shoppe’s large picture window lay North Washington Street. The morning had begun cold, with rain and fog, but the sky had cleared to a deep blue. A broad band of sunlight had just slipped across the street and was now edging into the crowded eatery.
“A hell of a fine day,” said Sonny in his usual, overloud voice. He tapped his chest with the mug. “Even if we didn’t get no damn squirrels.” Two women at an adjacent table glanced up and frowned. Sonny cleared his throat and lowered his voice. “No damn turkeys, neither.”
Banks glanced up, irritated with his hunting partner. Turkeys were still in season on March fourteenth, but squirrels weren’t. That hadn’t kept Sonny from hunting them that morning, though. The deputy sheriff was easily bored; he lacked the necessary patience to stalk game. For an hour, he’d kept fitfully quiet. Then he’d begun crashing through the underbrush and firing upward through the bare oak branches at the exposed nests.
It angered Banks that Sonny shot through nests that way, knowing it was unsportsmanlike. If a nested squirrel happened to be hit, it would never fall to the ground to find its way into a pot of dumplings and carrots and potatoes. The nest would be spoiled, and the noise would ruin the hunting for everyone else in the woods that day. Banks tended to hunt during weekday hours, now that he was retired. It was quieter. More elbow room. But the sport of it diminished without a hunting partner, and Sonny, with his random work schedule, was the only one in town who seemed to be perpetually available.
Banks finished the front page and handed it across the table. Then he returned to his breakfast with a sudden relish.
Sonny shook the paper in the space between the two men. His face brightened with mischief as he read. “Hey, Banks, you see this?”
Banks ran one hand through his wavy brown hair, raked at the traces of gray at one temple. He grunted and peered over the glasses stranded at the tip of his broad nose.
“I was just reading this here article,” said Sonny, “about some lady detective quitting the Atlanta Police Department.” He shook the paper again for emphasis. “It says she’s suing the city.”
“More power to her,” Banks said.
“Well,” Sonny went on, “she says she can’t do her job with all the favoritism going on.” He shook the paper again, folded it, and leaned forward. His grin grew broader. “You know about that, don’t you, buddy?”
“Okay,” Banks said, “I read it.”
Sonny leaned back, pug nose wrinkling above the grin. “Now, don’t you wish you’d’ve stayed on at APD? Maybe you coulda shared some of your viewpoints with this little lady. You know, kicked the system around one more time.”
Banks pushed his plate away and shook the remains of his paper until the sports section fell out. The section slid to the floor. He muttered as he bent to retrieve it.
Sonny chuckled. “On second thought, those people never did listen to you, did they?”
“Just read,” Banks growled. “Don’t talk.”
Sonny belly laughed this time.
A waitress filled their cups. Banks folded the sports section and stared at the busy print columns as he stirred a dollop of cream into his coffee. He was really angry now, too angry to read. He laid the paper down. Sonny was an obnoxious loudmouth.
He removed his wire-rimmed glasses and tasted the coffee. The Atlanta Police Department. Four years in the Marine Corps. He closed his eyes and pictured it all again.
He’d been orphaned at fourteen by an armed prowler, had watched as his parents’ caskets had been lowered into Florida’s soggy ground. After that, he’d gone to live with a widowed aunt, Bess Taylor, who had kept a tiny home in Marietta, just north of Atlanta, and who had died from cancer during Banks’ military enlistment. The parental loss had hurt him deeply, sending him into an emotional tailspin. And that had made him combative and unruly. Aunt Bess became a regular visitor to the principal’s office over his schoolyard fights. After his high school graduation, she wrung her hands over his desire to join the Corps, but the headstrong seventeen-year-old was bent on adventure. And that’s what the Marines were supposed to give you. Adventure.
Instead, he languished for eighteen months on guard duty aboard a decrepit aircraft carrier, the Shangri La. He rotated to shore duty after that and served as a conditioning coach at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis. He was still there two years later, in nineteen sixty-eight, eager to fight, doing little that he’d been trained for. In desperation, he volunteered for duty in Vietnam. His commanding officer turned him down. He was too intelligent for grunt duty, the major said. He urged Banks to apply for Officer Candidate School. Banks complied.
Suddenly, sights set on a commission, Banks resolved to be a pilot. He read books on aeronautics. He begged pilots for hops in the jet trainers housed at Andrews Air Force Base. Flying was now his life, he told his fellow Marines.
But during the requisite eye exams, he discovered the cause of his lifelong headaches: 20/40 vision in both eyes, correctable for reading. Further tests revealed that he misjudged distances in dim light.
Don’t do anything impulsive, Aunt Bess cautioned when he made his weekly call home. But Banks was impulsive. Before his OCS class began, he gained an audience with his Marine company’s Navy liaison officer, declared the tests in error, and demanded a shot at flight school. There’s nothing to appeal, the somber lieutenant commander told him. Your eyes are bad, and nothing will change that fact. And you must graduate from OCS before you can be considered for any kind of duty as a commissioned officer.
In a fit of anger and frustration, Banks withdrew his OCS application. He remembered being fitted for glasses shortly thereafter, remembered the humiliation he’d felt at this simple human limitation. He applied for OCS again six months later, still insistent on flight school. The ensuing eye exam revealed the same vision problems. This time he didn’t withdraw his OCS application.
But before the class could begin, his enlistment ended. His marriage to Jana, who also despaired his inability to become a pilot, ended as well. Theirs, like many military marriages, was infirm, the relationship contentious. Jana and their infant son Cooper left one morning after Jana initiated a thunderous argument over the family’s future. She and the child didn’t return. Weeks later, Banks received a manila envelope with a letter from her. She would stay with her sister in San Diego until she could get on her feet, the note said. The envelope included divorce papers. Banks left the Corps and returned to Georgia, lonely and despondent.
He now drained the last of his coffee, lifted his glasses, and wiped them with a paper napkin. His thoughts turned to the day he’d applied for a position with the Atlanta Police Department. His money had quickly disappeared after leaving the Corps; that month he’d hit bottom financially—three months delinquent in his child support. It had been a bright, sunny day in April. He could still smell the wisteria blooming in Aunt Bess’ yard as he’d left for the appointment in her fifty-eight Buick. The beauty of that day had been a good omen gone unnoticed amid his financial worries: the short, elfin dogwoods were blooming everywhere. Daffodils stood tall and radiant in every yard, and the azaleas’ deep, rich hues added to the springtime enchantment.
He’d retained a short, bristled military haircut, along with a Marine attitude, and he smiled as he remembered telling the police force personnel manager that he could do anything they threw at him. His interview went well, and he took their tests the following week. A month later, he stepped into the uniform of a beat cop in Georgia’s largest city. He rose quickly on the force. Soon he found himself in plainclothes. It was there he’d found the fulfillment he’d been seeking, the sense of adventure that had eluded him in the Corps.
But during his twelfth year on the force, while helping bust a counterfeit money ring housed in a wealthy Buckhead neighborhood, a bullet found him. It shattered a bone in his forearm. Reconstructive surgery helped, but his hand movements remained awkward. He became less prone to throw himself into danger, and he dispatched his duties at a slower pace. Even now his handshake was weak, and he felt a constant low level of pain in his arm and wrist.
Then his career stalled. He applied for lieutenant and was turned down. During those days, as Atlanta’s growing black population asserted their voting rights, the city’s administration came to be controlled by black politicians, and many capable blacks entered city government. But, as with any modern municipal government going through demographic change, there were others who moved into managerial and administrative positions through the workings of political patronage. Banks found himself working for one such person, a lieutenant, five service years his junior, with only low-level administrative experience.
Banks knew the female detective mentioned in that day’s newspaper article: Latisha Evans. A graduate of Spellman College, the black women’s college in the Atlanta University system. She held a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Georgia. A distance runner who ran the Peachtree Road Race every year in under thirty minutes. Extremely bright, she’d taken to police work like a duck to water.
She’d come to the force five years before Banks’ retirement, having graduated first in her class from the Police Academy. She was assigned to Banks’ unit and immediately sought an audience. I hear you’re the best detective on the force, she began. Could be, Banks replied. I want to know what you know, she said. I want to be the best detective on the force. Then she laughed. After you retire, of course. You’ll have to get your hands dirty, Banks told her. You’ll have to get out on the streets. Stick your neck out. Get street-wise. Let’s go, she said. He took her on as a partner, and off they went, into Atlanta’s meaner streets.
Banks found Latisha amazingly adept, and very gutsy. She tracked down a major drug dealer her first month on the force, busted him, then gave a police officer’s name to the Internal Affairs Unit. The cop had been the dealer’s unseen partner, and she had enough on him to put him away for years.
Now she was suing the city because she too had been passed over for lieutenant. Passed over to make room for a nephew of a City Council member. It’ll never work for her, Banks thought. If I were there, I could tell her that. He smiled. But she wouldn’t listen. She was tough, headstrong, and she would have her say. She’d learned more than police work from Banks, it seemed. Over the years, she’d adopted his rebellious streak, too.
Banks, already passed over once for promotion, had grown testy under his new lieutenant. In fact, the year after the shooting, as the lieutenant accused him of loafing on the job, Banks went ballistic. Had the lieutenant ever taken a bullet in the line of duty? he asked during a confrontation over his performance evaluation. No, it was irrelevant, the lieutenant replied from behind his steel desk. Did the lieutenant know the difference between a good bust from a sting operation and entrapment? The lieutenant knew the law, but as Banks cited case after case as examples of one or the other, the lieutenant sneered and looked away.
The law wasn’t a black and white thing, Banks proclaimed, voice rising. He rubbed his metal-reinforced wrist, unaware of the offense the lieutenant was taking to his choice of descriptives. It takes a high sense of principles to operate effectively as a policeman. Laws and regulations don’t give you enough. They don’t fit half the cases we have to referee.
He remembered being vaguely aware of the embarrassed officers who couldn’t help but hear his final outburst: We’re here to provide security for the good citizens of Atlanta, not to be controlled by one person’s interpretation of enforcement procedures. You can’t use procedure to reinforce your own inadequacies and prejudices.
He regretted his tantrum later as he read the administrative reprimand over a beer in his one-bedroom apartment on Monroe Drive. But, damn it, he’d been right, and he was glad he’d said it. His captain had tacitly admitted as much as he’d read the reprimand to Banks. But, the captain had added, that’s also why this reprimand is necessary. It’s not good for morale when an older guy like you constantly challenges a young lieutenant. Help the guy out, the captain had said. Find a way to make him look good, and he’ll cut you some slack. Banks didn’t make his lieutenant look good and, as the younger hires made their way up the promotion ladder, he didn’t keep his opinions about hiring and promotion policies to himself.
He remained a plainclothes sergeant with sporadically high-visibility busts. One of those gained him a citation from the mayor. But in his twentieth year on the force, he was wounded again. This time it was winter. He’d been ordered out at three in the morning to arbitrate an East Atlanta domestic dispute. He found an enraged housewife screaming, holding her drunken husband at bay with a butcher knife. Something went wrong, and Banks awoke in Grady Memorial Hospital hours later, his chest swathed in bandages, unable to talk. The knife punctured your left lung, the doctor told him. You almost died. You can’t go back to work as a beat cop.
Banks was despondent, and his combativeness began to slip away. But there was no way he would take one of the desk jobs he so openly despised. His lung failed to heal quickly, and he wasn’t able to return to work at all. Two months later, he took the disability retirement the Department offered, stayed alone in his efficiency apartment for another six months, and slowly recovered.
Loneliness hit him like a sledgehammer as he convalesced. But then Cooper moved to Atlanta. Against the wishes of his mother, Coop took a position at a large financial brokerage to be near Banks, hoping to deepen his relationship with the father he’d never really known. If it hadn’t been for Coop’s weekly visits, their dinners together, Banks now thought, I surely would’ve died. Atlanta was a big city. Too big, in fact, and as mean and impersonal as Houston or Miami. I need to get out of here.
So he’d resolved, with Coop’s help, to leave Atlanta. Coop helped him arrange the purchase of his house on Madison Street in Clarkesville. It was a small home, fifty years old, and in need of work. Banks, who had never found time to spend money on anything except Coop’s tuition at Oregon State, insisted on paying cash for the home. I have no desire to be in debt as a middle-aged pensioner, he told Coop, and this place is big enough for me. He’d be fine; he’d remodel the house himself.
Coop acceded to his father’s stubbornness, and Banks took on the work with the same intensity with which he’d dispatched his police work. But he was still in fragile health, and overweight. Over the next two years, the rigors of carpentry, drywall and painting slowly ground to a halt.
Anyway, he was spending a lot of time with Mattie. He often ate dinner at her place, a large white house on the corner of Washington and Rocky Branch Road. And he was spending more and more time running errands for her mother, Ellie Cormack, and for Karl York, the elderly ex-shoe salesman who rented a room from them.
But Banks had slowly become accustomed to the sedentary lifestyle his health had seemed to foist on him. All too often, he found himself in Mattie’s bookstore reading adventure novels and dozing while his remodeling idled.
The waitress interrupted his thoughts. He refused another cup of coffee. He put on his glasses. Sonny chuckled loudly over the comics. A metallic glint from outside the Omelette Shoppe caught Banks’ attention, and he squinted to see an eighteen-wheeler squeal to a stop and block his view of Clarkesville’s war memorial, which stood on a small rise on the opposite side of the street.
He fidgeted in his chair, found change for a tip, picked up his ticket. He pulled his jacket from the chair back, growled at the dirty sleeve. He was about to bid Sonny goodbye when the tractor-trailer rig revved its engine and labored westward. An unfamiliar woman now stood on the sidewalk opposite the Omelette Shoppe.
The woman smiled shyly as her eyes followed the truck. Banks paid his bill. The woman was young with long, dark hair and was very, very pretty. Still smiling, she started to cross the street to the Omelette Shop. A car honked. She jumped, stepped back, and began to cry. She retreated to a gazebo near the war memorial. Her shoulders shook as she continued to sob. Finally, she slumped to the concrete walkway, head in her hands.
Banks took to the sidewalk. He shielded his eyes and squinted until the woman came into sharp relief. Her clothes were filthy. Her hiking boots carried a coating of mud. The oversized red flannel shirt she wore cascaded down one jeans leg. Her grimy blue jean jacket hung almost a foot above the partially exposed shirttail. A canvas travel bag hung at her side. She wiped her eyes, one hand absently returning to the canvas bag’s grips.
“Hey, Banks,” Sonny called out, “you want your paper?”
Banks didn’t answer. He lumbered out the door, across the street, and huffed his way uphill toward the war memorial.
I’m a published writer of two books 4 more on the way as well as a recipe book greeting cards inspirational calendar with personal quotes