Four Horsemen

2004-11-11T17:44:00.000-05:00

Table of Contents

Coming Soon: FOUR HORSEMEN - A Novel

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Commentary on the writing process is posted at Snoozelets.

Chapter 4

2004-11-11T17:25:00.000-05:00

Jake shifted position, trying to get comfortable, but after six hours in an unheated warehouse, nothing but a hard run, hot shower and eight hours of sack time was going to be comfortable. “Such is the glamorous life of the Special Agent,” Jake thought to himself. It was nearing four. Slowly over the course of the night the once empty lot across from the warehouse had filled with containers. They were all colors, but of a sameness, nevertheless. Most bore the green and white trade markings of ‘Sea-Land’ while others were nondescript, with no hint of their origin.

A new container ship had arrived around three and docking was done in short order, with Able-bodies seamen tossing heaving traveling lines down to Longshoremen who hauled them in until the docking lines were secured to massive cleats and bollards on the dock. Once that was accomplished, tank trucks hauling Bunker C and potable water arrived and hoses more travelers were tossed to the ship. This time hoses were hauled aboard from shore, while produce and other provisions trucks pulled up and began unloading fresh supplies. On the dock it was a beehive of activity. Back here, on the far side of the transit yard, it was quiet, now that the yard engine had finished hauling in its load and the tractor-trailers had stopped hauling in hundreds of containers.

“41, this is 42. Our boys are arriving.”

“Roger, Charley. Watch your back. Over” Jake stood and stretched, working the nights kinks out of his neck and shoulders. No sense cramping up when things got tense. They considered it bad form in the Bureau to show ANY signs of weakness. Jake supposed that rolling on the floor in agony with a charley horse or being near stooped over from a back spasm would meet with disfavor from the boys in Washington.

The radio crackled to life again. “41, 43. Stand by. Wait for my mark. Over”

“Roger,” said Jake. It was quickly followed by a woman’s voice, “Affirmative, 41. On your mark. Over.” That was Sue Ellen Polansky, the other S.A. on this deal. She had the locals under her control. Harbor Master, Chicago PD, even Immigration and Naturalization. They were holed up in the warehouse next door, about six squads quietly idling inside with the big back doors open in the rear. Charley had the S.W.A.T. in with him in the building nearest to the gate. Once the “guests” had all arrived, the plan was to block the gate with a loader on one side and a couple of trucks and trailers on the other. The SAC had a contingent of seven other Special Agents, an APC (armored personnel carrier) on loan from the Illinois National Guard, courtesy of an assist from the Mayor’s “Military Liaison Office,” various and sundry members of other Federal law enforcement agencies, DEA, ATF and some shadowy types that were probably paid informants but might be spookier than that.

Jake had himself to worry about and no one else. Technically, he was a trainee and therefore ineligible to participate in field maneuvers without direct supervision. In practical terms, Charley had put Jake on point in the observation department, keeping an eye on the comings and goings in general, rather than concentrating on looking for specific subjects. His job was to try to anticipate “situations” before the occurred and head them off, if at all possible.

A lone figure in a pea coat and dark watch cap walked from between Jake’s building and the one next to it where Sue Ellen and her crew waited. Halfway across the quay, the figure stopped, apparently fumbling inside the pea coat. Jake tensed, gun drawn unconsciously when he saw the hand had reached inside the lapel of the coat. Light flared on a bearded face as mystery man lit a cigarette, then continued walking toward the dockside.

“41, 42. We have an unknown civilian crossing to the dockside. Male, unknown age, bearded, approximate height 5’8”, approximate weight 190 pounds, medium build. Wearing blue jeans, a navy pea coat and a watch cap. Over.”

“10-4, 41. Stay put.”

“Roger that, 42.”

Jake did as he was told. The only reason he was along on this little stakeout was the shortage of manpower in the Chicago office combined with his solemn vow to Charley that he’d obey every instruction given and, in general, stay the hell out of the way “while the big boys do their job.”

Chapter 4, Continued...

It had been an interesting twelve months, Jake mused while waiting for further instructions. He’d warmed up to Charley’s irrepressible sense of humor once the newness of the situation wore off. Jake had concluded that the AIC knew all about Charley’s quirks and peccadilloes. So long as Jake LaMott wasn’t caught making inappropriate statements about his bosses and their bosses, he was probably safe from any of Charley’s “stink” rubbing off onto him. They’d had some reason for making Charley the training officer, after all.

Jake found that, humor aside, Charley was a firm taskmaster. He expected quality work and accepted nothing less than the best from trainees assigned to him. He also had no sense of direction, so had developed the habit of tossing the keys to Jake to drive whenever their work took them into the field. Jake was one of those who had a built-in compass, on the other hand. He could be set down in a strange city, mountain wilderness or steaming swamp anywhere on earth and he’d have determined North and the rest of the cardinal points before most people could unpack a compass and glance at it. It had been a point of contention that first day, when they pulled out onto South Dearborn Street from under the Everett Darkness Federal Building.

“Where to, sir?” asked Jake. After sputtering over the ‘sir bit’, Charley said they needed to head out to Springfield. Jake had confounded Charley by turning right out of the garage, heading over to the Dan Ryan Expressway, getting on and heading West to I-55 and then South on the Interstate, all without asking Charley which way to go.

“How’d you do that?” sputtered Murphy.

“Do what?” replied Jake, although he had an idea what was bothering Charley.

“How did you know where to go?”

“I studied a map of the city and of Illinois during my rest breaks on the way here from the Academy,” Jake answered truthfully. “I’m working on Indiana now, in my spare time.”

Charley’s face, when Jake looked at him, told the story. Disgust and bewilderment all rolled into one. Jake didn’t rub it in by telling the story of his friend Andrea, who’d lived in Richmond for three years before she could find her way to the shopping center by the same route, two out of three tries. She’d nearly killed him the one time he’d visited her and her husband, Ken. He’d taken her down to get some party groceries, after having passed it on his way to their house. She was fit to be tied! But he’d thought about it… and decided having Charlie as an ally would be a whole lot smarted than pissing him off this early in his career.

~ ~ ~

Lt. Commander LaMott’s troops had been on high alert for sixteen hours when the fit hit the shan. One minute, his troops were staring across the empty plaza at some Jamaican Army Regulars who’d set up a machinegun nest behind some sand bags on the far side of the square. The next moment brought mortar rounds from the rear of the embassy and about 100 troops advancing on the front of the embassy from the left and right flanks. How they’d ever managed to set up a mortar emplacement without being spotted, Jake would worry about later. He ordered his men to open fire. An anti-tank gun was sufficient to stop the forward progress of the decrepit vehicle on the left, but the APC on the right was scoring some telling shots with its 1” cannon and they’d had to respond quickly to that threat, causing several of his men to get hit by machinegun fire from across the way.

Cursing under his breath, Jake called for air support. The Seahawks arrived “just in the nick of time” and made mincemeat of the APC and the mortar emplacement, which was found to be located in the playground of an elementary school two blocks away. Completely shielded from the view of the sharpshooters on the roof of the embassy.

Jake and his troops settled in for the long haul. Ambassador Gilchrist had departed for the Canadian Embassy earlier in order to meet on neutral soil with a representative from General Ramos. The Deputy Ambassador and Smith were holed up in the communications room, doing Lord knows what. That left Jake and company to mind the fort and keep the home fires burning. And burn they did. The APC was still aflame… “must have had a full tank of fuel,” thought Jake. “It’ll burn another couple of hours and then we’ll see. Something makes me think we haven’t seen the last of these jerks,” he told himself.

They’d had two dead and fourteen injured, although only eight required treatment beyond first aid. Lance Corporal Juan Martinez and Staff Sargent Ravenna Miller had both been taken out with machine gun fire. “Just like I said would happen,” Jake observed to himself. But no, the Ambassador ordered that “no one fire unless fired upon,” so the Jamaican regulars had had free rein to set up however they wanted. “Stupid, stupid, stupid. Damn civilians should stick to making the peace. It was his job to make the war.”

Jake sat down at a desk in the reception area and began composing the letters to the families. He suspected there would be more before this little skirmish ended, so he got these done with dispatch.

~ ~ ~

When Jake was passing out of childhood, America had only recently passed through the wildly misnamed “Summer of Love”. Just ask the folks getting their heads beaten in by the Chicago PD at the behest of the Democratic National Committee and that stalwart, Mayor Richard Daley. Maybe a few kids out in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco were getting their groove on getting their communal rocks off; for the vast majority of the country it was business as usual. Out in the hinterland of far eastern Maine, few took notice of the goings on, except as coffee break fodder. Jake was a staunch Nixon-Agnew supporter that year and was rewarded for his righteousness with the underwhelming election of his chosen candidate in November. It was almost anti-climactic – “…of course they elected him, was there any doubt?” he’d once stated to his father, an equally staunch Democrat and lukewarm supporter of the Humphrey-Muskie ticket that had stolen the nomination away from Senator Gene McCarthy after the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in June. Jake reveled in Richard Nixon’s first term, although he was unprepared for the vehement language of hate the violent protesters of the Vietnam War continued to hurl at speeches by his president. Nixon and Jake matured apace in the early seventies. Both were satisfied with the election results of 1972, what with Nixon getting more than 60% of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes to 17 for George McGovern, his Democratic opponent.

It was the beginning of the end for Richard Milhouse Nixon. The crisis of Watergate began with wiretaps in 1969 on an "enemies list" of those who opposed of the secret Cambodia invasion, the Tom Huston plan in 1970 to investigate protesters and cause their arrest and possible mass internment, the creation of the White House plumbers unit under John Ehrlichman to plug leaks such as Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the “Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP) organization and the use of dirty tricks in the 1972 campaign, led by Donald Segretti and CRP legal counsel G. Gordon Liddy, including the first break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in May, 1972, to plant a wiretap on the telephone of Larry O'Brien. The CRP operations became public with the arrest of 5 burglars June 17, 1972, during the second break-in of the Watergate headquarters. The cover-up began June 23 (later known as the smoking gun) when Nixon ordered Haldeman to lie to the FBI and use the CIA to stop the investigation of the burglars. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post began to write articles about the break-in for the Washington Post. The trial of the burglars began in Jan. 1973 and $400,000 was allocated from CRP to defend the burglars, but Judge John Sirica declared Feb. 2 he was "not satisfied" with the silence of the burglars. James McCord broke his silence in a letter to Sirica, confessing that he operated under orders from the White House. John Dean told the president on March 21, that the crisis was becoming a "cancer on the presidency;" Nixon declared in public on April 18, that the White House was cleared of any involvement. But within two weeks, key aides resigned: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Dean, Attorney General Kleindienst, and FBI director L. Patrick Gray. Nixon became increasingly secretive and paranoid, while the Senate began televised hearings May 17, 1973, under Chairman Sam Ervin (Dem, NC) that slowly revealed the breadth and details of the crisis, especially the revelation of the White House tapes on July 16. Archibald Cox was appointed special prosecutor and Judge Sirica ordered Cox to turn over the tapes to his court. To add insult to injury, Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew resigned on Oct. 10, due to tax evasion charges. It was at that time that Nixon appointed Gerald Ford as vice-president.

In the Saturday Night Massacre of Oct. 20, 1973 Nixon fired Archibald Cox, Attorney General Elliott Richardson, and James Ruckelshouse. After a six-month lull during which the Senate wrangled through more hearings and attorneys for all parties kept a blizzard of subpoenas blowing inside the Beltway, Nixon finally complied with Judge Sirica’s original order in part, releasing some tape transcripts in April 1974, revealing the 18 and 1/2-minute gap, causing the Supreme Court to rule on July 24, 1974 that Nixon must surrender 64 tapes to Sirica. The House Judiciary Committee voted 3 articles of impeachment on July 30, 1974. Nixon turned over the tapes Aug. 5, revealing the "smoking gun" cover-up of June 23, 1972. The stage was set, all players in place and the administration teetered on the edge. Would the Senate vote impeachment or would the President resign? Nixon resigned the presidency Aug. 9, 1974.

Jake had meanwhile grown into a strapping youth, good at sports, with blue eyes and an easy grin that attracted the lassies like bees to honey. He spent much of the summer glued to the television when he wasn’t out with his buddies goofing off or working to save some money for new clothes for school by mowing lawns and other odd jobs he managed to find despite the horrendous state of the economy.

By the time of the impeachment of Richard Nixon, Jake was going out with Linda Greenlaw-Beal, daughter of one of the few attorneys in Eastport and a rabid, foaming-mouth liberal Democrat and opponent of everything Republican. The only thing that kept him on her short leash was the fact her kisses were sweet and her boobies were sweeter, as he’d discovered out behind the LaMott carriage house the afternoon of August 9. Linda encouraged Jake to fondle her breasts that afternoon when his kisses were having an unanticipated impact upon her. Seeking to divert her body’s focus, Linda hit upon the plan as respite from the increasing flow of moisture soaking her panties. Little did she know … her first orgasm happened right there, in the LaMott’s backyard, after a particularly strong tickling tongue twist from Jake. At least, that’s what she thought it was. Just her stiffening like a board, holding desperately to Jake while whispering “stop, oh, ah … don’t stop, no, no don’t stop, Oh God, don’t stop!” convinced him he’d done something right. When she grabbed his hand and put it forcefully between her thighs and then clamped onto it with a death grip that would have choked the life out of him on the wrestling mat, and just shivered, kind of, he wasn’t so sure. But Linda didn’t respond to his whispered inquiries after her well being, nor did she appear to be in any danger. Eventually, she loosened her grip on him, let out a huge sigh, grinned and stretched from her fingertips to her toes, curled up in the shelter of his arm and side and went to sleep with the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen on anyone’s face. He was hooked forever, right then and there. Jake was eager to continue to experiment, but knew how much he hated anybody messing with him when he was asleep, so he sat there quietly, listening to the sound of the early evening coming on, the chirp of the crickets replacing the harsh clacking whir of the occasional cicada, the sweet, low hum of the wings of ruby throated hummingbirds gathering at the sugar water feeder. On the street behind his home he could hear some younger kids playing hide-and-seek while it sounded like the Johnson’s were having an argument about politics, again. The Larsens were in their backyard, smelled like they were barbecuing hot dogs and hamburgs. They were probably the ones who had the radio on and tuned to the Red Sox Radio Network out of Bangor, WLBZ-AM 620.

Sometimes at night, Jake would listen to a big old console radio that had belonged to his grandfather. It had multiple bands and could tune all the way from the long wave Tropic Bands up to HF Short-wave. He’s strung an antenna wire from his bedroom window to the peak of the roof on the carriage house and could tune in WBZ-AM 560 down in Boston anytime he wanted. He could listen to the ball games that way, even when the Bangor station wasn’t carrying them the year that the other Bangor station had the franchise. For some reason, he couldn’t get that station, there was interference from a station up in St. John’s, Newfoundland. That station didn’t care about baseball. Aside from country music and a bunch of crooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, they seemed to focus on the comings and goings of ships, weather forecasts for places like George’s Bank and Saint Michelon and the price of fresh cod versus finnan haddie and flake, whatever that was.

Linda stirred in her sleep and snuggled closer to her leg. He held her with one arm free, playing in the grass with his free hand. It was approaching dusk now, he could see lights on in the kitchens and living rooms of the few houses in view. He would have to wake Linda up soon. Her father came home promptly at 6:00 PM each weeknight and expected everyone to be gathered at the dining room table when he arrived, she’d told him. “Father sits and has a cocktail and asks Mom and me each about our day. He then wants dinner served by 6:30 PM. By 7:00, he’s finished and in front of the TV for the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.” That’s just the way he is,” she said. “Most nights, if it isn’t a school night, I watch the news with him and then help my Mom do the dishes and clean up the kitchen. She washes first, then watches “What’s My Line?” I dry and put away and then, if I have school, I finish up my homework.”

Linda awoke slowly, smiling sweetly, seemingly at peace with the world. “Hi there, sleepyhead, are you OK?” asked Jake.

“Mmmm, yes indeedy,” was her reply. “What time is it?
“Judging by the light and shadows, it’s just shy of six o’clock,” Jake replied. “You need to get a move on if your going to beat your father to the dinner table, Miss Greenlaw-Beal,” sounding remarkably like her father’s formal tones, even if it was half an octave higher.

“Uh huh, you’re right,” said Linda, standing and moving in slow motion, but making steady progress towards the front yard where she’d left her bike. Suddenly, she stopped and pulled him up against an old oak tree in the side yard. Standing on tip-toes, she gave Jake a kiss he felt all the way to his groin, particularly when she slipped her tongue past his teeth, which made his mouth feel funny and his cock start to swell. Just as suddenly, she released him and proceeded on, like nothing had happened. “See you later, alligator,” she called back to him.

He watched her sashay away and wistfully replied, “After a while, crocodile.”

The house was dark, compared to outside, when he went in the back door. After washing up at the kitchen sink, he put some franks in a sauce pan with some water, then opened a can of beans and dumped those into a double boiler. Checking again in the icebox, Jake took a bowl of salad out that was left over from the night before. His father was down to Bangor with his mother, at the hospital. She was just now finishing up a course of chemotherapy. She looked like warmed-over death, if you ask me, thought Jake. He suspected that she wasn’t going to make it. He’s had a conversation with his father in the car on the way back from Bangor on Sunday evening, each expressing their concerns about her failed recovery and interminable treatments, about how scared they were for her, and how sad they were for each other. It was the first time he could remember that he had ever talked with his father like that. It was good. But it was scary, too. “That’s the price of admission to the “Adult Conspiracy,” kiddo. Welcome to the Real World. Nothing is black and white – it’s all just shades of gray,” explained his father.

Finishing up his beans and franks, along with a couple of pieces of bread and butter, some pickles, carrot sticks and celery stalks filled with peanut butter, Jake put the dishes in the sink and ran some hot water over them to soak, cleaned up the kitchen and then went in and turned on the television. It was an old black and white console model from Philco in a cherry wood cabinet with a big speaker under the picture tube. No trouble hearing the sound. Seeing anything other than snow and ghosts depended on the atmospheric conditions, the station being tuned and how much wind was blowing the antenna around on the roof. It got 5 channels, two from Bangor, one from Orono, and two from Canada.

Tuning around with the dial, he managed to get the local CBS affiliate to come in surprisingly clear for summertime. Local news was just finishing up. Going back to the kitchen, Jake cut himself a piece of chocolate cake and scooped some vanilla ice cream on top. The “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” was just coming on. Lead story was from Viet Nam, followed by a story from Washington detailing the announcement that afternoon the President has scheduled an address to the nation at 8:00 PM. The reporter on the White House lawn speculated that the President would be discussing further responses to the vote of the House of Representatives… the phone rang. Jake caught it in the kitchen on the third ring, hoping it was Linda. He’d been thinking about asking her out for Friday night to go to the “Strand” and catch a movie.

It was his father. Down to the hospital in Bangor. “Your mother, she wasn’t feeling good this afternoon after her treatment, so rather than driving back tonight, we stayed with the French’s up in Orono.” Jake listened without comment, sensing something was wrong. “About suppertime,” Patrick LaMott hurried on, sensing his son’s growing alarm, “I went up to bring her down for supper after her nap and, she, well, she’d passed on, Jake. In her sleep. I don’t know what else to say.” He broke down then, sobbing. “What are we going to do, Jake? What am I going to do?”

Jake hung up the phone after his father rang off, and went back to the living room. He sat motionless, oblivious to the television for an hour or more, crying and raging against God and Fate internally. But if you’d have looked in from outside that night, all you’d have seen was a bereft young man, staring at the television with the tears silently streaming down his face as Richard Nixon announced his resignation as President of the United States of America.

~ ~ ~

Chapter 3

2004-11-09T13:46:00.000-05:00

There was clattering in the hall, the smell of feces and urine and that “sick room” odor humans exude when ill. Jake couldn’t tell what time it was. The bed linens were smooth, his leg propped up on a pillow. He could feel bandages wrapped around his head, a device with a wire attached to the finger of his right hand, a tube to his left – I.V. perhaps – something stuck in his chest just under the collar bone on his right side. There were wires stuck on his chest and abdomen and on his leg (?). Above his head he could hear a steady ‘beep’ that coincided with his heartbeat he concluded must be a pulse monitor. He was still in hospital then.

“Damn, it wasn’t all a bad dream.” Jake tried to roll onto his left side a little to relieve the pressure he could feel on his right buttocks. It seemed that he was constrained, somehow, but he couldn’t feel any belts or ties. His arms were free, if you didn’t count the wires and tubes. He could lift his head - it was unfettered.

Out in the hall, the noise level had increased. He suddenly understood the reason he couldn’t roll – he was on a bed pan and his cheek was being pinched by the lip of the pan. The noise must be coming from an orderly collecting the bed pans – hence the smell. “Oh Lord! Is that odor reeking from MY butt?” he wondered. In a minute or so, gloved hands had raised his left leg and torso like a baby and the pan was removed. A warm wash cloth was applied vigorously to the region. Some kind of lotion was next. It smelled faintly of fish oil and something else… oil paint? “It couldn’t be,” thought Jake, “I’m imagining things.”

Chapter 3, Continued...

Across the room he heard quiet grunts as the orderly strained to lift or roll the occupant of that bed. “He sounds pretty heavy,” he croaked. At least that was what he was going for. It came out sounding like a Canada goose call he had as a young man in Maine, hunting in Muscongus Bay for a Christmas goose for the table. His father loved goose and he loved the sweet, rich skin of the roasted bird, hot from the oven, crackling with each bite and munch in his mouth. Whatever made him think of that?

Shortly, he heard the squish, squish, squish of the orderly’s rubber shod feet leave the room, the harsh roar of the toilet flushing, more water running and the return. “Probably giving him a bed bath too,” thought Jake.

“What day is it?” came out “Warfarin tit?” Despite his rising frustration, Jake had to giggle. Rat poisoned boobies? Perish the thought!

Jake rolled a little to his side to get more comfortable. “Waa dee ish hit?”

“Tuesday. Five AM. And I have to get going out of here Mr. LaMott, I’m running late already or I’d stay and talk.” The voice was deep, masculine, Southern with a hint of Jamaican lilt to it. Black man, perhaps. Or someone who has worked the islands before.

“Warmiami?” croaked Jake.

“Nurse Johnson will be right with you, Commander. I have to go.”

~ ~ ~

That was the first time anyone had addressed him by rank since he’d left the States to come this god-forsaken island with its teeming masses of poverty, bugs, disease and religious hocus-pocus. At least the United States Consular Offices and the Embassy were like home. Clean, cool, quiet. Now if the masses outside would stop pressing so hard, maybe he and his men could get a breath or two to themselves.

Smith, the slimy intelligence attaché (privately, LaMott was sure that “Smith” was not his real name and he looked like CIA from a mile away) approached the security office at a trot. “L.C. we have a problem,” he started in immediately without so much as a “howdy, how you doing?”

“What sort of problem?” asked Jake.

“Jean-Claude has reportedly been placed under house arrest at the Presidential Palace.”

“The military?” asked LaMott.

“Yeah. Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras appears to be in charge,” replied Smith. “He’s ensconced himself, along with half a regiment at the Palace, too, ‘for security purposes.’ We expect they’ll set up on our doorstep any minute now. You and your troops need to secure the perimeter now,” he added, as an afterthought.

“Already done. Helicopters are standing by to guard the buses taking non-essential personnel out to the airport. We have more troops at the airport under the command of the XO of the Nimitz.”

More information was exchanged in terse sentences, each man going about his job with considerable dispatch and finesse. Things were likely to get worse before they got better.

~ ~ ~

The smell of food brought Jake out of a shallow doze. Jake was ravenous. Usually he ate a big breakfast an hour or two after his morning run while enroute to the office, time permitting. On the days he went to the gym, he’d bring a bag of fruit and pick up a toasted bagel and coffee at Sampson’s Bakery on Peachtree Boulevard . On occasion, he’d treat himself to a bearclaw, smiling at the incongruity of the sharply dressed agent being manhandled by a pastry the size of a dinner plate. Once a cop…

“Mr. Jake LaMott? Queried a young male voice. Probably a teenager, judging from the quavering timbre.

“Right here,” came out as “Rrrrar, rawr.” It didn’t seem to phase the young man any, though. Jake could hear the sounds of the tray table being wheeled into position, the tray settling onto the table top, a soft curse and whoosh as the server cursed his own clumsiness and turned the tray 180 degrees so the tray’s organization was consistent with all the other trays he’d brought to this patient. Poor bugger.

“Sir, coffee is at one o’clock, a small carafe at twelve. Utensils are all at 3 o’clock on top of the napkin. Salt and pepper packets are at 5 o’clock; salt has ridges, pepper is smooth. On the plate in front of you is scrambled eggs at twelve to two. Two slices of buttered toast sit at three to six. Two strips of bacon at 7 o’clock. A small monkey dish of grits is at 10 o’clock on the plate. At Seven o’clock on the tray is your napkin; at nine o’clock is a wet nap in a foil packet and at 11 is a carton of orange juice with a straw in the center of the side. Is there anything I can get you?” he asked.

“Unh-unh” grunted Jake. Funnily enough, it came out as ‘unh-unh’ just as he’d planned. He waited as the attendant put a napkin around his neck with a chain to retain it, much like in the dentist’s office. Except the drool here wasn’t going away after the novocaine wore off.

Jake picked up his fork and started in on his eggs, sipping his orange juice and munching on bacon with his free hand. It was awkward as hell, his right arm was encased almost to the top of the biceps. At least he could move it today. Not like the other day. He didn’t have the strength to even lift it off his chest when he’d first awakened.

As he worked his way through grits and then the toast, Jake thought back to when he first came to consciousness. At least he was able to eat solid food now. Jake had gotten terribly discouraged with a diet of liquids, thickened with some inert, tasteless, gel to avoid choking, the nurses told him. And he didn’t hurt anywhere near as bad as when he woke up the first time. He managed his own pain now. When it got to be too much, he squeezed a button and a spritz of morphine shot into his vein. Not enough to nod off on, but enough to take things down a notch. The worst pain was in his right eye. He could detect some difference between light and dark with his left eye. His right eye, though, that was like someone was shoving a red-hot poker into the eye and twiddling it around for good measure. Nothing but lightning bursts of pain-induced illumination.

Jake was just finishing up his coffee and wishing he could see enough to read a newspaper when the air filled with a lilac scent and there was a decided air of purposeful movement over in the other bed. As he concentrated on the scent, trying to “smell” who it was, Janice’s no-nonsense voice addressed him.

“Finished your breakfast, I see, Mr. LaMott.”

Janice. She was always one for stating the obvious, in his limited experience with her so far. She had the strange, flat accent. Hints of Scotch, Welsh and Irish to it. But peculiarly flat, in his opinion. Middle-aged, in his guesstimation. Maybe 50, maybe more – he didn’t think it was less.

“Here, now, sit up for me,” said Janice, raising the head end while simultaneously lowering the foot end of the bed. “Let me do the work – you’re just along for the ride,” she instructed as she lifted his legs and swung them over the side of the bed, steadying him with her other arm from tumbling out onto the floor. Slowly, she lowered his legs, allowing him to bend them at the knee.

“Sit there for me a while. Here’s your call button, If you get too tired sitting, just hold that button down and holler for help; someone will come running.”

Sooner than he expected, the lilac swoosh had returned, along with the lemon-lime scent from the other day. Roger must be with Janice.

“Jake, Good Morning. How are you doing today?” asked Roger as he picked up a chartbook and commenced documenting his patients condition. Pulse was a little elevated at 40, but that could be the strain of sitting up. Blood pressure was excellent at 120/82. Oxygen saturation was 97%, excellent for a smoker. Labs were all normal. Range of motion is slowly returning to uninjured areas, continue with 2X daily PT. “Guess it is time to let the Doctor know it’s time,” mused Roger.

“I’m going to give Doctor Lamhutt a call this morning after I finish initial rounds. We’ll see if we can’t get that bandage off your head today,” Roger remarked. “Janice, I want you to get a hold of a rolling walker with the tag-along hitch rig for the IV pole from PT to place in Commander LaMott’s billet.

Jake became very still. Someone else had done it again. Jumped him a full grade. Odd. Very odd.

~ ~ ~

Lieutenant Commander Jake LaMott had deployed the 63 Marines in his detachment as effectively as he knew how. The were working really thin, he knew all too well. Having to place a minimum of three guards per bus left them very short here at the Embassy. He had sharpshooters on the roof, extra guards at the gates. All were wearing full combat gear – today was not a day for dress blues. The ambassador’s wife was a little nonplussed at having to ride the bus with the other non-essential workers but Jake had been adamant. Stubborn resistance had outranked feminine wiles in the end. She left the compound with the others.

Suddenly the radio crackled. Sitops reports. Jamaican Regulars had attempted to board the plane and been repelled with deadly force. One friendly, three nasties down and out; seven friendlies hurt, unknown nasties injuries, if any. Five troops were on the ground protecting the plane, three others were aboard. Sgt. Major was requesting Seahawk cover as the plane taxis and prepares to take off as more nasties are enroute. All 220 civilians accounted for aboard the airliner. Carrier Nimitz orders 3 Seahawks aloft to the airport and two to the embassy to beef up the troops there.

Things are getting hot in the Port-au-Prince tonight!

~ ~ ~

“Where am I?” elicited no more success than when addressed to the mess steward earlier. “Got to work on that,” thought Jake.

Roger finished slicing the bandage away from the underside of the jaw and started slicing up the side of the head, across the temple, over the crown just behind where Jake’s hairline should be and back down the other side. The bandage stayed in place, even though Roger could see bright pink and blue veins underneath.

“They say discretion is the better part of valor.” observed Roger as he examined the newly revealed skin. “I think I’ll leave the rest for Doctor Lamhutt. I’ll be right back,” he added, as he left the room. Good to his word he was back shortly. This time he had the Doctor in tow. “He also had a wounds cart, and started off by opening a bottle of normal saline. He laid some instruments out on a sterile towel and waited for the Doctors instructions.

Doctor Lamhutt grabbed a pair of forceps and went to work, loosening and lifting off layers of bandage. Working quickly but without a sense of rushing, he peeled layer after layer, coaxing and teasing reluctant patches with small tugs and lots of saline spritzed from an oversize, needleless syringe. Slowly, what emerged was the visage of a man with eyepatches, his skin horribly disfigured on the right side of his face and mostly untouched, except for a couple of small areas where the caustic had splashed or dribbled . Healing was very good, everything considered. There were some areas still in need of debridement, but overall, the worst was past. The doctor ha d instructed Roger and Janice to close the blinds and dim the lights. Basically, the room was illuminated by the small amount of light leaking in around the edges of the blinds, through the small pane in the door to the hall and from the mirror light in the bathroom. Janice was stationed with her back to the hall door, to prevent someone from just flinging the door open as the opthamologist removed the dressings from Jake’s eyes. That was where the real damage had been done.

Slowly, the eyepatch on the left eye was lifted. Jake saw light and dark areas, but everything was blurry. The doctor put some drops in Jake’s eye which smarted something fierce, but he realized that his vision was improving, even as the stinging declined to a tolerable level. Shapes coalesced into images of individual items in the room, the curtain hanging from the ceiling, a bedside table with some flowers and a magazine on it, the doctor sitting in front of him between his legs, a device on his head that looked something like the contraption the evil man wore in “City of the Lost Children,” a man of medium height on the other side of the bed table, sandy haired, wearing blue scrubs, sporting a big beard and larger belly. There was someone over by the door, a woman, maybe, judging by the overall shape of the lower two-thirds of the legs and torso. She, if indeed it was a she as she had her head and face in shadow, was also wearing blue scrubs.

“Is that you, Janice?” asked Jake. “I can’t see you in the shadows. A smiling woman, blonde with her hair in a page boy cut, stepped out of the shadow into the light from the bathroom mirror. He’d over estimated her age, going by voice alone. She was barely thirty. And pretty, from what he could see.

And what he could see was suddenly thrown out of whack as the doctor took the last of the dressing off his right eye. He suddenly felt dizzy, nauseous. Dr. Lamhutt put some drops into his right eye and the world was instantly red, flashing lightning. The pain was intense, as though one of the troubadours in the Plaza in Port-au-Prince had suddenly let out a blood-curdling scream and shoved a knife into his eye. Except the scream was his own and the pain was real, here and now. There was no escaping it. He so wanted to get up and hop up and down, anything to extinguish the inferno in his right orb. His right shoulder started to throb and he started to put his right foot out to stop his slide off the bed. It was only then, sliding towards the floor, that he realized his leg was gone from above the knee, all the way down.

“Oh shit!” said Jake as he passed out. This time, they all understood what he had said.

~ ~ ~

Chapter 2

2004-11-03T16:01:00.000-05:00

The night was cold. Watching the activity on the docks from a begrimed window high on the wall of the warehouse across the quay, Jake was thankful for being in, out of the wind whipping in off the Atlantic. Tall, halogen arc lights illuminated the scene before him. A roadway on the quay ran across his field of vision, directly below him. Traffic was sparse this early in the evening; most of the longshoremen were probably off on a dinner break. On the other side of the quayside a large asphalt area presented itself. Ordinarily it was full of cranes and containers and trucks coming and going with cargo to be loaded onto the container ship tied up at dockside on the far side of the quay, nearly a quarter mile away. It was empty at the moment after the departure of the “Conte-Maru,” but would soon start filling again in anticipation of the arrival of the “Vincente-Maru.” That was the activity Jake patiently awaited now.

Distantly, the sound of one of the yard engines idling throbbed in the night, almost like a heart beat. “If hearts beat 360 times a minute,” he thought to himself. The old yard engine was an antique and should have been retired years ago. Something made in the twenties or thirties, it had a Fairbanks-Morse two-cycle diesel engine. A huge air intake duct expanded and contracted with each inhalation of the pistons. He remembered rides on a very similar engine as a kid, visiting his uncle down to Searsport. Uncle Howard was the engineer of the yard engine back then. A tall, big man in overalls and a real engineer’s hat made of blue and white cotton ticking, a bandana around his neck and a wipe rag perennially sticking out of a rear pocket. He had sandy colored hair then and usually sported a couple days worth of beard. And his eyes were a haunted blue that bore through you as if you were no more substantial than a ghost. He’d been an engineer with the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad for nearly twenty years. A full engineer at that. He’d been one of the team of engineers that worked the passenger line, picking up passengers and mail and freight in Bangor at the big granite Union Station on the Penobscot River at the foot of Harlow Street, hauling the transferees from the Maine Central’s bound for the North Country – Houlton or Millinockett, with lots of other stops in between on the locals.

Jake had never ridden that train as it stopped before he was born. But he’d heard the story seemingly hundreds of times of the night his uncle near lost his life when the train he was running fell into Sebois Stream after the railroad bridge had washed away in a spring freshet. He shuddered, remembering. Movement across the way caught his eye. Putting his field glasses to his eyes, he made out the hump-backed shape scurrying between containers. Rattus Nordicus, a Norway rat. A big one, too. Momentarily, Jake was glad to be high in the warehouse rather than crouching under a container with rodents the size of Scottish Terriers crawling around.
A chill ran from the top of his head to his tailbone. Jake hated rats with a passion.

~ ~ ~

Chapter 2, Continued...

Jake had been Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent for four years when he got his big break. He’d been assigned to the Atlanta Bureau in 1988 after completing his rookie year in Chicago field office. There, he’d mostly done background checks and local inquiries for cases going on elsewhere. He’d been assigned to S.A. Charles Murphy for his training officer. Agent Murphy had immediately let it be known that he was to be addressed as “Charley” outside of the confines of the office, except when superiors were present, of course. Charley was an easy-going bull of a man. Easily 6’2” and 250 pounds, he still ran the required 5 miles each week in under 30 minutes – heck, he ran a sprint mile at a near record pace of 4 minutes 32 seconds at the “company” picnic the summer of 1985, at the age of 41.

Charley had once been on the fast track to stardom, according to the scuttlebutt around the water cooler. In 1980, he was assigned as Special Agent In Charge to investigate one John Warnock Hinckley, Jr. on referral from the Secret Service detail guarding then president-elect, Ronald Reagan. Charley had been an agent for 10 years by then. He found that Hinckley was a 23 year old , mixed up kid with a penchant for some actress named Jodie Foster.

“John Warnock Hinckley Jr. was born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, on May 29, 1955. He was the youngest of the three children of John W. Hinckley Sr., called “Jack,” a successful businessman who became chairman and president of the Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, and homemaker Jo Ann Moore Hinckley,” started the damning document.

He didn’t think Hinckley posed much of a threat to the President and said as much in his report. Famous last words, akin to “What Indians? I don’t see any Indians.” From General George Custer as he rode over the hill towards a place known to the Sioux as “Little Big Horn.”
Charley was transferred from Denver to Fargo, North Dakota for five years after that. Only a spectacular, single-handed arrest of two bank robbers (sought by the FBI without success for over two years) that were numbers three and four on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list of fugitives restored Charley to the semblance of good graces with the powers that be in Washington. Even with no real chance of advancement, Charley had resigned himself to being the best FBI agent he could be and in a short time was transferred to the SID division in Chicago. “Special Investigations Department” was a misnomer, of course. All they ever did was background checks and historical research. Someone in Washington got a stiff breeze up their skirt at the thought of “Special Agent in Charge – Special Investigations Department.” So “SID” it remained.

An old saying goes “Once burned, twice schmart.” At least, that’s how Charley had learned it from an old babushka down the way in Southie when he was a kid roaming the streets, looking for trouble. She’d been the grandmother of someone he went to school with and typical of her kind, wrinkled skin, red, swollen cheeks from years of field toil and too much booze, a doughy, dumpy exterior, scarf over wispy gray hair, and beady black eyes you could lose your soul in. It was the eyes that held him as she castigated him for stealing a cabbage from her kitchen garden; it was the eyes which made him bend over and accept the switching from her whistling cane for his transgression; and, it was the eyes, welling with tears and telling him to “be a good boy, stay out of mischief…” he remembered as he looked at the neophyte agent in front of him. Something about him reminded Charley of himself as a younger man. Not as young as the miscreant cabbage thief, but something … it was the eyes. “They were old beyond their years, dark, liquid pools a soul could fall into…” Charley gave an almost imperceptible shake and refocused on the file in front of him.

“Agent LaMott, here in the SID we pride ourselves on the thoroughness with which we prosecute our tasks,” Charley began the standard spiel. “Unfortunately, that task is complicated and hindered by the utter stupidity
of the Special Agent in Charge and the extreme obtuseness of our fearless leaders in Washington, including his Majesty, Royal Ronnie.”

“Oh my God, he’s lost his mind,” thought Jake, as he struggled to keep a straight face.

Charley observed Jake’s struggles for a moment. LaMott never let on he was appalled and aghast at Charley’s unorthodox welcome to the office. “Good for him,” thought Charley. “he’ll do just fine” as he allowed a small smile to grace his lips.

“Let’s go get us some crooks!” exclaimed Charley, leaping from his desk and grabbing his coat and hat from the stand in the corner.

“Yes, sir.” Jake managed, stifling a laugh.

“Maybe this won’t be so bad, after all, he thought.” The rumor mill at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia had led Jake to believe his first assignment would be a stinker; that all training agents were by-the-books sticklers for the rules with all the social graces of a broom handle shoved up one’s ass.

Walking briskly through the sub-zero garage, Jake noticed his top coat, often too warm for the outside training exercises conducted at Quantico and at the headquarters in Washington, DC, where he did his internship, was totally inadequate to the job of keeping him warm in Chicago, Illinois, in January. The wind ran through it, and through him, like an old clipper ship running before the gales of the Screaming Fifties as it rounded Cape Hope – unstoppable. He’d have to do something about that – and soon. He needed something like the old green wool army top coat he’s had in high school. Although, he suspected a $600 black cashmere coat was expected for official winter garb for an S.A. in Chicago, judging by what “Charley” was wearing. He’d stopped the elevator on the way down from the office to the garage and proceeded to tell him in no uncertain terms that he “would be addressed as “Agent” or “Special Agent” only in formal situations. At all other times, unless they had superiors within earshot, he was to be called ‘Charley,’ got it, asshole?”

“If that’s what he wants, that’s what he gets,” Jake muttered through chattering teeth to himself as they approached the car.

“Stop shivering and drive,” said Charley, tossing the keys to him.

~ ~ ~

Chapter 1

2004-11-01T15:03:00.000-05:00

Jake LaMott slowly shook his way to consciousness. It was dark and cold. He was shivering slightly. “Black as the inside of a gravediggers arse,” he thought. Reaching out for the light on the nightstand by the bed, he jammed his fingers into a solid wall. Spreading his hand, he could feel satin with no give under an inch or so of batting.

“Maybe I’m in a sleeping bag.” Rolling onto his side only served to wedge his shoulder into the top of the what? Box? Above him. Struggling, Jake managed to get his old Zippo lighter out of his pocket. A wrist flick flung the cap back and a spin of the striker wheel brought a flare of light and a glimpse of cream colored satin igniting in front of his eyes, spreading outwards in a circle like a drop of fiery oil on water. For a frantic few moments, Jake beat at the flames until all that remained was the stench of burnt nylon and hot points of sticky plastic attached to his hand. And the beating of his heart. Oh yeah, it was doing box office business inside his ribcage, beating like there was no tomorrow. If it kept up, there’d be no tomorrow – he wasn’t sure how strong the grafts on his bypassed arteries were at this point…

“Where in hell am I?” Jake muttered aloud. His one flickering glimpse of his apartment put him in mind of a coffin.

Huge somethings crashed down on his world, outside of his cell. Vaguely, muffled voices could be heard to rumble like thunder in the distance. His breathing quickened. With dwindling strength, he started kicking the bottom of his enclosure with the heels of his dress boots. A startled shout and then some knocking above his head from outside brought renewed hope and increasing blackness as he lost all contact with his surroundings, slipping once again into unconsciousness.

Chapter 1, Continued...

Jake LaMott slowly came to consciousness like cream poured into strong, black coffee, swirling and mixing white with black, roiling up in an oily mass from the depths. He felt queasy, weak, disassociated from his body. It was there, alright, he could feel his pulse beating at his temple like a manic drummer, but it wasn’t real. The toes he wiggled were attached, but not completely under his control. Fingers wiggled, but not with intent. Eyes opened, but nothing moved, all was black – “black as the inside of a gravediggers arse,” he thought to himself, repeating a handy phrase he’d learned at his Father’s knee when just a wee tyke. Sounds were present, but lacked meaning. Clicks and hums and the occasional beep… not anything he could place. Gathering up his scattered willpower, he attempted to raise his head. Lightning burst before his eyes, thunder echoed in his ears as the rush of blood thrummed in his head amidst excruciating pain.

“Easy there, Jake, lie still,” commanded a woman’s voice to his right. A voice he didn’t know, an accent he couldn’t place. He started to raise his head again, only to feel immovable resistance at his forehead.

“Lie still, I said,” commanded the voice more forcefully this time. “Moving is out of the question. You are just lucky to be alive, again…” the disembodied voice explained. It was the last thing he heard. A sharp pain, then a rush of warmth signaled the departure of consciousness once again.
~ ~ ~

Waking was more abrupt this time. One moment, Jake was conversing with his Father over a glass of Tullemore Dew on the fate of his Grandfather Seamus’ horse in the peat bog, the next he was surrounded by a rush of cool air, efficiency in motion as he was rolled onto his side and warm water was applied by a strong hand, briskly rubbing the tingles away as goose bumps rose on his skin, then surrounded in a heated blanket and rolled onto his other side, scrubbed and massaged and chilled and warmed and rolled supine to have his front attacked with equal enthusiasm and no sense of hesitation or false modesty on the part of the wielder of the wash cloth (for he’d determined the nubbly cloth must be a wash cloth like his Momma used on him when he was young – bumpy and coarse and all business.) Quickly, another heated blanket cocooned him in its fluffy warmth and Jake relaxed into it, suddenly aware of the tension he’d been suppressing leaving him even as he realized it had existed. A pillow was inserted behind him as his head was raised by strong, sure fingers.

“There now, Mr. LaMott. That’ll do you for another morning, I think,” boomed a deep, scratchy voice – the kind that whiskey drinkers and chain smokers develop over decades of flogging by their personal addictions. “I’ll be back with your meds shortly. You just rest.”

And then it was gone with the swish of pant legs rubbing against each other and the pneumatic hiss of a self-closing door, the thunk of the latch offering punctuation to the woman’s statement.

Jake relaxed in the warmth and came to some conclusions. Rather, hypotheses. He was in a hospital of some sort, or a nursing home. He was all there. He could feel fingers and toes. His head itched under the wraps of what he supposed was a bandage. He couldn’t see anything, but he chalked that up to the bandages. He was injured, but he couldn’t remember how or why. He wasn’t sure where “here” was. He didn’t recognize the accents of the two voices he remembered, but they didn’t sound foreign. He knew his name was Jake. He supposed his last name was LaMott, at least that was how the last voice had addressed him. His grandfather’s horse was stuck in a peat bog and he was desperate to help, but couldn’t seem to reach him. Every step taken was like dragging through the deep marine mud of the flats off Eastport. Even as he pondered how he knew that and where in heck Eastport might be, the warm rush in his veins signaled another trip down the well.

~ ~ ~

“He’s stable now. I’m still not happy with his ‘crits, but I think you can let him spend part of the day awake. Give him 10mg Morphine now and p.r.n. We’ll let him self-medicate in time for his pain. Call me if there’s any significant change, of course. I’ll unbandage his eyes if my assessment this afternoon of his condition warrants it. No ambulation today, perhaps a trip to the bathroom this evening if he’s willing. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Certainly, Doctor. Solid food OK?” asked a second male voice, younger, higher in timbre.

“Nothing heavy, Roger. Clear broth and dry toast for midday. We’ll see how he tolerates it and go from there. No stimulants. No coffee, tea. No cigarettes – the dilation of his pupil is such that particles of smoke could be disastrous.
Jake swam upward through a veil of swirling mists, grasping, clawing his way to full alertness. Morphine? He must have been hurt far more seriously than he’d thought initially. He’d have to find a phone, call his superiors for instruction. Only, he still couldn’t see. And didn’t know where he was. He did know his name though. John Jacob Astor LaMott, Jake LaMott to all but his family. Family. Mother and father, now dead. Raised in Maine as a young man, uprooted to Connecticut as the fishing industry collapsed. His father worked at Sikorsky Aviation building the composite rotors needed by the Black Hawk/Seahawk line of military attack utility helicopters. Graduated high school in 1978. Ex-Marine. Graduated into adulthood on a little island nation in the Caribbean named Grenada, killing Cuban soldiers that had blocked the road into the port city in 1983. Served with distinction, getting shot and wounded but never leaving his post as a guard detailed to the United States Embassy in Jamaica during the upheavals following the deposition of “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Recovered for six months at Bethesda Naval Hospital and then at his grandparents’ former home in Eastport, Maine, now owned by his brother Bill, a carpenter and his wife Tammi, a nurse.

“Good Morning, sleepy head. Time to wakey-wakey,” a new voice, female, young. The bed hummed and vibrated, the head-end rising as the leg end dropped in response to unseen, unanticipated commands. Strong arms lifted him and placed a pillow behind him.

“Time to get cleaned up. You’re starting to look like a hoary old mountain man, judging from the whiskers I can see peeking through the bandages on your face. I’m Cindy and I’ll be your aide this morning. Janice is your nurse and Roger is Charge Nurse for the unit,” she went on. “Don’t get up. Roger seems to think you were alert and listening while the Doctor discussed your care plan with him this morning.”

I slowly nodded my head in the direction of her voice. I could hear her shoes on the floor, they made a “squishing” sound with each step she took on her way to the bathroom, which I judged to be off to my right. I could hear water running, the sound of a toilet flushing. More water. Then “squish, squish, squish, squish” as footsteps approached rapidly from the direction they’d disappeared to earlier.

“Let’s get that johnny off you,” the voice I knew to call Cindy said. “We’ll get you cleaned up and then I’ll put a pajama top on you.

Slowly, one at a time his arm was lifted, supported and cloth drawn off his shoulder, down his arm. Just as slowly, he was lowered back to the bed. The pain in his head was intense. Deep, black, scalding white hot when his neck flexed, fading to gray and then to blue, purple, finally back to black as the intensity eased off, his breathing slowed, the blood pounding in his temples whooshing instead of doing the Conga. It seemed worse on his right side, he thought. Perhaps that is where he was injured.

Suddenly he had a flash of memory. A hand bearing a gun, a 9mm Sig Sauer, black, coming at him suddenly and then… nothing. No further memory. No idea who might have hit him, either. He never got his arm up to block the blow. He sensed… no, recollected actually… feeling betrayed and hurt.

Someone had gotten the drop on him. That’s what he was feeling betrayed about. Someone he had trusted had done this to him, whatever “this” was.

Pain shot through his head like a hot knife through butter. Cindy had just raised him off the bed to take the other sleeve of the johnny off him. She’d been scrubbing him briskly the same way she’d done before.

“Now that’s odd. I just thought to myself that Cindy had done this to me before, but I don’t recall when.” Jake struggled to speak, but all he could muster was a hoarse croak.

“Don’t you be trying to talk yet, me boyo,” ordered a new voice from the bottom of the bed.

Female. Pleasant enough voice he supposed, mid-forties, maybe. Must be the nurse Cindy had mentioned. “What was her name? Oh yeah, Janice.” The name came to him slowly, like catfish floating up to the surface of the St. Croix after a discharge from the sewer treatment plant when he was a boy. He remembered an old wooden rowboat with oars about two times too big for him, a couple of cinder blocks on a fathom’s length of rope he’d scrounged from his grandfather’s shed, a long, bamboo pole and some netting twine with a big red and white plastic bobber and a big snelled hook he’d found in the wrack after a spring tide. The squeal of the oarlocks as he pulled, feathered then repeated his stroke up the river to the big, black pipe that ran out across the mud bank of the river to the trickle in the channel at low tide from the sewer plant. He preferred to fish there at slack tide because that was when the operators discharged into the river. One minute he’d be sitting over calm, blue water. The next saw the surface boil and roil with brown gobbets of something coming from the pipe eight feet down, spreading out in a widening gyre around him. There were many catfish, “hornpout” actually, was what they were called, in the immediate area of the discharge pipe. Something in the effluent paralyzed them and they’d come floating belly up to the surface. They weren’t dead, only stunned like. In a moment or ten, they righted themselves and swam away. But before they did, it was like floating amidst the dead bodies he’d seen on TV, the ones in Viet Nam, floating on the water of a river far away. But those bodies didn’t right themselves and swim away. Patrol boats came and men, strong men heaved the bodies into boats and carried them away. He’d seen it on the news. Uncle Walter told him about the dead bodies, “an act of a cowardly terrorist,” boomed the stentorian tones of the newsman.

He liked Walter Cronkite. He’d sailed into Eastport harbor one summer aboard this big, beautiful, white yacht, just him and his wife and a news crew filming them. It was covered in glistening mahogany, dull teak on the deck so one didn’t slip and slide overboard, polished brass and chrome. It was a marvelous sight to a 12 year old boy. He and Sammy Beal and John Jones had been buddies then and inseparable all summer long. That was the year his mother was ill with the cancer and he pretty much ran wild. They’d ride their bikes down Steamboat Avenue, this dinky little lane that fetched up at the edge of the river. The tough kids would hang out there on occasion, smoking pot they’d caged from the hippies in the commune up on High Street. The cops would sit down there in their cruisers, doing paperwork and drinking coffee, catching 40 winks, listening to the radio. Jake and Sammy were the same size and almost the same age, Sam’s birthday in August and Jake’s in September. John was about six months older, but he’d been a year ahead of them in school until the fifth grade when he got held back. He was bigger than they were, stronger, with just a hint of moustache appearing on his upper lip. He even had some hair under his arms and down there, in his crotch. Jake had seen that the last time they’d gone skinny-dipping out to the Quarry and John had swung back and forth on the rope hanging from the maple tree, bareass naked for all to see, just swinging in the breeze. The girls had all averted their eyes, but he’d gotten rather more of an eyeful than he was comfortable with. Johnny had grown up. It was the last time John went skinny dipping with the gang that summer.

Jake was yanked back to the present by pain shooting through his right eye. Cindy had finished and gone off to tend other patients. He was alone in the room for the time being, he judged, hearing no breathing other than his own, no footsteps or the scritching of pen on paper indicating the presence of a nurse or doctor. He fumbled around, feeling for a cord to pull to summon help. The pain was excruciating, red, angry throbbing in time to his heart. Finally locating a pushbutton device between his thigh and the side of the bed, he held the button down until a voice addressed him from a speaker over the bed.

“This is the front desk, Mr. LaMott. Someone will be with you as soon as they can. Is there an emergency?”

Jake just croaked, lay back on the pillow. He could feel sweat rolling down his forehead and into his eyes under the bandages. He raised a hand now to feel the bandage. Or at least, he tried to raise his right hand. It refused to cooperate. He got it about six inches off his chest and then couldn’t get it to move any farther.

“Dammit to Hell! What is wrong with me?” he thought angrily. He’d been top of his class in boot camp. He could lift a full 160 pound carboy of lobsters when he was sixteen. He thought nothing of bench pressing 220 pounds at the gym at Quantico where he worked out after running the six mile loop. He humped a 70 pound pack for twenty miles in training like it was nothing. And now he couldn’t lift his arm?

A rustle of skirts, or perhaps pant legs, Jake couldn’t tell. The air smelled faintly of lilac – it must be the nurse, Janice. Cindy had smelled of flowers, roses, he thought. This was lighter, subtle. A cool hand took his pulse, then the familiar rush of warmth spread up his arm and he gratefully succumbed to the black fingers of Morpheous.

~ ~ ~

Coming Soon: Four Horsemen - A Novel

2004-10-27T04:25:00.000-04:00

Beginning on November 1, 2004 and continuing through until November 30, 2004, I will be posting a novel under construction for the National Novel Writing Month challenge.

NaNoWriMo is a program embarking on it's fifth (sixth?) year. Stupidly, I have succumbed to this challenge and opened myself to public ridicule by taking it a step farther and joining with the other crazies here at Blogger.com participating via NaNoBloMo - the National Novel Blogging Month challenge. This is merely a change in where, not what.

Enjoy the craziness. Leave comments and criticism, but be gentle, I bleed easily...

Four Horsemen

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 4

Chapter 3

Chapter 2

Chapter 1

Coming Soon: Four Horsemen - A Novel