from A Spring in South Langland, Part 1

On New Years Day, Hannah Ellis arrived from the small town of Cantwell to live with her aunt Holly and her cousin Barbara in the city of Demeter. On the next available school day, everybody laughs at her rural appearance (“Yo, baby, you got some tight high waters on!”), but the young men at Kain Senior High School look her up and down and smiled at what they see.

Aubrey Newman, infatuated by a classmate, Amy Jamison, offers to carry her books. Annoyed at his bothering her, Amy thrusts three books – including one 500 pages long and the other 400 pages – into his stomach. She marches off down the hall, with Aubrey, juggling the texts (both hers and his), several steps behind her. When Amy orders him to walk faster because her bus is coming, he tries to do so, but then he encountered the icy pavement outside the school and spills her books on the sidewalk.

On the following Saturday afternoon, Aubrey walks the several miles between his house and Amy’s: “I’ll just tell her I was in the neighborhood visiting another friend and I knew she lived around the corner, so I’d thought I’d stop by.” But by the time he reaches her house, the early sunset and the freezing temperatures make it difficult to reach her house, but he finally does so. However, no one answers the door when he arrives.

With the new school week comes Hannah’s first workday at the local food emporium, Burger Castle – she arrives nine minutes late. She burns her first batch of fries beyond recognition, and she confuses the orders of several enraged patrons. If it weren’t for the assistance of the 19-year-old veteran of Burger Castle, “I don’t know what I would have done,” as she tells him a week later.

Her cousin Barbara warns her about Dorrell’s attentions: “Cousin, you better watch out for guy. It’s like I keep telling you – the boys around here are not like they were back in Cantwell. We could handle them down there like it was nothing, but the boys up here, well, they can get you in a corner you can’t get out of.”

“I can handle him. He won’t put his nasty hands on me, telling you,” Hannah assures Barbara.

But two days later, Dorrell persuades her to come with him because “I wanna show you something.” His sweet, insistent words and tone of voice, along with his caressing hands, lull Hannah, and one hour after they had started, Hannah is drifting down the sidewalk towards Aunt Holly’s house, in soft, measured steps. As soon as Barbara opens the door and inhales deeply, she quickly ushers her cousin into the shower for a ten-minute bath. When Hannah exits, she is about to speak to Barbara, who holds up her right hand with a smirk: “Don’t tell me. I know.”

During the same week, in the Kain cafeteria, Amy and friends jiggle the ice in their empty drinking glasses as Aubrey and his best friend Immanuel Norton go by with their lunches. “Damn, Manny,” Aubrey says in his foggy voice. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come to school at all today.”

“Got that right, Brey. You still got that cold. Listen, the babes aren’t impressed by what you did. Next time, just call her and see what she’s doing.”

“But she might not want to see me.”

“Well, that’ll save you going out in the snow and looking like you better get the coffin ready.”

Late that month, a grumpy Hannah Ellis drags through the front door of her Aunt Holly’s house and heads for Barbara’s room. Hannah doesn’t even knock on the door; as soon as she crawls over the threshhold, Barbara shrugs: “Told you, right?”

“Yup,” Hannah replies, “guess you did.”

“Now what?”

“Like you said – men ain’t no good up here. Took the cherry and left. I thought we were gonna get closer and everything, but he’s been ignoring me at work, when he ain’t dictating like I’m some slave of his.”

Barbara leans forward: “So what you got, Cousin?”

Hannah stares at her cousin with lifeless eyes: “If all the men up here are like Williams, then, well, tell you what. Time for me to go to real school. Bobby, you’re gonna teach me about all these lowlifes up here in Demeter, and we’ll take it from there.”

Barbara’s eyes dance, and her voice is eager voice: “By the time we’re through, we’ll get more than we give.”

On the first school day in February, Hannah enters her homeroom wearing perfume, with her hair done up, her clothes more form-fitting, her walk a bit slower and more measured. As she settles into the back of the room, more than half of the young men sit in the seats surrounding her.

Wyatt deserts his conversation with Herald to sit next to Miss Ellis: “Hey, baby, you sure looking good today, mama!”

“Wyatt, I ain’t your baby, and I sure ain’t your mama!” she answers to the accompaniment of hoots and whistles. “Besides, ain’t you the one who started calling me hick and hillbilly when I came in here last month?”

“Who, me?” a wide-eyed Wyatt answers. “Not me, ba. . .I mean, Hannah.”

“You ain’t been back there laughing at me when I come in here every morning?”

“No Hannah, no ma’am, no I. . .”

“He was the first one who had ‘hillbilly’ come out his mouth when you first came in here,” Herald speaks up.

“Hey, look here. . .”

“Said you went home to feed the pigs when you left here every day.”

Hannah squints at Wyatt as she opens her notebook and reads her magazine, oblivious to the entreaties of the other males in the room until the bell rings for first period.

Aubrey and Immanuel are headed the gym to watch the intramural basketball game when Michael Underwood’s voice booms behind them: “What’s up, Manny?” it says before its owner slaps Aubrey’s back very hard: “And what’s the Prof saying today?”

Aubrey bites his lip and Michael continues: “You heading to the game? Good! So are we!” He holds up his left hand – the one Amy Jamison, with her faint smile, is attached to. “Here to check out the competition we playing next week. By the way, Prof, who you playing for?”

“Cut it out, Underwood,” Immanuel intercedes while Aubrey’s left arm twitches. “You know Aubrey don’t play no hoops. He ain’t into that.”

“Well,” Michael says to Immanuel, “You playing for your team next week, ain’t you? All right then – oh, I forgot. Prof ain’t into hoops. He’s into ice-skating.” And he moves away as Aubrey’s left arm twitches even more violently.

Barbara’s eyes pop wide open as she accompanies her cousin back from the neighborhood store: “Why’d you do that for?”

“Because,” Hannah replies, “he was just giving me a song and a dance, and he wasn’t offering up anything, that’s why.”

“But this is Von Lee we’re talking about. He knows where all the happenings’re happening. You can go places with him.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t going nowhere but the outhouse with the lame stuff he was telling me. He was feeding me all this stuff about ‘baby you fine’ and ‘baby you make me sing’ and all that old crap. All that and fifty cents ain’t buying a soda, telling you.”

Barbara’s eyes have gone down a bit, and she begins to nod as Hannah keeps talking: “Tell me something. Make it worth my time. Ain’t that what you’re always telling me, Bobby?”

“Yeah, sure thing.”

“All right then, he wasn’t doing that. He better come up with something, or he can go roast with the other turkeys, you know?”

It is study period in the library, and Aubrey has been hard at work studying for the test he has to take during in fifteen minutes. He is alone at a table, when suddenly Geneva Jackson and two of her friends fill the other chairs. “Aubrey!” Geneva whispers out to Master Newman while her friends look at her, then each other. She pushes a typed document his way: “I gotta project to do for Mr. Pinkney’s class. I give to him next class, and I gotta collect signatures for the project. Would you sign this for me so I can turn it in to him on time?”

For eleven seconds, Aubrey stares at the document while Geneva and her friends stare at him. Then slowly he reaches into his pants pockets: “I’m sorry, Geneva, but I don’t have. . .” And Geneva produces a Bic that she thrusts into his hand. “Where. . .do. . .I sign?” he asks.

“Right at the bottom, okay?” He slowly pulls the paper to himself, puts the pen in his left hand, and pauses still longer. “Come on, Aubrey! I need this for class. Could you do it now, please?” Pursing his lips, he slowly signs the paper. Instantly Geneva pulls from her purse a folded piece of lined paper and holds it next to the document that Aubrey Newman just signed. Geneva Jackson shows her two friends the two pieces of paper, side by side. She puts the pieces of paper in front of Aubrey: the document he just signed on the left, and the anonymous handwritten love letter she had received on the right.

As he sits mortified, the three girls laugh loudly at the library table. Aubrey goes to grab the letter, but Geneva gets there first: “Are you kidding?” And as the bell rings, the girls happily get up from the table and go to their next class, leaving Aubrey Newman alone at the library table.

Hannah has left Burger Castle to work at a new job, as cook and waitress at the Eden Rib Pit. One day she is in negotiations with a student from Kain: “If I go out with you, how you gonna make it worth my while? If I’m going out with you, I wanna go in some style, and you gotta get me somebody for my cousin, because she’s gonna go too, if I do.” Hannah takes a step back: “You got something like that?”

“Might.”

“Like?”

“Nice car.”

“What? That old piece of junk you come to school in every day? You ain’t taking me and my cousin out in some old station wagon. That don’t cut no ice, sugar.”

Reginald purses his lips: “Does a BMW sound like a station wagon to you?”

“You, in a BMW?” She smirks at him.

“Well, they don’t let me drive the thing to school. Too many people getting jealous. I like being low-key.”

“Uh-huh. Right.”

“Look here,” Reginald propositions, “if I bring the keys to school tomorrow, we got a date?”

Hannah looks him up and down: “Maybe. Bring ‘em and I’ll let you know.”

“Meet you at your locker before school tomorrow.”

Hannah shrugs as he bolts up from his barely eaten food and leaves the Rib Pit – after the manager makes him pay for it. Hannah rips the cell phone from her pocket: “Bobby! We’re gonna sportin’ in a BMW!”

After the Valentines Day show the cousins are entertained through much of the night by their dates at one of their houses. Hannah and Barbara are able to get back to their house (Holly, who works the night shift, won’t get in until three in the morning). After the cousins excitedly relive moments from their night out, Hannah leans back in her chair: “I can keep this up forever.”

At a party the following weekend, Hannah studies the beverage put before her for six seconds, sniffs it for seven more, then calls Barbara and Gwen over. “I’m gonna try this drink and see what happens. Something strange happens to me, get me to the car.” She drinks the concoction, and within three minutes, she begins to slur her words and is barely able to take a step without stumbling. Dutifully, Barbara and Gwen swoop her up and take her to Gwen’s car, where she starts singing and yelling before suddenly nodding off to sleep. She spends the night at Gwen’s house; when she awakens the next morning, she asks Gwen, “How the hell did I get here?”

“I got the feeling,” Gwen replies, “that roofie sent you here.”

And later that month, Hannah is regaling Barbara and their friend Gwen with the details of her latest adventure when she is dragged off by Chloe Madden into a vacant classroom. There they engage in a brutal fistfight, one in which Hannah is winning, when the vice-principal, several male teachers, and a few male students drag the combatants apart. The vice-principal tries to make them promise that they won’t fight again. Chloe makes no such promise, but Hannah says, “I won’t do nothing to her unless she comes near me again. She does, I’ll kick her butt again!”

“Good enough,” the vice-principal sighs, and tries to get them to shake hands – unsuccessfully.

They are released with a warning. But for days afterwards, she tells Barbara, “I almost killed that wench, and I should have” and “That bastard didn’t tell me he had some witch on the side. And he’s still calling me!”

In early March Aubrey and Immanual are in the stands as their Kain Panthers win an High School League Basketball Tournament game. Immanuel watches the game intently, while Aubrey watches Michael Underwood and Irene Mabley intently. He watches them leave the gym after the game is over. After he finishes his homework (“Now if I add this here, divide this there, what’ll happen? Not what I want. Damn! So what did I do wrong? Let’s try this thing here. Hello! There you go! That oughta do it!”), he is about ready to turn his computer off, but instead switches to a new document page and begins: Why didn’t I move faster? The girl invites me to her house. I go over there. We play board games, play cards, watch TV. She’s sad that I got to leave. She was right there for me, and I just go sit in the corner. She’s been right there all along, and I could have had her anytime I wanted, instead of chasing after Geneva Jackson and Amy Jamison. I could have had Irene! All I had to do was ask, and she would have been mine.

Aubrey stops typing as he closes his eyes, turns his head first to his left, then to his right. He pounds on the keys: I keep whining about having nobody. I keep crying like some little baby about wanting somebody to like me. And I had somebody right HERE, and I couldn’t put my stupid rear end in gear and open my stupid mouth and ask her.

He the table with his left fist so hard it will hurt for eight days, and puts his head in his hands: “What the hell is wrong with me?”

All of the preceding material is the intellectual property of the writer of this blog and subject to copyright laws. Those violating such laws will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of that the courts allow.

Writing Notes: Follow instructions! Know what you’re supposed to write, to whom it’s addressed, when it is due to the supervisor, teacher, agency, etc. If you don’t do what you’re told, it will be rejected, no matter how good it is. Assigners can be ruthless (and I should know), so unless you have a really good, logical, feasible reason for doing things a different way, do it that way. As assigners like to say, one way or another, “It’s my way or the highway” – and guess who’ll be doing the traveling!

Final Note: This writer of this blog is available for tutoring students in written English, and editing texts. If you know anyone who would be interested in my services, please have them contact me at btenglish2010@hotmail.com.

Until next time – PEACE.

Introductory Post

Hello, everybody.  This is an attempt at a mainly literary blog:  short stories, excerpts from novels, and other material.  I hope you enjoy what you read here.  If so, let me know and massage my ego a little bit.  If not, let me know what you find offensive, so I'll know better next time.

There will be the occasional entry about what's going on in the world and reactions to same.  As with the literary portion of the show, please respond to my responses if you feel so led.  Please keep it clean and somewhat polite.  If you disagree, that's fine; you may know more about the topic than I do, and I'm always looking to learn something.  But profanity or illogical ravings?  Please, no, not here.  I'll respond to those, too - in ways you may not like.

But let's be positive and see what happens, eh?

an afternoon at menick's

It is August 18, at 3:55 in the afternoon – what John has waited for over the last week. The greatest championship game ever is about to played, and he has spent part of the morning and the afternoon preparing the munchies and the refreshments he will consume while watching it. He had called the others in the neighborhood whom he knows and are interested in the championship to invite them over to his house to watch it, but most of them have decided to go to the venue in question, way over in Brown Raven, something he cannot afford to do. He even asked a few of them if they would pay his way now, and he would pay them back later.

Their "Are You Kidding?" stares were their answers. The rest of those interested have said they have other things to do that day, and they will record it to watch later. So here descends John, on the basement steps to see who will be champ, when his wife Jane calls out, "You busy?"

He responds, "Well, yeah, I'm getting ready to watch this game that's getting ready to come on."

"Before you do that, could you run an errand for me?"

John grumps, "Does it have to be now?"

"You want electricity tomorrow?" Jane thrusts an envelope with several bills inside: "Well, the electric bill is due, and this'll cover it. Get me a money order."

John trudges down the stairs, turns off the set, admonishes the snacks - "Don't you go nowhere" - trudges back up the stairs, grabs the envelope, and heads for Menick's, six blocks away. As soon as he reaches the first intersection, with the cars whizzing by, he checks his watch: "4:07 – Why did she have to do this right now?" It takes two minutes for the traffic to slow enough to a trickle from both sides for John to cross the street, and even then he had to high-step the last several inches to avoid being hit by the SUV rumbling from his left. "They don't slow down for nothing, do they?" he grumbles as he continues his brisk journey to Menick's.

He sidesteps the children playing in the middle of the sidewalk. He bends his body around the two ladies gathered on the sidewalk to talk about who was and wasn't in church last Sunday. He tiptoes around the minefield that is broken bottles that have been there since last Saturday night. And he walks slowly and impatiently behind a strolling group of four young men deciding which party to go to on the upcoming weekend and which ladies will be worth their while when they get there.

Two of the young men see John virtually mark time behind them and step on the grass – and into dog waste - in order to let John pass. He leaves their profanities behind as he sees, looming in the distance, Menick's.

He pats his right-front pocket to make sure the envelope with the money is still there: "If this thing wasn't here and I had to go all the way back to get it. . ." He leaves the last of his mutterings unmuttered as he crosses the threshold of Menick's. Inside, he stands behind seven other customers. Most of them do basically the same thing: Ask the clerk behind the bulletproof glass for anywhere from one to four bottles of beverage, and it being Mega Night, for anywhere from two to ten lottery tickets. They pay what they owe, and head out the door. In two cases, the male patrons engage the female clerk with some small talk, basically centering around her availability for a date in the near future.

In one case, a customer loads up on eight scratch-off tickets as well. As he makes way for the customer directly in front of John, and passes John himself, this customer smiles and holds up the scratch-offs: "Just to make sure. Them other ones oughta work, but just to make sure!" John smiles at the exiting patron, but he still clenches and unclenches his hands a bit nervously, occasionally touching his envelope. He looks at his watch a few times: "Can't these people hurry up? Don't they know this game is on?" The young man immediately in front of John now has his turn in line, and he spends five minutes buying lottery tickets. A few times he pauses as though he has finished, and the clerk every more wearily asks, "Is there anything else, sir?"

After a four-second pause, the patron says, "Yeah, let me get another one for my lady/son/mama/etc." When the customer finally finishes his purchases, he takes a half-step to the side, partially blocking the clerk's window, while he scratches off his tickets. John tries to wait the patron out, but after another look at his watch, he steps forward and tries to squeeze into the narrow space the customer leaves him. He arouses the ire of the Lottery Buyer: "What's your problem? Can't you see I'm up here? You better wait till I'm finished, old dude."

John barks back, "You are finished. You're hogging the spot, young boy. Give it up. I got things to do."

The Lottery Buyer steps into John's body, bumping stomachs with him: "You better watch your mouth, or you're gonna be in trouble."

John replies, "Have some manners and get your lazy body out of the way."

The Lottery Buyer grabs his purchase: "I'll be outside waiting for you." And the Lottery Buyer marches outside to wait.

John buys the money order that his wife asked him to; the clerk counts out the change she owes John, then looks at him anxiously. He says with a smile, "Take care, now," and exits the store, almost immediately bumping into the Lottery Buyer.

They stand there on the sidewalk in front of Menick's, barely an inch apart, staring each other down. "Don't you be talking to me in front of the ladies like that," the Lottery Buyer growls.

John says nothing, and continues to stand erect and glare at his adversary, who threatens, "I oughta whip you up and down this block right now." They stare for seven seconds more before the Lottery Buyer remarks, "What, you ain't got nothing to say to me, old boy?" He looks John up and down: "What's that in your pocket? Let's have a look."

John, putting his hand over the envelope, warns, "Don't you dare touch me, you understand?"

After six more seconds of glaring, the Lottery Buyer spits on John's shoes and slowly marches away: "Better not say nothing to me." After the Lottery Buyer has walked halfway down the block, he turns to see John in the same spot - standing erect and glaring at his adversary.

The Lottery Buyer glares back for five seconds before he finally walks the length of the block and turns the corner. John stands on the spot for seven seconds more, as new patrons of Menick's step around him. He exhales slowly, pats the envelope in his pocket, and goes back inside the store to get a napkin from the clerk. He wipes off his shoes, deposits the napkin, and exits the store, walking the six blocks back to his house. He presents the envelope to Jane, who complains, "Can't you ever be careful with anything? I hope they take this bent-up old thing."

Quickly, John heads down the stairs, flicks on the television set – just in time to hear the announcer announce, "Boy, what a play! For those of you just turning in, you missed the play of the year!"

As the replay is broadcast, John, in his chair, his mouth full of chips, growls, "Humph!"