Mainstream Short Stories
| The Brothers Matuszewicz | Hank Schliemann | Other Mainstream Tales |
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| Home Takes More than Hat Hanging | The Man Who Wanted to Learn How to Whistle | Mine Mine Mine | Never, Ever Bring This Up Again |
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Home Takes More than Hat Hanging
We really can't blame the Matuszewicz (pronounced Mat-to-sez-vitz) Brothers, Coal & Onions, for turning to the wrong side of the law. Life was pitching just too many greaseballs, spitballs, and sliders, so that when that sweet lob came wafting in their direction, well, we should be able to empathize with the overwhelming appeal of stealing from the rich and giving to their own poor selves, or more specifically, to their own poor mother. Yielding to that temptation was just plain human, and the Matuszewicz Brothers were definitely human.
True be told, they came to the Mutters Bank of the West with good intentions and as the result of heroic actions. They ... well, it was Coal got this escapade started, but that's not to say that Onions didn't have his heroic moments; it just wasn't his time when a runaway dump truck came barreling down from Scaretakers Ridge, catching Hanna MacGiffin with her new VW Bug stalled but rolling slowly out onto County Highway 17. She hadn't quite gotten the hang of that German-engineered clutch and killed the engine after she'd lurched from the stop sign outside her daddy's HVAC business, which sat next to Thuy Nguyen's nails salon, then Dew Drop Internet, a cyber-cafe where you could also get your vacuum & VCR/DVD/DVR serviced, but couldn't get a good cup of joe, and finally, Paycheck Extenders, making every Saturday night possible for an oh-so-modest vigorish. Those four businesses comprised a flat-roofed shopette about 35 miles north and east of Mutters, Colorado, not all that far in that part of this fair land of ours..
The dump truck belonged to Slim-Tea Szilard, and he'd been meaning to get that parking brake fixed, especially when he just stepped out to take a quick leak and expected his heavily laden truck to sit there, rumbling on rough idle. This haul of concrete chunks from the Annealongton-River Dam would've paid for that fix, too, but now, what with the truck being totaled, there'd not be much point. Lots more concrete to haul, too, because the Corps of Engineers was gonna "undam that river", tricky business or not. The government had lost a lawsuit to the Mundo-y-Localistas, a brace of very successful eco-lobbyists, and the Corps would get it done, well, come Hell or high water -- and which was more likely given record snow-pack a-melting?.
"Scaretakers Ridge" names the wandering, jagged spine of hills (that would be mountain peaks if they weren't jutting from a high valley), a spine that separates a swarm of big-town folks and big ranchers who not only thought they ran the county, but actually did, from everybody else, namely Mutters. These two sets of folks fussed mostly over water, what else that far West? Their main source was the Annealongton River, the second east-west flow of water south of the Rio Colorado after which the state got its name, but north of the Rio Grande well before it defines Texas..
Of course, "River" was a misnomer for that stream, at least according to anybody from those smelly cities sprawling east of the Great Plains, but for the West, the Annealongton wasn't so bad, especially in the spring after a plentiful winter, which this one had been. Besides, how much is enough is relative when it comes to water; ask Rasputin..
Two dams shouldered each other "up the ridge", a big one north of the ridge that the Corps was getting started on. Then, there was a small, unnamed dam across a small fork that cut through the ridge and meandered south to make Mutters everything that it was. Damming it originally had made the Annealongton -- and its downstream folks -- even bigger and Mutters even smaller. How the Corps planned to tear down one dam while ignoring the other, the people of Mutters couldn't figure. They were just used to sucking hind-tit ever since this whole dam thing started. That was life south of Scaretakers Ridge..
All in all, Scaretakers looked very like that wall on the island that penned up King Kong, only this one was built by the Original Native of this & all other lands, as they like to call God in that Native-American church which meets in a kiva that used to be a missile silo, just off Riveredge Road, right inside the Pico-Ute Reservation. Right beside their casino, another ten miles east of Mutters, an easy exit off the new County Highway 17..
Spreading south from this jagged spine, the Sha-etta Valley rolls along full of scrub and dirt and what the anthropologists at Tufts like to call "subsistence living," but the folks around there just call it "home.".
Just then, Coal Matuszewicz didn't join in that particular homey chorus. In fact, Coal felt this whole region was just too "long" & "far" and all those other adjectives that left him exposed and wide-open to the vagaries of life. He liked the closer quarters of city life; he liked having threats and promises right at hand. In fact, he had just finished e-mailing their mom, predicting that they'd be rolling into Skokie in about three days, so she could start thawing out a turkey for her usual welcome-home-C&O dinner. He had continued to abstain from describing what happened in Baja where the SCUBA contest had turned out to be a scam; no $10,000 prize that would've made up her delinquent house payments. Instead, he sent electronic trip reports & movie reviews to Mom, that was all; everything else could wait till they sat down together in their living room, back home again, one more time .....
Movie reviews? DVD & campfire provided a staple for all their road-trips. Before they'd left, Mom had picked out seven films, George Sanders as The Saint. Each night on the road, they'd fast-forwarded through another of the so-called thrillers from the late 1930s and drafted a short review for Mom. Get it done so they could watch "H2fx", their own homage to the special effects of Ray Harryhausen, starting with the greatest work of his mentor Willis H. "O'Bie" O'Brien: 1933's
Coal had sent the message, logged off Hotmail, then plopped down a sawbuck to pay for the session & the cup of coffee that he'd barely touched. Then he'd headed out the door and across the dusty, beaten-down-dirt parking lot to join Onions who was gassing their pickup at the Bucking Q truck stop on the other side of the highway..
First, Coal noticed the Salsa Red VW -- New Beetle, 2.5L 5-cylinder engine -- still bright from the weekend car wash at the Pickens Congregational Church (though he didn't know the specifics at the time), then its hapless, but cute driver trying to start an engine that he could tell she'd flooded even from this distance, then -- more due to motion than sound, but still the thunder of that driver-less load of concrete hunks did its part in drawing his attention -- he noted the plummeting dump truck and quickly figured that it & the red VW would vie for the same physical place at the same physical time with the standard poor results for any living thing contained therein..
So: Coal hustled on over, and rather than yanking at the door, which was automatically locked, which he knew from the four months & one week he'd worked at Otto's German Verks back home, and rather than shouting at the young woman inside who was just figuring in her own stead that something needed to be done & right quick, he just lent his hefty muscles & well-exercised sinews to getting that car off the highway before the truck could join it there. And, once Hanna caught on and took both feet off their respective pedals, it worked right well, with all of four feet to spare. Not so good, of course, for the Bucking Q's tall sign with automated price adjustment that took Slim-Tea's dump truck hard to the cross-beams..
Onions Matuszewicz, in his turn, had a first-hand view of the collision since he'd just finished cleaning all the glass on their pickup, then wiping down the cracked rubber blade on the Bucking Q's squeegee as just good manners to his fellow travelers. The heavily laden truck charged deliberately by not more than twenty feet away. Onions panned to follow so he watched the whole interaction of vehicle & sign, how the former clipped the latter's right post, which was sturdy enough to stop a heavy truck, but not sturdy enough to survive the impact, so that it teetered, then twisted, which accelerated the fall, a ponderous, yet amazing sight (sad like O'Brien's King Kong, not the new one released in '05, sad despite Onions not knowing the people around there), amazing right down to the thundering crash caused by the sign colliding once again, this time with the ground but not much else..
Which reminded Onions of how he was coming to like that part of our great land. Back home, if you knocked over a tall, massive sign like that, damage occurred and people got hurt. Onions knew that for a fact..
Back across County Highway 17, people came pouring out, of course ... For more, contact me
The Man Who Wanted to Learn How to Whistle
Workin' on it ...
Mine Mine Mine
Workin' on it ...
Never, Ever Bring This Up Again
Mexico had been one disaster after another.
Onions drove north from Tecate which left Coal, in the pickup's right seat, with his hands free. He lifted them dramatically, middle fingers jutting up already, ready to flip.
Onions checked his mirrors. Behind them, uniformed officials manned three narrow lanes of the border crossing. He said to his older brother, "Better look where you're aiming those."
Coal shrugged, but put his hands down, squirmed around, and glared out the rear window. Submitting to discretion, he flopped to face America again.
Eyes on the busy road ahead, Onions reset his hands on the steering wheel as his right foot pressed them along Highway 188. In through the open windows blew dry air tainted by desert dust, a clogged sewer, and the bite of broken mesquite. Ahead, those trees stubbled low hills. Above them, haze gave a milky undertone to a clear blue sky.
Coal muttered, "Never, ever bring this up again." He glowered, looking like Stallone at his beefcake best.
Onions flared. "What? Paying up Mom's mortgage?"
"'Course not."
"Mexico?"
C straightened some in his seat. "And give up Acapulco?" He peered out his side, but not before O saw his smirk. Stallone gave way to Dylan McDermott.
Since they'd never been anywhere near Acapulco, O lightened up some. "Surfing contests?"
"Well, the contest part anyway. So: never, ever bring up surfing contests ..."
"In Baja ..."
"In May."
"Done," Onions said. "Speaking of money we
"How's the traveling fund?"
O recalled the contents of his money belt. "One more tank of gas, and a couple of burritos for us."
C reached for their cache of road maps and gazetteers. He then hauled his cell-phone out of its belt holster. His hum of delight meant it had found its designated network, and he could confirm what the possibly out-of-date paperbacks told him.
O checked the sun off his left shoulder: mid-point to the horizon. "We're turning east up ahead. Find a tavern this side of Yuma."
###
The Dew-Claw Tavern sat out in the boonies, the way Coal and Onions had come to like, surrounded by newly planted cropland, irrigation pushing back the desert. Though dusk still lingered in the clear sky, cars and trucks covered the asphalt parking lot. Onions had waited in their truck while Coal walked in.
O's turn to play shill in the little con-game they'd worked up on their trip from Skokie to Baja. All the games were honest, but as Harry Anderson advised in his book, they couldn't lose if they played the suckers right. They hadn't cut anybody deep, just traveling money, and in a busy bar, that spread the losses. Most of the time, the shill nursed a beer while the hustler worked, but if he had to play sucker, it really helped.
Confident in another lucrative night, Onions strolled toward the stuccoed fake hacienda. A crowded patio, tables picked out by lamps, ran behind a short adobe wall. O nonchalantly guessitimated 90 patrons outside. Probably half again that inside. Good pickings!
Heaving open the carved door, O plunged into a noisy, smoky, artificially cold dark partly relieved by the same kind of table lamps.
Against the far wall, a man stood on a small stage that he shared with a clear-plastic drop-box. Inside fluffed currency, several dozen bills. On top lay a small, black box and a money paddle like they use in casinos.
Onions slowed as his stomach soured. A stage, yes, but not in use.
Pale-skinned, tall, the man brought the microphone too close to say, "And, uh, and now, before the final question in this round of trivia, inside versus patio, I, uh, just want to say I've had fun up here. Little did I expect you'd let me run part of your nightly contest. So, thanks again!"
Disappointed, Onions sighed and scanned for Coal. They needed a fresher batch of suckers. Tapped out on trivia or thinking too much about it, not good marks for novice tricksters.
The em-cee grinned and poked the black box. "I'm turning on the cell-phone dampener again, to keep that ol' playing field level." He pulled a card from a pocket. "Which is further from Tokyo, Japan: Minneapolis, Minnesota, or Los Angeles, California?"
Onions froze. That question came right out of their book! Page 67. In a legit trivia contest?
"That's the last question, folks. Any more bets?" A shout from the patio. "Current score?" He leaned toward the bar. "Pipkin, the barkeep, keeps track of that."
Behind the bar, a stumpy man in coveralls shouted, and the em-cee repeated, "Inside: 20. Patio: 19."
Stuttering, as if still nervous, the em-cee recited from a sheet taped to the drop-box. "C'mon, patio, you can tie the score, but before you do, sweeten the pot. Remember: Pipkin applies the pot to the bar bills of the winning side, and gives you your money back."
People trooped in and swapped bills for tickets. The em-cee kept them lined up as he worked just above eye level.
Suspicions tickled, Onions watched carefully. The em-cee laid out each bill on top of the box, counted out tickets, then handed them over to the bettor. Bills in his left, money paddle in the right, his hands hovered above the money slot. His left hand twitched just before the right rammed down the bills with a loud clack. He straightened, left hand brushing his long, loose polo shirt, barely hiding a gut.
Onions recognized that twitch, but he couldn't quite place it. Excitement built in him anyway.
The em-cee turned his challenge inside. More bets. The em-cee handled each, orderly, openly, with a twitch each time.
Coal walked up. "Took a whiz before we leave." Grimacing with exasperation, he cocked his head at the em-cee.
Who said, "Finalize your answers while I pee."
Recognition bloomed in Onions. Thrill and hope mounting, he whispered, "The Poughkeepsie flinch."
"Here?"
O nodded. "Right here. Pocketed each bet, and now he's walking out with the pot."
"Cool for a grifter." C lifted his chin to boast, "I could do that."
"Think of what he could teach us." Grinning, Onions lightly punched C's arm. "We could pay up Mom's mortgage with some left over. Let's put it to him."
With Coal following, Onions pushed past the bouncer who shook his shaved head.
"Nobody in or out, fellas, not with a money question open." His grin showed gaps. "Folks get real competitive for a few bucks, pull sneaky stuff."
Coal cocked his fists. "He left."
The bouncer gaped. "What? Who?"
"And he took all the money."
The bouncer shifted his stare to the stage.
Coal slipped past.
Going along, Onions added, "Said he was going to pee, but ..." He joined C in pushing open the door.
Outside, C trotted onto asphalt. "They'd figure it out soon enough," he called. "This way, we get a chance to follow the grifter."
But nothing stirred in the parking lot. Somehow, the grifter had totally booked. Not even residual lights showed on the moonlit road.
Artificial light splashed from behind them.
"Shake the dust of this town ..." Onions broke into a run as he paraphrased St. Luke. "From our feet."
Coal laughed. "I'm driving!"
Off to their left, a single headlight angled to cut them off.
"Hey!"" Coal protested. On the right, another headlight closed in.
A third headlight brought up the rear. Onions and Coal spun around, raising their hands against the bright lights and any threat they hid.
Climbing off a scooter driven by the bouncer, Pipkin stepped into the light, hefting a club. Behind him, under a bright half-moon, a mass of bar patrons surged to engulf them.
"You're part of his crew," Pipkin said grimly.
Coal tried innocence. "Who?"
But Onions said straight out, "No, we're not. We just recognized what was going on."
"Why'd you run?"
O spread his hands. "Strangers in town?"
"Yeah," Coal added. "Who else you gonna lynch?"
Onions doubted the loaded word would help, but worth a try.
Pipkin weighed the situation -- and the club. "How did you recognize the con-game? We didn't, and we ain't no Yuma yokels."
Coal faded back, and with a shrug, O leaned forward. "Our mom's a junkie trying to stay clean. Even as kids, we got dragged to meetings, you know the kind. Lots of iffy characters, even when there was Al-Anon for us to go to. One guy" -- O chuckled tolerantly -- "called himself a 'grifter', but his drinking gave him shakes so bad, he couldn't keep doing it. We kids called it magic. We learned all the tricks, including the Poughkeepsie flinch."
"The what?"" Pipkin asked.
"How the grifter switched cash for fake bills in front of your eyes. He's very good, considering the close quarters."
Pipkin said, "Say we believe you. How do we catch this guy?"
Onions smiled, no fake relief required. "We're not grifters. We do not cheat. We play honest games where we already know the answers."
"Nevermind." Pipkin judged them, his eyes glittering. "C'mon inside while we sort this out." He shrugged good-humoredly. "The, uh, grifter hid the phone-buster and left it on. He also yanked the land-line on his way out. So, we can't call the cops."
He pivoted with a touch of military precision, and the crowd of patrons split. It didn't close until the brothers followed.
Inside, Pipkin checked in with his assistant barkeep, Runyon.
"The land-line's working, boss. Still looking for the jammer. No deputy yet because maybe handle this on our own. You caught the crew, so ...."
Onions and Coal stepped apart and looked for a way out.
Pipkin laughed, almost light enough to ease their minds. "Relax, boys, I'm believin' you right now."
Coal said, "In that case, I gotta pee." When the bouncer held up a hand, he added, "You got my brother as hostage, right?"
At that, Pipkin gave a nod, and Coal moseyed off, ignoring Onions' questioning look.
"Any of them" -- Runyon meant the lynch mob -- "know anything?"
On stage, Pipkin repeated the question. The drop-box had been tipped over, and its contents spilled, then torn into frustrated pieces.
"Fakes," Onions whispered to Coal when he wandered back. "Good fakes, but fakes nonetheless."
C grunted and looked mysterious.
The crowd fell quiet. Pipkin polled each table, inside and patio. He stood stumped.
Coal called out, "How about the cleaning woman?"
"Who?"
C waved towards the back. "When I arrived here, a woman peeked at me through curtains. Older, maybe, mousy looking. Not the cleaning woman?"
"Oh ho!"" Pipkin whooped. "Nosy Eva. Runyon, fetch!" He looked over the room. "Our bookkeeper. Maybe her snooping will help us out this time."
Soon, Runyon hooted, "Got his license-plate number! Got it!"
Behind him trailed a woman very much as Coal described. She smiled shyly at the fuss, then ogled Coal furtively. To Onions, she whispered, "You're cute too."
Bubbling with the victory, Runyon and the bouncer escorted Eva to the stage where Pipkin read the number aloud, an Arizona plate.
Onions noted the number, but Coal snatched at the paper as he edged toward the entrance, now unguarded.
Pipkin grinned, waving the paper. "Never, ever bring 'Nosy Eva' up again. Thank you, sweetheart." His grin faded. "Now what do we do?"
"Internet!" someone shouted. Cell-phone lamps glowed, then patrons wailed as the dampener kept working.
"Find that jammer!" someone shouted. Dozens stood in unison even as the door closed behind the brothers.
"Run!" shouted Coal.
"What'd you do?" asked Onions.
"Bribed the bookkeeper."
"To do what?"
"Deliver the wrong number to Pipkin, a slightly wrong number. Threes can look like eights in the dark. We got to get next to this grifter. Oh, the things we'll learn!"
"Coal, you promised."
"Not sex, either. Just some canoodling. Mousy bookkeepers don't get much canoodling."
"So, what are we going to do with it? No Internet, and those searches aren't free."
"Remember Fay? She'll get to work early Arizona time."
Fay who worked in the Illinois DMV. Never got over Coal even though they broke up nearly two years ago. That Fay.
Onions tossed the keys to Coal. "You drive," he grinned.
For more, contact me
The pseudonym "Hank Schliemann" rose out of my unconscious, that part of me I label "Lewis" (my middle name, after my maternal grandfather), sometime in the year 2000, probably as part of Lewis' fascination with alternate worlds. A concept explored thoroughly in the realms of science fiction, "alternate worlds" has recently seeped into the greater consciousness as indicated by an article in Discover Magazine and the film Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow. Basically, it supposes that each major nexus in my life (and yours) isn't resolved by the single choice I remember making, but in fact, gets resolved in every possible way, but each resolution splits off a version of the universe (creating even more "multiverses"), so that I, the one who's writing this particular web-page, am not aware of all those other fates working themselves out (O, that I could see how those choices turned out ... some day, I'll write a story — a science-fiction story, of course — about that).
So: Hank could be me in another universe where I made different choices and Fate dealt with me in far more crueler ways than this particular one has. As Lewis churned out various tales with Hank as the narrator, I recorded their gists using the bits on my computer, then labored to turn the first one into some of the best work I've done so far ... at least, that's what my critique group says. Time came to submit the story to the vagaries of publication and I needed to come up with a pen-name (fairly consistent advice pushes me to use different authorial names in different genres). I struggled for a moment, then — of course! Since Hank is telling the story as a first-person narrator, then his should naturally be the name on the story itself.
Without further ado, the "Hank Schliemann" stories:
- Red Line in My Mind
- Coming next! In Dreams, Ghosts Needn't be Gray
Other Mainstream Tales
- Downstream from Divorce — presented in league with Mark Twain, Bruce Holland Rogers, James Van Pelt, and H.P. Lovecraft! at
- Before I Wake — read by actors from "Stories For All Seasons On Stage" at the "A Day to End Violence," on Tuesday April 20th, 2004, at Café Café (44th Ave & Zuni, 2399 W. 44th Ave, Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.)
- False Power — read by actors from "Stories For All Seasons On Stage" at the historic Byers-Evans House on Sunday May 9th, 2004, 1310 Bannock St., Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.
