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 |
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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 ...
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.
