Tag Archives: deerskin-bag

by serialjones | September 12, 2011

Forbidden Truth #51: Gold on Black

On the way home from Gene Cassidy’s, Dean was out of sorts in so many ways they competed for his attention, the way his kids used to when they actually wanted him to notice them. Clearly those days were gone forever. So fucking be it!

This last conclusion pretty much sums up Dean’s frame of mind on the way home that night.

Of the many forms his foul disposition took, the most leadening was guilt, a multimodal regret that, at times, sunk farther, to a bitter remorse. He felt hollowed-out. Add to this the taste in his mouth from a few more acid-reflux belches, and the mood plunges even farther down, into that hideous awareness that his midlife was not only going to be hell, but was an early arrival and looked like it was here to stay. Till, that is, old age pushes it out, and then life would get even worse.

The full moon over Richardson Bay contrasted with his sour mood. It was later than he had wanted it to be, this return from the little excursion to Gene’s. He had needed a strong cup of black tea and a half-nap on the sofa after the three pints of Gene’s powerhouse porter.

The depression Dean wallowed in was exacerbated by the post-porter slump. Perhaps you know this experience. Not necessarily from porter, but from any alcohol consumed in sufficient quantity. If the buzz wears off before we sleep, it can leave us despondent. The easy story we tell ourselves is that we have flattened out after the party, the dull mood is but a result of the high that served us so well but has, as all good things must, now gone away. But this torpor is often accompanied by a grey-faced confrontation with some truth-bearing part of our minds that warns us about that ever-lurking, dark-blue thing, that sadness that wants to crash the feel-good life.

This special fatigue cold-cocks the bouncer that is stationed to keep that sadness out before it spoils the chance of something good happening. What if that good thing happens and we are too bummed to know it?

Dean knew how to navigate his way out of the tunnel of despond. Contrition. Compensation. Sacrifice.

He did not have anything left in him after the climax of the evening and not only of the evening but also the previous two months. The drama had reached its apex with Gene poised above the paper-wrapped cylinder, wet knife-tip stabbing at the rough blue paper. As Dean called an end to the surgery, as Gene set both knife and little cylinder on the coffee table, the slump had begun. Down, down, down sunk the mood of Dean Colfax.

The three objects were soon returned to the little leather bag. Gene’s hands were compliant, but the look on his face betrayed something less than full compliance. This was the part of Gene that made his custodianship of the deerskin bag more than a little dangerous.

For as long as he had known Gene – and, going back to when they met in graduate school, this was 17 years – Dean had seen his friend’s ethical guidelines shift. We can easily say that this is not so unusual with anyone, over time, but with Gene the shifts could be temporary and situational, opportunistic and self-serving. There had been half a dozen affairs, including two Maggie knew about, since they married.

Dean could see from his friend’s face, as he put the objects back into the little bag, that Gene felt cheated out of satisfying his curiosity. Could he be trusted to hold this stuff? Gene did seem to have great respect for Dean, the kind that makes honoring a request like this one vastly different from the oft-rescinded marital pledge to eschew erotic variety.

After Gene complied with Dean’s request, he said, “Just playing devil’s advocate here, OK?”

Then he presented the same arguments Dean had told himself and had already shared with Gene as justification for not giving the boy the bag: the safety of Harlan; the boy’s charisma; his beauty, hard to use that word to describe one’s son, but truth is truth; his innocent ignorance about the deviant behaviors of some of our more twisted citizens. Blake could be one of these sick predators who bugger a boy and then kill him.

Dean was mature enough to accept his son, and unconditionally, should the boy come out as gay. But he wanted it to be Harlan’s choice and not the choice of someone who had a warped fantasy about him.

But when Gene replayed these same protective notions that Dean had presented earlier in the evening as the most solid reason to open up the three little objects, it sounded to Dean like his agenda was different than mere protection of an innocent boy. The words seemed to disguise some less-than-noble urges, with a selfish curiosity the primary one.

Regrettably, Dean’s thorough account of Blake and their conversation at JavaPort, the indecipherable exchange between son and stranger, the calligraphed name, the deerskin bag and its recent adventure, together worked like some multimedia hype that inflamed Gene’s inherently inquisitive nature. His curiosity had grown big and steroidal even before it was tantalized by the bag and its three mysterious objects.

But it was Dean’s kid and Dean’s little brown bag (sort of, if possession really is nine-tenths of the law). So Dean had the final say. The still-wrapped objects went back into the little brown bag.

“I’ll find the perfect place to hide this, man. Trust me.”

On his drive home, as Dean played over this sentence, his foul mood went greyer, nastier. But what could be done about it? Under the full moon, now shining on San Francisco Bay, he settled on the old standby: contrition via compensation and sacrifice. The Golden Gate was true to its name that night, as the black, wrinkled canvas where the night bay mingled with the Pacific Ocean was painted with a golden oil, oil of moonlight, or, really, sunlight held and cooled and spilled down upon the restless black waters.

The gold-on-black luster took Dean’s eyes off the road surface where they belonged, to look out beyond the edge of the Western World.

Strangely inviting. But Dean sought the best means to contrition, and setting the brake on the Prius and leaping into the void was not one of them. He caught himself slowing and speeding and slowing while doing moonstruck penance for his catalog of bad behaviors. Can one truly perform an act of penance while attempting to explain to a Highway Patrol officer that the three pints had worn off long ago? Most likely the outcome would just pack more guilt in.

Compensation. Sacrifice. The tried and true. And steady, inconspicuous driving.

As he took a right on Divisadero and began the steep climb through Pacific Heights, he felt his spirits rise, slightly, almost not at all, like the recovery from a health condition aided by a placebo when we ask, Is something better or am I just imagining it?

The full moon now hid behind scattered clouds, rapid ones, that gave and took moonlight from the city as they clustered and broke apart to form new clusters.

As this slight elevation in mood transcended his self-loathing, Dean got a flash: he would cave in, for Scilla. She would love him for it. He would abandon his adamant refusal to lend Flo and Hank the money they needed.

Mitchell, OK, he’d shake his head in disgust. But, hey, no skin off his ass, really, unless Scilla pressures Artis to have the Cartfalers join the Colfaxes in their support of Flo and Hank. But that matter is between Mitchell and Artis. Oh, to be sure, Mitchell will sneer at Dean for caving, vent a little derisive disbelief that Dean could be so cocky in bonding with him, the stern husband, only to fold, apparently because his wife was the stronger of them (as everyone in the family must have thought). Dean just being Dean, no surprise there.

“To hell with him if that is what he thinks of me,” Dean declared aloud to some inner character he knew well but whose essence he did not understand and whose existence he would have denied if queried. To himself, he said, I do not live with Mitchell, I live with Scilla. I owe Mitchell nothing.

Dean and Mitchell would likely go back to their previous perfunctory conversation at the obligatory family gatherings: Giants/49ers/weather/traffic/ cars. It had worked for years. It would work again.

Scilla had burned through a day in hell. She did not know that Dean had been so careless as to let her go out the door and down the steps to Marisa’s idling Honda without telling her about Mitchell’s agreement with Hank, to allow Flo to break the news to her sister later. Mitchell would honor Flo’s need and not mention this call to his wife.

But it would be Scilla who broke the news to Artis later that night on Skype. Looking back on this, Scilla thought Artis was playacting. Poor Priscilla, left in the dark, inadvertently, yes, but in the dark nonetheless. Minds darkened by ignorance often entertain distortions of reality.

A day in hell. Scilla had worked around her fury, snapped at a few people but otherwise endured her discomfort unnoticed. Shackled in her inferno, she imagined calling her sisters snide bitches for being in league with one another against her. Much of her free mental time was spent supporting her conviction that she would not authorize one dime of the Colfax family funds to go to legal aid for that rotten doctor.

And Christmas? Why would she let either of the treasonous sisters into her house for anything? That would be a sure way to ruin the most beautiful holiday.

When Dean brought his mission of contrition up the stairs from the garage that Wednesday night, after taking off his coat and lowering the manbag to the nearest chair, lighter now without its little hard-on, he clapped his hands together a few times, kissed his wife, and held her face in his palms, the better to give her his gift. ”Scilla,” he said, “I think we ought to give Hank and Flo whatever you determine to be a good sum. It’s up to you.”

Scilla pulls her face from his affectionate hands and turns from him with disgust.

“Why would we want to give those hippies one dime of our money?”

“Because…” But Dean couldn’t finish.

No matter how long I live with her, I will never, ever figure out this woman, he said silently to some inner guy who understood what he meant.

To Scilla he nodded deliberately, slowly. Then he said, “OK. If that’s what you want.”

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Tagged as Dean, deerskin-bag, Gene, Priscilla

by serialjones | September 9, 2011

Forbidden Truth #50: 7% Porter

Wednesday, June 15, and Dean is sampling Gene Cassidy’s latest batch of homebrewed porter. The men clink their pint glasses, quaff, wipe their mouths and resume the running conversation they have been having since Dean arrived after his hospice volunteer work.

On this Wednesday night, the first part of the conversation skipped around as they took take care of preparatory tasks. Dean had picked up the burritos and side dishes that Gene had called into his favorite taqueria. Oscar, the Cassidy’s elkhound, had to be fed. Plates were taken down for dinner, and pint glasses for the new porter that was making its debut this week. They sat at the kitchen bar and took in bites of their burritos while the conversation made its way through myriad subjects.

The men were as close as, perhaps even tighter than, brothers. One mode of talk was this subject-jumping style that moved as they moved from rice and beans and tortillas, to jalapeños en escabeche balanced on chips, to pints of porter and back to the starch tubes.

Another kind of conversation the two men enjoyed was the more intense one, when one or the other, by implicit agreement, was allowed to take the conversation over, for a story or a political screed or a long joke. The other gave attention to the performance and sometimes matched it with one of his own. Like jazz musicians, they respected one another’s solos.

The dinner soon done, the emptied pint glasses refilled to their brims, the men moved the party from the counter to the sofa against the far wall. They set their brews on coasters waiting on the coffee table. Dean sat on one end of the sofa, leaned half-against the arm, and prepared to hold forth. Gene settled into the other end of the sofa.

“So now you gotta tell me. What is it this deerskin bag is gonna do for us? I got curious over those phone calls but I don’t know what to expect. This is a big deal because…?”

The men had talked some about the little deerskin bag on the telephone, had agreed that Gene would be a trusty steward, and had made an arrangement for this very face-to-face encounter.

Though some of it was redundant, Dean ran through the events that had led up to this burrito-and-porter party in Santa Venetia: Rory McGinnis and the near-death snooping; Blake, and the synchronicity of meeting Blake, how that tied into the near-death thing. The hospitality offer, the late-night-something that happened between the homeless guy and the son, the little dark brown deerskin bag left on the piece of paper with Harlan’s name in calligraphy.

Then the theft; the homeless guy with the shopping cart; Chato Suarez; and now, here, Dean refreshing his mouth after all that talk with a long swig from the second pint.

Dean had skipped the part about Flory Nornwasser, the soiled boxers, the couple’s petty politics. This night was about the deerskin bag.

“You have it with you?”

Dean’s answer was nonverbal. He reached beside him on the sofa where he’d put his manbag. His arm dove in. He withdrew the box and put it on the coffee table between the two pint glasses.

“I taped it up pretty good to keep the snoops out. You have a knife handy?”

Gene took out his pocketknife and worked through the tape. Dean opened the box as his friend folded the blade back into the knife. Dean picked up the bag and handed it to Gene. He looked at it from a few angles and then began to pick at the knot with his fingernails.

“This sucker is tight. Let’s cut it open. Right now.”

Gene continued to examine it. He spoke while looking at the little bag and pinching what seemed like objects that made firm lumps against the soft surface.

“This Blake guy, the researcher dude, sounds interesting. If he blows back by, let me know. We’ll have you all out here. Barbecue, maybe, if the weather’s nice. If he’s vegetarian, we’ll do halumi for him. Vegan? Veggie burgers, firm tofu or tempeh. I mean it. I would like to meet this guy.”

Dean worked at not making a face at the thought of these two worlds colliding that way. Weird, though, how the only time he had talked to Blake, he had mentioned Gene and Maggie. But now, here with his old friend, the imagined reality of those worlds together felt harsh and punitive.

In answer to Gene’s proposal that they cut that sucker open then and there, Dean explained how his relationship with his son was in jeopardy. Though Gene had never had a child, he got it right away. He took on the empathy for the situation as if he had slipped into a finely tailored vest.

Dean also warned about the unknown contents. Who knew? There might be essential oils, or an ashy piece of wood, maybe pin-feathers from some bird, for use in a ritual of some kind.

Gene led Dean to his workbench in the garden shed at the back of their yard. He cut up a brown paper shopping bag and tacked it to the surface of the workbench. Then he fished around a few metal drawers and pulled out an ice pick. He deftly inserted the point, wiggle-by-wiggle, into the knot.

“Sucker’s tight.”

“Yeah. After I got it back from the teenager, it was tighter, not looser. Go figure.”

The story of the tug-of-war between Farley Ralston and Staycee Gellen would never be known to these men, so that mystery would never be solved.

Wiggle, wiggle.

As Gene worked he swiveled on his funky, maybe homemade chair, built out of what looked like the raw materials a home inventor would find in his local hardware store. It squeaked as Gene’s weight shifted with each wiggle.

Gene put the tool down, picked up the bag, and picked at the new loop with his free hand. The knot sighed with relaxation.

A second knot was discovered. It, too required the insertion of the ice pick, the wiggle, wiggle, squeak, squeak till it, too, was a loop. That loop was also picked open.

Gene had an old ugly brown goose-neck lamp secured to the wall at the back of his workbench. He bent the neck and it let out an arthritic screech as he trained the beam into the narrow mouth of the open sack. He poked into the sack with his finger.

Dean was in that awkward position. Someone helps take a project to success, and then, by dint of their heroism, they take over ownership of the project. It is understood that this license is temporary and, with just a little more fiddling allowed, it will expire.

Gene could not grip any of the contents well enough to get them through the opening. He tried to shake the objects out of the bag, jiggling it over the brown paper tacked to the workbench surface.

“Careful.”

“Don’t worry. Contents are stuck. I think I see three objects when I get it under the lamp just right.”

Then Dean submitted the code for License Expired: ”Here, let me give it a try.”

Gene handed over the open bag and watched as Dean put his fingers in it. They gripped, slipped, fell off something cylindrical, hard like metal, but the surface more like thick rough paper to the fingertips.

Dean rolled the contents in the loosened bag and rolled them again. He detected an oval-shaped object in addition to the cylinder. It might have been made of very hard wood. He worked it near the opening and got his index finger onto it. It, too, was wrapped in the thick, rough papery stuff. This time Dean’s grip held. He removed it from the bag.

The perimeter of the oval was flat and smooth, the top and bottom, convex. It would not rest flat on a surface. If balanced on its edge, it rolled back and forth. On its sides, it rocked. It was preternaturally dense, and heavy for its size, maybe 3 cm wide, about 4 cm long.

Two other objects followed the dense oval-shaped one. There was a cylinder, and a cube that felt light, maybe made from wood. All of them were wrapped in paper. Layered, thick, maybe handmade, wrinkles and folds pressed into the rough surface. It appeared that the paper had been saturated with some medium before it was used to wrap the objects. While all the wrapping showed the same craft, each shape was a different color.

The paper covering the cylinder was dark blue; the oval object, a dull red too dark to be pink; the cube, a light brown. They examined each of the objects, trading back and forth.

Gene shifted their attention: “I think we have some pint glasses awaiting us in the house.” They went back to them, to continue their exploration.

They put some time into this. Enough for them each to consume a third pint of Gene Cassidy’s homebrewed 7% porter.

“We should open them up, right now,” proclaimed the brewmaster of Santa Venetia. “Scrape off this paper, see if these are containers or if they are the objects in themselves. I don’t know. What do you think we have here? Little statuettes? Paperweights? Let’s find out, OK?”

A cocktail brewed from the pure weirdness of the moment, fortified by the three pints, had taken Dean’s mind beyond fun into a careless and confident confusion that told him Gene was right. It felt right, man, it felt fuckin’ so right.

You have perhaps noticed the foregoing curses of Dean and will not need to be reminded here that Dean’s commonest imprecation was “frickin’.” Three pints of Gene’s brew and a different side came out frolicking.

“Yeah, fuck it, let’s do it,” said the careless, confident owner (by theft!) of the deerskin bag.

Gene picked up his pocketknife from the coffee table and drew out a blade. He dipped the tip of the blade into his water glass. Then he took up the dark blue cylinder and inserted the point into one of the hard folds plastered onto the object.

Dean floated in a haze. Rich food filled his torso with post-prandial sloth; his mind slumbered under that lullaby that sings from three pints of excellent dark beer. He nodded, entranced.

From his groggy mind, Dean saw the wet knife-tip create beads of blue drops that clung to the shiny blade and caught the room lights. Dean stared into the bright beads of blue as if they could carry him to some private fairyland. As Cassidy worked the knife tip, the room light reflected off the dots of wet blue and sent a beam into Dean’s eyes that slapped him out of his stupor.

Suddenly he jerked awake, as if his face had been splattered with a glass of ice water. He saw through the fog. The knife point was working its way under a piece of paper that said, in calligraphy like that on the paper upon which was presented the deerskin bag two months prior, “Harl…”

“No… Stop. Hold on.”

Gene pulled the blade away and looked up at his friend.

How to tell Gene that it all seemed suddenly like, not only an invasion into something that belonged to his son, but an actual violation of that son?

“You OK?”

Dean held up a hand to his mouth and swallowed back an acid-reflux burp that burned his throat with misplaced digestive juices.

“You OK, man?” repeated his friend.

Gene put the open knife and the little cylinder on the coffee table.

“I’ll be fine,” said Dean, “I’ll be fine.”

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Tagged as Dean, deerskin-bag, Gene

by serialjones | July 12, 2011

Forbidden Truth #7: Score!

Dean’s concentration had been pulled from the funding interests of the Pentile Family Foundation by a photo-like image lingering in his mind from a disruption at Sunday’s dinner. As Harlan rose from his place, in a tone never before heard at their dinner table, he announced, “This is it for me, this grub time, old peops.”

The previous summer, before he spent a month with his grandparents, there had been signs of incipient rebellion, the skateboard crew, violent music and video games, but the boy had still been small-voiced and, with only a few exceptions, a reasonably polite presence.

The image in Dean’s head froze the disgusted look on his son’s face that he shot at both parents as Scilla barks, “Hey. Wait a minute. You haven’t cleared your plate.”

“So what’s the deal, your hands are broken? Can’t you clear my plate? I have work to do on my project.”

Dean’s turn.

“Whoa. Hold on a sec. You want us to clear your plate? Fine. But how you planning to get your science fair project to the Exploratorium on the 13th? Well? Did you not say Ward’s parents are doing continuing ed that weekend? So you’re going to take it on the Muni?”

“No.”

“How then?”

“One of you guys.”

“Not if you wear us out doing your chores for you. Clear your things from the table and we will cooperate when you have a need. OK?”

Harlan did as he was told but the careless noise may have indicated a few new chips on the everydays he slid with defiance into the sink.

Dean held that image of the venomous scorn the boy had flashed at him, foremost, and less so at Scilla as he hurried by the table.

Could be 14-year-old defiance, garden variety, you’re never ready for it but not too surprised, either. Could be.

Or, Harlan knows about the leather bag Blake left for him.

Dean ran upstairs, pulled open his underwear drawer and retrieved the little dark leather bag. It was just big enough to rest in the palm of his hand. It was heavy. Stones or maybe metal. The rawhide drawstrings were pulled tight and knotted. It would take a long time to open them, it would take no time to cut them.

He put the bag back under his clean shorts. He took out the calligraphed paper with “Harlan Colfax” printed with care and elegance. He folded it once. Twice. Three times.

Dean did not understand why but he folded it with an anger that tensed his throat and made that deep, vigilant watchdog sound he made when he felt pushed to the brink. He ripped the paper apart, twice, thrice. He felt a calm descend, as if he had just wept or had an orgasm. He closed the drawer. Then he took the paper scraps to Barry and Shiloh’s place just up the hill and stuffed them deep in their trash. Somehow this made the image of the insolent boy recede enough that he could concentrate on his work.

He made a sandwich and brought it to the garage, ate it while he worked and the blarney flowed like spring melt from the Tuolumne. Time flew. The two kids came home. They could be heard stepping around the floor above his head. A few harsh tones were thrown around. Dean rose, went upstairs, not all the way, just to the penultimate step, threw open the door and urged quiet on them.

“I told you he was home,” Harlan said. “I can tell.”

It was only a little unnerving that Harlan did not look at him when he shushed them.

I don’t care,” Candice said, “let everyone hear. I think you’re making a big, big mistake not being on Facebook. And you don’t tweet! Who’s gonna even know about your science project? Your big, whatever-you-called-it, project? No one’s gonna know and no one’s gonna care ’cause you hide away like a nerd, like a geek.”

Harlan’s face then did jerk a glance at Dean. He fronted a threat, a threat that if the dad dared to laugh or join in any other way with the little sister’s taunting, that a spark would light the volatile boy’s compressed anger.

Dean bowed his head and quietly closed the door behind him and went back to work.

It was dark out when he ascended to the big-windowed part of the house. Bring on grant number two, he thought, as he opened a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale and pondered the Giants and their current four-game losing streak.

The automatic garage door lurched and grumbled out its precise message that Mom was home.

Nothing was as it had been in the 1911 three-bedroom Edwardian at 667 Regan Street. Their lives there had rolled along with predictable steadiness for as long as the kids could remember. Harlan had no memory of living elsewhere. Candice knew no other home. But flux was upon the family.

Harlan was croaking and stretching out his new height with the aches and pains that accompany fast growth. He liked his erections though not the gooey pajamas from his boner dreams. He wanted all this to happen privately, subtly. His mom was less tuned in to things that did not happen to her than was his dad, who seemed to see more and be more curious. He wanted to put a blindfold on the dad while he went through this. At the same time, he wished the old guy would teach him how to shave. Maybe how to use a condom, not that he had any reason to think that was in his near future.

He needed to have knowledge because the boys he wanted to take him seriously had, or so it seemed to him, more of this knowledge. Welcome to the trials of jumping ahead a grade. Like getting a secret tip on how to move to the next level of a video game and getting ready for the praise, “Sick, dude” but instead you find yourself short on clues, less able to move around that stratum than the one you’d just left.

There was no way to ask for help in this. The idea was to demo every chance you got that you were beyond that previous level.

He liked being considered really smart. He liked that his mind solved problems easily. But he felt he had to distinguish himself from other brainy kids. He did not want to be a social outcast.

He was just coming into awareness that his mother, whose praise and comparisons to him from when he was young had given him a solid foundation in self-appreciation, was herself fairly nerdy. He used to think so highly of her, that she had worked as an electrical engineer on nuclear plants for DPE. He had bragged about her to his friends. Now her social deficits were being bared. With further emulation he risked being branded with the dreaded geek and nerd labels.

These thoughts floated in utero because he lacked the experiential frames of reference that would later craft the language. But, inchoate as they were, they informed strategies for him.

The previous summer, after his freshman year at Hout, he had hooked up with a group of skateboarders. He studied the sport, learned about Tony Alva, Jay Adams and the other Z-Boys, bought a board from Skates on Haight and slapped on a bumper strip of an extraterrestrial face, and began the discipline of learning tricks.

He did not find the minds of these skaters stimulating but they were not geeks and they provisionally accepted him as non-geeky. They knew cool.

He did not cut his hair on schedule. His father made some pointed remarks which he ignored at first, but then one day Harlan turned on on one of these comments with what was still the boy’s tentative exploration of hostility toward a parent.

“So what would you tell Tim Lincecum if you were his dad?”

Because his voice sounded small and squeaky, he was surprised at its effect. The dad looked humbled! Score!

A month before, Dean had brought home Lincecum wigs for the two of them to wear to Giants’ games.

Silence upon silence.

Score!

“Keep it clean. Talk to your mom about how to tend to long hair. No lice. That’s all I care about.”

Big, big score!

Then, the week before he turned 14, in early August, his parents called a meeting with him. One of the skaters, his nickname was Lustre, had been arrested for dealing weed at the public middle school he attended for summer session.

Harlan was mandated to spend the rest of summer with his grandparents at their cabin in Tahoe. One week to get ready. If he was caught hanging with this “crowd of losers” they would burn his skateboard and forbid him from ever owning another one.

It was the first week in his young life that he persistently fought off the urge to kill himself.

From the far-reaches of the intricate web, items of background and intrigue (some even stranger than fiction):

Skates on Haight

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Tagged as Candice, Dean, deerskin-bag, Harlan, Priscilla

by serialjones | July 9, 2011

Forbidden Truth #5: Hardworking Elephants

Mr. Lizard pulsed its turgid vessels as if it had a separate heart. This was not garden-variety horniness. Oh, sure, Dean had played around in his boxers while he ruminated, and, sure, he had gotten farther along than he had intended, and this was not the first time this had happened. But something that Scilla had said about her unhappy dinner party at Casa di Barbolo had gone right down to Mr. Lizard and put a little more heat into that tumescent organ: Flory Nornwasser thought Dean was HOT. Or so she said after guzzling merlot.

Dean firmly put his fingers around Mr. Lizard’s neck. Then he put them up to his lips and spat on them and returned to his pet till his boxers were sticky with ejecta. Victory and foolishness combined.

Victory in that he had provoked release without rocking the bed. He had learned to do this after suffering through three or four awkward inquisitions on the subject of masturbation. Scilla called it “soft-core infidelity.” His subsequent efforts were clandestine and not at first successful. Oh, they weren’t entirely unsuccessful, in that she thought she had exacted obedience after the last of the inquisitions. But his efforts were unsuccessful in that they had awakened her a few times. Sitting upright, startled, she shook him, saying, “Mbake uph! Mbake uph! The Bev’s shdaking, I feel an eartsquake!”

After years sleeping with Scilla, he could understand bite-guard speech. He went along with her alarm, complied with her request that he look in the Chronicle a few days later for the earthquake report that never appeared.

No false temblors rocked the mattress and soon Mr. Lizard coughed up the hot semen, helped by the recent memory of Flory Nornwasser at a party, on a sofa with Dean, her unexpected interest in the unnerving near-death experience Bert Quant had told him about over coffee at the JavaPort. The green banana and the mobility of the soul. (Patience, good readers, we will explain this later.)

As Dean spoke, Flory had nodded, opened her little pretty mouth a few times to inhale for speech, waiting for him to pause. Lips the color of Red Hots. When she did find an opening, she bent over and touched his forearm as she released her words. Modestly dressed but with the top two buttons of her cobalt silk blouse undone, he could see the suggestive curve of both her breasts, framed at the top by a black pearl necklace and at the edges by fine lace that suggested a nineteenth century widow ready to receive visitors. Flory and Steve’s divorce had been dramatic, with serial deceits and, finally, an arrest for drug use in a motor vehicle before the breakup settled into the banality of property distribution and honest grief that, for Flory anyway, soon morphed into relief. It appeared that she was ready to move on.

“I believe there is a soul and I believe it survives our death,” she said in a whisper before removing her hand from Dean’s forearm. The recall of those words, accompanied as they were with the soft, mostly chaste touch, more than the lace-framed little breasts, warmed Dean to his climax, though the breasts, the pretty little mouth, were not insignificant.

And no faux earthquake.

The glow of victory led to a problem of foolishness as Dean had now to contend with the emission. He rose and walked awkwardly to the bathroom while the swamp inside his drawers migrated down his legs with a devilish tickle. It was only a few broad steps, open the door and into the bathroom connected to their bedroom. Squeeze the handle of the door, pull it tight, turn the knob to secure the pin, privacy achieved. He turned on the light and sighed. He dug around the hamper, found a pair of drawers.

“Dessie, man, I am not there yet,” Dean said to himself as he sat on the john and played janitor to his waistline.

Then he heard footsteps coming down the stairs. One of the kids was likely heading for the parents’ bathroom. The one between their bedrooms upstairs must be occupied by the other kid. This happened two or three times a year. Dean leaned over and scooched upon his knees and rose up high enough to turn the lock at the center of the door knob so its wings were horizontal.

The stocking feet stand outside the bathroom, the hand on the knob meets resistance from the secured lock. Silence. The feet pad away.

But wait. They don’t go back upstairs. They turn toward the living room. There are voices, the cracking voice of the fourteen-year-old Harlan and the rough tenor of a joyous hard life lived by the odd man who was bedded down on the daybed behind the Japanese folding screens of grey elephants bearing logs between their tusks and trunks, obedient to the workers under hard jungle hats who poked sticks at them.

Dean strained to listen but he could not make out one word of the conversation. Only the music of their dialogue. He put on the dry boxers, unlocked the door that faced the stairwell and slipped back into bed.

But now the doubts crept in. Scilla, had she been right? Was Harlan being seduced? How could a father go out there in his drawers and tell them to stop talking? Why was the boy not going to the bathroom? He must have noticed the bathroom light was out, heard the door bump in its frame as its opposite that led to the parents’ bedroom opened and closed. Was the old man seducing him?

Harlan had charisma. His face glowed around eyes seductive and intense. His forehead was like Dean’s, the straight, dark brown hair and full lips were from Scilla, he had Grandpa’s thick, curly lashes, Grandma’s dad’s pointed chin, Grandad’s open lobes, and so on. But these were mostly, except for Scilla’s dad, unstriking, even plain, people. In Harlan, these traits conferred a masculine beauty. Harlan did not care about this. He was a very bright young man who, throughout his life, would be more interested in the pursuit of truth than in parties, glamour, social networks. He had not yet realized that his good looks would cause many people to overlook his intellect. No one could predict that his early teen freshness, a kind of charisma many of us once evinced, would mature into a gorgeous man. His looks would be envied. Yet they worked as an impediment that frustrated his mission to bust open secrets and bare the truth.

But, lest we get ahead of ourselves, let us return to the moment.

Dean lay paralyzed in his thoughts. The boy will attract predators. Poor vulnerable kid. He begs for more independence while he looks so vulnerable.

The voices. One cracked from the froggy bridge between kid and unambiguous teen, while the other voice, not mellow and saintly as it had sounded over the course of the evening, now beguiled its listener with self-centered purpose.

Dean could not sleep. Nor could he estimate how long he lay there pondering the dangers. He wanted Scilla’s advice and then fell into depression thinking this crushed his new victory. He wanted to awaken her, tap her intelligence, make loud conversation with her to spook the molester. He had no idea what time it was when he heard a strong, steady piss stream in their toilet, a gurgle of wash water in the sink, the door out to the stairwell opened and closed, then footsteps disappearing up the stairs.

Dean napped, suspended above, then just below, waking consciousness. He rose before the alarm, slipped into his sweatpants and went out to have a friendly chat with Blake. His plan was to “accidentally” wake the guest as he went about getting coffee going. Bring him a cup as a goodwill offering, sit with him, take a reading.

But when he stepped around the screen with its hardworking elephants, the bed was made and Blake and his pack were gone. On the pile of neatly folded bedclothes was a small, dark brown leather bag. It rested on a piece of paper with “Harlan Colfax” neatly calligraphed. Dean took the sheet of paper and the bag and went back into the bedroom.

Scilla awoke as the alarm went off. She pushed the button that cut the uh-uh-uh-uh of annoying beeps. Dean pulled open the bottom drawer of his dresser and shoved the sheet of paper and bag to the back. He piled undershorts over it, took one pair, stood up, looked at Scilla as she removed the sleep mask, pulled out the bite guard, and set it in the little half-oval case on her bedside table. She pulled out the earplugs and looked up at her husband.

“You want first shower?” he asked, holding the boxers up.

“No. Go ahead. I’m fine.”

She lay back down and shut her eyes. The new day at 667 Regan Street kicked into action.