Skruggs

Skruggs

       By Dougy Hightops

Skruggs, though, sang with a voice beside which the sound of the dulcimer seemed humdrum. Melodious or not, when Skruggs’ wife had been gone only a year he sued my daddy for my hand. The conclusion of the matter was not a foregone one. He visited many times in between gigs in Techumsey, Valentine, Oklahoma City, Laramee, and even one in Mexico across the river from Reo Matte. He brought Jim Beam whiskey usually, if it was a Saturday night, and the two talked about the Andy Warhol paintings my father had inherited from his father, and some of which he himself had collected. When two or three paintings with impressive credentials had been proffered by my suitor and received, and a few dozen bottles of good whiskey drunk, supplied always by Skruggs, my father relented and I joined my husband in his home in Hollywood.

       Home? Mansion, more like. The place had a hundred rooms, it seemed to me. And, a walled garden into which I was not allowed to see, much less venture. Skruggs travelled endlessly and I saw little of him. He had given me a key on our wedding night (with a slyness about the mouth that made me wince). It unlocked a little garden door, the only one that served the garden, an entrance covered in vines and hidden from view. I am a humble woman for the most part. That is what I have been told and what I, too, know of myself if I am any judge of womankind. In this case, however, my patience with another’s requirements ran out.

       Each time Skruggs returned from one of his engagements he embraced me and looked, I noticed, to see if the key still hung about my neck. To find, if it were possible, some evidence that it had been used. Perhaps a scratch on its perfect surface, one designed to easily patina. Never. I did not wish for a long time—for my first ten years—to see the place. Whatever for would I want access to a garden long dead and where, for all I knew, butchered cats and dogs, if not wives, lay buried beyond the watch of neighbors or the arm of the law. My indifference changed the day I heard the melodic notes of a dulcimer from some hidden corner of the Skruggs mansion. I had never explored its length or width and so, in search of this eeriness that began more often to haunt my sleep, I set out on a cold, still night with torch for light to find their source. I had not long to search. None of the rooms housed the sound. The garden, it came to me then! Instantly I felt a surge of childhood curiosity and found myself at the very door I had vowed never to open. In walked I. And, there saw the most astonishing thing.

       In the cradle of a cherry tree, with blossoms about him, sat a young boy dressed in all the colors of the rainbow holding what looked from this distance to be a stringed instrument. The sadness of the music made me expect sadness in his face. When I approached him—cautiously, I must say, for all his smallness of size—I saw at once a remarkable glow about his face, and a beatific peace that dispelled my apprehensions. He laughed when he reached his hand toward me and as I took it in mine. I noticed his fingers flit over its surface. He was stone blind! Such joy in such a void! It goes without saying that I felt the presence of some greater power then, which I had, by accident as it were, discovered. I knew immediately and from that moment for the rest of my days that this hour had been saved for me for this precise time in my life. Never again, in all the sixty-three years that I lived in that house, with Skruggs first gone so much and then finally dead, did I feel that humble loneliness that in my youth I had carried west with me from out of the hills of home.    

Cabbage Under Her Arm

Cabbage Under Her Arm

       By Twelve Years in Postsecondary School

              Strike while the iron is hot.

“In lieu of money, I will give you . . . ” Lionel said, and could not think of anything he could hand over to Haman. Haman lived with Corona Belle Davis whose apartment had finally come available when the landlord had declared that he had had enough of her extemporary renovations. Lionel was down on his luck. All that his father had given him he had squandered at billiards in North Kildonan, gambling at the Regency Casino, fancy dinners for groups of friends in eateries such as Café del Sol on south Osborne, and more recently with the purchase of the motor launch tied on the Forks’ slips under bank orders not to even start the engines.

       Corona Belle Davis had been employed as a heavy machine mechanic till a year ago when her pregnancy brought her the care of two girls, one of whom died after two weeks. She’d stopped going to work, though the garage called every morning till they’d had enough, too. She’d spent her savings and then received welfare, but she lived in a space that the agency declared too expensive. Now, for these two reasons, she would be moving into a one bedroom apartment on Westminster near the Balmoral school for girls. As Lionel and Haman spoke, Corona could be seen on the front porch nursing Wendy Lou. She sat there in the shade many hours a day, calling out now and then to a passerby that this or that had happened to the little girl that day. She kept no pets, dogs and cats proliferating in the neighborhood as they did, and that, at least, had postponed the day of her having to give up her suite.

       Haman had met Corona in Montreal where she’d gone on three months vacation three years ago. He had decided to move in with her in Winnipeg since he had used up all his friendships out east. Unemployed, he spent much of his time indoors reading the papers or outdoors engaging with whoever walked by. He could always be found somewhere near Corona, though they seldom spoke to each other. He was not interested in returning to Iran, he had told her, but she guessed that one day she would have to go there to find her daughter. In Montreal he had tried to strangle another Iranian over an argument concerning his manhood. In prison for a year, he had immediately, on his release, left that city for life with the woman who had borne his child. His wife he left out east with their two school-aged children, telling Corona that under no circumstances would he ever have anything to do with that woman again.

       “You do own a car,” Haman said and looked toward the old Toyota that Lionel had parked a block away. Lionel kept his mother at his house and they made do with the strangeness of the need for her to be helped at every step of the way. He bathed her, and toileted her, even. Not pleasant, he said to people, but just one of those unexpected you get used to. His mother had been a marksman and won prizes and trophies. These hung on the walls of her room and filled the bookshelves in the house. Thieves had recently broken in and taken most of her firearms. She would soon die, Lionel thought, out of grief for the loss. Her housecoat hung open at odd times and she did not think to close it. Her teeth stayed in the glass in the bathroom all day sometimes, for she ate little now and really did not need them. At night, about once a week, he would find her wandering around inside, and even outside now and then. Winter would not be kind to her. Lionel had bought her a Winchester 30-30 and put it in a prominent place above a trophy shelf, but she only sighed.  He resigned himself to her leaving him.

       Corona walked toward them and took the baby from her breast. She said to Haman that he might go to the corner grocery and pick up some vegetables for curry. Haman pointed to Lionel’s ring. It was a diamond he had received from his Uncle Conivington when he turned twelve. His uncle was dead now, but when he lived he thought highly of his third nephew and spent lavishly on him. Lionel said that he would come back tomorrow and see what he had that he could part with. He wanted the apartment very badly indeed and thought that he might have to decide between car and ring, but could of course not in an instant make up his mind. Corona walked to the grocery on the corner herself, carrying Wendy Lou in one arm. She came back almost immediately with a cabbage tucked under her free arm. She passed them both without acknowledgement. Haman pointed to Lionel’s wallet and asked how much he had in it. Lionel said he had nothing in it but some change.

       “Let’s go for a beer,” Lionel said. They left the Sherbrooke an hour later and Lionel said he would be back next morning at ten. When he got there, Haman, Corona and Wendy Lou had gone and a moving truck stood in front of the apartment. Furniture was already being dollied in by the Two Small Men With Big Hearts.      

        

Then Will Come a Happy Day

Then Will Come a Happy Day

        

         By The Ladies’ Man

Ladies. Girls. Grandmothers. Nice to be here! Thank you for inviting me to speak to you. I hadn’t expected such a beautiful turnout. We’re packed tighter in here than hogs in a . . . . Well, anyway. Mennonite Ladies’ Historical Society. I’m so glad for your devotion to learning our history. It is a blessing to our culture for groups like yours to take such an interest in our past.

         Mennonites came to America from Mother Russia. They farmed, built houses, raised chickens, pigs, cows and horses, gave money to the church, and eventually turned en masse to America for their religion. They gave up their own religion and took on the one next door. Talk about loving thy neighbor as thyself! For evidence of this new religion today you need only listen to the songs Mennonites pay to hear. Any song about the corruption of this world, and the purity and joy of the next, captivates their interest. Take, for instance, my daughter and myself. If we decide to sing a number of gospel songs such as “Rock My soul in the Bosom of Abraham,” “High on the Hilltop,” Son of My Life,” or “That’s Why I’m Happy,” we get much brave and joyful applause and loving kudos after the performance. If, though, we stick in a few blues tunes like “Big-Legged Women,” a secular country tune such as “Half a Man," and an upbeat folk song like “On a Night Like This,” you can hear the silence rain down. You want to make it on the Mennonite performance circuit you sing gospel and bluegrass. Mennonites are totally committed to the presentation of the idea that this world holds naught good and the next will have chosen them, mainly them, to inhabit it and enjoy its luscious food, clothing, and nearness to Jesus.

Once, before the introduction of American ego psychology cum evangelism, Mennonite families were independent of the church for their essential spirituality. Then, they lived under a patriarchy that made the head of the house the final say in what religion meant for the family. Now, with American evangelism, we get a uniform message only—bad world, good heaven—as well as a subliminal, though even more potent message—make money, believe in yourself, don’t have sex for pleasure, rejoice in your disappointments but always believe that Jesus loves you and is actually looking out for you even though it may not seem like it. And, above all, be generous to others about your doctrine. Not your money, your doctrine. That is, share your religious beliefs with others.

Now, it is plain, ladies, that this is a desire of all of us, to be able to love as well as hoard the material things without feeling the need to be truly generous or charitable, to be alone or together, or interested in or indifferent to conventions, and so on. We are selfish beings, but should we be? American religion made fools of Mennonites about the year 1930. Capitalism caused it. Mennonites, too, wanted the freedom to enjoy the vices of greed and still firmly believe that God loved them. I am fain tempted to think that God hates greed and maybe even the greedy, especially if these greedy pretend to themselves with such boring regularity that they are being charitable. Which would mean that He hates us, right?

Now, girls, do you think God hates you? Well? No one?

Ladies? How about you? Grandmothers? For encouraging your husbands and families to look out for yourselves, while pretending to love others? No one? I am a bit disappointed, but that is to be expected. You are, however, a lovely audience and I wish I could spend quality time with each and every one of you. A weekend at least. But, clock and custom prohibit. If any of you girls and younger women fulsomely wish to do so, however, my number is in the Sunday bulletin. It has been a distinct pleasure. Thank you for this invitation, and God bless. I have already received your generous honorarium and for that I thank you again. I understand that coffee and snacks await in the basement following?

Bustle and Ease

Bustle and Ease

       By Rob Roymer

                If thine eyes offend thee

                        Pluck them out

                        If they don’t

                       Then sing and shout

Thousands of years ago, before the advent of writing, Christmas had not yet been imagined and no celebration of loving birth had entered the hearts and minds of those lands that bordered the Mediterranean. A rushing sea with waves lapping the shores of the Aegean, Cyrus, Turkey, Angora, the Levant, Sicily, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, North Africa and the eastern realms of Palestine, Israel and Iraq, alone spoke of steady turbulence. Synecdochaeic though the picture, it accurately resembles that time’s full balance of bustle and ease. Nefertiti placed perfume and balm beside the mummifications of all her train, even those of low rank and birth. Mohammedan prepared the Muslim gospels for all to read but butchers whom he deemed already enriched enough by their near presence to abundant food, and to vintners whose cellars could be assumed to contain more than an individual’s fair share of wine and pottage. Nero spent much time in the planning of the burning of the cities of Venice and Cibanitos, causing eventually the deaths of his most illustrious philosophers when they recommended to him that art works alone in those metropoli should exclude them from the flint and stone. Nicis, an early merchant lord in the wild mountains that separate northern China and the Russian steppes, found intolerable the new tendency, then first making itself known, of sparing slight women and girls, since they appeared delicate and also beautiful, the labor of carrying firewood on lengthy treks. William the Beautiful, hardened by stubborn prospecting and the outdoor life that such compulsion required, slew his brother Blanchard the Brutish for quietly retiring out of sight of the camp to a tent and a soft cot he had snuck on a wilderness trip without

William’s permission.

       Of all the examples of strange ease and labor the one of Hildigaard of Scotland strikes me as especially salient. I am not a good judge of best and worst.  My expertise lies not in judgment but in recitation. I, myself, am given to excess and have been know by friends and family to privilege beauty in women. My luxurious state alone, as well as my spending tendencies, should alert you to the slant I give history. As far as sleeping quarters go, mine opens through fine casements on the river Seine. I am a benefactor to the Sorbonne, donating, I almost blush to tell you, upwards of ten thousand francs annually to its Humanities Department. Recently, I acquired a sketch of the vineyards at Roliené by the eighteenth-century Alsatian painter Burbøi that hangs over the fireplace in a prominent location. Chirac himself has dropped by for brandy just to see it as well as, I fondly speculate, to make my acquaintance. I may not, much to my chagrin, be reckoned among the scholars, but do not presume then upon my meager savvy. Art and history, as well as literature and philosophy, I credit to myself as within my sphere of knowing and I have on many occasions shone in discussions with those who have considered themselves learnéd. I relate these details not to boast, though I would not hesitate to do so, but only to give you an idea of the particular bent of the saga I have begun to aproriate to this readership. My magazine attempts to preserve (and I hope you smile with me at the choice of words here) a certain popular broadness of interpretation that established (I do not say that my paper is not established) presses in their anxiety over reception never allow.

       Hildigaard of Scotland (1067-96), slave to opium, niggard in the donning of decent clothing, beloved of God and Christ as she was, died a wretched death in a closet attached to an exterior wall of the Ecclesiast de St. Surpluie in that almost forgotten cathedral near the little village of      Fecience aux Trois Flannette. Her name she derived from her place of birth and early residence. Her father, a collier in the coal mining district of Graadin, far from the country’s larger cities, drummed up a reputation for gluttonous drinking, flatulence and womanizing. Local history tells the story of a feat of nightly liquor imbibition that occurred over a period of two weeks and elevated him to the highest regard among both Loch MacGregoro (a county in the south of Scotland) dissolutes and its celebrated merchants. Apparently, during these personal activities, he compromised, in public, two dozen of the town’s wives, women who had become electrified by his prodigious charm as much as by his feats at the cup and horse.

       Hildigaard’s mother died at the ordinary age of fifty-two leaving to grieve her a brood of nineteen daughters and one son. Each of her offspring became renowned for excesses of one sort or another. Ralph spent lavishly on sword and book. Ruthy owned an inordinate number of flashy dresses. Karen swept continuously, literally plying the broom day and night, even when guests, important or not, visited their cottage. Isobel could not sleep and at the age of eighteen appeared in wrinkles and drooping chins to be eighty. Contenta imbibed with her father and opened her arms to any drunk, old or young, for the price of a mug of mead. Beatrice the Blonde daily consumed great quantities of flounder and smelled more of fish than did those animals themselves. Wyngronka the Wise, the second youngest, spent undue time with the horses, the stables her home, the haycroft her secondary residence, the pastures where the colts gamboled her favorite pastime.

       Hildgaard alone chose abstinence. She pined away until little but skin and bones came at one when she approached. She drank neither wine nor beer and partook of only a thimbleful of water at each meal. She wore no clothing, being so committed to the spiritual, and exhorted with exceeding politeness that none of her worshippers open their eyes in her presence (and she attracted devotees, mainly male, from far and wide, those seeking answers for their lifelong fears about the end of days). At the sound of church bells a rapturous light passed over her face and her eyes belied the deathly state of her bodily health. She read little and insisted that knowledge of biblical texts had come to her as a sudden gift at the age of eleven. She quoted lengthy passages from the psalms and gospels, enough to confound even the most erudite. Once, when she fell from a great height (inclined as she was to ever be as near God’s heavenly realms as possible) onto the pavements below the church towers, onlookers pointing and gasping in terror and concern, she landed on her feet and walked away without disconcertedness as if she were feathers and had flown purposely from the parapets. The stories of her fearless restraint and spiritual adventures abound and I have only begun to share with you their contents. Let this brief account inspire you to study them for yourselves and thus to become fully acquainted with one of the most fabulous accomplishments of the twelfth century.             

Saturday, May 16, 1873

Saturday, May 16, 1873

       By Time and Again Reimr (Ph.D)

Echj vel dot eifoch neenich fejeati. Zeen jeburtstag morje. Wot woh echj am jeve? Oda feleajcht sow goaw fa am downe? Hm, hm, hm, hm,. Felaecht en kleen baet rom speale? Fa am? Met am? Ha, ha. Dot gleiv etchj vood am eranow jefolle. He’s fifty-two tomorrow. I’m sixteen. Yet. Well, seventeen soon. Next month. He asked, so should I? In the woods by the old barn. In the ovenside. And I have to decide. I don’t have to decide. What will it be like? With him? Eva Zacharias. Eva Zacharias Reimer. Nice. He’s big.

Sunday, May 17, 1873

Three little pigs went to market! Praise God from whom all blessings flow! Now, I must not dwell on this in diary. In case. Maybe later I will erase yesterday’s. He’s so handsome! He’s kind, he’s big and he’s mine! Birdy’s in the yum yum tree, Bunny’s in the wood, Billy’s in the clover, Betty’s feeling good.

Monday, May 18, 1873

I met Rita Reimer today. I wonder how he ended up with that skinny thing? She’s nice and everything, but. I want kids with him. Seven plus five. Seven girls, five boys.

      

Tuesday, May 20, 1873

Today mother wants to plant potatoes and tomatoes. The onions are in already, as are the squash, radishes, lettuce, kohlrabi and cabbage. Watermelons not till June 1, and by then the first strawberries will be ready for jam. What for supper today? Fish. Mother said cook the jackfish and make the celery chowder.

Wednesday, May 20, 1873

Laundry, milking, cream separating, baking and then supper. I wonder what he’s doing today. Later I will take a walk to the barn and sit there for a while. He may show up.

Thursday, May 21, 1873

He did. But we can’t. He’s married. I laughed when he told me because I already knew, of course, and he looked so discouraged. I held his head on my lap and sang songs to him. Don’t cry little birdy, it’s going to be all right. I will never leave you. I’ll think of you each night. When you’re tired and weary, and she is weary, too, think of me my darling, for I’ll be holding you.

Friday, May 22, 1873

Sail away, sail away, we will cross the mighty ocean on the Charleston Bay. Sail away, sail away, we will cross the mighty ocean on the Charleston Bay. He’s talking about America and me joining him there some day, if luck allows. We shall see. I would love to see the new world. O for just one time, I will take the Northwest Passage and find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea. Tracing one warm line, through a land so wild and savage, and find my lonely way back home again.

   

Building Ice

Building Ice

       By Drop-Dead-Beautiful Reiemer

         If you know which way you’re going

         And you feel you might be lost

         Call on Jesus and he’ll guide you

         Though the sea be tempest tossed.

         Your boat withstands the stormy weather

         Rain beats on its sails and mast

         Sturdy as a city tower

         Cast this way and that way cast.

         Then the ice begins to build

         And slowly the frail vessel sinks

         Sailors soon call out for mercy

         “Jesus help me!” each soul thinks.

A Sperm whale carries as much as three tons of sperm about with it during the mating season, following its female mate around till she shows her readiness. Then, upon the eggs dropped in a shallow depression on the sandy ocean bottom, he sprays a massive whirling of his seed and, his ballast thus cast overboard, so to speak, he leaves the side of his life-long mate to spend a few weeks with male acquaintances. These carefree males often seek out the remote wildnesses of the icy northern regions where icebergs dance with deceptive grace in the bright sun. Here, amid objects that provide these monstrosities a sense of belonging, the temporary bachelors cavort and play. They meet no animals other than their own kind with the exception of walruses, sea lions and polar bears that might stray into their territory. These sundry wayfarers soon feel the weight of their error when ten or twelve majestic forms close in on them with terrible intent. After much sport, given the agility of Spermatis Leviathonis, the exhausted stranger longs for the end of his life and those in pursuit sensing this pass, oblige then and end it swiftly and surely.

       Now, Jonah not excepting, stories abound of the Sperm benefiting a human in dire straits. We know the one alluded to above of the man reluctant to speak for God and go to Nineveh on His behalf. The sailors threw Jonah into the sea for he admitted his role in the motivation for the storm. The sinking man wishes for all to end, his life so miserable, so beset by trouble since he began to flee Jehovah. But, God is not mocked, nor does he suffer the untimely deaths of his subjects. He sent a whale of mountainous girth, breadth and length to swallow this coward and having done so, it beat on like a ship through the seas toward Nineveh. There on its shores the fish deposited him and soon God’s evangelism began, His dire words of lamentation and warning gushing forth from that now eager mouth with great effect.

       We have encountered also, I am confident, the story of the sailor and his floundering bark. Night black as pitch, stars obscured by cloud thick as peat and marsh, lightening flashing now and then for a brief moment to show him the nature of the graveyard. Wind howls; the vessel tosses; all seems lost! The sailor finds himself about to fling himself bodily overboard and end it all when, lo and behold, to larboard an island! A small bit of land appears there as if a gift from heaven itself! “Hallelujah, I am saved!” he blubbers and applies himself to the oars. Straight way he anchors in the rocky surface and falls spent asleep. He realizes not that the island sleeps, too. The rock of his salvation is none other than Leviathan! And soon she will move. But sensing this weary unfortunate’s dire need, her movements keep to the ocean’s surface until the storm’s intent breaks and calm returns. Safe, the sailor mavels at the miracle of his salvation.  

       Now, another more modern account has also recently surfaced of a young woman swimming the English Channel. A squall arose and turned into a full-blown tempest. The daring Miranda called to her crew following for immediate assistance but nowhere were they to be seen. She deciphered then her fate. Waves as large as termopoli rose above her in wild fury. Up and down she careened until it seemed to her that her body’s force had spent itself entirely. She stopped flailing, thought about her parents one last time, expelled all her breath and dove downward. When to her amazement, a dark thing ascended toward her from out of the deathly depths and soon she found herself lifted to the surface that just moments before she had forgone and left behind as if forever. A beast of immeasurable proportions bore her up on its wide back and kept her there some hours till the wind and water’s fury subsided. Then it sank away. By now Miranda’s strength had fully returned and she found herself able to complete her swim to the French shore. She has vowed never again to set foot in waters of any kind.

       We must not despair. Nature at times indicates approval of our intelligence. She does step forward now and then to make that fact known. Swim or sail through your lives as you wish and with verve. You are important in the large scheme of things.            

Bobby Roy 4 (cont'd)

Bobby Roy 4 (cont'd)

      

       By Dianna Might

Saltpeter was readily available, but niter, as they called it then, remained scarce. A group of reformers had quietly infiltrated government inner circles for some time and they knew of the potential for damage of this new chemical mixture. One of their circle, a brilliant Irish alchemist by name of Sean Nautilas, devised a way of procuring sufficient nitrogen from potatoes and the rest is history. A mountain of gunpowder was manufactured under strict supervision in certain warehouses owned by an uncle of Nautilas, away just then on a continental tour. It was transferred into forty-five gallon wooden barrels and delivered to the servants’ entrance of parliament and from there carried by Fawkes into the dungeons below the very floor on which parliamentarians were set to begin discussions on reforms the next day. Fawkes, being a huge  man of immense strength and endurance, lugged them down the stairs one by one on his shoulders. Fawkes did the grunt work though his brain never dreamed up the idea nor passionately believed in any of it since it was till the day it died, under terrible circumstances (not of syphillic torture, though he did have that, too), of substandard activity.

       The day arrived, November 11, 1696. The spark was struck. The explosion rattled cutlery for miles around. In Stafford Upon Avon the local glover swore he heard a sound, a rumbling like a distant explosion, but he kept at his stitching and spoke to no one, not even his wife, about the matter, afraid of being thought a clairvoyant around town. Parliament dissolved. Fawkes found himself eventually arrested and put to death. To the end he appeared to know little if anything about the severity of his actions. He mumbled something about never again touching another tankard of rotten Willingstreet Black Ale and fell through the trapdoor singing ‘Lor.’

       Good old Billy, lordy what a dilly. Good old Billy, lordy he was silly. What I remember about him from a comic book my neighbor had concerned a cat under a floor. Billy walked around on a wooden floor for half an hour, quietly, listening, feeling with his whole being, appraising the various places the cat might be under his feet, sneaking along sensing everything, looking with his body more than his eyes, and finally shot twicet through the boards and said to Sally, the lady of the house, “That’s it. I’ve shot it. It won’t be pothering you no more, Mam.” Billy lived in the Hole in the Wall with the Dalton gang for a time when it became apparent that he had run out of hiding places. Here he had to fight against a man every now and then who was jealous of his fast draw and wanted to test him. Some imp of the perverse pestered these men to do it even if they knew he was too good for them. He was the gunslingers’ high water mark. And they often were not above getting buddies to help them by posting them up on rooftops or around corners with rifles to shoot him in the back just as the standoff began. He never got hit in any of these ambuscades until Wyatt Earp gunned him down while he slept in Sally’s house. I never believed the stories I read about him. Why would a sheriff bushwack anyone. It just don’t make no sense.   

Boston Blackie

Boston Blackie

       By Execrable (Douglas) Eddie Wilcox

We are what we are.

We do what we do.

We are and do.

We do and are.

And the big egos of the writing world

Go on writing without reading.

You read them. They don’t read you.

Boston Blackie was a pitiful specimen. Dwarfish at six foot ten he exuded all the worst qualities of the adolescent at the age of sixty-two when most men reach their prime. Once upon a time, he would think to himself, I held this city in the palm of my hand. I stole diamonds at night when all slept. I entered the establishments where money was kept and, well guarded as it was, I made away with it under the noses of the vigilant guards. Smooth, swift, lethal, and in all ways ducky, I could and did elude the best efforts of the best constabulary in the Americas. This is what he thought. This is how he still imagined himself. In actual fact, he gave off the impression of never having been efficient in any way. Big in the waist, narrow of shoulder, thin of arm and pointy of chin, he resembled one of those odd cars one sometimes sees that one wonders who would have engineered it in the first place.

       Now as he washed his face the morning of his “last great heist,” Boston Blackie puffed out his chest as he toweled himself and watched for signs of strength in the mirror. The Diamond Factory was their destination; a ton of diamonds was their mission. A shipment of the precious stones had arrived cut and polished from Ukraine and his crew would attempt, despite one of the heaviest guard of all time, to seize the whole shipment and secret it in one of Blackie’s warehouses.

       The men stood in place. The trucks arrived. A hundred guards formed a phalanx from the payload vehicle to the Factory door. A small tractor lifted a great box from the semi to the ground and then drove it into the building. There it was set in the middle of a large cleared space and surrounded by sixty guards who would stay the night. The room bristled with rifles and guns. Night had already fallen. Blackie’s men moved swiftly to the side of the building. They attached a hose to the truck and pushed it into the room through a small round hole in the wall. All the men inside got heavy-eyed. They fell asleep as one and then the thieves went inside and hustled the ton of diamonds onto their own truck with the help of the tractor left inside and disappeared into the night.

       “We did it!” Blackie said to his men. He coughed and hacked and doubled over, shaking with glee. When he’d finished laughing he smiled at all of the men and handed them each a thousand dollars on the spot. He drove away and unloaded the loot himself. He only came back to this hiding place when he needed more money. He would go with a pocketful of diamonds to a fence he knew and get cash for himself. Yes, this man lived a good life till he died at the age of one hundred and two.