by Mark McNease
Kyle smiled at him. “I never thought you were. But that’s what you want people to think. Camouflage. Pretty impressive, too. It probably saved your life.”
Jeremy stuck out his right hand. “So, boys, onward and downward.”
Kyle and Danny each shook his hand. They knew he hadn’t omitted anything out of malice, and that he really had no idea what lengths Dylan was going to to secure a fantasy future for himself.
A sound of laughter floated up from outside. Imogene, “Genie” to Ricki the desk clerk, was working her charm. And she was charming, to anyone who didn’t know her as more than an acquaintance or a brief encounter. To her loyal assistant Kyle Callahan she was a terror, but a lovable terror. He was in no mood to have that love tested this morning.
“Quickly,” Kyle said to Ricki. “Just the bill. We have appointments with destiny in, oh, about ten minutes.”
“Five,” Danny said, hurrying them along. “A laugh means she’s just about through with them.”
“Whoever she is,” Jeremy said, “I like the sound of her.”
Kyle turned to him. “Yes, I think you would. I think the two of you are going to hit it off very well. You might want to get back in your chair. She’s as much a sucker for frail old men as the rest of us. “
“Call her,” Danny said, signing the credit card slip. “Ten minutes down the road.”
“Lincoln Tunnel,” Kyle finished. “Got it, now let’s go.”
They each grabbed the handle of a suitcase and hurried out of the Lodge. They took the steps two at a time as they turned right into the main parking lot. Moments later Danny was pulling out of the drive just as Kyle saw Imogene hurrying down the hillside, waving at them.
“Look the other way!” Kyle said. “Drive! I’ll call her back eventually.”
“You’re going to hear about this for days, Kyle. She may even threaten to replace you.”
“Again?!” Kyle said, and the two of them shared a laugh for the first time in nearly two days.
Danny watched Pride Lodge recede in the rearview mirror. “Do you think we’ll ever come back?”
“Sure,” Kyle said. “It’s become an old friend by now, and one thing about old friends is that you want to know what happens to them. We’ll be back.”
Danny nodded; they would indeed. He turned the first corner and took one last glance in the mirror to see Imogene standing in the road behind them, hands on her hips, wagging her finger at them. She wasn’t fooled. And she would never replace Kyle. Love was love.
Pride and Perilous
Book II
Chapter 1
Bluejacket, Oklahoma-1978
The summer had been particularly hot, even for Oklahoma. Corn had withered and died on the stalk, acres of land had choked and killed many crops, leaving others so feeble the farmers who subsisted on them had been forced to charity. Predictions were made from pulpits across the state that if ever there were clear signs of the End Times, this fever baking the landscape was surely among them.
The four Stipling children could only pray for cooling rain and fan themselves with paper fans their mother brought home from the Baptist church they attended. Clement Stipling, their father, considered the use of electricity to power fans an extravagance and a waste of money. Air conditioning was for rich people, and the Stiplings would never be rich. Clement had even refused to donate to the church’s special collection two years ago for a new ceiling fan. Paper on sticks worked just fine for him, and it would work for his family.
The Stiplings were poor but proud. Clement worked as a handyman sometimes, other times as a farm hand, and every now and then as a carpenter, bringing in enough to pay rent on their small house and put food on the table most days. His tall, wiry frame, his natural agility and his unusually large hands made him well suited for physical labor. He’d never learned a trade, nor studied anything at the knee of his no-account father. He had left home at fourteen and never looked back, which made for thirty years of staring straight ahead, taking whatever next step there was to take. Those steps had gotten him a wife, Pearl, and four children, ages two to thirteen. He was about to be a father for the fifth time, if Pearl made it through, which was looking less likely with each passing minute.
Pearl Stipling was an obedient woman. That was probably the most descriptive thing to say about her, and the virtue, as she saw it, of which she would be most proud, were pride not a sin. Humility, perseverance, and obedience. If Pearl knew what a mantra was, those three words would be it. She had humbly submitted to her life as Clement Stipling’s wife, even though she was pretty enough to have found several alternatives – or so she’d been told. Middling height, with a kind face and just enough plump to her to attract men looking to raise children, Pearl had been a prize in her youth, and marrying Clement had been seen by her parents as a waste of that prize. Running off with him to elope in Tulsa was the only significant act of disobedience in her entire life, and one she had been forgiven for once the grandchildren began to arrive.
She had persevered for thirty-two years of her own difficult journey. She had been obedient, foremost to the Lord, and secondly to her husband. She loved her little ones, even though Jeffey was officially a teenager now and would not kiss her anymore except on the cheek. Doreen was ten, Emiline eight, Jessica two, and now, God willing, they would finally have another son, whom they had decided to name Kieran, after Pearl’s late grandfather. Pearl, in her innermost thoughts she shared with no one and hoped God could not hear, wanted no more children after this. If Clement insisted, of course she would bear them, and if God saw fit to keep her pregnant, she would obediently stay that way, but she sure hoped the fifth time was the charm and that a second son would be the end of her child-bearing.
The way the delivery was going, it might well be the end of Pearl. She had gone into labor three weeks early. It had caught them both off guard and unprepared to get her to the hospital. Clement Stipling did not own a car, which he considered even more of an extravagance than an electric fan. He walked everywhere he needed to be, and if that place was too far he hitched a ride. There was always someone willing to take him; they knew Clement Stipling wouldn’t distract them with useless talk, since he was a man of few words and the ones he spoke were seldom entertaining. So it was that on an extremely hot Thursday morning while Pearl was making breakfast, her water broke and she plunged into the hardest, most painful, most prayer-inducing labor she had ever experienced. None of the others had been like this, and two hours into it, as she lay in their bed sweating through the sheets, she knew something was wrong. She knew this would certainly be her last, as there would be nothing left of her when it was finished.
Clement Stipling had not delivered any of his children. He had done repair work and house painting to pay off Doctor Simonson for bringing his other four into the world, but to be in his own bedroom, in his own home, desperate to have this child come out already and stop this terrible experience, was something from a dream worse than any he’d ever had. He sent Jeffey off to the neighbors to call the hospital (since telephones were a waste of time and money), only to be told the doctor was in surgery. Pearl was bedridden by then, and it was just her and Clement, trying to free her body from the baby who wanted to rip her apart and at the same time stay safely inside her.
Mrs. Jansen, the neighbor woman, arrived a half hour into it. She was helping Pearl, or trying to, while Clement paced back and forth by the closed door. It was bad enough that his children could hear Pearl’s screams, he didn’t want them seeing any of this. Back and forth, back and forth, while Mrs. Jansen just kept telling Pearl to push. Something was terribly wrong. Well, yes, Clement thought, that’s pretty obvious. Terribly wrong.
And just about the time Kieran was willing to let go and exit his mother, Pearl saw the sky open up, in the ceiling! It was the strangest thing she’d ever seen, but not frightening at all. Like a very bright skylight, like a window in the plaster, and it slid open, and there was Jesus. Smiling at her and wavi
ng. She knew then her belief had not been in vain, her faith not wasted. She knew, too, there would be no more children, no more hardship, and no more Clement.
“What is she looking at?” Clement said, standing at the foot of the bed as Mrs. Jansen midwifed Kieran Stipling into the world. She ignored him, too busy with the birth. “What are you looking at?” he said to Pearl. She ignored him, too, immersed in the joy of her own liberation as she reached up as far as she could, took the hand of Jesus, to whom she had been most obedient all her life, and walked away into the clouds.
The baby did not cry, even when Mrs. Jansen slapped him to get him breathing.
“She’s dead,” Clement said, staring at the frozen rapture on his wife’s face. His voice was cold, flat and fierce. Within those two words were accusation, statement, and promise: he promised then and there never to love this child, never to give it warmth, never to forgive it. Not him; it. It was a thing, a murderous thing that had taken from Clement Stipling the only treasure his trying life had ever known.
Clement was not the drinking sort, or he would have slipped into a bottomless bottle then and there. Instead he slipped into himself. By day’s end he was a widower, alone with five children, one of whom he would just as soon be rid of. The child had taken Pearl from him, and he never felt the slightest obligation to repay the theft with love. He didn’t love little Kieran and never would.
That was how Kieran Stipling grew up, knowing he had killed his mother and that no prison term would ever be as harsh as the sentence his father handed down. He was hated by the man, ignored, berated and belittled. Clement never raised a hand to him, but the looks were cold enough to freeze the deepest recesses of space, the words sharp enough to bleed a man out on the spot. Kieran would never amount to anything, his father told him. He was no good, bad blood, and a gott-damned cripple to boot! The sooner he was grown and gone, the better. At the age of fifteen, Kieran granted his father’s only wish for him and left home; like his father, he never glanced back.
Time passed, the road hardened, his father’s prediction – his curse? – came true as nothing became of his son, his it, losing job after job, hustling to survive with the assistance (for it could not be called kindness) of strange men. And now, twenty years later, at the age of thirty-five, the boy who would be no one, stained at birth and declared a failure from his first breath, was about to make his mark.
Chapter 2
A Rainy Night in Brooklyn
It had been five years at least since Devin had worried about being followed. That’s how long he had been living as Devin 24/7. Denise Ellerton had ceased to exist – officially, legally, physically, psychologically, and every other way in which each person functions in the world. For Devin, she had ceased existing long before that, when he had realized as a teenager that he was not like other girls; that the simple reality of pronouns was different for him, as he thought of himself as “he” while everyone else insisted on calling him “she.” Tom-boyish Denise, odd Denise, rough-and-tumble Denise. He had wanted to correct them then, and even younger, as early as the third grade. “I’m not a girl,” he had wanted to say, but it wasn’t until he was in college that he fully understood what was going on with him, and when he finally had the distance from his family to do something about it.
The sensation of being shadowed down a dark street was one of those things that belonged to Denise, to women. Devin had long been aware of the differences in experiences men had from women; to suggest there were no differences was to choose denial over reality. There were experiences unique to men, and experiences unique to women, as well as experiences unique to those who did not fit readily into either. Devin had become a man in every way possible. The transition had been made, the journey completed, and not since before it had he worried about being followed down his own Brooklyn street, late on a rainy Friday night. There was something different about this, too. It wasn’t random, as if he’d crossed paths with the wrong person in an accident of fate, as so many people did who found themselves the victims of crimes of opportunity. Devin had the very distinct and unsettling feeling that the man coming up slowly behind him had been there for awhile, had followed him off the R train, along the platform, up the stairs, and now, six blocks later, nearly to his apartment on Prospect Avenue.
Devin was tall at five-eight, and worked out religiously at the local New York Athletic Club. He’d had a trainer for two years and always believed he could handle himself in a tight situation. Not that it happened often: he didn’t drink, didn’t stay out late unless he had a showing of his artwork or was attending one of a friend’s exhibits; he hadn’t dated in three years, and he was a night person, meaning he worked at night in his studio apartment and made every effort to be home by 7:00 pm, when he would start his routine of coffee-fueled creativity, putting together his latest collage or designing a multi-medium piece that he would then spend the next two or three weeks bringing to life.
He was an attractive man, too, or so he’d been told enough times to believe. His natural height was complimented by a thin frame, short black hair he gelled back, a high, wide, forehead, moist brown eyes that had never been bothered by glasses, a thin but ready smile, and a nose that had once been broken in a fall, although he told everyone it had been a boxing match. It was the one lie he allowed himself. He just liked the idea of having a nose broken by a fist in a boxing glove. And it made the person who had once been Denise all but unrecognizable.
He’d stayed out later then usual tonight and had been cursing his lapse in discipline when he first realized someone was behind him. This stretch of Prospect Avenue, unlike nearly all streets in neighboring Manhattan, was sparsely populated at night and the presence of other people was noticeable, especially other people who were shadowing you. He’d become aware of the man behind him not long after coming up the subway stairs but had thought nothing of it at the time. Then, a block later, he could hear the footsteps, as if he were in some B-movie thriller and a stalker was shortening the distance between then. Now, four blocks from the subway and just one from his apartment building, he became convinced he was the object of the man’s attention. Had it not been so worrying it would have been interesting: why would a strange man be following a reclusive artist down a deserted Brooklyn street on a rainy Friday night? He decided to ask the question directly. He adjusted his umbrella, with its caved-in side to his back, letting rain trickle down and soak his jacket, and he turned around to get a look at the man he now knew was his pursuer.
As Devin turned to face him, the stranger stopped. He was only about thirty feet away now. Devin saw that he did not have an umbrella, but his face was hidden by a hoodie pulled down over it. In late April the air was still chilly at night and most people wore jackets, sweaters, other clothes that kept them warm in the cool darkness. Hoodies were especially popular, but also had the disconcerting effect of hiding the person’s face. It was only human nature to want to know who was beneath the hood, and why he was covering his face.
The man made no attempt to pretend he was not following Devin. He didn’t keep walking with a turn this way or that; he didn’t cross the street and continue; he didn’t even keep coming, as someone would who really was just walking along the same street at the same time. He stopped. In the rain.
“Who are you?” Devin shouted, tilting his umbrella back to show himself and improve his line of sight.
The man just stood and, Devin assumed, stared. It was dark out and raining, and neither could see the other with any great clarity.
Then the man began to walk toward him.
Decision time. Devin could run for his apartment, which was only a block away; he could call for help, someone would throw open a window and call 911 – or would they? – or he could do what he decided to do and stand his ground. He was tough, he trained two hours, three days a week; he was quick and fit and thin, and above all he was not Denise, not anymore. He had not endured the challenges of his life, the demands of simply being and becoming who he
was, to flee in front of some punk on a Brooklyn street. He eased his shoulders back, loosened his grip on the umbrella to free his hands, and prepared for a fight.
The closer the man got, the more familiar he looked. He was wearing jeans, red sneakers and the green hoodie, and although his face was hidden, something about his overall presence rang a bell. There was also the limp, if that was the right word, a way of walking that made it appear one leg was shorter than the other, but housed more in the pelvis, a sort of up and down motion, like a piston misfiring every time the man took a step. Devin noticed the emblem on his sweatshirt, a rainbow flag with wording underneath it he couldn’t read. He relaxed; it must be a neighbor after all, or someone coming to visit a neighbor. At the very least the stranger was gay and, by inference, non-threatening.
But still he had not responded to Devin’s asking him who he was. And he had stopped, then kept coming. He was only about ten feet away now, and Devin put it all together: the walk, the sweatshirt, and finally, as the man drew close and eased his hood back – the face.
“You!” Devin said, startled.
“Yes, me,” the man replied, now face-to-face in the rain.
“Why are you following me?” Devin said, still trying to piece this puzzle together in his mind. He knew the man, but not really, not in any but a passing way.
“I’m following you, Devin,” the man replied, “because I heard the whispers.”
“The whispers? What whispers?”
The man said nothing as he stepped forward and quickly slipped his hand out from the sweatshirt’s front pouch.