New Untitled Novel

“Mount, tuneful Bird, and join the immortal quires!

She soared – and I awoke, struggling in vain to follow.”

– William Wordsworth

“We can be heroes

Just for one day.”

– David Bowie

Swing and Miss

            Fiona didn’t have time to react when Roger tackled her. Instead, she landed in the muck of his front lawn. He rolled her over to examine her face and, when he finally realized who she was, he sighed and went to sit on his front porch.

“Not funny,” Fiona said. “Not funny at all.”

“Not even a little?” Roger said. He felt his cheeks flush with shame. He wanted to walk into his house and lock the door. He could always drive the extra twenty minutes to the next closest bar.

“What the hell, Roger?” Fiona said. She hadn’t stood up yet.

“I saw someone looking in my windows. I thought it was you.”

“So you tackled me?” she said.

“I thought you were the Water Witch,” he said. He wondered if she knew it was true when she laughed out loud. He wrapped his arms around his shoulders. It was all happening again.

“You tried to tackle a ghost?”

“I thought someone was playing a joke.”

Fiona stood up. She wiped off her jeans like a softball player after a bad slide. She walked toward Roger and smiled, making no effort too hide the muddy stains. She gently squeezed Roger’s shoulder.

“You’ve got some problems. I figured that,” she said. “I’ve been a married woman and a bartender long enough to see that one coming.”

“If you saw me coming,” Roger said, “you should’ve moved out of the way.”

“I probably should have,” Fiona said. He wondered if she would leave. She sighed and shifted her weight, but she did not move to the unattached garage where her car was. In this town, they couldn’t risk leaving her car out in the open.

“We can go inside,” Fiona said.

“I really did see something out there,” Roger said.

“I’m sure you did,” Fiona said. She brushed the hair out of his eyes. “Maybe the next time you see the Water Witch, try a gentler approach. A quick talk before tackling, maybe?”

Roger stood up and held her hand.

“I can’t believe you’re staying, but I’m not going to try to talk sense into you,” Roger said. “If everyone was as forgiving as you, I’d have never ended up here.”

“If everyone were as forgiving as me, I wouldn’t have ended up here either,” Fiona said.

“I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came and made
My heart as dry as dust.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“I was gone for fourteen days

Coulda been gone for more

Held up in an intensive care ward

Lyin’ on the floor.” – Alice Cooper

Seeing Footprints

In the early evening, Roger Gordon established Smut the Bulldog liked splashing in the river. He took his dog to a bend where the current wasn’t so swift and Smut waded in, so blissfully dim he seemed unaware of the differences between land and water. The dog splashed with his front paws and looked into his new owner’s eyes. Within a few moments, Roger was laughing and taking of his socks and shoes.

If it were warmer in the water, Roger would’ve swum out into the river and fought his way through the current. He moved as effortlessly in water as he did moved clumsily on land. With the water cold enough to turn the skin under his toenails blue as soon as they were underwater, he settled for splashing his rescued bulldog and laughing as the animal snorted and grunted happily in muck.

There were small footprints in the mud at the edge of the river bend. Roger had to grasp Smut’s collar to hold him steady, away from tramping over the evidence. Then, as the sediment in the water settled and the water calmed itself, he kept the dog steady at his side. When everything was calm again, including Smut, he peered into the water and saw the footprints were not a figment of his imagination.

The footprints ranged from nearly adult-sized to infant-sized, so small Roger couldn’t believe they child above them could walk without crawling. They mottled the river bed everywhere he and Smut hadn’t trampled over in their horseplay. They all moved upstream. Roger could see the footprints on any part of the river bed where the water was clear enough.

He released Smut. The bulldog darted back into the water, biting at the splashes that arose in front of him. Suddenly, the songwriter was very cold. Roger went back to the bank and began putting on his socks. When Smut noticed this, he galloped over and began licking Roger’s face. Once his new master had laughed himself silly, the dog sniffed and ran back into the water.

It must’ve taken hundreds of children to make those tracks. He crouched by the edge of the water and gently felt the outline of a footprint with his finger. Then, he closed his eyes and reached in with the same finger. He was able to find a footprint just by feeling into the mud. There were indentations for five toes he could feel with his pinky finger.

The songwriter lay back onto the ground. The cool, wet mud and bits of snow underneath him made him shift his position slightly, but he did not move. The dog sensed his distress and left the river. Smut placed his head on his master’s belly and lay down in the muck. Without looking, Roger placed a hand on the dog’s head and stroked its ears.

Darren was never one to keep secrets, and he said he hadn’t heard anything about children running around the river. With all of this new evidence, either Darren was lying or Roger was seeing things. He had tested his senses and proven them correct, but he still believed Darren’s word. Roger Gordon was seeing things. Again.

“Come back inside,” he heard his neighbor Minnie shout to her son Bernard. Roger smiled. Minnie must’ve been dreading the day her new neighbor passed out and died in his backyard since he bought the house.

A tear collected at the corner of his eye, and Roger rubbed it with the back of one hand. It was starting again. The last time he started seeing things, he didn’t catch on until he had lost a wife, a child, and a career. He had ended up here, mending his wounds by the riverside. If he was seeing things again, he didn’t know where else he could

“Wedded she was some years, and to a man

Of fifty, and such husbands are in plenty;

And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE

‘T were better to have TWO of five-and-twenty”

– Lord Byron

“I want a mistress

For Christmas.”

-AC/DC

“Like him?” Darren Florence asked Roger. Roger tried to answer, but he was laughing too hard to breathe. The bulldog Darren brought over to his house greeted the former singer by running into his legs, then stopping and looking up into his eyes. The dog panted and fell onto his back like he was melting, exposing a belly in need of scratching.

“Guess so,” Darren said.

“What’s his name?” Roger asked.

“Smut,” Darren said.

“Really?”

“He’s a rescue from a stripper who got busted with a whole lotta meth. My buddy was her landlord, and he’s already got two dogs.”

“Smut it is,” Roger said. He briefly stopped scratching the dog’s stomach. Smut groaned, and Roger returned his attention to the bulldog.

Darren put a hand-rolled cigarette into his mouth and leaned into his truck. He lit the cigarette with a Zippo lighter and then slid the lighter into the breast pocket of his denim shirt. Years after Garth Brook made being a cowboy cool again, Darren continued to dress in the Western style he had when he was in a boy. Now that he was in his fifties, Darren might be the last Midwestern man who could wear boots and a cowboy hat without looking ridiculous.

“I’ll take him,” Roger said. “Of course I will.”

“He’ll be a good watchdog for you,” Darren said.

Roger smiled, knowing full well the only man in town with reason enough to come out to his house to shoot him was Darren himself. Darren’s cool, reserved manner and large bank account kept him interesting to younger women. The woman he married, Fiona, was a younger woman to Darren but an older woman to Roger. He was not adverse to having an affair with an attractive, older woman, even if he deeply respected her husband.

“I think there are kids running around the river at night. Young kids,” Roger said. “I saw tracks in the mud.”

Darren shook his head.

“That’s a new one to me,” he said. As a local bar owner, Darren heard all of the complaints about what local kids were doing.

Smut ran off into the trees. The men could hear the ragged sounds of his breathing as he crunched through twigs and leaves. Any animal dim enough to get caught by such an awkward animal deserved its fate. Darren laughed to himself, and then his laughter stopped suddenly. Roger prepared to hear the older man say he knew all about the affair, but he said nothing.

“If you do see the kids, get a good look at them,” Darren said. “If you tell me, I could probably figure out who they belong to.”

Roger nodded, then almost crumpled to the ground. Smut rammed the back of his knees at full speed. When the dog figured out he was facing the wrong side or Roger, he panted and scrambled to face his new owner.

“Whatya got, boy?” Roger asked. He pulled a thin, white strip of fabric out of the dog’s mouth. Smut smacked his lips together, sending slobber into Roger’s face. Roger dried the fabric on his jeans and held up to the sunlight. It was warmer out than when the deputy, his first visitor of the day, had come over to harass him. The snow in the neighbor’s lawn had melted noticeably.

Darren whistled.

“That’s old,” he said. “They don’t make ‘em like that no more. What do you got going on out here?”

Roger shrugged. He knew he could never really answer Darren’s question.

“Prisons are build with stones of Law,

Brothels with bricks of Religion.”

– William Blake

“I can make the earth stop in its tracks

I made the blue cars go away”

– Jim Morrison

Goodbye and Hello

            Roger kissed Carrie goodbye, deliberately holding her longer than was polite. She didn’t complain. He knew it made it harder for her to leave him, and he liked that. She pulled away and raised an eyebrow when one of his hands slid down into the back pocket of her jeans. Her eyes darted to her right, and he saw his four year old neighbor was kicking at a pile of unmelted snow and watching them with giant eyes.

“He has to learn somewhere,” Roger whispered in her ear. “His dad is a complete wimp.”

Carrie shook her head and smiled. She kissed him again, took a step back, and slid into the open door of her car. She shut it and waved again, then backed out of his driveway. As the front of her car pulled away from him, Roger touched the front bumper with his hand and gently followed the car with his fingers as it rolled out of reach.

Carrie honked, and then she drove down his gravel road. As she did so, she passed a cop car on its way to his driveway. As the cruiser pulled in, the mother of the neighbor kid (Minnie) pulled her zip-up hooded sweatshirt tighter around her body. Her boy, whose name Roger never remembered, was holding a hunk of snow in one hand and staring at the cop car with an open mouthed gape.

“Roger,” said Deputy Barnes. He shut his car door and then looked down at Roger’s feet and shook his head.

“That’s right. One of your legs isn’t right,” the deputy said.

Roger nodded. It was obvious when he wearing his boots in the daytime. One of the boots’ soles was nearly an inch thicker than the other. He never went out in public barefoot, and he could often meet someone two or three times before they noticed. They always noticed, though.

“See, Barnes? This is the kind of observation you need to tell other people about. When they say you’re a dumbshit cop in a Podunk town who’s incapable of figuring out which end his crap comes out of, you can point out an observation like this and really change their opinion of you.”

Deputy Barnes smiled and walked closer to Roger.

“I’d just think it’d make it hard to keep count time you’re on stage, being a rock star and all. Can you even tap your feet?”

“I can tap your mom,” Roger said.

The deputy paused at this. Minnie called to her son, who it turned out was named Bernard. The boy had just taken a bite out of the dirty snow mush he was holding in his hand. Minnie called again, and Bernard penguin-toddled back to his mother’s arms. She picked him up and scooped him into her arms. They both went inside.

Deputy Barnes smiled. He spit out a wet wad of sunflower seeds. Roger had heard rumors the deputy went through a bag of sunflower seeds every two or three days. When he went into The Coop, the town’s greasy spoon, he made them cook his chicken exactly the way the recipe from his men’s fitness magazine said it should be cooked.

“Why are you giving bad information to the Spencia police? They’re not any closer to finding your friend’s body.”

“They know where the truck went in the river,” Roger said. “Even if I had given them bad advice, which I haven’t, shouldn’t they be able to take it from there? Does the river move in two directions in Spencia?”

Deputy Barnes laughed at this. He produced a packet of sunflower seeds and offered them to Roger, with a flourish that suggested he was giving over precious jewels instead of salty snacks.

“Sherriff says they get a lot of anonymous tips. Sometimes, he says it sounds like they come from the same voice. Lots of weird tips, like they found the body under the bridge or in some culvert,” Pierce said. He leaned closer to Roger. “Says it sounds like some real sicko.”

“Why would I?” Pierce said. His fingers curled into a fist, and he shoved his fist into his pocket before the deputy could see it. “Pierce Benson was the best friend I’ve ever had. He was a better friend than I deserved.”

“That why are you banging his girlfriend? What’d you give her, about a week and a half to mourn before you took advantage of her?”

“Even when you make things up and we both know it, there comes a point where I’d have to consider making your ridiculously simple life more difficult to bear than it already must be,” Roger said.

Deputy Barnes smiled and pointed to the washed-up singer with the mismatched feet.

“Close to that line, huh? That’s usually your way,” the deputy said. He moved back to his car. “You been warned, anyway. I guess the longer it takes them out in Spencia, the longer you get to keep that girl around.”

“It’s not that,” Roger said. He put his other hand in his pocket, too.

“Yeah, I guess it couldn’t be. I mean, aren’t you already hooking up with a married lady in town? She knows about that, right?”

“Always a pleasure, Deputy Barnes,” Roger said. The deputy honked once and drove away.

“Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide

The Form remains, the Function never dies.” – William Wordsworth

“If it keeps on rainin’

Levee’s gonna break” – Led Zeppelin

The Lonely Bed

The moon was bright and beautiful, and Roger Gordon was awake. Beside him, Carrie Wellcraft stirred but did not wake. Roger rubbed his eyes. He grabbed the flimsy curtains and ran his thumb along their bottom hem. He was going to replace them the next time he made it into town. At least, he thought he would this time. He’d probably forget until the moon was bright again.

He walked out, past his living room, and opened the sliding door to the porch. With the moon reflecting off the Mississippi river below him, the outdoors was as bright as daylight. Roger looked at the other houses, but he was all alone in the night. He couldn’t even hear small critters rustling through the grass.

Tomorrow, Carrie was leaving his house in Iowa and making the drive back to Minneapolis. He tried to convince her to stay before they went to bed, and he tried again when they were in bed. She apologized and told him she had to go. He held her in his arms and watched her go to sleep. When she was finally asleep, he rolled over so he wasn’t touching her body at all and managed to find a few hours of sleep for himself.

Something lay in a heap near the river bank. For a moment, Roger’s heart stopped. It’s finally over, he thought. He stood and made his way to the porch steps when a cloud shifted in the sky and he saw he was looking at a plastic bag full of twigs, leaves, and human debris. He had seen the same bag earlier in the day, and had the same reaction. In the morning, he would pick the thing up and toss it in his garbage so it didn’t scare him like this again.

It’s not over, came his next thought. At least she’ll keep coming down to visit.

He went back inside and grabbed the whiskey he’d been working on that night. There wasn’t enough left in the bottle for him to need a glass. Carrie would smell the whiskey on his breath when she woke up, but she had come to expect that from him.

He was surprised Carrie wasn’t drinking more. She had plenty of reasons to be coping poorly. She was spending her time in Iowa with him because her boyfriend, Pierce Benson, had driven off of a bridge and into the frozen Mississippi a few dozen miles upriver. They had found the truck, but not the bodies. Now that it was March and the river was thawing, Carrie came back to Iowa every weekend, hoping to identify his body and work on finding closure. At first, she visited with law enforcement officials. When that became too awkward, she just spent the weekend at Roger’s house so she’d be closer if they found his remains. Roger wondered when she’d give up making the trip at all.

He’d met Carrie through Pierce. In an earlier life, Roger Gordon had almost been a successful musician. He might’ve made something of himself if he’d learned to keep his mouth shut, and if he hadn’t married the wrong woman, and divorced her too late. Pierce Benson enjoyed Roger’s music, and he’d brought Carrie with him when he visited the first time. On his next trip to Iowa, Pierce left his girlfriend at home, got drunk with some new friends, and ended up dead in a river.

After staring at the bag of leaves and garbage for another ten minutes, he set the bottle of whiskey on the railing of his porch and carefully started down the stairs and across his lawn. When he was halfway there, he realized he was only wearing boxer shorts. He picked up his feet faster as he made his way down the gradual decline to the river’s edge.

Not wanting to step into the mud and bird feces of the actual river bed, Roger balanced on his right foot and reached his arm out to grab the handle of the plastic bag. When his fingers didn’t even brush against it, he rummaged in the bushes and found a stick long enough to bridge the gap. On his third try, he hooked a handle and dragged the bag of filth and muck to the grass.

There were tracks of bare feet walking upstream, along the edge of the river. They belonged to children. They looked fresh to Roger, who admitted to himself he was no expert in such things. He and Carrie had been sitting on the porch until after it was too dark for children to be out. The few children in his neighborhood all had parents who locked them indoors once darkness fell.

Roger looked downstream and saw a woman standing in the middle of the river. She was standing somewhere too deep and too swift-moving for a person to stand in. As he watched, she waded toward him. He heard no splashing sounds as she moved toward him. He couldn’t see her face or what she was wearing.

Roger backed away, smiling in spite of his fear. He wondered what would happen if he shouted to the woman, or if he ran out to meet her. Carrie would wake up to find him gone, and maybe she’d be able to get on with her life. With the moon full overhead, it’d be a beautiful escape.

He heard a crinkling sound, and he realized he’d stepped on the plastic bag. He turned around and stepped out of the way, and when he turned back the woman in the river was gone. Only the children’s footprints remained.