Finishing a rewrite of “Swamps of Jersey.” The mystery part of the story is placed in the context of  a hard economy,  a devastating flood and fractured politics.  I use reporter Jimmy Dawson to catalogue all this.  Here is one of his summations near the end of the story:

“Where have you all been?”  Dawson asked in a newspaper column.  “We missed you.  Let me catch you up.

“Problem is, you’ve heard all this before.  It’s the same bad actors treading on a barren stage reading from a well-worn script.  You’ll recognize the characters.

“But I’ll tell you anyway.

“While you were gone, a few billionaires have been trying to buy Congress, and doing a pretty good job of it.  Congress took most of the year off except to vote on naming post offices.  It might have been okay they did, but you might have noticed in your travels that the economy is running a little slow.  Maybe there was something the President and Congress could have done about that.

“Federal authorities charged a lot of politicians with stealing your money, but that happens so often that you probably didn’t even raise your head from the pillow; hardly enough of an activity to rouse you from slumber.

“The big banks got in trouble again, but that’s been so constant, it’s what we expect.  The banking bosses will get hauled before a Congressional committee and on television promise never to do it again.  But they will; they always do.  Your money is probably safer under a mattress, and the bedbug is paying better interest.

“So if you haven’t noticed, the world’s gone to hell in a handbasket.  And know what?  Everyone who can, will blame you.  Yeah, it’s your fault.  I saw you out there.  You can’t make up your mind.  You stand on opposite sides of the street waving signs and yelling at one another.  You want to tax the rich, send the Mexicans back across the border, and tell women they can’t have sex or babies out of marriage.  You want all the homeless off the street, but you don’t want the government to buy up houses that became empty when the banks foreclosed, yet you want the banks to pay for being greedy.  You didn’t like the idea that the government bailed out the auto business, but you want all those unemployed people to find a job.  You don’t want to pay more taxes, but complained when the school board fired a third of teachers because they ran out of money.

“Everything we used to think was wrong with someone else is now wrong with us.

“So what you are going to do is put down the signs, take off the silly hats, stop spouting sections of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that you don’t get right in the first place, and truly don’t understand, and buy each other a beer and talk.  You can disagree, but start talking.   The longer you delay it, the longer all of this will be wrong.

“And once you’ve decided the guy you worked with for the  past twenty years hasn’t really changed, but is just one more person trying to do his best to raise a family, grow some tomatoes, take a week down the Shore and keep his head above water, the better off we’ll all be.

“And then you’re going to head out to the Forty-Six Motel and talk to Tommy Robinson.  You remember Tommy.  Seven years ago he played quarterback when the Ironton High football team won the state championship.  You were standing on Blackwell Street with more than half the town yelling your crazy head off when the bus got back from Giants Stadium.  The police cars and fire trucks led the way and for an hour or so, all the things that you thought bothered you were gone because those forty-five kids did the town proud.

Then Tommy married Camilla and they had that great baby girl.  He went to work for the delivery company but also joined the Army Reserves.  And a year later it all changed.  He did two tours of duty in the desert war and when he came home you all forgot to welcome him.

“Well, you can welcome him now, because the delivery company didn’t hold his job, and Camilla and the baby were thrown out of their house, and if it wasn’t for the church and some other folks they might have been  living in the stoveworks when it  burned down, and you really don’t want that on your conscious, do you?

“Maybe you saw him at the city council meeting the other day.  His head is shaved now, but his eyes have that direct, piercing stare of the truly committed.  He looks a little beat up. He came to ask the city council for some help.  He needs a job and there is some red-tape holding up some of his Army Reserve pay.  He wants to get his family out of the Forty-Six Motel and back into a decent apartment.  The baby is three now and sometimes plays in the parking lot and there are a lot of cars.  The city council thanked him for his service and told him how proud they were of him, but they had no answers for his questions.

“After a moment or two of watching the city’s leaders stare at one another, Tommy Robinson said, ‘I don’t want you to feel sorry for me.  I just want a chance to raise my daughter well. I just want the same chance that fathers who came before me had. It’s not about the uniform.  We serve proudly and willingly.  It doesn’t make me special.  I just need your help right now.’

Then he turned and walked out of the room.  He stopped as his wife helped him settle his crutches under his arms and helped him maneuver through the narrow aisle on the one leg he had left.

“So when you wake up this morning instead of worrying about whether your neighbor is a socialist, or whether the French or the Spanish or the Greeks are going to ruin the American economy, think about Tommy Robinson.

“He’s the reason you get to yell at your neighbor, just like generations of soldiers before him.  He’s the reason you get to be so disagreeable.

“We are a nation that was born arguing.  It is what we do best and it is what separates us from all the other nations. So revel in our raised voices, find joy in the sound of the words we speak.  Celebrate our differences and defy all those who tell you to conform, to damn the other side.  We live to disagree.  The louder the better. Roar on, Ironton.  Push back against the silence.  Rise up.  Rise up.  And forward.”

From “The Swamps of Jersey.”

Howard Newton, a former mayor of Ironton, N.J. explains corruption to reporter Jimmy Dawson:

“It’s what we learned, Jimmy.”  The voice came from a smoky distance.  “What our grandfathers learned to survive.  They were all working for the big boss who owned that mansion on Blackwell with the five turrets, the wide porch and thirty fancy windows. They worked fifteen hours a day in dirty overheated buildings handling hot metal with no protection.  They got burned, lost hands, arms, got crushed by a load of iron, branded by the dripping slag, and if they faltered, the shift bosses ground them into the dirt.  If they were lucky, they lived to be fifty.

“They’d walk past that house behind the iron gates – made with iron they had forged – and knew that it was their labor in that hot, stinking iron mill that had made the man rich. And he was going to keep it all.

“So they set up an alternative way of doing business, because, hell, they had no money, but mostly they knew they could not trust the mill owners or the bosses or the bankers, the landlords or anyone who had control over their lives. So we all did favors, and some of the favors got big.  It was how we fought back against a system that was killing us, one in which if we played by the rules, we had no chance to succeed.”

The old man stood up and put his hands in his pants pockets.

“Did that make us corrupt?  Don’t think so.  Made us traders.  Trade something, get a little extra for it when you trade it again. It was all so small time.  But you know what?  People didn’t lose their homes to the banks.  If they got behind somehow it was made right.  And when they got hurt on the job and the factory boss threw them out, their kids got fed, and the house got fixed.  Then they did a little work for you.  Look at that flood last week.  Those people will be paying off those repairs  for years because the insurance companies who sold them home insurance didn’t tell them that it didn’t cover  water damage.  What the fuck did they think a flood was anyway?”

Dawson stood and walked to the edge of the patio.  “The crooks are wearing the suits, Jimmy, sitting on city councils,” Newton said.  “Seems so innocuous.  They write an ordinance to tear down a building so only their friend’s company could qualify, look the other way when their brother’s kid wants to be a cop or stack the land-use board with their golf partners. They twist the law into knots to justify anything they want.  That’s who the Attorney General caught.  For them it’s like breathing. They don’t think anyone notices.  Then there’s the guys with three cell phones and nine hundred dollar suits.  Listen to them.  They sell so much bullshit, they forget who they sold it to.”
“But when that something you traded wasn’t really yours, isn’t that corrupt?”  Dawson asked.

The old man turned, his mouth working.
“You tell me, Jimmy.  You tell me.”  The raspy voice had an edge, the lips drawn tight.  “What’s it mean when a lobbyist for the oil business sits in a committee room and helps a Congressman write a bill about oil regulations?  Or when the bankers cook the books in a way that even other bankers can’t figure it out? The U.S. Supreme Court gave human rights to corporations and said that money is free speech;  said big companies can cheat women out of equal pay. The big stores pay so little or schedule employees so they work a little less than full time so they have to get health insurance from the government.  That’s corruption, Jimmy.  Big time, in your face, stop us if you can corruption and they have the money, the lawyers and the rules to make it stand up.

“They make rule after rule to shut that door of opportunity for the little guy. Get their hands around the throats of the middle class and squeeze.  They make deals that only benefit themselves and their money men.  They cut taxes for the rich and screw the poor.  Remember that congressman who wanted to get rid of Medicare and let the insurance companies run it?  That would put old folks out of their homes, take food from their mouths.  These assholes act like the Great Depression happened to somebody else.

“They won’t be happy till they grind everyone else under their wheels, the grinning bastards.  Eisenhower said fear the military-industrial complex.  These guys make the military-industrial complex look like a carnival, such is their immeasurable greed.”

“And you’re worried about me buying an old lady’s home so she can get out from under a monthly mortgage payment that’s more than what her immigrant parents earned in a year?  Bah.”

Newton returned to his chair and shut off the television.

“There’s a lot of people exercising their free speech these days, I’d say.  And that holier-than-thou U.S. Attorney has a list of friends as long as your arm and they’re all going to come calling one day.”

Thirteen, a terrible age. A wonderful age. For Smitty,  a kid shortstop, it was the summer when he found out that everything he knew was going to change.

This is the  story behind “The Summer of the Home Run,” a short story about baseball, girls and being thirteen.

“The Summer of the Home Run” is available at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/299057

“Might not seem like a big deal, being allowed to pitch in a summer league baseball game, but for us, summer was the game and the game was our summer, what we lived for.

Our town was not that big, but it was spread out and we could go all summer and not see any of our friends.  Anything could happen, like the year when we moved from sixth grade to the middle school and found out only when we got back to school that Jackie Dennis, the girl everybody on the baseball team wanted to take to the movies because she was like the prettiest girl in three counties, like we knew girls in three counties, but you know what I mean. Anyway, she had moved because her father, who was a minister, had been transferred to a church in, like, Iowa.  We didn’t even know that minsters got transferred.  I mean, all the ministers in all the rest of the town’s churches were old like they founded the church or something.

But anyway, we only found out Jackie Dennis had moved when she wasn’t sitting in the second seat of the third row in homeroom. That’s where she always sat, between Allan Anderson on her left, whose name was always second behind Brenda Ades, and Eddie Madden, who was always in the second seat of the fourth row.  I always sat in the fourth seat of the fifth row and had a perfect angle view of Jackie Dennis. She had the blondest hair. It shined like it absorbed the sunlight, and she had a soft, round face with green eyes and a pretty little crooked smile.

You know who sat in her seat now? Frankie Earl.  I didn’t like Frankie Earl.

It’s not like I would have had a chance with Jackie Dennis anyway.  She was too perfect. She moved with a confidence that I could never figure out. Her friends were all smart and she always gave the speech at graduation or at the Memorial Day parade, and read the notices during homeroom.

She knew my name, and would always say “Hi, Smitty,” when we passed in the hallways, but I’d never have a chance with her.

That’s why getting to pitch that summer was such a big deal.”

While at Smashwords, take a look at my collection of short stories, called “The Resurrection of Leo”   at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/282799.

The collection including, “What happened when he came back.”

A sample:

“The kitchen was as silent as a church when you finished speaking of her.  You and I remained quietly staring into each other’s eyes, silent, close, reaching.

And she floated above us like a ghost.

Like a prayer.

And I wanted to hate her for the lines and worried look she had painted on your face, wanted to hate her for all the energy she had drawn from you and wasted.  And when you finished speaking of her you seemed smaller, shrunken, as if expelling the words to describe her, the breath required to speak her name was torn from your very muscles, ripped out piece by piece, leaving emptiness.

Make love to me, Stephen, I said.  Take me and hold me.  Let us mix up all the things that happened and never happened, take  in all the dreams dying and dead, all the wishes nodding in the darkness, all the orphaned cares and give them shelter.

Let us love, Stephen, I said. Let us break the gloom with shouts.

And in the warm darkness I felt the sweat form between your shoulder blades and run like a fevered river down your back.  I opened my body to you and felt you climb inside.  I tasted your sweet breath and moved under your touch.   And at times we moved together, as if all the writhing and groaning of lovers could change the world, it would change that night.

My man done come. Back.

But in the morning when you awoke in my arms, she was in your eyes.

And I sent him away.

I will not save you, Stephen. The mistakes you make are your own.  I have enough of my own.

One more lie exposed.

What was saved that night, Stephen?   Have you gone back to that shadow where you fear that she might turn again that smile on you, or turn it off forever? Either is the same death.  If you came here for answers, I only gave you questions.

But you could say the same to me.  I wanted you to be a door, something with a knob I could grasp and turn and step through into a new place.  But you were only a mirror.  And the sadness that clung to your cheeks clung to mine; the darkness of your eyes glowed in my eyes.  I wanted  to blame you for the place my life had rested in all these years, to say if you had only answered me in the library, told me you loved me, if you had only stayed with me that night after we  drove on the Thruway, all would have been well.  For as crazy as it was, that night was just what I needed.  Everything had become so plain, so routine, I lost my direction.  The wars with Nick tore down my resistance.

And then you were there.  You brought me back to life.  And I sent you away.

Had I been waiting for you to come back?  You tell me.  I had carried you around with me ever since.  When I told you that day in the library so long ago that I loved you, it wasn’t some schoolgirl crush, and it was the purest love I have ever known.

Still you went away. I sent you away. It seems now that it is the same thing.

Then you came back with her in your heart, trapped there by all that was right and wrong.  If a night of love with me cannot dislodge her, then I will move on.

He came back.

And I sent him away.”

Smitty is a character from my story, “The Summer of the Homerun,” (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/299057).
I’m using his story as the centerpiece of another work so far called “Three Rivers.”

For reference, there is another sample available on this site at http://wp.me/p1mc2c-aa.
We’ll see where it goes.

Dan and me always talked about girls. Their hair and faces, how they giggled when they stood together. Their voices, how they walked. The ugly girls. The ones who thought they were better than us, stuck-ups. The girls we wanted to ask out, but never dared. The girls we liked as friends.
He seemed way ahead of me as far as girls went. I think he even did “it” or at least he talked like he did, always throwing in the words snatch and boobies into the conversation, saying how soft her skin was, whoever “she” was.
Me, I was like most of the kids I knew who didn’t want to be within three miles of “it.” I didn’t like the word snatch. It was a violent, nasty sound. It was like a lot of words we used as boys when we were together just to make it seem like we had more experience in that area than we did. Which for most of us was none at all. They were words that covered our shyness, the awkwardness. They were outsider words, things we said among ourselves, declarations of our independence from the rest of the polite and settled world.
But Dan used the words differently. They kind of melted off his lips like he had just tasted a new exotic flavor. Then he’d raise his eyebrows once or twice and smile slyly.
This conversation usually took place when we were at the gravel pit campground we had kind of carved out of the woods. After that first campfire with me hanging off the tree branch forty feet in the air, we decided it would be safer for all concerned of we had some tools. So after some poking around in my garage and in the dark, musty cellar at Dan’s house, we acquired an axe, a large knife and found some old boards that we lugged up to the gravel pit. And with some large rocks, a few big branches and the boards, we built a lean-to shelter. It wasn’t closed in, and wasn’t even rain proof as we found out during one hellacious thunderstorm, but it was a place, a thing that we could claim as our own. We even scratched our names in the backside: Dan and Smitty. It said we were here. That we lived.
The other thing we found in the cellar of Dan’s house was an old pistol and three bullets. They were in a small, wooden box wrapped in a dirty red cloth. The box was under a pile of lumber and boxes in the darkest corner.
“Hey, Smitty, look at this,” Dan called out.
I looked up to see him pointing the pistol at the opposite wall. He spun the cylinder and pulled the trigger. The firing pin closed with a soft clank. Then Dan rolled the pistol around his index finger a time or two and stopped the spinning by grabbing the handle firmly and then with his left hand he fanned the firing pin and pulled the trigger like they did in cowboy movies. The first two times were successful and in sync, but by the fourth time, the rhythm was off and he pulled the trigger just as his hand fanned the firing pin and it slammed shut on his little finger with enough force to break the skin.
“Damn it,” Dan cried out. “Crap, I’m bleeding.”
I looked for a towel or something and found an old rag, which I tossed to Dan.
“What’s that doing here?” I asked.
Dan wrapped the dirty cloth around his finger and pressed the cut for a moment. Then he unwrapped his finger, dabbed at the wound a couple of times and tossed the cloth on the bench. Then he pointed the pistol at the far wall, closed one eye and used the sight to zero in on a target. Then he pulled the trigger. “Pow.”
He had a look on his face, a slight smile and a darkness around his eyes, like a need had been met, a hunger filled.
“I don’t know,” Dan said, very pleased with his discovery, which he replaced in the box and tucked deep underneath the bench. “Not a word,” he said.

I met Katina sometime after the thing with Dan happened.
Everyone knew about it, and would stare at me with either suspicion or pity.
It was a confusing, horrible thing and I didn’t want to talk about it.
Still don’t.

I had a paper route that had me delivering the afternoon Herald to homes along one of Three Rivers’ swanky streets. Years ago the large, turreted homes had been built by the town’s industrial elite. They had long driveways, old carriage houses that had been turned into modern garages and some had sets of poles at the street corner that once held gates. Over time the homes had become owned by doctors, lawyers or bankers. There never were toys or bikes in the front yards, and I never delivered the paper to the front porch, only the side door that led to a dark, narrow set of stairs that had a big door at the top before it opened on the kitchen.
When I collected once a week, they’d let me stand in the dark unlighted hallway while they retrieved the dollar for a week’s worth of papers; some places tipped me a dime.
Katina lived with her grandparents, stern old Germans, Gustav and Margaret Swartz. Gustav Swartz was an engineer and worked for a local company that had factories around the country, so he traveled a lot. Her grandmother was a part-time nurse at the local hospital.
Katina said they had escaped Germany before the war, and I guessed that accounted for their suspicious, protective nature. Her grandmother would say , “Wait here,” while she retrieved her payment; sometimes Katina would lean on the upper door and say, “Hi,” while I waited. “Back to practice,” her grandmother would say when she returned to the door, and Katina would roll her eyes and slide away and I would climb the three stairs to take the dollar and change from the outstretched hand of Margaret Swartz..
“Thank you, Mrs. Swartz,” I’d say.
“Yes,” she would reply. Later, after we got to know one another better, I asked Katina why she lived with her grandparents, and she just shook her head as a sadness came over her eyes.
I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but it was late in the spring, I guess. I went to Katina’s house to collect and instead of her grandmother, Katina opened the door.
“Hello?”
“I’m here to collect for the paper.”
“Oh, yes. Grandmother left an envelope.”
The door shut and I was left standing in the driveway along the side of the house while Katina retrieved the envelope. She opened the outer door and leaned shyly on the frame.
“Thank you for delivering the paper. My grandparents really enjoy reading it,” she said.
I laughed at looked at the ground. “Sure. Thanks. I appreciate their tip. It’s one of the bigger ones I get.”
There was a silence.
“You don’t go to our school,” I said.
She smiled briefly. “No, I go to a private academy for musicians. I’m training as a pianist. “
“Wow,” I said, just cause it slipped out. I mean, Wow.
“My grandfather is working out of a state for a few weeks on a new plant, and grandmother has assumed the administration of nurses at the hospital,” she said, by way of answering the unasked question. “I’m sort of on my own.” She laughed. “But not really, Grandmama checks my schedule every day to ensure I am putting in my practice time.”
There was another silence.
“It’s James, right?” she asked.
“Smitty.” I laughed. “Yes, James Smith. But no one calls me James or Jim or Jimmy. It’s just Smitty.”
“May I call you James?”
She smiled softly.
Wham! I didn’t know what hit me.
“Sure.” I stood unsure that to do. I knew what I wanted to do, but I also knew that I wanted to be able to continue to deliver the afternoon Herald to her house.
“Thanks, again,” I said and shook the payment envelope. I’ve got more collections to make.”
“Of course. When you deliver the paper on Monday, please knock.”
I was backing away, then walking sideways, and I nodded my head. “I will.” I didn’t want to stop looking at her. She slowly closed the door.
Out front, on the sidewalk, I saw her standing in one of the tall windows in the front room, her dark figure blurred by the white, lace drape.

She was tall and dark. Her deep brown eyes were framed by even darker brown hair that draped around her shoulders. Her skin was like porcelain, so white as if it it had never been touched by sunlight.
She wanted to call me “James.”
And she wanted me to knock on the door when I delivered the paper on Monday.

So began what would be the most incredible summer of my short, up to then, meaningless life.

This is another sketch for the story about Smitty, tentatively called “Three Rivers.”

“How’d they get it in here?” I asked her, staring at the huge, gleaming Steinway that filled the middle of the study. Even the main entry into the room, with its twin sliding doors, was too narrow by a couple of feet to allow the piano to pass.
“I imagine they did it carefully,” Katina said, smiling at her joke. “Truthfully I don’t really know. It has been in this room long before I was born. I imagine my mother playing it…” and her voice trailed off.
I wanted to ask about her mother, but Katina’s face was still, her eyes were closed and lips pursed tightly as if trying to hold in some troubling thought, or trying to fend it off; I couldn’t tell. She looked over at me and smiled sadly.
“Would you like me to play?” she asked.
“Sure. I don’t know anything about piano music, you know classical music,” I said.
“It’s not complicated,” Katina said. “It’s like rock ‘n’ roll for its time, or jazz, all syncopation, volume, rhythm, playing with feeling, letting the passion expressed in the notes open the air, letting it flow through your fingers to your body to release sensations within.” She walked past the piano slowly, one finger caressing the wood, and then sat at the keyboard. She softly touched random keys one at a time, setting off a pure, ringing tone from each; then in pairs, in chords, releasing a stream of sounds that filled the room like a chorus of birds. Then she stopped and closed her eyes. She touched her fingertips together and pressed them until her palms met. Her breathing slowed and her face, so animated when she talked, mobile and alive, biting her lip when she laughed, eyes bright and deep, became a mask.

I had changed my paper route so that I could deliver the Herald to Katina’s house last, which gave us a few minutes to talk. At first it was just at the side door, me in the driveway and she standing with the door half opened. Then one day when it was raining, she invited me to stand in the dark hallway, laughing at her rudeness, she said, for letting me get wet while standing outside. Then another day it was in the hallway with the only light flowing in from the outside because she had shut the tall kitchen door. I tossed her the paper – “Catch,” I said — and she dropped it. Then she sat on the second-most step in the hallway, legs together at her knees, elbows resting on her thighs, and hands softly wrapped around her chin.
“If I had broken a finger, my career would be over,” she said, shaking her head.
“I, um,, I, didn’t mean…I’m sorry,” I stammered, unable to get my brain and my mouth to coordinate.
I must have had a look of sheer horror on my face because Katina started laughing.
“Oh, James. It was a joke,” she said, smiling. “I might have broken a nail, but that would hardly end my career.”
Eventually we would sit around the oak kitchen table with the massively carved legs and drink sodas and talk. She would hand me the cold bottle and then nod at the coasters, which I under no circumstances could avoid using. “Grandmama would be most upset to find watermarks on the oak,” Katina said.
And I would think, “Well, we wouldn’t want to upset Grandmama, now would we.”
It was early summer, so the sweaters and skirts and knee socks she had worn in the cooler weather had given way to sleeveless tops and shorts, and bare feet. She would stretch her slim legs out to another chair and cross them at the ankles while like a cat she put her arms above her head and stretched to her full length, fingers and toes straining, back arched, head thrown back and the muscles in her neck taut. Then she’d relax, place her hands behind her head and look at me.
Sometimes we just stared at one another across the table without speaking; there was no need.
And at those times I would think about how amazing she was, Katina, how special and unbelievable and how if she was let loose on the world, what a different place it would be. Because, I’m just Smitty, just me, some knock-around kid, but she was Katina, the amazing Katina.
Then walking home, I’d wonder about what she never talked about because sometimes in the silence that filled the kitchen, you could feel the weight of that sadness behind her smile. Then somehow knowing the mood was changing, Katina would wad up a napkin and toss it at me and smile. I’d fall again into the endless pool of her dark eyes.

That was the Katina I had come to know.
At the piano, it was Katina transformed.
I don’t know what she played. She might have told me, but the names and terms were so foreign she might as well have said it in German.
She paused over the keyboard, the room silent.
Then it wasn’t.
Two concussive chords blew the air out of the room Ta Dum! Ta Dum! Then two more, followed by a run of notes unbroken by even a breath.
Katina leaned her head low over the keyboard and it moved from side to side, weaving up and down with the notes as if they would not be heard unless her head was in motion. Her face was serene, concentrated on the sound, her eyes closed and soft smile on her lips as her fingers struck keys, then rose, and then struck again.
While she played a series of notes with her left hand, she ran her right hand through her hair and smiled at me. “Watch this,” she said.
Then she leaned to her left and began a series of syncopations, chords, then runs of bass notes; she took a deep breath and licked her lips as a sweat broke out on her forehead. She rocked side to side and bobbed her shoulder up and down as the music overtook her body, her hands and arms and legs reacting to every chord, tempo change, every note.
I sat transfixed as I watched Katina engulf the music and be engulfed by it, watched as the silence of what she could not speak poured through her and into the piano and out; at times it wept and other times, shouted joyfully or crashed angrily.
There had been a moment’s pause when she stopped playing and the echo of the music settled from the hard walls to a silence while the air still trembled.
“Here we go,” she said, and began a series of speeding notes arriving at my ears so swiftly it seemed the were all played at the same time, but were in fact played one by one as Katina’s fingers slid over the keyboard. First the deepest notes that started a rumble in my hands as I leaned on the piano; then as she moved up the keyboard octave by octave I began to understand the progression as I heard the tones of the higher octaves slip into the holes in the sound left as she abandoned the lower, deep notes; then as quick as that the composition was at a higher octave, then another higher still. Through it all Katina rocked back and forth and her head rolled and her eyes were closed and her mouth open in a broad yearning smile; then the run changed as a new chord crashed the air followed by a run of uncountable notes, then another chord, more runs, then another chord, then a swifter run as Katina’s breathing took on the rhythm of the sound, a deep breath as the chords crashed, then shorter, shallower breaths as the runs began; then a deeper breath as her face took on the most beautiful allure, her head back, her mouth open, and as she finished the run of sound, she struck two resounding chords, listened to the echo, then two more, stopping playing and shouted, “Yes!”
She leaned back and placed her hands in her hips; her eyes were blazing and her breath was deep and hard. She was shaking.
I watched. Whatever demons resided in her gentle soul had been expelled, for that moment, at least.
She pushed the stool away from the piano and crossed to me, and as her head rested on my shoulder I embraced her.
“That’s me, James.”
I was the luckiest kid in Three Rivers.

You need a set of new tires, the mechanic tells the woman with the three young kids, two of whom are screaming.
I don’t need to see the look on her face as she tells him to do the work, but I hear her soft mother voice, calming the screams; hear the weariness as another hour of waiting settles in.
The car dealership waiting room is a layer of sounds, but maybe it’s the story I’m reading, written from the inside of the character as all the parts of her life trip over themselves with their hands raised to say, I’m the reason your life is in the state it is. Come back to me, come back to where we were and I’ll fix it.
But there is no fixing, not in this story; it is a dream, a topsy-turvy slide with enough luck to miss the dead falls, but she rolls on, in the end is surrounded by the moments of her life, scattered on the floor.
The sound layers become a near silence, a background rumble. Seventies and Eighties rock pierces the air, or at least snatches of seventies rock: A Billy Joel chorus, a guitar riff I should know, “Vacation.” I’m sure with the usual DJ intro of “We all wish we were here;” Foreigner.
Then loudest, the squishy rubber soles of work shoes walking on shining linoleum, the slippery sound as if either the shoes or the floor was covered with a thin layer of liquid. A dozen wet steps, then the door opens and a crackle of car engines leaks in.
For a moment I am wrapped in a silence, layers of life deep, like the character in the book, dreaming, recalling your beautiful round face that from a distance was always filled with a smile, but close up was soft with worry, it seemed, anticipating.
Your chin was soft as I tipped your face. I should have kissed you, one light, sweet kiss, one hello, the first of many. Instead I saw a small scar on your chin and asked joking if you have been in a fight. Yes, you said as you fled.
That moment can not be fixed. A tiny nick buried deep in the heart, a nick that scars over but remains.
The character in the book picks at those scars, as if by opening them again, they will heal or reveal their meaning. There is no paperwork for that repair.
I am gazing into the parking lot. Through thick plate glass, then the half-shade of the car bay into bright sun where a worker on a rusted, yellow forklift stops, scoops up a wooden crate and drives on. Parts to fix something, in the place of fixing.
I see all this but don’t actually record it. I am standing in the street holding your hand. Your face again is a puzzle, your eyes small and intense. And I don’t want to be in the street holding your hand. I want to be somewhere alone. Gazing into your eyes to make them soft and large again, to hear your voice laugh as you tell of yourself, to touch your lips and your eyes with one finger, to touch and reach and puncture this invisible wall, to remove one stone that would let the uncertainty drain away, to say, yes, here’s the problem, this little spring right here, this microchip.
And I want to be in that street in your arms while the crowd around us fades to dark like shadows; to be alone with you saying to one another the one thing that we knew. But never said aloud.
Broken stuff.
Stuff the character in the book I’m reading steps around or picks up for examination before it floats away to rest on a pile of other broken stuff; later she reaches her hand into the pile again and probes what she pulled out.
In my silent dream I think of Smitty and Katina, two characters of my own, and how they will face all this stuff together. I want to offer them hope, and then wonder how.
“Looks like we missed the rain.”
I am pulled back from the daze to search for the source of the voice to see an older bearded man with a straw pork-pie hat, white t-shirt with gray pattered suspenders, black shorts and black shoes with white ankle socks. I feel like I’m in a Ricola commercial.
Then I’m back in the world of noise.
The woman with the yappy terrier tries to get the dog to play a computer game until a mechanic leads her away to show her something about her car.
Sales announcements float like mist, music drifts in and out.
Brakes are fixed, oil changed, fenders straightened.
Broken stuff repaired, replaced. Move on, they say, leave the broken stuff behind.
Then James Taylor, clearly, from a hidden speaker: “Sweet dreams and Flying Machines in pieces of the ground.”
Kisses missed, hands not held, in the book I’m reading, people discarded for ego and error; love lost.
Then James Taylor again in the high-ceilinged, echo chamber. I always thought I’d see you again.
Stuff broken; hope repairs.

This is “One stupid cup of coffee,” one of the shorts included in my collection, “The Resurrection of Leo.”
“The Resurrection of Leo” is available at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/282799.

Look soon for details on the publication of “The Swamps of Jersey,” a political murder mystery and love story.

You should be sitting here, in the diner booth opposite me.
The seatback is a little stiff, straight pine, stained to look like maple. The table is bit snug, but it wouldn’t be for you. Maybe it was just your presence, but you appeared taller, more substantial, yet I was able to wrap one arm around your waist and place my hand flat against your belly. Maybe it was your hair. I could find you in a crowd anytime just by looking for your hair. It shined.
There should be a cup of coffee across from me. And your hand around it, not ladylike with a manicured finger through the handle, but gripped from the other side like you drink coffee at a camp from a metal cup, with your feet still in your unlaced hiking boots and your bare Mickey Spillane legs running up into your shorts.
You remember Mickey Spillane. All his blonde bombshells had legs that ran up to there. You’d walk across a room with long strides, confident, stunning, and everyone in the room would notice.
And you’d be sitting there with that beautiful, crooked smile, and a few strands of hair unruly against your cheek and your sparkling eyes.
I worked in a place like this as a kid, in a roadside diner on an old main road in Upstate New York. It was attached to a night club run by gangsters, and half the help were criminals on a work release program.
We’d get mostly truckers hauling freight or milk from nearby farms, or gasoline from the smelly tank farm that left a rainbow sheen on the river. The truckers would sit at one of the counter stools and drink coffee from mugs they held in grubby, massive hands without using the handle and pile eggs and ham and beans into their mouths while they talked about the Yankees, bad transmissions, low pay and the goddamn lousy roads. Their red caps would be stained black with oil along the rim and brow, and one spot where their thumb landed was worn through to the lining.
On weekends we’d get the drag-racing crowd. They’d slam their pick-ups and trailers all over the parking lot cross-wise and cover all the spaces, and then end up parking along the narrow road, which would get the state cops all riled up.
The racing fans would show up in a wave, all at once, fill all the seats with a roaring chatter, swig beer and order burgers and fries with gravy and try to get the waitresses to join them in the men’s room for a quickie. Then they’d be gone like a flock of magpies, plates picked clean, sucking the noise from the room as they left, leaving silence as they got to the parking lot and revved the V-8s and burned rubber, heading south.
This place is not like that place. It is more suburban, quieter, more refined.
Maybe if we met at a place more like the other, it would have stuck. We would have laughed more, been louder, freer; our legs would have touched under the table, and that smile of yours would have been more of an evil, teasing grin. And we would have leaned across the table again and again and whispered the secret things we knew. Your cheek would have been soft to my touch and the waitress would have interrupted our staring by sticking the coffee pot between us and saying, “Let me warm that up for ya, Honey.”
Instead we met in a place like this, with lace curtains and news shows on the televisions, a more polite place where the waitresses call neither of us “Honey,” but call me “sir” and you “ma’am;” a place mannered, more shielded, where appearances matter more than substance; a place too calm for uncertain lovers. A place where we sat more upright in a hardbacked booth, a place with nervous eyes.
There should be a coffee cup across from me, waiting to be filled. There should be a spoon centered on a paper napkin, a handful of creamers, and off to the side, a menu wrapped in thick plastic.
I should be able to tell the waitress it’ll be just another minute or two.

This is the next part of the story in progress about Smitty and Katina. The story turns dark.

I suppose I should tell you what happened to Dan.
We hadn’t seen much of each other that summer. It was the first time that had happened because Danny and me were the best of friends since either of us could remember, not doing big things, just palling around. We’d hang out along the river and try to catch fish with our bare hands and wave to the barge captains, or throw rocks at the snapping turtles.
Mostly, we hung out. We’d grab a soda and a handful of penny candy from Petrocelli’s store and head out to the gravel pit.
We fixed up the lean-to a lot. Exploring the edges of the pit where the woods grew in close we found busted doors and planks and made a floor and covered the roof better so it didn’t leak as much in the rain. With the spade part of a shovel we found, we dug a small trench around the lean-to and jammed the ends of the planks into the ground and then buried them with dirt. Made the whole thing stronger and drier.
To goof off, we used a couple of pieces of plywood like surf boards and would slide down the steep sand banks of the pit, mostly sitting, but once in a while standing, waving our arms for balance and yelling like crazy and the board would twist sideways and pitch us off and we’d roll down the hill until we were half-buried in sand. And then we’d just laugh, me and Danny.
But that was the summer he got a real job at a landscaping company. He was fourteen but his family needed the money. He said they paid him “under the table,” which made it sound shady and illegal, but he said it was okay, because they paid him in cash, about a hundred bucks a week.
Boy, a hundred bucks. I was lucky if I made thirty doing my paper route.
We needed the money, too, but Danny’s family always seemed to need it more.
One day, when we were sitting on the riverbank watching some kids water skiing, Danny asked me, “You ever think about running away?”
I was like, “What?”
“You know, running away from home.”
“No, never have.”
He was quiet a minute, then sat and hunched his knees up to his chin.
“I have.” Then he looked at me and screwed up his mouth and raised one eyebrow. “Almost did.”
“Aw, man.”
I flopped back on the grass and stared into the bright blue sky till my eyes hurt.
“When?”
He stood up, picked up a handful of rocks and pitched them one by one into the river.
“Couple months ago. My old man was drunker than usual and I had to step in to stop him from beating my mom. We’d chased him out of the house and he’d driven off with the car fish-tailing all over the road and I thought at that moment the best thing that could happen was for him to hit a tree and die.
That got me sitting up. “Jeez, Danny.”
He waved his hand like it was nothing. “I told him once that if he hit Mom again I was going to call the cops, and he smacked me so hard I had a black-eye for a week. My boss asked what happened, and I lied, but he knew my Dad, too, and said he’d talk to him. I had the feeling that I got this job as a favor to my old man, and that sort of proved it.”
Danny sat on the grass again, then leaned back folding his fingers together as he laid back and closed his eyes.
The flies hummed around and the motor boats on the river buzzed softly past.
“Spent that night at the lean-to,” Danny said. “Just slept on the floor. Didn’t have a blanket or nothing. It was freezing! In the morning my Mom was so sad. It’s just so hard for her, Smitty. We’d be better off without my old man, but it would be awful for her.” He shrugged. “So I stay.”
I wanted to go and beat up Dan’s dad. Everyone in town knew he was a bad drunk, but they all covered for him. I was there sometimes when the cops would bring him home and drop him on the couch and tell her she had to take care of him, and her face would just collapse and she’d wring her hands in her apron and say she would. Then she’d find a blanket and cover him up, take off his shoes and we’d roll him onto the couch so he wouldn’t fall and let him sleep it off. Danny would hug his mom and nod at me to say it was okay, and I’d go home.
I would have had my mother talk to her, but she was always at work. I’d sit on the back roof of the house and stare at the big, dark sky and wonder what was going to happen, afraid it would always be bad.

****

It was also the summer that Katina was given permission to leave her house.
That’s what it seemed like, or maybe she and her Grandmother negotiated a deal.
Or maybe she went outside on her own.
I really didn’t know, but one day, after me asking maybe a thousand times, Katina said, Yes, and we walked around the block. Then we walked around the block twice. And then downtown where I took her to Petrocelli’s and bought her MaryJanes, Dots, little Tootsie Rolls, even a couple Jawbreakers.
It seemed that even Grandma Swartz was warming up to me. On Saturdays when I finished my paper route, she’d let me sit in the kitchen with Katina and served me a big slice of chocolate cake with strawberry jam and white icing. She even called me James and asked how I doing once or twice.
Katina would sit across the wide oak kitchen table, half close her eyes and grin slyly and I would stare at her until the room started spinning and then I’d snap my head and it would stop. Katina would put her head down and laugh softly.
She was still practicing piano three hours a day, sometimes with an instructor and sometimes not. She varied the times so we always had some time to hang out, but she said, the practice time was important because she was preparing for an audition or presentation that was a really big deal, although at the time I didn’t pay it much mind.
One day we finally got down to the river. The water was flat and still and the air thick with heat that stuck to your clothes and dropped sweat between your shoulder blades.
She leaned over the bank and ran her fingers through the water like she had never seen it before. She’d lift a handful and let it dribble through her fingers and stare at a drop that that clung to a finger before shaking it off. She as so thin, but her arms and hands were tense and strong, the muscles bulging slightly as she pushed herself back up. All that piano playing.
We didn’t talk much when we were together; guess we didn’t need to. Sometimes I wanted to tell her everything, like the funny stories from the paper route or about the baseball team and the home run the new kid hit that seemed like it went a mile and how a couple of guys and me started a band.
Or about me and Danny, or just maybe Danny and why I was worried about him.
Mostly we just walked. And it was okay.
Just being with Katina was worth everything and the more it happened, the less strange I felt, like a gate had been opened and me, this street kid, had been offered a way into the rest of the world.
And I wanted to tell her how grateful I was because I could never take her into my world. I don’t think she’d understand the shabbiness or the emptiness.
It was like stepping from darkness to light, from cold to warmth, from want to peace.
We had found a spot under a couple of trees and out of the hot sun. Katina stood on the river bank and stretched her arms up and rolled head from side to side over her shoulders. The sunlight played off her light brown hair flashing yellow and red in the changing light.
I watched her move as I laid on the bank on my back. So elegant and electric. She turned, her sweet face framed in the light and smiled, and then came beside me and sat cross-legged at my side.
She brushed the hair from my forehead so lightly, so sweetly, and then ran one finger down my jaw to my cheek and across my lips and I kissed it.
The touch was like liquid melting through the invisible screen, like feeling rain for the first time, wind; love.
“I fell in love with you before I ever met you,” Katina said softly as she rolled sideways, laid on her back and placed her head on my chest. “I would watch you deliver the paper and hear you speaking with my grandmother. You were so polite and friendly. One day she just said out of the blue, ‘That’s a nice boy.’ “
I laughed. She fell in love with me.
“I thought she didn’t like me.”
That was stupid. I needed to tell her that I loved her, too. She needed to know that.
Katina smiled to the sky.
“Grandmama is a funny old bird, James. She seems so old-fashioned and strict, but she’s seen so much of the world, she lets a lot of things slide. She was like that with my mother, before she went away.”
She turned her head to me and I saw the trouble that had settled in her eyes.
I was about to ask what that meant, when she rolled to face me and said, smiling, “Never mind that,” and she touched my cheek. “I used to walk from bay window to bay window and watch you on the sidewalk. I hid behind the curtains so you wouldn’t see me. You seemed so nice. And you are.”
So this is what it’s like, I thought, what it’s like to be loved. There was no reason for her to love me, no thing that I had done to earn her affection. It just was, and though I didn’t understand, I wasn’t about to argue.
Katina said she loved me. There was nothing else I needed to know.
I rose to my elbows and Katina sat up and rested on her knees. I pulled my legs back and was on my knees as well when we kissed.
Oh, those lips and tongue. Sweet mouth and soft face. And Katina laughed while we kissed and wrapped her arms around my neck and I fell backward to the ground and held her.
And we kissed. And we kissed. And we kissed.
Then we stopped and she put her chin on my chest and just stared at me, deep dark eyes, soft and open, then smiled and kissed my chin.
I wasn’t afraid; I wasn’t alone.
And I sensed that something in Katina had changed as well. This was Katina at the piano, fierce, letting it all fly. Me and Katina, two shy kids together kissing on the river bank.
I just said, “Wow.” And then, “Thank you.” She smiled and closed her eyes, her face at peace.

****

It was raining the day I told Katina about Danny.
It was also the day I first took her to the gravel pit; I hadn’t been there in a while.
We had planned a picnic along the river, but when the sky boiled with clouds and darkened I said we should probably head back to her house.
Katina frowned comically.
“I don’t want to go home,” she said. “I’d have to practice, and today I am tired of practicing.”
She took my arm. “How far is the gravel pit?”
“You’re kidding. It’s maybe a mile or so, at the edge of town.”
“Oooh,” she laughed. “The spooky edge of town.”
“You really want to go?”
“Yes, I want to see this famous lean-to.”
The sky had lowered and the rain began to spit by the time we reached the pit. The lean-to was still there, so all that work Dan and me had done paid off.
Katina smiled when she saw it and threw her arms around my neck. “It’s perfect,” she said and then kissed me.
We arranged the blanket we brought around the center pole that held up the roof just as the rain got heavier.
We both looked at the rain and the dark sky and then at each other, and then laughed.
“I hope the roof doesn’t leak,” I said, scanning the boards overhead.
“I don’t care,” Katina said. “I’m here with you and I don’t have to practice the damn piano.”
“Why are you practicing so much?”
She shifted next to me and put her head on my shoulder. She sighed. “It’s for a competitive audition for a fancy music school in Paris.” She glanced up at me to seek how I’d react to the word.
Jeez. “Paris?” You’d….
She reached up and touched my face. “It’s a year away, the competition. I have to be sixteen to enter the school, so that’s two years away.” She sat up, pulled her knees up and laid her head on her arms and looked into the rain. “That’s where my mother is, teaching,” she said softly. “It’s two years away,” she whispered.
I shifted against the center pole and Katina rolled over and straddled my legs.
“I love you James Smith, Mr. Smitty, and nothing would change that, not even being in Paris.”
She leaned into me and we kissed, hard, urgently, tongues probing, fingers grasping. I pushed her hair back and kissed her ears and neck and then along the rim of the zipper on her sweatshirt. I slipped the zipper tab between two fingers, hesitated and looked at Katina, who nodded.
The shirt opened and she said, “Touch me.”
My hand circled her breasts, so warm and so hard in the cold air. I kissed her neck and her shoulders as she rocked against me, and then tounged her nipple, then her flat belly.
Oh, man. What was going on?
Finally Katina leaned into me again and we held each other in the cold air, held each other tightly, held each other against the loneliness that we knew, against Paris, against the piano, against the world; just we two.
Then, finally I told her. “I love you, Katina, piano playing, crazy, mysterious Katina, Paris or no Paris.”
Her face was calm and her eyes deeply dark. Softly she said, “My Smitty.”
After we ate lunch, Katina said it was time for me to tell her about Danny.
“I’ve told you my secret, now it is your turn.”
I leaned against the center pole, closed my eyes and held my head in my hands.
“It’s not good, not good at all.”
She shifted to my side and wrapped an arm around me. “Then I’ll listen well.”
My head was spinning. Where to start? His father, the drunk? His mother, the fights and beatings? The threat to run away? The pistol?
Then I started and wanted to get it over as fast as possible.
“Danny’s father was a bad drunk, always was. He worked for a construction company driving equipment but he was so bad they put him in an office. He would run around the house crazy drunk and knock stuff over, breaking dishes and lamps and then blame Dan’s mom for everything. They never had anything nice because his old man would smash it. Sometimes the cops would come and they’d calm him down and once in a while took him to the city jail to sleep it off, just to get him out of the house …”
Katina touched my face. “Oh, James how awful. Couldn’t anyone help? His employer? The school?”
I sighed. “I guess they tried, but nothing worked. Dan started hanging out at my house and that’s how we became such good friends. He’d stay and eat dinner, but he was so worried about his mother getting hurt, he’d have to go home.”
I kissed Katina on the forehead. Just talking about it after all the time it was bottled up, felt better. But the worst part was yet to come.
“Danny used to confront his father about the drinking and try to get him to stop hitting his mother. So Danny got whacked, sometimes really hard. His old man was smart. He’s hit him in the stomach or the ribs and maybe across the legs, places that didn’t show. Once and a while in the face when he was really out of control. Danny would skip school until the bruises went away. I felt helpless. I knew about all this and couldn’t help. Who could I tell?”
I closed my eyes when the tears spilled out. “He was my best friend and I couldn’t help him.”
Katina moved closer and held me tighter. “Was? What’s that mean?”
Then I faced it.
“They found Danny hanging from that tree.” I pointed to the tree I had climbed before to break off branches for fire wood. Stumps of branches grew out of the side like stubby fingers. “He had climbed up a few of the lower branches, tossed the rope over the next biggest branch, slipped the noose over his head and jumped. That’s how bad it got.”
Katina rolled away horrified and screamed, “No!. Oh, James.” Then she asked, “Why? Was there no other choice?”
My voice was dark and icy. “He had shot and killed his father. One time we found an old pistol in the cellar of his house with a couple of bullets. I wanted him to throw it away but he wouldn’t. He came home from school one day and the house had been torn to shreds. His old man had gone on a real rampage. Dan found his mother unconscious on the floor of the kitchen. I guess Dan thought she was dead, because he snapped. He found his father in the living room and just stared hitting him. His father was a so drunk he couldn’t fight back. I guess Dan yelled and screamed but then went to the cellar and got the pistol. Shot his old man twice. Then he came here.”
My head was pounding and my gut was churning. Do I tell her the rest?
“The cops came to my house asking if I knew where Dan was, and I knew it was bad. I told them about the gravel pit, but one of them said it was a big place and they could use my help finding where he might be. God, I didn’t want to do that, but they put in a patrol car and we came here.
Katina’s face was white and drawn and wet with tears. “So you saw….?
“Yeah. Saw my best friend…”
We fell into each others’ arms sobbing uncontrollably. I was crying for Katina who had to hear that horrible tale and I was crying for Danny, my best friend whose life had been wasted. I was not crying for myself.
We fell asleep. Sometime later with bright lights in our eyes we saw the local cops and Katina’s grandmother standing in the dark gravel pit.
The cops were rough and shouting, but Katina’s grandmother calmed them.
“They’re fine, I see,” she said. “Good.”
Katina rubbed her eyes and looked back at me. I knew she wanted to smile, and was working hard to suppress one.
“It’s okay,” she mouthed.
Mrs. Swartz just said, “We will talk, James.
They took us home in separate police cars. My house was dark; once again I was the loneliest kid in the world. The rain had stopped. I laid back on the roof and stared at the murky changing sky, feeling small and lost.

Sometimes a story falls together all by itself. Such is the case with Smitty, Katina and the memory of Danny. To catch up, this all starts with Smitty, a 13-year-old regular kid, hanging from a tree branch forty feet in the air after deliberately breaking off a lower branch for firewood. Katina is his incredible girlfriend and Danny, his best friend. This piece ends the first part of the longer story.

Also  please check out “The Swamps of Jersey,” my new novel at amazon.com, barnesdandnoble.com and at the Clinton Book Shop,

http://www.clintonbookshop.com/

Information on independent book sellers is available at : http://www.indiebrand.org

Other draft parts of this story are available on this site.

In the dream I am falling. The branch I am standing on does not so much crack open, but peel apart, the sections separate from each other slowly — first the top short fibers tear, ones where the pressure of my jumping caused the break, then some longer ones in the middle of the branch, the white, dry wood opening like a broken bone, then the bottom, a long pointed shard with bark on the outside that ripped away when all the weight of me and the branch was grabbed by gravity. When I hear the limb break I tighten my grip on the overhead branch, but the bark is dry and crumbles in my hand and my fingers slide off the slick wood. Below me Danny sees the falling branch and runs a few feet away while it smacks loudly into the ground, throwing up dust and chunks of broken tree. He is laughing. He is always laughing. Laughing. In the dream. When I awake I am on the riverbank. Now, if this dream is a great uprising of hidden feeling that some author would write down as if it was of tremendous psychological importance, then why do I wake up on the river? Why don’t I wake up in the lean-to? With me falling forty feet and landing on the ground as agile as a bird. Or with a laughing Danny picking up the wood in his arms and dropping it next to our firepit, asking if I remembered the matches. Or wake up in his dimly lighted cellar while he is fingering the cold black metal of the pistol, twirling it on his finger and then wrapping it up in that dirty, red cloth and shoving it back in its hiding place with a wicked look in his eyes; why do not I wake up and say, “Give it to me, Danny. Don’t want you shooting anyone.” When that was exactly what I was thinking when I saw the pistol in his hand. Why, mister writer am I just falling; falling and never landing? I should drop like a stone and hit the ground while trying to get my legs under me so I don’t land lengthwise on my back and break everything. I should land and Danny should stop laughing long enough to run over and ask me if I hurt anything, and I should look at the edge of the big rock that is three feet away, sharp and solid, and be glad I didn’t land there. Instead I drift. I can hear Danny’s voice echo through the campground, see the sunlight flickering through the leaves and the big hawk circling over the gravel pit like God’s outlook. Then I awake on the riverbank. Which is just an altogether unsatisfactory outcome. Why can’t I wake up in Paris? Along the magic River Seine instead of this sticky hometown river? Why can’t I wake up in Paris and be sitting on some grassy slope with Katina? So I closed my eyes. Paris did Katina good. Her hair is longer, down to her shoulders, and her eyes show a little color. She laughs more and wears cool flowing skirts and low-cut tops and drapes bright, soft purple and red and yellow scarves around her neck and shoulders. Big earrings and bangling bracelets. Maybe it is the lack of the pressure of trying out for the fancy piano school or being with her mother again. I wish it would be because of me, but all these changes had taken place while she was in Paris and I was in Three Rivers digging a stupid blue swimming pool. She drops French phrases into her speech and for the life of me I wished I had paid more attention in Mrs. Henderson’s beginning French class. She pushes me down on the grass and kisses me, flashing her breasts through the open collar as she leans into me. Then with one finger she gently touches my forehead, my eyes, runs it down the length of my nose and across my mouth. “Ah, my Smitty. Mon amore. She kisses me and sticks her tongue in my mouth and then withdraws it, giggling. Then kisses me again. And all I can do is lay on the grass and take it all in. I feel as light as air, as free as the hawk. Katina. I was back watching her play the piano in her parlor in Three Rivers, amazed as she swayed and turned as the music drew her in, her eyes focused on a unknown distance, her soul loose. Speaking to me in language I was desperate to learn. And then holding her, feeling her heart pound through my shirt. When I awoke I was again on the riverbank. My eyes were wet. I had pulled my knees to my face and clutched my head in my hands and screamed into the ground. In the dream I am falling. Why, mister writer man, are you making me relive these most painful moments of my short, stupid life? I can see Danny with the gun. Hear the shots. One. Two. Three. See his old man collapse into the couch with the most astonished look on his face. Hear his mother scream, “Oh, Danny! No, Danny! Where did you get the gun?” And see Katina slide the canvas cover over the side of the piano, see her lift her suitcase and walk slowly to her grandfather’s car parked under the carport in the long driveway, doors open, awaiting its cargo. I see the lights go off and hear the key slide into the lock, turn and be withdrawn and see her grandfather grasp the handle and give the door one last shake. I see Katina at the end of the driveway glance once in each direction, then drop her head and walk to the open car door, step in and close it, enveloped in the darkness. I see this; I feel this all the time. I am falling in the dream. And may be falling for some time. When I awake on the riverbank this time I finally understand why. I had fallen asleep in the crotch of the half-dead maple whose roots held the sandy bank together. It was dark; didn’t know what time. The city murmured in the background. A few bullfrogs moaned in the distance and a long oil slick slithered along the river’s surface, sliding in and out of the moonlight, a sneaky purple and maroon tint on the dark water. Then I remembered I had gone walking. Sitting on the roof looking at the stars no longer seemed exciting enough. So I prowled Three River’s dark, silent streets, just watching. Cars pull off the dark streets into the glassy neon glow of one of the four gas stations that occupy all the corners of the city’s main intersection, the metallic ting of the pump the only sound. “Yeah, thanks,” the hollow voice of the attendant can’t fill the cavern of silence. Then a double ring as the car drives over the air hose and leaves. The rise and fall of muffled voices from inside Mahoney’s bar; a flash of golden light as a patron steps into the street, pulls at his collar, takes one last draw on a cigarette before flicking it into the street and then walks into the gloom. The hum outside the packaging plant and the sweet sticky aroma of chocolate at the candy factory. A single car slides across the bridge, faintly rattling the metal grates before turning down one of the long, brightly lit empty streets that hold the city together at night; then the river, the flowing, black passage to end of the world. “Hey, kid. You okay?” The voice came from a dark figure outlined by a distant street light. It didn’t sound dangerous. I didn’t move, but said, “Yeah. I’m good. Sitting here.” “Why?” “Felt like it. Went for a walk… Who are you?” The man took a few steps closer and lighted a cigarette. He offered me one, and I shook my head, no. He was wearing a dark ballcap and in the faint light I could see he hadn’t shaved in a few days and his cheeks were deeply lined. “I’m Dusty,” he said. “I run a barge up and down the river three times a week.” He kept his distance. “I’m Smitty,” I said. “So you run a barge. What’d you haul?” “Diesel. From the tank farm downriver to the power plant on Ontario.” Dusty’s cigarette flared as he took another draw. “Been in town a couple, days getting a valve replaced in the engine. Can’t sleep in a hotel. Been sleeping on a barge or a boat since I was a kid. Hotel’s don’t rise and fall with the river’s flow, and they’re too damn noisy anyway. So I walk.” He moved a little, still in the dark, so I guess he shrugged. “It’ll be just till tomorrow.” We both stared into the dark flow of the river. I thought maybe I should get up and head home, not being quite sure who or what old Dusty was after all. “Know anyone who needs work?” Dusty asked. Lost my deckhand a week ago to another barge. Kid couldn’t afford to be down while the repairs were made. I can’t either, but I ain’t got another choice.” I stood up and brushed off my pants. “Maybe I do. I know some folks. I’ll ask around.” Dusty flipped his cigarette into the river where the red glow went “pfft” as it went out. “I’m docked at the state pier on the island, pier twelve. Tug’s name is ‘Sandy Sweetie,’ which is what I tell her all the time when she’s acting up, ‘Come on Sandy Sweetie, get your ass in gear.’ ” I smiled at the line and Dusty cackled. “Tell anyone you know to be at the pier at noon.” Then he was gone. And that was how I became a deck hand on the Sandy Sweetie. I never told Dusty my age, and well, he didn’t much ask.

The shopping mall is hollow, a cavern of mangled sounds rising to the vaulted ceiling three stories up.
The aisles are filled with shuffling bodies, slowly passing by like workers assigned to the late shift waiting to punch the clock; even the children in their red-and-green holiday clothes seemed dispirited as if the long slog to Christmas wore them down.
Once, long ago, he stood at the edge of that shuffling mob, poised at the entry door of a shop, glanced left and then right, and fled as if a force repelled him back through the store into the parking lot and into his car.
The phone in his pocket buzzed once.
“Unknown.”
That’s what it said,
But he knew it was her.
That’s what we’ve become.
Anonymous electronic links.
Unknown. Unidentified. Little electric signals that we hide behind; little electric signals.
Once it was not that way.
Once we pushed through the shuffling crowd, ran east southeast and west southwest, not north and south, diagonally across the squares; ran because all that mattered was that we met somewhere at the fringe of that mob.
Then we ran past. Unseen. The wall, the mob enclosed.

He tucked the phone back into his pocket and rubbed his chin, rough with three or four days of beard growth.
Another way of hiding. Gone were the pants with sharp creases, dark suits and tasteful ties. Now it was jeans, jeans with bleach stains, holes on the back cuff where they dragged on the floor. Sweat shirts, wraps too large, a way to hide; faded blues, greys, and mottled browns, a place to blend and disappear.
Unknown.
Anonymous.
Undistinguishable.
If no one can find you, how can they hurt you?

He stood and entered the shuffling, shopping mob, stopping at a wagon loaded with shaving items. None seemed interesting. Fruity, musky, brutish. Alcohol with a trace of scent.
Except one.
He smiled as he recalled the name. Pinaud Clubman.
Suddenly he was eleven and sitting in the tall leather chair as Bernie the barber deftly brushed the hair off his neck with the white towel and dusted it with the soft brush after he had coated the head with scented powder shaken from a can with a dapper man in a top hat wearing a great coat with tails and leaning on a cane. For good measure, Bernie reached for a tall bottle with a slightly yellow liquid and shook a few drops into his hands before rubbing them together and rubbing his cheeks.

He held the small box to his nose and drew in the scent: A little citrus, a little musk, but faint, light. He smiled.
He remembered how hard it was to find the brand in stores, so hard that once when he found it on sale, he bought three bottles.
They are buried now in a cabinet, and get pushed to the rear every time a new item is placed on the shelf. One of the bottles tipped over and the cap was a little loose so for weeks the cabinet smelled like Clubman.
But still he didn’t use it.
No point.
“Can I help you?” The voice of the clerk at the wooden cart pulled him back to the shuffling mob. He fingered the Clubman box and shook it slightly.

In his car he took the bottle out of the box. The same tall, thin man in the same top hat, black, long coat leaned on his cane. The bottle, once glass, but now plastic like everything else. But it still had the classic shape. Broad shoulders at the top slimming down to a narrow waist, just like the man on the label. A marvel of marketing.
He twisted off the green, plastic top and tipped a few drops on his fingers. The silky liquid spilled into his palm and the car filled with the slight, refreshing scent of the aftershave.
He placed his hand over his nose and mouth and breathed in deeply.
There you are.

Here I am.

The phone buzzed again.
“Unknown.”
He pushed “Answer.”
Hello?

I will be the guest  of award winning radio host Georjean Trinkle on Hot in Hunterdon on the Hunterdon Chamber of Commerce web broadcast at 4 p.m. Monday, Jan. 11.

Here’s a link to our last conversation: http://www.hunterdonchamberradio.com/Radio_Shows/Hot_in_Hunterdon/Hot_in_Hunterdon-2015-08-03_09.mp3.

Guess we’ll talk about the release of the second Frank Nagler mystery, “A Game Called Dead.”

  Here’s info on where to find the book:

Amazon paperback:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1944653007?keywords=game%20called%20dead&qid=1452179426&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

Kindle:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AAKHH9G?keywords=game%20called%20dead&qid=1452179426&ref_=sr_1_2&sr=8-2

Kobo: https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebook/a-game-called-dead

Thanks to the following libraries for accepting copies of the Frank Nagler mysteries: Phillipsburg; Warren County, Franklin branch; Mount Arlington; Wharton; Dover; Hackettsown;  Clark, and the Ramsey library, as part of the Bergen County Cooperative Library System.

The Frank Nagler mysteries – “The Swamps of Jersey’’ and “A Game Called Dead” are now available at the following New Jersey book stores:

Bobby’s News and Gifts, 618 Main Street, Boonton.

The Clinton Book Shop, 12 E. Main Street, Clinton. http://www.clintonbookshop.com/

Sparta Books, 29 Theatre Center, Sparta. http://www.spartabooks.com/

For information on independent book sellers visit, http://www.indiebound.org/

The books are also newly available at the at the following libraries: Bernardsville Public Library; The Hunterdon County Public Library; Mount Olive Public Library;  and previously at Phillipsburg; Warren County, Franklin branch; Mount Arlington; Wharton; Dover; Hackettsown;  Clark, and the Ramsey library, as part of the Bergen County Cooperative Library System.

The first reviews of “A Game Called Dead” are in.

By JD on February 8, 2016

“Another great story in the Frank Nagler series. After reading the first book, “The Swamps of Jersey”, I was very excited to hear that another one was in the works. I thought the second one was just as good, if not better, than the first. Very much looking forward to the next one!”

5.0 out of 5 stars GREAT READ!!!!!!

By Otto Driver on February 7, 2016

“Loved “A Game Called Dead”, I was so enthralled I literally could not stop reading until I finished it. I was eager for this book after reading Mr. Daigle’s first book in the series, but now I can’t wait for the next one. Highly recommend both of these books to everyone.”

Outstanding, February 10, 2016

By

Dee

This review is from: A Game Called Dead (Paperback)

I greatly enjoyed the first Frank Nagler story, “Swamps of Jersey.” The writing is superb, settings so vividly portrayed as to be nearly palpable. The plot is engaging and the main character captivating. I was thrilled to learn that a second Frank Nagler story was in the works and couldn’t wait to read it. “A Game Called Dead” didn’t disappoint. Frank Nagler is still intriguing, a man whose sense of morality drives him to soldier on despite his deep personal pain. I may have actually hit on one of the clues well before the book ended which didn’t at all detract from the reading pleasure. The story isn’t so much a “whodunit” as a “why they dun it,” and the wide-ranging effects of the crime. I was rooting for Nagler to solve it because this very private person reveals himself in the how and why of his detective work. The only question I had left when I was finished was “when’s the next Frank Nagler book coming out?”

By Janice Walz on February 10, 2016

The main character, Frank Nagler, keeps getting more and more interesting as the series goes on.

Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment. I had a great time writing “Dead.”

The books are available at online at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo, and the Clinton Book Shop, Sparta Books and Bobby’s News and Gifts and at the following public libraries: Bernardsville Public Library; The Hunterdon County Public Library; Mount Olive Public Library; Phillipsburg; Warren County, Franklin branch; Mount Arlington; Wharton; Dover; Hackettstown;  Clark, and the Ramsey library, as part of the Bergen County Cooperative Library System.

In a recent review of “The Redoubt,” by Devorah Fox, the fourth book in the fantastic Bewildering Adventures of King Bewilliam series, (Do yourself a favor and read the books) I noted how she had structured the story using weather as an indicator of King Bewilliam’s state of mind, the used tale-telling to frame the story in a way that recalled Chaucer.

The tales told in “The Reboubt” by the cast of characters who joined the king on a trade mission, carry the story along but more, act as guides to the mood of the king, and also are a real-time commentary on the king’s plight and future action.

The tales are a marvelous device to carry the story forward. But more they are also a metaphor for the writer’s journey from the birth of an idea to the completion of its examination.

I thought of this because one of my birthday gifts is an annotated Edgar Allen Poe.

Annotations are the things that our college professors used to point out in English 302 that showed how the author referenced a Biblical passage, mirrored Shakespeare, stole the plot from the Ancient Greeks, or just dazzled the reader with language.

Then I wondered if those professors would be impressed to find out that writers like Devorah Fox and myself use these techniques as the literary and psychological guides for our stories.

 In “A Game Called Dead,” the second Frank Nagler mystery, the story is structured on a college video/real life game called “The Hunter’s Lair,” which the students begin to call “A Game Called Dead.”

The goal of the game is to get The Hunter, the hero. But the Hunter is not defenseless. It is the conflict laid out in first pages of the story and climaxes in the last, tense chapter.

Ironton, N.J., detective Frank Nagler, our hero, studies a webpage dedicated to the game for clues. Does he read the clues correctly? His interpretation of the clues drives his investigation.

Murder mysteries are about stripping away the secrets of the characters. Nagler has his secrets, the bad guy has his. It is part of the game, a way to break down the defenses of each character to bring conclusion to the game.

Another character caught in this game is college dean Harriet Waddley Jones. She finds herself in the middle of the investigation of the murder of a college student while planning to write a book about Charlie Adams, Ironton’s famous serial killer.

Her interactions with Nagler, who arrested Adams years before, drive her inward.

In this scene, Waddley-Jones faces herself:

“And yet they really don’t know why they came, she suddenly knew. They did not know the secrets of the place. But she would not tell them that night. Soon, but not that night. She closed her eyes and saw Dawson’s headline: “The Story of Student A.” ….

Harriet Waddley-Jones wanted to stand before the dark crowd that night and tell them what she knew of that time on the campus, to tell what she knew about Student A. But she knew she could not, not then. The meaning of the night – to honor three young women  – would have been lost in that story.

Not tonight. Instead, there are things I will say that will sound like the truth, but will be lies; things I will say that will sound encouraging, but are not. ….

For a moment Harriet Waddley-Jones stood on the edge of that truck and closed her eyes; all the sounds and shufflings, all the voices, for a moment became silence and the darkness behind her weeping eyes became light.

She stepped to the microphone, knocked on it a few times and sent booming raps out over the gathering. The image that filled her mind was that of Frank Nagler’s face after the Charlie Adams hearing. Firm jawed, resolute but soft at the eyes where the endless disappointments had settled. Like this crowd, she thought; like myself.

“I know you are in pain,” she said softly, then waited as the crowd hushed itself. “I know you want the pain to end. I know you are alone and want the loneliness to cease and want color and sound and light to fill your days. I know you want love to replace all that which you have lost. I know this because I, too, am in pain. All the events these past few weeks have brought forth have scoured my soul, rubbed raw all the things that I have carried and thought were scabbed over. There is too much death,” she said, her voice rising, “too much anger and sorrow, too much blame and too little forgiveness.”

A hush fell over the gathering. Great hissing “sshss” and shouts of “QUIET!” were heard until silence took hold of the crowd like a soothing hand, calming the noise, and the shuffling ceased like a sweet mist settling slowly; for a moment the night was crystal and silent, one body moving with purpose and devotion.

 Into that silence, Waddley-Jones strongly cast her voice, the leader’s tone recovered, but softened. “Oh, how we hide behind this shame, hide from any peace. How we revel in the pain and sadness and say that ‘joy is not for me’ when joy is the simplest thing to make. Come out of the darkness. We have much to say, much to say together. It is time to put down our burdens. Join together. Join me.”

Another technique professors pointed out is how authors used language to engage the reader. One professor I recall spent 20 minutes talking about a scene in “Huckleberry Finn” when Twain described making stew in a camp, and how all the ingredients “swaps around” with the others. Of course “stew” was a metaphor for society and the ingredients were people and their beliefs and actions, and so on.

In the following scene from “A Game Called Dead” I was not seeking so noble an outcome. Instead, I wanted the reader to feel the language as part of their enjoyment of the story.

This is scene featuring a make-shift drum line, the sound of which resonates in the story as a sign of hope.

I wanted the words to bounce of the page, and I think they do:

“Thump, thump, thump-a-thump. Then, tap, and tap, tap-tap-tap; then thump-a-thump, then crash-crash; thump-a-thump, then crash-crash. Notes between notes, sounds between silence, then a flurry, uncountable birds rising from tall grass, a thousand wings, chaotic flapping. Then the tempo shifting faster; so many hands and sticks, the sound in layers, colliding, then rising, engulfing the air, swooping in and out, the source obscured – one, maybe all – then in a moment the syncopation lost, the notes combined, one atop the other, rising, rising, louder as if passing through a pipe, sound with a single reason to be, pausing, then bursting out the end and shattering into a thousand single notes and beats and sounds, breaking, exploding, sprinkling back to earth to be gathered again by busy hands, shaped into something new and sent skyward one more time; then a voice, a single “Oh, oh.” Then another, “Oooo, ooo!” Three, in harmony. “Oh, Oh-oh, hey!” Oh, Oh-oh, hey. Thumpa, thumpa. Then Hey, then Oh; then Hey-ho. Then five voices singing Hey, and five others, Ho; then underneath a rising “Ah,” stepping up the scale, each Ah higher and louder, till twenty voices found a note and wordless, carried it on; just sound, harmony wrapped in harmony, song wrapped in rhythm, voices grabbing music from hard streets, moving, moving forward, pure sound, celebrating itself, celebrating life; joy.”

“A Game Called Dead” and the first Frank Nagler book, “The Swamps of Jersey” are available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and in several NJ bookstores and libraries.

As the third Frank Nagler mystery, “The Weight of Living”  unfolds, new characters emerge.

Calista Knox becomes therapist and later companion for Leonard, Nagler’s blind  bookstore-owning friend, who at the end of “A Game Called Dead” was hospitalized.

I like her.

“For months after that attack Leonard laid morosely in the hospital bed, eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, shunning visitors. He rarely spoke, even as the kids from the community center, Delvin Williams, Lauren, Bobby and Nagler took turns in reading him newspapers, books, or just chatting up recent events. Nagler knew he had seen this before, had seen it in his own mirror in the days that followed the death of his wife, Martha: The long slide to self-pity and forced solitude, the construction of the shell designed to block out the world, instead became a festering cauldron of anger.

“You’re doing what I did,” Nagler told Leonard one day.

Leonard at first just stared at the blank wall, then he sighed and rolled his head to face Nagler; his eyes were liquid and dark, swimming in the loathing Leonard felt for the world and himself.

“You’re right, Frank,” Leonard whispered. “And I do appreciate all the care that you and others have shown me, but I feel so useless…fat, blind, I can’t do anything for myself. I wished for once I didn’t need anyone.”

“Useless, oh Leonard. Don’t forget what you’ve done. The store. You saved that neighborhood even as the city was falling down around it. The friends you’ve made. The inspiration…”

“And I feel none of it Frank,” Leonard said as harshly and bitterly as Nagler could ever recall his voice.

Nagler sat silently. He had seen this side of Leonard many times before, but it passed. This time seemed deeper. He reached to hold his friend’s hand. “I’m always here, Leonard.”

Later, as he spoke with Leonard’s doctor, the plan to find Leonard a therapist or counselor was formed.

Thus, Calista Knox.

Thin, boyishly thin, but toned in a way that clearly came from long-term exercise and training. Eyes dark as coal, at first an apparent defense, but later, seen as probing. Hair dyed fire-engine red, cropped madly short, a gallery of tattoos on her arms and lower legs, and back-filling body of a tiger that was made visible to those in the bookshop the times she casually shrugged away the stares as she peeled off a shirt or hoodie and stood briefly naked from the waist up as she changed from her street clothes to workout garb before her sessions with Leonard.

  As Nagler came to know her, he saw the carnival appearance masked a deep personal understanding of Leonard’s pain; the appearance deliberately chosen as off-putting, more than a “my freedom, fuck you,” but as a way to ease around the stiff and unnumbered rules, to work as an insider while being an outsider, dismissed by the rule makers as frivolous, even dangerous, instead working as a clown does – the red bulbous nose and white pancake face the disguise of an insurgent.

She was profane, loud, insistent and right. “Get off your fucking ass, Leonard,” she’d scream at him. “Ya got legs, use ‘em.

At first shocked, Nagler came to understand that Calista was exactly the person to rouse Leonard’s spirit. She was not brazen; she was honest.

“We were all too nice to him,” he told her one day.

She nodded. “Friends are like that,” she said. “Didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But it was not his feelings that were hurt, Frank. It was his soul. You all went through that trouble together. None of you want to remind the others of the pain. Well, I didn’t go through it. So I get to kick him in the ass to remind our boy that he is the leader of the pack and that he damn well better show it.”

She lifted her head and stared directly at Nagler. “People lie to one another all the time, Frank. Wear masks. I look at this little group and wonder who is lying, who will eventually tell the truth and who will pay for it.”

She walked away before he could respond, but silently Nagler knew she was right; the shuttering heart.

Nagler listened to Leonard’s protesting cries of pain, the anguish on his face as she called harshly for five more arm curls with the ten-pound weight, ten more leg presses, the admonishments – “you’re not gonna die from work, Leonard, you’re gonna die from sitting” – but he held back any comment; watched as Calista’s words became softer, the touch more tender, the brief hug after a workout lengthen to an embrace; watched as Leonard’s fumbling, blind hand reached for her face and tenderly caressed her cheeks and lips as Calista’s fierce eyes softened, and her hard visage retreated and she kissed his fingers.

For information on previous Frank Nagler Mysteries:

Amazon: http://goo.gl/hVQIII Kobo: https://goo.gl/bgLH6v NOOK: http://goo.gl/WnQjtr

Gritty, But Poetic

(From Amazon) By Merritt Stewart

This book wasn’t really my cup of tea. It reminds me of ‘In Cold Blood’ By Truman Capote in that, there is a lot of psychological examination. The detective wonders what someone must feel to commit a certain act, standing somewhere, he ‘feels’ the motive, etc. There is also a lot of poetic imagery. I respect this, it is not easy to do, much less well but, It’s just not what I prefer when reading a mystery. The book is well written but, rather grim and stark. Again, just not my cup of tea. True crime readers that like some grit in their stories will enjoy this book, I’m sure.

  MSD: I appreciate the reviewer’s comments. It shows how varied readers’ expectations can be about what a mystery story entails, and how wide a field “mystery” can be.  Not every book is someone’s cup of tea. I’m currently reading a cop story written by Devorah Fox (read her King Bewilliam series) that has the form of a classic cop-chase-the-bad-guy story, but whose writing is both silken and gritty, an intriguing mix.

A GAME CALLED DEAD is available at:

Amazon: http://goo.gl/hVQIII Kobo: https://goo.gl/bgLH6v NOOK: http://goo.gl/WnQjtr

Also, The Clinton Book Shop and Sparta Books, newly available at the Morris County Library, and soon the Somerset County Library.

Here’s the villain in “A  GAME CALLED DEAD,” the second Frank Nagler mystery. He calls himself #ARMAGEDDON and taunts the police online.

“I’m baaa-ack!

Yes, it is me. #ARMAGEDDON. How have you been?

Oh, congratulations to the state police for busting those two Ironton College kids for playing a role in the community center fire. What has our youth come to?

Ping, ping, ping. Tracked them right down by following their cell phones. How cool.

But you’re gonna find they had been hacked.

By me. Hello.

I had no grudge against those kids, they were just convenient foils.

I’m here in cyberspace leading you all over the city chasing incidents or false leads, and you can barely operate your cell phone.

 So I will always be one step ahead of you. But I wish you would adapt more quickly.

What is it going to take for you to realize how this game called dead is played? I am trying to teach you. And the longer it takes, more people will die.

Each death is a lesson and a clue.

And at some point they will blame you.

Is that my goal? To discredit you, to leave you shamed and wounded?

It is one of them. You’ll soon understand the others.

So let’s talk about the game, just so we all understand.

You have come to believe that Ironton College students somehow changed the format from a real-world game to a virtual game and back again. Some of that is true, but it is quite amazing what you can get people to believe once you’ve altered the information they are presented.

The manhunts, the death-stalkers in masks and uniforms? My creations. In truth the game was played by about thirty students and was dying out, so I changed things. I created a roster of players, determined their fates and watched.

Oh, and yes, Doris Macomber and Arlene Katz were players, as was Sheila Okinowski. They were nice girls in the real world. In the game world, I had made them into monsters.

And a word to Ironton College officials: Spend a little less on your football team and more on cyber security. There are so many unguarded access points it almost took the fun out of it.

Almost.

So we need context.

We live in a confusing world. The truths we once thought were self-evident have been turned on their head, distorted by those with self-agendas, the power of money, greed and ideology, or by altering a simple computer program. We believe in nothing because everything is just a theory. We want concrete proof and believe our god will provide it.

Ah, god. Snapped his fingers one day and created all this, and if you are a follower, you understand that one day he will snap them again and all this will disappear. But you’ll be on the boat, so it will be okay.

Yes, god, whose followers have sent armies to plunder nations, to destroy people who believe in another god. Or that one over there. Or that one.

That is too large a context.

The context I seek is fear and confusion, within which lies the motive for revenge. I revel in the anarchy. I would have been a Viking raider, raping and pillaging Europe, or a spy riding through the dark Massachusetts night with a coded message, the rebel with a bomb, a patriot at the Dublin Post Office; destroyer to some, liberator to others.

At its heart, that is what the Game Called Dead should be about. Chaos, disorder, all the grand illusions with all the grand ideals. I am not a great thinker, alas.

It is more like one giant game of king of the hill.

And I will be the one left standing.

I would like it to be about something more majestic, but it is not.

The Hunter wants everyone to believe that he is the pure man, the stalwart figure, the leader, the knight in shining armor. In truth The Hunter is a man with a heart filled with pain and loss.

That is the unguarded access point, easier to penetrate than any cyber security network.

The access point is love. And I feel love for nothing. For which I in part blame you.

So I will return the favor. When I take way the objects The Hunter loves and he is nothing, then he will fall.

And I will rise The Hunter ascendant, cold-hearted, logical, unbeatable.

O-kay, wow, got a little carried away.

More to the point: Someone should ask why Charlie Adams said in court that Victim Z loved lavender. What an odd thing for him to say.

But look, I need to go, because the state police techies will be just a few electrons behind me about now. They have been chasing me across the electronic netherworld for several minutes and are just about to get to the last point I was at right about – take a breath – now. Bye.”

The Frank Nagler mysteries – “The Swamps of Jersey’’ and “A Game Called Dead” are now available at the following New Jersey book stores:

Bobby’s News and Gifts, 618 Main Street, Boonton.

The Clinton Book Shop, 12 E. Main Street, Clinton. http://www.clintonbookshop.com/

Sparta Books, 29 Theatre Center, Sparta. http://www.spartabooks.com/

For information on independent book sellers visit, http://www.indiebound.org/

The books are also available at the at the following libraries: Bernardsville Public Library; The Hunterdon County Public Library; Mount Olive Public Library;  Phillipsburg; Warren County, Franklin branch; Mount Arlington; Wharton; Dover; Hackettsown;  Clark;  Morris County Library;  Somerset County Public Library System, and the Ramsey library, as part of the Bergen County Cooperative Library System.

In the Frank Nagler mysteries, reporter Jimmy Dawson, through his online newspaper columns, acts as a Greek chorus, filling in the back story.

In this scene from the work-in-progress, THE WEIGHT OF LIVING, Dawson uses a visit to a former mill that is adjacent to Leonard’s bookstore as a way to question where Ironton, N.J. is headed.

It is also  a scene that also was fun to write because I could focus on how language sounds.

But a mystery is a zero-sum game. Where  there is an introduction, there must be a resolution.

This, at least, is the introduction:

Can you make music from an old building?

Are the hammer strokes just metal on metal or are they the chimes where history and the future meet in one square corner joint?

The shells of old buildings flank Leonard’s bookstore like ghosts with gray eyes, silent shades, voices stilled.

We ventured in, Dom, Del and me, emissaries from the present willing to greet the past.

What was said in that third floor meeting room when the plant’s production was planned; what whispered gossip slyly swirled among the office staff?

“Look at all this stuff,” exclaimed Dominique, the youthful crew chief. “They just left it here.”

His boss, Delvin Williams, just smiled. “Just didn’t need it. The mill closed down, the workers took their tools and what else the could carry, the secretaries took their belongings, and maybe the desk flowers and the boss just locked the doors.”

“And they left silence,” I said. “Silence nailed behind plywood frames.”

“Hey, Jimmy, what’s in these old cabinets?” Dom asked, pulling a handful of old paper files.

I looked over his shoulder. Ledgers, corporate histories on faded green lined paper, precise columns of numbers, unreadable notes in the margins; with enough of them we could see the creation, success and failure of this old plant, see its mathematical rise and fall; we could just not hear the joyful success or the harsh voices that debated its fate, see the anguish when that last decision was made, the order given. The voices live in the dust.

“This needs to be saved,” said Del Williams. “Have some guys box this stuff up. Maybe the historical society would want it.”

“Got it, man,” Dom replied. “This is the place, you know. I think my granddad worked here and a couple of uncles. This is the place….”

Then with his head bobbing, one foot tapping and his hands knocking out syncopation, Dom began:

“This is the place, the place of the mas-ter.

This is the place, the place that mat-tered.

Tired fingers moldin’, sweaty brows leanin’

Turnin’ rock into iron and iron into bread.

This is the place where we all gathered

This is the place where the tide is turnin’

The ghosts be talkin’ and we be listenin’

Raisin’ the dead, knowin’ the iron and the bread….”

The Dom stopped and shrugged.

“Work on it later.”

Del just smiled and grabbed the boy’s shoulder, “Cool, man.”

Dom just nodded. “We can make something of this old wreck.”

“I think you already have.”

Del, Dom and I turned to face the open door, where Leonard and Calista Knox stood grinning.

“I knew this old place had rhythm,” she said.

“It’s more than that,” Leonard said. “It’s a soul. I used to hear it. I’d lie awake at night. Imagine the pounding of metal presses, the grinding of sander and wheel, the shouts of workers. Feel the hiss as the iron was quenched, the clatter of the loading on trucks, the whine of the rail whistle as a load was hauled away.”

“Them old sounds ain’t goin’ way,” Del said. They livin’ in the walls, and I believe they just talked to our young man, here.”

“Know what I hear?” Calista asked. “I hear the voices of poets rising to replace the industrial crunch; to be or not to be, Lear’s anquish, Ahab’s wail and Pooh’s laughter. All those voices leaking out of the walls.”

After a moment, we all laughed and Leonard said, “Big dreams, here,” and nodding to Del and Dom, “and a lot of work to do.”

Del just smiled. “Yeah, Lenny.”

Later, sitting in my car as I watched the day’s work end, I realized I had answered my own question.

The music of the old mill didn’t end, just changed. The crash of a sledge on steel was replaced by the rat-a-tat of a nail gun fixing siding, the shouted queries and answers from workers on the open mill floor replaced by a hum of youthful voices singing snatches of song or trading rap lines – “Who say? They say. Who say? We say.”

This is a city that has lost its way.

Maybe that happened because we stopped listening to the jazz of a working life, stopped listening to the lessons pinned behind old boarded-up windows; the screech of that first nail being pulled out of a board could be the clarinet that opens Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue or the thunder of Beethoven’s Fifth, or the sound of our beginning.

Amazon: http://goo.gl/hVQIII Kobo: https://goo.gl/bgLH6v NOOK: http://goo.gl/WnQjtr

The Frank Nagler mysteries – “The Swamps of Jersey’’ and “A Game Called Dead” are available at the following New Jersey book stores:

Bobby’s News and Gifts, 618 Main Street, Boonton.

The Clinton Book Shop, 12 E. Main Street, Clinton. http://www.clintonbookshop.com/

Sparta Books, 29 Theatre Center, Sparta. http://www.spartabooks.com/

For information on independent book sellers visit, http://www.indiebound.org/

The books are also available at the at the following libraries: Bernardsville Public Library; The Hunterdon County Public Library; Mount Olive Public Library;  Phillipsburg; Warren County, Franklin branch; Mount Arlington; Wharton; Dover; Hackettstown;  Clark;  Morris County Library;  Somerset County Public Library System, and the Ramsey library, as part of the Bergen County Cooperative Library System.

I’ll be reading from the Frank Nagler Mysteries at a reading hosted by the New York branch of the Mystery Writers of America.

The event takes place at the KGB Bar, 85 East 4^th Street in the East Village, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Saturday, April 23.

I’ll be one of seven or eight MWA authors sharing their work.

“The Swamps of Jersey” and “A Game Called Dead” are available at:

Amazon: http://goo.gl/hVQIII Kobo: https://goo.gl/bgLH6v NOOK: http://goo.gl/WnQjtr

Bobby’s News and Gifts, 618 Main Street, Boonton.

The Clinton Book Shop, 12 E. Main Street, Clinton. http://www.clintonbookshop.com/

Sparta Books, 29 Theatre Center, Sparta. http://www.spartabooks.com/

For information on independent book sellers visit, http://www.indiebound.org/

The books are also available at the at the following libraries: Morris County Library; Somerset County Library System; Bernardsville Public Library; Hunterdon County Public Library; Mount Olive Public Library;  Phillipsburg; Warren County, Franklin branch; Mount Arlington; Wharton; Dover; Hackettstown;  Clark, and the Ramsey library, as part of the Bergen County Cooperative Library System.