You Can't Use Your Cell Phone in Here - A Book of Short Stories

You Can’t Use Your Cell Phone in Here

Kevin Beck and Lize Brittin

Edited by Kevin Beck

Copyright 2013 Kevin Beck and Lize Brittin

Published on Smashwords

Cover image: Lize Brittin and Scott Converse

Formatted by Lize Brittin

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All Rights Reserved.

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First Edition License Notes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Swing Time * Kevin Beck

The Constant Observer * Lize Brittin

Seven Items or Less * Kevin Beck

The Number 17 * Kevin Beck

A Dreamer’s Escape * Lize Brittin

Obits * Kevin Beck

The Perfect Cookie * Lize Brittin

Jimmy’s Ride * Kevin Beck

Missing the Big Lebowski * Lize Brittin

The Paper Route * Kevin Beck

Danforth Street * Kevin Beck

The Basement * Lize Brittin

Inspiration

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Swing Time * Kevin Beck

As the Kiddamoosuc River’s mellow, southward current first bisects Hadley, the lands on either side of it represent opposing chapters of a geography textbook. On the west, a floodplain fans out, a four-hundred-acre expanse nestled in a crook of the serpentine Kiddamoosuc. Some ninth-generation farmer owns the land; occasionally his labors transform the plain into a cornfield, and his cows often venture here to feed and while away their vacuous, desultory days. On the east, however, the land rises sharply: A sandy bluff hugs the river for a stretch of nearly two miles. At the top of this roughly forty-five degree pitch, nearly two hundred feet above the waterline (and for the time being, safely out of range of the bluff’s implacable erosion) the terrain levels off again. Here, a number of pricey homes sprouted up over the years, eventually coalescing into a loose neighborhood – Hadley Heights.

The best vantage point for viewing this fascinating study in topological contrast – a half-valley – is the Route 4 Bridge, which includes a bicycle path along its northern edge, separated from the flow of traffic by a chain-link fence. There, pleasantly stoned on a lazy July morning, two of Hadley’s foremost non-achievers stood slouching over the rusty guardrail like a mismatched pair of gargoyles.

Whaddya think? Greg Drumb punctuated his inquiry with a grainy-eyed belch and the flinging of an empty Budweiser can over the guardrail. Hadley’s northernmost passage over the Kiddamoosuc was sparsely traveled on weekday midmornings and offered excellent access to sunshine, making it an ideal spot for slacking.

Nothing, Bill Conroy said, not necessarily in reply, is expected of cows. He gestured at the faraway bovines, which had strayed unusually close to water’s edge. They seem satisfied to you?

They’re friggin’ cows, man. They ain’t smart enough to get upset. Greg was studying the nautical path of his jettisoned beer can, the fourth such vessel he’d emptied in the last half-hour. It floated in a series of subtly shifting eddies about the bridge’s central stanchions. All them whirlpools spin in the same direction, Greg observed. He tossed a thirty-day Alcoholics Anonymous sobriety chip over the side, aiming for one of the cans. The damned thing had been burning a hole in his pocket for days; what it represented had been squandered some time ago.

Coriolis force, Bill said absently, running a hand over his neatly shaved head (such had been his style long before it stumbled into the mainstream). He had shifted his gaze from the cows to the river’s eastern bank. Though the bluff could be navigated on foot from top to bottom and vice-versa by an ambitious and nimble traveler, it was more cliff than slope, and as it consisted entirely of sand (with the sun approaching its zenith, Bill could almost feel the soles-of-the-feet-baking heat of that sand from here, on the bridge), almost nothing grew there.

The laughable exception was a gigantic lone oak, a sort of unspoken local icon, that shot up from the base of the bluff – birthed somehow in soil that could scarcely support crabgrass, much less a woody obelisk seventy meters in height. It was if that one tree had usurped all available resources for botanical life on the riverbank for a half-mile in each direction and, in a slow but spectacular act of defiance, become something that all but a handful of more privileged local specimens could not.

Greg repeated his friend’s words in a doubtful monotone: Coriolis force. Bill knew that Greg’s parroting was a sign he had no idea what the hell Bill was talking about and wanted an explanation, but only if its complexity did not exceed that of, say, the puzzles on the back of a cereal box.

In the Southern hemisphere, those currents would flow in the opposite direction, Bill explained. The rotation of the – Bill could sense that Greg’s muddy intellect had given up with an almost audible plop, so Bill quit with it. He regarded the tree disinterestedly, but his subconscious was dealing with the image of it on all cylinders; and neither of these young men – their brains and bodies abuzz with the rising heat of the day and their potables – could know that the genesis of an event like none McDougal County had seen was unfurling in Bill’s inestimable mind at that exact moment.

William Francis Conroy had an intelligence quotient that faithfully tested in excess of one hundred and forty every two years during his childhood. Now 22, he would be the first to claim that a high I.Q. alone was no guarantee of manifest intelligence. It was an observation divorced from his own qualification – Bill was not much for value judgments – but it was something Bill had, over the course of years, effectively set out to prove.

Bill had graduated from high school twelfth in a class of nearly three hundred in spite of a work ethic that made one frustrated guidance counselor comment: "For God’s sake, Bill, I have weeds in my yard more motivated than you. His parents, both professionals, were dismayed by his decision to forego college only when it became apparent that Bill had no desire to fill this supposed void in a productive manner. He worked part-time as a hotel desk clerk because it required a minimal expenditure of energy and he was free to read – his only steady habit other than riding his bike, which he scarcely regarded as exercise even though he covered more territory than many self-declared cyclists." He was fired after the manager arrived one morning to find, for the sixth or seventh time, Bill sleeping on the floor behind the desk. The few guests gathered in the lobby were treated to the uniquely amusing sight of Bill ambling slowly toward the door, his nose buried in a copy of Silas Marner even as the manager was chewing him out, so engrossed in his reading  (within a minute of being rousted, at that) that he held an index finger in the air toward his barking ex-supervisor as he shuffled out into the parking lot: a silent and universal Be with you – and your fury – in a minute.

Since then he had worked at a number of other establishments that demanded equally little of him, each time failing to meet their low expectations in some manner and being dismissed as a result. He still lived with his parents, soft-spoken people who continued to tolerate his shiftless presence for a number of vague reasons: He wasn’t a bad boy; he was their only boy; he was never going to change; and he had the answer to just about everything.

But no one – including Bill himself – could quite figure out why a mind so incredibly active and deft could not infuse the body supposedly under its control with even a hint of honest ambition. Those who had once clucked and agonized over this contradiction had, to a one, come to terms with it in various ways; Bill, of course, had never been troubled by it at all.

Tree’s only got one branch to speak of, Bill remarked, dumping about half a beer down his throat to commemorate the observation. He drank almost as much as Greg did during these liquid picnics, but never appeared as drunk as he actually was.

But it’s a big mother, Greg noted. He, on the other hand, would be visibly plastered by mid-afternoon, when they would mount their bicycles and wobble back into town and, in Bill’s words, wait for the world to catch up. Greg – evidently consigned by his neural circuitry to a life of head-scratching and lagging a step or two behind the world’s achievers  – didn’t get that one, either. In the back of his mind, he was still thinking that Coriolis Force sounded like a Chuck Norris-type film with some Greek guy in a tunic playing the lead role.

If that tree is two hundred and fifty feet tall, said Bill (in fact, it was more like two-thirty), that branch is probably a hundred and eighty feet high, and…oh, fifty feet long. More or less parallel to the ground.

And thick as most regular trees, at least half of it, anyway, said Greg. A station wagon occupied by two teenage girls zoomed by. The girl on the passenger side smiled broadly behind large sunglasses and beneath a Duke Blue Devils baseball cap that did not completely contain her auburn hair, which flapped about in the breeze. Nice tits, remarked Greg, though he hadn’t seen them. He was inspired to remove his shirt (Bill had already done so), and hoped the sun would bake the zits off his back. Then he looked at the tree again, squinting. How the hell can you tell how long that branch is from here? Greg demanded. Thing points almost right towards us.

Which was true. The branch was not only parallel to the tree, but to the shore as well. Orthogonality, a cognitive burp suggested to Bill. He must have read the term somewhere.

I can’t, Bill admitted. I remember seeing it from up on the Heights, though. He didn’t know when he’d made this observation; only knew that he had, and that if their current discussion had not come to pass he would likely never have remembered this at all. Memory itself was an elusive thing.

What difference does it make? Greg asked, fishing around in his backpack for another beer. Soon, it would be time for a dip of Skoal, but a man needed to wet his whistle first. Greg farted in perfect synch with his popping the tab on the beer can, and chuckled. He wished, not for the first time, that some women would come wandering along the path and enjoy the day with them, but none ever did.

Bill asked, Remember when we used to go to the Coves a lot? Greg beamed. The Coves: long days and longer nights, aimless revelry and high bull sessions with the boys, booze and dope and running (and often swimming) from the cops – days, in other words, of good clean fun. High school days, mostly. Greg often longed for this bygone era, when he hadn’t yet been saddled with the responsibility of occasional employment. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? He shook his head wonderingly, his sunglasses concealing a stare that carried well beyond the cows and into the nowhere of nostalgia. He had dangled his legs over the side of the bridge and now swung them gently. For some, fond memory was Winning the Big Game, or a honeymoon, or the tearing open of an acceptance letter to some fabled institution. For Greg, it was his fifteenth birthday: the day they finally hauled his dad off to jail so that he couldn’t beat the shit out of Greg’s mother anymore. He never came back.

Bill asked another question: What do you remember the most about the Coves? Greg saw that his friend, who had produced a hackey-sack – one he’d stitched his initials on in gold thread – and was bouncing it from knee to thigh to foot and around again with surprising agility, had The Glow. Bill may not have been responsible for a great many deeds in his lifetime, good or otherwise. But his attention was not immune to capture by some fanciful concept or another from time to time, and when it happened – never predictably – his mind lit up like a Christmas tree with possibilities. In such times, his grey eyes became brightened portals, betraying his passion in the stagnant milieu of his external apathy. Greg saw this now.

Greg said (counting on his fingers), The time I fell out of Thackeray’s pickup. The time that cop tripped over a root when he was chasing Donny, who rode his bike into a tree after. The time Jill O’Brien puked on the campfire and you could see flames from the vodka she –

No, Bill said. I mean in general. Describe the place. Aglow. Putting him through the paces. Greg belched in exasperation and reached for another beer. Number seven. It always saddened him a little when there was less left to drink than he’d already had, no matter how much that was. Bill was still flipping the little bag of beans around. He always brought the damn thing and Greg kept waiting for it to disappear between the bars of the guardrail, but it never did. He sincerely hoped it would happen one day. In fact, he’d come close to tossing it over the edge of the bridge himself. Not because he was spiteful or resentful; he had an ulterior motive. It was because he could find the hackey-sack and return it to Bill, even if it sank into the lukewarm depths of the Kiddamoosuc. He wanted the opportunity to try.

Greg had watched a fair amount of television as a young kid, before the domestic tumult began in earnest, before the beatings, when it was usually quiet enough to hear what the faraway people on the little black-and-white teevee were saying. One of his favorite programs was the one with Jacques Cousteau, who never seemed to run out of outrageously cool stuff to do on the sea; under the sea. There was that: First Mr. Cousteau and his pals took a boat ride way out into the ocean, a long way from shore and presumably from loud people, and then, as if that weren’t enough, he went under the water, another wild trip in itself. What must it have been like under there? Was it frightening? Safe? A bit of both?

Greg Drumb wasn’t much of a dreamer, but he often lay in bed wondering what it was like to be a part of a world that seemed like it might have been part of another planet; and how they got cameras to work underwater Greg had no idea. But he was grateful for the teevee pictures.

There were bad times and there were worse times in Greg’s childhood and adolescence, but there were flashes of light and warmth, too, and as he grew into his late teens, with his father out of the picture and his mother (now unencumbered by bruises and chronic illness) holding consistent employment as a travel agent, items such as dry suits, fins, snorkels, hoods, and tanks found their way, with the help of various grandparents and aunts and uncles, into Greg’s eager hands. And slowly, slowly – between bouts of drunken foolishness and general malaise – he’d learned to use them. He could not afford a lesson, but he could learn.

Now his mouth undertook the task of describing the Coves – a section along the Kiddamoosuc a few miles to the north, so named for two conjoined, sharp bends in the river that rendered it especially wide there – before his brain had quite snapped to. Big patch of sand along the riverbank, mostly, Greg said. Lots of burned-out campfires. Beer cans. Always footprints everywhere, winter or summer. Two good little swimming nooks, one where the rope swing used to be. Couple of real rough access roads in and out – best to have four-wheel drive; remember when we took Dickie’s mother’s friggin’ Dart out there and got it –

The rope swing is gone? Bill asked with surprise. He dropped the hackey-sack in his own knapsack, exchanging it for a beer. An eighteen-wheeler rumbled by, pelting both of them with traces of road-dust and the grey, gassy breath of diesel exhaust. When did that happen?

Greg thought. Been cut down since least last October, he decided. I guess somebody needed the rope. Didn’t think much of it then, since it was too cold to go in anyway. He swigged the last of his beer and reached inside his pack for a canister of Skoal. I think that was the last time I went out, actually.

How long do you suppose that rope was? Bill asked. The Glow was still there. Greg could sense he was no longer being quizzed; Bill was making an honest inquiry. Why he wanted to know, Greg had no earthly idea. He never chased Bill’s train of thought anyway; he couldn’t keep pace, and it would eventually pull into the station on its own.

10 feet, I guess. No. More than that. 12, 15 feet. 15 tops. Greg recalled the rope swing: standing on the edge of a twenty-foot embankment; taking the rope from the last guy to go in and grabbing one of the two or three knots tied into the thick rope’s length for precisely this purpose; letting loose a whoop or a yee-hah! and flinging yourself down the embankment with a few running steps (and occasionally, after too much beer or too lax a hold on your knot of choice, losing your grip and crashing straight into foot-deep water and mud, much to the merriment of everyone present); drawing your feet up and waiting for the magical moment when you’d gone as far and high as various physical principles allowed and everything simply stopped; and letting go, dropping straight into the water with something like an anticlimax. The more drunk and daring attempted midair somersaults, sometimes successfully.

There was nothing spectacular about the rope swing; it was one of a million just like it rigged at swimming holes across the country, and it was rarely the focus of attention of whatever group was gathered at the Coves. It was simply a diversion and occasional photo op.

Bill pointed at the huge oak a quarter mile from their perch, but looked at Greg, his normally soft eyes shining with merriment. Can you imagine a rope swing on that big bitch-kitty? he asked.

Greg snorted with laughter, almost spitting out the wad of Skoal he was busily stuffing into his lower lip. Sure he could imagine it. He’d seen his share of Sylvester Stallone movies; surely a guy who could run screaming through the jungle for days on end with a live cannon exploding under each arm would have no problem with an eighteen-story drop into the Kiddamoosuc River. Hell, he’d probably find a way to get laid on the upswing.

It would be a hell of a thing, getting a rope up there, Bill mused, staring upriver. Greg looked at over at him, grinning and readying a wise-ass remark. But then he saw it, something a coal of understanding deep in his foggy mind told him he would see: The Glow was still there.

Bill was serious.

Three-thirty and the beer was long gone, but the sun was still high over the Western horizon. They were back at Bill’s house now, half-crashed in lawn chairs set up on the screen porch. Greg blearily mused that by sundown he would be working on a buzz entirely distinct from this one; getting drunk twice in the same day was hardly frontier territory. Meanwhile, Bill was verbally constructing the World’s Biggest Rope Swing again, including details so incredibly esoteric that not only did he obviously consider the idea feasible, but had seemingly been thinking about it for a long time. Bill’s cat, an affectionate American Shorthair named Hugh Hefner, prowled to and fro on the porch, watching the chickadees flitting about outside with more than passing interest.

I’m telling you, Malmo climbs trees bigger than that, Bill insisted. A mutual friend, Harry Malley, had attended conservation college in Maine and now worked for the Fish and Game Department. And it was true –  Malmo did climb trees, or at least had; Greg recalled chuckling over Malmo’s description of taking part in some sort of interscholastic lumberjack competition that Greg could only envision as the Redneck Olympics: Not only tree climbing but two-man handsaw, chainsaw, and chopping competitions – wherever ascending trees was not the aim, destroying them in any number of ways was. The faster the better. There was even a tobacco-juice-spitting contest. Greg might have held his own there, though snuff, not chaw, was really his purview.

There are no frigging branches, Greg intoned for the fourth time. He was ready for a nap, though he didn’t want to pass out here, where Bill’s parents would find him upon returning home from work. Not that it would surprise them to see his booze-riddled carcass sprawling about. He wondered if he would call in sick to his part-time job at Hadley’s only Texaco station the next morning. Probably; his mind was already rationalizing that outcome, a reliable sign Greg would not show up when and where he was supposed to.

You only need the one, Bill replied. Also for the fourth time. He had risen from his seat and was pacing back and forth on the small porch; a bit unsteadily, but none of the vitality he’d effused since formulating his dumb-ass rope-swing idea had faded. "One branch, one rope. One huge rope swing." He prated on around a wad of Skoal roughly the size of a golf ball. He rarely indulged in the stuff, but when he did, he made no pretense about it.

At the moment the tobacco-wad seemed to be doing his thinking for him, Greg thought. Greg was at something of a loss; he had never known his friend to come up with an idea that ultimately proved to be stupid, but in the past even his most far-fetched notions had made a modest amount of sense from the outset. This one did not.

Greg said: Suppose you get it rigged up. Don’t you see you gotta problem still. How you gonna swing on a rope that fuckin’ high over the water. He was drunk enough now so that all the interrogatory inflection had gone out of his questions. He remotely felt as if he should eat something before he fell unconscious.

Bill smiled wickedly. That’ll be taken care of, he said. He leaned over and spat the giant wad of Skoal into the soil surrounding one of his mother’s large, potted lemon trees. I’m gonna go in and give Malmo a shout, he announced, and disappeared into the house.

Greg pondered the whole idea again, but he was tired. Tired and hungry. Without opening his eyes, he reached to one side, aiming for a bag of chips he was fairly certain lay nearby. Instead, his fingers found Hef’s dish of mushy cat chow. Serenely, Greg scooped up a large handful and shoved it