Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Man in the Rafters
    The Man in the Rafters
    The Man in the Rafters
    Ebook54 pages51 minutes

    The Man in the Rafters

    By Jerry Kalman

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    After the attacks of 9-11 take his wife and career, John takes to the road, surviving as a homeless man in New England. On his second fall season in the region, he meets Bernice Topham, who has a problem with an organized crime syndicate that wants to force her out of business: selling Canadian meds to seniors.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJerry Kalman
    Release dateApr 28, 2010
    ISBN9781452348643
    The Man in the Rafters
    Author

    Jerry Kalman

    Hot steamy stuff is the forte of JL Kaye, author of “Cascade Nights”, "Friendly Fire" and the short story "Nanoelf of the Roses". Kaye also has published another erotic novel “Haunting Experiences” and Free Radicals is nearly ready for publishing as an eBook in 2011. Other than the fractured fairy tale about the nanoelf, Kaye’s erotica centers on the sometimes private lifestyles of professionals who want more from romances than kiss-and-not-tell. In 2011, JL Kaye expects a fourth work consisting of a broad collection of sci-fi, western and romantic short stories to be published as an eBook.J. L. Kaye lives north of San Diego.

    Read more from Jerry Kalman

    Related to The Man in the Rafters

    Related ebooks

    Thrillers For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Borderline

      Feb 20, 2019

      Borderline
      19 min read

    • Article

      Faces Across America

      Mar 1, 2021

      Faces Across America
      6 min read

    • Article

      Karolina

      Jun 15, 2019

      I first saw Karolina outside the Sumesa on the corner of Avenidas Oaxaca and Álvaro Obregón. She was smoking a stubby cigarette, a sled-like backpack hitched to her shoulders. I stopped short, felt my heart lurch. Could it be? Karolina was my brother

      31 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Michael Bourne

      Dec 16, 2017

      When I was growing up in suburban California, whenever my high school baseball team had an away game in farm country north of San Francisco, as soon as we passed the first cow pasture some wiseass in the back of the bus would break out an imaginary b

      3 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Sep 1, 2017

      Table Talk
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Smoke of the Land Went Up

      Mar 4, 2024

      The Smoke of the Land Went Up
      11 min read

    • Article

      Love Comes In The Morning

      May 13, 2019

      Love Comes In The Morning
      6 min read

    • Article

      On Refuge

      Jan 11, 2018

      When I was 18, I left home and moved to the big city. There’s nothing unusual in that. For me, though, there was no going back. That same year my father changed jobs. The whole family moved. It was four decades before I would see my childhood home ag

      6 min read

    • Article

      Bystander Training

      Nov 15, 2018

      Whenever I return from visiting my family in Germany, colleagues and friends ask if things have changed. After a quarter of a century of traveling back and forth, I no longer flinch at the question. I’ve learned that my well-read friends are not caug

      2 min read

    • Article

      Sleep Nights

      Oct 5, 2021

      Sleep Nights
      18 min read

    • Article

      Aughts

      Sep 11, 2017

      Aughts
      23 min read

    • Article

      79 The Terrible Grinning Men

      Sep 10, 2020

      79 The Terrible Grinning Men
      8 min read

    • Article

      Trains

      Jan 3, 2020

      Trains
      4 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      Today in the taxi I picked up a guy on Madison Avenue near 45th Street around noon. He was going to JFK. He was on the phone talking about his safari to Kenya, his deals selling a gold and silver mine, etc. The Pope was visiting during the UN General

      2 min read

    • Article

      Our Last Days in Country

      Nov 29, 2018

      Our Last Days in Country
      15 min read

    • Article

      Ride Of Passage

      May 17, 2021

      Ride Of Passage
      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      Ride Of Passage

      May 17, 2021

      Ride Of Passage
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Man in the Rafters

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Man in the Rafters - Jerry Kalman

      The Man in the Rafters

      By

      Jerry L. Kalman

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2010 Jerry L. Kalman

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this eBook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      John lived by the dictum: Avoid others else unless I’m ready to be trapped into sharing details about me so, when cornered, John said he liked living large, roaming, rootless, no longer tethered by time, place or attachment to others. To demonstrate the extent of his possessions, he pulled a small, well-used Swiss Army knife from the pocket of his battered Burberry raincoat and, for added emphasis, turned the empty pockets of his denims inside out. Then he walked away.

      Mostly, however, the skinny man of average height with a faded gray wool shirt and a baseball cap with ear flaps avoided contact.

      Before dawn on a dreary October day, his second fall season on the road, John completed a night of foraging around the outskirts of a remote New England town. Seeing no one, he moved silently along the fringe of the dirt road, in and out of red and yellow fall foliage, before reaching the old covered bridge that spanned the creek. He listened to rushing water that tumbled over exposed rocks and studied the gray wooden siding of the bridge and waited to be sure he remained unseen before scaling a gracefully curved truss into the rafters. As long as John focused on the chore of the moment, he muted the voices of his past. Avoiding detection, now a survival skill honed to razor-sharpness, served him well.

      John scurried to a hidden compartment he constructed many weeks earlier along the backside of a wooden apron that descended down from the hip of the roof. Convinced his stash remained secure, he took a deep breath and from the raincoat pulled two plastic shopping bags filled with food and distributed the larder by category, canned goods to the left and packaged foods to the right.

      Three days worth, he whispered as he wedged into the crotch of a network of timbers that crossed back and forth above the roadway that linked the rural side of the creek to the road into town. In time for bad weather. John studied his cache, then slipped a weathered four-by-eight section of plywood in place to hide his provisions. Moving among the trusses and beams to the other end of the covered bridge, he crawled behind another false front into a make-shift nest, pulled open a weathered old sleeping bag and dozed off before the voices he of mid-morning amped up.

      As the first dream intruded, a woman’s voice, inaudible, somewhat muffled by sounds from the creek rushing below the bridge, relieved him of the panic he felt when awakened from that bad dream. Peering through cracks in the siding he saw the sun burn holes in the clouds, sending yellow rays down into the valley and thought: It’s her; it must be Tuesday, the widow’s day to come and pray and mourn. She comes every Tuesday, rain or shine. A tear coursed down John’s cheek into the stubble of his beard.

      The pattern of her visits to the covered bridge never varied since July. As always, she remained an hour and stared out a window in the covered bridge to where she first cast the ashes down to the creek. At 9:45 she once again whispered goodbye and walked off toward town where, he suspected, the widow ran one of the art galleries that filled Main St.

      The only other regular, an old man dressed in bib overalls, walked two mutts that often looked up into the superstructure of the bridge. The old man came through at noon, every day, even when it rained or snowed. A slave to his

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1