Old School

Old School

Short fiction by Daniel B. O’Shea

“Old age is no place for sissies.” – Bette Davis

Old School by Daniel B O’Shea

Published by Snubnose Press at Amazon

The copyright belongs to the author unless otherwise noted. 2012. All rights reserved.

Amazon Edition

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

First Amazon Original Edition, 2012

Cover Design: John Hornor Jacobs

Amazon Edition, License Notes

All rights reserved. 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 book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

Table of Contents

Foreword by Chuck Wendig

Middle Age

The Summer of Fishing

Shackleton’s Hootch

Pink Cadillac

Thin Mints

Hilary’s Scars

The Bard’s Confession on the Matter of the Despoilment of the Fishmonger’s Daughter

Exit Interview

Two-Phones

The Golden Years

Absalom

Sheepshank

Purl Two

Circle of Life

The Afterlife

Vera Luce Alla Sua Fonta

The Blood of the Lamb

What Love Is

Author’s Note (including a special offer for free stuff!)

About the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword

So, there’s this photo.

No, no, not that photo. Sure, okay, that photo simultaneously proves the existence of Zombie Elvis, the Loch Ness Bigfoot and reveals me in all the glory of my “crotchless carnival barker” outfit – but we’re not here to talk about that photo. Just drop it already. Christ.

No, the photo about which we speak today is a photo of yours truly sitting at a table with the author of this estimable short story collection.

It is a photo of me—Chuck Wendig—and Dan O’Shea.

We were in San Francisco. Some hoity-toity restaurant on the bay. Both of us were there for – well, it was either Bouchercon or something about helping Stephen Blackmoore bury another hooker? Hard to say; the days and years and dead hookers blur together.

In this photo, O’Shea and I look… similar. We’re both leaning on our hands as if interested in what someone else was saying (or as if having digestive issues). We both appear deep in thought. Glasses perched on nose. Same-shaped heads. Dan’s admittedly in an, erm, greater evolution of hair loss than I, but I assure you that my follicles are eager to catch up.

One looking at this picture might assume it to be a picture of father and son. I wondered that myself, and yet, the paternity test that I performed upon stealing a pint of O’Shea’s blood after he passed out in the hotel bar (in a pile of his own sick, no less) revealed the truth:

He is not my father.

However, I am left to believe that we are in some ways much closer than that—genetically, spiritually, psychologically—and I have begun referring to Mister O’Shea as my “alpha clone.” As in, the original blueprint, the first design, the initiator of the bloodline.

All this brings us around to this collection you have in your hands – or, given that this is the bonafide motherfucking future, on the shiny techno-device which is itself in your hands.

See, Dan’s the alpha clone. Which makes me the beta clone.

You ever take a document and run it through the copier or FAX machine a bunch of times? Even after the first printing, the integrity of the thing starts to break down. Some clarity is lost. Letters bleed. Chaos and entropy creep.

I read a collection like this one, it proves that theory applies to clones, too, because good goddamn this is a fine collection of tales. I’d give parts of my anatomy (nothing too critical, mind you – some toes, a kidney, an eye) to write this fucking good.

Hell, if as this man’s beta clone I only write half as good as O’Shea, I’d say I’m doing pretty fine, indeed. So go forth. Read this collection. Marvel at a man from the old school writing at the top of his game. And then hope that just a little bit of that clarity and potency trickles down to the beta clone. Because a man cannot subsist along on images of himself in the clothes of a crotchless carnival barker.

Chuck Wendig

Chuck Wendig is the author of DOUBLE DEAD, BLACKBIRDS and MOCKINGBIRD, and also writes books about writing, including 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER. You can find his dubious wisdom about the writing life at his blog,
terribleminds.com
.

Middle Age

Too old to die young, but too young to die now. Unless that’s how it works out.

The Summer of Fishing

It’s July in the Summer of Fishing, or that’s how you remember it. The summer you bought that Diawa spinning reel over at Zayre, the summer you got over being afraid of the old black guys that would sit along the bank of Blackberry Creek by the rusted railroad trestle toward the west end of the bike trail, drinking whatever it was they drank out of the bottle wrapped in the paper bag, the way they’d talk to each other, trading insults that would have been fighting words in your world, but they’d just laugh about them, at least the insults you understood. The guys that shook their heads at the rubber worms you’d tried to use. The guys that showed you how to catch carp and catfish with wadded up balls of Wonder Bread dipped in some foul smelling crap that they kept in a rusty Folger’s can.

It’s a month or so before you bought the fly fishing rod, before you and Brian tried practice casting with it in the gloaming after dinner and found out you could fly fish for bats. Almost a decade before Brian was the best man at your wedding. Of course, Brian’s dead now, and even that’s five years back.

The summer you found that lake.

You called it a lake, and I guess it was near enough to one in your experience, this part of Illinois not being much stocked with them. Fifteen acres maybe, all in. A pond really, and not a naturally occurring one. You know that now. An irregular pit bulldozed into some old wetlands, developers trying to contain the runoff, keep the water out of the subdivision up the small slope on the east end, back when Orchard Road wasn’t Orchard Road yet, just a nameless gravel track. Now, it’s four lanes. Now, the golf course would be across the street. Now, you’d be able to see Home Depot from here. Now, you’re 52. Then, you were 13.

Your mom made you bring your brother with you, Patrick. He would have been what? Four? Maybe five? Ruined the spirit of the thing. Because that summer, in spirit you were one man alone on the edge of wilderness, pitted against nature, trying to coax beasts from the deep. But if your mom sent Patrick along, then this wasn’t any wilderness. If they let you bring Patrick, you were still just a kid fishing in some neighborhood pond. She dropped you off on the paved road at the edge of the subdivision, east of the pond.

You tried not to look east, because west it was still woods, still marsh, still wilderness. Wilderness to you, though it was really just saplings and scrub reclaiming an abandoned farm field, a field some developer had already bought, one they just hadn’t torn up yet. Wilderness if you ignored the hum of tires to your left, probably a couple hundred cars an hour driving up and down Galena.

But these tires weren’t on Galena. These tires were crunching along the gravel across the pond. An Impala, an old one, mid-sixties, the red paint faded to the color of diluted blood, the wheel wells and quarter panels lipsticked with rust. The car stopped where the pond pinched in, where it narrowed to a wasp’s waist of mud and shallow water, maybe ten yards across, where you could wade from one side to the other without getting your ankles wet. Two guys in front, you could see that. They just sat there a minute, didn’t seem to be looking at you, just sat there.

You knew you should leave. You knew you should take Patrick, walk up that embankment to the paved roads and the houses. You knew it and you cast your line back out into the pond anyway.

The passenger door opened and a guy got out. Twenty maybe, twenty five. Blue jeans, a ratty white t-shirt, stringy blond hair to his shoulders. Hippie hair, your dad would say, but when you thought of hippies, you thought of peace signs and dopey smiles. You thought of that San Francisco song, that “meet some gentle people there” song. They weren’t singing about this guy, arms cabled with muscle, the skin on his face looking like he scalped it off some older version of himself, a Winston bobbing in his lips. He was carrying a crutch, but he wasn’t using it. He smiled at you.

“You boys catching anything?”

You shook your head. “Not today.”

He nodded. “Too hot probably.”

“Probably.”

Then he’s sloshing across that narrow gap. Then he’s standing next to you. Patrick’s on the other side of him. The guy just stands there.

“What you using for bait?”

You reel in, hold up the tip of the rod, show him the little plastic minnow with the small treble hook behind the flashing Mepps spinner.

He snorts. “Shit kid, I doubt there’s anything in this ditch big enough to get its lips around that.” And you know he’s not going to help, not going to tell you about bread balls and stink bait. You know something bad is going to happen, but you keep trying to act like it isn’t. You cast out into the pond again.

He finishes the cigarette, flicks the butt out into the water. It hisses, a sunfish rises and pecks at it, spinning it a little.

“You got any money?” he says.

And you don’t. Not a cent.

“No.”

He touches your ass, running his hand across the back of your pants. Your insides freeze. But he’s just feeling your pockets for a wallet.

“Left you wallet home, huh?”

You just nod, knowing if you speak right now, your voice is going to crack. You don’t want your voice to crack.

The guy bends down, opens your tackle box, dumps it out in the dirt, paws through it, takes a quarter he finds glinting in a gray pile of spilled splitshot.

“Waste of fucking time,” he says and takes the first step back toward the car.

“I’ve got money,” Patrick says. Little kid’s voice, petulant, defiant. “But you can’t have it.” Turns out Patrick has a nickel in his pocket.

The guy stops, steps toward your brother, and all the embarrassment and rage and confusion short circuits you a minute and you whip the rod around, smacking it against the guy, the hook catching in his shirt, tearing it open as it rips away.

And the guy turns, the crutch he was carrying already in motion, him holding it down near the footpad, swinging it like an ax.

You shuffle just enough that it only glances of your head, slamming down onto your shoulder, the screw and the wing nut out sticking out in the middle where the handhold is bolted in bite into your flesh, gouge out a wound, and you backpedal into the water, trying to get some distance as the guy swings the crutch again, like a bat this time, in from the side.

You bunch your shoulder up, taking the first part of the blow on the meat, but the crutch skips up, hits you over the ear, and there’s that moment where time stops, where the force and the feel and the sound of the blow translate into this flash of light inside your head, where any outside sight or sound is cancelled out so that when your sight comes back, it’s skipped a frame, like a projector where the sprocket slipped, and you see that he’s already in mid-swing again, a three-quarter angle this time, from the top and side, and you turn your back, bending, and he blow lands across your scapula, that wing nut biting in again, and you hear a crack and you think for a moment that your bone is broken, but then you hear a splash and most of the crutch is bobbing in the middle of the pond in a riot of fresh ripples, and you turn and the guy is holding maybe six inches of busted wood now, and you’re screaming at Patrick to get into the water, to get behind you and Patrick is saying he’ll get his shoes wet and you scream “Get in the water, goddamn it,” you’re thinking maybe the guy won’t want to come in after you, won’t want to get wet, and even that idea feels stupid, but that light is still strobing inside your head and it’s the best you’ve got, and your brother gets it finally, the threat, the danger, gets it at the same time the guy does, the guy reaching for Patrick, Patrick running around him, and he splashes into the water, crying now, and you put your left arm back, holding him behind you, and you remember the filleting knife on your hip, hanging from your belt in its leather sheath, and you remember how sharp that is and you pull that, backing into the pond, the water over your knees now, almost to Patrick’s shoulders, so you stop, holding the knife out in front of you, not sure how far this is going, but knowing that, if the guy comes in after you, you have to start slashing.