Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker) is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
Copyright©️2020 J. Davis Henry
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN -13: 9798630329486 (paperback)
Imprint: Independently published
Cover Art by J. Davis Henry
This book is dedicated to my best friend and loving wife, Carol.
I ask myself what I would ever do without her support and encouragement.
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
~ Alexander Pope
Chapter 1
New York City, September 1967
Ever since stepping back into civilization, I had spent almost all of my time in custody, either in a piss-stinking cell or a sterile CIA interrogation room. Not only did my eyes feel the sting of tears, but my throat choked on them as my heart curled in on itself when I stepped into the small, gray-painted room with no windows. The bed, sink, and toilet had matching rust stains.
I had been placed in a holding cell of a Federal detention facility.
When I had been fleeing from Agent Orville and the NYPD—running through dank alleys, risking a jump or a dodge past a car, clambering up the stack of crates, hiding in the wild stratosphere with Rolly’s guitar welcoming me—those were the only moments I had felt alive since leaving the beautiful valleys of the Andes.
I found myself wishing I was in a pitch dark jungle, fearing everything but the stars. There was more freedom eluding a stalking jaguar than answering accusatory questions. Struggling through a muddy swamp, feeling the shock of bullets stitching a path towards me—I had maintained more hope for life then, than I did now, with authorities pointing their fingers at me, holding me responsible for their political assumptions. I had escaped poisonous fangs by listening to a crazed hallucination instructing me to jump, but in my newest cell all I heard were voices trapped inside me, mangled and confused, stirring ugly sounds within my soul.
I closed my eyes and relived the murder of Johnny. The walls surrounding me smelled of blood and cordite. Larvae squeezed under the door. The buzzing of flies filled the hallways. Water pipes banged with gunfire. Johnny always ended up with a blood-soaked grin. In the jungle, I hadn’t had time to grieve for him. In constant fear, my survival had been paramount. Later, in the Valley of the Monsters, I couldn’t permit myself to dwell on Johnny’s fate. I needed to breath with ease, needed to allow myself fantastic wonders. Spaced on mushrooms, witnessing magic, listening to a god play the flute, talking to a cigar-smoking monkey, or watching travelers visiting earth had obliterated the terrors of the jungle and murder. The respite had either been brought on by my own need to forget or maybe it had been a temporary blessing from the universe. But now, held captive in a claustrophobic, ugly space, not much larger than the Land Rover, I watched Johnny’s head get blown apart again and again.
And each time, I died with him. If being constantly locked up was life, I didn’t want it.
Johnny’s dead because I had to go poke Cecilia.
A frantic despair wrapped around me as I recalled that in order to survive in the jungle, I had pushed myself to return to Teresa to apologize, to hold her, and to promise her that I could never hurt her again. I promised it over and over. But, what if my experience with mystical beings and danger caused me to continue running, ducking, and looking for a place to hide? What if the jungle had ensconced itself as my normal reference, and she spotted me—just my wary eyes showing—searching for an opportunity, a weapon, or an escape? What if she just couldn’t stand the man that smashed her father with a beer bottle? Now that I had survived, the thought of her wanting to be by my side seemed an assuagement of my guilt or a reward for finding her father.
Ever since I left her, I had been imprisoned by a hope of redemption.
These cell walls, did I build them?
My cell grew tinier. Whispering voices and screams struggling to be heard vied to replace my thought process. I heard a baby cry. Dreams, mountains, jaguars, and wild magic faded to the infant’s wailing. Suddenly, something broke everywhere as if some god decided to buzz my skull with a lightning bolt, disconnect every nerve in my body, pluck my eyes out, toss my soul in a bag and discard it. Sam and her baby took over my mind. A newborn, lost to the intimate warmth of the womb, berated me. My brief lover’s enraged words scalded the air around me.
My guilt of abandoning them became a hellish fever.
How do I keep running? The money was to be Sam’s. That was my solution, not the child’s request. It’s all I could do.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to act. My vision suddenly blurred, blocking out the room around me. The bag my soul had been stuffed into split open, and every voice in the universe roared in horror at the sight of its contents. Searing desperation is the only emotion I can attach to what I did next. I stripped off my clothes and fell to my knees on the cell floor, then wrapped my shirt around my throat and yanked the sleeves in opposite directions, tightening the noose, trying to strangle myself.
I pulled harder. Something had grabbed me, was torturing me, wanted to swallow and choke on me, and finally spit me out into another world. It would be no better than this one, but it wouldn’t be this one. Existence in that moment was a screeching, tortured creature. My legs flailed, my mouth danced angrily in defiance of breath.
I twisted my grip on the shirt, trying to crush my windpipe. Wild, dark bat-like things flew around my head.
A guard threw open the door. Orville pushed past him.
“Jesus, Parker.” He ripped my hands from my shirt.
“Just give me a can of Three-Step Spam.” My body jittered with exhaustion.
“What?” Orville searched my eyes.
“Did you know there are places on earth where you take three steps and you’re dead.”
Orville untied the tangled cloth from around my neck. “Parker, are you all right?” He turned to the guard. “Get the doctor on duty.”
“Do you know what I never told you? There’s a bigger plot than communism, but you don’t know anything about it. Neanderthals are shipping cow shit around the universe. It contains the knowledge of the gods. Yeah.” Hunching forward, I stared at the floor. My voice felt hollow. “Operation Shit-Fungus is the revelation of the universe’s truths. It’s all about illumination as a deterrent to the gods’ interference. Could it be the end of the gods? What a party or war that’ll be. I wonder if the end of time, the non-existence of the gods, resembles a smoothed-out Zobe.” I looked up at Orville. “Y’know, a flute solo by Pan is a wonderful thing. It’ll be missed.”
The FBI man looked horrified. “Maybe you should get dressed.”
“Do you know how to play music on a rock?”
“Here’s your pants, Parker.”
“Cows could teach you. I think maybe anything can happen, like when I discovered dead guys seem like nice guys. Or, at least, they do the right thing. They take the bus and carry machine guns, but considering the situation, well, what else would you do?”
“The doctor will be here any minute.” Orville’s breath ricocheted off my face.
“Weird, I smell shoe polish. Man, talk about knowledge, you and that CIA guy asking me about five or six dead guys running around in the jungle, but you never asked me about cigar-smoking monkeys, psychic jaguars, and mountains that appear in a lost father’s dream. And you better
not be bugging the babies in California. You’re completely misinformed, and it seems to be your job to be so.”
“It’s okay, Parker. Everything will be okay.”
“Call the embassy and tell them it must have been a praying mantis stuck on Johnny’s duck tail. It had to be some kind of bug that would pray for him. It was... a terrible... pain.”
My voice was a monotone hum. My mind sank into the aura of entrapment contained in the blocks and squares of iron and brick stacked higher and higher around me, and I hoped they would all fall into a pile of rubble long before forty million years turned everything I knew into sand.
Before midnight of my first day back in New York I was shot up with a sedative, visited by my parents, a psychiatrist, a lawyer, and shipped over to Bellevue.
I stayed there, locked up in a prisoner’s cell under suicide watch, for three weeks.
Telepathic confusion ruled my thoughts. Pan was right—I longed for his idyllic valley. New York City was no place for an angst-ridden, neophyte mushroom mind reader. I didn’t know how to unravel or erase places, faces, or memories that didn’t belong to me. My thoughts seemed to originate outside in other people’s brains, and I had no skills to filter them. I diverted that despair by listening to the bedlam of fellow inmates yelling from their cells and trying to recognize which prisoner said what.
“I never ate anything chocolate after I killed her.”
The murderer with the shrill voice.
“When will the sky turn blue again? I can’t stand this green cloud. It’s all red.”
He’s the morose one. Freaked on acid, knocked rows of bottles off their shelves in a liquor store, then rolled naked in the broken glass.
“The street outside the palace is being repaired. Those scientists on that planet have hypothesized that we’ll all be like amoebas somewhere. I mean really far into the future. I can’t even imagine the number of light years it’ll take to complete that project.”
The philosopher star gazer. Can’t figure why he’s in criminal lockup.
I joined the babble one day, after a man’s voice cut through the racket echoing around the hallway. He had yelled, “I popped right through that jungle trapeze dream. Goddamn it. Can you even hear that fucking goat music anymore, you selfish little shit? Foozle you, it ain’t over. One more.”
“One what? Is it a game? Do you know the rules? Who are Santa Pigeon and Doctor Steel?” Some days I talked to or yelled along with the others until I fell asleep on my feet, my hands still uselessly pounding on the door that kept me locked away from the world.
Orderlies, doctors, and nurses always came into my cell in groups of three. They arrived carrying different colored pills in paper cups. It took awhile, but the medical staff finally served up a concoction that satisfied them. Their medicine dried my mouth and tightened my throat. I would lay in bed trying to still the panic that followed, fearing that I would swallow my tongue, praying that the next glass of water would bring a steady rain to the desert behind my lips. Every effort to sit up, or walk, or reach for a drink was a painful attempt in willing my dulled muscles into movement. My arms would fall back down to my sides, my legs would refuse to hold up the rest of me, and my fingers ached and fumbled when grasping at items. The little pills and regular shots in my arm thickened my blood to a crawl, my mind to a desensitized fog.
It must have been early October when my doctor told me all charges had been dropped against me, and I was moved out of the security ward. A few days later, he showed me a copy of the New York Times. An article with the headlines New York Artist Believed Dead Found in Venezuela sat in the lower right hand of the front page. An italicized subtitle read Deets Parker escaped kidnapers, endured three months in jungle while crossing remote Andes Mountains. A publicity picture of me from my art show was surrounded by three columns of type. In the photo, I stood next to my drawing of the dog-faced Indian charging across a meadow with the starlit skies of the Poconos overhead. The article didn’t mention Pan or a cigar-chomping Monkey Man or Charlie Little but focused on the murders in the Land Rover and my kidnaping by, and subsequent escape from, communist guerrillas. The story, riddled with errors, was put together from interviews with a Venezuelan General and Colonel Robertson. On the continuing inside page there was another four columns with a map of my possible route, plus a photograph of a military patrol pushing through thick jungle. A panoramic view of two snow-capped peaks rising above the dark masses of a rugged series of mountains stretched along the bottom of the columns.
The next day, national TV news broadcast the story, and I watched through a stupor of medicine as Walter Cronkite wrapped up a brief interpretation of my ordeal by stating, “This remarkable young man is recovering, taking a well-deserved rest, in a New York hospital.”
“Hey, that looks like you.” A guy with long pink hair pointed with exaggerated femininity as the publicity photo of the dog-Indian and me appeared on screen with Walter.
“Uh, huh. Yuh, does. Wuhter, I need wa...uhter.” I nodded my thick head and dragged my feet over to the water cooler outside the day room of my ward.
“Is it you? It could be you. Who’s that tattooed dog-headed man with you? He looks fearsome.”
“Thuh, huh, wuh, wuh, Wuhter Cronkite.”
Chapter 2
I was lying in my bed staring at a large bug walk upside down across the ceiling. My mind was preoccupied with figuring out if it was a New York Bellevue insect, an hallucination, or a Valley of the Monsters bug that had stepped into the portal and ended up in my cell somehow. Like Doctor Steel appearing in the jungle or in the Poconos? Or Santa Pigeon disappearing from a courthouse bathroom?
The trouble with walking upside down is one’s viewpoint is never the same as those who never do. These doctors and agents that have locked me up have no idea how to understand what I’ve seen. And I can’t see Steel’s or Santa’s perspective.
I remembered Teresa asking me once what I believed to be happening to me. Maybe nothing was happening to me. Lately I had conversed telepathically with a time-traveling Neanderthal, had slept on a flute-playing satyr’s porch, and escaped from dangers with the help of spirits or dream characters. Maybe this is how I interpreted life around me. It seemed different once. Before. Before when? Before the voice in the alley had said I had come out to play. Play. Like when I was a kid and the neighborhood gang got together and we picked sides.
But what was the point of the game? And was I picking or being picked?
“Deets, you’ve got visitors.”
She was standing in the visitor’s lobby, looking out the window. Her profile froze momentarily before me, the glow of the sun dancing on the tips of her blonde curls. Her hair had grown longer, teasing her shoulders softly. The sprinkle of freckles across her cheek and nose reminded me of light and fresh air.
Every jungle scar on my arms and face became a self-conscious memory of blood and fear.
I touched below my eye where Ezequiel’s rifle butt had shattered bone.
She hadn’t noticed me yet. She reached up and brushed away something from her face. A tear?
The stab wound to my shoulder burned with regret.
Teresa adjusted a thin gold chain around her neck, turned, and saw me.
Her eyes fluttered faintly, then closed briefly, and I could see a prayer of thanks grace her expression. She stepped towards me, out of the sunbeams streaming around her.
I could feel her body movement from across the room. The air vacated by her cried for her return.
Is it really you? Are you in my life again?
I couldn’t tell if I had heard her thoughts or my own.
She held my gaze, sensed my confusions, read the scars, caressed the fears, tilted her head curiously at the traces of Monster Valley in my aura, wondered who I was, believed I had died, forgot she hadn’t forgiven me, realized she loved me, and, with her last step, la
id her head against my chest. Wrapping her arms around my neck, she turned her face up at me. Her eyes, inches from mine, filled with the light of a far away mountain twinkling on a dark cold night.
She choked down the rapture of joyous relief held in her throat. Instead, tears came as a plea, her words as a curse. “Damn you, why are you always stepping out of my dreams and getting lost in someone else’s?”
I fought against the dryness in my mouth, answering as if we had been speaking to each other every day for the last ten months. “It’s the way I need to move to understand life. Sometimes dreams jump into me. Sometimes I jump into them. Then one comes along that I can’t let go of, and I fight myself through hell to see that it’s fulfilled. Can’t help it.”
She squeezed me gently as three other people approached. Maureen ran her hands through my hair, kissed my cheek, breathed the words “I’m so glad” over and over.
My mother and father stood back a short distance, smiling for me but shifting nervously, wondering what I would say, fearing that I was lost to the world. They had visited a few weeks earlier, when I was more zombie-like, and I had told them I had met a god in the mountains. A god who had played music and fed me.
“You should keep your hair cut short. You look so much more handsome.” My mother tugged slightly at me as if to unlock Teresa’s physical display of emotion. “Don’t you think he looks good? He was practically tripping over his beard before.”
“Anybody want a coke?” Dad rummaged through his pockets, clinking loose change.
I rested my hands on Teresa’s hips. “Maybe it was your father’s dream.”
Teresa shifted, eased slightly away from me. Her eyes questioned why I had brought up her father. She became uneasy, guarded.
My dad returned with sodas, and we all sat on uncomfortable institutional metal chairs, trying to figure a way through awkward pauses. Maureen talked of her plans to switch college majors and told me Greg was still a medic in the army. Mom said Stephanie was becoming interested in boys, and Dad apologized when he swore while relating the news that cousin Richard had gone AWOL from the army.
Miracles (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 3) Page 1
