Lori Shoop grinned back at me. "You needn't worry about that part, Gene. My old CB hasn't worked for a year.
"I was just yelling into a dead mike. I didn't dare let up because there wouldn't even have been static for an answer."
She pointed her finger at me like a pistol and went out. My thinking was slowing, and the truck was out of hearing before I got the angles right.
Whew, that had taken some nerve. If Jello and the others had turned on her, there wouldn't have been any police rushing to the rescue.
Lori Shoop, my kind of gal!
Until the painkiller took me, I wondered what I meant by that.
+++
Chapter 2
I lay like a log, letting daylight and dark ooze by. Codeine allowed hours to drift before a careless movement reminded me of how badly I was hurt.
A man who takes cracked ribs lightly is a fool. A cough might complete a break and spear a jagged end into a lung or an artery. If that happens, courage doesn't help; you need a surgeon—fast.
With my stomped on foot raised by pillows, its throbbing wasn't bad. I began hoping it had only suffered bruising. The contusions on my head weren't worse than those suffered by boxers. They would go away.
About dawn, nature forced me from my drug induced lethargy. Moving was a series of pain-filled efforts. I limped to the bathroom like a broken legged horse, every step jarring my ribs as though Jello was still thumping on them. Damned if my left eye hadn't swollen closed and my nose was blocked tighter than . . . well, awfully tight.
Even the finger I had gotten under Jello's helmet smash ached like a boil. I could taste the sweat, pain, and dope encasing me like mummy wrappings. The thought of standing in a hot shower seemed divinely inspired.
I got in, and it was. Hot water, steam raising wet warmth, surely it was one of God's greatest gifts. I dozed standing, letting healing heat soak to my soul, flushing away river muck, human sweat, and some dried on blood.
The warmth soothed physical pain, but it did nothing for the raw anger that chewed at my self-respect. I would squeeze down and disguise the rage and hunger for revenge. Outwardly, I would seem to ignore what had been done to me along the river, but never would I let it go. My time would come, and I would repay the embarrassment, the fear, and the pain in full. The bikers would learn to hate the day they trashed the Alaskan and his truck along the Juniata.
The damned hot water ran out too soon. When you don't use a thing it tends to seize up and not run right. I figured the lower heating unit had gone bad in the water heater. Easy enough to replace, but not by me right away.
When the water turned tepid, I got out before it became too cold. Real men end showers with cold water; everyone knows that. Makes you tough, or something. I guessed I was a sap or worse, because I never have found it comfortable.
I patted myself dry and wiped the mirror mist to stare at my battered face. Whew, good prospect for a horror movie, one eyed, swollen beaked, blue-black pouches under both eye sockets—really ugly.
Ordinarily I wasn't too bad looking. My thick, brown hair usually lay like un-shocked wheat, but I had a decent forehead, a little eye sparkle, and darned good teeth. My nose had always looked a little battered, and Jello's helmet wouldn't have improved it. Oh well.
My beard covered a normal jaw, and I recognized it was more than time to shave cleanly and rejoin the civilized part of the human race.
That would be later, however. My foot ached to my knee, and on the other side, my ribs beat a steady pulse. It was almost time for another Percodan, and almost was close enough.
Bed bordered heaven. I swallowed the pill and let everything go. Wonderful, maybe I would survive at that.
+++
A man should not even try to remember ideas, plans, or schemes conjured while under the influence. More sober evaluation inevitably reduces those thoughts to trash.
Yet, a good concept or a neat turn of phrase should be jotted down. Delay loses such things. Following my bear mauling, while some morphine derivative had me in its grasp, I had forced myself to carefully write out a trio of scintillating revelations that I recognized to be touching genius.
Realizing my precarious condition, I went beyond mere notes that might be somehow unclear, and carefully recorded my brilliant discoveries.
Alas, they made no sense. One referred to a cow with green shingles. The others were no better. So much for drug inspired insights. Whether religious enlightenment, artistic enhancement, or social clarifications, dope opens no doors.
With that awareness, I could safely enjoy my hallucinogenic vengeances on Jello and his mob. My plots reduced the brutes, bodies and souls, to helpless objects of disdain. How they suffered. How mightily I triumphed, sometimes magnanimously, but more often without hint of compassion.
Lori Shoop came poking in about noon of the next day. She brought her son along, a youth of eleven or so, well mannered, and properly respectful of the wounded Achilles—or was it Hector?
The mother made me soup. Elixir of mythology. I had not realized my hunger. Later she was gone. I am sure her scent lingered, probably fresh with a hint of strong soap, but with entire landfills blocking my nose I could not detect it.
Thereafter I entered the magnificent Lori in my hallucinatory imaginings, until real sleep let them all fade away.
+++
By the third day I had gorged all the self-indulgence I could tolerate. I could move, although it hurt. A deep breath set off alarms, so I kept my elbows low and breathed lightly. I scissored off my beard and shaved the stubble.
There I was, some sort of black and blue tinted aborigine, but my eye was open a crack, my swollen ear had lost its redness, and I could step on my bad foot almost comfortably. I got out a stick to help my balance and tried a bit of porch sitting.
It was a bright day in Perry County's paradise. June is a handsome month in the county. July can be too hot and August is rarely mentionable. But in June the trees are green and the breezes soft. Sun heat can be a pleasure and nights are comfortably cool.
My clearing lay sun dappled and as silent as a forest should be. At night, traffic roar on Route 22 could be detected, but it was distant enough not to intrude.
A groundhog scurried his fat way near the stone pile. In my youth I would have hustled for a rifle. Now, the chubby hole-digger couldn't have found a safer haven. Here, I was the intruder. My life did not depend on the clearing's juicy morsels. His did, and I wished him success.
The house water came from a driven well about one hundred and seventy-five feet deep, but the best tasting water was hauled by bucket from the hand dug, stone-lined well out front.
Once, long before the Perrys owned the land, someone had lived here. They had dug below the fifteen foot level to create a pool of soft, cold water.
As a boy I had climbed down the dry-walled stone sides and found a small recess at the water level. It was my secret hideout. Never revealed, I expected a few of my treasures, special stones, a ceramic drinking cup, maybe a board to sit on, were still down there.
Although only three feet deep, the well water looked opaque and bottomless. Some claimed Perry County's underground streams ran all the way from Lake Erie. Boys could hope that mysterious things might lurk in the black water and shiver delightedly, imagining the monsters that might rise from it. I limped my way to the well and sat on the cool limestone blocked edge. I could feel again the excitement of my boyhood descents into the damp, stone walled darkness. I wondered how I had first summoned the nerve. If Pap had found out, he would have switched my rump.
A man could hunger for childish delights. Where did the enthusiasms go? Now, a hole halfway to China wouldn't lure me.
The world held too few mysteries. The once deeply mysterious Dark Continent was reduced to a gaggle of squabbling mini-nations, and the mighty Andes Mountains had been mapped by satellite photography. We knew there were no Martians, and heaven was not, after all, just a few miles straight up.
I doubt juvenile
boys now examine National Geographies in hope of discovering bare-breasted natives. Why bother when Playboy and its imitators offer gynecological detail in every issue?
Santa Claus was now Dad's wallet, and heroes were punks with dyed hair screaming obscenities into microphones. No one built tree huts anymore or scrap- wood rafts that allowed imaginations to float on rivers of great adventure.
I think I would have liked the small boy who had long ago peered with utmost caution over the well lip, to make sure he could emerge undetected. If I had seen him, I would probably have said nothing. A youth should seek adventure and have his own special secrets.
Which jolted me a little with the realization that Pap might have known all along about my well climbing and had chosen to let it go. Damned if that didn't sound like something he would do.
+++
Lori Shoop came again, to find me cleaned up and rocking like landed gentry on my shady front porch.
Her boy came along. Chris said hello and began ranging about, the way a boy should. He flushed the groundhog and found a rock to plunk into the well. Once, children knew never to throw anything into a well, but that was old knowledge, long outmoded. Times change, and unless he'd been told, what boy could resist dropping a stone down a hole?
Chris's presence gave me a natural opening to ask about the Shoop family.
Lori said, "Chris and I are the Shoops. I took my maiden name back because his father and I were only married a year, and I hadn't gotten used to his. He went to California and hasn't come back—which suits me fine."
She looked at me quizzically. "You really don't remember me from high school, do you, Gene?"
I really didn't, but I wished I did.
"Well, I was three years behind you, and big guys don't notice young girls, I guess."
She was partly right, at least in my case. Girls had been powerfully interesting, but so had the woods and the rivers and even adventure novels and magazine stories that I devoured voraciously.
The dreamers didn't get the girls. The hungry-eyed connivers, whether athletes or corner hangers, did the scoring. The rest of us wished we were that lucky and went on to other things.
Lori told her story neatly, without dramatics. It was a familiar tale: married right out of high school, immediate pregnancy, and a husband who belatedly realized he hadn't done the things he had expected to do. Then dissolution of marriage, and within a year, a disappeared ex-husband and evasion of child support.
Someday, the big computers will lock onto us all tight enough to run down payment dodgers, but not yet. Unless he returned to Perry County, Lori's free-spirited child deserter would never be caught.
So, Lori Shoop went to work and the years rolled by.
Now she had a business. She cleaned houses and babysat homes, especially those with pets, for people on extended vacations. On the side, she studied antiques and was a picker at public sales for an antique dealer. Someday— someday—she would open her own antique shop. She knew just the place, but it was still too soon. When she started, she intended to succeed, not just potter around amid dusty old things.
It was the stuff of dreams. Start with nothing and build until you made a handsome living, doing something you liked. As the comedians say, "Where but in America?"
Then it was my turn. How do you explain away a vagabond existence? Sailboarding in the Keys, hunting big game in Alaska, rock climbing peaks without names, fishing for snook and tarpon, but preferring kings and silvers on the Kenai Peninsula, or the greyling and Dolly Varden trout in streams so cold they could be ice. God, it sounded adventurous—and it was.
But there was the other side of the coin, the passing seasons without preparation for older years. I had no prospective pensions, and too much of my pay had been under the table, avoiding taxes, but also missing social security quarters.
There was a wicked gouge in my back where a Chechako had cast a big salmon hook into me. A falling rock had split my scalp and nearly my skull in a five-inch gash that left me hanging on my rope, half unconscious. Hunting rabbits, an idiot had filled my leg with number six shot, and . . . of course there was the sow grizzly. Those kinds of hurts could eventually accumulate into crippling disabilities that I was not prepared to live with.
I had done well with a small gold pocket, panning a creek near Black Rapids. Along with the senator's settlement, I had an only half deserved nest egg. Invested with a little smarts, it might turn into something. It was more than most decent, hardworking people put together, and a lot more than I had ever expected to acquire.
Telling Lori about it gave me resolve to give my future some thought, while my beaten up body recuperated.
Chris Shoop liked my stories, and I sent him in to dig out the Magnum pistol and my special hunting knife. He could barely hold the big Smith and Wesson, but I liked the way he tried and how his eyes widened and his mouth fell open when I told how I had finished off the grizzly using the very gun he was handling.
They wouldn't stay for supper, and now that I was healing, they might not come again. No matter that we enjoyed just sitting and talking, it would be unseemly for Lori to keep visiting Gene Perry's cabin, even with her son along. Perry County was still rural American and reputations could easily fall. Girls who cared had to watch their actions.
I couldn't complain. Lori had already gone beyond Good Samaritan acts. If more were to come of it, the moves would have to be mine.
+++
In early dusk, my belly full of Dinty Moore beef stew and good old worthless but satisfying white bread, gobbed with pats of peanut butter, I thought some about what I was going to do.
First, I had to get well. That would take most of the summer. While I was mending, I would lay out my campaign to square things with Jello.
I never considered walking away. Jello and his allies had amused themselves at my expense, and it wasn't the Perry County, or the Perry family's way, to let that go unanswered.
Slumped on my porch, barely able to get up and down, whomping the starch out of a monster like Jello seemed a bit pretentious. But, I wasn't planning a high noon shoot out, or a stand up, him and me slugfest. Oh no, my way would have to be just as down and dirty as his work on me had been.
Only, I had other goals in mind that Jello hadn't bothered about. When I finished with him, Jello would be damaged so thoroughly that he would never consider trying to get even.
A few men needed almost killing to make them surrender. I was probably one of those. If Jello was another . . . Well, I figured I could face up to that as well.
+++
By Monday I had sat around as long as I could. The worst part was that I had run out of reading material. Even on the long, high mountain hunts I kept a paperback stuffed in a hip pocket and a spare in my pack. If I got through with them, I read can labels, or anything else with printing on it.
Some deep thinkers have claimed that reading is a self-hypnosis that allows the indulger to escape reality.
It has also been said that the solidly unimaginative prefer biographies or "how to" books, while the dreamer flies with a writer's more vivid fictional creations.
I stand with the latter. Gritty novels where men overcome odds through clear reasoning and determined physical action are my kind of stuff. I like men's books, where women are peripheral, and meaty conflicts are frequent and diverse.
And, I had no more to read. My shopping had not anticipated lengthy isolation. I needed a used bookstore where I could lay in a grocery bag full of smashing and bashing, high adventuring novels.
Essentials for civilized survival, I figured.
Big Blue rumbled to life on the first turn of the key. She looked pretty bad, but she hadn't been damaged where it counted.
The Doyles had not come by, which did not surprise me. One day this week or sometime next month, Jim or Vonnie might appear. When the mood struck they would come. I'd do the same with them. Good neighbors do not have to bother with duty calls.
Avoiding Duncannon and Jello's
hangout, I headed up the Juniata into Newport. Until I figured all of the angles, I didn't want the gang to know the Alaskan truck and its driver were still around. When I came down on them, it would be like lightning from a clear sky, and just as devastating, I hoped.
Newport's Second Street flea market sold me a bag of used paperbacks, enough for a week or two. I came back south on Route 34 to the edge of New Bloomfield and pulled into Perry Automotive. In one spot I could bury all traces of the beat up Alaskan pickup.
I pulled the license plates and made arrangements for complete repairs. To change the truck's appearance, I ordered the twin exhausts stacked straight up behind the cab and red piping striped along the body's sides.
Both outside mirrors had been smashed so I limped next door to Lyter's Auto Parts and picked out a nice set of replacements.
Then I bought a car. I wanted a small, nondescript automobile, something as hard to distinguish as one cherry pit among many. Almost any low priced Japanese import with a few years on it would do. I found a Datsun painted an objectionable brown, without too many identifying bends and dings.
The car hummed along without odd mechanical sounds or peculiar vibrations. The upholstery was hidden beneath cheapy cloth covers, and the sag and bag convinced me I didn't want to look underneath. I wasn't buying an heirloom. This was my Mike Hammer car. I could park anywhere or follow anybody and never be noticed.
I resolved to collect a number of different styled hats of diverse colors, so I could reach down and slap on another to change my appearance. Sherlock Perry was about ready to undertake the organized surveillance of the dread Jello gang.
Perry Automotive provided temporary plates for the Datsun and would see to the reregistration of Big Blue as a Pennsylvania truck.
I imagined trying to get the same services in most of the places I visited. In Florida no one could have been bothered. Service down there is what everyone wants but nobody gives. In Alaska . . . Hah, up there having anything done cost so much no one tried, which resulted in no one knowing how.
The Sweet Taste (Perry County) Page 3
