Toward the end of his senior year in high school when he was struggling to decide whether to go to college or to join the Marine Corps, he woke up one night in a cold sweat.
Madame Cervelli came to him and slapped him in the face, then cursed at him.
“You are destined to help mankind in another way,” she shouted at him. “Let the other boys join the Marines. Let the other boys fight for their country. You stay home and do what you are destined to do.”
It was so vivid a dream, so real, that Tony couldn’t get back to sleep. He first tried to laugh it off, then finally talked to Hannah about it. It was Hannah who, feeling bad for him, reached up to touch his face.
And only then did Tony realize his left cheek… the one the old gypsy brutally slapped, was tender to the touch.
The dream merely added another piece to the mystery that was Madame Cervelli. Pieces they were certain fit together somehow, in some sort of macabre puzzle the old woman wanted them to solve.
The trouble was, there were too many missing pieces, and they had nothing to guide them.
It so happened that on winter nights the pair had a habit of hanging out at Hannah’s parents’ house. Her folks liked Tony. He was kind and respectful, and helpful around the house. He wasn’t at all like some of the other boys who came around, sniffing like old dogs, and obviously interested only in getting into Hannah’s pants.
No, Tony was different from the beginning. Right after they started dating, Tony showed up at Hannah’s house one night when she was at cheerleading practice.
“Hannah’s not here, Tony,” he was told. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“Yes, ma’am, she did. But I’m not here to see her. I’m here to see you and Mr. Robbins. I have something very important to talk to you about.”
The couple was perplexed, but invited the young man in.
“Look,” he told them. “I love your daughter. I want to marry her someday. I want you to know that I’ll respect her and treat her like a queen. I may be young, but I can see that she’s special. And I wanted to promise you that I will never harm her in any way, and would give my life to protect her.”
Hannah’s mom and dad didn’t know quite what to make of the young man and his declaration. Bob, her father, told Tony, “Son, if you ever do anything to harm my daughter, you will already have forfeited your life.”
“Yes, sir. I understand. So, I have your permission to date her and to marry her someday?”
Bob looked at his wife before answering, then said, “You have our permission to date her, as long as you’re kind and respectful of her. As for marriage, she’s the one you need to impress. Not us. Who she marries will be up to her.”
Tony got up to leave and stopped short.
He had one more request.
“Can you… I mean, would you mind… just keeping this between us? Not tell Hannah, I mean?”
Bob said, “You don’t want Hannah to know that you love her and want to marry her someday?”
“Oh, she already knows that. I just don’t want her to know that I’ve come here and talked to you, behind her back like this. I mean we’ve always been totally honest with each other. I don’t want her to think I’m sneaking around or anything.”
“Son, I’ll tell you what… if this is the biggest secret you have from Hannah, you’re doing something right. But if you want us to keep this to ourselves, we will.”
It turned out that Tony couldn’t keep his own secret.
For several days after that Hannah could tell something was bothering him. And like girlfriends are wont to do, she bugged him unmercifully until he came clean.
That night, after he dropped her off and went home to study for a test, she had her own heart to heart with her folks.
“I’m marrying Beaver Cleaver,” she started.
“You’re doing what?”
“I’m marrying the only guy in the world who’d even think of meeting secretly with his girlfriend’s parents to ask their permission to marry her. I’m marrying Beaver Cleaver.”
Her mother smiled.
“It was rather sweet of him, wasn’t it? But you haven’t even started college yet, honey. It’s still way too early to start making wedding plans.”
“Oh, I didn’t say I’m going to marry him now. I’ll still finish school. And I’ll make darn sure he finishes too. But he’s definitely the one I want for my husband. Nothing’s gonna change that.”
Chapter 5
The two of them were sitting on a bench in the campus common, leafing through a course catalog and debating their options.
“But I don’t want to be a geologist. Who wants to spend four years studying stupid old rocks?”
“Well, I do, for one. Does that make me a stupid old girl, Tony? Is that what you think of me?”
She stuck out her lower lip and pretended to pout. But he could see she was teasing him.
“No, of course not. But rocks are just… well, they’re boring. They’re devoid of life. They just… sit there and don’t say anything. They don’t do anything. They are incredibly dull.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Tony. Every rock has a story to tell. Where it came from, what it’s made of, how it got to be where it is today. You just have to know how to hear their stories.”
Now it was his turn to tease her.
“So now you talk to rocks? And, even more to the point, they talk to you?”
“No, you big dumb clunk. They don’t talk to me. I read them. To me they’re fascinating. Way more fascinating that your dumb old football games. Or the dirty magazines you have hidden under your bed.”
That caught him off guard.
“What are you doing snooping under my bed?”
“Just being nosy. That’s what girlfriends are supposed to do. Can you honestly say that Miss July is as pretty as me?”
“Nobody’s as pretty as you.”
“Then what’s she got that I haven’t got?”
“She doesn’t go snooping through my stuff, for one thing.”
“The point I’m trying to make, Tony, is that to me rocks are interesting. They come alive, if you know what to look for. They tell the history of our planet. And to a lesser degree, the history of us. They‘re part of a bigger picture. The soil, the sand beneath our feet, the earth all the way to its core. They’re like a great novel. They’ve got all the information about where we came from that you’ll ever want to know. You just have to know how to read them.
“To me, they’re just as interesting, just as beautiful, as your Miss July.”
“But they’re still just rocks. Just dumb, stupid, never-moving, never-feeling rocks.”
“To you, maybe. Not to me.”
“Okay. Fine. I still don’t want to be a geologist.”
“Okay, babe. Don’t blame me if the Stan incident happens.”
“The Stan incident? What in heck is the ‘Stan incident?’”
“Oh, it’s just a hypothetical situation.”
“Explain please.”
“Let’s say I major in geology, but you don’t. You major in something silly like, maybe…”
“Astrophysics? Nuclear science?”
“Puleeze. More like Astronomy or Philosophy. Maybe elementary mathematics…”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that if we don’t major in the same thing, we’re likely not to share any classes. And instead of you sitting next to me in class, a guy named Stan will sit next to me.”
“That’s a stretch, isn’t?”
“Shut up and let me finish. So, if we don’t share classes, I’ll have to sit next to Stan. Now, Stan’s not too much on the bright side, but he’s quite handsome. And he has these huge…”
“Ears?”
“No, dummy. Muscles. He has these huge muscles. And in fact, he looks like Captain America, okay? So as I said, as hot as he is, he’s kind of dumb. So we make a deal. Since he’s so strong and has these really huge…”
“Muscle
s. I know…”
“Don’t interrupt. I’ll have lots of books, and since you won’t be there to help carry them for me, I’ll have no choice but to have Stan carry them for me.
“And of course, he’ll want something in repayment.”
“Of course he will. And of course, you’ll tell him no.”
“Nope. I’ll tell him I’d absolutely love to… tutor him after school each day.
“In his bachelor pad.
“The one with the round rotating bed.”
“Ha!” Tony shouted. “I call bullshit.”
“Why?”
“Because no self-respecting Captain America would be caught dead on a round rotating bed. Your hypothesis stinks and is totally unfounded in reality.”
A new voice joined in the conversation.
“Excuse me…”
The pair looked up to see a young man towering over them.
He looked like a body builder. His muscles had muscles. And he looked amazingly like the guy who played Captain America in the movies.
“Yes,” Tony offered. “How can we help you?”
“I hate to interrupt you guys. I signed up for a couple of basic geology classes and I was looking for the Earth Sciences Building. Do either of you know where it might be?”
Hannah spoke up.
“I’ve got two classes there too. I’ve already been over to meet my professors. It’s two buildings down that way, then over another building to your right.”
“Thank you. Who are your professors?”
“Willoughby for one class. Bennett for the other.”
“Hey, I’ve got Willoughby too. What’s your name?”
“Hannah Carson.”
“Hi Hannah. I’m Stan. Stan Mathers.”
The two shook hands.
“Well,” he said before he walked away. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
Hannah said, “Yes. I guess you will.”
As Stan followed Hannah’s directions, Hannah followed him with her eyes.
Tony picked his jaw up off the ground long enough to ask, “How in heck did you do that?”
“Shhhh,” she told him. “I’m busy watching him walk away. He looks mighty fine in those jeans, doesn’t he, Astrophysics Boy?”
“Forget that. How did you know about him?”
But Hannah wasn’t ready to let him off the hook. Not just yet, anyway. She was having too much fun.
“You ever heard the line from that old song, Tony? I hate to see you leave, but I love to watch you walk away?”
“Hannah, damn it, how did you know about him?”
She looked at him and grinned.
“I saw him at the administrative office. He was ahead of me in line, and asked them for some information about the class I’d already signed up for. He never saw me, but I darn sure noticed him. Oh, baby, did I ever notice him.”
Tony said nothing for a full thirty seconds. But he scanned her face so closely one would’ve thought he was counting her freckles.
“Let’s go back over there.”
“Where?”
“To the admin building.”
“Why?”
“I want to see if there are any more slots for your class.”
“Which class?”
“I don’t know. The one you share with Godzilla.”
“Basic Seismology.”
“Yeah. That one. I all of a sudden want to know everything there is to know about Basic Seismology.”
She won. She almost always did.
As they walked back so he could enroll in the class, he asked her, “Honey, I have just one question.”
“What, baby?”
“What in heck is seismology?”
Chapter 6
Present Day…
Tony was able to get the last available seat in Professor Willoughby’s class, but just couldn’t get into it. He slept through most of it, and relied on Hannah’s tutoring to barely pass the course.
As for Godzilla, he was a non-player. Instead of sitting anywhere near Hannah, he chose a seat on the other side of the room, directly behind another Neanderthal. It turned out he was gay. Tony had nothing to worry about.
Hannah, for her part, thought that part was funny. And she enjoyed sharing a class with Tony, as inattentive as he was.
She’d been hoping that her courses would strike his fancy and he’d change his major to align it more with her own. But that never happened.
As far as she knew, he never even learned what seismology was.
Tony never really regretted taking the class. It provided him a chance to grab a quick nap each day between the two computer programming classes he was taking.
And he did get credit for the course, thanks to Hannah’s assistance. So it wasn’t that bad.
They graduated together, she with a degree in environmental science, he in computer science. It was something he was much better suited in. As he explained to her, “I’m just not the kind of guy who’d be happy hiking around the world and fondling rocks.”
A month after graduating, her promise to her parents to wait until after she’d graduated to consider marriage fulfilled, Hannah finally accepted Tony’s proposal. They married in a chapel at the Army base where Tony’s dad had served and then retired, and drove a U-Haul truck full of their belongings to Chickasha, Oklahoma.
They didn’t particularly like Chickasha, nor did they particularly want to live there.
In fact, they’d never been there before.
But a recruiter from a company called Geo-Dynametrics needed a soil analyzer and had interviewed Hannah over her webcam. He’d been so impressed he flew to see her in person, and then called her back a couple of days later with an offer.
The offer was a generous one. Partly, he explained, because it involved living in Chickasha.
“There’s nothing wrong with Chickasha,” he was careful to explain. “It’s just that, well, it’s a small town. There’s not a lot to do. It’s pretty boring, I’m afraid.”
There happened to be a glut of computer programmers at the time. Word had gotten around that it was a career field of the future. College students, especially guys who grew up playing video games and tinkering with their systems, signed up for the program in droves. Now the demand for inexperienced programmers was lagging way behind the growing supply for them.
Tony woefully admitted he was more likely to get a job at 7-Eleven than in his chosen profession. At least until the glut began to dissipate.
“It’s not that big a deal, Tony. As long as we stick to our budget, we can live easily on my income. You can take your turn later, when the market for programmers is better. In the meantime, I’ll go to work and you can be a house-husband.”
“Okay,” he relented. “As long as you do one thing for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t ever call me a house-husband again.”
Chickasha was a quaint little town. It wasn’t the place to go for someone who enjoyed the nightlife. But the people were friendly, the restaurants were good, and it had a Walmart.
Hannah quipped, “What else could we possibly need?”
And they had each other.
They also had the freedom to do whatever they wanted to do, as long as their budget allowed it.
They fell into a routine, those first few months. Hannah worked days, and Tony took a part-time job at a convenience store to bring in a few extra bucks and to while away the hours until his new bride came home.
Their evenings were filled doing all the things young married folks do. They went on walks together, played intramural sports with their friends, played video games and sat on their patio each evening to watch the stars.
And had lots and lots of sex.
Chapter 7
Tony crawled out of bed one morning and stumbled to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee, to find his wife of seven months reading the morning paper and eating a piece of wheat toast.
He was surprised to see her ther
e. She’d gotten up herself an hour before and should have gone to work by then.
“Honey, are you okay?”
She smiled.
“Yes, baby. I’m fine. Why?”
“It’s after nine. You’re late for work.”
“I called in sick.”
“Uh oh. Is it your allergies again? Want me to run up to the CVS and get you something?”
“No, honey. I didn’t say I was sick. I just said I called in sick.”
“You’re playing hooky?”
“Precisely.”
“Good. I’ll call in too. We can go fishing or something.”
She lifted her toast to take a bite and he noticed for the first time what she was eating.
“Whoa! Are we out of frosted Pop-Tarts and donuts?”
“No. We have both.”
“Then why are you eating that crap?”
“What crap?”
“Wheat toast. With nothing on it. Yucko.”
“Oh, no reason. I’m just trying to eat a bit healthier. That’s all.”
He walked to the cupboard and took out a bag of white-frosted mini-donuts, then dumped a dozen into a bowl.
“Yeah, well… good luck with that.”
While his back was turned, Hannah reached into the pocket of her robe and took something from it. She laid it on the table where Tony usually sat.
“What’s that?” he asked when he returned to the table.
“What does it look like?”
“I don’t know. An old fashioned thermometer, I guess. Does it go under your tongue?”
She smiled.
“Hardly.”
“Then what is it?”
But she never had to answer. As he asked the question he turned the device over and read the words Early Pregnancy Tester on the back.
He smiled too, and then turned it back over.
“So what does the little blue plus sign mean?”
“It means you’re gonna be a daddy.”
He picked her up and twirled her around, laughing in great joy.
The Yellowstone Event: Book 1: Fire in the Sky Page 2
