Untitled Novel, Chapter 1 (First Draft)

In the days when only two Presidents had been shot, and it was easier to get an appointment to see one at the White House, Lewis Notley of the New York City Police traveled by train from that great city to Washington, D.C.

Notley's suitcase contained only one change of clothes: his only suit, a shabby brown thing, which he reluctantly spent a few dollars to augment with a new fake silk necktie and fake silk brown paisley waistcoat; Notley didn't mind its fakeness at all, as it fit his 48-inch torso perfectly without straining the buttons or rumpling the texture. He only regretted that he didn't own a hat to wear, as he envied men who could hold and clutch one when they were nervous. He hoped the fact that his only footwear was his patrol boots would remind President Cleveland that he was a common man, a working man, the kind of man to whom presidents hope their speeches appeal. He'd considered wearing his blue wool police uniform for the occasion, hoping to inspire the idea in the President's head that he was talking with a man of position. He quickly decided against it; he hadn't felt like a policeman since being taken off patrol duty, and pretending to feel like one would have only made him feel like he was multitasking.

He'd compiled a dossier (at least that's what he called it) laying out his case, complete with a handwritten three-page letter detailing his situation, a full incident report, pages of inquest testimony, and the names and contact information of every officer and character witness who'd vouched for Notley's absence of malice. He'd also included his badge number, the specifics of his birth (that is, date and location), and a list of his former employers, including his two years on the USS Essex while in the Navy, his further two years as a security guard at the Philadelphia Naval Asylum, and the further ten years as the lone security guard at his father's trousers factory. He'd been hesitant to include the fact that his father owned the business, at the risk of being seen as a benefactor of nepotism; he ultimately decided if he didn't include that fact, and it was later discovered, he'd be sized up as dishonest and shifty.

His nerves being fraught, he soothed them with any comforting thought he could grasp. One such thought was the President's girth. He regretted finding solace in President Cleveland's hefty weight, but it made him less daunting than if he were a Herculean figure. Notley was further assuaged by his own relatively round shape, hoping the President might find a kindred spirit in him–“the only weight Grover Cleveland carries is on the hay scale,” he once read in a newspaper–but Notley simultaneously took to heart that the President weighed seventy-five to a hundred pounds more than he did, making him feel less doughy by comparison.

Notley also noted the fact that he had a strong jawline for a chubby fellow, whereas Grover Cleveland's face, from the photographs he'd seen, was anchored by jowls and a second chin. He caught himself thinking his nose was stronger, too– sharp and pointed, while the President's nose was wide and round. Their biggest similarity was their hair: scant on the top with a small island of it near the forehead.

When convicted by the cruelty of comparing and critiquing their respective appearances, Notley defaulted to the well-known fact that during the War, upon being drafted, Cleveland paid a substitute to serve in his place. Notley felt justified in taking personal exception to this, given his mother's death on the USS Hannibal Hamlin in 1864. It made him feel that President Cleveland owed him.

It took longer to reach the capital from New York than it would have if he'd taken the standard Royal Blue Line; Notley took a train to Pittsburgh first, then to Washington from there, all for the sake of avoiding the Royal Blue's stop in Baltimore. He'd spent most of the first thirty-three years of his life in Baltimore, but he [couldn't bear] to see it now. So much so that he didn't mind spending extra money to keep away from it.

In Washington, as he journeyed from his hotel to Pennsylvania Avenue, Notley assured himself concerning Cleveland with less shallow thoughts than those he'd entertained on the trains. Notably that the President must have an affinity for New York; he'd been the state's Governor, and the mayor of some notable city (Notley couldn't remember which one). Hopefully, New York City held some good place in Cleveland's heart, even if as the waggish cousin who only comes around for weddings.

It was the fifteenth day of March and his appointment to see President Cleveland was scheduled for an unusually late 7:30. Notley had been more than a bit surprised a week earlier when he received a letter confirming that the President of the United States would see him. As much as he'd hoped such a thing would happen, he knew White House protocol for commoners was far more strict than it had been in the past, when visitors could come and go, presenting the President with petitions and pardons as if he were a city councilman.

Notley reasoned that the Secret Service must have checked the veracity of every detail in the detailed dossier, found them to be accurate, declared Notley an open and honest man, further declared him trustworthy enough to see President Cleveland, and, just maybe, had put in a good word for such a transparent officer of the law when they briefed the Chief Executive on the policeman's business. But the security man who met him at the gate in front of the White House (Secret Service, Notley surmised) was grave and humorless. He stepped out from a sentry box, which Notley hadn't seen in pictures and drawings of the place. He felt so scrutinized that he quickly lost his initial feeling of awe upon first approaching the Palladian mansion.

Notley didn't attempt small talk; from the man's demeanor he knew if he remarked on the weather being frigid for the edge of spring, he wouldn't get so much as a grunt in response. He was asked to take off his overcoat and raise his arms, and the Secret Serviceman patted him down for pistols and daggers. Notley should have felt vulnerable and extra cold, but his only thought was how much he missed searching a person for weapons himself.

After producing the letter he'd received confirming his appointment, signed by the President's personal secretary on official White House stationery, Notley was given back his coat and escorted across the sprawling lawn and under the ominous white pillars surrounding the north portico. Inside, he was ushered by another security man, who took another look at the letter, through a large hall and eventually into what Notley had read was called the Blue Room. He wasn't intimidated by the modest majesty of the White House. The outcome of the meeting with the President daunted him more than the place in which it was held. In fact, it wasn't much different from the homes of his father's business partners, with whose children young Notley was once arranged to play, while the elder Notley discussed the trousers industry with his friends while playing croquet.

If not in size, it was in aesthetic like the fulsome houses of Baltimore's elite. Though the officer hadn't dared go near his hometown in a year and a half, little things here and there in the Blue Room reminded him of the house he'd lived his first thirty-three years: tassels hanging from the fixtures and attached to the corner of every rug, settees and sofas along the walls where they didn't seem very practical, and most similar to Notley manor, the musty smell of age and memory. To him, it was like the smell of mildew and the pages of old books.

While he was struggling not to reel from the strangely lovely scent, a tall, box-bodied man entered the Blue Room through one of several doors and asked if he were Lewis Notley. The guest tightened inside at hearing the familiar “Snotley” sound that was built into his name; it made him feel so much smaller than usual, coming from a White House security man. He confirmed he was Officer Notley, though he only said his surname. The big man asked if he could take Notley's overcoat. It took him a moment to realize the agent was asking for the sake of hospitality and not security. When he was found to be physically harmless, the agent led him through more strange-smelling, familiar-looking splendor that threatened to distract his mind from the task at hand, up a set of stairs only slightly more austere than the ones he'd seen in Baltimore, and, eventually, into the office of the Chief Executive.

The President's office wasn't as large as Notley had imagined; the bulky bookshelves that lined one side seemed to make the walls close in, while an assortment of mismatched furniture took up the middle of the room. Notley remembered how the furniture in his father's house had at least been the same color and covered in the same upholstery (a petty observation he didn't bother to rebuke, if only to help his anxiety). A fat, unlit chandelier loomed from the ceiling and took up more space, reaching down to swipe at him like a floating ghoul.

The room was dimly lit by only two lamps. It was so dim that Notley didn't immediately notice when Grover Cleveland entered the office. The President wore a black suit and walked slowly, his shoulders drooping. His entire form and all of his features drooped, even his mustache, making his entrance rather inconspicuous. His walk was more of a meander, the turning of his head to look at his guest as languid as the rest of his movements.

Still, his deflated gait couldn't hide the President's height–he was nearly six feet tall, five inches taller than stout Notley, causing the latter's heart to sink.

“Good evening, Mr. Notley,” said the President in a languid tone. “Please have a seat.”

Notley clenched his fists nervously as he looked about him to choose a seat from the several armchairs with heart-shaped backs and miscellaneous upholstery. His hands tightened into fists as a reaction to both the President's height, and to the suspicion that Cleveland called him Mister Notley and not Officer Notley as a way to hint at something.

The President sat before his guest could decide on a chair, making his own choice easier; he sat across from the Chief Executive, reasoning that sitting closer and catty-corner from him would impose a presumptuous familiarity. He wished the President, or someone hired to do such tasks, would turn on another lamp or two. As it was, he could hardly see Cleveland's baldness, causing his imagined kinship with the President to fade slightly.

The someone hired to do such tasks was called upon by the President, languidly, to bring him a glass of beer, with a gruffly added, “if you would, please.” He turned to Notley and asked if he too would like a beer.

“It's too cold out for one, I know,” murmured Cleveland. “But I can have the fire turned up to make it warmer. It's Friday, after all.”

Notley had seen his father accept a drink on many occasions when discussing business (though nothing bigger than a small tumbler), and as a bigger fire would illuminate the President's baldness and weight, he said yes to the offer. Cleveland called for two beers, and a tall black woman soon appeared with a pitcher and two mugs. As she poured the men their beer it occurred to Notley that he ought to volunteer to work the fireplace. Cleveland insisted otherwise, to which Notley acquiesced after an awkward moment in which he froze in the middle of standing up.

The President lifted himself from his seat with a groan and shuffled to the hearth. As his host was illuminated by the blaze, it seemed to Notley that Cleveland's lethargy had less to do with his size and shape, and much more to do with an inner exhaustion. He surmised the President would still have displayed that exhaustion if he'd been as slim as Lincoln. He'd never met a President of the United States, but the [slowness] of his movements made him think they were all probably this tired by their second term.

He was so lost in contemplating the plight of presidents that he was startled when the maid offered him a mug of beer. He fumbled through a thank-you-ma'am as he took it. The domestic, noticing this, eyed him with her hands on her hips and said quietly, “don't worry about him. He's a peach when he wants to be.”

Notley hoped the President wanted to be a peach this evening as he watched him sit down with another groan (shrinking to a less intimidating height) and take a drink of his beer. “This is from the Straub Brewery in Pennsylvania,” said the Chief Executive, a touch of serenity in his lazy tone. “The state voted against me twice, but the Germans brew such a good beer I'll let bygones be bygones.”

Notley summoned his nerve and seized on the mention of the Germans. “Yes sir. My father made it a point to hire Germans at his factory. He said they're too good at war for his comfort, so he put them to work to keep them out of anything perilous.”

(Notley thought the word perilous means something like sneaky or malicious.)

Cleveland sipped his beer and, not looking at Notley but at something somewhere past a bookcase, he asked, “what kind of factory does your father run?”

“It was a trousers factory, sir. But my father had a stroke, and we're no longer in business.”

Notley took a long gulp of his beer, prefacing a lapse in talk. In the silence, he began to wonder if the President brought up Pennsylvania as a sly way of implying the fact he'd worked at the Naval Asylum in Philadelphia was a mark against him.

“A stroke, you say? I'm told I'm due for one of those myself. In any case,” murmured Cleveland, raising his mug, “good health to him.”

After the two men drank to the elder Notley's recovery, the President grunted and retrieved a set of folded papers from his coat pocket. Notley recognized them as the wealth of information, or selections from it, he'd sent to the White House. The President's eyes roamed slowly over the papers as he sipped his beer. Notley increased the frequency of his own sipping, for the sake of something physical to do to ease his nerves, being he had no hat to clutch.

He was stung by Cleveland's tone when he finally spoke; it was a baffled tone with a hint of incredulity:

“You shot a man because you thought he was a ghost.”

Cleveland didn't ask this, but stated it, as if to confirm he wasn't misreading the case before him. He then added, “on New Year's night.”

Notley had worded it “The first of January” in his dossier; he wondered if the President's phrasing it New Year's night was his way of reminding him of the optimism implied in the term “New Year” that had been snuffed out by his bullet.

“Did it occur to you, Mr. Notley, that a ghost could not be stopped with a bullet, being in theory a non-physical entity?” asked Cleveland.

Notley again noted the use of Mister rather than Officer. He was by now quite accustomed to being asked why he thought a bullet might stop a specter, so this was noted second. Being so used to this question in the two-and-a-half months since the unfortunate shooting, he was less fumbly with his words as he meekly recited his answer:

“Ghosts, as I understand them, sir, haven't as yet been confined to any undisputed scientific scrutiny. So–as I understand, sir–it can't be said with absolute certainty that a ghost, if they exist, could not be wounded by a bullet. I mean, a bullet fired by a mortal man, sir.”

The President's eyes moved from the papers he held and wandered about the room, as if thinking to himself, does he have a point? After another sip of Straub's best, a languid nod of his head signaled a touché. Notley was relieved the man with one of the highest offices in the land accepted his position as logical, but all the same he privately hoped he was wrong; the thought of Rosie Fallon's ghost, somewhere out there, not only alone but with the capability of being hurt again, made his stomach churn.

“You were taken off patrol duty but not terminated from the metropolitan police force,” Cleveland confirmed.

“Yes, sir. I was put to work in the Rogues Gallery.”

“The what?”

“I'm sorry, sir. It's an informal nickname, sort of. We take photographs of every person we arrest and we catalog them. For records and future identification, etcetera.”

Notley hoped he didn't sound pompous saying etcetera.

“You take photographs.”

“Yes sir. But I also make records. As detailed as possible. For records and future identification.”

“Interesting. Now, the inquest states the man died of infection,” continued Cleveland. “He lingered for five days with a high fever, it says. Mr. Notley, did the doctors who attended this John Poole note the condition of his health prior to your shooting him?”

“I only know that his condition before I–before the accident, was that he was alive, sir,” replied Notley, his eyes avoiding the President.

Cleveland drew a long, noisy breath through his nose. “What I'm getting at, Mr. Notley, is that it's possible that this Mr. Poole might have had any number of ailments, being his age–seventy-two, it says–that if not present, could have made his recovery from his wound more likely.”

Notley remembered the President was once a lawyer, as most of them seemed to be, if they weren't generals.

“I guess that could indeed or definitely have been so, sir. But if I hadn't–if I hadn't shot him in the first place, he wouldn't have got an infection.”

Cleveland raised a grim, brambly eyebrow. “Mr. Notley, did you say those words during the inquest?”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

Cleveland emitted another half-groan, half grunt and shook his ample head. “For your sake, I'd have advised against it. But,” he sipped his beer again, “I have to admire the fact you said it.”

Notley didn't know what the President meant, but he noted the word admire and took it as a positive.

Cleveland's body language signaled resignation as he slumped in his chair and let the papers drop to his lap. His eyes drifted to a window behind his large desk on the far side of the room. His mustache seemed to muffle his words as he murmured, “there's been some legal wrangling in England–” He said the country's name as one would spit out a rude term–for some ninety years now, over the question of diminished responsibility if a man causes grievous bodily harm to another man when he thinks he's in danger–even if it turns out that danger–” Cleveland regained his breath–“that the danger, though perceived at the time, was after the fact found to be non-existent. I believe the debate arose from a similar incident in which a man was shot after being mistaken for a ghost.”

Notley, instead of being relieved he wasn't the first to shoot someone he thought was a phantom, eagerly awaited for the President to continue and declare he sided with those who took such action while in perceived danger though found after the fact to be a non-existent danger, and that he would invoke his executive powers to make Notley a patrolman again.

Instead, the President paused, looked at Notley as if noticing him for the first time, and asked, “what do you think of Hawaii?”

Perhaps the President was about to cite a similar legal wrangling in Hawaii over a man being shot over a non-existent perception of danger.

“I don't know much about Hawaii, sir. I'm not sure where it is.”

“Hm. Well Mr. Notley, long ago, a bunch of missionary types who couldn't mind their own business decided the subjects in the kingdom of Hawaii ought to overthrow their monarchy and apply for annexation,” said Cleveland, with more pep in his speech than he'd utilized since their meeting began.

“Annexation?” asked Notley.

“Annexation,” replied Cleveland.

“When a place becomes a territory?” asked Notley.

“When a place becomes a territory,” replied Cleveland.

Notley stammered and struggled, unsure why he was being asked for his opinion on the Hawaii question. He decided to turn the tables to avoid giving the wrong answer. “What do you plan to do, sir?”

“I plan to leave the islands and the islanders the hell alone and let them continue their Asiatic ways as they please,” said the President firmly and gruffly.

Notley began to think Cleveland was drunk, but knew half a mug of beer, even if brewed by Germans, couldn't inebriate a man; certainly not one as large as President Cleveland. The President's mind was sober but simply elsewhere, apparently Hawaii, and Notley's own problem was far from wherever Hawaii was.

The President placed his elbow on the arm of his chair and leaned his head lazily in his hand, giving him a rather boyish look, despite his graying, thinning hair and wrinkles under his eyes. He'd aged from the images Notley had seen in the newspapers during the 1892 election, three years ago. It was his chubby face that achieved this look of a pouting or brooding child; Notley had been accused many times in his adulthood of sporting such a look in moments of despondency. It was, he knew, his cherub cheeks that did it.

“How's New York City these days?” asked the President. “It's two years since I've been there. A millennium ago,” he added bitterly.

Notley was glad the President's mind was drifting back from Hawaii. “Well, sir, I've been in Manhattan for going on two years now,” he said, not quite answering Cleveland's question. “On the police force,” he added quickly. “That is, I've been on the New York City police force for going on two years–going on two years and counting.”

He winced at his own addendum.

“It's a curious city, sir. It can be...”

He trailed off, fain to choose his words carefully, not sure if the President enjoyed or loathed the city. “It's a hard place to love. But! There's a lot to love about it.”

Notley still couldn't detect any feeling toward the city in Cleveland's face one way or another. So he added, “sometimes. Not all of the time.”

Cleveland's nose let forth a strong gust of wind. “Tammany Hall. They ought to rename it. Rename the entire city and be done with it. In honor of Honest John Kelly and his crooked pals...Honest John...” The President snorted, the sound of phlegm punctuating his disdain for Honest John Kelly, whoever he was. “If John Kelly was Honest, I'm a featherweight.”

Notley didn't know what a featherweight is, but deduced its meaning from the words feather and weight. He knew the remark was a joke, but a bitter one, and decided not to laugh.

“Vigilante clergymen, flapping their gums about reform. As if reform is something an entire city can do if it only hears a lovely sermon. Reform.” The President repeated the word in a mockingly whimsical tone. “I'd like to see one New York City preacher calling for reform take up a nice big stick of hickory and go clubbing every Tammany Hall rat between 34th and 59th Street. They'd get their reform a lot quicker than they would with whining.”

It occurred to Notley that the reason the President felt so comfortable expressing a desire to see physical assaults carried out might have been because he didn't see his guest as a real policeman; he was now relegated to photographing brawlers and bruised women, thus ineffective to prevent crime and make note of Cleveland's violent ruminations. In any case, the thought made him desperate enough to speak up and move the meeting to the business of his demotion.

“Speaking of New York City, sir; I was wondering–in humility, sir–what are your thoughts on my situation?”

“Oh. Yes. This ghost business.” Cleveland leaned forward with his mightiest groan and set his mug on a small table. “I apologize for going off the rails. A lot on my mind.”

“Yes sir, absolutely. A President must bear a terrible weight.”

“Every President before me–the ones I've met, anyway–have told me they think this place is haunted. Chester Arthur mentioned footsteps in the halls when no one was around. Hayes and Harrison both say they've seen wisps of fog. Probably a gas leak in this rickety old castle.”

“What do you think, sir?” Notley hoped the President was a firm believer in ghosts and any threat they might pose that could justify a bullet.

“If there are ghosts in this house, they're probably aching to tell me everything I'm doing wrong. Busybodies, ghosts. People might as well elect them to Congress.” Cleveland sarcastically called out to the empty air, “any ghosts in present company are exempt, of course.”

He then thumbed through Notley's dossier again as the latter fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Mr. Notley, if I'd been your representative I'd have asked about the history of supposed ghost sightings in Manhattan. It might have behooved your defender to ask around that area; find out if the residents have a habit of seeing ghosts. Drunks and vagrants included. If you could show the area has some established history of this kind of–phenomena,” (Cleveland muttered the last word cynically) “then you couldn't be blamed–as much–for panicking and firing your revolver.”

Notley winced at the President's description of the event. He'd been berated plenty for the shooting, but none of his critics had yet attributed to him the sin of panicking.

“As for the part of town in which you shot this man. You were outside the Schermerhorn Building on Lafayette Street.”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Poole, may he rest in peace, was painting the interior late at night. He was dressed in a big white painter's apron, covered in white paint, having a lot of white hair. The moon was shining harshly, very harshly, sir, and the glow gave him sort of a–”

“This ongoing debate I alluded to in England,” interjected the President, again spitting out the country's name, “all came about because the lane on which the poor fellow was shot had a reputation for alleged ghost activity. That's being figured into the responsibility, or lack thereof, as it relates to the man who did the panicking and the shooting, and all future similar cases.”

Notley's ears burned again at the word panicking, and more than ever, he wished he had a hat to squeeze. He took a healthy swallow of beer to give one hand something to do, and followed it with another large swig, hoping it would immediately loosen his lips. He forced out the words, all of them running together:

“Mr. President, sir, is there any way you can restore me to my former position? With all humility, sir.”

Cleveland sighed pityingly. “Oh, Mr. Notley, I have no control over that. That's New York City business. Not federal business, I'm afraid.”

The blow was softened somewhat by the President's newly sympathetic tone. Moreover, Notley had known just beneath the surface of optimism that his plight was small potatoes. He'd only hoped, or had tricked himself into hoping, that the President might be glad to deal with small potatoes for once, instead of the big ones a chief executive is usually thrown.

Leaning his hefty head on his hand again, Cleveland said, languidly, “I greatly appreciate you stopping by this evening, Mr. Notley. It's good to have someone to talk to.”

The President began to rise and Notley took this as his cue to do the same. He quickly finished the rest of his beer, conscious not to waste taxpayer money in case that's where presidents got their beer.

Grover Cleveland walked his guest to the office door, making the guest self-conscious again, being towered over by such a large man of nearly six feet.

“I understand New York City can soon expect quite a whirlwind,” said the President.

“We can? I forgot to read the weather report before I left, sir.”

“A figurative whirlwind, Mr. Notley. In the form of one Theodore Roosevelt.”

“Oh. Yes sir. I read about him in the papers. He's going to head the Board of Commissioners. I think.”

“That's right,” said the President, stopping at the door. “Roosevelt is a force to be reckoned with. I'm fortunate he was on my side as much as he was, Republican or not.”

“Do you know him, sir?”

“I do,” replied the President. “A mighty ally. I don't envy his opponents in your city. Maybe those reform clerics will learn from him to take action.”

Notley thought of the boisterous mustached man Roosevelt, who he'd only seen drawn in cartoons in the papers. He wondered if such a whirlwind of a man could rescue him from life as a photographer in police uniform.

He quickly lost the thought when Cleveland opened the office door and shook Notley's hand. “I wish you the best, Mr. Notley. Be careful Roosevelt doesn't blow you away,” said the President, allowing more warmth in his voice than he had all evening.

“Yes sir,” responded Notley, doing his best to hide his sorrow. “I wish you the best as well. I hope everything works out with Hawaii.”

Cleveland's voice regressed to a grumble. He turned and was heard to say as he slunk back into his office, “clerics. Clerics everywhere, making trouble. Hawaii to New York...”

The door closed with the typically cruel thud with which doors close when the person on the other side has let you down. Notley saw the same big man who'd escorted him up the stairs was crammed into a small chair in the hall, reading a newspaper.

“I'll just...” Notley motioned toward the stairs.

The big man nodded and said with a polite smile, “Someone downstairs will have your coat for you.”

Notley slowly descended the staircase, relishing the feeling, as the office to which he'd been banished was on the ground floor of police headquarters, and he'd had no reason to take a flight of stairs (outside of the tenement where he lived) since his disgrace.

A slightly smaller security man stood at the bottom, holding his coat, as if he'd been alerted Notley was making his exit. As he helped the guest into his coat (which made Notley uneasy for some reason he didn't understand), the security man asked, “did you not have a hat, sir?”

Notley instinctively touched his sparsely populated scalp. “No, I don't have one. Today.”

He felt the need to add “today” so the man might somehow understand he did use headwear on other days–namely his regal police helmet, which he now missed more than ever.

“Oh, yes. I remember now,” said the security man. “Goodnight, sir.”

Notley took a last glance around the Blue Room, pretended it was a room in a house in Baltimore, then forced the thought away, his head heavy enough for one night.

Walking back to his hotel at a sluggish pace that matched his mood, Notley relived the entire meeting in his head. He cringed when he heard himself tell the rotund President he “must bear terrible a weight.” Combing the conversation for more slip-ups, he abruptly stopped in his steps when he heard himself mention his father in the present tense.

The lie he'd told the President, that his father was alive and possibly recovering, and would maybe someday meet Grover Cleveland on the beach, caused his throat to tighten. Naturally, Rosie Fallon's face appeared in his mind's eye, he could smell her perfume, and he panicked just the way he had when he'd shot poor ghostly John Poole.

He forced himself to keep moving. As he lazily made his way down the gloomy gas-lit street in the cold, he struggled to retain some pride; tonight at least, he would refuse to be a thirty-five-year-old policeman who sniffled as often as he did. But being only forty miles from Baltimore was too much; he walked the rest of the way to the hotel with the salty taste of tears and mucous on his upper lip.

(You can browse my other books here.)

I'm Not Worried About "The Rise of Islam"

Yesterday, I got a text message from an unknown sender, asking if I'd answer a few questions about my county (Randall County, Texas). Texts like this are common enough in a political year. I'd normally ignore them, but something (probably my naturally poor judgment) prodded me to follow the link in the message.

There were only two questions: how did I plan to vote and which among a list of issues was the single most concerning to me. Among the options of mail-in ballots, early voting, absentee, in-person on election day, I chose my preferred method. The second question and the list of issues it listed were mostly standard fare: healthcare, inflation and the rise in the cost of living, gas prices, immigration and border security, reproductive rights, and one that stood out among the others: "the rise of Islam." 

It was a strange thing to list among issues that are objective concerns among Texas citizens, no matter their views on them, and its inclusion hinted at which party was behind the poll. 

I feel an affinity for the adherents of Islam. Our respective doctrines may be separated by a great gulf, but I can relate to anyone whose religion is blamed for social woes by ignorant people with knee-jerk reactions; moreover, I sympathize with anyone who, like me as a Christian, sees their holy text misinterpreted, miscontextualized and villified by those with only a superficial understanding of it.

I am not worried about "the rise of Islam" for two reasons. The first being, I know that Muslim does not equal violent extremist. I'll sleep fine if my apartment complex sees a huge influx of Muslim tenants. The second being, my own faith. How pitifully weak would a Christian's faith have to be for them to live in fear of another doctrine's rise? The Christian who fears Islam bringing the world into subjection forgets that the truth of Christ cannot be diminished - Jesus says of His church, "the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it" (Matthew 16:18). If every Christian on Earth today, except two or three, suddenly converted to Scientology, or deconstructed to a belief in nothing, Christ would be Christ no less, and those two or three would remain His Church.  

We'd do well to remember this when trying to legislate our faith.

Sick Things: A Novel - Chapter 1

Sick Things, by Bud Sturguess - Available here, or in PDF form for free, upon request.

Billy Milton - self-righteous, naive, and heartbroken - is a conspiracy theorist newly released from a psychiatric hospital. He learns upon his release that his friend Maggie, with whom Billy is in love, is addicted to drugs and has disappeared. Billy's obsessive search for Maggie leads him to a local homeless shelter known as "The Zoo." Slowly, Billy becomes entangled in the stories of the downtrodden souls who inhabit the shelter. Before he knows it, his mission to expose plots and conspiracies is overwhelmed by his growing love for the forgotten lives at the Zoo - and his struggle to keep a grip on his mental health. Soon, Billy is involved in the recovery of a pregnant addict, the mysterious mission of a mafia hitman, the efforts of a local doctor to help those in need, and a hatred for a local drug dealer that can only end in disaster.

Chapter One

Bestiality is currently not forbidden by federal law in the United States.  

Until very recently, this decade in fact, there were several states in which bestiality was only a misdemeanor. It was a felony in several other states, and the last few states to catch up on anti-zoophilia laws – Hawaii, Wyoming, New Mexico, and West Virginia – have only done so in this decade. Even so, it’s still not yet been made illegal on a federal level. I wrote to several senators and congresspeople, hoping to bring this unspoken issue to their attention. 

It was then that I felt at my least sincere, at my very lowest – when I found myself writing the US Government for help. Bestiality makes strange bedfellows, I suppose. I even wrote to the President, but around the time I mailed my letter from the state hospital, the unjust and violent oil dispute with Venezuela (where wildlife trafficking is rampant) had begun to consume his administration further, so it’s doubtful he gave it ample attention.

Bestiality is a taboo subject, and not one that attracts an abundance of activism, probably due to its exceptionally appalling nature. There are no trending hashtags or celebrity voices raising awareness. But doesn’t its uniquely depraved character elevate the need to address this abomination? It baffles me that lawmakers in a country where such animal abuse is not addressed with far-reaching federal legislation don’t take the chance to raise this issue during their campaigns. They’d certainly secure the animal rights vote, meaning some Republican candidates might even garner votes from liberals who wouldn’t vote for them otherwise. (I’m surprised at the rampant stereotyping that occurs when I ask people if they can guess which states had no laws against bestiality until the 2020s. Instead of those previously mentioned, more often than not, the states they guess are in the Deep South, which I find prejudicial and narrow-minded. When it comes to addressing this issue, the South is actually far more progressive than the rest of the United States.)

While I was confined to the state hospital after my one-man protest at Dr. Alex Enders’ clinic, when I threw a Duraflame log through the window of the building, I was encouraged by my psychiatrist and counselors to pursue some other form of activism. To direct my passions to an issue unlike the one that led me to the clinic that ugly day. What they were telling me, in not so many words, was that my stance against the rabies vaccine was itself some sort of mental illness, or at least a product of my diagnoses. Some other form of activism, they implied, one that won’t rock any boats, is time better spent, activity less likely to get me into trouble. So, I was reduced to campaigning against bestiality. 

(I did not, however, have any delusions that the Federal Government, despite its rampant corruption and infringements, was keeping tabs on my activity – I’m not so vain to think I’m so interesting that the US Government would take any pains to spy on me.) 

I began writing letters to various lawmakers and animal rights groups while still in the hospital, not looking forward to continuing the crusade after my eventual discharge, knowing my heart was not with it as much as it should have been.

My disappointment certainly isn’t to say I think bestiality is an unworthy cause: more people should devote time and attention to issues that aren’t as “mainstream,” so to speak, as domestic abuse or Alzheimer’s disease. But I knew in my heart that I had been called, so to speak, to expose the evil of the rabies vaccine. It was my Moriarty, my Joker. I believed it was the reason I was put on this planet by whatever intellectual force that decides those types of things, should one exist. To expose the rabies needles for what they are – cold, needle-like weapons crafted by murder and lies. And now, my mission, and perhaps my very reason for being on Earth had been taken from me.

The following is from a pamphlet compiled from research by myself and three other fellow anti-rabies vaxxers from our online community. Though I was not ashamed of the title “anti-vaxxer,” and I didn’t shy away from it, it should be stressed that I was not an anti-vaxxer in the broad, blanket sense. My moral ire was aimed at the rabies vaccine, not vaccines as a whole. I suppose I walked a thin line.

My colleagues who assisted in the research for this pamphlet were Trina H. Dewey, LL.D. (Pepperdine University) of Bakersfield, California; RaiderRon77 from Bryan, Texas; and Mean_Mrs_Mustard from Mesa, Arizona.

Mad Ahabs: The Truth About the Rabies Vaccine

“It is, we suppose, quite predictable for a pamphlet of this substance to begin with reference to the JFK assassination. But, although we do posit that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the lone gunman in the assassination, and did indeed act alone as the Warren Commission later concluded (hastily but nonetheless accurately), it is rather his victim that we dispute.

“In an exchange of e-mails with a former CIA official who requested to remain anonymous, it was revealed to us that the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 did not end as told, that is, with President John F. Kennedy agreeing to remove American missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union removing theirs from Cuba. Those events did indeed transpire, but Fidel Castro, feeling like a “third banana” in the scenario, insisted on one trophy – President Kennedy himself. 

“JFK, agreeing to sacrifice himself for the safety of the world, was clandestinely flown to Havana on November 12, 1962, where he would remain imprisoned for the next three years. It was only tragic coincidence that negated his value and leverage to Cuba in any future plans they had with the President, whatever they may have been.

“When Kennedy was secretly exiled to Cuba, he was replaced for public and television appearances by a double named Herman Farina, age forty, an actor and former aviation mechanic. Wisconsin born, Farina was a childhood friend of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Farina was apparently deeply in debt to the mafia (any particular “family” to which he was indebted is unknown). In a last ditch effort to avoid wearing “concrete shoes,” Farina contacted McNamara on September 30, 1962. At first, McNamara simply wished him luck and dismissed his old friend’s problem, but when Castro demanded Kennedy in exchange for restraint from nuclear activity, knowledge of Farina’s JFK impression, which he had performed in night clubs and comedy venues all over the US, and his close resemblance to the President, gave McNamara the idea to simply use Farina as a double for the President, to keep the public from any knowledge of the switch. Surgically cosmetic changes to the comedian’s eyes and lips were performed. It seemed like a preposterous long shot, but amazingly, it worked. 

“With Mrs. Kennedy and her children bereaved of their husband and father by communist politics, Herman Farina was, on camera at least, the “new” President Of the United States. It was only fate that ended his new career; on November 22, 1963, Farina, posing as Kennedy as was his public duty, was shot and killed in Dallas by a small-time communist radical, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was himself none the wiser to the ruse than any other American. Farina’s body was soon after dumped in Martha’s Vineyard. 

“With the American public believing the real Kennedy to be dead, Castro knew no one would believe his Kennedy was the real Kennedy and abandoned his future plans, whatever they may have been, involving the now-former President. Kennedy had been undergoing intense communist indoctrination since his imprisonment began (oddly enough in a heavily secured suite in Castro’s own palace), according to a former member of Castro’s security team, who requested to remain anonymous in an interview via phone. The indoctrination “therapy” seemed to be having an effect on Kennedy, who had begun keeping a diary in May of 1963. In it were brief essays on communism and what he gradually came to see as the evil of capitalism. After two more years of captivity and indoctrination, Kennedy was allowed to leave his “prison” in Castro’s palace as a citizen of Cuba under the new name Juan Monardies. 

“In 1966, after several rumors of JFK sightings in Cuba became a liability to Castro, he had John Kennedy / Juan Monardies sent back to the US, the ousted President agreeing to keep the entire fiasco secret and to never leave Florida, where he could be monitored by Cuban agents under threat of harm to Jacqueline Kennedy and their children. It was in late 1967 that Kennedy met actress Raquel Welch in Tampa, and the two began a discreet affair which led to Welch’s impregnation in February of 1968. Kennedy, having managed to keep his true identity from Welch, looked for help from the undercover Cuban agents assigned to monitor him and an abortion was arranged.”

 

[Note: Raquel Welch was the actress on the poster in Andy Dufresne’s cell in The Shawshank Redemption – not the black and white poster, but the poster at the end, the one which hid his escape tunnel.]

“On March 31st of that year, Usurper / President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek a second full term in the Oval Office. Longstanding enmity between Johnson and former Attorney General and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy hardened LBJ’s determination not to see RFK grasp the now-open Democratic nomination for President. Near the end of May, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara brought to Johnson’s attention a very new mind control drug that had hastily been developed by the Pentagon. A former aide to Secretary McNamara, who gave his story under the pseudonym “D.C. Campbell,” told these authors through e-mail exchange that the drug had been developed from the fetal tissue of John Kennedy and Raquel Welch’s aborted child. Mr. Campbell stated: “The unknown existence of the fetus to the public proved it to be an ideal source of tissue for the mind control drug experiment.”

“An Arab Palestinian who had come to the CIA’s attention, Sirhan Sirhan, who was known to have zealous pro-Palestinian political stances, was chosen as the test subject. Robert Kennedy had publicly expressed devotion to Israel and supported its military. Sirhan was arrested on June 2, 1968 in Los Angeles for “suspicion of robbery” by a CIA agent posing as an LAPD officer. He was taken to a secret Government lab in San Ysidro, administered the drug, and over the next two days instructed to gun down Robert Kennedy. The effect of the drug, one observer noted, was like that of hypnosis. On June 5th, under what was essentially hypnosis, Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. Kennedy died a day later. 

“Lyndon Johnson then ordered the murder of John F. Kennedy in Miami. He was shot and his corpse was dumped at a site known to be a body dumping ground used by local drug lords. Sirhan Sirhan, meanwhile, was thrown under the proverbial bus by the US Government, and was tried and convicted for the assassination of Robert Kennedy. 

“Incidentally, a British doctor who had participated in the development of the aborted fetal tissue into the mind control drug noted that many of the other “ingredients” could possibly be used to treat rabies, and much more effectively than the vaccine developed in 1885 by Louis Pasteur. 

“We ask you to imagine, dear reader, no doubt able to discern for yourself right and wrong, the needle being administered to some poor babe – perhaps your own – the parents completely ignorant to the source of their precious child’s “treatment.” The source was life extinguished by deception and a bloody plot that culminated in murder. 

To a child, skin tender with innocence, the needle is like a harpoon entering its skin, like some weapon of a mad Ahab concocted by the corruption of the United States Government. This is no way to prevent or treat an illness. Physical conditions must not be addressed with moral ailments far more destructive than the physical disease itself. This is neither ethical medical practice or human decency.

“We humbly beseech you, dear reader, to look into your own heart and ask yourself, is it right to treat my precious child with a vaccine born of such lies and death? Is there no better way to protect my young ones from rabies? Can the human race, in all its technological and medical advances, not develop a better formula with a clear conscience? A treatment not worse than the disease?

-W. W. Milton 

and faithful partners.”

[Note: Ahab was the maniacal sea captain in Moby Dick who was obsessed with killing a whale.]

The harpoon. By the time I was released into society again, I didn’t even think of vaccines when I thought of harpoons. Not even the smallpox vaccine and its exceptionally ominous bifurcated needle. I only thought of the harpoon they used on Maggie.

But Maggie was no whale. She was a goldfish in a merciless ocean, pursued by another demented Ahab. These Ahabs, the ones who destroyed Maggie, sought not to expand her mind, nor for her to kiss the sky. They were simply sadists who sought to infest the earth and its bodies with poison for profit. 

If you can believe such, the theft of my life’s purpose of exposing the truth of the rabies vaccine was only the second most devastating change to my life when I was released from the hospital. 

Maggie had disappeared from the face of the planet. From what Patrick, my boss and the founder and owner of Burns Auto, told me upon my return, she’d “got into some dark stuff.” To put a simple and ugly story even simpler and uglier, she’d been introduced to heroin and meth (that is, methamphetamine) by the scum of the earth. She became inevitably addicted and fell apart, as one does, and vanished. Slipped away into some other dimension, it seemed. Like the Nanjing Battalion, the crew of the Mary Celeste, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and the body of the real Ron Paul, Maggie had disappeared without a trace.

Maggie was Margaret Morning Glory Mare. Her mother named her such because her grandmother loved morning glories (a type of flower). Maggie always said she wished her grandmother had loved a flower with a simpler name, like roses or irises. She also hated the name Margaret. Not only did she despise the alliteration of Margaret Mare, she said, “it’s an old lady’s name. I don’t qualify for the name Margaret yet. I haven’t earned it – I haven’t broken my hip or said racist stuff at the dinner table.” 

I suggested the nicknames Magpie, or, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Marge. She “wasn’t feeling them,” especially “Large Marge.” So I called her Maggie. And she called me Billy. 

After she disappeared, I wouldn’t let anyone call me anything else. I’d been called Wyatt all my life, due to my father also having been named William. My mother forbade my father from making me a junior, for the reason that I might be given a silly nickname to differentiate from my father. Among the most repulsive options were “Little Bill,” “Billy Boy,” “Buffalo Bill,” and “Bubba.” My father compromised and gave me a different middle name than his, to avoid siring me William Milton, Jr. 

It worked out well for me in any case, as I could never be William Milton, suffix or not. Just as Maggie felt she hadn’t earned the name Margaret, I felt I’d not earned the name William Milton. To me, it would be akin to calling one’s self Ghost Rider while having no flaming skull on your shoulders, no motorcycle, no sense of hellbent vengeance. My father was William Milton. “Will” to friends and family. Never Billy.

When Maggie slipped away, I became Billy Milton. It was my way of hanging onto her. My psychiatrist, his nurses, and his student doctors called me Mr. Milton. That was fitting, as only strangers call one another mister and missus. And I had no desire to know them anymore than that. They were strangers who pretended not to think I was an absolute lunatic of a neanderthal.

I believed Maggie and I were in the gradual throes of being brought together forever. And I believed we were, instead, wed by a ceremony of separation, the closeness of which I intended never to break. Love’s mind was bursting with mad genius, and she had her hands full when shaping us, like two play-dough figurines in a cosmic game of Cranium, the part where you have to shape things out of play-dough, a cosmic play-dough unreachable to our fallible human hands. That’s what Love was doing for Maggie and me – shaping us, when Fate and Destiny slapped Love’s work from her hands and called her an idealistic troglodyte.

The first time I saw Maggie, her first day working in the front office of Burns Auto, I didn’t believe she was really there. There was no way she was real. She must have been the carefully crafted product of a factory that makes androids of deceptive beauty, I reasoned. Maybe the Night Surgeons had put something in the drinking water. No one could be that beautiful and still be so real. No one could be that beautiful. No one could be so beautiful but so obviously in pain. 

I didn’t have the delusion that she was some hologram designed by the “men in black” or some other such absurd conspiratorial boogeymen. Still, she seemed too gentle, too cool, too real, to be real.

Maggie was tall and thin, with olive skin, long arms, and dark brown eyes that always looked so tired. Maybe that was what made her seem so smooth and so cool in everything she did. As if she were disengaged in whatever she was doing, but her beauty overwhelmed the disinterest and made her seem somehow interested, but still too cool for the room, too cool to be doing whatever she was doing. Her hair was auburn, almost the color of a frozen piece of high quality steak. She always wore it up in a tussled bun. I never once saw Maggie with her hair down while she worked at the shop. 

She always wore black. She didn’t work in the garage, so she didn’t wear the standard blue coveralls like the rest of us. Whether it be a black t-shirt with black yoga pants, or a long-sleeve black summer dress, she was always in the garb of a mourning widow. It fit her perfectly: those eyes that always looked so tired were eyes one would see at a funeral, a wake that had taken a long and difficult trip to reach. 

But she spoke gently, not lifelessly or melancholically. Her soft, husky voice contradicted that sadness in her eyes. It was a voice you’d hear not at a funeral, but at a wedding, the less hammy and sappy of them, reciting some poignant but brief custom vow. Her lips were full, not quite plump, but full. When she smiled, it was never a big, toothy smile. She never showed her teeth when she smiled. Her full lips would curve upward with all their might, but were too weary to form a proper beam.

Maggie must have been two, maybe three inches taller than me. The first time I saw her smile was when I told her Patrick should appoint her as the Vice President in Charge of Reaching Things on the Top Shelf. It was also the first time I heard her laugh. It was so strange hearing such a soft but whimsical laugh come from such a sad face.

To this day I feel stupid for being shocked that she’d been using methamphetamine. I would have been shocked that she was partaking in any type of narcotic, but meth as I understood it was an ugly girl’s drug. It was one of those Southern, trailer trash addictions. I suppose I was just as ignorant and prejudiced as those who assumed bestiality only existed in the cotton states. When Patrick told me she’d eventually been led further into darkness by means of heroin, in my idiocy and ignorance it made more sense. Heroin is a New York drug, and Maggie looked as if she belonged in Greenwich Village, reciting poetry at a coffee house. But the poisons of man know no state or cultural boundaries, and they don’t seek only those into whose crowds they can blend.

Once, she called the garage on a day she’d called in sick and was absent from work. She asked specifically to speak to me. She asked if she could borrow fifteen dollars for gas, but she refused to meet me at the garage to retrieve it. 

“I just can’t go there today,” she said. 

I thought it odd, but reasoned that maybe she was playing hooky and didn’t want Patrick to know. We all have those days, I suppose. She asked if I could meet her behind the Dollar General across the street. When I gave her the money, she tried to give me some history books in return, as she knew I enjoy such things. She also had in her car a pile of old pulp romance novels. But I wouldn’t let her part with her books. 

Then, she gave me a side-hug. That side-hug was the catalyst, the tipping point that sent me spiraling in love with her. I desperately wish I hadn’t. When you fall in love with someone, you put a filter on your eyes and brain that makes it easier to ignore the red flags that dot the field of your love like the red poppies of Flanders Fields.

As time and our friendship went on, Maggie was always broke. I should have known something was amiss, and I should have asked her – no – I should have demanded to know what was going on, instead of giving her money every time I could tell she wasn’t eating, or when she needed help with rent or a bill for this or that. She very seldom directly asked me, mind you, nor did she sneak it into conversation to drop a hint. 

I often overheard her on the phone with her mother, who must have called her at least three times a week from her native Canada. I never heard Maggie ask her for any kind of help. I didn’t eavesdrop (though I suppose I actually did), but the only thing I ever distinctly heard Maggie say was after the call had ended: as if it were a ritual, she always repeated to herself, “I’m not my mom. I’m not my mom...”

And of course, there was Candyman.

Candyman was a banty rooster in human form who came into the front office perhaps twice a week with the express purpose of talking to Maggie and Maggie only. He never smiled. He never looked happy. Sometimes I thought he must have been some kind of android disguised as a person, as no human being could keep such a poker face while speaking to a collection of such beautiful atoms and tender carbon as Maggie. But, somehow, he never displayed any delight in seeing her. 

I hated it when he came into the office. The guy had scruffy facial hair, the hair of someone who can’t grow a proper beard or mustache, but in denial, he tells himself his wispy, dirty growth is sufficient to pass for manhood. Maybe that’s why he was such a sharp dresser – his newly pressed button-down shirts and corduroy jackets took the attention from his pathetic facial hair. He was likely the same age as me, in his late twenties, yet hadn’t registered the hint that the love between his face and his hair follicles was not meant to be. But those crisp jackets and vulgar JC Penney shirts did their job of distracting from it. 

The suspicion that this dandysprat was Maggie’s “sugar daddy,” as the crass term goes, led the boys in the garage to call him “Candyman.”

My jealousy would tumble into the caverns of hate when I saw him hand her money. Every time he came into the office, he leaned on the counter and talked to her like a father lecturing a child, and invariably handed her a few bills of cash. It made me want to be rich, beyond JC Penney rich like Candyman, to discover a treatment for rabies that didn’t come from conspiracy and evil, to get rich from it, set up a few charity hospitals, and buy Maggie a big house all her own. 

I think of it now, and I absolutely hate that feeling. The desire to do good in the world because you hate someone that much, rather than loving people with as much, if not more, genuine feeling than you hate the person you despise. 

Though Candyman gave her money every week, and she earned a regular paycheck, Maggie was routinely short of funds. I should have known something was amiss. But what really should have set off my alarms was how erratic she became. Toward the time I was hauled away to the hospital, the week of the fiery protest in April, it had become characteristic of Maggie to ramble when she spoke, to jump from one topic to the next, sometimes to the point that I couldn’t make heads or tails of the point she was trying to make. 

My last day of work, before the event that led to my hospitalization, Patrick was noticeably irritated with her. Whenever a customer came inside, she would hurry into his office, exclaiming she was afraid of whoever had just walked into the building, no matter who it was. Even a shrunken old woman who came to pay her bill for a blinker repair sent her into a panic. Patrick grudgingly went to the front counter and tended to the customers, while Maggie sat in his office, chewing her thumbnail, a look of frantic worry attempting to invade the cool beauty of her eyes, like a Germany of fear breaking the Maginot Line of her tender face.

Oddly enough, the first time she ever behaved erratically in any form was what led to us becoming actual friends. Though she’d already nicknamed me Billy, and I her Maggie, we were still only work associates until that Friday in January. She’d worked at Burns Auto for three months or so by then. That day, she looked more tired than usual, but she was also quite jumpy. She was frazzled, dropping things, behavior that belied how cool and calm she usually was. Suddenly, there came the sound of sirens, growing louder, getting closer to the shop. While working in the garage with the boys, I panicked and excused myself to the bathroom. I didn’t even think to listen long enough to differentiate between the sound of ambulance, fire or police sirens.

I discreetly left the garage and ran into the repo barn next door, thinking it to be a secure hiding place. I dove into the back of a recently repossessed orange Subaru, only to find Maggie already there. She looked at me, surprised and almost ashamed, like a child caught doing something they shouldn’t. She laughed a little nervous laugh. 

“I heard the sirens,” she said quietly. “The cops scare me.”

“They scare me, too,” I replied. Then, after somewhat of an awkward pause while we stared at one another, I asked, “Were they police sirens? Maybe it was an ambulance.”

“No, they were definitely cop sirens. They’re like Hendrix’s guitar. You know it as soon as you hear it. You know it’s not Jack White or somebody, you know?” Maggie said.

I didn’t tell this to Maggie, but I’d been wary of the police ever since Dr. Enders’ clinic filed their first complaint when they discovered and confiscated my (admittedly cheap and ineffective) surveillance equipment in their waiting room. The police came to my apartment and told me not to go back unless I had a serious medical issue that needed tending. They also made sure to emphasize how gracious it was for the doctor not to press charges. I was indignant. 

This was Dr. Enders’ second office, a free clinic for indigent patients. It was too much, seeing the spread of this moral abomination in syrup form spreading to the salt of the earth, so to speak, the most humble among us. After the incident with the bugging equipment, I went to the police, provided my findings about the rabies vaccine, and insisted Dr. Enders’ offices be closed and raided, his records seized. I was given a restraining order against the doctor himself for my efforts. 

When I heard the sirens that day in January, I thought maybe the police had found more of the recording equipment they’d missed the first time and were coming after me to lock me up, or turn me over to the Night Surgeons. Only now does it occur to me that no one would have sent a caravan of squad cars, sirens blaring, to apprehend the village idiot.

Maggie evasively explained why she was afraid of the police, saying rather shyly that she’d failed to pay a fine for a traffic violation, and another for being caught with a controlled sedative that hadn’t been prescribed to her, which she had borrowed from a friend for her anxiety. 

When she asked me likewise, I didn’t mention my illegal and idiotic surveillance. Instead I gave another story, albeit a true story, just not the one over which I was so exceptionally worried: I explained I’d been researching diseases in New Guinea, and in doing so I’d happened upon several photos of the indigenous tribes of the land, among them a picture of several young men in their “birthday suits,” so to speak. This made me uneasy, as I didn’t know if the lads in the photograph were of a legal age. If not, my computer now held the memory bytes of illegal images.

“I feel gross about the whole thing,” I told her truthfully.

“Well,” Maggie shifted in the seat and tapped the back of the driver’s seat with her foot. “I’ve heard you talk about...um...diseases. I mean, you know. The stuff you do...”

I braced my guts, not knowing if she was clenching a verbal fist of ridicule, or something more innocent.

“...and, you could prove really easy that you were just researching diseases and stuff, since that’s what you’re kind of known for. And if the guys in the picture were underage, it was just an honest mistake. You didn’t go to the Dark Web to find them, did you?”

She smiled slyly, with a mock stern expression, raising her eyebrow.

“Nooo, no, nothing like that. It was Wikipedia.”

Maggie tried to stifle a hard chuckle, her full pink lips blowing together. “I think you’ll be fine,” she said.

We must have sat in the back of the Subaru for almost an hour and a half, just talking and talking. Though, I did a lot of listening, too. Maggie had come to Whistling Elk, California from Steinbach, Manitoba. “I literally threw a dart at a map,” she said. She wanted to get away from her mother, by whom she felt she was being negatively influenced emotionally. 

“I think her anxiety was starting to rub off on me. I was anxious when she was anxious. I was negative about everything when she was negative about everything. It was like a spell or something. But it went from being anxious about what was gonna come in the mail that day to being anxious about every little thing in my life. Where was I going? What was I doing? Would I ever be somebody or would I just be nobody? I just needed to get away for a while. I needed to put some distance between me and that kind of energy. I think I’m trying to prove to myself that it’s her, not me. That I haven’t been permanently affected by all that fear. That I’m not the one who’s afraid all the time.” 

Maggie picked imaginary lint from her shirt and pants. “I’ll go back someday. But I have to prove to myself it’s not me. That I’m not the one who’s scared all the time,” she said, as we cowered in the backseat of a Subaru because we heard sirens that had long passed. 

“I just don’t want to live that way,” she concluded. “I refuse.”

I felt sad when she said she’d eventually return to Canada. I didn’t want her to ditch her mother forever, but I didn’t want to lose this human being that made my day so much brighter, though she didn’t know she did so. My brain fumbled to find something to say.

“I can’t tell you what the mailman will bring,” I told her, “but I do know you’ll never be nobody. You’ll always be somebody. Everyone is somebody. The challenge is being somebody who does what’s good and what’s right. And I have no reason to think you can’t meet that challenge. Never think you’re nobody.”

Maggie played with her hands after I gave my brief, hokey speech. She was probably as embarrassed as I was when someone said something positive about me. I could never accept it. I simply didn’t know how. Maybe I simply lacked the humility required to accept a good word.

“Thank you,” she eventually said, softly of course. “I’d like to move down to Half Moon Bay someday, just for a little while. I saw the name on the map and it sounded nice. I love pictures of beaches. I’ve still never seen an actual beach in person since I came to California. Can you believe that?”

“I can believe it. I avoid them. I’m very aquaphobic,” I replied. “I had a fascination with books about the Bermuda Triangle when I was a kid. They scared me so bad I never learned how to swim.”

“I can teach you to swim, you know,” Maggie said.

Butterflies led an air assault on my stomach.

“What do you think causes all those disappearances?” she asked.

Don’t say extraterrestrial forces.

“Magnets. Magnetic quirks. Magnetic phenomena in...on the surface of the seabed.”

“Yeah?” Maggie looked out of the window thoughtfully. “I think it’s aliens.”

I asked her about her father. 

“Well. When I was nine, he went out for a pack of cigarettes.”

“Oh...ohhh. I see...”

“Yeah...he’s been searching for that perfect brand for fifteen years now.”

[Note: “Going out for a pack of cigarettes” was once a code a deadbeat father would use when announcing he was leaving the house, but planning never to return. It started in the 1940s, when a person could easier leave their family and start a new life without being found. It gradually wore off as technology made it more and more easy to track everyone’s whereabouts. I suppose there are some benefits to our governments knowing where we are at all times.]

“He lives in Saskatoon now, the last I heard,” Maggie went on. “He got remarried and had another kid. But he left them, too. He just can’t find that perfect cigarette. He’s looking for the holy grail of cigarettes, I guess. But. At least then my mom and I knew it wasn’t just us that...that made him want to go away to look for it.”

The more we talked, we discovered we have the same birthday, May 18th, me being two years older. She asked me about my parents. I explained that my mother was killed in a car accident when I was seventeen. I told her that’s why I went to Perdida County Community College to learn to be a mechanic and specialize in brake repair and maintenance. It had been faulty brakes that caused my mother’s accident. I told her about my father, who had died the year before when he was poisoned by the VA Hospital for reporting patient abuse. I went on about having two older half-sisters from my mother’s first marriage, and several nieces and nephews, adding limply that we never speak.

“Why not?” Maggie asked.

I had the nerve to shrug as if I didn’t know why. Then, I lied. It was a small lie, but it was a lie, and I was lying to someone who was being so open and vulnerable with me. “I think it’s resentment,” I said. “Resentment to my being a half-brother from a man who wasn’t their father. They simply never saw me as a full brother, I suppose. Which is fair, because by definition I am after all a half-brother.”

I didn’t mention how my preaching about the rabies vaccine and disapproval of their children being filled with the world’s wizardry had probably had something to do with our slow estrangement. It’s not lost on me that my views and zeal have alienated a lot of people who might have otherwise been part of my life. Which makes it all the more amazing that I was eventually able to talk about those views with Maggie. 

Already weighing with the guilt of my dishonesty, like an Atlas carrying a globe of dishonesty on his shoulders, shoulders weak from conscience, I tried to change the subject. But I went right to the rabies vaccine. Maybe it was a subconscious transition, being that I’d lied about why my sisters and I had drifted apart. I took a Mad Ahabs pamphlet from one of the pockets of my coveralls (yes, I did keep a few on my person at all times). I timidly asked, “Would you care to read this sometime? I mean, when you get a few minutes.”

“There aren’t any pictures of naked New Guinean guys, are there?” she asked. 

I laughed. A legitimate, unadulterated laugh. 

Maggie took the pamphlet. I knew she thought it was nonsense. But one mustn’t be thin-skinned when they believe something so controversial. Or when they believe anything, I suppose. Their beliefs will make them much more miserable than beliefs already make a person. 

“You wrote this?” Maggie asked. 

“Well, I co-wrote it.”

She looked it over again. “Will you autograph it?”

I felt my eyes widen with surprise and confusion at not hearing any condescension in her voice. I signed the pamphlet. And, I dotted the i in Billy with a smiley face. I would have dotted it with a heart, but that would have been far too forward this soon.

“Do you have many friends?” 

I didn’t know why she asked that. Maybe she simply somehow knew.

“Not as many as I had when I was a kid, in Point Pleasant.”

“Where’s that?”

“West Virginia.”

“Point Pleasant, West Virginia. That sounds nice. I wish my dart had landed there.”

“It’s quite tiny.”

“But it sounds so quiet.”

“If you only knew...”

Maggie’s eyes narrowed. “Wait. I know that name. I heard it on a documentary. There’s some kind of flying monster there, right?” 

I was slightly stunned that someone outside West Virginia had ever heard of Point Pleasant or its claim to fame – the “Mothman sightings” of 1966. Purported to be part man, part moth, this horrifying creature with glowing blood-red eyes and an ungodly shriek terrorized Point Pleasant’s residents. Numerous sightings were reported by townsfolk whose eyes would be forever stained by the mustard of terror at what they beheld, even if no one believed them. Including me. 

I stifled a groan. “Yes. That’s where the Mothman was seen.”

“I remember the name of the town because I thought, that sounds like a nice, quiet place to live. A great place for a monster,” Maggie said.

“A great place for a monster, indeed,” I replied. “They’ve got a statue for him and everything. They practically worship it like a Babylonian image. Babylonian, I tell you, Maggie.” 

Maggie gave me a look. I instantly knew what she was thinking. My words betrayed my disbelief in the Mothman, yet she’d just read my outrageous pamphlet, and had no doubt overheard me telling the boys in the garage about the human colonies on Mars. But it wasn’t a look of condescension. It wasn’t a look of bemusement. 

It was the look of someone trying to figure out someone else. 

At that moment my heart and stomach fluttered with butterflies of humanity. If there were such a thing as the Butterfly Man, he’d have materialized then and there in the back of that Subaru, a manifestation of how important I suddenly felt to someone else. Maggie’s look was the look of someone who cared enough to think, to try to understand another human being. Though, her sleepy-cool demeanor hid any tear-jerking gooeyness of such a sentiment.  

“You don’t think the Mothman is real?” she asked. 

“Well...yes and no. Let me explain.” 

I almost lost my train of thought and my canned information when Maggie turned in the seat to face me, resting her elbow and leaning her face in her hand, offering me her full attention. It almost triggered a malfunction of my entire neurological skeleton.

“I...you see, the...” I finally collected myself. “Well, there was certainly something in the skies over Point Pleasant, but it was no half-moth, half-man hybrid.”

“No?” 

“No. It was completely inanimate. It was an experiment by the Government – ours,  you know – for use in the Vietnam War.” 

“Typical,” Maggie said.

“Right? The CIA put a chemical they’d developed into the town’s drinking water, to induce hallucinations. Then, they used a crudely made drone shaped like a winged beast-man to induce panic in the townspeople, which was intensified by the chemical they’d concocted.”

My tongue became twisted when I said “chemical they’d concocted,” which made Maggie laugh. A small, cool giggle. 

“Like the Scarecrow did in Batman Begins,” she said. “I see.”

I nodded and said, “exactly!”, though I’d never seen the movie.

I went on, “Thus explaining the red glowing eyes, the huge fluttering wings, the shriek that the creature was reported to emit. They hoped, the Government that is, to do the same in Vietnam, to disorient the superstitious Vietcong.” 

“Did they ever actually use the Mothman in Vietnam?”

“They did, but they didn’t bother tainting the water with the hallucinogens. The military assumed the Vietnamese were so primitive that they’d shrink in terror at seeing anything unusual in the sky. But, each drone was immediately shot down and repaired by the Vietcong, who flew them into North Vietnam to carry intelligence reports. It backfired on the US Government, and I can’t say I feel sorry for them. They thought the Vietnamese were stupid, superstitious neanderthals rather than reasonable people like us, who do the reasonable thing and shoot at whatever scares them.” 

Maggie continued to gaze, studying me. My heart felt still and fragile. I felt it could be pushed into the sea like a helicopter during the evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon. But this helicopter was not being pushed into the South China Sea – this helicopter heart was in danger of falling into the South Sea of Love. 

I had to say something before I underwent a mental breakdown from the overwhelming beauty of Maggie’s gaze. And yes, I do assert to you that it was indeed a gaze.  

“The Mothman was asinine indeed...” I fumbled for a segue, something to counsel this burgeoning friend. “As absurd as our fears. Some of our fears, anyway. We run in terror from hybrid creatures in the sky, but if only we’d face them, we’d find them to be only drones. I mean, not that there aren’t things in the sky that should truly scare us. But...um...our fears are only true monsters if we let them become such.” 

The garage fell even quieter. We’d been hiding in the Subaru for well over an hour. We must have both realized it at the same time. Maggie and I exited the vehicle and looked at each other like two children who had just hidden in a closet from a monster, and had just figured out that said monster was only the sound of the air conditioner. Embarrassed, but ready to convince each other there had truly been a monster. 

As we slinked back to the shop, Maggie sighed. 

“I think I’d rather be chased by the Mothman than chased by myself.”

Trump Has Been Held Accountable

If you need some form of silver lining in your week, consider this: writer E. Jean Carroll, who in 2023 was found by a jury to have been sexually abused and defamed by President Donald Trump, has received the 5.6 million dollar judgment she was awarded.

The money had been held in escrow the past three years, but Carroll's lawyer confirms payment was received this week. The judgment was upheld by the Supreme Court.

This is a civil judgment, and not the jail sentence Trump deserves. But the important thing to take away from this latest development - other than the President of the United States is a rapist and his party doesn't care - is that a woman Trump abused took him to court, and won. After twice surviving impeachment and receiving an unconditional release after his felony convictions, he has finally been, in some small but notable way, held accountable.

Hypocrisy is Hypocrisy - Truth is Truth

My bio/about me in most of my socials may sound like hyperbole, but I don't believe it is:

57th-worst sinner who ever lived. Saved by the blood of Jesus Christ.

I'm not so self-loathing that I don't think there are at least 56 sinners worse than me. But I also don't think the sins from which I've been cleansed were less egregious or offensive to God than almost everyone else's. I've always tried to emphasize in my limited capacity as a preacher that I'm a sinner who was given a few good words to say by the grace of God. To put it whimsically, the Biblical figure I most resemble is Balaam's donkey - a hairy and dumb creature miraculously given some wise words to share.

The American Founding Fathers took up the herald that "all men are created equal." Still, many of them were slaveowners. Later generations cited this declaration of equality in their fight against slavery. "All men are created equal" is a stark example of how someone can say something that exposes them as a hypocrite, but the truth and sentiment of what they say remains intact.

One of the unique things about the Bible is that so many of its heroes or most important figures aren't so lionized as to make them seem flawless. The two most prominent examples lie in two of Israel's greatest kings, David and his son Solomon. David was a mighty warrior who was famously described as being "after God's own heart." But among the times he was disobedient to God was his Machiavellian plot of coercing Bathsheba, a married woman, into having sex with him, then conspiring to ensure her husband Uriah would be killed in battle. Even so, King David wrote many of the Psalms, some of the most key pieces of Scripture - including a psalm in which he expressed his contrition and anguish in repentance of these sins (Psalm 51). The Psalms are pivotal in Christian theology, many of them pointing to the coming Savior, Jesus.

David's son Solomon was hailed as the wisest man in the world, and wrote most of the book of Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, and possibly the book of Ecclesiastes. Yet toward the end of his life and reign as king, as 1 Kings chapter 11 tells us, his heart was turned away from Yahweh as a result of his lust for the flesh - and his disregard for an instruction in the Torah that forbids kings from having many wives (Deuteronomy 17:17). 

And yet with these marks on these men's records, their words are invaluable treasures in our holy texts. Their praise of God, their enthusiasm in pointing their readers to Him, is not made dim or erased by their glaring sins. This is a stunning example of God's grace - He allows us sinners to speak truths that reveal Him. Even Judas Iscariot, who was a thief and later betrayed the Lord, performed miracles with the Twelve. 

It's important to note that Scripture is Divinely inspired, a word meaning "God-breathed" - "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work" (1 Timothy 3:16-17). The words these men shared flowed from the Holy Spirit and not their own personal whims. 

I've used this blog for many things, among them sharing the Gospel. This includes spiritual truths recorded by very flawed men, by Divine inspiration, truths from the holy Scriptures we've come to call the Bible. If my own many, many mistakes and misdeeds are ever scrutinized or magnified, I hope it's understood, if only so any good word I've shared wasn't shared in vain, that our sins don't negate the edifying things a Christian speaks about Christ. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), and as unfaithful Solomon (possibly) wrote before his own downfall: "there is not a just man on earth who does good and does not sin" (Ecclesiastes 7:20). The exposure of a Christian as an unrepentant hypocrite doesn't put an asterisk next to the truth he or she has spoken - even if it does cast a pall on their character.

A person steeped in unrepentant sin has no place to preach God's word. And yet it happens all the time - it's almost a trope that pastors and vocal Christians are caught committing some terrible indiscretion. But in your heartbreak and grief over that person's seemingly strong example being daashed to pieces by their hypocrisy, remember this one thing: a hypocrite is a hypocrite, but truth remains truth.

Think of it this way: if someone says Earth is round, but is caught at a Flat Earther convention, it doesn't change the truth that the planet is indeed round. Or, someone who advocates for the funding of advancement in medical science who's caught posting conspiracy theories on an anti-vax message board.

It's immensely difficult sometimes to focus on Christ when He's being spoken through people. It's easy to see only the person speaking about Him, to put them on pedastals for their eloquence or character. This is why it's important to latch onto the truth of Jesus in their words, and only Jesus, even if we think the speaker's character is unimpeachable. When we find that it's not - as we certainly will - we'll have grasped the truth of the Gospel from what they've said, and not an unhealthy reverence for the person relaying it. Anyone proclaiming Jesus will let you down - they're sinners like you and me. Even if those disappointments come not from sin or malice but some minor slight or disagreement, we'll always find some reason to be disenchanted, even if only slightly or briefly, by human beings. That disenchantment of course feels much heavier when the person who lets you down is a person from whom you've gathered some beautiful piece of truth.

But remember: a hypocrite is a hypocrite, but truth remains truth. That's one of the great things about God - He is unchanging and unchangeable; the truth He reveals to us never disappoints, even if the people sharing it will.