For Petie's Sake

By Kimbell Vincent

Through crazed pathos and blinding fear this is an uplifting story of humanity restored – not an easy task for a jail bird, schizophrenic and murderer. Our hero typifies the struggle between good and evil and the axiom: Life’s a bitch and then you die.
Petie, step out here and say a few words. He’ll do it if you give him a chance. It’s the sort of thing he’s good at. In fact, he does it all the time. Petie is the other half of each of us that few people talk about. St. Augustine did, in his Confessions; but Petie puts a new perspective on things – after all, he’s a cricket. Close to death and in conflict with himself and society – find out how our hero is restored through extraordinary involvement with Petie, his alter-ego, the product of dream-madness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kimbell Vincent
• Release date: Jan 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465944528

Kimbell Vincent

By age 16 Kim Vincent was captivated by the metaphysical. This fascination is still with him and shows up in his eight books. In his 30’s he was hosting home discussion groups and playing the organ in two different churches. By age 40 he had one of the largest collection of metaphysical books in Canada and had developed a 160 acre spiritual retreat which was attended by folks from all over the world. At the same time he organized university seminars and was featured on various radio shows and hosted a 33 week television series entitled “This Psychic World.” It was then that an editor from Doubleday came across some of his lecture papers and asked him to write an encyclopedia on parapsychology. That was almost 30 years ago. Once hooked, he has been writing ever since, during which time he had a construction business, a land development company, an architectural design practice, a vinyl window factory and a pewter foundry. The encyclopedia, updated and in a more popular style, is now available under the title GETTING REAL. A few years ago Kim was injured in a construction accident and is now confined to a wheelchair. According to Kim: “Things have not been dull. If I’ve got it figured right, I’m now on my third life, doing what I love most.”

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For Petie’s Sake

by

Kimbell Vincent

Copyright 2012 by Kimbell Vincent

Smashwords Edition

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 978-1-4659-4452-8

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To give you an idea how Petie’s mind works, his best definition of happiness is the way Dante put it in his poem entitled Beatrice. It’s supposed to be a kind of love story in which Dante reveals how Beatrice turns his crank. It works out, though, that the word Beatrice translates as making happy, and what Dante was really talking about was being in love with himself. So, go figure. I heard that kind of stuff gives you warts.

In a world where people love ice cream and snazzy cars, it’s hard for me to make much sense out of Petie’s notion of love, let alone the idea of being in love with love. It’s too abstract for me, if not downright absurd, which point Petie conceded when he said it was indeed unreasonable and for some people almost unattainable. But, taken in context with everything else, he insisted it was the only thing that really made any sense after all was said and done. That argument could have gone on forever so I let it drop.

The fact was that Petie was on a crash-course to convert me or something. But I let him know straight-off that how I think is strictly my own business. Still, like I said, he didn’t give up easily.

Chapter One

The first thing I knew I was caught up in my own dream. Has that ever happened to you? When you know you’re awake, but the dream just keeps on anyway? Well, that’s how it all began. It was the night of 7 November...

Petie! Where are you? I screamed, whirling about as panic ripped through me. "Petie? I yelled again, frantic. But there was no response. I was alone. I stood there mystified as the seeping cold swirled around me. A crumpled lottery ticket bounced by, making scratchy sounds in the gutter. I reached for a lamp post to steady myself. My legs were shaking.

The street was empty. Not a soul in either direction. The streetlight penetrated the dark like a dandelion puffball, with a slight crimson aura where it blended into the blackness. I could feel the night mist on my cheeks. Then, in my mind’s eye, I remembered how the damp gathered in Petie’s eyes like pearls. Would I ever see him again? Had I pushed him too far this time? It wouldn’t be the first time, but maybe it was the last.

Petie? I said, weakly, more to myself than anyone. A part of me knew it was useless. I laughed, mirthlessly, thinking that now I could die in peace after all, without Petie haranguing me all the time. Well, at least die anyway. I had given up on the peace part a long time ago.

You see, I figure that I’m a realist and it’s Petie who’s the dreamer. But somehow the tables got turned on me, sometime last fall, and the closer we got to Christmas the worse it became. I just didn’t feel like my old self anymore. No more zip. I was tired of running all the time and living a life on the dodge. It was the carols that got to me – that season to be jolly crap. I’m afraid that the only rest this merry gentleman will ever get is in a pine box.

I couldn’t convince Petie though. He’s a died-in-the-wool optimist. Can’t help himself, I guess. But it only makes him miserable, especially when he talks about his kids, how he misses them and how he’d do things different, by golly, if he ever had the chance again. Petie’s inclined to muse a lot and he talks to himself most of the time. Not me though. Although I know better, some people figure I’m a few bricks short of a load – just an old fogy with a stolen shopping cart, too many coats and a perpetual yen to find just one more bottle, usually an empty.

Anyway, that’s how Petie and I get along. On empties. When they put a deposit on just about every kind of bottle there ever was, Petie thought we had landed in heaven already. Heck, there were days when we couldn’t scrape up a buck between us. Now, suddenly, we’d make two-bits out’a nearly every trash bin. The back lanes were a treasure hoard and it was nothin’ to glean three of four dollar’s worth of cans and bottles in a single outing. That’s about as much as we could pack, unless we used a second shopping cart, but that meant stashing our packs and taking the risk that somebody might raid our stuff while we were gone.

You see, Petie and I are travelin’ men. At least that’s what we call ourselves. Other folks have different names for us, which was why we learned the hard way to look after each other, because it’s for damned sure nobody else would. Not anymore, anyway.

You’d think that after so many years it’d be easy to forget the past, bygones being bygones and all that. But it didn’t work out that way at all, at least not for Petie. He had it bad. Judging from the way he carried on, it was as if he’d never let it die. Maybe he’d lost too much to come to grips with the facts. I guess that kind of giving-up was just too painful for him. Even so, he didn’t get wound-up about life’s injustices as being some kind of retribution or karma thing, nothing like that at all. In Petie’s words, all that happened was neither good or bad, it just was. Period. I guess that sounds fatalistic, but it had nothing to do with resignation. Of all the people I ever knew, Petie was the one who kept on and on with a thing. It’s for sure he wasn’t a quitter. The people who thought they knew him used to call him a workaholic. Brother! If that’s not a sure-fire way to punch a hole in a man’s pluck – like he does it because he’s got some kind of deep-seated problem or something. It just goes to show how useless being a hero is. Anyway, regardless of Petie’s best efforts, he was one of those people who was like an accident waiting to happen. He was a perpetual screw-up in spite of himself. I figure it’s because he never quite grew up, not really. It’s like a part of him never wanted to – the stubborn part, I suppose. Sometimes he’d yak about the virtues of being a late bloomer, as he put it, but I wasn’t taken in. Still and all, he was my buddy and I liked him a lot, never mind he was something of a kid in an old man’s body, the bedeviled grin of an eight-year-old saddled with haunted eyes, all framed in smile wrinkles and a fan of ermine beard.

I met Petie on the highway about two years ago. I was on my way back from Duncan, poking through the overgrowth in the ditch, mindless to the traffic. My stick whacked into his boot. That was my first inclination of him. That’s how intent I was, looking down, poking here and there, always scurrying along, the years whipping behind

me like a railway track, each tie another day. For all that, I clearly remember how I felt right then. Just before bumping into him I had a kind of weird anticipation about what would come next. Strange, huh? You’d think I’d be bent out of shape by the miles of ditches I’ve crawled through, and my shoes made holey by the times I’ve been chased by dogs, but it wasn’t like that at all. It felt good. I mean really good and, like I said, I was kind of excited with a curious sense of expectation. It was a sort of creeping feeling, a dawning thing. It must be how a chick feels when it senses momma’s wing nearby. The feeling was like I had learned something or had earned something and that I was on the verge of discovering whatever it was. The mystery of it was that I had no idea what to expect. It was just a feeling, like I said. Then my stick thumped into his boot.

Petie just stood there, unmoving. My eyes slowly traversed up his body, taking him in. His boots were wide, laced high like a lumberjack’s. His jeans were somewhat baggy and the knees had been patched more than once. His coat was striped with fading grays and greens, hand-made as if from a heavy blanket. The collar was up, even though it was spring, and the lapels were emblazoned with his white, curly mat of beard. His teeth were sparkling just like his black eyes. Yes, black! Darndest thing I ever saw, beneath the shaded peak of a blue, corduroy ball cap that had the remnants of a painted blue-jay on it. He was an easy 220 pounds and he just stared at me, his feet planted apart, blocking my way. He carried a stick too, just like mine. No cans though.

Now comes the strange part: The instant I locked eyes with him I started to tremble and a minute later I was crying like a baby. So, help me. That’s the effect he had on me. Meeting Petie was like finding someone I had searched my whole life for. And the words: Really? Really? kept tumbling through my mind as I tried to behold him anew, his image gone blurry. Really? I asked, aloud.

Petie nodded his burly head.

With nothing else spoken between us we were encompassed by a world of understanding. I had finally found a friend.

That was a glorious summer. Petie and I were inseparable. At night, by a fire, we recounted all of the important things of the past and all our present thoughts too. It was like taking inventory and resorting everything according to each other’s sensibilities. When done, everything made better sense, the world was a better place in which to be and Petie was happy. Being happy might not be such a big deal to a lot o’folks, but it was to him. I had never experienced anything like it. The closest I ever came was back in ’63 when I was watching my four-year-old daughter look at herself in the mirror. It was like she and I discovered something at the same time. A kind of magic. It was too bad I had to leave her.

To give you an idea how Petie’s mind works, his best definition of happiness is the way Dante put it in his poem entitled Beatrice. It’s supposed to be a kind of love story in which Dante reveals how Beatrice turns his crank. It works out, though, that the word Beatrice translates as making happy, and what Dante was really talking about was being in love with himself. So, go figure. I heard that kind of stuff gives you warts.

In a world where people love ice cream and snazzy cars, it’s hard for me to make much sense out of Petie’s notion of love, let alone the idea of being in love with love. It’s too abstract for me, if not downright absurd, which point Petie conceded when he said it was indeed unreasonable and for some people almost unattainable. But, taken in context with everything else, he insisted it was the only thing that really made any sense after all was said and done. That argument could have gone on forever so I let it drop.

The fact was that Petie was on a crash-course to convert me or something. But I let him know straight-off that how I think is strictly my own business. Still, like I said, he didn’t give up easily.

* * *

I remember the time Petie and I were camped in the timbers on the far side of Shawnigan Lake. The big trees there reminded me of when I was a kid, when me and my little brother, Irish, used to play in the old totem park, not far from the ocean on the University Endowment Lands. What a time it was. We lived right on campus, the fourth duplex on Westbrook Road. Growing up there was like living in Disneyland. Every day was mystical. If we got hungry we stole something from the experimental farms. When adventure called we climbed the sand cliffs overlooking Wreck Beach where the nudies hung out, or else we went down to where the totem poles were hidden, especially early in the morning when the fog was rolling in and everything in the forest was ethereal and power seemed to exude from every mask and animal. I met Mungo Martin then. A famed carver. He had power too, but in all the times that I watched him work he never said a single word. His totems did the talking.

Petie left it up to me to make camp, since he was busy hugging trees and calling to the loons. Practically nobody ventures past the rocks there, maybe eighty feet high and jutting out over the water, so once on the other side it was like we had the lake to ourselves. I strung up a plastic tarp and got a fire going. Petie returned in time to make supper. He did most of the cooking, joking that it was his job to nourish me.

Some time later, Petie pushed a sapling into the ashes at the edge of the fire and scooped a potato towards me. Embers swirled hypnotically into the night like a swarm of fireflies. Petie watched me, half amused, and said. Yet man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward. Wherefore is light given unto him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul.

I looked at Petie, quizzically.

That’s from Job, he offered, gently, ending with a chuckle.

I grimaced and reached for the potato. You see, that’s how Petie was – always carrying on about some philosophical thing or other. The truth is it wasn’t so bad, and it beat the hell out of listening to some idiot brag about how drunk he got and the fights he got into. Still, I wasn’t about to let Petie walk all over me. You’re right about the born unto trouble part, I conceded. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, it’s inevitable, but the race must go on.

Petie looked at me, frowning. The human race?

I shook my head. You don’t want to know, I parried, looking for a butt. Soon I was squinting as the smoke curled past my eyes, stinging.

Try me.

I dragged on my cigarette, not wanting to remember. It had been many years since I figured out the thing about the races, but I tried not to think