Watching For The Green Flash

By R.T. Hamilton Brown

'Watching For The Green Flash' is a mystery of 60,000 words with subtle overtones of humor, well, maybe not so subtle at that. A wee bit of a road trip, and a totally wild and crazy read. Recommended for anyone who hates complicated stories that require a score card to keep track of all the players.

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Lennie was still drooling over Linda who was pushing herself backward up against the headboard to get as far away from him as possible.
I pulled open the drawer with my left hand and grabbed the .45 with my right. It was laying in just the right position for this or I might have looked pretty foolish. As I turned I drew the slide back and let it spring forward chambering the first round from the magazine. I barely saw Louie jump at me across the bed and Lennie grab the Beretta from under his arm. Linda screamed and lurched upward into........

Holy cow! Louie, Lennie and Linda.

Will this be a story of the ‘L’ people?

Read on oh faithful seeker of the trivial, read on!

At least he had a Berretta and not a Luger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R.T. Hamilton Brown
• Release date: Jul 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476411101

R.T. Hamilton Brown

R. T. Hamilton Brown is a Jack of All Trades and Master of Many. He is an award-winning photographer and with his wife Nan they have immortalized their musings as intrepid travelers in Dragontrippin.com. His travels have been made easier by his excellent mechanical ability, which kept their twenty year-old Class B camper van running through clever uses of duct tape, chewing gum, and an occasional paper clip. RT and Nan recently acquired a new larger RV because he used up the duct tape, the gum gave him cavities, and the paper clips were replaced with a stapler.

Book preview

Watching For The Green Flash

by

R. T. Hamilton Brown

Published by: R. T. Hamilton Brown at Smashwords

Watching For The Green Flash

Copyright © 2007 by R. T. Hamilton Brown.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. If you know, or are, someone who fits one or some combination of these characters in any way, live with it!

This book is dedicated to all those in my family who have not killed me to stop me from writing this story that is guaranteed to cause extreme embarrassment.

But, as my true love for these past two score and eight years, Nan Lou, said on our wedding day in 1964:

Oh what the Hell, I gotta do something!

Just a little teaser.

…………..Lennie was still drooling over Linda who was pushing herself backward up against the headboard to get as far away from him as possible.

I pulled open the drawer with my left hand and grabbed the .45 with my right. It was laying in just the right position for this or I might have looked pretty foolish. As I turned I drew the slide back and let it spring forward chambering the first round from the magazine. I barely saw Louie jump at me across the bed and Lennie grab the Beretta from under his arm. Linda screamed and lurched upward into……..

Holy cow! Louie, Lennie and Linda.

Will this be a story of the ‘L’ people?

Read on oh faithful seeker of the trivial, read on!

At least he had a Berretta and not a Luger.

Watching For The Green Flash

by

R.T. Hamilton Brown

Chapter 1

My name is Klark Bent. No nasty remarks about Superman or speeding bullets, I can’t help it, I’ve lived with it for too many years. My grandfather spelled it Behendt in Germany but changed it to Bent when he came over here in 1917. He spelled the Klark with a C when he named my father Clark Siegfried Roy Bent. My father thought that was a little much and changed the C to a K and dropped the Siegfried and the Roy names for me when I popped out. We were the All American Family by then, even though we lived in a part of Chicago where nine out of ten families spoke German around the dinner table. I never did learn much more than a few choice phrases that were pretty useful at school where I could cuss out some big bully and he wouldn’t have a clue about what I was saying. I had to choose the cussee carefully or I might have been beaten up more than I was. The Irish kids were dumb enough and thought I was blessing them. The Polish kids usually knew enough German words to know I was not being very complimentary.

Unlike most of my buddies who ended up in the stock yards or some local smokestack industry I went to a local community college and put together enough journalism courses to get a job with the old Herald American. You got it, I’m a writer. I bounced back and fourth from one Chicago paper to another and when the American and the Daily News finally went belly up I struck out on my own. That’s when I moved to Indiana, just another Chicago suburb to hear some of my contemporaries say it. Well let’s say I write and send these works of art off to various publishers who often forget all about them, seldom return them, and once in a blue moon publish them. I have been able to make enough money to stay here in the great mid-west where the living is cheap and the folks are friendly. I struggle to do a few pages a day, write some advertising copy for a friend who is a hot shot ad man but can’t put four words together that make any sense, and tend bar three nights a week at a middle class watering hole where the thirsty and lonely go to meet each other. I call it the Meet Market, some nasty folks around here call it a Meat Market. Its real name is Harrigan’s Hangout. There is no Harrigan, just an ex jock, ex cop, ex con, named Noel Pulaski.

Noel and I went to high school together in Chicago way back in the fifties. He was a football hero and I was a bookworm. We made a pretty good team. I made sure he passed all of the tests so he could stay on the team and he introduced me to some of the uglier cheerleaders. At that stage in my life there were no ugly cheerleaders. Come to think of it, there are still no ugly cheerleaders. When we graduated I went to the local community college and Noel went to Notre Dame on a football scholarship. Seems like every kid I knew thought going to Notre Dame was the ultimate place for an extended education. None of us knew what Harvard or Yale was, we thought the Ivy League was a bowling team from the suburbs. I managed to stay in school for the required four years and Noel barely made it through one semester. Seems a D+ average didn’t quite cut it at Notre Dame. Noel joined Chicago’s finest and served our fair city for three years until he was caught up in an investigation that had something to do with the entrapment of prostitutes and their subsequent shakedown for either money or certain fringe benefits they could provide. All of that wasn’t especially bad for a Chicago cop back then, but that D+ mentality just couldn’t help poor old Noel when the chips were down. He did 14 months in Joliet where he made enough connections to come up with a down payment on the bar here in Indy after working in a west side Chicago bar for less than a year. I think he did a little more than tend bar, all he ever told me was to never bet on any football game unless I checked it out with him. Since I never have been a betting man, I have never checked anything out and never really asked about his knowledge of the sport.

I never worked the bar job on the busy nights of the weekend, I usually did a midweek stint when the regular bartenders were sick or scoring on some of the two legged fringe benefits that were readily available. I liked the quietness of Mondays and Tuesdays when I could mull over the next chapter in whatever I was writing with a minimum of interruptions.

Noel was usually present glad-handing one and all and making them happy enough to stay for one more drink. A nearby pizza parlor was kept in business running their hot and greasy delights over to our hungry customers. A sporting event of some kind was usually the many TVs scattered around the main room and the one small TV in the poolroom. That’s pool, as in billiards, not, as in Mark Spitz. The pool room had two tables and they were usually being abused by lousy pool players trying to look tough with their Brooks Brothers suit jackets hung on a peg and their ties pulled aside in reckless abandon. The place was graced by girls who played pool too, usually some wild game where the object was to hit any ball with any other ball and get it off of the table, not just in a pocket, but over the edge and across the room was just as good. It was out of play and good for a point.

Anyway, it was one of those slow nights with two of the regulars shooting a game of nine ball, four guys watching some weird ESPN sporty thing from Ethiopia, and a group of school teachers telling each other about the little shits they had to put up with and the asshole principal who wouldn’t get off his butt for anything, even for a piece of Hilliary Snow, the school nurse, who had given all of the male staff some very good physicals down in the boiler room. I had it on good authority that they would go and see her complaining that they were afraid that they had ruptured themselves lifting a heavy stack of books. She led them to the boiler room where she then told them to drop their drawers, turn their head to the side, and cough. I guess the boiler room was used in case a little tyke came barging in during the coughing stage. A long standing story, never verified, was about Mr. Carson, a science teacher who told her that he was out in the woods looking for butterflies when he had to relieve himself and a Southside Rattlesnake hopped up and bit him. He reportedly she dutifully sucked all the venom out and he didn’t have the first symptom of snake poisoning. I heard many other stories, some of them far too wild to contemplate, but who knows.

The teachers usually didn’t come in until Friday when their week was over and they could relax. This must have been some special day in the school system for they were out in force and in a really vile mood. The last to show up was a tall good looking blond, no one really knew for sure if it was real or out of a bottle, who threw the door open and hollered out, Where the fuck is everyone, it’s so damn dark in here I feel like I’m walking through a septic tank.

That was Linda, she was always loud and vulgar. Guys would look at her, look at each other, nod their heads and smile that little, I’m gonna get a little of that, smile. It never failed, after several hours of drinking, one of them would break away from his buddies and casually walk over to Linda, who by now was standing at a pool table, lay his hand carefully on her well rounded rear end and start to say something very witty. They never finished, Linda would turn and look him right in the eye and say in her loud and clear teachers voice, If you don’t get that dick skinning hand offa my ass I’ll shove this cue so far up your butt that it’ll come out your that asshole you call a mouth.

This would discourage most men. Those who weren’t discouraged and didn’t slink away might be allowed to spend a few minutes with her and buy her a drink, Diet Coke with a twist of lemon, but they never left with her, and they never came around to tell of their conquests as did all the other gentlemen who hung out at Harrigan’s Hangout.

The most unusual thing about this woman was not her language, but her looks. She didn’t look a day over thirty-five, even in the bright light of day. But I had heard from very good sources that she was born on the day that Harry S. Truman was sworn in as the 43rd president of the good old US of A after beating Tom Dewey to the surprise of almost everyone. You remember that one; when the prestigious Chicago Tribune ran their infamous DEWEY WINS headlines the morning after the election. I never believed that, she was too damn good looking to be that old. Even my non-mathematical mind put her age at four bits with maybe ten shiny zinc pennies given back as change. Even some of her drinking buddies who were a few years her junior called her the kid of the group. Maybe she had found that fountin o yoot, as my friends from the region called it.

It wasn’t too much of a memorable night, this hot Monday in late May, as the whole city waited for Memorial Day to roll around with The Big Race. The way IT is treated here in Indy one would think that it is the only race in the world. Forget about the Boston Marathon, the Kentucky Derby, and the city series between the Cubs and the Sox from up in you-know-where, those are as big to those cities as the Indy 500 is to Indianapolis. But, you didn’t get the saturation treatment for them like you got for the Memorial Day Classic in the Indy papers.

Then things changed. Monday became very memorable for some of us. Two big husky guys who looked like they were a cross between linebackers and professional boxers came in and asked me if I knew where Noel Pulaski was. I mean they were big, not big as in fat, but big as in, well, a three story house.

I said, Have a seat, I’ll go and get him. They each sat on a retro chrome and leather barstool and I could see the gracefully curving chrome legs curve even more. I thought all that size they carried was not fat and heavy baggy clothing, but muscle, in spades.

I ducked under the swing up part of the bar, which always had a ton of just washed glasses stacked on it rendering the swing up name pretty silly, and headed for the back room Noel called his office. It was an oversized janitor’s closet with a partition separating Noel’s desk and computer from the big funny looking sink that they put in janitor’s closets. I guess the two guys decided that the bar stools were too perilous and were right behind me as I headed back to Noel’s cubbyhole. It was down the hall just past the washrooms. Noel never, I mean never, had his door shut. I think it had something to do with his time in Joliet.

Hey Noel, I said, there are these two guys here wanting to see you.

He was behind the computer and pretty absorbed in whatever he was doing. Come on in fellows, long time no see. Noel said as he got up and walked over to them. I noticed that he extended his hand for a handshake but they just stood immobile looking at him.

Looking at me he said, Better get back to the bar before those teachers fill their purses with Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. It was the first time he ever said anything that negative about our favorite patrons. Mighty strange, thought I.

I could tell when I wasn’t wanted and headed back down the dark hallway. Just about two steps past the door Noel called, Yo Klark, would you get the door for me.

Yes, mighty strange, he never closes this door. So I closed it like a good lackey and went about my business to count the bottles and look for bulging purses.

A few regulars dropped in for a quick thirst quencher and a look-see at the strange sports on the television. You could always see something new on ESPN in midweek. Like tonight’s Ethiopian football where they played in soft deep sand with only a towel like thing around their waist. Once last week they carried a South American jalopy race where all the cars went over a fifty foot cliff about ten yards past the finish line. I don’t think they were supposed to go over the cliff. The idea was to slam on the brakes just before the finish line and skid to a stop after getting the checkered flag. Somehow it just didn’t work out that way. Luckily the Amazon River was at the bottom of the cliff and all the drivers had to fear were the piranhas.

There were a few new faces in the place, probably guys who went shopping with their better halves at the nearby mall, couldn’t take it, and headed over to the Hangout. All the while the teachers kept vilifying the system and drinking their non-fat drinks. That is, all except Maggie, she was drinking double martinis the old fashioned way, straight up in a long stem glass. Maggie was an old timer. She and her husband had been coming in ever since I’d been working here; I guess that’s been about five years now. Or was it more like ten, time seems to have gotten away from me lately. They would drink martinis until closing time every Friday night, slosh out to their car, get home by the grace of God, and show up again the next Friday. One night she arrived alone and started to put them away as usual. Our waitress at the time was a starving artist named Judy who did caricatures of the customers for five bucks a head. She found out that Mr. Maggie, I can’t remember his name, had decided to give up drinking and had joined a local splinter group of the Methodist church and started going to bible school on Friday nights. That’s all we could find out. He gave his blessing to Maggie’s Friday night martinis and he went to church. It was in this year that Maggie started to bring her group of teachers to the Hangout. Maggie Martini and Linda Loudmouth were the only two survivors of the original group, the others changed from month to month, some of them embarrassed when Linda started abusing the kings English and the male customers. I suspect that Maggie lasted because her liver had long ago turned to rock and Linda could drink