Reichold Street

By R.L. Herron

Imagine J.D. Salinger, William Golding and Stephen King sitting down to write a fast-paced coming-of-age story set in a working-class American neighborhood in the turbulent 1960s Vietnam era. A place where neighborhood boys routinely played baseball in the street, but also a place where, with one new arrival, they discover the sometimes violent realities of life.

Albert Parker arrives, bringing with him the emotional scars of parental loss, and all the aggressive attitude a dysfunctional and abusive step-father can create. His struggle to fit in, and the stories of the neighborhood around him as he tries, create a fast-paced and powerful story about friendship, love and loss.

A 2012 Readers Favorite Gold Medal Winner, "Reichold Street" deals with some tough issues: alcoholism, suicide, bullying, criminal activities, family dysfunction and the horrors of fighting in the Vietnam War.

Masterfully written, "Reichold Street" comes to life on the pages and you become part of it all; from the whole gang's coming-of-age to the searing tragedy, yet remarkable redemption of war. Contains some adult language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R.L. Herron
• Release date: Mar 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301581993

R.L. Herron

Born in central Tennessee, Ron came to Michigan as an infant and has lived there ever since. Most authors claim they dreamed of being published as a kid. Although he's been writing and submitting stories since he was 17, his earliest dream was to play baseball for the Detroit Tigers and be the next Al Kaline.Ron once worked for some of the world's largest advertising agencies. He also enjoyed a career in public relations and marketing with an international Fortune 10 company. A member of Michigan Writers, the National Writers Association, the Association of Independent Authors, Detroit Working Writers, Motown Writers, and the American Academy of Poets, he has written numerous works of fiction.His debut novel REICHOLD STREET was a Readers Favorite Gold Medal Winner. Kirkus Reviews called it: "Skillfully written and emotionally charged." His powerful 5-Star-rated sequel to that award-winner, ONE WAY STREET, was published in 2014. Reviewer Jack Magnus said "...it ranks right up there with some of the very best war-related literature I've read." STREET LIGHT, Herron's thrilling 5-Star third book in the series, was named one of the "100 Notable Books of 2015" by Shelf Unbound, the online indie review magazine.His latest novel, the horror/thriller BLOOD LAKE, was published in May 2016. TopBookReviewers gave it 5-Stars and called it: "...ominous thriller...outstanding read..."Although he admits to disliking the winters there, Ron still lives and writes in Michigan with his lovely wife, a finally-paid mortgage and one very large cat.

Book preview

Chapter One – Paul

It was late August, 1962, when I first saw Albert Parker. After all this time I still remember the year quite distinctly. It was my second teenage summer and, like discovering I had a sexual identity, it was a part of life’s first great transition. I had been waiting months for something special to happen, something magical. Something like having Marilyn Monroe show up on my doorstep.

In my dreams she would be wearing that flouncy white dress she wore over the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch. She would lean close and ask me, in one of her breathless whispers, to take her. At the time I wasn’t even sure what that meant.

Hell, it didn’t matter. Just having her show up would have been enough, as long as the gang saw her. Of course, Marilyn never came to 752 Reichold Street in Brickdale.

Albert did.

The day started as a humid, hurt-your-lungs-on-a-deep-breath morning. A blistering sun was rising over the railroad switching yard at the far end of the street. Its red-orange glare filtered through exhausted-looking trees, while sinuous heat ribbons shimmered over motionless freight cars, their rusty shapes defined like so many slumbering beasts.

I was already sitting on the curb under a big oak tree, trying to find relief in occasional humid puffs of air. A battered gray panel truck pulled up across the street, and signaled its stop with a tortuous squeal. An angular middle-aged man slowly unwound from the driver’s seat. Garish sunlight lit the edges of his hair. It made halos of his tight, graying curls and gleamed brightly from the center of his balding crown.

Standing there in the street, he put his hands firmly on his hips and stared past the collection of mismatched dents and rust on his beat-up Chevy. He didn’t acknowledge my presence. He merely perched his sunglasses on top of his head and methodically chewed a toothpick as he stared at the sole object of his attention: the old white clapboard house across the street.

I smiled and thought: Hello, Toothpick Man.

He was looking at the old Cantwell Place. It was funny how no one back then thought of that old house as anything else. Cecil Cantwell, the only son of one of Brickdale’s founders, had built it. He had lived in it with his wife for more than seventy years. The house was there even before the railroad tracks were laid.

Meet you by Cantwell’s. Everyone in Brickdale, and in several other communities around it, knew that meant the east end of Reichold Street. People used it as a landmark.

Cecil had died the previous fall, about the time leaves started to turn. The maple in front of Mrs. Murphy’s house was a beautiful golden color the day I heard about his passing. I never knew exactly why he died. He was ninety-seven and I presumed he just wore out. His wife, a frail old stick, followed him a few days before Christmas. The house had been empty since then. Someone came by and mowed the lawn each week, but no one tended the flowers, pulled weeds, or repainted the shutters from the old can of Leaf Green #502 on the shelf in the garage. Then the Toothpick Man showed up.

My buddies on Reichold Street had joined me under the oak, as I knew they would. It was already uncomfortably muggy, and in those days only rich folks had an air conditioner. We were sitting on the curb, watching the new spectacle develop. Nobody said very much. It was too damn hot.

"Wassup?" Ken Pozanski, Puz to all of us, was the last to arrive and he slurred his question around a jelly doughnut. Puz was the biggest kid on the block. He had a belly, but he was also the strongest kid anyone knew. He worked with his uncle, after school and weekends, at Barczak Cement over on the northeast side…unofficially of course, since he was underage.

He had been working there for two years. His job consisted of lifting odd-lot orders of cinder block into the back of pickup trucks. He looked fat, but his arms were more enormous and foreboding than his belly. He took no guff from other kids.

Looks like it could be moving day, I said.

"Cool!" The Twins said, together. Eleven months apart, Donnie and Randy weren’t really twins. They didn’t even look alike. Randy’s hair was flame red, while Donnie was a towhead. But it was nothing short of uncanny how they always spoke in unison.

Neat-o! Puz said. His voice was a raspy slur. As he spoke, he was also busy wiping strawberry jelly, which had accumulated around his mouth, onto his wrist. Are there any babes?

Billy Strate, the wiry blond kid everyone called Sticks, looked at Puz as if he couldn’t believe what he had just heard. "Exactly what would you do with babes?"

Wouldn’t you like to know? Puz waggled his head, as if to say he knew something he wasn’t going to share.

Yeah, said Sticks, I really would.

Puz hesitated a moment before he answered. He was never very quick with comebacks. Well, he said, "maybe someday I’ll tell ya…Worm." The rest of us rolled our eyes.

I won’t hold my breath, Sticks waggled his head, too, openly mocking Puz.

Me neither, said both of The Twins, together.

Puz clenched his right fist, with his eyes fixed on Sticks, and took one slow, menacing step toward him. He halted as an ancient brown Hudson, the ‘51 or ’52 sedan model that looked like a giant metal cockroach, pulled up behind Toothpick Man.

It rattled and spat dark, oily-smelling smoke all over the street, then wheezed, almost in relief, when the ignition was turned off and it could finally shudder to a stop.

Toothpick Man walked over to it. He strutted, really, with abroad grin on his face. Leaning into the open driver’s window, he held the woman driver by the back of her bleached-blonde head and softly kissed her. After the kiss, he opened the driver’s door like a gentleman but, as the driver was attempting to get out of the car, he reached down and fondled her ample behind. She jumped at his touch, her brow an angry furrow.

Cut it out, fool!

She spoke in quick, hushed tones and wagged her head in our general direction, trying to appear angry as she tried to suppress a grin of her own.

We all stood, far too conspicuously, across the street, straining to contain our laughter. Toothpick Man glanced toward the oak tree and saw the five of us, apparently for the first time. He made a loud clicking sound with his tongue as if saying shame on me, and he pulled his shades down over his eyes. With a slow, deliberate movement he raised his right arm waist high, thrust his thumb into the air, pretended to pull a trigger…and smiled at us.

It must have been Toothpick Man’s way of saying hello.

The woman shook her head, but she was still grinning as she marched up onto the Cantwell porch. She was followed out of the car by two kids. The first one was an odd little boy, much younger than any of us, with a face that was at once joyful and vacant. He blinked in the bright sun and looked around, his head seeming to wag in multiple directions at the same time.

The second kid to emerge made the whole bunch of us take notice. She was pretty, a dark-haired girl about our age, with her hair styled in the upturned flip so popular with teenage girls that year. She wore jeans that hugged her hips and a tight T-shirt. There was a blue velvet headband in her hair. Even from that distance, the headband seemed to match her eyes. Best of all, as far as we were concerned, her figure had begun to give powerful hints of what she would look like as a woman. That’s why five pairs of eyes followed her every movement.

Look at that, would ya, Puz spoke in a whisper.

Sure nicer to look at than old lady Cantwell, Randy said.

Donnie was unusually quiet.

The new girl smiled and wiggled her fingers at us in a timid wave before she disappeared into the house.

Is that a babe? Sticks asked. He seemed all out of breath.

Yeah, dope, Puz said, that’s a babe.

Definitely, the Twins said together.

What do you think, Paul? Puz asked.

Almost as nice as Marilyn. I was about to answer when someone else, another boy, started to climb out of the old Hudson. He must have been asleep in the car’s hot interior. It took him a few moments to emerge.

He had to duck his head to get out of the car’s door and we saw a shaggy mane of auburn hair, all matted and spiked in every direction. One side of it stood straight up in a large cowlick, while the rest plastered itself in a dark mass to the side of his head. He looked like an angry clown. His hair couldn’t have been more unruly if it had been sheared with a mower.

Solidly built, with massive arms and a thick neck, he looked like a worthy opponent for Puz, without the belly. He spotted us immediately, but he didn’t say hello.

Instead, he fixed all of us with a glare and, without hesitation, stomped toward us. His gait seemed almost a carbon copy of the Toothpick Man’s swagger. What’re you sissies looking at? were the first words to come out of his mouth. His tone was definitely unfriendly, but I still put out my hand.

Hi, I said, I’m Paul…

Save it, asshole.

Puz, who was standing beside me, began to cough up moist little bits of doughnut. The angry clown-kid glared at him.

My name, the new kid said, is Albert.

He looked at each one of us in turn, as if he expected some kind of response. "Albert Parker. Get it straight. Not Patton. Parker." He practically shouted his last name. I glanced at the kids beside me and saw them all looking back at me.

Patton is my stepfather’s name, not mine, Albert put his hands on his hips for a moment and glared at the group, as if daring us to speak.

Then he returned his focus to me and my extended hand.

It’s not Al, either, it’s Albert. Get it right, asswipes.

I withdrew my hand, shaking it as if it had been burned.

Whoa-a! I said, Did somebody die and make you king? Who do you think you are?

I thought I just told you, dumbass.

I rolled my eyes at the others, Who invited this turd?

Albert snapped a response at us with a ferocity I had seldom heard from other kids. He literally spat the words at us.

Look, he said, I didn’t ask to come to this town, and I don’t expect to answer no stupid-ass questions. He looked from me to Puz, who was still coughing up bits of doughnut. So don’t even think of asking them.

Spittle landed on my hand, and I wiped it on my jeans in disgust. Albert took a step toward us and we all took a nervous, collective step backward.

Albert smirked, Besides, you look like a buncha wuses to me. He put his hands on his hips and seemed to consider his statement.

Yeah, he repeated, Pansies and wuses.

He stuck out his chin. It was such a comic pose that for a second I wanted to laugh, but when he looked directly at Pozanski we all watched Puz stiffen and bristle.

I don’t like the looks of any of you, Albert said.

No one in the neighborhood ever talked to Puz that way, not even me. You ain’t so hot your own self, Puz said. He spoke clearly, although his teeth were so tightly clenched you could see the muscles of his jaw flex.

Albert stomped the ground, surprising all of us. He pushed out his chest and took two quick paces toward Puz. I thought all hell was about to break loose. I don’t think I was alone in expecting shouting, but Albert’s voice came out low and quiet.

I ain’t asking you to like me, he said, poking his fingers near Puz’s nose, I’m telling you, stay out of my way.

That could be very hard to do, Pozanski’s voice was surprisingly calm, too.

Waiting for an apparent Armageddon, it was hard to know which of the two antagonists to look at first. Albert and Puz locked eyes and neither one moved. The glare of the hot morning sun broke through the branches and lit up the two of them, as if they were the main players on a stage.

In a way, I guess they were.

From the corner of my eye, I could see Puz take a deep breath and clench his right hand into a fist. It was so tight his knuckles were white. Albert did the same, and both of their bodies were rigid. We were all waiting for the explosion.

I held my breath until my lungs were about to burst.

It was the slapping sound of a screen door that interrupted the tension. Albert! shouted the Toothpick Man. Aren’t you coming in here soon? Your mother could use some help.

Albert wiped the side of his nose with his thumb and looked at each of us in turn. This ain’t over. He spun around and stomped away.

I heard Puz whisper, Bring it, but I had to look twice to be sure it was really Puz talking, because he didn’t sound like his normal, confident self.

It wasn’t their only confrontation, just their first. Sort of like a preview for Friday Night Fights. Albert fought with Puz before the week was out and, when I look back on it, I suppose we all saw it coming. But I don’t think anyone on Reichold Street or, for that matter, anyone in all of Brickdale, thought to see the day Pozanski would go down so fast.

I know I certainly didn’t.

On that Saturday before Labor Day, they were already crouched and circling each other when I saw them. They looked like two bulls getting ready for a head-butt to establish dominance.

Albert was mercilessly baiting Puz and you could see the color rising in Ken’s face. Puz, hell, Albert taunted, in a sing-song falsetto voice, more like pussy! Looking awkward and unsettled by the taunts, Puz swung first with a big round-house right, and missed. He didn’t get a second chance.

Albert pummeled Puz, his myriad blows a crazy blur, and it was over in less than three minutes. I’d never seen anyone punch so fast and hard. In those few minutes, Albert managed to blacken Puz’s eye and loosen one of his teeth. When Puz went down, his nose and lip were bleeding. Albert was untouched.

He had made a dramatic statement to the whole neighborhood that day. This new Albert kid knew how to fight.

Puz stumbled away with his head bowed, ignoring everybody. For a day or so it was quiet, but then the holiday weekend was finished and summer vacation was officially over. School started again and, from the first day he walked into the building, Albert seemed to make it a quest to establish dominance.

He could be counted on to bully the younger kids, but even older kids in the upper grades moved out of his way. He was pushy and obscene with most of us; mouthy and obnoxious to adults. In fact, I overheard Mr. Dixon, one of our Reichold Street neighbors, when he told my father, Albert’s the kind of kid who likes to keep everyone an axe-handle away.

All things considered, it summed him up rather well.

Still, in all of Brickdale, I was one of the few people to actually get along with him. Our semi-friendship surprised a lot of people, even me. I’m not sure why it turned out that way. Maybe it was because I worked out, too, and was almost his size. Perhaps it was the fact I didn’t react to him and let him push me around.

Perhaps…well, perhaps a lot of things. Who knows?

I suppose Albert could have given me the same treatment he gave to Puz, but he didn’t. I sometimes think we got along so well because I didn’t push him about too many things.

Albert respected that. Puz was always in his face. The rest of us had grown to expect that from Puz. But Albert and me? We tolerated each other. When I think about it now, that’s probably as good a way to describe it as any. Tolerance.

Things went on just that way for a long time. Each day pretty much blended into the next one. Albert, for all his failings, was absorbed into our world and became another member of our Reichold Street clique. He might not have been the best-liked kid in the neighborhood, but he was accepted for what he was.

Kids are remarkably resilient beings.

Chapter Two

There was one thing the neighborhood soon learned about Albert that was a constant. His family had only lived in Brickdale a short time before everyone knew just how often he fought with his step-father, Carl, the Toothpick Man. Their ongoing battle was one that escalated at the slightest provocation. It could never have been kept secret. It was too loud and happened too often.

I suppose you could say it was Carl who always started it.

He stopped at Food Town to pick up a fifth of bourbon every day of the week after work. Albert once told me his step-father would pick up his bottle from Andy’s Liquor on Heights Street on Sunday, when Food Town wouldn’t sell alcohol.

He consumed most of it every day, too. So, every evening Carl was either very mellow or awfully pissed by sometime after dinner. It seemed mellow seldom won.

I don’t know how she puts up with him being drunk all the time. My mother thought she was talking quietly to my father when I was out of earshot, but she hadn’t yet learned how well her voice traveled along the furnace’s heat ducts.

He insists on drinking that cheap stuff on the bottom shelf, too, my father said, mostly to himself.

"H-m-m-p-h!" my mother snorted, If you drank as much as Carl, you couldn’t afford anything but the bottom shelf, either.

There was no response from my father. My mother had a way of getting to the heart of things, with a definite opinion that brooked no dissent. She could be a very stubborn woman. Dad obviously knew better than to contradict her.

We stayed away from Albert’s house when Carl was drinking. So did the other neighbors, at least until all the shouting was over. There was always so much of that at Albert’s house; shouting and screaming, I mean. The days all seem to run together when I think about them. Very few of them stand out in that dysfunctional blur, but I remember one afternoon very clearly.

It was almost a year to the day after their family moved in and at first it seemed like just another Reichold Street afternoon with the Patton family circus ready to begin anew. A raucous cacophony of slammed doors and shouting erupted from their house about seven o’clock.

Puz poked my shoulder when it started. Hey, Paulie, he said, his smug grin seeming to fill his whole face, there they go again. It wasn’t much louder than usual and, after so many months of it, almost every day, people simply rolled their eyes and shrugged.

However, that day, amid a great deal more shouting and banging than usual, there was also the high, shrill scream of a woman. It wasn’t an angry shout like so many times before. This time it was a real, bloodcurdling scream.

I’m sure most of the neighborhood did exactly what I did when I heard it; they gave in to curiosity and looked outside.

Albert was standing at the side of his house, sweaty and disheveled, shouting a string of foul obscenities. His anger could not have been more obvious. He was also swinging a shovel in wide arcs in the direction of his stepfather.

His mother was weeping in their front yard. Her face bruised, with blood running down her chin, she had her hands wrapped around a bloody dishtowel, as she pleaded with Albert to stop.

Please, Albert… Her voice shook.

"He’ll never touch you again. Never!"

Albert bellowed as loud as I’ve ever heard anyone shout, his face contorted with rage. I’ll kill him first, that sonofabitch.

Carl staggered backward, muttering something unintelligible. Albert took a similar step forward with his face twisted into that angry mask, and brandished the shovel again. You’re a dead man, Carl, he screamed, a dead man.

"Bas-ard…" a drunken Carl was slurring his words.

Tears flooded down Albert’s face. He was as unlike the puffy braggart I thought I knew as it was possible for him to be. That day, I honestly thought he was going to kill Carl swinging that shovel.

Someone else must have thought so, too, because the Sheriff and several deputies arrived in Albert’s yard within moments. They all acted as if they had met Albert before, which of course they had. People were always calling them about either Albert or Carl…or both.

After breaking up the argument, the deputies took the shovel away from Albert and handcuffed him. Other than telling Carl to go back inside, they seemed almost to ignore him, while they none-too-gently shoved Albert into the back of the patrol car. In a way, the whole scene reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode. I expected to see Rod Serling standing at the curb, smoking into a camera.

My baby! Albert’s mother wailed. She put her hand on the car’s windows and ran alongside, as it pulled away. My baby!

And just like that it was over.

Chapter Three

Albert was gone for a long time. Kids at school talked about his disappearance and whispered joovie whenever his name was mentioned, but no one really knew for sure where he was. Not even after he came back.

He was a lot more subdued after he returned than he was when he left, but there was a new, angry look in his eyes. Neighborhood kids avoided him even more than before.

Part of him hadn’t changed very much; if anything, it had gotten worse. He was always in some kind of trouble. That much was the same, but now he seemed more determined than ever to develop his poor attitude and gutter vocabulary as if they were the high points of a career, to proudly flaunt on his resume.

His grades plummeted. That didn’t surprise anyone, but he wasn’t stupid. I know he wasn’t. He just didn’t try. He didn’t care what people thought. It seems, from the moment I met him, that he had a knack for being just what people expected, and not much more. But his act as a fool and a bully was a charade.

Albert was the only kid in the state who achieved an absolutely perfect score on the Air Force Aptitude Test administered in our junior year, and I know that for a fact.

Actually, the first time he took the test, Albert only finished in the ninety-eighth percentile – still better than anyone else in the county. You can look it up, if you like.

Principal Booker, the pompous ass the School Board eventually fired, took that high percentile placement as a reason to accuse Albert of cheating.

No one scores that well naturally on the AFAT, he said, "least of all someone like you, Parker." Booker wanted to throw out Albert’s score, and expunge it entirely from his academic record. He would have, too, if Albert’s mother hadn’t walked two miles to the high school, to plead with him to reconsider.

I watched her come into the school building that morning. She seemed hesitant and timid, but there was nothing timid about her message to Booker.

Personally, Booker huffed, after he listened