The Man in the Rafters
By Jerry Kalman
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About this ebook
After the attacks of 9-11 take his wife and career, John takes to the road, surviving as a homeless man in New England. On his second fall season in the region, he meets Bernice Topham, who has a problem with an organized crime syndicate that wants to force her out of business: selling Canadian meds to seniors.
Jerry Kalman
Hot steamy stuff is the forte of JL Kaye, author of “Cascade Nights”, "Friendly Fire" and the short story "Nanoelf of the Roses". Kaye also has published another erotic novel “Haunting Experiences” and Free Radicals is nearly ready for publishing as an eBook in 2011. Other than the fractured fairy tale about the nanoelf, Kaye’s erotica centers on the sometimes private lifestyles of professionals who want more from romances than kiss-and-not-tell. In 2011, JL Kaye expects a fourth work consisting of a broad collection of sci-fi, western and romantic short stories to be published as an eBook.J. L. Kaye lives north of San Diego.
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The Man in the Rafters - Jerry Kalman
The Man in the Rafters
By
Jerry L. Kalman
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Jerry L. Kalman
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this eBook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
John lived by the dictum: Avoid others else unless I’m ready to be trapped into sharing details about me
so, when cornered, John said he liked living large
, roaming, rootless, no longer tethered by time, place or attachment to others. To demonstrate the extent of his possessions, he pulled a small, well-used Swiss Army knife from the pocket of his battered Burberry raincoat and, for added emphasis, turned the empty pockets of his denims inside out. Then he walked away.
Mostly, however, the skinny man of average height with a faded gray wool shirt and a baseball cap with ear flaps avoided contact.
Before dawn on a dreary October day, his second fall season on the road, John completed a night of foraging around the outskirts of a remote New England town. Seeing no one, he moved silently along the fringe of the dirt road, in and out of red and yellow fall foliage, before reaching the old covered bridge that spanned the creek. He listened to rushing water that tumbled over exposed rocks and studied the gray wooden siding of the bridge and waited to be sure he remained unseen before scaling a gracefully curved truss into the rafters. As long as John focused on the chore of the moment, he muted the voices of his past. Avoiding detection, now a survival skill honed to razor-sharpness, served him well.
John scurried to a hidden compartment he constructed many weeks earlier along the backside of a wooden apron that descended down from the hip of the roof. Convinced his stash remained secure, he took a deep breath and from the raincoat pulled two plastic shopping bags filled with food and distributed the larder by category, canned goods to the left and packaged foods to the right.
Three days worth,
he whispered as he wedged into the crotch of a network of timbers that crossed back and forth above the roadway that linked the rural side of the creek to the road into town. In time for bad weather.
John studied his cache, then slipped a weathered four-by-eight section of plywood in place to hide his provisions. Moving among the trusses and beams to the other end of the covered bridge, he crawled behind another false front into a make-shift nest, pulled open a weathered old sleeping bag and dozed off before the voices he of mid-morning amped up.
As the first dream intruded, a woman’s voice, inaudible, somewhat muffled by sounds from the creek rushing below the bridge, relieved him of the panic he felt when awakened from that bad dream. Peering through cracks in the siding he saw the sun burn holes in the clouds, sending yellow rays down into the valley and thought: It’s her; it must be Tuesday, the widow’s day to come and pray and mourn. She comes every Tuesday, rain or shine. A tear coursed down John’s cheek into the stubble of his beard.
The pattern of her visits to the covered bridge never varied since July. As always, she remained an hour and stared out a window in the covered bridge to where she first cast the ashes down to the creek. At 9:45 she once again whispered goodbye
and walked off toward town where, he suspected, the widow ran one of the art galleries that filled Main St.
The only other regular, an old man dressed in bib overalls, walked two mutts that often looked up into the superstructure of the bridge. The old man came through at noon, every day, even when it rained or snowed. A slave to his