The Desert Croquet Player

By Garry Puffer

I've loved H.G. Wells' "The Croquet Player" ever since I first read it. I loved the story, I loved the brevity, and I really loved the illustrations done by Clifford Line. Being involved in Desert Croquet (I won the very first professional championship) made writing "The Desert Croquet Player" a natural exercise. I wrote it to share with the other desert croquet players that we knew. I made some using reduced-size copies and a stapler, but those copies were hard to read. I did the illustrations myself. The style I stole from Wells as much as possible, so if it reads as if it were old-fashioned, it is supposed to.

What unfolds is an examination of the paranormal, UFOs, alien abduction, and more, done as conversations the narrator has with Dr. Finch, an eccentric, and Dr. Norbert, a psychiatrist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Garry Puffer
• Release date: Sep 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9780983960713

Garry Puffer

Born 1945. Has lived in Michigan, New York, and California. Retired mathematics teacher. Loves golf, reading, and live rock and roll.

Book preview

THE DESERT CROQUET PLAYER

A Novel After H. G. Wells

By

Garry Puffer

Copyright © 2011 Garry Puffer

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Table of Contents

The Desert Croquet Player Introduces Himself

The Haunting of Yucca Tree

The Head In the Museum

The Psychiatrist

THE DESERT

CROQUET PLAYER

INTRODUCES

HIMSELF

I have lately run into two very bizarre individuals, and they have turned my usually clockwork-like brain into something akin to a pinball machine as played by the Who’s Tommy. I must needs set down my interactions with them if only to clear up these things in my own mind, although I hope to shape these events to also allow one or two sympathetic readers to respond and assure me that these two individuals are merely lunatics of some sort.

It is undoubtedly a tale of an unreal world that they unfolded. It is a tale of a kind of ghost, but not a ghost (there are no such things), a sort of interstellar spirit, but that is not right either. It is not easy to explain in twenty-five words or less just what it is they talked about that terrifies me so at odd hours of the day and night. They talked of a real world that lies entirely within us. We are what we think. But it is a great deal more than that as well. I think I had better begin at the beginning.

Which is to say I had better give you a few words about myself first. Of course I would rather not, but I do not think that you will be able to assess what I have to tell you unless you know a few things about me. Such as, I am the greatest desert croquet player in the world, and I am not ashamed to say so. I have won ten straight world championships. Professional championships, although one can scarcely make a living on the professional desert croquet tour. I am also a first-rate bowler. I bowl in a scratch league in the winter and my average is 204. A person can attain neither of these things without a great deal of determination and consistency in one’s make up. There are those who find in me a certain lack of the macho-rama because I make desert croquet my game, I know this, and at times I have been inclined to agree with them. But on the other hand, most people like me well enough, and I am not too humble to disagree with them. Everybody calls me Alfie in an affectionate way, and I think they mean it. I don’t do anybody enough harm for them to openly dislike me, and yet I have no close friends. But it takes all manner of people to make up a world, and I see no sense in pretending or wanting to be something I am not. All in all I am what you would call a wimp, but nevertheless I can make a wooden ball behave like a trained animal across a desert terrain invaded by rocks and plants and God knows what. I also play a mean game of table tennis as well as being able to do sleight-of-hand, a talent for which you need steady nerves and great self-confidence.

Many people think that the measure of a man is the amount of physical risk that he takes. Thus they see hockey or soccer or football as much more men’s sports than the sports that I engage in. However, when weighed, these more gladiatorial encounters come off just as empty of meaning as the harmless pastimes I pursue.

My life has been uneventful. I was called by my draft board during the Viet Nam war, but upon appeal to my Congressman was granted a deferment because of my teaching position in a Catholic school, a position created by God for men like me, a place where one can be abused by small women, simply because they wear a wimple.

I went to live with my aunt at such an early age that I remember nothing else. My aunt has served to make me what I am. She has a Baptist’s hostility to anything sexual, which has made me what in days gone by would be called a sissy, but which nowadays is termed a wimp, a manner in which I have heretofore made it obvious it is fair to characterize me. The reasons I went to live with my aunt when I was one year old or a little less, are not