If Walls Could Write and Other Stories

By Jeffrey Johnston

If Walls Could Write
and Other Stories
(Synopsis)

If Walls Could Write and Other Stories is a collection of fifteen short stories related to the human condition.

1. In the title story If Walls Could Write, we meet Lourdes, a young woman who through a metaphysical experience at Preston Castle, an abandoned youth detention facility in the Central Valley, finds answers to a lifetime of questions about her own origin.
2. Honor for the Drainpipe Kid tells the tale of a teenage boy who drops out of high school after being shunned by his fellow students, finding solace in a drainpipe in the creek near his Willow Glen neighborhood home.
3. Milk Crate Music chronicles the journey of a homeless man who moves to Sacramento from the mid-west in search of better pickings in his panhandling prospects and to ultimately find his way out of the harsh environment he has been forced to live in for so long.
4. Revelations is a piece of Flash Fiction that briefly introduces two people as they embark on a journey of infidelity.
5. Dick and Jane, a Love Story Tragedy is a story of high school sweethearts that goes bad when a hidden addiction is revealed with catastrophic results.
6. Surgical Steel is a tale of irony surrounding a young man’s injury after crashing his bicycle.
7. Midnight Run is a brief encounter told from the perspective of a small child awakened from sleep and taken on a late night car ride.
8. Spelunking. Losing touch after college, four friends attempt to rekindle their friendship by going cave exploring.
9. The Snake Pit. After a night of drinking, Tony awakens in a strange and unfamiliar place surrounded by dangerous looking characters.
10. In The Barista, Sarah finds herself in a terrifying place with only one goal... finding her way back home.
11. The Burden Son. After an auto accident leaves Johnny in a wheelchair, his parents are unable to cope with his newly developed behavioral problems, and ship him off to an institution in another city.
12. Sisters are Forever. The resilience of sisters is put to the test when Jenny and Anne encounter a carjacker.
13. Driver’s Training. When four friends go out for their high school driver’s training test together in their ordinarily quiet Willow Glen neighborhood, something goes terribly wrong, putting the teens’ contrasting ethics to the test.
14. Mind Games explores how the mind can play tricks on you, adapting to its surroundings... especially when in survival mode.
15. In Forbidden Fruit, we follow a pair of middle aged coworkers as they embark upon a forbidden love affair.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeffrey Johnston
• Release date: Jan 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991435807

Jeffrey Johnston

Jeffrey Johnston is a writer, a blogger and a published author of short fiction. In mountain cabins, coastal coffee shops and the occasional midtown Sacramento café he can be found huddled in a corner banging away at his computer, breathing life into his fictional characters. Also an award-winning photographer, when not immersed in writing his stories, he travels near and far capturing the beauty of his home state of California. Johnston holds a BS in Business and an MFA in Creative Writing. His short stories have appeared in the GNU.

Book preview

If Walls Could Write

And Other Stories

By

Jeffrey L. Johnston

COPYRIGHT NOTICE:

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under all copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

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. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

© 2014 Jeffrey L. Johnston

All rights reserved.

(Smashwords Edition)

This book is available in print at most online retailers

DEDICATION

To Helen, for always believing in me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To the following people who were instrumental in bringing this project to life, I owe my deepest respect and gratitude for your contribution:

My undergraduate English professor, Rebecca McNamara, for igniting my now-incessant desire to write.

Sonia, for lending me your eyes for several months in our tireless pursuit of perfection.

Lucy, for your unequivocally essential four words.

Margaret, who, upon learning of my love for writing and how I longed to do something with it, simply asked, So, what’s stopping you?

Lynda Marie Zabala, for the use of your poem Preston Castle. Without it, Lourdes would have never been born.

A special thanks to the staff of the Sheraton Grand Hotel in downtown Sacramento for permitting me to sit quietly in the corner of their lobby during my lunch hour for the past several years as I wrote many of these stories.

Cover art photography and design by ©Jeffrey Johnston

www.jeffreyjohnstonphotography.com

www.jeffreyjohnston.net

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEGMENTS

If Walls Could Write

Honor for the Drainpipe Kid

Milk Crate Music

Revelations

Dick and Jane, a Love Story Tragedy

Surgical Steel

Midnight Run

Spelunking

The Snake Pit

The Barista

The Burden Son

Sisters Are Forever

Driver’s Training

Mind Games

Forbidden Fruit

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INDEX

If Walls Could Write

Lourdes traveled alone. She always had. It was in her blood. It was a product of her rearing in the dysfunctional foster care system in the great state of California, and trust was a commodity not afforded to her. The Golden State, it was termed, but for Lourdes and others like her its golden luster had been forever tarnished.

Wrapped within the tight confines of her used 2001 Ford Focus, she drove. Her vehicle was very used and very white, but it was all hers. She had paid for it with money earned over the previous three summers washing the neighborhood dogs in a makeshift dog salon. She had taken a pair of zinc-coated tubs in her foster parents’ garage and several bottles of generic dog shampoo she picked up at the Dollar Store near her faux home and went into business.

Emergent predawn light surrounding her, she drove until she spotted her prey. Elusive as they were, she knew from experience that she would spy one very soon because she was in their territory—their environment. She wasn’t particular about the species of prey for which she hunted, just as long as she got a clean shot. Her weapon of choice was lying inconspicuously on the passenger seat to her right, cocked and ready. It was not disguised or concealed but at the ready for the moment she spotted her first victim of the morning.

Lourdes had been on the road for twenty minutes when she turned off of the interstate and onto a narrow two-lane county road. The road would wound over pussy willow–laden wetlands before plunging into the shadows of century-old oak and black walnut trees, miraculously spared from the wrath of lightning-born fires prevalent in the area.

Then she saw him. Pulling off to the right as far as she could go before sinking her tires into the mossy quagmire that bordered the gravel-topped dirt road, she slowed to a stop and killed the engine. Taking up her weapon with her right hand and cranking down the window with her left, she propped the heavy 500mm barrel into the open window frame, took careful aim, and fired.

Gotcha, you bastard, she whispered, firing off a few more frames in high-speed burst mode for good measure. She then took a moment to review the shots on the LCD screen to assess clarity and composition before returning her camera to the seat to her right. Turning the ignition, she resumed her quest for more victims, the next preferably of a dissimilar species.

***

Lourdes had a particularly difficult childhood, and among the people with whom she had been recurrently placed, it was quickly acknowledged that Lourdes came with baggage. She had very little memory of her mother and no recollection of a father figure at all. What she could remember of her mother came to her in brief flashes of images—images of her mother leading her by the hand into a grand cathedral where she was made to sit upon a hard wooden bench. These glimpses were so fleeting that she often wondered if they were spawned of memories at all or just adolescent longings to know a real family.

By the time she was fourteen years old, she was nearly five feet, eleven inches tall. With long, wavy black hair and a narrow, shapeless frame, Lourdes towered over her classmates. These physical attributes, more of a liability than an asset, were a disadvantage to her social life from the beginning. The acceptance of potential friends or suitors at school was further hampered by the necessity for her to change locations every time a foster family grew weary of her. This occurred every year and a half or so, it seemed, so she lacked any enduring relationships with friends, foster siblings, or even foster parents, for that matter. She knew she was different. Proportionally unbalanced physically, to say nothing of the emotional instability that her situation generated, she would spend her after-school hours reading and writing poetry. Her poetry gave her an outlet, an escape—a means to express her feelings in a nondestructive way while giving her something tangible to reflect upon later.

Unfortunately some of the foster families into which Lourdes’s care was entrusted carried deep-rooted deviant and sometimes violent predispositions and used their foster parent titles as a license to practice their acts of wickedness. Once Lourdes was delivered to the lairs of these immoral pairings, some would take an improper interest in Lourdes. Others would use her as an object onto which they would act out their contempt for their own dysfunctional upbringing and mistreat her in one fashion or another. Typically perpetrated by the faux father figure of these makeshift family units, this abuse occurred far too frequently and with more than one set of artificial familial authority figures until Lourdes had had enough and began to act out. When Lourdes had finally had enough, she was done, and she made it known, instigating fights with her foster siblings and talking back to the adults. She started to steal money from the family, staying out late with increasing frequency, sometimes not coming home at all. The offending parents’ paranoia would eventually take over, and Lourdes would be sent back to the foster care system out of fear that their offenses, some of which potentially carried long prison terms, would be discovered.

Lourdes didn’t have to worry about these things any longer—the immediate effects, anyway. The scars raked across her emotional psyche by those experiences, however, would likely linger for years to come. Maxed out of the foster care system a year earlier, Lourdes was on her own. Free from the ties that had her bound for most of her childhood and adolescence, she was now able to live her life the way she wanted. That was not an easy feat for a nineteen-year-old young woman with such a history of sadness in her recent past, but it was those very experiences that had fortified and prepared her for the world into which she had been thrown.

Having been forced to grow up far too soon, Lourdes had the good sense to save some money from her job at a downtown coffee shop. She was hired there during her tenure at the last foster home she lived in before her eighteenth birthday negated the necessity for her to be under a parent’s supervision and subsequent control. Taking what she had saved up, she secured a cute little apartment within walking distance to the coffee shop, where she worked and embarked upon a life of independence, free of the requirements and occasional abuses that came with being under the control of the foster care system.

On a sunny spring afternoon, Lourdes was driving up Highway 104 with the radio blaring some unintelligible rock tune and the fertile central California farmland whizzing by her open windows when it hit; it was awful. The smell carried a pungently sweet tinge that wrenched her stomach but somehow seemed familiar. It was a local dairy, one of the largest in the region, encompassing several hundred acres and with an inventory of an equal number of cattle. The cows wallowed in their own waste and emitted an unseen cloud of methane gas. Had it not been invisible, its sheer volume would have blocked the sun like the wind-blown, moisture-devoid soil of the Dust Bowl phenomenon that devastated the southern plains in the 1930s.

She ignored the assault on her senses. She’d smelled worse in her day…much worse. Passing the aromatic dairy, she continued her journey north on 104. Catching a glimpse of an occasional red-tailed hawk or its cousin, the cooper, she drove on, hoping to maybe spy the elusive white-tailed kite or perhaps capture a pair of American kestrels fully immersed in their high-velocity death-dive mating ritual. The further she drove, the fewer raptors she saw until, far in the distance, she saw what appeared to be several vultures circling. Curious, and with no other prospects in sight, she headed in the direction of the menacing-looking feathered creatures.

As she got closer, however, she saw something that took her breath away. A tall red brick building loomed in the distance, its open bell tower pushing through the treetops like the mast of some giant sailing vessel of Viking mythology; the patina of the copper roof was aged and green from the barrage of a century of seasonal change. Three vultures circled this ominous-looking structure in counterclockwise rotation, as if this trio of menacing creatures was plotting its demise, waiting for it to topple so they could scavenge from its red sandstone flesh.

Lourdes had always had a fascination with vintage architecture. This interest stemmed from her early exposure to the imposing bell tower of the cathedral from her childhood, images of which her memory periodically brought to the front of her mind, only to halt like a film strip that has snapped under the pressure of being wound too tightly. The church itself was not a scary place to her, but to a small child, the building’s white statuary–adorned architecture and grandiose proportions were nonetheless intimidating indeed.

She picked up speed but was unaware she was doing so. Heightened intrigue took hold of her. She felt drawn to the enormous red building, and as she continued along the highway, she passed a sign that brought everything to light. WELCOME TO IONE the sign read, and as she passed the sign, the highway name changed to HIGHWAY 104/PRESTON AVENUE.

Preston Avenue…holy shit, that’s the old Preston School of Industry—Preston Castle! I’ve read about this place in that architecture book I picked up at the Goodwill Store. Oh man, I have to take a closer look.

With a fresh flow of adrenaline coursing through her veins, Lourdes rounded the corner, passing a tiny one-pump gas station that was living a double life as a country store and turned right onto Palm Drive, where the road took on a steep incline. Winding up the hill, her four-banger Ford lurched as it shifted into low and chugged past single-level barrack-style buildings that appeared to be of the same era as the larger one with which she was now completely enthralled.

Driving up the little single-lane road under a protective canopy of ancient oaks, Lourdes began to feel dizzy. It was as if the air beneath these old trees had somehow been evacuated, sucked out like a vacuum. She imagined this must be what it feels like to be an astronaut experiencing a malfunction of their life sustaining air supply, having nothing to grasp but the oxygen void vacuum of outer space. Perhaps it was merely the excitement of seeing the castle that was getting the best of her…but maybe it was something else.

The road ended as abruptly as it began, terminating in a little turnabout encircling a small brick structure. A paint-chipped wooden sign with the faded word SECURITY proclaimed that the now-roofless and windowless little building had once served as a guard station. Stepping out of her car, Lourdes was struck by how quiet it was. Not a bird sang, and no windblown tree branch creaked. Not a sound permeated the gothic scene unfolding before her eyes. It was like she had stepped into an old horror movie, the cinematic view of a haunted castle growing to immense proportions as the camera slowly zoomed in.

Lourdes was in awe. The building that loomed before her was enormous and ominous, yet Lourdes found it mysteriously beautiful. This monolithic sandstone structure—a castle indeed in every sense of the word—was like a living, breathing thing and was equally as intimidating. A tall cyclone fence spanned the perimeter of the entire grounds with NO TRESPASSING signs affixed to it every ten feet or so. The atmosphere surrounding the castle was eerily still—unnaturally so. The only things in motion were the three vultures in their perpetual counterclockwise rotation high above the red brick tower that silently ascended into the sky.

Lourdes was completely and utterly enraptured. The potential of gaining access to this architectural work of art had her tingling with anticipation. An adrenaline-fueled tremor briefly took hold of her left hand as she reached back into her car to pull a small silver flashlight from the glove box and snatch up her camera from the passenger seat. The possibility that she would not be permitted to enter this magnificent structure left her. One way or another, she was going in. Flashlight in hand and cell phone in her pocket, she rolled up the windows and locked the doors. Seeing no one in sight, she set out to locate a point of entry.

The cyclone fencing with its intermittently spaced signage surrounded the entire compound, caging the historical building like some ancient prisoner. Its enormous red sandstone façade seemingly mocking the sheer insignificance of the minute transparent enclosure as though its omniscient consciousness somehow knew it could never keep out the voracious curiosity of explorers or contain whatever inhabitants still resided within the castle walls.

Prying her eyes away from the ominous tower and its perpetually circling buzzards, Lourdes noticed there was a narrow dirt path just beyond the perimeter of the fence line. Trodden by countless others seeking to gain access to the former boys’ prison, it began just to the right of the locked gate near the ghost of a guard shack. From her vantage point, it seemed to follow the perimeter of the fence before vanishing behind an old garage with four large wrought iron–adorned doors. Along this pathway was evidence of entry by eager trespassers who had preceded her. In some areas, the cyclone fencing had been peeled up from the bottom like a tin can, the elevation of the dry soil at its base lowered to accommodate the varying girths of a multitude of inquisitive souls who had passed beneath it. Intrigued, Lourdes eagerly yet cautiously embarked upon her quest.

The dirt path along the fence line was narrow. Portions of it gave her cause to turn sideways, lest she be impaled by tiny thorns from the many star thistle bushes at its border opposite the fence. As she approached the garage with its medieval-looking doors and gothic-spired eaves, the pathway dropped away into a gulley behind the structure, causing her to follow a narrow ledge in the rear of the garage around its border to the other side, where it widened once again before abruptly ending at the continuation of the cyclone fence. This appeared to be the end of the line. The pathway simply stopped and butted up against the wall, where the fence met the garage before continuing its lifeless metal journey around the rest of the property. Then…she saw it. An opening; a window, to be precise. Sadly, it was only a window to the garage, not the castle, but it was open.

Climbing onto some bricks that were stacked neatly below the window, she hoisted herself up and peered inside. There was nothing inherently interesting to see, however. Holding a hand over her brow to block the glare of the sun, she assessed the interior of the building. Another stack of bricks, leftover building materials from the castle or the garage by the looks of them, lined the back wall opposite those creepy-looking doors. Illuminated by a pyramid-shaped skylight in the center of the roof, she could see that the room was enormous, deceptively so, and in the bay farthest from her she saw a large tarp covering what appeared to be a car. Gauging by its size and the shape of the fender wells, Lourdes figured that it was likely a 1930s or ’40s touring sedan, like the ones she had seen in the old gangster movies on late-night television when she was a girl.

There weren’t many restrictions on what she watched on TV growing up. Appropriate is as appropriate does, one of her early foster mothers was fond of saying. Nothing could have been closer to the truth during that brief foster home stint. There were a lot of things wrong in