Wounded

By Robert Townsend

Two young people, a brother and sister, die in a freak Lake Superior storm. Ricky Belisle, the accused murderer, is released from jail for lack of evidence. In shame he leaves his hometown to prove himself worthy; worthy of Marie Jeanne, 'M.J.', Charbonneau, his childhood 'buddy'; worthy of his family; worthy of his village. M.J. finds Ricky on a Colorado mountain where the nightmarish night repeats itself. Ricky and M.J. must overcome childhood terrors if they are to save one another.
Ricky Belisle travels across the south and west of America, a minor league baseball player, seeking redemption before his family, his people, his Marie Jeanne. It is 1960, the nuclear age. His forebears far into the mists of time––father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and beyond––had been warriors, which the world no longer needs. He encounters temptation and corruption and injustice, a south of explosive rage and hypocrisy. Injury and death lurk under each friendly grin. Within the confines of the baseball stadium is safety and certainty. Baseball rules, if not just, are firm and clear. He suffers a concussion on a run down between third base and home plate.
Marie Jeanne finds him on a Colorado mountain, recovering, hardened, where Indifferent nature tests them, their love, their worth, yet again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liar's Path Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310004346

Robert Townsend

I was born in the village of Histon, which is just outside Cambridge, England, in December of 1959. When I was four years old and my younger brother was one the family moved to a house in Stevenage, Hertfordshire as my father had obtained a new and better paid job for Stevenage Borough Council as a Public Health Inspector. At the age of fourteen, while still at school, I became very interested in astronomy and stargazing. I obtained my first good proper astronomical telescope in 1976 for my sixteenth birthday. After leaving school I went to work for a small company making quality hand built astronomical telescopes at Astro-Systems in Luton. I was made redundant eight years later when the owner emigrated to America to work designing telescopes for Celestron Corporation. There followed a series of short term jobs that were only temporary. Later, I went to college and did a course in creative writing. I had already written several short stories with a science fiction/fantasy theme. This was followed by a romantic autobiographical account of some personal experiences called "Terpsichore's Fire". Later, I returned to fiction and in a flash of inspiration I hit on the idea for a full length comedy/fantasy/sexy book, and "Laura's New Boyfriend" was born. In the last ten years or so, when I get the time, this has been followed by three more full length books with the same comic characters, plus a few new ones. They are: "Laura's Wedding", "Laura's Baby" and "Laura's Child", I would like to see them published online and in paperback someday soon. I also have ideas for other comedy stories with different themes and characters, some of whom are based on real unusual and eccentric people I have met over the years. I also like doing wildlife photography, prehistoric model making, Chinese food and drinking real ales in country pubs. I live with my girlfriend Sarah in Stevenage and my star sign is Sagittarius. Robert Townsend, Astronomer and Author.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE: NORTH

In the summer of 1960 Richard Belisle and Marie-Jeanne, M.J., left their remote village upon the Lake Superior littoral, a world circumscribed by Life Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, the radio, stories told around a kitchen table during winter storms, and such news as an occasional visitor brought from the city.

The Great Lakes are dangerous waters, not to be trifled with. Lake Superior particularly expects to be treated with caution, wariness, and respect. Beneath its surface and upon its rocks rest the staves of ships, bateaux, and canoes and the bones of uncounted sailors, voyageurs, and Indians who did not.

Yet, there was great peace and healing to be found on its waters and along its shores. Ricky and M.J. had grown, no longer children, not yet adults. On a sun-filled day in May 1960, they had graduated from Spirit Falls Graded School.

It was a ten-year Lake Superior storm, not that fierce really, considering those gone before, that descended after the annual spring baseball game, but before Ricky's and M.J.'s Rite of the Sacrament of Confirmation. The storm snatched their childhood friends, Duane Scullen and his sister, Ruth. An error in teen judgment for which each took responsibility sent them, young and sobered, to wander in a 1960s America, itself soon to be roiled by unsettling deaths.

Rick and M.J. yearned, but what name could one attach to a longing when meaning eluded, slithered, refused to coalesce to a word? They had been taught that words had sense, but had yet to understand that experience gives meaning to our words, and if blessed, we share the experience with whom we love. They would learn that unshared meaning was the word for loneliness.

M.J., younger by months than Ricky, but wiser by years, understood that two created meaning in vague words—love, respect, sharing, kindness—through shared experience; a cup of coffee, a sunset, a birth. M.J. saw the world built in this order: man and wife, family, community, nation.

Richard saw it differently. He would be judged worthy by them, the tribe, the clan, the men. Yet, truth be told, that wasn't the complete calculation if calculation there were. During that storm, Ricky had proven himself courageous. It wasn't enough. He would prove himself worthy of his childhood friend by clearing the debt his parents took on to keep him out of prison and honor M.J.'s father with a 20-2 won-lost record and a 2.0 earned run average. Young men seek. He sought after honor as St. Augustine sought after God, O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.

This Marie-Jeanne intuited. Did she believe him foolish? Yes, she did. How was she to pass this sense into his consciousness? Beat his head against the side of the school-house wall as she had done when they were eight-year-olds? Get pregnant? She knew well enough how that was done, but she would not have a slave for a husband. She wanted Ricky to love her without regret, as he would someday love their children. She let him go. God or music, someone or something, would bring him back.

CHAPTER TWO: ON THE ROAD

Ricky walked north along the rural dirt road picking his way past the spots where the frost boiled out of the ground. Meltwaters stood high in the ditches, flowed fast through the concrete culvert and across a long field on which thirty or so heifers and young steers grazed on brown grasses to where the ditch waters flowed into the tamarack swamp. A light sprinkle began to fall through the mist. He pulled a black watch cap over his head and looked west over the pasture and grazing young stock. He was young and tall, hair shorn short, and seemed vaguely Indian—some slight fold to the eyelid, black hair and brown skin, though the winter had been long and cold. He walked tall, but with wariness, as one who'd had his first encounter with how unfair life might be.

He stared beyond the pasture into the grove of tamarack, beyond which lay the dells of the Spirit River, the gouged riverbed like a mirror crack; on the far side one life had been lived; on this side, a different life was to begin here, today.

The grazing herd lifted their heads as one, looking, a sense of nervousness touching one, the next, then all. Rick looked where the herd looked. Would he see a single groggy and peevish black bear or a pack of dogs? He listened to the sound of the rain, the wind rustling the swamp grasses. They—the cattle and the young man—sensed before they saw. An unease arose in the west.

Suddenly the tree line seemed to separate from the earth and rise, like the birthing of a mountain in a moment rather than an eon, into the sky.

The yearlings bolted bellowing, electric fence wire pinging as the animals ran through it. The emerging mountains now became a prehistoric pterodactyl, screaming, grey as the sky, wings stretched from north to south horizons, talons extended, and became an Air Force B-52 bomber, overflying so low that he thought for a moment he might touch its fuselage with a finger. It passed overhead and disappeared into the fog bank to the east, engines screaming, gone.

Ricky straightened from his crouch, legs tensed, heart pounding, and looked around. He turned north towards the Milwaukee Road rail line joined the Chicago and Northwestern at the Ishpeming switching yards.

The storm approached from the American side. Waves slapped against stones, from time to time splashing onto the jetty. Marie-Jeanne Charbonneau burrowed her bare feet into the sand, seeking the day's heat. She leaned against the drift-wood pulp log long ago fallen from a freighter and looked up to the full moon. A scudding cloud, an outrider of the storm, pierced it, passed across its face, dimming the lake, before moonlight again reflected on agitated waters. She had stood on the quay for two hours. He wasn't coming. It burned, stank like butchered chicken plunged into scalding water. So this was what 'heartache' meant. Your heart actually ached. The pain felt like...pneumonia. It burned her chest, constricted her breath, made her dizzy as when she stood suddenly, made her want to empty her guts onto the ground.

Shame? That hadn't felt so bad. People talked. What did they know? She had been sent to the convent school. She could hear them. 'Ah, American girls in trouble they send to a home, but Canuck girls, they send to the convent.' Idiots. If they thought she was that kind, what was she going to do? Rewire their peevish little brains? In the eyes of the Lord, she remained pure despite what catty old hens said. Ricky carried her unconscious to the barn, warmed her cold body with his own and did not do what they said. He saved her life, and he hadn't killed Duane.

And he hadn't come to her tonight.

Shame? The shame rolled over Ricky like a bulldozer. It fell upon him like a load of logs, the chain snapping, the awful mass releasing, crushing him. He listened to the bitter little battle-axes, petty, small-minded cripples with tight little mouths.

Ricky stood bowed before them. He had failed. She wanted to slug him. Couldn't he understand how little they mattered? When he had found her in the drugstore on the American side, she felt happiness so intense that it seemed he dark drugstore interior brightened as if the sun shone inside.

He was in such pain, it hurt her heart, though she wore the bruises and plasters. She held his head in her hands and put his face to her chest, wishing to heal him with her touch. She rained questions on his ears like hail, hovered like the red-shouldered hawk that sometimes followed them across the farm pasture with its insistent cry. Like the hawk, she watched him with anxious eyes and when he flinched, rephrased the question ten different ways, thus to pull his feelings out of him. She smiled at the moon. She knew what he was thinking before he did. Her smile disappeared. He had been torn away, and the pain was at the throat and at the chest and at the heart.

The moon hung in the sky like a big and fat and kindly grandmother. Thunder rumbled somewhere over the Upper Peninsula. The shame was shared if shame there was. He went to Ashland County jail. She went to the Convent School of Saint Marie in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. Wasn't it the same?

She shared everything with Ricky except what the gossips accused her of sharing. She felt the wool blanket, stolen from the convent hall closet, lain across the log. A fragment of cloud passed over the moon's face, and for a moment its expression was skeptical a raised eyebrow.

Had she not her share of guilt, if guilt there was to share. One of the Scullen men, father or brother, had made Ruth pregnant, but she wouldn't say which, and made Marie-Jeanne promise not to tell. Marie-Jeanne had planned to hide Ruth Scullen until Ruth's sister came to take her away. It had seemed so simple. It didn't work as intended.

Boy, did it not work as planned, and then some. While she was delirious with the fever of pneumonia, Ricky was accused.

Innocent, she exclaimed to the sky. Ricky was a man-boy, broad-shouldered and slim-waisted, who lifted boulders from the fields but gently cupped her chin in his hand. He had to leave. M.J. smelled the air and sensed cut hay and the sweaty boy and the passing of innocence.

She was 16, he 17. Who gave that fool the right to be guilty when so many others were responsible? Where does he get off seeking purity? If you are pure in the eyes of the Lord, what does it matter what others think? Doesn't that work for boys too?

A drop of rain struck her forehead. She loved him so much it addled her thoughts. She heard him in the bass clef of thunder, in the sound of rain drumming on the beach, the slap of waves on rocks. Why did he leave? They could have helped one another. She would say to him 'I can help.' Why hadn't she said so in the afternoon? How will he survive without her? Someone will hurt him. The moon disappeared behind heavy and writhing clouds.

The train wheels clicked in iron syncopation. The wind swirled dust and debris around the stacked, empty beer cases in the freight car. In the eastern sky the moon, yet to emerge, glowed the horizon. Lake Michigan appeared and disappeared through clearings in the woods.

He was on the road. His heart thumped with excitement. And with the next heartbeat, the excitement became shame. Adele Charbonneau cursed him. Sheriff Proulx jailed him. Mr. Charbonneau stood silent. M.J. forgave him. Two were dead at his hand. With money the family did not have, his mother paid off the judge. Thoughts swirled within like the bits of paper within the boxcar's chaotic winds. He was a predator, a dog gone wild, slavering over the proffered hand and upon the call of some unbidden impulse. No, he was a bull, a senseless, unthinking animal crushing the unwary.

Into the chilling winds this he resolved. He would hurt no other. He would cause no harm. He would pitch a baseball. On the diamond, he was contained. Four umpires, men as large and strong as he. None were innocent.

Rick struck the freight car door frame rhythmically as he heard the story fragments spoken on long winter nights against the flicker of firelight between the wood stove's cast iron plates. Stories of ancestors in battle and siege back to Pict tribesmen retreating before the Roman Legions into cold and windswept Scottish highlands, fighting, always fighting, sometimes victorious, often defeated, the women bearing more sons to fight yet again. A Roman emperor built his wall to confine them, and behind the wall they fell upon one another even as the legions retreated, their overweening pride and prickle disuniting them save for this campaign or another. Men fought, and women bore, savages arrayed in clans, sharing huts with their cattle, eating as the animals ate, an existence sanctified beyond the mists of time.

And one day the English—ah, Perfidious Albion—made the Scottish king their own and dispossessed the fighting men of employment and the clansmen went where they could live the life they knew. The Quakers of Philadelphia, aghast at these savages in their midst, passed them through to the borderland to fight their own, other savages, the Indians. Having exchanged long spears for long rifles, the Scottish clans spread across America.

Richard was a savage twice blest. On his mother's side, Serbs, tribal Slavic mountain men settled in the Balkan passes between Christian Germans and Muslim Turks fighting one, then the other, then each other.

Into the swirling winds, he denied his heritage of his mother and of his father. He would become neither fierce Pict nor cunning Slav. A brother and a sister had died at his hand. His gentle friend, M.J., had survived his predations and the beautiful Marina his lust. He was violent and rageful. He should be caged until he was old and could no longer hurt the innocent.

The passing forest began to open into farmland, clearings in the woods, barns in the darkness, now and then a yard light burning through the night, a lonely woman, a farmer's wife, luxuriating in connection to the larger world, electric lines strung to rural addresses not so long ago lit with kerosene lantern. He smiled. Was it ten years ago Paul Bender had wired the house and barn? The wind, now forest cool, now warmed by a passing farm field, whipped his jacket. Heat lightning pulsed in the north, a thunderstorm over the lake.

After the baseball game where he had struck out the great Sandusky, M.J. had appeared in her white confirmation dress among the rough miners and farmers, tentative, wings fragile, like a monarch emerged from its chrysalis. Do you like it? she asked shyly and fidgeted. Don't stare, she said.

The wind swirled a stench like rotten egg within the boxcar, a paper mill spewing sulfur gases into the air. Like burnt hair and burnt flesh. The thing had sprung from the earth, and he had lashed out with what came to hand, hefting the shotgun barrel in his heavy farm boy hands as if it were a twig.

He would become a better man. He would play baseball in a southern league. He fingered the matchbook with a name written in pencil. He would seek forgiveness. He would seek penitence. He would cadge himself within a 360-foot perimeter of the baseball diamond.

In the fall he would return home with honor.

The forest broke and opened into farmlands. The smell of warm grasses swirled through the boxcar. The full moon rested upon the still waters of Lake Michigan. He smiled. He saw her pitch-blackened feet scurrying up the white pine like a red squirrel. He felt the tomboy body, hard and angled as maple boards, knocking him to the ground, pinning him to the grass. He watched her fingers skimming the piano keys, her eyes conversing with the notes and the composer. He felt her brown eyes looking into his, searching to discern what lurked within. In the course of the last winter, she had changed. He had tried to ignore the roundness of her hips, the appearance of breasts, his response to her body.

A wisp of cloud touched the moon, and it became an eye half-closed, suspicious. Loneliness sliced his viscera like a razor-edged hunting knife opening a deer's gut, spilling them into the snow and he could not breathe. He clutched the door and looked down at the heavy stones at the trestle's base, the boulder-strewn embankment, then the water of a river, and thought if he threw himself from the door, the numbing shame could end. No. M.J. would be alone. She didn't want that. She had told him. Ricky leaned back. He was on his journey.

CHAPTER THREE: CROSSROAD

Rick slipped from the boxcar at the base of the Mannheim Road Bridge in Franklin Park, Illinois and climbed up to the road. Heavy traffic vibrated the concrete, the approaching car's liquid in the heated air, solidifying as they neared. The sun seared his eyes. Melted asphalt stuck to his brogans. Heated winds swirled dust off the gravel parking lot of a ready-mix concrete factory. A freight car's wheel bearings screeched and echoed in the yard. A bright red and blue airliner landing at O'Hare's passed overhead, its turbines screaming and spewing exhaust. The trains, traffic, and planes, their sound, sight, and effluent, seemed to intersect at the point on the earth at which he stood. He inhaled slowly as if his nose hairs might somehow filter the air he breathed and imagined himself on the ore slip at Ashland Harbor looking across Lake Superior's glass smooth surface.

The peace was short lived. In the parking lot, a tractor-trailer gunned its engine, sweeping out into the traffic, rolling clouds of dust and diesel fumes in its wake. A rusted Desoto car with five young men braked, swerved, squealing tires and gunning a poorly tuned motor. The gaunt young man riding shotgun, his hair greased and coiled, face white and pimpled, caught Rick's eye. Fury swept his face, and he thrust his index finger, southern-style, out the car window. Rick stepped into the rage, raised his finger like a pistol, sighted along an imagined barrel laid upon the greaser's nose and imagined the recoil and the black hole splitting the prick's unibrow. The young hillbilly's face contorted as if struck, and he struggled to crawl through the window, but it, half-open, would not release him, and he spit a thick hocker as the traffic like rushing water carried the car away.

Rick breathed away the adrenaline. What was with him? Rage flared. And for months and years, the damage endured. Had the Desoto stopped, the young hoods piling out with crowbars, what then? He had two baseballs, his glove and a pair of cleats in his pack. Could he have put one, maybe two out of commission with a fastball between the eyes, and then figure what to do with the others?

Run? It wouldn't have occurred to him. He resolved to carry a baseball bat. It wouldn't appear threatening if he hung his glove from the pack's strap. An itinerant baseball player had a purpose passing through and was less threatening than a bum.

Another airliner passed overhead, laying more noise and particulate into the industrial miasma. He headed down Mannheim Road to intersect the commuter trains for downtown.

Rick descended the stairs of the Chicago elevated train. Cars were parked bumper-to-bumper along both curbs of the avenue. Traffic moved slowly, horns blaring. The pedestrian traffic was black, white and Hispanic, dressed like Americans save for a group of Hasidic Jews and a Catholic priest.

He brushed his hand through his hair, avoided touching his face in order not to streak the dirt, shading his eyes to search the storefronts, and smelt an acrid stench. He glanced around for the dead animal decomposing on hot pavement, and then lowered his arms.

Two storefronts down hung a large sign Banya, 75 cents in both Roman and Cyrillic script. He thought for a moment. No, he'd keep his arms down and save the money. Two touts eyed him from across the street. He moved his wallet from back to the front pocket. Beyond the Russian baths hung a red neon sign, Ukrainian Unity, written in Ukrainian script.

The interior was dark. The cold air evaporated the moisture on his skin, and he shivered. He lifted his arms slightly to cool the festering bacteria of his armpits.

In a pool of light like a Ukrainian Easter egg stood a Bronco Nagurski built-alike—stocky with bones poured of concrete—reading glasses perched on his shaved head, a white handlebar mustache with waxed tips hanging downwards. His white cotton shirt was belted at the waist in the style of the Russian peasant with ornate cloth bands billowing his sleeves at the elbow, suggesting massive biceps. A gold twin-beam Orthodox cross hung from a thick gold chain around a thick neck. It was as if he had stepped from the Repin painting of Zaporozhian Cossacks, which hung on the wall to his left.

The Cossack looked up. His eyes were black. Meaty hands rested on the bar. He neither smiled nor frowned. A sawed-off and taped 34-ounce Louisville Slugger weighed down a pile of receipts and accounting book. He was a Ukrainian concentration camp guard bartending in America, who occasionally beat the crap out of Italian hoods and Irish labor organizers and kept the books.

You got ID, malchik? he said. Behind the bar, a school of angelfish in a large aquarium moved slowly from the Serbian brandies to the blends and back, then rose to