Togetherness (Short Stories Book 2)

By Steve Stroble

A collection of short stories:
Pink Belly Man -- One of bully Pink Belly Man's victims seeks revenge years later.

Working by Committee -- Three men and three women report to find answers about UFOs and Alien Abductions.

I Quit -- Guitar player and singer is odd man out as his bandmates harass him.

Don't Believe Them -- POTUS's departure from office leads to nationwide marital law.

The Case of the Wayward Grandson -- A grandfather hires P. I. Bobbi Heck to save his grandson.

The Review -- A review inspires a new author to higher expectations of turning her book into a movie.

The Last Move -- Worn down after 16 moves during his marriage, a husband swears, "This will be the last one."

No Drone Zone -- Country resident declares war against a neighbor's drone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Stroble
• Release date: Oct 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463828144

Steve Stroble

Steve Stroble grew up as a military brat, which took him from South Dakota to South Carolina to Germany to Ohio to Southern California to Alabama to the Philippines to Northern California. Drafted into the Army, he returned to Germany.His stories classified as historical fiction often weave historical events, people, and data into them.His science fiction stories try to present feasible even if not yet known technology.His dystopian and futuristic stories feature ordinary heroes and heroines placed into extraordinary situations and ordinary villains who drain the life out of others' souls (their minds, wills, and emotions) by any means available.

Book preview

Togetherness (Short Stories Book 2)

Steve Stroble

Togetherness (Short Stories Book 2), copyright © 2018 Stroble Family Trust. All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. All people, places, events, and situations are the product of the writer’s imagination. Any resemblance of them to actual persons, living or dead, places, events, and situations is purely coincidental.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Table of Contents

Pink Belly

Working by Committee

I Quit

Don’t Believe Them

The Case of the Wayward Grandson

The Review

The Last Move

No Drone Zone

Acknowledgments

Pink Belly

The basketball traveled a perfect arc and hit nothing but net. Swish, perfect jump shot made by a player twenty feet from the basket.

That makes it 9 to 9. Just one more basket and I win again.

No way, man. You have to win by at least two baskets, remember? Otherwise it’s too hard to beat you.

Get real. This ain’t a volleyball game we’re playing. This is the NBA. It’s the Boston Celtics versus the L.A. Lakers, Bill Russell vs. Jerry West, where games can be decided by one shot, even if it’s just a free throw. Let’s play.

At first the two twelve-year-old want-to-be superstars did not notice the red 1961 Chevrolet Corvair sliding to a stop in the gravel parking lot next to the asphalt basketball courts. Then Bill Burns let Monroe Smith score uncontested.

What’s wrong, Bill? Are you all bent out of shape so now you’re going to give up and let me win? Monroe asked after scoring on an easy lay-up. He turned to see what had transfixed Bill from roving point guard into an immobile spectator.

"Run, Bill. Those are two mean looking cats coming this way. They sure ‘nough can’t be no Welcome to the Neighborhood Committee."

But Bill stood motionless, as if his tennis shoes had been glued to the court.

Not until he saw the smaller of the two punks charging straight toward him did Bill turn to run toward home. Seven quick steps later, he was tackled from behind. His prize possession, a regulation sized basketball, squirted from Bill’s hands and bounced to the edge of the hot asphalt. The attacker seemed to weigh a ton, even though he stood shorter than Bill.

Did you catch the nigger? asked the one pinning Bill to the ground with butt on his stomach and hands on his wrists.

The winded six-foot tall partner joined his pal.

Nah. He got away, he said between gasps for air. You know how coons can be, faster than greased lightning when they’re scared of something.

What do you think we should we do with this here piece of white trash? That’s what you are, boy. The one on top of Bill sprayed spittle onto his face. It smelled of tobacco and beer. You need to be taught a real good lesson. You should know better than to be hanging around with those that ain’t your kind.

The second thug knelt down, planting his bony knees onto Bill’s arms.

Let’s give him a pink belly, he said as he pulled Bill’s jersey up over his face. Maybe that will make him better remember how he should be acting.

For the next minute, the one who now sat on Bill’s knees slapped his stomach with both palms, as if he were playing conga drums. The two bullies left Bill crying on the ground. He staggered to his feet, shuffling at a slow pace to let his tears dry and the stinging pain on his bright pink abdomen subside. After arriving home, Bill hid in his room. Unwilling to share his humiliation with siblings or parents, he listened to his radio.

Hits by the Beatles, James Brown, Rolling Stones, Supremes, Beach Boys, Temptations, Petula Clark, and others did nothing to quell his embarrassment and anger caused by the one he called Pink Belly Man.

* * *

One year later, Bill Burns started high school.

He felt lost, especially after realizing Pink Belly Man was a senior at their school of 2,403 students. At first, Bill remained vigilant in the hallways, cafeteria, bathrooms, gym, anywhere he might bump into Pink Belly Man. But after a semester of frazzled nerves, Bill realized he did even register on his nemesis’s radar.

To him, Bill was nobody, nothing, not even important enough to remember.

To make matters worse, The Beatles released a song called Nowhere Man during the winter of that school year. When Bill heard Pink Belly Man singing along with the song’s lyrics as he listened to a transistor radio while walking to class before school one morning, he began to wonder if that was his way of saying: You might think that I think you’re just a Nowhere Man, Billy boy. But I’ve got my eyes on you. So watch your step, freshman, or you’re dead meat.

Bill relaxed after Pink Belly Man graduated five months later. But every time he heard anything about the one he hated, his stomach knotted. The word on the street was that Pink Belly Man’s daddy had lots of connections and was getting his son hooked into the Democrat political machine in neighboring Georgia, where Pink Belly Man now attended college.

He’ll fit right in over there, Bill thought. He’ll look just perfect, wearing his fancy-pants three piece silk suits and shiny black leather shoes during the day and white sheet and hood at night.

* * *

Instead of navigating a well-planned future, Bill bumbled through community college after high school. The only class that interested him was Writing for Mass Media, which led to three semesters of writing stories for the college paper, which next resulted in Bill’s first full-time job after graduation. Family and friends thought being an editor for a weekly newspaper eighty miles from his hometown to be a great first step in a great career.

Bill thought reporting on local politics, school sports, and so many clubs and organizations was boring. Using his beat up 35 millimeter Canon camera to take photographs of grinning local yokels aged four months to104 did not fulfill any creative urges either. And doing it for fifty to sixty hours a week had become a pain in the butt. Somehow, he kept his feelings hidden beneath the professional exterior and friendly manner the paper’s publisher required of all his employees.

His seventy-three-year-old publisher also subscribed to two daily newspapers from Atlanta. Atlanta is the New York City of the South, he told all of his employees.

You all read these papers so you can make something out of yourselves, you hear? No sense in all of you all getting stuck in this here Podunk of a place for the rest of your natural lives.

But doing so meant Bill occasionally read something about Pink Belly Man. Sometimes just a short item about his latest promotion or new child, more often stories full of direct quotes from him about why the one he spoke on behalf of is the best politician that Georgia has ever been blessed with so far. He…

After suffering through one such overly long article, filled with eight direct quotations from Pink Belly Man, Bill had had his fill.

Time for revenge, he thought.

On my terms.

* * *

So Bill tacked a day of vacation onto a weekend to give him three days to carry out his plan. After checking into a cheap motel on Atlanta’s outskirts, he looked up Pink Belly Man’s home address in the thick Atlanta phonebook attached to the phone booth outside his motel room. He spent most of Saturday and Sunday walking Pink Belly Man’s neighborhood, but caught sight of him only once, driving his wife and two young children to church early Sunday morning.

It’s got to be done Monday morning or never, Bill thought. He most likely will be all alone then on his way to work.

Next morning, the wake-up call to Bill’s motel room rolled him out of bed at 4:30 a.m. After dressing in cotton t-shirt, long sleeved tieless white shirt, wool pants and heavy overcoat reaching to his thighs to ward off the autumn chill, he checked out and drove to Pink Belly Man’s neighborhood, parking three blocks from his home. Because of the early morning fog and drizzle, Bill grabbed his umbrella from the backseat of his 1971 green Ford Fairlane. His unkempt, long curly dark brown hair kept ears and part of his cheeks warm during the short walk.

He positioned himself at the corner nearest the two smallest homes on the block, short two-story houses having not much of a front or side yard. They were dwarfed by a long row of four and five story tall condominiums with adjoining walls that took up the rest of the block. Everything was built of brick, even the sidewalk on which Bill stood and the three and one-half foot tall wall separating the homes’ residents from passersby.

Bill stared down at the hem of his stylish pants resting on his brand new patent leather shoes and noticed the offset pattern of the bricks he stood on.

The bricklayers were probably still scared stiff because they had to use up the bricks left over after General Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground during his march to the sea during The Civil War, Bill thought. Say, maybe that’s who I am, the ghost of General Sherman. That means my target is just another good ol’ boy slave owner who needs to be set straight.

The target.

Now his nemesis had become the kind of nonentity Bill had been the hundreds of times he had walked past Pink Belly Man during high school. Not a man, father or husband. Just a target, unworthy of any other consideration or common courtesy Bill granted to others.

He spent a half hour imagining Sherman’s troops destroying Atlanta 115 years ago, before the target appeared, walking along the brick sidewalk toward a parking garage sheltering his gold colored 1979 Cadillac Coupe Deville.

Bill started to follow the short fat man. But after only a few steps, Pink Belly Man turned, leaning on his unfolded umbrella with one hand and clutching his briefcase with his other, legs crossed and bent at the knees, indications