Way I See It

By Wampus Reynolds

Norman, Oklahoma: the home of drinking, screwing around, and breaking down Sooners football. That's how Cole Posel sees it. He came to college here years ago with Hilton, his childhood best friend and never left. All that changes the morning Hilton Price is found shot dead on the side of a lake.

Cole and his old classmate/megachurch pastor's wife Robin, now look through their friend's hidden life for clues and answers police can't provide. They uncover a complex man who touched others in many ways and they uncover a town with many secrets. Can Hilton's killer be nearby? And did they kill those other victims?

 

The first novel from standup comedian and game show veteran Wampus Reynolds contains many elements: a tightly plotted crime novel, a meditation on friendship and adulthood and an examination of the people who went to college and never let it end. Way I See It is a mystery with an ending that will stay with you and make you think is the way you see it the way others do too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wampus Reynolds
• Release date: May 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393924074

Book preview

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wampus Reynolds is a standup comedian, cheesemonger and game show veteran who lives in Norman, Oklahoma. He is the author of many essays, short stories and pieces in print and online. This is his first novel.

Facebook.com/reynoldsprogram

Way I See It

by Wampus Reynolds

© 2020 Wampus Reynolds

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system. transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without the written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Please refer all pertinent questions to the author.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Under no circumstances may any part of this book be photocopied for resale.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.

Cover art and design by Jason Stout (jasonstout.com)

For Suzy, my pigeon

ONE

Outside on Main Street and the walk up here, the bitter gust of icy wind hits against the eyes and tears them up. We then step inside this diner with its greasy steam from the always spattering grill and I instinctively unzip my hoodie coat before spotting the one empty booth in the place.

I feel for and grab her hand without looking back and head down the aisle. This way it seems natural I’ll sit on the side facing the door. She slides in the booth across from me. This is my first long look at her in the morning.

She’s way early twenties, many years my junior. She does not make eye contact and looks way too hard at the menu she immediately grabbed behind the sugars, hot sauces and salt and pepper against the wall.

So she hasn’t done this much before. That doesn’t mean after the meal will be any easier or harder. I won’t adjust what I will say.

Wait, this sounds like I have a spiel planned out. I don’t. I just know that I will communicate the fact that while our encounter, our fucking, was great there will be no ensuing relationship. I hate this part, however necessary or needless it is.

What’ll you drink?

Hi, Dedra. Coffee. Black.

I’d like a diet coke please..

"Know what you want to eat?

Two eggs poached. Tomato slices. No bread.

Umm. This thing. She points to an item on the menu.

I look at my dining companion. We collided into each other hours before. I knew her heat. But now we are learning how each other orders breakfast.

Dedra walks off. A silence hangs and dances between us. She stops it.

That band was great last night.

Yeah.

They always are good. First time they’ve played Motor’s.

Cool. No wonder I didn’t know them. That’s where I am usually.

She smiles. Sort of. Motor’s is the one bar in town that has music every night. It is smack dab in the middle of the district where college kids hang out, but it’s not a college bar. In fact, it was the last bar in town to still allow smoking (earning it the nickname Odor’s from all non-smokers). The old locals keep the college kids, especially the entitled ones, and their attitudes in check. It’s the one bar where in fights punches land.

It’s sinking in she slept with an old local.

Dedra drops off the drinks without looking between us. The girl looks at Dedra walking away and starts intuiting a story there. She probably is getting it right. I interrupt her chain of thought.

Yeah, good band. There was one just like them ten years ago here.

Hmm hmm.

Their guitarist, main guy, went crazy. They couldn’t keep it together.

Hmm hmm.

Yeah, he went real religious. Not megachurch, but speaking in tongues. Now he’s laying hands, you know? Claiming his prayers cure kids’ physical deformities. Grow limbs back. Now here’s the thing... do you take psych classes?

I have.

Because this would be a good case study for a paper. I’m sure there’s a ton of jargon to bring in this, but his dad was a doctor. Pillar of the community. Was this healing resentment? Sublimation? Oedipal stuff, if you flirt with Freud?

Hmm.

I want to hear words.

Did you sleep well?

Great. All the night through.

Good. I like my mattress very soft but some people don’t.

She turns her head. Her profile against the daylight in the diner’s window shows her chin pointed ever so slightly down. I know this is killing her.

Name? What is her name? She shouted it at me in the bar. I repeated it then. I try to remember how my lips shaped saying it to jumpstart my memory. Nothing.

Cole! Hey man! I snap my head to my left and there stands an old friend holding a coffee to go. Thick plaid flannel juts out of a corduroy coat.

Good morning, Phil.

Phil Thomas is a handyman. Which in Norman means he’s a musician who ran out of gigs. Good guy. We’ve gone to the same parties, the same shows—that’s a large demographic of people I know.

Phil is in overalls. He smiles at my breakfast companion and turns back to me still smiling. He stands over our table.

How you think our Sooners are gonna do? Baylor is gonna kill us, right?.

Yeah, they let a few Iowa State players juke and pass them last week. I bet the coaches make adjustments. We’ll be fine.

Phil smiles and nods. He wants to be introduced to my new friend. To my advantage, Dedra appears behind him.

Oh Phil, here’s our breakfast. Excuse us. Good to see you, man.

It’s a narrow aisle that the diner booths line so Phil and Dedra have to do a dance for her to pass as he waves so long.

Dedra drops our plates in front of us with no small talk whatsoever. She’s not hustling for tips from me. I have tipped the same every time for years.

I look down. All the food looks perfect. That cook Chuy poaches like a champ. I grab the bottle of Cholula and cover my eggs. The first bites settle me as my blood sugar gets back to normal.

I look up at my dining partner concentrating on her dish she somehow could not pronounce. I am not judging; this is a tough situation.

How’s the food?

Really good. I already feel less hungover. I like this place. It’s my first time here.

Wait. How long have you been in Norman?

I’m a senior. Around four years.

Damn. She had a different college experience than I did. When I rolled into town, my friends and I checked out every little place in town. Norman compelled us to mentally map it. Now kids sit in front of a box and go out rarely. Or if they do, they go in huddled frightened packs.

Clearly now she has started going out. I picked her up at Motor’s last night. But in my own college youth this place would have been almost all college students comparing notes about the parties the night before, fixing hangovers, writing papers due in thirty minutes. Now it’s mainly town folk—courthouse lawyers, downtown retailers, people my age. The near-dozen people who have come either in or out through the door since we sat, I know half. There are two lawyers, an old ex of a friend (she’s now a housewife doing a MLM scheme whom I purposely avoid) and three guys who design all the local websites and drink geek beer all night—I’ve never seen those three apart.

The bell on the front door rings again. Officer Chuck Sanger undoes his coat and nods in greeting at people up front. They straighten up when talking to him, not because of his current uniform but because of his old one, the Crimson and Cream.

Chuck played fullback at the University of Oklahoma, the main reason this town exists. He was a really good one. Started. Got a few short-yardage TDs on set plays, a sign the coaches liked him because he reliably blocked for the pampered running backs. He was hyped as a high draft pick. His size and speed were unreal. Talk was the team who’d pick him up would switch him to another position. maybe d-back (of course the perpetually critical OU fans saw this as evidence the coaches had misused his talent and that’s another reason why we don’t win the national championship every year).

He did well at the NFL combine, but here in town during the summer where he was finishing his last classes for a degree in criminology, he was in an altercation in a parking lot. No one knows exactly what happened. That’s because Chuck would never say.

What I know is when the ambulance showed up, the EMTs found Chuck on the ground, staring stone-faced at the horizon, both of his kneecaps broken. I talked to one of the EMTs on that call once. He said there was a pool of blood ten feet from where Sanger sat. Sanger told them Don’t mind that. That’s not mine.

He worked hard and healed up, but no NFL team would take a chance. Instead, in a surprise move, he went to Norman Police Academy. He came out serious. The aw-shucks mode he brought about in post-game locker interviews was now gone. He is a solid policeman.

Chuck sits at the counter, a nice spot if you’re alone. You can get lost watching Chuy the cook and Margaret the prep smoothly putting special orders together and sending them out. It’s like watching a choreographed dance. Very elegant and calming how it all goes.

I turn to the woman who just recently yelled at me Goddamnit Fuck Me Harder. That is a detail more important to remember than any name if you ask me. Her nervousness is now defeated by the combination of eggs, onions, hash browns and green chiles; her cool repose is in full view. All the classmates attracted to females must be in love with her. I wipe off my mouth with a napkin and talk.

So here’s the deal...

Her pupils tic at the word deal. It’s a loaded word, a cheap word. Those eyes, which I wouldn’t have minded seeing look into mine more often, fill with tears. I finish my pitch.

After sighing and looking up at the ceiling in resignation, she gets up from the table. Goodbye, Cole. She leans on my name. Waits a second to confirm the absence of hers and walks off.

Damn it, doing the right thing hurts.

TWO

I sit at the booth, two plates of half-eaten breakfast and two drinks in front of me. Dedra doesn’t bus them away. This is much to her satisfaction. A man loses dignity alone in front of two plates of food.

A Bloody Mary sounds like it would help, but that’s against the rules for Smart Drinking. I learned the three rules from a wise junior when I was a sophomore in college. They are never drink three days in a row, never drink alone and never drink before noon. As long as I follow those, I feel I’m in control. I gulp down ice water instead and don’t hear Chuck Sanger come up to me.

Cole Posel. I have some news.

Officer Sanger, I did not hear you.

I motion for him to sit down. Now Dedra comes to bus the table. An officer sitting down across from the guy who loved on her one summer and took her around the country, from festival to slapdash festival intrigues her. Officer Sanger says nothing until she notes he’s not talking with her there. She leaves. He steels himself.

I just heard on radio Holden Price died.

Holden? My friend? What does that mean? How?

Preliminary report is gunshots.

Suicide? He seemed to be in a good place last time I talked to him.

Can’t comment on ongoing investigation, but it doesn’t look suicide.

I don’t get it.

Holden was not a friend. Holden was me. We went to daycare in another town together. We were so young when we met I remember him bragging about wiping his bottom good the first time.

We spent all hours together, against the careful plans of our parents. As my mom said, after a furious homebuilder came to our house to tell her about the shed Holden and I had made with materials from the lot where he was constructing a boring old house, you boys bring out the worst in each other.

This news via Officer Sanger brings out something in me.

You ok, Cole? You need a ride to your place?

I just need a moment. Thanks.

I don’t notice him leave the booth. This hurts. Our lives together, they were epic. Sure, we drifted apart. That’s because we conquered enough territory together. The Beatles broke up and the four went solo. That’s how we were. We knew each other completely. We had to find other people to entertain with our bags of tricks.

He held onto that one thing he thought kept him young but just took off years from the end—especially this last year. This news appears to have something to do with that. Already it makes me mad it will give people a one sentence plot to his life - He took drugs and he died because of it. But I am just speculating.

Now finding out has to wait. Wait after getting out of this diner before the phony sympathies arrive. Plus, I need to sleep that girl away.

THREE

The wind still blasts freezing bursts that I now have to walk into directly. It chaps the face and makes me wish I would use Uber. But that would require getting a phone and opening up all kinds of distractions and intrusions and that would keep me from real stuff like music and books and building up some wealth and...

And I just walk. A walk of numbness and shock. The few blocks blur by until I come up on my lot.

The house on my property is beautiful: two stories and craftsman-style with a wide porch covered with a roof with exposed and polished wood beams as rafters. It fits in this neighborhood of the good kind of comfortable people. No fleeing to the west side because a block over went Section 8. All around here is landscaping to interest the eye.

Hello, Cole!

Tim the Tenant strolls out through the front door. He had been lying in ambush mode. His round cheeks and chin dimple make him look like a hapless sitcom dad. His shirt is striped baby blue and pale yellow to drive the point home that his priorities aren’t getting drunk and bringing gals home, but just avoiding the real world and real nature.

Hi, Tim. How is the house?

Great. Yeah, all great. The phoniest pause where Tim pretends he just thought of something. Hold up, you know there’s one thing. The upstairs sink has a drip. I barely notice it but you know, Dani, my wife told me I had to tell you...

Sure. Tim, I just got some bad news. Can it wait a couple hours?

His feet back a few inches further away from me, an instinctive move to get further away from misfortune and the shock that I actually said something personal and vulnerable. I never do that with a tenant.

Oh yeah, Cole. No problem. Sorry about the bad news.

I nod and walk the length of the driveway to the garage behind. I sprint up the flight of wooden stairs to the apartment above, my home.

I move straight to my fridge and pour a glass of filtered water. I’m still not rehydrated and gulp down the water. Still don’t feel right. I take the hottest shower and unplug my phone—my only phone, a landline from another era. I tear off the