Who’s Going to Say Kaddish for the Chinaman’s Dog?: A Love Story Set in South Central Tennessee

By Jon Hykes

            Who’s going to Say Kaddish for the Chinaman’s Dog, is the Ultimate love story. In it there are ordinary people dealing with ordinary things: sex, violence, sexual violence, war, separation, dismemberment, death, and PTSD. It deals with revenge, atonement, redemption, and respect. It also deals in the difference between faith and religion, and ones relationship with one’s own deity. While exploring their world, they discover fundamental truths and each other. This is done in a unique, humorous, and unforgettable way, which can best be described as an emotional roller coaster. It is not for the faint of heart or soul, as the issues are dealt with in a graphic manner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499048636

Jon Hykes

Born in Pittsburgh Pa. Grew up in Murrysville, and Export Pa. Drafted into the U S Army in 1966. Moved around the country until 1977. Lived in New York City, Berkeley California, Vancouver B.C. Seattle Washington, Eugene Oregon, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Boulder, Colorado and Nashville, Tennessee. Have been living in Connecticut since 1977. Was involved in music scene off and on since 1964 as singer, instrumentalist, songwriter, philosopher, poet. Played at two rock festivals and did the coffee house circuit. Paid the bills by being a technician, fixing anything except broken hearts. Had some success as an artist doing pen and ink, and an occasional mural. Married with two children and two grand children.

Book preview

WHO’S GOING TO SAY

KADDISH

FOR THE

CHINAMAN’S

DOG?

A LOVE STORY SET IN SOUTH CENTRAL TENNESSEE

JON HYKES

Copyright © 2014 by Jon Hykes.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014912321

ISBN:   Hardcover     978-1-4990-4865-0

             Softcover       978-1-4990-4866-7

             eBook           978-1-4990-4863-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/10/2014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

636072

Contents

FOREWORD

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Dedicated to Hugh Gilmour who had the courage to fail me in sophomore high school English

He has my eternal gratitude

And to my brother, Bob, who steered this work in the right direction.

FOREWORD

T his is a story of ordinary people in an ordinary town. The town is called Sterling Forks, Tennessee. It is somewhere between Lynchburg and the Alabama line along Interstate 65. It has a Baptist Bible college, a local hospital serving the college, and the Jack Daniel’s Distillery in Lynchburg. On one side of town is I-65 and on the other is the L&N railroad. The railroad crosses a corner of South Park. There is a flooring mill, a Walmart, and a Fuller’s earth mine. Sterling Forks is home to many people, who moved here to escape the rush and crowding of Nashville, to the north, Huntsville, and Birmingham to the south, and Atlanta to the southeast. If a traveler is really desperate, he can fly into the airports in Anniston or Huntsville. They only do it once, as there are no real travel services in Huntsville and Anniston is scary to fly into and almost as far away as Nashville.

In 1976, the Bible college went liberal arts and attracted students and faculty who desired a small town environment. It made for a much greater variety of people than if they had just stayed a Bible college.

On I-65, there is a sign: STERLING FORKS NEXT 2 EXITS.

Off the first exit is Earl’s Place. It’s the only truck stop between Lynchburg and Huntsville. About two miles down the road from Earl’s is the rest of the town. Since 1976, the town has grown to about ten thousand people. It is the place to live in Southern Tennessee.

Welcome to Sterling Forks.

Population 10,641

Go! Get out! Thus I was greeted at the New Years Feast.

—John Kenneth White II, a haiku, 1966

1

F rancis, the Toad Smasher, sat in his corner, picking his nose. He always had that corner to himself when he came there. He had been going there for more years than anybody could remember. He had been driving the same rig, and everybody swore that he even wore the same clothes, but he spent good money and tipped well, so nobody really complained, at least to his face. His cap used to be yellow with a black and yellow Caterpillar logo on it. It came with the engine in his rig. He replaced the Detroit power plant with a Caterpillar diesel in Kansas City. No one really remembered when that had happened, not even Francis. The rest of his clothing was tired company issue, from a company that had been gone and forgotten a long time ago.

Francis was waiting.

Maryanne was leaning against the cashier stand, talking on the telephone and chewing gum. That was where Maryanne could always be found. There could be a diner full of hungry tourists, but Maryanne leaned there, talked, and chewed. Maryanne had gone to New York as a Barbizon model after she dropped out of high school. Barbazon sent her back a year later, and now she had to work for a living. She really didn’t work much though. She didn’t need to. Earl and Kenny did most of the work there. It was too much trouble to motivate Maryanne. Maryanne had been there since she came back from New York, and Earl figured that she was good for business.

Earl had inherited the place from his dad and the atmosphere along with it from his dad. It was the only food for a long way, so there was a certain amount of steady business. It was also the only fuel and comfort facilities for a long way. Earl knew it and priced things accordingly. In another life, Earl would probably have been either a small time hoodlum or a car salesman. Only the accident of where he was born determined his fortune. He had never been out of town, even on his honeymoon. The army didn’t want him because he had a crooked spine. The police didn’t want him because he had spent his life in a truck stop and never had the opportunity to get into trouble. He ran the place like a benevolent dictator. His father had run it that way too, and Earl didn’t have the imagination or drive to change anything.

Kenny came with the place. He was the source of the menu and the food. There was nothing written down. He simply cooked what he was asked to cook. He was even known to cook fish and game that came within his reach, for regular customers. He was one of those rare artists that could handle two grills and a fryolator and not get jammed or burned.

Francis waited. He waited for his order to come up. He waited for the clock to tick off his downtime. Mostly though, he really didn’t know what it was he waited for. He had waited all his life. He waited for loads. He waited to unload. He waited for meals. So he sat waiting and picking his nose.

Kenny put Francis’s breakfast, two eggs over easy with home fries, bacon and white toast, at the window. Earl put down his broom and took it over to Francis. Maryanne talked on the phone and chewed gum. She had her back to the counter and the phone cord wrapped around her fingers. Earl knew that it was pointless for Francis to wait for her. Francis was a regular from Daddy’s Day and it just wouldn’t do for his food to get cold. He put the plate in front of Francis and went back to sweeping the floor. Mike from the hardware store held up his empty coffee cup. Earl put down his broom and filled it.

Francis picked up the ketchup bottle to put some on his home fries. The bottle was empty. He leaned over, holding the empty bottle, and slid it across the floor. It caromed off the counter, banked off a booth, and came to rest against Maryanne’s foot. Everyone in the place started to clap. Maryanne blushed.

Hang on for a minute, Blanche, said Maryanne into the phone, as she untangled herself from the cord. She walked over to the counter, grabbed a bottle of ketchup, tossed it to Francis, and then resumed her conversation with Blanche.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.

—Dixon Typing Manual, c 1925

2

F red Katz sat at his computer, staring at a blank screen. It wasn’t completely blank, as it had PAGE 1 LINE1 in the bottom right-hand corner to make the emptiness emptier. He had been sitting there for too many hours. If he had been at a typewriter, he would have had a full wastebasket. At that moment, he had been forsaken by his and everybody else’s muse. He’d spent the afternoon there. He’d been there yesterday and probably would be there tomorrow too. Ideas seemed to find people other than him. Last week he had actually made it through another chapter. The next morning, though, it seemed like the fumings of a doddering old man. He labeled it trash and put it in the D:\ drive, where all his other meanderings and ruminations lived. He found that by composting his bad ideas and broken prose in a safe place, they would mix, fester, and occasionally bring forth great pearls of literature. It was much better than the typewriter, which couldn’t allow composting of ideas. This particular project had generated almost ten megabytes of compost. It had as yet produced neither pearls nor even a volunteer tomato plant as a real compost pile would. It just sat there and festered.

The project dragged though. It was supposed to be a book about the making of a misogynist. The publisher was wild about the idea and was delighted about the style sheets and synopsis, but . . .

A misogynist is a difficult person. His main character refused to cooperate and share his life with Fred, even though it was Fred’s own story. The other people fled too and left Fred quite alone, staring catatonically at his screen for months. Sure, he’d occasionally sit and play virtual solitaire with virtual cards. He thanked Bill Gates for that surcease. He’d also play an occasional game of minefield. He had the game down to less than nine seconds.

Usually though, his automatic backup would back up an empty page, or the screen saver would cut into his thoughts. He really didn’t like the universe of flying spooky-looking windows, but he really didn’t feel like figuring out how to make them stay away. He was lucky enough to be able to find his files and set up his formats. It still beat typing though. There were two or three virtual trees in compost by now. That didn’t even come close if one were to count typos. He thanked his ever-generous God for spell-check. But then, the ever-generous God probably thanked Fred for abandoning the typewriter.

Fred’s deadline was about a month away. Fred knew it. Worse yet, his publisher knew it and had been calling him for some more finished chapters. The ones he had sent came back all blue penciled, but they had been read and not rejected. For that, he was thankful. His editor had called him and cried over the phone when the divorce court scene came through. Fred had dashed that chapter off in about an hour and simply stuck it in the mail. It came back with one notation about run-on sentences and dangling participles. It also came back with the tearstains of at least ten people. That was the last thing Fred had sent them. It was simply too tough an act to follow.

Fred’s first book made the best seller list in four months. It had stayed there for about a year. It had taken him the better part of ten years to write. The effort destroyed every relationship in which he was involved and had mentally, emotionally, and financially bankrupted him. His picture was in Time and Newsweek. He made the rounds of talk shows. Now though, it was What have you done for me lately? Worse, he’d pissed away the advance and was living on future money. Relatives he didn’t know had hit him up for money. People he hadn’t seen or heard from in years came to schmooze. They ate his food, drank his beer, and ran up his phone bill. Then they left. Fred’s current book was about just that experience. The book came hard now. Fred waited for his muse to smile upon him and stared into his screen. Flying spooky windows again intruded into the empty expanse of blue. Fred sat and stared at the windows for a minute. He got up and walked away from his machine. He went to the kitchen and got a can of beer. He rummaged around in the refrigerator further and found some left-over chicken. He fixed himself a sandwich and walked back to his den, taking his sandwich and beer with him. He sat and regarded the flying windows and ate in desultory silence. He tossed the empty beer can into the pile of beer cans in the corner.

He gave the mouse a poke and said, Wake up! The blank blue screen reappeared. He ate the remnants of his sandwich and regarded the blue vastness before him. He typed: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The line of nonsense having nothing to do with foxes or dogs in the real world hung in the blue universe. He stared at the line of type until the windows intruded. He banished the universe of windows again by typing: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. It felt good to be typing something. He then typed: April honor speak which could title order yours menus world Year this city does most been like your hold know make duty Man who has our job may let all its you can ask him did and. It was a speed drill out of Gregg. It was full of mistakes. He typed it ten times until it went smoothly. He then typed:

It seems to me that a fire in a whore house is a spectacular thing indeed. First, there’s the aura of danger and the panic it engenders. Then the panic caused by all those men in danger of being seen someplace where they shouldn’t be. Thirdly, the nonesuch sight of all those unclad people scrambling for an exit is a true and enjoyable spectacle.

He cut out the repetitions of the speed drill out and left the lines about the foxes and dogs and the short political polemic. He looked at it and filed it in compost. He decided to call up some compost files. There were over seven hundred of them. Some were caustic political observations and others were jaundiced observations of the human experience. There was really nothing useful, though some were quite funny and others were quite profound. He got an idea. Why not use them for chapter headings? After all, Frank Herbert had used a similar device with great effectiveness in Dune. He took out sixteen of the best ones and formatted a set of chapters, each with a separate observation and a block of page numbers. He inserted his finished chapters into them. It looked stupid. He went back to the refrigerator for more beer, but he had just finished the last can. He stored his mess in compost to rot and fester, and headed to the 7-Eleven to get some more beer. Being a dry county, 3.2 would have to do until the next trip to Nashville or Huntsville.

Happiness does not come from external sources; it comes from within as the result of a conscious decision.. Unhappiness comes from a similar decision. We as individuals make that choice for ourselves.

—Fred Katz, How to Be Happy, A Manual

3

M arjorie was a bad girl today. She was a bad girl yesterday too. She didn’t really look like it, but Marjorie could party with the best of them. Her appetites were enormous. Where some women specialized, Marjorie was a generalist. She liked doctors and lawyers. She also liked plumbers and landscapers. Today it was a tennis pro. He certainly will be off his game tomorrow, Marjorie thought with a wicked grin. Together, they found positions that weren’t in the Kama Sutra. When she put on her clothes and left the room, her tennis pro was sleeping the sleep of happy exhaustion, as well as the sleep of a drug she bought from the college kids. She didn’t know what it was, but it worked magic. As she left the room, she helped herself to her share of his wad of bills and quietly closed the door. Poor sucker. She thought, He didn’t even last a decent couple of hours. She could still feel him warm and sticky inside her. She walked down the motel balcony toward the stairs, counting the money.

This is too easy, she said to herself. I need a challenge. Marjorie walked across the parking lot. She walked past the tennis pro’s Porsche. She thought about his macho fashion statement and giggled to herself. Poor bastard doesn’t know what to do with a real woman. Nothing between the ears and not much between his legs either. Marjorie stuffed the bills into her blouse and continued down the street. She needed something, and she just couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She had been waiting, that was for sure. The tennis pro would probably start looking for her. That was also for sure. She knew that men really were ambivalent about being used in such a manner. Some got quite angry, but she really didn’t give a rat’s ass about what they thought. Someday she’d find that one man. Then it would be all OK.

Some were downright humorless about it. The worst had been the secret service agent in DC. He’d tracked her across four states before he gave up. He was looking for a wife. She really didn’t know what she was looking for, but it certainly wasn’t him. He was a control freak, who had a problem with dirt. He wanted her to share his view of the world. She thought he was a flaming asshole. She didn’t like relationships anyway. They were too much trouble. As she crossed the street to the bus stop, she thought of him though. He was the most confused and dysfunctional human she had ever met. He didn’t want to learn what she wanted to teach him. His loss, she mused.

Charlene waited in the apartment. She was afraid to go out. There was evil out there. She kept the blinds drawn and the room dark. That way nobody could see into her world. If nobody could see her, nobody could hurt her. She sat in her rocking chair and rocked.

She rocked and waited.

Marjorie got on the uptown bus. She liked riding the bus because the bus was anonymous. She took a seat close to the back and sat down. There were only a couple of other people on the bus, so when their attention wandered to other things, she took the money out of her blouse and arranged it so it wouldn’t make a bulge. Then she put it back. It was a decent sum of money. It amazed her how some men liked to carry large amounts of cash. It also amazed her how those men could be as careless as to pick up women without knowing them first. She picked up strange men, but she knew the risks and willingly took them. It was worth it.

Charlene waited in the dark. She didn’t want light. She didn’t want them to see her. She waited for the ivory-faced angel with the raven hair that cared about and for her. She was tired of being alone. Her angel was out and she dreaded the coming of the night.

Every night was the same—walking back from the 7-Eleven with a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, a dozen of eggs, and a six-pack of Diet Coke. She would walk down to the end of the block, cross the street, and take the walkway through the park. He would be waiting there in the shadows where the walk went under the tracks. She wouldn’t notice him until she too was in the shadows. He would make an unintelligible remark. The hairs on the back of her neck would stand up. She would walk faster. He would follow.

Hey, baby, you’re sure looking good today, he would say in a taunting tone.

She would try to ignore him and walk faster across the park. He would walk faster too. She cursed herself for not wearing better shoes as her ankle twisted and her shoe came off. The eggs broke in the bag and ran down her legs. He trotted after her. She kicked off the other shoe. The walk turned to gravel. The gravel hurt her feet as she tried to run. The cap came off the milk jug and the soda cans started to slip through the bottom of the wet bag. Her pocketbook filled with milk from the open gallon in the bag. Her slacks and blouse were soaked in the mixture of egg and milk as she ran over the gravel, leaving bloody footprints behind her. She could feel the presence behind her . . . close, too close. An arm wrapped itself around her neck. She dropped everything and wet herself. She screamed and tried to get loose. The other hand hooked into the waistband of her slacks and pulled back. The waistband and the seam below it parted and she was free. The slacks without a solid waistband to support them sagged downward, making