Elephant Step

By Philip Bachman

What is the cost of conscious aware citizens? At what age can we confirm this? As Helmut charges forward into life, he begins to realize some the landmarks of change in his life are like planned disasters. Mostly, he is led by success, despite its controls. Technology is changing the world undeniably, but its timed application is what begins to get his attention. Also, because of the nature of daytime routine critical thinking is diminished quickly, and then forgotten.
As disaster economics displaces imbedded cultures Americans are seeing shattering community changes. Helmuts father is an armed forces civil servant. He is sworn to country. What are the nurturing cues and consequences for the children? Obviously, the American family absorbs and enables the ones that survive bad choices. Some will say this book is an example of radical behavior modification.
Incrementally, this book is a rite of passage for Helmut to leap forward in his thinking, pushing him sometimes dangerously. From the beginning, the question is If man can be made predictable, can the adventure be man-made? This series of short capers causes internalized shock, skepticism, and self-preservation. Elephant Step happens so naturally, or does it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493100804

Philip Bachman

Philip Bachman is a father, teacher, and carpenter. He is the son of second generation American parents of Mexican and German heritage, and has one son, a gracious kind sister, and a step brother. As a child, adolescent, and young adult he had the privilege of residing in both Los Angeles, and rural South Dakota. Thanks to the hard work of the first , and second generation there are many cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends. He has settled in Los Angeles, works as an ESL English teacher observing many immigrant challenges. Philip has worked with the abused child, physically and psychologically challenged, (Astrid) a gang shooting victim, paralyzed from under the arms before her eighteenth birthday, and the gifted. He teaches mostly in the secondary classroom, although also in the home school and hospital environment.

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Philip Bachman.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2013916814

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4931-0079-8

                Softcover       978-1-4931-0078-1

                eBook            978-1-4931-0080-4

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.

Rev. date: 10/08/2014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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Prelude

Caper One: Father’s Day

Caper Two: The Family

Caper Three: Contrast Of City Vs. Country

Caper Four: The Black Serpent

Caper Five: Purple Heart Soliloquy

Caper Six: Strange Camouflage Of Barry’s Identity—

The Adopted Son Of A Veteran

Caper Seven: Chaos, Community Disorder, Anarchy

Caper Eight: Influence Of Art

Caper Nine: Everyday Family Life In California

Caper Ten: The Oil Field Dream:

Caper Eleven: Boomtown Time-Off

Caper Twelve: Oilfield Accident

Caper Thirteen: Hunting Season At Cathedral, Castle, Prairie Home

Caper Fourteen: Flight To California; Beginning The Trip

Caper Fifteen: The First Vacation To Asia

Caper Sixteen: The Textbook Predictable Deal

Caper Seventeen: The Calmity Return Home Flight

Caper Eighteen: Secular Consequences

Caper Nineteen: Return To Asia-Radar,

Amphibious Aircraft, Movie Making-Pakistan

Caper Twenty: The Second Trip: India

Caper Twenty One: Opportunity The Blind Side

Caper Twenty Two: Harsh Visions

Caper Twenty Three: Women Helmut Love’s

Caper Twenty Four: Thailand

Caper Twenty Five: Note

Caper Twenty Six: Ten Days

Caper Twenty Seven: The Seventh Day

Caper Twenty Eight: The Tenth Day

Caper Twenty Nine: Traveling To Katmandu, Nepal

Caper Thirty: Returning To America

Caper Thirty One: A Constructed Crisis; Unsolved Problems

Caper Thirty Two: Future Jail

Caper Thirty Three: Helmut Becomes The Family Kill Child

Caper Thirty Four: Samurai Smith & Calmity Eve

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The morning dew was the catalyst to the resinous grape smell on the outside trellis. I was at my 10 ft. desk, the curtains open, my surfboard on the floor, my gold Schwinn10 speed bike on display for the summer, and my bags packed. I opened the encyclopedia that was sitting in the sun. The leather cover was hot and I had randomly turned to German amphibious tanks camouflaged with the ability to drive into a shallow murky pond and hide, it was a quiet time that I shared with the Spanish community that faced the morning eastern sun. Our house in the middle of the next block faced the west and the setting sun, our houses stood back to back. The evening before, I had played my last game of football with the neighbors for the summer. I also had watched television the night before while packing clothes for the summer vacation. The Evening News presented the astronauts testing rocket sleds with their faces rippling and mouths contorting like roaring Kodiak bears, and I also watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The next morning, my sister was getting ready; I had to walk through her room to go to the bathroom. She was in her walk in closet with the light on, You ready, she asked?

Yes, remember I am sitting by the window, on the airplane.

We played that string finger game on the way to the airport noticing the ugly wires in the air momentarily. It was as if the sky was not free.

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Cool breezes of sage and high plains grass weaved through the flowing hills and streams. Blue, gold, and pearl soaring mushroom clouds crowned the vast expanding prairie. Helmut and sister, Catherine, would be swimming at the Air Force base by noon. A couple walked past us sitting down: the male was square and intentional; the woman graceful, possessing attractive geometric symmetry revealing even to the glance of a child.

Helmut’s father told him to go out and sit at the pool while he checked on his sister. He was wearing a light silver wool suit and wing tip shoes that looked like waffle duck feet. Helmut sat down next to the couple he had seen moments earlier. They were talking about water boarding, their responsibility to stop it, an absence of empathy for suffering on the part of the torturers, and they were uncomfortably sweating and drinking cold drinks. Walking towards Helmut, his sister was adjusting her bikini, and our father was watching the couple stand to talk to our Father, Sir. Small talk, superficial courtesy, grisly banter, and he cut the conversation boldly, My children like to swim, can’t bore the children at this age. It was a momentary meeting, of intellect and hierarchy.

Helmut noticed that his father was not sweating in his silver wool suit as he led us to the pool. Catherine went to the shallow end searching for the steps. Helmut was hypnotized by the couple, they were like being around sickness, and it caused a distraction. His father as if in a bubble was immune to their suggestive small talk and body language. The pool was a familiar, learned, successful place and Helmut walked to the edge of the pool, set and dived . . . ,. A clean break from reality, a backward designed moment (was swimming completely learned), he notices the couple as he hit the cold water shocking him, his feet wondering where the bottom was. He was at the bottom, he jumped up and gasped for air, again, again, he was drowning. Gulp, big gulp, gulp and Helmut was a good swimmer, sometimes he swam all day . . . , in the ocean and he was thrashing in the water in an environment that was absolutely familiar. He was able to twist and see his father at the edge of the pool. Helmut jumped, wailed, and slapped his hands in the water and his father observed the fear stood waving the lifeguard into save him. Helmut never had a moment of fear in the water even when he was beginning to swim. A subconscious fear was realized that day, but health, nurturing and structured learning never revealed anything but pleasure in the water. Helmut pushed off the edge swimming across the pool after a look of recognition from his father.

In two days we would be on our way to the ranch. Our Grandparents were staying with our aunt and uncle and their children. We would go to work at the Air Force Base with our father tomorrow. He did not get to see us during the school year so he found things to do for us and made his days short at work when we came for the summer. One time work picked him up in a helicopter. There are no phones at the ranch.

CAPER TWO

THE FAMILY

July 1962: Helmut and Catherine are partly from the agricultural community, a cornerstone of civilizations that create food, and stakeholder citizens.

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The oak tree hit by lightning left half of it dark marking the entrance. From the car window, antelope herds skipped across the prairie horizon, and jackrabbits bobbed in the high grass like brave witless spies. Deer crossed the prairie 40 at a time.

Turning onto the ranch service road Grandfather opened the door aligning his front tire with a jackrabbit and eased the new family car down into the ditch. Grandfather grabbed the shotgun, and stuck it between the open door and car and boom, he asked Grandmother to hold the wheel. He ejected a used shell, bit his cigar and boom, he missed. We hit a big bump and it bounced us up in the rear seat.

Damn it these glasses, as he tried to run the rabbit down in the ditch. Got it, He drove up on the road, got the rabbit and threw it in the trunk. Thump!

Awww Thumper, said Catherine. Both brother and sister stared.

Papapapapaapa! Hurry now, the gnats will get us if we stand here staring at Thumper, said Grandfather slamming the trunk. He was speaking about dwelled upon memory. At the ranch, his uncle came in for ketchup to put on the grasshoppers, they had a plague. No shirt, sunburned, and boots that announced his whereabouts. Clodhopper boots didn’t need an introduction because everything was loud about them. The grasshoppers had a biblical reference. They referred to the land as virgin ground, a place of unordered natural selection.

Catherine asked, Where are you going with the ketchup?

He replied, Grasshopper salad, Catherine. I pinch off the body of a grasshopper and add ketchup.

I want to spit, Yuuuuck, Helmut replied and squirmed! He was in his grandmother’s kitchen . . . awkwardly uncomfortable. Yuuuck, and his cowboy uncle picked Catherine up and kissed her. Finally, Helmut spit on Grandmother’s clean kitchen floor. Nutrition and cleanliness were sacred in this kitchen, but so were children. Everyone stopped and stared momentarily . . . , and Grandfather took his white clean handkerchief and cleaned the floor.

Helmut said, Ooooo, grasshopper breath, and a fireplace is in there too with that cigarette! moving forward instinctively to strike his relative. You release her!

Catherine after being put down asked, Are they . . . good? squinting her face.

Immediately his cowboy uncle preached, You little city slickers. They crunch, young lady! If it ever gets dry in this part of the world, grasshoppers will be food, as if there was desert foreseen.

Helmut repeated the information like he had experienced eating a grasshopper, They crunch?

The return to California revealed a censoring contrast to hunting and freedom at the ranch. The evening news featured the starvation in Africa, and how the doctors were filling ditches with people because of a plague, and starvation. The women would hold their children until death, or the death of their children. Ditches filled with bodies were difficult to contrast after being at the ranch. Everything opposed starvation including the grasshopper. Grasshoppers were an increment of survival. A slight censorship indirectly displaced 1930’s and 40’s European history with a mass image in a different color displacing its white counterpart. The media had refocused trust in passionate missions by removing war, providing where there was starvation, and displacing hate with charity. Our big city re-entry subtly suggested the good mission of institutions, and law and order. Indirectly, our late summer airplane flight also contrasted the eggshell safety of the entire system we lived in.

Gradually, Helmut became mindful of the two places and their behavioral censorships. It was on a black Morgan quarter horse popular to the US Cavalry that he was going to get his lesson in learned response and the meaning of instincts created by habitual training. One July 9, 1962 morning at dawn he saddled up Lady, the black Morgan, to ride after some fence