Uncertainty Confusion and Nonsense

By Xlibris US

Dale Grant is semi-retired with a little time on his hands. He has shared some of his thoughts in regard to issues that are both universal and current in ways that are sometimes humorous, sometimes satirical and always amusing.

His vehicle for accomplishing this is a work of fiction in which the main character is a burglar named Nester Lincoln. Nester is a Harvard student who intends to apply to medical school. The reason that Nester wants to become a doctor is because he is sure that as a doctor it will be easier for him to steal from people than it is by committing burglaries.

Nester believes in no one, confides in no one and trusts no one. He has little respect for anything. He thinks that if he is careful and relies on no one he will always be successful.

As the story proceeds, however, Nester becomes the target not only of law enforcement, but of a powerful element of organized crime; and possibly one of his college roommates. Why the roommate? Because Nester is sleeping with his mother.

Uncertainty abounds as a result of the confusion that occurs and the nonsense that is interspersed throughout during the interactions among the numerous interesting characters who appear in the story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499008272

Book preview

Chapter One

Great empires destroyed and pillaged. Nothing wrong with that. Whole empires made up of hundreds of thousands of people with no one who could punish them, nobody to tell them that they would have to go to jail for stealing.

Nester Lincoln knew that there was someone who could send him to jail for stealing, but that was only if he got caught; and he didn’t think that would happen. That was because no one knew what he was doing. He never confided in or relied on anyone.

He only stole cash. Not foreign coins, just money that he could spend without arousing suspicion as long as he didn’t spend too much in one place at one time.

Nester never stole anything that had to be sold for cash. That was because, then, there would be someone who knew that you had been in possession of something that might subsequently become identified as stolen.

Nester’s business was strictly one man. He didn’t need anyone to help him cut through the second floor window of the house that he was breaking into.

He reached through the space where the pane had been and unlocked the window. Sometimes he would break a window with a small hammer wrapped in a towel. Sometimes he would use his small sharp cutting tool. That way he didn’t establish a pattern that could implicate him in every burglary that he committed.

Good. No dog barking. He climbed into the room. It looked like the room that he wanted to be in. The adult’s bedroom. There was a bathroom attached to it. He opened a closet door to the right of the king-sized bed. It was a large clothes closet with a woman’s clothing on one side and a man’s clothing on the other side. The closet must have been fifteen or sixteen feet long with clothes lining the walls on both sides of the closet. There were shelves six feet up on both walls jutting out two feet. There were sweaters and scarves and other clothing on the shelves. Nester scanned the shelves with his flashlight to see if there might be a metal box of some kind under the clothing on the shelves. He looked at the side of the closet that had the man’s clothing first. In his experience when there was cash in the bedroom it was with the man’s belongings more often than with the woman’s. Not all the time but usually.

About three quarters of the way along the shelf, in the middle of a stack of sweaters, there was a flat black leather pouch. There was money inside the pouch, twenty-two hundred dollars, all in one hundred dollar bills.

There might be more money in the house. But he was satisfied with his take for the night so he didn’t remain in the house any longer. He went back out the same way he had come in. Through the second floor window. No one was going to see him climbing down. The closest neighboring house was about a hundred yards away and there were plenty of trees surrounding the yard. He walked around to the driveway where he had parked his car, got in and drove away in the night. He was wearing gloves so he wasn’t worried about finger prints and he would get rid of the gloves in the trash at home.

Nester thought to himself as he drove home that he had become very adept at his avocation. It wasn’t his full time job. Burglary was a type of hobby that he enjoyed. Sort of like a guy who refurbishes old cars in his garage in his spare time, then sells the cars, hopefully for a profit. Usually a guy like that was happy though if he broke even. What that type of guy really liked was hunting around in junk yards in search of parts for the car that he was working on and escaping into his garage where he could get away from his wife and kids.

Burglary was a lot like that for Nester. He had to hunt around in order to find a house that was at least somewhat secluded. The house had to look like the people who lived in it weren’t poor. And he had to go by the house every once in a while until it appeared that nobody was home. Then he had to check for an alarm system and for dogs.

Nester hated small dogs. He wouldn’t break into a house if he knew that there was a dog living in it. But these small dogs, you usually couldn’t tell they were there until you entered the home. People tended to allow big dogs to go outside. But small dogs like the Chihuahua for example, people rarely let them out. At least that was Nester’s observation. Those small dogs yapped like hell and they were aggressive little monsters. Only the family that owned one of the little buggers could have really liked it. Whenever he encountered one of those small dogs, Nester got out as fast as he could.

But despite a few problems that he had to deal with while pursuing his avocation, Nester never lost money at it. He didn’t just break even either. And the cash that he took in was all pure profit; no accomplices, no fences and no taxes.

Snow started falling as Nester drove home. It was a few days before Christmas and he was spending the holidays with his parents. When he arrived at their home he drove onto the driveway along the right side so that he could park behind the garage door on the right. There was a two car garage connected to the house by a breezeway. His father parked on the right side of the garage, his mother parked on the left nearest the door to the breezeway.

She was working nights this week. Nester didn’t want to block her entrance to the garage. He thought to himself, I don’t want her to give me a ticket for parking in a restricted zone.

He expected that his father would be home because his father was almost never out after ten. The breezeway door was unlocked. Nester went into the breezeway and used his key to the kitchen door to enter the house. The light over the sink was on, but other than that and the light over the garage door, the first floor was dark. His father usually left those lights on at night if someone was out when he went to bed.

Nester opened the refrigerator and took out some food. He made himself a ham and cheese sandwich with mustard and poured a glass of milk. The bread was real good, not one of those mushy commercial breads like they served in the dining hall at college. His mother, for as long as he could remember, always liked to buy fresh baked bread from a local bakery. There was also a half eaten cherry pie in the refrigerator. After he finished the ham and cheese sandwich, Nester poured himself a little more milk and cut a nice large slice of cherry pie.

When he finished eating he washed the dishes that he had used, dried them and put them away. His mother didn’t like to come home at night after work to dirty dishes in the sink.

Nester then had to make a major decision. Should he brush his teeth or not before going to bed? He was pretty tired but he took the time to brush his teeth anyway. He didn’t always brush his teeth regularly when he was at college. Maybe two or three times a week at most. And he hardly ever did a thorough job of it on those occasions. He kept his tooth brush in a long thin plastic container in the downstairs bathroom. That way if he brushed late at night he wouldn’t disturb anyone. His sister, Charleen, was most likely in the house. She was a senior in high school. Charleen didn’t like it any more than his father or mother if Nester made noise in the night and woke her up.

And Charleen could really be a pain if you irritated her in any way. Once she went on the attack she was hard to derail. She could go on and on at you not only complaining about what you just did but criticizing you for any shortcoming that she imagined she had ever observed. She could be incessant. In that she was just like her mother. It was obvious that she had inherited from her mother the gene by which she could instantly switch on to being an ill-tempered, scolding, pain in the ass female.

Nester hadn’t been afflicted by that particular gene because Noreen, their mother, wasn’t his biological mother. Nester’s real mother had died in an elevator accident when the cable of the elevator she was in snapped while the elevator was at the twelfth floor. Nester never was told whether the elevator was going up or down when the cable snapped. But he knew which way the elevator went after the cable broke. It went down, accelerating at the rate of 9.8 feet per second, per second until it came to an abrupt and violent stop. Interestingly enough, Nester had learned by reading about the accident fifteen years later in the newspaper archives at the public library that there had been five other people in the elevator car when the accident occurred. Only one other person, a professional wrestler, had died. The other four had survived, but all four suffered some degree of permanent paralysis. He had heard his father talking one time when he was twelve years old about why the settlement that resulted from his mother’s death hadn’t been more. It had to do with the fact that there had been a limited amount of insurance money and the people who survived had received bigger shares because they had been paralyzed for life.

Even at an early age that had made sense to Nester because he figured that he would rather be dead than paralyzed for life. At the age of twenty-one his feeling in that regard had become more pronounced. He couldn’t see himself lingering on for years and years confined to a wheelchair and being constantly dependent on someone else for his physical needs. If someone else chose that course, that was all right by Nester. But it wouldn’t be the lifestyle he could ever abide by. A quadriplegic probably wouldn’t have much fun in the bathroom for example. Maybe not females, but most males got a lot of enjoyment out of the bathroom, reading and so forth. But going to the bathroom for a quadriplegic had to be anything but a pleasure. For one thing you couldn’t do it alone. And the person who had to help you probably wasn’t ecstatic over the prospect of helping you unless he or she was somewhat unusual. So that would put you in a situation where what you are doing has to be done. It’s not optional. And it has to be done, all the time, forever, as long as you’re alive; and it has to be done with someone who, if he or she were normal, would be probably less than a genial and enthusiastic companion during the process of assisting you.

One thing Nester knew was that if he were to become totally paralyzed he would want the option of ending his life. There were people like the physicist from Cambridge University in England who, although paralyzed, did carry on active lives. That guy had been married and divorced. That was normal. When people get married they usually get divorced. But for himself Nester knew that he would rather be dead than paralyzed. The only thing was if you were totally paralyzed you would need someone to assist you in order to kill yourself. Other than trying to go on a hunger strike, there wouldn’t be much you could do to kill yourself. Holding your breath wouldn’t work. There just wasn’t much you could do without someone’s help.

And therein was the rub. If someone was willing to help you and got caught helping she would be in trouble. In all likelihood she’d end up in prison for a long time. Whenever Nester thought about assisted suicide he envisioned women doing the assisting. This was because, in general, he thought women were more thoughtful and caring than men. Of course, if assisted suicide were to become sanctioned by the state and suicide centers were to be established, the suicide business might become lucrative.