Ezekiel: A Novel

By D Malone McMillan

Ezekiel is foremost a dark comedy with humorous interactions among the richly developed, decidedly peculiar characters. The main plot’s facade is the group’s bumbling investigation into a suspected conspiracy to influence the U.S. presidential election by an unlikely and diverse alliance.  The structural story line i

• Language: English
• Publisher: D Malone McMillan
• Release date: Jun 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9780692623718

D Malone McMillan

D Malone McMillan is a crotchety retired executive from the telecommunications sector. He was born absent PC filter as indicated by his writing, taking pen to paper regarding subjects he is passionate about with little regard to offense. McMillan is married to his wife, Jennifer, where they reside in Florida with their two rescue fur babies. He holds a BSBA from Shorter College. The Bin is his sixth book. He has penned four general fiction, including one YA for his grands. He has one nonfiction that remains unpublished waiting for a brave publisher willing to fight the man and the woke mob. DMaloneMcMillan.com

Book preview

a novel

D MALONE McMILLAN

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

ISBN:  978-0-9885818-9-0

Copyright © 2014

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America 2014

This, as with all novels, is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

To my Jennie…

friend, confident, lover, muse, wife

To Brat and Gma

We miss you so

Thanks B

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

— Galileo

PROLOGUE

I am wandering the narrow streets of Amsterdam aimlessly, stoned out of my mind on two inexpertly rolled joints of White Widow. It’s been 30 years since I rolled a joint (do they even call them joints now?) and, unlike riding a bike, rolling a joint is a skill that fades exponentially with time. I have to keep lighting it, and I burn my fingers and lips. My lungs protest violently, but after inhaling a few deep breaths of the acrid smoke, I just don’t care anymore.

It’s December 1st, 2012, just twenty days before the prophesized end of days. Do I inexplicably hold the answer, or at least a part of it, to extending those days? I feel driven to  find  something…some  missing  piece  to  solve  the  puzzle; a key, a crystal, I don’t know, maybe it’s a Cracker Jack box decoder ring. The answer lies on the edge of my consciousness just outside my grasp. I think better when I can’t think. I see things on the edge of consciousness that for years I dismissed as mere dreams or, perhaps I should say, terrors. Then I met my wife.

I turn down Klovenlersburgwal, a small cobbled lane split by a canal, and I am bumped by a passing cyclist who curses at me in Dutch. Such an ugly sounding language, Dutch. Even Hello, how are you? sounds like Screw off, asshole. I am staring in a street-level window looking at my reflection and I don’t recognize myself. I am old and tired-looking with rows in my forehead deep enough to plant corn. I have dark bags under my eyes, and my eyes are reduced to nothing but iris. I am unshaven with a sizable gut from an unfortunate beer-to- exercise ratio for much too long. An aging, fat whore in black lingerie with enormous breasts sagging to just north of what remains of a waist line joins my reflection and motions me closer. She pulls a sagging breast out, brings her enormous dark nipple to her mouth and licks it. My dick retracts inside me in mortal fear. I pray the key lies elsewhere.

Why me? I am not cut from the cloth of Indiana Jones. I am grossly unprepared, of average intelligence, South Georgia public schools educated, old, and, as mentioned, way out of shape. I have but one unique trait and perhaps it’s not so unique, or, more likely, I’m just nuts. And why am I here? What brought me to Amsterdam, and who or what the hell was guiding me…a scrawny, homeless dude?

Amsterdam is a nasty old town; canals lined with old decaying houseboats, sea birds of one ilk or another, and floating debris of all sorts. Like the aging whore, it’s a town best seen at night when its sagging, blemished skin is camouflaged by a heavy dose of makeup, low lights, and the considerable fog of alcohol. In the chaos that defines Amsterdam…buses, pedestrians (both stoned and lost), scooters, tourists pulling cheap, battered luggage, Mercedes taxis, delivery trucks, dogs, bikes, more bikes of every imaginable design, and all of these jostling for a share of the narrow, perpetually damp cobblestone streets littered with countless cigarette butts…there lies some uncovered secret I need to find. But I haven’t a clue.

I sit, still dazed by the Widow, at an outdoor café by Dam Square. Everyone speaks English, but no one speaks English. A small car with a big horn startles the pigeons into a violent wave of wing flapping and shitting as the Smart car protests the slow movement of a young woman pedaling her child in a plexi-glass covered carrier situated on the front of her bicycle. Best I can tell the only rule of the road is to yield to the person who cares the least about dying. I can’t decipher the traffic regulations in this damn place, so how am I to decode, or even recognize, this alleged secret to stop the prophesized extinction event. Savior my ass.

A tall blond woman, at least six two with an equally Amazonian red-headed girlfriend pause in front of me to embrace, share a brief tender kiss, and pose for a self-portrait with Madame Tussauds as a backdrop. An old man walks by in full Scottish garb, complete with bag pipes. A small girl, five or six years of age, with crystal blue eyes and flaming orange curls walks up to me and asks for a light. A midget painted with a clown face and bright red nose wearing leopard pants rides a unicycle through the square, a stone cherub hovers inches from my face and raises a chubby finger to his lips, bagpipes sing, the pigeon speaks, the train rumbles, it begins to snow, I lose consciousness.

The train to Almere rumbles under my ass. I awake slobbering against the cool window and watching the Dutch landscape go by in the waning light. Lush green fields crisscrossed with a network of irrigation ditches from large arteries narrowing down to tiny capillaries. Sheep graze hungrily on the grass. Horses covered in blankets roam among them. An ancient windmill stands silent against the sky. Paved bike lanes run parallel to the train and, despite the frigid cold, are filled with countless cyclists. I have no idea how the hell I got on any train, much less the right one. I am sober now, more or less, and heading to meet my wife in Almere. She is here on business. Rose, my wife, is a corporate lawyer for a small international chemical firm. More importantly, she shares my dreams.

GENESIS

May 22, 1960

Chile: An earthquake measuring 9.5 on the Moment Magnitude Scale hit southern Chile today. The epicenter of the quake was in the City of Lumaco. The quake created a tsunami with wave heights reported to be as high as ten meters that raced across the Pacific. Widespread damages are reported with estimates of fatalities reaching 5,000. It is the most powerful earthquake ever recorded.

Alongside Global News

CHAPTER ONE

I am a good Southern Baptist boy, or, I suppose I should say, I was a good Southern Baptist boy. I last cast a shadow during a church service a couple dozen years ago, sans the obligatory wedding and funeral. Rose, my wife, is similarly Catholic. Her only religious practice, outside the occasional Catholic School Girl fantasy, was during grandparental visits from upstate New York at Easter. My first Catholic experience was at Rose’s sister’s wedding. I damn near plowed through her when she paused to genuflect at the altar. I mean, what the hell, Rose, can you give me a hand signal or something? Then again, based on her driving practices, I should have known better than to presume a head’s up as to any subsequent move. My favorite awkward moment (there were many) was during the Communion proceeding the wedding. All of upstate New York apparently is Catholic except me and some random crack whore that remained seated in the pews during Communion.

On second thought, I think she was Catholic as well but just napping at the time. This was my first introduction to Rose’s family and her sister damn near stroked out on the revelation I wasn’t Catholic. She had heard of Baptists but assumed, like Big Foot, we were likely urban legends. Then again my inquiry as to the purpose and suitability of the homoerotic art on the church walls may have been the source of her stroke-like symptoms. Beats the shit out of me, but her jaw bottomed on the marble floor as she markedly increased the distance from me to avoid the collateral damage from the inevitable heavenly lightning bolt I was destined to endure for my sacrilege. Honest to God, I wasn’t making a joke or being disrespectful, I saw half-naked guys in sexual positions. My bad.

We Baptists, Protestants, Catholics, and even our Jewish friends, share the same creation myth; the whole God created the earth in seven days, Adam, Eve, sweet-ass garden, snake, apple, eviction gig. Virtually all religions have some story about the genesis of our world and again how it will likely end. Our Christian Bible gives us some solid hints on earth’s expiration period but, like most religions, is a bit vague on any certain date. But not our Mayan friends south of the border; those short fuckers nailed our world’s extinction event down to the exact date: the winter solstice of December, 2012 or, about four years from today. I guess they were not just priests or lowly calendar carvers, but the highly educated scientists of their day and, as such, could speak with absolute certainty for events far in the past and/or future; much like our scientists of today who profess absolute certainty as to the nature of our planet’s origin: The Big Ass Bang. There is not a shadow of a doubt of how the earth began. A single Big Bang is not a theory; it is the absolute, irrefutable truth. Failure to buy into our modern scientist’s theories as gospel earns one a flat-earther label. The Mayan naysayers were likely referred to as round-earthers. Scientists, even with unanimous consent amongst their learned community, have been known to be wrong a time or two throughout the ages.

I am not so certain the Mayans were trying to tell us much of anything. Maybe the Mayan calendar dude just ran out of rock, got serious hand cramps, or died from the tedium of carving a perpetual calendar on a very hard slab of rock. I mean, the calendar had to end somewhere, right? And besides, these are the same guys that tossed their sacrificed humans into their drinking well. Just how smart was that?

Suffice it to say my faith was somewhat worn and tattered around the fringes and my belief in the whole Mayan end of days crap was just that...crap. Growing up, I spent an inordinate amount of time beneath a church roof. My dad was a deacon and a border line religious zealot. He named me, his first born, Ezekiel, Zeke for short. My sisters bore similarly biblical names; Mary, Ruth, and Esther. Consequently, my chubby ass was sitting in the hard-straight-back-pine pews whenever the church doors were open. Twice on Sunday, Wednesday evenings, summer Bible schools, mid-summer scheduled revival week, prayer service for the revival, and again for any emergency revival deemed essential for urgent events and/or coffer replenishment. Ours was an agrarian economy and our community failed or prospered based on the unseen hand of God. Consequently, dry summers were bad for the farmers, but quite lucrative for the church treasury as extra revivals were scheduled and the farmers purchased divine crop insurance with their generous tithes.

It was a small, country church. As such, much of the time the country preachers were self-educated fellows that more or less made up their own version of Bible stories. But then again, the early church fathers for the first few centuries kept revising the Bible themselves, tossing out a gospel by Judas, possibly even Mary, and revising Paul’s writings significantly in order to suit the current powers to be. The hell fire and brimstone stories traveling Evangelists favored scared the shit out of us, extracting confessions of sins both real and imagined in order to dodge the fiery pits of hell. Most certainly we learned more about the vengeful God than the forgiving  one.

Somewhere along the way, I started noticing a few inconsistencies with my faith. I just could not get my arms around this God of mine that was all-powerful and yet allowed such evil and suffering in the world, even among the innocent. The standard, It’s God’s will answer just wasn’t cutting it for me. Don’t get me wrong, I still believed in a spiritual being and a spiritual plane. I just wasn’t so clear on God’s perfection, his form, or his quest for perfect justice. After all, there has been more bloodshed in God’s name over the centuries than for any other purpose.

Reverend Bob, my favorite pastor ever, explained that God designed us in His own image and granted us free will. God wants us to do the right thing, but He wants us to want to do the right thing. God giving us free will allows mankind to do both good and evil, the Reverend patiently explained. This was sort of like my wife wanting me to want to take out the trash. I’ll do it because there are consequences associated with not doing the assigned task, but I am never going to want to do it. All I know for certain was that God must spend a whole lot of time disappointed in His creation.

Right about Christmastime every year, our church, along with most Protestant churches in the south, conducted a special Sunday evening service and subsequent love offering for the Lottie Moon missionaries. This is a Christian organization that brings our version of God to the native people of lesser cultures...more or less. We keep doing this, even though our recipe as Christians of bringing God to others has historically involved a pinch of genocide, a tablespoon of torture, and a cup of slavery. Just ask the natives of Mexico for one of the most recent examples. But by God almighty, their heathen eternal souls were in much better condition, if not their finite worldly bodies…so, all good. Note, no small measure of sarcasm.

I will say most of the Lottie Moon missionaries that came to speak to us were, at a minimum, just lame and, at the worst, egotistical assholes that kept score of souls saved like it was a sporting competition. Then there was Jonas. This dude was for real. Jonas had been a missionary in Peru deep in the Andes Mountains on the shores of Lake Titicaca near Puerta de Hayu Marka. He helped build schools and taught illiterate kids to read. He worked in the fields beside the peasants, shared their homes, their food, their suffering, and their misery. In the process of improving their worldly lot, Jonas shared the gospel of Jesus. Jonas was a true believer in the goodness of God and in the message of the Christian Gospel.

Jonas, for once in my then thirteen-year-old life, captivated my attention in church even more so than Sally and her new found lady bumps. It was not that he was a good speaker, as he was not. Jonas was poorly dressed in ill-fitting clothing at least two sizes too large. Sweat rings stood out under his armpits on his once white button down shirt. He stuttered, got lost in the middle of sentences, whispered at times, awkwardly paused in mid-sentence, and rambled. But it was somehow evident he spoke from his heart. I believed he believed every word he said. Jonas was unshakeable in his faith in the goodness of God in a manner that transcended anything I had ever witnessed and made me want to believe again in this God of his.

Jonas told the congregation about the natives’ practice of building pagan spirit houses in the Peruvian village. The Indians, descendants of the Incans, constructed elaborately decorated doll-size houses on the fringes of their property. Their purpose was to attract the evil spirits into these well-adorned and luxurious structures in lieu of the spirits cohabiting the native’s meager huts of dirt floors, bare windows and thatched roofs. He called bullshit on this wasteful pagan practice and encouraged the Indians to tear down their spirit homes as they slowly converted to Christianity. Jonas himself tore down the spirit house in the family’s hut where he lived.

It was a cool Sunday evening for South Georgia and the church’s ill-equipped oil-fired furnace struggled to keep the church adequately warm. But now in the quiet stillness of the church it felt even colder. Jonas’ almost whispered words could be heard clearly to the furthest corners of the church and were now accompanied by the mist of his warm breath in the cool sanctuary. The air seemed charged and every hair on my thirteen-year-old body stood up as he continued, interrupted only by the nervous fidgeting of our pastor sitting on the pulpit directly behind Jonas. Jonas was clearly off course from a suitable Lottie Moon sermon.

Just as suddenly, Jonas returned to the approved Lottie Moon script, or there about, and spoke of how important it was to make these poor villagers self-sustainable and not just dependent on the charity of outsiders. Jonas mocked those that sent food and medicine. What was the use of saving one life today to only take three tomorrow. Boxes of Bibles and hymnals to illiterate peasants! Tractors, when the closest fuel station was miles away along a rocky steep mountain path!? He scoffed for once raising his voice to what seemed to be almost a shout in the still quietness of the sanctuary. The offering, he continued, must be used to buy goats, pigs, chickens, seeds, hand tools. The villagers need a fighting chance to help feed and shelter themselves not just for today but tomorrow and again the day after. Then once their worldly needs are met, we can help them see the goodness of the one and only true God and save their eternal souls.

Jonas’ voice returned to a whisper. Dreams, he said and paused, the dreams they began: fire, blood, wind, water, shattered bones. He spoke of apocalyptic dreams first at night and then his dreams, crept in to the light of day. Our pastor’s fidgeting increased in both frequency and in volume.

Jonas’ next words shook me to my very core. I stood at the top of a hill among tall narrow pines not like these outside your church doors. I was on a narrow rocky path still damp from the morning dew. It was quiet and cool, and peaceful. The sky was crystal blue, and the wind gently stirred the trees. The hill overlooked an old walled city with red tile roof homes, narrow cobblestone streets and countless bell towers topped with crosses, some rising high into the sky with beautiful, multi-colored, marble facades. A giant cathedral lay in the middle of the city with a marble-faced and tile-crowned cupola. A river crossed with stone bridges bordered the nearest edge of the town. In the distance stood snow-covered mountains. It was such a peaceful, beautiful setting. My wife… Jonas paused in mid-sentence to survey the congregation and then continued, …joined me. I held her hand as we watched the townspeople go about their day. Suddenly, the river rose at an impossibly rapid pace. Sounds of feral screams reached me on the hill top moments after seeing the mouthed screams of the townspeople. The earth beneath the town rose and began to swallow the town. A searing heat filled the air and the ancient town virtually melted. The marble, stone and tile along with the flesh and bones of the townspeople all dissolved into one homogenous soup of terror, destruction and death. The entirety of the now molten town sank into the earth in front of my eyes. All that was now left of the town was the mist from the river’s evaporation. The earth began to rumble beneath our feet. The air grew even hotter and I knew we were next as was the rest of humanity on this plane.

My trousers suddenly felt incongruously warm and damp… rarely a desired state. I had pissed myself in church on the row just behind the current lust of my life, Sally. Shit, I had the same dream as Jonas.

I awoke to a silent village without even the sound of a barking dog. The children, Jonas continued his Peruvian story, small children, babies, teenagers and their fathers all lay naked covered in blood and mud and piss and shit with their faces bashed in beyond any recognition. I stumbled from hut to hut finding the same bloody horrific scenes. The morning fires smoldered unattended for hours. The village animals domestic and feral had fled. There was not a single adult woman dead or alive anywhere in the carnage. I wandered aimlessly for hours among the dead praying for just one other single survivor. My clothes, hands and feet all became soiled with the bodily fluids of the villagers I had once considered family, along with the spoiled contents of my stomach as I retched violently until my stomach was vacant and then continued to retch uncontrollably. After what must have been hours, I wandered to the lake for a cool drink of water for my parched throat and to wash the dead off my body. I found the women there. All fully clothed. All lying peacefully without a single mark of violence. All lying face down in the small pool at the edge of the lake.

Jonas paused awkwardly. The sanctuary was wrapped in a silence so complete I could hear the piss rolling down my leg. Our pastor saw the pause as an opportunity to regain control of his pulpit and his congregation and began to rise from his purple velvet upholstered seat behind Jonas. Jonas did not budge but stood silent, gazing at some fixed point in the distance seemingly far outside of the confines of the church’s walls. Our pastor nervously returned to his seat powerless to stop the runaway train that Jonas and his sermon had become.

Jonas continued speaking without breaking his distant gaze, There are other worlds that lie within our own. Some are good but others are of the darkest sort of evil. He paused again for another eternity as his gaze shifted slowly but deliberately, and with his crystal blue eyes locked seemingly on mine, he warned in a whisper that echoed like a shout, Do not seek out these worlds. Some doors are left best open. And you, like me, are not strong enough to walk through them.

I gasped quietly, yet in the tomb-like silence of the sanctuary my gasp caught Sally’s attention. She turned in the pew, caught my eyes and offered a rare, seductive smile. But then upon noticing my wet pants she began to giggle. I was too shocked to register embarrassment...as of yet. I looked up and Jonas had turned and was now quietly leaving the sanctuary by the side door. I looked down at the unmistakable dark stain on my trousers and then at Sally facing forward now and attempting to stifle her giggles with a tissued hand. The spell was broken and my adolescent thoughts turned to more immediate concerns. Although yet battlefield tested in the love department, I seriously doubted inadvertent public urination scored points with the ladies. And consequently the feel and taste of Sally’s lady bumps were likely forever beyond my reach.

Monday following Sunday, as it tends to do, meant yet another stimulating day within the cinder blocked walls of my junior high school. I, of course, prayed no one would mention the strangeness of Sunday night’s church service and, more importantly, my little accident. Silly me. Sally couldn’t help herself, and by third period English everyone in the school knew and had some sweet enduring comment to share. Not cool, Sally, not cool. Oddly, no one even mentioned the service or Jonas. Just me and my pissy pants.

Teenage puberty is a real bitch for just about everyone, but toss in pissy pants, bizarre name and freaky ass dreams and I was most definitely the weird kid on campus. Sally’s proclivity to gossip had forever ended the precious little prospect I might have ever had for a sex life or even a normal social life, and Jonas had totally freaked me out. With nowhere else to turn, I sought God.

I looked everywhere for that dude. I read God’s book cover-to-cover and, side note here, God, with all due respect, for future reference, secure better ghost writers for your biography. Those guys, despite their innumerable good deeds and all, kind of suck at writing. I spent countless hours on bended knee praying both in private and at the church altar. I tried to eliminate my impure thoughts during at least daylight hours. Those twilight hours around sleep, given raging teenage hormones and the abundance of nascent pubescent breasts, were just too much to ask for. I chatted tirelessly to preachers and Sunday school teachers. I studied other religions. I attended other denomination’s churches, even the Negro churches which was a real commitment in the early 70s in South Georgia. Not because they were unfriendly or unaccepting of my lily white ass, because God knows they were very accepting. It was just that the Negro services were very physical and emotional and continued throughout the day including lunch on the grounds. And for the record, I strongly recommend passing on the chittlins even though the smell of frying pig intestines is peculiarly tantalizing.

In spite of my efforts, the crazy dreams continued and just as Jonas’s did, they crept into daylight. They were not all bad dreams. In fact, most were not. It’s just the bad ones scared the shit out of me and subsequently are the ones remembered. Many dreams repeated often, and some were like little television miniseries resuming where they left off the evening prior. Between natural puberty issues, being pretty much a pariah at school and the constant freaky ass dreams, I was tittering on losing the remainder of my limited marbles. And God...the big fellow was just not helping much as far as I could see. My knees were bloody from prayer and nada from the big guy. So I prayed some more and intensified my search because, by God, I was gonna find him.

Naturally, being the weird kid, I was a library assistant. Part of my duties included filing away the newspapers and periodicals in the proper shelves and cabinets. Kind of a joke really...not many junior high kids did any research save the World Book Encyclopedia. (For the under forty generation this is akin to using Wikipedia for research.) It was there in the file room where I read the story in the Macon Telegraph:

Milledgeville, G.A.: Police are treating the death of a patient at Central State Hospital as an accidental drowning. Jonas Stinson, 43, was found dead in his private room at the hospital on December 31. He had been a patient at the hospital off and on for much of the last two years.

Police