The Time Being

By Joseph Dunn

THE TIME BEING tells of a grown boy that was once considered as an unwilling ‘witness’ to the disappearance of three of his friends, and how he interacts with their surviving relatives when returning forty-plus unsolved years later. THE TIME BEING has mixed racial relationships taking place in long ago Baltimore, when the black parts of town were not yet in the white parts of town. THE TIME BEING travels from Civil War Maryland to recent Baltimore, while tripping THE WIRE with a dose of EDGAR ALLAN POE.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781635681604

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THE TIME

BEING

JOSEPH DUNN

Copyright © 2017 Joseph Dunn

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2017

ISBN 978-1-63568-159-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63568-161-1 (Hard Cover)

ISBN 978-1-63568-160-4 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

This book is a work of fiction. Any reference or allusion to other references or allusions, real people with real estates, teenage delinquency, debaucheries, revered acknowledgments or loquacious blurbs are presented in a strictly fictitious sense. Names, places, projections, and predicaments are products of the author’s imagination; any resemblances to actual realities are unintended.

THE TIME BEING

was written with respect for all citizens

of Baltimore and surrounding Maryland

from prior to present,

therefore . . .

if any depiction in this book offends anyone

let it be known beforehand that would be unintentional.

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for this stripped book.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or other ways, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise disseminated or circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including those conditions that are being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

Manufactured in the United States of America on recycled paper.

Dedication

This is to my deceased father,

who was the most real man

that I could ever imagine,

and without whom my entire life

would’ve been somebody else’s dream.

Historical Considerations

Maryland was colonized by England in the seventeenth century. It was one of the United States’ original thirteen states in the eighteenth century. Before the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, the Mason-Dixon Line was designated as the northern limit of slave-owning states. The confusion of the Mason-Dixon Line being above Maryland semantically blurred the future for the descendants of both slaves and slave owners. After the incinerated mid-sixties of the twentieth century the demographics of the City of Baltimore changed from mostly white to mostly black. During those decades of shifting, the derogatory migratory term white flight was mostly observed. Early in the twenty-first century, Baltimore had become the national epicenter of high-octane righteous indignation following the riot-inducing around-the-clock televised police inhumanity to Baltimorean Freddie Gray. His demise was a culmination of inevitabilities that were simmering before the American Civil War.

Maryland might’ve called itself the Free State but was in no hurry to give up slavery during the Civil War. Maryland bordered the North and the South. Some of the first war casualties occurred in the streets of Baltimore when Union soldiers were attacked by a pro-Confederate mob. On September 17, 1862, the Battle of Antietam, or the Battle of Sharpsburg, Maryland (as it was better known in the South), was the first major battle to take place on Union soil. It was the most bloody single-day battle in American history with over twenty-two thousand dead, wounded, or missing. Hundreds of dead Confederate soldiers from local hospitals and prisoners from Fort McHenry are buried in Confederate Hill of Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Honorable Mention and Acknowledgment

I give thanks to my father’s younger brother,

who was fatally wounded as a teenage soldier overseas.

Even though my uncle was killed before I was born,

I saw him being missed every day of my childhood in my father’s eyes.

Preface

Do you know something that you are not telling me? the detective asked the teenage-at-the-time Colt McCormick with repeated insinuations. He questioned him further with contempt, rewording the question as if young Colt had a comprehension problem. The boy understood. The man was right. He did know something, but he couldn’t bring himself to admitting anything. The detective watched closely as the boy continued to act oddly. Is the reason that you cannot remember anything because you buried it in the background of your subconscious?

The young boy did remember being nauseous. He knew then what he couldn’t say. It was etched in stone, forever stenciled to his teenage brainpan. Colt drove to the far ends of every road in every direction trying to override those life-changing years before he could drive. He left as a boy without telling his father. His soul felt permanent regret. Spirits by the dozens were now circling his head, watching him cry for not treating a just lost great man better. Those ghosts knew that Colt ran unchecked across their resting places like a thoughtless and rude and uncouth hooligan, turning a blind eye to their hallowed grounds, with so many acts of mindless indifference and utter disregard they were too numerous to calculate. That neighborhood has since changed its given name from Yale Heights to Some Other Heights. Those railroad tracks and their ties that once gave pivotal access to everywhere were removed in both directions. Locally, that extravagant church shuttered its stained glass windows and locked its over-the-top doors forever. The grand facade still stood but was abandoned, like vacant high ground in an ugly mud-covered flood.

Colt could still fondly remember thinking how the church was so beautiful inside yet totally surrounded by outside turmoil. It was an urban sanctuary where confessions on Saturday washed away most sins, cleansing a soul for tomorrow’s Holy Communion with a wink and a nod. Colt was left free to be kneeling at the altar’s steps with his mouth stretched wide open. The presently tensed Colt McCormick glanced toward the woods and those beckoning outlying tall trees. He could sense his subconscious twitching in the distance like a faintly dying plea. God help him, because if he were to slightly tilt his head and squint just a little bit, he could see himself running in these same woods losing his religion.

While walking the tracks of the Catonsville Short Line, just as he did at every given chance, the teenage Colt McCormick unknowingly stumbled upon three of his acquaintances doing an assortment of things that were frowned on by polite society of the day. He watched only a moment but that was more than enough. That split second was seared into his childhood subconscious. Dazed but still undetected, he stumbled away like a football player wobbling off the field after suffering a numbing concussion. The breaking news of the next few days became the boys that he’d witnessed in those compromising acts of unbecoming behavior had then gone missing without so much as a clue, a trace or a reason. Their case turned unsolvable per perpetuity. Colt’s fear of implied compliance kept him from even speaking in passing of his self­confusing discovery. The young boy had numerous uncertain concerns as to exactly what it was that he thought he saw. Nonetheless, his dazed silence was sadly mistaken by the general consensus as a naive attempt at denial of his involvement. Those alarming and incriminating preconceptions followed him closely wherever he went. Eventually, as an adult, he wandered beyond Maryland’s boundaries, to the far corners of the Continental United States. He had hoped to leave the insinuating whispers and colder weather behind, searching for pockets of solitude among warmer temperatures and the countless new strangers that did not immediately view him as a person hiding something nefarious. The long time gone and distance traveled only stoked those negative theories, until the sad day that he returned to bury his father in the same graveyard that those woefully misplaced boys were last seen. Relatives of those lost boys attended the funeral more eager than ever to confront their long-lost suspect. Many years of soul-searching had poised Colt to better weather his many detractors.

PART 1

The Way Back

"The two most important dates in a person’s life are:

The day that they’re born,

And the day they figure out why."

—Mark Twain

Nineteenth-century novelist /

Pioneer motivational speaker

CHAPTER ONE

Baltimore

The Best Way To Start A Riot 21

Train to Nowhere 23

Strong Headwinds 25

Big Shoes to Fill 27

Grandma’s Brownstone 29

Inner-City Branches 31

Uncle Schnooky’s Market 33

Aunt Irma’s Ocean Cottage 35

Ocean City After Dark 37

Kurtz’s Beach Club 39

Efforts to Swim 41

Patapsco State Park 43

Hero Worship 45

Bats in the Car Barn 47

The Drunken Mechanic 49

Grandpa in the Basement 51

Grandpa Going Gone 53

The Blue Law 55

Chin Music 57

One Flew over the Outfield Fence 59

Memorial Stadium 61

Big-League Diamond 63

Westside Game 65

The Gravity of Fair Play 67

Uncle Roscoe’s Shoes 69

Looking the Other Way 71

Monkeys in the Window 73

Saturday Morning Ritual 75

Starting Early 77

Weekends after Dinner 79

Baltimore or Less 81

Riding Buses’ Bumpers 83

Egging Frostie 85

Top Down in the Cold 87

Neighborhood Regular 89

When No One Knew Better 91

The Best Way To Start A Riot

The best way to start a riot is to incite one. There were still many boundaries yet to be held to, and examples to be made regardless of repercussions or implications. The world was almost the same as it ever was, but the slight difference mattered mightily to those armchair historians that were personally documenting modern-day evolution. Everyday people could use their smartphones to observe, zoom, and control satellite imagery. They, in turn, could watch themselves using their phones from space. Cameras are everywhere, just as Orwell had envisioned. The constant surveillance borders on excessiveness, guaranteeing that whatever happened to three fifteen-year-old boys in the woods way back when could never happen again. At the time they disappeared into thin air and were never seen or heard from again, invasive closed-circuit monitoring was just a dream or a nightmare like a teary glint in an unknown inventor’s eye. Exactly what happened inside that enchanted forest of long ago remains uncertain. Things haven’t changed in that regard. The circumstances that might have contributed to locating their whereabouts have gone. There had been no progress in the resolution stage, and the world went on about its merry way. Everyone had a theory of their own about the unsolved vanishings, but few can do anything other than gripe and complain to each other about their perceived revelations. Colt McCormick was a same-age friend separately to all three of the missing boys. It remains a well-known fact that Colt was in the same woods as those boys on that day. That was almost too large of a bone of contention to consider. Colt could not explain himself satisfactorily to anyone, including the detective that repeatedly asked him pointed questions about his direct involvement. Colt’s memory was nearly blank. He didn’t know what he could say. Police psychologists put their heads together to concur that Colt was traumatized and hiding something inside that electro-chemo hypnosis could not locate. The detectives resumed their searching elsewhere, and those paths were as cold as all their other attempts.

The investigations into the disappearances were shelved and gone. Detectives moved on, just like the rest of the world. Colt moved to the country landing clearly out of sight. The families of the missing boys were still there waiting for somebody to tell them what had happened. A very long time ago they were livid, now not so much. Time might heal all wounds, but it can’t change guilt or innocence.

Train to Nowhere

The north entrance to the cemetery in Irvington was only one block from young Colt McCormick’s school. He would walk to and from school through that peaceful solitude. On weekends he would walk away from his neighborhood just to check out the difference. On the cemetery’s far side was the Main Line or Eastern Corridor, where six different sets of well-used tracks of the high-speed Washington, DC, commuter trains to New York and back were in heavy use and on a rigid and frequent schedule. By comparison, Colt’s Irvington cemetery branch-off pair of rails were extra quiet. The train’s appearances seemed random, like sketchy cameos. When his train did appear, it slowed to almost stopping, apparently out of respect for those souls resting in peace. Colt was thrilled to just see this train, as any other same-age boy probably would have been. He figured his cemetery train’s schedule to be every fourth Tuesday at one in the afternoon. That meant that Colt could only see it in the summer. He often imagined that he could hear it from his classroom, but he was daydreaming.

On an especially wintry Tuesday, Colt’s school was closed because the snow was coming down too heavily. He waited knee-deep in anticipation, standing beside the snow-covered track to see if perhaps his favorite train would brave the elements. The train’s faint chugging in the distance grew slightly louder as it slowly crept nearer. The reliable, unassuming locomotive inched out of the trees right into broad but dimmed daylight. The puffer looked and sounded like a sick, wheezing water heater resting on its side. Colt grew more enthralled by the novelty of each of the train’s parts separately. But when he considered the overall concept of the whole of those parts working together, the thought pleasurably disoriented his untrained mind. It chugged throughout the clouds of Colt’s dreams. Colt imagined the train was dying a slow death on its last leg getting older by the minute one foot at a time. Each of its strained whimpering moans sounded as if it were gasping its last breath repeatedly. The snow was lying, blanketing the sounds of the train’s changing from puffing winter train into an injured iron monster furtively searching for a place to finally rest in pieces. The slow train had a hobble that was reminiscent of a creature’s limp. The locomotive was likely very hot, yet it was covered with snow. It quietly faded into the distance, huffing toward the horizon where the sun would have set if only the skies were not cloudy all day.

Strong Headwinds

While visiting his cousin and his cousin’s family for a week, young Colt was warned beforehand about the inevitable gigantic thunderstorms expected during his stay. On a Thursday night in June, they were having tornado warnings all over the radio. His uncle was in the dirt-floored barn that he used for a garage. Colt’s aunt told him to go get his uncle because they were all going to take cover inside their root cellar. When he found the uncle he was lying on his back next to a putrid metallic green puddle under the jacked-up car. He slid out, and to the boy’s surprise he had a lit cigarette dangling from his bottom lip. He took the butt out of his mouth to talk through a cloud of eye-stinging smoke. He wiped his hands and reached for his Wild Turkey. His little serving glass made him feel like he wasn’t drinking straight from the bottle. This here glass is half-full! he said. To the young Colt that glass was half-empty. Colt’s funky uncle was in his element with grease, booze, and smoke in a bare dirt-floored barn that he used for a garage with his project car on cinder blocks. He was also under the distinct impression that no weather was gonna put him inside a stark cement underground vault smelling like hard liquor and just staring at the rest of the family’s glow-in-the-dark eyeballs while being unable to drink or smoke. The drunken uncle told his nephew that right then was not a good time. Colt had been forewarned about his uncle’s antisocial behavior. His uncle would say he didn’t want to get all clusterphobic.

He stared Colt up one side and down the next. Just peek under here one minute. Do ya see that big metal box oozing fluids into the dirt? It has hundreds of cogs, springs, bands, and gaskets that go together just like a Swiss watch. So go tell your cousins and aunt that this here transmission ain’t gonna jump into place all by itself anytime soon. You tell ’em I’ll be in just as soon as I am finished putting this trans in.

He gave his nephew a scare on more than one level by defying danger. One way was the tornado; the other was his frazzled wife. That whisky smirk plastered on his greasy face only increased his scariness. The nephew had seen all the different news footage on the aftermath of ignoring a disastrous bout with a tornado warning. When Colt repeated his uncle’s reply to his aunt, he saw a heat burning in her squinty eyes then quickly opened them wide in disbelief.

Big Shoes to Fill

A certain summer Saturday morning found the young boy’s father getting up late, eating his breakfast closer to lunchtime when a small group of older boys ran in formation swinging his yard’s gate open and asking the young boy if his father was home. His father began coaching little league five years before he played and had numerous older boys from those teams that visited on a regular basis. The son told them all to wait in the yard while he retrieved his father. They stood silent beside themselves. At the quarry . . . was the only part of the talk that the disoriented son overheard.

His dad immediately looked aghast. He gathered himself momentarily then slid his feet into his weekend loafers with the leather tassels where shoestrings would be if loafers had strings, and grabbed his keys. The four boys lined the backseat like a human octopus while the baffled son sat in the front seat scratching his head and feeling left out. Father sped to the nearby quarry on a business’s private property.

The four boys jumped out of the backseat while the son’s father grabbed the bolt-cutters that he kept in his trunk. He ran to the gate of the chain-linked fence. Between the fence and the water on the dry sand sat what appeared to be a disheveled stack of wet clothes. There he is, the four older boys pointed out together. The confused boy’s father then instructed everybody to stand back as he gently squeezed his large bolt cutters. He pinched the substantial lock in half. He dropped the heavy tool at the spot to race toward the soggy laundry.

As the son watched intently with the other boys, it became clearer as to just what he was looking at. That pile of damp clothes was really his neighborhood friend. The son didn’t recognize him until his father picked the boy up and held him tightly. The man stared skyward and blinked his eyelids. The distressed dad placed the boy’s small chin atop his wide right shoulder. He held the poor boy’s head from behind as if he were palming a melon, testing it for freshness. There was none. The young son saw his dad whispering into the waterlogged child’s ear. He was begging the boy to come back.

The father broke down into sobbing tears as he swayed the boy from side to side. He kissed the dead boy’s head. All those watching were sadly instructed to walk home until further notice. They complied, stunned in silence. It became apparent to all the boys that the sad dad had the very unfortunate and unenviable chore of informing the deceased boy’s young single-parent mother that her one-and-only child was gone.

Grandma’s Brownstone

As a young boy gladly living in Baltimore, Colt was pleased to know just what he needed to know. He was happy to be a product of multiple generations of Baltimoreans. His home was the newer and improved version of the city homes of his grandparents’ neighborhood. The grandparents lived closer to the center of the city, and their home was called a brownstone. Their brownstone was a row house connected to their neighbors on both sides with the distinction of not having anything in the front but a set of steps directly from the city sidewalk. Their front door was a mere five or six steps up from that sidewalk where no grass could grow, just a red brick stoop surrounded by the concrete city walkways. Grandma could stand in her doorway and just about touch the pedestrians, who, in turn, could just about touch the parked cars. Those parked cars couldn’t open their doors to get into the driver’s side unless they waited for no street traffic to be passing. There was no need for maintenance out front except for the sweeping of the sidewalk into the street gutters.

During the winters there would be a big oil truck that parked just off the curb to deliver the winter furnace oil with a hose and nozzle from the truck. It went into a screwable-capped opening at the base of the exterior brick wall just above the sidewalk. That pipe went through the exterior wall to a gigantic storage tank against the front of the basement. That basement was a dirt-floored room where the gigantic furnace sat. The furnace was the size of the incinerator at the boy’s grade school, and roared into first use so loudly it could be heard three stories up in the top-floor bedrooms. Sound traveled through the heating ducts, ending by roaring through grates on the floor of every room in the house.

There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on each of the two floors above the main floor, on which the kitchen and dining room and the living room with the front door were. There was nothing in the dirt-floored cellar but the furnace and a laundry area with a basement door that led to the backyard.

The backyard was empty except for only a couple of clotheslines with poles and dented metal garbage cans with their detachable lids next to the fence at the gate that led to the alley. That alley was where the garbage truck drove, stopping to collect everybody’s cans. The garbage men first opened the gate to get the cans and then returned them emptied before letting themselves out.

Inner-City Branches

When it came to the young boy’s family tree, there were more branches sprouting out than he could keep track of. With a dozen children in his mother’s immediate family and six aunts and uncles on his father side, the boy needed help just remembering who was what to him. His mother was one of the younger siblings, so her older sisters were more like mothers to her, especially since her actual mom died a short few years after having her last offspring. The boy’s father had fewer relatives to keep track of, and they were bunched together in age like playing cards in a straight flush. It was easier to remember them because they looked like slight variations of each other, with similar features and speech patterns.

Mother’s looked like distant relatives of each other, which in some cases in some sense they actually were. Some of the boy’s cousins were as old as his mother, and when they came to visit, it was hard not to think of them as aunts or uncles. They all loved the boy’s mother, and she was the center of attention at every family get-together.

The relatives were scattered across the whole city of Baltimore, with some living close to the city’s center while some had homes that pushed the city limits in every different direction. They were all locally colorful with their thick city accents and their own large families stuffed into the limits of their city row houses. Since they each had their own brood to contend with, the boy’s relatively small family did most of the visiting. The boy’s father enjoyed the visits because he seemingly always had a new car, trading each in every three years. He was often chided that he traded them in when their ashtrays became filled. Others teased that he did it when the car’s payment obligations were fulfilled. For whatever the reason, he liked showing his wife’s family what a state-of-the-art automobile looked like.

The boy’s small family lived just within the western limits of the city that had yards with grass in the front and back. And seemingly just like everyone else in the city of Baltimore, they had a row house. New cars wouldn’t last very long in the heart of the city, where most of the car thieves lived or at least plied their trade. Downtown was filled with fuming buses and taxicabs that drove on the sidewalks when that need arose to get around the congestion. A new car would stick out like a sore thumb and unattended would present opportunities for the resentful have-nots to put their passing touches on the as-yet unblemished fenders and the polished paintjobs that taunted them.

Uncle Schnooky’s Market

One of the favorite city people and places that the young boy liked to visit was his mother’s older brother Schnooky and his inner city corner store. He and his family lived a half-block up the street from their little old-time store, and whenever the boy’s family stopped by it became a catered affair. Uncle Schnooky would bring every person a couple of room-temperature codfish cakes sandwiched between two saltine crackers and smothered with bright yellow mustard. Then he’d proudly marched his young nephew into his sawdust-on-the-wooden-floor establishment as if he was some visiting dignitary. He gave the boy whichever bottled soda he could fish out of the red box of an old-fashioned bottle cooler filled with cold water and melting ice. It also had an opener for the bottle caps on the side. Next to the freshly sliced cold cuts inside the glass deli case was a large wooden barrel filled with fresh pickles. They also needed to be fished out and placed in special waxed paper bags which were folded shut like envelopes. Potato chips came in tin drums, and the aisles of candy bars had brands not available in the boy’s modern supermarket. He walked those lanes of groceries looking at everything he mostly hadn’t seen before like the various differently colored flavors of canned Hawaiian Punch, or his selection of comic books that seemed like issues from the future. The boy and his friends kept collections that were neatly stacked in piles back in the basements of their homes. Schnooky patted his nephew on his shorthaired head as he led the boy around the corner market like he was a prince in his palace. The boy enjoyed the tour every time they walked that half-block to the market from Schnooky’s row house. The nearest comparable enjoyment would be the amusement pier in Ocean City, Maryland, and that was more than a hundred miles away that would take three hours or more of driving. More importantly, Ocean City was really only open during the three months of summer when the Atlantic Ocean’s warmer temperatures or clear weather would allow tourists. Schnooky’s wonderful deli mart was carved into the city corner like every other business in the real city, including local bars or whatever else an entrepreneur could imagine. The beauty of the confines of the old-time neighborhoods allowed everything that people would want, need, sell or buy to flourish for generations, existing only steps from everybody’s homes, being connected like city blocks on an antique grid all horizontal and as flat as a map.

Aunt Irma’s Ocean Cottage

Once every summer for as long as the boy could remember, his parents would pack the family car with him and his younger sister and a suitcase for each person to take a vacation at the shore. Ocean City was where everybody in Maryland wanted to vacation at and always nearly the same time. The young boy had an aunt that rented the same cottage for the same month of ever year. Her place was a great funky two-story house with parking and a large screened-in front porch that was mere steps from the elevated wooden boardwalk that nearly everyone vacationing walked around the clock. At least it seemed that way to the boy, but he went to sleep before the crowd died down. To him the parade went on into the night, likely even gathering momentum.

Aunt Irma had hosted some family that the boy didn’t even know of, and she’d done it for more years than the boy had been alive. The location was as close as a hop and a skip to the crowded true boardwalk and only three short blocks to the amusement pier, the center of the vacations of every tourist in the town. The pier was perpendicular to the boardwalk, and it was overflowing with rides. The boardwalk had the arcades and the hamburger stands and stalls with their varied smells and noises with pinging gleeful cheers. The pier itself had its own more exhilarating shouts of joyful shrieks from the Ferris Wheel to the speeding screeches of the roller coaster.

All this was happening while hanging above the crashing waves and the salty air was carrying the strong scent of tar from the pilings that held everything underfoot together. The brisk chill of the night drove up sales of souvenir sweatshirt printed with Ocean City, Md. or Maryland is for crabs in response to the catchy out-of-state slogan Virginia is for lovers, which would also be available. Colt didn’t remember what Delaware’s slogan was.

On the crowded boardwalk, there were souvenir shops of all