Rumi Revisited

By Craig Wells

In 1964, white in LA is the color of convenience. But for Cody, nothing in life is convenient. He falls in love with Malia who is from the nearly extinct Chumash tribe. He is befriended by Mr. Ozzard—a Persian refuge with grandiose, scary tales of faith and betrayal. His father treats Cody as harshly as his own father did—an Okie during the depression. Watts riots erupt. Malia is kidnapped by a demonic warrior from the ancient Chokki clan. As a boy, he must rescue her. As the man he must become, he relies on the strength his father has beaten into him. With the help of Mr. Ozzard, Malia's uncle, and a mythical dagger as deadly as a sliver of ice, Cody forges onward as if a cavalry soldier without a horse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Craig Wells
• Release date: Nov 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223350446

Craig Wells

I am who I never thought I would be. I have been a disciple of moveable spirituality. I move from Christianity to Buddhism to Native American mysticism until I find what works. I have been dedicated to the love of writing rather than romance. What matters most is that I am here; approaching 70, and fortunate to have a stronger sense of humor.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Image result for arabic+symbols+for+love

IN 1965, IN THE SUBURB of Downey southeast of LA, white was the color of convenience.  We conveniently ate white bread, they dressed their Catholic girls in white blouses, I slept under white sheets.  We lived a life of convenience.  We conveniently rode our bicycles anywhere because there were few cars and no kidnappers.  We were blessed by sunshine which conveniently showed up nearly every day. We had few choices.  The black and white TV was enough.  The Buick sedan always garaged and pampered.  The garden hose I dragged from front to back to water our newly planted magnolia tree with those big wonderful white flowers blossoming among our orange trees.

We were happy to have what we had. Because we were not as poor as my father who grew up as an Okie during the depression.  We were rich with our own house.  We fed our dog, a tawny colored cockapoo splotched with white on her chest, better than my father ate as a child during the Dustbowl years.

We were content to be where no blacks or browns lived too nearby. They conveniently chose to live in Compton or Pico Rivera. Or like most Indians, in Bell Gardens, where my best friend, hoped to soon be my girlfriend, Malia shared an apartment with her father across the alley from Dell Auto Parts.  They were the last survivors of the Chumash tribe who had fished off the coast of Malibu up until the end of the nineteenth century where they had settlements in the Santa Monica Mountains. The Chumash supposedly had a special gift.  Malia believed they could travel between worlds.  I let her believe I understood after she asked me to imagine a balloon in a movie.  After an hour or so, I claimed I saw it in front of my face.

Well, did it pop? she asked impatiently.

The balloon?

I did it then. I made you see it.

I suspected many of the Indians who frequented the RedBall Liquor store close to where the San Gabriel River separated Downey from Bell Gardens imagined more than balloons. If any showed up this early, I’d ask them.

I stood at RedBall’s backdoor and knocked. Most of the morning I collected pop bottles from vacant lots to have an excuse to wait for Malia whose father would drop her off at RedBall in his 1944 navy blue Chevy Fleetmaster after he left work after another Saturday of being the one crew member of four forced to work overtime as a roofer. 

The owner Mr. Ozzard stuck his head out as if he was a sandstone gathering momentum. He usually came out in full gentle prayer.

Not today, Cody. No time, he said and drew back.

Malia, is she here? I asked.

He smiled. "Ah, love, yes, leave those, and come inside. I have a cold Hires, and donuts Egret just delivered—warm and sugary like you like."

Mr. Ozzard told me he was Persian, and I believed they knew about love because he had the right way with words whenever I shyly mentioned Malia. He was stocky, an inch or so taller than me, and treated me as if a mother who greeted her newborn.

Mr. Ozzard took out a Coke bottle from the grocery bag I clutched against my chest. A black widow spider crawled out of the bottle. His calloused fingers crushed it. I shuddered.

More careful, must be more careful, he said.

Tiny metal shards clung to his five o’clock shadow and glittered. He put the bottle in the empty wooden case next to the door.  He stood up abruptly. A screwdriver in the back pocket of his black canvas slacks scraped his back.

Cody, he said.  Come back tomorrow.  I’ll pay you then.

But Malia? 

He nervously tapped me on the shoulder with the screwdriver.

You must go now, he said.

I spied the spot of blood on my T-shirt with a faded image of Froggy The Gremlin from the Buster Brown TV show. I was too old for it, but Malia claimed the frog was my spirit animal, and I never knew whether she was joking. I often wore it. I wanted her to like me.

When you come back, you can wash down the floor and deliver a couple chainsaws I got finished, he said. 

Mr. Ozzard had a lawnmower shop next door where he made repairs and sharpened blades.  He also built the fastest, meanest go carts around.  Recently he had been commissioned by Mr. Rikter to fashion two for his sons.  Mr. Ritker was the owner of Dell Auto Parts. The Ritkers were my neighbors. Dad told me that Mr. Ritker wanted to be a race car driver but his wife would not allow it. So Ritker invented crash helmets that kept him on the racing circuit to monitor their success.

More money to take Malia to those silly movies you got me to like, he said.

I don’t know, Mr. Ozzard.  Malia will be mad.  That’s her job.

The girl cannot be mad if she not here.  Last Thursday she missed.

Now I knew something was wrong.  Malia had been absent from school. I missed her. She often ventured across our classroom to talk to me without permission. My desk had been shoved into a corner so I would not disturb our English class.  Mrs. Belcer had punished me for being fidgety, bored, a smart aleck, and worst of all, I accidentally shot Malia in the eyebrow with a rubber band after she whipped around to smile at me. I made the best of my isolation.  I tacked up pictures of my favorite athletes like Henry Aaron and Juan Marichal and Roberto Clemente and Bill Russel and Cassius Clay.  They inspired me—it was okay to be different, and not just because I had the brightest red hair, or freckles on one ear and nowhere else, or that I squeaked, groaned, squealed, shrieked to add flavor to any story anyone might stay to listen. If they did, I tried too hard, and hated myself for it, and usually ended up saying something offensive. I read books my classmates had never heard of. Like WAR AND PEACE and GOD’S LITTLE ACRE and LOLITA. I was weird; different from my white classmates like Malia who was beautifully brown and sometimes an even bigger smart ass than me. Most of my junior high school made Malia feel stranded.  They ignored her as if she had a beard and hairy shoulders. Whenever Malia snapped back, girls treated her like she hid behind every drinking fountain and opened locker door—ready to burst out and scalp them.

She might come today. Don’t you think? I asked.

Mr. Ozzard twitched away a dragonfly that hovered near his mustache. He stared over my head. I turned around.  The sun glared against the bright red awning of Sal’s Subs.  I squinted.  A strange bird perched on its edge.  Did it tug at a spoiled fig clasped by its feet?

That no fig, Mr. Ozzard said. 

What? 

I turned back.  The dragonfly hovered near my face and peered at me. It reminded me of how my French grandmother looked at me and darted away after I asked her last Thanksgiving about the scars blistered on her chin and neck.  My grandfather, who seldom spoke after dinner while he sat in his recliner and smoked his cigar, told me that she had barely survived mustard gas during WWI.

Not a fig, not a fig, Mr. Ozzard stammered.

The dragonfly sped away.

What? I asked.

You have to go, Cody, he said, grasping my arm as if a warning.

Sure, Mr. Ozzard, not a fig at all, but an eye, I joked.

He yanked me against his sweaty belly.

Is that what you saw? he asked tensely.

Yeah, sure, an eye.

He grabbed both shoulders and shook me.

Is it, boy?  Is it?

I liked how Mr. Ozzard was peculiar.  I liked his exotic tales.  But this scared me much more.

I was kidding, I replied. Wasn’t I?

He tried to brush out the wrinkles he made in my T-shirt.

Of course you were.

His thumbs caressed my nose.

You are not to believe anything I say.

But what about the Chokki’s? I asked.

Ah, Cody, not that one, he said more calmly.  That one was true.

When Mr. Ozzard was around my age, he had been kidnapped by a horde of Chokki bandits who roamed the deserts near Damascus.  In a tent they tied him to the skeletal leg of a camel driven into the sand like a stake with strips of cloth they ripped from his mother’s jilbab, bluer than any starkly clear sky, after they raped her.  In the tent, they quartered their seven black stallions. The horses snorted and sniffed and constantly stamped and jostled against tenser muscles.  Sweat splattered his face so he barely breathed.  A hot night and an even hotter morning passed.  Fear became stronger than his thirst when two brothers charged in the tent.  They argued hotly.  After the older brother left, the only one with several gold teeth cut off Ozzard’s big toe with a dagger.  He sent it as proof they had him.

Did you cry? I had asked.

I couldn’t.  I was too scared.  A stallion nipped and tugged at my hair as if a tuft of grass.

But it worked.  You’re here and alive.  Your dad paid the ransom.

He did not.

Better.  You escaped.  How?

Mr. Ozzard smiled as he shook his head.

I was a boy.  Those were seven men.

The cops.  Damn good cops, I bet.

Mr. Ozzard laughed.

Hah, no, it was my father.  He hired five Germans—former soldiers in the army of Rommel during World War II.  Now they worked the drills on oil derricks.  They raided the camp under the cover of sand stirred up by helicopters owned by MAHRUTKAT PETRO, the company my father ran for the British.

Wait, who’s Rommel?

The bastard, the ‘Desert Fox.’  Ah, you Americans.

Hey, I’m only fourteen.

Yes, you are, my boy, you are.

Well?

The Germans reluctantly killed the bandits who refused to give up.  They rescued me.  My father caught the youngest Chokki alive.  Rami—the only name father offered me. Father ripped out his gold teeth.  He melted them down and made a band to secure my big toe until it healed.

I had stared down at its tarnished gold clamped around his big toe, pitted by sand, and inscribed with exotic Arabic symbols.  I was not stupid.

Impossible, I muttered. 

Mr. Ozzard affectionately gripped my shoulder.

Cody, one of the Germans, should I tell you, you see, this lieutenant had been an assistant to a doctor doing experiments at a death camp.  They perfected this kind of surgery.

Death camp?

He had tugged me away and back into his liquor store.  He gave me my favorite candy bar—an Abba Zaba.  How I love that luxurious nougat with peanut butter inside.  I chewed and forgot.

A bird screeched eerily. I turned and looked.  A National Guard helicopter passed overhead and cast a shadow across the awning.  A golden eagle stretched out its wings beyond six feet.

Is that? No way, I said.

The eagle leaned over and pumped its wings to free itself from the sun. Mr. Ozzard awkwardly clutched me around the neck and swung me around.  My sneakers clipped across Coke bottles. The violent velocity caused me to burp up a Vienna sausage I had snuck for breakfast.  Now I was really scared. He shoved me against the building.  He turned and planted himself against me. My teeth scraped against the brick as I struggled.

Mr. Ozzard.

Be still, boy.  For your life, and mine.

My lip bled. I tasted blood. Mr. Ozzard cried out seven syllables in Arabic. Each word of his anger grew stronger as they vibrated through his back and into me.  I trembled. Another shriek, shriller, erupted and struck closer to what is primal. Another three syllables choked out, and his body lunged off me. My fingers clawed up the brick over my head. Mr. Ozzard grunted and cried.

Allah!  To Jahannam! 

Hugging the wall, I squirmed around. Mr. Ozzard