Denau County Rocket Rangers
I don't write fiction almost ever. I rarely write. Here, you are seeing the bulk of what I do write. The rest stays in shoeboxes guarded by TOP MEN under my bed. The following is a hastily written short story for my creative writing class. It has silly dialog, is missing the ending I originally gave it (which would be another half added on if it was completed), and it just makes me feel uneasy throughout. All of my writing does that.
The really notable part about this is the fact that it is based on a drawing and a concept I made in seventh grade called "The Des Moines Rocket League". My dad thought it was funny, and it, along with all my other middle school writing, is hiding in the ceiling tiles of my former room (now Cass').
But, I have to get back to formatting it and writing about the almost non-existent revision supposedly done on it. Choke on it.
----------------------------------------
Raymond Johansen and Jonathan Friedman sat facing each other in a booth that spoke loudly about how they were a party too small to occupy it. If this were a Sunday morning instead of a Tuesday night, the pancake house waitress would approach and kindly ask them to move to a smaller table so the hungry churchgoers could fill these seats, built sturdy and wide, to accommodate for the respective rear-ends of the also sturdily built Lutheran men, women, and children of Denau County.
This was not a meal between two pancake loving friends. They had known each other their whole lives, and their families very close, but they sat in silence, examining the menus that had already been inspected and put to use, left carelessly by their waitress who had already come and collected their orders. They were quietly thankful for this diversion.
Jonathan sighed, and pushed the menu off to the table’s far end with the syrup selection. He dug around in his worn nylon backpack, and set a worn leather ledger in front of him.
On the cover of the ledger was a seal stamped directly into the aged leather, achieving a look of antiquity often sought after in upscale furniture stores. The seal featured a rocket at the center, a stretched long oval, two curved fins at it’s foot, with the raindrop shaped flame protruding from it’s bottom end. Two ears of corn held the rocket in the center, placed like the olive leaves often found on seals.
At the bottom of the circle that contained this were the initials D.C.R.L.: The Denau County Rocket League.
This was not a meeting of friends, but of compatriots in an organization of men in uniform. Their title accurately surmised the extent of their jurisdiction, and the borders of knowledge (however vague) of their existence. The wide booth contained their entire ranks at the present time, two tired young men who had inherited the mantle of “Rocket Men” from their fathers. The ledger, like Jonathan, had been present for all of Raymond’s life, accumulating recognition, but not familiarity. He had first seen it in his father’s office, when he, George Johansen, was the Director and acting president of the Denau County Rocket League.
The most accurate recording of the history of the organization, save for the worn ledger of the League’s president, exists in a small side room in the Denau County Historical Society located in Delbert, the first town and formerly the seat of power in the county. The historical society building, once a schoolhouse, is the oldest standing structure in the tri-county area, which would make it one of the oldest buildings in this part of Minnesota. The room, renovated and painted over dozens of times in the past century and a half, contains at its center a glass case, the size of a grown man. The case contains a mannequin, wearing the gray jumpsuit uniform of the League, with the accoutrements of a Rocket Man. This includes a large belt, with massive pouches strung all around the circumference of the mannequin with no visible buckle, stopping only for a moment to allow the placement of a leather holster on the right side, containing a shiny .44 automatic pistol. The head was topped with an old leather football helmet, painted a cracking silver, with a short fin across its center. Pulled up to the brow was a pair of fine particulate protection goggles, two ridged metal cylinders with flat lenses, dusted over. Across the chest, like two intersecting bandoliers, were leather straps run over and under the shoulder to a chrome rocket on the mannequin’s back, adorned with knobs and tubes of questionable purpose. At the foot of the mannequin was a neatly written label that read:
“The Uniform and Rocket of the Denau County Rocket League’s Founder William Johansen.”
On the walls of the small room was the history of the League illustrated in yellowed newspaper clippings and worn photographs, framed, labeled, and set in chronological order counter-clockwise, starting with the wall to the left of the doorway.
The League began in 1942 by William Johansen, a garage mechanic in Delbert. He was denied admission to the United States Armed Forces due to a leg injury he had sustained in a farm accident when he was a boy. Wanting to do his part for the war effort, as the news articles explained, he and two of his fellow mechanics made up costumes inspired by Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, and would travel to schools, social clubs, and town squares throughout Denau County speaking about what the people could do on the home front. They sold war bonds, encouraged recycling of tin and rubber, and performed skits for children about the importance of hygiene and civic service. The organization continued beyond the war, growing beyond the original three members, with Jonathan’s father Albert joining in 1955. They marched behind the Delbert High School Marching Band in the parade, would be at the opening of grocery stores and gravel mining pits, and every year would put on a stage show at the county fair that presented the citizen of the year award to someone who had displayed exceptional “community and American values”. This much of the history occupies three of the four walls, from the League’s founding in 1942 to the late 1960’s. The walls dense with costumed men smiling by prize winning pumpkins and holding oversized scissors lead to a sparsely populated wall, revealing the frequently painted over cracking plaster and wood below.
Jonathan cleared his throat and opened the ledger to a page near its back, which had been marked with a half-completed sandwich shop punch card. Setting it down next to the ledger, he started in a hurried, though professional tone.
“Alright, the monthly meeting of the Denau County Rocket League in the month of September nineteen-ninety eight is now in session.” He picked up a pen, and began writing the minutes. “Jonathan H. Friedman, director and acting president, present, also first officer Raymond M. Johansen, present.” He dragged the last syllable out, in the unamused fashion a of divorce court judge reciting formalities for the dozenth time in a day.
He looked up at Raymond, who had long ago perfected a technique in not looking Jonathan directly in the eyes.
“Alright, Ray, any new business? How’s the classes coming along?”
Ray, still rereading the beverage selection, looked up for a moment, surprised that Jonathan knew that he was attending night classes at the community college in Darby County.
“Oh, uh, they’re good. Pretty tough, but, um, it’s good to be back in school again.”
“Good, good. Those flyers I gave you a few months back, have you been putting them around Market Towne and Delberbrook Center?”
“Yeah, a bit. It was a while ago, they might have gotten taken down, but I haven’t been looking.”
Raymond kept all of the flyers in a neat pile on top of his dresser since Jonathan had given them to him. He had no desire to have his monthly obligation known amongst his patrons and coworkers at the Market Towne grocery store where he was a cashier, or at the electronics repair shop in the Delberbrook shopping center where he primarily dislodged foreign objects from household appliances.
“Well, I went by both of those places and didn’t see any. You should put some more up, and maybe around campus while you’re at it. We really need to step up the name recognition. Even in Darby County.”
“I-I don’t know if-“
Raymond paused. He always had a very hard time taking Jonathan seriously, and now he had an even harder time taking what were essentially orders in some sort of civic militia from him. Jonathan remained in his mind as the round kid with glasses who throughout the duration of grade, middle, and elementary school would juggle obsessions with action cartoons, comic books, and historical battles. This made him no friends as far as Raymond knew, though Jonathan seemed content with who he had become: a humorless man of twenty-three, an associate manager at a hardware store, and the director and acting president of the Denau County Rocket League.
Raymond sighed deeply, as if the exasperation had spurted a heavy leak in the back of his throat while he groped around for a way to finish the sentence. He had been putting it off for a while. It festered in all the corners of his mind for years.
“Look, Jonathan, um, ah, god…” He took his hands from their idle activity of scratching at the laminated edges of the menu, and looked Jonathan in the eye.
“In January, next semester, I’ll have enough credits done in Darby to head to the University in the cities. I’m moving away. I can’t be in the club anymore. I’m really sorry.”
For one without vested interest in what Raymond was saying, it would have sounded like one pained note sung in a low tone.
Jonathan’s body seemed to retract into itself. Every muscle in his body tensed in a microscopic way, and his skin turned invisible over the red torrents below. His expression was beyond pained, with eyes threatening to leave their home and teeth on the verge of exploding into clouds of talc. Words escaped him single file in a slow procession of disbelief.
“Why…are…you…doing…this…to…your…father?”
The statement seemed to Raymond something like a tired regurgitation of a comic book speech bubble, in a brief moment of drama between unbelievably proportioned men pummeling each other. With Jonathan no longer the one speaking to him, he felt more comfortable in expressing his frustration and making his case.
“Dad is dead. As far as I’m concerned, this goddamn gentleman’s club or whatever the fuck you’re calling it this week ended when him and all those other assholes with fire extinguishers on their backs crashed into that fucking semi-truck.”
He hadn’t spoken about it much since the funeral five years before, and there was a slight catharsis in raising his voice over the event for the first time. The fact was so briefly summarized, that to him, it didn’t warrant much thought then and even now. Your father and his friends all died on the way to one of their events in a car crash. It became a reality to him, along the lines of “the sky is often blue” or “when dropped, things fall”. At the funeral, the density of the crowd with unfamiliar faces affected him much more than the closed casket they were placed around. The repeated consolations came as naturally and awkwardly as the first introduction to an obscure relative or family friend. Save for the already assumed familiarity and tears.
The only thing Jonathan said to him at the event was “Are you going to be continuing the League like your dad did when his dad died?” At the time, Raymond could not conjure anger over the distastefulness of posing that question at that moment. He responded by wordlessly handing the ledger from the office to Jonathan while he stood with his family in the Johansen kitchen, who were drinking tea and following every sentence with “We’re so, so sorry.”
Tears, unlike the slow moving funeral ones, flowed purposely now down Jonathan’s face. Raymond was surprised that they hadn’t arrived sooner, not considering he feelings that had just been hurt, but rather that the pressure within Jonathan’s body seemed astronomical, and the exhaust of a handful of words could not relieve it. He began to equalize into coherence, pausing his sobs long enough to retain what little was left of the professional voice he had wielded earlier.
“Raymond. This… this was bigger than us. We were in charge of something, something important in this town.”
“No. You were in charge of it. I didn’t want any part of this. I had already told my dad that, and he respected that.”
“But it was a legacy! You could continue this, this dream that your grandfather had! It’s such a rare thing, to have something this honorable and accessible, I mean…”
“Honorable? What the fuck have we done since we started running this freakshow? Tell some kindergarteners that we’re not the goddamn Power Rangers while we clumsily explain fire safety to them? Fuck me. Your dad never joined when your grandpa asked him to. Why are you asking me to explain myself?”
“My father is not an honorable man… he left me and my mother.”
“Just because he divorced your mom for probably good reasons, and tries to be the best dad he can from Chicago coupled with the fact that he didn’t want to dress like a retard in nowhere Minnesota?”
“Because he abandoned me, and his hometown, and refused what his father was giving to him! Real men, real heroes, stay where they are needed and stand up for what’s right! Your father and grandfather were heroes. They did what they needed to do, and you just threw that legacy in their face!”
“I loved them, you think I don’t? They dressed like assholes, yes, but they did what they thought was right, and yeah, they did a lot of good for this town. That was a long time ago, though. Now it’s just you and me, sitting in a pancake house, going nowhere, with Halloween costumes in your trunk.”
Raymond extended his arm, pointing out the window towards Jonathan’s station wagon in the parking lot, his index finger striking the window loudly. The surrounding patrons and staff had been carefully ignoring the commotion for a while at that point, with the weeping, gesturing, and raised voices suggesting a strange end to a relationship, though their collective hypothesis was considerably distant from reality.
“We can still do a lot of good! We just need to get the word out that the League is still around, and it will be like it was in the old times. You’re not even giving it a chance!”
“Look, Jon, see where we are? The original meeting place, the real lifeblood of our families, the Delbert Auto Repair Garage, used to be in this exact spot. Right here.”
“So?” Jonathan said cautiously, unsuccessfully concealing the fact that he could no longer think well outside of attempts at reassurance and hope for a future that he saw was fast crumbling due to the indignation of others. He briefly conjured the image in his mind of being a union general in the civil war, whose last soldier lost his nerve and fled away from the frontlines. He still, though barely, had the presence of mind to classify this thought as mildly absurd.
“They tore it down after dad died. It’s gone, replaced with this fucking place. Look outside, everything‘s different now. The world is different now.”
Outside the window was Delbert’s Main Street, ornamented on both sides by large colorful signs for restaurants, gas stations, office supply stories, and clothing shops with names familiar the world round. The only alien sight in the scene was the old water tower peeking from behind the electronics superstore. Raymond felt a rant about the establishment rise in his belly, but he quelled it, as he was quickly becoming exhausted, feeling that he could not maintain this intensity for much longer. He waited for a response for a moment, but upon seeing that there would be none, he exhaled deeply. The adrenaline of the moment had worn out, and Raymond receded into a more recognizable demeanor.
“Look, Jon, I didn’t want this to end either. I didn’t want to be a part of it, but I didn’t want it to end. There was a while where I wanted to belong in this, but I know that I won’t. This place doesn’t need me, I have no idea what a place like this needs. My grandpa and dad did what they could, and hopefully I will to, just not like this. Man, I’m sorry.”
Jonathan had subsided into a vegetative state in his seat, and as Raymond got up and left, his eyes did not follow him. He stared at the brightly colored cushion where Raymond’s head was. He was no longer crying, and his color had returned to something only slightly pinker than usual. His and Raymond’s pancakes were had been ready for a while, but there was not a waitress that dared approach the table until half an hour after Raymond’s departure. The waitress set both dishes down, two tall stacks of thick pancakes with purple and red syrup atop them from fruits indeterminate. She collected the now unattended menus and left without a word.
After she left, Jonathan’s head angled down to look at the meal before him. After a shorter interval of staring, he picked up his pen and looked purposefully at the ledger, still open before him. In it, he wrote:
“Raymond M. Johansen tenders resignation, leadership approves. New recruits needed, more flyers must be made. Historical society presentation on the eighteenth will continue as planned. Meeting adjourned at 5:12 PM”
He replaced the perforated bookmark, set down his pencil, and picked up a fork.
The really notable part about this is the fact that it is based on a drawing and a concept I made in seventh grade called "The Des Moines Rocket League". My dad thought it was funny, and it, along with all my other middle school writing, is hiding in the ceiling tiles of my former room (now Cass').
But, I have to get back to formatting it and writing about the almost non-existent revision supposedly done on it. Choke on it.
----------------------------------------
Raymond Johansen and Jonathan Friedman sat facing each other in a booth that spoke loudly about how they were a party too small to occupy it. If this were a Sunday morning instead of a Tuesday night, the pancake house waitress would approach and kindly ask them to move to a smaller table so the hungry churchgoers could fill these seats, built sturdy and wide, to accommodate for the respective rear-ends of the also sturdily built Lutheran men, women, and children of Denau County.
This was not a meal between two pancake loving friends. They had known each other their whole lives, and their families very close, but they sat in silence, examining the menus that had already been inspected and put to use, left carelessly by their waitress who had already come and collected their orders. They were quietly thankful for this diversion.
Jonathan sighed, and pushed the menu off to the table’s far end with the syrup selection. He dug around in his worn nylon backpack, and set a worn leather ledger in front of him.
On the cover of the ledger was a seal stamped directly into the aged leather, achieving a look of antiquity often sought after in upscale furniture stores. The seal featured a rocket at the center, a stretched long oval, two curved fins at it’s foot, with the raindrop shaped flame protruding from it’s bottom end. Two ears of corn held the rocket in the center, placed like the olive leaves often found on seals.
At the bottom of the circle that contained this were the initials D.C.R.L.: The Denau County Rocket League.
This was not a meeting of friends, but of compatriots in an organization of men in uniform. Their title accurately surmised the extent of their jurisdiction, and the borders of knowledge (however vague) of their existence. The wide booth contained their entire ranks at the present time, two tired young men who had inherited the mantle of “Rocket Men” from their fathers. The ledger, like Jonathan, had been present for all of Raymond’s life, accumulating recognition, but not familiarity. He had first seen it in his father’s office, when he, George Johansen, was the Director and acting president of the Denau County Rocket League.
The most accurate recording of the history of the organization, save for the worn ledger of the League’s president, exists in a small side room in the Denau County Historical Society located in Delbert, the first town and formerly the seat of power in the county. The historical society building, once a schoolhouse, is the oldest standing structure in the tri-county area, which would make it one of the oldest buildings in this part of Minnesota. The room, renovated and painted over dozens of times in the past century and a half, contains at its center a glass case, the size of a grown man. The case contains a mannequin, wearing the gray jumpsuit uniform of the League, with the accoutrements of a Rocket Man. This includes a large belt, with massive pouches strung all around the circumference of the mannequin with no visible buckle, stopping only for a moment to allow the placement of a leather holster on the right side, containing a shiny .44 automatic pistol. The head was topped with an old leather football helmet, painted a cracking silver, with a short fin across its center. Pulled up to the brow was a pair of fine particulate protection goggles, two ridged metal cylinders with flat lenses, dusted over. Across the chest, like two intersecting bandoliers, were leather straps run over and under the shoulder to a chrome rocket on the mannequin’s back, adorned with knobs and tubes of questionable purpose. At the foot of the mannequin was a neatly written label that read:
“The Uniform and Rocket of the Denau County Rocket League’s Founder William Johansen.”
On the walls of the small room was the history of the League illustrated in yellowed newspaper clippings and worn photographs, framed, labeled, and set in chronological order counter-clockwise, starting with the wall to the left of the doorway.
The League began in 1942 by William Johansen, a garage mechanic in Delbert. He was denied admission to the United States Armed Forces due to a leg injury he had sustained in a farm accident when he was a boy. Wanting to do his part for the war effort, as the news articles explained, he and two of his fellow mechanics made up costumes inspired by Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials, and would travel to schools, social clubs, and town squares throughout Denau County speaking about what the people could do on the home front. They sold war bonds, encouraged recycling of tin and rubber, and performed skits for children about the importance of hygiene and civic service. The organization continued beyond the war, growing beyond the original three members, with Jonathan’s father Albert joining in 1955. They marched behind the Delbert High School Marching Band in the parade, would be at the opening of grocery stores and gravel mining pits, and every year would put on a stage show at the county fair that presented the citizen of the year award to someone who had displayed exceptional “community and American values”. This much of the history occupies three of the four walls, from the League’s founding in 1942 to the late 1960’s. The walls dense with costumed men smiling by prize winning pumpkins and holding oversized scissors lead to a sparsely populated wall, revealing the frequently painted over cracking plaster and wood below.
Jonathan cleared his throat and opened the ledger to a page near its back, which had been marked with a half-completed sandwich shop punch card. Setting it down next to the ledger, he started in a hurried, though professional tone.
“Alright, the monthly meeting of the Denau County Rocket League in the month of September nineteen-ninety eight is now in session.” He picked up a pen, and began writing the minutes. “Jonathan H. Friedman, director and acting president, present, also first officer Raymond M. Johansen, present.” He dragged the last syllable out, in the unamused fashion a of divorce court judge reciting formalities for the dozenth time in a day.
He looked up at Raymond, who had long ago perfected a technique in not looking Jonathan directly in the eyes.
“Alright, Ray, any new business? How’s the classes coming along?”
Ray, still rereading the beverage selection, looked up for a moment, surprised that Jonathan knew that he was attending night classes at the community college in Darby County.
“Oh, uh, they’re good. Pretty tough, but, um, it’s good to be back in school again.”
“Good, good. Those flyers I gave you a few months back, have you been putting them around Market Towne and Delberbrook Center?”
“Yeah, a bit. It was a while ago, they might have gotten taken down, but I haven’t been looking.”
Raymond kept all of the flyers in a neat pile on top of his dresser since Jonathan had given them to him. He had no desire to have his monthly obligation known amongst his patrons and coworkers at the Market Towne grocery store where he was a cashier, or at the electronics repair shop in the Delberbrook shopping center where he primarily dislodged foreign objects from household appliances.
“Well, I went by both of those places and didn’t see any. You should put some more up, and maybe around campus while you’re at it. We really need to step up the name recognition. Even in Darby County.”
“I-I don’t know if-“
Raymond paused. He always had a very hard time taking Jonathan seriously, and now he had an even harder time taking what were essentially orders in some sort of civic militia from him. Jonathan remained in his mind as the round kid with glasses who throughout the duration of grade, middle, and elementary school would juggle obsessions with action cartoons, comic books, and historical battles. This made him no friends as far as Raymond knew, though Jonathan seemed content with who he had become: a humorless man of twenty-three, an associate manager at a hardware store, and the director and acting president of the Denau County Rocket League.
Raymond sighed deeply, as if the exasperation had spurted a heavy leak in the back of his throat while he groped around for a way to finish the sentence. He had been putting it off for a while. It festered in all the corners of his mind for years.
“Look, Jonathan, um, ah, god…” He took his hands from their idle activity of scratching at the laminated edges of the menu, and looked Jonathan in the eye.
“In January, next semester, I’ll have enough credits done in Darby to head to the University in the cities. I’m moving away. I can’t be in the club anymore. I’m really sorry.”
For one without vested interest in what Raymond was saying, it would have sounded like one pained note sung in a low tone.
Jonathan’s body seemed to retract into itself. Every muscle in his body tensed in a microscopic way, and his skin turned invisible over the red torrents below. His expression was beyond pained, with eyes threatening to leave their home and teeth on the verge of exploding into clouds of talc. Words escaped him single file in a slow procession of disbelief.
“Why…are…you…doing…this…to…your…father?”
The statement seemed to Raymond something like a tired regurgitation of a comic book speech bubble, in a brief moment of drama between unbelievably proportioned men pummeling each other. With Jonathan no longer the one speaking to him, he felt more comfortable in expressing his frustration and making his case.
“Dad is dead. As far as I’m concerned, this goddamn gentleman’s club or whatever the fuck you’re calling it this week ended when him and all those other assholes with fire extinguishers on their backs crashed into that fucking semi-truck.”
He hadn’t spoken about it much since the funeral five years before, and there was a slight catharsis in raising his voice over the event for the first time. The fact was so briefly summarized, that to him, it didn’t warrant much thought then and even now. Your father and his friends all died on the way to one of their events in a car crash. It became a reality to him, along the lines of “the sky is often blue” or “when dropped, things fall”. At the funeral, the density of the crowd with unfamiliar faces affected him much more than the closed casket they were placed around. The repeated consolations came as naturally and awkwardly as the first introduction to an obscure relative or family friend. Save for the already assumed familiarity and tears.
The only thing Jonathan said to him at the event was “Are you going to be continuing the League like your dad did when his dad died?” At the time, Raymond could not conjure anger over the distastefulness of posing that question at that moment. He responded by wordlessly handing the ledger from the office to Jonathan while he stood with his family in the Johansen kitchen, who were drinking tea and following every sentence with “We’re so, so sorry.”
Tears, unlike the slow moving funeral ones, flowed purposely now down Jonathan’s face. Raymond was surprised that they hadn’t arrived sooner, not considering he feelings that had just been hurt, but rather that the pressure within Jonathan’s body seemed astronomical, and the exhaust of a handful of words could not relieve it. He began to equalize into coherence, pausing his sobs long enough to retain what little was left of the professional voice he had wielded earlier.
“Raymond. This… this was bigger than us. We were in charge of something, something important in this town.”
“No. You were in charge of it. I didn’t want any part of this. I had already told my dad that, and he respected that.”
“But it was a legacy! You could continue this, this dream that your grandfather had! It’s such a rare thing, to have something this honorable and accessible, I mean…”
“Honorable? What the fuck have we done since we started running this freakshow? Tell some kindergarteners that we’re not the goddamn Power Rangers while we clumsily explain fire safety to them? Fuck me. Your dad never joined when your grandpa asked him to. Why are you asking me to explain myself?”
“My father is not an honorable man… he left me and my mother.”
“Just because he divorced your mom for probably good reasons, and tries to be the best dad he can from Chicago coupled with the fact that he didn’t want to dress like a retard in nowhere Minnesota?”
“Because he abandoned me, and his hometown, and refused what his father was giving to him! Real men, real heroes, stay where they are needed and stand up for what’s right! Your father and grandfather were heroes. They did what they needed to do, and you just threw that legacy in their face!”
“I loved them, you think I don’t? They dressed like assholes, yes, but they did what they thought was right, and yeah, they did a lot of good for this town. That was a long time ago, though. Now it’s just you and me, sitting in a pancake house, going nowhere, with Halloween costumes in your trunk.”
Raymond extended his arm, pointing out the window towards Jonathan’s station wagon in the parking lot, his index finger striking the window loudly. The surrounding patrons and staff had been carefully ignoring the commotion for a while at that point, with the weeping, gesturing, and raised voices suggesting a strange end to a relationship, though their collective hypothesis was considerably distant from reality.
“We can still do a lot of good! We just need to get the word out that the League is still around, and it will be like it was in the old times. You’re not even giving it a chance!”
“Look, Jon, see where we are? The original meeting place, the real lifeblood of our families, the Delbert Auto Repair Garage, used to be in this exact spot. Right here.”
“So?” Jonathan said cautiously, unsuccessfully concealing the fact that he could no longer think well outside of attempts at reassurance and hope for a future that he saw was fast crumbling due to the indignation of others. He briefly conjured the image in his mind of being a union general in the civil war, whose last soldier lost his nerve and fled away from the frontlines. He still, though barely, had the presence of mind to classify this thought as mildly absurd.
“They tore it down after dad died. It’s gone, replaced with this fucking place. Look outside, everything‘s different now. The world is different now.”
Outside the window was Delbert’s Main Street, ornamented on both sides by large colorful signs for restaurants, gas stations, office supply stories, and clothing shops with names familiar the world round. The only alien sight in the scene was the old water tower peeking from behind the electronics superstore. Raymond felt a rant about the establishment rise in his belly, but he quelled it, as he was quickly becoming exhausted, feeling that he could not maintain this intensity for much longer. He waited for a response for a moment, but upon seeing that there would be none, he exhaled deeply. The adrenaline of the moment had worn out, and Raymond receded into a more recognizable demeanor.
“Look, Jon, I didn’t want this to end either. I didn’t want to be a part of it, but I didn’t want it to end. There was a while where I wanted to belong in this, but I know that I won’t. This place doesn’t need me, I have no idea what a place like this needs. My grandpa and dad did what they could, and hopefully I will to, just not like this. Man, I’m sorry.”
Jonathan had subsided into a vegetative state in his seat, and as Raymond got up and left, his eyes did not follow him. He stared at the brightly colored cushion where Raymond’s head was. He was no longer crying, and his color had returned to something only slightly pinker than usual. His and Raymond’s pancakes were had been ready for a while, but there was not a waitress that dared approach the table until half an hour after Raymond’s departure. The waitress set both dishes down, two tall stacks of thick pancakes with purple and red syrup atop them from fruits indeterminate. She collected the now unattended menus and left without a word.
After she left, Jonathan’s head angled down to look at the meal before him. After a shorter interval of staring, he picked up his pen and looked purposefully at the ledger, still open before him. In it, he wrote:
“Raymond M. Johansen tenders resignation, leadership approves. New recruits needed, more flyers must be made. Historical society presentation on the eighteenth will continue as planned. Meeting adjourned at 5:12 PM”
He replaced the perforated bookmark, set down his pencil, and picked up a fork.
posted by A.T. Nee at
3:38 AM
0 Comments
