Ryne Douglas Pearson's Blog, page 10

The prize? A DVD of Knowing. The rules? Simple--in four sentences, you must tell a story (in prose or verse) how bacon saved you. Obviously you must mention the word 'bacon' in your entry, AND, to spice things up, you must also use the word 'pneumothorax' at least once.

Simply craft your masterpiece in a comment to this post, and I will choose the winner and announce the results tomorrow.

So, have at it!

In addition to eBook format for Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, iPad, and other devices, you can now get my mystery novel, Confessions, as a paperback from Amazon for $9.99. It is MUCH more economical to purchase it as an eBook, but I understand that some people still prefer a physical copy, so I am making this available.

 

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What is Confessions about?

A call in the dead of night summons Father Michael Jerome to a suburban Chicago hospital--a police officer has been shot. As department chaplain, Michael arrives to find that the officer will survive.

The same cannot be said for his assailant, who lays mortally wounded on a gurney, begging for absolution for some past sin. Offering last rites to the dying man, Michael hears his final confession and is shaken by the admission of a crime committed five years earlier.

A murder that shattered his family.

Struggling with the constraints of his faith, Michael moves cautiously as he tries to identify others involved in the vicious killing. But every secret he uncovers leads him further down a path where it becomes clear that someone is desperate for the past to stay buried.

I hope you enjoy Confessions, and look for paperback editions of my other novels to appear shortly.

No, I'm not talking about the mechanical steps of conversion from Word documents using Mobipocket Creator to make a PRC file for Kindle, then running it through Calibre to get an ePub for Nook, and then sprinkling magic pixie dust on it to make the iBooks store like it. I'm talking about the decision to actually go that route. What pushed me toward ePublishing?

I had no other choice.

In the 90's I was a traditionally published author, with four novels from William Morrow and one from Putnam. None set the world on fire, but two were purchased for film and one actually made it to the big screen. Late 2000 rolls around and I find myself working as a screenwriter, and have been since then.

Then early 2009 arrives. My old prose urges have caught up with me and I finish a new novel. Confessions. It's very different from my previous books, and if you've read the forward to my novels The Donzerly Light and All For One, you'll understand what I mean when I say I knew that was going to be an issue. So, with the help of my film agents, I began the search for a new lit agent who would be able to sell the 'new' me.

Only problem was, no one wanted the new me. Or the old me, for that matter. The explanations were pretty standard (love it but can't figure how to sell it...I'm so close to taking this on...this is beautiful, but...) There were a lot of 'buts'. And amidst all this reaction filled with damning praise, whether sincere or not, there was an undercurrent that I only picked up on later.

None of them knew which box to check to classify it. That was their overriding concern. One agent said to me, in some form of literary gymnastics that still makes me giggle, 'It's sliding between the genre gaps.'

I knew then that traditional publishing was a business I no longer saw myself succeeding in.

Slow forward a couple months. A thought crept into my consciousness. Something from the previous year when I was recalling two novels that my publishers hadn't wanted. I had heard then about publishing directly to the Kindle, but had never really done anything to explore actually doing so. And, wait, hadn't I, since then, received a letter from Putnam stating that the rights to my novel Top Ten had reverted to me? Suddenly the gears were churning and I was coming to a pretty big realization.

I'm a storyteller. That's my profession. I make my living doing so. And I have FOUR novels just sitting on my hard drive, gathering electronic dust, hidden from potential readers simply because--in the case of three of them--they were not the right genre. What kind of sense did any of that make?

None. So, in September of last year, the first novel went up. Then another. I now have four, plus a short story collection, Dark and Darker. In the coming months I will release more short stories, and by the end of the year three more novels. They are available for Kindle, Nook, iPad, and virtually anything that uses an eReader app. Paperbacks of my novels will be out soon, and the four other novels I had published in the 90's will be released by me once the publisher stops dragging their feet and does the rights reversion paperwork.

And what does this all say? About me? About being a writer? About publishing?

I don't care. My stories are now being told, in the way I want, and at the time that I choose. The income I earn from publishing my own novels and stories is growing steadily, with most of it going to me, and I anticipate that within two years it will become my primary source of income.

And what are those 47 easy steps mentioned in the post title? They equate to the 47 years I've been blessed with on this earth so far, and the lessons I've learned over that time, to finally come to the understanding that when you are presented with the opportunity to control even part of your destiny, you should grab hold and enjoy the ride.

The Kindle eBook edition of Confessions now contains a bonus at the end: a sample of the bestselling novel Four Years From Home, a poignant and humorous mystery by Larry Enright.

 

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You can purchase Confessions from Amazon for the Kindle by clicking the cover image above. What is Confessions about?

A call in the dead of night summons Father Michael Jerome to a suburban Chicago hospital—a police officer has been shot. As department chaplain, Michael arrives to find that the officer will survive.

The same cannot be said for his assailant, who lays mortally wounded on a gurney, begging for absolution for some past sin. Offering last rites to the dying man, Michael hears his final confession and is shaken by the admission of a crime committed five years earlier.

A murder that shattered his family.

Struggling with the constraints of his faith, Michael moves cautiously as he tries to identify others involved in the vicious killing. But every secret he uncovers leads him further down a path where it becomes clear that someone is desperate for the past to stay buried.

What is Four Years From Home about?

Tom Ryan -- firstborn of five children in a large, Irish Catholic family, smart and acerbic, a cheat and a bully -- calls himself the future king of the Ryans. There are other opinions. His mother calls him a holy terror. Mrs. Ioli calls the police on him. His father says that had Trouble been a saint, that would have been Tom's middle name. But his parents, neighbors, peers, and siblings all must bow down before him or suffer the consequences. Just ask the Christmas turkey leftovers he buried in the side yard.

Harry, the youngest Ryan, was the shining star of the family. Bright, sensitive, and caring, he was protected by parental radar, called by God and Grandma Ryan to the priesthood, and was in Tom's eyes, a brown-nosing little punk who had become a threat to his kingdom and the primary target of his search and destroy missions. 

Then Harry changed. He abandoned his vocation and quit the church, and when he left for college, he left for good. He never called. He rarely wrote. His picture disappeared from the mantle. It was as if he had ceased to exist and his shining star had been but a passing comet. The enemy had retreated and Tom's war was over.

"Four Years from Home" begins on Christmas 1972 during Harry's senior year at college. The Ryan family has gathered without Harry for another bittersweet holiday celebration. When an unexpected and unwelcome gift arrives, the family demands answers and Tom Ryan, bully cum laude, must make a reluctant journey of discovery and self-discovery into a mystery that can only end in tragedy. 

Written by the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, "Four Years from Home" redefines brotherly love in the darkly humorous and often poignant actions of its principal skeptic, Tom Ryan.

I hope you enjoy both Confessions and Four Years From Home.

If you have an eReader other than Kindle, you can also purchase Confessions (without the bonus material) from the following retailers:

Barnes & Noble   Sony   Smashwords   Kobo   Borders AU

Thank you.

Today I'm posting the first two chapters of my paranormal suspense novel, The Donzerly Light, whose price has been reduced to just .99 (the new lower price is available at Amazon and B&N right now, and will soon propagate to the other retailers where my eBooks are available).

 

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What is The Donzerly Light about?
 

With a destitute childhood and the tragic loss of his parents a distant but constant memory, Jay Grady has come to Wall Street to make a name, and a fortune, for himself. But the success he'd imagined is frustratingly elusive.

Until he meets the bum. An enigmatic transient who occupies a Manhattan corner, offering puzzling morsels of wisdom on a sign he changes daily. Drawn to the bum one day by a familiar snippet on his sign, Jay gives the man some spare change.

What he gets in return shakes him to his core.

Suddenly gifted with some power of prescience, Jay becomes the darling of Wall Street, picking winning stocks as if he can glimpse the future.

Or shape it.

But the dark side of this gift reveals itself as a curse when Jay tries to turn away from what he's been given, leading the bum to reach into his life with murderous results. Running from the horrific reality that his power now unleashes, Jay finds his flight coming full circle as he must face the man, the thing, that set him on this path.

I hope you enjoy the sample and will enjoy the entire book.

 

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First Interrogation

August 14...11:20 p.m.

His hands had been cuffed and his eyes taped over for several hours when he heard footsteps approach the small space in which he was being held. A closet, he was certain, having tested its limits while stretching his good right leg, probing walls and a door from where he lay half curled in a corner. His left leg, casted from just below the knee to just above the toes, was throbbing against its plaster confines, sending dull bolts of pain up to his hip in a sickening, precise rhythm mated to the beating of his heart. It was pain verging on agony, but that Jay Grady could handle. He'd endured far, far worse a hundred times over.

The footsteps—two sets, Jay thought—stopped just outside. A latch clicked, the door opened. Four hands lifted him from the cold floor and half carried, half dragged him out and away from the closet. Beyond the heavy tape that masked his eyes, Jay could sense brightness. The cold glow of artificial light. Not the warm touch of a rising sun—a warmth he wanted to know again. But he wondered. He wondered if he ever would.

The men—they had to be male, Jay figured from the force of their grip on his upper arms—said nothing as they moved him down what must have been a corridor, the pain in his left leg making him wince as his cast slid along a long, hard floor. They made one turn to the left and stopped soon after that. Another door opened and Jay was taken into a space with much more depth than the closet, and a brightness more cold, more intense than that in the unseen halls he had just traveled.

A room. He was in a room.

The strong hands put him in a straight-back chair and slid the seat, with Jay in it, up to something that touched him about the stomach. An edge. A table edge. He was sitting at a table.

He had been made to sit at a table.

The hands that had gripped him withdrew, and he heard footsteps move away, back into the hall. The door closed.

Only then did Jay hear the breathing.

He 'looked' around, turning his head this way and that, facing all directions except directly behind. The breathing seemed to be coming from straight ahead, from a few feet distant, if that. Across the table. Someone was directly across the table from him.

The sound of paper came next. Loose pages being turned over from a stack just across the table. Fifteen seconds or so elapsed between each hushed scrape. Whoever was breathing was also reading.

"Who..." Jay swallowed, still able to taste the blood from the open welt on the soft flesh inside his lip, still feeling the grit of the earth clinging to his cheek where it had been forced hard to the ground, a knee pressed against the back of his neck. That was some hours ago. The past. Jay ran his tongue over the open wound inside his mouth and made himself focus on the present. The dark, uncertain moment that was now. "Who's there?"

"Quiet, please," a man said calmly, but firmly. Not an old voice, not a young voice.

"Just please tell me who—"

"If you cannot be quiet, I will have you gagged."

Jay swallowed the remainder of his plea and 'stared' toward the voice.

"Do I make myself clear?"

Spent physically, mentally, emotionally, his ability, his desire to protest gone, Jay acquiesced with a feeble nod. His head bowed. The throb in his left leg raced with the beat of his heart.

"When I want to hear from you, I'll speak to you," the man said, and that was that. The only sound for more than an hour was his breath and the slow rustle of pages turning.

 

August 15...12:36 a.m.

Jay was beginning to doze, a dream of Mari rising like a heat shimmer in his subconscious, when several sharp raps on the table cut short the coming of her pleasant, hazy visage, and snapped him back to the darkness of his waking world.

"What?" Jay asked, his head swinging left, then right, then the gentle hush of breathing drew his attention that way. "What is it?"

"Murder, Mr. Grady," a voice said. It was the man. The man who'd demanded his silence earlier.

"Murder?" Jay parroted, momentarily disoriented. But very soon his thoughts centered and he remembered what near-sleep had masked for so brief a time. "You mean—"

"Murder is a serious matter, Mr. Grady."

"Listen, you have to—"

"The intentional killing of another human being," the man interrupted, as if his were the only words of consequence. It seemed a natural part of his manner. "Do you know what the punishment for murder is in Missouri?"

Jay sniffed the air. It was stale. Old building stale. "Am I still in Missouri?"

"You are."

"I wasn't sure. I was in a trunk for an hour, two hours. I don't know. All I know is the road was lousy."

"Your confinement was necessary."

Jay brought his cuffed hands up from his lap and touched the tape over his eyes. "Is this still necessary?"

A contemplative quiet hung in the air for a moment, then the man said, "Lean over this way."

Jay did, rising slightly out of the chair on his good leg. He felt the rasp of calloused fingers at his temple, then a quick sting across his face as the tape was ripped away. His eyes were instantly dazzled by a bright pulse of light that lasted, and he fell back the short distance to the chair. He blinked rapidly, his face cast slightly down from the overhead lights that seemed grotesquely brilliant. But with each flutter of his lids his eyes adjusted to the very ordinary radiance thrown from the twin fluorescent fixtures mounted on the ceiling, and soon Jay was able to tolerate the light. Squinting somewhat, he looked to the man who had been only a voice until then.

"Better?"

Jay nodded and considered the man opposite him. Whoever he was, time had gone easy on him. He was maybe fifty, but there was just a light dusting of gray on the brown hair about his temples, and fine, spiny fissures in the tanned skin at the corners of his blue eyes—the second bluest eyes Jay had ever seen. Blue eyes that bore at him, a thousand things brooding behind the stare.

And then there were his hands. Resting before the man as fists atop a thick manila file folder, each was a meaty cudgel at the end of massive, chiseled forearms, which themselves sprouted from biceps that ballooned the cuffs of the T-shirt he wore. Taken whole, his hands and arms seemed to step toward shoulders as wide and solid as an anvil.

Jay gazed at those hands, recalling the roughness of the fingers on his temple. Reliving for an instant the calloused touch. These were hands that knew contact, that knew work of some kind. Hands that could strike. Fingers that might crush.

Jay wondered if he was going to die.

"What about these?" Jay asked, glancing at the black steel cuffs that bound his wrists together.

The man shook his head. "You're a cold-blooded murderer, Mr. Grady. Your victim was unarmed. I watched you do it."

Jay let his hands settle to his lap. "Who are you?"

"You can call me Mr. Wright."

The reply puzzled Jay briefly, his brow furrowing, but soon he found sense in it and the skin above his tired brown eyes smoothed. "'Mister'", is it? Not 'officer' or 'agent'?"

"You weren't expecting a Miranda warning, were you?" Mr. Wright grinned at his prisoner, and from somewhere below the table he retrieved a small notebook and put it near the thick file. A pen was clipped to its brown cover. "I don't know your experience, Mr. Grady, but no lawman I know has the power to blindfold someone and throw them in the trunk of a car."

"But you do?"

Mr. Wright nodded. "I have the power to do a great many things."

"Such as kill me," Jay offered, trying to sound defiant in spite of the wet, fearful ball rolling down his throat.

"If I choose," Mr. Wright answered without hesitation. "There are plenty of out of the way places in this state to dispose of a body. The brushy banks of some stream, or in a rocky gully somewhere. Countless places. And, maybe ten years from now, some hunter will step over a log and put one of his LL Beans through your rib cage. Into your bones, Mr. Grady. Birds will have picked you clean of meat long before then."

So casually, so knowledgeably did this Mr. Wright speak of such matters that Jay could imagine very clearly a magpie plucking his eyes from their sockets and making a meal of them. Could hear the keawwing of a flock circling ever closer to his remains. He could see this and more, and he thought how odd it was to finally glimpse a death that was his own.

"I could kill you, Mr. Grady. This very moment if I so choose. I'd simply be saving the 'Show Me' state the expense of a trial." Mr. Wright let his fists open so they laid flat upon the file. "But I want you to live—at least for a while."

"Why?"

Mr. Wright tapped the file twice with one stout finger. "You've led an interesting life, Mr. Grady. I've done some reading about you."

Jay eyed the file and tried to ignore the hands. "What's in there?"

"Everything about one Jay Marcus Grady. Newspaper articles, magazine articles..." Jay looked away from the file now and stared at a bare spot on the tabletop as his captor went on. "...police reports, school records, SEC filings, passport application, medical history, birth certificate, financial statements, etcetera, etcetera." Mr. Wright grinned. "Amazing the amount of information that a single thumb print from a murder weapon can lead one to."

Jay breathed hard through his nose and said nothing.

"Yes, you have led a very interesting life, Mr. Grady," Mr. Wright said again, then opened the file and removed a sheet of paper. He slid it toward Jay and spun it his way. It was a photocopy of a New York Times article, with a photo accompanying the story. A somewhat grainy photo of a younger Jay Grady, smiling smartly and dressed the part of the sophisticated businessman. "Hell of a suit. You looked good. What kind was it?"

Jay didn't need to look long. A glance brought it back. That time. That moment. A bleak, wintry pall clutched his heart. "Armani."

Mr. Wright turned the copy back his way and took it in hand. He examined it casually. "Very, very interesting. Tell me, how old were you in this picture?"

"It says in the article."

"Refresh my memory," Mr. Wright said, glancing sharply over the top of the paper at Jay.

"I was twenty four." A lifetime ago, Jay thought, though on the rare occasions when that time did come back to him, whether in dreams or in moments of unguarded rumination, it seemed another life entirely.

"Pretty fucking dapper," Mr. Wright commented, then slipped the paper back into the file. Something about his expression, his manner, seemed to change. It settled somewhere toward wonder as he ogled Jay, his head cocking slightly. Maybe a stone's throw from disdain, as well. "And look at you now. Eight years later. Look at Jay Marcus Grady." He snickered. "Things sure have changed, haven't they?"

Again, Jay had nothing to say.

"You see, this is what I find so fascinating: the change." Mr. Wright eased back where he sat and crossed his arms. They looked like fleshy pythons entwined across his chest. "Eight years ago you're the hottest stock broker on Wall Street. Newsweek called you the Street's wunderkind. You're picking stocks that no one else will touch. Low grade stuff that, lo and behold, goes through the roof after you pick it. Stop me if I'm getting any of this wrong, will you?" He smiled wryly at his prisoner, then went on. "Again and again you did this. You were mucho hot, my friend. You made a load of money. You were the kid with the Midas touch. On top of the fucking world." Mr. Wright quieted for a moment, then shook his head at the man who was avoiding his stare. "And here you are now in some dirtwater town in a nowhere state, about as far from Wall Street, as far from that life as you can get without going to the moon. You're a fucking nobody here, unremarkable except for the fact that you're a murderer." A little chuckle slipped from Mr. Wright and Jay looked up.

"You must find this really amusing," Jay observed coldly, his tone edged.

Mr. Wright leaned forward to the table and shoved the file toward Jay. It stopped just before him, some of its contents avalanching free of the folder. "I find it interesting, Mr. Grady. The transformation. The 'why'. The 'how'. How you ended up here. And why you murdered someone."

Jay glanced at the file. "You've got this. I'm sure you can put it all together."

"A man's life can't be documented in a few hours. Not all of it. You can only go back so far. Still, maybe I could, as you say, put it all together. Maybe not. Either way, I think that there are some things only you can tell me. Things that aren't on paper anywhere. We're in Missouri, Grady; you can't show me, so tell me. Tell me how you went from there to here, from then to now."

Jay swallowed and looked hard at Mr. Wright. "Who are you? How did you know to find me?"

"I'm not the one here to answer questions."

"Why should I answer yours?"

"Because I am the only hope you have. I am your judge and jury. I can be your executioner."

Death, Jay thought, feeling old, hollow echoes pulse deep within. Not so long ago he'd wished for death to befall him. Now it was sitting across from him and could be his for less than the asking. All he had to do was nothing. Not speak, not tell, not share of his life. This life and the other one. So easy. So easy to just let it happen.

But now, in this place, this time, this life, he wanted death to come as a scalpel, killing not all that he was, but rather excising the parts of his two lives that burned like caustic tumors in his soul. To break the chains of memory that bound him to old and horrible wounds.

He wanted to live. The desire was still alien to him. It had been so long since he'd done anything more than accept each day as his eyes opened after sleep. Since he'd actually longed to see the next day come. But now he craved the tomorrows that his life might hold. The next day, the new sunrise. The one after that. And the one after that. He wanted those. Yes, he did want to live. To put all that had happened behind. To forget.

But to live he would have to remember. To...

"Tell me, Grady. It's your only chance."

...recount.

"I was just an ordinary guy once," Jay said, leaden thoughts weighing on him. His recollections raced back, far back, to the old time. The real time, when his life was often sweet, sometimes sad, and always random. "I wasn't always on top."

"But you got there," Mr. Wright observed. The point of his tongue slipped out a bit and glistened his lips.

Jay nodded, smiling wanly. "I got there all right."

"How?" Mr. Wright pressed him. "How did you get there?"

Beneath the table, out of view, Jay's bound hands began to tremble. "You know, some lives are best lived once and then buried."

Atop the table, very much in view, one of Mr. Wright's hands condensed to a fist. The crunch of his knuckles cracking clicked off the cinder block walls. "Is burial what you want to talk about, Grady? Is it?"

The threat lay there, still and waiting, as Jay focused on the big, rough hands. The one that wasn't clenched scratched slowly at the tabletop, as if its fingers were legs ready to propel it across the table to his neck where it might...

"There's no way you can understand," Jay told him. "You'll think I'm insane."

"I'm an understanding sort of fellow," Mr. Wright said with unconvincing coldness. "Try me."

Jay took a shallow breath and swallowed what moisture his mouth could muster and focused, trolling back in time, back to his previous life, and as dark, dead memories blossomed into clarity his eyes snapped shut like traps and his head shook defiantly, fearfully, from side to side. "Please, I don't want to go back there."

"Grady..." Impatience welled dangerously beneath Mr. Wright's words.

"I don't want to think about..."

...T H E  D O N Z E R L Y  L I G H T

"...him."

Anticipatory furrows cleaved into Mr. Wright's brow. "Him? Who is that, Grady? Who?"

"Sign Guy!" Jay answered sharply, quickly, before fear could staunch the reply, his eyes opening slowly and his voice heavy with resignation, as if he'd just started across a bridge and set it to burn behind him.

"Sign Guy," Mr. Wright repeated softly, breathily, as though sampling the words. His gaze narrowed and ticked briefly away from his prisoner. After a moment he looked back and his fist relaxed and went flat on the table. His scratching fingers stilled. "Tell me about this Sign Guy."

Jay breathed, and the air seemed scented with dread.

 

One

A Mean Streak Of Humanity

Sign Guy was a bum. But he was a bum with an angle.

If asked on that April night in 1989, Thursday the 6th to be exact, Jay Grady would have said that the bum's sign was his angle. But that was the folly of the obvious. The truth was somewhere south of credulity, a truth Jay would not realize for some time. And so that April night, as he stood across Broadway with a wistful smile building on his face, he could only gaze fondly at the bum while taxis passed between them as humming yellow blurs.

By appearance he was maybe forty, possibly a little less, even, and was, on the whole, far easier on the senses than your typical New York transient. Every few days he was clean shaven, his beard never making it much past stubble, and the thrift store clothes he wore looked to have made the acquaintance of a washer and dryer at least once a week. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, which in daytime kept his tanned face in shadow, and an old army parka when the season or the night brought a chill. Blue Converse high tops, the old canvas kind, rounded out his attire.

Like a lot of bums in the city he had a 'spot', a tiny piece of Manhattan to call his own. His was on the Broadway side of Trinity Church, where Wall Street started or stopped depending on one's perspective. He would sit there all day, every day, his back to the landmark church's magnificent stone spire and his butt planted on an overturned plastic bucket that, going by what remained of a label on its side, had once held five gallons of Ganello pitted black olives. Simply sit there on his makeshift stool, smiling serenely, keeping mostly to himself as he watched the suits and skirts ebb in and out of the concrete canyon that was the world's financial center in a bipedal gray tide, an empty Yuban coffee can at his feet and his sign leaning against his knees.

His sign.

A piece of plywood maybe three feet by four, painted a bright and spotless white, and atop that stark background a message Sign Guy had crafted in bold black letters. A morsel of cryptic wisdom that was fresh with each sunrise. A new offering for the new day. Jay had passed him a hundred times coming and going to his job at Stanley & Mitchell, one of the Street's oldest and stodgiest brokerage houses. Since his first day in the city some three months back, he had seen nearly every sign, mostly on his way home when his direction of travel took him toward the bum, though there had been a few occasions on the way in when a backfire or some other noise had made him look back as he crossed Broadway and, by happenstance, he had seen that day's message in the morning's cold, gray glow. Black on white. Always something to raise an eyebrow, or maybe even elicit a grin.

But never, until this evening, something that took him back like a time machine to the innocent days of his youth. The happy days before fate's cruel hand changed everything.

Yes, to those happy times. Jay smiled. Smiled full and bright, with only a hint of nostalgic melancholy, and savored the day's sign as traffic segmented the sight into bits of light and motion that flickered like an old movie. Just stood there waiting for the light to change and took it all in.

B U Y  T H E

D O N Z E R L Y

L I G H T

I was how old? Seven? Eight? His head moved in an almost imperceptible nod. Seven. I was seven. I remember.

Jay stared at the sign, remembering, the memory coming at him like a warm and pleasant breeze. Stared at those words, that nonsensical grouping of words, and then at the bum who had made them for a moment more, watching him as a very well dressed older man walked casually, wordlessly up and slipped a bill, maybe two, through the slit cut in the plastic lid of the coffee can, then continue on his way. The exchange seemed oddly uncomplicated, Jay thought, reminding him somewhat of paying the rent in grad school—a couple knocks, the landlord would open his door, and Jay would hand over the envelope. The one big difference, though, was that he had never enjoyed forking over money that, had the need for shelter not been paramount, might have been better spent on beer, or pizza, or maybe a weekend skiing with Carrie. But this man, he must have gotten something out of giving, because he was grinning from ear to ear, almost as big as Sign Guy was.

The light changed, and Jay stepped into the crosswalk with a fellow about his age, but blue collar all the way. Probably one of the maintenance workers in one of the Street's many office buildings. Not that he, himself, was the epitome of male model fashiondom. His suit was off the rack, as was every piece of business attire in the closet of the very modest Greenwich Village apartment he shared with his girlfriend. He could still remember his very first suit, the one his parents had made him get when he was nine for his Uncle Anson's wedding, a Sears special that was some color between gray and brown that he had never seen before or since, thank goodness. His wardrobe now was a little farther on in the color department, thanks mainly to Carrie, but not far from Sears. Not yet it wasn't. But it would be. It damn sure would be.

But he wasn't thinking of that nearoff/faroff tomorrow as he crossed Broadway. No, he was letting his recollections drift back. Back to the carefree time when he was a child. Just a kid who loved the summer and hated Labor Day because it meant the time for school had come 'round again. A kid who thought that if you stayed out in the cold air without a coat you would catch 'ammonia'. A kid who loved baseball, and whose father had scrounged enough money to take him to his first game, the Brewers versus somebody (they were wearing red caps—right?), for his seventh birthday. A kid who had heard a song sung at that game, a song which his father had explained was the national anthem. An important song that you were supposed to stand for, kind of like the pledge of allegiance in school, and put your hand over your heart, and, for sure, take your hat off if you were wearing one. All the players had done that, the Brewers and the guys with the red (?) caps, and they had all held their hats over their hearts as a little man with a big voice began to sing into a microphone near home plate. Jay hadn't known the words, but it sure seemed like everybody else in County Stadium did, because they were all singing, and singing loud. Not knowing the words embarrassed him, in a way. It was an important song, like his father had said, so he probably should have known it. But he didn't, so he did the next best thing to singing: faking singing. He moved his lips slowly, pretending, pretty sure that no one, not even his dad, would know he wasn't making a sound. He faked, and while his lips moved soundlessly he listened, because the next time he came to a game, or if his mother could sell enough of her knitting so that he could afford the uniform and the cleats for little league next summer (his father had also told him that the national anthem was sung before the games in little league, as well as before just about every important thing there was), Jay wanted to be able to actually sing the darn thing. Yes, he listened, and he tried to remember, and he could still, walking slowly across Broadway seventeen years later, recall one line from the very important song. A line that had puzzled him, that had made his freckled nose scrunch up with wonder. One line. The first line. 'Oh say can you see by the donzerly light...' The donzerly light. If it was in a very important song, he figured that it must be some special kind of light.

Donzerly Light. A special kind of light. That's what he had thought until his first year of junior high, when he'd stumbled across the actual words to the Star Spangled Banner in an appendix to his history book. Donzerly Light had died for him in the seventh grade, replaced by the 'dawn's early light'. Gone. Forgotten with 'ammonia' and the dozens of other silly things a child's mind could twist and conjure from what was real. Lost.

Until now.

Jay stepped from the crosswalk to the curb and went no further. Didn't turn left toward the subway, didn't follow Joe Blue Collar who was headed that way as well. Instead he looked at Sign Guy, who was sitting there gazing across the traffic that was moving along Broadway again, looking beyond to the dark concrete canyon that was Wall Street, his hands resting atop the plywood placard tilted against his legs, fingers tapping gently on the painted surface. He didn't look to Jay at first, didn't even seem to notice he was there.

And then notice he did, his head twisting slowly left, chin rising so that the streetlight shadows cut by the brim of his straw hat rose above his smile, above his slender nose, and revealed eyes that were cast at Jay with...surprise.

"Hey there," Jay said. His right hand came out of his pocket where it had been fiddling with the change from lunch and gave a small, polite wave.

Sign Guy's head tipped slightly to one side, as if the gesture was an oddity. His left hand moved from the sign and came to a point where it hovered for a moment in a loose fist in the space between himself and Jay, then the index and middle fingers straightened upward and spread to form a V. Forty some years ago, back when the Germans were Krauts and the Japanese Japs, it would have meant 'Victory', but this symbol that Sign Guy was flashing was born of a more recent time, of a later, very different period of conflict, and it held a somewhat opposite meaning to its earlier brethren. A meaning that Sign Guy gave quiet voice to. "Peace, brother."

"Yeah," Jay said, his hand slipping back into his pocket where it began to sieve the loose change once more, coins clinking softly as his fingers dredged through them. "I like the saying you have today. On your sign."

The V folded back to a loose fist that settled on his knee as Sign Guy gave his new fan a slow once-over. Young, reddish-blonde hair, eyes that were lost yet eager, like those of some yearling creature venturing off into the big wide world for the first time. He held a briefcase in his left hand, an imitation leather one, and in the pit of that arm was tucked a folded Wall Street Journal. Thousands like him passed each weekday. Tens of thousands.

Yet this one, unlike the others, had stopped, of his own accord, and was speaking, of his own accord. And wasn't that queer. Queer and interesting. "Is that so?"

"It reminded me of something. Something when I was a kid."

Sign Guy nodded at the odd young man who was still talking to him. Who seemed eager to share something with him. How very, very interesting indeed. "Is that so?"

"I was curious," Jay began. "I mean, I know what it means to me, but what does what you wrote mean? What did you intend it to mean?"

"It means what it means."

Well, that was cryptic enough. As cryptic as what was written on his sign. But maybe that was part of its meaning, Jay surmised. Of what it spoke to. The ambiguity might be an invitation to see what one wanted to see in the words, if anything. It could mean what anyone wanted it to.

Or it could mean nothing at all. Just the rantings of a fellow two aces short of a full deck. Harmless enough, though.

Still, he didn't seem crazy, Jay thought as he looked at Sign Guy, at his perpetual smile and the simple wonder on his face that he was being talked to. He didn't have that vacuous glint in his eyes, nor the random haunt to his voice, as if the conversation might suddenly split off toward something of significance only to himself. No, just the opposite seemed the case, in fact. Jay sensed purpose in this man. And contentment. It showed in his expression, and in the economy about his manner, the frugal peace of his words. His smile seemed the comfortable range of expressed emotion. No more, no less. No swings to melancholy or euphoria. He said what needed to be said. Did what needed to be done. For whatever his purpose was.

In a perfect world, one where money, where position did not matter, Jay could see himself in envy of the calm about this man. This bum.

But that world did not exist. Never had, never would. Money mattered. Position mattered. This Jay Grady knew. Knew painfully better than most.

"I work up the street," Jay offered, and Sign Guy nodded pleasantly.

"You're a stock broker."

"Right," Jay said, not correcting the record so that it was clear he was a junior broker, a wet behind the ears gofer (slave) assigned to one of Stanley & Mitchell's account brokers. He did grunt work, paper work, any work that smacked of shit work because the account brokers had once been juniors themselves, as had the account managers, and the account executives, and at good old Stanley & Mitchell you followed in the footsteps of those before you in order to learn the way. The right way. The Stanley & Mitchell way. "I suppose that's not a tough guess, considering where we are."

"Not tough at all."

Jay nodded, and the silence that followed dragged, becoming awkward after a few seconds, and outright discomfiting after a few more. Sign Guy did not look away, but Jay did, his eyes dipping toward the ground and fixing on the coffee can near the bum's feet. Looking at this he was struck suddenly by the image of a bone-thin black man who had begged a buck off of him his second day in the city, and he remembered being disturbed by the sight of the transient's arms. They looked like waxy twigs, so fragile that a sharp gust seemed capable of snapping them, yet they were clearly resilient enough to stand God knew how many years' worth of pokes from this needle or that. Scars stitched up the tender flesh of either forearm like plastic zippers that allowed life to leak away. That mélange of sickening sights had churned in Jay's gut as he walked away from the transient less one buck, his appetite, and certain illusions of the down and out.

That encounter had stuck in his mind for some reason, and now it pricked at him like an old fracture that spat pain when irritated.

"What do you do with the money?" Jay asked as he stared at the coffee can. The streetlight's white glow penetrated the opaque plastic of the slitted lid, and he could make out the faded green folds of money inside. A decent little mound of it, though he could not discern any denominations. Probably ones, he figured. It was what he had given the addict his second day in the city, and what most people likely gave panhandlers. Except the rare individual who might slip the downtrodden a five, maybe to soothe a guilt or two. "Do you—"

"I deposit it," Sign Guy answered, his smile never breaking. If he did take any offense at the amputated inquiry, it showed not one bit.

"You deposit it," Jay parroted. It was one answer he had not expected—a bum with a bank account?

"Of course."

It was laughable, but Jay wasn't about to laugh, because he could remember few people who'd sounded as serious about anything as Sign Guy sounded about this.

"Good for you, buddy," Jay said, and again the quiet lingered. He eyed the coffee can once more. Purposefully now, though. In his pocket the hand that had been fiddling with the change now scooped it all together and fisted around it. A buck fifty, maybe, that was all. He had no paper in his wallet. None at all. Not a five, not a one. Lunch had tapped him out, and he wouldn't be stopping by the ATM until morning. He had credit cards—too many, of course—but he doubted that Sign Guy was set up to take plastic. Wouldn't that be a hoot if he was.

So the change it was, and Jay's hand came out of his pocket. He smiled at Sign Guy, but said nothing, thinking that to speak of charity might clutter the moment with unnecessary discomfort—for both of them. And why do that? The gesture was simple enough. Something had been innocently given him, a short reminiscence of childhood naivete, and now he was going to give something in return. To that end he stepped one pace closer, and that was when the bum said something that came from somewhere left of left field.

"What the hell are you doing?"

The question, the challenge, came as Jay was about to lean toward the Yuban can. It stopped him cold. "Excuse me?"

"What are you doing?" Sign Guy asked again, firmly and less the Hades modifier. Still, not angrily. More curiously, as if the handout he was about to receive was wildly unexpected. An aberration—if that were possible for a bum to think.

Jay glanced at his fist, then looked back to Sign Guy. "I have some spare change."

"And?"

'And'? 'And' what? "I'm afraid I'm not following you, buddy. I just want to give you some change."

"Why?" The retort came sharply, quickly, the unwavering smile almost too sincere considering the turn the exchange had taken.

The inquiry, like the one preceding it, stuttered Jay's thoughts. "'Why?'"

"Why?"

"Look, I was just—"

"Did I ask you to?"

Okay, wherever left of left field was, a lefter place had just been discovered. "Ask me? To give you money?"

"Did I?"

"Of course not."

The reply moved Sign Guy's face, cocking it quizzically aside a bit, his televangelist smile warming with wonder. He seemed half pleased, half bewildered. "Did I make you?"

"Make me?" Jay parroted, lost completely now. Ask? Make? What was the problem here? "I really don't know where you're going with this, fella."

Sign Guy considered Jay's response for a moment, then he nodded slightly. "You really don't, do you?"

"Look, I just—"

"Wanted to," Sign Guy said, completing the statement with quiet wonder, as though intoning some pleasing revelation.

"Right," Jay confirmed, though why that was necessary he hadn't a clue. Wasn't his action, and the 'why' associated with it, obvious in motive? Wasn't it innocent, or had he violated some unwritten rule by which this bum live his life?

"You just...wanted to?" Sign Guy pressed, a subtle lack of belief about his words.

Jay nodded. "I didn't mean any—"

"You're doing this because you want to?"

Again, Jay nodded, beating the dead horse once more for good measure.

"Because you want to," Sign Guy said once again, though it was not a question this time. Rather, it seemed a statement of peculiar acceptance, as if someone had just informed him that up was down, and, after taking a good look at things, doggone if that wasn't the honest to God truth. His smiling face shook from side to side. "Wanted to..."

"Is something wrong here? Did I do something to offe—"

"Why did you want to?" Sign Guy inquired, much like a child might ask an adult a question about some wonder of the big wide world.

Jay shrugged at first, but the answer was plain enough. "Because of your sign. Like I told you, it reminded me of something when I was a kid. Something...pleasant."

Sign Guy ogled Jay for a moment, beaming all the while, then said, "Donzerly light."

"Right," Jay said.

A second's digestion of the reply, then a fading gasp of doubt. "Nothing else?"

Jay shook his head. "Look, my parents taught me that you did something nice for someone if they did something nice for you. You repay them as best you can." He jerked his head toward the change. "This is the best I can do right now."

Sign Guy considered the explanation. "So your parents are nice people."

"They were."

"I see," Sign Guy said, understanding. Seeing it on the young man's face. Old pain, worn like the skin of a snake, shed for awhile but back again. Always it came back, didn't it, some errant thought or innocent remark the catalyst. How sad, the bum thought, smiling. "Dead, are they?"

Jay nodded crisply. This wasn't where he'd wanted the conversation to go. Hell, he hadn't really wanted much of a conversation at all. Just a few words, here's some change, and stay warm, fella. That was all he wanted, so couldn't they just get on with things and be past this already. "It was a long time ago. History."

"I see," the bum said. Clearly the lad wanted to be done with that. But...

...but was there something else the lad might want?

"You're not from around here, are you?"

"Wisconsin," Jay told the bum. He could still think of Wisconsin. Of his boyhood home. There was still good in those memories, as long as all recollection ceased before the summer of his tenth year. Before then there were still happy times to be recalled. Things like...like Donzerly Light. "Ever been there?"

"I've been most places," Sign Guy replied with scattergun precision. And then, before the exchange could progress another step this way or that way, he swung things in a different direction entirely. "You're not rich, are you?"

"Me?" Jay chuckled breathily, glad that the subject had moved far from the fallow fields of old memory, but still bemused by the tack this bum was able to manage. Wind this way? Well, he was going thataway. "Rich? I wish."

"I didn't think so," Sign Guy said, the nod coming again as though a certainty had just been confirmed. "But you want to be."

"Well, I know for sure I don't want to be poor," Jay said, and for a moment his eyes fixed on the change he was about to give. He grinned sadly at the meager pile, and, despite his earnest desire not to, he remembered a time when the few coins mounded in his palm would have seemed a fortune. Would have been a fortune. Yes, he remembered poor. Looking poor. Smelling poor. And worst of all, feeling poor. He'd been that kind of poor not so many years ago, had seen poor drive good people down. Had seen it steal the hope from their hearts. Had seen it take more than that, even. And from that experience he had learned one true and concrete thing—that he wanted to be as far from the economic bottom as his gumption and any bit of luck could get him. "So, yeah, I'd like to give rich a try."

The admission seemed to please the bum. "That's a reasonable expectation."

He spoke it as if approving a transaction, a trade, but what of that could there be? Jay was the one doing the giving. Or trying to do some giving.

"Some people would say it's a selfish way of thinking," Jay told the bum. "Wanting money for money's sake."

"I say, the more rich people in the world the better," Sign Guy shared, and glanced briefly up Wall Street. "The more rich people here the better." He looked back to his would-be donor. "Why not you?"

"Why not," Jay agreed, mostly for the sake of conversation, and hopefully ending it. He wondered if whatever questioning, testing, sizing-up that the bum required before accepting a handout was finally complete. He sensed that maybe it was. That the bum was...what?...satisfied. That he had given Jay his stamp of approval. Weird. Plenty weird. "So, can I give you this now?"

Sign Guy nodded serenely.

Jay bounced the mound of change in his palm once, closed his hand around it, and reached toward the Yuban can, bending until his hand was just about over the slitted lid.

That was when the bum grabbed him.

His hands came with surprising speed, a graceful blur that Jay hardly noticed until both were clamped around his fist, tight like the gummy maw of some toothless pitbull. The action caught him off guard, enough so that his instinctive reaction—which would have been to yank away and run—was momentarily suspended. Long enough for the bum's words to quiet any rising fears.

"I thank you."

Jay stood there, almost motionless, his right arm levered in Sign Guy's firm grip like the handle of an old fashioned well pump, the hands squeezing as one might before releasing a warm and friendly handshake. Compressing Jay's fist around the coins so that he could feel their thin edges press into the tactile folds of his palm.

"I give you my..." the bum began to say, but his words stopped suddenly there. His gaze broke briefly, looking down to sample the hand encased in his, and when it rose again the everpresent smile was sparkling in his eyes, bright like fireworks frozen at their moment of brilliance. Radiant as though some grand and pleasing truth had just presented itself. "Oh, my."

Jay puzzled at the odd and sudden shift in the bum's reaction. "What?"

"Oh, yes," Sign Guy said, releasing what Jay thought was an amazed breath. "Isn't this going to be interesting?"

"What?"

"Yes, yes, interesting," the bum said further, savoring all about the young man whose touch connected them right now. Gazing fondly at him, so deeply that it seemed he might be looking through him, to someone or something else altogether. "I shouldn't be surprised, I guess."

Jay's head shook slightly as he puzzled at the bum's weird words. "Surprised at what?"

To that inquiry the bum only smiled. "Fate is a clever ringmaster, I must say."

"Pardon me?" Jay asked, missing whatever the bum's meaning was. Did that just 'mean what it means', too, he wondered?

For a moment Sign Guy was quiet, simply admiring his visitor lingeringly, as though in awe, then finally he said, "How rude I am. I was offering my gratitude, and then I ramble on. I apologize."

Whatever, Jay thought. The weird-o-meter had notched up a piece right then, and he was ready for this little interlude to be over.

The bum clutched Jay's hand and the offering it bore a bit tighter right then, and he said, "I give you my thanks."

This intonation drew Jay's interest. The way Sign Guy had offered his appreciation, as if literally handing it over. As if it were more than a word and more than a feeling. As if his thanks were a thing, Jay thought as he looked into the bum's eyes, the night's artificial glow dancing on the sheen that surfaced them. But more thought on that would not come, for right then he felt the grip upon him finally ease. Not pull completely away, but slowly go gentle, both hands sliding off together to form a cup beneath his fist. Waiting. Waiting to receive.

Jay's pinkie moved first, flexing open to let a few coins drop into the fleshy bowl below, then his ring finger and middle finger, letting the bulk of the change fall, and finally his index finger straightened and his hand opened fully, dropping the last bit to join the rest, the entire offering jingling like the meager winnings of some slot machine jackpot as it tumbled piecemeal into Sign Guy's hands.

Jay drew his hand slowly back and turned the palm up, staring at it. The wrinkled pinkish skin was striped with the thin indentations of the coins' edges where they had temporarily left their mark. He flexed the fingers in and out, fisting, relaxing, fisting, relaxing, watching as Sign Guy maneuvered his cupped hands directly over the Yuban can and let the change just given him drain coin by coin through the slit in the lid. Muffled tings and clonks rose from within the receptacle as the coins fell through the paper money and gathered at the bottom of the can, Sign Guy beaming at Jay throughout the uneven metallic timpani.

The moment hung between them like the lasting resonance of a bass note played perfectly. Impossibly long. Penetrating. Palpable.

Jay's hand closed to a loose fist, his fingertips tracing over the palm, exploring the mesh of tiny, squared-off channels pressed into it. "I've gotta," he began, and Sign Guy was nodding already, "be going."

The smile bobbed up and down as Jay took a few steps backward and started to turn. But before he was facing away he saw Sign Guy's now empty left hand come up into the light, two fingers spreading as before to make the V.

"Peace, brother."

"Yeah," Jay said softly, then showed the bum his back and headed down Broadway. Twice he glanced back and saw that the bum's beaming gaze was trailing him, and that he was still showing the peace sign, but after that he looked no more. He simply walked on, night shadows a thick black cloak upon him, thinking about the bum for a few minutes, then about work, then about grabbing a free Reuben or some chicken fried steak at Greenie's on his way home (Carrie waitressed there, and if the occasional gratis meat wasn't a good enough reason to have her as his girl, there were plenty more), but not at all did he muse about what he could not know. About the change that had already started, a change that had its own shadows, its own solitary cadence in the night. A change that was already in step with its host, a few paces back like the ever ready servant, or like some cunning beast in slow and steady pursuit. A change that was what it was.

And not that at all.

 

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The Donzerly Light is available as an eBook for Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony Reader, PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and other devices using the appropriate devices and reading apps. You can purchase The Donzerly Light from the following online retailers:
 

Amazon   Amazon UK   Barnes & Noble   Sony   Smashwords   Kobo
 

In addition, you can purchase The Donzerly Light directly from Apple using the iBooks app on your iPad or iPhone.
 

Thank you!

A telling and very funny talk from the master.

I do this under duress from the Twitterverse.

 

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I had no idea that Ordinary People started out as a short story.

You shouldn't be surprised that it was a library. A lot of libraries.

Here's a sneak peek at the cover for my science fiction short story (yes, even shorts have covers now), The Outpost, which will be released in the next two weeks.

 

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