A Short Life and a Merry One ~ A Short Story

A Short Life and a Merry One
A Short Life and a Merry One
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

I had my friend Calvin Pears. He was in my class at school. We were both twelve years old and had known each other since we were five. We spent a lot of time together. We were good friends because we were both shy and not popular in school.

Calvin and I always had a lot of things to talk about. We laughed a lot. We laughed about things that nobody else would have thought funny. We made fun of people behind their backs. Calvin was a good imitator. He imitated our teachers, whether they were male or female. He imitated the way they walked or talked or smoked. He wanted to have a show business career after he finished school.

It was a Friday evening in October. After being in school all week, it was time to get out of the house and have some fun. Calvin and I decided we’d rather go roller skating than see the western movie at the Bijou. I liked roller skating and could skate circles around Calvin. He usually said he was tired or his legs hurt and he wanted to call it a night.

We were a couple blocks from the roller rink when we saw two boys from high school standing on the street corner. I had seen them but didn’t know their names.

“Well, here’s a couple of little kids!” the taller of the two boys said when he saw us. “Does your mommy let you out after dark?”

“Hi, Lonnie!” Calvin said enthusiastically.

“How’s it going, little man?”

“I’m doing spectacularly well!” Calvin said.

“Well, glad to hear it! What’s your sister, Bimbo, up to these days?”

“Bimbo’s fine. She was rolling her hair up at the kitchen table when I left home.”

“She wasn’t going out on a date, was she?”

“No, I think she was just going to pop some popcorn and watch TV.”

“Well, you be sure and tell her old Lonnie said ‘hi’!”

“I will.”

Lonnie’s friend’s name was Brent. He had red hair and a sly look about him like a fox. When Calvin introduced me to Lonnie and Brent, they both shook my hand without irony. I was used to high school boys calling me names or making fun of me.

“Where you little hoodlums headed?” Lonnie asked.

“We’re going roller skating,” Calvin said.

“Well, that’s a kids’ thing, isn’t it?”

“I guess it is,” Calvin said. “It’s fun, though.”

“Yeah, I guess you would think it’s fun!”

“They are kids,” Brent said.

“Yeah, and we’re grown men, ain’t we?” Lonnie said. “Hah-hah-hah!”

“Let’s go!” Brent said. “I’m tired of just standin’ here!”

“Now, look here, you two little kids!” Lonnie said. “I’ve got my brother’s car parked over there. I don’t have my own car yet, but I will soon. We were just about to go for a little hell-raising adventure, if you two would care to join us.”

“What do we need them for?” Brent said.

“It’s just for a little while,” Lonnie said. “I need to find out some stuff about Bimbo.”

“Oh, you and your girls! You make me sick!”

“So, how about it?” Lonnie said. “Do you two little sixth graders want to go with us for a little ride?”

“Sure!” Calvin said.

“We’re not sixth graders,” I said. “We’re in the seventh.”

“Do you want to go?” Calvin asked me.

“I guess so. If you do.”

“Well, let’s get crackin’, then!” Lonnie said.

On the way to the car, Lonnie put his hand on Calvin’s shoulder and leaned down and talked in his ear. So, that’s what this is all about, I thought. Lonnie only pays any attention to Calvin and me at all because he’s interested in Calvin’s sister, Bimbo. I’d rather go roller skating.

Lonnie opened the door for Calvin and me to climb into the back seat. He and Brent got into the front seat and Lonnie started the engine and pulled away from the curb with a jerk.

“Where do you kids want to go?” Lonnie asked over his shoulder.

“Any place is fine with us,” Calvin said.

“Isn’t this fun?”

“I’ve never had so much fun in all my life!”

“Does Bimbo ever talk about me?” Lonnie asked. “I mean, like at the dinner table or anything?”

“I never pay any attention to anything Bimbo says,” Calvin said.

“Do you know if she’s seeing anybody right now?”

“Seeing anybody? I don’t know what that means.”

“Is she dating anybody regularly?”

“I don’t know. I don’t pay any attention.”

“Well, are there any guys that hang around?”

“I haven’t seen any. Except for the man who reads the gas meter.”

“If you see any, you be sure and let me know.”

“I will.”

We went through town, past the chemical plant, over the railroad tracks and the bridge, and in ten minutes we were out in the country. The road was dark, now, and hilly, with abrupt dips in the road and signs about watching for high water. There were sharp curves that couldn’t be seen until we were right up on them.

Lonnie angled around in the front seat so he could see Calvin’s face. “Does Bimbo go around much? With other girls, I mean?”

“Yeah, they have stupid slumber parties and they go to shows and things like that. They’re all hoping a talent scout from Hollywood will discover them and want to put them in the movies.”

“Yeah, I know what they’re like,” Lonnie said. “Completely unrealistic. I mean, how many people get discovered by talent scouts?”

“I never heard of anybody.”

“Watch this!” Lonnie said.

He got the speed up to sixty miles an hour (the limit was twenty-five) and then he turned off the headlights, and we found ourselves speeding blindly through absolute darkness. I held on to the door beside me and closed my eyes.

“Oh, my god!” Calvin gasped.

“Isn’t that the wildest thing you’ve ever seen!” Lonnie said.

“That’s a stupid trick, man!” Brent said. “What are you trying to do? Get us all killed?”

“If you don’t like it, man, I can always let you out here!”

“No thanks, man! It’s a long walk back to town! Just slow down a little.”

“Now it’s time for the roller coaster!” Lonnie said. “Don’t you kids in the back seat just love roller coasters?”

“Sure!” Calvin said.

He took a series of small hills at a high rate of speed, engine roaring. At times we were flying, all four tires off the road at the same time. We could hear the bottom of the car scraping the road in the low places.

“I’m glad this is not my car!” Brent said.

“Oh, my brother does this all the time!” Lonnie said. “He’s the one that told me about it!”

There was a sharp curve in the road and then another one. Lonnie had to fight the wheel to keep the car on the road.

“This is so much fun!” Lonnie said. “I’m going to turn the headlights off again!”

“Don’t be a jerk, man!” Brent said.

He didn’t turn the headlights off, but he went faster. There was a curve on a hill and then another curve going down the hill. There was a straightaway, then another hill.

“Isn’t this living!” Lonnie said. “It feels just like flying!”

He didn’t see the next sharp curve until it was too late and the car left the road. He struggled to regain control, but it was too late. The car glanced off a tree and kept going to the next tree—down a gulley, up the other side, taking out fence posts and small trees as it went. Finally it came to rest on a huge flat rock ten feet below the level of the road, smashed flat like a stepped-on bug.

I was thrown from the car. I didn’t know where the others were. I knew I was dead, but I also knew that I was aware of what was happening and that the same thing had happened to me before at an earlier time. All this went through my head in the briefest of flashes.

I was present at my funeral, and I don’t mean just as a dead body in a closed-up box at the front of the church. I saw the whole thing from up near the ceiling. My mother sat on the front row, a stunned look on her face. My father, divorced from my mother since I was four, sat on the other side of the room. Everybody from my seventh-grade class was there, even the ones who didn’t like me.

My mother, sparing no expense, had me buried in the Methodist cemetery beside my great-grandfather, who died long before I was born. I was dead, now, and buried and the people who had known me would soon forget about me.

The one person who remembered me years later was my father, though I had hardly known him in my short life. Since I was the only child he ever had, he became sentimental about me in his old age. When he was over ninety and aware that he was nearing the end, he had my body (what was left of it) disinterred from the grave where it had lain in for fifty years, flown halfway across the country, and cremated.

When he died a short time later, he had my ashes, along with his own, interred in a niche in a columbaria. Both our names were inscribed on the niche, along with the dates we were born and the dates we died. He had a long life and I had a short one. Father and Son. Together Forever.

Copyright © 2022 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

No Country for Old Men ~ A Capsule Book Review

No Country for Old Men book cover
No Country for Old Men
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~

Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men, is set in Texas around 1980.

There are three principal characters in No Country for Old Men:

  • Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, sheriff of Terrell County, Texas. He represents the old America where people said “sir” and “ma’am” and were polite to each other. He is approaching the end of his career as a lawman. He has little patience for, or understanding of, the modern world.
  • Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic killer with a philosophical bent. He kills, not so much because he enjoys killing, but because he believes it is what he is supposed to do. He has no sympathy or empathy for any of his victims. In reading the book, I eventually lost track of how much many people he kills.
  • Llewellyn Moss is the “everyman” character. He is thirty-six years old, a decent and ordinary fellow who works as a welder, lives in a trailer and has a pretty, nineteen-year-old wife named Carla Jean.

Out in an isolated spot in the Texas desert, Llewellyn Moss inadvertently stumbles across a scene of carnage: a drug deal gone wrong. There are several vehicles and eight dead bodies. It’s apparent there has been a shootout. After Llewellyn does a little snooping, he comes across a case containing over two million dollars. What does he do? Does he alert the police? No, he takes the case home with him. He may be unsophisticated, but he’s not stupid. He knows that somebody will be coming after him to get the money back and, even if they do get the money back, they will still kill him.

It’s up to traditional Texas lawman Ed Tom Bell to solve the drug-shootout crime in the desert, since it happened in his jurisdiction. Besides eight dead bodies and some shot-up vehicles, he doesn’t have much to go on. Llewellyn Moss knows that as long as he has the two million dollars in his possession, he is in deadly peril. He sends Carla Jean to her mama in Odessa and goes on the run. He comes to realize after a while that, in with the money, is a “transponder” sending a signal of his whereabouts to a receiver. This does not bode well for him.

It’s up to murderer Anton Chigurh to locate the money and get it back, inflicting pain, death, and mayhem with his every move. He might be thought of as the physical incarnation of Satan.

No Country for Old Men is a sort of modern-day western. It might just as easily have taken place in 1880 as 1980. There’s a crime committed and then the crime’s aftermath. There’s the hunter and the hunted. There are good men and bad. There are surprising twists and turns in the plot. There is much death, much violence. Cormac McCarthy turns it all on its ear.

Copyright © 2022 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Go and Sin No More ~ A Short Story

Go and Sin No More image 3
Go and Sin No More
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

They were acquaintances, though not quite friends. They lived the same kind of life, but they were a study in contrasts. Zelda Zane (a name she chose for herself) was in her late fifties but looked much older. She was an indiscriminate alcoholic, known to drink turpentine or paint thinner if it was all she had. A frequent user of drugs, she was always on the lookout for any new sensation, any kind of substance to ingest or pills to take. She would take anything, even pills intended for dogs. Sometimes pills she took made her feel good and other times they nearly killed her.

Her companion sitting beside her on the park bench in the mellow, late-October light was one Vicki-Vicki Vale. She was twenty-three and still wore the bloom of youth. Her hair was and clothes were not quite clean, but she made the effort every day to tidy herself up, the way a cat might do. She was a shoplifter, a sneak thief, a sometime prostitute (when she had no other choice), a dope fiend, a social drinker, a check forger, a con artist, a liar, a fourth for bridge, and just about anything else she needed to be when the occasion called for it. You name it and she had done it.

“Where did you sleep last night, princess?” Zelda asked.

“In the cemetery,” Vicki-Vicki replied.

“Anybody try to mess with you?”

“There was nobody around, except for a few ghosts. I went over to the oldest part, where the moss hangs down from the trees.”

“That’s where the cholera victims are. Their ghosts, I mean.”

“Yeah, but ghosts don’t bother me nearly as much as living men do.”

“The grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace,” Zelda said.

“Isn’t that the truth?”

“It got pretty cold last night,” Zelda Zane said.

“I would have been all right if I had just had a warm blanket to roll up in.”

“No blankets for bums.”

“I had to settle for leaves. I covered myself over with leaves, the way my brother and I used to do when we were little. I shivered my ass off for a while, but then I went to sleep. If anybody had come along, they wouldn’t have even known I was there unless they stepped on me.”

“Last night was a mild autumn night,” Zelda Zane said. “It’s nothing compared to what’s coming.”

“I know. Winter. I try not to think about it too much.”

“Winters are rough when you don’t have a roof over your head.”

“Winters are rough when you do have a roof over your head.”

“Why don’t you go back home before winter comes?” Zelda Zane said.

“I don’t have a home to go to.”

“You have family.”

“My mother said she’d kill me when she sees me again. She means it, too.”

“She couldn’t be that mad at you.”

“She is, though.”

“What did you do to her?”

“We got into a fight. A fist fight. We drew blood. It wasn’t pretty. She hit me, so I punched her in the face. Broke her nose.”

“Why don’t you give her a call? I bet she’d be glad to hear from you.”

“No, she wouldn’t. She’d tell me to go to hell.”

“She’s still your mother.”

“She’d like to kill me, honest and true.” Vicki-Vicki said. “I hope I never lay eyes on her again in my life.”

“More’s the pity. My own mother died when I was eight. I lived with my grandparents until I was married the first time.”

“How did that work out?”

“The results you see before you.”

“What about you? Where did you spend the mild autumn night last night?”

“I’ve stayed the last two nights at the mission shelter. I don’t like staying there, but sometimes you just have to get inside where there are four walls and a roof.”

“I stayed in the mission shelter one night,” Vicki-Vicki said. “I swore I’d never stay there again. I’d rather die. Some of the people there have diseases, coughing their lungs out. And some of them have got bugs crawling on them.”

“I know it’s not the best company, darling, but if you live on the streets long enough, you’ll have bugs crawling on you, too.”

“I haven’t quite reached that point yet.”

“Do you have a place to stay tonight?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Well, weep no more, my lady, because I hit the jackpot this morning!” Zelda Zane said.

“What do you mean?”

“When I left the shelter at eight o’clock this morning, I was cutting across the parking lot when I happened to notice, in a big black Cadillac sitting there, a lady’s purse inside the car, on the front seat, clearly visible through the window.”

“A lady’s purse? No kidding?”

“If there is a God, I thought, the door won’t be locked. And do you know what? It wasn’t!”

“So, that means there’s a God?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I opened the door of the big black Cadillac and, as slick as a pig sliding down a chute, I grabbed the purse by its handle and ran away with it.”

“The dish ran away with the spoon! Did you remember to shut the door of the big black Cadillac?”

“Well, of course I shut the door! That just comes natural. You open a door and then you shut it.”

“Well, all right. Then what?”

“I went to the library across the street and went into the ladies’ room and closed myself up in one of the stalls and I opened the son of a bitch to see what was inside.”

“Well, what was inside?”

“A lot of junk that didn’t interest me, but what did interest me was a wallet with some money in it!”

“How much money?”

“A hundred and seven dollars and sixty-three cents! I left the sixty-three cents and I took the rest and put it in my pocket.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I dumped the purse and the rest of the stuff in the trash and then I came over here to the park and I’ve been here ever since.”

“A hundred and seven dollars! What are you thinking of doing with all that money? Go on an epic toot?”

“No. I was thinking I might give it to somebody in need.”

“Yeah? Who’s that?”

“Well, I was thinking I might give it to you.”

“Me! Why?”

“It’s enough for a bus ticket.”

“Bus ticket? I don’t need a bus ticket. I’m not going anywhere!”

“I’d be happy to give you the whole kaboodle!”

“Why would you do that?”

“You need to get the hell out of the city and go home while you still can.”

“Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you? I don’t have a home to go to!”

“You don’t want to be stuck here when winter comes.”

“You don’t need to worry about me. I can worry about myself.”

“Just tryin’ to help a friend in need.”

“I could never take your money! It’s your money!”

“Not really my money. I stole it.”

“It is your money. You found it. You seized the opportunity and you took it.”

“It belongs to the woman I stole it from.”

“Then take it back to her!”

“You know I can’t do that! The only way for this money to do any good in the world is for you to take it and get yourself home with it!”

“I’d rather die first!”

“All right, then. I won’t say anything else about it.”

“Please don’t!”

“But if you should happen to change your mind, you know where I can be found.”

“I won’t.”

They parted then. Vicki-Vicki said she had an important appointment, but it was only an excuse to end the conversation with Zelda Zane.

After Vicki-Vicki left, Zelda Zane continued to sit on the bench in the park until the sun went down behind the trees and the air turned colder. She tried to cheer herself with the thought of the hundred and seven dollars she had in her pocket, but there wasn’t much pleasure in it for her.

She went directly to the liquor store and bought an ample supply of whiskey and wine. Carrying her bulky treasure to the Chichester Motel a few blocks away, she engaged a room for two nights and possibly three. Locked away from the world in her motel room, she began the epic drinking binge that would result in her stuporous death two nights later.

The winter to come was a harsh and cruel one. People were found frozen to death all over the city: in alleyways, in the park, in the cemetery. In December, Vicki-Vicki disappeared and was never heard from again. Nobody ever knew what really happened to her.

Copyright 2022 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997