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FEATURED AUTHOR/ARTIST: Sean M. Riley
Sean M. Riley is from Omaha, Nebraska. He spends most of his time with an incredible wife named Beverly, and he spends a great deal of time with his brother Bryan, and his brother’s kids Aiden and Andrew.
Sean M. Riley has been writing for twenty years. He writes fiction, political blogs, and casual, humorous blogs. He has four novels and three short story collections. Excerpts of his novels, examples of his short stories, his creative non-fiction, and his blogs can be found at http://rilaly.com.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
“What is it about me?” Eddie Fitch asked in an unguarded moment. “Why can’t I get over this?”
“I don’t know,” his Dad said, “you have no regard for me or your brother Walter. Don’t you think he’s in pain? We’re all in pain Eddie.” This was said with a great deal of impatience on a long drive to a cabin they were about to give up for a song.
All the books say that you’re supposed to move on after tragedy. They allow for a little flinching and a lot of crying. They say that that’s healthy. They say that you’re supposed to bring your close ones in tight and hug them, and love them, and mourn with them, and cry with them. It’s just a healthy response, they say. There is a certain point in time, a point that no one knows but everyone seems to know, in which you’re supposed to forget it all and smile, and move on, and study, and laugh, and play, and do all the things a normal boy would do. It all becomes a little unhealthy if you don’t, they say.
Some opined that it was a ploy on his Dad’s part to get Eddie focused on others, so he wouldn’t focus so much on his own pain. Those who believed that were talking about a normal man who did normal things for the betterment of his children. Those who believed that did not know Richard Fitch well. Richard Fitch was not a normal man, and he didn’t engage in psychological ploys. Richard Fitch was focused on himself. Richard Fitch was weak. Richard Fitch lived a life he considered far worse than anyone else’s, and if you disagreed he would prove it to you. Walter and Eddie had no rock to turn to in Richard Fitch. In the face of their complaints, or their cries for help, they would receive the words of a man competing with their pain.
The trip they took to the cabin was a two hour tour. For most normal human beings, the trip was forty-five minutes long, but their Dad took the longest possible route to every destination. He was a man who stated that he did not believe in short cuts. He turned this activity into a philosophy to cover for his lack of courage. He said things like: “Taking short cuts in life never got me anywhere.” It was a decent philosophy when applied to larger things in life, but the man didn’t avoid shortcuts in driving for philosophical purity. He was afraid. He was afraid that if he didn’t travel in right angles, he would get lost. He was afraid that if he drove too fast, he would not be able to react in time to oncoming vehicles. He was afraid that if he didn’t yield to another driver at a stop sign, even when it was obvious that it was his turn to go, he would get into an accident that was his fault. He was afraid to drive more than ten miles under the recommended speed limit for fear that the law may mistake him for a vagabond on the loose. He was afraid to drive on the interstate in fear of the young minds acting too quickly for him. He was afraid to turn right on a red light. He was afraid that if his kids began playing wildly in the backseat he would become distracted from the horrible responsibility of driving. He didn’t use the car’s radio for much the same reasoning. He was a man who accepted the horrible responsibility of driving, but it pained him to do so.
The deer on the roadside looked so free in their little worlds with their little brains Eddie thought looking out on those deer they passed en route to the cabin. Did they have the capacity to mourn? If they did, it probably incapacitated them for mere seconds. A deer didn’t understand death any more than they understood life. If they did, they would have taught their offspring to avoid roads long ago. Roads and cars were the only thing a deer had to fear in the middle of small town Nebraska, and they didn’t even do that well. They had only instincts and survival mechanisms. Their meager brains weren’t equipped for complex memories, so they couldn’t have the capacity to mourn, but maybe that limited capacity freed them up to enjoy their meager lives more.
They arrived at the cabin two hours later. Walter got out and opened the gate to the Lake Platte View resort. The power and prestige associated with opening the gate left Eddie long ago. It may have been due to the fact that he was older now, or it may have been that Lake Platte View had lost much of its mystique for him. Whatever the case, they no longer had to take turns opening and closing the gate. Eddie allowed Walter to do it full time now.
Lake Platte View wouldn’t be theirs in an hour anyway, Eddie thought as Walter reentered the car. They would be selling their lot for to a family called Dinslage for a song. The father of the Dinslage family worked with Richard Fitch, so Eddie was expecting this Mr. Dinslage to have no respect for Richard Fitch. No one who knew Richard Fitch did, or if they did they didn’t show it.
Richard Fitch was usually right out of the box with his weakness. For most people, the greeting ‘how you doing?’ was a salutation to which the responder replied ‘fine!’ and everyone got on with their lives. To Richard Fitch, this was a prompt to launch into whatever malaise he could dream up. It was embarrassing for Eddie to watch those introductory smiles turn sympathetic.
Most boys reach a certain point in life when they learn their fathers are not all they dreamed them up to be. Most boys begin to believe that their fathers are foolish, old-fashioned, stupid, and boring. Some would say that this moment in a boy’s life is a moment of rebellion and a necessary moment in a boy’s life in which he attempts to define the man he is eventually going to become. It’s a period of transition in a boy’s life in which a boy is trying to learn what he wants and what he doesn’t want to be as a man.
No boy wants these notions substantiated however. They enjoy the notion that their theories are correct, so that they can play with the idea and form their identity based on it, but it’s one thing to think your dad is foolish, old-fashioned, stupid, and boring. It’s quite another to learn that he actually is. It’s one thing to believe that your sole role model in life has no idea how to get along in an adult world, but it’s quite another thing to overhear a discussion at a pool table on the matter among other adult males.
“God, he’s an idiot,” said a pool player. Eddie noticed that the man said it the minute Richard Fitch left the pool table, but he didn’t put it all together immediately. Eddie was beneath the pool table spying on his Dad, his Uncles, and their friends. He was younger at the time. He didn’t know spying was wrong. He was just down there, and they didn’t know he was down there. He smiled a secretive smile when the pool player said that. He couldn’t wait to hear the scuttlebutt on this idiot.
“He’s my wife’s brother,” Eddie’s Uncle George replied. “What do you want me to do?” George then launched into a series of incidents that detailed Richard Fitch’s idiocy. It was a lot for a young Eddie Fitch to handle all at once like that. He remembered some of those incidents. It validated much of what Eddie felt about his Dad, but that didn’t make it any easier to hear.
Eddie noticed that his Dad didn’t participate well in conversations with the fellas. The man just didn’t have much to add to the conversations that concerned business, and tits, and history, and the world affairs of the day. It was embarrassing. His Father was much more comfortable around the ladies who sympathized with him, and his current plight in life. “How you holding up Richard?” the women would ask. “How are the kids in school?” It went on and on, and his Father loved it. The men said nothing about the accident, and they didn’t ask Richard how he was doing. They may have cared, but their method was to simply change the subject and try and help Richard forget. Richard didn’t want to forget. He wanted to go on and on about his difficult life and the problems he now faced and how unfair the whole situation was. He wanted people to console him, so he could say that he didn’t want to be consoled. He wanted people to make a big deal out of it, so he could say it was no big deal.
“I always wondered what you thought of the guy,” one of the pool players said when George finished telling the stories of Richard Fitch.
“Let’s put it this way,” George returned, “I’m thinking Ellen must’ve contracted a mean case of the splinters in her fingernails after scraping the bottom so hard.” This caused such raucous laughter that the pool shooter knocked the cue ball off the table.
George leaned under the pool table to retrieve the ball. Eddie handed it to him. “What are you doing under there?” George asked with a wink and a smile.
“We’re playing hide and go seek,” Eddie lied. The lie must’ve been obvious because George locked in on him, trying to figure out why he would lie about such a thing. It didn’t take long for the glint of recognition to take hold of George’s face. Eddie left the room and hung on the backside of the doorframe to hear his Uncle say: “How much do you think he heard?” I heard everything Eddie wanted to shout back.
When the Dinslage’s station wagon pulled up to the gates of The Lake Platte View, Eddie wanted to tell them that they had all changed their mind. He wanted to tell them that the lot was no longer for sale, and that they had decided that it was utterly ridiculous for them to give their lot away for a song.
That was the term Richard used when he described the sale a week ago. He said it with a pained smile. “So we’ll have nothing?” Eddie said.
“Well, I can’t take the memories,” his Father replied. “I even gave her sewing machine away. I told them to take everything. I couldn’t even stand to look at her sandwich griddle, and when no one wanted it, I tossed it.” The man’s very posture suggested weakness. If he couldn’t manage strength around the fellas, he should’ve at least been able to muster up the strength to appear strong before the opinions he didn’t seek.
Walter opened the gates for the Dinslages when they arrived. He was all smiles for them. He waved and closed the gate behind them. Walter could shut it all down and put it in the off position. He could remove all the larger things from his mind and concentrate on the little things like opening and closing a gate. The kid had it all. He could remove the notion that these people were stealing their fun, because these people had kids.
The Dinslages smiled and waved at the three of them as they passed through the Lake Platte View gate. They were taking the Fitch future away and erasing their past. The Dinslages would be swimming in their lakes; they would be catching their toads; they would be cooking out with the Fitch cooking gear; they would be climbing their trees; and bicycling around on their sandy trails. Eddie watched them drive by with revulsion for the happiness they displayed. Walter was smiling, and waving, and running after their car.
The Dinslages were new people for Walter to meet. They were new kids with which Walter could play. The Dinslages didn’t have anything to do with anything, so why treat them any different than people you meet at the grocery store? Walter could be as dense and uncomplicated as the deer, the rabbits, and all the other beings that existed at the bottom of the food chain. Beings that nature accustomed to death in a fashion that required them to have lots of offspring in preparation for loss.
When the two Dinslage boys jumped out of the station wagon Walter greeted them as playmates. Their boys appeared to be Eddie and Walter’s ages respectively. Walter took quickly to the younger one, and he said hello to the older one. Eddie provided polite hellos. When they began unloading some of the boxes from the back of their station wagon, Walter and Richard offered assistance. They all spoke like old friends, they all laughed and joked with another, and they all appraised the land like surveyors without equipment.
When Eddie spotted the marsh mellows in the Dinslage gear, his upper lip twitched a little. All four of them used to laugh themselves silly when they roasted marsh mellows on a fire. He liked to burn them in the beginning. He loved the way fire danced around a marsh mellow. He was told that that ruined the flavor of the marsh mellow. He tasted the browned marsh mellow. She was right. The process of browning wasn’t as dramatic or as visually tantalizing, but it did taste better. The four of them had always had such fun with marsh mellows on a fire. It was one of their traditions.
When he spotted their swimsuits, their inflatables, their grungy shirts, their flip flops, and their cooking gear he got a lump in his throat. It was over for the Fitches. These Dinslages were planning on spending the night tonight. The transference would be that immediate. Eddie walked off. He may have only taken three steps, but he needed distance. He couldn’t bear to see them place their articles in his cabin. He couldn’t bear to see them walk around on the paths to and from the cabin that his feet took part in creating. It was too much for one afternoon.
“Do you think that you could help us out here a little bit,” Richard Fitch asked Eddie with a tinge of indignation. It woke Eddie from his spell, and he walked back. He grabbed a stray shirt. It was the only thing he could touch without breaking down in one way or another. He wasn’t sure if he was on the verge of tears or screaming, but touching one of the precious articles would’ve brought it all out.
He tried to block out the precious items and put his focus on this shirt he was grabbing, but when he lifted the shirt a Nerf football rolled out from under it. That just about cinched it. He couldn’t be mad at the Dinslages, he reminded himself with quiet revulsion. He couldn’t cry in front of them, and he couldn’t cry in front of his Dad. He couldn’t hate the Dinslages either. It wasn’t their fault.
The Nerf was a beautiful shade of orange. It was fresh out of the package. Nerf footballs always had a flap on one side. One side is smooth, and the other side has that flap or fold or whatever one wants to call it. The fold was always the first thing to go when the rough housing started. Eddie couldn’t take his eyes off it. It was his instinct to reach for a Nerf football before anything else. ‘Go out!’ he would normally call out to Walter when a Nerf football touched his hand. He couldn’t touch this Nerf. It would’ve been too much to touch it, but he couldn’t look away from it either. He envied these two boys the hours of enjoyment they would have with the Nerf. There’s so much one can do with a Nerf in this area. Don’t play with the Nerf in the water he wanted to tell the boys. It ruins a Nerf, he wanted to say just to say something. It may seem like it’s cool to get a Nerf hard, but you can never get it back to its squishy newness once that happens.
“Are you going to stand there all day?” his Father asked him. Eddie turned to see that everyone was standing behind him waiting to get into the station wagon. He took the shirt to the cabin.
To see Brad and Ty out on the road playing with the Nerf would’ve provided a complete transformation of lot 21. A regular passerby probably would’ve assumed it was Eddie and Walter at first. The passerby would soon adapt, and Eddie and Walter would become a memory, until they were forgotten.
The final articles Ty and Brad removed from the station wagon were sticks. The boys both looked to their Mother when they removed the sticks. “It’s fine,” she said. They both put their sticks to the ground and stood astride them like warriors.
“What are they for?” Eddie asked the older boy, named Brad, just to say something.
“To write our names in the sand,” Brad responded. Eddie smiled up at Brad’s Mother. That was dumb, Eddie thought, but he was polite about it. The Mother walked away from them with a polite smile. Brad watched her walk away, and as soon as she was a safe distance he leaned into Eddie’s ear: “To stick a wild boar,” he whispered.
“What?” Eddie asked.
“The sharpened sticks are to stick a wild boar.” Brad said this with a wild spark in his eyes. He showed Eddie the portion of the sticks they had put to the ground. The sticks were carved into sharp points. Brad was alive and electric as Eddie investigated the sticks. This was Brad’s opportunity to live out the Lord of the Flies that electric excitement suggested. He and his brother had probably spent hours in their basement devising attack strategies and plots and plans to take down a boar. Along with the sticks, Eddie assumed they probably brought war paint, and they probably developed war cries in their basement, but there were no boars in Lake Platte View.
Eddie wanted to douse that dream and diminish that wild spark, but for whatever reason he couldn’t. Brad stood there with those wild eyes locked in on Eddie’s awaiting reaction. Brad was confident. His stance was one he probably mimicked from some warrior in some movie he loved.
“Ty and I,” Brad whispered motioning to his little brother, “are going to go into those trees tonight to stick some boars and hear them whine and squeal. We’re going to wipe their blood on our faces, like they did in Lord of the Flies.” Eddie smiled at the reference. Brad’s Dad probably bought them the book soon after cinching the deal for the Lake Platte View lot in much the same manner Richard Fitch had for Eddie and Walter. But there are no boars here, Eddie wanted to say. There are no boars in those trees he thought looking out onto them. It was a trap of sorts that Brad had placed him in. It was a corner between reality and reason, and illogical thinking and adventure. There are no boars in there, he thought, but he couldn’t take his eyes off those trees.
Why didn’t I ever think of that, he asked himself peering into the darkness within those trees.
“Why didn’t you think of that?” Walter asked him. Walter was now standing beside him looking out into those same trees.
“Shut up,” Eddie returned. He walked back to the adults sitting around the rickety, old picnic table that the Fitchs ate hundreds of meals on.
Eddie was the leader of the gang at Lake Platte View. Eddie was the one who thought up adventures with story logs, and backdrops, and the possible consequences of their adventures if anyone wanted to back out now. No one dared back out on one of Eddie’s adventures. No one, except a kid named Phillip. Phillip informed the throng of kids standing on the sand that he thought Eddie was dumb, and the adventure Eddie had proposed was gay.
It would be the last time that Phillip would say such a thing. It would also be the last time Phillip said no to one of Eddie’s adventures. Phillip fueled Eddie that day to draw out the greatest adventure his mind could conceive, and he did it. They all talked about it for weeks thereafter. There were big kids Eddie didn’t even know that joined them on that particular adventure. There’s a lot of pressure put on a kid when big kids join in, especially when those big kids let you lead. Eddie led. Eddie came through, even with all that pressure. Weeks later, they were still asking Eddie when the next adventure would come about. They wouldn’t leave him alone about it. The pressure was on, and when he came up with another Phillip was the first boy in line. There was a time when I ruled this roost, Eddie thought, but I still should’ve thought of that boar thing. That would’ve been awesome.
Eddie watched his Dad sign on the dotted line. He looked out on those trees. This lot would be in good hands. Brad would take over, and he would breathe new life into lot 21, and no one would remember Eddie Fitch in these parts.
“We appreciate how you’ve kept the place up,” the Dinslage Dad, who introduced himself to Eddie as John, said to Richard Fitch, “and we know that you’re selling this at the price you bought it at. We’ve added to the agreed total,” the man said handing a check over to Eddie’s Dad. “Appreciation and inflation and such,” John Dinslage added. After handing over the check, he placed his other arm around his wife. She had an expectant smile on her face as she looked at Richard Fitch. She smiled, and pulled Ty into her arms. “We hope you find it very generous,” John added.
“Thank you,” Richard Fitch said. Even the man’s thank yous were weak. He smiled, but his smile was insecure. He didn’t know how to feel most of the time, and he didn’t know how to act. He needed to be told how to react for him to do it with any force. How is it that I’ve landed in a situation where this man is my sole role model for interactions with other adults? What kind of cruel joke is this? The man can’t even dress himself properly. Next to John Dinslage, Richard Fitch appeared like a peasant grateful for a lord’s generosity.
John Dinslage’s casual clothes even appeared refined and carefully considered. The man wore half-smiles elegantly. He could appear happy and sympathetic while maintaining a gruff demeanor. When John Dinslage spoke, he appeared to grace you with his words. He wore a smile that appeared to be secretly guarded, as if the Fitch situation bothered him, but he was tickled pink to be the benefactor of it. Eddie rethought that. He decided he was reading too much into it. He was reading the man from his own perspective.
John Dinslage managed the center of attention so deftly that Eddie couldn’t wait for him to talk again, and the man didn’t speak often. He said what was to be said, and that was it. He was what Eddie’s Grandfather would call a word economist, or was it an economist with words? Eddie couldn’t remember.
When John Dinslage touched his wife, she sank into that touch. When the wife touched Ty, he all but purred with glee under her hand. Did I ever purr like that, Eddie wondered? Did I appreciate it all in the manner these people seem to appreciate it? It seems like there was a time. I’ve seen it in pictures. I’ve seen all of our smiles, but you’re supposed to smile for a camera. Maybe we weren’t the puzzle pieces that the Dinslage’s appear to be, but we found our ways of connecting that had a discordant beauty that can only be appreciated by an onlooker or who appreciates it from afar. Is this why the adults hate Leave it to Beaver and the Brady Bunch? Is this why they speak of the dangerous depictions of a happy family on those shows? Is it because they’re as jealous as I am now? Is that the only way one can fight back against the crumbling within? Brad went under his Dad’s other free arm. He smiled at Eddie under that arm. That smile may have been totally innocuous, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like a competitive smile.
Eddie’s family was pathetic. Walter did what he was told. He didn’t sass. He didn’t complain. He ate what he was supposed to eat. He played when he was supposed to play. He was the boy. Eddie was the other. Eddie was the responsibility. Eddie was to keep up his room and his grades, for fear of what the relatives might think. Walter didn’t like to be touched, and Richard never touched him. Eddie didn’t to be touched, and Richard never touched him. They would’ve never managed a spectacle such as the one the Dinslage’s displayed at the sale. The Fitches would’ve never been able to provide an image of solidarity in the manner this family had. We have portraits of our solidarity where everyone says cheese, but we could’ve never managed the effortless smiles that mirrored these people. Not on a Saturday afternoon, in the middle of nowhere Nebraska, for no reason whatsoever. We need a man behind a camera with a yellow, squeak toy to create this kind of harmony.
Eddie imagined that John Dinslage spoke of his children with great pride. He imagined that co-workers probably got sick of those stories, and they didn’t care to see another photo of the Dinslage’s family in harmony. It made people sick when you did this, when you went overboard. Eddie imagined that John went overboard a lot. Richard Fitch never spoke fondly of his children in the company of others. He didn’t speak poorly of them either for that matter. The three of them just existed together like three individuals trapped within the same circumstance.
“We would love it,” said the wife, “if your boys would show our boys around.” She looked over at Eddie, and he fell into a trance. He could not speak, but he didn’t need to. Her eyes told him this. Her eyes told him there was love in the world. He didn’t think he would ever have it, but her eyes told him it was out there. How long she had been gauging him, Eddie did not know, but her eyes told him that she knew the answer to the question before she asked it, and her smile suggested that she knew she had asked the perfect question.
“They would be happy to,” Eddie’s Dad said in a manner that suggested that he was covering for his boys’ rudeness.
It wasn’t accepted among fellas, but Eddie wanted to tell Brad and Ty how lucky they were. He wanted them to know that if he were to enter into a lab to create a mom and dad, theirs would be the ones he created. How does one say this though without sounding creepy or odd? Eddie thought of a few ways, as they walked from the picnic table, but he couldn’t come up with one.
“Your tree’s crooked,” Brad whispered.
Eddie snapped a disgusted look at Brad. He held all comments at bay and simply said: “I know.” ‘How can you complain about anything?’ would’ve been the comment that snapped out of that disgusted look if Eddie hadn’t been schooled in the art of discretion.
All four of them loved that tree. The tree slanted at a thirty degree angle, but that only added to what Eddie tagged the tree’s climbability. He wanted to tell Brad how many hours he spent climbing that “crooked” tree to get to its mulberries. He wanted to tell Brad that his family was stealing their tree, their future and their fun. He wanted to tell Brad that if he asked to trade lives, Eddie would do so so quickly that it would be embarrassing for both of them to find out that Brad was only joking. Eddie figured that he would probably scream his “yes, OH GOD Yes!” with joyous tears to follow. Then again, he decided, no kid is grateful for their situation in life. Brad was as normal as any other kid. It was Eddie that was the orphaned freak.
Ty and Brad had their sticks, and they drew their names in the dirt road for their Mom to see. Ty was such a pleaser. He smiled at the Mom when he was done writing his name, then he smiled at Brad. Eddie caught Ty changing his grip on the stick to match Brad’s. Ty was a follower. Most kids his age are, Eddie corrected, maybe they have such identity crises that they seek the leadership of others to help them fashion their own identity, but Eddie didn’t see this kid snapping out of it. Ty was a little brother, and he would probably live with the little brother mentality for much of his life, for he wasn’t even a strong little brother as little brothers go. Walter was a lot stronger by comparison, but then again Walter had been through a lot more.
Sean M. Riley is from Omaha, Nebraska. He spends most of his time with an incredible wife named Beverly, and he spends a great deal of time with his brother Bryan, and his brother’s kids Aiden and Andrew.