Long Gone & Lost

Bobby Horecka

Description

Bobby Horecka writes short fiction laced with truth. He tells tales of a man who had the roughest of starts in life. Through the fireside bardic storytelling tradition, readers learn of the resilience of children and the power of love to redeem even the most damaged. As the young man grows, he discovers a talent for observing and recording stories, ultimately becoming a newsman with the bad luck and poor timing of entering a dying field. These partially true, tongue-in-cheek stories offer a first-hand look, at the demise of the American newspaper, and at a slice of the unique Czeck community in and around Lavaca County, Texas.
You might've just started out or reached the jumping off spot. Maybe you're the rainy-day saver who never left anyplace without charting a precise destination and itinerary first, or you're plumb astounded you got where you're at and couldn't tell me what happened last night much less what's in store six weeks from now. You might have a working man's calloused hands the calloused soul that only the mistreated know or the calloused heart that comes with having yours shattered too many times. Everybody needs to catch an occasional break or they risk becoming Long Gone & Lost...

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Journalism
• CPS
• Texas

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 02 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692298
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 by Bobby Horecka All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions Madville Publishing P.O. Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Author Photograph: John Squyres @ Blue Media Works Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis
 
ISBN: 978-1-948692-28-1 paperback, 978-1-948692-29-8 ebook Library of Congress Control Number: 2019950605
for Jenn, my bride—
I’ll never have time enough nor words to say how much it means that you find within yourself    the strength it takes to love me …       
—B—
T ABLE OF C ONTENTS
Lubbock, 1974
HAP/HAZ/ARD
Hiccups
Chicken Hawk Down
The Legend of Chunk
Roll Models
My First Time
Bumboozled
Mr. Man Candy
Bad Blood
Forget the Alamo
My Little Girl
Gonna Eat This?
Trouble in Paradise
Acknowledgements
About the Author
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
—W.B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899
L UBBOCK , 1974
If the stars had aligned better, the boy could’ve been the son of a teacher, a scientist, or a business tycoon. He might’ve spent his days blowing out birthday candles, playing catch outside with dad, or singing silly songs with mom, full of elaborate gestures. The itsy-bitsy spider, perhaps. Or He’s Got the Whole World. That one about that bridge that kept falling down.
He’d settle for the alphabet song. Johnny Cash. Sabbath. The Doors. The son of son of a sailor. Anything, really. Was it so much to ask?
Other kids did such things. He’d seen it, out in the world, the few times he got to go. But not at this house. Never here. It could’ve been a fairy tale for all he knew. Make believe. Something in a faraway, near-forgotten dream.
He often swipes a grimy paw at his overgrown hair. It is forever falling in his face—pasting to one of his cheeks, poking him in the eye, or crawling up a nostril—always itching something awful. It’s a blonde like you rarely see, not so much a color as a light . It seems to emit its own luminance, an untamed radiance of tangled muss.
Paired with those ice blue eyes and a devilish perma-grin Kool-Aid stain, he’s impossible to forget. Even if he wasn’t yet three and already scrawny for his age.
Those cold eyes, that wild, flame-like hair.
They burn in your soul, alive and living, as he was, beyond the outer fringe of nightmares out at reality’s bitter edge. That fiery hair, those frozen eyes, consuming …

The fuzzies came on bouncing, bounding footses into his hidey spot, his hole, his safe place, beyond the owey pokes that make you bleed. He found it following bunnies . They were always outside. Light and dawk . Nibble, nibble. Hawp , hop, to over they-yuh .
Thems eated da gwass . The boy snatches a tuft of winter-burned stems, holds it high. Grass, he means to say. The man with long dark hair listens intently, looking on in bemused disbelief.
“No thanks,” the man says, his voice deep, mellow. “I got my own.”
He laughs like a whisper, airy, holds up funnel-shaped hand-rolled, the smoke curling and vanishing. Curling. Swirling. Gone. Curling. Delicate. Swirling threads. Kitty whiskers , the boy tried to say once, then vanished and gone.
The man never understands him.
He comes out every day and sits on the wooden steps, smokes his smoke beside the half-opened back door. Twirls of smoke vanish in the cold air. Smells so good to the boy. Not the smoke, but behind that door.
He can’t tell him that. He doesn’t know how. No one taught him how. But the coffee brewing, butter melting, eggs browning, sizzling bacon: the boy’s insides churn each morning, his senses keen.
Like something wild. Half-starved wolf cub. Always the same.
The man never understands.
Often, at night, the boy races off in the dark. Has to, you see. Got crazy inside. He makes the red-dirt yard in seconds flat, dodging minefields of junk, rusted, jagged-edged cans, busted crates spilling broken bottle shards, sharp as razors and hidden by night. Barefoot, of course, but much safer there than he was inside. He spies the secret path deep into the thorny brush. He knows the spot well. He has used it too many times before. They never ever wake up it seems, when darkness gives way to light. They stay up moaning, screaming, fighting is what it sounds like to the boy, and it goes on all night. Don’t try and wake them, though, or walk in when there’s noise. They get awful mean. They just don’t like little boys. Or perhaps they do—too much—that’s what sets them off. But it’s times like these, when they catch him, he thinks he won’t make it out. They hit with belts and boards and fists, often swinging blind in the dark. Twice they’d connected when they lashed out like that, and twice they’d knocked him out.
The Preacher , everybody calls him, and with him always that skinny white, white pink-eyed man that everybody calls the Ghost . They are always trying to hurt. Just last month, the little boy stuck his finger in a door hinge, a stupid thing to do. Split his finger and his nail, got blood all everywhere. Over the next few weeks, though, it was healing. Until Preacher stomped it flat at church. Ghost grabbed his head and shoved him to the floor. That wasn’t bad, though. Not until Preacher took his heel and ground round, mashing it hard into the floor, like he’d seen the Hunter do with cigarettes when he was through. He never hears anybody call Hunter anything. He scares everybody because he is always mean. He carries a big, bone-handled knife and had taken it to the boy once or twice. It doesn’t hurt so bad, getting cut by his knife. Nothing like when they hit him instead. The last time he got hold of him, he turned his whole bed red. But the Candyman was hardest of all to read. One minute he’ll be almost nice, the next he’ll beat you half to death. And he does things, awful things, that hurt so bad. Just know you need to run hard and fast, no matter how hungry you may be, if you ever hear him ask Want some candy, baby boy?
So, mornings the boy always spends outside. Most days, he is already there anyway. And one day, he tried to catch a bunny. The boy thought he’d finally have a friend. They’re always hopping around, nibbling on this, then hopping over there. But whenever he gets close, they run away. Run away fast. He followed it one day, down its hidden bunny trail, to see where it went. What might be there. Perhaps he’d find bunny houses, or big piles of carrots someplace. He sure could eat a few. Fuzzy warm mommy bunnies. He could go live with them. She might even sing to him. Teach him the words to that bridge song.
The spines on the bushes left him several owies . They burned for days and bled and bled. Took several tries to get it right, but he could run full speed and dive like Superman, his belly in the dirt. The bunny may have disappeared, no bunny house ever found, but the boy had a new hidey hole.
One even THEY wouldn’t brave. Not Preacher or his Ghost . Not Hunter nor Candyman , even Maybelle and Iris , too. None of them get to him here, and all of them have tried. Hunter even tried to burn it down, with fire and a can of gas. Almost burned down that awful house instead. The boy would have been glad.
Its entrance hidden beneath sprawling boughs, pointy thorns like needles, some long as the boy’s hand. Unlike before, too, when he ran out in the night, this time he brings a blanket. Probably not a blanket, really. Probably more like a towel. He isn’t exactly toasty warm now, his breath hanging in white wisps about his face, but it is better than nothing. He nearly froze to death that last time without it, when the snows almost buried his boney hide, inside his secret hidey hole. Still, better than inside. He didn’t dare go there. That’s the fringe of nightmares …
Run away, if you can. It only hurts in there.
If only he had something to eat. But each time’s the same.
The man with long dark hair never understands.

The man with the long dark hair considers the boy with matted fiery hair. He only appears after he’s had his pain pills, dabbed the salve on the wound by his heart that never wants to heal, and lights up on the back stoop. The boy never appears until the pills kick in, until he’s smoked half his smoke. Not every time, but often enough. He’s not quite sure if he’s even real.
Maybe it’s the mix of those pills and the smoke. It doesn’t help that he’s always alone whenever the boy appears. His old lady said it’s just a hallucination, a vision, something she read about in a book.
He just doesn’t know.
The last time the boy appeared, the man with the long dark hair stuck his hand in the wound by his heart that never wants to heal. The pain was real enough. Even the boy’s strange babble seemed real, too. He couldn’t make it out, quite yet, but he knew he was close. His old lady, though, cooking breakfast just beyond the door, said she heard nothing, just the man with the long dark hair talking to himself.
So, that’s his routine now, every day. Pills. Salve. Grass. The boy doesn’t appear every day, but enough. He tries to interpret what it means when the boy appears, if it’s omen or luck. He hasn’t figured that out either. His old lady says it’s just him, starting out the day too fucked up. He’d love to latch on to the boy, bring him inside, dangle him by one of his scrawny arms, show him to the woman beyond the door cooking breakfast. But he can’t. His pain is always worse at first light. Plus, for all he knows, his hand might pass straight through. The boy, that is. But at least he’d know if he’s real …
It doesn’t help that the boy always looks the same whenever he appears, barefoot and barebacked, heavy diaper he’s always hiking up. Covered in grime, always the filth, babbling away beneath his matted fiery hair. It doesn’t matter, July hot or fresh fallen snow. When he appears—if he appears—it’s always barebacked