Westinghouse Patent Pend. and Friends

Adam Dumphy

Description

The morning of his eighteen
birthday Westinghouse Patent Pend. class=SpellE>Ainstruther hears his Ma say, “Wes, break a leg.”

He realizes it is carnie talk
telling him to leave the desolate homestead to go out in the world to make his
fortune and send it back, that the other eight kid’s ration of corn meal mush
and goat’s milk not be permanently interrupted.

Unschooled he is well read from
his Uncle Abernathy, an English Remittance Man’s, library.

He is then a Victorian minded
American youth dropped into the bucolic glitz of San Diego,
CA of the Thirties.

His first acquaintance is class=SpellE>Alyse, rambunctious daughter of an oil tycoon. Smitten she
offers to help his quest but her mind is more on long white dresses and bridal
bouquets.

At Alyse’s
admission of her love of antiques they mine the defunct Ensenada
Hotel, once a posh beanery, of its furnishings as items to sell on Antique Row
in San Diego.

They are astonished to find in
the various armoires exotic birds and reptiles being smuggled in for the San
Diego Zoo, and finally a defunct Mafia gunman.

They over come to make it, in
Wes’ own words, “A typical American Horatio Aglae
(sic) Success story”.

Sujets

• Romance
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 26 mai 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781418458966
• Langue: English

Extrait

WESTINGHOUSE PATENT Pend. and Friends
By
 
ADAM DUMPHY
 
This book is a work of fiction. Places, events, and situations in this story are purely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
 
 
© 2005 by ADAM DUMPHY. All rights reserved.
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.
 
First published by AuthorHouse 02/11/05
 
ISBN: 1-4184-5896-1 (e-book)
ISBN: 1-4184-3639-9 (Paperback)
ISBN: 1-4184-3640-2 (Dust Jacket)
ISBN: 978-1-4184-5896-6 (ebk)
Contents
Chapter 1  
Chapter 2  
Chapter 3  
Chapter 4  
Chapter 5  
Chapter 6  
Chapter 7  
Chapter 8  
Chapter 9  
Chapter 10  
Chapter 11  
Chapter 12  
Chapter 13  
Chapter 14  
Chapter 15  
Chapter 16  
Chapter 18  
Chapter 19  
Chapter 20  
Chapter 21  
Chapter 22  
Chapter 23  
Chapter 24  
Chapter 25  
Chapter 26  
Chapter 27  
Chapter 28  
Chapter 29  
Chapter 29  
About the Author  
 
 
 
 
For Irene.
 
Of course.
Chapter 1 
 
Carrizo Gorge, San Diego County, February 1937.
 
It was my eighteenth birthday, my day for the silver spoon in my mouth. I chased the last lumps of corn meal mush around the wooden bowel with the silver spoon attatchment on Uncle Abernathy’s sterling-silver pipe cleaner, and picked up the bowl to drink the very last of the goat’s milk and sighed. Life did have its great moments.
I looked around our three room hacienda set in the most desolate corner of DeAnza Desert on the California/ Mexico border.The soft morning sun peeked through the cracks in the weathered clapboard siding giving a pinstripe to the worn, plank floor and a soft morning breeze sighed through the broken window pane of our window and set the tin cans suspended beneath each of the major leaks in the roof into a wind chime and setting the dust motes dancing.
My mind was on Aramantha Ochoa and exactly what she meant last night in the moonlight behind the Ochoa mule barn, when I realized I was being spoken to.
“Wes, kick the kiddy cord.”
“What, Ma?”
“Live it without the net.”
“But Ma…”
It was my Ma’s voice all right but I hardly recognized it as it was kind of deep now and throaty. Looking at her I remembered. She looked exactly like that when she said the same words when my older brother Roengten left a year ago. I remember he was eighteen when he left and I was just nine months and a few weeks younger than he.
Ma was a thin, tiny, little thing sitting sunk wearily on the three-legged kitchen chair, one chair leg mended with a redwood paling but still teetery. Short like me, but not like me otherwise. I took after my Pa, not real tall but equal in size, front to back, side to side and up and down.
She was skinny as a snake with the the double jointed look that had made her the greatest aerialist, ‘THE GREAT NORTHUMBERLAND CIRCUS, Greatest in all Britain’, had boasted. She was the only one who could do a triple flip off the high wire and catch the follow-up trapeze every time. Even when she was pretty far gone carrying one us nine kids she could. She’d just sew a few more ruffles on her costume and keep performing, then just give it up for a few days when one was ready to arrive or the tights got so they wouldn’t meet in front. Then she would be back at it again and never had to rehearse.
My Pa never could do that one. Although he was billed as, ‘THE STRONGEST MAN ON EARTH, THE KING OF THE HIGH WIRE.’ he just couldn’t.
He did try the triple flip once though I knew. He was trying to catch the eye of one of those music hall hussies seated in the third row. He got her attention all right but just momentarily. He landed in her lap and they was so intertwined nobody bothered to try to untangle them just buried them together in the same box.
That was when Ma brought the kids to live with Uncle Abernathy here in Carrizo Gorge.
She mourned for my Pa I know, although she never said nothing. But her greatest curse was, “Like a music hall hussy.”
And I know she didn’t mind leaving the circus, she just talked the language still like today. It was her way of saying something and still to insure circus-type good luck. In the carnie if you wished someone ‘good luck’ it meant a disaster, certain sure.
Her face was kind of tired looking I suddenly noticed, but not old, with a tear coming down her cheek and her nose was red. She had been crying at night a lot, I guessed.
I pulled myself together. “Me, Ma? Today?”
She got wearily to her feet, kissed me on the cheek and started to pick up the seven remaining bowls off the big table avoiding the pick handle under one table edge put there to level it and a rock where the short leg was.
She sighed again and said:
“Never do tomorrow what needs to do today
For the train that goes tomorrow is a mile upon its way.”
She always quoted that and it didn’t make sense to me but I knew what she meant. And I realized suddenly that the cornmeal mush in the bowls was getting more and more watery and less and less in amount lately.
Uncle Abernathy’s remittance must have been held up or else he lost it at Dolph’s Poker Palace again.
I says, “Right Ma. I ‘ll get my stuff and break a leg or two.”
I stepped over the broken window sill to the outside porch where I’d slept and lived the last years. I dug out my cigar box and took out my clasp knife, lucky Indian-Head penny, and a picture of my Mom and Dad in pink tights. I pulled on my brogans and took down my canvas coat but I left the boy’s communal comb.
Returning through the window I left a dime and quarter and three pennies from last night’s wrestling winnings on the table and headed for the door.
“Wes.” she says.
“Yeah Ma.”
“Don’t forget to send the cush cush.” She pointed to the front yard where the kids were playing. My they sure could race around and yell a lot on half a bowl of mush a day. And even that required cush cush.
“I won’t Ma. And Ma..”
“Yes, Son?”
“Thanks for everything.” I pointed all around the place. “I mean it so much, Ma. All the things you’ve give me and us…and I promise I will not be a shame to you, ever.”
She turned away kind of shy. “Never were. Never could be, Son.”
 
 
Chapter 2 
 
On the porch Uncle Abernathy was rocking on the glider chair he slept in. I guess he read my expression.
“Well laddie, me buck.” He always talked like that cause he was an English Remittance Man. He got a ‘stipend’ from a big estate in Essex and never let any of the rest of the world, “them cart horse buggers”, forget it.
He continued. “I was just your age when I took foot in hand between two days as it was. Malay was the place then. I remember still…”
I had heard the stories more than once and more than twice now that I think of it, but now reluctant to leave I guess, I listened. They was all about the same. A beautiful native girl with emeralds (or maybe rubies or diamonds) hidden in her earrings (or necklace or navel) and not wearing more than ‘a scrap or two or less’, had fallen in love with him.
Her father (or tribe or clan) could never approve of them. So he fought his way through pirates (or headhunters or slave traders) to the gold fields (or diamond mines or pearling waters) found the fabulous treasure and got clean away. Except at the last river (or bay or swamp) she stayed behind to save his life and was struck by a lance (or arrow or spear or bullet) and died in his arms.
“Well thanks, Uncle Abernahy,” He was only half through but I was feeling too down to listen, “I best get along.”
His voice changed then from them high flown English tones to something more natural. “Yes, best get at the job, Laddie. And Lord how I wish I was going with you.” He looked down at the crippled leg that hurt him so much just before a rain storm and I hurried away.
I walked down the sandy hill trail to the County Fire Road in a pretty low mood. Every boulder, creosote bush, yucca, or mesquite tree brought back a memory. Good memories most of them too. If I hadn’t been a man and full growed I’d likely cried a little myself.
Arriving at the black topped one-and-a-half lane road I suddenly realized that I would have to make a decision, my first decision ever, all on my own. I looked both ways along the road but nothing was moving. There was no sign of any living thing all across the whole valley but me. Where was I going to go? And what was I going to do?
As I often do when I got some serious thinking to do, I bent down and put my hands on the ground and walked a couple hundred yards on my hands. In our family and with my kind of build it’s as easy to walk on my hands as on my feet. And it always seemed to kind’a help my thinking when I was upside down. More blood in my brain or something but this time nothing came.
I stopped, did a hundred one arm push ups with one hand and then with the other but still there was no enlightenment. I didn’t stop to rest at all. Little stuff like that doesn’t bother me none, but I was perplexed.
I sat a spell and then backing up to a cut bank by the road I put my coat on the ground, I got kind of sensitive head nerves or something, as padding, and stood on my head on it. I figured if walking on my hands didn’t bring any ideas I’d just stand there a half hour or so and let things percolate.
I guess in a way it worked at least something happened. At first it was jus