The Meeky Mouse

Adam Dumphy

Description

A “modern western” for men, this novel is set in 1943 and describes a little known off shoot of WW1I. In a partly true scenario it involves an attempt of Japanese Intelligence to establish a radio receiving station high in the mountains of Sonora, Mexico.

A Marine newly returned from Guadalcanal and seeking only the quiet necessary to heal his wounded body and mind encounters the tense situation of Mexican/Americans vs. Anglos in a small New Mexican valley.

And he meets two Mexican/American women who behind their attractive faces seem to have dark shadows.

Being asked to locate the receiving station results in a shoot out between a marine-trained marksman with his Garand and the traditional Winchesters of the old west.

Sujets

• Westerns
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 02 mars 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781463475093
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Meeky Mouse
 
 
By
 
Adam Dumphy
 
 

 
© 2005 Adam Dumphy. All Rights Reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
First published by AuthorHouse 02/22/05
 
 
ISBN: 1-4208-1367-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4634-7509-3 (eBook)
 
Printed in the United States of America
Bloomington, Indiana
 
 
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 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
About the Author
 
 
 
 
 
To
Irene
And
Mair who is so like her.
 
 
 
The Meeky Mouse
Summer 1943. War Time San Diego, CA.
 
  Chapter 1
 
 
The reason the Jeep was so cheap was the shrapnel holes all through it. “Only $250.00.” the handwritten sign said.
“It’s plenty cheap all right because of all those holes.”
The very tall, blonde, young man walked all around it and observed it carefully from every side.
“I almost said shrapnel wounds .” He thought as they were one inch sized holes on the driver’s side, at the site of entry, and had expanded to three or four inch sized holes on exit through the hood and shallow body, besides the fabric top was shredded.
The impact had given the body a definite tilt, lifting the driver’s side and tilting the frame down and to the right.
“It caught it good somewhere, sometime.” He mused.
He walked around it again. Only three and a half years old it was a 1939 Willys.
Another sign said, “Runs good.”
How it had gotten here on the back lot of a third rate used car dealer, “Manny’s Motors”, in the South Bay section of San Diego he couldn’t think. Equipment was so scarce in these wartime days; the services were all so sorely stressed just now that there were hardly ever surplus sales. Every truck, tank and gun was recovered and repaired or supposed to be.
“Probably smuggled in from Mexico after being sold as junk by some enterprising CB to a freighter off some South Pacific Island.” He thought.
Suddenly he decided he liked it. Wanted it, coveted it actually. And in a manner totally characteristic of himself he looked into his mind to try to discover why.
Counting on his fingers, he enumerated:
1. He had always wanted a Jeep.
2. He needed transportation.
3. He was intending to head for the roughest and most desolate country he could find.
4. An errant thought came. He resented it, rejected it, but it returned and persisted. Wasn’t it just possible he felt a certain empathy, a comradeship, with this battered old wreck? After all he was full of shrapnel holes too. He had a tilt. His left shoulder was still humped, the arm hanging unnaturally where the surgeons at the Navy Hospital had put the pieces back together as best they could. They had even done some fancy tendon transplants to try to keep the shoulder from dislocating again.
He considered this further. He wasn’t old either just five weeks less than twenty-one. And like the Willys he was already cast off, out of the main stream of the war and the world. In a kind of junk yard of his own and going for cheap.
“Well, hell.” Either way he wanted it. He removed a thin wallet from the back pocket of his comfortably worn, old prewar Levi’s. Opening it the torn threads of the center section showed as white strands where the celluloid filler that usually held pictures; family pictures, high school pictures, a girl friend’s picture, had been torn out savagely, leaving broken threads and now only two flat slabs of leather.
He counted the contents again carefully. It was always the same, $438.00, when it wasn’t less. That and the $2000.00 in War Bonds were his total assets. When he went over seas he remembered that as a new, very suddenly made orphan after an auto accident, he had owned the family house in solid, comfortable Mission Hills, a Beach house in Ocean Beach and a little ranch in the Laguna Mountains. And had $20,000 odd in cash in a joint bank account. That was before…. Well that was neither here nor there, now. Another story…
He counted again, still the same. Well maybe Manny would take less.
 
 
  Chapter 2
 
 
The next day plus one he was heading the battered old Jeep out and away from San Diego on Highway 80 toward Route 66. And he wasn’t the least bit sorry to be leaving Dago. He had heard it called at various times and places: “The Avocado Center of the World”, “The American Beauty Rose Center of the World, “The Best Climate in the World,” “the Center of Fun in the Sun in the World”. And also “The lousiest liberty town in the world”, and “the North End of the Tijuana Sewer”. It was now simply what it was.
He sighed at the thought that it wasn’t the town that he knew and grew up in. That had been a bifid village, with a below-Broadway section with bars and locker rooms and assorted sailor bait. And then there was above Broadway a very conservative, small, Southwestern town.
Then it had a few streets laying at the top of the slope toward the bay and ending at the bay. A few houses sprawled over a few stumpy hills, which were here called mountains. It had two streetcars only, which tooted and stuttered and sparked their way down town and at times to the beaches from the car barn, an old dairy barn in North Park.
There were two high schools, bitter rivals, and miles of long, clean, white, sandy beaches where the rollers came in soft and blue like they had just left the Orient and stopped only to clean up their act about Hawaii. And one could body surf a good half mile from the breakers to the beach. There were a couple distinct and distinctive communities of Spanish style, stucco houses built in the twenties and that was all.
A wonderful town to grow up in and he looked back on his boyhood as ideal. Now it was a hive of aircraft activity; of flying and building planes, of bedroom communities for the 4F’s who drew down big salaries, drove big cars and lived the good life in the best housing, while chasing Rosie the Riveter who wasn’t running very fast. The poor wife of an enlisted sailor or Marine had to live three or four in a bedroom in a rented house with the understanding that they all stayed out late on the night when a husband came home from the war.
That was another world too, now. Best forget it.
The Jeep however pleased him. It was at first a little nerve wracking to drive. Tilting down and to the right as it did, it gave the impression that the highway sloped and looked for all the world as if one was heading off the right lane into the curb. On correcting this, one found oneself over the centerline.
But the Jeep pleased him in other ways too. Three of the seats had been left with Manny for a credit. A piece of marine plywood extended from the forward fire wall to the rear body frame, being long enough for a comforter as a mattress, and with his sleeping bag made a satisfactory bed. A cross shelf in the rear held a Coleman stove and beneath it a box of food and utensils. On top of all and piled indiscriminately were a few clothes.
The fabric roof was now neatly mended and more or less rain proof but he was accustomed to ignore rain after thirteen months in Guadalcanal. Along the side and under the bed was his Garand, his really. Issued to him in Boot Camp it had cost him $20 to have a gunnery sergeant accurize it, and his also as with it he had fired top man in the regiment. When he was wounded the second time on the big island and found he was being sent home he dismantled it, padded it, and packed it in his sea bag so no one could feel it from the outside and brought it home instead of worn out uniforms. A lot of weapons were “lost” like that.
Beside him was his Father’s old Colt .44-40 about the only thing he had left of his Father’s after his aunt had held the estate sale while he was overseas.
He was equipped then for most anything and that too was satisfying.
But he was eager to get along. So eager he didn’t stop until midnight in El Centro for a bowl of chili and a roll of French bread, $0.68, total, now down to $264.75.
He stopped about 3:00 AM to sleep a little but he was too excited to be on his way, to sleep long. Also mostly he wanted to see if his memories of dawn on the desert were as vivid as he recalled.
They were. First the velvety and impenetrable black, soft, dry, dark blanket of the desert night. Then the first light, felt not seen. Then the moment of the Arabic definition of dawn, when a white thread could be told from a black. He wanted to try that but by the time he had found two threads it was too late. And even before he was watching for it the saguaro’s all grew a shadow behind them and almost instantly the entire world was rose grey; sand, sage, cactus, rock, all a faint rose that increased slowly. Then a tiny sleepy looking rim of the sun peeped over the edge of the desert as if testing it’s welcome. It seemed to retreat a moment and then came gradually into view and bringing with it warmth and cheer.
As the day lightened there was the numbing dampness from the scanty, night dew seeping through everything to chill the bones and make one want to hurry back under the covers. And finally the heat starting up that would dry out his bones and reduce the aching in his sh