Hector's Juice

Peter White

Description

This is a great American novel. However, the story of Hector's Juice starts long before America was a country. In fact it starts long before any history was written about anything. It starts at the very beginning of time and fast forwards to evolution and the beginnings of mankind. But evolution also has a spiritual side and that's where Spencer the very first guardian angel comes in. He will take you from the beginnings of man in the Great Rift Valley of Africa to the lime colored gas chamber of San Quentin State Penitentiary in California. From the beginnings of surfing (not in Hawaii) to the gunfight at the OK Corral this is a great American novel that is neither restricted to time or space.

Sujets

• Fantastique
• Fantasy historique
• Médiéval-Fantastique
• Historical
• Fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456600426
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hector's Juice
by
Peter White
 
Published for the Internet by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0042-6
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 
Copyright © 2004 by Peter White. Cover art done by Jeremy Turner.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
PA R T ONE : W ilm a ’ s S to r y
 


CHAPTER 1: THE FIRST ASSIGNMENT
I’ve made this trip before across the eons of time flowing up and down the evolutionary river that is man’s history. Usually my trips have been to help generals and admirals make life-or- death decisions. Or at other times, help lawyers and judges make some piss-poor decisions. It’s been my pleasure to help cooks and bakers come up with some of the world’s most renowned recipes. While great artists and musicians have formulated with help from little old me some of the works that hang in prominent museums around the world or fill the airwaves of your favorite radio stations.
I was with the dogfaces that fought the Nazis at the Bulge, and really screwed up with Custer and his boys at the Little Big Horn. Admiral Halsey was one of my favorite pupils when he and the marines kicked the Japs off Guadalcanal. I was also the one that helped to make sure the carriers weren’t in Pearl that fateful Sunday morning in ’4l. If I would have had them sound reveille just an hour earlier though, we could have gotten a few more of those slant-eyed little bastards.
Martin Luther started the Reformation under my expert tutelage, while I really should have kept a closer eye on old Jimmy Swaggart when he was making those frequent trips to the corner 7-Eleven. The inspiration for Beethoven’s Third Symphony, “The Eroica” , was given to that old deaf dude Ludwig by yours truly. It, however, took a whole lot of persuasion to get Sammy Davis Jr. to do that “Candy Man” song . . . the song sucked, but it turned out to be his biggest hit ever. Boy, that little black fella sure could sing and dance.
I walked to the ocean to make salt, right beside the most Christ-like man since Christ himself. He shuffled his Jesus shoes across the face of this earth, and he wasn’t even Christian. His name, Mohandas Gandhi. I also got green with seasickness, when I sailed aboard the HMS Beagle and watched the young Charles Darwin with rapt attention while he slowly unlocked the secrets of my work, the work that I, and my brother, began so long ago. Not bad for a screwed-up, has-been guardian angel, who sometimes can’t seem to control his own foul mouth.
As you can see, my lows have been low, and my highs have been bench markers for some of mine and mankind’s greatest moments. I was there at the very beginning—yes, the very beginning of time, when all the decisions were being made about how things were going to be done in this mass conglomerate of organized confusion popularly known as the universe. Not that my two cents ever meant much, but I got to hand it to the old boy for coming up with that gem that holds everything together, the ATOM! I’ve seen them as the building blocks of matter in every corner of the universe.
In my universe though, the spirit universe, there is no need for the atom. For that matter, time and space, or any of the other measuring standards human beings use to give their lives boundaries and meaning, have no relevance here. Einstein would have gone nuts trying to come up with an equation that would have explained it all. Oh, yes, there are ways we measure time and space here, but hell, I don’t really understand the concepts involved myself, let alone try to explain them to a world that still thinks Elvis is alive and well and runs a Laundromat in Vegas.
Let’s cut through all the bull and let me introduce myself. My name is Spencer. Maybe not the greatest name for the first commissioned guardian angel ever, but who ever gets to pick their own name, right? Now, please, for God’s sake, don’t get me mixed-up with that It’s a Wonderful Life story that you, no doubt, are familiar with. Believe me, if George Bailey would have jumped into that cold ass water on my watch, I sure as hell wouldn’t have jumped in after his sorry butt. You see, my time for retirement from the guardian service has come and gone many times. Usually, most of us in the service do our twenty million years or so and get out, but somewhere along the line I came up with a bad habit, a swearing habit, not a good habit for a guardian angel to have, but we’re not perfect here, either.
For instance, I should have never called the brave yellow brothers from the Land of the Rising Sun little slant-eyed bastards. I, too, can pick up some of the prejudices, hatreds, and stupid unfounded distortions of human arrogance that you humans possess. Not that it’s possible that I can really become warped, or that these displays of verbal stupidity are really representative of the way I truly feel, but if you have been exposed to the human condition for as long as I have, it’s hard not to have things rub off on you, even if you’re supposed to be above all that crap. OOPS! There I go again. You see, I’ve seen all the wars, riots, depressions, crusades, assassinations, crucifixions, and all the other demonstrations of human brutality over the years. Yes! you heard right, I saw all the crucifixions also, and that means I watched Jesus Christ hang there on that cross, while his life slowly ebbed away, that life being the greatest ever lived. But that was just his physical body that died. There’s more—much, much more.
As I said, I am making a trip, that trip being to the year 1994, and hopefully, if everything goes right, and I can get a handle on my mouth. Then I’ll be able to retire, or better yet, become an escort. Ah, yes, an escort. That special guardian that gets to take the dearly departed to that next level of energy. Not that there has been much of a need for one up to now; there just simply has been no one to escort up to this point.
You see, when energy is spent, it just takes on another form, or is just added to and homogenized with all the other spent energy in the universe, to create a dimension we can’t measure with our senses, or any of the other usual ways you down there on earth use to measure things. But there is one there just the same, and it’s called the spirit dimension or spirit universe. In other words, when you die, the energy that is your soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it, leaves the shell that is your body, and is condensed in a spiritual black hole. This is where heaven, or whatever you want to call it, is. One other thing, this spiritual black hole is connected directly to the other black holes that are spread out throughout the universe and are condensing matter from the material universe. The result, everything that ever was, is, or will be, will someday be condensed through one of these black holes of nothingness, and end up in the eternal destination of everything—Heaven. That is, of course, if you’re good. If you’re bad, you go to some other place; and by all accounts, the company isn’t that great in that place.
This spirit universe that I’m talking about, that is where I live. You see, I’m supposed to help this guy named Hector accomplish a couple of miracles in that year that sorely needed some, l994, and along the way, toward that year, help him correct some long-forgotten wrongs that had been done to folks. If I can pull them off and do it without cussing, I can then go to my next energy awareness level—hopefully—and then I can become an escort.
But before I go any further though, let me first tell you the story about Wilma. No, I didn’t name her after the cartoon character that you no doubt are familiar with. Wilma just seems to be a good name for prehistoric chicks, or should I say young ladies? Now, remember I told you I was the first commissioned guardian angel ever? Well, actually, I was the second, behind my brother Hugo. Hey, I told you we don’t pick the names up here. Anyway, we had the assignment to get mankind’s first ancestors off all fours and walking tall, and in the meantime, we might find the first person to be escorted. I mean, these chimps needed all the help they could get. If they weren’t being eaten up by large cats, or other predators of that day, they were beating each other over the heads with rocks or sticks. Sounds more like l994 all the time, doesn’t it?
I used to say to Hugo, “Hugo, you’ve been messing around down there in Africa for two million years. By the time you get that little wench to stand upright, the Buffalo Bills might have won their first Super Bowl.”
Usually, his reply would be, “Spencer, nature takes its own sweet time. You can’t just speed up the natural order of evolution that we helped to set up. You’ve even told me that yourself a million times.”
I turned to him and said with a knowing smile, knowing that if we didn’t get some results within a few millennia, our assignment might be changed.
I said, “Hugo, if we don’t start getting some results down here—and quick—we might find ourselves working with some other developing alien life cultures in a much more remote corner of the ever-expanding universe. And another thing, if we ever vote to use that Big Bang thing again, we best get somebody that knows what the hell th