A Misfit’s Vision

Ron Brown

Description

Through a series of unusual events, a seventeen-year-old boy’s misguided quest for recognition and significance emerges: a humorous, witty, tragic yet hopeful journey of growth.
When seventeen-year-old Billy loses his dilapidated baseball glove, the disabled, neighborhood dropout, Rodney Drake, finds and keeps it. In his pursuit to retrieve the glove, Billy witnesses the strength of Rodney’s pitching arm and concocts a plan to pursue his vision of grandeur by exploiting Rodney’s talent.
Billy befriends Rodney and naively embarks on a mission to turn the petty thief into a professional baseball player and thereby impress the girl of his dreams. In appreciation for Billy taking Rodney under his wing, Rodney’s peculiar, old-fashioned parents bequeath Billy a portion of their estate. When a catastrophe strikes his protégé’s world, Billy must solve a mystery if he is to reap the benefits of his inheritance.
With the help of his clique of ostracized friends—a twenty-something-year-old little person, a sixty-something-year-old deaf ex-G-man, and a crippled classmate—Billy tries to make sense of what has occurred. At every turn, he rearranges his priorities. Does he seek an inheritance, recognition for ambitious accomplishments, the girl of his dreams, or loyal friendship?

Sujets

• Univers ado
• Fiction ado
• Young Adult Fiction
• Coming of Age

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 08 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665563758
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

A MISFIT’S VISION
RON BROWN


AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: [phone]
 
 
 
 
 
 
© 2022 Ron Brown. 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.
 
Published by AuthorHouse 06/24/2022
 
ISBN: 978-1-6655-6374-1 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-6373-4 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-6375-8 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022911989
 
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
CONTENTS
I SPRING
Having Friends
Making Friends
Nurturing Friends
II SUMMER
Getting Started
Keeping Going
Finishing Up
III AUTUMN
A Pleasant Surprise
A Shocking Discovery
The Mystery Unfolds
IV WINTER
Search for Significance
The Villain and the Treasure
In Search of a Vision
 
Epilogue
I
SPRING
HAVING FRIENDS

M y name is Wilhelm Reichenbach III. I was born the year John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier. I point that out because, in a way, I almost could have been their son. Everyone called my grandfather “Wilhelm” or “Mr. Wilhelm” and my father “Will.” But everyone calls me “Billy.” That tells you that your parents give you your legal name, but everyone else gives you your real name. And that’s the one that really sticks and really stings if you try to take it off.
I was born at a time when people had started trying to not appear to be prejudiced. The Mississippi Legislature had just passed a law providing “separate but equal” school facilities for black and white children. And for the second consecutive year, there had actually been no lynching. Racial bias was such a charged issue that President Eisenhower felt compelled to establish a fifteen-member government contract committee to discourage religious and racial discrimination.
The Civil Rights Act was passed about nine or ten years after I was born. I don’t remember exactly without looking it up. At the same time, Senator McCarthy was reportedly raising a royal ruckus over his conviction that communists were hiding in every nook and cranny. Even the talented and beloved Charlie Chaplin left the country because his loyalties came under scrutiny.
I suppose all prejudice has its roots in some reality of one sort or another. After all, we had just ended the Korean War, and Joseph Stalin, Russia’s most powerful dictator in history, had just died. But even now, sixteen years later, war drags on unmercifully over there in Viet Nam.
And I pray to God it ends before I am old enough for them to snatch me up in the draft. As far as I’m concerned, old guys in Washington, DC, should not be allowed to send young guys to get killed in their egotistical wars. If righteousness ever prevails, those self-serving political prigs will come to their senses and outlaw the draft.
All that said, I don’t know what makes the ignorant idealists of my generation think we can do any better than anyone else has. Prejudice is as old as time. And even though God hasn’t always condoned it, I bet more people have been killed in his name than for any other single reason. Oh, I expect we will pass laws and such, but you can’t legislate feelings because if you could—I’ll get into that later, if I don’t forget.
As you can see, I’m somewhat of a history buff, but the irony is that history is my worst subject in school. Our history teachers don’t get it as far as I’m concerned. They pay no attention to the relevance of anything. And I, for one, am not going to waste my time trying to memorize all those trivial dates so I can just regurgitate them on a test and then forget them the next day.
I just turned sixteen, and if nothing else, I hope knowing about history serves as a useful conversation piece for meeting girls. Like every other guy my age, I devote a generous share of my time to obsessing about girls. It’s not that I meet many girls, mind you, but I’ll be ready when the opportunity presents itself.
But unlike most other guys my age, I’m not really interested in meeting a lot of girls. I have eyes for one girl, and I haven’t really had the chance to lay my best stuff on her yet. She is always with Stan the Man. I’ll tell you more about him and her, Autumn Winters, later.
Within a couple of weeks of my sixteenth birthday, I got my driver’s license. I waited a respectable two weeks so I would at least appear credible to the police. I could have passed the exam the day I turned sixteen because understanding the rules of driving is a cinch. And I, like all the other guys around here, had been driving for years. The year I was born, 70 percent of the drivers on the road were males.
My generation of young men have grown up driving either his dad’s tractor, car, or pickup truck. Now that I have a car, even though it is nothing to brag about, with a license and an after-school job, I might add, I’m all set to take Autumn out. Several things stand in the way, however. Not the least among them includes the fact that my car isn’t the coolest. And I have this other problem: My acne flares up intermittently, usually at the most inopportune times.
I’m telling you all this stuff because I think you need to know where I’m coming from when you meet my friends. They are not the regular sort of people, and you probably wouldn’t believe that a respectable dude, like myself, would actually enjoy the kind of guys I pal around with. But I have to tell you that I’m never more myself than when I am with my buddies.
It’s because I have a lot of interests and talents. For one, I like to hunt and fish. I joined the Field and Stream Club at school so I could mix it up with the other guys in my class with similar interests. But most of them weren’t all that interested in hunting and fishing as far as I could see. I think they just wanted something to put on their resumes to help them get into college. A couple of the club members actually got into a fight over which one would be president.
I went to a couple of meetings and pretty much decided that there are two kinds of people in this world: talkers and doers. I am the latter when it comes to outdoor activities, and I think it’s fair to say that most of them were not. So I just quit. I didn’t bother to say goodbye because I don’t think they even realized I was a member.
Another interest of mine is sports, pretty much anything with a ball in it. Give me a ball—any kind, any size—and I can run with it. I have always done well in gym class, so I figured I should try out for a varsity sport. But then I got this car I told you about. Then, of course, I had to get a job to support the car, and well, you know the rest.
Initially, I was thinking that if I went out for varsity sports, maybe I could have impressed Autumn by beating out Stan the Man for a first-string position. But even if I would have gotten a date with the girl of my dreams, I wouldn’t have had wheels to take her anywhere. So now that I have the car and not the varsity endorsement, I guess I’ll have to find another way to get the girl.
Then I have my music. I see music as a very private thing, sort of like my relationship with God. Once you write a song and perform it or even perform a song written by someone else, you have exposed a very intimate part of yourself. So you’d better be ready for the fallout.
Until now, except during hunting season, I’ve always come home, opened my guitar case, taken out the Martin guitar my dad left me (when he left Mom and me), and worked on a Glen Campbell song or some other hit. Depending on my mood, I have worked on writing songs of my own. Music is one of the best media to express one’s feelings or impress girls, if I ever have the opportunity and can work up the courage.
Trust me, I have plenty of testosterone to go around, but even real men get the blues sometimes. That’d be a great title for a song, come to think of it, for someone like Merle Haggard to write and sing. Now all that information is about as intimate a revelation that I’m going to share with you. So keep that to yourself if you don’t mind.
But enough about my interests. If I’m not careful talking about things that interest me, I will flat bore you. And there is nothing more boring than someone who insists on talking about himself all the time. Instead, let’s get back to my friends.
It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m outside shooting basketball at the net-less hoop my mom let me nail to the side of the house with no windows. Vernon pulls up in his ’57 Chevy, sounding real cheery. It’s a relatively-warm spring day; the snow has just melted. Just when Vernon hops out of the car, the ball hits a muddy spot on the dirt court, makes a “tic” sound, and just sticks to the spot where I last dribbled.
I stop to retrieve the ball, and my feet skid out from under me, landing me squarely on my butt. Vernon slaps the ground with the palms of his hands without even bending his knees, laughing in that strange, high-pitched timbre that little people have. He keeps laughing as he waddles toward the court on those compressed legs of his, waving his short pudgy arms.
“Hey, man, if you’d been concentrating on the court instead of daydreaming abo