The Acolytes of Crane (Theodore Crane, #1)(26)

She always had a way with words. After all, she is a grandma; comforting was her job. I found out soon enough what she was waiting to tell me, but not from her own lips.

She was right on one thing. I was different.

I furiously thought of an escape from my dour mood. I had it! For the last several years, my rich uncle always sent me fifty dollars for each of my birthdays. I had that money stashed away inside a T-ball trophy that I had on the top of my dresser. It was the perfect time to spend some of that money.

I skateboarded up to the Big-Mart and used the pay phone to call a cab. The cab arrived, and the driver asked, ‘Where to, sir?’

‘Taylors Falls,’ I said.

‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Why so far?’

I served him some lie about visiting my grandparents who retired there and wanted me to stay with them at their campsite near town.

As I read the driver’s expression, my only worry was that The Intervention, that unknown power, could intervene. I dismissed the thought. Its jurisdiction was obviously limited to my surroundings, and not my mind.

Hey. Maybe I was doing what it wanted me to do. That was precisely it, I figured. Perhaps, now, destiny was calling me. Travis’s obituary was the tipping point.

Fortunately, the cab driver bought it. ‘We got a long ride. Geez, you are going to have to pay half now. Twenty dollars up front, and pay the rest later. That is the deal,’ the driver requested, with his hand extended through the slot in the Plexiglas.

“After the driver spoke, I knew Lincoln was right about the slang word geez. I paid the man his money, and we left for Taylors Falls.”





7 THEODORE: K. T.





“The funneled sound of an awesome classic folk-rock band lifted me from my slumber. My eyes still shut, the foggy sensation of color at backs of my lids reverted from deep brown to a glowing orange.”

The roll of band’s fluid guitar solos and appealing vocals jarred uneasily with the off-tune pitch of the cab driver.

There was something familiar about waking up to the smell of an armpit. My vision went from a blur to clear, and I had a flash of Jason’s arm extended with his pit firing stench into my direction. I wanted so badly to be with him. His image faded away after I rubbed the sleep out of the corners of my eyes.

My neck was incredibly sore on both sides. I wiped the drool from the corner of my mouth.

My hot breath stank; the smell was not unlike that of the stench of sweat pouring out from a Muay Thai boxer after several rounds of fighting, combined with that of camel poop. The smell of my hot breath could not contend with the nostril-flaring, olfactory-nerve-depleting stench of the second-hand smoke of cheap cigars, the sickly artificial scent of a half-dozen vanilla air fresheners, and the ongoing perspiration of the cab driver, itself a manly-man-sweat-factory of death. Put simply, the cab and its operator reeked. For a moment, I thought about my dad. The cabby reminded me of him with his rough demeanor.

My dad had three important mottos. Of course, number one was; don’t ever eat the yellow snow. The rest were inherited by my great grandfather Willard: number two, you will not succeed in anything without a little hard work, and number three, trust is based on predicting from experience.

Whenever my father told me these three things, he fashioned his voice in a way such that he sounded like a newscaster. I was thankful that I had the pleasure to meet his granddaddy Willard before he passed away.

‘Well kid, the ride takes around an hour, and you have managed to take up fifty minutes of that by snoring. We are almost there. You sure you know your way around town?’ he asked.

Always having been escorted to and from the place, and having only been allowed to freely roam the campgrounds themselves, I really didn’t know much about the town of Taylors Falls itself. I only knew how to find the cliffs from the gas station, but even that was going to be difficult. I continued to put up a show of demonstrating maturity and confidence.

‘You can drop me off at the gas station,’ I said.

‘Whatever you say, sir. You have the dough, you do have more money right?’ he asked letting out a wild cackle that spun off into a coughing tangent. ‘I am only messing with ya, you little turkey.’ He continued driving, thumping at the steering wheel with his right thumb from time to time.


‘Yes sir, what happened to your neck?’ I asked as I pointed out the four-inch long scar across his hairy neck, beneath his ear.

He said, ‘Oh, that old thing? That is from shrapnel I caught in the bush. I am not talking about casualties from the lady-folk,’ he said, breaking to laugh over a joke that must have gone beyond me, because I didn’t laugh, ‘In ’Nam, I was doing a patrol through the jungle, and my battle buddy stepped out of formation onto a land-mine. Well, my poor buddy was cut clean in half, and I caught the rough edge of some shrapnel in my neck. The doc told me it was a metal shard from my buddy’s canteen! I almost lost my life to a canteen! Hit a centimeter away from my jugular. Well, it got me a ticket home. I’ve been driving this cab ever since.’

He had a huge lump of chewing tobacco protruding from his lip; there was slimy brown spit, teasing an exit near the corner of his mouth. One unexpected bump while driving, and it could have landed on the fur-covered steering wheel. I nearly heaved at the smell when he talked.

I asked him where he was from, and he told me originally that he lived in Palmyra, Missouri. He said he grew up on a cattle farm. Then he rambled about freemartin heifers and jersey cows.