Bennett Snake and Other Short Stories

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 979-8-3509-1174-9
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 308 Seiten

The book is a collection of ten short fiction stories.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bennett, Richard

Leseproben

The One Who Got Away The forecast was for rain showers, but the sun was still shining that cool Saturday morning in October so James Slovatsky decided to go mushroom hunting and hopefully beat the rain. He did not want to waste one of his two weekend days off hanging around home. He could have gone to the gym and done his weight lifting routine, but this day he felt more like moving, walking. October was the best month for mushroom gathering in the Pacific Northwest, at least for the mushrooms James was interested in, which were chanterelles and morels, both easily identified, and matsutakes, which were another matter. White and large as they aged you had to know what you were doing. There were other large white mushrooms in these forests that could kill you. Sometimes his girlfriend Lynnella would accompany him, but she remained in Seattle that weekend. Lynn and he were engaged to be married the following summer. He would hunt in Stanton State Park where he liked to leave the trails and venture cross country. Traveling alone off-trail in the forests west of the Cascade Range was potentially hazardous with its tangle of downed trees to be climbed over or crawled under. Fully decayed logs often hid a void beneath and walking across such mounds one could step through and sprain an ankle. Pushing through patches of salal berries could snag one’s feet and cause a fall. Furthermore, because of all the detours one had to make, it was easy to get disoriented and lost. So most users of the park stayed strictly on the trails. But James enjoyed both the exercise and adventure of it all. He was very careful and traveled with two walking sticks for balance, which he generally picked up enroute, and in his day pack was a thin rain jacket, a compass, water and trail mix, and a small plastic bag for storing the mushrooms. Strapped to his belt in its sheath was a knife for cutting the mushroom stems. This state park was large. A main trail went for about three miles in a generally north/south direction with parking lots at both ends and shorter trails branching off in loops that returned to the main trail. James did not drive to either lot. He lived in a cottage a short walk from his landlord’s house. Many years previous his landlord, who owned land abutting the western border of the park had put in a trail from his house that connected to one of the trails at the boundary of the park. This park trail was called the Bent Tree Trail. James had permission to use his landlord’s trail and he did so that Saturday. He wore a black hoodie sweatshirt, blue jeans, and hiking boots. He was a tall man (6’2”), 35 years old, and handsome in a rough sort of way with pock marked cheeks bequeathed to him from a difficult adolescence. It was about 10:30 that morning when James came out of the southern entrance of Bent Tree loop, and proceeded south along the main trail of the park. In the distance, he saw a solitary figure approaching. As she came closer he discerned her to be a teenage girl. She struck him as about sixteen. Being the biology teacher at the local high school for the little seaside town of Willard, he was good at guessing a teenager’s age. She was wearing blue jeans, running shoes, a buttoned plaid flannel shirt, and a green knit cap from under which flowed vibrant red hair, straight and not quite shoulder length. Her lightly freckled face was exceedingly pretty. The girl reminded him of Lynnella, who had similar red hair, worn the same way, but was taller than this kid, who was maybe 5’5. James knew she did not go to his high school because he would have noticed her. Perhaps she went to the local private school that took in female students from generally wealthy families from around the nation. As she came closer yet she kept her gaze down on the trail, and it was obvious she was lost in her own thoughts and probably did not wish any interaction. Nonetheless, James said “Hi” to her as she passed him. She glanced up at him, did not acknowledge the greeting, and moved rapidly along. This did not surprise him. He knew teenage girls could be very shy, and perhaps she was just being cautious. For her, he probably was a rather imposing older male and they were alone in the woods with no one else in sight. Probably many people stayed away this day because of the weather forecast. As he resumed his walk he wondered what was she doing alone out here? Serious crime was rare in Willard, but James had a prescient thought that if he had a teenage daughter he would not care for her to be walking here unaccompanied. Continuing on the trail, that was the last thought he had about her. James liked to talk with animals, especially wild animals. If he saw a male barn owl up on a branch gazing down at him, he might say, “Why you’re a handsome fellow! Just keeping an eye on who walks by today?” Or seeing a chipmunk scamper across the trail to hide on the other side of a tree, he might say, “You’d better hide little guy, I might try to get you!” Rationally, he fully understood that probably the only thing these animals cared about in an encounter with him was that he not come too close. But he liked to anthropomorphize animals nonetheless. Some of the “higher” mammals, like the great apes, dogs and cats, and probably horses, and some other species were capable of reading human emotions. Hell, Koko the gorilla had even learned sign language and could express her feelings and gauge the emotions of her handlers. James had earned his Bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz. His concentration was zoology because he enjoyed learning about the behavior of an animal. This was somewhat in opposition to the reductionist direction of the biology department there where the animal was reduced to its genes and proteins—its biochemistry. In this regard he was close to philosopher Thomas Nagel whose famous essay What Is It Like To Be A Bat James had read in the one philosophy course he had taken at Santa Cruz. James wished he could get into the heads of the animals he watched. What did it feel like to be an owl, to be a chipmunk, or any other conscious being? Putting Nagel’s nearly fifty year old essay into the neurological science of the present, what it feels like for the bat is probably nothing like action potentials where sodium or potassium atoms pop in and out of neuronal axons, and neurotransmitters leap across synapses. This day he had as yet seen no animals but heard a woodpecker in the distance. Probably it was a Pileated woodpecker which were common in the area, and quite possibly the same animal that had the annoyingly funny habit of creating a racket on a downspout at James’s cottage, thereby broadcasting to all the females in the area that he was a mighty bird and more than ready to have a go at it. As the crow flies, James did not live far from here. Just a week previous shortly after dawn on a Saturday morning, after a late night of hot sex, Lynnella awoke and groaned, “O crap! Stentor (as she had named him) is back! All I don’t need at the moment is another testosterone saturated male!” She then pulled a pillow over her head and James went out in his undershorts with a broom and shooed the little love-hungry critter away then returned and wrapped his arms around Lynn, who whispered a sleepy, “Thank you, sweetie,” then rolled away from him. Sometimes unfettered sleep is more appealing than snuggling. Kara had parked her car, a cute little Mini Cooper, at the south end lot, about half an hour earlier, and proceeded north on the main trail. Though Kara disliked receiving gifts from her repulsive new stepfather, what teenager could spurn a brand new car right after having passed her driving exam at sixteen years old, the youngest legal age to drive in this state. She was here this day in October, which was her father’s birthday, in remembrance of him. Her father, John McCracken, had died a miserable suffering death from esophageal cancer when Kara was ten. Kara had loved her father deeply and he had loved her, his only child and daughter, with equal intensity. Sometimes Kara and her father would walk in this park before visiting Kara’s grandfather, who owned five acres of land in the woods, not far from the seashore in Willard. Kara’s father and two brothers had grown up there. Both brothers now lived in other parts of the country. When Grandpa died, John and Leslie entered into an agreement to buy out his brothers over time, and when John died the contract continued with Leslie, who in the desperate times after her husband’s death had rented the lovely two-story rustic log cabin home to a family of seven for the past six years. They were now being evicted with only one month’s notice by Kara’s asshole stepfather, Morton, who now managed the family’s finances. Kara and Leslie and Morton were now renting an insipid palatial house just outside of Willard until an equally insipid palatial house could be built on Grandpa’s lovely land, and the beautiful old log cabin house demolished. As Kara walked along she momentarily reflected on the tall man who had said “Hi” to her. These backwoods characters were so presumptuous with their greetings. She could walk the sidewalks of Seattle all day long with no one greeting her. That was how it should be. Proper. When she walked around Willard, not that there was anything worth seeing, some goofball hippie looking woman or other was always smiling at her or saying hello. How she missed living in Seattle where she had lots of friends and there was plenty to do. When she complained to her mother about the state of affairs here, Leslie had told her she’d read in the little town...