Snippets from my next book:
"Napoleon's Great Escape"
(This is the first of a series of snippet's going into a book I'm writing for my children, my grandchildren, and hopefully for soon-arriving great grand son, because circumstances have prevented them from getting to know me as they should. I hope to add more snippets over time, some of which are personal and which may be uninteresting to you, but maybe not. This one is long, but I'm betting after the first few paragraphs you won't put it down. It is a story I understand is still being passed around by the new kids on the playgrounds of Hernando Grammar School. Get ready to smile. And understand, this first story is totally and absolutely true ... except for those parts which are not. Enjoy) 404330
RL was the son of a prominent Brooksville family who owned a
successful furniture store and sold low-cost furniture to the folks of Hernando
County, most of whom could not afford much else. Mr. L, his father, would sell furniture to
anyone for a dollar down and a dollar a week and if the debt went south, he
would just send his man, Maynor, out to confiscate the furniture and bring it
back to the storeroom. Mr. L. would then sell it to someone else. No hard
feelings.
RL was the second son, the first having died in a tragic car
accident years earlier. The accident
saddened the entire town because Andy, the brother, was a popular star football
player who in his high school senior year received scholarship offers from over
a dozen universities because of his athletic prowess. It was a very sad tragedy for both the family
and the community.
The accident changed RL’s mother in such a way that she became
more protective of RL than perhaps she otherwise would have been. This was a
good thing for RL’s friends because it meant access to lots of interesting
things she would get for him to keep him close by. Things that would not only stimulate
his young mind but also keep him within the universe of her protective eyes.
So, RL’s house was always a fun place for a bunch of 10 and
11-year-olds because they could go upstairs and be pretty much left alone to do
whatever they wanted, that is if it didn’t make too much noise or cause his
mother to call the fire department.
For reasons lost in the wear of time, RL at one point
acquired a huge red rooster he named Napoleon and which soon became a constant
source of intrigue to RL and his friends, since none of them had ever been
presented with an opportunity to inspect a live chicken close up, rooster or
otherwise. Napoleon’s colorful strutting and roosting presence in the rafters
of the family’s closed garage presented an interesting and near overwhelming dilemma
for the boys’ inquisitive young minds.
Though they knew with virtual certainty that Napoleon was a rooster
because of its gender-specific plumage but there was no other apparent
component of the bird’s anatomy they could identify that irrefutably declared
it to be male.
This conundrum created much mystery and unresolved debate
among the boys. None of them, however,
were so brave as to suggest they should engage the rooster mano a mano, which is
what it would take if a closer look were to be had. And it would doubtlessly
cause a tremendous amount of cackling and squawking which would surely arouse the
always-not-so-very-far-away attention of RL’s mother.
RL, nonetheless, being ever imaginative in devising
strategies for solving such complex perplexities, determined one day that they
should render Napoleon somehow unconscious because that was the only way they
were going to safely and discretely get a first-hand, detailed look at that
particular part of the bird’s anatomy which was the object of their interest,
and determine if, and indeed, what actually existed under all those red and
black feathers.
This idea caused much excitement among the pubescent boys
because aside from never having put anything to sleep, they were going to be
able to accomplish in the interest of greater science what their mothers might
otherwise consider highly inappropriate.
Their mothers, the boys’ rationale went, never mentioned roosters in
their sometimes-oblique conversations about such matters so they weren’t really
defying any motherly edicts forbidding same.
So, then the discussion turned to the ways of putting
Napoleon “under.” Charlie suggested taping his nose and beak closed long enough
for him to pass out, but after some debate and a closer look at Napoleon’s beak
it was determined undoable because it would take all of them to hold him down, the
ruckus would surely trigger Ms. L.’s interest in what was going on, and, “What
if it killed him?” Sonny asked somberly.
Well, in 1954, the federal drug administration, or its
equivalent if such even existed back then, was apparently not too concerned
about who might buy Ether, the gas with which doctors put you to sleep just
before doing things to you that you don’t want to be awake to see. Consequently, even a 12-year-old could buy a
bottle “over the counter” down at Bacon’s Drug Store which was on the corner
right across Main Street from the Hernando State Bank which, in turn, happened
to be right next door to RL’s family furniture store.
So the next afternoon after school, RL walks into
Bacon’s saying he needed some liquid Ether, paid $1.75 and walked right out
with a six-ounce bottle as if it was a perfectly reasonable thing a 12-year-old
might need for a school project.
In
addition to saving his allowance sometimes, and being pretty bright, RL could
also be pretty ballsy when it involved science.
The sense on the afternoon of the great experiment was that
something momentous was about to happen.
RL, Sonny, RS and Charlie, a skinny little kid who was famous on the
school playgrounds for being the first to actually acquire and smoke a
cigarette and who walked like he had stiff legs, were all very solemn as they
coaxed Napoleon from his cage in the garage into a grocery sack. Napoleon
seemed ok with the sack so with great disciplined nonchalance, they secreted
him up the stairs without earning any sidelong suspicion from RL’s mother who
was sitting in the living room talking to her good friend Margaret D. and
drinking diet Tab.
Napoleon was calm for the whole trip from the garage, up the
stairs, and into RL’s bedroom, until, that is, the sack was opened, and he got
a good strong whiff of the Ether coming at him in RL’s hand. At that point, he lurched upward in a mighty
storm of flailing wings and would’ve become airborne had it not been for Sonny,
who, just as the room filled with wings and feathers, beaned the rooster
momentarily senseless with a fungo bat from the corner closet giving RL just
enough time to leap on the hapless bird with a pink, ether-soaked washcloth,
covering his head completely as the other two boys helped hold him down. Trying to muffle their glee at avoiding a
near disaster, they held him there until his eyes rolled backwards in his head
and he became still.
Nevertheless, Ms. L., ever sensitive to virtually anything that
might be alien to her routinized existence, heard the scuffling from RL’s
bedroom which was located directly above where she was still sitting and chatting
with Ms. D. Bumps and scrapings from up
there weren’t really all that unusual in a house typically full of young boys
but something told her she might should check it out anyway.
Just in case, she thought, as Andy’s face
flashed through her mind just beneath her consciousness.
“RL?” she called from the bottom of
the stairs.
The boys heard nothing at first through the giggling and
gasping at what they had just experienced but RL clearly heard the weight of
his mother’s first step on the stairs as she began her ascent to his room. Panic transformed his face from laughter to
fear and quiet swept over the now disheveled room as he tried to whisper as loudly
as he dared, “Mom’s coming!”
He grabbed the comatose bird from Charlie who was holding it
real close so he could see what had happened to its eyeballs and tossed it in
the closet where Sonny had found the fungo bat, slamming the door just in time
to see his mother poke her head around the hallway door and look inside.
“RL, what’s going on in here. Is everything alright?”
“Sure, mom, we’re just horsing around,” he said as
nonchalantly as any 12-year-old could under the circumstances.
Mothers have a silent, infallible sense that triggers
movement of the cilia in their inner ear when one of their children is being
less than forthright. This movement in
turn triggers an electric current so minute as to be undetectable by even the
most sensitive medical instruments but is yet powerful enough to send ripples
of concern throughout a mother’s delicate nerve endings. It is probably the same mechanism that allows
some humans to see ghosts when others do not.
All mothers have this phenomenon. No other humans do. When it comes to their sons, mothers can also
sense the presence of an inappropriate odor even if the concentration is less
than the equivalent of one grain of sand among all the grit of the Gobi Desert.
“RL, I said what’s going here. What’s that smell?” this time
dropping the, I’m-just-checking-on-you tone of voice and replacing it with an
increasingly firm monotone.
This, RL knew, was a moment of revelation, the dénouement, a
defining point in his life. He knew from
past experience he would either be able to convince his mother at that precise instant
that all in the room was innocent and wholesome, or he would not, and the earth
and all its inhabitants it would suffer the wrath of her determination to the
contrary.
At exactly that point, Charlie, whose eyes sort of always
bulged outward anyway even during moments of low stress, said, “I don’t smell
anything,” his pupils appearing as pinpoints in a sea of white, looking
anything but innocent.
RL’s heart fell. For
all his mother’s weaknesses, being stupid she was not. The room reeked with the sharp effervescence
of ether pluming from the pink washcloth lying in front of the closet door,
behind which lay Napoleon in a very confused state. Then, with even greater precision and
certainty than a military homing device, she pointed directly at the pink
washcloth and said sharply, “RL, what’s that?”
As if on cue when her accusing digit brought all their eyes
to the pink washcloth indicting their fading innocence beyond question,
Napoleon tried to stand in the darkness of the closet but with his brain cells
still swimming he made only a frumping sound as he lurched drunkenly against
the other side of the door, his head falling into an empty shoe.
RL’s mother was normally a calm person, absolutely assured
that she had her world in control and could easily outwit her very bright son
in his childish games any day of the week.
So it was with a hidden smile and thinking boys-will-be-boys her hand
went to the closet doorknob to reveal to the boys their own secrets which they
should not try to keep from the mothers of the world anywhere and, before RL or
any of the now fully paralyzed boys could stop her, flung open the closet door
to see just exactly what it was she now knew for certain was not right.
The sudden burst of light seemed to Napoleon like a bolt of
lightning, fire from a black sky that was about to render him unto
charcoal. Yet only semi-conscious but
with Herculean determination, he sprang through the opening, a screaming
Phoenix out of the darkness that had held him, straight into the once calm face
of RL’s mother.
What happened next became legend among all the kids at
Brooksville Grammar School as well as some of the teachers there who later
heard the story from Ms. D.
The human brain has a penchant for making moments of sheer
terror last much longer than they do in fact.
Scenes become liquid, slowing until it is possible to describe and
remember each frame which can then be run forward and backward, over and over
again. It is this same quality that
allows someone who wishes to embellish upon an original event to be very
precise and convincing when describing the event to someone who wasn’t there. Accurate depiction of factual history is a
fault of adulthood and is not a constraint found in the minds of young boys who
seem to know from birth that history belongs to those who tell the best
stories. Thus, the legend of Napoleon
was not fixed like facts on a video recorder that can be repeated faithfully over
and again. Over the ensuing years, , the story evolved each
time it was told, even by those who were there and who later grew up to become
adults and who, by attaining that status, should have been constrained by the
facts but weren’t. The difference
between what actually happened and what was embellishment has, therefore,
become indistinguishable because time has a way of messing with human brains
that way.
Each of the boys witnessed what happened next in slow motion
and this is how the story became a legend.
As RL’s mother opened wide the closet door, out of its darkness exploded
the angriest, half crazed, semi-conscious, 8-pound Rhode Island Red rooster
the five people in that room could never have imagined. The flurry of feathers and squawking was only
slightly less remarkable than the whoop and scream that came involuntarily from
the lungs of RL’s mother when that feathered furry engulfed her face. The terror of it all fairly sucked the
strength from RS, Charlie and Sonny’s legs sending them to their knees at what
they beheld.
RL’s mother threw her arms up in defensive terror and
immediately lost consciousness, falling backward onto RL who then fell onto his
bed as he tried to stand and meet whatever would come next in this rapidly
deteriorating situation. What came next
was his mother, like an NFL defensive end running backwards, flattening him on
the bed so hard it knocked the breath out of him. By this time Napoleon, fully airborne, was
tearing around and around the room like a pterodactyl squawking so loud it was
astonishing to all that heard it.
All the noise had clearly alarmed Ms. D. Her heart pounding, she labored up the stairs
and burst into the bedroom, already more frightened than she had ever been in
her whole life by all the sounds and commotion, to find her good friend lying
backward and unconscious on her son who was choking and gasping, while a huge
angry bird tore about the room’s limited airspace and three little boys with
eyes as big as Tokyo cowered in the corner.
Napoleon, at that moment, noting the door was open but still without full recovery of
his navigational skills, flew straight into Ms. D.’s ample bosom causing him to
fall to the floor stunned and Ms. D. to careen backward out of the doorway she
had just entered where she landed spread eagle on a University of Florida
Fighting Gator throw rug.
During this brief moment of stillness, Sonny, Charlie and RS
broke from the shackles of fear that held them and bolted from that terrible
scene of chaos out the bedroom door, followed by Napoleon whose senses were by
now recovering quickly.
They went down
the stairs taking three steps at a time just under the whooshing of Napoleon’s
wings.
Once out of the house, napoleon flew straight up into the
cosmos and disappeared. The two boys
fled, each in different directions to where they lived several miles away and
where they went straightaway to their respective bedrooms, locked the door, and
did not come out for dinner claiming they did not feel well.
Meanwhile, RL who was able to somehow extract himself from
his mother’s considerable weight stood trying to catch his breath and crying as
Ms. D. grabbed the pink washcloth and tried to wipe RL’s mother’s face who,
upon opening her eyes momentarily, swooned again unconscious, staying that way
until the EMT's arrived and took RL’s mother and Ms. D. to the emergency room
where they were admitted for severe emotional trauma and distress and not
released for a week.
It was a long time before Sonny and RS returned to RL’s
house and Charlie never did, which was probably a good thing for all concerned.
As for Napoleon, he was never seen again.
For years, though, the kids at Brooksville Grammar would recount again
and again, ever evolving, the incredible story of his miraculous escape.
***
