The Mindstorm Chronicles:
Chapter Five
A work of fiction? A work of non-fiction? The work of insanity?
You decide.
As I was saying, my dog was enough company for me most of the time. Well, along with my mother, of course, who had just as much time on her hands as I did, and didn't mind spending it with me whenever I wanted to learn something, or whenever I was just bored. Growing up a farm girl, she knew more ways to entertain your mind than anyone else that I ever knew.
She knew every kind of riddle and puzzle, all kinds of jokes and card tricks, and she allowed her thoughts to be all her own, profound and deep, even if it would only be years later that I understood how exceptional she was in that way. For all I knew all mothers were like that, and I suspect that a good many really are. She respected me enough to let me think about things which most grown ups wouldn't have bothered teaching to someone my age. So, I suppose that there is something to be said for boredom, that it often leads to things like creativity. And discussion.
One night we were talking about telepathy and I challenged her to prove that she could suggest things to people that way. She said alright, then wrote down something on a piece of paper and said that I would do it. She said is was something that I never, ever did, but that she wished that I would. So I sat there intent on not doing anything at all just to see. But wouldn't you know it, after awhile I became restless and fidgety and the first thing I did was put the top back on the ketchup bottle, just as she said. That's what was written on the piece of paper.
Not that she would do that kind of thing alot, just whenever she wanted people to go home.
Before we had moved out to the old fox farm in the hills there between Moonridge and Big Bear City, we'd rented a cabin in 'Bear City that belonged to a Polish family that had seven kids. They became our good friends, and if you can imagine what it was like to go from just me and the dog to the nine of us whenever they'd visit, well, you'd think the circus had arrived in town. They were great people, very kind, very thoughtful, and very smart. One of the two girls was about my age. And I had my first crush on her.
One night, when they had visited us at the cabin that we had rented there, before moving out to Fox Farm Road, the mother of the seven kids from who we had rented the house began to tell my mother about having been in a concentration camp during the big war. She was just a young girl then, and the Nazis had come to their town and rounded up all the young women and took them away to make prostitutes of them, not that I would have known what that meant, but later my mother told me enough about it, something like that they were forced to be wives for people who didn't have wives, sort of thing. Because she was a nurse and had medical skills they put her to work in a concentration camp. She had tried to escape with some other girls by swimming across a river, but she got caught up in what she thought was some sort of sea weed or something, only to find out that she'd become entangled in human intestines. They caught the girls who had tried to flee.
She talked for hours and hours about all of that, as if she could never say enough about it. About how she was forced to watch them do cruel things to people but couldn't do anything about it. And about how they didn't know that any of this was going to happen, how they just ended up on a train going somewhere and were taken into the camps. That's when she showed us the numbers that were tattooed on her arm. All of that was as horrifying as it was interesting to a boy who wasn't even six years old yet. I didn't sleep so well that night, I was experiencing emotions I had never had before, and had no idea just what to call them. But I tried not to think about it too much, except that I finally remembered who Nazis were from the old war movies that I'd seen. And I was proud as could be that my country fought against such things.
So I didn't come to all of this Nazi spy business without any understanding at all, though like most folks I had no idea how anyone could ever be so mean in the first place. I had an older brother, so I understood mean. But I didn't understand about, nor had I ever even heard the word cruelty. Maybe I had heard it in the movies, and from my sister, but truth be told, there were a lot of words that I didn't understand in the movies.
And lots of words that my sister said that I didn't know what they meant. She was much older.
It wasn't until we moved to Fox Farm Road that my mother turned up one day with a Tricolor Collie puppy which I wanted to name Laddie, just because I loved the movie "Lassie", which I'd only ever seen in black and white. And everyone in those days would say, "Oh! You have a Lassie Dog!" And I would correct them by saying no, we had a Laddie dog. My mother thought that he might be part wolf because of the way he sort of hung his nose over the edge of his water bowl when he'd take a drink. Anyway, we were practically inseparable from the very first day. And as he grew we found him to be really smart. Whenever our flatland friends would come up for the weekend, often with other members of our family who were still living in Lil' Miss, my Dad would take us all out to hike in the woods somewhere, and that dog would liked to have worked himself to death running up and down the line, keeping us all together. Up to the front he would go and grab the lead persons sleeve and gently tug to slow them down, and once that was accomplished he'd run to the end of the line and hurry up the slower ones.
He was a great bodyguard as well. If ever anyone ever began to play fight he would separate them. All you would have to do is hold up a fist like you were going to punch somebody and you were going to have to deal with that dog first. But being as I was the youngest, and the closest with Lad, he always listened to me first. My brother was quite a bit older than me and all I ever had to do was say, "Get 'em, Lad!" and that dog was all over him whenever he tried to pick on me. Of course, Laddie always listened to my Mom, as well. After all, she fed him more often than we did. He learned all of the usual dog tricks, but never seemed to feel too obliged to perform them either. Sometimes I thought that he was every bit as smart as anyone else, and maybe even smarter.
Sometimes in the summer we'd go down the hill and spend some time in Lil' Miss. The suburbs were noisy and smelly, but full of action everywhere. I'd catch up with my best friend and neighbor, who was Navajo, and along with all the otherkids who were coming by tosee us we'd go out into "the jungle" nursery and play Army and get as dirty as kids could ever hope to get. My sister was fond of taking me to movies and reading me stories at night, she introduced me to A.A. Milne's Now We Are Six when I had just turned that age. She was always protective of me and stood up for me every time. Being high school age, she didn't have much use for the mountains, all of her friends were in Downey, and so she stayed there with my Dad and Granny, and sometimes my older brother, who seemed to be content in either place, but ended up liking the mountains more than the flatlands. Our folks let us decide in which place we would like to live, but I was always going wherever my Mom went, and so did Lad.
The city was a much busier place and I didn't have time to worry about aliens or Nazi spies or any such things. Only once do I remember when I was a kid the elder alien trying to speak with me when I was there. But I was too busy enjoying the business of city dwelling, all my friends and family, catching up with the TV and so forth, and I didn't want to become worried right then about anything, and the once that I did try and set apart some time for a discussion kept getting interrupted by one person or the next, and so whatever it was would just have to wait. Besides, I was just a kid, and something about being a kid in the city just made me feel so much less important than I did in the mountains where one could hike all day and not see another human being anywhere. So I would usually tell them that, well, if it were really important they should talk to my Dad, he would know better than I did anyway. To which the alien, once again, in my minds eye, just seemed perplexed. And in fact the alien came back to me and said something to the effect that my Dad didn't really understand, but I would have none of it at that point. I thought it would make me seem crazy to go having these silent conversations right about then when everyone seemed to want my attention.
To be clear about all of this, my father and I never discussed aliens in my whole life. There was once when I was much older when the subject came up and he gave me a very serious look, but no talk about aliens. And when he passed away everyone was wondering if he had worked for the government or something. People had little stories about mysterious calls, limousines, getting things past airport security, the things he used to know and so on. But although to me he seemed to know so much more about the world than anyone else that I knew, he never mentioned anything to me about such things, although some times it was if between us there were things unspoken about something going on. For all I knew, his only involvement with anything of the kind was when he was a SCUBA diver repairing war torn ships in Pearl Harbor, or that he was a deputy sheriff so that he could perform Civil Defense duties during the war. But folks were right, that he had a mysterious side to him. Somehow, he could even carry his gun on a plane. But I'm not sure to this day what any of that was really about, although I've heard some interesting things via telepathy, but at a time when, quite frankly, I was just overwhelmed by everything, and can't be entirely sure about what I'd heard.
I have a really good memory. You know, when I was just two we had a monkey who used to steal my lolly pops from a string of them tied to my high chair. But I didn't know about monkeys, so I thought that he was an older brother or an adult or something, and that he knew what he was doing, I didn't. But I'll never forget the guilty look on his face when he would do it, or the day my mother caught him at it.
End Chapter Five
No comments:
Post a Comment