HoW - OFWC Winners: 2012

Old-Fashioned Fiction Writing Contest
2012 Winners

1st Place: You Shall Be My Brother by Bill Lapham
2nd Place: Obsolete Medium by Bill Floyd
3rd Place: Two Dishes of Very Nice Salad by Amy Hale Auker

Gita M. Smith:

I believe in rewards for good writing and wanted to do something for our little online writers' community. So I laid out the contest, found a few good prize ideas and roped a few friends into judging the stories. They had no idea whose stories they were reading, either. Ten people entered (I'd hoped for more, I will confess) and, as promised, we're now printing the winners here on MuDJoB. I'd like to do it every year, or as long as I am employed and able to buy prizes.

Old-Fashioned Fiction Writing Contest: 1st Place

YOU SHALL BE MY BROTHER

by Bill Lapham

FRANCIS CAME HOME from Vietnam a changed man. He claimed the orange shit they dropped on the jungle made guys crazy. It could have been that, I suppose, or a thousand other things. Who knows what changes a man?
   Francis, not Frank, was my brother. He showed me how to get along in the world. We had fathers, but Mother didn’t know who they were. She said she carried Francis and me to delivery because she was making decent money at the time and thought it would be fun to have little babies around. Other potential siblings weren’t so “lucky.”
   After we grew up some, we started acting like little boys. Francis suffered considerable pain at the belt of Mother’s frustration with us. He was the oldest. I had to watch, she said, to “learn something.” The lesson escaped me.
   Francis drank beer before he went to Vietnam, but nothing like when he came home. There was a Before Vietnam Francis and an After Vietnam Francis. BVF was more or less normal, except for the scars. AVF was not normal, and had more scars. I have never seen a man drink so much, so fast, and not puke. He said American beer was too weak, so he fortified it with shots of Jim Beam and an occasional hit of blotter acid. He bought pot by the pound and sold what we didn’t smoke to buy more of the same. A “non-profit” high, he called it.
   After the Marines discharged him, he moved into a trailer outside Detroit with his Marine buddy Max. Together we called them FM. I still lived with Mother. They set up a big fish tank in the living room. I would usually find Francis staring at the fish, drinking beer and smoking dope with Max, who would be cleaning his gun. I always asked if I could have a beer on the way to the refrigerator, but they never replied. They never knew who put beer in the refrigerator. They never knew what belonged to whom.
   “Fuck ownership and shit, man.”
   They lived on unemployment checks, VA disability payments, pot ‘profits’, ‘gook noodles’, and old potato chips. They had a TV, but they hardly ever watched it.
   Stuart Granger and his wife Mary Kate lived next door. She was young and blonde, and he was young and blonde. It seemed like they were always kissing. When they weren’t working or sleeping, they were at FM’s, partying.
   Stuart was riding his dirt bike one day when he climbed a steep hill in the woods and fell into a newly poured basement. Carpenters found him the next day face down in the dried concrete. They used jackhammers to get his body out.
   Three days of funeral shit took their toll on Mary Kate. She ended up moving in with FM a couple of weeks after the funeral. She said she couldn’t sleep with Stuart’s ghost pacing the trailer in his underwear at night. Somebody burnt her trailer to the ground a week later. Trailer park management hired a crew from Detroit to clean up the melted remains, and nobody was ever charged with the crime.
   One day I brought Mother out to visit. She had wanted to see how Francis had “grown up” during the war, but she hadn’t made it to the front steps before he yelled at me to take her home. I complained that he ought to give Mother a chance to make amends, but he wouldn’t have it.
   “Bitch never sent me a single letter when I was in the shit, man.”
   I saw him in the kitchen cracking a beer and lighting a joint as I pulled out of the driveway. Mother cried all the way home, but it was hard for me to sympathize. You reap what you sow, I figured.
   The next night, Francis, Max, Mary Kate and I did some blotter. Max, who had spent a little time in Germany, was the disk jockey. He started with Hawkwind’s Brain Ticket, a vinyl LP. Max danced with Mary Kate, who looked too young to be a widow. Max looked like he had just come out of the bush, scarred and muscular. He had taken his shirt off revealing a huge spread eagle tattoo on his back. From wingtip-to-wingtip, shoulder-to-shoulder, printed in flowing script, were the words: “Where Were You?” There was a list of his dead friends. Below the list, across the small of his back, it said: Dak Pec, Vietnam, February 1970. Below that, tucked in his jeans, was his gun. Max had been in the hospital in Da Nang having a boil lanced during the battle of Dak Pec. He told me about it once when he was very drunk, and never mentioned it again.
   The music forced me and Francis out of the house; that, and the walls seemed to be melting. Outside, the street lamps showered pixilated glitter bits on the ground. Piles grew into giant cones and erupted in slow flowing lemonade. Our footsteps glowed and never faded away. Everything moved leaving rainbow trails in their wake. When the scene outside drove us back inside, the music would force us to go back outside. The front door revolved. It was a harrowing night. I don’t remember how I got back home.
   Later that same day, sometime after sunup, I think, Francis phoned to tell me Max was dead. He said he woke around noon, toured the trailer. His car was parked in the driveway and Mary Kate was asleep in her room alone, but no Max. He said he walked down to the lake where he and Max sometimes liked to sit and watch the sun come up. He found Max hanging from a tree branch. His gun and a step ladder lay on the ground under his feet. He had shot himself in the head and used the rope for insurance. Francis said they had seen guys survive headshots all fucked up.
   What bothered me most was that Max’s death never seemed to faze Francis. “He’s just dead,” he said.
   The day after we buried Max, Mary Kate, Francis and I were watching General Hospital when the phone rang. I answered it. Mother was slurring, said she had read Max’s obituary and was calling Francis.
   Francis wouldn’t take her call. “I got nothin’ for her, man,” he said.
   “He’s puking in the toilet,” I said, and hung up.
   Mary Kate lit a joint and passed it to Francis. He took a hit and passed it to me. Joints went around for the rest of the afternoon and well into the night. Every so often one of us got up to get cold beers. We ate everything in the kitchen that was edible. We toasted the ghosts of Stuart Granger and Pvt. Maxwell Connelly, USMC, (deceased) with shots of chilled Jim Beam. When Mary Kate passed out on the sofa, I covered her with a blanket. I remember seeing Francis polishing Max’s gun with a soft rag humming along with the national anthem on TV, sipping whiskey. The flag was waving in the black-and-white breeze.
   The announcer said it was the end of the broadcast day.

© William Lapham 2012

Bill Lapham is studying creative writing at Goddard College in Vermont. He teaches and tutors undergraduate writing at Davenport University. He lives in Brighton, Michigan.

Bill Lapham

THE POWER OF HER WORDS

   She got into my head with the power of her words and twisted my thoughts in pretzelnovel ways. The Samizdat of Mid-Twentieth Century Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: An Analysis of Popular Dissident Literature in a Modern Communist State moved me. It forced me out of my seat to walk in nervous circles, twitching. I felt anxious, like in that moment before delivering a speech when you come to realize there will be no substitutions.
   The power of her words came from the library. From their distribution and consumption, from the inspiration they fomented. I had stumbled on the title while binder-browsing with my head bent. From the moment I received her words inside me I understood them. It was then that knew I was fucked.
   I pictured the words flowing from her brain to her fingertips, across the electronic divide, and into the wide world with no defined destination. The blackness of the print blotted out the light and their shadows found comfort in my eyes. They got converted into signals my brain could understand, and produced meaning. She got one shot at making herself clear or leaving me behind forever, and she had gotten it right, at least for me. Ambiguity is an unstable state where meanings are lost. She made me think and I think she meant to.
   She flung my thoughts in diverse directions. Ideas were like her discarded lace clothing floating through the air and falling on lampshades in her bedroom. Her words have spanned time to take up residence in my head. Did she sit in her room to write during a summer morning thunderstorm in her pajamas? Did she sip piping hot Colombian coffee and breathe in the supercharged Leningrad air?
   She and I had been intimate, I knew. She shared her thoughts with me and I had agreed to go along. But it had been years since she had written them; could her meaning have been warped by war or her intentions perverted by the pause between them?
   Or maybe the breeze was just a breeze.
   She transmogrified herself, entered my head, influence me, persuaded me. Once she got inside, her words changed me, fucked with me, made me think about things I would not have considered in the absence of her agency. Her words wielded power and transformed me forever. I cannot undo this thing she has done. Now I know and I have no way of not knowing it.
   I am a gentle human being, impressionable and willing. She could do great harm or great good in the matter that was me.
   And that’s what made her a target for tyrants, the builders and keepers of gulags and starvation camps. To kill her words – their power and grace – they had to cancel her voice. To counter the danger of her immortality they shredded her books and burnt the shreds. They spilled their powdered ashes across the black northern sea.
   They thought they had to stop the flow of thoughts from her mind to mine. The greatest danger that they might be spread. But they couldn’t do that; the splendor had already been wrought between the teacher and the taught.
   A skeletal tree with rough bark armor, standing mindless and alone, snow drifting in its lee. They chained her to a place where bars set in stone guarded her uneasy sleep. A barren place of bare cells, crowded graves and flat gray light.
   But she had gotten in my head with the power of her words. She was in me. The damage had been done.

© William Lapham 2012

Bill Lapham is a student in the Goddard College low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program. His flash fiction and short stories have been featured here and at MudSpots, and at Six Sentences, Thinking Ten—A Writer’s Playground, and the Molotov Cocktail. His work has also appeared in several Six Sentences and Thinking Ten print anthologies, as well as Goddard College’s own peer-reviewed literary journal, the Pitkin Review. He lives in Brighton, Michigan.

Bill Lapham

An Homage to Trumbo

As combat operations go, this one sucked. On the morning of the third day, the squad inspected the weapons they had cleaned after the firefight the night before—M-4’s, 240’s, 203’s, the M-60. They ate chow then formed a huddle. Only the members of Weapons Squad—Baker, Brown, De Jesus, Callahan and Jakes—were in the huddle, no one else. They’d gather in a circle, wrap arms over each other’s shoulders and butt heads while an iPod sound system blasted Drowning Pool’s “Soldiers.” They’d shout the line: “On your feet/who’s with me,” leap into the air and body-slam. Then they’d shout the lines: “THIS is for the soldiers/THIS is for the soldiers” while punching each other in the chest with their hard-plastic knuckle gloved fists, usually at half power. Sometimes, when they were really jacked up on Red Bull and adderall, they’d switch to full power, and had to be stopped by the First Sergeant.
Those who observed the ritual thought the boys were crazy. But these five guys, who came from every corner of the United States, had been together for three combat tours, one in Iraq and now their second in Afghanistan. They had collected more medals for valor than any ten other guys in the division.
They thought leave to go back home was ‘soft shit’. It made warriors act like civilians, and they had no truck with civilians. Civilians had no clue what they did. That they might someday share their thoughts on the subject of war was unthinkable. Even embedded journalists had a hard time penetrating their thick exterior.
By the end of the song, the boys were dancing on a razor’s edge—they were combat ready.
Sergeant Baker led the squad on dismounted patrol that morning. They moved into the valley with their heads on swivels. Steep mountainsides stretched from the river to the sky like a giant V imprinted on the land. Each guy had a sector to scan for threats to the group. They were not waiting for somebody else to shoot first.
The patrol wore on and was relatively uneventful, boring even, until a flash of light illuminated the entirety of the space around them. For an instant, Baker didn’t think the sun could get that bright. It was as if what they had been walking in darkness, and this was suddenly daylight. In the next instant, Baker was smashed to the ground, the wind smashed from his lungs.

*

Sergeant Baker started feeling the pain three months later when he slow-woke in a hospital in Germany. He could hear noises, sounds like words from a language he hadn’t been taught, and doubted he could ever learn. The room looked like it had been submerged in a swimming pool recently violated by a fat boy doing a cannonball. He was cloaked in a bubble of ambiguity, and he would have panicked had he been aware enough to panic.
He and his boys had been known to guzzle a beer or two back in the world. Blackouts were not uncommon. But this was the blackout from hell—
When he woke, nothing remained still, everything moved. Objects seemed to float on unstable cushions of air. Nothing conformed to the nature of things he was accustomed to. A cacophony filled the room and irritated the tiny hairs in his ears, and on his arms and legs.
He wanted quiet, but all he got was noise.
He wanted to go back to sleep, but the air conditioner was blowing air; oxygen hissed; medical devices alarmed; word-sounds reverberated; an electronic voice spoke in a strange language outside his room. Something squeezed his arm, and then let go slowly. He felt a sharp, searing pain in his back and neck, like an enemy was still in the process of inflicting wounds with a bayonet, sticking and twisting.
He knew nothing: not where he was, or who he was, what he was looking at, or what he was hearing. His world was encrypted, staticky, and he had no key for the code. All he knew for sure was that he was hurt, and the pain was intense—
When he woke, someone was standing over him: an insubstantial, amorphous mass of humanness he could not bring into focus. The person-presence was speaking words, a name maybe, maybe his name, maybe not. He heard words, words he thought he knew, or knew a long time ago, a long time, a long—
When he woke, someone was standing over him yelling his name, or what he thought was his name. What he thought—
The rhythm of the sound had a familiar beat, like it was associated with him somehow. A body in a white lab coat was saying his name over and over again.
Why is he doing that? I’m right here, he thought. I can fucking hear you, man, he thought he said. Shut up or I’ll come off this bed and fucking ruin your day, whatever your name is.
Where are my guys?
He thought he was awake, finally, but not for long—
When he woke, the bodies in the room bore a resemblance to forms he had seen before he joined the Army. These people seemed different from the others, the ones in the white coats. These people seemed to know him better; and he seemed to know them. The sounds of the words they used were closer to the set he understood. They followed familiar patterns and their voices were friendlier. They had soft voices, like civilians use. Mom?
Though he felt safe in their midst, he also felt exposed, like his junk was showing.
He didn’t have a weapon—
Where is my weapon?
When he woke, it was by the sound of an alarm. It was coming from one of the machines. One of the people in white coats responded to it, a woman. He was embarrassed he didn’t know her name, though she seemed to know his. Sounds were getting clearer: not as many echoes. His vision was stabilizing, scenes held their firmness. People moved because they had a means of locomotion, not because they floated like ghosts. He could see causes producing effects he could predict. The machines stayed in place, solid, heavy, full of purpose and commitment and knowledge—
When he woke, he heard his name but he couldn’t respond to it. Someone noticed tears in his eyes. They called his name again, and he blinked his eyes. There were more people now, all hovering over him, blocking the light, yelling his name.
Shut the fuck up, I can hear you just fine.
He blinked rapidly, and often, trying to clear his vision. It made his head hurt.
“Brian, can you hear me?” one of them said. “Sergeant Baker. Can you hear me? Blink once for ‘yes,’ twice for ‘no.’
Baker blinked twice. He had lost none of his wit. The guy in the white coat was pissing him off. He wondered if he’d get the joke.
Brian Baker didn’t give a fuck what these people wanted; he wanted to know where his boys were. Were they all right? Was anybody wounded? Were they receiving the care they needed? But he couldn’t form words with his mouth. There was some sort of communications breakdown in his head.
He knew the words; he just couldn’t speak them.
Baker heard the guy in the white coat say to someone else in the room that based on the results of an MRI, they didn’t think he had suffered any cognitive impairment. He had, however, suffered a significant brain injury, and it would take time, maybe a long time, to determine to what extent he would recover.
“No,” the guy continued, as if he was responding to a question Baker couldn’t hear, “he won’t be going back to his old unit. No way.”
Baker’s first thought upon hearing that was:
Bullshit.

© William Lapham 2012

Bill Lapham is a student in the Goddard College low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program. His flash fiction and short stories have been featured here and at MuDSpots, and at Six Sentences, Thinking Ten—A Writer’s Playground, and the Molotov Cocktail. His work has also appeared in several Six Sentences and Thinking Ten print anthologies, as well as Goddard College’s own peer-reviewed literary journal, the Pitkin Review. He lives in Brighton, Michigan.

Bill Lapham

Appomattox Exodus

Jim Noah and James Dix were tending their generals’ horses outside Wilmer McLean’s red brick colonial in the village of Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Jim looked neat in his best blue uniform, brass shined, leather polished, clean shave. James was a skinny man with long, scraggly blond hair and bright eyes. He was dressed in his best grey uniform, the one with patches in places. He wore dusty boots with holes in the soles and he was chewing tobacco. He spat some on the ground in Jim’s general direction, testing him. But Jim took no offense, he’d seen enough fighting.
“What’s his name?” Jim inquired of the gray horse James was grooming.
“This ‘ere is Traveller,” James said.
“This is Cincinnati.”
“Looks fast,” James said, not looking at the horse, but tending to his own chores.
“Is,” Jim said.
Jim tried to take advantage of the broken ice.
“My name’s Jim.”
“James.”
“I go by Jim.”
“I go by James,” he said, squinting one eye against the afternoon glare to see if the other kid got it. He did.
“Huh,” Jim grunted. “You figure the war’s over, James?”
James leant over and spat on a nearby rock, away from Jim this time.
“If Gen’l Lee says it is, it is,” he said.
“What if he says it ain’t?”
“Then I’ll shoot you.”
“Hell you say,” Jim said with a chuckle. “What if he says go home?”
“I’ll do whatever the Gen’l says to do.”
They worked on their horses as they waited for the generals to emerge from the house; each minute seemed to take an hour’s time. Jim wondered how such a big decision could be left to two mere mortal men. Maybe they were immortal, he thought. They were still alive, weren’t they?
“Where’s home?”
“Russell County, Alabama,” James said in his best southern drawl.
“What’d’ya do before the war?”
“You got a lotta questions, don’t you, Yank?”
“Jus’ curious, I guess.”
“I went to school, like you.”
They didn’t look very old, twenty, maybe twenty-one, Jim figured.
“How ‘bout y’all?”
“Small town in southern Indiana—on the river.”
“What river?”
“The Ohio.”
“What’s the name of the town?”
“Rising Sun.”
“Huh,” James grunted. “Sounds like an Injun name.”
“River runs north south there. Town’s on the west bank. Sun comes up over the river.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Is.”
The horses were still saddled because no one knew how long the generals would take. They ate from feed bags as the orderlies tended their duties.
Presently, they heard a loud southern voice.
“Orderly!”
“Oh shit, that’s Gen’l Lee.” James quickly removed the feed bag from Traveller’s nose and hustled the horse around front of the house.
“I’m headed back to camp, James.”
“Yes sir,” James replied. “Gen’l, sir?”
General Lee looked down from his mount, blinking back tears.
“Gen’l, is the war over?” James asked.
“It is for us, son,” he said, looking across the rolling countryside. “It is for us.”
James wasn’t sure if he was sad or relieved. He had survived his father who was killed at Second Manassas, early on. He was only sixteen at the time. Seemed like a century had passed since then. He wasn’t sure where his mother was, or if she was still alive. He’d heard stories of Sherman’s campaign in the South. Wasn’t sure if Opelika even existed anymore.

*     *     *

James rode into Opelika, Alabama five weeks after Appomattox. He had the horse at a slow walk as he looked around the ruined town. He saw a few women and children, some old men, but nobody his own age. He stopped at a saloon, lashed his horse to weather-beaten hitching fence and stepped inside.
The floorboards creaked as he walked to the bar. His spurs rattled. His visage in the mirror looked thinner than he remembered the last time he looked in a mirror. He asked the old man tending the bar for a drink of whiskey. The bartender wiped out a shot glass, set it in front of James and poured him a drink.
“Not many men around here your age, son,” the old man said.
James took a sip and felt the warm liquid slide down his throat. The burn felt good. A glow ignited in his belly.
“You know a lady named Annabelle Dix?” James asked.
“I might. Who’s askin’?”
“She’s my mother. I ain’t seen her since the war started.”
“You Philip’s boy?”
“Yes sir.”
“You know where he’s at?”
“Kill’t. At Second Manassas.”
“Huh.”
The old man was washing glasses, shining them with his bar rag while he tried to correlate similar dates with disparate events. Maybe some things were related, he figured.
“I ain’t seen Annabelle since around that time, I guess.”
“Any idea where she got off to?” James asked, finishing his drink and placing the glass on the bar.
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Hmph.”
“You’d be James then?”
“That’s right.”
“I remember you boys running around town when you were youngsters, raising hell. Where you been?”
James had to think. Where hadn’t he been? The 15th Alabama had fought at Front Royal, Gaines Mill, Manassas, Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Knoxville, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and those were just the big ones. He couldn’t count the skirmishes in places with no names.
“I been wherever Gen’l Lee’s been.”
The old man gave a soft whistle.
“And you’re still alive?” the bartender said in a tone like he’d just entered a sacred tomb.
“Jus’ lucky, I guess. What happened here?” James asked.
“Yankees sacked the place last summer,” the old man replied, filling the boy’s glass again. “Most folks high-tailed it outta here ahead of ‘em.”
“But not you?”
“I’m old. I tend a bar. Shoot me,” he said. “They busted up the tracks for thirty miles east of town and burnt the warehouses.”
“Did many folks come back?”
“Some did. It’ll take some time, I reckon.”
James finished his drink and reached in his pocket for coinage.
“Drink’s on the house, James. Welcome home.”
“Think I’ll ride around some; see what I can see.”
“You do that. I’ll be here.”
James stepped back into the springtime sun. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, it felt good to be alive, to breathe warm southern air. He mounted the horse he called Bama and continued down Main Street. He made his way out of town and headed southeast toward Salem. His mother’s house was about halfway between the two towns.
Outside Opelika he passed the warehouses that before the war stored cotton awaiting shipment east and north by rail. During the war, the warehouses stored war materiel: bullets, bombs and blankets, everything an army needs to conduct offensive operations far afield. Now their roofs were caved in, timbers burnt black and sticking up at odd angles inside distressed brick walls. The fire was out and the smoke was gone but the ruins remained and probably would for foreseeable future. Who would have the confidence to rebuild them?
It took him the rest of the afternoon to reach his house, what was left of it. Somebody had torched it. It had not been far from the tracks that connected Montgomery to Atlanta, so he figured it was probably Yankees that did it. Safe assumption anyway. Not that it mattered. The house was gone, but they didn’t destroy the barn. Seemed odd. The fields where they grew vegetables had gone to seed and was overgrown with four years worth of thistle and assorted other weeds.
He dismounted Bama but held on to the reins. He stood for a moment, listening. There was a soft breeze blowing in the pines that reminded him of his childhood. It was dead quiet but for the pines. The sun hid dipped below the tops of the trees but it had not set. He led his horse around to the barn, slid open the door and released a flock of doves that scared the dickens out of him and riled Bama a little bit. He patted the horse’s neck and they both calmed down. He stepped inside and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.
There were a few bales of hay laying around, farm implements in various stages of disintegration and rust. Dirt and dust and cobwebs. Tools lying under a blanket of dust. A familiar smell, too, the smell of something dead. Light leaked through the cracks between the boards. There were holes in the roof. He probably could have found a dry comfortable place to sleep but something didn’t feel right, a feeling of foreboding. Maybe it was the dead animal smell. At any rate, he was not comfortable inside the barn. They turned and went back outside. It didn’t look nor feel like rain was imminent, so he decided to spend the night where he had spent so many nights in the last four years, outside on the ground.
“C’mon, Bama. Let’s get us some’n to eat.”

© William Lapham 2011

Bill Lapham started writing a few years after he retired from the Navy. This is what came out last. You can find more of his stuff at Just a Pedestrian.

Bill Lapham

Turner, Raymond K.

We found him inside his gun turret charred black, his mouth frozen in a permanent smile, teeth white as fresh sheets on a country clothesline. His dogtags said he was Turner, Raymond K., Protestant, Blood Type A+. He was frozen in position and in time as if someone had doused him in black plaster. He had been loading a projectile into the breach of his gun when another had penetrated the armored skin of the turret and exploded. For some reason the explosion did not blow Turner’s body to bits but incinerated him and cemented it into the exact position we found him in. He would still be there, stuck in World War II loading that shell, if we hadn’t gently recovered his body and buried it at sea where it rests still today.

Earlier that day, before Turner, Raymond K. had been hurled from his upper rack by the call to General Quarters, he had been studying a picture of his wife who was back home in Liberty, Iowa. The picture was threadbare and faded, details of the image nearly imperceptible, rubbed away by his fingers and thumbs. The case on the pillow under his head was moist from the tears that had run down the sides of his head. He missed his wife.
He had answered his country’s call to arms with reluctance. Others were. Sure the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, but before December 7, 1941, who had never heard of the place? Hawaii wasn’t even a state for chrissakes.

Before his ship had set sail as part of the fleet invading the Philippine Islands, Turner, Raymond K. had been lying on the beach in Waikiki enjoying the sun and the waves and the motion of the beautiful Hawaiian ladies in their grass skirts. Most guys his age were drunk by noon, or hungover from the night before and sleeping it off in their hotel rooms or back in the barracks on base. Not Turner, Raymond K. He enjoyed his time off sight-seeing, sun-bathing and running on the beach. He liked sitting in the shade of palm trees, looking at Diamondhead while listening to ukulele music. Every once in a while he would climb Tantalus Mountain and hike on the trails in the rainforest above Pearl Harbor and Honolulu. War had brought its own kind of peace to the mind of Turner, Raymond K.

Before his ship had steamed off to the Hawaiian Islands, it was overhauled in the shipyard at Mare Island near San Francisco. Those days had been long and hot. Not that it was hot in San Francisco, it wasn’t, but it was always hot in a ship with no air conditioning. And the destroyer-escort USS VIRGIL J. JOHNSON had never seen any air conditioning. Sweat dripped off the end of Turner, Raymond K.’s nose as he polished the bright work in his gun turret. He referred to it as “his gun turret” because it made the long hours he spent locked up inside it training and cleaning easier to endure. He knew the purpose of every switch, valve, lever, door, swivel and fastener inside the contraption. He could operate the thing blind-folded. And he could lift the shells and stuff them into the breach until 7 times a minute from now until the gates of Hell swung open to welcome him home.

Two years before Turner, Raymond K. hauled his seabag up the brow of his new ship, he was driving a tractor on his Uncle Jim’s farm in Liberty, Iowa. He and Karen had just been married and she was expecting their first child. The doctor in town thirty miles away had given Karen a clean bill of health and said the baby was doing just fine. He could hear his or her heartbeat and it was strong, nothing to worry about. Two days later, Karen miscarried. Such was the state of prenatal medicine at the time. Karen was devastated and Ray could not console her. Eventually, after months of getting used to the idea, Karen resolved that she wouldn’t have a baby until God was ready to give her one, and when that time came, they planned to name the baby William after his great-grandfather from Ireland. Ray was relieved that Karen seemed to be back to her happy self again.

Before Young Ray married Karen and long before he shipped off to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese Navy, he was a strapping young lad living on a farm owned by his father’s brother in Iowa. His parents had been killed in a freak fire at their home two counties away. He had narrowly escaped the blaze and survived only because his dog Jake had jumped on his bed to warn him of the impending danger. Both he and the dog fled the burning house out his bedroom window, and despite yelling until his throat was raw, could not raise the attention of his parents who must have died in their sleep. He never saw them again. The next morning, his Uncle Jim came to the house and found Ray asleep on the grass under the sycamore tree hugging his dog Jake, the smoldering embers of the house lying in ruins not far away.

Not long before the tragic loss of his parents and his house, Raymond K. Turner was born into a peaceful world on the verge of unprecedented wealth, peace and prosperity at the beginning of what would come to be known as the Roaring Twenties. He had a happy childhood living on his parents’ farm, playing with his dog, Jake, growing up strong and smart and morally straight. He worked hard, studied hard and played hard. He loved baseball. He loved his parents and his dog and he could not wait for the day when he would have his own farm and family.

© Bill Lapham 2011

Bill Lapham is a retired submarine sailor and current MFA student at Goddard College in Vermont. Find his blog here.

Guest Poet: Bill Lapham

Steady

For Darlene

I know you know
There's an icy harbor
In my heart for
Hallmark days.
But it melts when
I think of you.
Why do we get
Jostled like we do,
Find ways always
To remain steady
Through it all, and
Kiss at the end
Of the day, still
In love?

© William Lapham 2011

Bill Lapham is a retired submarine Chief of the Boat and a recent graduate of the MLS program at U of M-Flint. He and Darlene live in Brighton, MI.

Guest Writer: Bill Lapham

Stonehenge

Truth be told, the stones of Stonehenge have always been here in this configuration. They were waiting here when man arrived. The stones are mass, gray mass, and they cannot be dated, nor can they be moved. They have achieved a balance in the universe that man can only dream of achieving. They are immortal as forever; always have been.
Theories abound as to their origin and placement, about how they were brought here. They seem to beg for an explanation, how they were carved out of some English mountain with some mythical power and rolled here on a carpet of logs and hoisted into place with sand pits and rudimentary cranes made of posts and hemp lines, manipulated by brawn, muscle and sinew.
None of that is true, but the truth is what we seek. Our theory is that the stones have always been here. Always. Since before the Earth was formed, by the power of whatever god you choose to believe in, they were here. All that is the earth formed under them.

•

I am Professor Joe Jackson (yes, some of my friends call me “Shoeless,” but usually only after a pint and a shot) and I am accompanied by my (beautiful) graduate assistant Michelle Champion. When we got here yesterday, we found green grass in the surrounding fields; each blade offering its chlorophyll face to the sun for its blessing. We saw a blue sky; some would call it azure, but I would say blue. There were wispy clouds thousands of feet overhead, but no chance of rain.
And there were the stones, elephantine in their mass, they are mass itself. Moss grows on the north sides and looking at them from that angle makes them look ancient, ponderous, heavy, like any one of them could crush a man if it toppled over on him. They won’t, though. The ground is bedrock around here, solid. These stones have been here forever. They were here even before the earth was here.

•

We are at Stonehenge, in the south of England. Winter is approaching and we’ve been planning for an observation on the day the season changes – at Stonehenge, in Stonehenge, with Stonehenge. We think a universal constant—a fundamental number—is hidden in the arrangement of these stones and will be revealed to us on December 21, 2012.
We are standing at the center of the circle waiting for the moment the sun rises on the shortest day of the year – the Winter Solstice. We’ll mark the spot on the stone where the sun appears and measure the distance from that spot to the center of the circle and divide that distance by the height of the stone and multiply the dividend by the volume of air displaced by that stone, record that figure in our notebooks and then search for other relationships. We think there are many—perhaps all things, all physical formulae—rely on this constant for stability in this chaotic milieu we call the universe. We think this ratio may be the number upon which all other relationships can be described.
Unlike many of the other people present for this occasion, we do not believe this is the day the world will come to an abrupt end. It is, however, the day when our equator points directly at the sun and we find ourselves in alignment with the equator of the Milky Way galaxy – our galaxy. That makes it a special day; a good day to take measurements, test hypotheses, and observe natural phenomena for the sake of observation alone, because we will see things no other human being has ever seen before, or ever will again.

•

We are here with many other people. We are not alone. They touch the stones in the same place and with the same tenderness and consideration, with the same sense of awe, as every other human being who has ever touched them. How many people is that? How many humans have touched the stones of Stonehenge and wondered at their origin? How many languages have they spoken? How many different gods have they summoned to explain these massive forms and their arrangement? How many of those gods remain?
Maybe none.
There are many other people here today, each with their own story, their own reasons, their own theories. There are scientists with fantastical mathematical formulae and mystics with fantastical mathematical formulae and faith and there are priests from many different churches and religions, each with their own idea about the key to the entry into life everlasting. But they all believe, or want to believe, that the object of their personal search for a clue to the hereafter is to be found here, in the present tense, and the present place, Stonehenge.

•

The sky lightens in the East and it’s almost time to take our measurements. We prepare for our test just as the others prepare for theirs. Everybody’s got a theory to test and you’d think the place would be abuzz with conversations regarding various hypotheses, but there is no talking at all. The place is quiet, as if the beauty of the place has penetrated our shells and become part of us. We are in it, a part of it. We are integral.
We are ready at the precise moment the sun tips over the horizon. There it is. Michelle fires a laser at the spot where the sun appears above the stone. She takes the measurement and records it in her notebook. It is the measurement that we think will lead to the key of understanding: the fundamental number, the universal number, the number that will unlock all the mysteries mankind has conjured over the millennia. We have it.

•

We pack up our equipment and take a seat on camp chairs while other scientists and charlatans continue following their logical and illogical whims. We watch them with some amusement, I must admit. Why is it that we each think we are right about our assumptions and everyone else is wrong. Perhaps it is human nature to play zero-sum games: for one of us to be right, every other one of us has to be wrong. Think of it: how much time and effort will be spent on seemingly fruitless efforts?

•

“Professor?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you think there is any value in wasting time and energy on fruitless efforts?”
“Certainly,” I reply. “How could anyone make a conclusion before they conduct the experiment? Perhaps we only know the right answers by eliminating all the wrong ones. Somebody has to discover all the dead ends. We just don’t recognize those efforts with awards like the Nobel Prize. Maybe we should.”
“Do you think we might have wasted all this time and energy we’ve put into this experiment?”
“Absolutely not, dear. If nothing else, we will have discovered that there is no relationship between these stones and the rest of the universe. It might very well be that these stones were cut out of a mountainside and placed here with haphazard abandon. They have no significance to offer at all.”
“If that is true, will you be disappointed then?”
“If that is true, I will be happy we discovered a piece of the truth.”
Actually, I tremble at the thought. We will have expended a lot of time and energy, not to mention university resources, on a wayward scheme for little return. But not yet. We’re not done.
Then I hear a low rumble, like a heavily loaded freight train straining against the leash of inertia.
“Do you feel that?” Michelle asked. “The ground, it’s moving.”

© William Lapham 2010

Bill Lapham is a retired U.S. Navy submarine veteran (Chief of the Boat) and a recent graduate of the MLS program at The University of Michigan, Rackham Grad School, for which he thanks the GI Bill. He’s been published at Six Sentences and the U.S. Army NCO Journal.

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