Call of the Beguiled by Barry Rachin (free novels txt) 📖

even though no one else was within a hundred feet of where we were talking. “It’s about a gold prospector in the Canadian Yukon who falls through the ice as he’s traveling alone in the wilderness returning to camp. He has to light a fire in order to dry his wet clothing and keep from freezing.”
“It’s cold as hell up there.”
“At seventy-five degrees below zero spit freezes as soon as it leaves the mouth, making a crackling sound like a small caliber gunshot.”
I stared at her uncertainly. Several camp counselors passed by nodding as they headed toward the main office. “Jack London wrote two versions of the same story. The original had a happy ending, the second not so pleasant.” A blue jay nestled away in the dense foliage of a maple let out a barrage of energetic squawks before flying away. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could write multiple endings to events in our lives? Pick the ones that suit us best.”
“Unfortunately, most people have no choice in the matter,” I muttered. “I saw your father yesterday afternoon when he picked you up after class. Your old man looks just like you.”
The girl’s features contorted in a foul expression. “That’s where the similarity ends,” she replied gruffly. “My father has affairs with women half his age and treats my mother like garbage. My parents shouldn’t really even be together, but that’s for them to work out.”
The outburst caught me unawares. I shifted uncomfortably on the balls of my feet and watched the otters make another pass in front of us before lithely doubling back to the wider end of the pool. One of the sleek brown rodents crawled out of the water long enough to devour a chunk of raw fish in the feeding trough. “I have a problem with my filter,” Cheryl muttered apologetically, almost as an afterthought. It was clear she regretted the emotional flare-up and was trying to make amends.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I replied, wishing I had gone directly to the staging area rather than pausing to commiserate with the eccentric girl. Cheryl Oliphant had seemed so engaging and sensitive when we first met. But now I was experiencing major doubts. Maybe what I mistook for an offbeat, quirky personality was a brittle façade masking morbid tendencies – a proverbial Pandora’s Box of adolescent pathology! And what was that crazy business about filters. There were oil and air filters on cars – fuel filters on the domestic oil burners my father serviced. The week before Zoofari, I went on a service call with my old man to a home where the filter on a four-hundred gallon oil tank was clogged with sludge and sediment. He replaced the cylinder and bled the air out of the gravity feed line.
“My mother says that I have this pathological tendency to say every foolish thing that crosses my mind without filtering content. I blurt things out impulsively … things that, even if true, are inappropriate.” Cheryl blinked several times and her voice cracked. “They sent me to a psychiatrist. He gave me some pills.”
“Did it help?”
She shook her head from side to side. “The medication made me feel like a zombie. After the first week, I stopped taking it.” She made a sharp snorting sound that only vaguely resembled a laugh and, without warning, reached out and poked me on the upper arm. “My parents have marital problems so they send me for counseling. Does that make any sense?” She didn’t wait for a response. Rather, Cheryl’s voice dropped several decibels, assuming a droll, self-mocking tone. “Last Tuesday I overheard them quarrelling and, for the first time, they used the ‘D’ word.”
Now I was in it up to my eyeballs! This petite brunette with a South American boa constrictor for a best friend was spilling the beans about her dysfunctional family. I knew the girl less than two days and she was having emotional dysentary! “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“No, I don’t mind,” she parried my remark.
Mr. Oliphant was having a love affair with a woman half his age, a secretary at the insurance firm he managed, and wanted out of the marriage. Cheryl broke off her commentary, running her slender fingers through her dark hair in a repetitive gesture.
“So what happened?”
“My father got a lawyer. He’s drawing up the paperwork. A bittersweet, convoluted smile enveloped her features. “My dad’s moving into an efficiency apartment over the weekend.”
I stood quietly now, mulling over what I had just heard. “How much time before class starts?”
“About eight minutes.” She blew all the air out of her lungs in a prolonged sigh. “We should probably head over to the main hall.”
“No, not yet.” I went and sat on a gray bench close by the monkey house. A plaque on the side of the structure explained that it had been fabricated from recyclable waste – plastic milk cartons, TV dinner plates and such. “Here, eat this.” I handed her the inch-thick slab of sour cream apricot loaf that my mother, with much fanfare and ceremony, had cut an hour earlier.
Cheryl closed her eyes and bit into the golden bread shot through with orange flecks. Then she smiled - the most beautiful, rapturous, enigmatic and mystifying display of transcendent emotion I had ever witnessed. “God, this is delicious!” A pungent, fruity sweetness wafted through the muggy, early morning air.
“My mother baked the bread last night. It has sour cream and orange juice and apricots and some crazy spice that can only be found in the remote mountain regions of Sicily but don’t quote me on the Sicily thing.”
She broke the uneaten piece in half and handed a portion to me. When the magic bread – the bread that made the singularly saddest girl in the universe smile as though it was the second coming of Christ – was gone, Cheryl reached out and placed the splayed fingers of her right hand on my chest. “You are the sweetest boy in the world.” Like a benediction, her hand floated down my body falling away at the stomach. “And now we should go to class.”

  

Each Saturday throughout the summer vacation straight through until Labor Day I went out with my father, a furnace repairman, on emergency calls. My mother said that, since I was clever with my hands, “mechanically inclined just like your old man” – those were her exact words – it would be as good as a first job.
“How much do I get paid?”
My mother flashed a dirty look. “Room and board plus the usual amenities.”
I wasn’t quite sure what the 'usual amenities' entailed but it wasn’t like I had anything better to do with my life, which seemed to be in a perpetual holding pattern over a destination not of my own choosing.
My father was a lanky, outdoorsy type with an unruly mop of dirty brown hair that fell down over his ears. My mom suspected him of trimming the shabby mess with a pointy scissors squirreled away with the razors and dental floss on his side of the medicine cabinet, but my father always pleaded the Fifth Amendment, refusing to incriminate himself regarding the butchery and self-mutilation that passed for personal grooming. When it came to shaving, the man was equally lax, running a Schick twin-blade disposable over his stubbly chin no more than twice a week at best so that he never grew a full beard or appeared clean shaven for more than a few, random days per month. However, my dad’s personal grooming habits had no appreciable impact on business. The man, who was honest to a fault, never charged a penny more than the job demanded and guaranteed all his work.
The first house call was in an upscale neighborhood on the historic East Side of Providence. The oil burner shut down in the middle of the night and there was no hot water. My father slid the metal face plate on the front of the burner to one side and stuck his nose up against the belly of the furnace, sniffing the acrid air.
“How many times did you try the reset button?” he asked.
The owner, a thin, rather effeminate looking man with a sallow complexion and horn-rimmed glasses, scratched his earlobe. “I don’t remember. I kept hitting it but nothing happened.”
I didn’t like the sissified guy right off. He sounded snooty – like he had a bad case of book brains. Book brains was a term my father coined to describe a person with a PhD in nuclear physics, who could design an nuclear bomb but had trouble tying his shoe laces or balancing a checkbook. It was people with book brains who were running the country into the ground. President Obama, according to my dad, had a terminal case of book brains. So did all the fat-cat politicians in Washington D.C.. They talked a good line and, at face value, seemed harmless enough but were a menace to society. And they never worked with their hands.
“You don’t recall how many times you pressed the red button?” My father repeated the question.
“I forget exactly. What difference does it make?” Acting as though his fragile feelings had been injured by the ‘indelicate’ question, the gaunt man hurried from the basement without waiting for an answer.
“The walls of the furnace are flooded,” My father spoke in a sober drawl. “If the motor fired up with that much fuel in the system, it could have caused an explosion and burnt the house down.” He grinned sheepishly and punched me lightly on the upper arm. “But we won’t share that minor detail with the owner.”
He knelt down on the cold cement and waved a half-inch wrench at the furnace. “Draft regulator, stack control, master switch, blower, oil pump.” The man proceeded from top to bottom identifying each mechanical part. “Transformer, motor, oil shutoff button, burner assembly and, on the inside, is the combustion chamber.”
Pulling the metal cap off the transformer, he placed the blade of a flat head screwdriver vertically on the further pole of the electrical unit and then lowered the blade until it rested a fraction of an inch away from the opposite pole. A dim flash of electricity arced, jumped from the transformer to the screwdriver but just as quickly died away to nothing. He repeated the process a second and third time. “Transformer’s burnt out.” He reached into the toolbox and located an adjustable wrench. “Go out to the truck and get a replacement. There’s a pile of spare parts over to the right alongside the wheel well.”


“Did you notice how it killed him to write out the stupid check?” My father chuckled. We were a good three miles away from the home.
“Yeah, he did seem rather aggravated.” The homeowner, who mentioned that he taught comparative literature at Brown University, made a half-hearted attempt to smile when the burner fired up and my father began packing his tools. The supercilious grim quickly petered away when he was handed the bill. You could tell that the chump was in the habit of bossing other people around, having his own way ninety-nine per cent of the time.
“You weren’t here even an hour.” The emaciated man waved the bill fitfully in the air. “Isn’t this a bit steep?”
“Parts and labor – that’s all I charged you.”
“Well, I dunno …” It was a nasty, vindictive jab as though to suggest that my father was somehow taking unfair advantage. I hated the guy. I wanted to kick him in the shins or tell him outright what a pompous ass he was. But my father didn’t seem the least