Mustard Fields by Barry Rachin (ereader for comics TXT) 📖

sucked in toward shore then thrust back to sea by the whimsical currents. They skirted a cove and, on the far end, found a middle-aged man laying out the frame of a smallish kite on a terrycloth beach towel. Thirty feet away a team of three men was flying similar bat-shaped kites in precision drill. "Those are synchronized flying kites," Maddie said. With a hand shielding her eyes from the bright sun, she stared up into the sky. “Very expensive.”
Angie followed the trio of kites as they pirouetted in a perfect figure-eight then hovered motionless for a fraction of a second before darting off in another combination of twists and turns “Next month there's an oceanfront festival off Newport. Kite clubs from as far away as Connecticut and New Jersey will be competing. My parents and I went every year.”
The festival featured teams from all over New England. The more sophisticated models were constructed of lightweight, space-age metals and colorful fabrics. Four-member groups took turns running through a series of choreographed maneuvers, with the team leader calling out directions seconds in advance of each, new routine.
"Too bad!" Angie said, gesturing with her eyes. The end kite on the far left suddenly veered off in the wrong direction from the other three. "He missed the call." The young girl had never seen anything quite like it. The kites dived and soared in perfect - or, as in the previous, botched effort, near perfect - unison, covering a span of a hundred feet out toward the ocean.
"See how they adjust the height and direction,” Maddie said, “by moving their hands."
Angie had been too busy enjoying the acrobatics to notice how the men handled the strings. But now she could see, as the kites tacked in a new direction, the three sets of hands moving in and out, up and down, accordingly.
"Kites are easy,” Maddie thought on the walk back. Angie was skipping about in the tumbling surf. “When something goes wrong with the routine, you adjust the line or check the metal kite frame. With human nature it's not so simple.” Maddie glanced over her shoulder at her daughter bringing up the rear. Angie looked up and smiled - a quirky, darkly beautiful expression that pulled her malleable features at cross-purposes.
“There was a letter from the court,” Angie said.
Up ahead a tall man in his thirties was surfcasting with a metal lure that sailed far out over the breaking surf in a looping arc. “I asked the judge for a few extra dollars alimony, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
Angie put her hands inside the pouch on her windbreaker. “Why didn’t you ask dad directly?” Maddie had asked Jake on several occasions - more like begged. But she had no desire to tell her daughter. “He doesn’t get it, does he?” Angie said, anticipating her mother's unspoken thoughts.
“No, I guess not.”

Monkey syndrome. That’s what Maddie called Jake's affliction. Baby monkeys developed at the same rate as humans up to a certain fixed point. Then the primates hit an intellectual brick wall and stopped learning. Jake was a conniver, an ace at using the system to beat the system, but as a parent his potential petered out shortly after his daughter was born. Now, strangely enough, Angie had come into her own and, in myriad ways that Jake could never comprehend, outstripped her father.
They hung back to the left of the surfcaster, watching him heave the monofilament line out over the water. “Any luck?”
“Not today.” He kept jerking at the rod with a spastic pumping action to simulate an injured minnow on the end of the line. “Too windy… fish aren’t cooperating.” He gestured with his head so they could pass safely.
“Dad’s got this new girl friend,” Angie said.
“What happened to Gloria?” The young girl shrugged. “What’s the new one like?”
Angie flicked her hair back over a shoulder. The sun caught the blond highlights in the dusky, chestnut colored strands. She didn’t answer right away. “She’s nice enough.”
Another unwitting victim. When an Osprey caught a fish, it always carried the prey back to the nest tail down so its flight was unencumbered. Maddie imagined Jake carrying his latest romantic quarry back to the domestic nest in similar fashion but kept the cynicism to herself. A soft breeze was blowing now diagonally across the beach. They could smell the pebbly seaweed drying in the damp sand. Up ahead another fisherman was threading a sea worm onto a barbed hook. The worm was blood red and slimy, its tiny legs and pincers writhing in agony. In a pail next to the fishing gear was a half dozen flounder, flat and smooth. “I’m going to take a vow of silence,” Maddie spoke in a confidential tone. “Show up to school on Monday morning with a chalkboard on a string.”
“And how exactly are you going teach eighth-grade English?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
A chalkboard and a string. Maddie was talking nonsense, but behind the silly blather hid a darker reality. The brown-skinned holy man could parade around with a goofy chalkboard dangling from his scrawny neck. But maybe he was a colossal faker - that’s faker, not ‘fakir’, as in religious mendicant - and who would know the difference? He never spoke a solitary word just smiled incessantly. Enlightened soul or simpleton - besides levitation, mind travel to distant cosmic galaxies and sleeping on a bed on rusty, sixteen-penny nails, did the mystic possess any practical skills? Could he teach eighth graders how to conjugate a verb? Navigate a fifteen year old through life's mind fields? Maddie was tired of all the phony baloney, the verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, the sham. Maybe the bearded yogi in the geriatric diaper was on to something. Or just maybe he was laughing at humanity behind his silvery whiskers.

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On Sunday morning a damp chill gripped the air, but the sun quickly rose over the bay nudging the temperature up to a comfortable eighty degrees. Crossing the inlet, the Osprey were feasting on the remains of a large fish. The mother held the mangled body in her beak while the fledglings ripped the flesh to pieces.
They cruised south on Route 28 into the center of Hyannis where the harbor was filled with private yachts and sailboats. On the main square bordering the wharf, they found a few boutiques open early but came away empty handed. But for the colonial New England architecture and oak trees, they could just as easily been on Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive. They bought cappuccinos and croissants at a gourmet pastry shop and lounged outside on metal folding chairs with their food.
An elderly woman with a wrinkled face and platinum colored hair emerged from a jewelry store with several bags. She was carrying a funny looking dog that resembled a cross between a Shiatsu and a pug. The dog had a face like an exploded cigar with dark, spiky hairs sprouting in a dozen different directions. The pooch wore a collar studded with garish stones. The woman hurried past with a preoccupied expression, on her way to some hoity-toity tea party or socialite function.
“Such a slave to fashion,” Maddie muttered under her breath.
A Boston Brahman with a pampered pooch - not the sort of woman who would ever have to beg the courts for chump change. But still, the weather was delightful and it felt wonderful to get away. Two doors down was a store with a blue awning. The sign over the door read Cape Cod Collectibles. Maddie stepped over the threshold. Metal sculpture and small statuettes in various medium rested on tiered displays. Wash in a soft sheen of track lighting, glazed pottery and an assortment of porcelain figurines rimmed the far wall. From a speaker in the rear, Clifford Brown's limpid jazz trumpet was navigating through the melodic chords to Joy Spring. The smoky horn leaped into the upper register, hammering out a barrage of staccato triplets before settling back into the final chorus of the tune.
A man came out from behind the counter. He was casually dressed in a V-necked sweater and hush puppies. “That sculpture you were admiring is by a local artist.” The fellow had a boyish appearance despite a barren patch on the back of his skull where the hair had thinned away to a mere wisp. “It just sold yesterday.”
The piece, which stood four feet high, had been executed entirely in thin-gauged, brass. Using multiple strands of wire to recreate the instrument and performer, the artist had literally drawn the figure of a jazz saxophonist in silhouette. Off to the side was a trumpeter, a skier and a ballerina up on her toes. A five hundred dollar prima ballerina!
Maddie budgeted everything. Now, without that extra twenty-five bucks from Jake, there was no margin for error. And yet, some people could blow five hundred dollars on a brass ballerina and never give the extravagance a second thought. The Kennedy compound was less than a mile down the road. The senator from Massachusetts could, on a whim, buy the ballerina, jazz saxophonist or an entire sixteen-piece big band without breaking a sweat. “Clever concept, don’t you think?” The proprietor explained how the artist drew a rough sketch in charcoal in order to visualize each figure. Then, using the drawing as a template, he shaped, rolled and twisted dozens of metal strands bringing the figure to life. “They’re three-dimensional,” he added. “Each image has depth despite the thinness of the metal.”
The garrulous owner knew Maddie and her daughter had no intention of buying anything but didn’t seem to care and Maddie appreciated that. To meet someone without an agenda or ulterior motive was refreshing. He handed her a business card. “Feel free to stop in any time.”

   

The winter that Maddie dumped her husband - the decision was unilateral - Jake was making regular pilgrimages to the social security office on Cooper Avenue, angling to get on medical disability for an old back injury. A herniated disc in the lumbar region - that was the provisional diagnosis. "Why don't you lose some weight and try physical therapy?" Maddie offered.
"I was hoping you’d support me on this." Jake's face assumed that hurt, little-boy expression that in recent months caused Maddie to flinch inwardly and avert her eyes. "When we married, you were out on a workman's compensation claim."
Jake had tripped over a bunched rug in the lobby of the Libby Fruit Processing Center. A bunched rug - he milked that one for a year and a half until the medical board autocratically ordered him back to work or out on the streets. Three years later, Jake argued with his immediate supervisor at the plant over vacation pay and finessed the squabble into sixteen months of unemployment benefits. Now, with his latest get-rich-quick scheme, he hobbled around the house wearing an elaborate back brace.
"What if they offer you a desk job?"
"Yeah, well… that hasn't happened and I need a paycheck."
The company couldn't offer Maddie's husband a desk job. He lacked both the personality and tact to oversee other people. The saddest thing of all, perhaps, was that Maddie felt absolutely no empathy for her soon-to-be ex-husband. He wasn't a bad person. He was just... Well, what difference did it make?
Buyer beware! Let Jake Timberland become someone else's burden. Maddie had been harangued by his vacuous pipedreams for eight years. Enough was enough!

   

A week after they returned from the Cape Cod mini-vacation, Trevor Osborne's slate blue Toyota was gone from the driveway across the street.