Pursuit Of The Cygnus Thief

Chapter 30 - I Shoulda...

“I Shoulda…”

Chapter 30

     It had a head, a tail, and a spinal s-curve between, the blue green image on John’s chest was situated just north of his left nipple. I clung tightly to the ragged siding at the rear of the shed. I dug the tips of my slippers deeper into the two grooves I’d found just a foot above the ground in the dark. A dozen word-bare thoughts streaked through my mind, and my skin warmed. No longer than my thumb, no wider than my index finger the lizard tattoo seared my memory as I gawked through the most strategic hole in the shed’s rear wall.

     Shirtless, oblivious of my intrusion, John turned away and began to hum to the radio music that cloaked my breathing and filled the shed’s interior. It certainly sounded like the sped up blues he'd disapproved at the Parrishes only the night before. Finally, better judgement kicked through the layer of 2AM urge and foolishness that had ruled me. I closed my mouth, blinked, and swallowed a sea of spit. My arm muscles quivered from the prolonged effort of holding my weight up while every other fiber that made me declared a shirtless John distinct from, and vastly more electrifying than a shirtless Freddy.

     A harmonica soared through the radio. I relinquished my hold, pushed away from the shed’s rear wall so that my bathrobe could not snag on any protrusion on the way down. I landed softly on the hard-pack, paused in a crouch, a quieter piece of the music proceeded. The negative lizard image blistered my line of sight, bright, yellow it was there when I blinked and when I opened my eyes. I allowed my vision to re-adjust for a few moments while inside John continued to hum. I heard him handling something heavy and detected his movements in the flicker of light and dark through the many holes at the back of the shed. It had been a stupid, cloying idea. Sleepless, I’d noticed the shed’s interior light from my bedroom window, ventured out in the dark to assuage one itch only to have it replaced with another horribly mundane feeling. I’d seen other girls get crushes, I’d seen puppy love too, but I’d never experienced any of it until that moment. I refused to give in. Girls did sappy things for a crush, and it invariably ended in a smash-up of public humiliation. I could not afford infatuation, not with Mr. Abel’s attention focused on me, and Matilda’s return looming. No one could know. The feeling had to die. I had to kill it.

     I'd left the shed as I had come, quietly, and in a wide arc through the garden rather than a straight line to conceal my true point of origin. If someone sighted me, I would appear to have just added something unmentionable to the incinerator at the farthest end of our backyard. If he spotted my return, I needed only to touch my lower abdomen and my father would balk, retreat, forgo questions that would kindle answers that he had never wanted to hear.

I’d just reached my bedroom door when the telephone rang. My father stirred in his bedroom, then spoke with more sleep than wakefulness in his voice.

“What? I told you to wait until morning,” my father sounded annoyed, exhausted. Lamp light suddenly beamed through the transom of his bedroom door. My father moved heavily, likely to an upright position, feet on the floor as he listened to the person on the other end of the telephone line.

“They would have all been in church if you’d just waited a few more hours,” my father said. He followed up with a couple of expletives. He was silent for only a moment before he reached a decision.

“I’ll be right over. Just stay put. Forget it. I know what to do.”

My father hung up. I heard him dial the operator.

“Give me NOrmandy…”

I'd ducked into my room, but I continued to listen from my doorway. My father had called Mr. Abel. Something had gone wrong somewhere.