Pursuit Of The Cygnus Thief

Chapter 1 - To Reach For Reddy's Pop

April 1956

Chapter 1

To Reach For Reddy’s Pop

He held out his right hand, palm up just a few inches from the lower center of his torso. Then, Mr. Abel peered down at me through eyes as frosty as the bottle of Orange Reddy’s Pop I had just fished out of the soft drink ice tank. At first, I thought that Mr. Abel meant to take the bottle from me. But I was fifteen years old and there was no question that I was quite capable of carrying the cold wet bottle of pop to the store counter up front without dropping it on the floor. There was no drying cloth hanging on the nail lodged in the wall to the right of the ice tank like there usually was, so my second thought was that Mr. Abel was going to use his apron to dry the bottle for me. I started to hand the bottle to Mr. Abel but when I held it up to his palm, he made no move to grab it.

“I have a nickel. I can pay for it Mr. Abel.” I was suddenly worried that he thought I might be attempting to swipe the pop which was far-fetched, stealing from the General Store was just not a part of my repretoire and where would I secret away a cold wet bottle of pop anyway? I glanced at my shoes as I spoke because it was rude to look at adults eye to eye for very long. It was also too forward I was beginning to learn to look men in the eye for too long. Mr. Abel was well beyond repulsive however; and just my brief glance into his eyes was all that I could bear in that moment. Ice. He was like a sentient glacier yearning to suck first heat and then life from me. Even during the summer months at midday there in the desert, the chill in Mr. Abel’s eyes was an altogether revolting one. He often stared at me that way. He did it when there were no other adults around who could detect his leers and in that moment, I was the only customer in Abel’s General Store. He had already explained that he was tending to the store because Mrs. Abel had taken Freddy, their only son into Muncie for the day. Freddy was three years older than I was but it had been evident since we were both young children in the way that he talked, the way his father treated him, the fact that he’d gone to a school in Muncie and the things that were whispered in the village that Freddy would never mature mentally.

“Amelia.” Mr. Abel uttered my name as if he was trying to supress a nasty wet cough. His face was red, sweaty he was breathing through his mouth staring into me. I took a few steps backward when I realized that I could feel the heat rising off his body. He smelled like one of the filthy bathrooms in my school, unscrubbed, unwiped, unsavory and sticky.

“You know? I can never decide whether I should make you use the front door or the side one. Your skin is so very fair…hell,it’s white…” I could hear his breath catch in his throat as he spoke.

“Straight auburn hair too…you know? You’re losing those freckles these days. You look so much like your mother. Her hair was lighter red though. I suspect yours is going to do the same thing eventually.” It felt as if he’d given me too much thought and had worked hard to keep it to himself for so long that he needed to vent. I knew that he wasn’t really expecting me to say anything to him. These were simply Mr. Abel’s confessions. I felt like he was spitting on me.

“Those lips of yours…All wrong…not like Suzy at all. I shouldn’t even like them. But mein Gott…I want to chew on them…big and pink like two big pieces of Bazonka Bubble gum!” I gasped as much from the shock of him speaking of my mother so casually as from the implications of what he’d said about me.

“Would you like Bazonka? I’ll give some for free but I want to see how you chew them for me.Yes?” I had already calculated a dash for the front doors. My main obstacles were Mr. Abel planted firmly in front of me and the butcher counter to my right. To my left was the soft drink ice tank and a couple of wooden pallets laden with boxes of laundry detergent.