Pursuit Of The Cygnus Thief

Chapter 3 - A Chanteuse On Scrub Peak

Chapter Three

A Chanteuse On Scrub Peak

     If you viewed it from a distance and with a little imagination, Scrub Peak resembled a giant stoney headboard over a dusty desert mattress. In reality, Scrub Peak was the summit of a distinct group of rock strata that jutted out of the desert floor and surged upward some two-hundred and fifty feet over Assumption. It was a youthful refuge. Sensible adults who approached the foot of Scrub Peak weighed the oppressive desert heat against both the exertion of a climb and their number of years past thirty before invariably deciding to forgo the venture. The summit was easily accessible if you knew the right path; via the south not the north end, which ran contrary to all visual intuition. Generally unencumbered by thoughts of personal mortality on any account; young people in Assumption regularly made the climb to gain such enjoyments as a panoramic view of Muncie County, a place to smoke in peace and a measure of furtive independence.

     Galina slipped a Chanteuse between her lips, shut her eyes, and leaned forward. Three gangly boys rushed towards her with lighters in their hands. There was momentary jostling amongst the three, followed by a silent moment of aquiesence. Ron Blay, the tallest of Galina’s three suitors had won the right to place his lighter beneath the tip of Galina’s cigarette. A few moments later, Ron garnered a distracted nod from Galina then she exhaled a puff of smoke into his face. Ron smiled. His two friends looked on with mouths agape as if the puff of smoke from Galina had some unspoken significance. Emboldened, Ron wedged himself sideways into the narrow space between my left shoulder and Galina’s right. I was left mid-sentence, staring first at Ron’s back and then up at the short pale hairs that trailed beyond his hairline down the nape of his neck. It was the end of April and we were all standing at the summit of Scrub Peak.    

     I turned away, stuck a Chanteuse in my mouth and struck a match. Thin, extra long and white, Chanteuse cigarettes were shitty to the nose and astoundingly worse on the tongue yet well worth the in-take for all that they then symbolized. Galina had stolen the cigarettes from her mother and shared a few with me to nurse over the weekend. Matilda McKee smoked Chanteuses too but pilfering even one from her supply in the basement would have been foolish. Matilda kept everything at home organized, enumerated and deviously booby-trapped. There was little wind up at Scrub Peak on most days but I was careful nonetheless, to note the direction of it. A concentration of cigarette smoke on my person could only inflame Matilda’s rapacious appetite for screeching every insult she knew at me and seeing me in trouble with my father.

     I moved out of the vicinity of Galina’s spotlight towards the northern edge of the summit and gazed out into the distance while she held court. The familiar little smudge on the horizon was Muncie; the largest and only city within the impoverished county that shared its name. Just outside and to the right of Muncie lay the source of its smudged visage; the Stetlon Jet facility which consisted of a series of hangars, a tremendous chimney that chugged out a seemingly permenant cloud of brown smoke and a sprawling complex of nondescript window-starved brick buildings behind barbed wire fencing. To the left of Muncie was the Reddy’s Pop Bottling factory and grounds with several large white brick buildings topped by an array of giant garish billboards.

     Behind me, Galina said something silly and Ron, the more advanced of the three boys tried to goad her into a mock argument. While she was not a silly girl, Galina did have an excess of beauty; an attribute that made people both over estimate her qualities and under estimate her abilities. This was Galina’s strength however; and a curse to anyone who could not see the exploitive streak beneath her beauty for what it was. Ron had been responsible for her history and science homework since the eigth grade. She’d never even kissed him. Galina would not allow her merchandise to be touched as she put it. Her parents were determined to marry off their daughter to money in exchange for her beauty, youth and purity. To that end, Galina couldn’t ride horses or bicycles and she had a trumped up medical condition that excused her from physical education at school. There’d been a time before, when we were kids in which Galina mentioned acting as a career, but any career save that of wife to a wealthy man ran contrary to the plans of her parents. Galina soon out grew the urge to display any overt ambition and concentrated instead on testing the power her singular looks provided. As boys only one generation removed from the Po’Court, Ron Blay and his friends never stood a chance with Galina Markham.

     I approached the edge of the summit where the rocks were loose and contemplated what the seconds of a tumble would be like. This was a frequent musing of mine, one likely borne of a life in which Matilda had replaced my deceased mother in a macabre reverse of the cuckoo bird’s habit I suppose. While some people are afraid of heights, others seek risks for the sensation of fear followed by the elation of triumph. I’ve often felt however; that I might be of third breed, one who is drawn to the edge not to survive but to feel the sensation of ultimate failure without time to regret it.