Arlene!
The moment he sat down in Mr. Warren's old Plymouth, Kelsey remembered he was supposed to meet Arlene at her locker after school. In his excitement over his teacher's offer, Kelsey had forgotten his date to walk Arlene home.
Most days Arlene's older sister picked her up, but today her sister had an activity after school. Kelsey had agreed to walk Arlene home.
Mr. Warren had the engine running; Kelsey couldn't back out on his teacher's offer now. He had no choice but to stand Arlene up. After all, Mr. Warren was doing him a favor, and Kelsey still hoped the teacher might change his mind about punishing the class.
Arlene would be angry with him for standing her up. He hated it when she was mad because she quit talking to him. No, it was worse than that; she shunned him. The more he tried to make amends, the more determined she became not to forgive him. It continued for days, even weeks, until one day, for no apparent reason, she would speak to him. He blubbered apologies for a few days after that. Arlene listened to them with a pleasant smile on her face, but Kelsey's words didn't have any effect on her. She had moved on.
Not only would Kelsey have to suffer Arlene's anger, but he had missed a rare opportunity to walk through Willow Park with her. There, among the forsythia bushes that crowded around a slimy green pond, he hoped to steal his first kiss. Every time Arlene asked Kelsey to walk her home, he expected them to end up in the forsythia bushes, but he had never suggested it to Arlene. He didn't think she was ready. He decided to wait until he received a sign that she wanted him to kiss her.
Junior told Kelsey not to worry. A man knows when to kiss a woman; it's instinct. Junior's advice didn't reassure him.
Kelsey wondered if this would have been the day Arlene gave him the sign.
Mr. Warren lived in a lime green bungalow with a screened-in front porch. That is where they found Mr. Warren's father, sitting in a ragged, overstuffed easy chair.
"This is my father, Clyde Warren. Father, this is one of my best students, Kelsey Landis."
The old man winked at Kelsey. "Call me Clyde."
"Kelsey has some questions about the Hartley Mansion blueprints."
"Ho, ho!" Clyde said. "The Hartley project. Quite a deal in its time. Big bucks for the firm, too. I did most of the scut work in those days. Got no credit for it. Hell, I was a pup-only twenty-eight. I-I..."
The old man, who had been smiling and jovial while he spoke, frowned and began convulsing with hacking coughs, which caused him to bounce around in the easy chair. Kelsey thought he was dying and backed away.
As if signaling for Death to halt, Clyde raised a quivering hand. He coughed out the word whiskey. "Whiskey!" he demanded.
Mr. Warren, who had been patting his father on the back and looking worried, hustled into the house and returned with a decanter and a glass. When Clyde saw them, he nodded his head and reached for his son with both arms. Mr. Warren sloshed some whiskey into the glass and helped his father get it to his lips. The amber liquid disappeared in one continuous flow. The old man's coughing spasm subsided. After he gulped another glassful, it quit altogether.
Clyde poured himself a third glass of liquor and took a sip. He held it up before his eyes, turning the glass in his fingers as he examined it.
"The elixir of life, it is," he said and stared at Kelsey. "Whiskey, my boy! Why, by the time I was your age, I was accustomed to the stuff. Not a drunkard, you see. Never a drunkard. No, sir. Just enough to keep the body tuned and to ward off disease."
Clyde took another sip of the whiskey. "Now this one." He pointed at Mr. Warren. "He don't partake. Never would. Don't understand it. I'm seventy-one. Drank the stuff all of my life. Never a drunkard, you see. Whiskey is good for the heart, good for the soul, and good for the bowels. Cheers!"
With that, the old man tipped his head back, drained the glass, and slammed it down on the arm of the chair. "All right!" he bellowed. "The Hartley project. Let me see those prints."
Kelsey handed the roll of papers to Mr. Warren, who spread them out before his father. Clyde perused the blueprints, flipping pages back and forth, nodding his head, and chuckling from time to time. After a few minutes, he looked up, first at Mr. Warren and then at Kelsey.
"Damn, I did good work." He reached for the decanter of whiskey. Mr. Warren beat him to it and drew the crystal container away from his grasp.
"You've had enough for this afternoon, Dad."
After giving his son a sour look, Clyde tapped the blueprints with a pointed index finger and said to Kelsey, "What is it you want to know?"
"It's these." Kelsey turned a couple of pages to the prints with the dotted lines. "Are they secret passageways?"
"Prohibition, my boy. It was that damned prohibition. You studied that in school, yet?"
"Well..." Kelsey hesitated. Clyde seemed upset again. Kelsey remembered studying prohibition, but the details escaped his memory. History did not interest him. In fact, he found little about school that appealed to him besides shop class and Arlene. "Yes, we studied prohibition, but I-"
"That was a sorry time for this nation. Government denying the common man his refreshment. The Noble Experiment, they called it. Bah! Gave organized crime a boost was all it did. People wanted to drink, law or no law. The bootleggers gave the people what they wanted. Now Willard Hartley was a respectable businessman who understood where to make a buck, so he turned bootlegger and made a bundle. The firm received a nice slice for these plans, though I didn't get but a journeyman's wages."
"Don't the Hartleys own a bank?" Kelsey wasn't sure how all of this related to the dotted lines on the blueprints, but he wanted to sound knowledgeable. He'd seen a Mr. Hartley in a TV commercial advertising one of the local banks.
"That's the grandson," Clyde said. "Willard Hartley started that bank to launder whiskey money through it. The new bank was an enormous boost to the community. Gave me a loan once. Willard Hartley became sort of a local hero-provided the booze people wanted and pumped a lot of that bootleg money into the town through bank loans. People looked the other way about some of the side effects."
"Dad," Mr. Warren said. "What about the blueprints? Answer the boy's question."
Mr. Warren pulled a pencil out of his pocket and picked his front teeth with it.
"I'm trying to give this boy an education. You shouldn't object to that; you're a teacher. And quit that nasty habit. You're going to rot your gums before you turn sixty. Good teeth and good whiskey make life pleasant in old age. Let the boy decide if his education should be curtailed or not. What do you say, Kelsey?"
Kelsey didn't like being caught in the middle of a dispute between Mr. Warren and his father. The way they scolded each other made him uncomfortable. Now he had to choose a side. He found the elder Warren's story fascinating and sensed it must have something to do with the secret passages, but Mr. Warren was his teacher and impatient to conclude the interview.
Mr. Warren spared Kelsey the need to answer. He told Clyde to continue. The old man in the easy chair grinned and winked knowingly at Kelsey.
"For years Willard Hartley ran this town. To protect his bootlegging, he bought off the police and sheriff, and of course, the mayor and city council were under his control. He pushed a lot of people around. The town was rougher then; open prostitution and gambling went hand-in-hand with bootlegging and were good business for Hartley, too. We had no corruption of morals before the moralists made everyone stop drinking.
"Hartley trusted no one. Always figured someone was trying to get him. Most of the time he got them first, if you know what I mean, but in case something went wrong, he had these secret passages designed into his house." The old man pointed to the dotted lines on the blueprints.
"All right!" Kelsey balled his right hand into a fist and made a hammering gesture. "So there are secret passages."
Somewhere from inside the house came the faint tinkle of a telephone ringing.
"I'll get it." Mr. Warren slipped through the front door and into the house.
"He wanted concealed panels and doorways-the works. A bastard, that Hartley." Clyde's eyes were set in a fierce stare. Kelsey turned to see what the old man was looking at, but there was only the empty street. "One of his prostitute mistresses shot him. He deserved worse. Hurt a lot of fine people."
"But I thought you said Hartley's bank was a good thing-."
Clyde held up a hand and swung his head around to check the front door. Mr. Warren was still inside.
"Glad that party pooper is gone." Clyde chuckled. "Pass me the whiskey."
Kelsey hesitated. Mr. Warren didn't want his father to drink anymore that afternoon, but it wasn't Kelsey's place to refuse the old man, was it? Kelsey's parents had taught him to respect his elders. Of course, he didn't want to upset Mr. Warren, either.
"Well, hurry up." Clyde monitored the front door as he spoke. "He'll be back any minute now."
"But Mr. Warren-I mean your son said..."
"Just bring it here, dammit. I'll take responsibility."
Kelsey handed Clyde the decanter. He filled a glass, splashing some whiskey on his pants and shirt. "Oops." He laughed hard and then coughed. But instead of taking a drink, Clyde held the glass out to Kelsey, who had been watching him.
"How old are you, Kelsey?"
"Almost fourteen."
"You're curious about this, aren't you?" The old man shoved the whiskey at Kelsey. "Here, try it. It's good stuff."
Clyde was right; Kelsey was curious about drinking. He had heard Mike Stephenson and some of the other tough guys at school boast about drinking and getting drunk.
His mother warned him that a person could become addicted to alcohol. Kelsey had seen the derelict men downtown near the bus station in their long, ragged coats with crumpled paper sacks in their hands: the winos. He didn't want to end up like them. If he never took a drink, he'd never get addicted; that's what his mother told him. Never take a drink.
"Never taken a drink, eh?" The old man once again offered Kelsey the glass. "This will make a man of you. Go on."
"I drank a little beer," Kelsey said in his defense, although the little beer had been a sip from his father's mug when Kelsey was seven years old.
Kelsey's father drank a beer now and then, and he wasn't an alcoholic; Kelsey was sure of that. And Kelsey didn't become an alcoholic from that sip of beer, either. Had he been too young or was he immune? The icy cold, golden bubbly liquid in that dripping mug with a foamy head on it looked delicious, but it wasn't, at least not to a seven-year-old boy. Do taste buds change as a person gets older, so things like beer and spinach and liver become appealing?
"I didn't figure you for a sissy." Clyde withdrew the glass.
"I'm not a sissy," Kelsey thought it was a strange word to use. A sissy must be something like a nerd. He probably was a nerd. He certainly wasn't a jock. He wasn't popular or cool. But Mr. Warren's father hadn't said nerd, although he might have meant that. He said sissy. Nobody had ever called Kelsey a sissy.
"Well." The old man extended the arm that held the glass toward Kelsey. "Drink this if you aren't a sissy."
"I would, but my mother wouldn't want me to do it. She says it's not right."
"Your mother? Ha! You are a sissy. A mama's boy."
"Am not. I don't want to become an alcoholic."
"One drink won't make you an alcoholic. Your father wants you to become a man, doesn't he?"
"Sure," Kelsey said, irritated at Clyde for questioning his father's intentions.
"This!" The old man nodded toward the glass. "This is part of becoming a man. A rite of passage, so to speak. There is nothing wrong with it. You won't become an alcoholic. You're just scared of being a real man. Sissy!"
Kelsey's hand glided toward the quivering tumbler. Before he realized what he was doing, he wrapped his fingers around the glass. The sweet aroma and amber color of the contents beckoned to him.
"Take a good mouthful." Clyde tried to hold back a smile.
Kelsey took a deep breath and brought the glass to his lips. He let the whiskey stream into his mouth until it was near full. He held it there. So far, so good. Some whiskey oozed out of the corner of his mouth and dribbled down his chin as Kelsey worked up the nerve to swallow it. The old man gazed at him, an amused grin plastered on his face. Kelsey thought he'd let a little trickle down his throat to see how he would react, but before he could do it, Mr. Warren stepped onto the porch.
Kelsey swallowed the whiskey in one gulp.
At first, he felt nothing and allowed a satisfied smile to spread across his face. He'd done it. Then he struggled to inhale. His throat was on fire. The whiskey was like a rubber ball; no sooner did it hit his stomach than it bounced back into his throat. His mouth became watery, and Kelsey thought he was going to vomit. But nothing happened, except he couldn't breathe. As he stood gagging, Clyde roared with laughter. Mr. Warren looked at Kelsey, dumbfounded.
"What's the matter with him?" Mr. Warren asked his father.
The old man pointed at Kelsey and continued to laugh.
"A chaser. The boy needs a chaser." That was all Clyde got out before the laughing fit turned into another spasm of coughing.
"A what?" Mr. Warren looked quite confused, what with Kelsey choking and his father hacking.
Clyde clutched the decanter and poured some whiskey down his throat, spilling it over his face and shirt.
"Come with me." Mr. Warren took Kelsey by the arm and led him inside to the kitchen sink.
Kelsey could breathe again after drinking a cup of water, although his stomach continued to wrestle with the whiskey.
"He shamed you into trying some, didn't he?" Mr. Warren searched the cabinets for something. "That damned old fart-excuse my language, Kelsey. Sometimes I'm at a loss about what to do with him." Mr. Warren retrieved a package of gum off a shelf. "Here, chew on this." He offered Kelsey a stick of spearmint. "If your folks find out about the whiskey you drank, I will lose my job."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Warren." Kelsey wasn't sorry; he enjoyed the warm, relaxed sensation the whiskey produced. "I won't say anything about this to my folks."
It was true, he wouldn't tell his folks, but he had to tell Junior. Junior had never drunk straight whiskey. And although Kelsey didn't like the stuff and wasn't eager to consume more of it, he had something to brag about to his friend. He was the whiskey expert now.
"Father did the same thing to me when I was twelve." Mr. Warren spoke as he walked Kelsey out to the porch. "He thought it would make a man out of me. It put me off liquor for good. Haven't had a drink since. I disappointed him that day, just like I let him down later when I became a teacher instead of an architect. Father had high hopes for me there, too."
They emerged from the house to find the elder Warren overcome by the whiskey. He sat, head on his chest, snoring in long, raspy gusts.
"Well, at least we found out something about those blueprints. They brought back some pleasant memories for my father. Can I give you a ride home?"
"Oh, I don't live far from here, Mr. Warren. I can walk."
"That is a good idea. Walking will help you get over the effects of the liquor. How are you doing?"
"Not bad." To prove the point, Kelsey skipped down the steps.
Two blocks from his house, Kelsey detoured down an alley, where he slipped behind a garage and heaved his guts. The vomit gave off the sickening sweet odor of whiskey. Kelsey had the presence of mind to take the wad of chewing gum out of his mouth before he puked. Now he tossed it back in to get rid of the tang of vomit and the burning in his throat.
Photo by Thomas Park via Unsplash.com
Note: This is Chapter 3 of a 32 chapter novel. I will post a new chapter each week.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this chapter, please click the star.
I plan to publish this novel after it appears on Wattpad, and you can help me make it better by providing feedback in the comments section: Are you invested in the plight of the main character? Does the plot hold your attention? Are you looking forward to reading the next chapter? Are there gaps or inconsistencies in character development or plot?
K.C. Knouse is the author of two published collections of short fiction: Twenty Miles West of Branch, Texas and other stories and A Short Stack of Short Fiction: Three Character-Driven Short Stories . Both are available on Amazon.com.