Chapter 1 - Matty and the Old Man

You know, if we live here on a planet that is only five billion years old, and we’re at this spot in our evolution, imagine how well those schmoes are doing on the ten billion year old planet down the block. Freaking awesome! - Jeff, from the end of the bar

I would like to tell you a story. Some of it happened, some of it did not, but it is all true.

My parents were busy individuals. My mother spent a great deal of her time mothering others as a member of the gifted education program in Wichita. She had been working in Lenexa, a town on the Kansas side of Kansas City, but decided to come home when her father became ill. It was a chance coincidence that my father had returned from graduate school that same month and that they met in their first few days back. Meanwhile, my father had gone into the business consultation racket and was making the big bucks being gone four days out of every seven. With both parents gone or otherwise involved for such long stretches of time it was only natural that I found myself in unusual situations with my pal Matty.

My father’s friend, a sports journalist in KC who liked to visit when the opportunity presented itself, had a son close in age to myself. We got along well together, and he never made jokes about my name. This was likely because his own name was so ridiculous. He was named after the newspaperman’s great grandfather Mathias. I called him Matt, but the mean kids back home had learned his name early and abused it to no end.

The two of us enjoyed hiding in the upper alcoves of the library imagining ourselves in different worlds. My parents did not mind, as long as neither of us was too violent with the books we used to build our castles and forts. It had all been great fun until the day the old man appeared.

On that particular day it had been raining pretty hard. The game my father’s friend had come down to cover (though George, my father’s friend, was the editor of the KC Moon-Gazette, he enjoyed getting down and dirty once in a while) looked to be rained out. This was a phrase of George’s. “The Royals game was lookin’ to be rained out, until those clouds just broke the way they did. It was a nice’un.”

On days that it rained Matty always wanted to play pirate ship. It may have had to do with the way the drops plunked against the Plexiglas dome in the Library ceiling high above our heads. Or perhaps it was the way the birds called louder and sharper in the air, like gulls on an abandon pier. Regardless, Matty wanted to play ship, so we played ship.

We were on a voyage from Persia to a way station in Africa carrying a full cargo of His Majesty’s Tea when we heard the man’s feet clomping off the port bow.

“Did you hear that, Matt?” I asked.

“Arr, mate, I sure did,” he replied. “D’ya reckon it’s Dad?” He meant, of course, his father George.

“I d’nah think so,” I whispered in an atrocious piraty accent. “Don’t George and Dad usually call us when they bring back the pizza?”

At that moment, I was interrupted by a smoky, scratchy voice that I did not recognize. The ship around us vanished, and in its place stood a bunch of books stacked like a large box with a broom as a mast in the center. We both turned to look behind us. An old, scabby man, wearing faded and torn clothing frowned at us.

“Hello, boys. I don’t mean to interrupt your voyage, but – Ha! – I thought I might point out that wave to starboard. If you don’t get the bow facing it head on, your – Ha! – ship will be in for a world of hurt.”

Confused, Matty and I looked at one another and then turned to what had been starboard. The Library vanished. The books were a boat again. And there, before us, was a fifty foot wave.

For a moment, the both of us were speechless. We could not think. We could not act. We were consumed by the towering Blue. Then a splash of water hit my face, and it was time to move. “To the helm, Matty!” I screamed.

The scabby, grizzled man – where was he? – was correct. To ride such a wave without capsizing, one must face it.

Both of us sprinted down the gangway and leapt for the helm. The water was falling all around us now. The Plexiglas ceiling of the Library was a dream from another world. My silk shirt and canvas pants –strange, wasn’t I wearing jeans and a t-shirt? – were soaked through. The wind was howling and had torn away my hat in our dash for the helm. We both moved to one side of the massive wheel and shoved, but there was no movement. The water, the ocean would not allow it. The sky was beginning to vanish as the hurtling wave came toward us.

“Matty, we’ve got to move this wheel if we don’t want to die,” I cried.

“Then let’s move it, Dewey. I’ve got you, if you’ve got me,” he replied. In his face I could see tears begging to be let loose. They were tears of confusion and fear.

I said, “Then I’ve got you.” We both turned once more to the helm. I gritted my teeth. And we heaved.

It is strange to remember those moments before the wheel began to give. In my head all of the sounds are gone. The terrible wave had caused a momentary lull in the rain and the wind. I could hear the heartbeat in my ears and feel it in my gut just below the ribcage. The only other sounds were those of Matt and myself breathing, yet those sounds were like fog horns or hurricanes against the stillness of the wave.

Then I felt a click, and the helm gave like a sideways top. Faster and faster it whirled, until Matt and I could no longer touch it. The ship's bow turned into the wave. And as the bow moved fearlessly into the wave’s path, the world exploded. The wave broke. I managed one quick breath, grabbed a railing, and hung on. A thousand watery hands ripped at my face and shoulders. My pants tried to pull away from my hips. I dared not open my eyes. My nostrils burned as the salt struck.

As the wave passed, I risked opening my eyes against the stinging salt water. The ship was totally submerged. We were easily twenty feet under water. Matt held another rail close to me. The mast appeared to be breaking the water’s surface, so I grabbed Matt’s shoulder and pulled him toward oxygen.

When our heads broke the surface, the water faded. Our clothes dried. The Library reappeared. The old, grizzled man stood in front of us. “Welcome back, boys. How (Ha!) was your trip?”

Matt looked to me. I did not know what to say. A moment before it was as if we had been older: men born and bred to the sea. Now we were children again, and we felt like it. Matt was only six years old. I was seven. The things I knew a moment ago faded away. Only the words we spoke and the visions we saw remained.

This man was older and more frightening now. He leered at the two of us as we stood silently before him. “Not ready yet, are ye?” he asked, looking through the window high above at the still rumbling clouds. “Ha!”

It was a violent word and with it came a terrible gust of aging breath. The man smelled of parmesan cheese and rotten olives. “You’ll want to pay (Ha!) attention from now on. You never know when the next wave might come crushing down. Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.” The man turned, grumbling in a sotto voice neither of us could make out. He moved down one of the many spiral staircases out of sight. We leapt from behind our wall of books, rushed to the staircase, and stopped. There was nothing there. The front door flew open, and we both jumped. Then a strong, male voice called, “Dewey! Matty! We’re home, and we have pizza!” I heard a sob and turned. Matty, behind me, had slumped to the floor and was crying between clamped lips. I was exhausted.

It was sometime before this that I had decided Matty was somehow special. He had a demeanor that forced others to overlook him. He stood in corners with his eyes lowered. He never said much. He was quite a bit smarter than the babysitters and teachers who wandered in and out of his life. Had circumstances been different, he probably would have been the boy everyone in his hometown forgot. He might have gone off to college, entered a random engineering field, joined a company that may well have promoted him to some position in middle management, and died a quiet but content old man.

Such a story was not in the cards for Matty. As I said, he was special. Matty was introspective, as is common among the quiet and shy. He had to deal with that inner voice that told him no one liked him, and that he was not popular. But within that voice was also a strange confidence. Matty believed anything was possible. Maybe it was. He just needed someone to stand with him.

Prelude - My Name

SO oft have I invok’d thee for my Muse
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.
Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned’s wing
And given grace a double majesty.
Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
Whose influence is thine, and born of thee:
In others’ works thou dost but mend the style,
And arts with thy sweet graces graced be;
But thou art all my art, and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance. -The Bard

In the white darkness of the mind, at that point where the axon reaches desperately for the next neuron lies chaos. The brain has no power over that terrible space called the synaptic cleft. And yet, we still think… Sometimes… - unknown


When I was younger, they used to laugh at my father, and by extension myself, for his idiosyncratic home called “The Library.” It had been a foolish notion of his to give tours to everyone around town because he was so proud of it. I suppose it was just my misfortune that I had been born only a few short days prior to the completion of the bullet-shaped building.

When attempting to tell my story, it is difficult to decide whether to start with that first day in which I was forever linked to the Library or follow the crowd and go with the more typical day of my birth. Both were foolish days, but it seemed a time of foolishness all around. Perhaps it might be best to start the way my father starts it… with me relaxing in the womb.

My father’s aunt came to visit that day. With her, as was often the case, came her three insane children. Allow me to paint the scene. My mother and father were living in one of the bottom apartments on Ridge road in west Wichita. These days, that may as well be called the city center. At the time, though, it was a cute, if start-upish neighborhood.

But first, the doorbell rang.

My mother, a small, dark-haired woman with a strong nose, soft eyes, and clay-mation grin sighed and put her hands to either side of the lounger she’d just slumped into. She had returned from work not long before and was finally comfortable. “You forgot the keys again, didn’t you?” she said to herself. My father, who had rung the doorbell, now began to knock. Her eyes assumed the look of a tired deer as she stood up and sidled to the door. My father hated that look, and she loved him for it.

However, this time he did not notice. She turned the knob, and he leapt inside, slamming the door closed behind him. “She’s coming,” he whispered. His throat sounded dry.

“Who’s coming?” replied my mother.

“They’re coming!” he responded.

“Who…,” she thought for a second. “No!”

“Yes,” said my father and ran to the kitchen. In later years my mother would often recount this story and laugh at the amazing speed that burst forth from my father’s heels. For now, she went through the rapid process of monster-proofing the apartment. The glass was locked away in the closet. The fancy silverware, given as a present from my father’s other aunt in New York, was hidden above the refrigerator. The older blankets and quilts were folded and stored in a closet marked “moth-balls.”

In the meantime, my father was in the kitchen, stowing away and tying down any implements that might cause a foolish or reckless soul to kill himself. There had already been too many close calls. When he finished, he hurried back into to living room to find my mother finished as well. He hugged her, briefly placed his hand upon her belly and what was likely my shoulder and then they both flopped into the couch. My mother turned on the television, and the doorbell rang for the second time that day. The sound of the doorbell was overpowered, though, by the much more insistent sound of eight fists hammering at the door from its base to a point midway between the knob and the top edge of the door jam.

My father grinned, kissed my mother on the cheek right beneath the ear-lobe, and called, “It’s open.” On the television played a swing band. My parent’s decision to get a satellite dish with music had been a celebrated one.

The knob turned, and my father’s cousins spilled in like so many bowling pins at the end of a strike. “Hi, Natey!” called my father’s aunt, who regularly ignored my mother on the grounds that mom was far too attractive for the rest of the family. In other words, my mother had replaced my great aunt as the “cute” one, and the most galling part was that my mother did not try to be adorable. “Did you say something about pasgetti?” My father’s aunt tried to be adorable all the time.

An awkward pause filled the air until my mother spoke. “Yes, Nathan, did you say something about pasgetti?” She looked at him with an expression that stumbled between fear and resignation.

My father, for his part, shot his wife a look of helplessness and apology before saying, “I may have mentioned it in passing. I’m sorry, Alice. I hadn’t realized you were bringing the family over.” This was not true. “I’m not sure if we have enough.”

Alice gave them both a look filled with angelic sweetness. She lived for these moments. She thrived on being the victim. “Oh. Don’t worry. I kin get somethin’ whipped up at home. I only had a ten hour shift today. It wasn’t too bad.”

My mother shot dad an unreadable look, sighed, and hoisted herself and her third trimester belly up with a grunt. “No, no, Alice. You can eat with us. I’ll just add more noodles to the water.”

The next two hours were a painful affair that my parents choose to skip over when telling the story. Suffice it to say that Aunt Alice has a knack for digging at just the right wounds; everyone ate dinner; the house was in shambles; and two of the three children were crying.

When supper ended, my parents began to clean up, but were interrupted when my aunt called from the living room. They followed the sound of her voice. Aunt Alice was at the door. She had collected her children without any help from my parents, which was sure to be a sore point in the next few weeks. She explained to my mother that a proper house cleaning was always the job of the hosts, and that she needed to get home to sleep before another ten hour day. It was at this point, as the conversation wound down and it seemed as though no problems of any major consequence were on the horizon, that my destiny was set. My aunt asked the question.

“So what are you going to name him?”

My parents looked at one another and gave, in unison, the same response they always gave, “We don’t know yet.”

“You’ve got to name him something that won’t embarrass him. He’ll probably have the same temperament as both of you and will end up crying and whining all the time.” As I said, Aunt Alice had a way of picking at holes. “And while you’re at it, I’d level that stupid house of yours before you’ve finished it. What kind of weirdos build a library for a home? Your boy will be the laughing stock of the town. He’ll probably be called something nerdy like Poindexter…”

“Or Dewey?” my mother said. And that was it. My aunt did not get the joke. Heck, I did not get the joke when they told the story to me (“Dewey Decimal, get it? We live in a library,” Dad explained). The trouble was that my aunt assumed any joke that went over her head was mean-spirited and rude, and to top it off my mother was the joker.

“Well to hell with that!” said Aunt Alice. “Both of you just be that way! I could tell you all didn’t want me here anyway. See if I ever come back!” And that was the last we saw of Aunt Alice. At least, it was the last for a little while. It’s hard to keep Aunt Alice away. And that’s also how I came to be named Dewey. My father was proud of my mother’s quick thinking, and my mom liked the name. To this day, I’m still not sure whether I should be grateful to my aunt Alice or curse her until the end of days. I suppose we shall see.

The Trail

Hmm. So I've been thinking that I need a way to push myself into working on the story I've been writing. As such I've decided to try the Dickensian route of offering installments of my story. This means, for all you lucky folks out there who probably don't give a crap about this story, that you have the personal opportunity to read what is probably a bunch of crap.

To that effect, please allow me to post a quick bit.

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent reader.

All characters in this publication are fictitious. The characters of Kenzie, Aly, and Jonathan are inspired by but not intended to represent the actual people of which they portray. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, otherwise, is purely coincidental.

Also, I would like to thank Glen Seebers and the people at the Chisholm Trail Heritage Center for providing such interesting information on their respective websites. Regrettably, my hard drive recently perished, so I do not have the link to the website with the map of the Trail that I personally followed. However, if I ever do find that site again, I will surely post it.

This story is dedicated to my nieces and nephew. And also to the woman, whomever she might be, who will one day bear us a child. Don't worry, whoever you are, we don't have to name him Dewey.

Have fun folks.