New Short Story
The Strange Tale of the Porvenir
I’m still diligently working on the next major tale from the Order of St. George, but it’s probably a month away from being ready for publication. Once that one is published I’ll do my first paperback edition as a collection of the first arc of tales. Hopefully they’ll make good Christmas gifts. Until then enjoy my new short story The Strange Tale of the Porvenir. I’ve included the first half of the story here for free, if you want to find out what happens next you’ll need to purchase it on kindle for 99 cents.
Summers in the Gulf
Every summer growing up we’d visit my grandfather in the Panhandle of Florida. He was an old fisherman from back when Okaloosa Island was still an island in the Gulf of Mexico instead of a tourist trap in the Gulf of America. Back then if he wanted to go to Pensacola he had to travel by boat instead of car. Grandpa’s hands were rough, his skin like leather, beaten down by the sun and rope. He lived to be a hundred. He married Grandma when she was young and he was already a bit old, she outlived him by decades. But he still got to meet all his grand kids, there were fifteen of us in all.
My dad hated this yearly trip back home. Dad hated fish, the beach, and pretty much everything to do with his father. He had gone to college in Colorado to get as far from it all as he could. We returned every year because he loved Grandma. But I loved Grandpa. I could never understand why I seemed to be the only one. He was a bit gruff and rough around the edges but he told the best stories, and I thought he was the most interesting person I’d ever met. I think Dad disliked him not because of anything he’d done, but because of things he hadn’t done, like being warm or taking them to theme parks. Going to the panhandle was my favorite part of summer until I discovered girls and became too cool for Grandpa.
I loved rolling down the window of the station wagon as we came in view of the gulf. The long drive was exhausting but it always seemed worth it when I felt that air coming off the sea. The saltiness and humidity made me feel renewed, it was an idyllic world compared to Boulder. Warm, exciting and beautiful. We would pull up to my grandparents house and everyone would get out and swarm grandma. But I would ignore that fiasco and go out back where I knew Grandpa would be. He was always there sitting on the dock. It was a long wooden dock extending far out over the water. He had crab traps under it that he’d check every few days. Sometimes he’d be fishing. Sometimes he’d be sitting in his chair sipping sweat tea with a bit of fireball mixed in. Sometimes he’d be smoking his old corn cob pipe, one of those comically big ones named after General MacArthur. Sometimes he’d be doing all three. He wouldn’t notice me for a few moments. I’d just watch him do whatever he was doing in my quiet boyish worship. His forearms were big and gnarly like Popeye. His gut sagged. He usually wore Hawaiian shirts and a beater, but he always wore a dark blue hat that said Marine Corps. To me he looked like a man who had been through it all and could go through it all again if he had to.
Finally he’d notice me standing there and say “which one are you again?” It made me laugh every time. As he got older I wasn’t so sure it was a joke anymore, his memory started to go towards the end.
The first night of our visit Grandma would always make us a big seafood boil. Full of potatoes, corn, muscles, crab, shrimp and cray fish. I never warmed up to cray fish but I liked everything else. She would get me and dad to pick up the massive pot and pour out the contents onto a big picnic table in the screened in patio. She’d lay down garbage bags on the table like a disposable table cloth. Grandpa would say a simple prayer and open a beer, always the same kind: miller high life. He wouldn’t start eating till the beer was halfway done. When he did start the only things he ate were shrimp, crayfish, and corn. I asked him why once and he said “that’s just what I like I guess.” That’s the way Grandpa was. He liked what he liked and didn’t fuss about it.
He had only ever purchased ten VHS tapes and they all sat under the small TV/VCR set in the den right in front of his old La-z-boy. Those tapes are burned into my brain: El Dorado, Red River, The Cowboys, To Have and Have Not, Casablanca, The African Queen, Smoky and the Bandit, The Longest Yard, Jaws, and Meet Me in St. Louis. He had to replace his copy of Jaws three or four times because it had been watched so much. I watched it with him at least once every time I visited. I’d lay on the floor in the den with a big pillow while grandpa sat in his chair smoking a pipe. People still make fun of shag carpet but I loved the way it felt as a kid, laying on the floor of the den watching Jaws with Grandpa. When I asked him why just those ten he said “those are the only movies I ever wanted to watch twice.” On his bedside there were seven books and I still think they may have been the only books he ever read: 1st edition Scofield reference Bible, The 1928 Book of Common Prayer, The Lord of the Rings, Orthodoxy, Mere Christianity, That Hideous Strength (with the old weird artwork from the 70s) and an Arthur Machen anthology. He prayed the office every morning and most evenings, usually he missed evening prayer because he had fallen asleep in a chair somewhere in the house. He attended St Andrew’s by the Sea until he died, and he died right before the Episcopal Church went so liberal that the Christians within the denomination started to leave. Otherwise I’m quite sure he would’ve left as well, thankfully he didn’t live long enough to have to deal with that.
Grandma owned hundreds of books and had accumulated a massive collection of VHS tapes. When DVDs became a thing she got right on that too. She consumed stories like no one I’ve ever known. Weird stuff too, like things you wouldn’t expect a good Anglican lady to own. She had the largest collection of Stephen King first editions I’d ever seen. I loved pulling her edition of The Gunslinger off the shelf just to look at the illustrations inside. She had Night Gallery and The X-files on vhs. Grandma liked horror and Sci Fi during an era when women her age seemed to mostly read cookbooks and watch Soaps. She was a funny outgoing lady. I moved into their house when she died in part so I could keep her collection of media together so that it could still be enjoyed. I treat the shelves and shelves of books and tapes she collected like some kind of museum. I haven’t changed much of the house, that way it kinda feels like they still live here.
I asked Grandma once what Grandpa’s favorite movie actually was and she said “Ask him!”
“I did and he said he didn’t know.”
She looked around and whispered “it’s the Sound of Music.”
“So why isn’t that in his top ten tapes?”
“He would never admit to liking it that much. It’s kind of a kids musical.”
“But Meet Me in St Louis is kind of a musical, why not the Sound of Music?”
She shrugged. “Meet me in St Louis isn’t for kids exactly. Whenever we watch the Sound of Music he’s the happiest afterwards, and he doesn’t like to admit when he’s happy. Meet me in St Louis is kinda melancholy.”
Usually we’d spend a week with them. By the end it always felt like it was time to go, mostly because Dad would be so irritable. “You can only go to the beach so many times, fish so many times, watch so many old movies and play so many games of Rummy” he would finally say and I knew it was time to go home. Rummy wasn’t the only game we played, Grandma had a decent collection of good board games as well. She had all of the classic 3M bookshelf games, I think she bought them as they came out through mail order somehow. There were no hobby shops anywhere near them back in the day so that must be how she got them. They’re mostly still in tact, but a few are missing pieces. My favorite in that collection is Regatta because of the sailing theme. It was hard to get Grandpa to play anything but variations of Rummy.
But at some point during that week before Dad was fed up, grandpa would take us out into the gulf on his boat. It was a modest vessel, nothing too fancy. A 45 foot modified shrimp boat that Grandpa had fixed up just the way he wanted. I don’t know what its original name was but he renamed it the Delia, which was Grandma’s name. It reminded me of Quint’s Orca from Jaws. There was plenty of room for us grand kids especially when we were small and it was definitely big enough to handle the Gulf waves easily. We would putter around and do some fishing, then at night we’d sleep out under the stars. Grandpa would cook for us like they used to out on fishing trips in the old days. Usually the dishes involved cabbage. I loved Grandpa’s corned beef and cabbage. It wasn’t fancy but it tasted great on those gulf summer nights.
Not everyone would go on those outings. Dad never went and grandma never went. But I always went. One time I was the only one that wanted to go. I’ll never forget that trip for two reasons. Grandpa helped me land an 80 pound Wahoo. They get a lot bigger than that but it’s still the biggest fish I’ve ever caught. I’m not half the fisherman grandpa was. But the second thing was Grandpa told me a story I’ll never forget. My favorite part of those gulf boat trips was Grandpa’s stories. He had a lot. Between being a marine in World War 2, to decades of fishing, he had a lot of stories. He had a repertoire of about a dozen stories we all knew because we’d heard them so many times. Some were funny, some exciting and a few were clearly tall tales. He claimed to have seen a 25 foot sturgeon in Santa Rosa Bayou more than once. He also claimed to have seen an actual sea serpent near Micronesia.
But the story he told me that night after dinner, he only ever told that story once that I know of. I never brought it up with anyone else, until now, so I don’t really know.
(Remember you’ll have to pay 99 cents on kindle to find out what happens next! You can find it here. The first minor tale from the Order of St. George should be coming out soon, which will be launching a new character who will spin off into this own series: Armadel the Heretic. As usual I’ll be posting the first chapter for free here when its published.)