Galley Galley FLAME VINE A NOVEL Charles Porter Galley ©2017 Charles Porter Illustrated by Kathy Von Ertfelda, Loxahatchee FL. Cover art by Gisela Pferdekamper, Loxahatchee FL. Cover design by Larissa Hise Henoch. Interior design and formatting by Dawn Von Strolley Grove. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher. www.charlesporterauthor.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Porter, Charles Library of Congress Control Number: 2017909232 Charles Porter, Loxahatchee, FL ISBN: 9780989425629 (trade paper) ISBN: 9780989425636 (ePub) Printed in the United States of America by Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Beach, Florida. Galley For Bill, Julia, and Ethel Porter Galley Galley Contents Gathered .......................................................................vii Schema ........................................................................ viii Foreword .......................................................................ix PART ONE Chapter 1—The Gas....................................................1 Chapter 2—Aubrey ...................................................13 Chapter 3—I Wax .....................................................25 Chapter 4—Incontinence and Joy .............................37 Chapter 5—Leda .......................................................47 Chapter 6—The Junior: Vietnam 1967 .....................61 Chapter 7—The Terrible and the Sublime ................73 Chapter 8—The Blue Goose Gang ...........................85 Chapter 9—John Chrome........................................109 Chapter 10—Arquette .............................................127 Chapter 11—Aubrey’s House .................................145 Chapter 12—Carburetion ........................................159 v CONTENTS Galley PART TWO Chapter 13—Ship in a Bottle ..................................163 Chapter 14—The Potato Thief ................................173 Chapter 15—The Cemetery: First Visit ..................185 Chapter 16—The Raw of Averages ........................195 Chapter 17—Sirens .................................................211 Chapter 18—All White ...........................................229 Chapter 19—Trucks ������������������������������������������������241 Chapter 20—The Shell Rock Road .........................251 Chapter 21—The Cemetery: 2nd Visit ....................263 Chapter 22—Reckonings: Half a Love Story .........277 Chapter 23—The Saloon Singer .............................289 Chapter 24—Alone .................................................299 Chapter 25—Sonny .................................................307 Interview .................................................................313 Questions and Topics for Discussions .....................320 vi Galley Gathered Sonny: the Tin Snip Killer Aubrey: main character Triple Suiter: Aubrey’s other voice Amper Sand: Triple Suiter’s other voice Leda: Aubrey’s wife The Junior: old schoolmate Arquette: old schoolmate Melinda: Arquette’s girlfriend Punky: old schoolmate Nell Kitching: institutionalized schoolmate John Chrome: English teacher/surfer Rose Mothershed: John Chrome’s girlfriend Reve: a gypsy woman vii Galley SCHEMA THE INCONTINENCE: Killing Swallowing Screwing Thinking Drugging Drinking Fighting None THE GUILT: Murder Blue jays Women Fat Fidelity Brother Vietnam None THE GAS: Freon Neon Nitrous Chloroform Smoke Bowel Ozone None THE JOY: Each other viii Galley Foreword The condition of hearing voices is not always pathological, and many voice hearers do not come forward or tell anyone for fear of being discriminated against. This is not a story about paranormal powers, nor is it fantasy or magic realism. This fictional piece is taken from the real world, the scientific world, and South Florida’s cultural landscape, except my theory about slippers—voices one hears in their head that live on the neuronal roads and in the vast, unknown spandrels of the brain. The reader does not have to believe in slippers, but I do. This book is a prequel to the novel Shallcross, by the same author; however, the two books do not have to be read in order. DEDICATED TO THE HEARING VOICES MOVEMENT ALL CHARACTERS IN THIS STORY ARE FICTIONAL. ix Galley Galley PART ONE There are two worlds! But they cannot be explained by Plato, only schizophrenia. —Triple Suiter In 2004, a man named Charles Porter unlocks a door to an aban- doned shop called Sonny’s Bookstore. On a table display he sees a book with his name on it and opens it to the first page. The page describes him walking into the bookstore, finding a book with his name on it and reading a story about him walking into a bookstore, seeing his name on a book, opening it to the first page and reading a story about him- self reading a story about himself in a book . infinitely. Don Quixote—2nd book Galley Galley Galley Galley Chapter 1 THE GAS Summer 1950 He, Sonny, had Newman blue eyes and lived with his mother in a Georgia town called Ludowici, his father’s body left on a German battlefield somewhere, tripwire racked and ruined. Sonny played foot­ ball and was president of his high school class, the class of 1950. Mr. Thompson’s appliance store gave him a summer job, and Randy White learned him to huff Freon, unscrewing the copper tube from refrigerators to take the spew into his lungs and ride his blood. His halfback legs would fly him through town in his underwear, no shirt, while his mother cried and the police watched him circle, too fast to catch with that coolant in his sweat. After he collapsed, the police took their football hero home. Sonny was not right. Couldn’t stand it when his mother said the word bosom, wrinkled her neck, looked down at her large breasts, and made him do things like stand at the open door of the bathroom to talk to her while she used the toilet. He hated the bosom word and the bathroom thing, though he didn’t know why. His mother was mean. Spread her pox throughout the house and pounded his every behavior. He got help from Dr. Price, the minister, and his old scoutmaster for huffing Freon, but still he huffed in private. Sonny found gasoline fumes, too, but Freon was the best way to make his head slop. Randy White and him got high on weekends. At Randy’s, when their girlfriends were there, they showed off their facile football moves by chasing armadillos on the lawn, grabbing the half-blind animal’s tail on the run, holding it up for the girls while the creature kicked 1 FLAME VINE Galley and scratched at their hands. That’s how Dr. Price thought Sonny got leprosy, from the nine-banded armadillo that carried the bacterium in its hind legs where the temperature is only 93 degrees and perfect for the disease to wait. Dr. Price had seen it in India and by law, Sonny was sent to the leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, for a year, to have no contact with anyone on the outside. His right hand became a half-numb claw, and he bitterly drew perverse pictures with it on paper that seemed to move instead of the pen. Sonny read everything in the leper colony library to fight bore- dom and engaged in an orgy of self-education. There was a craft shop where he learned to make a ship in a bottle. He liked things inside of things that couldn’t get out, especially things he hated or was afraid of, and he was afraid of ships. A recurring dream put him on the open ocean in a little dory. A whaling vessel, the Charles W. Morgan, came towards him, and on the bow stood his mother with a harpoon. Sonny made the dream go away by making a model of the Charles Morgan inside a bottle, where it could never get out. Forever. In the library, Sonny read every day. He read that Christopher Wren built a telescope with a lens from a horse’s eye and that the Turks believed women had no souls. He studied the Old Testament, especially the Book of Job, and was surprised to learn God bet Satan he could torture Job and kill his children and Job would take it, like Sonny was taking it, because God was torturing him. Sonny wondered what kind of god did things like that. He read that William Blake said God was showing Job the mulatto between the terrible and the sublime, and Sonny nodded to himself then whittled a whole new idea about righteousness and killing. At the leper place, he stared at the refrigerators in the main din- ing room and thought about Freon. He studied the properties of other gases, and a man at Carville showed him how to knock off a prison tattoo using burnt ash and a pin. Sonny scratched the word MIDGE on the inside of his forearm in honor of Thomas Midgley, who dis- 2 THE GAS Galley covered Freon. “Halo carbons,” they were called, and they would give you a halo if you wanted. Sonny received injections of a new drug called Promin to kill the progress of the leper disease and was told he could go home. Bitter, sad—a quiet hothead that viewed the whole world as a leprosarium— he carried a mean hammer in his good hand. “Too bad about the other hand,” the doctors said. In the woods at Randy White’s, people dumped trash, so Sonny dragged an old Frigidaire to a clear spot in the palmettos. He made a shrine there to Our Lady of White Appliances and decided to sacrifice things he thought should atone for his father getting killed in the war, his mother’s punishments and weirdness, and being locked away at Carville. Sonny didn’t have the nerve to kill Dr. Price, so the first things he offered up to the White Appliance Lady were Dr. Price’s nasty Jack Russell and the minister’s cat, which ran loose in the town. He put them in the refrigerator with their owner’s pictures from the newspaper and closed the door to see what the last shape they chose would be. He arranged their bodies inside as he did the ships in bottles he made and created a strange Cabinet of Cat and Dog, with flowers, bones, empty Mayonnaise jars, and barbed wire from the surround- ing area. When the display was complete, he went down on one knee to his oblation and thought about Mr.