Apple River Short Stories

By Jonathan M. Purver

These lyrical stories are about hearing what is not spoken, seeing what is not visible, being open to the unexpected. Like a dream or memory, they will enfold you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468596311

Jonathan M. Purver

Jonathan M. Purver has written more than a dozen books, and he has written many feature stories for Gannett Newspapers. His works also appear in numerous journals and reviews. He adapted the Broadway play Dark of the Moon (by Berney and Richardson) for Public Radio, and his play Night Train has been produced for Los Angeles regional television. Jonathan, his wife Jeannie, and their cat Sunset, live in South Lake Tahoe and Novato California. This is his first book of short stories.

Book preview

Apple River

Short Stories

Jonathan M. Purver

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2012 by Jonathan M. Purver. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/05/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-9632-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4685-9631-1 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Waiting for the Rain

Click

Route 42

The Cat in the Book Store Window

Animal Crackers

Giraffe

Fortune Cookie

The Promise

The Yellow Pad

The Carousel Horse

Firebird

Miss Dunne

Patrick

A Cop and His Horse

A Mouse Named Hampton

Little Girl and a Red Scarf

The Camera

Letter Home

Novelist

Snowbird

Apple River

For Jeannie

who continues to make everything possible

and to the memory of my mother Edith and my father Eugene

He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging, and parallel times. This web of time embraces every possibility.

Jorge Luis Borges

The Garden of Forking Paths

We live in many worlds at the same time.

Swift Turtle

Shoshone medicine man

Preface

Jonathan, your Indian’s in the lobby. I got the call once a month like clockwork when I worked in San Francisco down by the bay in the 80s. And on those days I came downstairs during my lunchtime to have lunch with him. His Shoshone name was Swift Turtle. He was a medicine man, a shaman, and when he saw the Zuni turtle ring I wore we were friends for life. Great power the turtle, great healer, he said.

He looked like Johnny Cash if Johnny Cash had been five foot seven. Swift Turtle had the same broad shoulders and commanding presence, the same slow deep voice and knowing look in his eyes that bore through to your soul. He wore denim jeans and a denim jacket with fetishes hanging from his belt. Shoulder length black hair. I’m Shoshone, Wyoming, he said when we first met. "Did Korea in ’56. Marine medic. When I got out, came to San Francisco. Well actually I went to L.A. for a few years first until it became a totally crazy place. Rather not talk about that time in my life. It was a learning experience. What I learned was we live in many different worlds at the same time. A medicine man is taught to exist in all of them.

We Shoshone are hunter-gatherers, philosophers, very peaceful, he continued. Like your own Miwok who came to Yosemite and now are in Marin and Contra Costa Counties. He gave a shrug. Look. We’re not all the same. You meet Cherokee, Mohawk, Apache, you don’t want to get in a big fight with those guys."

We sometimes traveled around the city in his broken down red Chevy truck. He counseled Indians and others down on their luck at soup kitchens, halfway houses and jails. I saw parts of the town and met people I wouldn’t otherwise have known existed. These weren’t tourist destinations and you didn’t see them on the evening news. When we walked those streets it was clear to anyone who saw him that he was not a man to be messed with. But if you were cold he’d give you his shirt, if you were hungry he’d give you his food, and if you were ill he’d do a sacred chant for you, and not think twice about it.

By the way, he said, I’m an Indian, not a Native American. So that issue was settled.

How I hooked up with him is a book in itself, but for now let’s just say we became close friends. During lunch one day, I told him that in a week I was going to have a retinal repair in my right eye, an in-office procedure. He reached in his pocket and produced a small shining crystal in a leather pouch. Much power. Take this with you for your operation which will be successful. A week later, holding the crystal in my left hand, I underwent the retinal repair. A complete success. After awhile, he traveled to other places he was needed, and we lost contact.

Twenty-five years later I began writing this collection of short stories. Apple River was the first. It was a story about two brothers who lived on a ranch in Wyoming in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. While I was writing the fifth sentence, Swift Turtle appeared. It was good to see him again.

And that’s the way it was with many of the stories in this book. I’d begin to write a story—a piece of fiction—and realize, sometimes not until after I’d completed it, that I was writing about people I’d met in one form or another—even though in my stories they were living different lives.

Carolyn is another example. She had long blond hair, green eyes, a sweet disposition and looked more like a film starlet than a member of the transcription department of the publishing company where I worked. She was adored by everyone who knew her. Through use of specially designed optical equipment, she was able to transcribe material by listening to dictation through a headset and scanning it onto an oversized computer screen. Carolyn was legally blind. Her lab Randy always sat by her side.

A few years earlier when I lived in Rochester, New York, I wrote a story for a newspaper’s weekend magazine. It was about BOLD, a blind skier program. I spent several weeks with blind skiers at their homes and with their instructors at ski areas near Rochester and became friends with many of them. To enable them to ski, the blind skier was attached to a specially trained sighted skier behind them by long straps, and the sighted skier called out directions. I came to know and write about Evan, a fearless twelve-year-old sightless boy I watched learn to ski and for whom learning to ski was the most wonderful thing in the world. We skied together, and I envied the feelings of joy he felt when he entered what he called the world of flying.

Since Lake Tahoe slopes were just three hours away, Carolyn’s sighted boyfriend encouraged her to try out the San Francisco branch of BOLD. Although not enthralled with the skiing suggestion, she was curious about the program. I gave her a copy of the story I’d written and said perhaps her boyfriend would read it to her.

I love it when he reads to me, she said, "but hey, the writer’s right here so I’d like you to read it to me, and I did. When I finished, her comment was Well, if Evan did it at twelve and lived to tell the tale, I’ll give it a try."

Two weeks later, I went to the transcription department to see if she still intended to try it. As I approached the room, I became aware of a deep quiet. Carolyn’s desk was vacant. Someone had placed flowers on it. The department manager came up to me as I entered the room and spoke in a whisper. She’d been crying.

Last night Carolyn and Randy were hit by a car that ran a light. They didn’t make it. I’ve still never gotten over the shock or sadness. Many years later, after I’d written Click, I realized the sightless photographer in the story was Carolyn. Or rather, the essence of Carolyn.

And there were others some of whom I’d known who’d every so often find themselves in my fiction—sometimes more than a quarter of a century later. A seven year old who loved animal crackers but wouldn’t eat the monkeys, a ski instructor who taught little kids to soar, a young soldier who learned that the meaning of family extended far beyond blood relationship, an actor who knew timing is everything, a novelist who wrote his own final scene, a high school teacher who was a great deal more than she appeared in the classroom, a little girl who found a special winter friend, a photojournalist who discovered that true vision came not from the eyes but the soul.

Four of the stories are true, and I was the one who experienced them: Giraffe, Firebird, Patrick and The Yellow Pad. A few have appeared in Giraffe and Other Short Stories (2009).

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Like a friendly spider, the mind weaves its web of memories and dreams, and some of us continue to become lost in them. And as to which are the memories and which are the dreams, as the years pass the difference becomes less important. Finally you come to know that what’s real and what is not, is simply a matter of where you’re standing at the time. I now understand what the novelist Ken Kesey meant when he said that some things are true even if they didn’t happen.

Ever since I held my first camera I’ve been inspired by the photographs taken by the legendary Life Magazine photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt. Although my story The Camera is fiction, I’ve borrowed Mr. Eisenstaedt to make an appearance in it. I don’t think he would have minded.

I would like to thank three gifted writers for their tremendous guidance and support: Roma Dehr, my wife Jeannie and Helen Mayne.

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The jazz musician Miles Davis once said Don’t play what’s written, play what’s not written. It’s my hope that in these stories you’ll read what’s not written.

Jonathan M. Purver

South Lake Tahoe, California

July 25, 2012

Waiting for

the Rain

It was the beginning of twilight and the street lamps of the village were just coming on. Early fall had brought thunder storms during the afternoon, leaving lawns and parks saturated, sidewalks drenched, and you could smell soaked grass and see the