Catching Shadows

By John Gordon

This volume of collected stories gathers nine tales of unforgettable characters in settings that are both brutally realistic and cast from a spirit world of whimsical imagination. An introspective and imaginative discovery on a primeval Canadian lake; a brave boy defending his family in a struggle between love and hatred, injury and pardon; the despair of a woman trapped on a bridge and held hostage to the witness of the World Trade Center collapse; the sadness, joy, vulnerability, and strength of a young New York City couple who lose each other but keep seeking love; and the quirky narrative of a young Southern girl reporting on the comical entanglements of her Georgia familythese and other tales await you inside this volume of Catching Shadows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514471036

John Gordon

John Gordon has written and illustrated many children's books as well as worked extensively in most areas of illustration. When he's not writing or illustrating, he gives talks in schools and libraries and plays squash.

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Copyright © 2016 by John Gordon.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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.

Rev. date: 02/26/2016

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Contents

Colorado & Evans

Gus And The Geese

Just Missed

The Bean Company

The Christmas Slap

The Moose

The Sins Of Sanibel Sally

The Summer My Daddy Got Tan

The Woman In Mink

COLORADO & EVANS

A LL THE RICH kids lived at the Latin Quarter Apartments. They were pretty much all upper classmen, and mostly east coast snobs. The Latin Quarter was the height of society at the University. It was acceptance and aristocracy. It represented hip, cool, and favored. It was expensive and smelled of the new car money that crowded its parking spaces.

Parties were frequent and lavish at the Latin Quarter. Rumors abounded of fancy catered affairs with popular live bands, and favorite foods flown in from New York, Boston, and Chicago restaurants. These were the children of Wall Street and Beacon Hill that casually chatted about homes in Newport, South Hampton, and Palm Beach. They took entire weeks away from class to ski and lounge in Aspen lodges. Their infrequent attendance in class was splendid in mink and designer clothes. They were out of my league and I knew it.

This was not the crowd that had part-time or after-school jobs. These kids did not work. I worked.

I poured concrete for Laredo Construction, and I was the only gringo on the job. Jimmy Lee Doyle had hired me because I was a gringo. He and I were the only two American-born Anglos on the Laredo payroll. Jimmy Lee had started his little construction company when he returned from Vietnam, and he recognized early on that he needed someone who could speak decipherable English and charm the housefraus and office ladies where we often found work.

I was very young, but I was clean, well-mannered, polite, and well-bred. As much as I tried to be a tough guy, Jimmy Lee teased me that I could not hide my breeding, and so, I got used to traveling low to the ground. I was adept at fitting in to most situations and environments. I adjusted my persona to my surroundings. I was a chameleon.

As such, I had no trouble melting into the Latin Quarter crowd when I felt like it. I was a tough kid who had spent summers moving furniture with the eastern European immigrant laborers that my father employed, but I also spoke fluent country club. I was as comfortable in the box seats as I was in the bleachers.

So, when the cute debutante and her friends picked me up hitchhiking they were in for a surprise. Four young rich girls dared each other to pull over on Colorado Boulevard for the thrill of picking up a good-looking, young construction worker with a pony-tail and hardhat. I recognized the New Jersey tags from Bernardsville, and casually asked how things were at the Hunt Club. The debutante owned the BMW. The other girls weren’t from Jersey. Consequently, Miss Bernardsville and I were the only people in the car that knew that the window sticker of the little fox in a riding helmet and crop indicated membership in the Essex Hunt Club, in tony Far Hills, New Jersey.

She squinted hard at me in her rear view mirror.

Coincidences are funny things, and the older I get the more I question their randomness. I know now that the girl from New Jersey and I were meant to meet. If not that day, under those circumstances, then somewhere else, perhaps, at a different time and place, but we were destined for entanglement. We were clearly not meant for long term devotion, but I suspect that on that day, that glance in the mirror blinded us both. I thought she was the love of my life, the girl I had been searching for, and she believed at that moment that she had given a ride to her knight in shining armor. She was as sure of our imminent matrimony as I was. Mercifully, that was not to be.

Today we are friends, the very best of friends. She is twice divorced with children from two men, and I am happily married to the sweet little hippie that rescued me a month and a half after that car ride.

I spent the night at the deb’s apartment in the Latin Quarter with thirty or forty of her dearest friends. The champagne, cocaine, pot, and quaaludes insured that we would awaken jumbled together like infant nappers at a day care center. I opened my eyes slowly on the couch that I had been sitting on since I’d walked in the door the afternoon before with all four girls.

She had roommates, but I never sorted how who was who. There were plenty of bedrooms in the big apartment, and I suspected that they were all full with confusing multiples. My cowboy shirt was unsnapped to the waist, but I was still in jeans and work boots. The chubby little sweetheart wrapped around me though, was snoring tobacco breath in panties and a bra. I extricated myself carefully and picked my way to the door without waking a reveler.

I found my hardhat in the beemer from Bernardsville. The windows were all open, and the keys were in the ignition. It’s easy to be trusting when one has nothing to lose. I reflected on the likelihood that there surely must be a supreme being watching over the slow and the gullible. I was grateful that He had watched over me the night before, and yet I was very aware that I had no concept of who He was.

I wanted to be a good person. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, or use anybody, but I wanted to have fun, and like many young people, my idea of fun was often skewed. Peer pressure and the social pressure to conform are powerful drivers, but I had an instinctive sense of right versus wrong. I wanted to be a rebel, and to be cool as much as any young man, but there resided in my heart an intuitive kindness that rebelled at popular rebellion and selfish destruction.

I was glad that I’d woken up with my clothes on. I felt free and loose. I felt light and remorseless. I felt clean. I headed down the sidewalk into a new dawn. I walked with a jaunty, light step, and no regrets. I was eighteen years old, strong, confident, and utterly at peace with myself.

I suspect that I was a fairly typical young man. I drank a little beer, and I smoked a little weed. The difference was that I looked into every eye, searched every dark spot, and gazed forever across every horizon. I questioned everything, every motive, every deed, good and bad, every shift and change, every glance and glare, and every action of weakness and strength. I knew only the insecurity of knowing nothing. My feelings scared me. My thoughts were consumed with a desperate need to try to figure out who I was, and who I might want to be.

So, when I woke up on a couch, part of a party, sharing a scene, a part of something worth remembering and talking about, yet gratefully unscathed, I felt connected. I had been a participant, but then I had to leave, to quickly and quietly escape, hoping that I would be a part of the memory.

I worked hard, and took care of myself. I had a teenager’s sensitivity and sense of immortality. I was proud of my tough young body and I knew that I was not ugly. I had yet to encounter the ego tantrums that would bedevil me after the curse of addiction began to take hold. And take hold it would, as surely as it had plagued my uncles, my grandmothers, and my father. I had no way of knowing it then, but they were the living ghosts that I was dreadfully trying to avoid.

The new day unfolded before me. A warming sun was quickly rising behind me, casting a sharp brightness on the foothills miles in front of me. Behind the foothills snow glistened on the majestic peaks like twinkling stars sprinkled randomly on a vanilla sugar cone.

I was awestruck. I felt great. There was nobody around me. A single city bus chugged by, and then the road was empty. Both roads were empty. I had come to an inadvertent stop at the intersection of two major roads, and I was all alone on the planet. Grace bumped into me at the corner of Colorado Boulevard and Evans Avenue. I was paralyzed, emotionally stuck to the curb I was floating above. I felt as though some unseen hand had stopped the spin of the world. I wondered if I might have ingested something the night before. I was standing before an invisible wall that I sensed more than I comprehended. Beyond this partition was something very important that I could not grasp.

I have had moments of perception in my life that are absolutely beyond my capacity of explanation. Scattered instances and infrequent incidences of seeming chance and wonderful coincidence have surprised me throughout my life. This was the first and perhaps the most powerful, and it came at such an innocuous time in such an unimportant place, and was preceded by such a mundane prelude that I doubted the magic. I did not appreciate the significance. I was not properly engendered to the wonder, the humility, or the gratitude.

And then I saw the dog.

There was an Albertson’s Supermarket directly across the boulevard. It was fronted by an expanse of empty black parking lot. The lot ran around the side of the big store, too, but there were no cars parked anywhere. The sun had not yet reached the asphalt, but the lot seemed to shiver and squirm in anticipation of the solar morning kiss. The doors opened. I heard them before I saw them. My eyes had been glued to the spectacle of the western mountains when I suddenly heard the distinctive whoosh of automatic air doors. I looked at the opening, but nothing emerged. The store was dark. Nobody seemed to be inside. They closed, and I looked around cautiously. It was very quiet.

There was an International House