Blacki: Belief Is Never Gray

By Mike Lemonte

A dispirited small town in Georgia believes it lives under a curse that was conjured by the towns founding father during the Civil War.

The people of Fair Haven do not share one anothers joys. They do not comfort one anothers pains. They barely relate to one another, but for clandestine, they huddle at the back of the nights quiet. They have never learned to rally around their own.

Or have they?

They agree on one thing: there are monsters in the woods.

An agent of US Fish and Wildlife, Causey Bentz, has set up camp in the neck of the woods before and seems to be as interested in the bigfoot on the mountain as the citizens are prepared to pretend it does not exist, for the last thing they intend to be is having backwoods fodder as a punch line for the worlds unbelief in mysterious things.

The local pastor uncovers a rich vein of civic pride and indiscreet support within tattered linking of folks and is pressed into service as an undersheriff. If the people will not attend Sunday services, the sanctuary will come to them. Father Chad, as they have come to call him, makes house calls.

Polly Mankiller, the sheriff, attempts to balance the spiritual keel of the town that is seeing young folks drop off the rolls forever, for a scourge of poison in the form of recreational boredoms first casualty is killing them.

A biblical reign of weather draws the worlds focus on a town that only wanted to be left alone. In a time when people are increasingly alienated, what first appears to have been parts of a cosmic mockery shows increasingly to be blessings of a merciful god. Slowly the people come to recognize their need for one another.

Mr. Blackburn, known affectionately as Blackie, is the unofficial mayor of the town and somewhat of an old-style fixer. He is one of the few men in the town to have grown up without a father and whose life dramatizes the fact that not all poverty is rooted in the lack of material things.

Fair Haven depends on Blackies masterful but understated grip on the town, but to whom will he lean as spiritual decay gnaws at him from the inside?

Is Bigfoot a descendant of Gigantopithecus blacki? A relict hominoid? A Heidelbergensis?

Will Blackie help to hold together a town that seems primed to implode under the weight of meteorological oddities and strange creatures at the edge of the woods?

Sometimes, it is enough to believe in those who believe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543459203

Mike Lemonte

Mike Lemonte is a Bucks County Baptist from Doylestown Pennsylvania. He now resides in the Atlanta area. He is the father of a precocious rascal of eleven years. Mike Lemonte loves Confederate Motorcycles, Harley Davidsons, Dodge Trucks, and dogs. Cats too. Mike Lemonte belongs to the Sandy Springs Community Church which is commonly referred to as the BBQ Church, having formerly worshipped at Slopes BBQ, owned by Glen McDaniel, a fine upstanding gentleman and friend and uproariously funny. The members of SSCC speak High German at the pinnacle of the Reformations compassion. The Senior Pastor at SSCC is a man of uncommon gifts. His name is Bill Sloan, affectionately rechristened Rabbi Sloan. Mike would like to thank Father Medina for his friendship and kindness. He was the first to request this book, and even prayed for the message of blacki to find a home in the hearts of many.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Mike Lemonte.

ISBN:                   Softcover                               978-1-5434-5919-7

                            eBook                                     978-1-5434-5920-3

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: 10/21/2017

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Contents

Most Special Thanks

Dramatis Personae

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Most Special Thanks

My mom and sister. You know who you are. Enjoy, Marty and Dad! Marty, I’m sorry the body count isn’t higher. Maybe my next effort will boast more action.

Mrs. Nuckols, whose name is sure to have been misspelled, a resident of Sandy Springs, Georgia, and proud grandparent of a budding theater/drama actress in Tennessee. Mrs. Nuckols is a patron to my effort to the point of threatening to have Poet Laureate Adrian Matejka blurb my book.

Tina Romaniello and her mother-in-law. Thank you both for your many kindnesses to myself and my coworkers at our little sweatshop in Sandy Springs City Walk.

Cindy Collum. Enough said. Hello to your daughter and grandchildren.

Jeff, Cindy, Madison, and Nicholas. Western Pennsylvania rules! I hope the kids are great.

Eric, Debra, Justin, McKenzie. Awesomeness personified. Thanks, Eric.

Karen Noel, my sixth-grade teacher at Plumstead Christian School in Plumsteadville, Pennsylvania. A very special lady. I think of you every day.

Shannel Wheeler and Big E! Thanks, guys. Ohio State is going down! Penn State rules!

Gloria Pipkin, my eighth grade English teacher at Mowat Junior High School in Panama City Florida. I owe you my writing life. It was through you that the incipient spark (redundant? see!) was formulated. You managed to leave the residue of the idea that through energy and purpose, if not innate creative talent, that I might make sense from these in a fixed form. That is what a book is, if often more. Thank you, Mrs. Pipkin. I think of you every time I open my laptop, and do so fondly.

Cheryl Von Soosten! Dr. Pam Kennett! And Nicholas’s mom for being my first editor!

Gerald and Loretta Bailey of Cullman, Alabama. Thank you for being so wonderful.

Dramatis Personae

Blackie

Causey Bentz is revealed to be Nicholas Pettaway, agent with U.S. Fish and Wildlife

Chad Probert (very white), aka Father Chad aka Deputy Probert aka Denzel Washington (very black).

Red, White, Blue, and Green are active-duty Navy SEALs aka the Coloreds

Polly Mankiller is the sheriff

Ratso

Sir Richard, aka Dick, is a renovation and restoration professional

Tommy Killdeer is also known by his Lakota name Tanka

Thomas Killdeer is Tommy’s father, hailing from the same Oglala Sioux nation

I believe God is raising up people to stand in the way of other people’s destruction.

—Pastor Bill Sloan, Protestant teaching pastor aka Wild Willy aka Rabbi Sloan aka the Priest Bill

There is a communal effect to sins.

—Pastor Bill Sloan

When someone is honest about their sin, that is a precious gift that they present to you.

—Pastor Bill Sloan

He is beyond his years. Amazingly brilliant.

—Laurie Sloan (as an educator speaking on a child’s precocity and, more importantly, never without a probing, kindly instinct)

The battle is the Lord’s, the victory is ours.

—Linda Sommer

God is in charge of unexpected things.

—Thom Sommer

God did an unusual thing for me. He gave me a new name.

—Thom Sommer

It almost takes a supernatural whammy to turn that stronghold around.

—Deane Johnson

We receive the ability to become super-conquerors through love.

—Deane Johnson

%%#@!~J+= *(^!~~S *$#_++=

—Erica Johnson (An attributable quote makes no difference. Her prayerful petitions to God most high, being of such bandwidth and ferocity—even at a modest timbre of voice—that to quote any one thing would be a rank obscenity.)

It is much too early for that. People don’t get drunk by nine o’clock in the morning.

—Peter the Jew, a.k.a. Cephas a.k.a. the first pope (protesting an early stereotype)

True poverty is not necessarily economic.

—Tim Wordell, missionary to the Oglala Lakota Sioux

It’s very important you manage your identity or others will manage it for you.

—Richard Harris

One

Luck out there lately? Andy asked, the papered counter taking the twined panel of swine with a satisfying groan.

Well, it wouldn’t be a hobby if it required luck now, would it? Causey said. Causey ignored the flippant gesture that he fully expected was … there it came. Causey was still at the feet of the family’s fire. Any tribal resolutions found Causey a relative by all but blood.

Andy would refuse payment. Causey would equal the pretense with an arched brow. Andy would offer the next week as settlement of accountants, and Causey would accept.

The ancient origins of this dance’s fallen shadow darkened Ibrihim’s droll matinee looks. The cultural conjugations that took Abe—not Abraham, but Ibrihim—to settle for Andy were a small price to be a kosher butcher nestled among the comings and goings of this mote of Georgia where Andy’s Islamic fundamentalism never hindered invites to Saturday barbecues or Sunday church.

Causey had to stuff down the laryngitic parch he felt when patriotism unfurled to welter the weary at the corners of that great flag.

Andy looked over Causey’s shoulder at the lusty menace of the Gurkha parked in the lot. What branch were you in again? Andy asked.

Bucks County Baptist, Causey said with a wink, their laughter a memory of the worn reprise that ends their every encounter. Andy refused to remember that Causey was not ex-military. Causey held up the money. Andy drew a blank, thinking they had settled the matter of Causey paying today, but there the money was for him to take.

Not this time, Andy. I better pay you now. There’s no telling what could happen out there.

Andy took the money. The drawer popped, taking the carved look on Andy’s face with it. Causey threw the piece of dead pig over his shoulder, nodding at his friend. Andy didn’t respond, again looking past Causey at the armored vehicle as though seeing it for the first time with the knowledge that one man’s war was another man’s weekend.

He pulled the Gurkha onto the softly rutted drive up to the shotgun house. Tanner appeared with a wave from the back, so Causey did a three-point, backing it up to point the main business of the truck’s back end toward the source. What vegan did not have memories of when what so cruelly took to the wind was not a promise to the sense of what was feint but to what would make them full? A whole hog turning on a spit was enough to drop the best man to his knees.

Causey got out, eyes never off the turning gorge of flesh, slapping his friend on the back. Causey saw a cooler, going to it and opening it. Its original home permeated to his nose with everything but the freshwater itself, the rainbow trout already cut into baseball-sized chunks. Causey smiled, grabbing up the cooler. He placed it in the back of the vehicle.

Tanner smiled at Larnie, the air laced with the cheap cigarette dangling from her fine-boned hands, as she smiled at Causey, the millionth pucker off her parliament doing nothing to take away from the heroic resolve of her undiminished looks. Either Tanner had aged poorly or she had stolen time, for they dropped out of high school the same year. She timed the enjoyment of the smoke with stubs of her toe on the porch, watching Causey with shy intensity as he helped her common-law hubby drag the pig into the rusted barrow. She supposed there was no use being delicate. It would be a family enjoying this feast, but they probably had little use for the chain of custody’s sterility that plates and utensils implied. She smiled at her nifty little reasoning.

The boys pulled the barrow to the truck, Causey leaping up, and both pulled and pushed that gleaming heft into the back. Tanner unhooked his homemade grappling hook and nodded adieu to Causey. Causey blew a kiss to the Larnie, then jogging over to give a her a quick hug. The tension in her spirit dissipated, for she had worn the white jean cutoffs in sole anticipation of seeing him. A girl did such things. Crowding what was left of the middle passage into the daily, she only realized how disappointed she would have been if he had not paid some undivided loft toward her when he actually did. She was not, to her mind, flirting. She was demanding something of what was gallant in the things he did not do. He did not frisk her with ill-timed darts of eye or hold a look too long when she had turned to walk away but did always manage to take her away from this paint-splintered lean-to if just for a moment. He was a strange man. Every part borrowed against every other part. His truck didn’t fit the way he spoke. His build didn’t fit his manner. The way he made his living was not aspirational to the people with whom he so cordially quartered. He was a strange and fascinating mystery. To share a moment is to share something of the strange with him and with everyone he met whether you met them or not.

Tanner saw the folded envelope in the lawn chair beneath the ashtray. He had not even seen the man deposit this tribute. There was something more than services rendered with this man.

Tanner’s grandfather would lose it in his overalls if he knew an age where a nigra featured so casually in the life of any blood kin, much less whites to be looked down upon that should still be better off than such a fate. He turned to watch the fortress pull out on the road. He watched it go out of view, knowing that every goodbye might mean more than it should.

Two

Seven minutes from right, he glanced at his wrist chrono. Now would have his lower back abashed by the post-hole digger. He would do that first, giving the cement time to complete the effect of the exhibition’s design. Then the fish. Then the digital networking snare. What was he missing? Didn’t matter. How would one ever know what was enough or not enough, especially if any of it actually worked? Most of it would work at staggered degrees of success, the main variable being that thing of such dwindling currency. Patience. He needed it to happen all at once. Patience, my dear boy. Patience. Which meant time. Which meant money. He had not gotten this far without the dull-eyed pluck of a wolverine.

He merged onto the battened earth, tossed gently from left to right to left, the ground plowed by tires and rain, man, and God. A verdant tunnel swallowed him up, the nestles battling the fronds for supremacy in the pond’s shallow end, a wall of lush vegetation to the other side. This even lower step of the greater amphitheater of a rising bowl was the sun-hardened saucer. A clearing became full on every side, the scooped-out perimeter of tree line affording the illusion of pristine solitude. Causey bumped the vehicle to stop, looking about. He made a hard turn, backing into the middle so that the nose pointed to his route of escape. Leaving in a hurry was preferable to …

He stood before both pines and agreed with his first hurried assessment that it was welcoming while providing cover. He kicked the footstool to the base, used it to get to eight feet, and let the nail gun fly. He seconded the motion with the twin sentinel, stepping back to look. His conspirator might tear them down out of curiosity if not distracted by the succulent offering, but even so, it would be too late. It would have been sufficiently scaled by that point.

The packed earth fought him, but he got his cylinders cored out. He stepped over to see his camera was operative.

He then tapped the bottom of each round steel beam. They weren’t plastic, was the point he hoped to make for the camera. Water was poured into the bucket. Mealy concrete was poured around the beams in the pear-shaped guard.

Excitement animated his labors. That was until, of course, he saw that he had painted his pig into a corner. He looked on with a dim sense of defeat until the upside presented itself. The sheer effort it took for a man of his physical abilities would prove his point magnificently.

He pushed a few things around in the back of his tactical vehicle, finding the ten-pound sledge. He walked up to the pole at the top of the bulb-shaped trap and pushed on it with one hand. He snugged the pole to his shoulder, putting his back into it to sense any give. He shook his head, rolled his neck, bluffed his shoulders to loosen things up. He took one spectacular whack, throwing the sledgehammer away. He rubbed his hands, going to the truck. He backed it up, pulled the hook from the winch, looped it around the pole, grappling the hook around the line, and got back in the tac vehicle. He backed it up gently, wrenching the offending party from its hasty burial.

The camera now having documented the thorny laurel of his victory, he grabbed 200 pounds of pig to the digital scale so daintily planed into the earth the day before. The scale was coded to record its heaviest weight in any forty-eight-hour period. A good 850 pounds would be expected to be added to Ms. Piggy’s dead weight. He opted to dig two more holes than scrub the hard cement out of the one. This quick analysis was the inherited bounty of what gray matter could do. He was given to stop a moment. He thought of the boasted feats and the things he had seen his woodland friends do and wondered what might be on par with the engineering of reduced labor, operational efficiency, and allotted material loss. Without having to think about this, he knew the answer. It didn’t always bother him that some only found this to be true in quickened partial seconds of their own enactment at the cusp of prehistoric terror.

The bed roll did not act as a faithful intermediary for his tired bones against the Gurkha’s rear compartment. He knew by the way he had awoken that he had fallen fast asleep anyway. Might as well have been Christmas morning, the churning of the guts commanding its loins, his first exertion being to look for the tops of poles no longer straight. They were not. He saw what he could of the truck’s rear, the ground clear. He used both side mirrors to ruin the surprise of any belly crawlers. The squad automatic weapon was put in the front passenger seat, his S&W .500 warming his belly beneath his shirt. He got out with a casual scan. He tied his shoe as an excuse to check beneath the vehicle, his Oakleys concealing what he was seeing so as to not make clear to them that they were seen. And it was always them. This was not an affair of an it. Not ever. He went back and put the SAW on the front seat with the barrel down.

It shot lead fists, but also, as an accompaniment to tearing meat, was a terrific sound hammer that would catalyze their nano-comparative study of the sounds of hunters’ .270s and 7-mags and find his more promising of lowering their place on the food chain. They knew guns. In the event he needed any of it, he was a goner. This setup gave him the chance to open the door for a miracle. And given that everything was hidden, he, if observed, could be seen as coming in peace.

Given seven straight days of putting out a buffet table was a fine argument to that effect. The mister had sprung in spectacular fashion. The glow of soluble water-based glitter as his friend passed by the tape that would make his height a fact in a one-side honky-tonk debate had worked miraculously well. The slight indentations in the leafy carpet betrayed one male having accepted the dinner party invitation. Causey felt his back stiffen. He let out a stagnant breath, seeing three of the poles flat on the ground and having heard nothing. No man that cared to live should ever be in less than revulsion at a display of silent demolition speaking to the compression of so graceful a compact rage. He felt that enshrouding fog. Glassed over, he used a rapid Morse code with his eyes to speak to his eyes and the sympathetic nervous system that would tear himself from the trance. It always began with the eyes. One had to learn to speak with the eyes. They are what would betray you. They are what would get you killed. A kindly usher entered at the sides of his consciousness. Without questioning this, Causey went slowly to his car. As he reached for the cracked door, the sun reached for the mirror that danced wildly off the dew of leaves that lit the eyes of one of his friends that peered out from thirty feet in the pine. He saw one, which meant at least four. And probably six.

Three

Going south at this hour was the first gracious act of the host of the journey’s end even if he didn’t create the hellish northward crawl that had someone or something else to blame. The taxi service crawled to the uncontested inner bounds of Buckhead, Causey tipping generously to be able to jump ship and avoid the exchange of receiving change and having to then tip anyway. He was in a fine mood. At least he wasn’t schlepping an upright bass. He tired of always having to carry something. Always with totage was he, dire contingency in mind, value of a life in the balance, usually his own. He smiled that Benny probably questioned if he shouldn’t have chosen, say, tenor sax given the logistics of his many engagements. Benny after all was a pro. Causey just a sit-in.

Marnie answered the door to number 11 of these smart walkups right off the road. She kissed Causey on the cheek, hardly missing a beat of her end of the conversational volley. Causey caught a full look in the foyer mirror, having developed an animal sense of his surroundings. His dreadlocks were the rare taste-making accent to the setting and his place in it. This scene would have been at home at any place where those unmarred by classical educations and the overstuffed vocations that snuffed out the usual redoubts of socially bland colorations. The tall brunette holding her girlfriend’s hand gave him a fake double look that seemed to boast that she was super hip enough to toy with going back to the USSR, her defection from hetero a whim.

Friends became strangers to a design ethic that did all but change the aesthetic fiber of the hosts themselves. Where did that pendant lighting come from? The pastel at once bold but retiring. Things in which to sit were both from the future and invited no comfort. Fossils from the next century would feel over welcome. Yet Causey was struck by the strangest thought that he would love to be married to the woman that created this minor opus. He wasn’t aware that he might be open to the idea of being married until he found himself in a connubial nest.

Mantini? Scott asked, looking better in person than he had on television. Make it a virgin,

Causey gave back a smile at the thought of the engineering that goes into whatever it takes for someone authorizing an outcome’s bearings to remind men that the proceeds of the hunt always leaves the scent of prey upon their person. Bankers everywhere were only narrowly diverted from the earthen bounty of their nobler true selves. Venison loaf is gamey no matter how shiny the platter on which it is served. Birdwatchers seldom had guns, but hunters always had a camera. And a mantini to remind men that they were men monkeyed up in Armani or not. Scott was warm for a federal prosecutor.

A man could feel cornered when he hopelessly senses it was you Marnie’s eye caught as she traversed the tall men like trees being shed gently to either side, the demand of an answer as to who are you. Are you the kind of man that will gracefully accept never knowing the sceptered horizons of the threat she presented? The sloping runoff of primordial mind always poised but raised like a razor to go through the heart of a matter. The corniced parchment of soul that crumpled or cauterized depending on the windless sound of song.

Years before, after showering and making good talk with a man wearing only a towel and a yarmulke, Causey remarked that he knew a Rabinowitz working for that firm. By name of Marnie Causey, he had said, it of course being his daughter the nice man said. It is your daughter with all due respect I’d rather be standing around half-naked with, Causey had thought. A formal appraisal of eye with a twinkle before the man turned and Causey knew he had been bagged.

What’s one Jew to come between a man and his daughter anyway? her father said while walking out fully clothed just moments enough later for the humor to strike both the moment and punch line to the jovial banter on many occasions before.

To gladly take him as an in-law with only Jesus himself as the question to such a blending of tribes.

Marnie had been privy to some version of this conversation. Causey could almost see the offhanded way her father might have mentioned having met Causey and the lovely human affirmations that spoke of the higher order of seeing what things could be and demanding that they be seen.

Still running around in the woods?