Damage Rendered - 2nd Ed. , livre ebook

Straightforward Publishing - Johnny Richards

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160 pages

English

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Description

Montana and Manhattan provide the backdrop for a tale of both satisfying intimacy and universal perspective and insight. This brilliant first novel by Johnny Richards is set in the cataclysmic week that historians already speak of as a real nexus between two millennia. That week is now forever captured as 9/11. Damage Rendered is a story about people who are damaged, some of whom are caught up in events beyond their control, some of who render that damage.

Informations

Publié par	Straightforward Publishing
Date de parution	02 janvier 2007
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847162885
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0300€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

DAMAGE RENDERED
JOHNNY RICHARDS
Emerald Publishing www.straightforwardco.co.uk

Emerald Publishing Brighton BN2 4EG
© Johnny Richards 2006 First edition.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, photocopying or other wise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
British Cataloguing in Publication data. A catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library.
ISBN 9781847162885
Printed in the United Kingdom by Webspeed Books Beds www.webspeedbooks.com
Cover Design by Bookworks, Islington Cover illustration from an dea by David Miller.
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information in this book is accurate at the time of going to print. However, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for errors and omissions and no responsibility is held for the information within.
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Acknowedgements
The author and publisher are grateful to the estate of T.S Elliot, through Faber and Faber, for permission to reproduce an extract from ’The Wasteland’.
Scriptures sourced from the Good News Bible published by the Bible Societies, Harper Collins Publisher Ltd U.K. and the American Bible Society 1966, 1971, 1974 and 1992.
We are further grateful to Denise Dodkin for all her hard work on the editing and formatting of this book.
To: Dareshia
Happy are those who reject the advice of evil people But evil people are not like this at all; Do not follow the example of sinners They are like straw that the wind blows away The righteous are guided and protected by the Lord But the evil are on the way to their doom.
(Psalm 1)
Chapter I
The mountain was looking its best, sharp against the blue sky. A few buzzards winged their saturnine way around in the foreground, foraging aerially for their breakfast. There in the stand of pines by the fort a foal skipped playfully watched with pride by her mare. It was one of those cool, crisp, invigorating, Montana scenes, barely witnessed by any human this day but the town’s newest resident, Bryan Creet.
Creet drank from a glass with a petroleum corporation logo, enjoying the daily first of his many bourbon interludes. He lit a cigarette and sat down on the wooden bench which ran the length of the frontage of his shack. It was seven a.m. He would go down into town soon and order up a flurry of pancakes with maple syrup and strong coffee to wash them down.
It was only the fourth week Creet had been in Moonstone and yet he had settled into an unbending routine. He enjoyed the last gulp of his rich libation then trod out his cigarette butt on the decking. He put his hipflask into his pocket and walked towards town. As he strolled down the rather disingenuously named Main Street , hands gently linked in the small of his back, he felt happy – perhaps for the first time truly in ten long, terrible years.
“Hiya man,” acknowledged the sheriff thru an iridescent fug of cheroot smoke.
“Nice mornin’, ain’t it?” replied Creet, taking his customary seat by the window.
“Sure as hell is!” exclaimed Baker, smiling his gap-toothed grin.
Creet took the proffered coffee, absent-mindedly warming his fingers on the white cup.
“How ya doin’. There’re ya pancakes, Bryan.”
“Thanks. I sure need these today,” said Creet politely.
He had the same thing every day, requiring minimal verbal contact now in order to maintain the proprieties with his new acquaintances.
Kim, a brunette, returned from the bathroom and poured herself a milky coffee. Creet’s eyes casually met hers and she smiled. He wolfed down the second of his pancakes and tuned into the radio station that was currently playing a Beach Boys song. Fleetingly it occurred to him how incongruous the epitome of sixties West Coast cool seemed in the environs of down-home Moonstone.
“Whatdya think o’ this business then, Sheriff?” asked Baker, pointing to the front page of yesterday’s newspaper showing the cataclysmic scenes at the World Trade Center.
“Gotta nuke ’em back – that’s the only goddamn language these terrorists understand,” he replied. “Things will never be the same again!” he added, shaking his head.
“Sure. Right you are, sheriff,” averred Baker bashing the page.
Creet was sure too that the retired lawman was speaking the truth. He had watched the whole unbelievable event unfold on television. He and billions of others could not believe that this assault on the citadels would not be comprehensively answered by Bush and the Pentagon. If anything in the history of the last fifty years demanded nuclear action then positively this heinous crime did.
He finished the last of his breakfast, bade everyone farewell in his usual understated way and made for the door. Creet looked up at the frosted alp and smiled. With beauty like that what right had he to feel anything but joyful at his new life. He halted outside the general store and got himself some cigarettes and a loaf of bread. He went home, his mind full of the vastness of the evil just perpetrated against his country, yet still a semblance of individual contentment channeling thru the endorphin process centers in his brain. It was hardly inexplicable considering the fact that the natural world, which he had so craved whilst in jail, was now liberally all around him.
Creet walked up the dirt track to his ramshackle abode, the home that (for all its domestic privations he had dreamed of to the point of obsession. No one locked their doors in the magnificent wilderness around here except of course for the Yuppies who frequented the weekend cabins on the southern edge of town.
He went in and, as was his wont, went to the bathroom and the chemical toilet that due to the isolation of the shack had been deemed too costly to upgrade by his predecessor. There would be no way he either would be able to link up to the town’s system in the foreseeable future, but the inconvenience of the arrangements was to his mind not a burning issue after a decade of penal insanitation.
Having completed his ablutions Creet went out onto the veranda and took a slug of liquor. He lit a cigarette and, looking at the awesome view of the mountain, he started ruminating on what he was to do with the day. He had spent the time since he had arrived on the bus doing nothing in particular. ‘Acclimatizing to the freedom’ he called it when catching himself yet again wasting his days reading his Raymond Chandler collection, supine on his divan.
Thus the weeks since liberating his lungs from the fetid atmosphere in his cell had passed in a hazy blur of whisky, smokes, hardboiled P.I.’s and natural beauty. Whenever a translucent moment of perspicacity dawned on him between books or when a bottle prematurely was exhausted at night, Creet did question himself thru a miasma of guilt about what he was to do next with his life – guilt which not only reflected his short-term self-indulgence but deep regret in regard to his whole life.
All of a sudden his peaceful reverie on the rickety decking was interrupted by the footfall of another person approaching. He had received no visitors until now – either because of his demeanor or by local custom, his solitude had not thus far been intruded upon.
“How’re you doing,” she said, her voice a blend of Midwest and possibly metropolitan influences.
“How’re you,” he answered noncommittally, not even a trace of a smile lighting his granite-set features – the safe straightjacket of routine that he had acquired in prison and persevered with since his release now compromised.
“I’ve been camping in these woods for the last three days,” she went on by way of introduction, sensing that his lack of hospitableness might be the instinctive reaction of a preternaturally cautious man.
“Hhhum,” Creet mouthed softly, his eyes taking in the woman’s backpack and dirty jeans, her khaki cap and hiking boots.
“Thing is – I had a kinda accident with my car about five miles back.”
She pointed in the vague direction of the road that ran thru the forest.
“I was driving along fine and then a mink or a stoat or something suddenly ran out into the road and I automatically slammed on my brakes. I must have skidded on the wet leaves and I ended up wrapped around a tree.”
“I get ya okay,” commiserated Creet in his singular way. “You’re all right though?”
“Yeah, thanks. I think so,” she said. “I was lucky I was wearing my seatbelt.”
She un-strapped her rucksack and settled down unbidden on the steps. Creet saw that she was slightly older than he had first appraised and also far better looking. She took her headgear off and shook her hair, which fell in lovely mahogany tresses over her shapely shoulders.
“I’ll make some coffee,” he offered, retreating into the cabin and flicking the switch on the electric kettle.
“I sure could do with a cup,” she responded smiling, fidgeting in her flak jacket for her cigarettes and a lighter. She shouted thru the semi-open door, “Do you smoke?”
Creet demurred and went about getting the coffee things together. She seems friendly he thought, peeking a look at her in profile, sitting there on his stoop, taking in the sharp line of her cheekbones, the almost architectural ski-slope nose. She had obviously had quite a shock, an adventure, which he somehow deduced, was totally alien to her normal existence. Not so much the accident, he mused – although, patently, she had been fortunate – no, the story of her sojourn in the woods he felt sure, with some intuition which all human beings possess when surmising other people, had not yet yielded up to him