Almost Wasted E-Book

Angel Rupert

• Herausgeber: Bentockiz
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

She stood in her azure and cream print dress with short sleeves and a scoop neck. She had on a simple pearl necklace. She slipped into her calf-length camelhair coat that was open in the front and had no belt.

Leseprobe

Title Page

Almost Wasted

Without Consolation

Angel Rupert

Almost Wasted / 6th of series: Without Consolation / By Angel Rupert

Published 2023 by Bentockiz

e-book Imprint: Uniochlors

e-book Registration: Stockholm, Sweden

e-book ISBN: 9789198847154

e-book editing: Athens, Greece

Cover Images created via AI art generators

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Introduction

Through books we come into contact with everything important that has happened in the past, analyzing also current events and putting our thoughts together to predict the future. The book is a window to the world, acquiring valuable knowledge and sparking our vivid imagination. It is a means of entertainment and is generally seen as a best friend, or as a slave that carries together all valuable information for us. The book is a friend who stays together without demands, a friend you call upon at every moment and abandon when you want.

It accompanies us in the hours of boredom and loneliness, while at the same time it entertains us. In general, a book does not ask anything from us, while it waits patiently on a dusty shelf to give us its information, to get us out of dead ends and to travel us to magical worlds.

This may be the travel mission of our books. Abstract narration, weird or unconscious thoughts difficult to be understood, but always genuine and full of life experiences, these are stories of life that can’t be overlooked easily.

This may be the start of something amazing.

Chapter One

If Zach had worried about travelling with Barton (and why wouldn’t he?—he’d never travelled with anyone except Allison and, long ago, his family), those concerns were quickly dispelled with Barton’s easy and unpresumptuous manner on the road. Yes, Barton had a schedule and an itinerary that he intended to keep; but as long as Zach adhered to that schedule (which wasn’t difficult, given the frequent reminders) Zach was otherwise free to do as he pleased. For now, that consisted of tagging along behind Barton; but he could foresee occasion when the two of them might go on separate outings, meeting back at the motel or somewhere in the village. This freedom and self-reliance was a welcome change from needing to always be attentive to Allison when they’d travelled.

Perhaps more importantly, despite their frequent jokes about masturbation and other bodily functions, Barton took great care not to push this teasing too far, not to in any way threaten Zach with unwanted touch or proximity or advances. And from his side, Zach took care not to be overly cautious or sensitive to Barton’s every move or comment. Rather quickly, at least in their travel and rooming habits, Zach began to see Barton as a brother, devoid of sexual interest or intimidation. Whether this was in fact true—that Barton had moved past sexual attraction to Zach—was a secret he kept closely guarded. And, of course, Zach didn’t ask.

When the rather tepid film (even by the low standards of tourist documentaries) ended and the lights came up in the room still empty save the two of them, Barton clicked the tape recorder off but kept it by his side for the walk back into the lobby and gift shop. There he engaged—and recorded, with her permission—the woman who had taken their admission in a conversation about an earlier layout of the excavations and settlement. In particular, he wanted to verify the former location of the large Pocahontas statue now placed near the Visitor Center. She confirmed his memory that it had been mounted on a granite pedestal near the old church and moved sometime after the anniversary celebrations in 1957.

With this critical piece of information secured, Barton then deftly interrogated the woman about her own past and family history, discovering that she was raised in the same area of eastern North Carolina where he was born, still had relatives the next town over from his home town of Surry. Zach stood off to one side, nonchalantly leafing through postcards and glossy coffee-table books as he listened closely to the woman’s ready surrender of her life story to Barton’s quiet inquiry, including an allusion to her “former life” before some tragedy sent her packing to Virginia. Barton thanked her for all her help and wished her well, claimed he’d check on her cousins next time he was in Surry. Zach joined him as he walked out the door and headed toward the recreated Indian village.

“How do you do that?” Zach asked in amazement.

“Do what?”

“Get complete strangers to tell you things about themselves they wouldn’t tell their pastor or best friend.”

Barton grinned. “I grew up in the South, boy. How do you think we get all those stories to tell?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

“We just ask, but in the right way. It also helps to be a stranger—no danger of the stories coming back to haunt you.”

“Until Barton Cosgrove puts you in his next novel.”

“The names are changed, to protect the innocent.”

The lone guide at the Indian village was a black girl whose light-toned skin closely matched the color of her buckskin leggings and tunic. She sat cross-legged on a reed mat on a raised platform inside the village’s centerpiece—a curved roof longhouse of the sort that Zach had seen in comparable recreated native villages in New England. The young woman—barely more than a girl, maybe a student earning spending money during her break—greeted them shyly soon after they’d entered the dim and smoky space (there was a small wood fire burning in the midst of a circle of stones, beneath a hole in the roof meant to draw off the smoke but not working well on the low and damp day). They did a slow circuit of the large room, studying the various exhibits of native tools and weapons and cooking implements.

When Zach ended up near the guide, he asked, “How many people would’ve lived in this longhouse?”

“Probably twenty to twenty-five, most likely all members of a single extended family—three or even four generations, numerous married couples, many children.”

“Sounds like a recipe for disaster—the mother-in-law not only in the same house but in the same room!”

The girl laughed. “We assume they had a different social order.”

Zach laughed. “That, or a big stick.”

“Maybe both,” the girl said, looking away when Zach briefly caught her eye.

Barton came up and asked about the Indian uprisings—there were two major incidents, according to their guide, in 1622 and 1644—and how many native Americans currently lived in the Jamestown area. The girl answered his questions in great detail. Zach listened politely for a few minutes then sauntered back outside.

Barton caught up at the crude granary—an open-sided structure with a woven-reed roof and sheaves of corn hanging like ghosts twisting in the damp breeze from a rough beam across the middle. The short ears dangling from their husks were of the multi-colored variety, what Zach’s family had always called “Indian corn” though its hybrid origins were twentieth century, long after the eradication of these sorts of villages and their inhabitants turning cloddy soil with stone tools.

Barton said, “You might learn more if your curiosity extended beyond females between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.” He didn’t look up.

Zach laughed. “That might take some radical reprogramming.”

“Mandarin Chinese is a difficult language,” Barton said. “People learn it every day.” He looked to Zach with a neutral stare.

“They read from right to left, don’t they?”

Barton just shook his head, turned and headed for some mounds of dirt along the river, the excavations at what was thought to be the original fort.

––––––––

The next morning dawned clear but cool. After a brisk loop through the colonial village, including a brief stint with Zach in the stocks at the village green—“For the crime of whistling on the Sabbath” Barton announced as he took a photo, using one of the offenses listed on the informational plaque, then whispered as Zach lifted his big form out of the well-worn sockets, “Really, it’s for jerking off too often” and Zach had answered, “Then you’d have been permanently restrained” and Barton had replied “Only if they caught me”—and a speedy round of packing in the motel room (neither had brought much or distributed what few things they’d brought far), they walked to the Sunday Brunch at a nearby restaurant called The Cascades. They ate their fill of eggs (Barton had Eggs Benedict, Zach scrambled) and pancakes and pastries and ham and bacon and sausage (this single meal was intended, by Barton’s planning, to tide them all the way back to Shefford) then hit the road around noon.

They’d decided (Barton decided, Zach offered token agreement) to take the rural back roads home, through the low-country farms and fields and pine woods of Tidewater Virginia and eastern North Carolina. The first leg of this trip included a ferry ride across the broad James River from a spot near the Jamestown Settlement to the Scotland slip on the far side. Barton parked the car in the line waiting for the small ferry bearing down on them to dock and unload its cargo. They climbed out of the car and walked the short distance to a pier where a replica of the Susan Constant, one of the three original Jamestown ships, was docked and open for touring.

They walked together across the small open deck, the boat rocking gently from side to side in the shallow swells sent forth by the approaching ferry. Even safely tied off to this pier on this clear and placid day, the ship seemed vulnerable and frail. It was impossible to imagine it packed with four dozen ill-prepared passengers and their inadequate stores making their way across the dark and often stormy Atlantic.

“How desperate would you have to be?” Zach wondered aloud.

“People risk their lives to save them every day.”

“Crossing the Atlantic in this?”

Barton shrugged. “Worse fates.”

“Shoe-horned in with a bunkmate that hadn’t bathed for a month?”

“Now that might be a bit much,” Barton laughed.

“I’ll take the soft leather seats of the Mercedes, thank you.”

“And its munificent and unfailing captain.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” Zach intoned though they both knew he’d thrown his lot in with that captain long before, counting on that munificence and reliability—which, so far at least, had proven to be good bets.

They returned to the car and boarded at their turn, never left the safe confines of their gold metal ship riding the waves atop the rusty metal ferry beneath them, all the way to the other side.

The drive through the flat fields and intermittent single flashing light small towns held Zach’s attention for the first half hour. They shared the occasional laugh—at Hitler’s Used Cars with its three forlorn vehicles on a sandy lot in the middle of nowhere, at The Realistic Beauty Salon (“Who wants realism at a beauty salon?” Barton asked rhetorically)—and Barton occasionally volunteered nostalgic recall of some incident or person associated with this highway or that town.

But after a while Zach slipped into a lazy and relaxed half-daze, his eyes sometimes open on the fallow fields and muddy tracks, sometimes lightly closed with the bright sun pushing pink through the skin of his lids. Such a trusting stupor was rare for Zach on the road. He was always either driving and alert to all its known and hidden demands, or closely observant as a front seat passenger—watching for upcoming turns or obstacles or threats. But today he gave all those anxieties over to Barton, trusted his driving ability and his planning and his obvious familiarity with the roads and the region.