This story starts like most stories, with people you don’t know and will probably never meet. Nonetheless, they will remind you, kinda, of people in your life. Sorry, that’s just the way these things work out … nothing personal.
The hero in this little tale of silliness is Ruben Morese, a fairly nice guy who grew up in a small clapboard house in Dublin, California, just a few miles away from the first Safeway to open in the area. Rubin’s family, who don’t appear directly in this story, were kind and decent folks who, for the most part, led very uninteresting lives. For instance, Rubin’s sister, who he rarely thinks of and only occasionally calls, lives in Nebraska and is married to a shoe store manager. Her name is Jane, which pretty much says it all, really.
The villain of our story is a nondescript adult male who sells woman’s shoes for a living. Technically, he’s a sales rep for a rather large company that manufactures woman’s shoes and sells hundreds of pairs to stores throughout a bloody huge area, but – and let’s be brutally honest here – a shoe salesman is a shoe salesman, no matter how he sells the damn shoes, okay? His name was never known to any of those involved with our little tragedy, but for the sake of completeness it was Bob; Bob Helker of 3356 Demont Street, Hayward, California, where he lived with his wife and four children. Bob was a deacon in his church, a little league coach, and a Boy Scout scoutmaster for his youngest boy’s troop. Bob also was a bigamist, with families in two other towns, and – oddly enough – an amateur serial killer. In time, he’d quit the shoe business, killing off all his various families, and move to North Dakota, where he’d specialize in traveling the country and killing loners … but that’s some time in the future and has nothing to do with this story.
The victim is Barbara Mackey, a young woman in her mid-twenties, who believes that she pretty much has it all figured out. She comes from a broken home, which is not a euphemism; her home was literally broken by a falling plane. A student pilot was taking lessons when her teacher died of a heart attack, one brought on by poor genetics, but exacerbated by the fact that he was, when all is said and done, a student driver instructor who’s taught roughly five hundred feet up in the sky. Anyway, the student was only on her second lesson (and had secretly made up her mind to quit and take up quilting, instead), so her decision to try and land on a neighborhood street could, perhaps, be forgiven due to her inexperience and panic. The fact, however, that she missed the street and plowed straight into the Mackey home is a little less forgivable, although Mr. Mackey eventually came to grips with the loss of his wife and son and did forgive her in his heart.
The setting of our tale is a mall located a few miles from the town center. Oddly enough, the mall is actually built on top of an ancient Indian burial site, one that contained around ninety-nine percent of the entire tribe who once lived there. Actually, it contained every single member of that once lively tribe, save one, who lived long enough to bury all the rest, put a rather elaborate and complicated curse on the white man, who’d brought the deadly illness with them as they crossed the new nation, and who died several miles away in full battle mode attacking a wagon train all by himself. His grave was discovered when they dug the foundation of the Mackey home and his tribe’s graves were discovered when the contractor (a Mr. Frank Mackey, whose family was going to be decimated in a freak plane crash a few years down the road) started digging the foundation for the Sears that was going to anchor the mall. The last warrior’s remains were sent to a university for study and his people’s remains were quietly collected at night and deposited in a nice new hole, well away from the mall and any possible litigation or legal difficulties.
The fact that one of the remaining Mackey’s was almost killed on the site of the original burial grounds, which were desecrated by her father a few decades earlier, might have given the last surviving warrior a post-mortem smile. The plane crash and near death wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind when he’d cursed the white people, but it would have done in a pinch.
(For the record, by the way, that once happy tribe was known as the Yahoo’s, so their unfortunate fate at least saved a large web company from any possible lawsuits. This is often how it works, y’know … )
Okay, so this is where the hero, Rubin, saves the victim, Barbara, from the villain, who was nameless (but we all know was actually Bob). The scene is the street corner in front of the mall (right above the original grave of the last surviving Yahoo warrior’s wife, if you really need to keep tract of such things) and the light has just changed. Barbara is looking at the coffee shop on the other side of the street and thinking more about the latte she wants than the traffic.
“Hey! Lady! LOOK OUT!!” Ruben leaps forward and grabs Barbara by the neck of her jacket, jerking her back just as the dark Oldsmobile roars through the crosswalk, taking a left. “Jesus. Are you alright?”
“Yeah … thanks. Oh my God, he would have run me right over!”
For the record, Bob would have run over Barbara, killing her, had Rubin not intervened. However, he also would have been caught, since Rubin was close enough to get his license plate numbers, convicted, discovered to be a bigamist and the seven bodies buried in the backyards of the three different households he maintained would have been discovered while he was still in jail for the vehicular manslaughter charge, which would have put him away for the rest of his life and spared the lives of the two hundred and twenty-six people (which included his wives and children) he eventually murdered.
Ruben, for his quick actions, ended up dating Barbara and getting laid frequently for the next year until he proposed marriage. Barbara, who did suffer a small whiplash being saved, unfortunately was terrified of commitment, so she ran away the next day and moved to Nebraska, where she ended up having an affair with the husband of Rubin’s sister and, eventually, was the one hundred and eighteenth victim of the serial killer who the press started calling “The Shoe Man,” because of his habit of taking the shoes of his victims. Her lover, Jane’s husband, quit the shoe business the next day and dedicated himself to tracking down the killer, using his unique experience and understanding of the shoe mentality to eventually bring Bob to justice.
This mishmash of events and coincidences goes by the unlikely title of “life.”
The end.
No, I haven’t the slightest fucking idea where all this came from! I was in the middle of a game of computer chess when the need to write hit me and this is what spewed out. I was more of an innocent bystander than author on this one.
