The Pineview Incident
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Authors: Kayla Griffith
The Pineview Incident
by
Kayla Griffith
The Pineview Incident
© 2014, Kayla Griffith
Self published by the author.
Art work and cover image created and copyrighted by the author. Sheep photo courtesy of Morguefile.com.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. 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 express written permission from the author / publisher.
This book is dedicated to all those who feels that life has passed them by.
Here’s to second chances, laughter, and a little insanity.
This little novella wouldn’t exist without the help of a great many people. Thank you to Erin Roth of Wise Owl Editing for your comments, criticisms and help. Thank you to the wonderful ladies of The Writer’s Collective for your ever-present support. Thank you to my coworkers, amazing teachers all, who never batted an eye when I talked character development, strange plot twists, or mentioned that my idea of a fun time was being locked in a room with a computer all day. Mostly, thank you to my wonderful husband who lets me write even though there is no money in it and pulls me away from my computer to walk in the woods for my own good.
Table of Contents
Donna tapped her finger on the arm of the sofa and tried to think of anything else to talk about. She couldn’t let there be a lull in the conversation. If she did, her daughter would steer the discussion to Donna's life, or her lack thereof.
Haley's concern was commendable, but unbearably annoying.
“...and that's when he flushed the watch down the toilet. So what about you? What have you done for fun this week? You promised me you’d have fun, Mom.”
“That's not fair. You didn't even take a breath,” Donna protested.
“You can't avoid the subject forever.” Haley’s voice held a tone of triumph.
“I can avoid it tonight.”
“Mom, it's been five years. What are you going to do with your life?”
“I like my life the way it is,” Donna said automatically. Her children's insistence that she come live with one of them was very sweet, but totally unnecessary. Besides, they had families of their own and she refused to be a burden.
And her life wasn't all that bad. She happened to like old reruns and quilt shows.
“Mom, you're all alone. You're always home. Aren't you lonely and bored?”
“I'm fine,” Donna said a little too quickly. “I can handle my life myself. Besides, between work, church, the quilting circle and bowling I'm really too busy to consider moving.” She heard her grandchildren playing in the background and longed to see them again, but it simply wasn't possible right now.
“You know I don't believe you, right?” Haley asked. “Maybe we can come up for a visit before Christmas.”
“You don't need to come up every time you hear me sigh. Stay there and take care of those grand babies of mine.” It was very sweet of Haley to offer, but with a new baby, she didn't need to come to her mother's rescue. Donna cringed at the idea she even needed rescuing.
“Why don't you take a trip? Maybe you can take one of those buses,” Haley continued.
“It's the school year. I have to work,” Donna stated simply. The fact was true enough. Her late husband, John, had been a pastor, and after his death there wasn't much in the way of money. She needed her full-time job as a school lunch lady, and none of her kids lived close enough for a short visit.
One of the children screamed in the background and began wailing.
“Get your brother out of there!” Haley yelled. “Don't you dare shut that! I gotta go. Promise me you'll do something unexpected.”
“Fine, I promise.”
“You're lying.”
“Probably.”
Another long wail caused Donna to pull the receiver away from her ear.
“Bye, mom. Do something new. Learn to live again.” The phone went dead.
Donna sighed and looked around the neat, shabby room. She eyed the decor for a moment before grabbing a fake plant and moving it to the bookshelves lining the wall.
“There,” she said. “Something new.”
She looked around again, cringed at her pathetic life, and went to her perfectly clean kitchen to make tea.
“I'm closing.” Mark Lewis didn't even turn around when he heard the door jingle. Everyone in town knew he closed his barbershop when the bowling alley and its adjacent bar opened.
“You have time for me,” said Hank McCree as he tossed his worn baseball cap at a hook on the shop's wall. The toothless and mostly bald farmer grinned at him and rubbed his hairless head. “Just a quick trim.”
“I hate taking your money.” Mark put up his broom and patted the barber chair. “My big toe has more hair on it than your whole head.”
“I know, but it tickles my ears.” Hank leaned back and let Mark swoop the cape on him, though they both knew it wasn't necessary. “And there's no way I'm letting the wife near me with any kind of sharp object.”
“Fair enough,” said Mark.
Hank's wife was a woman to be reckoned with. Mark wouldn't want her pointing sharp things at him, either. He deftly sheered off the few remaining white hairs, making sure to trim them far away from Hank's offended ears.
“Two minutes and seventeen seconds. That's gotta be a record even for you.” Hank laughed and ran his fingers along the tops of his ears.
“I can do Old Man Potter's hair in under sixty seconds.” Mark brushed off the downy hairs and undid the cape.
Hank whistled. “I hear he tries to bite anyone who comes near him.”
“That's why I do it so fast.”
Old Man Potter was legendary when it came to his dementia and the deft use of his dentures.
“You're a braver man than me, Mark Lewis,” Hank said. “So, got any good scuttlebutt to share?”
Mark snorted. Men were as bad as women when it came to the local gossip, and Mark’s barbershop was the men’s gossip hot spot in the small town.
“Not really. It's been a quiet week.”
Hank just looked at Mark and tapped the counter with his calloused finger.
“Fine. Patsy Carlson kicked Dave out for the third time. She spread his stuff all over the road again.”
Hank chuckled. “That poor boy is going to have tire marks all over his clothes if he keeps going back to her.”
“You'd think he'd learn. Oh, and the MacKenzie's oldest girl just went to live with her 'aunt'.” Mark made quote marks with his fingers as he said the word. “She'll be there for the next few months.”
Hank whistled. “I wonder which boy did that.”
Mark shrugged. There was no way he'd comment on that. The men of town considered anything the barber said as God's own truth, and he'd learned to be careful with his words.
Hank cleared his throat and drummed his fingers for a moment. The look on his face made Mark want to run and hide.
He knew what came next. As the town's oldest bachelor, he was also their pet project. Anyone with an adult, unclaimed female relative eventually sought him out.
“My niece just moved up from Sacramento to Idaho Falls. She's a nice girl and mostly easy on the eyes. She'll be single as soon as all the paperwork goes through. If you're ever headed that way, I could give you her number.”
Mark began cleaning off his scissors so he didn't have to make eye contact. “If I ever head over there, I'll take you up on that.”
“She's nice,” Hank repeated, “and you gotta settle down sometime, Lewis.” The pause that followed wasn't too long to be abnormally awkward. Hank shoved his hand into his pocket to fish out the money. The bill had a yellow note with a name and number on it stuck prominently on top. “Might need your crop dusting services next spring.” Hank slipped the bill, and note, to Mark while nodding at the wall behind the register.
Mark looked behind him. “It's still valid,” he said. “Just tell me when and where.” The crop dusting business was one of thirteen licenses hanging from the wall. Each one a failed attempt at not owning a barbershop.
“So, you bowling tonight?”
“Yeah.” Mark looked out at the darkening sky. With winter just around the corner, he never seemed to see the sun anymore. “You wanna take my place in the league?”
“Nice try, but no. You joined, and you're the one stuck with it,” Hank said with a laugh. He pulled his hat off the peg. “You're in 'till you're dead.”
Mark harrumphed and tossed the money in the cash register. He'd have to count it up in the morning, not that it mattered much. With no family to provide for, the small but steady cash flow was more than enough for him to live on, if not quite enough to retire.
He glanced at the clock and locked the front door. He had thirty minutes till he had to be at the bowling alley—Hell Night as he liked to think of it. He couldn't even remember when it had been fun. After a quick final sweep, he walked back to the storage room and grabbed his regular Tuesday night meal from the tiny fridge. Day old roast beef on rye. His mouth dried out on the first bite.
He looked across at what the men in town called his trophy wall. The images of over two hundred women stared back at him. To the others, these were his triumphs, his bragging rights. For years, he added to the wall, proudly proclaiming he'd gotten away from another one.
Now, the women seemed to leer at him and remind him of what he didn't have.
He flipped on the radio to offset the silence of his small shop. He didn't need silence. It let him think too much, and thinking always got him mad. So, instead, he listened to the radio drone on about the rising price of soybeans and crop loss to blight.
Southern Idaho wasn't known for its excitement, unless you counted watching the potatoes grow, deer season, and bowling. Mark hated all three.
Too soon, it was time to head to Mumford's Burger and Bowl. He donned his ball cap, locked the back door, and headed down the two streets to the oblong building on the other side of the city's combined library, police station, and makeshift jail.
He passed each building with the same number of steps he used every day. Nothing changed here but the number of tombstones sticking out of the ground.
Mark walked in, added his name to the roster and looked around at the familiar faces.
“You may want to change that calendar,” he said for the third time this month. “It's not May any more.”
No one answered him.
He sat at his assigned spot around the ancient plastic table and waited for the show to begin.
Cassidy Brown, the town's mayor, cleared her throat and raised two t-shirts featuring a bowling ball inside a burger bun.
“We need to choose our new t-shirts. Purple and orange or purple and green?” Cassidy shook each shirt in turn.
The colors made Mark's eyes hurt.
“Why don't we just use one of our old ones?” asked a voice from the back.
“I don't need any more t-shirts,” added another. “I've already got eighteen of the things.”
Mark snorted. “I've got twenty-eight.” He didn't add they made good rags when he changed his oil.
“Where is your town spirit?” Cassidy glared and shook her finger at the room. “When I became mayor, one of the things I promised you all is a new sense of civic pride—”
Mark tuned her out, just as he did every week. Twenty-eight years in the same league and same old town was like poisoning yourself every day with a bit of arsenic, eventually you become immune to the chatter.
His eyes drifted to Donna's face. Like him, she was busy ignoring the speakers.
Donna Vanderwald had been on the town's bowling league for as long as Mark, and up until five years ago, she’d sat at Mark's table. Her husband John had been Mark's best friend since they were toddlers. Donna had been Mark's enemy for just as long, and when John died, she immediately moved to the table furthest from Mark.
Suddenly, Donna looked up, and Mark dropped his gaze.
“Hey, Mark.” Cory Edwards, the town's exterminator and part-time taxidermist, whispered. Cory had a very loud whisper. “What's up with the Erickson's donkeys?”
Everyone looked up from examining the t-shirts and dutifully turned their attention to Mark. Mark smiled at them and settled in to his roll as chief gossipmonger.
“It seems the Hanford’s donkeys have been frolicking with the Meyer's stud horses again, and several mules may come of it.” Two people sniggered. “The Meyers want a city ordinance banning all lustful donkey's. I informed them that while unbridled donkey lust is indeed a civic problem, there is no way to enforce such an ordinance since livestock lust levels are not easily measurable.”
Mark paused for the laughter to die down before continuing. “In a similar issue, feral cats have become a major issue on the farms and ranches to the west of town. There is talk of a hunt to bring down the population.”
“You can't just go around killing cats,” gasped Emily Gauch, resident tree-hugger and vegan vegetarian who ran the town's pet store. “That's inhumane! There has to be another way. Can we possibly use birth control methods to keep the cat population in check?”
“We've tried,” explained Mark, “but the little critters won't use the condoms.”
Again, the room burst out into laughter, all except for Emily who looked angry.
“Aren't there some kind of pills they can take? Didn't they try it with geese? If they can give geese birth control pills, why not cats?” Emily demanded.
“Cats can't pop the pills out of the little bubble packaging,” said Rob Michaels, the police chief. “No opposable thumbs.” He stuck up his own thumbs and wriggled them.
Emily ignored him. “I know for a fact they have shots for humans. Why can't we just use shots on the cats.”
“That's exactly what we're trying to do here, shoot cats!” Cory Edwards said. As the town's taxidermist, dead animals were right up his alley.
Emily threw a bowling shoe at him.
Mayor Brown whistled between two fingers. “Can we please focus on t-shirts, here? I'm not sure the entire city needs to get involved in the sex lives of the town's animals.”
“Don't knock it till you try it,” Chief Michaels said.
“You would know. Well, you and your sheep.” Emily's face turned red as she said it.
Chief Michaels grinned. “Again, don't knock it till you try it.”
The entire room burst out in uproarious laughter.
Mark looked at Donna, expecting her to be red as a beet. Her husband had been the Presbyterian pastor before his death, and Donna was a bit of a prude.
Donna's hand covered her mouth, trying to hold back a laugh. Then, to Mark's astonishment, she dropped her hand and bleated like a sheep.
Chief Michaels and Corey both fell off their chairs.
“Idaho, where men are men, and sheep are scared,” Mark said.
Donna looked at him and smiled.
Mark nearly choked on his own laughter. Donna hadn't smiled at him in a decade.
He smiled back at her and gave her a nod. Then, as if Donna remembered they were supposed to be archenemies, she frowned and glared at him.
Mark's skin actually felt hot from the fury in her eyes. It was the same look she'd used on him since his sixth birthday party.
He flipped her off.
Donna huffed and looked away, crossing her arms and legs tightly. To Mark, she actually looked hurt.
The room gradually quieted as the lane lights came on, reminding them they were there to play a game.
Mark's satisfied smugness slowly turned to regret as he watched Donna's stiff posture. He swallowed back a feeling of guilt just as he always did when he hurt her
Why did he need to fight with her so badly? Why did he constantly hurt someone he longed to be near?
“Hey, you paying attention, Lewis?” Cory poked Mark’s ribs.
“Yeah.” He stood up and reached for the familiar hardness of the ball he hated.