BOILED PEANUTS

By John Patrick Doyle

Published by
Copperhill Media Corporation
158 Log Plain Road
Greenfield, MA 01301
USA

Copyright © 2011 by John Patrick Doyle

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

PROLOGUE

Normally Paul was good, quietly rebelling against the tough kids at school whose bravery scared him. He didn’t like trouble, and his sneakiness in opening her mailbox had puzzled him, but he’d found her name and that was the key. In the weeks since she’d moved next door, he’d seen how alive and pretty she was. Adopting Sarah Jenks as his mother was like warm buttered toast.

He’d rushed his homework and now he could watch her house and imagine his life with her. Between his fingers, he twirled his pencil like a revolving door hurling twilight off its sides. Even holding it just before his eyes the pencil couldn’t hide her bedroom window from him, but, at ten, he was old enough to work out that shutting an eye stopped things doubling. With the pencil dancing ghostly between his blinks, he shifted his view from her empty bedroom down to the lit kitchen. He outlined her shining blonde hair on his window, the pencil-point tracing down her sides as she washed dishes. From peering too close, his breath frosted the glass, and his fingers ached as he spiraled them over the pane to rub her into view again. It was chilly in his room. He ought to grab a blanket off the bed to huddle in, but watching pulled him more.

Angrily, his bedroom door shook, rattling the room. The door-base boomed and his wad of papers shot from under the door. He froze as the door opened. “Damn thing,” his dad grumbled, swaying in like a heavy tree, planting and uprooting its feet. If he got slapped at, he’d throw himself on the floor and be harder to reach. “Y’er wanted,” his dad said.

Paul trailed the stink of sour whisky, grateful his dad had gone downstairs. He edged through his mother’s door and closed it gently, hoping not to wake her if she’d gone to sleep. The window curtains were pulled, the room dark. Low lamplight puddled around her bony face, the nasty waspish orange bars of her electric heater buzzed near the floor. Her head turned to him, creaking like brushing twigs. He didn’t understand why, but she was caking and cracking like river mud with the tide gone out. “Lo paw, ki,” she strangled out. Obedient, he kissed her cheek, putting his lips on the cream that coated her flaked skin. Its jasmine smelled of decay.

Focused on his mom’s brown eyes, large in her shrunken face, he told her about ‘Smelly’ who was gawky and picked on by the rougher kids who’d been hauled to the principal’s office for calling him names. “I should have defended him,” he told her, but he hadn’t. He felt better, telling her the boy wasn’t really smelly. Sometime during his story, she’d fallen asleep. Soothed by his confession, he left her heated room for his bedroom. He jammed more papers under the door, pushed his small desk under the window and climbed on it. Wrapped in a blanket, he sat with his shoulder wedged against the window frame.

He pulled his legs nearly to his chest and balanced his notepad on his knees. The sky went inky purple to charcoal while he worked on his picture of Mrs. Jenks. When he quit pressing his face closer, he brought the pad under his blanket and wrapped his arms around her. It’s a long time, from winter’s dark to grown-up bedtime. Needing adventure, he raised his pencil through the blanket crack, waving King Arthur’s sword. Laying its tip on his tongue, he bravely twirled its lead. Sucking on it, sniffing the sweet wood, smelling clean hay and the beams of his Great Hall, he was surrounded by his knights. Perched on his desk he dreamed and dozed hours into the night.

Blearily aware of her bedroom light, he rubbed the sleepy film from his eyes. He clamped his tongue between his teeth and squeezed hard. She was already undressed, facing him, framed by the red curtains that barely covered a quarter of her window. Mr. Jenks was behind her at the back of the room. Paul could see her large breasts as she sat on her bed pulling over her head a cloth nightgown, white with blue flowers. She climbed onto her bed and he thought himself a younger child, sharing her pillow, warm beside her, sinking into her cuddle. Her bedroom went dark. Drooping with fatigue, he clambered onto his cold sheets, the blanket dragged over him, and he was asleep.

CHAPTER 1                        Saturday

Paul leaned against the rough bark of the magnolia tree, firmly surrounded by its lower branches. He caressed the felt on the undersides of the large leaves. Light from the nearby house glinted on the outer leaves, and, from the center of his darkness, he imagined his tree a castle and the reflected lights his few townsfolk still awake that late. Mulch, damp from the afternoon rain, released its heady fragrance, jolting his brain with smells from his Pittsburgh childhood–gravel dust, the hot tar of road repairs, diesel fumes–aromas he perversely categorized as bracing. Inhaling deeply, wrapped in the sensuous odor of the earth, he observed the family in their living room, cherishing his secret intimacy.

While he watched, he dwelt in a reverie of another time, in a story, told by his old English teacher who’d grown up in wartime London. Her attributes had faded to a caricature in his memory; a spinster of some severity and angularity who loved precision and took care to criticize his compositions. He remembered reading in front of the class, and her correcting his misuse of ‘bifurcation.’ He replayed her childhood tale, ‘You’d hear the doodlebugs overhead, and if the two-stroke engine noise stopped, you knew the bomb was falling. We dawdled past each shelter with our teacher, hurried to the next, and lingered again as we passed that shelter.’ He’d never asked what he wanted to know, ‘what were the children doing, out beneath the bombs?’

Abruptly, a crash of splintering glass pierced his dreaming state. In the older parts of Lexington the street lamps stood aloof, their cones of yellow light forming the rims of black valleys between, and there, dimly-lit, less than twenty yards ahead, two young men had smashed the window of a car. A sense of unreality split him from his body. He seemed to float above the street, observing himself blended into the bark, pinned to his tree. The men looked around. One reached in and opened the car door. Paul would have liked to shout, were he able. Then, to this tableau was added the deep snarl of a dog, and Paul re-focused on his closer danger. Disturbed by the activity in its street, angry, crouching low, the dog growled its warning. Paul had been bitten as a boy, riding a bike, his white legs flashing–an undoubted attraction to be sure–and since then he’d avoided confrontation with any angry creature. This one was poised to attack, and Paul’s desperately whispered, “hush” and “there, there” failed to appease. It sprang. Paul, lashed through the leaves, tore from the confining tree and ran. Man and pursuing dog fell in unison upon the pair of delinquents who struggled from the maelstrom and were chased beyond the street by the excited, yowling dog.

Transposed from his peaceful seclusion to an exposed sidewalk, with his knees torn and his face abraded, Paul lay bewildered on the concrete. Tentatively, he pulled himself erect by the side of the car. A large garden rock rested on the driver’s seat, surrounded by broken glass.

“Are you all right?” exclaimed a woman who’d rushed from the nearby house.

“I’ll help you,” offered her companion, his arm needlessly about Paul, assisting him to stand.

“Goodness, you’re injured,” she said. “Come in and we’ll fix you up.”

Their attentions confused him. His murmured mild protests were ignored by his forceful helpers as they ushered him up the steps and through to the kitchen at the rear of the house.

“How brave you were!” she said, ministering to his inconsequential wounds. “Rudy heard the glass break, and we saw you tackling those hooligans and their dog. You were amazing.” She turned to her companion. “Rudy, call the police, will you. The phone’s over there.” She dabbed Paul’s forehead with antiseptic cream as they listened to Rudy’s conversation with the dispatcher. Assistance was promised in a few minutes, he reported, “But not likely”, he added acerbically. “They’ll be busy with drunken college students this time on a Saturday.”

“I’m Pat,” she said, “and this is Rudy. It was my car they were after.” Her brow furrowed, “I’m worried I left my purse in the car. Be a dear and look, will you, Rudy?” Rudy left, and Pat excused herself for a moment. Paul glanced about. It was an elegant, older house, high ceilinged with plaster cornices, wainscoting in the dining room, a chandelier above the dining table. The kitchen, where he was perched on a barstool beside a stone-covered island, was modern, with gleaming appliances of steel. The loud music from the front room was silenced. Pat reappeared, armed with bottles.

“Funny,” she remarked, “a small university town and, like half the place, my front door’s unlocked with nobody bothering it, lock the car door and someone heaves a great boulder through it.” Paul nodded mechanically, the oddity of being wrenched from outside to inside had not yet receded from him. “Oh well, my own fault,” Pat said, looking at Rudy who came in flourishing her purse. Turning to Paul she said, “Let’s finish introductions.”

“I’m Paul,” he dutifully supplied.

Pat began pulling glasses from a kitchen cabinet. “What can I get you? Scotch? Would you like wine?”

His desire to leave was outweighed by his need to be inoffensive. Paul said, “It’s not really necessary, but some red wine, thanks.” Pat showed him the wine rack. He selected what he hoped was an inexpensive bottle.

“My last ex-wife did that,” Rudy said, “visiting cousins of hers. We drove to some ancient church on a Sunday morning. While the service was on, somebody smashed the passenger window and stole her purse. It certainly makes you doubt religion. Said she put it under the seat, but even so, tempting fate to leave it there.”

“Very true,” Pat said, “but Paul prevented any great disaster.” Suffering this praise, Paul drank his remaining wine. Pat refilled his glass and asked, “What do you do, Paul?”

“Well, I’m a librarian, at the public library.”

“Have I seen you at the Episcopal Church?” she asked.

“I go sometimes. I like the music at the 10:30 service.”

“I thought so, though I usually go at eight o’clock. It’s shorter and more contemplative. In and out, and on with the day, that’s me. I’m a retired school principal, but, retired or not, there’s so little time.”

Paul had difficulty matching this efficient and reflective ideal with the Pat before him. Sixtyish and slightly plump, much tanned, her bleached hair stylishly tousled, with enough red lipstick for several lips, she seemed roguish and chatty; a kind, if somewhat scattered, person. Although a school principal would have steel in her. Rudy, on a barstool at the other side of the kitchen island from them, was significantly younger than Pat. He appeared fit, his skin so bronzed it looked hot to touch. His eyes played with hers, their glances meeting over their drinks as they sipped. Uncomfortable within these ocular embraces, Paul concentrated on his glass.

“I don’t often get to the library,” Pat said. “I do know a couple that are on your library board, Melissa Coombs and Daisy Fox.” She gurgled at her thought, “They’re actually not a couple, you understand.” Paul nodded numbly. “And are you married?” she asked.

Lacking the technique to end Pat’s friendly examination, he answered, “I’m divorced, about four years.”

“And is there a girlfriend?” she asked.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Same here, Paul,” Rudy said. “On the divorce part, that is. I’ve been divorced three times.”

“Rudy and I met six months ago on the Internet,” Pat explained. “He has relatives here, but lives in Florida. We only set eyes on each other yesterday.” She smiled broadly at Rudy. “Our first date was dinner at the Depot Grille, thirty miles away. Tonight, as you see, I was more trusting.”

“Goodness! This is your second date. I should leave,” Paul said, trying to stand.

Pat put her hand on his arm. “No, please don’t. The police will want to talk to you, and we’re truly delighted having you. Let me refill your wine, and we’ll get better acquainted.” A dazed bird brought to a gilded cage, he abandoned his feeble efforts to escape. Entertaining her reluctant guest, Pat’s fountain of words flowed on. “We’re all of us divorced, then. I was the trophy wife. The jerk dumped me for an even younger woman, but a tidy settlement got him where it hurt.” She looked playfully at Paul, and lingeringly at Rudy. “And now I prefer my men younger.” She turned back to Paul, “So, tell us how your divorce came about.”

Paul didn’t attempt to skirt the issue. Feeling his excess of alcohol and unpracticed at evasion, he said, “Amanda found someone else. In fact, she found herself another woman.”

“How delightful,” Pat gleamed, which she immediately changed to a doleful expression, “but distressing at the time, no doubt. Does Amanda still live here?”

Paul nodded. “She’s an instructor at the Fitness Center. We get along okay. I do odd jobs for her when she needs help.”

“Helpful as always, I’m sure,” Rudy said. Paul detected sarcasm. It was awkward, coming between Rudy and his plans.

Responding to the flashing blue lights from the street, Pat and Rudy rose together. Not wanting to be left behind, Paul trailed after them.

“Evening, officers,” Pat said. “Two police cars. We do feel special. But what will the neighbors think!”

“Good evening Ma’am. I’m Sergeant Driscoll and this is Officer Pruett from the Lexington Police Department. You’ve had some excitement, we understand.” Pat led them into the living room. Paul sank into an overstuffed couch, wishing he’d chosen a firmer seat. Nervously waiting to be grilled, he focused on the ceiling light.

Officer Pruett flipped open his notebook, readied his pencil, and Sergeant Driscoll spoke. “An accident to the car, was it?”

“No accident, unless it rained chunks of rock,” Rudy said. “Probably kids up to mischief. They smashed a window.”

“Anything missing?” asked Officer Pruett.

“It’s my car, officers,” Pat said. “I’d left my purse there, but they didn’t have time to take anything. Paul, here, was our hero and tackled them to the ground.”

Sergeant Driscoll turned to Paul. “Is that so? And how did you come to be there at the time?”

Paul, everyone attending to him, felt the difficulty of squirming upright, sunk as he was into a marshmallow. He firmed his spine and responded, “I was out for a walk, heard the breaking glass, and before I knew it I was mixed in with them and they ran. It was nothing, really.”

“Your pants are torn at the knees and your face scratched. There must have been a scuffle,” observed Sergeant Driscoll. Paul had entered the melee blindly and could only say that, from glimpses, he thought them younger than his own age of twenty-nine, possibly eighteen to twenty-two. Not wishing to muddy the logic of events, he offered nothing as to his trespassing under a magnolia or the dog chasing him. To his immense relief, the interrogation concluded with no gimlet questions exposing his falsity. Sergeant Driscoll promised to examine the car on his way out and suggested, with rain coming, that the gentlemen cover the car window.

Pat found duct tape and black plastic garbage bags in the kitchen, Rudy and Paul went out to work on the car. The police had left. A chill wind gusted and the air smelled of rain. A sliver of moon had risen, showing clouds massed on the horizon.

“It was foolish of you, getting involved,” Rudy said.

Rudy’s judgment annoyed Paul, even though, had his heroism been real, he would have agreed with Rudy. “Everything worked out well,” he said.

“For you certainly,” Rudy grumpily replied between biting off strips of duct tape to attach to the plastic bags. “Maybe you’d like to be useful and take a bag to collect the broken glass?”

Paul removed the rock from the car. With the aid of the car’s interior light, he collected shards from around the driver’s seat. One plastic bag inside the other couldn’t entirely contain the sharp glass, and he felt guilty that blood from his fingers dripped on the driver’s seat. He took the glass to Pat’s garbage can and, released from obligation, was anxious to depart. “Please say goodbye to Pat for me. I’ll get home before it pours.”

“You should go,” agreed Rudy. “Good night.”

Glad to leave his adventure behind, Paul hurried away. Despite the threat from the fast-moving clouds, he soon slowed and took the longer way home through Woods Creek Park where the path snaked beside the stream and little man-made light reached. It was a struggle to see and to stay on the path. When the clouds weren’t covering the moon, he looked above and followed a pale strip of sky between the darkness of the overhanging trees as though he walked along the Milky Way. When the moonlight failed, he pushed blindly onwards, feeling the path’s surface beneath his feet. He had found the steps leading up from the park to the road, when the rain, that he knew would come, did. The cold water, striking at him and biting into his cut fingers, was exhilarating. The deluge saturated his clothes, forming a soggy husk about his body, but Paul felt happy, and free of constraint, as he beat uphill against the pounding rain.

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Boiled Peanuts

A Novel by John Patrick Doyle

A Peeping Tom Goes Nuts Over A Blind Girl

Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents.  In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding.

Then Paul meets Bronwyn, a counselor who is lovely, independent and blind. She has inherited her Aunt Phyllis’ house and is newly arrived in town. When Paul first sees Bronwyn at church, he knows he wants to be part of her life. As the mystery of Aunt Phyllis unfolds, Bronwyn and Paul become more deeply involved as they learn about Phyllis’ secrets and how they relate to Bronwyn and her past, but Paul’s peeping ways may ruin it all. [Read more...]

Boiled Peanuts is available through Amazon.Com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.