A Mound over hell
Copyright © 2018 Gary Morgenstein
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Indigo
an imprint of BHC Press
Library of Congress Control Number:
2017936818
Print edition ISBN:
978-1-946848-01-7
Visit the publisher at:
www.bhcpress.com
Also available in trade softcover
Jesse’s Girl
Loving Rabbi Thalia Kleinman
Take Me Out to the Ballgame
The Man Who Wanted to
Play Center Field for the
New York Yankees
To my wonderful wife Marcina,
who never stops believing
It’s the end of the world
as we know it and I feel fine.
~ R.E.M. ~
1
On opening day of the last baseball season ever, Puppy Nedick woke up to find a hologram named Greta dancing on his chest. He wasn’t happy.
“Good morning, good morning, good morning to you. Did you sleep well?”
The brown wooden shutters automatically slid open, letting darkness spill into the small bedroom. Puppy glared at the ten-inch high alarm clock HG. He so hated Zelda for giving him this birthday present. He stumbled out of bed, landing on all fours.
“Does Puppy need help? Just tell Greta what you want and she will do it.”
He crawled under the bed, but couldn’t find the plug, though the top of his head found the bedspring, adding a bruised skull to his hangover. Puppy half fell into the bathroom, a step ahead of the pursuing HG.
“I’ve turned on the coffee. Toast is a ‘cooking’…”
He slammed the door and sat on the toilet. This morning I’ll find ways to get even with Zelda, Puppy thought. One effective, horrible-I-got-you-since-you-got-me. Greta pealed about the sunlight, as if Grandma wouldn’t let the sun come up.
Puppy chose that day’s water allotment to shave instead of shower. He lathered up his cocoa-colored face, his watery green eyes, always percolating with surprised disappointment, peered back, boxed by a thick, hooked nose and receding hairline chasing thick black hair.
He slumped at the rickety kitchen table. The vidnews, which went on automatically at sunrise, sang about some skateboarding champions. Apparently they so delighted a visiting Fifth Cousin that the said dignitary decided to skateboard himself. A true man of the people, he went down a hill and hit a rock, crashing head-first into a car. The teenagers whose athletic prowess started all this helped the Cousin, dressed his facial wounds and announced they’d set up a skateboarding tutorial right there in Dayton, Ohio. Everyone was happy. Life was good.
“The true test of Family is adversity.” Grandma’s Eighteenth Insight skipped across the top of the screen. Puppy swallowed some aspirin.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Puppy.” The hologram waited for him in the bedroom when he returned to dress.
“Get at the end of the line.”
“Out drinking and in your circumstances.”
“Other people paid.”
“For how long?” she whined.
“As long as I can persuade other people to pay for my drinks. And hey, I still have a job.”
“For five months.”
“Instead of tormenting me, help me find my socks.”
“Do I look like I have real arms?” Greta shook her head in disgust.
Faint grey skittered across the sky as Puppy shivered and zipped up his black Bronx Hawks hoodie, adjusting the backpack off his aching right shoulder. Commuters pressed past toward the Grand Concourse, edging away from Morris Avenue, which was the tip of the southern Bronx Disappointment Village.
There they went, dashing through the curtain of endless traffic, hurrying against a light; he’d swear on Grandma’s bra straps the damn Regs acted as if they could contract failure. That went against everything the Family stood for. As Grandma said in her Third Insight, nothing was permanent if you loved deeply and worked hard. Honesty, ethics, taking care of each other. Everyone believed that. If you failed, it was your fault. That’s how you ended up in a DV, like Puppy’s parents; he still lived two blocks away, on the Reg side. Close enough to seethe, far enough to remember.
He cut through the DV. The aged buildings’ beige and rust brick faces were worn, yet there was always a flower pot in the windowsills. The cars were older models, some even from before the war, bodies scratched, dents hammered out into dimples. Playgrounds, at this hour, were empty. You went to school or worked. You tried to do something, anything, or you stayed out of sight. Otherwise you shamed the whole community.
They said you could eat off the streets of a DV. He had here, many times. Sidewalks were scrubbed. Light poles gleamed. Garbage didn’t seem to exist. You filled a trash bag even a quarter of the way and then shoved it down the chute. You took pride in something, even when you had nothing. At least you could be clean. Every one of the eighty-nine Disappointment Villages in what was left of America was the same, an old suit pressed and cleaned over and over until the frayed strands begged for mercy, just waiting for a pretty new tie.
Leaving the DV, as if they ever did, Puppy strolled along the water, pausing near the Drive to watch HG sailboats drift past on the Harlem River, the abandoned buildings of Manhattan’s Washington Heights like decayed beggars on the other side. Puppy waved back at the fake boat crew and headed down 161st Street to River Avenue. He paused under the El, the B train rumbling overhead, and waited out the fifteen-minute 8AM shower, squirming into his thin sweatshirt as the temperature
