Learning to Fly
Charles DeMaris
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Also by Charles DeMaris
About the Author
1
Walter Hicks gave up trying to sleep, put his slippers on, and meandered out to the living room. It was the constant flow of traffic outside that kept him awake. ‘Why the hell doesn’t it keep me awake when I’m in my recliner?’ he thought to himself. He looked at the clock on the wall. “Almost midnight and these damn kids are still running up and down the street. Don’t they ever sleep?”
The English Mastiff that had followed him from the bedroom lifted his head to listen, then put his head down again with a sigh. Whatever his master was mumbling about didn’t concern him one bit, as long as he was fed and got the requisite number of head scratches. As if on cue, Walter reached down and absentmindedly scratched the dog’s head.
“Kids don’t bother you, do they, Otis?”
Otis just swished his tail and let out a low contented growl before shutting his eyes and drifting off.
“How you do that, with these kids making all that noise…How they manage to make it through school, I’ll never know.”
Walter thought about that as he turned on the TV and surfed through the channels. He didn’t have many good things to say about college kids, but he lived blocks from the University of Cincinnati campus. Why he hadn’t moved in the last decade was beyond him. Laziness, mostly. Since Marcy died, he had lost all incentive to do much of anything, let alone try to find an apartment in a better part of town.
They had lived in a nicer neighborhood once, before the cancer treatments took all their savings and the proceeds from the sale of the house. Walter took more and more time off work to be with her toward the end, and the apartment on Ohio was the best they could afford. Now, going on ten years later, he was simply too lazy to pack his things and move, so he put up with the college kids driving up and down the street at all weird hours, and he put up with the incessant parties every weekend. At sixty-five, he figured he was entitled to a bit of laziness.
Not that he begrudged the kids their drinking. Lord knows he did enough of that himself. ‘Speaking of drinking…’ he thought as he scrolled through the channels for the third time.
“Otis old boy, don’t think you could learn how to fetch me a beer, do you?”
He didn’t wait for the dog’s answer, but got up and walked to the kitchen, checking the fridge only to find half a gallon of milk, a few eggs, half of a hamburger, and half a block of Colby jack that looked like it had been there since the Clinton administration.
“Hell, not bad if you cut the mold off,” he said as he removed the cheese and the burger, before filling a glass from the tap.
Halfway through the burger he was in the mood for something besides water to wash it down and reached for his keys. He got in his car, realized that he was still wearing house slippers, but put the key in anyway. Nothing. No lights on the dash, nothing at all. Then he looked to the left and noticed that his headlight switch was on.
“Damn it Walter, that was careless. Well, Shell ain’t too far to walk,” he said, locking the car and walking up Ohio toward the Shell station at McMillan. A few minutes later, he was walking back down Ohio with a twelve pack in hand, wondering again when the college kids were going to turn in for the night. He didn’t admire their professors. He was also wondering why he had walked several blocks to buy beer when he should be sleeping. ‘Maybe I’m not so different than those kids,’ he thought.
He was only three blocks from his apartment when the stiffness in his back caused him to stop walking for a moment and lean back to try to stretch it out. When he looked up, he saw a flash of light brighter than anything he had ever seen.
The next thing he could remember, it was thirty minutes later and he was lying there on the sidewalk, and his beer was nowhere to be seen. He sat there for a second, assessing himself to see if he was injured. Other than a splitting headache and a sore back, no doubt from when he had fallen, he was fine. Well, there was the matter of the missing beer, but there was nothing he could do about that. Stupid kids probably took it and just left him lying there. He managed to get up and stumble the last few blocks to his apartment, where he almost tripped over Otis on the way to the bathroom. His head was absolutely throbbing. He grabbed a glass of water and a couple pain pills, and went back to bed.
Walter woke up at the crack of noon, expecting to be stiff, but feeling quite well, all things considered. He took a shower, went to the fridge for the rest of the hamburger, realized the burger was still on the table next to his recliner, so he settled for scrambling a couple eggs. He poured a glass of tap water when he tried to pour a glass of milk, only to have it come out in chunks.
“Thought the date was still good on that one,” he said as he threw it away. He ate his eggs, downed three glasses of water, and went outside to see if he could find someone to jump start his car. He finally managed to flag down an Uber driver dropping someone
