Wendy, My Brother's Wife Ch. 02

Immediately after service, Father Alex made a beeline to me and steered me around the fellowship hall to 'meet a few people' - more like hundreds of them. Within minutes I had two jobs, a day job maintaining and driving a tired old truck to handle some local and regional deliveries, and a night job assisting the elderly solo-proprietor and Editor of the Lovett Starry-Beacon (with a circulation of 'dozens').

Another senior citizen member offered a room for lease at a rate that seemed more than reasonable and before I knew it I was all set and established in town.

The Church 'Fellowship Hour' actually seemed to continue long past noon and much of the afternoon was spent with a large church luncheon and picnic on their vast grounds. Children played in a large well-equipped park, teenagers swam in the local pool or played a dozen other sporting games and the adults chatted, socialized and enjoyed the sun - all without a stitch of clothing. The more I learned about the town, the stranger indeed it seemed to become.

The rather enormous Nudist Colony that ran a bit to the east of the town center and then down onwards to the coast was the bread and butter industry of much of the township and county of the same name. There was some minor tourism for the beach, but ranching and farming were the only other traditional industries, and both were rather depressed economically. There was a bit of a harbor in a bay to the southwest, but it wasn't an especially good one, surrounded nearly on all sides with shallow mudflats and hardly any deep water for landing boats. Also the very bad local county road made getting anywhere outside of the old town in poor weather problematic at best. Much of the land to the west and especially southwest near the bay tended to be worthless salt marsh, but there was an old WW-2 era airfield to the northeast that had a minor charter service business and a fledgling aviation corporation that had just moved down here from New England. There was also some talk of a local computer software company that was starting to prosper a little bit, but the overall tone was of a small rural economy with very few opportunities for growth.

I settled into my new jobs easily and the next Friday late afternoon, with a paycheck in my hand, I was greeted by the good Father Al, as he preferred to be called. He jokingly asked that, "Since I was now a man of means, would I enjoy sharing a glass of wine and a beach walk with him to discuss my week in town and perhaps share a bit of past history?" All three ideas sounded good to me.

We took his jeep down to the beach area, and I splurged for a pair of tall icy-cold Pinot Grigio wine glasses served from a beachside saloon called Phil's Cantina and we enjoyed a bit of a walk. We were the only ones clothed at all on the beach, but I wasn't in the mood to strip down and my tippling priest and confessor followed my example.

I had resolved that I would mention nothing of prison, let alone my framing and under no circumstances discuss my brother Dragos whatsoever. This firm resolution held fast for least 1/4 mile, and by the time forty-five minutes later when we had reached the end of the beach inside the bay, near the Marsh-King's fishing pier, I had pretty much confessed everything there was to be confessed.

We walked back to Phil's, which was apparently a very well regarded local beachside watering hole that was a favorite place for young couples enjoying their weekends, sipping a frozen margarita or two and splashing about nude on the nearby well-lighted beach to either watch or be watched. I splurged for another round of drinks, the famous frozen hard lemonades this time, and I continued to confess until my 'insides were now my outsides' as a local expression went.

Father Al just sat in silence. The scary part was that I knew that he had believed, really believed every single word that I had told him. I had tried lying to him earlier, and he had detected it instantly, and even the slightest shading of the truth had brought a gentle correction from him. He believed my real story - but now what was I to do?

"Charles... Scott... Kipling..." He muttered, "as in Dickens, Sir Walter and Rudyard, right?" He asked me with a smile. Damn, I hate smart assed priests! I had to buy him another drink just to wipe the smug look off of his face.

"Father, do you believe in magic? Real 'wave your wand and the Prince is turned into a frog' kind of magic?" I asked him a few hours later when he dropped me off at my boarding house.

"Oh, yes. Absolutely and without a doubt!" He said with a faint smile before driving back on to the Church.

************

I settled into a routine with my jobs and soon decided that I liked the town (and especially its people) enough to want to stay for a good long while. I found a small abandoned house that I could rent for about what I was paying in rent that was near my day job, and I bought a used 10-speed bike cheap to ride into Towns Centre, where the small newspaper office was. I needed the exercise anyway.

Alice Grumley, had to have been at least seventy-five years old and was bitchy and cantankerous, but she had also worked for this newspaper since her grandfather took it over in the late 1920's. Lovett had a bit of a revival in those days before the Great Depression, but had collapsed enough that even the minor benefits of a local Army Air Corps Base during the war had not much improved the economy until the arrival of a large number of hippies and 'free-spirits' during the late 1960's, and the start of the Nudist Colony. Alice had seen it all, and I actually learned more from her in a few weeks than I had learned in an entire semester in some of my college journalism classes.

Her eyes were bad, quite terrible in fact, and the printing press we used was straight from her grandfather's era, using metal type that had to be painstakingly selected a single character at a time. Naturally, with her bad eyes, there were a lot of mistakes being made, and I soon did all of the typesetting duty on Tuesday nights, the night our press rolled. Technically, the newspaper lost money every time a page was printed. Theoretically, there was a subscription fee and there was some minor advertising, but it didn't come close to paying Alice's actual production costs, let alone my time. I was working now as an Assistant Editor (there were only the two of us) for virtually free, as even the minor expense of buying a new can of coffee for the office sometimes became a major problem.

We couldn't afford to pay even the local kids to deliver the papers, so Wednesday morning they were just taken to all of the remaining open businesses in the Towns Centre, for them to hand out free to their customers. About noon, one of the Church Ladies would come and get a great stack to be kept at the Church for most folks to pickup on Sunday.

It was an odd system, but it worked more or less. We both knew that nearly every dime from her pocket went to feed the printing press and that some day its expenses would exceed her small pension (what she ate or lived on I have no clue), but that final day always just seemed another month or two away. Somehow we survived. If she ever noticed that I sometimes slipped a ten or twenty dollar bill of my own into the petty cash, it was politely never mentioned.

*********

The time just seemed to flow, and a pleasant stay of a few months soon turned into a few years, and I will be honest - I hardly thought of Wendy or Dragos at all. I was safe, secure, and happy. In fact I was the happiest I could ever remember being in my entire life. I had friends, co-workers at both jobs who respected me, and I even had no particular lack of female companionship, albeit this was mostly 'just sex'. There were no indications of any of my casual relationships would turn into more permanent companionship. Things just never seemed to work out in that direction.

I can remember paying a brief visit to our local printing shop one Monday. They made the engraving plates for photos or the advertisements used for our vintage printing press and we also got our cheap paper stock from them, only to find a lady I knew casually from Church by the name of Marsha there. She worked for the resident computer genius, Warren Black, and I saw something that just about stopped my heart. Yes, she was very pretty, but it was common knowledge she only really had eyes for Warren - who being a total git, was clueless as to her love for him.

She said it was called desktop publishing! On her Mac computer, she had created a newsletter brochure for their customers that looked 100 times better than our old vintage mechanical press could create. I begged her to show me how it was done, and I then spent the next two hours in awe of how easily in theory a newspaper could be assembled on a computer screen, edited and then printed on a laser printer complete with glorious photos and scrolling details far too delicate for anything we could otherwise print with our old heap. I had seen the future of publishing, but I knew that neither Alice nor I could afford any of the expenses of setting this equipment up, even if it would save us a fortune in other costs each and every month thereafter.

I seemed also to spend an evening at least once a month with Father Al, but we rarely discussed my past now or even Dragos, Wanda and the Ring, until one evening walking down the beach anticipating our rendezvous with Phil's Cantina and Ice House for something pleasant and frozenly alcoholic he casually mentioned this bombshell.

"You know your father died last month just after Christmas, I saw it in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He'd been sick for quite a long time they said, and his eldest son and heir had been selling off most of the family businesses a piece at a time for many years. I hear Jeff Wallace has a container load that needs to be taken up by truck up to Delaware, not too far from your hometown. Why don't you ask to handle that delivery and then stop by the grave and say goodbye?"

Why not, I soon talked myself into it and resolved by the end of the evening to do just that. I also made one other more secret resolution. I was tired of living a false life under another name and I was really feeling the urge to be "Me" instead of "Kip" as I was known around town. Since I couldn't take a medieval crossbow to shoot down the evil Wizard from the safety of a nearby rooftop, I'd do the next best thing.

In one of my last stops before leaving the area, I bought a deer hunting rifle with a scope and a case of .30-06 slugs that would make any further operation of a 'Magic Ring quite moot. I was long past time, I decided, that I fought back!

***********

I don't know when this idea to finally eliminate my brother occurred to me, but I know it had been in the back of my mind for some years. Maybe even since my final weeks in prison once I realized that I would be at last escaping the trap he had set for me. He had stolen most of my life, and certainly my only real hope for romantic happiness. Sadly, every woman I had met since Wendy seemed oddly inferior to her somehow and I could never figure out exactly why. Undoubtedly, he had totally destroyed her life too somehow, and I just couldn't picture them as a normal happily married couple. I just felt a growing and burning need to destroy the ogre, to put him down like the insane and diseased creature he obviously was.

This single thought occupied my time for the entire three days of my drive, quite insanely, until I finally found myself for the first time in over a decade, parked unobtrusively as a truck can get, right in front of my old family home.

I had no clue what kind of car Dragos now drove, or if he had a chauffeur as my father often did in his Congressional days. I resolved to just watch the house and wait. I parked the truck further down the road closer to the main road in an area where a big diesel truck cab wouldn't look too out of place and I waited in the woods for two days with my scope trained on the front door to watch and nail the bastard if he ever walked out.

Instead, late on my second day a small two-seat sports car at length pulled into the drive from the other direction down the main road and I saw Dragos get out of the car and walk (seemingly a tad unsteadily) towards the front door. I hardly recognized him, he had gained at least fifty pounds, and perhaps even a hundred, enough for his gait to waddle, even if stone cold sober, which Dragos didn't at all appear to be. I thought he had been drinking fairly heavily, and his unsteadiness made the adjustment of my rifle scope on him difficult. His lurching steps made it nearly impossible for me feel certain enough about hitting him, and I reluctantly held my fire.

Just when I thought I had a good shot (but was still hoping for a better one) the front door opened and a little boy of about six ran to greet his 'Papa'. In the doorway, with her hands folded in front of her chest was the scowling form of Wendy!

This changed everything; my thoughts of shooting down Dragos like a rabid dog were now evaporated. Wendy and Dragos were still married, although they did not appear to be in love, and they did not kiss or touch each other or show any signs of affection as he entered the house, but his son appeared to love him nevertheless.

Alone, I am sure that I could have murdered my evil brother, and in cold blood without the slightest bit of remorse... but I couldn't make Wendy a widow, or assassinate a little boy's father right in front of his eyes.

**********

I cried in the woods until long after dark and cried nearly continually for most of the non-stop drive home, stopping only for fuel and to throw my unused rifle into a nearby river. My world was once again shattered, seemingly beyond any and all hope of repair.

*********

I had assumed that my moronic brother would eventually tire of her, his attention span had never been very long at best, and he usually tired of most of his women partners within a few months. I had prayed that Wendy would now hopefully be safe somewhere, and with Dragos out of the picture I could maybe safely 'reappear' and find her again. My feelings had not changed for her. She had been trapped by a sadistic bastard with all of his alleged magical power at his disposal - what could she hope to do to evade this? The answer was 'frankly not much'.

But now, over ten years later, she was apparently still his prisoner, and my heart began to utterly despair. This was worse than being in prison; these walls and bars seemed so much stronger and higher and I could see no way outside.

**********

I returned the truck to Jeff's small trucking yard and muttered that I needed a few days off. Before going home to brood, I'm afraid I bought quite a few bottles of liquid refreshment to enjoy (or not) for the next few days. I don't make a good drunk, I just get weepier and sleepy, so I'd drink, cry and sleep, in a repeating cycle. Somehow, it wasn't quite as therapeutic as I thought and hoped it would be, and after a few days Father Al came banging on the door and brought my private little grief session to a close, and dragged me off to a noontime walk on the beach (sans more alcoholic beverages).

"I'm glad to see you decided not to kill your brother." He said without much of a preamble before continuing.

"How did I know? Assume that I might also have a magic ring of my own (waving his large antique blue sapphire ring that he always wore at me casually), or being a priest, I am especially good at detecting when people are 'up to something' and especially something that they shouldn't be doing. Or lastly, I could have just noticed a box of deer slugs in your house right before you left and I know you don't hunt, and it's isn't even the right time of year to go shooting Bambi anyway. That left just your brother Dragos."

Damn he was good. That was the main trouble with his Church that preached nothing but living honesty. You are expected to be totally honest!

I confessed my sins of thought, but not of deed and I think I did feel a bit better afterwards, although I didn't know quite why.

"My penance?" I asked him.

"Just meditate, if you can, and try and get all of your very tangled feelings straightened out." And one other tiny little detail.

"Sometime soon," he added, "I will be asking you to do something very hard that you will feel not at all capable of doing, but I will ask you to do it anyway. You really won't like it, but I'll ask you to do it anyway. Understand? Of course not, but you will later."

With that we walked back towards town, it being a lovely early spring day with the walk was more enjoyable than the short drive would have been.

********

The spring and summer seemed to crawl by slowly, as if each day was about forty-eight hours long instead of just the normal twenty-four. I kept feeling that I was waiting for something to happen, but things just remained normal and my life slowly got back into its usual routine. I sometimes felt that if I could have climbed the next tallest building or hill, then I might have been able seen it coming, but I never did. I think when the envelope arrived one Saturday afternoon it was more of a relief than anything else, I knew the period of waiting that I had been enduring was finally over.

The envelope had Wendy's married name and the return address of the family home in New England. Inside was a printed notification of the time and date of my brother's funeral. At the bottom, below the time and date of the internment ceremony at the graveyard, was a doubled underlined phrase in Wendy's delicate handwriting saying, "Please come!"

I brooded on the letter all evening and night, but I saw no way to raise the money for the plane flight (my own savings were now being eaten to keep the paper alive for yet 'one more issue), and a drive would take too long to get there, even driving non-stop. I had seen The Church work at least thousand 'miracles' in my few years there with them, but I had never seen anything like what happened right during church the next morning, when Father Al rose up to speak as the offering plates were being distributed.

"Kip has received notice of a critical family emergency out of state that needs to respond to fast, and could a few folks please make some minor contributions to help him get there and back."

This started an avalanche of cash, mostly single dollars, but sometimes five's and ten's. Everyone was poor then, but still they donated what they could spare, and when the collection was counted up I had enough for a round trip commercial plane flight from Houston. A local bush pilot from the County airfield even donated his time and gas to get me there.

There was no hint or discussion of 'repayment' - if the Church ever helped you, then you made sure to help others in equal need later if you had an extra dollar or two. It was a barter system that always worked and even earned interest.

"Was this the unpleasant thing I was going to have to do?" I asked Father Al later.

"Not even close." He said with a laugh.

***********

The next day I was 'home', or rather at the closest inexpensive hotel I could find near the cemetery. I even had enough cash left over for an economy rental car so that I would not have to contact any remaining family members for transportation to and from the airport. I had my own plans for honoring my brother's funeral and I was pretty sure they would not be entirely welcomed by my remaining relatives.

I needn't have worried; my Wendy always did have a sense of humor and style.

I did not approach anywhere near the family during the actual service, even though frankly almost no one was there. There was a minister of some sort and a representative from the funeral home I think. Aunt was tending to Wendy's son and Wendy was dressed for a sunny day on a tropical beach in a very bright floral and short Hawaiian sundress, despite the fact that it was late fall and quite cold and wet. That was it for the mourners.