Bring it Back Again

271 Pages·2013·1.59 MB·English

Bring it Back Again

Or

It’s Not Wrong to Want to be Happy

Jonny Pepperston

Bring it Back Again press
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

Copy right 2013 Jonny Pepperston, all rigts reserved.

Edited by firstediting.com

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Prologue

Now this story isn’t really about music, but I mention it because for a
lot of people, music defines an age. Heavy Metal and Punk Rock were
popular, along with a new kind of music called New Wave. Disco was dead,
may it rest in peace, and believe it or not, Rockabilly was popular again. Rap
was coming into being but it wasn’t that big yet, and Michael Jackson was the
king of pop.
Many people called it the “Decade of Decadence,” not just for the
styles but for everything. America had finally come out of the post-Vietnam
recession, and maybe was trying to get some of its innocents back, even if it
was just window dressing. For a lot of people things weren’t good, but for a
lot of people things were good, and for one family called the Morgans, it was
really good.
Clark Morgan was an unassuming 40-something year old man. He
was somewhat more noticeable than some only because of his Greek statue-
like face, dirty blond hair and piercing blue eyes. He was handsome. But he
dressed modestly, talked modestly, and for most of his life, lived modestly.
Until now the greatest job he ever had--best paying anyway--was fighting the
Communists in the jungles of Vietnam, something he’d rather not remember.
But somewhere along the line a great awareness blossomed in him. He got a
job as a salesman while he went back to school. He soon got a degree--only a
two-year degree, but it was enough to get him a job at a company that helped
make computers, of all things.
Clark had a wife, about 40 years old, for about 20 years, and five
children, if you can believe it. Until recently they lived in a one-bedroom
trailer in a town named Oilville in the Republic of California. Clark and his
family were part of a group of people often called the Okies. Like most of the
Californian Okies, his parents and grandparents, as well as his wife’s, came to
California to escape the Dustbowl and probably a lot of other stuff, too. Of
course, not all Okies were from Oklahoma. Clark’s parents and grandparents
were from Missouri. Before that his ancestors lived in Wales and immigrated
to America in the 1600s. The Morgans liked to say that they were related to
Founding Father Daniel Morgan and the pirate that conquered Panama,
Henry Morgan.
Now maybe they were related to those guys and maybe they weren’t;
in fact, all of that stuff wasn’t really important. I only mention it ‘cause the
Morgans loved their family. They were proud of their heritage; they were
proud of who they were, what they were, and where they came from. Now
that’s important.
With his new job Clark Morgan moved his family out of that trailer,
out of Oilville and into a town called Los Fronteriza--still in California, if
you’re wondering. They bought a ranch house with four bedrooms. And
that’s where they spent the greatest years of their lives.
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Chapter 1

Clark opened the door and the two youngest brothers ran in, rapidly
inspecting every room, and the two teenagers did so at a more moderate
pace. Shere Khan, the pit bull, waddled through the door and sat next to the
wall, content to watch his humans like a TV show.
Sharon only stood in the living room holding her hands together,
blushing like a school girl and swaying back and forth. She might have
swayed like that for hours if Clark hadn’t gone to the wall and turned a dial.
As Sharon heard a low hum echo through the house, she smiled and
knelt down over a vent in the floor next to the wall. Her hair flew in the air
like the tentacles of a black octopus and for the first time in her life, in her
own home, in the summer time, the beads of sweat that had always been on
her face since she was a little girl stopped. Stopped cold, literally.
‘Oooohhhh,’ she said in the long, lilting voice she was known for.
‘Clark, it’s incredible.’ The kitchen and living room were really the same
room, separated only by a bar or an island or something. On the kitchen side
was a screen door leading to the garage. On the living room side was a
hallway that led to a closet, a bathroom, and four bedrooms, all in that older.
‘I feel like I’m married to Pablo Escobar,’ Sharon said. Clark only smiled.
The kids came back into the living room.
‘Gadzooks, Dad! Do all four of us get our own room?’ said Danny.
‘Of course not,’ Clark responded. ‘Your mother and I get one, of
course.’
‘Can I have the one on the end?’ said Enos.
‘No way, dork!’ said Susanna. ‘That one’s mine!’ She punched her
brother in the shoulder, almost knocking him down, and Susanna was holding
back.
‘But Dad, it’s the only one with a grounded outlet, and I want to get a
computer!’ Enos shouted. Susanna grabbed Enos by the ears and was about
to throw him across the room, but her father interrupted.
‘It doesn’t matter!’ said Clark. ‘None of you can have a computer or
TV in your room. You do that and you’re just going to stay in there all God
damn day!
‘OK,’ Clark continued, ‘first of all, Susanna gets her own room ‘cause
she’s the only girl.’ Susana folded her arms, looked at Enos and raised her
eyebrows. She did it every time she won, and she won a lot. ‘So the last two
rooms are divided between you three boys.’
Enos shouted, ‘So one of us gets our own room!?’
‘Just until Calvin comes home,’ said Clark. ‘Sharon, why don’t you
decide?’
Sharon smiled. She pointed at the boys and spoke. ‘Bubblegum,
bubblegum in a dish, how many pieces do you wish?’ She stopped on Leroy.
Leroy froze. ‘Uh… uh… uh…’ he said.
‘Pick a number, you moron!’ his sister said.
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‘Uh… uh… uh,’ Leroy could only mutter again.
‘FOUR!’ Susanna yelled.
‘Four,’ Leroy said softly.
‘One, two, three…’ Sharon continued with all that other bullshit, until
she rested on Leroy again. ‘Uh, I guess it’s you… or something,’ Sharon said
to Leroy.
‘Me?’ said Leroy. He hardly won anything. Sharon kissed him on the
cheek playfully.
‘Wait a minute,’ cried Enos, ‘you didn’t even… I wasn’t in…’ he
struggled for words, ‘you never rested your finger on me; you only went back
and forth between Danny and Leroy.’ He was right.
‘Oh, I did not.’ She was wrong. Sharon didn’t even notice what she
had done, and hell, she didn’t even care.
‘Look,’ said Clark, as Sharon lit up a cigarette, ‘this is just as well. It’s
better to have the two younger boys in a room, and when Calvin comes back,
we’ll have the two older boys in a room.’
‘So there,’ said Sharon, sticking out her tongue at Enos.
‘Now look guys,’ said Clark. ‘Are we gonna fill this house up, or are
we gonna sleep on the floor tonight?’
And like that, the family went out into the moving van and started
fillin’ that house up. It really didn’t seem like work at first. It was like they
were building their new life. Deciding what went where and seeing those
empty, white box-like rooms fill up with their familiar possessions gave them
a weird kind of satisfaction.
But after a while they didn’t seem so enthusiastic. Sharon was the
first to stop working, then it was Danny, then it was Enos. Clark put a stop to
that. He couldn’t really make Sharon do what he wanted, ‘cause what the hell
could he do? But he put those kids to work. When the moving van was
empty, Clark took Leroy and Enos and drove off and returned with the van
late that night, just as full as before. And the next day Clark and the kids got
to work again.
Soon it wasn’t long before that house was filled, and I mean filled,
with old lamps, tables, wire spools, old chairs, old couches, and two TVs, one
with the screen busted open. If he could have brought that pickup truck, he
probably would have, but it hadn’t run since Pat Brown was in office and he
really couldn’t fit it in the van, of course. But in front of their new pretty
ranch house, along with the junk that was too dirty to put in the house, Clark
put a big old ugly brown couch, with springs poking out of it.
The rest of the family wouldn’t sit outside on that couch. They all
gave their own reasons. But Clark, like the stubborn son of a bitch he was, sat
on that awful thing every evening while he drank his beer.
No one had the courage to say anything, until one night at the dinner
table Susanna, the smart ass that she was, opened her mouth and said, ‘So
Dad, when are we going to bring home Fred Sanford and Lamont?’ Sharon
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and Enos started laughing, Leroy smiled, and Danny started laughing too,
even though he really didn’t understand the joke.
Clark put down his fork on his mashed potatoes and gave Susana a
look. Now it’s hard to explain why, but with no words, no actions, no nothing-
-with just a look, Clark could control everything that girl said, did and
thought, and I mean everything. And while the rest of the family was still
giggling from her joke, she turned as serious as a Sgt. Friday and as sober as a
Mormon on Sunday.
She opened her mouth and said, ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’ And she meant it.
‘Look,’ said Clark, ‘this isn’t the time to get cocky. The only reason
we’ve survived is because we saved every piece of food, every penny,
everything lesser people would have thrown out. Now if anything, we need
to save more and we need to waste less. If these are the seven fat years, then
we better save everything we can. ‘Cause someday this is going to end.
Someday a famine is going to come; as sure as we’re sitting here, it’s coming.
And if we aren’t prepared, it will end us. There’s nothing in the world that’s
gonna save us, that will show us any mercy, if we aren’t prepared.’
Now the rest of the family didn’t believe any of that crap. Except for
Susanna, who sat there, hung on every word, and nodded her head.

The first day Clark went to work after they had moved, he woke
Sharon from her hangover.
‘Now Sharon, this is important, I need to talk to you,’ he said. She sat
up and looked at him at first but then her eyes glazed over and she started to
stare at the floor as she held her forehead. ‘Sharon? Sharon?’
‘I’m listening, Clark! Jesus Christ!’ she snapped.
‘I need to give you something,’ he said.
‘Really?’ That got her attention.
‘I need to trust you with something important, and you can’t screw it
up,’ he said.
‘Can you just spit it out so I can go back to sleep?’ she said.
‘Look, don’t tell the kids you have this, don’t tell anyone, and promise
me on your life you will only use this in an emergency.’ Now for a lot of
people this kind of speech could only be about a gun. But the Morgans
already had a gun or four or five, and they held no such reverence for such a
thing, any more than other people do for a coffee maker. What Clark took out
of his back pocket was a credit card.
Now that stupor Sharon was in broke faster than the speed of light.
Her eyes looked like ping pong balls and she snapped to her feet and grabbed
it out of his hand. Sharon Morgan jumped around her bedroom like a toddler
on Christmas.
‘Sharon!’ She stopped and looked at him with a frown on her face.
‘Sharon, you remember what I said, right!?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘only use it for emergencies… and beer.’ Clark looked
at her. ‘Just kidding, God.’
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Sharon saw Clark out the door as she said he looked handsome in his
shirt and tie. When he drove off in that Volkswagen van, her eyes darkened
and she smiled ear to ear and kinda looked like the Grinch in that cartoon,
wonderfully awful idea and all.

That night when Clark Morgan came home he got a shock that a man
at the end of long hard day could hardly stand. When he stepped out of his
VW van he saw where that ugly old brown couch had been was a brand new,
outside couch. A couch with thin arms and a thin back, and believe it or not, a
diagonal checkered pattern of purple and blue-green squares.
Danny ran out the front door laughing his head off, holding a plastic
gun and getting pelted by ping pong balls. Sharon appeared in the doorway,
holding another plastic gun, the source of those ping pongs. She walked out
and Clark hardly recognized her. Her straight black hair was now curly, and
instead of a Raiders jersey she had a jacket on that was black on the left side
and white on the right side, and the right sleeve was black and the left sleeve
was white, and on her head was a bright purple-pink derby.
‘Sharon!’ he yelled. He ran in the house and looked around the living
room, and at least a third of his clutter was gone. The living room couch was
gone too, and in its place was a brand new one not unlike the one outside
only its squares were pink and white. Standing at the living room window
were the other kids, looking back and forth between him and their mother.
‘Sharon, what did you do!?’ he said, walking outside again. ‘Did you
hire moving men?’
‘No!’ she answered, ‘Those kids helped me ‘cause they hated that
crap as much as I do!’
‘You threw it out!?’
‘Not all of it. I sold some of the lamps.’
‘Why did you do this? ‘Cause you’re too proud?’ Clark said.
Sharon narrowed her eyes. ‘How proud do you have to be to not
want to live in a God damn junk yard!?’
‘And this!’ he pointed at her clothes. ‘How do you justify that?’
‘But Clark,’ she said in a lilting voice, ‘I have a hat.’ She held her hat
and turned around and smiled.
Now that was one of the stupidest arguments that Clark Morgan had
ever heard. It was so stupid that he didn’t know how to respond. All he
could think to do is sit on that tacky, gaudy, brand-new outside couch.
Sharon went inside, grabbed two beers, came back out and sat next to him.
She opened both their beers and lit a cigarette.
And that was that. She had won. If she had thought of it, she would
have said ‘checkmate,’ but she didn’t even think to say ‘checkers-mate.’ But
she didn’t have to. Clark knew that there was nothing he could do that
wouldn’t just make it worse.
‘This is just another storm we have to weather,’ said Clark.
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‘Clark, I called the bank and what I spent hardly made a dent,’ she
said, ‘besides what’s done is done and there’s nothing we can do about it
now.’
Those four kids stared out the window at their parents on the
outside couch and the uneasy peace forming between them.
‘Mom totally said she wasn’t going to do this,’ said Susanna.
‘So she lied,’ said Enos. ‘You lied to Danny ten times today. He held it
for hours when you told him Skeletor was in the bathroom.’
‘Do skeletons even poop?’ said Danny.
‘I never lie to Dad, never,’ said Susanna.
‘You always side with Dad,’ said Danny.
‘Dad’s always right. Even when he’s wrong he’s right,’ said Susanna.
‘You just have to look harder. You just have to try and understand him. Not
that it’s Mom’s fault. It’s nobody’s fault. Change is just hard sometimes, even
when it’s for the better. I just hate contradictions. ’
‘You hate everything,’ said Danny. Susanna smacked him on the head
and he accidentally shot off another ping pong.
‘I didn’t hate that,’ said Susanna.
‘Hey look,’ said Leroy.
The kids watched their parents through the window as Sharon
kissed Clark, then he put his arm around her and smiled.
‘They’ll be fine,’ said Susanna. ‘Come on, dudes.’
The kids then ran to the inside couch and turned on the TV. Enos
leaned up against his sister and she put her arm around him. They
occasionally looked around the giant living room that was now theirs. And it
looked a lot bigger without all that crap in it.

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Chapter 2

Till now the Morgans had never learned about their neighbors. The
ones on one side of their house, they never did, and God only knows what
happened over there. But the ones on the other side, they did.
This whole time Susanna never got the mail. She used her privilege
as the only daughter to get out of jobs like that. Only this time it didn’t work,
and at the mailbox she heard an awful noise. She looked and saw a neighbor
boy in front of his garage trying to play an electric guitar, and he didn’t know
what the hell he was doing. Susanna decided to leave that junk mail in the
box and walked over to get a better look at that thing--the guitar I mean.
David Solomon, Davy, as the Morgans would come to call him,
reached up with one of his strong arms and pulled his long black hair back
behind his ear, revealing a gigantic muscular jaw and a face like a lion.
He was learning to play the guitar to try and meet girls, but when
Susanna came up to him he thought it was working a lot faster than he had
ever hoped. Her rose-colored hair flew freely in the breeze, except for the two
little pigtails she had tied up with long purple ribbons. Her body, wrapped in
a lime green t-shirt, moved and twisted half-independently inside her purple
overalls, like a cobra in a basket.
I would like to say it was love at first sight but there probably isn’t
such a thing. Susanna had only gotten to play an electric guitar twice in her
life, both times at church. And that electric guitar was the only thing she was
interested in. And Davy wasn’t thinking with his heart or his head; he was
thinking with another part of his body. In fact Davy was so infatuated with
her that he let her take that prized possession of his right out of his hands
with not even a hello.
Susanna casually moved one hand up and down the neck and
strummed the strings with the other. She eventually started singing softly to
herself. ‘Don’t say what you mean; you might spoil your face. Walk in the
crowd, you won’t leave any trace…’
‘You’re pretty gnarly,’ Davy said.
‘Yeah? And you stink on ice,’ answered Susanna.
‘Why don’t you give me some lessons sometime?’ he said.
‘Lesson one,’ said Susanna as she raised her hand so high and
brought that pick down so hard that she broke every one of those strings--
well most of them, anyway. She then handed it back to that bewildered boy
and said, ‘Whoops.’ His orange–brown eyes grew large in shock. She walked
back in her house without even getting the mail. She made one of her
brothers get it after all.
‘Jesus,’ said Davy, ‘what a bi… babe.’

Davy tried to talk to Susanna the next day when she came outside to
sit on the couch to read a book. He complimented her and told some lies
about himself. He asked her to go to one of his many parties but she only
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rolled her eyes and ignored him. She ignored him until he awkwardly walked
back to his own house, than she eventually went back inside her house.
Davy would come outside periodically and look at the Morgans’
house, racking his brain on what to do, until luck would have it, Leroy walked
out the front door.
Now for some reason Leroy was known for going on very long walks.
No one knew why and he couldn’t think of the words to explain it. You might
think he did it to think, but he really wasn’t much of a thinker. You might
think he did it to be alone, but he had his own room now. The answer might
have been that just putting one foot in front of the other was all it took to
keep his simple little mind entertained.
But anyway, when Leroy came out of that house and started walking
down the street, Davy ran to meet him.
‘Hey, where you going?’ Davy said as he ran up to meet Leroy. Leroy
looked at him and was shocked and embarrassed. He wasn’t sure what he
was more embarrassed about, that he had this ritual or that he couldn’t
explain why he did it.
‘I uh was, uh…uh…’ Leroy said and maybe repeated several times.
‘Kool,’ said Davy, Hell he wasn’t even listening to Leroy, not closely
anyway. Davy went on to ask Leroy several questions.
‘Hi, I’m David,’ said Davy. He looked at Leroy, begging a response.
‘Uh… uh… Leroy.’
‘Leroy?’ said Davy, ‘that’s Kool man, that’s original. I’ll tell you
something, dude, you’re going to be the only Leroy at this school, totally.’
‘Uh… great,’ said Leroy.
Davy laughed. ‘You’re going to Los Fronteriza High, right?’
‘Uh yeah.’
‘Look, relax, dude, it’s Kool,’ said Davy. ‘The high school in this town
is awesome, dude, there’s like three girls for every guy.’
‘Really?’ said Leroy.
‘Don’t worry dude,’ said Davy. ‘I’ll give you a head start.’
‘Like on homework?’ said Leroy.
‘No, a party, dude,’ said Davy, smiling. ‘You know you’ll never catch
anything if you don’t put your line in the water once in a while. Where’d you
move from?’
‘Oilville,’ said Leroy.
Davy went on to ask Leroy several questions and he didn’t really
listen to those answers, either. And Leroy was starting to panic ‘cause he was
afraid that at any minute, with any footstep, this other boy was going to figure
out they weren’t going anyplace. But as Davy’s conversation turned to the
impersonal subjects of sports and music, Leroy relaxed, and Davy started to
listen.
Now Leroy and Davy were like oil and water and normally would
never have been friends; in fact, the only time Davy would probably talk to a
boy like Leroy was to make fun of him, but Leroy was Davy’s in.
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