The Hornswoggle Flim-Flam

by Aria Creek

EXCERPT

Chapter 1

I lay blissfully motionless; enjoying the awareness of my sleep drenched body calmly floating its way up to full wakefulness; leaving the past snugly tucked away, out of sight and out of mind.

Through my bedroom window, a sliver of dawn light was breaking into the surrounding darkness, heralding the second day of the bacchanal called Spring break. A time where mostly college age humans go berserk in mind and body; doing the most foolish naïve things that they will ever do in their entire lives.

(Spring Break was something quite foreign to me and my friends at their age. I don’t think Class ‘94 knew what youthful exuberance was back then. But that is the past.)

It’s been more than two decades since my friends and I, all high school champion athletes, christened ourselves Class’94.

At the moment, there were nine kids I knew who were on the loose in this conflagration of excess and youthful exuberance.

Today, all of those nine children that encircle the constellation named Class ’94, are at home or have run away to parts I don’t want to know about. All of them are my godchildren, and I like them … but … they’re all high maintenance. Frankly, I like unencumberment (the state of being blissfully unencumbered).

So … there I lay, in my elegant bedroom; an original Class ‘94 Sam & Grace creation. (Grace, a champion baseball player in high school, is our clothing experts and Sam, a professional tennis medal winner, is our home decor designer.)  

The unencumbered room consists of one extravagant, one of a kind, I am told, bed, four walls, a few windows and a door.

The bare walls are painted the blue of a robin’s egg. The windows have fancy curtains. (Sam insisted. I fought. I lost. They’ve grown on me.)

Now, the best part is the bed.  Great firm foam mattress covered in sheets which are as soft as a floating summer cloud. Yummy.  And a luscious floral printed duvet covered the bed and me. (The design is a Class ’94’s Whitney textile design original. Whitney’s our champion cyclist turned famous artist.)

The cover is filled with the softest, lightest down … ethically sourced of course. (There was a time when ethically sourced and organic were not in the vocabulary of the poor girl I used to be.)

Well, I’m not poor anymore and I’m determined to stay that way so I took a deep breath, absorbing the last silent ephemeral sliver of predawn light and up I got to begin my day.

In under eight minutes, I did the bathroom thing, put on my high-end running gear, made my way downstairs, grabbed my water bottle and was on my way out to the garage.

I swung my leg over my 350 cc classic orange trimmed motorcycle (which was not too small, not too big, and just the right size for zipping over to the high school. Yeash! OK! So it’s a Ducati). I turned on the headlights (so no half-asleep early-worker drove over me) and headed out to meet Sam at the high school track.  

There are perks to being two of Kerry high school’s very successful athletic champions. We had the keys for the locked gate that surrounded the school’s regulation sized track where we ran three times a week (when we were both in town).

We also had the use of their six-lane track and the tennis courts. Sam, our high school tennis champion who turned professional, takes advantage of these courts. Her tall well-proportioned mesomorph body needs to run and do the courts to keep her from turning into a blob.

Me? I’m slim, tall, broad shouldered and just love to run. That’s how I got my education. I ran for scholarships, the Elvira Fitzpatrick way.

Our beneficent angel of a high school coach made sure all eight of us were the best at the sport she chose for each of us. She drilled us into champion and scholarship worthy material.

And champions we became and scholarships we won.

All eight of us.

Casey, my next door neighbor, having the athlete’s body configuration similar to mine, became a champion cyclist (riding for scholarship money throughout college, with Whitney and Susan. The three of them became known as the trinity on wheels).

In high school, Grace played baseball with me and Amel’iya ( the unmentionable one  (I’ll get to that later; maybe).  Grace skipped the square on the board that read college, she stayed in Kerry, starting the best clothing store for hundreds of miles … in all directions. (This is her PR. But it’s based on truth and testimonials.)

The last member of Class ‘94, Char’Elene, is our need-for-speed member. Skiing is her forte. Downhill wins and an Olympic medal gave her the money to become a doctor.

Poor we may have been, but not anymore.

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Chapter 2

Sam and I did our run and an hour later I was back home, pulling into my one car garage that had just enough room for my hybrid car and the cycle.

I locked up and ran into the house. I was on a tight schedule this morning.

I took a fast shower, grabbed an outfit out of the closet and raced downstairs in time for my early morning zoom call to New York.

I’m a tech wiz, both hardware and software, even have patents to prove it, and I had anxious clients in New York that needed to talk.

I was wearing one of the casual work outfits (that’s what Grace calls them - she’s our clothes wizard as I’ve mentioned) that make me look good on a zoom call. (Grace did a test, making me try on way too many outfits until she was satisfied that I didn’t fade away or buzz on screen. She would know what works and what doesn’t … she owns (with Sam) what really is the best clothing/home décor store east of the Mississippi and west of the Hudson River.)

I call the color of the long sleeve t-shirt I was wearing, mustard. Grace calls it something fancy that I refuse to remember. I wore it with a pair of really nice deep purple pants (the color has a fancy name too, and yes, I refuse to remember that also).

And so my day started.

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Chapter 3

I’m Claire Elizabeth Stockton. I’m one of seven women (used to be eight - I’m referring to the unmentionable Amel’iya) who are known throughout the kingdom as The Class of ‘94.

You can consider us a click, a pod, a troop, a cauldron, or in plain English an exceptional group of champion athletes way back in high school who continued on throughout our college years (except for Grace as I mentioned. She went into business).

We formed a tight knit bond way back in high school. A bond that’s held together through the muck and mire of life … so far (sometimes by the slimmest of threads).

(Except for the one that betrayed us. She, the unmentionable, as I’ve mentioned, the one we don’t talk about.)

We hail from Kerry, Ohio. (A small, now gentrified town within driving distance of metropolises like Cleveland and Columbus.)

The seven of us (even the missing one) came from that part of town where poor black, poor brown and a lot of white-trash mixed but never matched. It was a place that was dangerous and tough for all the kids.

(I will note here, that we’ve all moved on from our depressing, mostly dysfunctional beginnings. Letting you know this up front, because we’d rather you cheer us than feel sorry for us.)

Besides the bad streets where we grew up, there was another part of town marked off for the struggling but not considered poor whites, while another small part was for prosperous blacks, and another practically gigantic part for prosperous whites. It was like a bunch of gangs or thugs marking off their territories with invisible electrified twenty foot high fencing.

Today, I live in a beautiful house next door to my closest friend Casey Buckhauser (in the run-down but now gentrified tree lined part of town).

Casey, (who is the second in command of our group) and her husband Mitch have three children. I call them the Wild Bunch. They are the reason people should think twice before having children.

At the moment, their daughter was banging on my front door. Yes I have a doorbell. No she wasn’t using it.

I watched her on my security screen as I was ending my business call to the client in New York, which would necessitate worming my way through their system after they closed for the day, hunting down whatever smash-up their internal tech person did.

I do a lot of this kind of clean up. When it’s a smash-up on a program I delicately hand wove for them I get real testy with my client. Which was the mood I was in right now.

Casey’s daughter had given up knocking and had now moved on to ringing my doorbell like a normal person.

I hung up on my client, looked over at the screen again which showed her looking up into the security camera while her finger kept pressing the bell. I need to rig something to stop the bell from ringing at moments like this.

She wasn’t giving up and going back home, so I had to let her in.

Chapter 4

Casey’s daughter Mia, came charging into my house wearing stove-pipe jeans I’d swear she’d painted onto her body, and a long-sleeve tank top that might have been painted on too. A studded belt was around her waist and a pair of ankle boots with a wedge heel were on her feet. All new stuff.

She had a growth spurt this year that put her eye to eye with her mom and into the next clothing size. That’s why all the new threads.

Today, Mia, a tall willowy reed of a teenager, was a young woman dressed for battle.

This week her hair was short, with a sharp wedge cut out on the side that looked stunning, and, happened to match the wedge boots on her feet. I think it was done on purpose.

Sometimes she wears her hair long, sometimes short, sometimes straightened, sometimes natural and sometimes in rows. The only thing she hasn’t tried yet is bald.

She’s Casey’s middle child and one of my many, like way too many godchildren.

I closed the door behind her as she blew past me.

After closing the door, I followed in her wake through my entrance hallway.

There’s a small break away kitchen to my left and a half bathroom  to my right. These small but necessary rooms were inconsequential because they were swallowed up and practically disappeared due to the enormity of the room that Sam (of the aforementioned early morning track run partner) one of my eight (now seven, ugh) terrific Class’94 friends, had created out of three rooms on the first floor of my house.

Samanthea had re-designed, demolished and re-built my living room, slash office, slash workspace as her first Interior Design project when she and Grace expanded their retail fashion business into home and office Interiors and decor. 

The space that Sam created for me is brilliant, if I must say so myself. The floors are stained a deep gray, almost black, accented by the light wood used for all the built-in’s. Like desks, cubby holes, drawers, shelves.

 She also used the light wood for framing the entire wall that was glass windows and doors. The glorious view past this wide expanse of light and sky was of my landscaped and brick walled garden.

Casey calls it my retreat from the maddening world.

I don’t really need the upscale interior layout, but Sam and Grace think I do … and they always win when it comes to clothes and home/office decor.

The open floorplan is amazingly comfortable, has lots of breathing room and enough hideyholes to store the accessories which I need to build, repair or invent tech stuff.

In case I didn’t mention it, not only am I a tech genius but I own my own business - which is why I was within arm’s reach of Mia the day that she wanted to be filled in on all the blanks in her mom’s history … therefore her own history.

Mia was now sitting in one of my many comfortable client chairs.

After giving me an extensive buildup and rationale for wanting the historical information she was asking me to provide, Mia demanded, “Aunt Claire you have to tell me what happened.”

I had listened patiently.  Then I said, “Go ask your mother?” This is my standard answer to all my godchildren’s questions.

“She just brushes me off! And the Reverend Cooper is coming soon, and I just have to know!” she wined.

I hate when she wines; so I gave her my-get-out-of-here look to which she immediately composed herself. Why Casey can’t do this with any of her kids I don’t know. It seems easy enough to me.

 “If your mother doesn’t want to tell you then …”

“It’s not that she doesn’t want to tell me,” she interrupted, “ it’s that she doesn’t think it’s important or relevant or whatever. But I think she did something cool and saved the Reverend from something terrible. For god’s sake Aunt Claire, Matie Cooper’s my great aunt and I don’t know their history. Well not all of it anyway. Not the juicy parts.”

I looked at her and sat back in my very comfortable CEO chair that Samanthea Robinson, had replaced three or four times already. She insists that the chair be kept fresh, firm, comfortable and up to date, especially since I spend so much of my time in it. And since she is the decorator extraordinaire of Class’94 I go along with it.

And even if I didn’t go along … she’d switch the chairs out anyway. I don’t argue anymore with Sam or her partner in fashion Grace Philamore Montgomery, because they always win and they’re always right.

So, there I sat deciding what to say. Since I couldn’t make up my mind I did the only sensible thing I could think of.

I called Casey.

Mia cringed, putting on one of her hopeless defeated faces. I ignored her which of course made her go into exasperation mode.

As I waited for Casey to answer her phone, I just smiled at Mia. She started to moan and groan.

I said a few words to Casey and ended the call.

“So what did mom say?” Mia said, despondently expecting the worst.

“She said yes.”

“Just yes? No if ands or buts?”

“Just yes,” I assured her to which I was given the broadest smile the child could muster.

“So?” she pushed.

“So, don’t call me Aunt Claire – I’m not your aunt,” I said, making it a condition for my cooperation. I hate the teenage whining and being called aunt.

She pursed her lips, scrunched up her face and said in her most imperious voice, “OK … godmother Stockton … please tell me about my mom and her aunt.”

I took a deep breath, tried not to laugh and began, “It was back during the crazy months before the clock turned over to January 1, 2000.

It was a time when everyone thought the world would collapse, disintegrate or unravel.

It was a time when the specter of the Y2K bug was suspended over the world like an acid breathing evil monster ready to suck-out all the 1’s and 0’s in a vampire feast.

It was a time where the chains, locks and firewalls of “Cyber Security” was nowhere near robust as is it today.

The turn of the millennium was a time when people thought planes would crash, trains would careen off their tracks, bank vaults wouldn’t open, communication links would melt down, rockets would go off and Armageddon would be upon us.

Into this fevered madhouse came the Preacher.

Chapter 5

Preacher Charmeur arrived in Gening, New York in the early spring; at the same time the first tulips of the season burst upon the scene in all their glory.

At first glance he appeared to have just walked off a movie set, like he was in costume… some would say. Rather ordinary in appearance … others would say. Enigmatic charismatic and riveting … most would agree.

The preacher was a tall man. Scrawny and bow legged. His black hair was shaved close to the scalp, his dark eyes were deep set under bushy eyebrows.

His long nose, manicured mustache and firm bony chin, all jutted out in front of him as he walked, like he was daring anyone to take a fist to that part of his anatomy.

What gave the impression of his walking off a movie set, well, besides the exaggerated tall wide brimmed black hat and old western gunslinger movie mustache, were his clothes.

He wore a combination of clerical stiffness and dangerous goth, with large laced shoes that were spit polish shinned.

His outfit was neither proper Catholic, Protestant, Baptist or even Evangelical. What it was … was noticeable.

His appearance was only second to the combination of power and humility that emanated like perfume from the man, which was strikingly contagious but not unusual for a religious-performer.

Within a week of his arrival, in a late model four door Chrysler, he took up residence in a second-floor apartment, that was neither lavish nor rundown. It was just one of the many ordinary apartments available in Gening at that time.

The Main Street corner apartment may have been innocuous and bland but it did have what the preacher needed. It had a back door, a main entrance on the side street plus, he was able to quietly arrange access to the fledgling internet.

At that time the internet resembled the wild west of tech wizardry where a hacker could use “capabilities” existing in algorithms, software and programs, at will.

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It could easily be said of the preacher that he looked like a man who had come to town to settle down and do good works.

But the Reverend Dr. Matie Cooper of the Springrock Baptist Church knew otherwise. She couldn’t explain it. But something was definitely off. The new preacher man didn’t quite hit the mark.