I.M. Flippy - A Fugitive in Grass Valley

A Fugitive in Grass Valley

I.M. FLIPPY

A FUGITIVE IN GRASS VALLEY

Copyright 2017 I.M. Flippy

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Book Interior by The Book Khaleesi

CHAPTER ONE

Lev

A few years ago, I lost one of my balls to ball cancer, so if there's some annoying thing I don't feel like doing I ask myself if I would rather do the annoying thing or lose the other ball and that's usually enough to motivate me. I know it's not the most logical reasoning in the world but, according to my mother, all humans are magical thinkers and if they say they aren't, they're lying to make themselves look untouchably rational and should not be trusted. Nowadays she says it with a wink in front of my stepdad, and he kisses the top of her head when she does. I like Scott. I didn't at first. There's territorial and then there are the sons of single moms. It was just the two of us until I hit college, so I couldn't help but show my teeth a little. Not that the teeth of a twinky art major are particularly impressive, even to a balding immigration lawyer from Santa Rosa. But Scott turned out to be a good guyunfailingly kind to my mom and generous to me. When I got sick he was as reliable as any real dad would have been. Once I caught him crying about it on the porch. He told me that sometimes he couldn't help but worry that I would die and then further worried that imagining it would make it happen. Magical thinking. Like all humans.

That is why one Wednesday morning in April, my thought process went like this: Walk the dogs or lose another ball? It was ten o'clock in Grass Valley, California, and I had been up since eight playing with shading techniques in ink pencil like it was a nervous tick, and listening to public radio.

I didn't live at home with my mom anymore like some sad aging millennial victim of an increasingly low-wage service economy, no siree. I lived with my friend Bianca and her husband Marco, like some sad aging millennial victim of our increasingly low-wage service economy. Marco and Bianca's house was a green wood-sided bungalow, it sat at the end of a maple-lined street, within walking distance of town on a cool day. Town itself was really just a few streets of main drag culminating in some big box stores in a giant parking lot, just out of sight enough to not risk ruining the quaint aesthetic of our little Gold-Rush-era strip that was Grass Valley's bread and butter for tourists passing through on the way to San Francisco or Sacramento or Yosemite. I had hesitated to move anywhere that could be termed "small town" at first, having grown up in Sac, but found that Bianca's social diagnosis of the place as more free-thinking than conservative held true. I was gay, the lesbian couple who ran the fabric store in town was gay. Everybody knew and everybody shrugged and it had not taken me long to feel at home there. It was also difficult not to feel at home in a cozy house that had a real old-fashioned wood burning stove that made all the blankets smell pleasantly smoky and a kitchen where Marco made up gourmet pizzas. He owned a food truck and drove out to cater events and hawk pies in Sac on the regular, and he kept me fat with carbs while Bianca, as the owner of the most popular coffeehouse in town, kept me caffeinated and almost gainfully employed.

Bianca and Marco also owned a Springer Spaniel named Delilah, who was currently licking my face and jostling my glasses because she knew it was nine o'clock on a Wednesday, and that was the walkies hour.

All right. All right." I gently shoved Lilah's face away. "Jesus, lady."

After showering and dressing, I stuffed a somewhat stale bagel in my mouth and made my way out with the excitable Springer on a leash, some sketching supplies in my messenger bag, and Bon Iver in the earbuds. It was a cool morning in April and I had four backyards to hit on my way to the dog park. Bonnie was just two doors down and then I'd be tossing giant balls of slobbering fur into Marco's 4Runner. The cherry tree at the Forsyth's was blossoming and Delilah was trying to run in circles because a bloom had landed on her nose. I grumbled at her to mellow as I made my way to the Forsyth's back gate.

"Bonnie! Hey, Bonnie!" I knocked on the gate first to warn the Sheltie.

The Wednesday morning dog park routine had just sort of happened by accident. Five dogs, none of them mine, that I took down to the park every week. I didn't even get paid regularly for it, but I occasionally garnered some nice favors and baked goods. Bianca thought they took advantage of me and, while it's true that I'm notoriously lousy at saying no, I would also point out that she has never tried Donna Forsyth's coffee cake.

The distance to Condon Park was short enough that it seemed wasteful to drive but just long enough that walking five hyper dogs was a nightmare. Besides, when I walked, I was apt to think about how I had moved in with Bianca and Marco four years ago to get my head together for a while after the cancer and the getting dumped and the dropping out of school and yet somehowI was still in Grass Valley. I had gone nowhere.

The dog park was a fenced area farther up inside woodsy Condon Park. It was usually deserted on Wednesday mornings which was how I liked it. I let the dogs do their thing and camped out on a bench under my favorite fir with my sketch pad and my music, intending to draw. Sometimes I got distracted by how pretty the pine trees were in the morning light or by the dogs shenanigans. There were some shallow pools, rope toys, and things around for them to play with, and they all got along. I sat back, man-spreading all over the place because there was nobody else around, and started idly sketching a gangster character wearing a fedora and carrying a briefcase. I stuck a cigar in his big mouth. Bianca kept telling me I should try some freelance illustration, but I wasn't driven to draw for other people. I should have been, I supposed. It would have given me some extra cash. Even with the pittance of rent I paid to Bianca, slinging espressos and teaching art classes part-time at the Grass Valley Cultural Center didn't keep me exactly flush.

I was illustrating a whole noir scene around my gangster (a nightclub behind him, a mysterious showgirl getting out of a car), when an action hero walked into the dog park.

At least he looked sort of like an action hero.

He was wearing baggy black pants and a thermal, as if he were on his way to rob a bank but slept in late, and a Yankees ball cap slapped on top of a dark curly mop. He had a black beard with just a dash of salt and pepper. He was wearing combat boots and his hands were shoved into his pockets. He was completely out of place. He didn't even have a dog. He wandered into the clearing, his eyes fixed on Delilah and Bonnie, who were bounding at each other and pawing at wood chips in the grass. He stood there, still and silent for a while, clearly in a daze, and I pretended to concentrate on my drawing. When he turned slightly I tried to, as surreptitiously as possible, raise my eyes.

He looked right at me and my cheeks got hot, especially since I could tell, even given the excess of facial hair, that he was probably very good looking. He had these big brown eyes framed by stupid long lashes. They were a little...vacant, but still quite pretty.