Excerpt from Thomas Sparrow’s crime noir Northwoods Standoff.
Dedicated to the brave souls of the Occupy movement. May their resolve maintain.
PART SEVEN
As an accompaniment, the sweet low sound of electric blues floated in from the living room, courtesy of a Chicago FM station. Warm air blew from the registers and the lights grew dim. My head got heavy as Roy began to move about the room, weaving a most fascinating and mind-blowing tale. A strange and absorbing saga that took me places I’d never been, made me feel things I’d never felt. The whole thing seemed like a dance. A crazy, shaman-like Native American dance with an eerie background of black blues and British blues-rock.
Sometimes Roy was a marine, down on the floor doing push-ups and extolling the virtues of physical fitness. The next moment he was a twelve-year-old kid, seeing his life collapse around him and watching the white man take over his destiny. Often, he was a glib and intelligent television reporter from Madison, reciting with charm and confidence his conquests and experiences in the city. But most often, the narrator that winter’s evening was a slightly feral, slightly mad creature.
In my dilated pupils, he ceased being Roy Rogers Hollinday and became a warrior/shaman. Maybe it was the French Canadian in him fueling the fire of the mescaline, as he tried to explain it, but I wasn’t convinced. Something bigger was taking place. I was lost in the cosmos. I was a student in front of the teacher.
I held him in my gaze and felt strange rumblings inside me, as his eyes sunk deeper in his head and turned momentarily empty, like marbles or an animal’s eyes. At one point, he glided way over to the edge of the living room in one effortless motion. After a pause he turned back to talk and his tone was more serious, more emphatic.
I was ready to believe just about anything.
(To be continued)
