I knew this was going to happen. I shouldn’t have let Archie talk me into this whole thing. But it was a done deal as soon as I got into his flivver. He and his gal Grace thought they could show me a grand old time.

“Best time you’ll have this side of the Rouge,” he said. I wasn’t convinced, but I had nothing better to do after getting off from the factory, and it’d been a bit since I had a real drink.

Archie drove us up to the place, which was in the back of a hat shop. It was after hours, but the door to the front of the store was unlocked. The three of us walked to the back where there was a little door hidden behind some display racks.

“This is how we get into the joint,” Archie said. “Joe down at the foundry said you knock five times. Guy asks who wants some tea, and you say Warren G.”

And it went just like that. Five knocks and a harsh voice and Archie giving the code. A bruiser of a guy opened the door and led us down to the basement, where there was a jazz band and about forty guys and gals drinking and having a grand old time. Even the piano man was knocking them back.

“Hooch came in over the river from Windsor,” Archie says. “The Purple outfit has been running some high quality stuff from the Canadians. No turpentine or any of that crap, won’t turn you blue or put you six feet under.”

“How reassuring,” I said, taking a seat next to Grace. She was a looker alright, but I didn’t let my eyes linger lest I piss off Archie.

The three of us were in there for about an hour and thirty minutes before it all went to hell. The barman hit a switch that flipped all the shelving behind him back into the wall, a horrible crunching sound overcoming the playing band. It was all for naught. The fuzz busted in real quick. All of us were pretty loaded, and the only way into the basement was through the stairway, which was where all the heat was. Apparently there was a passageway off to the side, as most of the people in the know snuck out that way, including Archie and Grace. That left me and a few straggler members of the jazz band. A big burly cop decked me in the gut and sent me reeling. When I got up back on my feet, he and his goon partner had me cuffed.

“I didn’t do anything, officer,” I managed. “I just came down here to check the joint out.”

“Well, I assume you know that speakeasies are illegal, and that drinking in one is as well.”

“I guess, I just don’t see the harm,” I managed.

The cop chuckled. “The harm is that you happened to be at this particular establishment, which many of our fellow officers hold in disrepute.”

“This establishment?”

The other cop started chuckling.

“What the sergeant is trying to say is that we are much more amenably inclined towards Morty’s off of Woodward.”

I put two and two together.

“What’s the word?” The cop who decked me undid my cuffs. “They ask who pays the piper, and you say Al.”

“Simple as that?”

“Yeah.”

The cops proceeded to bash in the place with their billy clubs, but they let all of us out. Helluva world we live in these days.

Michael Hughes is an author living in Los Angeles. His novels include Pumpkin Farmer, The Crimson Shamrock, Inland Intrigue, and Loafing by La Brea. 

John Monroe lived on Lost Creek by the covered bridge. John ran cattle for decades and always wore a big cowboy hat. John rode round-up in the fall with Leonard Bradshaw. John would hunt mountain lions with Tom Tibbetts as they both kept hounds, and Tom said John was the best lion hunter in the county. Tom said they’d start off together and split apart in opposite directions so their hounds would not get mixed up during the chase. Improving the family income with bounties on the big cats every winter as each lion brought $50 from the state, and $10 from Jackson County.

John would not have electricity in his home until a short time after a man walked on the moon. He then gave in to his wife and got electricity and a modern phone. They’d had a crank phone for a time, when Lloyd and his brother were kids. In 94 years, John, had only been to Medford six times which was 24 miles away.

Once, John’s sister decided to take him to the ocean in a car and they were gone for 3 days. John saw the Redwoods and went to the beach.

Everyone had a distinct cattle call; each owner’s beasts knew his masters call. Many of the neighbors knew each other’s call. According to Emil Pech, John’s call was a good one, with a “Whoopee! “on the end of it.

John gave up on horses when he got old and drove an International Diesel tractor. John was up the South Fork looking for cows and didn’t make it back one evening. Lloyd, John’s son went looking for John with his brother-in-law. After finding the tractor at the bottom of a steep grade, that went up to Conde Creek, they began calling out for John in the dark, pretty far up the South Fork of Little Butte Creek and up on Hepsie Mountain, past Grizzly Canyon.

Eventually they heard his “Whoopee! “and followed his call in the dark about a half mile from the tractor. He was cold, wet and muddy and had the big hat pulled over his ears with a plastic sack tied round his head to hold it down. Each of the men got a shoulder under the old cowboy and got him off the mountain.

“I think I had a stroke,” John said to Lloyd on the way home in the car, long after midnight.

A few weeks later, John fell while feeding calves, the calves tromped the old man until he crawled under a flat bedded wagon, he hauled the baled hay on.

For a brief time, they put him in a nursing home in Medford. John became so sorrowful because he was embarrassed when they took his clothes away. One day, he found his overalls and his flannel shirt and made a break for it out of the nursing home. After that escape his sons took him home and cared for him there. At the age of 94 John passed, three months after his wife Ida Marie had died. Lloyd said, John would say, of his one trip to the ocean:

“Oh, that’s a mad thing to look at! That’s a mad thing—those waves coming in!”

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA) Flash Fiction and Rue Scribe have all featured one or more of his stories.

Andrew was about to master the art of paper folding, but his self-confidence was suffering from serious deprivation. The Origami evening class was engaging and well structured — and the teacher, Mr. Nakamura, one of a kind — if it were not for Blaine.

Andrew’s eyes wandered discreetly across the table to feeble hands sculpting fiery red paper as if they were defining material behavior at will. His paper crane, on the contrary, had a will of his own and was never tired of resisting his attempts. Of all twenty-four participants, Andrew had to share a table with Blaine. Twenty-three adults and one soft and pedantic boy, Andrew thought.

“Now here’s what you do,” he said and folded the sheet of paper in front of Andrew. “You can’t skip a step, this is crucial.”

Mr. Nakamura came to help. “Everything clear?”

“Yes,” Andrew grumbled.

Blaine disagreed: “Not at all. He mustn’t skip a step.”

The Origami class was a birthday present from Andrew’s parents. Alone during the day and lonely at night, the slightly overweight 36-year-old had been looking forward to a change from his downbeat routine. He couldn’t admit it, since it was too shameful, but he enjoyed this minimalist craft with all that enchanting and recyclable sculptures. Unfortunately, every Monday evening, Blaine had one hour in which to spoil his joy. And it worked every time.

After the class, Andrew rushed straight to his car, and his drive home was a long rant about his classmate. “That little braggart!“ he shouted. “He does need that satisfaction, doesn’t he? Because he failed to get anywhere in life! Narrow shoulders, tiny hands … He is calling himself a man, but is just a boy! And what is this name anyway? Blaine sounds like a girl’s name. I’ll show him!“

Next day at work Andrew was still annoyed. And the day after. The entire week there was a low-lying pain in his chest, hurting with the wrong movement of thought. It came from a sting which Blaine left in him, and next Monday he thrust it deeper.

“Evening, big guy!“ he said with a lower tone in his boyish voice.

“Today we’ll make a dragon. Can you do that? Can you handle the dragon, champ?“

“Yes,“ Andrew grumbled, irritated by Blaine’s stilted masculinity.

Mr. Nakamura detailed the folding of the paper dragon step by step, and Andrew noted that his unpleasant partner was observing him. Pretending to be unaware, he followed Mr. Nakamura instructions. First Blaine stayed quiet, but at step number five he ventured to comment.

“Careful, you need to …“

“I know,“ Andrew said contorting with pain and turning sideways. It took him ten minutes and a flawless hunter green dragon was already posing from the other side of the table, but he managed to finish his own.

“Excellent work,“ Mr. Nakamura said. “And yours is good too, Andrew.“

It was the first night since beginning the Origami course that
he drove through the cold city lights with peace of mind. He did not understand Blaine’s smile when he examined his correct and — to a lesser extent — decent dragon, but it seemed there was no competition between the pair mismatched by nature. At the moment of this insight, the pain in his chest vanished, and he got a full night’s sleep. The following working week ran smoothly, and Andrew overcame the shame and told Jim, one of his closest colleagues, about the success of the paper dragon. He had never heard of Origami though. “Why paper? You should do a dragon out of plaster and paint it with varnish colors. That would be something.“

Andrew returned to the course for the very last time with a fresh sense of self- confidence. It came to an end after eight weeks and he found it a pity. The one he would not miss sat at the table and did dry-runs with pale white paper. Blaine was in such a too-good mood that Andrew’s ignorance couldn’t impede his vigorous flow of words.

“Do you know why I’m doing this class? We all have stressful daytime jobs, but Origami is more than relaxing, isn’t it? It’s contemplation, it’s meditation, it’s Yoga for the hands. Here we find inner peace and learn a fine craft. Isn’t it nice to learn something new in your free time? Why are you doing it, Andrew?“

“Certainly not to talk,“ he said.

“You have a great sense of humor! I love it!“

Blaine began to laugh and Andrew froze looking at him. “Is he hitting on me?“ he thought and found alarming details in Blaine’s facial expression. There was a particular gleam in his eyes, he never saw before, a tilting of his head and pointy lips too. He stopped all the joking immediately worried that he was misconceiving the signals. The simmering embarrassment ensured a total silence on either side of the table the entire hour. At the end, both used the quiet time to finish two marvellous paper flowers. Andrew’s was better than expected, Blaine’s worse, at least measured at his talent. After the course, when they parted ways, both said from a distance “See you!“, and one of them added “or not“ in thought.

On Saturday, Andrew visited his proud parents to show his Origami sculptures and the certificate that Mr. Nakamura had awarded him. He remembered Blaine, the annoyance that he underwent, and it was still embarrassing. But somehow he was missing him as an existence in his empty life that cared about his crafting.

As usual, he went alone to the movies downtown, leaving after nightfall with a cosy warmth in his chest. Outside the cinema, a beautiful starry sky gently tarnished by the city lights greet him, and he stopped. At that very moment, somebody leaving the same movie brushed his shoulder. He turned around and saw Blaine, but dressed in women’s clothing and painted with lipstick and blusher. Disgusted by the cross-dressing, his first thought was: “I knew he is gay!“ His disgust was also the reason he made no response.

“Surprised, big guy? I’m a woman. So what?“ Blaine said and set off without looking back disappearing in the lively city.

Andrew stood motionless while his thoughts derailed. His eyes followed Blaine, but what he saw were old reminiscences of him breaching the thick layers of his twisted mind to form a strange identity. He was not a boy, nor a man. Blaine was a woman, and the thing that remained after she left was the wish to see her again. He realized, just now, that he had gone to the movies with her and that was a good start.

Hendrik Kühn has studied sociology, lives with his wife and daughter in Bremen, Germany, and works there as a researcher at the University. His short stories have been published in Amazon’s Kindle Singles program and his debut novel will be coming out in January 2020 (Luzifer Verlag).