Morgan's Hollow - Part I

Falling from over a mile high is a heady experience. The wind rushes past giving wing to dreams and thoughts of freedom. From the prison of clouds to the waiting world below, when finally the drop fell, it broke the silence with the first splash of what would be a solid thrumming on the roof. More droplets fell, harder than that first one, each outdoing the last to make it to the soggy earth.
Beneath the roof, the last of the patrons called goodnight and hurried out to make it home. One o’clock in Morgan’s Hollow is late. One o’clock and rain makes for an empty bar. The Hunter’s Roost was just such an empty bar. Michael wiped his hands and sighed as he finished cleaning up.
“Another day in paradise” he thought.
Gaffney had left him here to watch the place in a rare show of trust. Peter Gaffney was no fool, but he had a wife and two kids and sometimes things on the business side had to give. His eldest daughter was graduating junior college in January, Christmas was coming soon and there were errands he had to run. “Mike, you better damn well run this place the way I want it run tonight, or I’ll have to find somebody else. I need a man I can trust!” he had said. “Things being what they are at home, I need time off now and again.”
Taking down a mostly empty bottle of scotch, Michael took a deep swig. He began dabbing at the floor with the mop. People had tracked in mud all night. He heard the rain again and shook his head. Five days of rain, one nice evening, now rain again. Morgan’s Hollow was going to have to be changing its name to Morgan’s Lake.
Swallowing another gulp of the strong liquor gave him the strength to finish his work and turn out the lights. He retreated to the back room to collect the empty beer bottles left by the dart players early that night. He brought the larger bottle with him. When his chores were done, he downed the last of the scotch and reeled a bit. The strumming on the roof had taken on an intensity that it hadn’t had all during the week. The parking lot was a swamp. The gutters were overflowing. Gaffney hadn’t bothered to have them cleaned out this fall. Glancing out the window, Michael watched as a wall of water hid the view of his car and a wicked wind drove the few remaining leaves from the trees. Returning to the bar area he chucked the empty bottles into the recycling chute.
The rows of gleaming bottles called to him and he answered with a snarl as he grabbed one and twisted off the top. Gaffney could go to hell. The Hunter’s Roost could go to hell, and the whole goddamn town could go to hell for all he cared. “Trustworthy my ass.”
The rain kept up a whispering beat that lashed at his mind. He thought of what he had to go back to and what he was running from. He thought of water as it pooled in the darkness of his thoughts to drip forth fragments of memory of what he had been.

* * * * * * * * *

Judith had been a gorgeous girl once. At nine she had been the cutest thing you would ever want to see. Her pretty little face belied the terror that awaited her each night at home. Her mother was a drunk and her father a cabbie who was involved with nefarious extracurricular pursuits. The terror of watching her father come home and beat his wife, the terror of what he might someday do with the gun he hid in a box beneath the bed and the terror of not pleasing these two impossible to please people. She learned early to use her situation and her smile to make others do things for her. She became a user of people in a desperate bid to try to control the world around her. When she was twelve, she ran away to live with a street gang in Queens. Her father found her after a week and dragged her back screaming to the apartment. After that, like clockwork, she lit out whenever she had a chance, staying away for months before being found and returned to her own personal hell. She became strung out on angel dust and rock cocaine before finally being confined to a treatment center by her father. At age sixteen, she left the center, sober and thirty pounds heavier than when she went in.
Moving in with a friend, she got a decent job and began to live what to her was a normal life. Disillusioned with her mother’s Anglican background and her father’s secular nod to Catholicism, she grew up with no formal religion. Instead her prayers were formed as spells to make things happen, or stop happening. The few occasions when her prayers were answered gave her all the faith she needed to believe she was a witch. She flirted with Wicca but rejected it as too confining, she dabbled in the dark magic she read from the underground bookstores she frequented in SoHo and the Village, but never really found a niche. She had power she believed, not the same as the nonsense in the books, but real power. She melded her own thoughts and rituals with what she read and learned from others to create her personal cloak of mystery. Outwardly she was a plain twenty four year old secretary, slightly pudgy with shoulder length brown hair living in Coney Island, but inwardly she was a legend in her own mind.

Michael met Judith though a mutual friend. She was coming off a bad breakup and was looking for someone to make her forget her problems. He was just lonely. Seven months later, in a rain storm, a shot rang out in Coney Island and Michael ran.

Howard Beach was a tight community. You knew your neighbors, you respected them and they respected you. Michael grew up there. Cross Bay Boulevard was his Vegas Strip. It was lights and cars and hanging out at the coffee shop with his buddies. The inevitable beach traffic headed to and from the Rockaways each summer brought an endless supply of faces through the neighborhood, if only to shop or eat at one of the many restaurants. The few party boats that docked in the canals behind the stores drew their own loads of day trippers. Cross Bay was the main street of Howard Beach.
Michael never had luck with women. A shy kid in high school, he had an ideal of the perfect woman whom he wanted. At a short five eight and weighing in at a flabby 220, wearing glasses and a bit nerdy, his ideal was out of his reach. He was taking night classes in City College while working in his uncle’s gas station as a cashier, so he was both broke and busy all the time, but he had his own car and he had his own apartment, sort of, if you can count a room behind the station as an apartment. He had been fed up with his father’s controlling rules and his mother’s harping on him to finish college and get a real job when he up and left. Uncle Carlo had been nice enough to rent him the studio for only three hundred a month, (taken from his pay of course). Nobody bothered him in his new place, but it was lonely after living with four siblings and his parents in a three bedroom house whose family room was converted into a dorm each night.

... (to be continued in the future)