Coming Home

Roquefort went out to the tree, to check on the stove, burning hickory smoked chips; He would do this every thanksgiving, thawing out his feet on the floor mat inside the Wisconsin home. His wife was busy putting up the tree, as she did every year, Thanksgiving just being the excuse she needed to start the Christmas season, while Roquefort sat with his gun and sipping whiskey, watching the Detroit Lions and there come-from-behind victory over the Minnesota Vikings, and even though his favorite team was losing, he was aided by the Makers Mark in his glass, the burn it delivered down through his esophagus, and the smell wafting in from the stove outdoors.

After the game there were still a few hours before his son and daughter would return home from their city lives in Chicago. He was proud of them in the way that fathers often are, but he felt the slight pangs of disappointment on this chilly day, he felt empty as his Gortex jacket scraped past the lone branch in the yard. He hadn't seen this branch, as he worked his way across the property towards the slight hill where he could see their cars come in, and he took out his flask and tugged on the rusty container, coughing a little bit as the sour mash slithered down his throat and hit the top of his stomach in a way he hadn’t anticipated.

His daughter Cindy had married the wrong man. He knew it at the wedding seeing the big smile on the car-salesmen suit Gary wore. He didn’t like the way he shook hands or wore his tie, and his business was dubious. He told lies for a living, selling enough real estate to have a penthouse in uptown Chicago. So he was a provider sure, but a true man would never have let his daughter marry such a shyster.

He looked out towards the old highway, which lay empty, not snaked with incoming travelers from the city. He was waiting for the headlights of his son’s Blazer. He was proud of Tim. Here was a man who not only put his god given talents to work for him, but also managed to be a successful sports reporter at the Chicago Sun Times. He always encouraged his son to write in the boys room on the south side of the house. Pendants from the Twins late 1970’s Season hung on the wall, drooping slightly from the rusty nail, and he realized how long ago it was that they propped the boy up, still in diapers in the crib, as they stared at him in awe, stepping back to here his giggle as his first Minnesota Twins cap was placed on his still-bald head.

It had started there, the dream that one day he could put his love of sports into a thinking-man’s profession, to do what Roquefort always dreamed of – Getting cozy at the bar in Chicago with the other newspaper men, curtly discussing the Cubs victory-- this was what he wanted, the life of the real men, men Roquefort’s father never could be with his drinking and wasted rustic life.

He looked down at his leg, the appendage he dragged around ever since he returned for the war, then looked down further this time, below the hill, and felt his plastic kneecap give as he tripped on the stone, watched expectantly as the whiskey flew out in front of him, his knee giving out, as he yelled out to a sky that insulated the scream, not allowing it to be heard as the high beams of his son’s blazer snaked its way through the main artery, rounded the last bough of land, not able to see his father lying there, reaching for his flask, seeing the lights in his peripheries as he stared up at the lone branch in his field of vision, as the last leaf of fall drifted down and caressed his forehead, and closed his eyes so the coroner wouldn’t have to.

Hershel and Marzine Contained in Novel Format

Hello,

So I listen to those around me. Over beers they say "Hey, I like what you've written, but it's too hard to follow, I don't know what comes next." I sit and take it all in and respond, but it's not enough. So I act. I spend hours transferring the various posts into a static, complete entity.

So, from now on, Hershel and Marzine will continue here and only here. There are chapters upon chapters. Minor editing in spots has occurred, but for the most part it's identical to what came before, but more organized. Now it's easier to sit in a comfortable chair and scroll while you read. As for this space, I shall return to the olden days of Kronski.com, when I'd post random ramblings, music reviews and the scribbles of my journal entries.

I will continue to update Rustic Round Up as often as I find singles that cannot go unheard by the likes of you my readers. The Kronski.com Network is open for business.

Marzine flees Shanghai

The edges of the badge burned bright in her eyes, as underneath a pile of wool coats she fingered the cold ridges of the embossing and peered out into the streets.

She would be leaving in a matter of hours, and she caught the red splotches of two of her posters as the cart wiggled its way to the outskirts of the city, towards the airport.

Dissolving the party wasn’t easy, and took place indirectly over the passed few weeks. The meetings were held in the rear of the betting shop, in the back room, while excited boys threw paper bills into the air, screaming and yelling at which rooster would peck the others eyes out. She had never heard it and found all of this mess a little disgusting. She never lasted long in these meetings, and she’d end up in her basement with Robert, after they snuck away and into each other’s arms as she contemplated the love that could have existed if she hadn’t found the badge that day in the rear pants pocket. He’d left it, Robert had, in a daring sort of way, as a challenge, having felt too guilty about this affair for too long, he needed a way out, either from Hoover or from Marzine herself.

She found his badge late one night, eyeing the fog from the lone barred window in her basement. It shocked her how quickly her disappointment turned into bloodlust. For it was through this that shed finally be able to exorcise Ed from her life for good.

It hadn’t been easy plotting the murder, which took place over the 12 afternoons and evenings that Robert and Marzine spent together, lying in the ephemeral fog of their relationship. She had fallen for so many men, felt and needed weakness and fed off of it, she’d always been that way, taking in the love and storing it away, savoring the temporary void they filled. For it struck her then how odd it was that retribution and the violence of sex was intertwined to the level that it was. She had waited until Robert had let his guard down and would allow his throat to be slit as he haphazardly lay on the bed while Marzine fiddled with the ivory chopsticks in her hair, digging through the bureau drawer, looking for her dagger.

She could tell he was torn, that he really did love her, but was somehow still inclined to report back to headquarters from time to time. Still She felt sorry for him, and wondered that maybe if things had been different, if Ed had not been killed by the organization; if things would have wandered down a different path, if she would be here, crying at the foot of the bed, wondering how to get out and get back to the US, to find herself all over again, and find another career, having botched and left behind the radical period.

The meetings took too much out of her, and shed hit the Opium pipe with great delight upon returning home to the basement with all four walls staring back at her. With Ed and Hershel long gone it was just her and the visions that haunted her, too distressed to write, she contacted the syndicate whom had managed to not only let her in the country for refuge, but also to maintain the idea that she was killed by the local authorities, even going so far as staging a fake murder, which she saw little of, Marzine deciding instead to burn the silkscreen press, smoking her Chesterfields, smudging the charcoal leftover from the fire and replaying the whole murder scene through her mind.

The Syndicate had arranged for the local police to arrive at the apartment, in response to a domestic disturbance, a lover’s spat between Robert and Marzine. Nina Fawilde had portrayed a frenzied Marzine, who ran screaming until Robert (played exceptionally well by Syndicate member Charlie Garbles, a retired CIA agent who had been a double agent for years.) flew up the stairwell in a rage, scraping a sword against the wet pavement, turning up his arms and the sword which sailed through the bloodpack on Nina’s chest, whereby sirens could be heard, syndicate members who had parked two streets down, in the garage of a government transportation authority, where two men hopped out, dragging both into the subterranean caverns of the syndicate.

And as the wool cart head down through the streets of Shanghai, the news of her and Robert’s passing no doubt reaching Washington by now, most likely by a large red phone dialed from somewhere in the bowels of city into Washington, crisscrossing way stations from across the pacific and beyond. Through translators, telegraph operators and curt agents, who breathed heavily and spit largely into the receivers, they slammed them down sometimes, creating the nervous air that Hoover thrived on.

As Night Turns into Day, Ashes Turn to Dust

The frosty corridors of Shanghai held many victims in their warm apartment pods, where penniless citizens leaned on their heaters, often only a series of candles that ran off of the oils of the dead animals that lay heavy over their shivering shoulders. In the middle of the night, only a few lights could be seen in the city, as the rickshaws and bicyclists had fled the streets for the warm confines of their domiciles, but one lone candle flickered toward the bottom of a basement window next to Chan’s open-air market. It was Marzine’s apartment, which at the moment lay host not only to an unexpected guest, but also to a clamoring alarm clock.

As the alarm clock hammered its way into the pair’s brain, she awoke and was surprised at her discovery of a male torso next to hers. As she silenced the clock, she looked into his thick closed brown eyes, and smiled while she caressed the long main of hair that lay comfortably on the twists and crevices of the comforter.

It had all happened in a blur aided by bootlegged liquor and several hits off of the opium pipe, that lay undispensed on the floor, next to the silkscreen print caked in red.

Only broad red strokes of memory came to her now, another one night stand with a faceless gent who temporarily filled her head and bed with passion, only to be left as immobile as the corpse that he is, snoring and void of any of the passionate insights from the night before.

But his eyes came to life, and she pretended that she never second guessed his motives, backed her rear end to his torso, and pulled the blankets and sheets over them, smiling and looking demurely into the stranger’s eyes (She remembered his name was Robert, but that was it, something lingered on the surface. Shed seen him before, perhaps only in a nightmare, or an opium daze.)

But at this moment they lie in each other’s arms, as she reached out while his eyes stumbled open, catching the yearning in her eyes, as they pulled back the sheets, and slid into a coital pose, where Marzine straddled him, making love as the first morning’s rays peeked into her basement, the shipping trucks roared by, as she flailed on top of him, enjoying her orgasm as she dismounted, reached to the bedside table, unlatching the drawer, grabbing the knife and slitting Robert’s throat until his gasps filled, then left the room abruptly as she stared down at his FBI badge that lay behind the flung clothing that inhabited a dark space in the corner.

She’d have to disappear for a while, again. The dossier that she would uncover during the next few days made that inexplicitly clear. This one was for Ed, and as the post coital bliss faded into a powerful cavity in the lower recesses of her heart, the place that still believed in the sanctity of marriage, the fidelity of fatherhood and the goodliness found in politicians.