Just Passing Through
Volume 1
James Morgan Ayres
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © James Morgan Ayres
Published by Nomadic Press
June 2011
Cover design: Shawn Carlson
Cover photo: James Morgan Ayres
Book design: ML Ayres
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to:
Joseph Shields for enduring friendship, the right title and professional advice and support beyond all expectations. Thank you my brother
David Shields for suggesting I do this collection
Ashley for insisting that I tell my stories
Shawn Carlson for a cool cover design
My family for everything
ML for pulling this book together, for loyalty, for love, for making it all worthwhile
Dedicated to
Wives and lovers
Family and friends
Traveling companions
ML always
Table of Contents
Introduction
This is a collection of writings: journeys, places, lovers and friends; a magic knife, a motorcycle journey across France, a friendly werewolf, an exile and quiet hero, a bear hunting Crow Indian etre bien dans sa peau, and a meditation on beauty and death.
The thread that ties these pieces together and gives the collection its title is the sense that life is a journey and that we're just passing through. I’ve never truly settled in one place, never lived in a place that felt anything other than temporary. Perhaps that’s true for each of us. After all, we’re all on the way to another place.
They’re short stories that can be fitted into a busy life and offer a slight refuge from tedium and the work-a-day world. Memory is a fragile flower; details might be misremembered, but the stories are all true. I hope you enjoy them.
Sincerely,
Morgan
Ruby
Sloe gin, bathtub gin, fine imported gin, it’s all the same to me and I hate the taste of all of it. Gin and Ruby get mixed up in my mind when I drink too much, which I do from time to time when I think about that woman.
I first met Ruby on the sidewalk in front of Jesse’s, a hillbilly bar across from the train station where I used to go to watch the trains pull out and wish I was on one. It was one of those heavy magnolia scented nights near the end of summer the week before I turned eighteen. She was about twenty-five or twenty-six, right in there, had flame red hair to her waist, go to hell green eyes and a switchblade in the hip pocket of her long legged skintight Wranglers.
Ruby smiled her devil’s smile at me and snatched me off that sidewalk the way a hawk will take a backyard pussycat. Took me up to her room and didn’t let go. We slept a little after dawn. Midmorning sun was streaming through the lace curtains when she woke me again and… We didn’t leave her bed until she had to go to work that night and all I could think about was getting back to her.
Ruby lived in a one-room apartment over Jesse’s where she waitressed. At night the light from the red neon sign made her look like she was on fire. Hell, we were both on fire, all tangled in the sheets and each other. She played “The Wayward Wind,” night after night and it almost drowned out the music from Jesse’s. She had one of those old style record players, played 33 1/3 records and she had a stack of them but only played the one song. We drank sloe gin, Beefeater gin, any damn gin she had. All she drank was gin.
I didn’t much like gin. But Ruby, well, she was something else. So I drank with her. The juniper tasting stuff was bad enough but that sickly sweet sloe gin was the worst, except when it was mixed with the taste of her summer hot body. She would trickle some of that sweet stuff over her breasts and belly and it would run down thick and slow and mix in with her fiery tangle and then it was just fine.
It went on for weeks and I lost my job detasseling corn because I just couldn’t get up out of her bed in the morning. I would watch the sunrise through the arch of her knee, my head on her smooth thigh, and then she would turn to me and her eyes would catch a shaft of sunlight and glow devilish green with flecks of amber and it would start up again, not that it ever really stopped. We were all over each other even when we were asleep and we’d wake up pressed together so hard and tight it seemed like we were one person. I didn’t know how to say it even to myself but somehow I knew I had found something I had been looking for all my life.
In between times we looked out the window and watched the trains leaving the station and talked about going away together, maybe to New York or California. I would have left on one of those trains with her in a country minute not caring where it was going. But Ruby thought we’d travel better in a car. I had already all but left home. I only stopped by every day or so to change clothes and say hello to my folks. My Mom worried that I had lost my mind. Dad told her I was just summer crazy and that it would pass.
I never told anyone about Ruby. She was my secret and I figured the whole thing would lose something if I talked about it. But that didn’t stop me from making plans. I had my savings from working all summer and I figured I could just about afford an old Chevy that a guy I knew wanted to sell. I could see us, me behind the wheel and Ruby leaning on me as we headed out west for California or maybe back east to New York. Ruby couldn’t decide where she wanted to go, and me, I just wanted to go.
Ruby didn’t answer when I knocked on her door that last night. The bartender downstairs at Jesse’s said he had seen her in a convertible Cadillac car with a guy with slicked back hair. “Kinda city lookin fella,” he said.
I walked the streets until dawn looking for that Cadillac. Went back to her place and hammered on her door. No one answered. Finally I just flat kicked the door open and went in. The bed was neatly made. The closet was empty. Her record player was gone. The Wayward Wind was lying on top of the dresser. Next to it was a note weighed down by a bottle of Beefeaters gin. My heart clenched up and I cried like I hadn’t cried since I was five years old and my grandmother died. I broke the record, tore up the note and threw that Goddamn bottle of gin right through the window.
I took it till I couldn’t take it anymore. Then I grabbed a freight train out of town. The Wayward Wind was running through my mind when I grabbed the cold steel ladder on the side of the boxcar and swung on board. I wanted to leave it all behind, the hick town and hillbilly bars, the miles wide cornfields and narrow minded people, even the Wildcat Creek with its cool fast running water and grassy banks where I tried a few times to forget about Ruby with one or another of the local girls.
Since then I’ve seen a lot of the world but I never was able to leave Ruby behind. She took up residence in my mind. Ruby, her room with the neon sign lighting the bed and us, the sound of honky-tonk music coming up from Jesse’s and mixing with the Wayward Wind, her silky skin and hair like fire and those green eyes that stole a young man’s soul.
Even after all these years if I saw Ruby walking down the street today I’d chase her down and tell her I still loved her, or wanted her and had to have her, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, or maybe it amounts to the same thing. I would grab her and drag her off not caring who she might be with or about anything else. I’m a grown man now and know a hell of lot more about women than I did when I was seventeen and I know down deep in my heart where it counts that with half a chance I could make Ruby mine.
I’ve never since drunk gin. Except for that cocktail party at the Watergate where I met Lyndon Johnson and drank too many martinis and got thrown out by those Secret Service fellows. But that’s another story.
Walkabout In Werewolf Country
Only a silver bullet can kill a werewolf. Everyone knows that. Right? I’ve never even seen a silver bullet, let alone owned one. But once I wished I had one, when menaced by a nightmare creature during a moonstruck night in remote Italian mountains.
The Le Marche region runs along Italy’s east coast. The Adriatic’s turquoise waters wash the fine grained sand of its beaches. The Romans who flee here to escape the hoards of tourists that overrun their city each summer call the area “Tuscany without the tourists.” But the Romans don’t venture much more than a mile from the beaches and the mountains of the interior have little in common with tamed and tour bussed Tuscany.
The Sibilline Mountains, part of the Apennine Range, straddle Le Marche. These remote hills and hidden valleys are wrapped in myth and legend. In the ancient world the oracle Sibyl lived in a mysterious cave in a mountain, which was named for her. Emperors and commoners came for her prophecies. Over the centuries the area became home to healers and herbalists, sorcerers who could call up storms, and, legend has it, werewolves.
Today Le Marche is still rumored to be home to wild magic. When I mentioned to one of my friends in Italy, an anthropologist, that we planned to do some foraging for wild edible plants during our walkabout in the Sibilline, she recounted a legend—that digging up a mandrake root without the proper invocations would cause powerful storms, wash away roads, flood valleys and send boulders tumbling down mountain sides. Mandrake roots could be safely taken from the earth only by a sorcerer and when accompanied by magical spells. She warned us to beware of anyone who had a mandrake root hanging over their door; these people were, perhaps, sorcerers – or maybe just crazy.
Regarding werewolves she said, “As an educated woman I must tell you that these are nothing more than creatures of folk tales. Although my father claimed to have seen one when he was a boy.”
“So you don’t believe in them?”
“Of course not. But...”
Before leaving home I had done some research on the area’s fauna and learned that the Sibilline mountains were home to one of Europe's largest populations of wild wolves with packs running free and taking down deer, sheep and sometimes cows. There had been no mention of werewolves in the biology text. Wild boars ran free in packs (herds?) snorting and snuffling through vineyards and gardens. Boars are nuisances everywhere in the Marche hills, but probably not a menace. Still there seemed reason for caution.
I was in company with ML, lovely wife and faithful companion of a hundred adventures, stalwart in emergencies and tolerant of my tendency to get us into…situations. The plan was to wander through the hills, mostly on foot and unencumbered by reservations. We were equipped for our journey with small rucksacks, a change of clothing and some simple camping gear. Our only defense against evil sorcerers and ravening predators a positive attitude—and a corkscrew. Although my hopes were high, I didn’t think we would really run into any bad tempered wild animals, shape changers or sorcerers but I was confident we would encounter more than one bottle of local wine. It was against this eventuality that I packed the all-important corkscrew. Hardly a weapon, but I figured if nothing else availed I could pull a cork and offer a glass of vino to potential assailants, two or four legged. Certainly Italian werewolves would welcome a nice glass of Montepulciano, sorcerers too. I’m sure of it.
Suitably outfitted for our adventure and setting aside our friend’s warnings we hit the road, planning to camp out most nights and stay in country inns every few days. Things didn’t turn out quite that way.
Our routine was to rise in the cool of the morning and trek intrepidly through the hills for, oh, at least an hour or two and then lay up in the shade during the sun heated hours. No point in over exertion. One day, overcome by the beauty of the hills with their covering of umber wheat and olive trees with leaves fluttering in mountain winds and the heady scent of wine sweet grapes growing in rows next to the road, we forgot ourselves and pressed on through the afternoon. Throwing common sense to the wind and drawing on nonexistent physical conditioning we must have walked as much as five miles that day, maybe even six. But that was an exceptional day. Usually we strolled, stopping to examine ancient ruins, dangle our feet in cool running streams, talk to farmers, lie on our backs and watch clouds. Fresh greens and herbs for salads grew wild on the margins of fields, uncultivated fig and plum trees flourished.
When we wearied of our arduous pace we hopped on a local bus or simply raised a hand for a ride when a vehicle passed by—the friendly locals would find room for us even in tiny Fiats—wandering from stone village to tumble down Roman theaters, to medieval palaces and windswept mountaintops. Every village had a well-tended memorial to its fallen soldiers from the World Wars, and a café. We stopped in those cafes for refreshment, and listened to older folks tell stories about American soldiers in War II, how they had welcomed their arrival and hid them from the Nazis and Fascists. One village square had been a POW camp for captured American soldiers and downed flyers. Italians had administered the camp and somehow the American prisoners had managed to meet local girls. After the war there were many marriages, and Italian American babies.