This is a work of fiction. Names of characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously; any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Dennis Milholland – All rights reserved. Other than for private, not-for-profit use, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in any form or by any means, other than that intended by the author, without written permission from the copyright holder.

Careful! This is a work of fiction containing graphic descriptions of sex between males and critiques of religion and governments.

Love It or Leave It

by Dennis Milholland

questions and comments are welcome. www.milholland.eu / dennis@milholland.eu

Eleven

(Wednesday, October 5th)

On our walk to Blue Valley Park, we only have to carry the picnic basket, since Mother is out and about, chauffeuring our ritual blanket on the backseat and our bag of dope under the front seat of Busby’s beat-up Chevrolet, that 1960 Impala with the butt-ugly horizontal fins and six round taillights, meant to give you the feel of piloting a spacecraft, which, in fact, I sometimes do get when having indulged in that from under the front seat prior to lifting the hood to hot wire the rust bucket with a screwdriver. But, at the end of the day, it’s like religion: the feeling the fantasy gives you is what counts.

I’m carrying the basket and walking only a short distance in front of Dad and Raph, when I hear Dad mention Raphie’s father’s name. It always catches my attention, since Joey, when speaking English, doesn’t use the French pronunciation, which is usual on this side of the Atlantic, he says ‘Morris’. I don’t catch what he actually says, but I can gather from Raphie’s expression and response that he’s asking something about the Mongrain family.

“Ya know, Son, that’s what Maurice once told me. He said that his family has been in the Kansas City area, virtually forever.”

I look at Dad over my shoulder and butt in: “I didn’t realize that you knew the Mongrains other than from Raphie’s dad’s funeral.”

“How about that?” he snickers, “Children never do think that their parents are smart enough to use a telephone. And yus regarded PTA meetings with the same resentment as a buncha Catholics would a gatherin’ of the feckin’ Free Masons.”

The traffic lights on Hardesty change, letting us cross the street. A driver, turning right, toots his horn to hurry us up; I flash him the bird. “When the Hell did you meet them, then?” My tone isn’t as considerate as it should be, “Uh, sorry, that didn’t come out right.”

Dad shakes his head. “We met for the first time when I drove the two of yus over to 24th and Norton after having phoned Geneviève to tell her that her oldest son had been adopted by my youngest.”

“Adopted?” Raphie doesn’t seem to remember, and I pretend to remember the incident only vaguely.

“It was about this time of year, and there seems to have been some altercation with a fellow pupil of certain Mediterranean descent, who had been parrotin’ his parents’ opinion that our schools in Missouri should not be racially integrated, just because there had been that big blow out and law suit over in Kansas about the schools in Topeka.

“Apparently, there had been some choosin’ up sides on the playground and yer wee fecker had been sayin’ ‘Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe,’ and when he got to ‘Catch a nigger by his toe’, you slugged him. Then some others held you down, while the bully beat up on you.” He winks at Raphie and chuckles with a strained voice.

“I can only dimly remember the fight.” Raphie pretends.

“And by the time I got home from work, you and Danny were sitting in the back yard, drinking lemonade. You had a big pink plaster over the cut on your forehead, where the school nurse had tried to patch ya up. And Danny here wasn’t letting anyone near ya. Not even his own mother. And anyway, she was hopeless in getting any information out of ya. ‘Cause of your wee accent, back then, she didn’t understand your name and decided to wait for the old man to show up.”

“Accent?”

“Hmm,” I gush involuntarily. “You had a French accent as a kid. And, of course, my mother was totally snowed. Hell, she can barely understand Dad, most of the time.”

“So, anyway, when I did show up, I managed to convince Danny that I wouldn’t hurt you and sat you on my knee and asked: ‘Tu parles français ?’. And you hugged me and promptly told me everything I needed to know, your name and your papa’s name. Found him listed in the phone book and made the call.

“Your mother was horrified that something might have happened to you. It took quite some convincin’ that ya hadn’t been kidnapped. She was probably thinkn’ that me accent must a belonged to some kinda New York gangster.”

“Kidnapped?” Raphie wonders and then bursts out laughing. “Why would anyone kidnap me?” He glances in my direction. I shrug, indicating ignorance.

“Don’t forget, that was only a couple a years followin’ the kidnappin’ and murder of Bobby Greenlease, and your da did work for the international accounts department at Commerce Bank. The French Consulate is located in his department. Yer ol’ man wasn’t just anybody.”

Raphie exhales sharply. “I knew that he worked for a bank, and that he was an accountant. But he never really talked about his work.”

“Yeah, Maurice Mongrain was certainly a well bred man.”

Raph takes the basket from me, looking thoughtful. “That must be why Maman is still so bitter about his colleagues’ not having come to the funeral. At the time, she said that for them he was just another mal blanchi killed in a liquor store stickup.”

« Mal blanchi ? » Dad asks; I feel a surge of embarrassment, because that, of course, would have to be the one word, he doesn’t understand.

“Yeah, there’s even a French word for nigger.” Raphie states bluntly, mixing bitterness and sardonic humor.

“Aw, don’t ever be thinkin’ like that.” Dad looks somber. “Maurice was one of the finest men, I ever knew. And I regret not havin’ known him better.” He wipes his eyes quickly. “But havin’ said that,” he clears his throat, “what would fine educated people like yer folks wanna be doin’ with a yobbo carpenter, like me?”

Raphie hurriedly hands me the basket and grabs Dad into a bear hug. “I don’t know what yobbo means, but I can’t imagine it’s good, and if it’s not good, it’s certainly not you, Joey.” He lifts Dad’s well-worn baseball cap with one hand, kisses him on the top of his forehead and replaces the cap.

Once released from the hug, Dad wipes his eyes with the back of his calloused hand and grabs the basket. “You’re a good man.”

As we walk up the main road of the park, up the hill towards the shelter house, the conversation turns to how Miss Waldon picked me to protect Raphie.

“As I remember it, I must have volunteered.” Don’t want to let my guard down in front of my father and say something about Raphie’s butt.

“As I remember,” Dad has that mischievous joviality in his voice, which tells me that this could get embarrassing. “Miss Waldon told us at the PTA meeting that you’d taken on anybody who’d even dared get near Raphaël. You’d threatened the nurse, who’d wanted to put the plaster on his forehead, insisting on doin’ it yourself. You’d kicked and threatened to bite the principal, when she’d tried to pull you off the kid, who’d beaten up on Raphaël. You had insisted that Raphaël be transferred to Miss Waldon’s class, so you could watch out for him.”

He addresses Raphie: “Of course, they did exactly as he demanded, just because they were runnin’ scared that any incident at their very recently integrated school could cost the old biddies their jobs. And then…”

‘Damn that PTA grapevine’, runs through my mind. “Okay, that’s enough.” This is getting much too detailed. I look over at Raphie to see how he’s taking all this.

He looks stunned and, at the same time, bemused. “Wow, I never knew how much you cared, way back--”

I interrupt with: “--Dad, could we please change the subject?”

“All right. Raphaël, you were tellin’ us about the fact that your da’s people have been here longer than the Jonnie Anglos.” Joey watches Raphie and me kick off our shoes, sets the basket between us and does the same.

“Yeah, uh,” Raphie lies down on his side under the trees with their brilliantly colored leaves. “my, uh, dad, well, his people were employees of the Chouteau family.”

“The ones they named the bridge after?” Dad seems better informed than I’d have thought for not really being a local.

“Yeah, François Gesseau Chouteau, the founder of Kansas City, well, of Westport.”

“Employees?” I ask naively. “Not…?”

“The Arcadians didn’t keep slaves, Dan. Besides, my grandfather Mongrain was half Osage Indian and half Caucasian: French, to be exact. And he was only able to marry Alice Sainte Michelle, who was totally French but half Caucasian and half Martiniquaise, at the mission connected to their grounds on the Kansas side of Marais de Cygnes. Even under the provisions of the Osage Treaty, it would not have been possible due to the anti-miscegenation laws in Missouri, which, by the way, still exist.“

“Anti-miscegenation laws?” The term is new to me.

« Lois d’anti-métissage. » Raphie takes a deep breath and a swig of Royal Crown, and Joey gives me a perplexed look as Raphie continues. “So, my father was half Caucasian, a quarter Osage Nation and a quarter Martiniquais. That made him three quarters French and a quarter Indian.”

“Ah, sweet Jesus,” Dad’s mouth is still half-full of sandwich. “I just knew yer man was Irish.”

Raphie laughs, more out of politeness. “You can’t really think that everybody’s Irish?”

“Naw, it’s the other way round. The Irish are everybody. First ya had the Celts, who came from Czechoslovakia, then the Roman deserters from England, then the Vikings, then yer man, St. Patrick, who was German and claimed to’ve got rid of all the snakes. Then came the Spaniards and Portuguese and anyone else who’d shipwrecked on their way to a better place, not to mention the feckin’ English, who would pop over to screw anything that would lie still long enough.

“Now, how ‘bout yer ma?” There, he does it again. Bam. He can change the subject so fast it makes your head swim.

“Maman’s maiden name is Geneviève Maillet and was born and raised in the Vieux Carré of La Nouvelle-Orléans. And if you ask her, she’s never even been to the French Quarter. That’s something Anglophone tourists do, and Tennessee Williams writes about.

“Her ethnicity is Cajun Métis, which in her case is Choctaw, French and Haitian. She is the great-great niece of Pushmataha, head chief of the Choctaws.”

Father takes on a relatively pious look. “If there ever was a god--”

“--which there never was, ever--” My tolerance of all things religious is in increasingly short supply.

Dad chooses to ignore it. “--may he bless the Choctaws.”

But my cardinal sin of the day is not mocking the remnants of his faith, it’s imitating his accent: “And ya’ve heard talk of the Choctaw, have ya now?”

His glare alone puts me in my place. “Yes, I have.” He tells me between gritted teeth. “Choctaws are national heroes back home.”

“Whoa, this I have got to hear.” Raphie is skeptical, since most white Americans have never heard of them.

“Ever heard of the Great Famine?” he starts, knowing full well that we have not. “In this country, yus call it the ‘Irish Potato Famine.’”

We both shake our heads; Raphie, at least, is able not to look as stupid as I feel.

“Roughly between 1845 and 1850, the potato blight hit all of Europe, which was bad enough. But in Ireland, where the vast majority of folks relied most only on potatoes for food, because the bleedin’ English were ransackin’ the country and three-quarters of the population were unemployed and scarcely existin’ in abject poverty, t’was devastatin’.

“Me da’s family, who were better off than most, lost some, and me ma’s side were still in France. When they came up with a final count, more than a million had died. That was about a quarter of the population.

“From all the richest nations in the world, only one helped with money and food. And that was the Ottoman Empire. The poxy-arsed British did sweet fuck all.

“And from all the nations in the world, rich or poor, the one who sacrificed the most to help us, was the Choctaw Nation. They came up with just short of a thousand dollars, from god…” His glare shuts me up. “…knows where, so we could buy food from the feckin’ British, who had more than enough, mind you, but who were givin’ us naught.

“And just two decades before the Choctaws came up with that huge chunk of humanity...”

He turns to Raphie “The British Crown,” and explains somberly. “the richest feckers in the entire bleedin’ world, only begrudgingly managed two thousand, at a time when yer feckin’ fat-arsed Prince of Wales was said to be spendin’ that much regularly on dirty weekends in the rue Chabanais in Paris.”

 “...anyway,” Dad now looks again at both of us. “just some 16 years before the Choctaws donated a veritable fortune, yer feckin’ Yanks under that evil, sneakin’, wee fecker, Andrew Jackson, had forced our Choctaw friends out of their own ancient tribal homeland down round Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, where they’d been for thousands of years before ol’ Jonnie Anglo came down off his feckin’ tree, and made them march under armed military escort in the dead of winter to Okla-feckin’-homa, for Christ’s sake...” His intermediate glare isn’t as intense. “...lettin’ ‘em freeze and starve to death.

“And still these saintly people, whom that wee fucker, Jackson, called heathen savages, felt compassion enough with us and wanted to keep us from starvin’ as they’d been forced to do only a few years earlier.

“Indeed, ya can bet yer feckin’ arse, I actually do know somethin’ about that fine nation. And when compared to all the Caucasian, Christian, Bible-thumpin’ gobshites, I’ve known in me lifetime, I’d rather be round Choctaws than anythin’ European any day.”

Speechless doesn’t even come close.

Only on one other occasion, have I ever heard my father allow himself to delve into the depths of his absolute abhorrence of British and American establishment. He is still a British subject some forty-some-odd years after immigrating to the United States, since he claims that the ‘feckin’ Brits’ are the lesser evil, and proudly mails in his and my Alien Registration Card every April first. I am officially a dual national until I turn twenty one, when I have to choose to be either British or American but no longer both. My brother and sisters have all chosen to be Americans and are supposedly proud of it. I’m not so sure that I really care.

“Ya got one of them relaxin’ fags, Dan?”

Raphie slightly bristles at the word, then sighs, looking faintly embarrassed. And I start rolling. “Uh, by the bye, Dad, it’s called a ‘joint’, rather than a ‘relaxin’ fag’.” I snicker.

“I’ve seen yus both get troubled, when I say ‘fag’. Now, would one a yus mind tellin’ me what the quandary is?”

I light the joint and quickly hand it to Raphie, so he doesn’t have to respond. I cut my five-second inhalation short, take a deep breath of fresh air and look Dad square in the eyes. “It’s a nasty name for a man who loves another man. It’s like calling you a bog stomper or Raphie a spear chucker.”

Raphie sputters, gasps and then coughs, handing off to Dad, who takes a desperately long toke.

He hands the rollup to me, “I see.” Dad speaks almost under his breath. And slowly, Raphie and I can observe his brief bewilderment shift to understanding. “And do yus wanna talk about it?”

“Now is as good a time as any.” I sound as if I have a stuffy nose, releasing the smoke slowly. Dad waves it off, so I hand it back to Raphie.

“Can’t say that I’m surprised. There never were any hords of girls hangin’ about, like with yer brother. Ya were either with yer man, Raphie, or Mack. Mack was always the big question mark in me mind.”

“What do you mean by question mark, Joey?” Raphaël is back to protecting me. His tone isn’t quite as edgy as yesterday, but he is certainly in control. He extinguishes the joint and gives it to me to swallow.

“Ya know, Son, I never took a likin’ to him.” He looks concerned at Raphie. “He never seemed to be at all honest. He’d never look ya in the eye. I know it’s not proper to be speakin’ poorly of the dead, but--”

“--okay, so let’s talk about the living.” The edge in Raphie’s voice is back.

“Aw, fer Fuck’s sake, Son, would ya ever loosen up. I know that you and Dan are a pair. I’ve probably known it before either of you did. I just never figured out how Mack fit in.”

“Huh?” resounds in unison.

“How feckin’ stupid d’yus think yer ol’ man is?”

“Huh?” Again Raphaël is able to look much less dumbstruck than I feel.

“Dan, every mornin’ of the world you’d walk blocks out of yer way, to collect Raphie at his home on Norton and then retrace yer steps along 24th Street to yer school. And every afternoon, you’d bring him over to the house and walk him back home when it got dark. Ya don’t do that every day for all of yer life for a casual acquaintance.

“And Raphie, when yus got to East High, Dan refused to join a literary society because they were segregated. He’d wait fer ya ta finish swimming practice four times a week and then walk ya home.”

Luckily Raphie didn’t mention the fact that I was foolin’ ‘round with Mack in the library, while I was waiting for swimming practice to end.

“And Dan, when ya had the flu back in ’58, Raphie would bring ya special food from his ma, which, needless to say, pissed Mildred off no end. And he’d haul books and homework over from school every day, and he’d sit by your bed until it’d get dark and his mother would phone and make him go home.

“And the summer with the bad sunburn, Dan, when ya looked like beet root with blond hair, yer man, Raphie, came and kept ya company all day and most of the night and would bathe ya in strong, cold tea to make the sting of the burn go away.

“T’aint yer ordinary friendship, Lads. That level of commitment is what most people generally refer to as love. In my mind, it was never a question of if, just a question of when you’d both realize what’s goin’ on.

“Truth be told, I was fearful that Mack could bugger things up. He wasn’t good for either of yus. The two of yus’ll have to stick together.”

Raphaël and I look at each other, stunned by the surprise, astounded that Dad has known all along.

“Got another of them, uh, thingies, Dan?”