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(Jon Le Mac Book II) ISBN: 978-0-9803486-2-0 LATEST UPLOAD PRE-RELEASE PREVIEW Saturday May 1 2010 LAZOO Kindle edition 2010 (Publish Date Aprox Mid June 2010) BOOK 1 PRELUDE Janine was adopted by a wealthy Wisconsin family, the Eltons, when a barren couple found the three-year old girl in a New York orphanage. Janine grew up as their house-maid. When Janine reached the ripe age of fourteen, she was abruptly put on a bus to New York City because it was discovered she was pregnant. By whom was of no concern to the influential family. She gave birth to James in a New York shelter for the homeless, only blocks from where she believed she had been rescued by her Wisconsin family. When James was twenty-four hours old, Janine left New York for the heartland in hopes of changing her, and ultimately, her baby’s circumstances and to give her son an earthy grounding away from the rot, dampness, and sleaze of the city. CHAPTER 1 PART 1 Her sore and tender teats weep as the hungry baby cries. But she is relaxed as she steps down from the steel steps of the stuffy, crass, and crammed bus onto the dirt and stone sidewalk of Pleasant Prairie. Janine’s only concern lies in her arms—her new bundle of life, wrapped in white wool and delivered to her by God, breathes in the fresh country air rather than the stench in a freezing New York City squatter hall, carpeted by wet mattresses, surrounded by pane-less smashed windows, with polluted raindrops that hang from their serrated, cutting edges. Janine looks down on baby James, and then kisses his wrinkled red forehead. From a need for some sort of security, she reaches around and grabs hold of the shabby quilt knapsack hanging from her back that holds her meager belongings: rags, two single bed fleece sheets torn in four as James’ first diapers, a book, her grey radio, and the tins of baby food she relies on for nourishment for the two of them. Janine stands on the roadside looking straight ahead at the vastness of farmland across the road. The young mother daydreams of a scene in which she and her baby share a cottage on a quarter acre that a kindhearted widower offers her in return for housekeeping duties and bookkeeping work. A car zooms by; its engine disturbs her concentration, and then the sound of the tires on the road seem to smooth the way for the woman to fall back into her dreaming, as the vehicle fades to her right, leaving Janine to visualize her concept for her and her baby. Some time later… A mystic mood made by music that floods the fields for as far as the eye can see, and as wide as her ears can fathom. “The look of Love is in your eyes.” The song fills the air when a cloud passes over the shying sun, in summer’s wake. Janine sits inside the paddock she looked at as James feeds. There’s a glimmer of hope; a smile seen in her eyes tells of her contentment. Even without abode, she knows she will be all right. She has already made the choice to give James Janine Elton the best chance possible. PART 2 “James,” Janine pushes a strand of hair away from the boy’s eyes. “James,” the mother whispers again. Janine Elton checks to see if her son is still awake. James begins to smile, and then he wrinkles his nose as he can longer fake that he is asleep. James is comfortable in the warmth of the June night. The stories his mother reads to him from the hand-bound leather book are a fine replacement for the hot chocolate that she cannot afford. Later in the evening when the boy is really asleep, Janine looks straight ahead into the rafters of her cottage. The STORYBOOK lies open and face down across her chest. Janine’s fears are few, but they are not new nor are they far away. Janine started work for the first time in James’ life when James turned six. She labored at the Juke Bike Factory, where she assembled brand new shiny bicycles. On James’ seventh birthday in the autumn, his mother presented him with his first set of wheels, compliments of a two dollars per week pay deduction and a staff discount, and even then, the new bicycle did not come with the aid of training wheels. In winter, spring, summer, and then fall, when leaves fall from trees, Janine wonders whether the willow in the “The Wind’s Words and a Flower” from the STORYBOOK her son talks of frequently has shed itself this year, as James’s attention for the moment, is captivated by his birthday gift. She steps back at his request and seats herself on the steps to the cottage. Clasping her golden hair in one hand, and holding the front of her floral dress in her other hand, she has no hands to spare to cover the smile on her face at her son’s excitement. “Mum, I can do it; don’t need you to hold the seat mother; I can do it; I can drive Mr. Ghettis’ tractor. I can ride a bike, Mum; I can do it.” James is both ecstatic and concerned about letting his mother know he can ride his new present. James holds the bike away from him as he sizes up the contraption. He calls upon his experience from steering Mr. Ghettis’ Tractor. He had been steering Mr Ghettis’ tractor, while sitting on the old man’s lap since he was five years old; now Mr. Ghettis, the owner and farmer of the land that his mother’s cottage stood on, sat in the trailer while at seven years old, the little man drove, plowed, and controlled the big red tiller of the land like a farm hand of twenty harvests. Surely, he will be able to master the two-wheeler in front of him. The tractor steering wheel was well supported by the tractor’s chassis and four wheels, but the handlebars of his new, shiny bike feel like holding onto the bathroom railing in the middle of one of his famous fevers when he would see characters from the STORYBOOK and the end-to-end saga, entities from other dimensions whom he would never allow to inhabit him; rather, he would inhabit them instead, or better still he could apply for Temporary Shape as a TRUFUNK Soldier and exhume the entities, condemning them to life in the SenFenide Dimension. He lifts his left leg off the ground, the only leg that was supporting him and his mother’s only new belonging. The whole contraption and the boy topple to the right. Janine, with her arms folded, naturally levers her right hand to her mouth to cover her smiling lips. James, after picking himself up and having checked if any of the shine on his new present has been scratched, looks back at his mother on the porch beneath the small arch formed by his left arm on the handle bar. He pleads with the accompaniment of a screwed up foreheadforrid, “Mom, remember you told me never to laugh at anyone in trouble; Mom, remember?” In no time, the wobbling handlebars are steered straight, and the wheels become perpendicular with the path they speed along. Not long after that—“Look, Mom, no hands!” As James dismounts his new bike, his mind goes back to what he was thinking about before his mother surprised him—driving Mr. Ghettis’ tractor. His hands on the tractor’s steering wheel make James feel like what he believes to be a man. The tall sheets of the gold dry grass part uniformly for him as he turns his head to smile at Mr. Ghettis on the trailer, the sun sparkles in his hazel eyes to pronounce a magic moment in his life he will hold onto until the end of this, the next, and all sagas that unfold in his neat wake. He easily lifts his present up the cottage steps and onto the veranda where he parks it close to the table his mother sets for dinner, so his gift is within reach... Janine finishes setting the scene for his arrival home, on the eve of his ninth birthday, as she hears the tractor’s engine chugging along the path between the cottage and Mr. Ghettis’ barn and home. The mother and son’s humble existence also limit their expectations of what is conceivable, imaginable, and affordable on her single income; another new bike for James Elton on his ninth birthday—the consolation being that it is the latest model that all the kids want. The STORYBOOK, and its Dimensions with AFANASY, are more than enough for any young lad to create the wildest dreams that even sick amounts of money cannot buy. Janine brushes her hair back as she glances over her shoulder at the little gray radio. When it begins to play her favorite song, the chugging of the tractor’s engine becomes a constant idle over which she can hear her son. “I swear, Mr. Ghettis, it was AFANASY. He was at the bottom of the ninth. He waved me home...” Janine smiles at her boy’s imagination, which takes its lavishness and generosity from the same end-to-end saga she had dreamed of participating in from a very young age also. “Did AFANASY say, ‘LAZOO’s dinner is getting cold’?” Janine calls out as “The Look of Love” begins. The large inflamed but soft orange ball falling behind the long horizons of the plains casts a filter made in heaven over the cottage and James’ arrival home. On the cottage’s porch, behind a table for two, sits his mother with her hair up, smelling of her own soap. In front of her are tender beef from the roaming cattle and cheese from the goats that keep the parameters of their quarter acre defined. As the tractor’s revolutions quadruple and it rolls away down the metal track, the diesel particles that fume and line James’ nostrils evaporate and give way to a waft of aroma and fragrance that descends from the slight three-step elevation on which Janine seems to perch. “Now that you don’t shower before dinner anymore, young man, I truly do hope that when you are on your own, you discover the simple pleasures of water on your skin.” “I like showering in the morning, Mum; it makes me ready for the kids and teachers at school.” With Janine, James was allowed to be who he was; it wasn’t because the blonde girl in woman’s clothing feared her only man leaving her because of her installing demands upon him; it was because of how much Janine enjoyed watching her creation in all his naturalness. Janine laughed continuously in her head at the iconic and simple manners that poured from the pint-sized member of the male species. That night, beef melted and goat cheese oozed to fill every corner of their mouths as mother and son first enjoyed dinner on their balcony, and then poetry—what Janine’s reading from the STORYBOOK seems to be—in their only bed… Next morning, Janine loves the look on her son’s face as he finds the best, surprised look he can imagine when he opens his eyes to see his birthday present. After breakfast, he helps wash up as he waits for Mr. Ghettis to pick him up for a day in the field of driving the tractor, a special gift for James instead of going to school today. As the tractor heads off up the gravel path, Janine decides to treat herself to a day off from her job at the factory. “Remember, keep your shirt on!” the mother reminds her boy, who nods his head as he waves back at her. PART 3 The sun beams down natural color on James’ back as he drives the red tractor in straight two-thousand yard lines, his shirt removed against his mother’s only withstanding rule. The orange garment turned into a hat makes James imagine he is on a camel’s back in some vast and dry desert in the east. He can hear the music of the cobra and see a young fella with dirty brown skin and an orange turban conducting magic through his flute that makes the snake rise. On the trailer, Mr. Ghettis lies lazy and sleepy with his straw hat providing shade for his eyes from the same rays that James adored. The rhythm of the tractor traveling on uneven, soft soil makes James’ passenger believe himself with his wife on the deck of a yacht somewhere in the Aegean. Mr. Ghettis admires his wife’s long legs, but cannot see his wife’s eyes behind the big brown tortoiseshell rimmed sunglasses. Mr. Ghettis smiles every time the captain turns around to see whether he is enjoying himself. James looks into the sky as he believes he hears the author’s voice. James wonders about John Reyer’s F3quenZor as he sees a figure in the distance. The revolving musical notation, a riff within a well-worked groove from another time, fills the ATMOS thick with anticipation of something about to happen. That something is pivotal in consideration of a greater good. It is consequential doing away with the need for a single end result, and it is circumstantial, the young kid with a learning difficulty which has prevented him from reading or writing knows. On the dirt sidewalk of Pleasant Prairie—a vantage point from which a figure is seen… Inside wire fencing, a lad around the age of twelve checks inside his little green bag… The boy, with curly black hair, stands on the edge of a farm field, in Wisconsin. In the distance, a red tractor ploughs the Wisconsin dirt. As the tractor nears, the boy standing at the edge of the field holds out a hand… James Elton sees the boy, who is older than him, standing at the end of a row. He believes he is AFANASY. The sun sparkles in the boy’s hazel eyes as his hand—which had seemed to say, “Halt!”—now begins to wave. The F3quenZor hums as James pulls the steering wheel to his right; the humming grows warmer and louder as he passes the boy. James touches the orange cloth on his head as he looks back, but the boy is gone. Janine’s heart is in her mouth. Her disorientation just about causes her to crash into oncoming traffic as she rides her son’s bike, his birthday present to a place she knows fate has marked—fatality’s spot. She just knows as a mother does that her only child is within death’s reaches as she cuts off the oncoming car to make up seconds on the sirens in the distance, which she would bet her life on are headed for the place she is desperate to reach. She makes it to the gate of the field, the end of the road, and the beginning of the end. The mother has the red tractor in her sights when she hears a voice from the police car, “Please pull over.” The different sirens behind her envelope her, then engulf her, seemingly sapping her energy, as the police car and then the ambulance advance upon her, pass her, and then leave her in their dust. Helpless, Janine watches as eight wheels damage James’ straight tractor tracks and leave her in a mammoth thick cloud of Wisconsin dirt that suffocates her endeavour. James’ heart physically hurts as if someone has punched it, pronouncing it dead, making its only function a pump for blood. The tractor had stalled to a stop sixty feet away, leaving an arc in the once parallel symmetry James had created. Mr. Ghettis had fallen into a deep sleep and tumbled down between tractor and trailer. If Mr. Ghettis had fallen forward, he would have been truly one with the earth by now, but he had fallen sideways and only his legs, thigh-down, had suffered treatment meant for soil. Stunned, the stricken boy stands over the unconscious Mr. Ghettis. The last time James saw Janine face to face in open air, under the ceiling of sky, his mother was covered in soil, horror in her eyes, her mouth gaping as something inside her screamed for help. Her floral dress—his favorite—was drenched in sweated tears. The ambulance medics were carrying Mr. Ghettis away, his lower body wrapped in grey hospital blankets, wet, burgundy dyed, in the old man’s dark blood, as police handcuffed a nine year old boy and dragged him by the back of his orange t-shirt to a waiting cop car. To be Continued... As possible precursor to LAZOO read free eBook: Jon Le Mac Book I. Part one of how Lazoo, Metofeaz, Le Mac and Afamasaga came to notoriety. Jon Le Mac —Book II (LAZOO) & III (GUIOPERA III) are to be published by 2011. ISBN: 978-0-9803486-2-0
LAZOO Kindle edition 2010 (Publish Date Aprox Mid June 2010)
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