Devil's Hopper

       Jim Stallings

4    Devil's Hopper

How could those cast off babies know everything…he wondered and felt him­ self sinking beneath swamp water. He just didn’t care any­more. He’d sink into the mud and be preserved like one of those toxic castaway babies.

*    *    *    *

Lucky walked to work with Jewel’s departing refrain, “We need to talk,” circling through his skull. Yeah, there was plenty to talk about and it was all about how screwed up he was.

Lucky’s residence with Jewel in her family home was a mere two blocks from the job. A convenient spring-summer stay over situation…perhaps about to change with the fall. He paused in the bright early light, a strong northwest wind out of Canada.

The toy factory looked like a composite of a 19th century mill, castle and armory. Red brick façade with towers and crenellated walls as if marksmen or medieval bowmen might suddenly appear and launch an arrow straight through your heart. Even the front ramp looked a bit like a moat and drawbridge with the wide concrete expanse of its tongue feeding into a semicircular archway. No moat with gators, but Lucky always thought he could hear snapping jaws when the waves on the lake were choppy.

A piece of industrial history, the old textile mills first sat there using the lake as waterpower back in the mid 19th century. Now the lake water poured through a channel under the frontage road and made its harmless way through the toy fac­tory sluice run and thence into the woods and wetlands beyond. Marktree’s lake and streams eventually settled into the Charles River that practically encircled the town making it almost an island. The local Indians had called it Quinobequin, snaky or meandering river, and that it was.

Lucky stood looking at the wind churning the surface of Lake Hoiden, named after the colonial Indian chief who negotiated the land swap with the colonists back in the early 18th century. The guy had run around selling off everything in the region…a regular Century 19th man…probably had a gold sport jacket. The clock on the bell tower of the factory said a minute to eight. Lucky crossed the road and descended into his day.

Jewel stood at the kitchen window and looked out on Lake Hoiden. She’d watched Lucky standing across the road from Bakerville Toys. He was a hand­some man, always had been to her, and now was a middle-aged kind of

Devil's Hopper

Copyright © 2004 Jim Stallings. All rights reserved.
Maintained by R M Stelting.
Updated: 24 August, 2004