Living the Life of Reilly

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This morning I started on Chapter Twenty in my new book 'Dancing By My Brother's Grave'. (Historical Fiction.) Nathan, one of the brothers is living in Carmel, California under the assumed name Olin. He has isolated himself because he thinks that he is wanted by the law. shermansmithauthor.com??????????????????????????????????

?? Living the Life of Rielly

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“You are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. I guess I’m damned because I don’t do anything.” ?Olin gazed into his steamed bathroom mirror hoping that his image might have some bright wisdom to start his day. “I’m not exactly living the life of Reilly here, am I. He was in a deep rut, and he knew it. The day before he had brought out a bucket of water to his Zen Garden, sat and tried to make a sandcastle. ?Sandcastles are a great way to get outside and exercise. It didn’t work out, his pals - Me, Myself, and I - had argued the architectural design until it all fell down.

????? He had an irrational phobia about being caught and going to jail. His anxiety was reality based, he was guilty of tax evasion, being the titular head of a foreign shell corporation that had been set up to defraud the United States Government in collaboration with the Japanese Mafia, ?and a dozen other laws he might have broken but did not know about. Now, here he was living in paradise, with a shit-load of cash, building sandcastles when he would prefer to count the grains of sand, and his only friends were the three stooges, and their resident guest, Mr. Solitude.

????? Olin had hired a Japanese- American woman in her fifties to manage his gallery. Ruth Amaki was widowed, asked few questions, and added a nice touch of atmosphere in the kimonos Olin had purchased for her. Now he rarely went to his gallery, never-dined out, had his food delivered, and his mail twice a month from the post office.

????? By design, Carmel doesn’t have street addresses, the only building in Carmel?— business or residential?— with an official address is the post office. Every other spot in town is either known by the business’s name, the home’s name, or is found using a varied, if not explicit, set of hints that one might have to deploy some kind of wizard’s map in order to figure out. ?Having no street address made Olin’s self-arrest almost complete just as long as he did not have to go to the post office. The Gossip Office was not just the place where one collected their mail it was the social center where people met, gossip was made, and where inuendoes began. Carmelites were in whole a polite if not friendly people unless you made a point of avoiding them, then that became a problem.

?????? Norm MacDonald, an elderly gentleman who lived somewhere down the street walked almost daily to the post office, for exercise and a sense of community. He was a listener, not a talker, a man in his early eighties who possessed a winning smile and a short memory.

By proxy Norm became Olin’s gatekeeper who would drop off Olin’s shopping list at the grocery and pick up what little mail came and went on his behalf. A cup of ice-tea and a game of checkers was all Norm asked. While Norm studies the board, he always played the red checkers, Olin would entertain him with stories of people and places that never existed which really did not matter because Norm would never remember them anyway. All Olin knew was that Norm’s father had been some sort of haberdashery back before time was old and Norm had been a little boy.