The Redemption of Marvin Fuster by Patrick Sean Lee (best affordable ebook reader TXT) 📕

and reached for them. Two or three stems of daisies had already begun to droop their heads. Delilah’s spindly fingers were twitching, nervously she thought, taking them from his outstretched hand. She looked up into his face. His cheeks were rouge-red. She could almost feel the heat emanating from them. His lips had curled just slightly, and his eyes had a schoolboy beseeching quality suddenly, as though he wasn’t at all sure she wouldn’t scorn him and return them.

“You are a darling, John. Thank you so much. They’re beautiful.” Even though they were not. “I’ll find a vase…that was so thoughtful of you.”

Roget was near, hovering at the end of the desk. He peered between them at the flowers, then turned his gaze to John, who it seemed might need a steadying hand, to Amy who was smiling, and then back again to the urchin bouquet. A quick breath, a passing of his fingertips across the blooms was all that it would take. The flowers would enjoy a resurrection; a re-erection, he mused with a smile. But he thought, no. Amy was about to raise the indigent Marvin from the dead. Her touch would be enough with simple, wilting flowers. He brought his fingertips near her already shining hair instead. That was close enough, he was certain. The air in the small room seemed charged suddenly, the light taking on a warm, golden glow around her face and shoulders and chest. The strange phenomenon brought a rush of goose bumps that danced from her toes to every strand of hair on her head. Her delicately molded cheeks went suddenly white hot. Her fingers tingled. The blossoms responded, as though they’d sucked up a pot of super-octane water drawn from the wells of heaven. Which in a way they had.

What had a moment ago been a clutch of sickly flowers with puny, yellowing stems and stringy leaves, were now robust kings and queens that would have made the most profoundly glorious rose blush and fall to its thorny knees in any garden.

Amy stood weak-kneed and stunned at the waves of hyper-driven tingles that continued to swell beneath the soft layer of her skin, in a momentary trance, seeing bursts of stars in front of her eyes. John Delilah’s jaw dropped. His owlish eyes popped straight and opened wide. He let the briefcase he had been holding with fingers clenched around the handle as if it had been his soul preparing to vacate the shell of his body fall helplessly to the carpet at his feet.

She blinked once, twice, and then a third time, until her vision cleared. Amy glanced at the bouquet quickly, and then over to John.  His shoulders were drooping forward. He had seen many strange and wondrous things in his life, but nothing like this.

“John?”

“Holy smoke,” was all he could manage in return. Holy something at any rate.

“Amy! Where’s the Bauer deposition?” Sampson’s booming voice broke the trances. “I’m due at McDougal’s office in an hour.  Hustle it up.”

“Yes sir,” she said in a whisper, staring at Delilah, wondering if he could come up with an explanation. He stared back, wondering if she might be able to do the same.

“I’d better get him a vase…or the, uh…something,” she said, lowering the flowers onto her desk.

John? Delilah?

EIGHT

Marvin slipped behind a tree that was dense with leaves of light green, and with a thick trunk sporting an armor gown of rough, gray bark. He leaned against it, looking away from Colfax Avenue where the delivery truck driver and the cop stood hashing over the barely averted disaster that had nearly squashed him like a bug. His eyes beheld the columns of the amphitheater a hundred feet away bathed in colonnades of shadows and light, but the vision in his mind was fixed on the snapshot of the truck and the driver’s head visible above the cab. He searched his memory, trying to recall whether flipping off a cop was a misdemeanor. Yes, he thought, it had to be. If he had been arrested, or even detained for rightly putting the cop in his place, precious minutes would have slipped away, and he would miss her.

He couldn’t go back yet. Neither could he risk making a run for the southern end of the park. He closed his eyes and began to count, to buy a minute or two.

“One thousand and one, Colorado. One thousand and two, Colorado. One thousand and three, Colorado…” 

One thousand two hundred twenty-three Colorados later he turned and peered out, clenching the rough bark of the tree with all ten fingers. The right eye emerged first, and then the left, very slowly.  He was good at this game of hide and seek, having had a king’s ransom of practice over the years.

The truck was gone. The patrol car was gone. He hoped—it was all such a blur.

Damn! Gotta’ do somethin’ about these eyes…

 

Traffic along Colfax Avenue was thickening, and pedestrians seemed to appear out of nowhere, stepping out of city buses, rounding corners, flooding into the maze of buildings like hoards of little ants crawling over one another with money-making seeds in their pincers. From somewhere in the distance a clock in a bell tower chimed eight times.

No time to lose. Legs, let’s get movin’!

He darted across the soft green lawn toward the street light years away, running the scenario through his head.

Amy…that’s your name, right? I’m Marvin. You don’t know me…well, yes ya’ do, but you don’t realize it yet. 

He huffed, starting to gasp a little for more air. Fifty light years lay behind him, only fifty more to go. 

He saw that she was not going to slap him and run away. He continued, walking beside her through the throng of people on the sidewalk.

Oh, no, don’t pay no attention to how I’m dressed. I got better clothes back home…

She suddenly eyed him with suspicion, indignity, and disinterest. How could she not help looking at his shitty trench coat, his filthy tee shirt and trousers, and his bare feet? She began to lengthen her stride.  He was losing her.

Imagination!

Tell it like it is.  Just cut to the chase.

Hey, you don’t know it yet, but you and me are gonna’ get married.  I…I…  This was the hard part.  I’m in love with you, Amy, whatever your last name is.

That made her stop. It most assuredly did. He felt her beautiful little hand crash into his cheek before she muttered something foul sounding.  And then she rushed off.

Marvin arrived at the street and bent over with his hands on his thighs to catch his breath.

That weren’t so good.  Think, Marvin.

He focused on the problem at hand instead—getting back across the busy street without a replay in reverse, with a tragic ending this time.  He did not want to find himself searching, waiting forlornly for her, with a set of wings flapping in the morning air.  As he waited with his toes flexed on the edge of the curb for a break in the parade of cars and trucks, he wondered why angels needed wings at all?  Who dreamt that up?

Who cares.

Oh God, make her late…just enough so’s I can catch a glimpse of her.  That goddam cop. 

Sorry, didn’t mean that.  The goddam part, anyway.

Casper the Friendly Ghost don’t have wings…

The eastbound traffic died at the light and he took off, only to be stopped at the center of the street by the westbound rush of cars.  An empty McDonald’s wrapper wadded up into a ball came zinging out of nowhere and struck him in the nose.  The driver of the Toyota sedan who had thrown it waved out the window at him and went his way, amused at the insult.

“Yeah, go ahead and laugh at me.  Go ahead.  But I’m gonna’ do great things startin’ pretty soon here.  You’ll see.”

Marvin waited impatiently as the westbound traffic crawled past him, and the eastbound kicked into gear again, whizzing past his rear end like shining buzz saws. He felt the little whirlpools of air climb up his legs, begging him to take a step backward. Eventually, as the long minute hand of the clock spun forward at a dizzy pace, he reached the other side and walked through the line of men and women to the spot he had occupied half an hour ago. They gave him wide berth, as if he carried the plague.

He took his place outside the women’s boutique, scanning the faces that went by on the sidewalk. Ten minutes elapsed alongside a hundred different complexions; beautiful, some were—handsome, plain, laughing, well-dressed or casual. Amy was not among them.  He had missed her.  Just as well. He let his eyes fall to his clothing and his bare feet, which for all he knew stank.

I need some new clothes. By God, I’m gonna’ clean myself up and come back here tomorrow. When she sees me again I’ll look like Clark fuckin’ Gable! No, Errol Flynn. Yeah, him.

Marvin moped away in the direction of the street once again.  Disconsolate, and yet happy that he had evaded a set of handcuffs and hadn’t gotten smashed under a truck. Happy that soon he would be transformed into a movie idol. How could Amy not fall headlong into his arms then?

Christ Almighty, Clark Gable…with them ears he was uglier’n a mudpost!  Flynn. Yeah, that’s me…

Unbeknownst to Marvin Fuster, Mr. Errol Flynn had passed on thirty-one years ago. He was physically just a pile of bones now.   Somewhat less than Marvin, but not by much.

Imagination, my good man. 

Imagination.

Amy.

NINE

Marvin returned later that day with a new sense of purpose to the place he loathed more than the inside of any confessional. The Salvation Army Mission on Tenth Avenue and Bannock. It was only six blocks away from Civic Center Park, and had many years ago been a large private residence covering two full-sized city lots, plus another fifty feet on one side where lawn and flowerbeds and Weeping Willow trees grew in wild abandon. The Army purchased it a dozen years ago after the eccentric widow—a certain Mrs. Maybelle Stump who maintained it like a macabre Hollywood movie set—finally left the world for supernatural parts unknown.

An hour after sitting through the reading of the will, her smiling heirs promptly threw it into the hands of a real estate broker, who promptly threw it out to the public listed as “…one of Denver’s finest, charming old haunted houses, with a view of the Pacific.”

He meant Rockies.

No one of the Army believed in ghosts, although they were