Louis Shalako: Heaven Is Too Far Away, Chapter Fifteen. Louis Shalako.

Chapter Fifteen

Man is Gregarious

When you’re young, you have the ability to make and break new bonds quickly.

These can be surprisingly strong, for while man is gregarious, he is also monogamous. As we age, the ability to form new bonds diminishes. While a stork is also monogamous, and if it should lose its mate it may never have another, in human beings there is also the power of reason. The ability to think about things, and work them out in your head.

I had a couple of things to confront. Is it possible to love one woman and have sex with another? Yes, of course. But I disapproved of adultery, and fornication. You name it, I disapproved of it. To be honest, I thought I was better than some other people.

But I’m not, am I? I was just never tempted before, was I? I had never had the opportunity.

What happens now? Does this mean I am a womanizer?

Hardly. Yesterday morning I was practically a virgin. And pretty damned innocent.

Even ignorant, in the sense that I knew nothing.

Was Betty a bad person? I don’t think so. I think she was a very kind person, and what happened was some kind of an accident. And I don’t believe in accidents. She must have been a lonely person. Or maybe God wanted this. Blame God for everything if you must.

Things are ‘caused’ to happen, and I don’t care to put every little problem in life at God’s door. We do have free will. Otherwise, what is the point? Tin soldiers don’t need salvation. They have no will, no reason. No choice but to be lined up where the intellect chooses to place them. If a boy, in a prankish mood, angry at being forced to eat his Brussels sprouts, should take one of his sister’s dollies, take its clothes off, and put it with a boy doll, just back from years of combat? And if that boy doll should be in a state…of need…but wait a minute…these are dolls we’re discussing.

Back to the question of choice. And I guess I chose to have sex with Betty.

I wanted to fuck Betty. I wanted to real bad. May as well be honest about it. She was a stunning, gorgeous, lovely, sweetheart of a gal. The truth was, I probably didn’t deserve her.

Oh, maybe she was a little heavy.

Who am I to judge someone based upon their personal appearance?

Who’s kidding who, now? In personal photos, I always look like some damned foreigner. I am a stranger to myself. There were better men than me in the world, that’s for sure. I can show you their graves, a thousand of them, ten thousand of them. Why should they die and I live? Why should I get her, and they’re all dead?

I am nothing special. Just a tin soldier that didn’t get knocked down.

When I think of Betty it makes me happy. A sense of anticipation, a feeling that I don’t have to be alone. What would a relationship with Betty bring?

If Melissa married her man, was I supposed to go through life alone?

Why do I even think of Melissa? Am I some kind of perverted sex maniac?

Betty and I started out kind of bass-ackwards, in that we sort of got the cart in front of the horse. Oh, God, what have I done?

What have I done now? I pulled out a picture from my wallet, and looked at it as I sat on a bench in a little park, waiting to go back to Betty’s place. It was a picture of my team.

Not a ball team. My horses. Tess and Tinkerbell, and two finer ladies you never met.

They’d pull the legs off of any three other horses any day of the week, let me tell you.

Those ladies were strong, and patient, and nothing put them off when they were being treated right. They could work me under the grass, if I let them. Truth was, I put them to pasture early some nights.

No stump was too deep or too strongly embedded, no field too large, no load too big.

No creek was too deep to ford or swim. No sled, no log, no drag-line that they, or we couldn’t handle. If all it took was hard work, no man could stop us or stand up to my team. The trouble was, I was out of my league with all these women. This big city, this different land. I was a long way from home, with nowhere to turn.

Life was so simple before things went bad and I left home. I wanted to be a ship’s captain. Hah. That seems so long ago. A very brief career as a deck-hand. It made a weird kind of sense. Farm boys get tired of dirt. Why not try water? Lots and lots of water…

There were times when I missed those horses more than anything in the world. I could talk to them, and the answers I got always made sense. I don’t believe in the devil.

The devil is a symbol, for something that is inside of each and every man. The power to be bad, if we choose. That’s what the devil is. The symbol of a bad soul. Think of it that way. Hell is unnecessary. We create our own anyway.

And yet the world is a beautiful place, as I watched a maid or servant walking through the park with a double perambulator. The fog is lit from above. It glows like a kind of halo in the treetops. Birds flit, darting about in the shrubbery. The grass is still green, but then grass is tough, isn’t it? Voices walk behind me, the faces of the people never seen.

They sound like happy people.

Tradesmen went about their work, going about the deliveries and daily commerce.

The shop windows were filled with the things people need or must have, or simply desire. A man swept the sidewalk in front of his little establishment. Mr. Ebenezer, of Ebenezer Tailors, because who else could it be? The place is too small to have an employee.

Of course it’s his establishment.

In this neighborhood, who else would care enough to sweep the pavement?

I looked at my watch. Betty would be home in two and a half hours. Better make up my mind as to what to do next. I wonder if she’s thinking about me right now. Being at work she may not have time.

But I’m just kidding myself. She must have thought about me at least once. I’ve had her on my mind all day. It takes your thoughts off of a lot of other things. There was also the matter of having a rather persistent and troublesome erection, which did not appear to want to go away. Due to the novelty of the experience, a mental picture of Betty, naked except for her garters, et cetera, kept appearing in my head. If and when Betty thinks of me, does she think of me sexually?

Now there’s a thought. Doesn’t help with the immediate problem, but it sure was interesting. I was very young.

END