By the time I'm done with the whole process I've got a novel, except for Del of Kerao. I'm stuck for the moment on that one. It's also been evolving differently -- the chapters are pretty much written when I'm through them the first time. I'm waiting for Inspiration to come back on that one.
So I've just finished reading two books: Galataea of the Poconos and The Duke of Chimney Butte, by G.W. Ogden.
I let Galataea sit after publishing for a longish time. The first book of the Poconos series that I actually wrote was Mistress Peterson. It's a story of the follies of youth encroaching on Happily Ever After, with a bit of a real life miscarriage of "justice" -- and the destruction of the poor guy's family -- sneaking in as part of the plot. I wrote it with a lot of flashbacks, then decided I didn't like them, rebuilt part of it, wrote Cinderella and the Devil with the same characters and the same real-life miscarriage of justice, then wrote the prequel to Mistress Peterson as a stand-alone story, which was Galataea. I think that's the way ideas normally work. I'm sure Raphael Sabatini had the same sort of evolutions, which is why there were so many Captain Blood stories. I'm guessing the final version of the Iliad wasn't the same as the first time Homer told it.
So getting back to Galataea: Cazzie, a fatherless fifteen year old girl gets involved with some unsavory guys, doing unsavory things. The alpha unsavory guy gets her a summer job with his rich Uncle Al, who becomes her mentor. After another of the unsavory guys rapes her in the front seat of his Mom's minivan she proposes to Uncle Al -- who accepts. So there's the plot: A fatherly and business interest turns tentatively romantic. Uncle Al and Cazzie have to maintain a platonic relationship until she's of age. Meanwhile Jimmy, the alpha kid, is maintaining the fantasy that Cazzie remains his girl and is after Uncle Al's money.
The idea's not new with me. I'm sure there have been lots of Lolita-style pedo-porno stories written given the grownup and fifteen-year-old (or younger) plot device. But that wasn't what I wanted. I actually read a Bret Harte story with the same device. I can't remember the title, but I think the protagonist raised the girl from a sullen child of about eleven or twelve, straightened her out, and ran off with her in the end. Harte probably got it from the Pygmalion story.
Naturally Cazzie is way smarter than the average fifteen year old, a Major Achiever, but she has her goofy moments. Uncle Al is a self-made man, risen by his bootstraps out of a poverty-stricken and loveless youth; he's a father figure, not a predator. Cazzie learns to work hard, to set goals and work toward them. He's in love for the first time in his life, and has his intimidating personality softened.
So reading it from start to finish does it hang together? I think so. If you're going to maintain a long-term platonic relationship you have to be friends.
Angie's was conveniently on the way to his house. It was the kind of place that offered breakfast all day long and they had four-alarm chili made by a guy named Manuel. Cazzie's truck was still at the stables, so he would be taking her home and picking her up for work in the morning.
"You haven't met Jeff Edgell yet, have you?" Allen asked as they occupied a booth.
"Jeff Edgell? The guy you did your first company with? Not yet. Am I going to?"
They looked over the menus, which were heavy on omelettes, fried eggs, and pancakes. Angie's also had boysenberry syrup, for which both had a weakness.
"I came in here thinking 'hot turkey sandwich,'" Cazzie explained. "My appetite is now hollering 'two eggs, hash browns, bacon, and three flapjacks.'"
"And you can hold all that?"
"I doubt it. I'll taste a bit of each and feed some of it to you and have the rest in a doggy bag, maybe for tomorrow's lunch, when it won't taste a thing like it will today! So what's up with Jeff Edgell?"
"I'm going to get him to build an alarm for you. It will look like a piece of jewelry. You get in trouble, you press the secret button, and I'm on my way to the rescue. I think I'll have the chili."
"You'll give me a bite?"
"Last time you ate half of it!"
"See? I left some for you! You really think there's that much danger from Jimmy and his crew?"
Allen paused to think over the entire problem. "Yes," he said at length. "I think you should be much more cautious when you're forced to deal with them than you have been. They live in that sociopath's dream world, where they're much smarter than the rest of us and they can waltz around society's petty rules and nothing will happen to them. There being no penalty for what they did to you, and now no penalty for what they did to Keri, reinforces that."
He paused while the waitress brought a bowl of chili with extra crackers, two glasses of cold lemonade, and one breakfast suitable for a lumberjack on a heavy workday.
"I wonder how Keri got tied in with those dirty words?" Cazzie mused, starting on her eggs, bacon, hash browns, and toast.
"Don's getting a divorce," Allen suggested. "The woman's his third wife. The story I got from a fairly reliable source says he came home to find her taking a shower with some fellow he'd never met. He threw them both out, wet and naked, and told them not to come back."
"I like Mr. Brennan more and more," Cazzie smiled. "And I'll bet he'd have done the same even if he'd known the guy."
"His second marriage didn't end as dramatically, but it ended for the same sort of reason."
"Ow. Did Keri's Mom...?"
"She had the good grace to leave him over money. He started his first company for his father who was a drunk, while he was a state policeman. When his Dad died he quit the State Police and worked the company full time. His income dropped and she didn't have the confidence in him that he'd get it built up. Nor could she be a partner to him in the business. She didn't have the head for it. She divorced him, took up with another policeman whom I understand is a perfectly nice fellow."
Cazzie nodded, mopping up the last of the egg yolk with the corner of a triangle of toast. "I'll trade you part of my flapjacks for some of your chili," she offered, shoving the plate to his side of the table and appropriating his bowl for herself. She had a cautious bite of the chili, followed by a large drink of cold lemonade, followed by fanning her hand in front of her mouth.
"Tasty, huh?" he asked, as she had another big gulp of lemonade.
"So Keri's having a hard time in her life," she breathed in a cloud flavored by chili powder, raw onion, jalapeños, and two or three other unidentified spicy things. "She's just reaching puberty and she's got the curiosity and Jimmy, at least, is good-looking. Lonnie can be nice when he wants to. They gave her that 'just one of the guys' guff that I bought into. And I'll bet neither of her most recent step-moms spent a lot of time teaching her that what she sits on isn't the most important part of her."
"I think that pretty much covers it," Allen agreed, ordering two more lemonades to try and avert his sweetheart erupting in flames. "Melanie seemed to impress her with her descriptions of syphilis and gonorrhea and chlamydia and herpes and HIV..."
"Boss! Please! I'm eating!" The chili bowl retained about a third of its contents when she passed it back to him, prior to starting on her third glass of lemonade. Regaining some of the feeling in her lips and tongue, she put more boysenberry syrup on the pancakes and had a soothing bite.
"I think the point she took away from Melanie's conversation," he explained, "was that nice girls don't get such diseases. The point she took away from our conversation was that she's a nice girl."
"Meaning a lady?" Cazzie asked.
"Meaning a lady," he agreed. "Or at least a lady in training."
"Kids our age," Cazzie mused, reluctantly deciding she was unable to fit anymore into her belly, at least for a little while, "don't spend a lot of time talking about whether we're going to be ladies. Or the boys gentlemen."
"They didn't when I was growing up, either," Allen agreed. "The age when they did was well past by then. I believe the current beau ideal is a rebel, with or without a cause. I knew what I didn't want to be, which was a rebel. I was raised by rebels. That meant I had to figure out what I did want to be. Then one day I stumbled across Sabatini, almost by accident..."
"Which one did you read first?" They shared a love for almost anything Rafael Sabatini had written.
"Saint Martin's Summer. Probably his silliest..."
"But it's my favorite, too," she pointed out. "Sometimes I think of you as 'Martin Marie Rigobert de Peterson,' come to rescue me, the fair young maiden. Martin Marie Rigobert de Garnache would have thumped Lonnie, too."
"And probably wouldn't have hurt himself..."
"But once us fair young maidens have been rescued from a fate worse than death..."
"I was a little late there," he pointed out.
"That was my fault, not yours. I should have called you earlier. Once we've been rescued we kind of have an obligation to deserve what the Rigoberts went through, don't we? I mean, if you fight off a dozen villains or so, or jump out a window and fall fifty feet into a moat at night, or you break a couple fingers laying out the bad guy, then I'm kind of obligated to be worth the effort and the damage, right?"
"You were worth it before the damage occurred, sweetheart."
"Maybe I was following somebody else's example? Honey... I mean 'Boss,' I've never seen you be mean or nasty..."
"Not even when I fired you?"
"You were cold, you weren't mean. And I deserved it. I've heard you say precisely one bad word in all the time I've known you, unless 'dipshit' is a bad word. I'd have been cussin' a blue streak if I'd had to drive a silly half-hysterical girl someplace with two broken fingers and I'd bumped them against the steering wheel... Are you really going to have coconut cream pie for dessert?"
"Uhuh. You want a slice?"
"I don't have room for dessert, but I'll take a taste of yours."
He eyed her warily. "Last time you ate most of it," he grumbled.
"Did not," she dismissed. "I ate less than fifty percent of it."
"49.75 percent, maybe," he allowed, adding two coffees to the order.
"So anyway," she continued, "you'd been a gent from the time I met you. It stuck out all over you. And Johnny's a gentleman. And Mayra's a lady."
"Your Mom's a lady," he pointed out.
"A hard-working lady," Cazzie agreed. "Here I am in my formative years, and she's busy trying to keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. If there were thirty or thirty five hours in a day she'd have been giving me guidance and direction, but there aren't."
"Which was how you fell in with Jimmy."
"If Mom had known him better she'd have made sure I hadn't. I think Joel and Ricky are natural gents. Their language isn't so nice, but they wouldn't hurt anybody, at least not without good reason."
He nodded, getting her point and at the same time forgiving such shortcomings of Ricky and Joel as he knew of. The waitress deposited two cups of coffee and one slice of pie with two forks on the table.
"So then I met Gail," she said, taking a bite of the pie. "Mmmm... This is really good," she added, taking a second bite before Allen got his first. "Gail had a whole summer with nothing to do but teach Cassandra Jane to be a lady, some of which took."
"Quite a bit of which took," Allen corrected, watching the slice of pie decrease in size while he had a sip of coffee.
"So what's going to happen with Keri?" she asked.
"Gail's back to work," he said as Cazzie ceased consuming the pie at precisely the 49.75 percent point, daintily dabbing at her lips with her napkin. "Keri's going to have to get her good example and guidance from us."
"I am, like, way too young to be a mom!"
"Just settle for being a good influence," he suggested, moving the pie out of her reach as she picked her fork up again.
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