Book One: The Rebel and the Saint
by Joe Gill
“The night was long and deep and dark
Pierced only by my self-made mark
To show me where that I should stand
In this old strange and distant land.”
~ Such A Dreamer
Year: 2223 C.E. (Formerly known as A.D.)
~1~
Chase Woodcock sat by himself at the end of a long, bleak hallway. Whitewashed walls lined the space, and only a solitary window shed any light on the walkway. There were doors - oh, yes, there were doors. Chase had often walked through the doors from misery into misery, from sadness into sadness, from despair into despair. Unrepentant, Chase sat and wondered what he would do with his life when he was free from his own prison.
Presently a door opened and a man stepped out. This man was tall and old, wearing a weatherworn face that told of things he had seen. This man had seen lives slip through his fingers - lives of young men, whose troubled pasts only led to hopeless futures. With a scowl firmly plastered upon his face, he turned to face Chase.
“Come in,” he said in a voice that was totally devoid of emotion.
Slowly Chase stood up and began the trod through yet another door. He became conscious of the man’s eyes, which were following him. His eyes were as unfriendly as the expression on his face.
Chase entered a small office, with a desk and two chairs and a computer. It was a simple office. Unsure of himself, he stood there in the center of the room until the man closed the door behind him and ordered him to sit down.
“All right, Chase, this is the opportunity to reclaim your life,” the man began as he sat down at his chair behind the desk. “We have decided to let you out on parole.”
While Chase should have been relieved, instead his anxiety heightened. He was about to leave the only place that he had ever really known - the Hagerstown Juvenile Detention Center.
“We have found a foster home for you in a small suburb of Frederick. The family is very nice, and they’re Christian too.”
Chase rolled his eyes.
“On the terms of your release, you need to check in with your parole officer twice a month for the next three years.”
Chase then interrupted. “That’s not so bad. I thought it would be worse.”
The man frowned coldly. “I’m not finished yet. You also have to be tested for drugs twice a year, and you have to maintain a C average in school.”
Chase laughed arrogantly. “Piece of cake. I can get good grades if I really try.” Typically, he had been a D student in his classes.
The man, displaying more patience than he usually does, remained sullen. “There’s one more condition.”
“Oh yeah, what’s that?”
“You have to join the local Boy Scout troop and be an active member for three years.”
“WHAT!” Chase became incredulous. “That’s absurd!” He punctuated his remarks with a string of foul words.
At his reaction the man became angry. “It seems to me, Mr. Woodcock, that your five years here have taught you absolutely nothing. What we have tried to do here is to instill some sort of values system into young men such as yourself who have gone astray. It appears that we have failed our job, so instead of continuing to make taxpayers finance your life in this institution, I think it might be for both of our benefit for you to get some personalized care from two loving foster parents. Furthermore, I have seen that the boys with whom you associate here are not fit company for you to be in. I hope that by this last condition of joining such a worthy organization as the Boy Scouts you may come to see that there is a life outside of criminal activity by the positive peers you will meet.” The man became suddenly reserved and looked off into the distance. “Besides, I was a Boy Scout.”
“Oh, boy did I have an awful day at school!” Joey exclaimed as Mike Connor and he walked down the path into the woods. The flowers were out in full bloom, filling the air with the sweet smell of honeysuckle. The shade of the woods felt good on this hot day in June, as birds were singing in the air and squirrels frolicked briskly nearby.
“Well, luckily you only have a few more days left. What went wrong?”
“Everything,” he responded, kicking a dead tree branch out of my way. “It turns out that the last test I took in Spanish I failed, which really bites because my folks are going to ground me for that. Then I knocked over my full can of soda onto Kelly Spinnett.”
Mike chuckled. “I bet that was funny.”
“Not really. I was talking to Bryce from across the cafeteria, and he said that he was going to toss me his orange, since he didn’t want it, and you know, I love oranges. So he tosses it to me and I missed it and it hit my soda which went flying across the room, right onto Kelly’s lap. That was embarrassing.”
Joey could tell that Mike was laughing under his breath. That’s one thing about best friends, they never laugh at you right in your face. But you can always tell when they’re laughing at you anyway.
They passed underneath a peaceful pine grove and entered a thick growth of prickle bushes. “You know, Joey,” Mike said, “That’s not as bad as some of my more embarrassing moments. Like the time I was at the baseball hall of fame, and I was standing in front of the exhibit with George Brett’s bat. You know, the one with too much pine tar. Anyway there was this Chinese guy standing behind me who was saying to me, ‘I want to take a picture! I want to take a picture!’ So I turned around and started posing for him, before realizing that he wanted to take a picture of the exhibit, not me!”
They both laughed at the memory. “I don’t know how many times you’ve told me that story, but it gets funnier every time! How about the time we were both in pre-school…”
Mike shot him a steely glance. “I don’t think we need to bring that incident up again.”
Joey knew this embarrassed him still even though it was ten years ago. “Why not? Are you still embarrassed by the Incident?”
“Can we drop it?”
He laughed. “For heaven’s sake, all you did was fall through a trampoline. What’s so bad about that?”
Mike blushed but was smiling. “That’s not the whole story.”
“Oh, please refresh my memory.”
“The reason it was so bad was because all the big, bad kindergarten and first grade kids were on the trampoline. I wanted to show off by bouncing with them, so I got on.The first bounce, they launched me into the air and I landed in between the actual trampoline and the bars. That hurt pretty badly. But then no one would let me forget about it, either, for the rest of the year. You know, I have never gone on a trampoline since.”
“Really?”
“I’m not kidding.”
“You must have been scarred for life.”
“I was. I think I need therapy now.” Mike had never been more sarcastic.
The path took a sharp right turn and soon they were walking down a switchback. The land sloped downward sharply into a dry riverbed, but they could hear the sounds of the creek further away. There was something more that Joey wanted to tell Mike, but somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to speak. So they walked in silence for a while.
The sun was nearer to the horizon now. It must be almost four o’clock, he thought. The land leveled out as we crossed the gully, which hadn’t had water in it since the rainstorms in May. It was a strangely mystifying sight, with some vines partially obscuring theirview of the forest. Up ahead, they could see the stream, which was not very large but still a wonderful place to visit. Farther on, across the stream, lay an area of flat grazing land. Today there were a few cows out in the field. It was peaceful here, but Joey was feeling melancholy. He heaved a sigh quite loudly, hoping that his friend would notice.
And indeed he did. “So what else went wrong at school today?” he asked.
“What makes you think that anything else went wrong?” Joey said, trying to sound innocent.
But of course, Mike knew him all too well. “No one sighs that heavily without something else being the matter.”
“Oh, everything’s just fine. I’ve never been better,” he lied.
They arrived at the stream, which was flowing significantly lower than usual. There was a large pool of water, about seven feet across and three feet deep, which they had dammed up a few years back to act as a makeshift fishing hole. Mike went over to a hollow log lying against the bank of the river, and pulled out two fishing rods. After handing one to his friend, he found a comfortable rock along the shore to sit upon, and he proceeded to drop his already-baited line into the water. Likewise Joey climbed upon a downed tree that spanned the river, and he too cast his line into the small pool of water.
It wasn’t long before Mike broke the silence by bringing up the one topic that Joey had not wanted to discuss today. “So, did you ask out Crystal today?”
He sighed again. “Yeah.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said no.”
Mike looked at his friend with sympathy. “I’m sorry.”
Joey paused before replying. “It wasn’t just that she said no. It was that she said, ‘I would never go out with you if you were the last guy on earth.’ That hurts.”
Mike said nothing.
He continued. “Sometimes I think you’re lucky to be home schooled. There’s so much peer pressure at school it’s insane. The only reason I wanted to go out with her was because she’s the most popular girl in the whole school. You know, by default, if I went out with her, I would be popular too.”
“Naturally.”
“I mean, I really like this other girl, Heather. She’s funny, and pretty, and very nice. I think she likes me, too. But see, I could never go out with her, because that would bring me down on the social scale.”
“And where are you on the social scale, might I ask?”
“I’m near the top.”
“Wow, I’m honored to be hanging out with someone who’s near the top of the social scale.” Ouch, such stinging sarcasm.
Undaunted, he continued. “You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with that kind of stuff. It gets frustrating, after a while. I try to fit in, but I never quite get there to the popular crowd.” He paused. “Am I making any sense?”
“Very little.”
Oh, well, at least he’s honest.
But Mike continued. “You’d have to be pretty insecure to need to be popular. Just look at me. I really don’t care about what other people think of me, and I’m perfectly happy.”
Right then Joey had one of those moments when he suddenly realized the answers to all of his problems. “That’s a good point. I guess I’ve just been so stressed out about nothing, huh? After all, I’ve got great friends. What more could you ask for?”
Mike nodded his head in agreement.
“But,” he continued, “I still think you’re lucky to be homeschooled.”
Mike shook his head. “Homeschooling is not all it’s cracked up to be. Yeah, you do get to sleep in late and take days off whenever you feel like it, but it does get sort of lonely after a while.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking about going to public school next year.”
Mike had never mentioned this to Joey before, so naturally he was stunned. Mike had gone to public pre-school, but his mother decided to home school him after that. He had always gotten the impression that his friend was happy where he was. After all, most people would have loved to be home schooled.
He continued. “I’m still praying about it, though. But please don’t tell anyone that I’m considering it.”
“Is your mom letting you choose?”
“Yeah. Everyone knows that Urbana High is one of the best high schools in the country. They’ve got the best scores on all the standardized tests, and their football team has won the state championship for four years in a row. I hear it’s a really good school.”
Joey wanted to agree with him, and encourage him to come. After all, they were best friends. But deep down he knew that Mike shouldn’t go to public school. One of the things everyone likes about Mike is that he’s innocent; he had never been exposed to the things that “regular kids” had seen and heard on a daily basis. Joey wondered what sort of person he might become if he went to public school.
“Mike,” he started, leveling with him. “You don’t know what goes on in public schools. I mean, it’s not like they’re terrible. There are lots of good people who go there. But it’s kind of bad, too, at the same time. I know this one kid who comes to school every day with a hangover, and I know where the druggies hang out and all that.”
“I know!” he replied excitedly. “This will give me a great chance to evangelize to those people!”
Joey looked with pity on his innocence. Here was Mike, excited to go into a place that Joey would give anything to be out of. “You can do what you want. But I still think you’re better off being homeschooled.”
“Don’t you think I’ve seen and heard it all in Boy Scouts? Perhaps I’m not as innocent as you might think.” Mike looked hurt.
Joey shook his head and replied much more forcefully, “The people you meet in Boy Scouts are genuine saints compared to some of the people in school.”
He could see Mike thinking it over. Of course, knowing him, he might have been praying.
“Just think about it. It would be cool, though, if you would come to school.” Joey leaned back on his log, confident that he had made his point.
Mike looked at him for what seemed like the longest time, before saying, “Joey…”
“What?” he responded, reclining even more.
“You’re about to fall off that log!”
And the next thing he knew, he was in the water. When he had stood up, Mike walked over to him and, reaching up, pulled a fish off the top of his head.
Joey rolled his eyes. “This is a bad ending to a very bad day.”
“I suppose this is the only thing we’ll catch today,” he commented, gently returning the fish to the pool. “Come on, let’s go back so you can change into dry clothes.”
~2~
To Chase, this house was the most dreadful sight he had ever beheld. The house was ordinary, even boring, and located in a tremendous development filled with houses that looked exactly like this one. It was a tidy brick-and-siding house, two stories, with a whitewashed porch out front and exactly eight windows on the front of the house. Chase could see an SUV parked in the driveway, alongside a basketball net and a bicycle which was lying in the grass.
Stepping out of the police car, he walked across a thick and freshly manicured lawn. The setting sun cast shadows all over the yard, making the house look even more dreadful than it would normally look.
Chase was accompanied by his parole officer, who happened to be a cop who worked at the local barracks. Both Chase and the man tramped up onto the porch, and the man rang the doorbell.
Chase’s heart leapt when he heard footsteps walking towards the door. ‘This is it,’ he thought, ‘my last moments as a free man.’
The door was opened, and out stepped a haggardly-looking old woman. Actually, in reality, she wasn’t all that old, but to Chase she looked like she was a relic from the Stone Age. She was tall and thin, with a horribly long nose and wildly frizzy grey hair. She wore sweatpants and a thin tee-shirt which at one time had “Disney World” written on it.
Her voice, however, calmed Chase’s fears as she spoke to him. “Hello! You must be Chase Woodcock! I’m Lisa Talbot.”
She extended her hand in friendship, but Chase drew back and remained sullen, quite afraid at meeting the woman who would become his new foster mother.
The woman withdrew her hand and addressed the man. “Officer Tudor, won’t you please come in. I’m sure there are a few forms to fill out.” With that she reentered the house, followed by Officer Tudor, who was carrying the suitcase that contained all of Chase’s earthly possessions. Chase lingered out on the porch for a few moments longer. The sky was now growing much darker, and there were only a few people outside in this neighborhood. Chase watched them for a while: a man and his daughter, kicking around a soccer ball, a woman tending the flowers along the walkway, two kids playing catch, an elderly couple walking their dogs.