The Freight Train of Love
by John Klawitter
When true love comes along, you’re just a bug on the tracks.
I am author John Klawitter, and I’m presenting my novel The Freight Train of Love on the Boomer Lit Friday Blog Hop http://boomerlitfriday.blogspot.com sponsored by the Boomer Lit Group on Goodreads.com
The hero of The Freight Train of Love, the highly successful action-thriller novelist Jack Larch, was born in the thick of WWII, but even though he is a so-called boomer baby, he doesn’t see himself that way. Jack thinks he’s found the fountain of youth. With three or four wives behind him, Jack’s on-again off-again girlfriend of the past ten years is understandably hesitant to commit, even though she has a growing affection for the cranky old genius. But Jack’s wildly carefree youth is now coming back to haunt him in violent and murderous ways…spelling disaster not for Jack himself, but for anyone showing they might be falling for him.
Here are a few lines from The Freight Train of Love:
His small study desk was the usual
mess. I paid his bills, gathered his
checks for deposit and read his letters, which were mostly fan mail except for
one. This one must have slipped behind
the others, because it was dated right after New Years day, the first week in
January. It was sad, in a way, because
it was from the widow of an old army buddy, informing Jack that his friend had
died. See there, how little I knew about the Jack-ster! He’d had another actual friend beside me, and
I hadn’t even known it. I stacked the
open letters in a pile with the silver letter opener on top of them. Jack would come up later in the day, put the
letter opener on the shelf where it belonged and sweep the letters into the
waste can without reading them.
Hey, I was done! I jumped to my feet and snapped off the green
shade reading lamp on his desk. Then I
bounded down the stairs, headed for the door.
Free at last! I could practically taste the
orange Jamba Juice I was going to have for breakfast. I paused on the way out.
“Can I drive your new bird?”
“You can drive my bird any time,”
Eddie chuckled, but I pursed my lips at him.
That wiped the quick grin off his face.
Eddie’d had his shot with me, and he’d blown it.
I gave my voice that school-girlish,
pleading tone, and push my full red lips into a sexy pout, “Please, Jack. Please, please, please, please…?”
It was a good act, but Jack was
definitely not in the mood.
“No, Clair-Bear,” he growled at
me. “Christ, my new car’s a classic.”
I tossed my honey-blonde curls.
“Jack, don’t be such a bastard. It’s not new and it’s not a classic.”
“Marilyn Monroe owned that car, and
she hardly ever drove it. It was her personal
car.”
“Jack, a couple days ago you put my
car on life support.”
There wasn’t much he could say to
that. He sighed, “If you have to go out,
take the Jag.”
I looked over at Eddie. We’d developed our own language. He did a little sideways tilt of his head and
a brief squint of his face combined with a shrug that meant Let it pass.
“No bird for you, Clair,” Jack said
again for effect.
I gave Eddie another look, this one
that said I was thinking I’d like to tell Jack where to stuff his bird. But I pulled myself back from the edge, the
way I generally did with the Larch-ster.
The cream-yellow Jag was a sweet little number in its own right (Jack
ran around telling everybody it was once owned by one of the stars on General
Hospital), and, after all, I needed a ride, and the Jag was light-years better
than a taxi.
“Oh, all right,” I told him, giving
my voice just enough push so he could figure I was not amused. I put on a show, flouncing through the study
like I’d gotten a mad on. My real aim
was to make my getaway before Jack had time to change his mind, but then I
remembered the letter from his dead friend’s widow. I paused, framed in the doorway that led from
the study to the great room, a huge dining hall with a giant fireplace and a
long, heavy table that could seat twenty-six people if they owned the right
film credits or maybe had been nominated for an Oscar.
“You got a letter from Miami,” I
told him.
“The town sent me a letter?”
I’ve already told you; Jack can be a
real bastard. I bit my lip, struggling
to keep my temper. “No, Jack. The girl.”
“It’s Mi-a Mi-i. Mia My.”
He repeated the name for emphasis, then paused, thinking about it. “Jesus, now you read my mail?”
“I’ve read your mail for years,
remember? You let it pile up. Checks from publishers, threats from crazy
people—everything.”
“Yeah, yeah. What did Mia My say?”
Jack wasn’t really listening. His mind was miles and continents away. He was in the southern hemisphere, marching
along with Dunk Stingray as the heroic fellow sauntered out of the barren Andes
foothills after dispatching three Bulgarian assassins.
“Her husband died,” I told him.
I have no idea how those three words
will affect Jack. I was just passing on
the news from a letter he obviously hadn’t cared enough about to open, even
though it had been sitting on the cluttered oak secretary desk in his bedroom
for months. He was in another of his
foul moods, I had his permission to use the Jag, and all I wanted now was to
get out of the study before some other bad thing happened. But I wasn’t fast enough.
Jack stood up with a sudden jerking
motion and shouted without turning around to face me. He was half-crouched over and his sudden
piercing cry was that of a man with a big spear or stage-four cancer in his
guts. The harshness in his voice
startled Eddie, and it was more than enough to freeze me in my tracks.
“What?! NO!!
It can’t be!! How?” Jack screamed
his anguish, talking more to God or the devil than anyone in the room. “How could this happen?!”
As I’ve said, I’d been around Jack
for quite a while, competing with the fast young crowd that wants to hang with
‘the new Hemingway,’ as
he likes to be called. In that moment
I’m sure I looked every bit my nearly thirty-six years…and more. My eyes darted from Jack to Eddie. I was feeling uncertain, and even afraid—not
of Jack , but for him.
“Some rich kid lost control of his
daddy’s SUV,” I told him. “From what Mi-a Mi-i wrote, I think he
saved her when he pushed her out of the way.”
Jack sagged back in his chair.
“Yeah,” he said to himself, talking
in a low, defeated voice, “That’s something he would do.”
I was staring at Jack, shaking my
head, the fun sucked out of my day.
Eddie looked out the window and didn’t say anything. I walked back across the huge open area and
sat next to Jack in the leopard print chair I use when I have to over-the-shoulder
proofread for him, and after a while I gently ran one hand through his unruly
stand up hair.
“Jack, I honestly didn’t know,” I
told him. “You never write him.”
“I send Christmas cards,” he
grumbled. He glared at me as if
everything was my fault, “Go do your shopping.”
I knew him well enough to let the
thoughtless, abrasive side of his personality slide on by. It was part of survival in The House of Jack. I didn’t move. I could hear the antique windup clock ticking
in another room as the silence lengthened between the three of us.
“What the hell, Jackie-poo,” I said
after a while. “I’ve got more purses
than I know what to do with.”
To read the reviews on The Freight Train of Love:
http://www.amazon.com/Freight-Train-Love-Michael-Klawitter/dp/0983037213/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363105591&sr=1-1&keywords=john+klawitter
And for more about the author click on: www.johnklawitter.com
And please check out the other samples of Boomer Lit at http://boomerlitfriday.blogspot.com.
