Staying In Signal, 8
May. 1st, 2011 05:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
morrobay1990Title: Staying In Signal, 8
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morrobay1990
Genre: au
Warning:
Word count: 900
Disclaimer: Jack & Ennis are AP's
♥ Jack
Comments/opinions on this one would be greatly appreciated.
...Jack seemed fair enough with his curly hair and quick laugh, but for a small man he carried some weight in the haunch and his smile disclosed buckteeth...
Ennis, high-arched nose and narrow face, was scruffy and a little cave-chested...
When he was small, he loved to hear the story of how he got his name.
“Mama, why'd you name me Laramie?”
She stood at his bedside, “Darlin boy, you heard that story a hundred times, ain't you tired of it?”
Ruth always said that before she sat on his bed, pushed his pajama top up and scratched his back as he closed his eyes and waited for her soft voice to send him to sleep...the story was always a little different, but he didn't know...what mattered to him was her presence, her loving touch, her soothing voice...the words themselves were secondary to him...but they transported Ruth away from a harsh present and back to her childhood.
“My best friend, Margery, moved away from here...thought I'd never get over missin her...we did everything together...then she was gone...Lord, it was hard getting on without her. Her daddy took the whole family and went up north...someplace we never heard of...to work, and she sent me postcards of the towns they went through on the way up there. My favorite one had a picture of a palomino stallion, wearing a bridle covered in heavy silver...prettier than any jewelry I ever saw...and a girl was standing next to him wearin a white cowboy hat, and a bright red scarf around her neck...”
She would get lost in her own words...and wouldn't notice that her voice had softened, that her hand had stopped moving on Laramie's back, “Mama, scratch.”
“...and she was smilin and so pretty...I wanted to be that girl, standin there with my pretty horse. That card was from Laramie, Wyoming. I used to dream about going to Laramie and meetin that girl, bein friends with her, and how she'd let me ride her horse...I still have that postcard somewhere..."
In truth, it was so much more than a child's daydream...it was a desperate desire to get out of the bayou, away from the swamp where everything was too close together...there was no space, no room to move, to breathe...the need to get away from the suffocating drape of moss hanging from the live oaks...the way the cypress knees rose up out of the water like amputated limbs...the stifling humidity that enveloped you like a soggy blanket...and the river that never flowed.
“Wyoming's a big, wide open space, I seen pictures...you can really stretch out there...and I heard the sky is so high...” She sighed, pulled his pajama top down and smoothed it with her hand.
"When you was born, just popped inta my head that I should name you Laramie, after a far-away place that sounded so perfect.”
“Well, some day we'll go to Laramie...I promise.”
When Ruth died shortly after his twentieth birthday, he found that postcard among her things...and he swore to her and to himself that he would go...and he had gone.
But it was just another city to him and without his mother to share it with, it meant nothing to him now.
Laramie Lafontaine,voted handsomest boy in his small high school class but knowing that title wouldn't carry much weight at home, had spent his twenty and one half years living on, and living off, the Louisiana bayou.
His young life was complicated by his circumstances. He grew up exceptionally close to his mother...missed his wayward if loving father, rarely home...felt a loneliness that he couldn't explain to himself or anyone else.
But he tried to make the most of what he'd been given, didn't feel sorry for himself, moved easily through the small high school, making temporary friends and mediocre grades.
He had more than his share of girlfriends and treated them all with a sort of kindly neglect, though they, down to the last, fell head over heels in love with him and he left a sea of broken hearts behind him, without ever knowing or caring.
And he graduated as a six foot four inch tall handsome boy, with wit and charm that had been a gift to him, and had gotten him into and out of all sorts of trouble...and trained to do absolutely nothing.
Part of his history, and that of all river dwellers, was voodoo. They believed it, they practiced it, they did not share it with outsiders, they did not feel a lack of spiritual presence in their souls.
On the contrary, the children grew up with the fabled stories of the High Priestess Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen who held her meetings near Bayou St. John...meetings, they heard (not from parents, but passed down among the older children) where they would dance naked all night...even the women...they'd dance naked, and work themselves into rapturous frenzies...frenzies from whence came their power to influence love, hate, goodness, evil, and death.
Laramie was coming up on his twenty-first birthday...he had left everything familiar behind and in a small carpetbag he'd brought with him some clothes, a well-worn leather-bound book of spells, and one highly potent potion (both of which he fervently believed in) passed down from his long-dead grandmother who had claimed to have attended a midnight meeting at Bayou St. John with Marie Laveau, though other family members had scoffed at that, and an old postcard of Laramie, Wyoming.
And now he was driving north through Wyoming with no real destination in mind...maybe Canada.
And on his way to nowhere in particular, he would drive through Cedar Bluff.
Author:
morrobay1990Genre: au
Warning:
Word count: 900
Disclaimer: Jack & Ennis are AP's
♥ Jack
Comments/opinions on this one would be greatly appreciated.
...Jack seemed fair enough with his curly hair and quick laugh, but for a small man he carried some weight in the haunch and his smile disclosed buckteeth...
Ennis, high-arched nose and narrow face, was scruffy and a little cave-chested...
When he was small, he loved to hear the story of how he got his name.
“Mama, why'd you name me Laramie?”
She stood at his bedside, “Darlin boy, you heard that story a hundred times, ain't you tired of it?”
Ruth always said that before she sat on his bed, pushed his pajama top up and scratched his back as he closed his eyes and waited for her soft voice to send him to sleep...the story was always a little different, but he didn't know...what mattered to him was her presence, her loving touch, her soothing voice...the words themselves were secondary to him...but they transported Ruth away from a harsh present and back to her childhood.
“My best friend, Margery, moved away from here...thought I'd never get over missin her...we did everything together...then she was gone...Lord, it was hard getting on without her. Her daddy took the whole family and went up north...someplace we never heard of...to work, and she sent me postcards of the towns they went through on the way up there. My favorite one had a picture of a palomino stallion, wearing a bridle covered in heavy silver...prettier than any jewelry I ever saw...and a girl was standing next to him wearin a white cowboy hat, and a bright red scarf around her neck...”
She would get lost in her own words...and wouldn't notice that her voice had softened, that her hand had stopped moving on Laramie's back, “Mama, scratch.”
“...and she was smilin and so pretty...I wanted to be that girl, standin there with my pretty horse. That card was from Laramie, Wyoming. I used to dream about going to Laramie and meetin that girl, bein friends with her, and how she'd let me ride her horse...I still have that postcard somewhere..."
In truth, it was so much more than a child's daydream...it was a desperate desire to get out of the bayou, away from the swamp where everything was too close together...there was no space, no room to move, to breathe...the need to get away from the suffocating drape of moss hanging from the live oaks...the way the cypress knees rose up out of the water like amputated limbs...the stifling humidity that enveloped you like a soggy blanket...and the river that never flowed.
“Wyoming's a big, wide open space, I seen pictures...you can really stretch out there...and I heard the sky is so high...” She sighed, pulled his pajama top down and smoothed it with her hand.
"When you was born, just popped inta my head that I should name you Laramie, after a far-away place that sounded so perfect.”
“Well, some day we'll go to Laramie...I promise.”
When Ruth died shortly after his twentieth birthday, he found that postcard among her things...and he swore to her and to himself that he would go...and he had gone.
But it was just another city to him and without his mother to share it with, it meant nothing to him now.
Laramie Lafontaine,voted handsomest boy in his small high school class but knowing that title wouldn't carry much weight at home, had spent his twenty and one half years living on, and living off, the Louisiana bayou.
His young life was complicated by his circumstances. He grew up exceptionally close to his mother...missed his wayward if loving father, rarely home...felt a loneliness that he couldn't explain to himself or anyone else.
But he tried to make the most of what he'd been given, didn't feel sorry for himself, moved easily through the small high school, making temporary friends and mediocre grades.
He had more than his share of girlfriends and treated them all with a sort of kindly neglect, though they, down to the last, fell head over heels in love with him and he left a sea of broken hearts behind him, without ever knowing or caring.
And he graduated as a six foot four inch tall handsome boy, with wit and charm that had been a gift to him, and had gotten him into and out of all sorts of trouble...and trained to do absolutely nothing.
Part of his history, and that of all river dwellers, was voodoo. They believed it, they practiced it, they did not share it with outsiders, they did not feel a lack of spiritual presence in their souls.
On the contrary, the children grew up with the fabled stories of the High Priestess Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen who held her meetings near Bayou St. John...meetings, they heard (not from parents, but passed down among the older children) where they would dance naked all night...even the women...they'd dance naked, and work themselves into rapturous frenzies...frenzies from whence came their power to influence love, hate, goodness, evil, and death.
Laramie was coming up on his twenty-first birthday...he had left everything familiar behind and in a small carpetbag he'd brought with him some clothes, a well-worn leather-bound book of spells, and one highly potent potion (both of which he fervently believed in) passed down from his long-dead grandmother who had claimed to have attended a midnight meeting at Bayou St. John with Marie Laveau, though other family members had scoffed at that, and an old postcard of Laramie, Wyoming.
And now he was driving north through Wyoming with no real destination in mind...maybe Canada.
And on his way to nowhere in particular, he would drive through Cedar Bluff.
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stumble upon
Date: 2011-05-02 01:49 am (UTC)Re: stumble upon
Date: 2011-05-02 04:42 pm (UTC)Re: stumble upon
Date: 2011-05-19 11:48 pm (UTC)I've been getting a lot of requests to update Staying In Signal and I'm taking "requests" for how people would like the story to go. I'm sending this to everyone who left a comment on Chapter 8.
So, if you want to, reply to this with your view on how you'd like the story to go, i.e. Laramie = bad guy or good guy, idea for where you'd like to see the story go, etc.
Not saying I'll use your ideas, but thought this would be interesting, to get input from readers who are thoughtful enough to take the time to leave me comments.
thanks
Morrobay1990
Re: stumble upon
Date: 2011-05-19 11:57 pm (UTC)If you want to send ideas, my email is morrobay@austin.rr.com
thanks