St Eubrie: Japanese House (642 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 11 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by FuckTheArmy (View user info) at 2006-08-08 08:13:51 EDT
Me? Well Roger Franklin usually keeps as far away from well-to-do folk as I can, nice though they may be, so I'm right up near the other end of town, at 1500 Orange. Good pension from an old union contract, not like the shit people put up with today, so I mostly do charity work if I'm not in the bar. Richard Blackwell, young gentleman that he is, keeps a comfortable enough place, and I quite prefer the new name, though it's been called that for twenty years now. Somehow the civil rights movement took a while to get to this town, 'cos before it was the Dirty Habit, I quite clearly recall it was the Hanging Tree. Someone changed the town records, as sure as night's night.
But I do have a story, if you'd care to hear it.
At the far west end of Cedar Street, there's a well-tended garden. It has neatly trimmed grass, perfect round-cropped hedges, manicured gravel paths between stately trees and shrubs, and not a horizontal line in sight. Being as it is on the edge of town, it's more of a country villa than a simple suburban house.
The building itself rests on stone foundations, and there are no native burial grounds underneath, or any other dirty secrets in the ground; only billion-year-old lodestone, a natural outcrop mostly unrelated to other local geology. Messes with the electric, mostly, and everyone knows it. Makes you wonder why they built the house there. Rising from the pond mist, and there is often mist there, by some quirk of weather, are four massive lacquered wooden columns, one at each corner, supporting the pagoda-style roof of an open plan house. The decking is still there and still square, but the original timber walls were never structural, so in the 70's the owners replaced them all with clear glass, except at the back, where the bedrooms are.
Name of Hirosaka, they're rich out-of-towners, at least seen that way by people who've been here as long as myself; who else would build a place like that? The family's been in the town since just after dubya-dubya-two, least as much as they've settled anywhere. You can tell just lookin' at 'em they got money; they don't even get their car serviced at Sonny's any more. Mind you, they like their food fresh and their service friendly, so they're in Penn's twice a week, regular-like. It's milkshakes for the kids and sushi for momma; pop's away most always. The boys are grown up at college, come home to town once in a while, but young Mary's still in school at Wilbeck. Grandparents caught a lot of flak when they first came here, especially with the candles every August six. I never asked, but I expect they did not appreciate the President's using their country as a test site for the A-bomb.
That Little Boy sent a great shock to the Russians. What with McCarthy and all, I weren't too willin' to admit it to just any folk, but I'd been in the Party. Not the only one in St. Eubrie, either. But that bomb was about when it came clear to me that the Communist Party was just a front for Moscow's foreign policy. These days, mind, I don't give a damn who hears my political bent, I just wish they'd stop going on about terrorism. I keep my nose to the grindstone and my ear to the keyhole, so I know a few things that folks around here don't much care to tell.
A few years back, would have been '89, I was taking a walk with old Marshall; don't know his last name, but he's friendly, for what more respectable folks might call a 'bum'. Says something about the town, I suppose, though it fits in just as neatly with their prejudices. More than one neck around here is redder than my shirt.
Anyways, we were walking down in the cedar forest - down at the west end of Cedar Street, how comes the street got its name - when we realised we were down near the back of what has been called, for the past 50 years, the Japanese house. Being as the children were well behaved, and they had no pets save the Koi in their pond, there is neither a rear fence nor hedge - the rear boundary is delineated by one of their many gravelled pathways, this one up by the trees of the forest, curving this way and that to keep all the untended trees on the forest side.
Now Marshall isn't quite what I'd call one hundred cents to the dollar, so when we heard a noise he just up and bailed. If I were a betting man, which I ain't, I'd wager a good fi'ty he thought it were all in his head, as I did nothing more out of the ordinary than continue walking towards the house. I don't know why, but I was not in the slightest bit startled. I believe curiosity got the better of me that day.
Now, everyone knows radio reception down that end of town is pretty poor, owing to the rock, so I can see how come the poor man got shook when he heard crystal clear music coming out of their house. Now, even tapes get a little fuzzed up in the field generated by all that magnetite, and there isn't a man, woman or child who expects to get a good radio signal. So when I heard a crystal clear orchestra coming through the living room glass, I half expected they'd gone crazy and paid for one to play there.
The only thing was, all you could see through the window was young Mary, in her school dress, sitting there on the floor listening. Clearly, this is what had spooked my pal, but I being a somewhat more reasonable man decided that there must be an explanation. So, figuring that since I could hear it from the back, I should probably be able to hear it from the front, I walked around the property via the street, up the path to the front door, and rang the doorbell.
When Mrs. Hirosaka answered the door, I made mention of the fact that, due to the local lodestone outcrop, I was surprised to hear music playing clearly. I discounted openly the thought that anyone would hire a private orchestra in a place like this, as there are public performances every month or two, where we had met each other before. At this point I asked blatantly how the music was produced.
Recognising as she does that on matters that won't hurt anyone by indiscretion I have been known to talk, she invited me in for a cup of tea, and to show me her brand-new stereo system. Now apparently, while the rock around there messes with the radio signal badly to the point where television isn't an option unless you get cable, and music cassette tapes left out of their cases have been wiped clean, there is another medium that was hitting the market around here at just that time.
Mr Hudson was not at all pleased to discover that the Hirosaka family had bought the first compact disc player in St. Eubrie.
User Reviews
Submitted by Crystle (user info) at 2006-11-01 23:18:57 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Submitted by DrogoRoch (user info) at 2006-08-09 08:12:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Very nice.
Submitted by Stagger_Lee (user info) at 2006-08-09 01:43:36 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by KindaNews (user info) at 2006-08-08 19:13:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Very nice.
Submitted by houseman (user info) at 2006-08-08 16:36:59 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This Eubrie thing rocks.
Submitted by copsucker (user info) at 2006-08-08 16:23:59 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Nice character and scene development!
Submitted by joedaddy (user info) at 2006-08-08 13:53:17 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
for not being homeless or in the military
Submitted by sicosemen (user info) at 2006-08-08 13:02:43 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Auto +2 Smitty.
Submitted by forthewin (user info) at 2006-08-08 10:01:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Yay for Marshall. That's actually the name of the resident bum in the little country town I live near.
Submitted by kaos-king (user info) at 2006-08-08 09:19:44 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
This was a damn good piece.
Fuck, you wove all kinds of shit into this one!
Submitted by rad1101 (user info) at 2006-08-08 08:26:57 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
its been a year