Dreams The Ragman Read Free Page A

Ragman’s beckoning hands, reaching from the shadows, fingers gnarled and dirty and horrifying as his diseased mind.
    Earlier that night so many years ago...at Caleb’s house…I stood waiting near the door in the kitchen, feeling awkward, as I always did in his house. Caleb’s father, a man of few words, greeted me with a brusque nod while sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper, the aroma from their recent dinner still lingering in the air. Never entirely certain what he did for a living, I knew it had something to do with the construction business, but he looked more like a policeman from some old French film. An impeccably dressed, trim little fellow with beady eyes, a pencil-thin mustache and ashen skin, hair dyed black and combed away from his forehead, he seemed perpetually suspicious and disapproving of me.
    Caleb’s mother was more overtly intimidating, perhaps due to her unusual height, general size and booming voice. A woman many might describe as ‘big-boned,’ I never saw her in anything but formal dresses, heels and jewelry, which she wore about the house like a wife from some 1950s TV show. On that night she’d been busying herself filling the dishwasher. Per usual, she was more talkative and outwardly sociable than her husband, but our exchange felt more like an interrogation than a conversation.
    Caleb’s parents were an odd couple to be sure, but I knew from some of the stories Caleb had told me that his home life with them was anything but comical.
    “You’re lucky,” he used to tell me. “Your mother and grandparents are cool. I can’t breathe without making sure it meets my parents’ approval, which, of course, it never does.”
    It was true that Caleb and I came from very different backgrounds, but he’d always mistakenly considered mine to be some sort of single-parent paradise existence. I was an only child. Caleb had an older brother and two older sisters. My mother, a teacher employed by the local school system, was a good communicator and generally demonstrative. Caleb’s parents were cold and often harsh. I was given tremendous amounts of freedom as a teenager. Caleb had to steal any freedom he had. On the surface, it looked (particularly to other kids my age) like mine was a charmed life. But it wasn’t, because while I knew and never questioned that my mother loved me, she was a busy woman with a busy life. When she made time for me it was genuine but limited, and it wasn’t until years later, as a grown man in the throes of anger management classes and appointments with my psychologist, that I came to accept that in many ways, I’d been neglected. For me the problem had always been reconciling love with neglect. So while Caleb spent time wishing his parents would leave him the hell alone, I’d spent just as much wishing my mother would step in and notice me.
    Like me, Caleb was more or less a loner in high school. Caleb was quick-witted, had a razor sharp tongue and usually waged verbal warfare against his adversaries, while I tended more toward the physical. What I respected most about him back then was his uncanny ability to shrug things off, to rise above it all like a bird drifting among the clouds, gazing at the world below with sad but vigilant eyes. I was infantry, a foot soldier right in the shit, never missing an opportunity at conflict or what I was so sure then was righteous indignation. Even then I’d been angry. I’d struggled with it for most of my life. There were times it helped and times it cost me dearly, but regardless, I was good at physical conflict. I was never a bully, but I didn’t stand down for anyone or anything. Even when I was in over my head, a beating was preferable to running. And just as I dished out quite a few beatings, I was on the other end of them numerous times as well, and even into adulthood, bore scars and marks from those days, including a crooked nose and a section of the little finger on my left hand that no longer had