Story from a picture
A story I wrote from a picture on a record album.
Sick of hearing me prattle on about the environment, or politics, or my old car? Me, too! I thought I’d try something different, just for fun, and with the attempt I am creating a new category; “Fiction”.
One of my favorite writing exercises is to look at a picture, and write an entire story from it. This picture is from the cover of the Jethro Tull Aqualung Live benefit concert album. You could probably write a whole anthology of stories from it.
Here for your reading entertainment (I hope) is one:
“AQUALUNG, MY FRIEND…”
People are immersed in everyday life; they buy newspapers to read about stuff that doesn’t happen everyday. So when 140 people including 10 cops attended the funeral of a homeless man, it got my attention. There had to be a lot of column-inches in that story.
I met officer Stephen Dohman at Smiley’s, a diner frequented by cops, reporters, and occasionally politicians trying to connect with either one. I had known him for 2 years, since reporting on a series of muggings in his precinct. He is a patrol cop, covering the Meuller park district with his partner Benny Taylor.
They knew the homeless man; they were there when he died, each putting two bullets in him. It made their attendance at his funeral that much more interesting. My editor thought our readers would want to know why…
“His name was Richard Mosier,” said officer Dohman. “He was an actuary. He worked for an insurance company figuring out risk factors for auto policies. He and his wife and little daughter lived a block away from the park. It was one of the reasons they bought that house. His wife Sandra worked for an advertising company.”
“That’s a pretty nice area,” I said. “How did Mosier wind up homeless? Where’s his wife and daughter?” Just like a cop investigating a case, I’ve learned to ask open-ended questions, and let the other guy talk. He looked past me for a moment, and took a sip from his coffee. A fly landed on his slice of pie, and he waved it away. It circled around for another landing.
Dohman had come to the force years later, from Seattle, and he knew the story as part of the collective consciousness of his precinct. “Mosier blamed himself,” he said. “He let it eat him up inside.”
I waited. For a moment I became aware of the waitress refilling coffee, the clatter of silverware and glasses, and Dohman entering a familiar mental state, where someone has a story to tell and has finally decided to let it out.
“It was Casimir Pulaski day, fifteen years ago, and the schools were closed. His daughter was in kindergarten, and he took the day off just to go have fun with her. I don’t remember where his wife was, probably at work.”
He went on for a long time, telling the story. Some of it I’d heard from other witnesses, but some was new:
His daughter was on the climbing bars with a bunch of other kids. There were other parents around, most looking for some adult conversation. Mosier found himself in an aimless exchange with a woman who ran a home day-care center. He only let his attention wander for a few minutes, and his little girl was gone. Her name was Angela. His little angel.
It had been traumatic for Mosier and wrenching for his wife. The all-too-common pattern repeated itself; night fell, and still no Angela. The combination of hope and dread is corrosive to the mind, to the emotions.
Another day went by, then five days. As hope faded, the combination shifted to dread and pain. Police interviewed people in the park, but there were no children or parents - the park was nearly deserted after the news hit. They went door-to-door, asking for photographs, for any detail no matter how insignificant. They combed the bushes and surrounding woods.
Eventually, a vague description of a suspect emerged. Picture a man in his thirties, medium build, wearing a blue windbreaker and a ball cap. People thought they had seen the little girl get into a blue, four-door car with him. They hadn’t thought anything about it at the time.
Nine more nights came and went for the Mosiers before a detective knocked on their door. A child had been found, but there wasn’t that much to identify. Could Mr and Mrs Mosier come in to provide a DNA sample? There was DNA evidence, too, but the chance of ever matching it up with anyone was slim at best.
Mosier was destroyed, utterly unable to work. His disability insurance had only limited coverage for mental distress, and when it ran out, they began to have financial difficulties. Neither of them went into their daughter’s room. Their house was silent, resounding with the deafening, unspoken accusation; “If I had been with her…”
Half of all marriages break up under ordinary circumstances. Mosier and his wife split, and she transferred to another city. He rented an apartment but his attempts to work even simple jobs failed. One day he found himself standing in Meuller park. And the next day, too.
- -
Becoming a traumatized mental patient hadn’t made Mosier stupid. When he wasn’t recycling cans, he read microfilmed news reports at the library going back thirty years. He began to analyze patterns of child abductions, carrying his calculations around in a notebook stuffed with scavenged newspaper clippings.
Nervous parents at the park complained; who was that old man who was always near the playground? For Mosier no longer looked young; he appeared closer to seventy than forty. The police knew him, of course. To tell the truth they were happy to have his eyes on that playground. If he had been sane, Dohman told me, they would have liked to have him working for them.
It was the fact that Mosier watched adults and not children that reassured the police he was not a danger to anyone. Occasionally he sent a packet of notes to the investigating detective of his daughter’s cold case; license numbers, pictures from the disposable camera he always carried. The detective went through the notes carefully at first, but eventually took to tossing them in a box.
Police began calling him “Aqualung” behind his back, after a character on the cover of a Jethro Tull album. The one time he heard them say it, he exploded; “Don’t call me that!” He objected not to the imagery, but to the line in the song, “eyeing little girls with bad intent”. For obvious reasons Mosier didn’t like that association. But he did resemble the picture, and the name stuck.
Dohman had gotten to know Mosier, and wondered how much longer he would live. Mosier was careless of his health, and made a point of sleeping in a different place every night even in the coldest weather. One day, passers-by began offering him alms, and much later he began to accept. But he never pursued anyone for a donation; he was too proud to beg, and besides it might get him thrown out of the park. And he needed to watch the park.
The police did not know, or most of them did not suspect, the growing certainty in Mosier’s mind. Mosier had convinced himself he had solved his daughter’s murder. He had a grainy photograph of a man, blown up on a color copier from a drugstore print. This person, he was sure, was the man. But the photo was so unclear it could have been anybody.
It was not unclear in Mosier’ mind. He had reconstructed the awful day of his daughter’s disappearance, filling in the gaps with external information, with wishful thinking and the post-analysis of his powerful mind, that had solidified into a mental accretion indistinguishable from actual memory. Mosier knew.
Child abductors, he had learned, are predators. They watch, they wait, they analyze; so Mosier was watching, waiting, and analyzing. He could have taught a graduate-level class in “spotting the goblin”. He read everything he could find on child-abductor behavior. He knew everyone who frequented the playground by sight; he knew which kids were theirs. He knew their cars. He spotted the new arrivals in the neighborhood. He knew the divorcees, and their schedule for having their children; it was all in the notebook written in his miniscule, precise print.
- - -
To him the goblin stood out like an orange snake on a blue rock. One day a car pulled into the curving lot around the playground and a man got out. He was wearing slacks, a tan windbreaker, and a Chicago Cubs ball cap. He walked all around the edge of the park, avoiding the playground. Mosier watched him from his bench, quietly, avoiding notice. At length the man circled around to the edge of the playground and watched the children playing for a few minutes. Then he got back in his car and drove away. Mosier took detailed notes; the man’s description, his car, make and model, color, license number. He wrote; “Possible goblin” next to the entry.
Goblin came back to the park three more times, each time unaware of the homeless man in the long coat gulping huge amounts of information with each casual glance in his direction. One day Goblin stooped to talk briefly and kindly to a little girl; Mosier repositioned himself. But the man got back in his car and drove away.
Mosier slept well that night, lulled by the rhythm of cars passing over the expansion joint of the bridge under which he slept. Soon, he told himself. He would not fail this time.
The little girl with whom Goblin had shared conversation seemed socially isolated from the other children. She was inquisitive and tended to wander. She had no apparent fear of strangers, striking up conversations with other adults. Once she had even talked to Mosier; her mother did not notice. She would probably be Goblin’s victim.
Mosier walked in a wide arc away from the playground as the man chatted with the girl. The child’s mother was out-of-sight reading a magazine, on the other side of the playground and paying scant attention. The man dug into his pocket and offered her a little toy; she accepted it. Mosier could not hear what he was saying, being 70 feet away on a bench near the man’s car, but he knew it was an improbable story about how he was a friend of the girl’s mother, and mother had asked him to do her a favor and give her a ride home.
The man and the girl began to walk toward the car. The little girl was looking up at the man, clutching the toy in one hand and holding his hand with her other hand. He smiled down at her and winked. Mosier was in position, but he appeared distracted, uninterested.
Inside Mosier a long-dormant furnace reignited, pouring white-hot energy into his aching limbs. He rose smoothly, moving behind the man and the girl, keeping his distance, heading in not quite the same direction. He was not playing it ‘by ear’ - he had rehearsed this scenario and many others, reckoning contingencies, actions, and outcomes.
Goblin reached for the car door and looked over his shoulder toward the playground, as Mosier knew he would. For a moment he stood transfixed by the sight of Mosier’s .38 calibre revolver. The little girl looked up too, and screamed.
Mosier said nothing, and squeezed the trigger. The girl jumped back as the man fell beside his car. At the sound of the shot pandemonium erupted in the playground behind; Mosier paid no attention to it. He walked toward the man in long, quick strides, standing over him as the woman retrieved her daughter and beat a hasty retreat. Suddenly the park seemed deserted.
He studied Goblin, who was slumped against the car door with a neat hole in his forehead above his open, dead eyes. He raised the pistol again and slowly fired five more times into the man’s chest. It is hard to guess what he was thinking but witnesses say he did appear to be savoring each shot.
Dohman and Taylor were only a block away when the torrent of 911 calls bounced to their dispatcher. As they pulled into the lot they saw Mosier standing over the man, a pistol at his side. They crouched behind their car doors, demanding Mosier throw down his gun.
He turned toward them and looked down at the gun, a puzzled expression on his face. His finger was still in the trigger guard; his gun was empty, but they did not know that. Each policeman fired his weapon twice, and Mosier fell beside Goblin.
- - - -
“I’m probably not supposed to be telling you this,” said Dohman. His pie was untouched. The waitress had avoided our table; while such conversations were not really so uncommon at the diner, plainly this was an emotional one.
“It wasn’t the guy,” Dohman said. “He wasn’t a match for his daughter’s killer. But the thing is, he matched up for two little girls in Iowa. Mosier didn’t get his goblin, but he got a goblin, all right.”
That’s the part of the story I originally released. When it hit the papers, so did a lively public debate on the morality of vigilante action. An organization of parents of missing children ponied up for Mosier’s funeral, all the while denying that they endorsed what he did. But I had no problem with it. No one was more vigilant than he, except for that first time.
There was more. There were things about the shooting itself that bothered me. Mosier shot Goblin - his real name had been Jack Martin - almost perfectly right between the eyes. It’s a difficult shot; you only attempt it if you are sure.
You have to use up a lot of ammunition to get that sure: Mosier had been practicing. I saw the gun in the police evidence impound; the serial numbers had been filed off, but it was a top-quality weapon and Mosier had kept it clean and oiled. I imagined him in the basement of an abandoned building, burning through one box of ammunition after another. And he didn’t even have a firearm owner’s card. How had he been getting ammunition?
How is it he had been picked up by the police a half-dozen times and no one ever noticed the gun? Police don’t miss guns. And how did he get the gun in the first place? I couldn’t resist asking Dohman.
“Where did he get the gun?” I asked.
There is a moment when you know someone is lying, but you can’t prove it. The cadence of their storytelling changes, and they shake their heads differently. Their throats constrict imperceptably, raising the pitch of their voices just a little. Their eye contact seems just a little more measured, deliberate, as if they are trying to act normally. They use more words than necessary.
“I don’t know,” said Dohman, shaking his head slightly. “I don’t - I really have no idea.”
© 2006 by George Wiman; all rights reserved
Wow. Powerful story, beautifully told. I loved the terse sentences, the dark tone ... this had all the feeling of film noir. Lovely writing ... I’m glad Diane suggested I come for a visit.
Posted by Nilbo on 08/04/06 at 10:15 AMWow. That is great.
Posted by cubic rooms on 08/04/06 at 12:16 PMI’m so glad Diane sent me this link. You’ve written a great story—-I agree, rather film noir-ish…Although it would also make a great script for Law and Order. Great work!
Posted by goldenlucy on 08/04/06 at 09:39 PMThis is your best work yet, George….
Posted by Mother on 08/04/06 at 11:02 PMgreat work, thanks
Posted by GUYK on 08/05/06 at 08:22 PMoohh, very good. when is chapter 2?
Posted by Laura on 08/05/06 at 10:23 PMWow, that was powerful and very interesting. I couldn’t stop reading. So when are you going to pitch the script…
Posted by webs05 on 08/06/06 at 01:31 AMGot here via GuyK… Wow. You had me reading the whole thing without stopping.
Posted by vw bug on 08/06/06 at 08:56 AMAnd I got here via vw bug. The story is riveting. Waiting to see if there is a sequel.
Posted by Tink on 08/06/06 at 09:14 AMI just linked over from Nils’ site. That is a great short story. Do some more, okay?
Posted by Squirl on 08/06/06 at 11:09 AMGot here via GuyK. and I’m happy I followed that link.
I was a LEO for twelve years in a small PD, and the details of the story rang true to life. I agree with goldenlucy, this could be the best Law & Order script thats been aired in years.
Please continue writing stories like this.
Posted by Delftsman3 on 08/06/06 at 04:23 PMExcellent story. Riveting, I hope to read more fiction from you in the future.
Posted by momma on 08/06/06 at 07:59 PMThank you for all the wonderful comments and many links! I really appreciate it.
It also gave me a chance to go out and see all of your blogs, which is like a little trip around the world from my kitchen.Based on the demand, I think it’s likely we’ll be hearing from the reporter again. Based on my work schedule, it’ll probably be in about a month.
Posted by george.w on 08/07/06 at 06:14 AMVery very interesting story !!
Posted by abhilasha on 08/07/06 at 02:20 PMNow that was a very good read. I’ve paid (and later resented the money) to read much worse.
Posted by Peter McGrath on 08/07/06 at 04:20 PMYou write a good story, DoF. It held me.
Posted by LuckyJohn19 on 08/07/06 at 06:42 PMDOF, this was absolutely riveting. Lovely work!
Posted by GeekMom on 08/07/06 at 07:22 PMVery well done! I loved using this technique with students when I was a teacher.
Posted by Mrs SEB on 08/07/06 at 08:23 PMWOW DOF!! What a great read. Linked over from SEB’s site because I haven’t visited MrsDOF’s as of yet. You write very good. Haven’t heard of anyone using that technique to write since I was in grade school; and you did a fantastic job. Looking forward to more - wow!!
Posted by Darlene on 08/07/06 at 10:33 PMExcellent, DOF. A wonderfully and powerfully evocative story. Kudos.
Posted by Brent Rasmussen on 08/07/06 at 10:51 PMThank you. That was the best short story that I’ve read in a long, long time.
Posted by Bob on 08/09/06 at 01:43 AMwonderful story…..hope you do more!
Found you through Delftsman3.Posted by Jean on 08/11/06 at 06:41 PMI just visited Jean’s blog and enjoyed the post Lunch at 7-11. It’s a very different take on the related theme of a homeless person’s life. Check it out!
Posted by george.w on 08/11/06 at 10:19 PM
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