The Biscuit

 The Biscuit

  

My third shift meal break was scheduled for 3:30 in the morning and I was more than ready for it. It had been an unusually active Wednesday night on the “graveyard shift”, so I hadn’t had time to take a break since it started.  I had been on one stupid call after another all night.  Nothing had been very interesting, just the usual domestic complaints and a couple of fender-bender traffic accidents.

Now it was 3:20AM and I was as hungry as a starving wino. The radio traffic had finally quieted down some, so I headed toward the huddle house on High Point Road to get me a “Big Boy” breakfast.  I groaned aloud as my radio crackled and the dispatcher said, “Car 420, are you near to I-40?”  My stomach wanted me to lie, but my conscience would not let me. Thinking that the dispatcher must be psychic, I pressed the talk button and said, “Car 420, I just drove under I-40 on High Point Road”. After a brief pause, she told me to swing back on I-40 East bound and see if I can find a car off the road in the bushes. It should be between High point Road and Randleman Road.  I acknowledged with the obligatory 10-4 that probably sounded a little grumpy. I get grumpy when I’m hungry...

Please order this complete e-book http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=William+T.+Moyer

Not A Little Angel

Not A Little Angel

After our summer in Blowing Rock, N.C. we moved back in with Aunt Eliza and Uncle Bing.  Mom reopened the Jack and Jill Playschool and I went back to my original elementary school about two blocks away.  The artistic pilgrimage mom took for that year must have satisfied her inner being for now.  She seemed to settle back to normal, well as normal as possible for mom. There was a lot of tension between mom and Aunt Eliza, but they seemed to solve it by avoiding each other all the time. Not an easy thing for them to do when they live in the same house.

That was the summer I learned about the joys of capitalism and about the mystique of girls. I guess I was about eleven years old.  I started my capitalistic career by doing yard work for people in the neighborhood after school at a very reasonable price.  When I had enough money saved from these odd jobs, I invested in my very own used lawn mower from a guy down the street for twelve dollars. I got it running and then started my lawn mowing business.  It took me a while to acquire eight yards to mow each week that summer. Most of these yards belonged to elderly neighbors. I got my customers by going door to door and charging about half of what they had been paying to adult yardmen and I did a better job by providing personal and extra service.

I mowed these lawns every other week or so after school in the spring and fall. I worked full time in the summer months for an average of five dollars a yard.  Forty dollars a week back then, for a kid my age, was very good money. Mowing yards was great. I felt like I had been doing it all my life. I found a picture of me when I was two years old with a push lawn mower. Maybe it was my destiny.

 How much money I made by mowing lawns I kept secret from the rest of my family.  They were on a need to know basis.  Nobody in the family ever kept tabs on me anyway, so it was easy to have a secret. During the summer I would leave home early in the morning and not come home until after dark.  No one ever asked where I had been or what I was doing.

I discovering that I liked girls one afternoon that summer. I was on my way home after mowing a couple of yards, when I ran into two older girls from my elementary school. I could tell that they were far wiser than I was.  They were very pretty and I was impressed, because they were both smoking cigarettes.  I thought that was very cool. They actually stopped and started a conversation with me.  That had never happened before. One of the girls was holding a book of matches and had a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. “Do you want to see a magic trick”, she said.  I said “Sure, I like magic.” She said, “I will bet you a quarter that I can use my magic ability to make a match burn twice”...

Please order this complete e-book http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=William+T.+Moyer

A Christmas Miracle

A Christmas Miracle

Christmas Eve on the night shift is always very quiet.  Most of the bad guys are at home with family and friends, just like the honest folks. Crooks have to have Christmas too. My main responsibility, when not answering radio calls is checking buildings in the downtown commercial area for break-ins. From 10PM Christmas Eve to 8AM on Christmas Morning, I patrolled monotonously, looking for signs of break-ins or suspicious activity.  Patrolling is sort of like hunting or fishing.  There are long boring times interspersed with brief periods of excitement. My wife always makes fun of me when I just start patrolling aimlessly, just driving where the mood takes me, when the family is in the car. This Christmas Eve there had been no excitement at all. Like I said, even criminals like to spend Christmas Eve with their loved ones.

I planned on getting off in a few hours when my shift ended. I was going home and having Christmas with my wife and two year old little daughter, before I went to bed for the day. When I was a kid I thought staying up all night was exciting, but not so much now.  Third shift was usually sort of peaceful, but Christmas Eve is even more peaceful and the most difficult thing I had to do was try to stay awake.

On the outer perimeter of my patrol zone was a large commercial complex that had been abandoned years ago and now sat in decay.  I always drove around it to check for trespassers or frozen winos.  I turned off my headlights and slowly coasted in behind the old unsafe and haunted looking structure. There was a bright moon so I could see where I was going without any problem. I flipped the switch that turned off my break lights and backup lights and came to a quiet stop.

As I sat in my warm patrol car looking at the old falling down three story structure, I thought about how my little girl, Jennifer, would be all excited when she opened her presents that Santa Claus would leave under our Christmas tree tonight.  She was still too young to understand it all, but her eyes would be sparkling anyway tomorrow morning. While I am out here working, I know my wife, Leah, has put all the little presents under the tree for our little girl. I volunteered to work tonight, so that some of the guys on my squad with older kids could stay home with their families. I’ll probably get home before Leah and Jennifer wake up tomorrow. I have never been a big fan of Christmas myself. I had a few bad Christmas experiences when I was a kid, but once you have a kid of your own all that changes. Christmas is all about the children.

As I daydreamed about Christmas morning, I thought that I could barely make out a dim glow coming from a third story window of the old building.  I knew there was no electricity on in the building so it couldn’t be an electric light. It wasn’t moving so it probably wasn’t a person with a flashlight...

Please order this complete e-book http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=William+T.+Moyer

The Early Years

The Early Years

I was born a couple of years after World War II had ended, during the big “baby Boom”, on August 4^th, 1947 in the small southern town of Leakesville, North Carolina. It’s a picturesque little mill town sitting on the banks of the “Dan River” in the northern part of North Carolina. Almost all of my mother’s relatives still live in Leakesville, but a few years ago they changed the town’s name to Eden. Doctor Frank King, my great grandfather on my mother’s side, started the first bank in town over one hundred years ago and his large Victorian house on South Bridge Street was the first one to have indoor plumbing and electricity. He evidently was a big fish in a little pond. I think he pretty much owned the whole town. What he didn’t own he controlled through his bank. He was given the name Doctor, because he was the seventh son of a seventh son. That’s some kind of a tradition. When he died of old age, the in-laws, the dreaded Barker family, stole all of the inheritance from the rightful heirs. That is why we were so poor when I was growing up. At least that’s what I’ve been told since childhood. All my older relatives still act like they are “Old Rich” without the rich part. They look down their noses at anyone that is “Nuevo Rich”.

Little boys don’t think about rich or poor. I never really thought about how poor we were or all the problems mom had to overcome until many years later.  Like all little boys, I was too busy playing and having fun to think deeply about things. When I reminisce about my childhood, now that I am older, all of the characters of my youth and their motives seem quite obvious to me.

When I was two or three years old we moved to Greensboro, North Carolina and lived in a government assisted housing project called “Morningside Homes”. My very first memory is sitting under the outside stairs in the housing project, dressed only in a cloth diaper and eating handfuls of dirt.  I remember marveling at how it ground between my teeth. This was evidently right after my father had abandoned us and taken off to Panama.  He supposedly left to find work as an electrician and we never heard from him again.  I suspect living with mom was pretty difficult and my brother being born with serious birth defects was too hard for a weak guy like him to tough it out.  The child support law back then must have been pretty slack.  Even if my mom had known where dear old dad was, I doubt that he would have helped us out.  So she had to struggle to earn a living and to rely on the State of North Carolina and on generous relatives to survive. That is why we were living in the “Housing Project”.

When I got older, I learned that my father was a bigamist, as well as an asshole. He had been married twice before he married my mother, unknown to her, and had a son with each wife. He never bothered to divorce any of his wives.

Mom and dad met at the end of WWII, when my dear old dad was in the hospital where my mom was volunteering.  Everyone was doing their part back then. My father was in the 82^nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army and saw a lot of action in the Pacific theater of war. The only thing I have from him is a Samurai sword he brought back from the war that he forgot to take with him when he left us.

He had been injured during a training exercise after the war had ended. He was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina waiting to be discharged. When on a training parachute jump, his main parachute did not open and he had to use his reserve parachute.  Evidently he waited a little to long before opening the reserve. He hit a tree top and suffered some serious injuries. Well, he and mom fell in love and got married. I was born about a year later and my little brother Jimmy was born a year and a half after I was born.  Jimmy had some major birth defects and went through a dozen operations before he was one year old.

After he abandoned us, dad went to Panama to work as a power linesman and married a woman there named Lea.  They eventually moved to Las Vegas and had a son named Billy and a daughter named Yolanda.  Billy died in an accident at a service station where he worked part time when he was sixteen years old. I have no idea what happened to my half sister Yolanda. He died of a heart attack in Las Vegas when he was in his fifties.  I have never met any of my half brothers or my half sister.

Morningside Homes was a large apartment complex that housed many “down on their luck” families getting government assistance like us.  The residents back then in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s were about equally split between black families and white families.

I remember that my mother worked part time at two different jobs and had a vast array of baby sitters that would come in and watch us while she was gone.  Thinking back now, I can recall that it was pretty dangerous living in the project.  This was something I did not grasp as a kid. My brother and I ran around the project all day barefooted and I can remember him cutting his foot pretty bad on a broken beer bottle one day.  It sure was a different time back then.

One day I remember vividly that there was a knock on the apartment door and I toddled over with my favorite little toy truck in my hand and opened the door. An older kid was standing there and he grabbed my favorite little toy truck out of my hands and ran away with it.  I can still remember standing there, looking out in disbelief, as he disappeared around the corner, my little toy truck clutched in his grimy hands.  I never forgot that experience and to this day I am very suspicious of all five and six year old kids.

I realize now that my Aunt Eliza and Uncle Bing were responsible for rescuing us from the housing project. Aunt Eliza was my mom’s sister. When she and her husband Bing, a retired Army Colonel, returned from Formosa, now called Taiwan, where he had been stationed since the end of World War II, they bought a very large house in a nice quiet neighborhood.  The next thing I know, we moved out of the project and in with them.

Aunt Eliza was a stout woman with knee high stockings that always seemed to have falling down.  She loved my little brother Jimmy like he was her own child. I had the feeling that the only reason we were allowed to move in with them was because of my little brother.  Jimmy was born with serious birth defects and he had already survived about twelve operations before he was two years old.  All the operations were paid for by the “March of Dimes”, they are a great charity. 

The doctors told mom, when Jimmy was born, that he would not live for a month.  When he lived past a month they said he would not live past two years. When he did, they said he would never walk. When he did, she quit listening to them....

Please go to 

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=William+T.+Moyer

  for the complete book.