Is Wanting Enough? - Terry J Kunkel - Prologue: A Little Backstory

Prologue:

Past Tense

Paris, France, July 18, 1985 Current Era (CE)

T

hursday, July 18, 1985, nineteen-year-old corporal Thorson Kyeler, met Marlena outside the gates of the United States embassy in Paris, during an anti-nuclear weapons demonstration. It was a warm, muggy day. The type of day meant for picnicking along the Seine with your sweetheart, for presenting your loved one with fresh cut flowers from one of the many boutiques lining the Champs Elysees, or for just walking hand in hand through one of the city’s myriad parks. Thorson Kyeler, eight months out of boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, now at his first duty station, Paris, France, met his future wife outside the US Embassy gates and shot her.

He had been on embassy duty there during the early days of the eco-wars. It was during this time, a Green Peace splinter group, led by a Dakota shaman named Merlin Darkmoon allied with French environmentalists had attempted to storm government buildings throughout the capital city. Their goal: to occupy those buildings until the government agreed to cease nuclear warhead testing in the Southern Pacific.

A week before, in an engagement between the Green Peace fleet and a French frigate, smart torpedoes had been exchanged between the two sides, sinking one of Green Peace ships and crippling the frigate. After that incident, the embassy marines were put on alert.

At fifteen-hundred hours that afternoon, a small group of twenty protesters had gathered outside the gates of the US Embassy. Marlena Merrimac, exchange student from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was observing the demonstration as research for a paper in social dynamics at Sorbonne University.

By 15:15, things had turned ugly when the protesters clashed with a group of thirty-two French patriots bent on denying the environmentalists their rights to free speech. At 15:25, it was patriots: 4, green peacers: 0, as a new playing team took the field. A squad of marines dispatched from the embassy, in the charge of Corporal Kyeler, waded into the melee, armed with tear-gas launchers and riot batons.

The skirmish slowed, as the two sides took stock of the common threat to what they saw as their inalienable rights to maim and injure each other. The two factions of the crowd separated, and as the marines moved in to fill the void, the riotous throng closed in behind them in a classic pincers’ movement. The rioters were as unaware of their collective brilliance as military strategists, as the marines were of the blunder they committed in underestimating the viciousness of the rabble.

The marines circled shoulder-to-shoulder facing outward as they attempted to regroup, but the mob was upon them and gave no time to react. Three marines were down and being pummeled by at least a dozen rioters when Thorson drew his sidearm and raised its muzzle to fire a warning shot. One of the environmentalists seeing him raise the gun to fire, attempted to grab it away from him but only succeeded in pulling his arm down as Thorson’s finger tightened on the trigger releasing the hammer spring. Years later, Thorson would recall the surreal slow motion of the events that followed.

The trip hammer moved forward striking the firing pin mechanism. The firing pin drove into the primer pan of the .45 caliber bullet, igniting the powder charge in front of it. A brief powder flash from the muzzle preceded the hollow sounding explosion of the .45 slug breaching the sound barrier as it left the barrel of the weapon.

Marlena turned toward the sound. Thorson’s arm recoiled as the spent shell casing tumbled lazily after being ejected from the automatic’s chamber. Later, Marlena swore she could see the bullet coming toward her in slow motion, sunlight glinting off its sides as it rifled through the crowd toward her. A moment, an eternity later, she lay face down in the street. The fighting stopped as the stunned crowd looked from her to Corporal Kyeler. He stood dumbfounded, still holding the .45 in a white-knuckled grip at his side. A blanched expression masked his face, as he looked wide-eyed at the still form of Marlena.

This incident would mark the one time in his thirty-year career as a marine that Thorson would fire a weapon at another living being. Concerned for her well-being and ashamed of the fact that he was responsible for nearly killing her, he went to visit her in the Embassy infirmary the next day. Two years later, they walked beneath a canopy of crossed sabers, as man and wife. Each marine on either side of the newlyweds, lowering his sword in salute as they passed.

For years into their sixty-eight year marriage, in the dim lit intimacy of their bedchamber, during the privacy of their nights when they would come to each other not as partners or helpmates in the day-to-day struggles of rent checks and grocery bills, but as something more primal, something more base than the daytime veneer of their lives belied. It was during these interludes, when man met woman, woman met man, that he would reach out to touch the small round scar above her right breast. Tracing fingertips up and over a slender shoulder to the exit wound behind her shoulder blade. He would kiss her wounds, long since scarred over, himself long since forgiven by her for receiving them, and remember that day in Paris when a marine from Parris Island, who was just nineteen and eight months out of boot camp, shot the love of his life.

Marlena after marrying Thorson, finished her college degree over the next two years at various colleges and universities wherever Thorson was stationed.

He was stationed for a year at Iwakuni, Japan, for two years in Manila, for six months TAD in Korea. The list of places they had lived and of the friends they left behind with each new reassignment grew throughout the years each time Thorson re-enlisted. From duty station to duty station, packing, and unpacking, from nondescript base housing to substandard civilian housing she followed him, complacent if not exactly happy in the role of marine wife.

Marlena gave birth to a stillborn boy in the fall of 1989. She never recovered from her grief until late spring 1990, when Peregrine Ulysses Kyeler came into the world squalling and kicking. Marlena named her son for the falcons she watched streaking and diving across the skyline of Chicago as a little girl.

If ever there had been creatures born to fly, it had been the peregrines that nested among the rooftops of Chicago’s skyscrapers. She would sit for hours by the glass doors of her parents’ Lakeshore Drive high-rise watching the aerial ballet of the raptors. She watched one summer morning, as one of the falcons took a pigeon as its first meal of the day.

The sun had tinged early morning clouds a rosy purple as it climbed above the horizon on Lake Michigan. The falcon flying inland, spotted its prey. Tucking its tapered wings ever so slightly to increase speed, it waited with perfect timing until it was just above and behind its target, then with a precision granted only to birds of prey, it rolled inverted, folded its wings completely and dived, neatly snatching the pigeon from midair. Then, she had been able to articulate what moved her to such wonder as she watched this moment of brutal, terrible beauty, but it would be a memory she would carry the rest of her life.

The word peregrine also meant wanderer. A word that she thought succinctly described the nomadic life of a military family.

Thorson, picked their son’s middle name, Ulysses. Being a military man and civil war buff he, held General Ulysses Grant in high esteem. Whatever the general’s personal failings may have been, there was no denying that the man had been a first-rate military strategist. Thorson also was an enthusiast of Greek mythology. Of all the ancient stories from Greece, “The Illiad”, was his favorite piece. Odysseus, the hero of the Trojan War, cursed by the goddess, Athena, spent a decade to return to his native Ithaca and his one true love, Penelope. Thorson knew that Ulysses was the Latin translation for the Greek name Odysseus. Therefore, he was able to combine two of his favorite pastimes with the name choice of Odysseus.

It was while Thorson was on a shipboard detail, Marlena, alone in New Orleans with their newborn son, became interested in the Occult and parapsychology. She had called Brigitte Marson, a friend and navy wife, whose husband was serving aboard the same ship as Thorson, and asked whether she would watch Peregrine for a while to give her a much-needed respite from the constant neediness of a two year old.

She walked aimlessly through the French Quarter, stopping randomly to look in shops to make those adventitious purchases of things she never knew were needed until they were bought. Upon whim, she walked into Madame Bonaparte’s House of Tarocco.

Esmeraude Bonaparte proceeded to do a tarot reading for Marlena. Looking into her soul, she saw a kindred spirit. She saw a woman of great psychic talent who only needed the guidance to ripen her gift to fruition. After Thorson returned from his tour of duty aboard the USS Dubuque, she attended twice-weekly meetings of the New Orleans French Quarter Witches’ coven, presided over by Madame Bonaparte.

Thorson saw Marlena’s fascination with the Occult and New Age movement as a chance for her to get out of the apartment and away from Peregrines constant tirades for a few hours each week. It was a time for him to try unsuccessfully at forming a father-son bond with Peregrine. Even at an early age, Peregrine was aloof and disdained being held or touched, preferring to spend time by himself, playing with his toys and imaginary friends.

The years passed. Their marriage endured the usual storms of life in the twentieth century. Peregrine grew into a young boy, ever more introverted and shy. Six more months and time to pack again. Four more duty stations and finally the recruiting detail in Wisconsin.

Marlena started her own coven that met at her home Thursday evenings. During these meetings, Thorson gladly went to his workshop located in an old shed on their property. Over the years, he had grown increasingly estranged from his wife and any chance to sneak away for a few hours to the workshop was a welcome break from the tedium of her incessant chattering about crystals, potions, and ESP.

In his workshop, Thorson had gotten in touch with his artistic self. He was not sure why he took up arc weld sculpting, but he found that he liked doing it. Whatever he lacked in talent or training he made up for in sheer quantity. No piece of metal, no matter how large or small was safe from his cutting torch.

He started with small projects like the yard flamingos made from spare wrought iron railings. Slowly working up to larger abstract projects. His artistic reach currently culminated in his latest creation: a tyrannosaurus rex, which in a previous life had been a 1988 Nissan wagon. Shortly after he hauled the dinosaur from the shed to the front lawn, the townspeople began to give sidelong looks at Thorson and Marlena whenever the couple ventured into town. They’d quietly whisper about the crazy marine and his witch wife that lived on the little hobby farm outside of town when the couple were out of earshot.

Thorson pretended that he did not care what the townspeople said about him. When the curious or would-be comics down at Lindsey’s Bar good-naturedly laughed about Marlena being a witch, calling her Samantha, while referring to him as Darren, He would simply grunt, shrug and say, “Women.”

Their marriage like a rose garden, once bloomed in the Spring of their passion. It was this passion that produced their son Peregrine. However, like so many gardens that at one time thrived, but due to negligence and indifference, became disheveled and choked by weeds, so it was with Thorsen and Marlena.

Their season in the sun had been a scant 10 years. The decline of romance in their lives had begun about nine years earlier. Still 19 years together, was a successful marriage, after a fashion.

Now in the winter of their marriage, they stayed together more out of momentum, than love. They were complacent. They were comfortable with each other, knowing what and what not to expect from the other. Thorsen had his friends at Lindsey’s and his arc-welded sculptures. His sculpting forms had become increasing bizarre as the years progressed. Marlena had her crystals, mystical chants, and the coven meetings every month under the full moon at a makeshift ‘Stonehenge’ at the crest of Mattock Knoll.

Peregrine, named for a solitary bird of prey, took to solitary ‘flights’ of running the Wisconsin backroads. Running from what he was to what he would become. Always the running and the aloneness—they were always there. The two constant threads winding through his life that he could depend on. Peregrine Ulysses Kyeler, whose name meant handsome wanderer on a long journey, became increasing estranged from his family—from everyone.

Thorsen and Marlena, could not have known just how appropriately they had named their son.