the Wakefield Doctrine

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is our contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise, guided by the simplest of rules: use the prompt word and tell a story in exactly six sentenceseses.

[N.B. I’d almost forgotten the story thread involving Ian Devereaux being ‘requested’ by Lou to do some background research on Cyrus St. Loreto. This was at the outset of the merger proposal from the Bernebau Company to the Bottom of the Sea Strip Club and Lounge. I’ll try to find the link back. First, I got, like, eighteen sentences to pare down. In my defense, our Mr. Ceasare simply writes himself and anyone else he cares to interact with, once he takes the floor.]

Prompt word:

SEAL

“Yeah, the deal is off,”  being a Friday, Lou was dressed in business casual, which in the world of crime, restaurants and other non-FTC regulated financial institutions, meant a white shirt half-buttoned like a badly stitched wound, two Cross pens keeping a cigarillo prisoner in the breast pocket, a pair of drugstore reading glasses hanging from a lanyard of pray-worn rosary beads; his face betrayed nothing that did not reinforce whatever message he was interested in conveying; he simply looked at me, the way a hawk on the top limb of a tree is just looking at the grassy meadow below.

Before I could respond, Diane Tierney walked up and spoke into Lou’s ear, the brown waves of her hair tugged by gravity into a profane sacramental seal as effective as any confessional’s latticed-wood screen; I knew better than to interrupt, fidget or do anything that made my presence in the other half of the booth more obvious than it was, not that it would matter; Lou ended whatever discussion he was having with a sotto voce PowerPoint consisting of a series of ‘fuck that’ bullet points.

I looked up as Diane turned to walk back to her office, aka the hostess station at the front entrance, and was rewarded with a half-smile swinging from a raised eyebrow and the brush-bump of her left hip; my day’s ledger left the negative column and soared, discretely of course, into the positive.

I turned my attention back to Lou, as voluntary an action as a dinghy tethered to an oil tanker, in time to see him begin to address me, “Just outa curiosity, mind you, what didja learn about my guy down in Miami?”

Despite the name Emile Zola trying to crash the party, I leaned over the table as far as the force of Lou’s personality permitted, “If the key metric on this guy was deferential respect from his peer group and the desire to do business with him, Mr. St. Loreto makes Keyser Söze look like John Mayer; in one word: Be Careful.”

Lou’s outburst of laughter was as commanding as it was loud, like a pack of starving timber wolves avalanching into a pre-school playground, everything in the place stopped: Sal Divine ceased her slide down the brass pole, the table of college boys froze into sexual mimes and at least one of the power drinkers at the bar had what was clearly a Moment of Clarity; finally Lou stopped laughing, “I like you Devereaux, I know I shouldn’t, but what the hell.”

 

 

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

How long has it been? Jeez, it’s not like I have to buy a ticket on an aeroplane, needless to say there’s no extra value in a fast train.

As we all know, the Six Sentence Café & Bistro is just a short city-walk, if the weather is nice, a low-cost taxi ride if packages are involved. Even if Mimi’s shift coincided with our schedule, the bus runs every forty-four minutes, so we could get there with good company and interesting conversation.

But, this is a Wakefield Doctrine Six Sentence Story contribution to Denise’s ‘hop.

Prompt word:

GRID

“Hold on… won’t be but a moment,” the casual observer, and, this being the Six Sentence Café & Bistro, you were expecting, maybe an emotionally-depressed undertaker? Queried as to their immediate impressions, a (first time) visitor to the Café might have reported, “Well, he was tall and thin, but the thing about the man was the air of distraction that surrounded him like a degenerate eigenstate, ya know?”

If challenged on this characterization, the tall, thin man would, likely-as-not, deny being distracted, busy or even partially-aware of what a degenerate eigenstate is, other than being a cool name for a band.

Within minutes, the Manager re-appeared, a stray cobweb hanging off his left ear, “Just checked the utility room, the problem is not with the power grid, maybe it’s in the plumbing, give us one more minute,” three steps away towards the hall-that-is-buried-in-night, he might turn and say, “Now that you mention it, could you see if we have any eggs and stale Wonder Bread in the kitchen, I could really go for some French toast when I get back.”

Feeling uncomfortable about stepping behind the bar and through the double swinging doors in to the kitchen, our hypothetical first-timer might look about the interior of the Bistro, hope being pulled along by ambition, (and not a small ripple of visceral thrill at the daring, like adolescent friends pulling her towards the stolen car), and suddenly realize that the room was not entirely empty.

From somewhere, perhaps an alcove bathed in cathode-blue light, a woman appears behind a smile and calls out, “There are no take-backs in life, seize what you can and let no regrets hold you back;” and moving around the end of the bar, another, baritone in timbre, good natured in intent, a man behind that bandstand agreed, “You can’t step in the same river twice, so go for it,” smoke obscured his face; pushing through the double-swinging doors into the kitchen, the visitor, (now, very much no longer an innocent bystander), remembering rainy, childhood days announced, “…and what is the use of a book, without pictures or conversation.”

 

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Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise.

Last week we were privy to the ‘morning after’ enjoyed by Rue DeNite. She (and her bodyguard/man-in-waiting) was but half the dyad of that night’s dinner meeting. In the interest of fairness, shall we look in one her host, Cyrus St. Loreto’s morning after?

Prompt word:

TOAST

“So, Cyrus, is a toast in order this morning?”

The conference room on the actual top floor of the Espirito Santo building consisted of a very large table and two walls of optically-engineered glass affording a view down on Miami’s financial district and out over the Atlantic Ocean.

Genevieve Novak crossed the expanse of carpeting between the door to her reception area and the man sitting at the head of the conference table; the pre-dawn light from the East was striated by a hedgerow of clouds low on the horizon, turning the glow from glass panels into columns and tempted a person with a certain inclination to think of ancient temples and profane rites.

Standing to the left of the only person seated at the table, before a single setting consisting of crystal, china and linen, she waited with the restrained excitement of a trained raptor, the slightest of quiver of feathers betraying her anticipation of the command to fly; the smile, a skilled misdirection of the intensity of her focus on her boss, Cyrus, permitted no doubt that for this couple, the hunt was her dowry.

“The affair to the North has become of greater value and, as such demands a certain… gentle nurturing,” the first of the sun’s knocking on the coming day’s door brought a transitory illumination to the sole owner of the Bernebau Company’s face betraying an often unexpected humor, “This no longer is a, ‘wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am’ negotiation, and as much as that might come as a disappointment; call Constantin and have him return with no further efforts to convince our Mr. Caesare.”

Seeing the disappointment in his admin’s face, Cyrus smiled, rose from his chair and as he walked to the only other door into the conference room, left his words as sole consolation,

“Fiecare dimineață este produsul neintenționat al Păcatului Original. Aș fi mai rău decât un prost să nu sărbătoresc, aș fi un ingrat și Dumnezeu urăște ingrații.”

 

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Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop

Hosted by Denise

We last saw Rocco and Rue, they were having lunch overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The evening ahead consisted of Rue having dinner with Cyrus St. Loreto and Rocco trying not to worry about his charge.

Prompt word:

GRID

The amber fluid, warmed to the perfect viscosity, began it’s cascade over the lip of the carafe. A single, stray beam of a Miami-dawn, released into the dark hotel room by a random gust of the air conditioner under the window, coinciding with a change in angle too subtle to be detected by the naked eye, created the briefest of flashes; like a slow-motion funnel cloud, the syrup touched and filled the center half-cuboid depression of the golden-brown grid.

“I take it things went well last night,” Rocco steepled his hands like a schoolboy at his first High Mass and, raising his left eyebrow for good measure, waited for Rue to respond.

Satisfied her careful flooding of the waffles was past the point of no return, she looked up at her bodyguard; the secondary effect of her change in posture was to cause the collars of her silk dressing gown, held open by gravity and mischievousness, to regain their proper, modesty-enhancing function,

“My job was to have dinner with our mutual boss’s proposed business partner, the original predatory-businessman and come out of it alive and…. unscathed.”

Without further preamble, the dancer known as Rue DeNite attacked the pile of waffles with the hotel’s sterling silver flatware and the glee of a ten-year-old girl on the first day of Summer.

“And,” looking over the rim of her coffee mug, “for the record, I scathe those who and when I choose, not because whatever man or woman feels entitled because of wealth, power or hotness.”

 

 

Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise, ruled by a single… rule? To use the prompt word and keep it to six sentences in length.

To get you back into the story, here’s where we left off : Previously on…

(quick note: as we mentioned to Frank in our Reply to his Comment today: “…serial Sixes do offer the opportunity to learn/practice/develop what(ever) skills.” So, this week I kept tripping over a draft Six for the Ian Devereaux series. ikr? Why would we let it sit there, getting stale? That business of ‘staleness’ in fiction, i.e. a near-final draft, is interesting. Remind us to address it next week. You know the old saying, ‘Writing begets writing”.)

This week’s prompt word:

CONSOLE

“Now that I think of it, this is the first time you’ve had me at your house.”

Rising on an elbow, Leanne Thunberg’s head occluded the overly-bright face of the atomic clock on the 1960’s stereo console that stood, like a time-traveler in a lock-room mystery, against the opposite wall; it clearly offered information, but not a scintilla of advice.

“If it wasn’t half-past passion, I might be inclined to sit you down for a little adult / teenage-regressive chat about relationships,” settling back, her head making an eyelash-soft landing somewhere between my face and shoulder, my talent for inference hinted that she might be waiting for a response.

“Look, first let me say, you’re one of the most intelligent and educated women I know,” a tactile semaphore of the light stroke of an eyebrow on my upper-right pec suggested I qualify my assertion so I quickly added, “… the most intelligent and educated woman I’ve ever been naked with.”

Like five patriotic, but thoroughly-inept diplomats, the nails of her right hand stopped their downward slide and decided to take the shortcut to my attention, digging into unsuspecting external obliques; she regained the floor in our debate.

Despite the darkness of my bedroom, I could feel her gaze grasp the sides of my head and her smile direct resources of a less subtle nature to other parts of my body; as my old elementary ed. teacher said on the first day of class: “In the struggle between education and intelligence, if you bring a chair into the cage, you might as well bring a whip.”

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