The Garbage Ing

*Author's Note: Any and all persons engaging in any sexual activity are at least eighteen years of age.

*Disclaimers: This story has been edited by myself, utilizing Microsoft Spell-check. You have been forewarned, expect to find mistakes.

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Gordon and Donna King stared at Dr. Berkshire in disbelief. The man had just told them what no parent should ever have to hear and had told them the news in a cold and detached professional manner.

"Now, of course, with Todd's form of cancer there are many options available, the heartless bastard droned on.

"My baby's dying?" Donna burst into wails.

"God, really? Why don't you people just listen?" the doctor snapped. "It is an aggressive cancer and yes, the likelihood is if the treatment we choose is unsuccessful then..."

"I hope you have to hear those words one day, you heartless mother fucker," Gordon snarled, getting to his feet. "You hear me? I hope one day you have to hear those words about your own child. You hear me?"

When they had composed themselves, Gordon and Donna King pasted on cheerful faces and agreed they would wait to tell Todd about his illness. He had a school dance that night and even had a date for the dance and was very excited about it. They agreed to let him have this night; they'd tell him tomorrow.

The heartsick parents went into the waiting room where a bored Nicole and exhausted Todd King sat and waited.

"God, about time," Nicole complained, getting to her feet and dragging Todd to his feet.

"Come on, Dad, remember?" Twelve year old Todd said as they drove home. "I got that dance tonight and we got to pick up Freyja and..."

"What kind of name is Freyja anyway," sixteen year old Nicole sneered. "She some kind of n*gger or something?"

"Nicole," Gordon snapped.

"No!" Todd said. "It's Nordic; Freyja was the Norse goddess of love and fertility."

"You would know that nerd," Nicole sneered.

"Shut up!" Todd yelled.

"Nicole, God damn it!" Donna screamed at her daughter.

While the King family travelled from Lafayette, Louisiana to Baylor Lake, Louisiana, twelve year old Freyja Wertzin sat in her aunt's Jazz Beach home while her aunt, Linda New, tried to get the snarls and snags out of Freyja's long honey blonde hair.

"Ow-uh!" Freyja complained.

"Well it's not my fault," Linda smiled. "You sleep in a briar patch last night?"

Tracy Baxter smiled as she applied the light pink fingernail polish, the only cosmetics Aunt Linda and Uncle Bob would allow their niece to wear.

"Not even lipstick?" Freyja had complained.

"You're only twelve years old," Uncle Bob had said. "You can wear lipstick when you're sixty eight."

"Sixty eight!" Freyja screeched.

"Yeah, I'll be dead by then," Bob smiled.

Now, while Freyja endured the indignities of Aunt Linda's brush, Uncle Bob appeared in the doorway, smiling.

"And uh, who just had to have this dress?" he asked, pulling the pink dress from behind his back.

"Oh!" Freyja gasped with delight. "You got it!"

Then Aunt Linda hit another snag.

"Ow-uh!" Freyja cried out.

As Aunt Linda finished detangling Freyja's long neglected hair, Todd and his dad got out the three ties that Todd King owned and selected the dark blue tie to go with the charcoal grey blazer and dark blue slacks.

"And tying a tie is easy," Gordon smiled, showing his son how to knot the tie. "Line the skinny side up with your belly button and..."

Donna took one look at her son in his blazer and tie and burst into sobs. Was this the outfit they would bury her baby boy in?

"And how about a couple of pictures?" Gordon asked. "Nicole, go over there with your brother, okay?"

"Why?" Nicole sneered, then stared in shock when Donna delivered a stinging slap to her face.

"Because we fucking said to, all right? Do you have to be such a God damned bitch about everything?"

Donna screamed.

Nicole ran out of the room, screaming that she hated them all. Donna took one picture of Gordon with their son, then Gordon took one with mother and son.

Gordon pasted a cheerful smile to his face and drove to the address that Todd had written down. They arrived at a small, neat house next to other small, neat little houses. Gordon got out and walked behind his son.

He beamed with pride as his son squared his shoulders and knocked on the pink door.

"Yes?" a frowning man asked.

"Hi, um, this, I'm uh I'm Todd King, does Freyja Wertzin live here?" Todd asked, swallowing nervously.

"No!" Bob New said and closed the door.

"Uncle Bob!" Freyja screamed in horror.

"Well he asked if you live here; you don't live here," Bob said.

"You open that door and let that young man in. Now," Linda ordered.

"I already hate him," Bob muttered, opening the door.

"She doesn't live here, but she is here," Bob said.

"Hi. Gordon King," Gordon smiled. "Wanted to slam the door in the face of the first little snot nose that came for my Nicole."

"Did you?" Bob smiled as the two men shook hands.

"Would have but my wife threatened to kill me," Gordon admitted.

"Hi um, you look beautiful," Todd stammered as he saw Freyja standing there.

"Should have locked the door after I slammed it," Bob muttered as he saw his beloved niece's face light up.

"Too late, the wolf's already in," Gordon said.

"And I'm Linda New," Linda said, shaking Gordon's hand.

"I know, I know, it's really stupid, why I got to do this, but can I get a few pictures?" Gordon said, smiling as the two twelve year olds moved together and smiled.

Freyja was at least ten inches taller, even with Todd trying to puff himself up. Gordon felt the sting of tears but focused and snapped off a few pictures. Next to him, Linda New also snapped off a few photos of their favorite (their only) niece on her first date.

With more handshakes, the trio left the house. Bob also felt the sting of tears as he watched from the open door of the house, but laughed when he watched Gordon yank Todd back so that Freyja could get into the car first.

Then the tears did begin as the car drove away.

"You big softie," Linda teased, hugging him.

In the gymnasium of Roemer Middle School in Jazz Beach, Principal Ferguson was acting as the DJ and was playing mid to fast tempo songs. The boys were clumped together on one side of the gymnasium, preening and posturing for each other, while the girls were on the other side, dancing with each other, talking and laughing and shrieking, and looking at the boys.

Then Todd King put down his glass of too sweet punch and walked the five hundred miles across the gymnasium floor. With every eye in the building on him, Todd King approached Freyja Wertzin and asked her to dance with him.

Todd knew how to dance; he'd watched Nicole and her friends as they got together on the back deck, next to their above ground swimming pool, and danced to the insipid music, or what the record companies called music.

All it was, from what Todd observed, was bouncing up and down and from side to side, trying to match the tempo of the music. So that's what Todd did. He also threw in a few pelvic thrusts as Shelly, Nicole's best friend, and outrageous flirt liked to do.

Soon, a few other brave souls wandered onto the floor. But the majority of the boys stayed safely on their side and the majority of the girls stayed on their side of the large building.

At nine forty five, Gordon King forced a smile to his face. Freyja and Todd were standing outside, waiting. Freyja was lively, energetic, her mouth running a mile a minute. But Todd looked ashen, exhausted.

"Hi, Kids, y'all have a good time?" Gordon asked, opening the door of the car.

This time, Todd didn't have to be pulled back; he tiredly followed Freyja into the rear of the car.

All the way to her aunt's house, Freyja filled Gordon's ear with information about who danced with who, who couldn't dance, who wore what. As if Gordon knew any of the children she was talking about.

Outside of Aunt Linda's home, Gordon watched as Todd walked Freyja to the door. Gordon smiled sadly as Todd got on his tiptoes and delivered a quick kiss to Freyja's lips, then raced for the car like his ass was on fire.

Chapter 1

Gordon King tiredly got off the boat at the Industrial Canal's dock and made his way to his car. As tired as he was, Gordon stopped first at Women and Children's Hospital in Lafayette, Louisiana and walked to the Oncology Ward.

"Hi Mr. King," Madison Arcenaux greeted him.

"Madison, you get more and more beautiful every time I see you," Gordon smiled at the young nurse with her smoothly shaved head. "What would it take for you to run off with me?"

"An act of God," Madison smiled. "Sorry, Sugar Pie, but I am just way too in love with my

Yohny to ever run off, even as handsome as you are."

"Oh well, a man's got to try," Gordon smiled, shrugging.

Gordon entered the main room and smiled; Todd had his chess board out and was playing Bonita Morales.

"Bonita, you letting him win again?" Gordon asked the bald headed girl.

"I wish!" Bonita said in her heavily accented English. "He always beating me."

"Hey Dad," Todd said, looking up.

"Hey boy," Gordon smiled and hugged his son.

It broke the father's heart; the fifteen year old youth was so emaciated Gordon could count all the ribs, count all the vertebrae as he hugged his child. He tried not to squeeze too hard, even though he wanted desperately to cling to his son.

"How you feeling?" Gordon asked, searching the child's blue eyes.

"I hate this, Dad," Todd said, tears spilling. "I get better, then it comes back again."

"I know, boy," Gordon said. "I hate it too."

He talked with his son for about an hour, also talking with Bonita. A few other children also came over; they saw Gordon King more often than they saw their own families. Madison walked in and had the teenagers gather together for an activity, so Gordon left.

From Lafayette, Gordon drove to their small home in Baylor Lake, Louisiana and backed into his spot. He wondered what he would find inside. Since finding out about her brother's illness, Nicole had begun to act out even worse than she had previously.

Nicole stole money, she stole jewelry, she used the money to buy drugs. She ran away, hitching rides with truckers, bikers, whomever could get her miles away from Todd's cancer.

Then Nicole would come home, beaten and bruised, apologetic. She'd be contrite, filled with promises to never do it again. But before the physical bruises would heal, she'd be gone again.

Gordon wanted Nicole to go to DeGarde Chemical Dependency Unit, but Donna blocked that suggestion. She wouldn't even hear of it.

"Oh no sir, no sir," Donna hissed hatefully at Gordon. "Bad enough I got to visit one kid in the God damned hospital; you want to put the other one in a hospital too?"

Gordon grabbed his dirty clothes out of the back seat of the car and unlocked the side door of the small brick house.

"Donna?" he called out when he entered the kitchen.

Only silence greeted him.

"Donna?" he called out again, going to their bedroom.

Gordon frowned; the door to Todd's room was shut. He didn't like looking in the child's bedroom either but felt that shutting the door was like trying to pretend that Todd did not exist.

"Donna?" Gordon called out again.

He returned to the kitchen and looked around. On the kitchen table, he found copies of their savings accounts, Nicole's college account, Todd's college account, and their checking account. True, there wasn't much money in any of those accounts; the medical bills were eating them alive.

Gordon looked at the telephone number at the bottom of the savings account statement and dialed the number. He then entered their PIN and heard that there was no balance. A check of each of the accounts revealed the same information; they each had been emptied.

Underneath the bank documents, Gordon found a post-it note in Donna's chicken scratch that declared that she and Nicole had their fill of sacrificing their lives and were leaving.

At the end of the note, Donna warned against coming to look for them.

"Like I'd fucking want to?" Gordon snorted.

From his home, Gordon drove to the office of Pilot Petroleum Exploration and Development Incorporated to speak with Chris Dumas, his boss; to see if it would be possible to transfer to a land rig.

At the office, Sandra, Chris's receptionist, asked Gordon about Todd. She clucked in sympathy when Gordon admitted that the cancer had, once again, resisted treatment and was even more aggressive.

"Is Ugly, darn it, I mean, Chris Dumas in?" Gordon asked.

"I heard that; look in a mirror lately?" Chris called out.

The two men shook hands, Gordon showed Chris the Post-it note and asked about land work; work that would put him home every night for his son.

"Well yeah, but damn it, Gordon, it pays roughly a third less than what you making right now," Chris said. "And, no, I can't give you a raise; you're at the top pay for a mud logger already."

"Believe this shit? Huh?" William Kennedy barged in. "Benoit's going up, oh, sorry, didn't realize you was busy."

"Come on in, Sweet William," Gordon smiled, shaking the giant man's hand. "We're just trying to figure out why a gorgeous woman like Alicia would want to be around a man looks like Chris."

"Oh, that's easy," William smiled. "Poor girl's blind and deaf too."

"Both of y'all? Bite me," Chris said.

"But look at this shit; Benoit's gone up again," William said, showing Chris an invoice.

"Again? They went up, what?" Chris said and rapidly typed on his keyboard.

"Seven months ago," both William and Chris said at the same time.

"Yeah, they claiming its some shit about Haz Mat; we don't have any hazardous material we using," William complained.

"I take a look at that?" Gordon asked, nodding to the invoice for the waste disposal company.

William shoved the paper across the desk and looked at Chris's computer monitor over Chris's shoulder again.

"Hey, Chris?" Gordon smiled widely.

"Yeah?" Chris said, not looking up from the monitor.

"I quit. But believe me, you are going to be so glad I did," Gordon laughed.

While Gordon King was leaving the Bender, Louisiana PPEDI office, in Dr. LeMoine's office, Kelly

Straughter pasted a smile on her beautiful face. She worked quickly, efficiently as she cleaned the teeth of Mr. Jacoby. The man was a heavy smoker, so his teeth were horribly stained. Worse, though, was how the patient smelled. And he was a horrible lech as well; looking down her blouse as often as he possibly could.

Kelly knew she was extremely over-endowed. Not many women had a thirty seven F chest. She couldn't help being large breasted; her mother, Heloise, had been likewise afflicted.

Kerry, Kelly's baby sister, however, had not suffered that fate; she was normal. At fifteen years old, Kerry was your typical blonde cheerleader with beautiful green eyes, wide smile and air in between her ears.

Kelly knew she wasn't being fair to her baby sister. But sometimes it just exasperated Kelly; how little Kerry thought seemed to put into her actions.

"So, uh, what you say, you and me maybe going to Manny's, huh? Like Mexican? That place has got the best salsa anywhere, huh?" Mr. Jacoby asked when Kellly ceased scraping on a particularly heavy stain.

"Thank you, Mr. Jacoby, but..." Kelly smiled tightly.

"Aw, hey, call me Henry, huh?" the man said.

"Uh huh, well, Henry, yes, I love Mexican food, but I do not date married men," Kelly said and tapped Henry's wedding band with her fingernail, then again attacked the stubborn stain.

"Or smokers, or jerks, or perverts," Kelly thought to herself and again worried about her younger sister. The girl seemed to have so little ambition, seemed perfectly happy to maintain a 'C' average in school.

Ever since their mother's death, Kelly had been raising her sister and had done her absolute best but Kelly really felt like she was losing her grip on Kerry.

"No, no, my wife and me? We got this understanding..." Mr. Jacoby said when Kelly moved to grab the floss.

"And I have an understanding too," Kelly said seriously. "I will not date a married man, no matter what understanding he and his wife have."

While Gordon King was leaving his former employer's office, while Kelly Straughter was trying, with great difficulty to maintain a professional attitude, Freyja Wertzin sat in her mother's trailer, at the kitchen table, doing her homework. Her older brother, Odin sauntered in, walking somewhat penguin style to keep his pants from falling off his hips.

"Hey!" Freyja protested when Odin purposefully jostled the table, causing the fifteen year old girl's pen to jump across the page.

"Oops," the African-American male sneered at his white sister.

Baldar came in, also waddling and also bumped the table.

"Hey, asshole!" Freyja screamed at her two smirking brothers.

Lauren Wertzin, their mother came into the kitchen and slapped her fifteen year old daughter on the back of her head.

"Ow-uh, what was that for?" Freyja cried out, rubbing the back of her head.

"Making all that fucking noise, huh?" Lauren sneered at her white child.

Lauren found it both funny, and annoying, that she had a white daughter. She often asked how she could have been drunk enough to sleep with a white guy.

The horribly obese woman flung her long blonde hair out of her eyes and dug around in the refrigerator. She moved things out of the way, peering into the filthy appliance's dimly lighted interior.

Odin, you drank the last beer?" Lauren yelled.

Odin wasn't fast enough and Lauren delivered a slap that almost toppled the young man over. As it was, he staggered into the kitchen table.

"Fucker, drink the last one, go to the God damned store, huh?" Lauren yelled and slapped Odin again.

"All right, all right!" Odin screamed, falling to his knees as his jeans slithered down.

"Here, and don't be getting that cheap ass shit neither," Lauren said, slapping a ten dollar bill in his hand.

"Oh, get me a..." Freyja started to ask.

"Get it yourself, bitch," Odin sneered, pulling his jeans up again.

While Dr. LeMoine was looking at Mr. Jacoby's mouth, Kelly standing behind him, while Freyja was sullenly correcting the mistake Odin had caused her to make, Gordon was travelling east on Highway 52. He was end route to look at the property his parents had purchased in unincorporated St. Ann's Parish.

He had been unable to sell the two thousand acres of weeds and pine trees and scrub but had been diligently paying the property taxes on the land.

Looking to his right, Gordon saw a mobile building, with a small wooden sign out front. 'Richards And Pellichet, Attorneys At Law' was emblazoned on the board. Gordon pulled into the clam shell parking lot and parked next to the only car in front of the building.

Inside the fabricated building, the air conditioning ran high. Donald Pellichet looked up from his endless game of Scrabble against his computer and smiled when Gordon King opened the door, sticking his head into the room.

"Hi, I'm Gordon King, looking for either Richards or Pellichet," Gordon said.

"Well, Jay Richards is in court right now, so you're stuck with Pellichet," Donald said and reached out his hand. "Donald Pellichet; how can I help you?"

Gordon liked the man's handshake. He worked with many African-American males and when he shook hands with many of the younger men, they would give a dead fish kind of shake. Their posture, the dead fish handshake let Gordon know that these younger men did not like him, did not trust him, but lacked the backbone to simply refuse to shake hands with him.

Donald Pellichet gave a firm grip and gave two pumps, then let go. It was a man's handshake, a professional handshake. Then he invited Gordon King to have a seat.