Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

We are Jemima and Easter Yeggs.  Lieutenant Yeggs wants his son to write these reports to keep in touch when we are out having our adventures, and Rev C.S.L., my Dad, doesn’t mind an update either.

I really do not know how to tell this story, so I will just tell it.

I was pushing a stroller.  It was a nice autumn day.  The little fellow in the stroller was bundled up, but it wasn’t that cold.  I only had a light jacket.  We were in a park, and the leaves were all different colors.

An old man in a windbreaker with a hoodie approached.  He wore a hat, and the hoodie lay across his shoulders.  It was odd.  He wore a fedora.  He had a necktie and dress shirt, but he had comfortable slacks.  He walked with a cane.  And he wore athletic shoes.

But I was confused at the combination.  Half of his outfit was formal business attire.  The other half was casual.

He leaned down and looked in the stroller.  “Oh, my, he is such a cute fella,” he said.

I said, “Thank you.”

And then this whirlwind swooped around from behind me.  The whirlwind said, “His name is Dusty!”

The old man began to chuckle.  “And what is your name?”

The whirlwind giggled, “My name is Stormie!”

The old man laughed, “You run around like you are stormy.”  He nudged his head toward me but kept looking at Stormie.  “And who is this?”

Stormie smiled, “That’s Mommy.  She’s Stinker!”

The old man leaned back.  “Oh, that’s a terrible thing to say about your Mommy!”

Stormie cackled, “No, Silly, that’s her co-name.  She’s on a TV show.”

The old man looked at me.  “A co-name?”

I said, “It’s a long story, Sir.  Stinker is my code name.  I work part-time with a storm chasing team.  Actually, we are a teaching team.  The original members of the team were assigned code names, and then each person that becomes a semi-regular member of the team is given a code name.  There is a cable TV channel called the Storm Chasing Channel, but we rarely appear on it since we sell our storm chasing experiences to small markets around the world.  Other than a watermark, most people that watch us have no idea about the video production.  But I am the photographer for the team.  My husband is the driver.  We call ourselves the Turtle Team.  That is the nickname for our vehicle.”

The old man said, “Nicknames for vehicles.  Code names for teammates.  I am fascinated.  Here is a park bench.  Can we sit and talk about it?  That is if Stormie doesn’t mind.”

I shrugged, “I was meeting someone here in a little while, but I suppose so.”

He asked, “Who are the other members of the team?”

I shook my head.  “Sir, I feel funny about this.  I have no idea who you are.”

He laughed, “I apologize.  You are Stinker.  I am semi-retired, Rev. George Walton, descendant of the Georgia Waltons.  My great-great many times over uncle signed the Declaration of Independence.  I just threw that out there in case you thought I was that old and I was that George.  He was George Walton also.”

I laughed, “And what brings you to the big city of Tracy, as my father-in-law calls it?”

He shrugged, “I might want to move here.  But I wanted to know if it was okay to do so.”

I laughed even more.  “We are a free country, at least that was the case the last time that I checked.  I don’t think you need permission to move here.”

He nodded, “We can get to that later, but I have seen your reality television show.  I have streamed as many episodes as the streaming service has on file.  But I wanted to find you and talk to you first.”

I said, “You are making me uncomfortable, Sir.  You could just be ready to serve a subpoena to another member of the team or to me.  If you have seen every episode, you know the team pretty well.”

He nodded.  He pulled out his wallet and showed his credentials.  He was George Walton.  He had an identification for being a pastor.  Some hospitals require that to visit patients outside normal visiting hours.  He had an identification to a neighboring state’s penal system as part of a prison ministry.  And he had pictures of his wife, now deceased, his son, and four grandchildren.  He was who he said he was.

Then he said, “I was not always so straightlaced.  I had a wild childhood.  When I went to college, I fooled around.  I met a girl, and we slept together a few times over one weekend.  She wanted to meet my parents.  I was in a wealthy family.  Then, the girl disappeared.  Well, I looked for her, but she had vanished.  But while I was looking for her, I found Jesus instead.  I went from college to seminary, and I spent my career sharing the Gospel.  I spent several years on the mission fields in Africa.  And then, my wife thought it best if we come to the states to have a stable environment for our little son.  I have been here in the USA ever since.  Now, please tell me about the original Turtle Team.”

I shrugged, “There is not much to tell.  I was the first to get a code name, but that’s no big deal.  My husband, Easter, code name Easy, we were just engaged then; he was the Turtle driver.  We call it the Turtle because we can deploy drills to anchor us to the ground and shields to protect the windows and skirts to keep wind from getting under the vehicle and lifting it.  It’s like being inside a turtle shell.  I press those buttons when Easy, my husband, tells me to.  The director and producer of the TV channel is B.B., Bossy Boss, she graduated about four years ago, finished her masters, and is now a doctoral candidate.  She fills in wherever she is needed, except she does not drive the Turtle during a storm chase.  And then, Home Wrecker is the professor in charge of the team, teaching the new members, running the radar to inform Easy of where to go.  She is sometimes replaced by her husband.  When Rev. Joseph Jones, B.B.’s husband, code name No Joe, is available he is part of the team.  And now, the Johnson’s spend time with the team.  Joseline, code name Amazon, is in medical school, but her husband Kevin, code name Skinny, is almost a regular, as my replacement as the photographer.”

He smiled, “And how did the original members get their code names?  Talk about you first.  I am fuzzy about how the team became Christians.  That is important to me.”

I nodded, “Okay, Dr. Ellie, as I call her now outside the Turtle, was a woman like her mother.  She loved them and left them.”  The old man winced.  “We were on a winter storm chase, driving through a blizzard and she directed Easy into a snowbank, wrecking the Turtle and getting us stuck.  She ordered Easy and me to strip naked and get into a single sleeping bag, but we refused.  We wore wetsuits instead.  It offered little insulation between our body heat warming each other and the water was wicked away.  Dr. Ellie failed to sleep due to amorous activity with the other man onboard, both naked, and they were cold when morning came.  While the guys helped dig us out with the help of a trucker from Alabama, I asked if we could start a series of girl talks.  In the first talk I asked if she gained anything lasting from her lifestyle?  From that point on, it was God who did all the work.  Probably God put that question on my lips, but it ate at her until she accepted Jesus, many girl talks later.  Since she thought she was happy in her lifestyle, she called me ‘Stinker.’  Easy became Easy, not because his real name is Easter Yeggs, being born on Easter Sunday and his mother could not resist the temptation.  No, again it was Dr. Ellie’s sarcasm at work.  He was the most difficult conquest because she never conquered Easter Yeggs.  Thus, instead of being Difficult, he became Easy.”

He smiled and nodded.

I continued, “Mary Sheltie joined our team as a two-week student fill in.  When the next person scheduled was murdered, she continued for two more weeks.  By then, our teamwork was jelled.  Mary was a senior and could do any of the jobs, except for driving.  The first storm, she whined the whole time, but then she snapped out of it.  The first time Easy saw her, he said she was ‘drop-dead-gorgeous.’  When I told him what the expression meant, and he had just told his intended bride this, Dr. Ellie called Mary Home Wrecker.  Within those four weeks, Mary accepted Jesus because the rest of us had it together and she didn’t.  Mary had never dated in her life, too goal oriented.  We dared her to talk to a guy at a breakfast area who was reading his Bible.  It turned out that he was a chaplain who followed the storms for a disaster relief organization.  His name was Joseph Jones.  But then that summer, the four of us were back together waiting out a hurricane in Florida, and Joseph was a little more inland, doing the same for different reasons.  We had an inland house that was safe.  As we settled in, Mary and I went to the bathroom.  When I returned to the living room, Dr. Ellie had stripped to her swimsuit and Easy was hugging her.  I went ballistic.  Dr. Ellie suggested that she be called Home Wrecker, and Mary could get another code name.  That was about the same point when Mary and Dr. Ellie delivered a baby, someone stranded by the storm.  But Mary became ‘Joseph and the virgin Mary.’  She was a virgin.  Joseph and Mary have since married and they have a little one, not named Jesus.  It was later, when Joseph announced that he was taking a sabbatical from his job to work on a Theology degree and the seminary was considering transferring the hours so that he could finish his Masters of Divinity also – he is now an ordained minister, but he remains working on his PhD while working as the chaplain at Lily the Pink, and preaching a few Sundays each year at my Dad’s church as an associate.  But when he made the announcement to stay in Tracy, we thought ‘Joseph and the virgin Mary’ might be in bad taste, so her code name was changed to Bossy Boss, and B.B. for short.  That is what stuck.  I do not know how many times that we have said after a storm passed us.  B.B. would say, “Stinker, did you get the storm on film?” and I would reply, “Ready when you are, B.B.!”

The old man rocked back and forth laughing, knowing the reference.

I said, “So, that is how the Turtle team became Christians.  I was a preacher’s kid, finally figuring it out in high school.  Easter’s parents are two saints.  Lt. Deviled Yeggs runs homicide for the Tracy Police Department, and Trinity Naomi Tesla Yeggs created her own department at T.R.U.S.T., and of course is the head of it, Kinesiological Psychology, therapy for the whole person.  Their youngest, Gigi, is in elementary school.  Blaise is getting close to graduation from college.  And I think wedding bells might ring for Sophia and her hunk before they graduate.  Sophia already works at the police department, parttime.  And all of them love Jesus.  But now you.  How did you find Jesus, Reverend Walton?”

He smiled, “I told you about my wild youth.  I was in college.  My parents bought me a house.  I had advertised rooms for rent, but that semester, I had no takers for some strange reason.  I had never had any bad problems before.  Wild parties, but the police were never called.  But one day, the doorbell rang.  I went to the door and saw this beautiful woman in a tie-dyed T-shirt and bellbottoms.  She walked right past me into the living room saying, ‘I’m here for the party.’  I shut the door, turned around and said, ‘There is no party here tonight.’  She smiled, flipped the T-shirt over her head, with nothing underneath, and she said, ‘Then the party is just us two.’  From that moment until Monday morning, we were naked, and in each other’s arms the entire weekend.  Classes started that Monday morning, and I had some early classes.  I told her I would be back by lunchtime, and I had no afternoon classes.  She said she would be waiting for me, but when I returned, she was gone.  I went to a desk drawer where I had some cash.  She only took $20.  I had a couple of hundred dollars in the drawer.  I checked the airlines.  She had not flown out of town.  I checked the bus station and a girl meeting her description had gotten on a bus early that morning, before nine.  She had left just after I did.  They would not give me the direction she travelled, but I called a few bus stations toward the west, and she had changed buses.  She was making sure I would not track her down.  I really had fallen for her, but as I sat on a bench in the bus station, a guy came up and asked if I knew Jesus.  I was at my emotional bottom, and how he explained things was just what I needed.  While searching for the girl that got away, I was really searching for Truth that had escaped me, and I needed Jesus.  I accepted Jesus while sitting on that bench.  And you might not believe this, but without telling people that I had accepted Jesus, my extra rooms in my house were filled by Christians within two weeks, mostly to escape the shenanigans in the dormitories.  By the end of the semester, those other students had guided me.  We had Bible studies.  We had long prayer times.  And before Christmas, I had heard the call for ministry.  But I still wanted to know what happened to the girl who spent that weekend with me.  I met someone new and married her, but something always troubled my heart.”

I heard a voice that was familiar.  “And she was haunted by that weekend too.  She had violated two of her rules.  Never get emotionally involved.  And take precautions.  The second rule slipping led to me being born.  Sir, the DNA test facility contacted me. Are you George Walton?”  He nodded and looked into Dr. Ellie’s eyes.  Her eyes filled with tears.  He stood and she ran into his arms, “Daddy!”

A little girl behind her said, “Daddy is at work.”

Ellie wiped away a tear.  “No, Joanie, this is my Daddy.  Your granddaddy.  You go play with Stormie, and you two girls don’t get dirty.  We have a birthday party at the Mommie’s club.”

Rev. Walton said, “Are you being hasty?  The DNA might be in error.”

Ellie shook her head.  “My mother rarely said much about you, but she often said that I had your eyes.  That and the DNA test, and I simply know.”

I said, “Rev. Walton, Lily the Pink has a lot of families with little children, so after the elementary students get home from school, we have a birthday party once each month.  Among the children, we have more than one birthday every month.  So, we pick a day and that takes care of that month’s birthdays.”

But I doubt if he heard a word of that.  In fact, I don’t know if I really told the old man that because I was suddenly back in bed, with Easy by my side.  I was still pregnant, and I had not had the first child yet.  It had all been a dream.

“Easy!  Easy!” I shook his shoulder.

“Wha!  What!?  Good morning?  Did I miss the alarm?” Easy mumbled incoherently.

“No,” I replied, “I had a dream, and I think it was a glimpse into the future.  Our first child will be a girl.  We will name her Stormie.  You know, like Stormie Omartian.  Then we will have a boy about three years, three and a half years later.  His name will be Dusty.  But that is not the weird part.  I met Dr. Ellie’s father.  Somehow there was DNA testing, but I woke up before I found out how.”

Easy said, “That’s nice.” And within a few seconds, he was sleeping again.

“Men!” I growled.  I got out of bed and went to my desk and started typing.  I was convinced this dream was prophetic.  The Bible says that old men will dream dreams and young men will see visions.  Hmmm. I am not old, so I am calling this a vision!

Later that day, I asked Dr. Ellie about DNA testing.  She laughed, “Some years ago, with extra money from the television station, I spit into the tube.  I asked the DNA center to flag my DNA to find my father.  There are so many of those companies these days.  Even if my father got his DNA tested, what would be the odds of us using the same company, and it has already been so many years, will they honor the flag?  Why do you ask?”

I shrugged, “Oh, nothing, nothing at all.”  If this was not a vision, I did not want her hopes up.  Maybe after I give birth to my first one and it’s a girl…  Nope, that’s a fifty-fifty proposition.  I’ll need more assurance before I get her hopes up.

Credits

This post did not come to me in a dream.  Honest!

George Walton of Georgia was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

And I do realize that an unannounced dream story is a no-no in the mystery writing world, but I could not resist.