Signing off... but check this out!

Blogs are so 2008...

For those interested in hearing (reading) more of my miscellaneous ramblings, follow me in the usual places.

But before I go, check out my new website, designed and built by the world's best brother -- thanks!

www.jeremyandkeisha.com

Few things better...

There really are few things better than getting out some old tunes and waxing nostalgiac on a crisp autumn day.  Here's what's been doing it for me lately:

   John Coltrane - Blue Train

Fugazi - Repeater, In on the Killtaker and Red Machine

   Jayhawks - Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass

Lyle Lovett - Joshua, Judges, Ruth

   Old 97's - Too Far to Care

Uncle Tupelo - Anodyne

   Wilco - A.M. and Being There

Neil Young - Everybody Knows this is Nowhere and Harvest

Something... There in the distance....

Update grab bag! (Or... a grab bag of updates)

Lots of workin', not much time for updates lately...

Here's an inside look at all the stuff that is piled up (quite literally) on my desk these days.

First of all, many, many thanks to the wonderful folks at Aphelion for publishing the next "installment" in the Shirasawa series.

This one is called "Shirasawa's Rage" and follows our young protagonist from her home in the maple grove up through an ominous wooded area near the coast.  Click on the link below to read more:

http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/shorts/2013/09/ShirasawasRage.html

Second, the folks at Aphelion were so nice this month, that they also agreed to publish a recent poem of mine.  It is one that regular readers of this blog will recognize, as it was posted here first, but feel free to stop by the Aphelion site and refresh your memory:

http://www.aphelion-webzine.com/poetry/2013/09/LateSummerSunset.html

Next, the short novella, Puddle Jumper is finished and submitted to the monthly contest over at the Creator and the Catalyst forum.  I posted the installments here as well for easy access, but here's hoping that this one fares well in this month's voting!

Next, next...  I have some work to do on another story tentatively accepted by another online 'zine.  They asked for a pretty substantial re-write of the middle section; so that is filling my days of late.  We'll see how things go with that one (fingers crossed).

And finally, there's that little thing that we here at the old blog have been referring to as the "ghost train" novel.  Well the current draft is getting very, very close to being finished.  In fact, I can safely say that the title of the book, at least for now is ...  [drum roll] ...  [drum roll] ... [cymbal crash!] 

The Silver Arrow!

"That's Right (You're Not From Texas)"

Soundtrack for writin' on "the train"...

      The Civil Wars - [Self-titled]

         Guy Clark - My Favorite Picture of You

      Vince Gill & Paul Franklin - Bakersfield

         Jason Isbell - Southeastern

      Stoney LaRue - Velvet

         Amanda Shires - Down Fell the Doves

      Two Tons of Steel - Unravelled

...and of course, Lyle Lovett - The Road to Ensenada!

Puddle Jumper, Part 5: Whistler's Fugue in B Minor

V. Whistler’s Fugue in B Minor

I heard the news on a television broadcast, while I was sitting at a diner in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

“Millionaire cattleman found dead in his West Texas home. Local police suspect foul play.”

I wish the newscaster would have provided more details. At the time, I wanted to know how he died. After all, Levi had me arrange the $10 million bounty so he wouldn’t have to take his own life.

The only reason I agreed to do it was that I figured when the winning candidate learned there was only $300,000 in all of Levi’s accounts, that he’d do me in as well. Two birds, one stone and all.

The police called a day later and asked me to come in for questioning. Jericho is about four hours from Santa Rosa; so I told them I wasn’t sure what help I could offer. They asked me to come in anyway, said there were some loose ends that maybe I could help them with.

The irony of it all – and life is filled with strange and dark bits of cruel irony – was that when we wanted the “puddle jumper” to carry us away, it didn’t. We drove Irene out to the hangar and pulled the old plane out onto the runway. Levi fired her engines and we all rose into the sky thinking that when we landed it would be some place else entirely, another new “parallel”, and hopefully one that would hold a cure for Irene’s cancer. But whatever accidents consolidated to create our ability to walk across the various planes of this universe, time had undone. We must have taken that old plane out thirty or forty times before conceding that it was no longer a conduit for inter-universal travel.

With the options for an unconventional cure removed, Irene died in June of 1998, and I cried like I did before, blubbering and moaning and shivering in my anguish. We were never married, and yes, I blamed Levi for her death. It was irrational to think that he’d done something to make the plane carry us to all of those parallels, but it made me feel better to focus my hate.

In all likelihood, the change had something to do with time and opportunity. Simply put, a window was open for a while and we found our way through it. Then it closed and we were caught, for better or worse in the place we stood when the proverbial music stopped playing.

That same quicksand of time acted strangely on our lives in other ways as well. The near forty year old Levi that left one version of Jericho in 1984 should have looked like a 55 year old man in the Jericho he died in, during the September of 1999. But somehow our years spent travelling between worlds caused us to age differently, almost three years for every one we would have grown otherwise. The result was that an almost eighty year old man – he swore he was only 78! – slipped and fell in that entry way. I once heard it said that it’s the travelling that ages a person, that no one ever grew old from sitting still.

I live alone in a cabin now, out in a stretch of woods that looks like Colorado, but I believe is actually northern New Mexico. At least it is in some version of the known universe. There are spruce trees there, and aspens. Cottonwood, oak, cypress, ash. Pines and willows. A dense wall of foliage, shade and solitude.

I read a lot and watch the birds come and go. Roadrunners, quail, geese, bitterns, hawks, swallows and wrens. Sometimes when I look up, I see planes fly by, and I can’t help but wonder if they’re going some place conventional like Dallas or Denver, or if they are heading to a random parallel, fixed somewhere between all of the other parallel places in this world. Then I wonder if the passengers on that plane know where they are headed, if they planned on crossing over, or just took their chances. It’s a lot to think about for an old man lost in the woods.

The last time I saw Irene she kissed my hand and said thanks for a hundred memories.

“No,” I answered, “Thank you for all the time we spent making them.”

She cried and I held her there in the hospital bed, a tangle of machines and wires, beeping and humming around us.

“I wonder what I will see when I go?” she asked.

“You’ll see home,” I said without hesitating. “No matter where you’ve been, or what you’ve done, we all go home in the end.”

The last time I saw Levi, he begged me to help him die.

“Why?” I asked, thinking it was the logical question for the situation.

“I don’t know,” he said, lighting a cigarillo and easing back in his chair. “I guess I’m just tired of living.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” he answered, “But I can’t do the things I used to do anymore. At least not in the same ways that I used to do them, and that makes it not worth doing somehow.” Then he explained his plan to have himself murdered.

Looking back on it now, it was no more strange a thing to hear from that man than any other facet of the Levi Bingham that I knew, but it made me wonder if there wasn’t another Levi Bingham out there in some parallel universe somewhere, a more conservative Levi who heeded every norm and conducted his affairs with some semblance of convention. But after all the things I’d seen, I couldn’t imagine something so benign existing in any of the other combinations of space and time that I had encountered.

The universe must have a sentience inherent in its design somehow. I say that because the whole measure of existence seems to be the work of some cosmic trickster. For example, despite the $10 million bounty on his life, Levi died because he slipped in a puddle of Earl Grey tea and cracked his old bones on the polished stone tiles in the entry way of his ranch in Jericho, Texas. Somewhere that vague notion of reason must have laughed at the particular combination of events.

But that same spirit has a cruel streak as well, because I loved one woman in all my life, and yet I never considered her mine or myself as hers.

***

A few years ago, I went into town to get a haircut and shop for some supplies: coffee, sugar, rice, flour. The few essential things I needed for my solitary existence.

Sitting in the barber’s chair at an old time shop that still offered a shave with a haircut, a hot towel and the brilliant smell of talcum powder, the man in the chair next to me said something about a woman on the news saying that drinking too much coffee would kill a person.

“It causes Alzheimer’s too,” he said in a warped country drawl.

“No, no,” the man next to him and furthest from me countered, “It’s supposed to help with the Alzheimer’s. You got it backwards old man.”

“Well either way,” the first patron continued, “I only drink hot tea with my breakfast.”

Then the second man began telling his barber about the cattleman from England who slipped on his tea and died forty-six hours later from a simple broken hip.

And for my friends, I cried again. I asked the barber to wait a second, then I buried my face in my hands and I cried, because that slip made me the last one of our unlikely trio, the lone whistler chirping the notes of our desperate song, a minor fugue in the greater symphony of the broad universe.

THE END

Puddle Jumper, Part 4: The Line at the End of The Milky Way

IV. The Line at the End of The Milky Way

Jericho, Texas. February, 1998.

It’s funny how the line at the end of The Milky Way sneaks up on a person, how something as simple as a visit to the country doctor will do it. We never thought something like that would catch us, but it did.

After her shower one morning, Irene complained to Levi about a stiffness in her right arm.

“It feels tight,” she said, “Like something’s stretching inside of my arm.”

Ken Roberts, the local General Practitioner in Jericho did a breast exam, and ordered x-rays of Irene’s chest and arm. The physical exam revealed an oblong lump on the right side of her breast. The x-ray however, showed no trace of the fractured collar bone that Irene suffered when she was thirteen.

“I don’t understand,” Dr. Roberts said, as he shook his head at us. “Signs of a fracture like that don’t just go away. They show up on an x-ray for years and years after the fracture has healed.”

We didn’t have much of an opportunity to question our “doubles” before Levi dispatched them.

“Nasty business,” was the phrase he used, along with chloroform, thick ropes, garden shears, duct tape and three heavy duty, two-ply garbage bags. If fratricide is murder committed against a sibling, and suicide is killing one’s self, then what is the term for murdering a person’s double in a parallel universe?

I don’t know, but after the thing was done, the three of us were never the same again. And after the revealing visit to the doctor’s office was completed, we all decided to do a little research into our respective characters’ lives. Turns out the Levi Bingham from this parallel never married the Irene Turner. Records at the court house indicated that she’d married a local boy, a promising baseball player named Ted Wilcox, who eventually divorced her for a lonely life on the road as a scout.

Our Irene moved out of Levi’s house the next day, and I proposed to her a month later.

In 1988, renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking published a book about the universe, called A Brief History of Time. It provided a fundamental understanding necessary to comprehend the theories he would espouse in later tomes dedicated to black holes, general relativity and string theory. Mr. Hawking’s name is most often associated with discussions of quantum physics in the general and popular media outlets, but it was a man named Hugh Everett, working in the late 1950’s who initially proposed the idea of the so-called “multi-verse”.

Years later, another scientist named Bryce Seligman DeWitt renamed the notion, calling it the “many-worlds interpretation” of the theory of universal wave function. These are all heady terms for what is best depicted in the model, often referred to as the Schrodinger’s cat analogy. In one “root” world, the feline encounters a box, containing a radioactive substance or poison. This poses a dilemma for the cat. If it indulges its curiosity and investigates the toxic substance, it dies; if it doesn’t, it lives. The “choice” forms a “branch” in the root world, creating two possible outcomes, one with a surviving cat, one without. Multiplying the number of “branches” each entity faces over the course of a day, produces an almost infinite number of possible parallels, and thus the “many-worlds” of DeWitt’s nomenclature.

I have no scientific basis for my own reinterpretation of these tenets, but I firmly believe that a considerable amount of randomness has been injected into this equation by the very universe itself. Take for example a billiards table. Once the triangle of stripes and solids has been scattered all over the green felt, the person acting on the cue ball has a multitude of decisions that he or she could make. Added to this complexity is the presence of the opponent, who also could make any number of decisions concerning which ball to strike next.

It makes little sense to me that every single one of these decision points would produce an alternate world, filled with variable circumstances. To put it another way, sometimes the sky gets cloudy and it rains. Sometimes it gets cloudy and it doesn’t rain. I don’t know why. Maybe the humidity or barometric pressure, temperature or dew point isn’t right. Like I said, I don’t know. However, my humble modification to the “branches” in DeWitt’s “many-worlds” theory is that sometimes a decision produces an alternate or parallel scenario; sometimes it doesn’t.

When I asked Irene to marry me, she said yes, and in that world, we became engaged. But in that world, the results of her biopsy showed that she also had stage IV breast cancer. It had metastasized and spread through her lymph nodes to several other areas around her body.

I left her in her room there at the hospital with Dr. Roberts and a couple of nurses. I went around the corner and found a telephone in an empty corridor and I dialed Levi’s number.

“What do you want?” he answered in a gruff tone.

“We have to keep going,” I said.

“Keep going where?”

“The plane, the ‘puddle jumper’,” I clarified, “We have to find a parallel where they can help Irene.”

“So now you want my help,” he asked.

“It’s for Irene, not me.”

There was a long pause, during which I heard his labored breathing, the rattle in his chest from years of smoking and drinking.

“You know where the hangar is,” Levi said at last. The phone clicked and the mechanic buzz that flooded my ear was the sound of hope calling us to endure a little more, to be patient just a little while longer. I sat down and I cried. I blubbered into my hands and my body shook and I moaned like a broken old man. I cried so hard that it literally hurt inside. It wouldn’t be the last time.

***

Jericho, Texas. October, 1994.

The first time Levi caught us in bed was on a gorgeous autumn afternoon during our sixth year in the new parallel. The window was open and the light fabric of the curtains was blowing in the gentle breeze drifting in from outside.

At some point, Irene and I had both slipped into a lazy afternoon slumber. Levi said very little about the incident in retrospect; he just kind of grunted his disapproval, muttered something about how he assumed this would happen eventually and walked past the disheveled bed and the two naked bodies wrapped up together on top of it. What could he say really, given the long string of his own dalliances?

The second time occurred about six months later, around five in the morning. He was sneaking in and I was sneaking out.

“I ought to punch you in the jaw,” he said.

I straightened up and hardened my body, preparing myself on the off chance that he did that very thing.

“But it wouldn’t change anything,” Levi added.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“You love her,” he answered. “You think I don’t know that?”

“Why did you marry her?” In all honesty, I didn’t expect an answer. It was a simple observation phrased as a question. “You don’t love her.”

“I don’t know,” he said, “Maybe I do, and I just don’t know how to show it.”

“But surely you know that being with all of these other women doesn’t help your cause on that front.”

“It’s what I do,” he said, looking down and shaking his head. “I buy and sell cattle, real estate, municipal bonds. I drink too much and I screw around. It’s all part of what I do.”

“But why?!” I shouted, not really meaning to raise my voice.

“Because just like you,” Levi hissed at me, “I want something in my life that feels normal! Something that feels like it used to –“

“Before we got on that plane,” Again, not meaning to, I interrupted him and finished the thought.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s right.”

We stood away from each other, but our postures relaxed. Without him saying so, I knew he wasn’t going to hit me anymore. Still, Levi rubbed his fist in his opposite hand as if he was consciously trying to give up the notion of throwing a right jab at my face.

“You want to come inside and have some coffee?”

“I don’t know,” I answered him honestly. “Sure.”

We talked for hours, retracing and re-thinking several of our decisions, but as is nearly always the case, the only way out of the forest is to keep moving forward down the path. Some time later, Irene got up and fixed us eggs and bacon, toast and more coffee. In the oddest sense, it was the happiest day of our lives after “Spruce Lake”, a moment when all time seemed to stop and give us the right of way for several minutes, maybe even a couple of hours.

The three of us sat at the breakfast table in the other Levi’s house, eating and laughing, even making plans for the coming spring. We talked about the places we’d been together, the things we’d seen and done, and we lamented the fact that we had no pictures, no souvenirs other than the plane, the Grumman G-44 Widgeon sitting in a rented hangar out at the small two landing-strip Jericho airport. We had nothing more than that old “puddle jumper” and our own ephemeral recollections, but for that span of several hours that morning, it was enough.

The next time I ran into Levi, he was drunk and angry and he did hit me. It was just before midnight, and I was headed for my truck. He was coming from the barn, a cigar in one hand, a bottle in the other. Despite the arid climate, thick rain poured down around us.

“Why can’t I have something normal like you’ve got?” Levi shouted over the dull white hum of falling precipitation.

“You did!” I answered. “She was married to you for more than ten years.”

“She never loved me,” he responded.

“You never loved her!”

He staggered forward, too drunk to be steady on his feet. “I did,” he mumbled in that crazy blend of British and West Texas accents. “I loved you both like my own family.”

Levi’s parents died in an automobile accident when he was sixteen years old. For a year, he lived with a grandmother who couldn’t even begin to control the grieving boy’s wild desires. After he turned eighteen, he left England for good, choosing the small town of Jericho on the western side of the Texas panhandle for a home.

“It doesn’t rain much there,” he said to anyone who asked. Those who knew him understood that he blamed the rain, the infamous London weather for his parents’ demise.

In West Texas, the lanky young man found work on a ranch. He worked hard and kept his mouth shut, because he knew his accent would be a challenge to the hard worn cowboys that grew up in towns like Jericho. He fought, drank and screwed to prove that he was every bit the man that they were. But he rode bulls in the local rodeos because he wanted to fight with the spirit of the universe itself.

“We were going to have kids,” he sputtered. “We were going to start trying after the cabin was built.”

“You were forty years old,” I reminded him. “Irene was thirty-five.”

“It’s too late for any of that now,” he added.

“Let’s go inside,” I tried to pull him over with my arm. “We’ll go inside and we’ll drink some coffee.”

“All of this,” he backed away and motioned with the bottle in his hand, “All of this is our hell. It was our heaven and our hell both at the same time. Every day we pay for what I’ve done.”

CONTINUED…