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…

Puddle Jumper, Part 3: New Longitudes

III. New Longitudes

Somewhere over the Southwestern United States; specific location, not determined. Time and date, unknown.


“Russians,” Irene said as if the concept had just occurred to her, as if the word itself had just taken on meaning. “In Colorado.”

“And they weren’t just visiting,” Levi clarified. “The name of the store was written in that Russian script, the one that looks like half-formed shapes instead of actual letters.”

I looked at Irene and then down at the palm of my hand, unable to process all the information I’d been given.

“Even the street signs had Russian names!” Levi added.

During his pause between proclamations, Irene started crying.

“The people – all of them! – were speaking Russian,” Levi said. “It was like we lost some kind of war to those guys.”

After that, we flew for over an hour before anyone said another word. Just before dawn, Levi set the plane down in a flat, hard baked strip of Arizona sand.

“I don’t understand,” I said, questioning Levi, “How did you not pick up on this when you were talking to the radio tower?”

Levi shook his head, and I knew the answer. He never called the tower, only kept it low like a crop duster, buzzing away to wherever he wanted to go, a renegade to the very last.

“Can’t we just go home?” Irene asked, her face becoming more frantic.

I’ll never forget the look on her face when she phrased that simple question. It was desperate, ragged and beautiful, lost and hopeful. I wanted to be her hero, to pull her into my arms and press my hand against her head and tell her things would be alright. But it was a promise I didn’t have the confidence to make, and a move I never would have attempted with her husband sitting next to us, flying the plane.

Somehow, some way, I can’t even begin to explain it, but there was a connection between that plane, that cursed Grumman G-44 Widgeon and “Spruce Lake”. Maybe it was in the name (“Spruce Lake”, The Blue Spruce), maybe it was a paranormal phantom thing, I don’t know, but when we left the lake and Levi decided to fly west, rather than going directly back home, the connection evaporated. Shifted. Became something else.

I don’t ask anyone to understand it. I don’t even ask them to believe it. Not really. But I tell the story, only because it is true. For me, every minute, every week and month and year we spent lost was real and true. And time warped on us, the years cheated forward and the lines between places became thinner and thinner. And with the change, the relationship between the three of us grew more and more strained.

***

Somewhere in Arizona; time and date, unknown.

The truck that drove by was a standard military thing, drab green paint, big tires and a heavy duty engine that hummed its way down the road. The inscription on the side however, read, “R. S. A.”.

“Are you sure that’s what it said?” Levi asked Irene.

“It went by so fast,” I added, forcing her to look at me. “It could have read ‘U.S.A.’”

“It said ‘R.S.A.’” Irene insisted. ”I’m positive.”

“Okay,” Levi shrugged his shoulders, “At least it was one of ours.”

“We think it was one of ours,” Irene said. “’R.S.A.’ could be ‘Russian States of America’.”

“The letters wouldn’t be written in English like that,” I countered her suggestion. “It would probably be ‘C.C.P.’... or something else, but foreign sounding.”

Another truck rushed by and this one definitely read “R.S.A.”.

The three of us stood in a small circle on the side of the highway, all of our lips moving slightly as we tried to work out the acronym. The next vehicle was a white patrol car with an interesting crest painted on the door. It pulled off the side of the road and came to a stop beside us. Up close, the emblem looked like the silhouette of a Comanche Indian riding on a horse beside a Navajo hogan. The rider was painted in a golden color, a rich yellow, the color of a warm summer sun, the hogan was a deep desert shade of red and the sky behind them blue. Written in a crest above and below the drawing were five exacting words, “The Reservation States of America”.

“You people need to stay on your land,” the officer stepping out of the patrol car announced. The treaty after the East-West Civil War says you can’t come over here.”

He had long hair, running down to his waist and wore a silver badge, not a star, but a round shield, with an intricate inlay of turquoise shapes: a coyote, a horse, a sheep, and an owl.

“The East-West Civil War?” Levi asked, his chest bowing a little as he said it.

“Yeah,” the officer answered. “That’s the one that came after the North-South Civil War, about fifty years ago. You need help with your geography homework or your history lessons? Or both?”

“We don’t mean any –“ I ventured, holding my palms out in a sign of deference.

“That’s what they always say,” the officer continued. “Listen, the treaty says that Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona are ours. You folks need to stay off of our land.”

“What happened to Texas?” Irene asked.

“Who cares?” the officer answered. “Are you going to get back across the line or am I going to have to have you deported?”

“Deported?” Levi laughed. “Out of Arizona?”

A second patrol car pulled in behind the first and a taller Navajo stepped out and thumped his billy club in the palm of his opposite hand.

***

Headed east again…. Time and date, still unknown.

We had to sneak back across the border to get to the “puddle jumper”. It was a long day, followed by an even longer night. We stopped to re-fuel in a “parallel” – that’s what we naturally started calling them – that had never made it out of the great depression. It was a place where gasoline sold for almost $8.00 a gallon, and the people we encountered knew nothing about dental hygiene. We soon learned that most of them couldn’t read, and when they saw our clothes, rugged, but well-made western wear, they assumed we were “federals”. We weren’t sure if that was a good thing or not, but Irene took pity on them and gave away nearly all of the food we had in the plane.

From there, we ventured next into a parallel that seemed to be totally empty of human existence. We found traces, old things, rusted and crumbling: a horseshoe, a railroad spike, a misshapen belt buckle, but nothing recent. The trees were charred in places and the land seemed barren, but we couldn’t tell what might have happened to eliminate the population. We landed and camped for the night, catching fish and eating. I remember this spot well, as the fish were extremely plentiful and their taste was particularly good, perhaps because they were so free of human contaminants.

We took off again in the morning and came to a place close to where Jericho would have been, but it was nothing but a stretch of desert, blown dunes, brutal sun and a whipping wind. We found people there, but they were nomads, who spoke a broken Spanish dialect with a Comanche cadence to it. They were beautiful people, proud and resilient, tough without seeming hardened by their condition. They wanted us to stay and eat with them, but Irene insisted that we had put upon them too much already and begged us not to disturb their unique blend of cultures any further. We wandered through other parallels, sometimes existing on the very fringes of the societies we found, sometimes engaging and socializing, even taking jobs on one occasion.

Some of these dimensions or lateral universes were similar to the one we had been born into, but others were so markedly different that we felt like explorers stepping first on an uncharted planet in some remote solar system. Some of them resonated more with Irene, while others appealed to Levi. Some were war torn and haggard, desolate, impoverished. Others were simply different, sometimes pastoral and peaceful, sometimes just different, even if it was only slightly. But the more we wandered, the more it became obvious that we weren’t going to find our way back. The mathematical possibilities proved far too disconcerting. Summer faded into fall. The leaves turned and fell no matter what dimension we encountered, and winter made its way across the collective trail of parallel universes. One morning I woke to find a thick layer of frost on the ground in some unknown place, lost in space and time. I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders and shivered not from the cold, but because I just wanted to go home.

***

I look back now and estimate that we spent that whole first year, crossing from parallel to parallel. During that time, we must have stepped into and ultimately back out of at least 200 separate worlds, never staying more than a few days. In the spring, we decided to find a parallel that closely resembled the universe we started in and give up the search. We were no longer looking for “home”, merely the closest substitute. In retrospect, it was this decision that broke us apart. The burden of constant travel itself was maddening, but once we agreed to find a “new” home, the opportunities for argument increased exponentially.

At one place, the society had developed such that women held prominence over men, a true “maternal” order. And while I could have easily endured a lifetime beholden to Irene’s direction, Levi would have nothing to do with it. In another, strange religions held sway and people travelled in rigorous cliques based on their denomination or sect. They refused to intermarry or even associate with other factions and the economic impact on society had turned the world into a poor, bitter, uneducated place.

Still, when we found one that seemed to be only marginally different from our universe of origin, Irene thought that it rained too much, or Levi found that the price of gasoline or cattle was prohibitive. In one instance, they argued over the fact that nothing repugnant immediately presented itself, meaning of course, that in the end, the differences between that parallel and ours would inevitably catch us off guard later.

After a few more days of debate, most often heated debate, we boarded the “puddle jumper” and moved on again. And again, until we found ourselves marking the second anniversary of our travels on a hill in a place that looked sort of like Colorado, but smelled like the Pittsburgh of old. A thick swelter of coal smog lingered in the eastern horizon. Above, the skies were the dull grey of a thunderstorm and yet no rain came.

“I think it’s time we just picked one and made it our home,” I said.

Levi sat on a log, smoking. He nodded and spat into the fire.

Irene harrumphed and turned away from him.

“We can’t go on like this forever,” I added. “Maybe this place here is a sign.”

Levi looked around at the thin trees and the wasted ground of a world ruined by over-industrialization. He snorted his disapproval. The mind has a way of coming untethered, losing its footing and slipping in its gears. I can’t speak for the others, but I tried to cover my lapses, first with humor, then with alcohol – when it was available – and finally, the coming of age.

“We can try,” Irene said, trying to come up with a smile.

“It’s been two years,” I made of point of reiterating that notion as often as I could.

“Alright then,” Levi announced, standing and smoothing his shirt. “Let’s do this. Let’s find ourselves a new home.”


CONTINUED…

Puddle Jumper, Part 2: "Spruce Lake"

II. "Spruce Lake"

“Spruce Lake”, Colorado. October, 1984.

Of course, in the years that followed, I could always do that, close my eyes and imagine myself back at that place just over the Colorado border that we named “Spruce Lake”, a secluded place in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with forests full of aspen and spruce trees, a place that was always thick with the smell of pines and crisp autumn air.

Levi wanted a site to land the “puddle jumper” on the water. So one weekend, the three of us boarded the Grumman G-44 Widgeon and flew across the northeast corner of New Mexico into Colorado and landed the old thing in the water next to a beach front lined with spruce trees. Without hesitating, Levi pulled her in tight to the bank and we unloaded all of our camping gear and piled it just inside the tree line before dusk. I made a campfire, while Levi and Irene tried to catch whatever fish the lake held for dinner. It was a picturesque moment, like something from one of those nostalgic beer commercials shot in the Rocky Mountains throughout the 1980s. The sky was perfect, just a light string of sun lit clouds stretched out across the horizon; the trees were dark in silhouette and the water glistened in the fading light. The fire crackled and popped and the smell of fish and potatoes cooked in a skillet over burning wood completed the setting.

After dinner, Levi propped his leg up on a log beside the fire, lit a cigarillo and took a quick pull from the whiskey bottle.

“I’m thinking of calling her the ‘Blue Spruce’,” he said after a long exhale.

It was his plane, so neither Irene nor I refuted the notion.

“She’ll need a new coat of paint obviously, and for someone to come along and paint the name in script along the side.”

Irene looked across the campfire at me, made a glance at Levi sitting next to the fire and smiled.

“I wonder,” he said in his British accent, “Do they write it on the starboard side or the port? Or both? Do they even use those terms with aeroplanes?”

The whiskey bottle came to me and I passed, sending it around the campfire to Irene. Since I’d known Levi, his accent had been muddied by the west Texas drawl. The effect slowed the clipped British phrasing and gave it a thick, heavy sound, made him sound like a rugged old Tom, world weary and worn thin.

“Do either of you have an opinion on the matter?”

Irene shook her head without saying anything, and I uttered the obvious phrase, “It’s your plane, boss.”

The whiskey bottle came around to him again and he stared at its amber liquid as if it was a crystal ball and the answer to the question lay within.

“Then its name shall be the ‘Blue Spruce’,” he said with a slight flourish, and with that, he took a long pull from the bottle, wiped his chin on his sleeve and resumed his smoke, not bothering to send the whiskey around the fire again. That was Levi, eccentric, a tad insane, always self-obsessed and still wonderful, all at the same time. He was my best friend and I loved him more than any brother, but I hated almost everything he did in this life.

The following year, he married Irene, and I can’t say why he did such a thing, other than he was forty years old and he thought he should be married. He didn’t really love her, couldn’t love anyone more than or as much himself. And after the wedding, he didn’t even pretend to be faithful. The line of senoritas Mexicanas that passed through his bedroom would have impressed any other man so convinced of the need to explore the boundaries of his own virility. I do think – although I was never there to witness such an event – that he often enjoyed having them two (and perhaps three, maybe even four) at a time. What they did in the hours past midnight, I can’t even imagine, but the rest of the staff, the maids and stewards that lived at the ranch regaled me with the tales of loud Latin music, raucous screams, nude swimming, Tequila and cervezas by the dozen.

Yes, Levi had money, natural good looks, and a confident sense of bravado that any woman would find intoxicating, but if he felt anything more than a passing curiosity about this world, he never said a word; and that lack of feeling, or perhaps the inability or unwillingness to communicate what things he did feel drove Irene into my bed and my arms. Where Levi cheated with any chica older than eighteen, Irene was loyal to me in her disloyalty to Levi.

It is perhaps clichéd to say that a woman is radiant, that in a certain light, she looks like an angel, that her eyes are fetching, her hair like threads of golden silk, her lips and cheeks lightly touched with the delicate shades of rose petals. Irene was all of these and still they do her beauty a disservice because they are so inadequate. The first time I saw her, was in Levi’s bedroom, mid-morning and she had just finished brushing her hair out. She heard my boots on the hardwood floor and flipped her long curls back like Rita Hayworth in the movie, Gilda. Irene was sitting at the edge of Levi’s bed, wearing nothing more than a lacy white brassiere and a tight pair of riding pants. She made no attempt to cover herself, only called over to me as if I were one of the staff, which in a way, of course I was.

“You there,” she flicked her wrist as if trying to get my attention. “Do you speak English?”

My dark skin was tanned from a life spent working outside, my brown hair covered by the Stetson hat I wore. I’m sure I looked like one of the servants in the passing glance she afforded me.

“Yes ma’am,” I answered.

“I could really use something to drink,” she said. “Orange juice, water, anything really.”

Our eyes met for only a fraction of a second, nothing to her, but for me, I thought I’d slipped inside a dream.

“Coffee would be absolutely wonderful!”

I nodded and started towards the door, but my feet didn’t want to move. My body seemed stuck to that spot just a few steps inside the entry way.

“Well, are you going to bring me something?” she asked again.

Before I could answer, Levi stepped out of the bathroom, wearing only a towel around his waist.

“Dale,” he called me by name, “We’re going to take the new horses out later, can you have them ready after lunch?”

***

“Spruce Lake”, Colorado. June, 1986.

The cabin was Irene’s idea. We scouted a site in late April and found a little knoll with a small clearing far enough up the hill that it afforded a good view of the lake, but not so high that it made lugging everything back and forth an overly laborious chore. We flew up again in May and cut enough trees to start the foundation, widening the circle to what we thought would be its final circumference. Irene bought a “do-it-yourself” book on cabin building and wandered the construction site, offering impractical suggestions, while Levi and I cleaned up the logs and set them in place. It was a good start, and when we left to go back to Texas for a cattle show at the end of the month, we thought another week or two would finish the job.

We ran into some weather flying up in June, encountered the kind of storm that breathes with God’s own vengeance. Thunder, lightning, high winds and torrential rain. We landed just off the shoreline and spent the night inside the plane, eating cold hot dogs and drinking too much, talking late into the night, then sleeping at odd angles around the cargo section of the plane. Morning presented blue skies and after coffee over a small campfire on the beach, we climbed the hillside to inspect the construction site.

“I’m sure it was over this way,” Levi said with a longer than usual string of curses. He lit a cigarillo and scanned the hillside for any sign of the cabin.

Standing twenty or so feet down the hill side, Irene shook her head.

“If it washed away in the storm,” I offered, “We would still be able to find the trunks of the trees we cut down to build the foundation.”

“I don’t see anything that even looks like a clearing,” Levi slapped the nearest tree and cussed again.

“Maybe it’s the wrong hill,” Irene suggested.

“No, no, no,” Levi answered. “We’ve been coming here for almost a year now. I think I know the look of the bloody hill where we always camp!”

He was right. We had the right hill, but the cabin and any trace of it was gone. Still, we searched that stretch of forest for the rest of the morning, coming up with nothing but an antique bicycle tangled in a juniper bush, beside an outcropping of rocks. The tires were flat, the chain a little rusty, but the rims were in good shape. Levi decided that after lunch he would ride the thing into town to see if anybody there knew anything about the cabin.

We ate cold cuts and canned beans, sliced cucumbers and red grapes. Irene had brought a case of some California Chardonnay she liked and between the three of us, we easily polished off two bottles of it. Noon passed and the sun began its slow descent over the western sky. In the middle of our hazy afternoon drowsiness, Levi jumped up and grabbed the bike.

“I’ll be back around dinner time,” he announced, cigarillo dangling from his lips. “Save me some fish.”

By that point in the affair, Levi must have known what he was leaving. He was a smart man, intelligent in the established sense, both educated and experienced, but he was also street wise, having fought and drunk his way around a good portion of the bars in west Texas. He tousled Irene’s hair as he rode by, giving it just a shake like a father would a daughter. Me, he slapped on the shoulder.

She was all over me the minute he rode out of sight.

“We haven’t got much time,” she said. “Who knows when he’ll be back.”

We took a blanket up the hillside, seeking the solitude and cover of the trees, spread it beneath that great sylvan canopy and made love beneath a cloudless afternoon sky. But sunset came and went without a sign of Levi. We ate and drank and sat by the campfire talking to each other, occasionally wondering – with a smile – what sort of trouble he’d gotten himself into and whether it would take his fists or wits or check book to get him out of it.

Eventually, we dozed off, a chaste scene if ever there was one. Wrapped in a blanket, Irene sat on her side of the fire, and I sat on mine. The sound of Levi stumbling through the bushes and calling to us as he climbed the hill woke us both with a start.

“Dale! Irene!,” he half-whispered, half-hissed. “Wake up, we’ve got to go.”

I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus on my friend pulling his way up the hill to the low-burning campfire between us.

“Dale, get the stuff together,” Levi said a little louder. “We need to go.”

“What is it dear?” Irene said in almost patronizing tone.

“We’re not in Colorado,” Levi said, “At least not in the Colorado that we think of as home.”

CONTINUED…

Puddle Jumper, Part 1: Home Sweet Home

Puddle Jumper

A serial novella, in five parts...

I. Home Sweet Home

Jericho, Texas. September, 1999.

If anyone took the trouble to look through the stack of unopened mail scattered across the table top in the entry way, just inside the front door, they would find that there was little more than $300,000 spread between five accounts – approximately $175,000 in a company-sponsored retirement account, $99,000 in a savings account at Jericho State Bank, $21,000 in a money market account at First Federal, $15,000 in a similar account at Jericho State, and $2,400 in a regular checking account – a paltry sum considering the bounty on J. Levi Bingham’s life was $10 million.

Mixed in with the bank statements and utility bills, sport and car magazines, discount circulars and church bulletins was a small envelope containing a 3” x 5” RSVP card, indicating the invited guest would be happy to attend the farewell dinner scheduled for 6 p.m. on the night of the Autumnal equinox. It was the only response, meaning simply that the others hadn’t bothered to respond or did not wish to make their planned attendance known. Still, there was a good six or seven mail days left before the “RSVP by” date.

Of course all of it was a moot point, given that J. Levi Bingham’s corpse lay stretched across the marble tile beneath the table, his dark blue silk evening robe wrapped indelicately around his feeble old legs. He’d fumbled the mail and his hot cup of Earl Grey tea, or vice versa, and in the effort to stop one or both from spilling, he’d slipped and fallen and broken both his hip and his right arm. The pain was intricate; it hurt him in so many places at once, hurt in so many ways, all at the same time. A sharp, bright pain radiated around his torso and up his spine and a dull throbbing ache ran down his leg and thrummed in the ball of his foot.

Immediately after it happened, he tried to straighten himself and assess the damage, but the effort proved too exhausting. Neither arm would support his scant weight, 148 lbs. of withered 78-year-old man. He tried to roll away from the spot, get closer to the phone in the hallway, but every move made the hip feel like broken glass, ground by a pestle in a mortar. And all of him was wet, his upper torso from a faint sweat and the tea soaked into his pajama top, the lower part of him because of the quarter cup of urine that escaped when his body cracked on the hard tile floor, a figurative “accident” after the literal one. With all of the commotion, Levi was tired, and being in such a state, it seemed perfectly logical for him to lay his head on his unwounded arm and rest a while before trying to figure a way out of the mess he found himself in the morning before he died.

***

A long time ago, during some random encounter in a transient life filled with them, another elderly gentleman, not at all unlike Levi warned me that a young man dreams about the things he will do in this life and then sets out to do them, accomplishing what he can and re-defining what he can’t, so that his life’s successes seem planned and his failures, calculated changes in direction. The stranger said a middle-aged man’s life is spent re-defining and an old man spends his days remembering. I don’t know and can’t say exactly what Levi spent his final 46 hours thinking about, but stuck there on the floor like he was, I have to imagine it was spent remembering the events – both successes and re-defined failures – of his life. It’s what I would have done, but that doesn’t make it any better an assumption. It just makes it congruent with any other possible answer.

To understand Levi, a person first needs to consider that he was an Englishman, a true “Brit’s Brit” as they say, born in Manchester, raised in London, loyal to the Queen and fond of his tea and biscuits. After that, one needs to consider the fact that he was the most fearless amateur bull rider in all of west Texas. Add the two sums and it’ll will produce a fraction of what it meant to be Levi Bingham in a town like Jericho, Texas. See, he liked his beer in a glass, his whiskey straight from the bottle, liked his women smart, and liked his horses tall, at least fifteen hands. He also liked a good book, Charles Dickens being his favorite, enjoyed listening to classical music (Copland, Stravinsky) and wore Italian loafers to Sunday morning worship service, the one time a week he didn’t wear boots.

He preferred driving his heavy duty pick-up truck with the windows down, even in the middle of the summer on a dusty dirt top road. He bathed in the evenings before supper and sat on his porch, watching the sun fade while smoking a cigarillo. He rose before dawn and sat in the same spot drinking hot black coffee, thinking about all of the things he needed to do before he could return to that spot. It was a ritual, hard and set, but Levi was a risk taker just the same, a man who bought low and sold high: land, real estate, oil properties, stocks, bonds. And he made enemies: lawyers who wanted to take every dime he’d made, ex-wives who wanted the same, but would settle for a steady stream of alimony. Then there were the transactional losers, the foolish men who underestimated him on a cattle deal or a land sale. They paid the price for their ignorance and usually it was steep.

***

So where was I while my boss and friend of forty some odd years lay dying in a pool of urine and Earl Grey tea?

The better question might be phrased this way: Where did Levi send me the day before he slipped and died in a puddle of Earl Grey tea? The small town sheriff at the Jericho police station asked me the question the first way.

“Where did you say you were again Mr. Carter?”

“Me? When?”

“The morning your former boss took a nasty fall and ended up dead on the floor of his million dollar ranch?”

“You don’t think I –“

“Weren’t you engaged to Miss Irene?” the second officer interrupted.

“...had anything to do with this?”

“Did you have a falling out with Mr. Bingham over Irene Turner?” Yes, Levi and I had a “falling out” over Irene Turner. Police the world over have one thing in common. They all seem to get the wrong facts right, while inevitably getting the right facts wrong. Truth is, Levi and I had been having a falling out over Irene for forty years, and it didn’t take a junior police ranger with a real brass secret decoder badge to sort that fact from all of the other circumstances. The question they should have been asking was about Irene. Where was she the morning Levi died?

I’ll save that for later. I need to explain where I was on that morning first, and to do that, I need to talk about something else for a minute.

On May 13, 2013, CNN reported that time travel was in fact, possible. The staff writer clarified by saying that a person would have to move faster than the speed of light, and then would only be able to travel forward a mere fraction of a second, but they conceded to the general public that such a feat might be possible. In 2011, noted science magazine, Scientific American speculated that parallel universes really do exist citing quantum theory as a postulate and pointing to the results of several independent laboratory experiments as potential proof. Sources like these merely speculate on what might be possible and are constrained by what the general public can understand. They don’t endeavor to explain what could happen if the cosmos were to align in a random place at an unspecified time.

Phrased slightly differently, they convey only a general understanding of the sufficiently proven theories, interpreted by an extensively degreed consensus, agreed upon by other steadfast conservatives. Such thinkers also observed, and the great rationals of the day largely agreed that the world is flat and the coelacanth was extinct. The earth is the center of the universe, Columbus discovered America and parallel universes, well… such things exist only in the realm of science fiction magazines. None of those revered laboratory creatures stood with us on the rocky banks of Spruce Lake. Not a one of those ordered scientific minds stood beside us when the wind blew cold and sharp out of the northwest. The water slapped at the shoreline, sloshing and spraying our faces with a faint mist. A smell of broken evergreens and spent airplane fuel filled the morning air and Levi walked back and forth from the wreckage, collecting his things while mumbling an odd phrase and a string of curses.

***

Jericho Municipal Airport, August, 1984.

“We need a bigger engine,” he said after invoking the name of God and suggesting something just short of eternal condemnation for all of the people standing in the immediate vicinity. “Same make and model, but a better engine.”

I looked at him and Irene, standing next to each other in front of the dusty Quonset hut located out by the patch of dirt affectionately known as the “south runway”.

“I don’t think they’ve got one with a bigger engine.”

There were only two runways at the Jericho Municipal Airport. One ran north and south, the other sort of northeast, southwest, with a little hitch in it leading to the rented hangars. There were a couple of planes for sale in front of the hangars, an Antonov An-2 “crop duster” and a small Cessna; we were looking at the Cessna. Parked next to those, an extreme oddity for the wide, baked flatlands leading to the fabled llano estacado, a Grumman G-44 Widgeon, a real “puddle jumper” made for carting passengers, albeit only a few of them between islands in the Caribbean or Hawaii, maybe Alaska. A plane that could land on water, an anomaly, a ghost, a thing out of place in the desert southwest.

“I like this one,” Irene said. “It’s got character. Seems like it has a story to tell.”

“I don’t know,” I ventured. “It’s a plane for taking off and landing on water. Not much of that around these parts.”

“What kind of bloody engine does it have?” Levi asked.

“A good one,” the assistant manager at the Jericho Municipal Airport answered. “A real good one.”

“What did you call it?” Levi turned and glared at me.

“A ‘puddle jumper’,” I said it again.

“Any idea what that means back home?” he asked with a nod in the general direction of mother England.

“Nope,” I shrugged.

“Probably best,” he quipped before turning to face the assistant manager. “How much would you be willing…?” His voice trailed off and the assistant manager’s eyes craned upwards as he attempted a mathematical calculation in his head.

After several seconds, he quoted a price. Levi immediately offered the man fifteen percent less. The man thought long and hard again and came back with a price that was $1,000 lower than the original. Again, Levi instantly offered fifteen percent less, having revised the amount to factor in the owner’s reduction in mere seconds.

“You got a head for figures,” the man said. “I can see that I won’t be getting much out of you. How about we settle in the middle?”

Levi announced the agreed upon amount in his British accent and they shook hands. They shook hands and the next twelve years seemed to disappear in little more than a blink. My eyes fluttered softly and I was standing on the beach at Spruce Lake.

CONTINUED…

A nice long (Texas music) playlist!

Lots of writing (and editing... and re-writing) going on lately.  Here's what I've been listening to while trying to get it all done!

   The Avett Brothers - The Carpenter

      Ryan Bingham - Junky Star and Tomorrowland

         Jason Boland & The Stragglers - Rancho Alto

      Hayes Carll - Trouble in Mind

   Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell - Old Yellow Moon

      John Hiatt - Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns

         Jason Isbell - Here We Rest and Southeastern

      Robert Earl Keen - The Rose Hotel

   Lyle Lovett - Natural Forces

      Stoney LaRue - Velvet

         Tejas Brothers - Rich Man

      Two Tons of Steel - Not That Lucky

   Dwight Yoakam - 3 Pears

Thanks (again) for keeping up with it all and reading along!  Just wait and see what's next....

First place! Thank you all (again)!

Just announced this morning...  the winner of this month's writing event over on the Creator and the Catalyst forum.  Yes, you guessed it,... The Best Game on Earth!

http://www.creatorandthecatalyst.com/dir/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=494&start=25

Just wanted to say thank you to all of you for following along with the story, clicking and reading, and...  for all of the kind words throughout!  This is a tremendous honor, as the competition was tough!  I am thrilled and honored and truly humbled.  Thank you, thank you and thank you again!

A poem for a (rainy) Friday

I don't write poetry much, as I've mentioned before...  But here's something that captured my imagination for an hour or so yesterday....

Lament for the Wandering Native Spirits

The ghosts that walk the southern road at night,
Caddo, Choctaw, Alabama-Coushatta, Tawakoni pass
Under the moss strung live oak branches, breathing
The frog air, thick with sweat, painted mud red and
Covered in shadow, amble slowly past the small
Town cemetery with no greeting for the sleeping
Spirits, dead eyes lingering on stone. They know
The ordered trees -- soldier pine, loblolly, birch,
Corkwood -– hear their leaves whispering, recognize
The sound and choose a path according to the wind
Humming through the boughs. They are no more and
Still exist, a tear on the stain of futile memory, lost
On a wintry night behind the cackle of
A tripping stream, banks pock-marked with crawfish
Holes, the albino forms of channel cats slurping
Flies from the surface. This is the way
We remember, random images, forms of thought, shades
And slips and reconsidered visions, all of our misspent sins
Counted again with pebbles, exactly numbered. Hold me
With only eyes, fix this face with strong arms and
Shaken hands; the dawn rains insufferably ahead, out
On the plain, cleared and desolate.

 

VII. The Open Window

VII. The Open Window

In Dallas, a manager at a combined comic book and card shop put us in touch with a serious collector, a retired attorney who bought the whole stack of cards for $56,000. Mom and I sat there while he and the manager went through the deck, assigning values to each card: $3,200 for the 1933 Gehrig, $1,500 for each of the Mantles, $750 apiece for the Clemente and Campanella cards. When the list was done, and the individual values were tallied, the collector pulled a checkbook out of his sports coat and wrote out the amount like it was a trip to the grocery store, nothing more.

Seeing my arm in a sling, he asked if I played.

“No sir,” I said, knowing it was true then, even if it hadn’t been just days before. My mother and the store manager exchanged glances, but neither said anything.

The surgeries to fix my arm cost $39,000 and the remaining $17,000 was just enough to catch up on the mortgage and hire some help to get us through the rest of the summer. In the end, I didn’t quit baseball to help my mom around the farm, and I certainly didn’t quit because I lost interest or met a girl, like some of the other guys. No, I gave up baseball because it would never be the same for me again. Sure, I could have come back as an outfielder like the guy in the John Tunis novel, but after tossing the ball around with Mantle and Gehrig and receiving pitch advice from Drysdale, what would that look like really? After it was all said and done, I gave up baseball to focus more on life.

They’re similar in so many ways, that it’s easy to get one confused with the other. In both “games,” a person has to overcome disappointment, unfair circumstances, and even deal with a few bad calls now and then. And speaking metaphorically, a guy (or gal) has got to know how to throw a fastball when the situation calls for it, when to go with the curve, and when to throw the slider. It also requires a lot of listening to the “catcher,” the coaches, friends and parents. And honestly, it’s all about practice, practice, practice. The old adage about a person playing the way he or she practices was never more true. Still, the best advice I got on the game of life was from some guy calling himself “Charles” Mantle. He once said, “A win’s a win.” It took me several years to know just what he was getting at, but I think I understood it better after my baseball days were finished.

He and his friends, “Henry” Gehrig and “Robert” Clemente also taught me that, “only one game matters” and that tomorrow is for getting better. In 1997, I thought they were only talking about baseball, but sitting on a tractor in the middle of a pasture some years later, I know that it was about so much more. I look back now and I realize what that seventeen year old kid needed to learn most was that the best game on earth is life. I needed to hear that because I hadn’t really been living it much, not since dad died in Iraq.

Mantle also said that we have to hurry, “we don’t have much time.”

Yeah, I made it through all those lost days and nights, went to school, did my chores and woke up and did it all over again. But for a while, I wasn’t really there for any of it. It was something more like, I moved to the rhythm of it all, playing my part, saying my lines and swaying with the other dancers, but it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t living. Through it all, the farm was the place where my mom and dad took long walks out along the fence row, sat and watched the sunset under the oak tree, kissed and fell in love and made a life. It is also the place where some bend in the rules of the universe allowed the ghosts of Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig and Roberto Clemente to walk out of a freshly mowed hay meadow and toss a baseball around with a seventeen year old kid.

I don’t know how that happened or why, only that it was and is. I said before that I never saw my dad again that summer, but I never said a word about the summers that came after. And I never said a word about Mantle or Gehrig either.

On summer nights, sometimes in the late spring, and on occasion, the early fall, just before sunset, mom or I would see a shadow walking out across the field, moving past the oak tree or the pecan tree, coming up the fence row or stepping out from behind the barn. Most often, it was dad, stopping by for a quick conversation, a brief hug, but sometimes it was Mantle or “The Iron Horse” checking in on their former student. A smart man would probably make some observation about cosmic doors closing and other windows opening. I don’t know about any of that.

What I do know is that there’s a farm and a barn, a hay meadow and an oak tree just off of Highway 19, out on Route 5 in Ramblewood, Texas where ghosts stop by on seemingly random afternoons. They walk across the pasture and talk about the old days while the whippoorwills and quail call. And if there’s a place like that in Texas, then I bet there’s another somewhere, maybe in Iowa.

In the years that have followed, the farm has changed in ways that I never imagined. After the turn of the century, we converted the south pasture into a field for growing soy beans and it created a nice boon for a farm that previously had always existed just inches from the brink of bankruptcy. The neighbors asked why we didn’t expand our new crop into the pasture to the west. We told them we wanted to keep some of the old farm “the way it was”, and left it at that.

As for me, well I never made it to college, but in 2001, I met a girl named Marcie at the J & C Farm and Implement store over in Mt. Verdant. She has dark hair, bright eyes and a smile that fills me with a happiness that I never knew was possible. We re-modeled the farm house and made it our home in 2003, put in a new kitchen with granite counter tops and a deep industrial sink, just like they show on all of the home renovation shows on Saturday mornings. The next summer, we re-finished the carriage house for mom. She said that dad felt a little weird stopping by to visit mom with Marcie in the house.

Marcie and I were blessed with a daughter the following year, and coincidentally, I published a little book on pitching techniques for adolescents to help with the increased financial demands around the house. With no more baseball cards to sell, I had to find some way to cover the cost of diapers!

Still, the non-fiction sports market is a precarious one. It takes the name recognition of a former star player (or a Ph. D. in the field) to really succeed; so my next book was a fictional offering, a tale about a sheriff in a small town in west Texas, who utilizes his uncanny connection with the paranormal spirits that hang around the family ranch to solve murder mysteries. One might say that the idea just came to me one afternoon….

I changed a few details, made it a ranch instead of a farm, west Texas instead of east and made the protagonist a sheriff instead of an old ballplayer. The series caught on just enough to get a multi-book deal, with a nice advance that arrived around the same time my second daughter was born. So, sitting on a new John Deere tractor out in a hay meadow in the middle of east Texas in 2013, I have to admit that so far, it’s been a nice life. And if I ever think about baseball, it’s only when and if my kids show a little interest in whatever game is showing on television on a Sunday afternoon. If they ask, I tell them (again) how their dad pitched the first four innings of the Ramblewood state championship game, the really close one that clinched it all for the 1997 Wrangler baseball team. Ramblewood 2, Westlake 1.

THE END



Notes

First of all, I have to acknowledge the tremendous debt owed to John R. Tunis for his 1940 book, The Kid from Tomkinsville. Take out all of the ghosts, and this story could have been titled, “The Kid from Ramblewood.” As it stands, the piece is at the very least, an homage to Mr. Tunis’ far superior work!

Second, many of the avid baseball fans “in the audience” will recognize a few not so subtle references to David Clyde, the eighteen-year-old “phenomenon” who pitched for the Texas Rangers from 1973 to 1975. I was a youngster growing up in Texas around that time and kept my fingers crossed that Mr. Clyde would make a successful come back, either with my favorite team, the Rangers, or in one of his subsequent attempts with the Cleveland Indians and Houston Astros. The protagonist’s family name (“Davidson”) was an intentional choice, as at least one part of this tale is based (albeit loosely) on real events.

And finally, many, many thanks to the writer and director (Phil Alden Robinson), as well as the cast and crew from one of my all-time favorite movies, Field of Dreams (Yes, that is the one about the other magical field up in Iowa.). Their wonderful adaptation of the 1982 book by W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe, was an obvious point of inspiration in crafting this work.

VI. The Circle Changes

VI. The Circle Changes

At the far edge of the west pasture, just beside the place where the fence row ran parallel to the hard top oil road leading down to Highway 19 and off into town, a large oak tree marked the corner of the Davidson land. When I was ten, maybe eleven years old, it was the place I’d go when things weren’t going well back at the house. It being the farthest point away from the kitchen table without actually stepping off the property most likely had something to do with it, but there’s also something about the great leafy stretch of shade that a giant oak tree gives in the middle of a long summer.

I still remember running there – full out panting and breathing hard, lungs aching, tears streaming from the side of my face – the day we heard that dad was killed in action in Iraq. By the time I got to the oak tree, I was all out of tears and angry at the cruelness of a world that could take a father away from his son for such a paltry thing as oil stuck in the sand some place I’d never heard of until Operation Desert Storm. Later, many years later, I learned about things like ideological differences and the politics of a global economy and it still did nothing to assuage the burning rage I felt in that moment.

In a sense, baseball saved me that summer. I spent days, weeks actually going through dad’s things in the house, in the loft in the barn, in his workspace out in the garage and I collected all of the things that seemed most dear to him, or at least most personal to me: an old safety razor, a pocket knife, a cane fishing pole, his tackle box with the last swimsuit edition folded inside, a brand new set of socket wrenches, his favorite flannel shirt, an old pea coat – far too big for me, but worth saving for whenever I grew into it, a stack of Robert Parker detective novels – tattered and yellowed, but obviously read and re-read, a coffee mug, with the fading logo for Kramer Tool & Dye fading on the outside and a permanent ring of deep brown coffee stains inside and three shoe boxes filled with baseball cards, mostly from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s.

I kept all of these things in the loft of the barn, visiting them regularly throughout the winter of 1991 and on into the spring of 1992. Obviously, the baseball cards held my attention longest and when the season started in the spring of ’92, I was dedicated to the notion of honoring my dad’s memory with the best little league performance I could deliver. Over the course of that season, I listened to every suggestion the coaches offered, choking up on the bat when they said, knowing and hitting my cut-off man when the situation called for it and practicing a little bit, every day.

At the end of that season, I gathered up all of the loose balls around the house and spent hours working with them that winter, bouncing grounders off the side of the barn wall, taking swings out in the hay meadow, long-tossing balls up onto the roof of the house and “getting under them” to catch them like fly-balls hit deep to center. The following year, I was so far ahead of my peers that the coaches let me work with some of the other players as sort of a surrogate instructor; and by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was striking out seniors from other towns, getting clutch hits in big games and daydreaming about which college program would get me the exposure needed to make it to “The Bigs”.

It was certainly a promising beginning to my baseball career, but on Memorial Day in 1997, I sat under that same old oak tree, knowing that win or lose, the state playoff game that Thursday night would be my last baseball game. I was only seventeen years old, a junior in high school, and yet in a lot of ways, I was already washed-up and done. And it sounds strange to say it now, but when the shadow of a man walked up from behind me out in the pasture and sat down next to me in the shade of that tree, I thought it was the ghost of Mickey Mantle again. I’d certainly seen a lot of that guy and his pal, Gehrig over the course of the spring.

“You know these are probably worth something by now,” the stranger said, handing me a stack of baseball cards held together by a rubber band. I looked up and saw the man that looked like me, but wasn’t. I recognized the sharp nose, the intense blue eyes and the short Army haircut.

“Dad!” I hugged him and simultaneously felt the solid nature of his chest and arms, back and shoulders, but I also sensed the fluid untenable motion of it all. It was real in one sense, but also a thing that couldn’t be fixed and held onto for very long without concentrating. Years later, I realized that the feeling, the emotion connected to that embrace was real, but the physical structure of it wasn’t.

“What are you doing here?”

“Well,” he smiled my smile, a sort of nodding half grin that I knew I did, but didn’t know where I’d learned it. “That’s a long story, but it’s not the one I came to tell you today.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know,” he nodded “But I need you to pay attention to what all I am going to tell you.” He removed the rubber band from the stack of baseball cards and began sorting through them. I watched as he ran his thumbs through the stack, sliding each card past the next: a 1953 Mickey Mantle, a Lou Gehrig from 1933, a couple of Clementes, a ’61 of Mantle, a Campanella, a Bob Gibson, a Sandy Koufax and several more. They were all there, the greatest to ever play the game, and nearly all of the ones who had passed on had signed their cards.

“Some of these cards aren’t in great shape,” he said, “But hopefully, the autographs will make up for that. They were your granddad’s and mine and now I’m telling you to take them to Dallas and sell them all. Get what you can for them and save the farm for you and your mother.”

“But dad,” I said, confused and wondering what he must know that I didn’t.

“Listen son,” he showed me the cards again. “These are worth a lot of money, enough to change some things, some very important things.”

“Dad, what is it?” I pleaded with him now. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

“I can’t,” he said. “It would ruin everything if I told you. Hold on to these.”

He pressed them into my hands.

“You’ll know what to do with them,” he said and then mused to himself a minute before repeating the phrase. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do with them.”

“Is it mom?”

He shook his head.

“The car? The tractor?”

Dad didn’t answer, but he hugged me again, and harder the second time, longer, as if it was going to have to last him a while. It was the last and only time I saw his ghost that summer.

In 1940, a guy named John Tunis published a book called, The Kid from Tomkinsville. It is a bittersweet tale about a kid name Roy Tucker who is in many ways, a true baseball prodigy. At a young age, he finds himself pitching for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but suffers an unfortunate accident after a big game and never pitches again. I’d never even heard of the book when I took the mound that Thursday in the state playoffs against the Westlake Vipers, but it’s fair to say that I’ve read it a few times since.

Everything was going so well that night. The fastballs were getting the calls, the curve was getting the swings and the slider was practically untouchable. Still, it’s worth noting here that my short career was unusual in that I never really developed what insiders like to call an “off-speed” pitch. The most common is probably the “circle change”, a pitch thrown like a fastball, but where much more of the hand makes contact with the ball, increasing the friction at the point of release and taking momentum off the ball once it’s thrown. I had two good, hard fastballs, a four-seamer and a two-seamer. I threw a mean curve and a decent slider. The coaches never thought to encourage me to develop a slower pitch that would add some variety into my repertoire. I guess they all got caught up in the excitement of having a hard-throwing righty like me on their team.

Against Westlake, I first noticed the pain after a hard curve in the third inning. It was everywhere inside my arm, everywhere all at once, the muscle, the joint, the bone. The pain stabbed and throbbed, both at the same time, but it flashed and went away. The pitch produced a good hard swing for strike three to end the inning, and I went back to the dugout, rubbing my elbow a little, but not really concerned. I’d gotten over too far on my curve a few times before and winced in pain as a result. A little ice after the game usually did the trick, but Mr. Peterson noticed the look on my face as I walked off the mound and mouthed the words, “Everything okay?”

Nodding, I released the arm and went and sat down next to Jefferies, my catcher.

“Let’s stay away from the curve in the fourth,” I mumbled, “If we can.”

He shrugged in agreement and that was all that was said about it.

These days, they don’t even recommend introducing the curve ball to kids younger than fourteen years old. Their arms aren’t developed, their mental toughness and discipline aren’t ready. My curve was always an erratic pitch for me, one that worked perfectly sometimes and not so much on other occasions. That being said, I had the mechanics of it down by the time I was twelve and was using it regularly by the time I was a freshman. Still, I probably forced it too much on the days when it wasn’t working and when the science teacher is the baseball coach, well who’s going to say “Knock it off kid, you’ll blow out your arm.”

Fourth inning, second batter, the count was two balls, one strike. Jefferies called for the curve and I started to shake my head, but decided to try the pitch again. It had been several minutes and most of the pain had subsided. I came to a set position, ball in my glove, both tucked neatly at the center of my chest. My eyes locked on the batter at the plate and I started my throwing motion.

This time, the pain flashed like a bright light in my eyes. It was a clear night, but I seriously thought I saw lightning blink on the horizon. Then I registered the ripping sound and became aware of the dull numbing sensation in my lower arm. It felt like my forearm had separated from the rest of my body and was this unreal appendage hanging dead and limp at my side. I pulled it in against my torso and the ache was so intense that the grey fog of a faint passed over the corners of my vision.

By the time Jefferies and Mr. Peterson arrived, I was kneeling at the base of the pitcher’s mound, holding my arm and shaking my head, saying “No, no, no” over and over again.

CONTINUED...

V. Regional Playoffs: Ramblewood 5, Bon Homme 3

V.  Regional Playoffs:  Ramblewood 5, Bon Homme 3

First inning, first batter, first pitch.  Fastball right on the imaginary number seven!

“Ball!” the umpire called.  I looked at the catcher, Ryan Jefferies and shook my head because that pitch usually goes for a strike.  Yes, it was down low at the knees and yes of course it was right on the corner of the plate, but most of the time, the umpire, whoever it may be, calls it a strike.

Next pitch:  I tried a fastball on the opposite corner, and the umpire called it the same, ball two.  Jefferies could sense my frustration.  It wasn’t that I was a “nibbler”, one of those pitchers who threw right off the side of the plate all day, hoping to get the questionable calls.  Still, we needed those pitches to be called strikes.  Jefferies gave the sign for a curve, and we got lucky because the batter practically threw his bat at the ball.  It made the count two and one, but I had no idea what to throw next.  The catcher asked for another fastball.  I nodded and sent the pitch right back at the number seven spot.

“Strike two!”  Things were worse than I thought.  The umpire was going to call the game inconsistently.  What worked once, might not work again and vice versa.  For me, there was nothing more infuriating.  I liked knowing that my fastball was a strike, relished the fact that my curve was a ball, but highly likely to induce a swing.  Without those assurances, it could be a long afternoon.

Jefferies gave me the sign for a slider.  I didn’t get a good snap on the ball and compensated by coming around too far on the pitch.  It hung right over the middle of the plate, but the batter picked up on that too late and was only able to slap it foul.  Everybody was having trouble it seemed.

We tried another fastball, this time on the inside corner, only to have it called a ball.  Some coaches will preach to their hitters to sit and wait in a full count, that the odds are in the favor to get a called ball and a free ride to first base.  Others press their batters to “go down swinging”.  I think it depends on the guy’s philosophy in life, aggressive or passive, but I can usually tell by the way a player swings if he wants to swing or he’s afraid to do so. 

This guy was afraid.  He’d watched four fastballs sail by, all of which were strikes.  He’d missed on a good curve and pulled the trigger late on a hanging slider.  Not an aggressive hitter at all.  I was going to have to give him something that the umpire would ring him up on, because he wasn’t going to do it to himself.  Jefferies and I agreed on the slider.

I paused and took a deep breath, knowing that I needed one pitch to work for me.  The fastballs weren’t getting the calls and the curve was a risky proposition.  Put simply, I had to make the slider work for me.  As I moved into my wind-up, I revisited my time on the mower in the south pasture.  I’d been working fastballs and curves in my mind, ignoring the slider because it was a new pitch and I wasn’t yet comfortable with it.  For a minute, I closed my eyes and imagined what a perfect slider would have looked like, sitting in the tractor, going down the rows in the hay meadow, motor humming, sunset a burnt orange behind my back; and in an odd way, I could see it there, better than I could standing on the mound in a game situation, sweat on my upper lip, heart beating heavy with excitement.

Opening my eyes, I launched my body towards home plate, mimicking the motion I envisioned for myself on the tractor.  My arm came over and around, my wrist snapped, the ball whipped out of my fingertips and tumbled through the waiting air between me and home plate.

I saw the batter’s face.  At first, he thought it was a curve, but it didn’t break like one.  Next, he seemed to think it might be a fastball, but he didn’t recognize its trajectory, not with the lateral break that it had.  He was stymied by the pitch and still contemplating whether to swing or not when the ball hit the catcher’s mitt behind him.  Strike three! 

For the next three innings, Jefferies and I took our chances with the fastballs, getting the call sometimes and wishing we had it at others.  The curve was switched on and getting the swings, but the slider was the “out” pitch, and it carried it us through the line-up.  I looked up and saw “Charles” Mantle and “Henry” Gehrig sitting about four rows back on the first base side.  I assumed that was “Robert” Clemente and “Scott” Drysdale sitting in the row behind them.  There was a new guy with them and he looked an awful lot like the baseball card picture of Roy Campanella.  They were all smiling.

Still, the fourth inning is when things get interesting.  At that point, the pitcher is facing the batters for the second time, and what worked the first trip to the plate, most likely will not get the hitter back to the dugout the second time around.  These guys were well coached, and they were laying off the curve.  We still weren’t getting a consistent call on the fastballs; so an element of luck was introduced. If we get a good call on the fastball and use an off-speed pitch to induce a foul ball, then the slider would get them for strike three.  They weren’t swinging at much, owing to the favorable calls they were getting.  However, that also mean the infielders and outfielders were having trouble staying focused on the game.  The Bon Homme Bobcat second baseman made good contact with one of my low outside fastballs, driving it into right field for a single that ripped down the first base line.

I couldn’t get the umpire to call anything a strike during the next at bat and ended up issuing a walk on four straight pitches, three of which would have been strikes with any other guy calling the game.  Still, I didn’t complain.  A good pitcher takes what the ump is giving and works with it.  The next guy hit a grounder to short and the guys behind me turned a double play, but it let the man on second get to third.  Two outs and the next guy walks to put men on the corners.  Four innings, four walks.  Not one of my better days statistically.  Then their catcher hit a nice blooper over our second baseman’s head, scoring the first run.  I was so mad at myself, the umpire, everything, that I struck the next guy out on three straight fastballs, all four-seamers and all as hard as I could through them right at the guy’s hands.  Poor guy swung more as a defense mechanism than anything else, but it gave me a good idea.  If I wanted this game, and yes, I most certainly did, then I was going to have to earn it.

One good thing about an inconsistent umpire is that usually whatever way he’s calling the game, the other team is dealing with the same issues.  Our guys got to their pitcher in the fifth inning, grinding out two runs with good base-running and carefully placed singles.  It gave us the lead back 2-1, and made my job a lot easier.  Mantle gave me a knowing look and I went to work on the next few guys in the Bon Homme line-up.  However, after four more batters, I’d issued another walk, an infield single and pitched one in too far on a batter, giving him first base on a questionable “hit by pitcher” call.  That had the bases loaded with only one out.  Up in the stands, Drysdale motioned for me to hurry up and bring the pitch to the plate quicker.  It put the hitters off their game just a little, just enough to get the next guy out with two subsequent sliders. 

Typically, I don’t like throwing the same pitch twice, but sometimes the best move is to stick with what’s working.  Jefferies called for more of the slider, and I obliged.  The next guy saw four of them, managing to foul two off, but missing completely on the fourth for strike three.  At the end of the fifth inning, the game was tied 2-2.

“Let’s keep going with the slider,” Jefferies caught me in the dugout in between innings.  “It’s the only thing they can’t seem to figure out.”

He was right.  The Bon Homme coach had told his hitters to sit on the fastballs and curves, but the slider looked like something in between.  When they decided to swing at it, they usually missed.  When they didn’t swing, the umpire uncharacteristically gave it a consistent strike call.  In the bottom half of the sixth inning, I threw the pitch well and often.  In fact, it was my best inning of the day.  No walks, one hit and two strike-outs. 

In the top of the seventh, our guys took full advantage of a Bobcat pitching change.  The new kid never even got settled in, giving up three runs on two walks and three hits.  It ultimately cost the Bobcats the ball game, as my reliever only gave up one run after Mr. Peterson told me I was done for the day.  It was one of the most frustrating outings of my young career, but we won.  That was enough to prolong my baseball career for at least one more game.

That night, I sat in my room and watched the moon rise up over the oak tree and cast its silver light through the leaves and into the window.  The door was open and my mother stuck her head in as she walked by.

“Not one of your best, huh?”

“Nope,” I said, confirming what we both knew.

“You stuck it out though.”

I didn’t say it, but all I could think was that I didn’t have much choice.  With so few games left in my limited baseball career, I had to hang on to ever second as long as I could.

“I’m proud of you,” she added.

Mantle was proud of me for toughing it out.  Gehrig and Campanella were proud of me.  What I wanted was for my dad to see it.  I wanted him to be proud, not mom.  Not Mickey Mantle.  And not the ghost of Lou Gehrig.  It sounds ungrateful, like something a spoiled brat of a child would think or say, but all I wanted was for my dad to see me play.

My mom must have read some of the frustrated emotions in my expression, because she said the one thing that would console me in that moment.

“Your dad would have been proud of you too.”

I said thanks and she tousled my hair the way she did when I was little.  With a smile on my face, I rolled over and went to sleep, dreaming of what a career in the big leagues would have been like.  I could almost hear the roar of the crowd, smell the dewy scent of freshly hewn grass, marvel at the good solid thump of a fastball hitting the catcher’s mitt. 

My mind also drifted through the grind of a long humid afternoon, hurling pitch after pitch in the bright August sun.  I felt the boredom of an extended rain delay, knew the weariness and monotony of a late season road trip.  I saw all of these things in contrast to the feeling of a nice familiar tractor, running back and forth in the pasture next to an old farmhouse in Ramblewood, Texas.

CONTINUED…