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!
Friday, September 27, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
"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!
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!
Monday, September 23, 2013
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
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
Friday, September 20, 2013
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…
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…
Thursday, September 19, 2013
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…
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
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…
“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…
Monday, September 16, 2013
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 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…
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
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....
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....
Sunday, September 8, 2013
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!
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!
Friday, September 6, 2013
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.
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.
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