The Battle of the Swine King

Cinderella Story

2006-12-15T06:39:00.000-08:00

I walk up the rickety stairs of the Cleveland Boxing Academy and into a movie set straight from Sylvester Stallone or Clint Eastwood.

The same peeling paint, the same tattered poster of Muhammad Ali, the same punched-out speed bag. A lean guy skipping rope and an empty sparring ring. In movies, back-alley gyms like this are where nobodies become contenders and where has-beens become legends.

If Melinda Woody’s life were a screenplay, I’d be meeting her at the end of Act One…in which the Unknown Kid shows Great Potential.

We sit down by the vacant ring. Her trainer Mike Lewis looks on, along with her manager Jeff Yarber. They’re clearly very fond of her. She’s blonde, a bit petite, what my grandmother would have called “homespun pretty.” Her nickname is “2 Cute.”

“Why boxing?” I ask. I don’t realize until later what a stupidly chauvinistic question this is.

Melinda tells me her story.

She was a three-sport athlete in the PCHS class of ’98, but a few short years later found herself soft around the middle and working a desk job. Her glory days were long gone. She made what some might call an unusual decision.

“I heard of a Tough Woman bout,” she says, “and just wanted to do something to stay back in shape. I was always athletic, and after three kids what can you do to stay in shape?”

Hmm…work out at Curves? Go paddling? Buck hay? Anything besides get punched in the face?

Melinda grins. “My neighborhood was all guys. I played football with all the guys in the back yard. Got beat up a bunch.”

When she smiles, her teeth are all there. I notice that she’s brick-solid. I wonder exactly who was beating up on whom.

Jeff Yarber, a former Golden Gloves champion and current Bradley County Commissioner (insert many jokes here), soon got her in touch with Mike. But Mike refused to train her. Everybody wants to box until they find out how much work is involved. Mike wanted to see if she had talent, and more importantly, that mysterious and essential quality called “heart.”

So…“A year and a half, I fought Tough Woman,” she says. Tough Woman, if you haven’t heard, is a sort of loosely organized amateur fighting series where women the size of wildebeest try to mash one another into giblet gravy. It is to professional boxing what slam-dancing is to Swan Lake.

“I only trained for two weeks before my first Tough Woman fight,” Melinda remembers. “I actually beat a former Tough Woman champion. Then I fought again in East Ridge and won that one. I fought again in Alabama against a woman that was fifty pounds heavier than me and I won a belt in that one.”

I whistle. Melinda weighs maybe one-twenty, so as a relatively inexperienced amateur she beat a hundred and seventy-pound belt-holding brawler—a woman I wouldn’t approach without a tranquilizer gun.

And this turned out to be talent and heart enough for Mike. “After she went and fought—” he says, chuckling—“we began to recognize that this is actually something she can do.”

Jeff speaks up. “I’ve worked with Mike now for fifteen years. Over those fifteen years I’ve probably seen five hundred people come to events who want to be fighters—they say. Until they see it’s a lot of guts, a little glory. People don’t understand how hard it is to come here five days a week and work out, how bad you feel. Your hands are always aching. Your body’s always aching. Then when you actually get in the ring and get hit a couple of times, that heart leaves.”

Melinda does have heart, that’s for sure. I watched a tape of her second professional fight, from last March, and I saw right away how Melinda used her wits and her training. As the four-round fight progressed, she wore her opponent down with good guarding, quick punch-volleys, and nimble footwork. By the final round her opponent was dragging and Melinda was still dancing and jabbing. Inspiring stuff.

But her heart goes beyond the ring. After that fight she decided to quit her day job to train full-time. I think about this very hard.

“I don’t get,” I finally say, “why some people think it’s easier to work a job they can’t stand for not enough money to get by on. And when they have a dream, they won’t pursue it…they’ll settle.”

Melinda starts nodding. “When I’m in the ring and I get hit, it’s just so easy to think ‘I don’t have to do this.’ You have to be hungry for it. You have to want it. I want to give my kids what I didn’t have. I want for them to be able to go to college straight out of high school. I want to be something, you know what I mean? I want to look back and say, ‘I did something.’”

Melinda, a single mom, could have easily relaxed into the security of a day job. For that matter, she could have easily relaxed into a drug habit, gone on the government dole, found evil companions, and squandered whatever potential she might have had.

In that light, what do a few punches in the face matter?

Will Melinda make a million bucks? Maybe, if she keeps winning. She’s marketable, but still ten or so wins away from the big purses. Those fights are Act Two, in which Cinderella Goes Dancing. Jeff and Mike are bringing her along gradually so she won’t peak out before she matures. The peak comes in Act Three, the Title Bout. Things get dark and heavy in Act Three, and there are no guarantees.

I hope she wins it, because I admire anyone with the guts to chase dreams. Meanwhile she’s got a good fall-back plan. She’s engaged now, starting school to be a P.E. teacher. Hopefully at PCHS. I like that idea too, because that’s where I’ll be sending my daughter someday. By then my daughter might need a few pointers on how to roll with a punch.

And on how to beat up the neighborhood guys, come to think of it.

Bean Mountain

2006-10-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

Mornin Jerry.
Mornin.

Them pigs Ricky run off has shown up agin.
Where at?
You know up air
the foot a Bean Mountain
overlookin the river?
That acreage Bowater sold to that bunch from
what was it? Cincinnati?
Yep.
Well, they are rootin it all to pieces.

Pretty up air. Me and Irene dug sang in them woods.
Yessir. Good country for pigs.
It is that.
Aah. Whole thingll be posted fore ye know it.
I reckon.
Work crew up air layin in a golf course.
No shit?
Yea verily I shit you not. Nine holes.

Heh. Pitchur them hawgs snufflin a golf green.
Ricky said they was prowlin his corn pastures.
Least till he come out with a shotgun.
Ricky shot at em?
Run em right off. Said they was
nosin around of a night.
figurin the lay of the land.

And son, theyve done hired a all-Mexican crew
puttin down that sod.
That aint the only grass theyll be growin.
I heard there was whole trucks haulin quicklime
t sweeten up th soil. Bulldozers everywhar.
The law. Bulldozin
Bean Mountain
for a gat dam golf course.

How many houses they buildin?
Paper said a hundred. Big uns.
Sauners and walk in closets.
On how many acres?
Nine hundred and some
not all of it buildable.

We oughtta do somebody a favor.
Whats that.
Finish what Ricky shoulda done.
Ride up air one mornin
sit on one a them bulldozers
wait on a hawg to come along
and shoot him between of his eyes.

Well. Hear bout the woman needed hep with breakfast?
Aint heard thatn.

Woman needed hep with breakfast.
Asked the chicken and the pig for hep.
Chicken said hep y sef to eggs.
Pig didnt say nothin.
Knowin the only hep he could give was
a piece of his ass.

Heh. Thats a goodn.
Piece of a pigs ass.

The Nature of Rich(es)

2006-05-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

or

The Second Annual Carpetbaggers’ Ball

or

Bless Their Hearts

The early Tennessee sun has baked my black plastic mailbox hotter than a skillet-load of biscuits in a wood stove. I go to pull the door open and then jerk my fingers away.

Hatcha hatcha!

Fortunately, the heat has mummified the spring black widow crop. Behind their shriveled little bodies I find a thick stack of mail. Utility bills, credit card statements, and slick glossy catalogs of slick glossy models in slick glossy lingerie. Sad evidence that for the past several days I have been Neglecting my Duty.

So I open one of the catalogs.

Hatcha hatcha!

~

Thus preoccupied, I fail to notice the letter from Noah until after I’ve walked up the hill, through the woods, and past my tomato garden. But before I can open the envelope I meet my friend Rich in the driveway. He’s sweating and shoving a kayak into the back of his SUV. He shoves and shoves and eventually shoves it right on through the windshield.

Rich is doing his darnedest to destroy this vehicle. It is, after all, a Rental. People’s Exhibit A: on the way home from kayaking at Rock Island he and Kenny contrived to explode one of its massive off-road tires doing an illegal U-turn through a cactus garden donated to the City of Dayton by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

But Rich and Kenny and Mark and Sue—and all the other Carpetbaggers who have come to my refuge in the hill country to kayak and shoot the breeze and drink beer for a few days—all of these people are strangers in Dixie. They do not understand our ways.

Bless their hearts.

~

Written letters are a treat. Nobody writes anymore.

Noah and his wife Sarah live in a Mennonite community a short distance away from my house. Well, their community would be “a short distance away” in Rich’s SUV, but it’s more like an hour in Noah’s horse and buggy.

I’ve found them to be honest, hardworking farmers who eschew modernity, praise God in High German, and grow vegetables to shame the Devil. Perhaps Noah writes such good letters because he’s never owned a telephone.

When I get one of his letters I sit on the porch and unfold it in my lap and read it. And then I rock in the sun for a while before reading it again.

My wife and I first met Noah at the Mennonite community’s little produce market, where I was buying tomato seedlings. Noah invited us to visit his home. We did so, and learned the following:

Noah and Sarah have thirteen children.

Adam was the first farmer. “Be fruitful and multiply” was one of God’s first commandments to him.

Hatcha hatcha!

~

One of the Southern Ways the Carpetbaggers are slowly learning is that down here you can say anything you want about anyone as long as you bless their heart immediately afterwards.

Kenny comes out on the front porch carrying a dripping box of neoprene gear. “You got my boat loaded yet?” he hollers at Rich.

“I’m working on it,” Rich hollers back. “Only thing heavier than your boat is your fat ass that rides around in it!”

On the other end of the porch, Sue and Mark are rocking and observing. “Rich, you have to bless his heart now!” Sue calls. A quick study, our Sue.

“Bless your heart, fatass,” Rich says to Kenny.

Mark, wise in the ways of warfare, only reaches into his cooler for a beer. In Tennessee it’s been five o’clock since April 9, 1865.

~

But I’m ignoring Rich and Kenny. I sit on the steps reading Noah’s letter.

I’m fairly atheistic and Noah has taken me on as a project. As if I were a prize vegetable, you might say.

We talk a lot about the nature of happiness.

“I can tell you’ve thought the thing of riches through & through,” he writes in his simple, spare hand. "Certainly happiness does Not come From Riches.”

I shake my head. Oh, if only he knew the Riches I know.

He writes further down: “There is prob. also tooo kinds of happiness. One comes by Faith and contentment, the other is always short Lived.”

And at the end: “Love is stronger than Hate!”

~

Later that day Sue and Mark and Kenny and Rich and I are high in the Tellico Gorge. We’re paddling one of those clear, moss-rocked rivers you see on wine labels. The water is strong and cold. It fountains sweetly off sandstone shelves into shady pools, where rainbow trout surf the riffles slurping caddis flies like sommeliers.

I am so tranquil I am damn nearly floating.

But suddenly Rich is not. He blows his line entering a nasty ledge and he gets rolled over by a foaming curler wave. From fifty yards downriver I watch him jarring as the water slams his body against the sub-surface rocks. He tries to Eskimo roll and he misses once, then twice. He washes over the main body of the ledge, inverted. There’s a gut-wrenching boom as he bottoms out in the pool below.

Whereupon: nothing. He’s not trying to roll up at all.

It occurs to me that Noah’s list isn’t quite complete. There is a third kind of happiness. As I watch Rich’s boat go still, I wish I had some of it.

~

But there I go, wishing for more stuff when I’ve already got so much.

Noah’s comment about “the thing of riches” is his response to something I had written in my last letter to him.

“Very few of the ‘rich’ people I know are actually happy,” I wrote. “A few are, but their happiness seems to come from non-material sources: family, art, faith, and so on. I’d say that knowing the difference between riches and wealth is akin to knowing the difference between knowledge and wisdom.”

Well.

This is what passes for deep thinking when you’ve been fizzing your brains with booze and chemicals for twenty-five years. It’s been five o’clock for me since junior high.

Bless my heart.

~

Kenny digs his way across the pool so quickly that he literally leaves a wake. He’s a big guy and he puts every bit of his muscle into his paddle strokes.

Rich’s boat starts jostling around in that funny way that indicates he’s trying to swim free. If Rich swims, though, the water’s going to grind him through a hundred feet of boulders and tree limbs.

It’ll be cactus garden vs. tire all over again.

But then Kenny’s on him. Kenny leans down and with one arm he manhandles Rich and his boat upright.

Rich coughs and gags. There’s snot all over his face. He doubles over. His rib cage works like a blacksmith’s bellows.

“Pull it together, fatass,” bellows Kenny. His smile is wider than the Mason-Dixon line.

~

The reason people should write more often is that the stuff on the paper winds up being more factual than what actually happened.

We all know that Rich survived this year’s Carpetbaggers’ Ball, of course. And we all know that Kenny and Rich are the best of friends, despite their Floyd-and-Ethel routine.

On the other hand, as long as I’m making up stories, I’m sure Rich had rather read how he hooked up with one of the slick glossy models from the lingerie catalog in my mailbox. This screed about him getting skull-cracked in an imaginary rapid is probably giving him the jeebs in his teeth.

And my hippy-trippy harangues about how I’m getting stoned on raw happiness in the wilds of East Tennessee…well, that shit would bore the aphids off a tomato plant.

But since I’m the one writing this: tough titty. Write something yourself and see what happens to it.

~

In closing I leave you to speculate on the difference between riches and wealth. Here is one hint:

On my Wealthy People list, Noah and Sarah are numbers two and three. Rich and Kenny are four and five.

And with friends like these, guess who’s number one?

Bears and Little Girls

2006-04-23T15:43:00.000-07:00

My daughter isn’t quite two. In a few minutes she’ll wake up from her nap and she’ll want to watch “Little Bear” on the cartoon channel. I don’t know if I can stomach that. I’ve been thinking about little girls and bears all day.

The first time I took my daughter to Benton Falls was late last August. We swam in the lake together, watching the bluegill school up in the clear water just off the beach, and then I hiked her down the hill on my shoulders so she could wet her head in the spray from the falls. She giggled, surprised by its chill. Afterwards she wandered down the creek searching out just the right pebble to give Daddy. I still have it, right here on my windowsill. It’s smooth and glittery. Heart-shaped.

Five years ago, a lifetime before my daughter came along, I was backpacking in Utah and a ranger warned me to avoid a certain canyon. There had been a juniper berry famine or some such thing, and hungry black bears were roaming down out of the mountains to forage in low-lying areas. Tents had been invaded and food bags torn loose from their hangings. Savvy hikers should stay well clear.

This was roughly the same time Elizabeth Smart was abducted from the safety of her own bed in Salt Lake City. A self-styled polygamist “prophet” snatched her away into the desert and kept her as his second wife for nine months. Eventually an alert woman tipped off the Salt Lake police that the cloaked, veiled teenager wandering about with the bearded lunatic was suspicious and needed investigation.

Bears seem harmless to children. They’re cute and fuzzy and their best friends are Christopher Robin and Boo Boo. But they’re also scavengers, predators. When the honey pots run dry and the juniper berry crop fails, they range around looking for picnic baskets to raid. They get narrow-minded and mean. A bear can turn on you in a flash, charge from zero to thirty in a matter of seconds, knock you sprawling, claw you to ribbons.

What to do when attacked by a bear: roll into a ball and pray.

The biblical prophet Elisha—a praying man of some renown—was hiking in the wilderness near Bethel when he was waylaid by a gang of forty-two kids. They jeered him, as kids will jeer anything old and strange. Elisha cursed them and—so the story goes—God sent two she-bears from the woods to rip the kids to bloody scraps.

Elizabeth Smart was rescued from her predatory “prophet” and reunited with her sobbing parents mere hours after police received the tip-off. If there’s any justice in Utah, and I suspect that there is, the delusional wingnut who abducted her will still be in prison when Smart’s granddaughters are grown.

But if there was any justice near Bethel the day Elisha trekked through, I’m sure the sobbing parents of those forty-two kids had harsh words for it. I like to think the story about the prophet and the bears is metaphorical or even mis-translated. I like to think the God who said “suffer the little children to come unto me” and “better for him that a millstone should be hung about his neck than he should offend one of these little ones” isn’t a God who sends bears to kill children.

When I see my daughter playing with her teddy bear I’m surprised by the ferocity of my own love for her. Get this: somewhere out there is a two year-old boy who’s going to break her heart in fifteen or twenty years. Where is the little varmint? I’ll scalp him right now. I’m her dad; I’m supposed to keep her safe.

To protect the public the Forest Service has shut down the Chilhowee Recreation Area for a while. Trappers and trackers are out there. Dead bears can’t kill little girls, so there’s a hunt on.

I’ve heard bullets only make bears madder, and I seldom hike with a gun these days. The keeping and bearing of arms is prohibited in the Cherokee National Forest, save during hunting season. Even then, I could no more pass my Ruger P-89 off as a hunting weapon than I could pass my daughter off as Goldilocks. So what can I do?

For one thing, I can take back my anger at that little boy who’s going to break my daughter’s heart someday. I can’t protect her from everything. I don’t want to; that’s not how a good father plays it. She’s going to have to learn a few things the hard way. Probably more than a few things. Don’t believe cartoons are real. Tread carefully around weirdness. Give wild animals a wide berth. Fight when you have to.

How to fight off an attacking bear: scream and yell and hit him with anything you have.

Reports say Susan Cenkus waded in swinging on the bear that was mauling her son. Imagine this woman lighting after a fanged, clawed beast three times her size. Mama Bear versus Mama Bear. And saving her son’s life. I’ll always admire her for that. She’s Mother of the Century material.

Sitting here, as I hear my daughter waking up, I wonder if I could do that. I hope I could, even if it was someone else’s child being mauled.

But other possibilities occur to me. There’s always one more delusional wingnut out there in the wilderness that’s today’s America. Perhaps he’s going to invade my home someday, maybe to snatch my daughter and make her one of his wives. Or worse.

I guess I keep this Ruger handy so my daughter can sleep in peace.

Instead of resting in it.

There’s only one more thing I can say, and that’s to Susan Cenkus. Susan: I mourn your daughter. I aspire to your courage. I celebrate your strength. And I congratulate you on the life of your son.

The Polk County Meth War, Part Three

2006-03-06T13:35:00.000-08:00

Working the Steps

The newcomer says he doesn’t have a problem. I’m forbidden to describe him to you, but I can tell you that he’s acting like he’d rather be back in the state penitentiary. Instead he’s here, at Action Counseling…with a circle of recovering addicts scrutinizing his every word.

“I shouldn’t have to be at this,” he tells everyone, “except I flunked a [urinalysis] test; my parole officer found marijuana and cocaine and opioids and meth. I don’t know how it got there.”

“You don’t know how it got there,” repeats Dr. Linda Wells. “Right. Sir, it got there because you put it there.”

“Are they processing meth with that stuff now?” he asks. “‘Cause I smoked a joint and some meth, but I don’t remember the coke or anything else.”

A woman shakes her head. “I’ve done plenty of stuff I don’t remember when I was high.”

Others nod as he frowns. “Well, ice is bad stuff, I won’t argue that,” he says. “But I want to smoke marijuana ‘til the day I die. I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

Dr. Wells stands up. “Sir, do you see that poster behind you?”

He turns and studies the cutaway view of a human body that’s taped to the wall. Organ systems are outlined in lurid colors; each with an arrow highlighting marijuana’s ill effects on it. His jaw drops as Dr. Wells describes the harm he can expect if he keeps toking up. He stays deep in thought for the balance of the meeting and leaves with a troubled look on his face. Perhaps he has a problem after all.

Afterwards, Dr. Wells muses on the episode in the privacy of her office. “Did you see him turn?” she asks me. “He turned in a matter of just seconds. He says he was in prison for years without fully understanding the dangers of marijuana. They’re not teaching well. They’re not giving them adequate tools. Yes, I think incarceration is great, but what are we doing? The state is literally going in the hole to try to keep these people in prison, and they’re coming back out and they still don’t have the tools to keep them from using when they get home.”

Criminals deserve punishment, and lockup is great detox, but counseling is the best cure…if you want to call a lifelong struggle against relapse a cure, that is. Maybe this fellow flushed his stash down the john when he got home, or maybe he rolled the fattest joint of his life. Either way, a seed of motivation was planted in him.

Unfortunately, Dr. Wells is right about the lack of substance abuse counseling in prisons and jails. There is some access to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous in state prisons, but the Tennessee Department of Correction’s Substance Abuse Services Delivery Policy reveals how tight funding and high inmate substance abuse rates necessarily limit the availability of in-depth therapy. Too many addicts, not enough cash. The DOC winds up depending on the community to get users into long-term recovery after release.

And the Polk County Jail can’t even host AA and NA meetings. I’ve asked Sheriff Bill Davis about that, and though he understands their value and he’s looking at offering such services in the new jail, the old jail’s simply…you guessed it, too old. It’s often overcrowded and not set up for secure group sessions. Even Sunday church can be tough to pull off. So the Sheriff is trying the best he can, but for the moment…

…it falls to Sessions Court Judge Billy Baliles to haul on every line he can reach to pull community resources into the boat. He’s gotten approximately forty local pastors enlisted to offer counseling through Drug Interdiction Court. He’s worked with AA and NA and Al-Anon to increase the number of twelve-step meetings in Polk County—to one or more every day. And he’s partnered with Dr. Wells and Action Counseling to earmark a portion of $17.5 million in federal money granted to Tennessee from the Justice Department’s Access to Recovery Program, so the funds will flow through the Tennessee Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services and directly to the treatment of local addicts.

The judge favors organizations like AA and others because they work from a twelve-step plan; a disciplined ladder to recovery. Substance abusers admit their lives are out of control, place faith in a higher power, ask that power for forgiveness and strength, take inventory of themselves, list their offenses, make amends, work toward daily progress, and commit to helping other addicts recover.

The degree of these groups’ success correlates to supervision—Dr. Wells will tell you, for instance, that 60 percent of her heavily-monitored clients stay clean. How successful AA, NA, and Al-Anon are depends on individual persistence, but it’s hard to argue against the idea that one Polk County addict placed on the road to recovery is better than none. In the words of Teddy Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

I drop by an open session of a recovery group one night at—oh, it doesn’t matter where—to see how it goes. I also want to answer a question that’s been nagging me: how come I’m not an addict? I’m no saint; I’ve wrestled every temptation in the Book and succumbed to more than a few. The addicts I know are much like me—good folks, mostly, who have had bad choices turn on them and rend them some.

It’s a heavy scene, at first. Sad eyes, worn faces, the sense of the reach being longer than the grasp…and one tired toddler in the back, who’s tagged along with mom. The group murmurs its way through an opening ritual of affirmation, which I can barely follow. They’ve done this so often that they’ve mouthed the words beyond familiarity and into indistinction.

But then various ones testify to their Trials & Tribulations since the last meeting they attended. One woman says she’s been so worried about the safety of her children that she hasn’t slept in days.

Horrible insomnia…brain won’t shut off…her kids were breathing when she put them to bed, but are they now?…what about now?…and now?…and it’s the holidays, so she’ll be driving…what if she nods off and crashes?…no way she’ll be able to sleep, worried about that…unless she scored a few painkillers…not such a bad idea, in fact…knock herself unconscious, find the sweet peace she craves…or pour a drink or two…not enough to get drunk…just enough to…

And I start getting it. Maybe I’m not an addict because I can cope with my fears without self-medicating—lucky me. Or maybe it’s something else. Who knows? People use drugs for many reasons, but this is what they all mean when they talk about One Day at a Time.

Others in the room console her, tell her to hang in there, and when she leaves she’s smiling. Actually smiling. She knew there was a meeting coming up, that she’d be able to get some support, and she resolved not to use until then. Which worked. Whatever else there is to say, she worked the steps and the steps worked.

There’s nothing shameful about going to recovery meetings, and if you think there is, get thee hence and meditate on Galatians 6:2. Some of the strongest people in the world are in these meetings; people who got strong grappling with a beast every second of their lives.

Afterwards, a man catches my eye. “You know,” he says, “I’m glad Judge Baliles forces people to come here, but…”

“Is it working for you?” I ask.

He ponders the question for a long time. “My heart’s not in it, but my butt’s here, ain’t it?”

“Do you think you’ll keep coming after your supervision is up?”

He pauses again. “I don’t know. Maybe, if I still have a problem.”

The Polk County Meth War, Part Two

2006-01-02T05:59:00.000-08:00

The View from the System

Detectives Brian Epperson and Mike Monteith are waiting on a phone call, and when that call comes they’ll stand up and shake my hand and this jailhouse interview will be over. They’ll be driving somewhere to tape a wire to somebody’s chest, so this somebody can go to some house and buy some controlled substance from some dealer about to get his…er…something anatomical busted—which is nothing out of the ordinary for drug detectives.

“[Meth] is a dead end,” says Epperson. “If we don’t catch you, somebody is going to…whether it be a state or federal authority. A lot of people think me and Mike Monteith and the deputies of Polk County are the only ones working and watching ‘em.” He ticks off the jurisdictions that overlap here: DEA, FBI, Forest Service, TVA, TBI, State Troopers, the State Park Service, the 10th Judicial Drug Task Force, and so forth…proving there’s a stove-full of heat in Polk County, to be sure. But like street cops everywhere, he and Monteith rely mainly on The Word.

“If we don’t have the help of the people it makes things a lot harder for us,” Monteith tells me. Anything can be significant; a sharp-eyed neighbor who spots an unfamiliar car with North Carolina plates on Monday, smells an odd odor on Tuesday, and sees an unhappy kid burning a barrel of starter fluid cans on Wednesday…well, with one phone call that neighbor can do more to clean out the neighborhood than Epperson and Monteith can get done unaided in an entire year. They’ll check out such tips, do a “knock-and-talk,” maybe ask for consent to search…and put the cuffs on if there’s cause.

But then they tell me that locking a man up isn’t always about incarcerating him.

Sandra Donaghy, the Chief Assistant District Attorney for the 10th Judicial District, elaborates on this concept as she fills me in on how DAs work the cases detectives like Epperson and Monteith make. (Incidentally, Matt Dunn, the Assistant District Attorney in Charge of Rolling the Rock Back Up the Hill Every Morning, was so busy prosecuting Polk County drug cases at the time of this interview that he couldn’t spare me a few minutes to talk about them…an ironic reminder that as meth steamrollers users, the users steamroller the system—a dynamic bewailed by everyone in the legal community, even high-dollar defense lawyers, but not by anyone who peddles meth for a living.)

At any rate, the DAG’s office draws a hard line on meth manufacture and possession. The class B manufacturing charge carries a sentence of eight-to-twelve, the class C three-to-six, and DAs crack heads even for simple possession, asking for four months. And these aren’t the bulk trafficking cases, where the interests of the community are often better served by elevation to federal jurisdiction—a grim country of mandatory sentences and nary a hope of parole—no, this is how much time the 10th Judicial DAG wants mom-and-pop, Joe Eightball types to serve…in short, average Polk County users.

Jail ain’t fun. Even an addict suffering his own living hell will fear it, but sending offenders there is only half the DAG’s game plan. “If [convicts] haven’t had the benefit of any treatment within the system,” says Donaghy, “we’ve basically put them away for four months, put them right back into the community where they’re with the same friends, the same suppliers, the same everything, and we’ve just inconvenienced them for a while versus really changing their lives.

“Hopefully, that time in the jail will be the time where they can detox…and then if we put them on probation and give them supervision, where they’re drug-tested and the consequence is that if you use drugs you’re gonna go back to the jail, it’s hopefully been a bad enough experience that they don’t want to go back, and they’ll keep going to therapy.”

In other words: Recidivism Bad, Rehabilitation Good…a mantra Donaghy and 10th Judicial Public Defender Richard Hughes chant in unison. Which seems a bizarre convergence in the court system, where by definition the DA and the PD are opponents—at the left and right hands of the Judge, as it were—and where at least on TV their rivalry spins on the lock ‘em up/spring ‘em axis, with no middle leanings. But though he believes in consequences, Hughes is a strong advocate that substance abuse requires a different approach; that it’s not so sheep-or-goat.

“That’s the simple catch-phrase,” Hughes says. “‘Just put ‘em in jail.’ In the abstract that’s fine, but we’re dealing with real people, that live in the community, that have families, that have children, and some of them can be helped. The key is, identifying those that can be helped…that really want help.

“The whole point of this is trying to get people back into the community so they can be productive. Go to work, take care of their family, their children, pay child support. You’ve got the trickle-down; you help the offender, you’re helping his family.

“I admire what Judge Baliles is doing [in Polk County Sessions Court.] He’s an activist judge; he’s trying to do some different things that haven’t been tried before. And that doesn’t always go over well with people…but I think that Judge Baliles strongly believes that substance abuse is the underlying problem of so many people that come through his court. He’s very determined to give them an opportunity to change their life.”

When I sit down with Judge Baliles, he tells me—in the neutral, measured tones of a doctor informing a patient that his cancer is malignant—why he thinks substance abuse is so unrelenting, and why he feels compelled to change Sessions Court’s approach to it.

“The first thing you’ve got to recognize: there’s nothing the medical profession can do for an addiction. The second thing you’ve got to do: you’ve got to understand addiction. Now, a lot of people say: ‘Well, they started, why don’t they quit?’ The answer is simple—they can’t quit. They can’t quit without help and without a system.”

And Judge Baliles, an ex-pharmacist, is at the hub of The System. He tells me he now allows qualifying offenders to enter conditional guilty pleas, thereby arming himself with a heavy hammer…jail time should they fail to complete court-ordered treatment. Such treatment may include counseling with any of forty different local pastors, AA, NA, and even intensive in-patient at Valley in Chattanooga or intensive out-patient with Dr. Linda Wells at Action Counseling in Cleveland.

But he can reward those who succeed by forbearing to enter a Judgment of Conviction against them; enormous leverage, because for some offenders the difference between checking “Yes” or “No” in the “Any Convictions?” box on a job application may very well mean the difference between a productive career and a ruined one—a fact the Judge is keenly aware of, as a man committed to breaking the cycle of addiction.

“What you’ve got to fight is that relapse,” he says. “If you don’t get these people in an AA or NA meeting following their thirty days of rehab, their outpatient rehab, what-have-you…they’ll slip back into their old ways.”

As I listen to the Judge, I notice how the study of meth in specific keeps circling back to the problem of substance abuse in general. The cob wrapped in all of this…which is worth shucking on, for a minute…is that to cops and attorneys and courts, substance abuse is very different from possession, manufacture, trafficking, or any of a dozen other drug-related violations, and isn’t connected to any single drug in particular.

Addiction is a cause of criminal activity, not a crime, and in this context methamphetamine, per se, could just as easily be cocaine or alcohol or even Galapagos Giggling Gas…just another chemical compound that’s been access-controlled through the legislative process. It’s the irrational and unhealthy lust for a compound that drives the collateral damage—case-gluts, epidemics of substance abuse, wrecked health, neglected children—and not the compound itself.

Mangle the root and the weed will soon wither…and people who get this distinction between cause and effect, between sickness and wrongdoing, are much more likely to support court-supervised treatment programs, and much more likely to support the addicts themselves as they struggle to get clean.

And what are these programs like? That's where we're headed next week.

The Polk County Meth War, Part One

2005-12-26T20:22:00.000-08:00

The Parable of the Snake

In the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Six I’ll have good reason to remember a lesson from my grandfather. When I was a boy a copperhead ambushed me from a cornrow and he shoved me out of the way and lit after it. It fled under a stone and he cursed it and kicked the stone away and crushed its skull under his bootheel. He toed it to make sure it was dead and then gave me a long, thoughtful look, but he didn’t have to explain a thing.

“Addiction is one of the biggest secrets in our area,” Dr. Linda Wells tells me. “No one wants to say that ‘my mom or my dad is an addict.’” Her practice, Action Counseling in Cleveland, treats hundreds of addicts from East Tennessee but she’s especially worried about Polk County, where the explosion of substance abuse and the scant access to addiction treatment are problems decent folk don’t discuss—like a chancre on a pretty girl’s face or a snake under a stone.

Others…boot-shod cops and judges and prosecuting attorneys…shake their heads and mutter disease-words like “plague” and “cancer.” They talk about stomping it out, crushing its skull before it poisons anyone else.

Trouble is: how?

On December 7th I sat in Judge Billy Baliles’ monthly drug court in Benton as he ordered more than fifty people—sullen-eyed moms, dads in orange jumpsuits and leg shackles, petrified teenagers—into a new state-funded substance abuse program at Action Counseling. The day before he’d done the same with twenty from Ducktown, making December’s tally approximately seventy people who’d run afoul of state drug laws and been ordered into treatment as a consequence.

And a mere seventy people would be bad enough, but if December was an average month—and Dr. Wells thinks it may ultimately be proven to have been below average—by next Christmas one out of every seventeen men, women, and children in Polk County will have been court-ordered to attend treatment for substance abuse …most on methamphetamine-related charges. What’s more, that one-in-seventeen only counts those “unlucky” enough to have been arrested—not active users or those struggling to get clean on their own. So what’s the true scale of the meth problem in Polk County?

God only knows. “[The addicts’] family members are coming, and they’re not mandated to be here,” says Dr. Wells. “And the first thing they’ve said, is ‘I’m gonna get off of meth.’”

One recovering addict tells me crystal meth is cheaper than liquor, and like the moonshine of yore, fairly easy to cook. But the Meth-Free Tennessee Act of 2005 has made it tougher for personal-use and small-scale manufacturers to lay hands on sufficient quantities of the ephedrine and pseudoephedrine-containing cold medicines that are its main precursor, and indeed, South/East Tennessee Methamphetamine Task Force statistics show the number of Polk County lab seizures in 2005 is one-third what it was in 2004—implying labs are fewer and further between.

So…what’s up? I applaud the Act’s accomplishments—any hole in a tornado, right?—but if meth’s ingredients are harder to procure these days, why does clinical experience suggest an increase in addiction rates? Where are users getting it now? District Attorney General Jerry Estes’ office has made cases on Mexican methamphetamine coming up from Atlanta and Dalton—I’ll leave the reader to connect the dots on that one—and I hear stories of meth from neighboring counties, telling me many users are simply sending next door for what they used to make themselves…which makes me wonder: what else are their new delivery boys selling them?

Dr. Wells’ eyes flash when I ask her this. “We’ve got more addiction right now from meth, and now we’re picking up cocaine,” she says. “We’ve not had that much heroin in this area, and I’m beginning to see that.”

Judge Baliles is worried too. The users he gets are often haggard and poverty-ridden, with little access to proper medical or psychological care. They’re self-medicating with anything that comes to hand…grass, oxy, crack, and especially crystal meth…perpetuating a lifestyle based solely on day-to-day survival. All they know how to do is use. It’s a poor-man’s solution to a poor-man’s problem—addiction as both cause and effect.

As a pharmacist by trade Judge Baliles has a scientific perspective on the subject, and he tells me his extensive study of substance abuse—thirty-eight books, at last count—has convinced him the best long-term solutions are twelve-step programs, like Action Counseling’s, that intercept users in the early stages before they become too dysfunctional, too entangled in the court systems, and that get them clean so they can care for themselves and their kids.

Which brings me to the Sharpest Fang, as it were…viz, that meth trouble has caused dozens of Polk County kids to wind up in the custody of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services or in juvenile corrections. On July 26th, 2005 a DCS case manager—Betsy Dunn of the Upper Cumberland Region, an area not so different from Polk County—testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources on meth’s effects on children’s lives. You want chilling prose, forget Stephen King…have some of this instead:

“The adults who are supposed to be these children’s caretakers have become totally consumed by this drug and have turned their backs on these youngsters.

“These children’s worlds have been totally destroyed. They breathe toxic fumes. They endure physical and sexual abuse. We see children that are actually participating in the manufacture of methamphetamine.”

“I’ve had children say to me, ‘Miss Betsy, my mom’s making that rock candy on the stove and it caught fire and we had to leave the house.’

“When a child is taken out of a meth environment, this child loses everything that is familiar. They lose their clothes. Their toys. Everything. Because it is all contaminated. That is what makes this so tragic. These children lose everything. They’ve lost their parents. They have to start over.

“What do you say when the parents tell you, ‘I can give up my children, but I can’t give up the drug?’”

I think that question would kindle holy fire in my granddaddy. He’d mull things over for a while and then he’d fix me with his stern eye and rise up and get to stompin’. I miss that old man; he’d be ninety this year. The lesson he taught me the day he trampled that snake was that there are bad things in the world, and those who can have a duty to protect those who can’t—meaning kids of course, but also meaning addicts powerless to protect themselves.

And in weeks to come I’ll write more about how Polk County is struggling to do that. Meanwhile, I have to go hug my daughter.

Jeff West

2005-12-15T15:53:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in Polk County News, December 14, 2005)

Bean Mountain will crumble before Steve McNair scrimmages at Davis Field or John Smoltz flings a split-finger fastball at Copper Basin High. But any day on the Ocoee you’re likely to see Joe Jacobi, Eric Jackson, Marc Lyle, or eleventy-odd other world-class athletes; whitewater pros who are here because this is where the game is, and what’s more, this is where the players can make a living.

So why does it seem like they’re the only ones doing so? It’s not like there’s a lack of opportunity along the 64 corridor. I’m sitting with one such pro—Jeff West, owner of Ace Ocoee Funyaks—at his cabin on Old Federal Road, and we’re talking about Polk County’s weird duality; the gulf between the “locals” and the “river hippies.” In short, about why a Polk County teenager, if given the choice between a paddle and a spatula, will likely be flipping burgers inside of a week.

Jeff, like me, grew up kayaking the Ocoee and he’s as puzzled by this as I am. He contrasts our situation with West Virginia’s Gauley River...a big brawling run with rapids like “Hungry Mother” and “Pure Screaming Hell.”

“Most of the raft guides [there] are big old local boys. Full-on local guys. The rafting community was really integrated into the local community, and they were much more rural than Polk County, Tennessee. And they were so proud of that river. Here...out of twenty-four companies, only one or two are owned by true local families.”

“I don’t think there’s any river that has, as far as location, proximity to your market, and everything else...I couldn’t think of a more ideal place to own a business. There’s just no place as good as the Ocoee.”

Jeff knows whereof he speaks; he grew up in Dahlonega and since graduating from Georgia Southern in 1994 he’s paddled all over the world. He explains the limits of rivers: access, remoteness, scant rainfall, water release constraints. The Ocoee suffers from none of these problems; making it his first choice.

He’s run Ace Ocoee Funyaks for nine years now, offering personalized whitewater instruction to paddlers of all skill levels. Maybe it’s someone who’s been on a few raft trips and wants to push the envelope a little by running the Ocoee in an inflatable open boat, AKA a “funyak,” or maybe it’s a moderately-skilled kayaker who wants to run the hairy stuff and needs a little preparation.

Whatever his customers’ skill level, Jeff’s love of the sport shines through when he tells me about their reactions. “I deal with about five hundred people a year. For the most part, my customers walk away going ‘That was the greatest thing I did this year.’ There’s somebody sitting around right now probably going ‘Gosh, I had so much fun at the Ocoee that day.’ Every day that I’m on the river, I see somebody out there who’s kayaking, and they’re kayaking well, and they’re somebody that either I’ve taught how to paddle or did a funyak trip or they came to me as an intermediate boater and I made them better.”

“And I guess the most rewarding thing is I’ve actually got folks, where, they did a funyak trip because it looked like something fun to do. And then they learned how to kayak, and they became avid kayakers, then they became great kayakers, and then they moved to this area and they kayak all the time. They still have professional jobs, but they bought homes in the area and they go paddling all the time.”

When’s the last time you heard the lettuce-washer at a fast food joint talk about his job in those terms? Not to run down people’s choice of occupation, but whitewater is magnetic, a “hungry mother” that gets hold of you and doesn’t let go. Jeff, who can’t imagine a career in any other setting, tries to sum it up. “Kayaking is wonderful...it’s so rewarding, fulfilling. And of course there’s fear involved, and the chance of danger and getting injured...but it’s still a wonderful experience. It improves people’s lives. That’s my whole gig. That’s what I facilitate.”

He starts telling me about the Faithful, as it were, and their potential to Polk County. “There’s thirty thousand private boaters that use this area every year—thirty thousand private boaters—and almost all of ‘em want to camp out. You could have a restaurant that...had some type of atmosphere that would draw the private boater. They all drive really nice SUVs, they all make a lot of money, they’re all single, they all come up here and they spend money, and nobody’s really capitalizing on that.” He goes on to describe the successes of two local lodging establishments, and how he plans to build cabins on his own property.

The opportunities feed on each other. Most of Jeff’s customers stay over for a couple of days; he sends them to Rock/Creek Outfitters, to area grocery stores and restaurants, to local cabins. They burn washtubs of gas getting here in those SUVs. They buy parking permits and guidebooks. And as he’s mentioned, some of them decide to stay.

I joke with Jeff that I’m going to entitle this column “Liquid Crack.”

“My biggest fear,” he says, “is all of a sudden I’m selling them, not just on improving their skill and becoming a better boater, but on the lifestyle, too. I feel bad, because then this person has to go back to their...well, when they first came to me, they were just looking for some fun, and then they leave going ‘Gosh, maybe my choices haven’t been...’”

Jeff breaks into embarrassed laughter, imagining the poor yuppie pining away for river life, but it’s as concise a statement of his passion as I’ve heard him make. The difference between him and that yuppie is that he’s got the confidence of his conviction that he’s in the right place. Most of the Ocoee pros will tell you the same thing. And so will I.

The Man Who Wins Little Ones

2005-11-23T07:01:00.000-08:00

(Originally published in Polk County News, November 23, 2005)

McCaysville, morning in a sunlit pasture. I watch as Dr. Bill Mitchell strokes the horse’s neck, murmurs into its upright ear—a secret, perhaps—and slips a needle through the glossy hair and under the skin. The horse nuzzles him, blinking shy brown eyes. Hot blood fills the sample tube.

We ride back to the Copper Basin Vet Clinic, the vial of blood cooling in the cup-holder between us, and Dr. Mitchell tells me, in his genteel Georgia drawl, why he left a three-decade career as a pathologist and veterinarian for the U.S. Army to come home and care for animals full-time.

“During Desert Storm I had to do autopsies, every day, every day, every day. And you’re doing autopsies on people that are perfectly healthy; the only bad thing is that they’ve been killed. And the thing that I could never—that always bothered me—I just couldn’t deal with their faces, with the expressions on their faces. It just got to me. And when I came back I said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore. I’m not dealing with humans any more.’ That was enough.”

When a man realizes he can’t win the big one, he tries to win a few of the little ones instead. At his clinic Dr. Mitchell leads me into his “rescue room,” a tragically crowded space in the back where he keeps the unwanted, the abandoned, the abused. Unweaned kittens claw a wire cage, malnourished dogs pace in kennels. And on a cushion in the corner lies a dog with long black hair, a white nose, and stumps where his hind legs once were. I stoop to pet him, to offer a little sympathy, but he cringes. This mutilated animal was a puppy once, a confident curious fuzzball; and now he whimpers at the sight of a human. I wonder: what horrible lesson has he learned about people? The same one Dr. Mitchell learned during Desert Storm?

The poor dog is a parable cast in fur and flesh; an appalling commentary on victimization. If Dr. Mitchell can no longer deal in human victims, he can still treat the victims of humans—or sub-humans, if you like—and as he and I sit in his waiting room and discuss his practice, I’m shaken.

Most people, thank God, don’t abuse animals, but Dr. Mitchell explains how pets can suffer even when owners and would-be caregivers have the best of intentions.

“I think that poor lady that had all these creatures up there, all these poor animals—” referring to the recent allegations of animal cruelty against Turtletown resident Maureen Vieira “—I think she had intentions of doing something good, but the sad part is, it turned out to be horrible. It was a horrible, horrible thing, and I wonder...what took so long for somebody to say, you know, that something needs to be done? Nobody did anything.”

He goes on to describe how economic circumstances in the Copper Basin can contribute to animal neglect. “What we have are people who are having a hard time making it. The boom days are long gone. The young people either have to find something here to do, or they’ve gotta leave. There’s no industry.”

“I deal with people who...are on a fixed income, that have to make a decision between food, and heat, and their animal. And the sad part is, a lot of these people, that’s their companion. There’s one veteran, he has this little dog, and his wife, of course, is in the nursing home. That dog is his companion, that’s his life, and if something happens to that dog, he’ll come in...and he’s just all to pieces. So I enjoy when I can do something.”

“You’re not making anything, but at least I do two things: I give jobs to people that need a job, plus I take care of some animals. I make enough that...ah...I think last year I lost a lot of money. This year, hopefully, I won’t lose so much.”

I don’t meet many business owners who are content to take a loss, but even Dr. Mitchell’s low fee structure is designed to benefit animals. His prices help some owners afford care, while bringing in others who might refuse the indignity of charity. So on Thanksgiving Day I guess Dr. Mitchell will thank the Army for providing the pension he uses to subsidize his little wins.

Some of his wins, though, aren’t so little. An exuberant Boxer named Rocky—yeah, it’s a bad pun—bounds into my lap and knocks my tape recorder clattering across the room. I remark on the aptness of the name; Rocky favors Sylvester Stallone, and Dr. Mitchell’s daughter Robbii surprises me by hauling Rocky’s mouth open to reveal his cleft palate. Robbii tells me Dr. Mitchell delivered Rocky by C-section from a dog show champion, accepting Rocky as his fee when he learned the champion’s breeder was planning to destroy Rocky in order to eradicate his genetic abnormality from her stock.

I’ve barely recovered from Rocky’s relentless affection when a Jack Russell mix named Little Girl explodes onto me, slinging slobber near and far. Dr. Mitchell smiles, reaches over to pet her. “This dog right here, I found her in a ditch. She was almost dead. I brought her down here and I put her on fluids and IVs, and I did all this stuff...I thought she was gonna die, but she survived. And ever since then, she’s been right under me.”

Right under him. Yeah, I can see why she’d want to be.

But an apparent contradiction occurs to me. As an Army pathologist he experimented on animals, studied tissue samples, tried to come up with ways to protect soldiers from anthrax and botulism. I ask if this bothers him now—why would an animal rescuer condone animal experimentation? His answer comes quickly, as if he’s known it since medical school.

“I’m a religious person. And when God made this earth, he made all the animals, and then he made man to take care of his animals. But he also made the animals to take care of man. It was a two-way street. When I look at research using animals...the animals are not being abused. They’re not being tortured. They’re making a gift back to us.”

“There are some really terrible human diseases. Spinal bifida. There’s an animal model for that, and that’s a Manx cat. By studying the genetic defect...the lethal gene, or whatever you want to call it...we can head off spinal bifida.” He goes on to describe how animal research is helping eradicate muscular dystrophy, and as he talks his manner is gentle, warm. Grateful, even. And I realize that not only does Dr. Mitchell help animals, but animals also help him.

When I get home from the clinic my family’s Scottish Terrier, Gracie, wiggles all over me. Then she backs off, sniffing me suspiciously as if I’ve been unfaithful to her with Rocky and Little Girl—how dare those tramps! My wife mentions she’s worried about Gracie’s breath. Maybe it’s a problem with her teeth?

“I know a good vet,” I say.

Two Ways at Once

2005-11-17T09:23:00.000-08:00

The fry cook had yellow stains on his fingers, a black t-shirt with no sleeves, grey hair tucked under a scally cap. He grunted at me when I sat down at the counter, slid me a mug, topped it with smoking coffee before turning his back on me to shovel a mess of something around the griddle.

The coffee wasn’t good but it was hot. I sipped it and waited on a menu, studied the black flecks on the silverware

“Christ, Arlene, get the guy a menu,” he said.

“All right, all right, gimme a break. Arlene hurried over with a sheet of laminated cardstock, rearranging something in her apron pocket as she came. “Sorry, I’m still kinda new. More coffee?”

I thought maybe she’d rushed the makeup that morning. New? She had skin like old china, lines no amount of anything would ever fill in. “Sure, and pancakes,” I said, handing the menu back.

She wrote it down, pancakes, and read it to the cook. “Pancakes.”

“I heard him, I heard him.”

They wore on bickering as I read the paper. A man had been stabbed outside Corrigan’s pub the night before, something about a football bet and too much alcohol. I knew the place: a locals’ bar, you could get a B&B there...beer and a beating. Menino was still mayor and winter was still on the way in. Nothing changes.

The guy down the counter was wearing white-spattered jeans and his shirt had a drywall company logo. The cook dished the mess off the griddle at him. Eggs, maybe. He started wolfing them.

“Hot in here,” the cook grumbled. “You think it’s too hot?”

“I think it’s nice,” I said, “after being in that damp outside.”

Arlene was polishing the meat slicer. “It’s gorgeous out there. Hey, how do you get this cover off to clean the blade?” she asked the cook.

“I’ll take care of it. Take it outside, maybe let the rain wash it off.” He chuckled.

“Yeah, fry cook’s a hot job,” said Drywall. “I did it for four years before I got started in houses.”

“What’s that like? Good money?” The cook came out with a screwdriver, started backing the screws out of the slicer’s chrome cover.

“Not bad; I just bought a little place—a shell, burned out—for one-twenty and flipped it for one-fifty.”

“How long it take you?”

“Five months. Best money I’ve made since...uh...yeah, it’s good money.”

Arlene picked up my paperback, studied the tangle-headed youth on the cover. “I never liked this guy,” she said. “Or that Baez girl, either.” There was a silver cross on a chain weighing on her neck.

“He’s a hell of a writer,” I told her. “Regardless how you feel about his songs.”

She shivered. “Uck. Paul Anka, now there was a songwriter.”

I caught the word “recovery” out of one ear. “—and sober for five years and four months now,” Drywall was saying to the cook.

“Can I get a clean fork?” I asked Arlene.

She turned around and reached for a rolled-up napkin without missing a beat, placed it just so. “I hated how he toyed with people’s feelings. How he kept disappearing.”

“Well, I think that’s because he hated the life,” I said, straining my attention two ways at once. “He writes about that, how you can sell things you can never buy back. Privacy, for one.”

Drywall was leaning over his plate talking intently to the cook, who had put down the screwdriver, was resting his elbows on the counter rolling a toothpick between his teeth.

“One of the guys at my meetings, Navy guy, told me he liked how I handled myself,” Drywall said. “Hired me on to cook breakfast at his place. Even gave me the keys to the restaurant.”

“Oh, I know, that’s a temptation,” said the cook.

“I was like, all that beer in the basement! Those kegs. And that cash drawer!”

“Mmm-hmmph.”

Arlene put my book down, tapped the counter in front of me. “That’s true, y’know...I watch that biography channel, and that’s the first thing any of ‘em say. How they just want to have normal lives, be Joe Schmoe again.”

I nodded. “Joe Schmoe: the most looked-up-to man in America.”

“Pancakes up,” said the cook. “Arlene.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She frowned, fetched them.

The pancakes were heavy, glue-hearted, and Arlene gave me a helpless shot of syrup in a little steel pitcher. I dumped it in the plate.

“—an honor, to get trusted like that after—” The cook coughed.

He had a vein like a millipede burrowing under the skin of his arm and I looked down at my pancakes, suddenly ashamed for eavesdropping. There was a hair or a thread or something leaking out of one of them. I scraped it to one side. Arlene topped off my mug again. I opened my book, chewed

P.S.

2005-11-17T09:18:00.000-08:00

One more thing.

The woman who bought the second-floor condo from us has the mechanical aptitude of a boxcar of Carolina salamanders. She just rang the bell and showed me a brown jug of sludge the guy at the hardware store sold her. He’d said it’d clear out her clogged bathtub drain lickety-split, and did I think she should use it?

I took it from her carefully, having seen unknown substances explode from mishandling before, and read the label. POISON, TOXIC, DANGER DANGER DANGER, and so on. And then I came to a line that went, more or less:

“May result in a gout of hot acid from the drain immediately upon application; use extreme caution and wear safety goggles.”

There was more to that effect, but I didn’t need to read it. I handed the jug back to her and cleared my throat. “Look, ask this hardware guy in what world is a gout of hot acid a good thing? This stuff removes clogs by melting the pipes out from around them, but never mind that...you’re gonna spray acid in your eyes and you’re not doing the environment any good either. How about taking it back and trading it for a plumber’s snake?”

“I hate snakes,” she said. So I Smote her Dedd and Rejoined my Work.

Dear Cassia, Part II

2005-11-17T09:15:00.000-08:00

November 16th, 2005

Dear Cassia,

It’s raining very hard in Hyde Park right now—dark, cool breeze, maybe fifty degrees—and I just got soaked to the skin, right through my shirt and undershirt and jeans, even through my sneakers and into my socks. I was coming home from dinner with my good friends Sean and Seth, compadres brave & true, and I stepped off the train into the sort of driving rain that only comes down in New England. The rain on the train falls mainly in Ed’s brain: inhospitable stuff, a real downpour. Icepicks on the scalp and a clammy hand down the back of your shirt.

So I ran three blocks to my truck and jumped inside, cut the defroster on to clear the windshield, and hauled ass for...well, not home, because my family’s not here, but at least the house where I’m staying until Friday morning. And then I was sitting in the driveway, still catching my breath, when I realized that the goddamned garbage had to be put out, and that it was raining harder than ever. Yes, your father sat and blasphemed most foully, for a good while...and then, of course, ran back and forth in the rain humping the cans to the curb. Garbage, you understand, that wasn’t even his. Of such is his life this week.

If it weren’t for the fact that I just had a wonderful day at Harvard University I’d be slap out of my mind by now, what with the isolation and boredom and loneliness and wind-sucking karma and bone-freezing wetness of this idiot trip, but I got some wonderful writing done today and I got to see one mentor and, as I mentioned, two good friends. All of whom, incidentally, told me that I seem much less stressed out than last time they saw me. Go figure, since I had to root around all over the house to find my alarm clock while I was packing for this trip. And of course, that I live in a place where I can step out on the porch and squeeze off a round whenever circumstances warrant.

But getting back to it...first I sat in a coffee shop and wrote a short story about something that happened to me at a greasy spoon diner this morning—I was eavesdropping on two recovering addicts—and then I book-shopped until I discovered to my astonishment that Harvard Square is actually a shitty place to shop for books. You can get everything, but none of it is what you want at the moment. Which is odd, even for an old head like me.

I left book shopping for dead and stopped at another coffee shop—four or five cups by now, thrumming like a tuning fork—and worked on my new novel until three. I’ve got a good scene going where an aunt is throwing a birthday party for her live-in nephew, whose dad is a junkie, and when the dad shows up there’s a bunch of uncomfortable byplay. It’s a very hard scene to write; not only are there eight characters in it, but the setting and the mood and the prose and the symbolism all have to be mixed in and reflect each other, and I keep writing paragraphs and staring at them and then cutting them. And as you can tell from my use of the present tense, I’m still working on it.

I made a quick stop at a tobacconist, i.e., a peddler of Smoke-Weed, for a bitty of the aromatic stuff for a guy who’s taught me much about fly-fishing, Don Denney. I was confused and the clerk was helpful, as follows:

Me: “Um...I need some stuff, plain vanilla, for...ah...a friend.”
The Clerk: “A friend, mmm-hmm. What does your friend like?”
Me: “No, I know what that sounds like. Really, he’s a fly-fishing buddy.”
The Clerk (smiling): “It’s no big deal, man. What does he like?”
Me: “Uh. Plain vanilla. He likes cheap vanilla stuff he gets at the drug store.”
The Clerk: “We have this stuff, House Gold. It’s good, it’s vanilla. He’ll probably like it.”
Me: “Sure. “How does it...um...work?”
The Clerk: “Well, it’s pipe tobacco.”
Me: “No, I mean the prices. I don’t know how to relate to that.”
The Clerk (with great patience): “We sell it by the...ounce. OK?”
Me (lifting an eyebrow): “Ah...the ounce. I can relate to that. How much is in an ounce?”
The Clerk: “It’s about five bowls.”
Me (staring, slack-jawed): “Those are some big damn bowls.”

Right. At three-thirty I rang Chris Keane’s doorbell. He’s a capital-H-for-Hollywood capital-S-for-Screenwriter who plays golf with John Updike and has chilled in a hot tub, as it were, with Hunter Thompson. I respect the hell out of the guy; met him though another writer, Bill Martin, and I’ve kept in touch and even paid him to tutor me from time to time. Given his resume he may know whereof he speaketh when he tells me I’m a good writer. Not in the Updike/Thompson league, perhaps, but it’d be easy enough for him to tell me I suck since there’s not any money changing hands between us these days.

Yeah. We sat in the Harvard Hotel, a ritzy place that charged us six bucks for...you guessed it...more coffee, and shot the shit about the writing biz for an hour. He just finished a screenplay for Samuel Jackson and he’s working on one for Charlise Theron, or Charlize Theron, or Charlie’s Throne, or however you spell it. Remind me to get that cleared up when I’m a capital-H-for-Hollywood capital-S-for-Screenwriter myself.

Eventually I got up from the table, shook hands with him, and doo-daa’d over to 9 Tastes, a decent Thai place on a street named after a dead president, to meet my friends. I ate Golden Bags and Larb, hoping the dishes wouldn’t be what they sounded like, and they were what they sounded like, but not like what I was afraid of. Which may not make any more sense than that line about Harvard bookstores, I realize, so I ought to quit the Yogi Berra while I’m ahead. Don’t be frightened; it’s prose, and prose is only the skin on the soup.

I drank beer, not coffee. Coffee wakes you, whereupon you need beer to keep calm, whereafter you need more coffee to keep sober, et cetera. We talked at great length and then went for ice cream for Sean and Seth. I sat with them as they ate it, in a little steel-and-concrete room that used to be a bank vault, felt uncomfortably like a drunk tank, and was painted like...get this...a fishbowl, with waving seaweed, questionable seahorses, and goldfish out of a plastic diver’s nightmare. Pity the drunk who wakes up in a place like that.

We walked back to the Harvard subway stop and shook hands goodbye. But there was this guy at the stop twirling pairs of tennis balls on long strings, sort of a cross between yo-yos and nunchaku. Entertaining people. He was deft with them, artistic...spinning them around his head and torso and legs like tiny planets on tight orbits, and I figured he was getting a good workout because his arm muscles were rippling and his eyes had the faraway look of a man deep in concentration. But he kept spinning the balls into his own crotch every so often—whack!—and he’d flinch and lose his rhythm. He’d spin some more, get lost in his mind, and—whack!—lose it again. Whackity-whack-whack! Sean and Seth and I watched this for many minutes before losing interest, and for all I know the poor bastard is still standing there spinning those balls, with his member...er, I’ll explain what that is to you later, Cassia...with his member swollen up like a varicosed grapefruit.

OK, so then I rode the train home and drowned in the rain, and now you’re caught up with me. I’m sitting here wired from darting around hauling garbage in the rain—sizzling like 220 across a wet steel bar—and it’ll probably be a few more hours before I calm down enough to sleep.

Which give me time to tell you, dear Cassia, that there are many beautiful people in this world spinning around you like tiny planets on tight orbits. They thump their own crotches to entertain you, eat ice cream in fishbowls with you, praise your writing when you need it. They sell you strong fragrant Smoke-Weed and teach you to fly-fish. They serve you Golden Bags and breakfast, even if they’re battling a raging drug-hunger they can’t push down without confessing it every day to complete strangers, and they leave their garbage for you to carry in the rain so you’ll be able to stay awake, heart thumping, and write a letter to your own dear daughter. Beautiful, beautiful people, and I wouldn’t trade any of them for all the coffee and shitty bookstores in Harvard Square.

And I know when I take you to Boston and we go to Harvard Square together, someday, and I take your little hand and your Mom’s bigger hand in mine, that another guy...silver laptop on his table and too much caffeine singing in his blood, will think: hey, there go some beautiful people too.

I love you,

DA-DA

Dear Cassia

2005-11-17T09:14:00.000-08:00

November 13, 2005

Dear Cassia,

I’m in Hyde Park, not far from the hospital where you were born, at the first house you lived in; the big brown triple-decker with the white picket fence on the noisy street. I towed our trailer to Hyde Park from Tennessee to pack it with the last of our stuff that’s still here and bring it back home so you and Alicia and I could use it in our home. It’s colder up here than where you are, more crowded and the air’s not as clean, but some of the people are good and later on I’m having dinner with two of them; an interesting couple you’ll get to meet next March.

It was a sixteen-hour drive to get here—but very pretty, through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Eastern Pennsylvania—and I’ve been taking a lot of naps, like you, because I stay road-weary for a couple of days after a drive like that. Not to mention that I was up late last night drinking wine and talking about fishing with an old friend who thought it was funny how you wouldn’t eat your bacon in the video I showed him.

This morning I woke up in our empty little apartment that the realtor can’t seem to sell and had breakfast out of the big steel cooler with the white Ocracoke sticker. I had Triscuits and raisins and coffee, probably not that much different from what you ate.

Then I had to go over to the hardware store and buy eye bolts for the trailer, and I came home and installed them on its roof (with my friend’s electric drill, because I forgot mine—I’m bad like that sometimes.) Now that I’ve installed the bolts I can lash the blue ladder to the roof of the trailer, and bring it home and use it to hang the new ceiling fan in the upstairs bedroom, to paint the side of the house where the woodpeckers hammered in hunting for carpenter bees, and to trim the tree that’s tapping on the roof keeping everybody awake at night.

All this theoretical productivity made me very hungry so I had lunch—peanut butter on a whole-wheat bagel—and worked on my novel until I got drowsy. A sign, perhaps, I should make my novel more exciting. Anyway, I laid down on the air mattress and listened to C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a wonderful book read by John Cleese, a very funny man, until I couldn’t hear him reading any more because I’d fallen asleep. Maybe The Screwtape Letters isn’t that exciting either. Eventually I woke up and wrote some more, and now I’m working on this letter to you.

So now that we’re all caught up I have to go away and do some other stuff. I’ll do it for a while and maybe write about it afterwards and then something else will happen and I’ll write about that too, and if I’m lucky it’ll be funny or important enough to use in more than one piece of work.

But before you know it it’ll be Friday and I’ll be back in my truck towing the trailer and the stuff and the cooler and—well, not my friend’s drill, I hope, because I’m supposed to return it—and the ladder and the air mattress and The Screwtape Letters...towing all this crap I’ve written you about through Eastern Pennsylvania and the Blue Ridge Mountains and right back to Tennessee where I started from. I’ll come into the house and you’ll grin at me and holler DA-DA! loud enough to startle the dog, but you won’t care two farts about the trailer and all that because you understand that people only need each other to live happily ever after, and not a bunch of stuff.

Which is a very strange way of telling you I love you, I know. But what the hell, writing about it kills the hours in Hyde Park.

DA-DA

The BallBagger's Carpet

2005-10-21T13:08:00.000-07:00

The Second Annual Carpetbaggers' Ball, tentatively entitled "The BallBagger's Carpet," will be held from May 19th, 2006 until May 29th, 2006, in Benton, Tennessee. Please watch this space (swineking.blogspot.com) for further information.

Free Odds

2005-10-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

I went to college
So I could stay home.
Make biscuits, can okra,
And change the baby.
As a southern man I find this puzzling.

When fishing,
I worry about work.
When working,
I worry about fish.
Behold: the jackass!

Irony is everywhere.
Even the sad clown is guffawing.
My daughter of fifteen months
Knows precisely how to love.
Yet at thirty-six, I’m clueless.

Why then, O Lord, hast Thou
Afflicted me with Ambition
So greater than my Talent?
What is this, a Joke?
Hey Christ! Don’t bogart the Cup!

Albert, he say
God don’t roll no dice.
Well, maybe.
He rolls a fine joint, though—
The biggest in the multiverse.

See, I’ve been trained to beat your chest
Until a doctor can be found
To declare you dead.
Which'd be a buzz-kill, except
I’ve had one save:

An alcoholic who quit drinking.
His medication made him seize
And stopped his breath.
So we whaled on him, until
Living grew easier than dying.

I also have five fishing rods,
Three kayaks, two rifles,
A truck, a tractor,
Parents, brothers, daughter, and a good woman.
My wealth embarrasses me.

I don’t know the score,
Or who’s got the stopwatch.
But I’ve figured out a rule:
The least likely, is, now.
(A small price for such a good seat.)

—GR8FLED

The View from Up Thar

2005-10-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

Had a bald spot as big as a biscuit,
A steel belt around my spare tar,
And the ills to bewilder a barrel of pills.
Yep, I knowed I was gettin’ up thar.

Then the doctor-man sed, “Here’s yer trouble.
“In life they’s but one guarantee.
“Some say that the bod is a prank played by God.
“It costs, but ye gets it fer free.”

Doc’s words made me think that it’s few-tile
T’ cry over what ye can’t change.
If the key to this biz is to likes whar you is,
Yer whar is what-choo rearrange.

Them rich folks runs off t’ Bermoody.
They soaks up the booze and the sun.
But a poor boy like me gits ta East Tennessee
Where they ain’t sich a price tag on fun.

I fount a place up Baker Mountain
Whar a feller had built a old shack,
And I said, “I intend Jest t’ stay the weekend,”
But now I can’t wait ta git back.

If my wrinkles has got other wrinkles,
If I got fewer hairs than I had,
If my last birthday bake was more candles than cake,
Well, the view from up thar ain’t so bad.

I kin see from thar plumb down the valley,
I kin snore with the cats in the shade,
And the songs I has heard from them high mountain birds
Is as sweet as my Maw’s lemonade.

Took that biscuit and et it with gravy.
Took that spare tar and let out the air.
I barreled them ills in my shack in the hills,
And I’m happy I’m gettin’ up thar.

-GR8FLED

The Font of All Mojo

2005-03-01T00:21:00.000-08:00

Andy and Skeezix and I couldn’t decide if Mojo was lying to us or not.

We were ensconced in a Technicolor tiki bar in Copper Hill, Tennessee. At our table the Mai-Tais bubbled and smoked like volcano cones and the roast pig sizzled in rumfire. Conga drumming and slack-key guitar vied with the hissing of the surf, or at least the hissing of the cheap speakers hanging above the bar. The sun had set behind the Appalachians after a hard day’s play, and we weary whitewater kayakers had come here to lounge underneath the plastic palms and tell lies.

But was Mojo really lying? He’d shown up at the river that morning with a new pickup and a new kayak and sundry other accessories, stuff that must have set him back ten grand or more, but now, over drinks, his story about how he’d acquired this shiny swag just wasn’t holding water.

Mojo was holding a lot of liquid himself that night, but none of it was water either. He leaned forward, wavered, and braced himself on the table with his palm. “Well, I was asleep and I heard an explosion,” he said. “’Bout three weeks ago. And I ran out to my living room…buck naked, mindja…and what I found was—”

His voice was thick and fuzzy. He’d found a smoldering crater in the floor, that’s what, and other peculiarities. His old water bottle was embedded in the ceiling, his TV was gone from its pedestal, and all the glass was shattered out of his living room window. What the hell?

He peered through the window’s splintered frame and saw a greasy yellow fire flickering in the parking lot, right where he’d left his old Vega.

Mojo hopped up and batted the water bottle down from the ceiling. It was one of those standard-issue blue jobs, with hash marks up the sides indicating fluid ounces and milliliters, but damn! it was hot. The bottom was still thick and gooey, blobby from some great and terrible heat.

He dropped it and bolted out the door, hoping he was in time. But his Vega was as fricasseed as a blazing Bonze; the cleansing fires had sent it home to meet its Buddha. Mojo was jabbering and cursing his water bottle and dancing back and forth on the melting pavement when the firemen and cops arrived to douse the Vega’s carcass.

“I got dressed after they took the cuffs off me, and the arson investigator and I figured it all out.” He looked up as the waiter arrived at our table with an enormous ceramic skull, brim-full of fruity poison. A Zombie, the house specialty. “Grassy-ass,” Mojo said as he took it. The waiter flourished a Zippo and a blue flame blossomed atop the concoction in the skull.

Mojo grinned. “That there is what my Vega looked like.” He puffed the drink out, and we all jabbed our straws in and slurped.

He got the story out between sips and gasps. “The TV got het up and melted the bottom outta that water bottle and what was inside it zizzed the TV. Shorted out the whole thing. Blew that TV clean through the window. And it landed on my windshield.

“Some kinda gizmo, maybe the pitcher tube, lit the upholstery on fire and the car went up. I’d just loaded it up with my boat and stuff the night before, so that all got burnt too. Funny thing is, the insurance company almost wouldn’t pay. Asked me was I using the water bottle in a manner consistent with its instructions. I mean, hell, there wasn’t that much vodka in it.” He shook his head, took a mighty pull on his straw, and looked around at us. “Lucky, eh?”

Skeezix leaned back and threw up his hands. “Lucky? Mojo, I wouldn’t take your luck if you threw in the Coors twins. That TV could have blown through your wall and burned you in your bed. Man, I’m not even sure I should sit at the same table with you and your poison karma.”

A sly smile slid across Mojo’s face. “Oh, but I got the mojo laundry now. Yessir, I shouldn’t wonder if Ed McMahon pulls up in his double-wide any old day now. You oughtta see what I brung—” and with that he passed out straight over backwards in a clatter of chopsticks without finishing his story.

Some luck.

Mojo’s demise pretty much ended dinner. We gathered him and his things. I wound up standing at the table with the check in one hand and Mojo’s new water bottle in the other, while Andy and Skeezix hustled Mojo outside.

His water bottle was unlike any I’d ever seen. It fit the décor of the bar perfectly, for it was a red plastic tiki head, grinning horribly. The War God or some such tabu thing, straight from the Brady Bunch’s vacation. I shook it; it was empty.

But there was still about three inches of Zombie in that big skull on the table, and on impulse I unscrewed the War God and emptied the skull straight into it, fruit slices and all, filling it half-full of rum and absinthe and whatnot. The War God seemed to grin even wider, as if relishing his new payload. I shivered. Was this thing the cure-all Mojo was talking about? Or just the latest of Mojo’s ills?

The next morning I was first up. Andy and Skeezix soon followed, and upon being kicked, Mojo. He looked a mess, no more pretty than that tiki-head bottle of his, but coffee and bacon revived him. Shortly after sunrise we broke camp and headed for the Ocoee River, at the heart of the Cherokee National Forest in East Tennessee.

I was driving Mojo’s new truck, and I admit I was speeding. I was eager to play in the rapids and Mojo needed to get to a bathroom, or at least an outhouse or a bush or even somebody’s hat. So when I saw the lights in the mirror I looked down at the odometer and my spleen fell out, splat. Twenty-eight miles an hour over the limit. I slowed and crunched onto the shoulder.

The tall khaki-clad Park Ranger ambled up. When I rolled down the window he wrinkled his nose immediately. “It’s eight-thirty in the ayy emm, and you boys are drinkin’ already?” He craned his neck to see past me into the passenger’s seat, where Mojo was slumped in boneless discombobulation. His lip curled. “Step out of the car, please sir. And tell your friend not to move. Not that he can, I reckon.”

Now we may have been speeding, but I categorically deny we were drinking. Even so, I had forgotten that the Park Rangers at the Ocoee River have, as of late, grown downright intolerant of deviants. And any old deviants at all will do.

While the Ranger had me balancing on one leg and touching my nose with one elbow and reciting the presidents of the United States backwards, I took a moment to look back up the road. Skeezix and Andy were watching my humiliation through Skeezix’s windshield. They were trying to stifle it, but I could tell they were far gone in laughter at my predicament. Oh, they’d pay. Soon as I had.

Presently the Ranger gave it up. “OK, you pass,” he muttered. “But your vehicle reeks of booze and I want to see what you’re carryin’. Possession of alcoholic beverages in a National Forest is punishable by a five-hunnerd dollar fine. Turn it out, boys!”

My liver fell out and plooped on the pavement beside my spleen. Mojo’s tiki bottle, the War God, was full of the most potent boom-boom ever distilled in the equatorial belt. I’d poured it in there myself. And I might as well forget about refusing the search; Mojo’s paint-melting aroma was enough probable cause for the Ranger to have us dissected with little truck stop butterknives, if he chose.

So I roused Mojo and he helped me unload the truck under the Ranger’s eye. As gawkers motored by we unrolled the sleeping bags and emptied the food box and shook out the tents. The Ranger poked and sniffed and—stupidly, I thought— even got down on his hands and knees to inspect the undercarriage. When he was through he squared his shoulders and clapped the dust from his hands and got out his little book.

“Well, if there’s alcohol in this truck, I can’t find it. I guess ya’ll drank it all last night. So all I’m gonna do is write you for…ah-HA!” he exclaimed suddenly, pointing at Mojo.

Mojo was standing on the shoulder behaving himself, but he had the War God in his hand and he was chugging its contents as fast as his Adam’s Apple would bob.

“Put that bottle down and step back from it!” the Ranger ordered, thrusting his finger directly into Mojo’s chest. “I knew you boys was holdin’.”

Mojo choked and sprayed a fine mist into the Ranger’s face.

“Oh, Lord, that stinks,” the Ranger cried. He wiped his face angrily and seized the War God from Mojo’s hands and held it up to the sun so he could examine its toothsome visage. “Reminds me of the ex-wife,” he spat, his face still red, and he finally sniffed its contents.

And sniffed them again. And again, as he contorted his features. When he tipped the bottle over, a stream of clear liquid poured out to spatter the gravel roadside.

“This is water!” he bellowed. “Not alcohol! Water!” He shoved the War God at Mojo.

“It’s a water bottle,” Mojo said. “Alcohol’d ruin it. You’d have to be a moron to put booze in one of them bottles. Trust me, I know.” He cut me a quick glance.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Only a jackass’d put booze in there.” Hee-haw, I thought.

The Ranger glared at us for a goodly while. Then he opened his mouth, allowed it to hang open, and slammed it closed again without speaking. He growled instead, low and throaty, and stomped back to his car without uttering another word.

When he was gone Andy and Skeezix climbed out of Skeezix’s truck. “What was that?” Andy asked.

I was in no mood to explain. I pounced on the War God the same as the Ranger had. The bottle smirked at me, leering with its oversized teeth, flaring nostrils, and slit eyes. I sniffed it. Sure enough, there wasn’t a solitary fume of rum to be whiffed.

I turned on Mojo. “Did you pour out that leftover Zombie that was in there? Or drink it this morning?”

His eyes grew wide. “What Zombie? There was never any Zombie in there.”

I stammered. “Mojo, I poured what was left from that big Zombie bowl we had last night into your water bottle. There was at least a pint of rum in there.” I looked in the direction the Ranger had gone. “Scot-free. He didn’t even write us a ticket.”

A look of understanding grew on Mojo. He reached for the War God. “Oh, I know what happened,” he cooed. “Come here, you. This tiki bottle’s got powers. Turned that likker into water, just like magic. I knew it’d change my luck.” He cradled the bottle like a newborn baby.

The War God grinned at us from Mojo’s arms, mysterious and merry.

“Screw you, War God,” I said to the bottle. “If you were really lucky, you’d be doing that little trick in reverse.”

Quote from a Doctor in Utah

2005-02-24T13:46:00.000-08:00

"It was just a damfool thing...you should've been killed, and you're lucky you didn't land on your thick skull. I get a whole mess of kids like you every year, and I do mean mess, because every one a you outta be shipped off somewhere that's all padded surfaces and no sharp corners. No respect for yourselfs. What in the hell were you a lookin' for up on that rock anyhow? A clue? I'll give you a clue: stay offit for about eight weeks, and for God's sake don't go monkeyin' around with the cast if you want that thing to set right. See a doctor in eight weeks and he'll hep you get it off. That's a order. Now tomorrow the nurse will see about some crutches for you, although I oughtta confine you to that bed for the rest of your life, or at least castrate you. And don't sell these pills...they're for you, not for your damfool dopesmokin' friends. Alright then."

Strange Fire

2005-02-24T09:40:00.000-08:00

I was sipping a dollar draft on the deck of the Bull Moose Bar in Cambridge, New Hampshire (unincorporated), watching the bar’s new owner shellac his throat with gin, waiting for my paddling gang. The rains arrived before my friends, so I scuttled inside, into the dry refuge of the pine bar where the Good People sat blowing beer foam and strong talk through their beards.

They were bitching about the man outside, who had fiddled with the place. He’d renewed the felt on the pool table, re-stocked the jukebox with shite like Christina Aguilera, and he’d even hung a card over the bar, a storebought cardboard square that forewarned patrons not to order more than two shots. Foppery, all of it, and bound to cost him some business. I figured the place was doomed and I took to pounding beers as fast as they’d let me.

A half-dozen later I was on good enough terms with Kevin, the tall rangy dude on my right, to ask him what was the deal.

It was an open-ended question, sort of a conversational Rorschach blot. He was wearing an “I’m the NRA” cap and I wanted to see if I could goad him into blowing a hole in the jukebox a la Mark Chesnutt.

Kevin turned around and peered at the thing as it cranked up a Metallica song, and he spat a dry pah! on Lars Ulrich’s sonic shadow. “You bleeve ‘at shit? Gat damn heavy metal.” He turned back and pounded the bar with a fist. “John!” he exploded.

John, his buddy at the other end of the bar, glanced up owl-eyed from a pair of empty shot glasses. “Hwat?”

“Put some gat damn country music in that thang b’fore I harm somebody!”

John lurched off his stool and crashed into a waitress. Frisbees of hamburger and onion and bread went cartwheeling all over everywhere. She screeched and hammered on his bald spot with the empty tray and there was laughter from every quarter. I ordered them each a shot and Kevin and I bought five bucks worth of Merle Haggard and Mel Tillis and Hank, Sr. from the jukebox.

There was gunfire later, after my friends got there, up the hill at the Bull Moose’s campsite. And somebody set off a barrage of bottle rockets, and a few of what we used to call “quarter-sticks.” Plus the thunder and rain, and the snoring and farting. But all that was harmless fun, because we were going down the Rapid River the next morning.

I forget who it was that found the slug in her helmet, and Sean and I had a biggety wolf spider skritching at our tent all night. The rain pissed down until the wee hours.

We got up and fried muffins in butter and ate cantaloupe as the sun came out.

And the whole time I was thinking of my new daughter, five weeks old. Someday all this’ll be hers.

Being an EMT

2005-02-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

This is a true story.

Shortly before 0748 on 1/4/05 I was waiting on the inbound platform at the [redacted] commuter rail stop in [redacted], facing away from the platform and chatting with fellow commuter [redacted]. As the 0748 train arrived and slowed through the platform area [redacted] gasped and flinched and moved away from me. Since I’d had my back to the train as it arrived I hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual, and I spun towards the train but only saw other people scattering and shielding their eyes. At first I thought the train had kicked up some debris into people’s faces, but when I turned back to [redacted] and asked what had happened he told me a man had been hit by the train. I asked him to call 911 immediately.

I ran up the platform looking under the train until I found the victim. I recognized him right away as a man I’d been seeing at the [redacted] stop for years: middle-aged, a grey mustache, frequently in a [redacted] cap. He was lying supine in the gravel between the concrete platform and the nearest rail and I saw that his left leg had been raggedly amputated halfway between his knee and ankle. His calf muscle and some tissue was all that remained of his lower leg.

He made a gurgling, snoring noise and I climbed down under the train so I could open his airway. I tried a jaw thrust but his snoring didn’t decrease, so I had to tilt his head back and lift his chin. It worked; his breath sounds improved.

I continued to survey him from my position at his head. The bleeding from his stump was dark and oozing—venous in character rather than arterial—and I saw no evidence of bleeding or other trauma anywhere else on his clothes. I did see possible deformity to his right ankle but it may have just been the position of his leg. His color was grey and his pupils were equal and sluggish. While I didn’t shake him (being mindful of the possibility of spinal injury) I did shout “Sir, sir?” into his ear. He blinked but didn’t speak.

A conductor asked me who I was and what I was doing to help. I told him I was an EMT and asked him to get 911 on the phone so I could relay information to rescuers.

A woman volunteered to help me. I instructed her to take control of the victim’s airway and I showed her how to do it. As we were transferring control I moved my hands to the back of the victim’s skull and found it to be sticky with blood, although I felt no softness, crepitus, swelling, or other signs of skull fracture.

I crawled from the victim’s head to his left side and immediately applied pressure to the femoral artery in his left groin. I noticed the bleeding from his stump lessen. In a few moments another bystander I knew from the train named [redacted] offered to help, and at the same time a woman offered us a pair of latex gloves. I told [redacted] to put on the gloves and I gave him instructions on how to take up pressure on the femoral artery. As [redacted] took pressure the victim’s breathing slowed and I told the woman at his head to look, listen, and feel for breath sounds.

I think this was when someone told me a bystander had gone up [redacted] Ave. to the firehall to get help.

I returned to the victim’s head and checked the victim’s breathing for myself. He was barely breathing and I was getting ready to assist him with mouth-to-mouth, but he started gurgling loudly and I realized the problem was that his airway was becoming obstructed again. I looked in his mouth and saw a buildup of yellowish matter in the back of his throat. I was reluctant to roll him but knew I had to get his airway clear, and I instructed the woman and [redacted] to prepare for it. As we were setting up for the roll, though, the victim’s breath sounds improved and I cancelled the maneuver.

More bystanders offered help. I asked them to search underneath the train for the victim’s missing foot. I told them they didn’t have to touch it but needed to find it for EMS. They searched but couldn’t locate it. One theorized that it might be under the victim.

I heard sirens. At about the same time a bystander informed us that the victim is epileptic, and [redacted]told me he could see a med-alert bracelet on the victim’s wrist. He also pointed out what looked like a deep bruise on one of the victim’s hands.

A couple of people offered me their belts, thinking I’d want to use them as tourniquets, but I declined. I thought [redacted] was doing a good job controlling the bleeding—it was relatively slight, in relation to the severity of the injury, and still oozing and venous in character—and I didn’t want to compound the damage to the victim’s leg. If I’d seen spurting blood or if high arterial pressure had become ineffective, I’d have used a more aggressive technique.

I continued surveying the victim and trying to get a verbal response from him. His eyes were growing heavy-lidded and I kept calling out to him. I opened his eyelids with my fingers and tried to assess his pupils for reaction by shading and unshading them. His pupil response was sluggish and he remained unresponsive to my voice, though his eyes did dart from side to side a couple of times.

I looked up to see EMS workers arriving. I’m pretty sure less than ten minutes had elapsed since the accident. I’m not sure who arrived first, [redacted] Fire or [redacted] EMS. I communicated the situation to a paramedic who slid in beside me, up on the platform.

I asked the paramedic for an OPA and he gave it to me, but when I tried to seat it in the victim’s airway he gagged it back out.

The paramedic handed me a c-collar and I started putting it on the victim. I started working on this and the medic climbed down next to me and asked to take over. I helped his team roll the victim onto a long board and strap him down. They put him on 02 with a non-rebreather.

I noticed the victim blink several times as the paramedics and firefighters lifted him out from under the train and onto a stretcher. They rolled him to the ambulance. [redacted] and the woman who had helped with the airway and an eyewitness and I stayed behind for a few minutes to answer questions from police.

A Poem for my Bastard Cat

2005-02-23T16:18:00.000-08:00

Egad! What’s this glutinous hairball-wad thing?
(It’s ME! It’s ME! It’s ME! It’s ME!)
From where did that grapefruit-sized ball of lint spring?
(From ME! From ME! From ME! From ME!)
Who scattered the gritty-ass sand in the sheets?
(ME! ME! ME! ME!)
And who shat a doody I smelled from the street?
(Just ME! Yes, ME! All ME-ME-ME-ME!)

You little bastard! I’ll step on your head!
You’re a useless, ubiquitous eunuch.
Your hygiene is suspect and you are brain-dead.
I would happily punt you to Munich.

Why is there cat hair all stuck to my clothes?
(Ask ME! Ask ME! Ask ME! Ask ME!)
And whose kitty litter adorns the dog’s nose?
(Oh, ME! Oh, ME! It’s ME! It’s ME!)
Who’s pissed because of his harvested nuts?
(That’s ME! That’s ME! ME-ME! ME-ME!)
And who spent the afternoon licking his butt?
(ME! ME! It could only be ME!)

You little bastard! I slept not at all!
You were raising the Devil at midnight.
There’s a Thing that I cannot explain in the hall,
And the bathroom’s a Superfund site.

Who tripped me up while I carried a beer?
Who stuck his sandpaper tongue in my ear?
Who shed his pelt in the chair where I sit?
Who chased the dog ‘til the wife threw a snit?
Who flung the catnip all over the floor?
Who ran up the bill at the pet superstore?
Who clawed the carpets and scratched up the shades?
Who barfed on the quilt that my grandmother made?
Who knocked the violets down from the shelf?
And who is insufferably pleased with himself?

Yes, who could this piteous pain-in-the-ass be?
I give you one guess, and the answer is ME!

The lesson is simple; the moral is plain.
Let this feline factoid be burned in your brain:
The curse of a cuddly kitten is that
Unless you first kill him, he’ll soon be a cat.

The Carpetbaggers' Ball - Attendees

2005-02-23T16:04:00.000-08:00

So far as I can tell, here's the list of attendees:

-Norm & Hope - 6/10 or 6/11 through the week
-Kenny Donahue (maybe maybe maybe maybe)
-Marie Bullamore - 6/10 through 6/18 or 6/19
-Kara Berrini & Matt (Jesus) Jarvinen
-Ken Green & Liz Fuller - 6/10 or 6/11 through 6/17 or 6/18. Yough on the way back?
-Geoff Willoughby
-Nicole Vassar - 6/10 through 6/18 or 6/19
-Sue Walsh
-Sean Buckley
-Rich Ochmanowicz
-Mark Salisbury
-Seth Fitzsimmons
-The Cinnamon Girl & the Cinnamon Girlet & I - 6/10 through 6/19. Ed is driving down, Alicia and Cassia are flying.

A Flake Falls in Woody Creek

2005-02-23T12:28:00.000-08:00

This is what I was writing the very moment Hunter Thompson shot himself.

It’s a fun little thing, like a finger-painting. But when you put a finger-painting up on the wall beside a masterwork like...say...Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, you see it for the simpleminded scribbling it is.

If I’ve enjoyed my scribbling, simpleminded though it may be, it’s because I could look up and see Thompson’s masterworks hanging there.

Writers don’t leave suicide notes. They shoot themselves because words have failed them. But Thompson’s words have never failed me. I got many words from him, and here are a few. I wish I could give them back in better style. I’ll keep trying.

A Big Pile of Ostrich Shit

Grateful Ed

Bax dropped the last sack of dog food next to the others and puffed like the brakes on a county school bus. “There, fifteen,” he said.

I pushed the old register keys carefully. “Let’s see. Seven hundred and fifty pounds of Alpo and one stick of beef jerky. Beef jerky, Bax? Why’s an ostrich farmer buyin’ cow meat?”

He fumbled bills onto the faded rubber change mat and squinted across the counter. “You ever smell a big pile of ostrich shit in the hot sun, Ed?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

He shuddered. “It’d drive a crow off a road-killed possum.”

I broke the tape on a new pack of ones and gave him his change. “Ah. Well, I’ll help y’get that outside.”

He folded the ones into his wallet and stooped for one of the orange sacks. In the parking lot we bucked them into the bed of his battered GMAC. He’d hit a trifecta of bumper stickers that was unlikely to be reproduced anywhere else in the world: a bad caricature of Bill Clinton with his head buried in the sand, Calvin pissing on a Brahma bull, and an ostrich standing over the words: “My other car is a Struthio.”

We finished loading and as we were shaking hands, tires crunched the gravel behind us. Bert Darby’s Lexus was a silver galaxy of sun-sparkles and he wheeled it into the handicapped space. Bax’s lip curled.

The door opened and the bell dinged softly as Bert labored himself out of the car. He’d lost a leg to a corn combine a few years back and gotten a big settlement from the manufacturer. He and the little Atlanta gold-digger he’d married had spawned about forty yard-apes, and now she was fat and he was a big shot with the County.

“Ed, Bax,” he said, thumbing his Stetson.

Bax spat and pulled his cap down low over his eyes. “I gotta git.” As he pulled out of the parking lot he fishtailed his truck and sprayed gravel all over Bert’s car.

“God-dammit!” Bert hollered. His knuckles were white against the ebony handle of his cane as he wobbled around the car surveying the damage.

“What’s that about?” I asked.

He flicked a chip in the mirror-bright paint and looked up from the car door. “Aw, hell. School procurement committee turned Bax down for a contract and now he’s all worked up over it. Thinks we oughtta supply the schools from locals since they’re the one payin’ the taxes.”

“It wouldn’t bother me none to get more business from the County,” I said. “I run this place on a damn shoestring. But let me get this straight. He wanted to sell ostrich meat to the school system?”

Bert looked me straight in the eye. “Yup. Said he could supply about three hundred pounds of ostrich-burger a week, delivered to the junior high at a dollar forty a pound”

I held my stomach. “Bert, my daughter goes to the junior high. You wanna make her eat ostrich? Seriously?”

He shrugged. “Leaner than beef, great source of protein, low cholesterol. Sure, why not?”

“I don’t know, Bert…seems a little Reagan to me.”

Bert chuckled. “Times they are a-changin’. Bigger problem was Bax’s askin’ price.”

“How so? A dollar forty’s as cheap as it gets for meat. And jeez, Bert, Bax is broker than I am. Help him out.”

He grimaced. “It’s not that simple, Ed. We priced it and Aramark bid a dollar twenty-two. So we signed with the low bidder.”

I nodded. “They undercut him. No wonder he’s pissed about his taxes. He pays for a subsidized lunch program and the program goes and subsidizes his competition.”

“Well, he’d best catch up. The sole proprietorship’s a thing of the past, Ed.” He glanced at the peeling sign over my door—Ed’s Hardware—and he cleared his throat. “Um, no offense. Anyway, what’ve you got for pistol shells?”

I scratched my temple. Arrogant prick or not, his money was good. “Come on in, I’ll show you.”

A few days later the siren on the courthouse started whooping at around three in the afternoon. It startled me awake and I jumped up from my chair behind the counter. I hadn’t had a customer since ten and I locked up for the day and jogged across the street to the VFD. The Chief and Melba Sue and I climbed into Number Nine, our pumper-tanker. “Route three, one-forty-one,” the Chief barked at Melba Sue.

I was in the back seat zipping into my bunker coat and I paused when I heard the address. “Bax Haskell got a fire at his place?”

Melba Sue gave Nine the gas. The Chief hooked an arm behind the seat to steady himself and looked over his shoulder at me. “I wish. Somebody phoned in a murder.”

I was relieved to see Bax waiting on us by his mailbox. Jimmy Nalber’s squad car was parked beside the house, lights looping, and Jimmy was walking across the stockpen towards the barn, gun drawn. The ground in the pen was an inch deep in what I took for dirty snow, at first, until I realized it was ninety degrees out and Jimmy was wading through feathers.

“Whatcha got, Bax?” Melba Sue called.

“It’s a fuckin’ slaughterhouse in there!” Bax yelled. He had a raw bruise on his cheekbone. His hands were covered with blood and there was blood on the knees of his overalls and the toes of his boots. My armpits grew damp.

There was a high thin scream from inside the barn. Melba Sue set her jaw and stomped down and we accelerated up the driveway and broke through the pen fence with a loud guitar-string twang. She almost ran Jimmy over as he bolted out of the barn being pursued by…well, by a screeching fiend so horrible that at first my mind wouldn’t even process what I was seeing.

Jimmy ran straight up Nine’s bumper, hollering. He scrabbled up the windshield and onto the roof, out of our sight. We heard his boot heels crinkling the metal.

The ostrich (for that’s what the hell-fiend was) strutted around Number Nine. The black bird was every inch of seven feet tall and its beady eyes glared with mean hatred and stupid suspicion. Its feathers were clotted with blood. We sat there, shocked and silent, and it suddenly lunged and whocked a dent into the hood with its beak.

A gunshot roared from above us and a puff of dust lept up at the ostrich’s taloned feet. It arched its neck and hissed like a cobra.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” It was Bax, sprinting towards us.

“Get back!” Jimmy shouted down.

“No, no!” Bax reached the ostrich and threw his arms around its ropy neck. “Poopty-Doo won’t hurtcha! She’s just scared!”

“Poopty-Doo?” I repeated. “That thing’s name is Poopty-Doo?”

Bax stroked the ostrich’s head and whispered into whatever passed for her ears, and Poopty-Doo came over all docile. She blinked her long eyelashes and lowered her head bashfully and butted her forehead into Bax’s chest like a love-starved kitten.

“Aw,” cooed Melba Sue.

The Chief craned his head out of the window. “You can come down now, Jimmy,” he said, his voice just a tad bit dry.

Jimmy’s voice was tight. “---- that.”

The stench in the barn was worse than anything I’d ever smelled before, including when I’d lived in New Jersey. Bax was right, it was a slaughterhouse. There were nine ostriches lying in limp-necked lumps about the barn. Spatters of black and red and grey patched the rough wooden walls in a tarry quiltwork. Poopty-Doo darted around her stall in a restless circle, cheeping nervously.

“I’m ruint,” Bax sobbed. “These ones were my breedin’ stock. Eight-thousand dollar birds.”

“You’re seriously accusing Bert Darby of this?” the Chief asked.

Bax sniffled. “He kilt my birds! You wait ‘til I find his sorry ass.”

“Hey, check this out,” Melba Sue said. She was in one of the stalls pointing at a window. Something had drilled a neat hole through it and the glass around the hole was a spiderweb of cracks. “He shoot your birds?”

“Uh-hunh!”

“Oh shit,” I said. “Yeah. He bought a box of shells from me the other day.”

The Chief played a good grouch but he had a soft spot for young kids and harmless simpletons. He patted Bax’s shoulder. “Don’t worry too much about it, son. If he did it, insurance’ll pay for it, or either he will.” And then he bellowed at a simpleton of quite another flavor: “JIMMY! GET YOUR ASS IN HERE AND TAKE THIS MAN’S STATEMENT!”

That night it took three showers to exorcize the smell from my skin. I was helping my daughter with her algebra when the phone rang.

It was Jimmy. “Ed, reckon you can ride down for a few minutes?”

“Well, I’m sorta tied up. Can I see you tomorrow?”

“No, sorry. It needs to be right now. It’s important.”

“What?”

He sighed. “County Hospital rang over ‘bout a half hour ago and told us Bert Darby’s dead.”

“Shot?”

“No, somebody beat the shit out of him. Can you come down?”

At the station house I sat across from Jimmy in the dayroom. There was a big mess on his desk and the coffee he poured me was terrible. I set the mug amidst a ream of loose papers and noticed a plastic bag marked with Bert’s name. It held keys, cigarettes, some pocket change, and a big roll of cash. Bert’s cane leaned in the corner.

Jimmy tapped his pencil on his bony chin. “And you’re prepared to say you heard Bax threaten Bert’s life?”

I spread my hands in the air. “I guess so, but just ‘cause he said it don’t mean he did it, right? I mean, I’ve known Bax my whole life. He’s dim but he ain’t a killer.”

Jimmy leaned back in his chair. His flat eyes and sinewy neck reminded me of Poopty-Doo’s. “Did you see how savage that sumbitch that chased me was?” he asked, as if he’d read my mind.

“Yeah, I saw.”

He pointed a finger at me. “How many of those bloodthirsty things you think Bax kills in an average week?”

“I get your point. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Are you gonna arrest him?”

“It’s a good bet. The sheriff and the PA are meetin’ first thing tomorrow.”

“Well, let me know what you find out, would you?”

“‘Course.” He looked down at the desk and started fiddling with the plastic bag. “Damn, that’s a lotta money, ain’t it? You think a man like Mister Darby carries a bankroll like that all the time?”

“Wouldn’t know,” I said. He started counting the bills out. I was thinking of my house payment and how much a math tutor would cost when something caught my eye. “Can I see that one?”

“This one here?” he asked, holding up a dollar bill. It was stamped up the left side with blue ink:

Conway County
Farmers’ Bank

“Thanks,” I said. “Never mind.”

Jimmy looked confused. “All right,” he said, and went on counting.

I bought a six-pack and rode out to Bax’s place. It was sunset but he was still working in his pasture, scooping out a big hole with an old yellow backhoe. Beside the hole was the body of an ostrich, wrapped in the trace chains he’d used to drag it down from the barn.

“Hold up, hold up,” I shouted over the diesel, waving the beers.

He disengaged the drive system and shut the engine down and climbed off the machine. “Hey, that looks good.”

I cracked one for him and he drank deeply and wiped the cold can across his forehead. We sat down and let our legs dangle in the hole.

“Somebody beat Bert to death,” I said, watching him.

He pooched out his lip, thought for a while, and nodded. “Well. I s’pose he deserved it.”

“Did he?”

Bax leaned over and put his hand on the neck of the dead ostrich. “Yeah, he did. Are you gonna ask me if I did it?”

“No. But I think somebody’s goin’ to, pretty soon. I’ve got a different question.”

“What’s that?”

“I want to know why a man in your dire financial straights was givin’ money to Bert Darby.”

His eyes went wide. “Who said I did that?”

“Nobody. But he had a dollar bill on him that I think I gave you in change a few days ago. Remember that deck of ones I had to break open? I get one of those from the Farmers’ Bank every week or so.”

He stared into the hole for a long time.

“How’d you get that bruise on your cheek?” I asked gently. “Ya’ll fight?”

“All right, all right,” he said. He crushed the can between his palms and threw it into the hole, and he told me his story.

Jimmy called me the next day. “You’re not gonna believe this, Ed.”

“Prob’ly not,” I agreed. I was reading the Crier’s help wanted section and wondering how a career in fast food management could possibly be as rewarding as the ad promised.

“I knew that bastard was savage,” Jimmy said.

“Bax?”

“No, that bird. Poopty-shit.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“Bert Darby wasn’t beaten to death, he was pecked.”

Hell. It sounded like he was getting close to the truth, but I didn’t have to make it easy for him. “You know, Jimmy, I really think you’d be happier on the job if you’d make a habit of explainin’ yourself more clearly.”

His voice turned sour. “Fine. Bert Darby died of internal injuries resulting from repeated blows to his gut with an object about the size of…oh…an ostrich’s beak. You with me? Somebody or some thing hit him over and over again like a triphammer, and he bled to death later. Slow, inside his belly.”

“So Bax didn’t kill him, then.”

“Well, yes he did. Indirectly. If I sic my dog on you and he tears out your throat, it’s the same as if I shot you point blank.”

I closed my eyes. “Your theory is that Bax sicced an ostrich on Bert?”

“Exactly!”

“Oh, well, good luck with that in court.”

Jimmy chuckled. “We got one other thing. We listened to the 911 tape and Bert is the one that called in the murder.”

I sat stock still for about three seconds. “Wait a minute. Bert Darby phoned in his own murder? How? They got phones in hell now?”

“No, no, no,” Jimmy said. “He called from Bax’s house. Said he wanted to report a killin’ and dropped the phone. And now we’re gonna do what we gotta do.”

After Bax had been in jail for a few days Doyle Martin asked me to come by. He was a Methodist attorney who took on pro bono cases every now and again and he’d agreed to take on Bax’s. His office was paneled in pine and the number and names of the books on his shelves made me dizzy.

“It was a box of nine millimeter,” I told him. I slid the receipt with Bert Darby’s signature on it across his desk.

He curled a hand over his mouth and looked over the tops of his reading glasses at me. “And that’s all you know?”

“I don’t know what to say. Is there somethin’ else?”

He stared at me.

“OK,” I said. “Bax told me what really happened.”

“Did he?”

Now I stared at him. “Well, maybe not,” I finally said. “I guess all I have to go on is what he told me.”

“I need you to tell me the version you heard,” he said. “It’s best for Bax if I know how the story has changed since the incident. It’ll help me in front of the jury.”

The thought of Bax up against a jury made me see red. “Come on, Doyle, the whole town knows Bert Darby was crooked. Find twelve people who won’t be glad he’s dead.”

Doyle held his face still, and I wondered if Methodists played poker. I shook my head. “Bax had it figured that he could bribe Bert into changing his mind about the contract for ostrich meat. So they met and Bert tried to hit him up for a few hundred bucks extra to repair some damage Bax did to his car.”

“Damage caused at your hardware store.”

“Right. So some things got said and they started in yellin’ and Bert socked him. And that’s when the ostrich jumped Bert. Bax said it was ‘cause they’re social birds and they attack the common enemy. I guess Bax is part of the flock. The ostrich trampled Bert pretty good before Bax could drag it off him. Bert drew his gun and shot all the birds and fled the scene. End of story.”

Doyle reached for a notepad and scribbled a few lines.

“Is that the same version you heard?” I asked. “Because it’s got more holes in than Bax’s ostriches and I hope you’re helpin’ him fill ‘em in.”

He stopped scribbling. “I have to protect my client’s confidentiality and I can’t address that question.”

I chewed my lip. “Do you think it’ll stand up in court?”

Doyle put his pen down. “If Bert provoked the animal Bax won’t serve manslaughter time. Beyond that, I couldn’t say.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Ed, I’ll give you some free advice. If you ever get tempted to burn down your hardware store, don’t.”

At three AM I sat straight up in bed. So that’s what Doyle had meant.

Cassidy was sitting at the kitchen table in her Yoda PJs. She had a glass of milk and her algebra book was open. Her eyes were red.

I sat down beside her with my own glass.

“Algebra sucks,” she said. “Listen to this: ‘In any matrix an individual’s value is dependent upon its position.’ That’s so stupid.” She looked up. “Why are you smiling at me?”

“Algebra’s stupid, but you ain’t,” I said, ruffling her honey-blonde hair.

On Sunday afternoon I locked the store and drove over to the county jail.

Prisoners and their families milled about in the sun. Bax and I sat at one of the picnic tables in the fenceyard. The orange jumpsuit fit him like a dog food sack. He put his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. “I hate this place,” he choked.

“I’m gonna bail you out,” I said. “You need to be back out at your farm, gettin’ ready for those new hens when they come in. Is that the right term, hens?”

He uncovered his face and looked at me like I’d plucked him from the ocean. “Yeah, hens. You’d do that for me? How?”

“I’m thinkin’ I’ll take out a mortgage on the store. I own the property outright, so there’ll be eighty grand or so. We can pump the extra cash back into the farm. But you have to drop your insurance claim.”

Doubt crossed his face. “Drop the claim? Why would I do that?”

“’Cause you killed your own birds. After Bert killed the one that attacked him and took off for your house to call the law. He left his gun behind and you shot the rest thinking you could blame it on him. Insurance fraud, and besides, you shot your breeding stock. Not very smart.”

His eyes narrowed. “You said ‘we.’”

“You and me. And Cassidy. We’re gonna raise ostriches together.”

He smiled for the first time I could remember. “You ever smell a big pile of ostrich shit in the hot sun, Ed?”

I took a deep breath. “Well, the hardware store is bust. And if it’s a choice between ostrich shit and a career in fast food…”