My newest novel, a work in progress, Sonoran Justice – retitled, with more editing, is coming along and should be out this fall.  I’m shooting for September or October for the paperback version with kindle and ebooks to follow shortly thereafter.  This suspense/thriller novel is book two of the Charlie Draper series which follows Charlie’s adventures from by last novel Finding Jennifer.  This excerpt continues the series.  Comment and/or constructive criticism is valued and appreciated.

Sonoran Justice

 Chapter One

Southeastern Arizona

The killer stood behind granite boulders high above the surrounding landscape.  His custom-built M98B Super Magnum sniper rifle, chambered for .338 Lapua, rested on a wool blanket cushion spread carefully over the granite table.  The finely-crafted rifle cost just under five thousand dollars, had a two and half pound trigger pull, a customize barrel with a muzzle brake, a 4×16 power high optic scope, a built-in biped in front and desert camouflage.  The two things Damián Sanchez learned during his years of contract killing included: use a precision weapon and be patient.  His specialty, killing at distance, ranked as his only employment.  Demanding complete anonymity, and working only through a broker of such things, he required fifty percent payment up front.  The drug cartels kept him busy and made him rich.

Still early, the morning sun beat on his back through a desert camouflage-colored shirt and threatened to drive the afternoon temperature into the nineties by noon.  Damián Sanchez ignored the heat since he anticipated the job would be done quickly.  He watched his prey through the rifle’s scope waiting for the moment his target would stand for even a second when he could squeeze ever so gently on the rifle’s hair trigger.  While the M98B was capable of kills in excess of two thousand yards, Sanchez preferred a distance under a thousand.  At any measure under that he could put five out of five shots through the center of a man’s chest with ease.  When the distance lengthened a rare chance of a sloppy kill or even a miss arose.  Not likely, but still not a sure thing.  Therefore, he waited, knowing from his study of the target, a closer opportunity would afford itself before the day became much older.  Damián Sanchez earned a tidy one hundred thousand American dollars for each kill and in ten years he’d never failed.  His employment took maybe one or two weeks, rarely more, four or five times a year which left him considerable time to cultivate a lavish lifestyle on the western beaches of Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Yucatan, Mexico; and best yet, near the tourist city of Cancun.  He owned and piloted a Cessna Citation Mustang hangared at the Aeropuerto De Isla Mujeres less than a mile from his estate.  The plane’s 391 mile-per-hour cruising speed could place him anywhere in the North American Hemisphere in a short time with the M98B and ammo concealed in a custom-built hidden compartment.  His mostly wealthy neighbors thought him an inherited-money playboy and he cultivated the image.  The cartels paid well for his services and this day he intended to add to his already bursting coffers.

***

John Quinn worked at chores almost two thousand yards distant, unaware of the watcher.  Standing tall and heavy set, a long-time rancher pushing sixty, but still hard as nails and ornerier than a Irish grizzly bear with a toothache, Quinn owned two thousand acres of dry Arizona desert supporting no more than one cow per several acres in a good year; but he’d buried two wives in that Sonoran sand and raised three daughters, now grown and gone.  Two were married with families and lived clear across the country.  The third taught school in Phoenix, lived alone and rarely visited since she’d inherited her father’s disparaging outlook on existence and the idiots who inhabited it.  John Quinn’s Silver Buckle Ranch butted against Sonora, Mexico on the south and the Tohono O’Odam Indian Reservation on the west.  The buildings were sun-baked, tinder dry and paint naked from years of neglected maintenance.  John rose early every day to tend his dwindling stock because he always had, if not for any other reason.  The land was windswept, drier than bleached bones, and needed constant irrigation.  The single deep well that supplied his irrigation needs had, in recent years, pumped dry at the height of the growing season forcing Quinn to reduce his herd to match the available feed.  In today’s market he knew he’d be lucky to find a buyer for the either the cattle or the land at anything but giveaway prices.  Just before ten in the morning, Quinn walked to his old Honda four-wheeler to start his daily hunt for strays.  Quinn’s cattle, not unlike similar bovine creatures, habitually searched for food, a continuing quest occasionally finding trouble.  This morning, his count came up two short.

His dog, a mixed breed Border Collie stray that found Quinn’s doorstep six years before and never left, followed behind at a safe distance.  Quinn and the dog shared a love-hate relationship.  Quinn liked the dog because it didn’t talk back and was pretty good at rounding up stray cattle; the dog on the other hand didn’t much like Quinn and growled if he got too close, but scarfed down the table scraps provided.  After his master backed away the dog would eat and then followed everywhere behind him at a discreet distance.  Quinn started calling him Dog and the name stuck.

“Come on, Dog!” Quinn growled mounting his four-wheeler.  He started the engine and twisted the throttle, not looking to see if the dog followed.  Quinn rode west toward the sloping hills that split his property into two distinct sections.  The western side over the hills shared a common boundary with the Reservation and the eastern side served as the main ranch and went as far as the highway.  His cattle usually hid from the afternoon heat in the steep valleys and deep gulches that divided the ranch.  Quinn was just short of the beginning of the elevation change when the .338 copper-jacketed bullet slammed into his chest slightly to the left of his breastbone.

The dog cowered in the shade of a mammoth Saguaro watching the inert body of his master for the rest of the day listening to the Honda idle.  The next morning, nearly seventeen hours after the Honda ran out of gas, the dog trotted over to the body, sniffed, and turned away.  The dog looked back once from the top of a low hill a quarter-mile or so away, before continuing.

 ***

 Alice Quinn felt anger mixed with growing concern when she called to check on her father and he didn’t answer.  She bought him a cell phone two years ago and struggled to teach him how to use it.  It took three months of nagging before he’d answer it and almost six before he called her the first time.  Alice had been calling for two days with no response.  When school was out on Friday, she loaded up her five-year old Nissan Quest and headed south on Interstate 10, the beginning of the hundred-seventy-five mile drive to the ranch southwest of Tucson.

The nearly three hour drive would have pleased her had not Alice worried about her father.  The sun began to set and the spring weather cooled the temperature into the seventies almost immediately.  This time of year it would be in the low fifties by morning and she’d need a jacket.  At Tucson, where she entered Interstate 19 toward Nogales, she shut down the air-conditioning and cracked the rear passenger windows to drag in cool air.  Alice stood five-nine in flats, the oldest and tallest of her siblings by several inches, supported mousy-brown hair that defied all attempts to control it and pretty much always looked like she’d just risen from sleep.  At thirty-one, she’d quit worrying about her lack of male suitors, despite attempts of her few friends to arrange things.  She knew she wasn’t movie-star material, but her slim figure and natural beauty were better than average.  In those rare moments when she reflected on it, she knew her downfall included hating beer and sports compounded by few potential males wanting to discuss quantum physics.

Alice turned into the single lane driveway that meandered through stately Saguaros and green-barked Palo Verdes forming a sparse canopy over low-growing creosote.  She saw the house in the distance and her father’s old beater Ford pickup parked in front.  As she drove closer, a second pickup alongside became visible.  Parking, she recognized one of the local boys she’d known since high school.

“Hi, Alice,” he said, grinning through white teeth and a sun-aged face that made him look older than she knew him to be.

“Hi, Buck,” she answered.

“I came over to talk to your dad, but he doesn’t seem to be around.”

“I know,” Alice said, “I’ve been trying to call him for several days with no answer.  Have you checked the house?”

“Couldn’t, the dog wouldn’t let me on the porch.”

Alice noticed the dog, lying on the front porch with its head resting on its front paws, watching.  She approached him knowing, like always, she’d have to make friends again.  The dog had never been friendly, but would let her pet him only after an introductory period becoming longer depending on how extended the time was since she last visited.  She moved slowly, talking to dog in a low soothing voice while she let him smell her hand.  She sat on the step and gently touched his head letting her hand slide down to his back.  The dog moaned and crept forward placing his head on her lap.

“Where’s your master, Dog?”  The dog moaned again, got to his feet, jumped off the porch, ran a short distance before stopping and looking back.

“I think he wants us to follow him,” Buck said.

Alice climbed into Buck’s pickup and they followed the dog for a mile or so into the desert following a meandering course to avoid washes, standing cacti and occasional boulders.  Finally, the terrain became too rough and they were forced to walk.  The dog led them through rolling sand hills and deep gullies to a plateau of soft sand where Buck spotted the Honda several hundred yards distant.

“Maybe you’d better stay here,” he said.  His suggestion met with a hard stare from Alice.

“He’s my father,” she said, “I need to take care of him”.

Alice Quinn didn’t cry until hours later, long after the Sheriff’s Department personnel, the coroner and Buck left her alone with the dog, sitting on the front porch of her father’s house.

“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what happened out there, right?” she said to the dog, her rhetorical question hanging like a cloud in the hot desert air.

The dog cocked his head and looked at her and didn’t respond.  Then the crying started.  When her blubbering finally stopped, the dog moved over and placed his head on her lap.  She knew the dog and her father never got along, but the animal seemed to be mourning also, a surprise to her as much as her own tears.  Her father had been a difficult man; distant, silent, and unreachable.  Alice couldn’t remember her mother and her step-mother’s short vision lasted only brief years before she died when Alice was nine.  After that her father threw himself into running the ranch and expected Alice to run the house and raise her siblings.  Alice called her sisters the next morning, neither one of whom expressed interested in making the trip to Arizona leaving the decision-making up to her.

“Guard the place,” she said to the dog and slipped into the Nissan.  Her father might have been a disagreeable asshole, but he didn’t deserve a bullet in the chest on his own place.  The more Alice thought about it the angrier she became.  The first thing on her agenda included making sure someone paid for his death.  The Sheriff’s Office in Ajo seemed a good place to start.

 ***

 Molly Sorenson, the elected Sheriff of Ayo County and acutely acquainted with grieving relatives, angry crime victims, and an array of genuine criminal assholes, decided the mousy-haired woman sitting in her office didn’t match the usual anguished next-of-kin.  She sat in Molly’s overstuffed faux leather guest chair straight-backed, knees tight together, with hands-in-lap demureness, yet Molly detected sand in her voice and angry eyes.  Molly’s twenty-year career in law enforcement enabled her to recognize the look.

“Sheriff, someone killed my father.  I want to know why and I want them punished,” the young woman said.

“I understand, Miss Quinn, and we are doing everything we can.  I have to tell you though, there are no witnesses, no bullet since it passed through him and chances of finding it in the desert are slim, but we are trying.  We know it was a very large caliber.  Now, is there anyone you know who would want to harm your father?”

“My father was a very disagreeable man.  His only friend I know of was his dog and they didn’t get along.  I don’t know anyone who’d want to kill him, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a few,” Alice said.

Molly’s phone rang and she said, “Excuse me just a second,” to her guest and “Yes,” to the dispatcher who she knew wouldn’t interrupt unless it was important.

“Sheriff, Mr. Draper is here.”

“Tell him I’ll be right out,” Molly said and hung up.  She looked at Alice Quinn and made a decision.  Something about this young woman made her want to help more than her department could afford to do.

“Miss Quinn, would you mind excusing me a moment, I will be right back.”  Without waiting for an answer Molly left her office and closing the door behind her, walked down the short hallway to the dispatch room.  Rachel, her dispatcher, a twenty something five-foot tall cutie, who flirted with anything male over the age of ten, but ranked as the calmest and most efficient dispatcher since her election, had Charlie Draper standing embarrassed-looking at her desk.

“Can I talk to you for a second in an interview room?” she said to Draper who she was sure was glad to be rescued.

“Sure,” he said, “what’s up?”

“I’ve got a favor to ask.”

“For you, anything,” Draper said.

“You better wait until you hear what I have to say before you agree.”

If you liked the excerpt of Sonoran Justice grab a copy of Finding Jennifer, the first in the series, available on Amazon.com.  Click here.

Review of Reasonable Fear by Scott Pratt.

Four Stars

This is the second of Scott Pratt’s books that I‘ve read though the other wasn’t part of this series.  It is the latest of his Joe Dillard series.  I have not read any of the others but I could be tempted.  The characters are well developed and we are shown some internal family problems that make the story and characters real.  The plot, a district attorney/police procedural effort moves along well and held my interest.  I would have given it five stars except the ending went a bit soft, but in general, I liked it and likely most readers would.

The Independent Authors Network recently posted the following Press Release which we are happy to share here:

The Sonoran Desert is a huge tract of semi-arid landscape that stretches from northwestern Mexico into the United States almost to Las Vegas, Nevada where it mingles with the Mohave Desert. At its lowest point at the Salton Sea it drops 226 below sea level. Reputed to be the largest and hottest desert in North America, its reputation enlarged two days ago by a recorded temperature of 109 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale at Yuma, AZ. This beautiful country, despite the heat and low dew points, has a unique attraction difficult to describe. Home to the gigantic Saguaro Cactus (See the top right picture) the Sonora is as colorful and interesting as it is sometimes hostile. The pictures included in this post are but a hint at its wondrous splendor.  In ancient times the area roared with the sounds of active volcanoes leaving towering solid rock cones that now dot the desert floor. (See the top center picture)  It’s a harsh land, inhabited by strange critters whose lives are consumed by simply surviving.  I used the Sonoran Desert area as the backdrop for my latest suspense/thriller novel, Finding Jennifer, which highlights this amazing country.

The harsh life of desert creatures is epitomized by the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) (in the lower right picture).  These large scavenger birds are magnificent in flight showing their distinctive red head and neck.  If you click on any of the thumbnails a full-sized version will show in a new window.  Enjoy.

As part of my promotion of my promotion of my new novel the next two days will be Finding Jennifer Free days on Amazon Kindle.  A gripping novel of murder, drug trafficking and human smuggling.  Free days are April 18 and 19 only!

Charlie Draper only took the job of finding the missing girl as favor.  He approached it convinced that the hot desert sun had likely eliminated another unprepared hiker rather than a part of the Border Wars.  It didn’t take long to realize his error.  Then it became complicated.  In less than a day he discovers that drug cartel members shot her and threw her into a volcano vent.  The resulting trail leads into Mexico where his actions bring on the wrath of the cartel.  The bodies start to pile up with a vengeance as he and his helicopter-flying Apache friend attempt to rescue the young women and prevent the revenge determined drug alliance from killing them all.

Don’t miss your chance – here’s the link:  Amazon

Deadly Stillwater by Roger Stelljes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed Deadly Stillwater.  It’s a well plotted, police procedural novel that takes you through a complicated crime and the efforts to solve the kidnapping of two innocent young women. The characters are strong and well-defined and a plot has many twists and turns leading up to a surprising and exciting ending. I’ll be looking for other work from this author.

Read all my reviews here

Sage Creek at the Boundary – Author’s note: Over fifty years ago, at about age twelve I accompanied my father on a work trip into to a stream gauging station many miles over the prairie in northern Montana.  Reaching this area by road required a long detour into Alberta, Canada before dropping back into Montana.  The following short story is based on that adventure.

Sage Creek at the Boundary

The high Alberta sun beat on my father’s government black Ford panel truck and drove the temperature on the lonely Canadian prairie past ninety degrees.  On a sweltering June day, we followed a two-path road winding in and out of deep treeless dry coulees along a westerly route paralleling the boundary between the U.S and its northern neighbor.  Our tracks raised fine dust more than a hundred miles from the nearest civilization.  Anchoring the center of Montana’s  “high-line,” the farming community of Havre was closest by way of cow-path trails and dusty gravel roads.  Hot prairie air blew through my open passenger window as I watched my father drive.  His hands gripped the steering wheel and heat sweat poured from under his khaki J.C. Penney cap.  I turned eleven years old the summer of 1952 on my first trip with my dad.

“How far is it,” I asked, squirming.  Tall and lean, my newly acquired height now filling a thirty-inch inseam and size nine red ball tennis shoes.  Hot, sweaty and uncomfortable, I sat impatient for scenery other than the dry Alberta prairie.  My t-shirt and jeans stuck sweaty to the truck seat and my young mind passed beyond bored twenty miles and an hour earlier.  A dozen times I’d inventoried the truck cab, fingering the thin paper Simplex Recorder scrolls that lined the shelf behind the seat, trying on the earphones that I’d seen my father use, and reading the sun wrinkled notes clipped securely to the dash.  My father informed me at five in the morning, when we were only a mile out of Havre that, at Sage Creek, even the rattlesnakes carried canteens.  He neglected to add that it would take most of the day to get there.  Lonesome antelope, Columbia ground squirrels and diamond-backs stood stoic in sagebrush, prairie bunch grass and cactus viewing our progress with disinterest, unable to comprehend why we were there.  In any direction, the Montana/Alberta landscape looked flat and endless, stretching to the horizon in a road map of winding coulees and eroded washes.

During spring, when mountain snow melted hundreds of miles to the west in Glacier Park, the resulting runoff swelled Sage Creek to a raging torrent.  Most of the year however, the flow was calmer and barely recordable.  Later I would learn that Sage Creek sometimes meant driving for what seemed like forever under a burning sun to “wind the clock” if no water was flowing.

“A ways yet,” my father said, concentrating on his driving and answering my questions in short sentences or monosyllables.  My father was a man of few words and he expected his progeny to follow suit.

Shortly after noon, we stopped at the double barbed wire fence that marked the border.  It was there I learned gate opening was my delegated duty, a job that, I realized quickly, came automatically with possession of the passenger seat.  A rule of farmers and ranchers, and one my father adopted, decreed drivers never open gates unless they’re alone.  Without fail, the stretched taught barbed wire would take minutes of struggling to open, followed by more struggling after my father had driven through.  He was teaching me independence and self-reliance, or so he said when I finally climbed back into the truck, out of breath and bloody from the barbed wire.  As I remember it, I aged to thirteen before I could open gates without bleeding.

We drove through Canada most of the morning since the only way to get to the gauging station was by driving north across the border and then west deep into the headwaters of the Milk River.  We crossed back into the United States less than a mile from Sage Creek.

The United States and Canada signed a treaty that dealt with the sharing of water in the Milk River that, though it originated in GlacierPark, passed through Canada.  Sage Creek was one of many tributaries of the Milk that carried water south into Montana.  My father’s lifelong job with U.S. Geological Survey took him to Havre regularly to measure the flow.

Sage Creek at the boundary, one of many remote gauging stations, ranked as the farthest from anywhere, and my father drove there at least once a month during summer for most of his career.  The black Ford held all his measuring instruments, rotary meters, weights, gauging staff, rubber waders, cable car tools, and spooled cable.  These lay behind a wooden partition my Dad built just behind the seats to keep prairie dust out of the driver’s area.  The partition, holding back flying tools in an accident or sudden braking, shone with battleship gray enamel, a color that, in 1952, could be found in excess in every GSA warehouse.

Straining with all my strength, I closed the second gate and crawled back into the Ford.  “Are we close now?” I asked, for what must have seemed to my father, the hundredth time.  My growling stomach, empty down to my knees, demanded food.

A mile from the border crossing, we topped a barren hill and I could see the two-path road we were following drop into a grassy basin divided by dry washes, eroded gulches and the white bentonite banks of Sage Creek.  The gauging station house, barely a four by four room, looked like a white-painted privy sitting next to the creek.  Downstream a hundred yards or so stood a cable car A-frame for those times when Sage Creek ran too deep to wade.

After we ate hot soggy sandwiches in the shade of the Ford panel, my father opened the door of the gauge house and prepared to work.  I stood behind him, looking carefully for rattlesnakes, sulking in the dark, cool reaches of the building.  This time there were none and my father stepped inside to check the recorder.  There wasn’t room for both of us, so I stood holding the door open.  The recorder sat on a narrow shelf and quarter-inch spring steel bands dropped through the floor into a well underneath.  This allowed the ups and downs of the creek’s level to raise or lower copper floats attached to the steel bands.  Inside, on the recorder, an ink pen drew these changes on rolling paper.  A clock timer moved the paper under the pen so that my father could read what day and hour the peak flow occurred.  It must have been over a hundred degrees inside the gauge house and I watched my father’s weathered face as he worked.  At six foot, he stood slim and work-hardened with a farmer tan that stopped abruptly at wrists and neck.  His dark curly hair wilted under the blazing sun and sweat rolled out from under the band of his cap in rivers.  His khaki shirt stained wet down his back as he wound the clock.  “Get me a roll,” he said, assuming, as he usually did, that by then I would know intuitively what he meant.

“One of those paper rolls?” I questioned.

“Yes.”

I ran to the truck and retrieved a roll and returned with the prize, proud as a Labrador pup.  While I watched, he replaced the paper and slipped the used one carefully into a cardboard tube.  Later, in Helena, he and others in his office would meticulously compute the flow volume.  That done, he lifted the trap door into the well and crawled cautiously down into the dark to inspect the inlet tube.  Rats, snakes and other creatures, never having read the treaty, frequented these places and occasionally plugged off the water.  This part of the job caused my father some trepidation since heights and rattlesnakes were his only real fears.  Never admitting to these frailties, he blamed shaking hands and nervous sweat on the sweltering heat.  It never kept him from doing his job, but I could tell he didn’t like it.  Once, later in his career, a rotten ladder rung gave way and dropped him to the bottom of the well with a broken leg.  Alone and a hundred miles from help, my father dragged himself up the ladder and drove back to Havre.  Remembering the dark, damp closeness of those gauge house wells, I’m sure the rats and rattlesnakes had much to do with encouraging his accent.

These chores done, it was time to measure the water.  Sage Creek that spring day ran swift and deep, still carrying runoff to the ocean.  I felt a thrill.  It meant riding the cable car high above the water.

The cable car ran on steel rope strung between two A-frame structures on each shore.  The car consisted of a square wooden frame, two seats facing one another, foot‑rests, and a space between, through which the measuring instruments dangled to the water.  It hung from the cable by two pulleys and steel flat strapping.  Because the cable hung lowest in the center over the water, the car would roll unaided to this point.  From there, my father used a tool that fit over the cable to pull us to the other side to a point where we began measuring.  My father boosted me into the cable car and proceeded to load the instruments.

I sat ten feet off the ground watching my father work with my young fingers playing with the flip latch holding the cable car secure.  Normally, a heavy Master lock attached the latch to the A-frame, but since we were going to use it my father had removed the lock.  Prairie jackrabbits played in the distance and a hawk floated overhead riding thermal air against an azure sky. I gazed upward, fascinated by the drifting hawk, with my slim fingers fiddling with the latch and tugging on the cable tool.  In order for the cable car to roll backwards, one had only to pull forward on the cable tool and the latch would fall loose.  When the car started to roll, I watched the A-frame move away, slowly at first and then faster.  Panic rose in my young breast and filled the car.

My father stood stunned and I can only imagine his feelings as he watched the cable car roll toward the center of Sage Creek gaining speed with every foot.  I remember the fear as the A-frame became smaller and more distant.  My fingers clutched the steel framework when the swirling waters of Sage Creek appeared under my feet.  The car finally came to rest halfway between the banks and nearly thirty feet above the water.  In the distance, I could see the black Ford panel truck, the gauge house with its door hanging open, and my father, standing next to the A-frame, more than a hundred‑fifty yards away.  He tried to yell at me, but the roar of the water carried away the sound.  The hot Alberta sun bathed me in warmth, but it was pure fear that made me sweat.  The thought I could be stranded forever crossed my mind since I couldn’t see a way back.  The cable tool, necessary to return to the A-frame, hung back at my starting point.

My father stood on the shore helpless, unable to reach me with a rescue line and too far from anywhere to summon help.  No doubt in a quandary, he couldn’t leave me out there, though I suspect the possibility might have occurred to him.  I watched him walk back to the truck and thought he might have made that decision.  But, shortly, after digging around in the back of the panel he walked back and climbed the A-frame.  Once there, he rigged a rope sling around his waist and over the cable.  As I watched, he grabbed the cable in both hands and hooked both legs over until he hung upside down underneath.  The cable tool dangled on a shank of light rope tied to his waist.

Hand over hand, hanging like a monkey, my father worked his way out to the cable car and his wayward son.  I watched with my heart in my throat, fearing he’d fall or worse yet, he’d kill me when he reached the car.  Neither happened.  Instead, when he finally arrived and climbed in, my father said nothing.  His face ghost white and sweat soaked, he sat across from me, hauled in the cable tool, placed it over the cable and began pulling us back to the A-frame.  The squeaking cable car wheels talked to us over the rush of water below and accented the deafening silence hanging between us.  On that trip back to the A-frame, I waited an eternity for a tongue lashing that never came.

We measured Sage Creek that day with a minimum of conversation.  My father instructed me on how to take notes while he counted the clicks in his headphones.  Each click represented one turn of the velocity meter dangling in the water below us.  It took the rest of the afternoon to finish, measuring at one-foot intervals across the width of Sage Creek.  The afternoon heat hung over us like a heavy cloud.  The sun had dipped low in the sky when we loaded up the instruments and pointed the black Ford back across the barren prairie.  There wasn’t a breath of air and the heavy silence in the truck cab forced me to concede it unlikely I would see another trip to Sage Creek.

We reached Highway 2, west of Havre, shortly after nine pm. The heat soaked sandwiches of earlier seemed distant memories.  My stomach growled in protest, but I said nothing.  Finally allowing a faster pace, the cooling tarmac flashed under us when the windshield in front of my face exploded.  A foot square piece landed in my lap and splinters of shining glass rained around me like a morning shower.  The windshield, as the safety glass of that day was designed to, shattered into opaque crystals.  My father couldn’t see a thing and the Ford was traveling better that sixty miles an hour.

It certainly wasn’t my father’s day.  With his eldest son bleeding from a face full of glass, unable to see out the windshield, and certain from my bellowing that I was blinded or worse, my father stuck his head out the driver’s window and slammed on the brakes.  Everything on the shelf behind us, rolls of recorder paper, clip boards, earphones, Kleenex boxes and stacks of notebooks flew forward in a blizzard of paper.  Dust boiled up around the truck as we came to a stop and dusted us with a combination of prairie dirt and road gravel.  Fortunately, while we ended up in the wide sloping borrow pit, no serious damage resulted.

My father checked me over quickly, saying, “you all right, son?”

“Yes, I think so.  My face hurts.”

“You’ve got a little glass in your face, so don’t touch it.”

My glasses had shielded my eyes so injury was minimal.  We got out and brushed away most of the glass and inspected the dead pheasant that caused it all.  My father drove the rest of the way into Havre with his head out the window and when we were safely back at the hotel, he picked glass out of my face with tweezers. He borrowed a bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the hotel clerk and bathed my cuts in foam.  I guess it never occurred to him to take me to a doctor because, in those days, we were tough and took care of our own.  Finished finally, we prepared to leave the room to find a cafe.  My father, smiling at me with tired eyes, tousled my hair and said, “I don’t know what you’ve got planned for tomorrow, son, but let’s make it a little less adventurous, ok?”

I agreed.

This story  was first published in “Running with Moose” by Dave Folsom © 1992, 2010

Writing short stories is a great way to practice creative writing, character development, and plotting and occasionally the story develops into a full length novel.  One of my first novels, Scaling Tall Timber, (see the video trailer in a previous post) resulted from two short stories I wrote many years ago for a creative writing class.  The first one, entitled Scaling Rexford received Honorable Mention and was published in the 1992 University of Oregon’s West Wind Review.  Scaling Rexford also appears in my book of short stories called Running with Moose and Other Stories. It is reprinted here for your enjoyment.  Comments are welcome and aways appreciated.

Scaling Rexford

He stumbled through the scale house door that day, waving a scale ticket and bouncing off the door jam.  His eyes whiskey wild and pupils tight as pinpoints, he slapped the small square card on the counter and staggered me with moonshine breath.

“Scale’er boy,” he told me, his speech colored by local white lightning. “There’s a load on her.”

Through the tiny window I could see his fourteen-year-old Mack wedged tight between the tire-high wooden scaffolding paralleling each side of the truck lane.  His old truck carried six hundred thousand log hauling miles and a load of lodgepole and alpine fir logs, the dregs of the lot.  Later I would know that Rags was usually the last load of the day.

I stepped out the door into a fading late summer afternoon sun and studied the truck.  Brush and limb marks crisscrossed it’s deeply oxidized green paint.  The doors closed hard and nothing remained of the cab except dented metal and fractured glass.  The other drivers called him Rags, shortened from ‘raggedy-ass trucker’.  The truck had set years behind the Rexford bar abandoned to the tire-rotting and paint-fading sun until Rags came along.  Jasper Northey owned the bar and the old Mack, a default from a gypo logger who couldn’t pay his tab.  They struck a bargain, Jasper and old Rags, Jasper turning a buck on the truck and Rags never lacking for Northey’s unbonded trade.

Rags drove in a washed-thin pair of gray cotton bibs worn over black woolen pants and a torn red flannel shirt that needed an oil change.  His age was on hold somewhere between forty and sixty and his snarled gray hair fell from under a dented aluminum hard hat.  He had given up shaving with any regularity, always it seemed, wearing six days of salt and pepper beard.

The St. Regis Paper Company moved into virgin timber that year.  Chain saws roared, cutting western larch, white pine, and fir, three to four feet on the stump.  They hired me as a timber scaler, barely out of college, and we measured logs in board feet — they called it ‘scaling’– daylight to dark.  We scaled climbing still loaded twelve-foot wide off-highway trucks.  The loads ran three to ten sticks, averaging thirty inches.  The drivers hovered over me in the tiny scale shack as I tallied their load.  All were positive that I, as the company representative, would short them.

In the woods, the drivers had a strict rotation on who sat first under the heel boom loader each morning.  The first two or three trucks got the better logs and were able to make three rounds during the day.  The unwritten code demanded that if you missed your turn you went to the end of the line.  Rags never did make his first turn and always came in dead last.  Some days he would only make one load.  He’d start sipping from his mayonnaise jar while he waited his turn under the heel boom.  Then roaring into the Rexford log landing, just before dark, carrying fifty or sixty scab logs and he’d be running without his safety binders on.

On rare occasions he would pull in sunken-cheeked, hollow eyed, and cold sober.  This condition, so foreign to his nature that he looked a different person, gradually worsened until about the third day of his self-imposed misery, when he began to heal.

“Never again!” he’d say, slouching in the company’s straight-backed wooden chair while I fingered the Olivetti.  “Soon as I save up some cash I’m gonna get me a place.  A good place, with lots of grass and water — and sheep.  Hundreds of sheep.  There’s money in sheep, you know that kid?”

He’d push up his bent hardhat, lay his head back and stare at the water-stained ceiling of the scale shack.  His grease stained fingers stuck out of grimy cloth gloves and his tin pants stood caked with road dirt.  “My old man had a thousand ewes and when I was eighteen I couldn’t wait to get away.  Never wanted to see another damned wooly.”

“I wouldn’t know the front of a sheep from the back,” I said, still adding scale.

“You’ve got a good job.  Don’t let it go.  Stick to it, kid.  I’ve drifted all my life.  Had so many jobs I couldn’t name them all.  Got nothing to show for it.”

During these temperate periods he would fill me with stories.  I heard of the places he’d roamed, the wars he’d fought, and the women he’d loved.  I believed not a tenth of it.  But they told well, and the words rolled out convincingly, accented by his rolling gray eyes and a wink in the right places.  I wanted them to be gospel.

Yet, Rags was the only driver who would talk to me, maybe because he too carried the mark of an outsider.  The others eyed me suspiciously, spoke in monosyllables, and mostly ignored us both.

Rexford, in the summer of 1963, before the dam, slept peacefully on the edge of the Kootenai River.  The town lay sheltered by tall yellow pine and surrounded by blue Montana mountains rising sharply out of the valley floor to grind the sky.  The inbred residents were a close-knit bunch, living in houses built of cull two by fours laid up like logs and painted with whitewash.  The Corps of Engineers, with their yellow plastic hard hats and shiny metal clipboards, were yet a year away.  Carpet bagging land appraisers hadn’t condemned the reluctant natives and the Rexford Tavern still roared on Saturday afternoon.

Jasper Northey’s bar sat next to Highway 43, on the edge of a backwater pond two hundred yards from the main river channel. Jasper stood just over five feet tall, had little hair on his head, admitted to seventy and looked years older.  He loved to tell stories of the early logging days.  His establishment mirrored that interest.  Over the bar top and lining the walls hung old double bits, broadaxes, crosscuts, springboards, harness parts, chokers, and a broken set of tongs.  By two in the afternoon most Saturdays the tavern began to jump.  Jasper would mix drinks and spin tales, while jukebox music and whiskey noise flowed into a parking lot full of diesel soaked pickups.

I enjoyed the flavor of the Rexford bar because of its sense of unchanging age.  I soaked up its dingy lights and rustic atmosphere in spite of the cold reception the loggers gave us company men.  The gypos sat on one side of the room and us on the other.  Rags sat mostly alone, sometimes with me, but never with the locals.

Rags started it on a warm September afternoon.  Awash with homemade brew and running at the mouth, he began bragging Pennsylvania coal miners to be the toughest men alive.  Loudly, he challenged anyone within ear shot to prove him wrong.  No one paid the slightest attention — until Frenchy Therriault and his brother Porky came in.

The Therriault brothers were twins and until Porky got his nose smashed in a bar fight in Troy– thereby gaining his nickname — they were difficult to tell apart.  Neither man had a neck.  Their bodies started just below their mouths and followed a long curve that ended at toe level.  Neither weighed under three hundred.  Coal black hair covered heads and chins and their round cheeks bulged with Copenhagen.  Both wore black and red checkered wool shirts summer and winter, open in the front from throat to belly, exposing a forest of black chest hair between bright red suspenders and black wool pants.  The Therriault brothers lived to wrestle, the furniture breaking, glass shattering kind that always turned into a free-for-all.  Frenchy’s reputation as an arm breaking champion ranged county wide.  Without effort, he regularly won beer by the case holding a Homelite 990 one-handed at arms length to the count of ten.

Before I knew it Frenchy had Rags by the front of his faded bibs, toes stretching to touch the floor. Copenhagen dribbling off the corner of Frenchy’s mouth, he demanded to know the name of the person who coveted the toughest-son-of-a-bitch-in-the-county crown he held.  Poor Rags, fear clutching at his throat, pointed at the only person in the place that wasn’t a native.  Me.

Frenchy Therriault dropped Rags like a forgotten toy and chiseled a chunk out of my heart with icy eyes.  “Scaler-kid?” he said, as if asking the gypo crowd.  Porky laughed and I could see grins abound.  Jasper Northey’s bald dome beaded sweat and his head-worn solid ash attitude adjuster hit the bar top.

“Not in here,” Jasper said.  A marauding rhino couldn’t have hurt the place’s half-log furniture, but Jasper defended it anyway.

“Wouldn’t think of it,” Frenchy said, appraising me from head to toe.  The look on his face suggested that he wondered if I was worth it.

Not that I blamed him.  At six-foot-four I stood a head taller, but my one hundred sixty-five pounds left me a hundred thirty-five short of an even match.  I had trouble holding a six-pack at arms length.

“Old Rags has had a little too much ‘shine,” I said.

“Hell, I know it,” Frenchy said.  “I want to give you a fair chance.  Time to make out your will and such.”  He sat down beside me and put his arm over my shoulders, friendly-like.  It weighed a ton and I could smell sawdust, sweat and Copenhagen.  He poked me in the ribs with a stubby finger.

“Ain’t much meat there, Scaler-kid.  You should eat more.  I think you and me should get drunk and then we’ll wrestle.”

“What if I say no?” I asked.

“Then we wrestle now.”

“Drink first,” I agreed.  Anesthetic sounded like a good plan.

That’s when Rags threw in his wildest claim yet.  “Scotty here’s the log rollin’ champion of Montana.”

“He’s drunk,” I said, silently cursing my beer-loosened tongue.  A week earlier I’d told Rags of my college log-rolling experiences.  Influenced by five cans of Budweiser, I’d neglected to tell him that I’d lost.

Frenchy’s eyes lit up.  His reputation as a log-roller ran second only to arm-breaking and chain saw holding.  He tightened his grip on my shoulders.  “You got a pair of caulks?”

“Of course he does,” Rags said, appointing himself my second in the duel.

“Then it’s settled.  Scaler-kid and my brother Porky will roll-um.”

I looked at Porky ‑‑ a flat-nosed replica of Frenchy ‑‑ and he growled at me.  Frenchy and old Rags began negotiating the rules and pounding the two inch plank bar table making their points.  Jasper drug out a jug of yesterday’s batch and bought the house a round.  I asked for a beer, but Frenchy yelled for another pass.

Out behind the bar in the backwater slew, a thirty inch log lay half submerged in brackish water.  The loggers played a drunken game on it.  Two contestants stood on the log and rolled it in the water with caulk-booted feet trying to unbalance each other.  The loser took a bath in the glacier cold Kootenai.  Most of the time it was a ‘king of the mountain’ game, with the last one dry the winner.  No one had dumped Porky in years.  I had no hope.

“Best of seven,” Rags argued, downing clear ‘shine like water.

Frenchy held out for three out of five only for the sake of argument, finally conceding to Rags’ higher number.  I favored best of one, not relishing more than a single dunking in the pond.

Another pass of the jug sealed the agreement between the seconds.  Porky and I led the crowd through the back door to the slab covered platform next to the water.  Rags went to my pickup and came back holding my coveted White’s; a pair of metal caulked logger boots, high heeled, steel-shanked, creek shrunk to fit right, and shiny new.  No self-respecting woodsman would be without a pair.  The crowd cheered while I sat on the rough slabs and tied them on.  The rolling log floated in the slew still and ominous.

The local loggers built the platform close to the water allowing contestants to step directly onto the log.  Porky and I stood on the edge and we both jumped when Frenchy yelled, “Now!”

Porky hit the log solid and started it rolling, his heels half in the water as his feet spun the slew-slick log.  He looked like an overweight ballerina up on his toes with his arms wide to counter balance his flying feet and a whiskey grin on his face.

My feet hit a split second behind and my timing somehow matched Porky.  For half a minute we both ran as hard as we could, rooster-tailing slew water off both ends of the log.  Then he slammed on the brakes, slowing the spin with his extra weight and I felt myself riding over the top.

I hit the cold water face first, my mouth open in surprise.  It tasted like decaying fish and my stomach rolled a turn.  Hard hands dragged me out spitting and coughing.  Porky grinned standing on the log, spinning it slowly, taunting me, inviting me to join him.  I shook off the crowd and jumped.

Fear of the cold water gone, I started to plot.  Instinct guided my spiked boots to a point just below the waterline, knowing that Porky would speed up the moment I moved.  I surprised him with my sudden jump and as the momentum of the log carried me over the top I leapt into the air and reversed direction.  I came down feet positioned and running hard.  Porky’s calks flew out and he sat down hard on the log.  His bulk submerged his end, stopped the rotation and threw me into the water for the second time.  I kept my mouth closed, second round, a tie.

We started even the third round and Porky dumped me easily when my foot slipped.  Grabbing air, I bounced my face hard on the spinning log.  The crowd cheered like Roman spectators.  Minus some hide and a bloodied nose, I dragged myself onto the platform.

“You’re doing good, Scaler-kid,” Frenchy said.  “Another hour or two and he’ll be worn down.  Then he’s a pushover.”

Rags wiped blood and slew scum from my face.  “Keep loose Scotty, do what you did before.  You can beat him.”  I drank and climbed to my feet, shaking off dizziness.

Porky rolled the log slow, playing for the crowd, filling his mouth with fresh Copenhagen, not breathing hard, confident that I would beg off another round.

“Come on, kid,” he taunted.

I leaped off the platform, aiming my boots below the water line again, and when my calks dug in I jumped and reversed direction.  I caught Porky off guard again and found myself struggling for balance while my opponent disappeared under water.  I made it, running as hard as I could, alone on the log, carefully slowing its spin, wallowing in the moment.  The drunken loggers changed their loyalties and hollered for more.  Someone had dumped Porky clean.  No matter what the outcome, nothing would change that.  For a moment or two I almost believed I could win.

Porky surfaced and splashed onto the platform.  His face turned dark red.  He stood on the rough planks, staring at me alone on the log, water dripping off his woolen shirt and pants and puddling under his work worn boots.  His long dark hair hung wet and straight.

Porky jumped at the log and when he hit his weight submerged his end and lifted me out of the water like a see-saw.  I struggled to keep my balance and failed.  The water reached up and grabbed me again.  My advantage gone, the fickle loggers cheered for Porky again.

Porky, once dumped, gave no quarter and the contest ended with my fourth trip in to slew.  I’d both lost and won.

Frenchy helped me climb out of the water.  “Not bad, Scaler-kid.  Porky hates to lose, even a little,” he said.  “Come on, I’ll buy you one.”

Porky and I splashed into the bar, wet, chilled to the bone and arms around each other like conquering heroes.  After several passes of the ceremonial jug Jasper Northey crawled up on a barstool and wrote my name under the broken set of tongs with a red lumber crayon.  ‘Scaler-kid’ stained the wall until the day the Corps of Engineers burned the bar along with the rest of Rexford in preparation for Libby Dam.

I half carried, half walked Rags to his cabin that night.  He rambled nonsense as we stumbled along the gravel road under the northern Montana moonlight.  He fell at his front door and sat grinning up at me.

“We showed them tonight, didn’t we, Scotty.”

“That we did,” I said.

“Goddamn, it felt good.  You did us proud.  I will never forget the look on Porky’s face when you dumped him.  It was worth the price.”

“You’re forgetting all the time I spent in the water.”

“Worth it, my boy, definitely worth it.”

My still damp clothes smelled like dead fish and the night air sucked moonshine from my pores instead of sweat.  I wanted a hot shower and a warm bed.  Rags sat on the porch, a jar of Jasper’s brew beside him, happy as a lamb.

“God, it feels good to belong somewhere,” he said.  I left him sitting in the moonlight and I knew he would not make first round on Monday morning.

© Dave Folsom 1992 2009-2010 2012 All rights reserved

Author’s Note:  This story was previously published in the 1992 West Wind Review.
© Dave Folsom 1992 2009-2010  All rights reserved

This and other short stories are available in Running With Moose and Other Stories along with Scaling Tall Timber at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and many other online bookstores.

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