A Snapshot of Beautiful New Mexico

When I started looking around for something in THE BISTI BUSINESS to talk about today, I came across the following scenes early in the book. BJ has been hired to locate the son of Napa Valley wine mogul and his traveling companion. Given that the two young men are gay and the father’s attitude is definitely homophobic, BJ wonders if the two haven’t disappeared on purpose. Nonetheless, he sets about doing what he’s been hired to do. In the following passage from the book, he contacts his old partner at the Albuquerque Police Department with the intent of picking his brains. I chose this because it gives you a flavor of downtown Albuquerque and some of the state’s other interesting points.

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Gene Enriquez, my old partner at APD, had recently made Lieutenant, and he sometimes chaffed at the rein the promotion put on his field work. When I called, he indulged in some bellyaching about being swamped but agreed to meet for a cup of coffee at Eulalia’s in the La Posada on Second and Copper, a short walk for each of us.

The central core of my building opened onto an atrium soaring through all five levels. As the elevator doors parted on the ground floor, my eyes automatically swept the waxed tiles. A year ago, a man had died on those hard clay squares when he went over the railing after attacking me on the landing outside of my office on the third floor. Sometimes I still saw smears of blood on the floor, but it was an illusion. The blue-black terracotta was scrubbed spotless and polished to a high shine.

I exited the building and headed east on Copper, pausing to say hello to the “Sidewalk Society,” nine life-sized bronzes by the Santa Fe based sculptor, Glenna Goodacre, that were grouped on the corner sidewalk outside the Hyatt Regency. After greeting the cast figures almost daily for the past few years, I had reached a few conclusions about them. The young woman with a briefcase was said to be an up-and-coming CEO, but I’m convinced she was a 1950s lawyer. The construction worker and his foreman, who sported a battered, old-style broad-brimmed hat, represented the thirties or forties. It had taken me some time to tumble to the fact the statues reflected different time periods in Albuquerque’s more recent history.

Gene yelled for me to wait for him as he strode briskly across Civic Plaza. “You always talk to statues?” He was a little breathless after running to beat the light change at the intersection. A stocky Hispanic with regular, pleasant features that seem vaguely Polynesian, Gene always appeared slightly frazzled; a consequence of dealing with the Albuquerque Police Department, a wife, and five kids on a daily basis.

I accepted both his hand and his ribbing. “Every time. Get some of my best answers from them.”

“I keep expecting one of the rookies to arrest the kid.” He motioned to the bronze of a teenager with a skateboard.

We entered the La Posada by the north entrance and stepped into another world. The interior was done in Spanish Territorial with aged wood copings, corbels highlighted in scarlet and turquoise, and heavily carved lintels. Nichos, small shelves in the white plastered walls, held carved wooden Santos and ornate Mexican tinwork. This hotel had once been part of the Hilton chain—Conrad’s first in New Mexico, as a matter of fact—but had been recently sold, yet again, and was scheduled for a makeover in the near future.

Gene and I selected a heavy oak table stained ebony by the passage of time, and claimed a pair of sturdy straight-backed chairs padded in green and gold. We spent a few minutes bringing one another up to date on our lives.

After making a brunch of the restaurant’s éclairs and a wedge of superb lemon meringue pie dribbled with chocolate, Gene was through chitchatting. “Okay, so what do you want?”

“What makes you think I want something? Can’t I call a pal without having an ulterior motive?”

“No.”

I pretended to think for a moment. “Okay then, I’ve got a client looking for his missing son and the kid’s traveling companion.” In less than two minutes, I’d briefed him on the situation.

“So they’re like that, huh?” He wiggled his hand back and forth, a gesture that was supposed to convey something. Gene knew me too well to be sensitive about my sexual orientation.

“You mean are they gay? Yeah, I’d say so.”

“And you want to get in their hotel room.”

“Seems a logical place to start since one of their fathers hired me to represent the family.”

“These two, they’re emancipated, right? Adults.”

“Both are twenty-one, according to Alfano.”

“Hmm. Alfano gonna file a missing person’s report?”

“He will if you think it’ll help.”

“Naw. We’ve got enough to do without looking for a couple of kids who’ve run off to play hanky-panky. But if they strayed across the border into Arizona, they might be cooling their heels in some county sheriff’s jail as we speak. They take that shit seriously over there.”

“Possible, but not likely. They could be in real trouble, Gene. Alfano keeps a tight rein on his boy, and the fact he’s looking for him is troubling.”

“Maybe the colt got out of the family pasture and is feeling his oats. But okay, have the old man file a report, and I’ll see if I can get us inside the hotel room. Unofficially.”

I picked up the tab to see what kind of damage Gene had done to my pocketbook. Anthony P. Alfano’s pocketbook, actually.

Gene caught me peeking at the check. “Come on, you can afford it.”

“Maybe so, but it’s not my expense; it’s my client’s, and I don’t know how picky he is.”

Gene Enriquez is a good detective and a smooth-talker, at least smooth enough to get us access to the room occupied by—or held in the names of—Orlando Alfano and Dana Norville. There was little to see. The pair had taken their traveling bags with them, leaving behind nothing personal except for two bundles of clothing destined for the laundry, the only sign they intended to return. One set of duds was expensive Abercrombie and Fitch, the other bundle was GAP. It wasn’t hard to figure which clothes belonged to what dude.

The breast pocket of one shirt held a carefully folded Chamber of Commerce brochure extolling the virtues of El Moro’s Inscription Rock and the Ice Caves near Grants. A rumpled pair of trousers—the expensive ones—gave up a not-so-neatly folded tourist road map of the state.

The bell captain remembered the two men asking his advice about the Enchanted Circle in the Taos area. They had specifically asked about white water rafting along the Taos Box.

The clerk in the gift shop remembered the pair because, she blushingly admitted, they were both so handsome. Shortly after checking in, they had picked up several pamphlets from her, expressing interest in the Turquoise Trail, a sixty-two mile National Scenic Byway up Route 14 to Santa Fe studded with quaint, historic villages. Orlando and Dana had been especially curious about Valles Caldera, the seventeen-mile wide crater of an extinct volcano south of Los Alamos, the Atomic City. Unfortunately, they also asked about Lincoln County and Carlsbad Caverns to the south and east, as well as Mesa Verde and the Bisti Badlands in the northwest corner of the state.

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How’s that for a swift glimpse of our little piece of paradise. Thanks for reading. Please let me hear from you.

Don

Next week: We’re back to “who knows” again.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

Sometimes Life Just Gets in the Way

Once again, I’d planned to do something on The Bisti Business this week but ended up letting life get in the way of my plans. That seems to happen more and more often of late. In the first place, my new computer continues to act up. The screen occasionally burps … meaning that it will suddenly jump up a couple of inches and then fall right back where it was. That should technically qualify as a burp, right? Or perhaps a hiccup. It doesn’t do any damage or cause me to lose material, but as I get older (which is happening at an increasingly rapid pace), I become more paranoid. So I tend to view this as something analogous to a volcano. These little “interruptions” are likely precursors to a building “eruption.” So I’ll be taking the machine to the fellows who helped me obtain it in the first place to see if my fears are well founded.

However, that is not exactly what sent me off the track this week. It was something much more personal. I tend to wear plaid, Wal-Mart trousers around that house that my friend E calls “pajama bottoms.” They aren’t (and I won’t shock her by showing her the actual garment), but I like them because they are comfortable and easy to slip into. Even so, I’ve allowed her interpretation of the trousers to intimidate me to the point where I only wear them in private.

This morning, after rising earlier than usual and cleaning up, I donned a pair of these casual pants and went about my usual routine. I noticed that something wasn’t quite right, but didn’t actually realize what it was until I tried to slip my cell phone into a pocket. I had the blessed things on backward. Now think about that for a moment, folks. I walked around for half an hour with my pants turned bass-ackward without knowing it. That bears repeating: Without knowing it. This should tell you more than you want to know about the state of my aging and shifting physique. I’m not even sure you can call it a physique any longer.

Now I have friends who will say, “Aha, a wake-up call. Start watching your diet and (wait for it now) … exercise.”

There are others who will take the attitude of “so what. So long as you’re not obscene, who cares?”

I have no idea of how obscene I appeared as I felt absolutely no compunction to go check it out in the mirror. I just removed them, turned them around, and donned them the proper way. Something that took all of fifteen seconds thanks to the stretchy elastic waistband.

What is obscene, at least in my dictionary, is the word “exercise.” A shiver runs up my back every time I hear the word. (By the way, does that qualify as a form of exercise?). I’m a reasonably proficient writer, and I don’t think the word appears in any of my sixty short stories and seven published novels except to “exercise caution” or “exercise patience,” both rather non-physical applications of the word.

My friend J wrote a post to her Farther to Go blog the other day extolling the benefits of her physical exer… uh, physical exertion program. Toward the end, she said something that caught my eye. She found that sometimes sitting and imagining going through a particular routine actually helped in the physical performance of that routine. Sort of a One-Two approach.

Well, as of today, I’ve progressed to Stage One.

Check with me next month to see how much that’s helped.

Thanks for reading. Please let me hear from you.

Don

Next week: I’ll really, really try to get to THE BISTI BUSINESS.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

Enough is Enough…and Sometimes Too Much

I’d planned to do something on The Bisti Business this week, but my new computer (did I mention I got a new one last week?) occupied too much time to organize and get rid of a glitch to get any writing done. So I succumbed to a need to write something fresh, which means we’ll have a bit of flash fiction for this post. However, I want to make it absolutely clear that what follows is in no way autobiographical.

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ENOUGH IS ENOUGH…AND SOMETIMES TOO MUCH

     “Harry, get your fanny in gear! I told you to take out the garbage five minutes ago.”

     He flinched at the sound of his wife’ voice coming from the kitchen. He swiped ineffectually at the cigarette ash collected in a neat little pile on his undershirt. Sometimes Hilda couldn’t stand the idea he might actually sit still for a moment. At least, that’s the way it seemed to him.

     “Are you smoking in the house again? I smell cigarette smoke.”

He took a quick drag and then pinched out one butt while he heaved the other one from his chair and lumbered into the kitchen.

     His wife stood at the sink in a faded pink housecoat that looked like an out-sized Vienna sausage hugging her paunch. The tightly coiled hair curlers on her head reminded him this was Wednesday…prayer meeting night. Well, he wasn’t going. He’d put his foot down this time.

     She paused in the act of washing the supper dishes to glance at him through thick spectacles that made her eyes too big for the rest of her face. “You reek of tobacco. Get your chores done and go take a bath. But don’t use all the hot water. I still have to clean up before we go to church.”

     “Not going.” He hefted the sour garbage bag and started outside, imagining he could taste the liver and onion scraps through the plastic.

     “What was that? You’re not going? Of course, you are. It’s Wednesday night. Wednesday nights we go to prayer meetings. Have for twenty-five years.”

     “Been smoking in the house for twenty-five years, too. But can’t do that anymore.”

     He skedaddled out the back door before she had a chance to react. Harry snatched a minute to enjoy the warmth of the dying sun on his face and savor a whiff of his pink-petaled roses before going back inside to march straight into the bathroom for a tepid bath. God help him of he used too much hot water.

     At church later that evening, the preacher uttered the same words he had last Wednesday and the previous Wednesday and all the Wednesdays before that. Harry was in the row directly behind Hilda because there wasn’t room in the front pew where she sat with her friend, Goldina Frussman. Arthur Frussman occupied the pew beside him, but Harry didn’t much care for the man. From the other’s expression, the feeling was mutual.

     Harry studied the back of his wife’s head and discovered a few things he already knew but hadn’t given much thought to recently. Her shoulders were fat. Which made her neck fat. Which made… He almost snickered as he wondered what her head looked like underneath the meticulously blued hair. The mole behind her left ear had grown. Looked like a big wrinkled bug that climbed up there to die. He resisted the urge to flick the thing.

     He wanted to go straight home, but Hilda and Goldie decided to discuss Reverend Hospers’ sage comments at Burt’s Diner on the corner of Roosevelt and Third. Halfway through the second cup, Harry made as if to get up and go outside for a smoke, but Hilda firmly quashed that idea. No telling how long the coffee klatch would have gone on if Arthur hadn’t decided he’d had enough. Harry blinked when Goldie rushed to accommodate her husband.

     He almost choked on his gorge as Hilda extolled the virtue of Arthur Frussman on their three-block walk home. So firm, so decisive. Prerequisites for such a successful haberdasher, she claimed. Harry halfway hoped they’d be mugged on that long, tree-shrouded block just before they turned down their own street. He’d happily give up his wallet, his watch…anything to put a scare into his wife. But, of course, they arrived home unmolested.

     He was abed a good half hour before he was sleepy because she decided it was time. He tried to protest, but she insisted he simply wanted to sneak another cigarette. That was true, although he protested the idea.

     She nodded off  before he did, which was usual. He lay on his pillow, eyes wide open, awaiting the inevitable. Within five minutes, it began as a soft mewling sound. Then it took on a distinctive growl. Within minutes, it grew into a loud, raucous, full-throated snore that soon turned into a snorting gasp as she came awake. Hilda turned over and slapped his shoulder.

     “Harry, your snoring woke me from a sound sleep.”

     “But I haven’t been asl—”

     “Don’t argue. Go get another pillow and elevate your head. I don’t want to be awakened again.”

     Stifling a sigh, he crawled out of bed and went for the thick throw pillow on the sofa in the den. The couch looked inviting. But as he considered the idea of bedding down out here, she called out.

     “Harry, come back to bed. You know I can’t sleep with you prowling the house. Get the pillow and come to bed.”

     Harry hefted the pillow and pressed it to his nose. It cut off the air sufficiently, but she was bigger than he was. As he prepared to return to bed and accept one more humiliation, his eyes fell on a pair of scissors jutting out of his wife’s sewing basket. He carefully extracted the long-bladed shears and looked from the pillow to the scissors. After a moment, he straightened his spine, dropped the pillow, and marched resolutely into the bedroom with the shears grasped firmly in his right hand.

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Well, what do you think? Did Harry finally get his fill and use the scissors, or did he just throw a scare into Hilda? Or maybe he returned  to the bedroom only to revert to form.

Have you ever met someone like Harry? Can you identify a Hilda you’ve known? I hope not.

Thanks for reading. Please let me hear from you.

Don

Next week: I’ll try to get to THE BISTI BUSINESS.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

Suspicion Can Mess With Your Head!

Establishing new relationships—especially ones that have the potential to become significant—can be difficult under the best of circumstances. When the one who tugs at your heartstrings might possibly be mixed up in a blackmail scheme you’re struggling to unravel, the task becomes infinitely more difficult. That is the position BJ Vinson, the confidential investigator in THE ZOZOBRA INCIDENT, finds himself at the beginning of Chapter 11.

BJ has spent a celibate year recovering from both the gunshot wound which forced his retirement from the Albuquerque Police Department and a wrenching breakup with his life partner. When he meets Paul Barton, his interest is stirred again. He is falling for the handsome young man fast when APD Det. Eugene Enriquez, points out Paul closely resembles Emilio Prada, the chief suspect. BJ struggles with his personal desires versus his professionalism. As you can see from the following excerpt of the book, professionalism seems to be winning.

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     Early the next morning, I polished off the bagel, cream cheese, and lox Paul had prepared and watched him push his plate back from the edge of the table. He glanced up and smiled when he caught my eye.

     “I’ve been wondering how you dealt with being gay in the Marine Corps? That’s supposed to be the ultimate man machine.”

     I laughed. “It’s like anything else. It’s got a little bit of everything in it. But to answer your question, mostly I did without. There was one guy, another lieutenant, who helped me come to grips with a few things.”

     “Like what?”

     Fifteen minutes later, I realized Paul had been conducting an interview. He got me started talking about what interested him, and prompted me with a “who, what, when, and why” whenever I flagged. That was the first time I realized a journalist did much the same thing I do every day of the week. And Paul was very good at it.

     After he left, I dawdled at the dinette with a second cup of coffee while my restless mind seesawed between Paul’s departure and Del’s stubborn problem. Worse, I couldn’t avoid thinking about the possible connection between them. There are times my brain seems hard-wired toward the suspicious. The connections my devious head made were both inevitable and odious but they wouldn’t go away.

     James Addleston, Steve Sturgis, Paul Barton, Emilio Prada, and Del Dahlman. One way or the other, they all tied together as the two lawyers battled it out over a coveted partnership position potentially worth millions. Of course, it could all be happenstance, but one thing preyed on my mind more than anything else. This new scholarship of Paul’s to one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country came in the last semester of his undergraduate career. Was Sturgis the Medill alumnus sponsoring Paul at Northwestern? The professor was a client of Emilio’s. Did Paul and Emilio know one another? It was possible, of course. Both of them frequented the C&W Palace on East Central, and two such extremely attractive guys might well have gotten together, especially with a mutual friend to introduce them—someone like Sturgis, for instance.

     I set my cup down so hard the coffee dregs sloshed onto the table. Ignoring the mess, I mentally recoiled from my thought processes. Paul fit the description of the man who rented the post office boxes as readily as Emilio.

     With dragging footsteps, I went to my bedroom and took a snapshot of Paul from a frame on my nightstand, glancing at it fondly. It was one of several I had taken last week. Dressed in black jeans and a red form-fitting pullover shirt, he stood in front of the fireplace in the den with a broad smile on his face. His black hair was slightly long and unruly, like a kid’s. I reluctantly slipped the photo into my pocket along with the one of Emilio and Estelle.

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Life is tough sometimes. Thanks for reading. Please let me hear from you.

Don

Next week: Maybe a little more from THE BISTI BUSINESS.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

DON’T TELL ME …

When my wife died, she was occasionally taking care of three or four dogs for friends of ours, and I continue to sit one of those critters, a white and black Papillion named Gizmo. I happen to think Gizzy is one of the most intelligent animals around, but I love him and cannot be considered an objective observer.

However, the following is something that actually happened with two very likeable dogs I’d never met before I took care of them for a few days. Since I had no prior attachment to the dogs, I can represent myself as an absolutely unbiased observer. I got a big bang out of what happened and hope you enjoy reading about it.

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Dogs don’t think; they don’t reason. Everyone knows that. Their actions are dictated by a pack instinct and by rote training, right? At least, that’s the cachet. My education came a few year ago when I was cajoled into dog sitting for two families who were going on a joint vacation. The dogs were strangers to me and had only a passing acquaintance with one another.

Ursa was a loveable chocolate miniature Poodle whose primary mission in life was to sit on someone’s lap…anyone’s lap…for as long as possible. Sparkie, a West Highland Terrier, was far too independent for that sort of thing. If I plopped down on the couch, he might sit beside me, but that was the extent of his bonding.

About five days into the dog-sitting caper, I was watching television with You-Know-Who sprawled across my legs. During a commercial, I glanced at Sparkie lying under the dining room table and noticed him observing us carefully. A few minutes later, Ursa hopped down and went to the kitchen to get something to eat. The Westie immediately came over and climbed into my lap. When Ursa returned to reclaim her seat, she was clearly annoyed at the new situation. First, she leveled “the stare.” That didn’t work, so she did a little pacing, a little sitting, and periodically gave what I can only describe as a moan. A few minutes later, she tried out a yip.

When Sparkie ignored all of her tactics, the Poodle suddenly ran to the front hallway and began barking furiously, something both dogs did when anyone walked near the house. Sparkie came off my lap like he’d been goosed and raced to the door, adding his manly bark to her feminine voice.

As soon as he reached the front door, Ursa trotted back and jumped into my lap. When the Westie finally figured out no one was outside, he came back into the den. Now it was his turn to stop and stare. He’d been snookered. Ursa, the little dickens, had planned and executed her plot to regain the lap she considered her private property. I laughed myself to sleep that night.

The next evening, events played out more or less as they had the day before. As soon as Ursa went to get a drink of water, Sparkie scurried over and wanted up. The Poodle wasn’t so patient this time. Within a couple of minutes, she headed for the front door, barking as if she were fighting off crazed intruders. Sparkie came halfway out of my lap, froze for a moment, and then settled back down.

I’ll swear Ursa looked absolutely shocked when she returned to find Sparkie still taking his ease on my lap.

Don’t tell me dogs can’t think.

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Hope you enjoyed my little tale (no pun intended). Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Don

Next week: I’m getting a new computer tomorrow, and I’m sure that will provide a few oopsies to tell you about.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

PANIC TIME!

My computer crashed last week. Talk about panic time! I couldn’t check my emails. Okay, calm down. Just sign into my blog, instead. Oops. Can’t do that, either. Edit my novel. Nope. So I sat frozen in front of a useless keyboard while the realization sank in. I was helpless. Emasculated. Rendered less than human by the failure of a piece of electronics.

A tragedy! Or is it? Perhaps it's a wake-up call. Get a life, Don! Wean yourself away from the computer. Go take a walk down in the Bosque. Skip a few stones in the Rio Grande. Check out the wildlife. Count the birds. Breathe some fresh air.

Air. Oh, yeah! There's plenty of that. The wind is blowing. It’s springtime in New Mexico, so the wind is really blowing. “Lean into it” blowing. And a cold snap has set in. Better start my new life some other way.

Go to a movie. Haven’t been to one in a while. Great. Wait. Nothing I want to see at the $2.00 theater, and nothing I’ll pay $8.00 for at the other houses.

Okay, read. I haven’t kept up with my reading properly. I pull out a James Lee Burke novel. He’s one of my favorites, so that’ll distract me for sure. But Dave Robicheaux and Creole Belle just couldn’t compete with my sense of loss. I’m off the internet, man! Disconnected from the Big World!

Oh, sure. I get news on the TV. But I can’t interact with it. What if some movie producer has sent an email desperately begging me to sell him the rights to The Zozobra Incident or The Bisti Business? What if a reader has attempted to get in touch through my blog, and I’m falling down on my promise to answer each and every contact? What if … what if … what if ….

Reality sets in. I'm a twentieth-century man caught in the twenty-first century. So I start my new life by running out and buying a new computer. Talk about pathetic!

Don

Next week: I’ll try to stop whining.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

Who Shot Shorty: Finale

The story so far: Shorty Colson, owner of the Cartwheel Ranch was killed by a double-barreled blast of buckshot at his kitchen door one stormy night. As the crew tries to figure out who could have done it, new and surprising facts about the Cartwheel and its denizens begin to surface. Last week’s segment ended with Bushy Bushmiller turning the tables on Pencil and questioning why the old man had put up with his shenanigans over the years. Part 3 of the story begins below.

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WHO SHOT SHORTY (Continued)

     My ears flamed. I lurched to my feet. The old cowboy shuffled backwards. “Shorty Colson never laid a hand on me, and if he had, I’d have knocked him clear into next year. Shorty wasn’t—that way!”

     “Then how do ya account fer the kid there?” Bushy smirked and threw a thumb over his shoulder. Five pairs of eyes turned to focus on Pedro, who sat staring at the ground.

     I shook my head. “There’s a better way of going about this than tearing one another apart. Shorty took both barrels to the chest. A double blast from a twelve gauge has a hell of a recoil. Whoever did it oughta have a bruise.”

     “It might not be one of us, Pencil,” Tex pointed out. “And if it is, you sure you wanna know?”

     “Maybe not, but I sure as shooting want everybody to know it wasn’t me.” I stripped off my shirt.

     “Well, I ain’t got nothing to hide,” Tex declared. There wasn’t a mark on him either.

     After Red John followed suit, Bushy exposed his scrawny chest. No bruises on either one of them. As a man, we swung around to confront Lubell.

     “Now wait a minute! I’m a lady. You expect me to bare it all to you bozos?”

     Tex grinned. “Ain’t nothing we never seen before.”

     “You ain’t seen these particular ones,” she snapped. Nonetheless, she unbuttoned the man’s shirt stretched tight across her torso and pulled it down around her shoulders. “Satisfied, you perverts?”

     The arbor fell quiet as we turned to Pedro. Lubell stepped over and put an arm around the slender frame. “You leave her alone!”

     After a stunned silence, four masculine voices thundered, “Her?”

     Pedro peeked up from under Lubell’s protective arm. “You knew about me?”

     “Course I knew, honey. You tried to be almighty careful living with me in the bedroom back of the chow hall, but you slipped up a time or two. Besides, why else would Shorty put you up with the only other woman on the spread?”

     The girl pointed at Tex. “I afraid he figure it out. He a woman’s man.”

     Lubell sniffed. “If you mean a woman-chasing man, you’re right. But he ain’t no more sensitive than any other male around here. Why don’t you tell us what all this is about?”

     I stepped in. “Do you have a bruise, Pedro … uh, ma’am?”

     “Consuelo,” she said. “My name, Consuelo. Yes, bruise on mi espalda…my shoulder.” She began to shake. “Dios help me! I…I kill my papa.” She collapsed against Lubell and sobbed.

     As she told her story, the tears dried up and a streak of steel emerged. Her mother was a Mexican Shorty got sweet on after his wife passed. Worried about his son’s reaction to a new woman with a baby, he sent her home to Juarez. To the old man’s credit, he acknowledged paternity of their child—at least he sent money regularly.

     After her mother died, Consuelo made her way north to the ranch, arriving in the middle of the fall gathering when all of us, except for Shorty, were chasing cattle out of the bush and hazing the animals down to the loading pens.

     According to Consuelo, Shorty swore her to secrecy, dressed her up like a boy, and passed her off as a new hand until he figured out how to tell Junior he had a half-Mexican sister. When Consuelo overheard him talking about selling the ranch, she decided to press him to acknowledge her as his daughter.

     “I pick a bad time,” the girl said in her soft accent. “Like Lubell say, he drinking bad. But I go anyway. It was mistake. He drunk. Look at me with wild, crazy eyes. He grab me. I get away, but he catch me at the door. He…he say he don’t believe I his hija. Call my mama a bad name and say she swindle him.” The girl broke out crying. “He try to rape me!”

     Another thunderbolt out of a clear, blue sky. “Oh, Lord!” Lubell spoke for all of us.

     “The dirty old somabitch,” Bushy added. “Musta been drunk outa his skull.”

     “So … so,” Consuelo continued between sobs, “I grab big gun he keep in corner of kitchen and try to back out door. I think he stop then, but he grab the cañón … the barrel. Gun go off. I think you all hear and come running. I think whole world hear the big boom, but nobody come. I get up out of the mud and go clean up in my room. Then I cry me to sleep.”

     I straightened my spine. “Well, that solves the mystery of who shot Shorty. Somebody better go call the sheriff.”

     “The sheriff?” Everybody looked at me as if I were loco.

     “Or,” I backtracked, “we can let him do his own sleuthing.” Then with an eye to the future, I mused out loud. “Wonder if Junior will lease the spread to us?”

THE END

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Well, that’s it. Hope you enjoyed the story. Let me know if the serial thing works. Please let me hear from you.

Don

Next week: We’re back to “who knows” again.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

Who Shot Shorty: Part 2 of 3 Parts

Last week, Shorty Colson, owner of the Cartwheel Ranch was blasted into eternity by a double-barrel blast of buckshot. After the authorities leave, the crew (Pencil, Tex, Red John, Bushy, Lubell, and the new kid, Pedro) sit around trying to make sense of the murder.  Part 2 of the story begins below.

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WHO SHOT SHORTY (Continued)

     Lubell stirred the emotional pot again as John claimed part of the bench beside Tex. “Anybody notice Shorty was drinking more’n usual lately? He was tying on a blue-ribbon lulu last night before all this happened. Wonder if it was cuz he was selling the place?”

     “Shorty wouldn’t do that.” Bushy spoke for all of us. “What the hell’d he do, he didn’t have this spread to run?”

     “Heard him talking to Shorty, Jr. on the telephone. The kid wanted his old man to sell and let him invest the money.”

     “With Shorty gone, the Cartwheel’ll get sold for sure,” Tex said.

     “Lordy, I hope not.” Bushy stroked his facial hair like it needed taming.

     Red John spoke up. “Hell, old man, you oughta have enough put away so you don’t have to worry.”

     Bushy turned the color of an overripe pumpkin. “Keep yer mouth shut, hear?”

     Lubell straightened up, jutting out her awesome bosom, her belly coming right along with it. “What was Bushy and Shorty up to up in them mountains, John? Something was going on none of us knew about. Except maybe you. You spent lotsa time up there with Bushy.”

     “Now hold on!” The old cowboy struggled to his feet. “Shorty ain’t been dead fer a whole day, and everbody cain’t wait to dump on him. Leave it be, ya hear!”

     “Leave it be?” I said. “We’re trying to figure out who pumped him full of lead pellets.”

     “It was weed.” John held up a hand to forestall Bushy’s explosion. “Cool it, old man. They got a right to know. He’s been growing it up in the high country for years. I helped harvest the stuff these past four seasons.”

     “And ya got yer share, too.” The old cowhand looked like he wanted to take John on.

     “I’ll be horse-whipped,” Tex said. “Wondered how this place kept going in the bad times. Now it makes sense.”

     So did the big crew and paying for leases he didn’t need. I shoulda known. Shorty pinched a penny until it howled out loud—except for keeping me on to help out while I went to college part time, even buying some raw horseflesh now and then to make my job of busting broncs look real. Somehow, he never got around to explaining I was an orphaned shirttail cousin a couple of branches away on the family tree.

     “Did that pot get Shorty gunned down?” Lubell asked.

     Bushy blustered a minute before coming clean. “Naw. It’s a straight up business. Not none of that Mexican cartel stuff.”

     Lubell nodded at him. “You found out he was gonna sell and didn’t want your sweet deal going south. You took Shorty out.”

     “Me! You been festering fer years over Shorty taking the Cartwheel offa yore old man in a poker game. Ya blew him away, didn’t ya? Go ahead! Own up to it!”

     The cook turned three shades darker. “You old coot! That’s a fairy tale.”

     “I ain’t so sure ‘bout that.” Bushy turned on Tex. “And yer still smarting over Shorty breaking his promise to set ya up with that art dealer over in Taos.”

     “Don’t look at me, old man. I ain’t no killer. Maybe Red John didn’t like the cut he was getting and hit Shorty up for a bigger share of the grass.”

     “Wait a minute!” I stuck my nose in before John had a chance to blow. “Let’s slow down and look at this with a level eye. It doesn’t make sense that Bushy took him out. Even if Shorty was thinking on selling the Cartwheel, shooting him makes the sale a done deal. Both of them’s got short fuses, but they always ended up just cussing each other out.

     “And if Tex got his back up over a broken promise,” I went on, “he’d pull up stakes and head back home for a job. Besides, he’s on the edge of being good enough to make a living from painting, so that doesn’t hold water.

     “As for Red John,” I eyed the Indian, “that’s not his way of handling things. He’d of done something if he figured he was getting cheated. Maybe go to the law, but he doesn’t cotton to authority. Naw, he’d have pulled all the plants up by the roots.”

     “Lubell?” Shorty asked.

     “Even if the story about Shorty and her family is true, why would she wait twenty years to take revenge? I don’t believe it.”

     “Well, what about you, Pencil?” Bushy jabbed me with a twisted, arthritic finger.

     “Me? Why would I kill him? He gave me a roof over my head.”

     “Yeah, and why’s that? The old man kept ya awful close, putting up with yore drinking and running around. I figger Shorty turned funny in his old age when he couldn’t even buy a woman no more.”

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The plot thickens. But now that Pencil’s debunked theories about the rest of the crew as the killer, suspicion is centered on him. Did he do it? What do you think? Look around the site before you go…and let me hear from you.

Don

Next week:Who Shot Shorty: Finale.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

Who Shot Shorty: Part 1 of 3 Parts

I’m tired of the short-short stuff, so thought I’d try something else. I wrote “Who Shot Shorty” some time back, but have never really put it out there for publication. 

     “So why not serialize the story,” you ask.

     "Well, why not,” I reply.

Ergo, Part 1 of the story begins below.

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WHO SHOT SHORTY

     Shorty Colson, longtime owner of the Cartwheel spread, opened the back door of the ranch house and took a double-barreled shotgun blast to the chest on a November night heavy with rain and thunder and the smell of ozone. Bored through with double-aught lead pellets and shreds of flannel from his long johns, the old rancher flew back against the dinner table like a scarecrow losing his stuffing.

     Nobody heard the shotgun blast that blew Shorty away—or else they took it for thunder. The whole countryside heard the cook bellow when she went to fix breakfast the next morning and found him splattered all over the kitchen.

***

     My name’s Pencil Martinez Gold, and I’ve ridden for Shorty since I was a skinny kid built like…well, like a pencil. Even though I’ve filled out pretty decent, the nickname stuck.

     About two hours after the cook woke the countryside, the County Sheriff and Medical Investigator showed up, scratched their heads, and eventually left toting the corpse and the outfit’s two twelve-gauge shotguns. Shorty, an ornery old cuss, had made plenty of enemies over his seventy-odd years, and some woulda been happy to squeeze that double trigger. Trouble was—he’d outlived them all.

     After tending a few chores, all the ranch hands settled down in the brush arbor beside the bunkhouse to commiserate and cogitate. Eyeballing the spooky crime scene tape stretched around the old adobe ranch house gave a man a snaky ripple down his back.

     It struck me—not for the first time—that Shorty had a heap of help for a ranch this size, even if you included the twenty leased sections that sprawled across the nearby mountains. Paying an animal unit rental for vertical ground never made much sense, although high meadows carry heavier animal loads than desert range. Even that didn’t add up. Shorty never stocked his ranch to capacity.

     “Where’s Red John?” Tex asked. Our top hand was tall and good-looking and talked with a drawl. The stereotype ended right there. He didn’t cuss or drink, and he painted pictures of flowers and mountains on his own time. Tex was a hell of a line dancer who, as the old saw goes, rode Ensolado’s women hard and put them away wet. He worked the lower pastures.

     “You think he coulda done it?” Lubell asked of our missing cowboy. Lubell was short for Lula Belle, and folks still whispered about Shorty cheating her family out of the Cartwheel years back. But people are always claiming a muskrat hide is a beaver pelt, and I never gave that rumor much weight. Why would she stay on the place if that was true? A hard fifty, Lubell was dumpy and lumpy, but she set the best table in northern New Mexico. She was the reason we all put up with Shorty’s venomous temper. During the spring calf crop, she cowboyed like everybody else, tossing a noose that rarely missed horn or heel.

     “Truck’s coming,” Pedro piped in a thin voice. The kid was our misfit. On the Cartwheel for only a couple of months, he was likely a wetback, but nobody ever asked or wanted to know. Minding your own business was pretty much the law around here. Shy to the point of painful, the kid kept his mouth shut, answering questions in a voice constantly on the edge of breaking. He handled the domestic animals and kept the buildings and grounds cleaned out.

     We all turned and watched the vehicle splashing through mud and water from last night’s storm turn into Red John’s ’77 Dodge pickup.

     I answered Lubell’s question. “John didn’t have any reason to shoot Shorty.”

     “Mebbe not, but he cleared out the back way soon’s the law crossed the cattle guard,” she said.

     “A man crazy on drink don’t need no reason.” Bushy Bushmiller was crippled up and pretty near the end of his run. He toted around the smell of chewing tobacco and mangled the King’s English something terrible. Strange, because he’d surprised me more than once by his knowledge of Shakespeare back when I was wrestling with literature classes over at Ensolado Community College. Bushy worked the high pastures from spring thaw until the fall gathering.

     “That’s baloney!” Tex said. “Don’t you go painting him with that brush. John’s a stand up Indian. I had to guess, I’d say he don’t drink as much as you do.”

     “Don’t hold it as good as me, neither.”

     Nobody said another word until John strode over to join us. Tall for an Apache and on the skinny side, he was the most efficient-moving man I’d ever seen. He covered ground like he was storing up energy for hard times. He’d married a gal from nearby San Miguel Pueblo and made the trip back and forth most days except when the War Chief threw everyone not on the tribal rolls off the reservation during religious festivals. He’d got “Red” tacked onto his name back when we had two Johns on the crew. He divided his time between Tex in the lower pastures and Bushy in the high country.

     “They find out who done it?” he asked by way of greeting.

     “Naw.” Bushy’s grizzled beard quivered, a sure sign he was up to mischief. “Ya vamoosed so quick thought mebbe it was you.”

     “Went and told the wife about the shooting so she wouldn’t worry over it.”

     “Likely seen one of them medicine men, too.”

     “Yeah. He warned me clear of stove-up old cowpokes chewing tobacco and quoting Shakespeare.”

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I hope that piqued your interest enough to bring you back next week. Thanks for reading. Take a look around the site before you go.

Don

Next week:Who Shot Shorty: Part 2.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.

The Case of the Vanishing Penny

Well, my umpy-umph wedding anniversary is next Tuesday, so a kiss to my late wife and a sigh that my blue period is coming to an end … for this year, at least.

Enough of that. Let’s get on to another short story.

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THE CASE OF THE MISSING PENNY

     The usual gang was hanging on the street corner—Squiggly and Wiggly, also known as the Hoffman brothers, Maxine, and me—doing what ten-year-old kids do at high summer. Killing time. Actually, I was showing off one of my magician’s tricks when Ryan walked up. He was another kid from this neighborhood just south of the tracks not quite in the dumps but not uptown either. Ryan’s bigger’n we are and a bully, but he gets by ‘cause all the girls says he’s “sooo good looking.” Couldn’t see it.

     Anyway, I was bamboozling them with this penny—my entire bankroll at the moment. I’m pretty fast, so I was doing a fair job of keeping them guessing which hand it was in until Randy Ryan showed up. Then all my fingers turned into thumbs.

     He gave a horse laugh. “You ain’t very good.”

     I don’t know if it was because Maxine went all twitter-twitter-and-chirp when he was around or because he’d given me a bloody nose last summer, but I didn’t like Ryan very much. My mouth went motor on me.

     “Yeah, well I can make this disappear. Completely.” I was holding up the penny and smirking at him when it hit me that was as likely to happen as me breaking the four-minute mile. Cripes. He hopped right on it.

     “You do that, Colin, and I’ll buy ever body a RC Cola down at the corner store.”

     “Rather have a Dr. Pepper, Wiggly said.

     “Strawberry,” his brother piped up.

     A Nehi orange was Maxine’s choice.

     “Whatever,” Ryan dismissed them. He could afford to. His dad was the only one on the block had a job except for some CCC work. Those three Cs stood for Civilian Conservation Corps, but us kids mostly called it Civil Constipation Cramps. People kept talking about the Great Depression, but we didn’t know what that was. We just knew everybody was poor. Raggedly-assed underwear poor. Hell, I wasn’t even wearing any beneath my bib overalls. Saved the only patched pair I had for church on Sunday. Frankly, all I had on was the overalls and my brother’s hand-me-down shoes…about a size and a half too big.

     Naturally, my pals were salivating for a treat like a nickel soda pop. We likely couldn’t put together enough among us to buy one of them, and that included my penny. But I didn’t trust Ryan. He probably had the twenty-cents all right, but he wasn’t dangling the coins in front of us for free.

     “What happens if I can’t do it?” I asked.

     The bully gave a real mean smile. “Then I get to whomp on you without nobody telling.”

     Made giddy by shouts of “You can do it” and “Show the bum,” I heard the part of me that’s always getting me in trouble accept the bet. Dumb-ass. Nothing but a dumb-ass.

     With no idea of how I was going to come out of this without a beating, I started my routine under the sharp, beady-eyed stare of Ryan Dilfigger. Fear made me fumble-fingered at first, but desperation soon restored some agility as I flipped the penny between my fingers and started moving it from hand to hand and pocket to pocket. It went on so long my digits started to cramp, and Ryan got tired of waiting. I couldn’t stall any longer.

     I switched from the right hand to the left, and dropped the penny into my overall pocket while pretending to palm it. After supposedly switching it from hand to hand again, I turned my palms up and unclenched my fingers. Everyone went “Awww!” at the sight of my empty hands.

     Except for Ryan. Declaring it was in my pocket, he started pawing around with both hands without any regard for my personal dignity. Then he felt all up and down my legs. “Crap! Where is it. Pull your pockets out.”

     “You can’t pull overall pockets out,” Squiggly said. “They’re sewed to the legs.”

     So Ryan shoved his hands down in both of them. “A hole! He’s got a hole in his pocket. Without another word, he shoved me aside and started grubbing in the dirt. I figured that was the end of me, but he came up empty.

     Then he got another bright idea. “Your underpants! You stowed it there.”

     “Not wearing none.” I got kinda red-faced admitting that in front of Maxine. I couldn’t imagine her telling me she wasn’t wearing panties. But Ryan didn’t leave anything to chance. He tugged at my waistband and peeked down inside. I jerked away, but he’d seen enough to know I wasn’t lying.

     It took another five minutes of pawing, but after that, even Ryan had to give up. Muttering dire threats, he led us down the street to the grocery store. Before trailing along behind, I paused to sweep the ground with my gaze. Where was that danged penny? Maybe it had disappeared. Be great if I really did have powers like Mandrake the Magician.

     Halfway down the street, I felt something flopping in my left shoe. That danged penny didn’t bother me until it got stuck under my heel. Then I started limping.

     I’d have a blister tomorrow, but a blister was better than a beating.

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Thanks for visiting the site.

Don

Next week: You never know.

New posts are published at 6:00 a.m. each Thursday.