On boots and bars and motorbikes...

Photo retrieved via Bing Images and credited to The Audubon Society. After a slight diversion yesterday--sorry, a lot of things all came together all at once that needed dealing with--we're back, as promised, to one of the stories from my book: Chicken Hawk Down (Part 2) If you remember from our last segment, Grandpa grabbed this old gun and hollered something at Mom that made her kick that old truck into gears not typically seen blazing across a gopher hole riddled cattle pasture. I missed all the details of what got said exactly, not because I wasn't paying attention, but because it got spoken in a language no one wanted me learning back then. Being from my part of Texas--namely South Texas--most people generally assume that such conversations would only involve one language, the one spoken a few miles south in Mexico. But, as you'll read today, that's not always the case. Not in an immigrant family like mine, anyway. In fact, there were probably lo

As I begin to flesh out that that mess of a book I  put together I'll be posting new stories (or at least parts of them, at least as I go. The truck shown above wasn't ours actually, but its awful close to what ours looked like. I so wanted to get bad boy beat back into shape and repainted. "Drive!” the old man yelled, reaching inside the pickup cab to grab his weather-beaten .22 from the back window gun rack. He prattles something urgent sounding in Czech, before leaping the side-rail of the truck bed, Duke-boy style, and taking his place hunkered over the cab. “Hang on,” the old man tells me, shoots me one of those great stiff-lipped smirks of his, his blue eyes glittering like diamonds. He and Mom both had the greatest eyes on the planet whenever they were up to no good. Most days you saw him out walking across the farm, he was hunched forward and limped when he walked. After all, he was pushing sixty about then, I do believe, and while they wer

Yesterday you met our good buddy Doug, who had a bit of a potty mouth, a bit of a problem with his neighbor, and a bit of a tussle in the yard. With a cop. A real cop, it turned out, not just one of those Rent-A-Cop wannabes like at the mall. Doug just assumed, you know, especially when the fellow showed up in one those annoying little carts and looked every bit of twelve. It was an assumption that ended with Doug chewing his own lawn, ruining his best Hawaiian shirt, and getting a free ride to the pokey. It couldn't possibly get any wor--   Wait a minute! Isn't that how all this started in the first place? “I always told you that temper of yours was gonna get you in trouble one of these days,” Maggie says, steering the Suburban like it was her first time behind the wheel. “I guess now you’ll listen.” After spending the night in a holding cell with two drunks and a drug dealer, one of them a puker, Doug didn’t have the energy to respond. “I had to sell your boat

Once again, as a courtesy to friends and family not particularly fond of my blue language from time to time, I must once again beg your forgiveness and rate this with R. For the rest of you, though (let's hum a few bars and give that first bunch a chance to log out: Hmmm, hmm HMMMM hmmm hmm ) . . . Alright. Is that all of them? Here we go then. One bad day can always get worse… It could have happened to anyone, anyplace, at any time. It happened to be a Tuesday for Doug, not long after he handed a raft of shit to his neighbor, Bob, that should've come with paddles. “What the hell do you mean, you called the law?” “I mean I called the police to report your dang dog,” Bob says. “That beast kept me up all hours barking last night. No one should have to put up with that kind of racket.” “He was barking at your damn car, which you drove through my fucking fence, you moron.” “Oh, we’re back to that are we?” “Hell yeah, I’m back to that,” Doug says, taking a c

You met my dog, Hico, in my last installment. We were talking about how you could pick up on all sorts of things from a dog's bark, if you learned how to listen. And as promised, allow me to introduce said possum. (Don't get too attached to him.) And here's where we left off: There’s the choppy, the-puppies-are-missing bark, usually in concert with some other hound (or hounds), clear across town. You can almost make out each dot and dash of their canine Morse code, passing on their messages in a sort of doggy dictation. Then there’s the throatier, stouter “BA-ruff!” she slings at most passersby. It’s the this-is-my-yard-so-you-best-keep-walking bark. Works like a charm, most days, especially when you toss in that tremendous leap of hers. Few and far between are those who loiter on my block. Finally, you’ve got the break-out-straight-jacket, aliens-have-landed, ninjas-are-on-the-roof bark. It’s about five parts wolf pack, three parts Rottweiler and two parts get-your-ass

Like most everything I write, even most outlandish of fictions, there's a good chance there's some hint of truth hidden somewhere. Some would say that probably makes me a rather liar, and I wouldn't tell them they're wrong. Every once in a while, though, you really gotta facts because you couldn't make up shit that good if you tried. That's the definitely the case with this next piece. . . And be patient: We'll get to the possums. Trust me... Meet Hico, a Boxer/Shepard mix that'll make you rethink your religious convictions once she gets to snarling and leaping every bit of five feet straight up, well above the four-foot fence that surrounds the yard. She's never gotten out, but I truly have no idea why that is. She's more than capable. Hard to believe that  she fit in the palm on my hand, the day I brought her home... *** I’m sure my notions on animals in general make me outright barbaric by most standards today,

You gotta love you some online classes, every once in a while. I banged this out over the weekend for one of mine, destined for a professor who specifically asked that we creative types showcase some our talents. Well, he asked for it: [In response to suffering through Between the Acts by English author and early feminist Virginia Woolf, a book written within a single day's timespan of a family and their home, just days before the outbreak of World War II.]  F irst off, I gotta apologize for my ramble. I’ve always been on the long-winded side to begin with, but this writing business with my thesis project is definitely bringing it to an all-new level of annoying, I’m sure. I’m trying to get down every detail possible right now in creation mode, sort it all out later. It’s hard to shut that switch off once you let it loose, so sorry if this gets even longer and windier than my usual. To those of you already familiar with my work, welcome back. The those of you not: I'm

Everything had been daisies until about a month ago, when the kids turned up with all their ingrate little brats to celebrate his ninety-fourth. Mind you, Paul hadn’t seen any of his five children since they laid poor Annie to rest nine months earlier, yet here they all were without so much as a phone call. Before he spotted the first of them snaking down his drive, he was ready to grab a pole and spend the day snagging bass and catfish out of the creek. With a half-cup of coffee still to go, he figured he'd at least stay and see they wanted. After all, maybe one of them had died or something. He soon realized he should've snuck out the back while the getting was good. Not that he didn’t love his family. He did. He devoted most of his life to them, a fact he wished they'd remember every once in a while. Like those dark days after his wife died, or the previous eight years, when Paul slowly watched Annie shrivel to nothing after she caught the cancer. But Thanksgivin

Paul knew Janice was pissed as soon as he rounded the corner. She crossed her arms over her fleshy breasts as her ample hips shifted her entire weight from one leg to the other, just so she’d have a better angle to glare at him from behind the reinforced glass, Paul figured. Her widow’s peak, accentuated by the tight bun she wore, gave her long nose a sharp, beaklike quality. Her glacial blue eyes glared at him like a half-starved falcon, and he, a frolicking field mouse, about to be devoured. They never wavered, those eyes of hers, not even when the skinny man beside her—a bail bondsman, most likely—spoke a few words and handed her a stack of papers every bit as thick as the Encyclopedia Britannica volume Paul kept in handy reach of his easy chair, back when Janice and the rest of the bunch were just kids.  It never failed: Nearly every afternoon back then, there’d be some loud THUMP! resonate through the wood floors of his house, followed by some muffled voices and half-heart