DEDICATION

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I let Udella Mabry who lives two apartments down read what I wrote for a Preface when she got back from her regular weekly hair appointment at Opal’s Beauty Palace and she said well, you have some pretty long sentences in there and you spell right good too, I was quite pleased to get both of those compliments because I consider Udella as fair and impartial a judge as they come plus you can’t hear nice things too often if you ask me, which you didn’t, but it reminded me of the only time I ever wound up anything but first in one of Mrs. Mary Lillard’s Friday afternoon eighth grade spelling bees, we would choose up into two sides and stand along opposite walls and if you missed your word you took your seat, I was always the last one standing and whichever side chose first always chose me before anybody else, it was kind of a guarantee of winning, but one time when several people were still standing, Mrs. Lillard gave me the word “material” to spell, only being a good Texan she said it like it had three syllables instead of four, I think that’s what threw me, because I stood right up there in front of God and everybody and spelled it M-A-T-E-I-R-A-L, and the whole room whooped and hollered for about three minutes, it was a day I would rather forget, prolly the low point of my entire life up to that time. Anyways, getting back to dedicating this book, if you managed to read the preface all the way through you prolly think I’m going to dedicate it to Mr. D. P. Morris, my old English teacher back in Grapevine Texas, well you would be wrong because I am not, I am going to dedicate it to Mrs. Janet Baines Brockett instead. Mrs. Brockett lived on the same gravel road we did about two miles out of town, we were the first house and she was the fourth, so we were neighbors even though it was about a mile to her house, Jimmy Wayne Oxley and Howard Griffin lived in between, Jimmy Wayne was two years behind me in school and his mother raised Poland China hogs, and Howard was the guy who later wrote the book Black Like Me even though he was white, Lord, that’s a whole story in itself, he went blind for ten or twelve years because of a plane crash he was in during World War II but one day when he was walking in his parents’ fields with his collie dog a blood clot behind his eyes suddenly dissolved, Howard’s eyes I mean, not the collie dog’s, and he could see again, and after that he said his blindness had taught him that the color of a person’s skin meant nothing, now this was a revolutionary idea in the South at the time, it was so shocking that after Howard’s book came out some local racists made a dummy and hanged Howard in effigy from one of the town’s two stop lights during the middle of the night, its right side was white and its left side was black and a big yellow stripe was painted down its back, the dummy I mean, not the stop light, and there it was the next morning, just hanging there, when everybody made the turn to go to school, personally I thought it said a whole lot more about the local racists than it did about Howard, and nobody took it down until after a news photographer from The Fort Worth Star-Telegram came out and took a picture to put in the paper. All Howard had done was he went down to New Orleans and paid to have a doctor chemically darken his skin, Howard’s skin I mean, not the doctor’s, and after wandering around the South for a while as a black man he came home, eventually his skin went back to being white and later he wrote about his experiences in a book, and his parents kept hogs just like the Oxleys, wait, I don’t mean the hogs were just like the Oxleys, I mean the Griffins kept hogs just like the Oxleys did, but they were Ohio Improved Chester Whites, the hogs I mean, not Howard’s parents. While he was blind, Howard had married Pie Holland, well her name was really Elizabeth but everybody in town called her Pie, and they had two children which he had never seen either her or them until that day he went walking in the field with his collie dog, you talk about a story. Anyways, not counting summers I rode to school with Mrs. Brockett every day of my life between second grade and eleventh grade, well Mondays through Fridays anyways, mainly because she was going there anyhow, she taught mathematics in the high school and all twelve grades were in the same building, and I would have gone with her in twelfth grade too if she hadn’t retired from teaching after my Junior year and the school hired old Mrs. Vickers, Flavill George’s mother, as math teacher when it hired Flavill as the new football coach, let me tell you she couldn’t hold a candle to Mrs. Brockett when it came to teaching, for one thing during trigonometry tests Mrs. Vickers let us use a sheet of paper with all the formulas on it, sines and cosines and secants and tangents, stuff like that, she didn’t make us memorize them like Mrs. Brockett did and as a result I can tell you very little today about trigonometry but I can still quote you the quadratic equation thanks to Mrs. Brockett, X equals minus B plus or minus the square root of B square minus four A C over two A, and to think some people actually say what good is algebra. Mrs. Brockett would tell me things on the way to school, for instance she told me about her grandfather who was a Southern Baptist preacher back in the early days of Texas before there was even such a thing as Southern Baptists, he supposedly baptized Sam Houston, stuff like that, and she got all upset at the thought that her daughter Genevieve had gone and married a Presbyterian but after visiting her daughter and son-in-law she seemed so relieved, she went to church with them and saw that Presbyterians preached the Scriptures too so she decided that they were just Baptists who have a little money, Presbyterians I mean, not Genevieve and John, although John was an architect so I suppose he had money, and also Mrs. Brockett’s son Delwyn became chairman of the board of Gulf Oil and whenever it was that Queen Elizabeth came over to Canada and dedicated the St. Lawrence Seaway Mrs. Brockett got to sit on the same platform with The Queen thanks to Delwyn. He was really Ernest D. Junior but I guess they called him Delwyn so they wouldn’t get confused at home and he went to Texas A&M and got a geology degree and eventually he married Francis Sammons from over in Keller and they had a son named Belmont who went to Duke University and years later after Delwyn retired from Gulf Oil they moved to the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club in Boca Raton Florida and eventually it was bought out by British Petroleum, Gulf Oil I mean, not the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club or Boca Raton Florida. But back to Mrs. Brockett, she drove her old two-tone green 1949 Pontiac with both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road and she wouldn’t look anywhere else for all the tea in China, I know because I tried to get her to many times, but the thing I love most about Mrs. Brockett was after she retired from teaching I visited her in Arlington Texas when L.B.J. was in the White House, and I said, “Mrs. Brockett, you were a Baines weren’t you, are you any kin to Lyndon Baines Johnson?” and she said, “Oh, yes, Billy, I thought you knew that,” and I said, “Well, have any of the White House historians contacted you?” and she said, “Yes they have, but I told them they didn’t want to talk to me, they should go talk to the other side of the family,” and she wasn’t real happy that Lynda Bird or Lucy Baines one, I can’t remember which, had brown eyes instead of blue eyes like the Baineses and she told me how she and President Johnson’s mother, Rebekah Baines, were first cousins and how they used to go shopping together when they were young ladies before either one of them was married, we’re talking 1906 or 1907 here, and how Rebekah Baines was so stately and so dignified and that it was like being in the presence of royalty to walk down the street with Rebekah Baines and then Mrs. Brockett got a faraway look in her eyes like she was remembering something she hadn’t thought of in a long time, something she would rather forget if she could, only she couldn’t, and what came out of her mouth was “And then she had to go and marry that trashy Sam Johnson” and need I remind you she was talking about the father of the man who was then president of the United States and who if he had had a son in addition to his two daughters Linda Bird and Lucy Baines would prolly have named him Bird Baines, L.B.J. was so self-centered even his wife and dog had the initials L.B.J., Lady Bird Johnson and Little Beagle Johnson respectively, but L.B.J. the dog’s pups were called Him and Her and the president later got his picture in the newspapers when he picked up either Him or Her by the ears, I forget which one, dog I mean, not ear, and one time he even showed photographers the scars from his gall bladder operation, Lyndon’s operation I mean, not Him’s or Her’s, you talk about a trashy guy, I guess it’s true that the apple never falls far from the tree. Anyways, that one statement of Mrs. Brockett’s, plus the fact that A she may have been the first woman to graduate with a degree in mathematics from Baylor University in Waco Texas and B she lived to be 92 years old and C one day in the car on the way to school this woman whose whole career involved numbers shocked me by reciting from memory the first twelve lines of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard” complete with the beetle’s droning flight and the moping owl complaining and D when I came back from my hitch in the military and told her I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior she said, “You know, don’t you, Billy, that only a Southern Baptist minister has the right to baptize you,” is why I have decided to dedicate this book to the memory of the one and only Janet Baines Brockett, because they don’t make people like that any more, or if they do I haven’t met any, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 1

Billy Ray Barnwell here, okay before I get started for real I just want to say that I don’t have anything against short sentences or dividing things up into paragraphs or using past participles or semicolons or periods or having pronouns agree with their whatchamacallits, antecedents, I just think A all that stuff gets in the way a lot of the time and B you ought to write the way you talk, don’t you usually just open your mouth and let ‘er rip? well why should the printed word be any different, anyone in their right mind can still understand what you’re saying, except of course for the Triplett twins, Myrna and Verna from over in Smyrna, they haven’t been in their right mind or really understood much of anything since their big brother Horace Earl Triplett ran naked through the produce section down to the Super Wal-Mart in May of two thousand and four, he must have wanted to display the family jewels real bad, it really put them over the edge and they haven’t been seen in public now for nearly three years, the twins I mean, not Horace Earl’s family jewels, because to be more accurate I should have said first ran naked, everybody in town now knows he is their big brother if you get my drift. I kind of like saying “the Triplett twins” and “Myrna and Verna from over in Smyrna,” it makes me chuckle just thinking about it, have you ever noticed how some names are funny to write but not to say, like Garrison Keillor, and others are funny both to write and to say, like that childhood friend of Woody Allen’s, whatzizname, Guy de Maupassant Rabinowitz who Woody called Geeda for short, and some names just aren’t funny at all, like Dennis Miller. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Dennis Miller the man isn’t funny, just Dennis Miller the name, I guess it’s like with Horace Earl Triplett, it’s all in how you look at it.

That reminds me, a pet peeve of mine is when people say drug instead of dragged, snuck instead of sneaked, and hung when it should be hanged, for example someone might ask whatever happened to a certain outlaw in the Old West and another person says, “He was hung,” well excuse me, curtains can be hung and stockings are hung by the chimney with care, but “He was hung” means something entirely different altogether, as all the ladies who gather in the produce section down to the Super Wal-Mart hoping to get a glimpse of Horace Earl Triplett can tell you. Udella Mabry’s cousin Iva Parnell says Horace makes that actor in that Boogie Nights movie look positively prepubescent, I really wouldn’t know since A I never saw that movie and B I make it a point to stay at the QuikTrip and eat Krispy Kreme doughnuts on days when Horace is running, I don’t need to see what Horace has, I got my own. Daddy always said half the world has what the other half is looking for, and I think this is true no matter which half you happen to be in, I showed this chapter to Udella like I always do and she said something about a fish and a bicycle, I didn’t get what she was driving at, but then she said Billy Ray you’re all the man I want, well she is a sweetie but I have never even asked her out for coffee as she is always in the company of that Juanita Chastain anyways, why they’re practically joined at the hip, I mean it’s something else the way they are always together.

I think I am going to leave autobiography to the fiction writers and fiction to the autobiographers and write me some essays, after all it worked for E. B. White, I can hear some of you going “who?” well he was the guy who wrote that book Charlotte’s Web, okay that wasn’t an essay but he did write some good ones, essays I mean, and I am now going to let you in on a little secret, some of the names in this book are real and some are not and some of the real ones are used in a fictitious way and some of the invented ones convey the God’s honest truth, for example there is a Grapevine Texas but I didn’t go to school there, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 2

Billy Ray Barnwell here, in one of these little chapters or vignettes or whatever they are I absolutely positively must get started on a poem or essay or something really literary, boy it sure is hard being an author, there are so many possibilities to choose from that some days I can’t focus at all, maybe I could find me a pill I could take for that, but I sure wouldn’t want to become dependent on drugs like Udella Mabry’s cousin Virgil Abernathy did, that was a really sad case, but after he finished doing his time he went to school and became the town pharmacist, so all’s well that ends well, to coin a phrase. I do know this is not going to be a novel because if I were going to write me a novel the characters would already be saying things like “It don’t make me no never mind” and “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy,” things I would never say in real life. I wish I could think of something interesting to write about today, nothing ever happens in this one-horse town, I will just keep pouring the words onto the paper and maybe something good will come of it, I have faith in the process. Mr. Morris said the only way to become a writer is to write, I don’t know why it took me so long to actually do it, Udella said the other day just think this is how Ernest Hemingway got started and I said I like William Faulkner better, then Udella’s buddy Juanita chimed in and said she didn’t care for Faulkner and I asked her why not and she scrunched up her face for a minute like she was trying to decide why herself and finally she said “too many words” well let me tell you I was flabbergasted, it was just like that scene in that Amadeus movie where the Italian composers tell the king or duke or whatever he is that Mozart’s music has too many notes, well in my opinion we should all have too many notes like Mozart or too many words like Faulkner, even though he did tend to use words like “scrofulous” and “phylacteries” and “lugubrious” and “mendaciously,” Faulkner I mean, not Mozart, which always sent me scurrying to the dictionary, wait a minute, hold the fort, that isn’t Faulkner I’m thinking of, that’s Thomas Wolfe, talk about a man who used too many words, O by the lost and wind-grieved ghost come back again my eye, why couldn’t he just write about simple things, a stone, a leaf, a door, that’s a joke for all you literary types, I’m sure it will bring great guffaws in English departments at universities all across this wonderful land of ours, and for those of you who don’t get the joke, I don’t want to ruin your concentration by explaining it, the joke I mean, not your concentration.

I wouldn’t want to think the well is running dry or anything, but all I can think to tell you about right now are things my father used to say, such as using a condom is like wearing socks to take a shower, or when you eat beans if you also eat macaroni you will get a pipe organ effect, or the ever popular pull my finger, he was a real delight to know, I didn’t think so then and I don’t think so now, in fact I prayed many times for him to be gone and now that he is I miss him more than I like to admit, damn was his favorite adjective and hell was his favorite noun, he smoked Chesterfield cigarettes like they were going out of style and between him and Mama the ashtrays at our house were always full and the air was always blue with smoke, and in spite of all of that or maybe because of it he started teaching the men’s Sunday School class at the Methodist church, you couldn’t make this stuff up, truth is stranger than fiction, I guess I should cut him some slack, he was a good man trying to do his best, he served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War as a machinist’s mate, whatever that is, on a ship called the PCE869, which PCE stands for Patrol Craft Escort, I know because he talked about the Navy every single day of his life and it is emblazoned in my brain along with the Great Lakes Naval Training Center and the Panama Canal Zone that has towns named Cristobal and Colón and when you say Colón it is not like the part of your body that is somewhere between your stomach and your anal sphincter, it is like the cologne that a man might want to splash on various parts of his body before going out on a big date so that if a person got close enough to smell him that person would end up smelling the cologne and not the body parts, oh by the way Cristobal Colón means Christopher Columbus in Spanish, he drove me absolutely bonkers, my father I mean, not Christopher Columbus, but he did have what every man wants and what every woman dreams about, Udella please tell Juanita she can stop laughing, I’m talking about a weekly paycheck, he was a good provider, for nearly twenty years he worked at Consolidated Vultee Aircraft which changed its name to Convair and then changed it again to General Dynamics Corporation, he was a turret lathe and milling machine operator, he helped build the wing assemblies of the B-36, B-58, and F-111 airplanes with guys named Jim Hodges and Ike Pemberton and Finn Wahl, and he rode thirty-four miles each way to work in a car pool with guys named Bill Poe and Wayne Harmon and Hubert Beard, his round dark green plastic-covered badge said he was employee number 183473, Daddy’s badge I mean, not Hubert Beard’s, not that I ever really noticed, then he got sick and died about a year and a half before he would have been eligible to retire and it’s a damn shame, pardon my French, that he died of pancreatic cancer, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone so be careful what you pray for because you just might get it, and it is way past time to end it for now, this is Billy Ray Barnwell your roving reporter signing off.

CHAPTER 3

In the spring of my fourteenth year, my parents decided to give me a horse for my birthday, and after some searching my father eventually brought home a gentle fourteen-year-old mare that I named Silver after the Lone Ranger’s big white stallion even though she looked nothing like her famous namesake. She was a Pinto, a painted pony with big splotches of brown and white, and we kept her in a dilapidated structure that might have been red once, a multipurpose building that was part garage, part barn, part pigpen, and part henhouse. She shared it with a small, similarly splotched flock of chickens that included White Leghorns, Buff Orphingtons, Rhode Island Reds, and Black Dominicks; and she also shared it with Lady Henrietta, the pig I was raising to meet the personal project requirement in Mr. Ben Barber’s ninth grade vocational agriculture class and who later provided us with a delicious supply of ham, sausage, bacon, and pork chops, Lady Henrietta I mean, not Mr. Ben Barber.

All summer long I rode Silver around our pasture bareback, using only a bridle because my parents couldn’t afford to buy a saddle and stirrups, and I loved that horse more than any dog or cat that ever lived. She had about two acres in which to roam and graze; a third acre held a vegetable garden and all sorts of trees that old Mrs. Mason, the former owner, had planted: apple trees, pear trees, peach trees, cherry trees, plum trees, persimmon trees, mulberry trees, and there were also fig bushes, blackberry bushes, a grape arbor, two big oaks, two big elms, and another dilapidated and unpainted structure that housed Mama, Daddy, and me in its four small rooms. Between the house and the barn-garage-pigpen-henhouse sat an old Dodge pickup that had seen better days, rusting, with grass and weeds growing up all around it and, thanks to holes in the floorboard, into it as well. We didn’t have indoor plumbing; whenever Nature called, we had to walk down a well-worn path about fifty yards to an outhouse. Every drop of water for drinking, cooking, and bathing was obtained by lowering a bucket on a rope over a pulley into a well next to the back door and drawing it out by hand, every drop except what we gathered in pots and pans and jars and basins whenever an occasional rainstorm pounded on our corrugated tin roof and demanded to be let through. On the kitchen counter sat a bucket we drank out of using a long-handled ladle. There was no sink. On the counter next to the bucket sat two basins, a round metal one, white with a red rim, where Mama put soapy water for washing dishes, and a square one made of red plastic where she put clear water for rinsing. When the dishwashing was finished, we simply opened the screen door and threw the water into the back yard. We bathed in a number three tin tub that my father would set in the middle of the kitchen, spreading newspapers around on the floor to absorb any water that might slosh over the edge of the tub onto the ancient, cracked, nondescript linoleum. The water for the tub and also for the dishwashing had to be heated on an equally ancient wood-burning stove. We had a wooden icebox instead of an electric refrigerator like everybody else, and supplying it with blocks of ice every week and emptying the drain pan every day were a regular part of our routine. Even allowing for it being Texas in the nineteen fifties, it was a pretty primitive existence; I was the only kid I knew who lived this way.

Eventually we acquired a real refrigerator and an electric stove from the local Western Auto store, but Daddy never did put in plumbing. The shallow well went not dry but bad when a film of oil developed on the water, so it became my job two or three times each week to go through Silver’s pasture carrying a five-gallon bucket in each hand or sometimes pulling my old Red Flyer wagon with a large metal garbage can balanced on top, to a neighbor’s house about a quarter of a mile away, where my parents had been given permission by Florabelle Oxley, Jimmy Wayne’s mother, to get our water supply from a hose hooked to an outdoor spigot on the side of their house. Sometimes I would call to Silver, “Hey, girl,” whereupon she would stop grazing, look up, and neigh softly as if to say she understood completely the humiliation I felt, having to depend on others and living in substandard housing herself. Today, all these years later, when I turn on the sprinklers to water my azaleas I still think about pulling that red wagon across Silver’s pasture to the Oxleys’ house to get water; it’s hard to forget that Florabelle Oxley’s Poland China hogs lived better than we did.

In late autumn, when the “blue norther” cold fronts for which Texas is famous came roaring down the plains from the Panhandle and the weather turned wintry, Silver stayed in the barn most of the time eating hay. By the time spring arrived, when Mrs. Mason’s jonquils and violets and irises and God’s bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes splattered our yard with their colors, my father thought Silver might be a bit skittish since she hadn’t been ridden all winter. “I’m going to ride the damn horse first,” he said. Mama didn’t think it was a good idea, but Daddy was adamant, and since he wore the pants in the family, the decision was made. Whether it was Silver’s skittishness or the fact that my father was twice my weight I’ll never know, but as he swung himself up onto her back she bolted out of the barn door and began galloping across the pasture with my father holding on for dear life. At the far fence line she made a turn and headed back straight toward the plum tree where Mama and I were standing and staring in disbelief. Daddy was yelling “Whoa! Whoa!” and doing his best to get the horse to stop, but Silver, who apparently wore the pants in her family, kept running toward us. When she reached her destination, she deftly scraped my father off her back under a low-hanging branch of the plum tree, then stopped and began grazing calmly as though nothing had happened. Daddy lay on the ground, conscious but stunned, trying to comprehend what had just occurred. By this time Mama was laughing hysterically. “What the hell are you laughing at?” Daddy demanded, but Mama just kept on laughing. Picking himself up off the ground, Daddy dusted himself off, said, “You damn fool,” and slowly made his way back to the house. The doctor said Daddy had three cracked ribs and taped his chest up for a month, Daddy’s chest I mean, not the doctor’s. Before the tape came off, Silver had been sold, and even though I cried buckets the day they took her away, my father never bought another horse.

CHAPTER 4

Billy Ray Barnwell here, a while back Udella showed me a letter she and Juanita got from their old friend Ila Faye Hostetter who lives down in Micanopee Florida and it was right intriguing so I said let me have Ila Faye’s address I might want to write to her sometime, so she did and I did and I’ll be dog if we didn’t strike up a whatchamacallit, a correspondence, last month I sent her an original poem I wrote, it went like this:


Whene’er urine micanopee
I hope that yew will thank of me
And ever time I thank of yew
I’ll be micanopeein’ too.


She wrote back and said my poem was real good, she liked it a lot and that she was mighty flatured, so I wrote her back last week and said that I have not been mighty flatured in quite a spell but I keep a special spray can in the bathroom for just such occasions, I can’t wait to hear from her again, well I know this is short but I have to run over to the post office and check my box, so this is Billy Ray Barnwell temporarily putting it on Pause.

.#.#. .#.#. .#.#.

Okay it has been three days since I got back from the P.O. but I have been unable to write one single word until now because I am completely devastated, I got a short note from Ila Faye that said, “Do not ever write to me again, I am no longer amused by references to bodily functions, I have started going to a Pentecostal church, you need to get right with the Lord” and that was it, well excuse me but from what I hear I think Pentecostal people are interested in a lot of bodily functions, I mean waving your hands in the air is a bodily function, speaking in tongues is a bodily function, rolling around on the floor is a bodily function, the whole Pentecostal ball of wax seems to be a very physical experience plumb full of bodily functions if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, okay I will concede that swinging from the chandeliers is not a bodily function, it’s more of an acrobatic skill, not that I’ve ever seen anybody actually do that but I have it on very good authority that that’s what they do, gosh I sure am going to miss hearing from Ila Faye, I wrote her once that I owe my love of stream of consciousness to Joyce and she wrote me back and said “Joyce who?” which made me laugh, it reminded me of the time I had to go by the church to rehearse a song with Mary Louise Calcavecchio and Calvin Bryson for someone’s wedding and I got there first so I sat down at the piano and started playing Clair de Lune to pass the time and towards the end of it Mary Louise came in and said “what is that?” and I said Clair de Lune and she said “who wrote it?” and I said Debussy and she looked puzzled and said “W. C. who?” but I did manage to keep from laughing that time, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 5

Billy Ray Barnwell here, well since my long-distance relationship with Ila Faye Hostetter went belly up a couple of weeks ago and we are no longer Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, we are no longer Heloise and Abelard, face it, we were never even Sonny and Cher, I figured I needed to do something else with my life, something important, or I would go crazy, so I thought and thought about it and here’s what I have decided I will do, I have decided I will become a real estate agent so I can sell houses and maybe also those whatchamacallits, condominia, to all the new people moving in around here but I just have to wait a few more days until my nose heals up and this black eye goes away. See, what happened was Udella Mabry and her friend Juanita decided to take me out on the town last night to get my mind off Ila Faye, I think what they really wanted was to get me good and drunk even though they know I don’t drink, well actually I do drink, everybody drinks, I just don’t drink what they drink, I heard the famous singer Pat Boone say that one time on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson, so anyways we went to a new club out on McFarland Road, Saffron’s or Sapporo or something like that, no wait, I remember now, it was called Sappho’s, well wonder of wonders I had my pick of any woman in the place to dance with as it turned out I was just about the only man in the entire establishment, it was kind of fun in a weird sort of way, all the women were dancing with each other, and you know what, they seemed to be having a good time even without benefit of male companionship, go figure. Well, I must not have been sending out the usual waves of animal magnetism, or maybe it was because of the funk I was in over losing Ila Faye, but would you believe it, not one of those lovely ladies would consent to take a spin around the floor with me so since there was no action whatsoever at Sappho’s I left Udella and Juanita there and went across the street to a place called The End Zone, which turned out to be a sports bar, and ended up watching professional football on the big screen. I ordered a root beer and a hamburger and struck up a conversation with this guy sitting next to me at the bar who looked big enough to have been a defensive lineman in the NFL himself. “I just come from Sappho’s across the street” I said and he said “Well I’m new in town but I hear that place is full of lezzies” and my first thought was how shocked Udella and Juanita would be if they knew, and then it occurred to me that since this guy had just moved here he might be a prospect for my upcoming real estate career, so I decided to change the subject, I leaned in a little closer to him and said, “Well I don’t know about that, but would you be interested in having a condominia?” and I won’t repeat what he said back to me but it was ugly and uncalled for and then before I even knew what was happening he hauled off and socked me square in the jaw with one fist and up side of the nose with the other, bam, bam, just like that, I guess it was what people call a one-two punch, he hit me so hard I flew off the barstool and landed face down kersplat on the floor, I ended up with a broken nose and a black eye on top of a sore jaw, I have no idea why Mr. NFL got so upset, it’s a mystery to me, but I’m just glad I still have all my teeth, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

CHAPTER 6

Billy Ray Barnwell here, while my nose was healing I decided to read back over everything I have written so far which you prolly won’t believe this but according to the computer comes to over six thousand words, Mr. Morris was right after all, and it was a real eye-opener for me because I learned something about how inspiration works, I didn’t realize it before but I’m pretty sure the seed for the story about my horse Silver in Chapter 3 was planted in my mind when I happened to write the phrase “one-horse town” in Chapter 2 and then I just kept pouring the words onto the paper like I said I was going to do and soon, I don’t know why, I was telling you things my father used to say and as the French say, vwah-lah, Chapter 3 just sort of appeared out of nowhere, it just popped out fully grown kind of like Athena I think it was did from the forehead of Zeus according to Bulfinch’s Mythology, which if you have never read you ought to run right down to your public library and check out. Those old Greek and Roman guys were pretty smart, I learned a lot of neat stuff in Bulfinch’s about Echo and Narcissus and Arachne and Tantalus and a whole lot of other folks besides, Vulcan the god of the forge and Persephone which rhymes with Stephanie and not telephone to name two. I guess the Greek language is still managing to hang in there, especially for people who happen to be from Greece but I hate it that Latin is dead, did you know that someone with a lot more spare time than brains went and translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin? well they did, it was called Winnie Ille Pooh but as my old work buddy Tom Bledsoe says about his days in Latin class, “flunko, flunkare, flunkuisti” and I imagine his experience is prolly more common than you might think, well I must say I don’t think we have improved any since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, all kids care about today is stuff like American Idol on the TV and Britney Spears clones and P. Diddy and drugs and driving their parents bonkers. And sex of course. Hey, maybe things haven’t changed that much over the centuries after all, we just don’t talk about it in Latin any more, except in my family we sometimes did, when my uncle would get really disgusted he never cussed, he would say “sum esse fui” and then smile mysteriously, for years I thought he was saying “so messy phooey” and even Mama would sometimes say “heek hike hoke hoo-yus hoo-yus hoo-yus” and begin to giggle. I asked her to write that down one time and she wrote “hic haec hoc” in one vertical column, if that’s redundant you can just go ahead and report me to the Department Of Redundancy Department, and then she wrote “hujus hujus hujus” in another, I thought A it was a very strange thing to do and B it looked more like hick hake hock than heek hike hoke, and C why a J would be pronounced like a Y is beyond me, I asked her why she put it in two columns like that and at first she didn’t answer but when I said Mama aren’t you going to answer? she said “I respectfully decline” and began to giggle again, I guess I come from a strange breed, I wouldn’t know, I never met but one of my grandparents, so anyways instead of giving up I have decided to continue pouring the words onto the paper, God bless you Mr. Morris, well as Tigger in Winnie the Pooh would say, Ta Ta For Now, I wonder what that is in Latin, and I just want to say here that like my uncle I never cuss but where I spit grass never grows again, oh by the way I have decided not to go into real estate and this is illy-Bay ay-Ray arnwell-Bay igning-say off-ay.