Miracles Ain't What They Used to Be

  I had given up on my university degree and decided I wanted to be a farmer. Part of this was a love for the idea and the fact I had grown up in the country around this sort of thing. My parents generally raised a garden and a few hogs and chickens, so I had experience. It was a sincere lifestyle we thought might get us through until I could write stories and novels, which was what I really wanted to do, and until Karen could get her degree in criminology-sociology, and perhaps go about harassing or rehabilitating criminals, depending on the criminal.

  Neither of us saw our back-to-the-land venture as a lifetime job, but something we could enjoy in our youth, a means to an end. So we moved, and it was nice not to put out $30 a month for rent. This was the 1970s; for us, $30 was a lot of money. We had my parents’ land to raise a large garden, plus a truck crop patch for vegetables to sell, and out back we had room for hogs, mules, goats, and a chicken house. We bought a mule, and I learned to plow. I bought all kinds of old equipment and went to work. My parents moved into town, probably due to our presence, and we took over the place temporarily.

  The first year was successful. We were living off about $4,000, a small sum even for that time. Everything we ate, we raised. We bought only wheat berries, sugar, salt, animal feed, and a few other odds and ends. We ground the wheat berries, made our own bread and sold vegetables from the garden for an occasional splurge in Tyler on a movie or an outing at a cheap Mexican restaurant. It was pretty much a daylight-to-dark job. I didn’t write as much as I thought. I kept telling myself I would. Eventually.

  The second summer brought dry weather and not as much food. My wife went to work loading packages of meat into refrigerated cars, the contents to be delivered to convenience stores, and I got a job working the rose fields. There I worked with other poor folk. When winter came, there was less work, so fewer of us were kept on. I was glad to be among those kept for rose-digging time. They dug the roses with a machine, and we tossed them into trucks that hauled them to be loaded into refrigeration cars. The roses, fresh from the ground and dangling lots of wet dirt, were heavy, cumbersome, and prickly. It was a job that, once started, had to be finished, so we were literally working day and night, sometimes loading roses by spotlight.

  One night after work, the wind shifted, and the rain thumped our roof like a thug with a cat o’ nine tails. When I went outside for a look, the porch light made everything look like something Noah might have spied from the poop deck of the ark. Lots of water. When morning came, the storm was gone and the high water had drained out, but the ground was wet and icy, and the sky was the color of pearl.

  My boss lived close by, and it became his ritual during rose-digging to pick me up at my house and drive me to and from the fields. On this morning, we crossed a little bridge, and as we did, we both spied off to our right, down on the creek bank, a large box. My boss said, “I think that’s a toolbox.” He pulled over, and we went down for a look. Sure enough, it was a toolbox, the kind that goes in the back of a pickup. As if on command, we turned our heads and glanced under the bridge. On the other side, we could see a pickup with its nose in the creek. We went over and discovered that not only was there a truck, but there was a man behind the wheel. He was swollen from the water, and his flesh looked puffy and soft, like bread dough. He reminded me of a horror version of the Pillsbury Doughboy, his eyes swollen shut, his lips like two fat, dark worms. My boss said, “I think I know him.”

  We decided that most likely he had driven across the bridge when the water was high and had been swept into the creek. We drove to a phone (no cell phones then) and called authorities. That night, I dreamed of that poor man, and the thing that came to me was not only is life short, but quit screwing around; our time is brief, and nothing is promised. It’s what you do now that matters, not what you do tomorrow or what you think you will do tomorrow.

  We finished the rose field job as the weather turned worse, and for three months I didn’t have a job. My wife, always my greatest supporter, insisted she continue working and that I should write until the end of the year, when the weather broke. I think she knew how bad I wanted to do it, and how mortal I felt after the discovery of that dead man. I set to work, and since I didn’t know what I was doing, I wrote a short story a day for ninety days. I sent them out, one after another, and they sent them back. There were a lot of markets then. Eventually I collected around a thousand rejects on those 90 stories. But I felt I was in the game, and learning.

  We abandoned our farming venture, moved back to Nacogdoches. I got a janitor job at the university, and my wife got her degree. My job started midafternoon, so in the mornings I wrote, and when I got off work I wrote or read for another hour or two. Gradually, I began to sell a lot of stories and novels and went full-time as a writer and a house dad.

  I think I would have written eventually. I had already sold a few articles. But when I saw the Drowned Man, I realized that if I wasn’t careful, I could end up working my life away, always planning on writing and never seriously pursuing it; that at the end of my life, I might end up with a fraction of the work I could have done, writing now and then while doing a job I didn’t really like.

  It was a sad way of finding my eureka moment, but here I am, more than thirty-five years later, and instead of the smattering of stories I might have written, the Drowned Man pushed me forward, gave me will and placed the cold hand of mortality on my shoulder. I’ve become comfortable with it resting there. I think of it as a gentle reminder not to waste my time on earth—and not only with the writing, but with family, with all the things that matter.

  I know it’s odd, and I don’t even know the poor man’s name. But in a strange way, I owe him a lot.

  DARKNESS IN THE EAST

  NOIR IS A FRENCH word meaning dark. It’s used to identify a certain type of grim fiction or film. Don’t let the French name fool you. There’s plenty of noir right here in East Texas, though it’s mixed with southern gothic and western and all manner of stuff; it’s a gumbo boiled in hell. I know. I’m from East Texas. I’ve seen it. I’ve written about it. Weird as some of it is, fictionalized as the work is, it comes from a wellspring of true events you just can’t make up.

  Let’s clear up one thing. There are plenty of good people in East Texas (saw one yesterday), but if you’re a writer of crime fiction, which I am at least some of the time, you’re not looking for good people. You’re looking for weirdos, criminals, malcontents, and the just plain stupid. That’s your meat if you write crime.

  In spite of the word, not all of the fiction or films associated with this genre are completely dark. Noir wears many hats, some even with bright feathers in them. Sometimes noir can laugh, which is where I come in. It’s where East Texas comes in. You can’t point at noir and call it one thing, but it usually has some of these elements: existentialist attitude, cynical and desperate characters, wise-ass talk, rain and shadows, a lightning bolt and shadowed blinds, sweaty sheets and cigarette smoke, whiskey breath and dark street corners where shots are fired and a body is found, and long black cars squealing tires as they race around poorly lit corners.

  For me as a writer, noir takes place in the backwoods and slick, brick streets and red clay roads and sandy hills of East Texas. My noir is about Baptist preachers claiming with lilting poetry to be called by the Lord to preach The Word, but who have intentions as false as a stuffed sock in a rock star’s pants; pretty soon they’re gone with the congregation’s money and three deacon’s wives are knocked up. My noir is about the deep backwoods and small-town girls with inflated dreams and big blonde hair and the kind of oozing sex appeal that would make a good family man set fire to the wife’s cat and use it as a torch to burn down his house—with his wife in it.

  You got your slicked-back-shiny-haired used car salesman with more better deals and a plan to burn his business for the insurance money. You got your muscle-armed, pot-bellied hick with a toothpick and a John Deere gimme cap, forever dressed in hunting boots, camouflage pants and a wife-beater T-s
hirt—even if his destination is just the barber shop or the barbecue joint. He’s the kind of guy who likes to get drunk every night and drive home weaving. He’s the kind of guy whose last words are to his best buddy in the passenger seat—“Hey, hold my beer and watch this”—and who then proceeds to unzip his pants and attempt to drive his truck with his manly appendage.

  You got this same kind of guy at the Wednesday prayer meeting, wearing a concealed-carry pistol tucked under his worn-out high-school letter jacket in case the Muslims attack or there’s an unexpected run on grape juice and tasteless wafers by liberal Democrats. He’s the kind of guy who carries a pack of condoms in his front pocket to signify high hopes for the big-breasted, blonde church organist with an orthodontist’s grin and an ass like two volley balls banging together in a croaker sack. If that don’t happen, well hell, on his way home he’s got a spotlight and a rifle in the trunk for popping blinded rabbits. In fact, in that trunk he’s got so many guns that his guns own guns, and who knows where that kind of firepower might lead? For example, there are those guys down at the job who done him wrong, the ex-wife that got the kids, the dog that digs in his yard, and all those folks who want the new health care program so they can pull the plug on Grandma. They could all get a taste of his ammunition if the mood strikes him right.

  You got the Aryan Nations with their pale skins covered in jailhouse tattoos, crosses and swastikas, a heart with Mama written across it on a crawling snake, their necks so covered in tattoo print they look like they fell asleep on a damp newspaper, talking authoritatively with tears in their eyes about the Bible they’ve never read, cussing science and manmade books.

  Then you got the Dixie flag, southern heritage guys talking about how fine it would be had the South won the war, worrying that they’re losing their white heritage, which when you get right down to it is most likely great-grandpa’s weed-infested grave, a mayonnaise sandwich on white bread, a MoonPie, a bag of pork skins, a big Bud Light, and a Jim Beam chaser. Here in East Texas, we got rampaging horse-shooters, wife-beaters, child abusers, murderers, gangs (yeah, really), scripture-quoting psychopaths and enough crystal meth that if some cooker gets drunk and drops a match, he could blow us all the way to Mars.

  The people I write about lurk in small East Texas towns, living in same-alike houses, on cleared clay lots with little anemic bushes in their yards, yards that often sport mossy gnomes and colorful wooden frames painted up like bent-over grannies. In the backyard, the flowers may even be holding down that missing relative not seen since 1985, or the freezer might contain a human head next to a plastic bag of hotdogs.

  Let’s come back to this, as it might save me from a lynching. Yes, East Texas is full of good people. Some of them might even be Christians. Some might be used car salesmen and back-road runners wearing camouflage with a toothpick in their mouth. They might be public servants so paranoid they want college students to be armed in the case of a nut going wild; students could kill the nut and each other in a crossfire, but these are otherwise good people with the best of intentions. Not everyone is out to do bad. Some have done well with their GEDs, and they have a nice library—consisting primarily of Guns and Ammo magazines, and others where naked women wear only staples. Seriously, I even know one person who has been to clown college—and graduated. These are my peeps, man.

  Sometimes you look at noir and realize it’s real, not just a story or a film. Some of it is so like a sucking gunshot wound that, to keep from hanging yourself from a shower rod, you have to laugh at it, make fun of it. You got to do what firefighters and policemen do—and when I speak of the latter I don’t mean senselessly beating a suspect with three feet of water hose and a telephone book. I mean laugh at the terrible things, because laughter is the only antidote. It’s the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that holds the dark at bay.

  My noir may not be your noir, but nonetheless it is noir, and though it’s not all I write, it’s a lot of what I write. It often informs work of mine that I meant to be absolutely as far away from noir as I’d like to be from the Tea Party. East Texas has its own kind of dark side that comes deep-fried, baptized, and sanctified with a side of hollow points and racial epithets. That’s my beat, here in the shadows and sticky heat, nestled up tight as a hungry chigger in a fat man’s armpit.

  When you write crime, you’re not looking at the good that exists. You’re thinking about and looking at the bad, at the criminals, at the lowlifes and how they affect those who just want to do their part—people who just want to go to their jobs, raise their families, and maybe retire with a lakefront view and a good supply of adult diapers, with no one cooking crystal meth next door or kicking in the door to take their plasma television or sell their crippled dog to medical research.

  Those bad folks are out there, like the flu. Waiting. They are outnumbered by the good, but all it takes is one bad sucker to ruin your day. We all know that therein lies the appeal of the noir tale, the books of mystery and suspense, crime and sacrifice, trips to the Dairy Queen gone horribly wrong. Stories like that are a way to flirt with the dark without having to actually date and marry it.

  We know bad can happen, but mostly we like to think we’re pretty safe in our bedrooms at night with books in our hands. We can turn the pages and see what happens, or we can put it down, turn off the light, and go to sleep. On some level, it’s like an inoculation against disaster, pre-coping with things that might happen and probably never will, a metaphorical way of dealing with the Big D. And I don’t mean Dallas.

  That part will happen. Be it by crime, poorly chewed steak lodged in the windpipe, car wreck, or lying in an old folks’ home wired up like a spaceman watching shadows move across the wall. Noir is our way of saying howdy to the dark side without going there to live.

  At least not yet.

  DOGGONE JUSTICE

  THINGS HAVE CHANGED. The world has evolved. A punch in the mouth ain’t what it used to be.

  Once you were more apt to settle your own problems, or have them settled for you, by an angry party. Teeth could be lost, and bones could be broken, but mostly you just got a black eye, a bloody nose, or you might be found temporarily unconscious, face down in a small pool of blood out back of a bar with a shoe missing.

  These days, even defending yourself can be tricky. It seems to me a butt-whipping in the name of justice has mutated to three shots from an automatic weapon at close quarters and three frames of bowling with your dead head. There are too many nuts with guns these days, and most of them just think the other guy is nuts. An armed society is a polite society only if those armed are polite. Otherwise, it just makes a fellow nervous.

  Still, not wishing back the past. Not exactly. But there are elements of the past I do miss. There are times when I like the idea of settling your own hash—without gunfire. Sometimes the other guy has it coming.

  When I was a kid in East Texas, we lived in a home that sat on a hill overlooking what was called a beer joint or honkytonk. Beyond the tonk was a highway, and beyond that a drive-in theater standing as tall and white as a monstrous slice of Wonder Bread.

  You could see the drive-in from our house, and from that hill my mother and I would watch the drive-in without sound. What I remember best were Warner Bros. cartoons. As we watched, mom would tell me what the cartoon characters were saying. Later, when I saw the cartoons on TV—something we didn’t have at the time—I was shocked to discover Mom had made up the stories out of the visuals. My mom was a dad-burned liar. It was an early introduction to storytelling.

  But this isn’t storytelling. This is reporting, and what I’m about to tell you is real, and I was there. It’s one of my first memories. So mixed up was the memory that, years later, when I was a grown man, I had to ask my mother if it was a dream, or fragments of memories shoved together. I had some things out of order, and I had mixed in an item or two, but my mother sorted them out for me. This is what happened.

  My mother and I stayed at home nights while my dad was on the road, wor
king on trucks. He was a mechanic and a troubleshooter for a truck company. My entertainment was my mother and that silent drive-in and the fistfights that sometimes occurred in the honky-tonk parking lot, along with the colorful language I filed away for later use.

  We were so poor that my dad used to say that if it cost a quarter to crap, we’d have to throw up. There wasn’t money for a lot of toys, nor at that time a TV, which was a fairly newfangled instrument anyway. We listened to the radio when the tubes finally glowed and warmed up enough for us to bring in something.

  Dad decided that the drive-in, seen through a window at a great distance, and a static-laden radio with a loose tube that if touched incorrectly would knock you across the room with a flash of light and a hiss like a spitting cobra, were not proper things for a growing boy. He thought I needed a friend.

  Below, at the tonk, a dog delivered pups. Dad got me one. It was a small, fuzzy ball of dynamite. Dad named him Honky-Tonk. I called him Blackie. I loved that dog so dearly that even writing about him now makes me emotional. We were like brothers. We drank out of the same bowl, when mom didn’t catch us; and he slept in my bed, and we shared fleas. We had a large place to play, a small creek out back, and beyond that a junkyard of rusting cars full of broken glass and sharp metal and plenty of tetanus.

  And there was the house.

  It sat on a hill above the creek, higher than our house, surrounded by glowing red and yellow flowers immersed in dark beds of dirt. It was a beautiful sight, and on a fine spring day those flowers pulled me across that little creek and straight to them as surely as a siren calling to a mariner. Blackie came with me, tongue hanging out, his tail wagging. Life was great. We were as happy as if we had good sense and someone else’s money.