Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 3: Last Night When We Were Young (1994)

 

Sarah Arndt’s sleeveless blue denim dress billowed out in waves at about mid-thigh, and she covered her shoulders with a brown denim jacket. A pair of orange Chuck Taylors completed her funeral outfit. Her short hair was styled so that her long bangs rolled like the surf on the top of head while the sides were cut down to the stubble. The bangs were dyed sliver with the rest toned a dark gray. She stood out, to say the least, among the collared shirts and modest midwestern dresses. Richie noticed her, that’s for sure, as she approached in the receiving line of the visitation before the service. First question: What the hell was she was doing there? She was known as the Queen of Shadows. She smoked, she cursed, she ruled the seedy underbelly of Jordan High School. He was a mere mental case a year behind her. The second question, when would he see her again? She murmured condolences to his father before greeting Richie with an awkward embrace and placing her lips to his left ear.

“Today the world is old. You flew away and time grew cold. Where is that star that shone so bright ages ago last night?” She whispered and before walking away added, “I got my eyes on you, Little Richie.”  

She retreated to the back row of folding chairs where she sat two spaces away from the next person. His eyes kept drifting toward her, and he felt guilty for being distracted by a girl during the mother’s visitation, but he barely knew most of the people passing through the line and they all had the same empty condolences: “She’s in a better place,” “the Lord called her home,” and “At least she’s not hurting anymore.” Plus, they all wanted to touch him. Hug him. Kiss him. Shake his hand. His father refused to let him wear gloves, and his skin was crawling with prickles from the germs. The germs that were burrowing deeper and deeper into his follicles, invading his blood stream, one domino after biological domino falling until he was in an urn alongside his mother.

As far as mourning, he couldn’t cry anymore. There was simply a gap in his heart where she once was, and the events of funeral didn’t feel like they were going to change anything. It just let everyone else wash their hands of the whole sad affair while he and his dad were left without the sun that kept their orbits on comfortable paths.

The last person passed by, and Richie and his father were ushered to a pair of chairs in front. While the pastor, who had never met his mother, regurgitated their memories, and in turn, co-opted them as his own, he could feel Sarah Arndt’s eyes on the back of his head. It made no sense that she was here among the grieving, and it made even less sense that she’d have her eyes on Richie Dean Glenn. What did she want? He was nothing to her. She was a legend of Jordan High, known for her far-out fashion and smoking marijuana in the girl’s room. Did Richie attract outlaws, or something? His mother’s urn rested on a pedestal surrounded by an embarrassment of flowers. Richie wished that the stupid holy man would shut up and lead everyone else out of the room so that Richie could ask his mother’s ashes what to do about Sarah Arndt. She would have answered with something clever.

“Give the girl a chance,” He could hear his mom saying. “The unique ones are always the best ones.”

Or maybe she’d be off put by Sarah’s assumption of belonging at the service. His mom could be a stickler for social etiquette.

“Send her packing, Richie. Trouble is as trouble does, and that girls does trouble.”

His father didn’t flinch the entire service, his wide features reddening in the heat of wearing the three-piece suit. His tie was loosened to accommodate his massive neck and his beard was tangled and uneven. Shaving had become optional in the last couple weeks. R.J. Dean hadn’t registered any of the attendees at the funeral, simply providing quiet acknowledgements of their condolences. He had forewarned Richie that he intended to drink that night, and that he was welcome to stay at any friend’s house that Richie wished. So much for grieving together. Richie’s grandmother sat beside him, and he intended to stay on the sofa at her assisted living home. He’d checked out a Dean Koontz book from the school library the day before, and he planned on reading it to her. They both liked a good scare, and it’d be nice to disappear into the pages of fiction for a few hours. He’d have to do all the reading now, as her eyesight had diminished to near nothing in the last two years.

The service ended and they drove to the cemetery where thankfully the pastor stuck to the basic lines of scripture. The ground was soft from rain the day before, and ducks quacked in a man-made pond centered in the cemetery. Sarah Arndt smoked a cigarette next to a tree about a football field away from the plot, her arms folded over her chest. If it were a movie, Richie would have assumed she were some sort of assassin, just waiting to get a clean shot of him before moving on to her next assignment. Was that what he was to her? Some sort of challenge? Or was she elaborately messing with the most tormented kid at Jordan High? Richie’s usual suspicions about people’s motives were buzzing in his head, but for the first time, they were losing out by a tug at his groin. Jesus, how messed up was he? The pastor finished, Richie looked down at the hole where the urn would be placed, and when his eyes rose, Sarah Arndt was gone. Maybe he’d imagined her the entire time.

Richie rode back in a limousine with his dad and grandma, she commented on how the grass was beginning to green finally after a long cold winter. She could probably barely tell. His dad mumbled a few things on the ride, but none of it was important or even all that intelligible. They weren’t in their house more than ten minutes before he cracked open his first can of beer, not bother to shed his suit.

Richie packed the book, a change of clothes, a few CDS and his portable disc player after slipping into some jeans and a sweatshirt. His dad was slumped in his recliner in the living room as Richie made to leave.

“I’m heading over to Grandmas.”

“All right,” he said, not looking up.

“Don’t drink too much.”

“Yeah, yeah, now you sound like…” He didn’t finish the line, just sort of snorted. He was going to say, “my mother,” before catching himself.

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“Is it?”

Contest Entry: NYC Midnight – Flash Fiction Challenge 3

 

So, along with covering a game for SVM last weekend, I had the third round of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction challenge, a 48-hour competition to come up with a thousand-word story based off a prompt. Six hundred writers remain, and they were split into to 25 groups. The top three in each group will move on to the fourth and final round in December.

I won’t lie, I struggled mightily with this one. My prompts were:

Genre: Comedy

Setting: An Interview

Object: An Easel

The genre messed with me as the concern of being funny was paramount in my head, making focusing on story difficult. The story I ended up filing was the third one I came up with, the first two falling short for different reason. The first one seemed to mean spirited and more of a political satire. The second I wrote myself into a corner and figure a way out of it.

So, this was the Hail Mary that I threw together on Sunday afternoon. It turned out OK, but I hold no illusions that I’ll be moving on. The competition gets stiff at this point, and this is far from my best work.

If you would like to read it, follow the link below. Thanks.

https://bit.ly/3wf8aJw

Game Story: Sterling vs. St. Patrick

 

Photo courtesy of Alex T. Paschal/Sauk Valley Media

Here's a short post with a link to the game I covered yesterday for Sauk Valley Media. It was a beautiful afternoon to be outside, but it didn't go well for the home team the Sterling Golden Warriors. It might be behind a paywall, but I always encourage supporting local journalism. 

Thanks for reading!

https://www.shawlocal.com/friday-night-drive/news/2021/10/31/sterling-knocked-out-of-5a-playoffs-by-physical-st-patrick-squad/

Stories from the Beat: What are you doing here?

 (Note: This is a screenshot from a weekly prep football video we would shoot at SVM. Probably about 7-10 years ago. The photos in background were campus wraps for our yearly football preview section.)

On Saturday, October 30, 2021, I’ll return to the sideline to cover a high school football game. For those following this blog with bated breath, you might wonder how that could happen. Didn’t I declare just a month or so ago that I wouldn’t be covering a sporting event this fall. Well, things change, people come and go, and my old friends find themselves in an untenantable position heading into the IHSA football playoffs.

So, I signed on the dotted line to be a stringer (freelancer) for at least one more game. I don’t intend for this to be an ongoing thing, as I have come to value my free time. Plus, the weekday deadlines are so darned tight now that I just don’t want to put myself through that stress very often.

Game coverage is a unique beast, particularly at the high school level. I remember the first event I covered was a boys soccer match behind Challand Junior High in Sterling in the fall of 2004. The match was a lopsided loss by the home team, and about five minutes into it, I realized just how little I knew about soccer.

Afterward, I approached the coach, who happened to be a former P.E. teacher of mine. My reporting career started with a question – from my source. “What are you doing here?”

That’s the key question for every reporter on any story. “What are you doing here?”

Consider that, and keep in mind some of the items below, if you ever find yourself covering a game.

1. Be Prepared – Have an idea of what is at stake. Playoff games are easy. Midseason swimming meets or golf meets can be more challenging. Find out records, if possible, and if there are any interesting storylines heading into the event. That prep might provide the blueprint for your story.
2. Have a plan for keeping stats. Some schools and some sports provide all kinds of stats, but they almost all do so on their own timeline. In the prep reporting biz, that means you better be able to keep your own stats. That takes some thought, and every reporter I’ve met does it their own way. For football, I carry a clipboard with a stat sheet to track individual and team stats. I also carry a notebook where I keep a running play list. A good gamer should have some statistical backup. It’s a balance on how much. Learn to pick out the numbers that matter.
3. Always be thinking – “What’s the story?” or “What will people be talking about after this game?” Having edited dozens of other reporter’s stories, I know many fall into the trap of “This happened, and this happened, and this happened.” Maybe that sounds like crack reporting, but it’s the equivalent of watching paint dry when reading. Form the story of the game in your head. If the last play determines the winner, you better believe that should be a lion’s share of the story and the lede. I don’t need to know details of plays that had relatively little bearing on the result, I want to know why exactly Team A won and Team B lost.
4. Develop questions for your sources as you go. I admit that I am not always the best at doing this. Often, I just decide to wing it and ramble out something that sort of ends up sounding like a question. Still, it’s a great goal. Also, know who you want to talk to when that whistle blows, so that you can start lining the interviews up ASAP. Remember you are dealing with kids, who might have just lost a big game, or who might be nervous about talking to a reporter. You’re not trying to stump them, or catch them in some sort of drama, you just want them to provide information to the reader and you.
5. Have a plan for filing. Maybe you can drive to the office and write the story. That’s great. If not, know where and how you are going to file. I have filed stories from McDonalds, from the roof of my car in school parking lots, and a dozen of other places. Time is of the essence. Don’t get caught with no way to get your story from your computer to your editor’s computer in time. Also, check your technology that it is working properly.
6. Know your editor’s expectations for length and deadline. I preferred short gamers – 500 words or less. It’s my belief anything longer better be pretty darn important and top-notch writing. Most gamers are glanced at by readers who care and ignored by those without a stake in the teams playing. I always wanted space in my sections for feature stories, breaking news, and columns that might cast a wider net.
7. It’s not a phonebook. I’ve known reporters who try and sneak in as many names into a story as possible, and while that might be great for the scrapbookers out there, it almost always leads to bitter feelings because you can rarely, if ever, name everyone. It’s always the one that’s left out that you hear from. Tell the story and mention the names that need to be mentioned (and spell those names right!).
8. Assuming things is the fast lane to reporting hell.
9. Write clean. If you don’t know what that means, get an AP Stylebook, that’s a great starting point. Nothing worse for an editor than having to spend an hour trying to take a poorly written story and edit it into something presentable.
10. Finally, keep your ears and eyes open. There’s always the story in front of you, but likely a better one if you are really paying attention. Maybe you can gain some extra details for the story. Craft the setting for the reader. Or maybe, you’ll pick up a tip for a feature story.

I could probably list things all day, but I’ll stop there.  I’ve never considered myself a great game story writer. My strength was features where my creativity could be put to better use, and I thought I rounded into a pretty good columnist by the end of my run at SVM. I’ll talk about those forms another time.

Anyways, I guess I am back on the beat, let just hope I don’t get beat!

Write-On Prompt: Gone

 Note: Tuesday night was Prompt night at the Write On Writing Group in Rock Falls. I wrote the below based on the prompt: "You hear news of your next door neighbor vanishing without a trace." I decided to write a story in multiple short segments in hopes that the sparseness of the scenes would help to build the tension. I like how this turned out, and hope to maybe develop it some more. Let me know what you think if you get a chance to read it. 

Gone

The rooster crowed, belting out it’s daily greeting like nothing was changing. Annie stayed in bed, a film of sweat covering her face, the weight of the damp air pressing on her like a rolling pin. The sun wasn’t up, but it was already at least seventy degrees, something unheard of in Illinois for late October. It would be another day in the 90s, the thirty-seventh consecutive day to be exact and the fiftieth in the last sixty. Annie wondered if people were melting.

***

The hens rarely laid eggs anymore, and the eggs they did were like golf balls, hard and hollow. She scattered corn on the floor of the pen, halfheartedly, they clucked with just as little enthusiasm. Routine was the last comfort for Annie and the chickens. Only the rooster seemed to have some gusto, tearing around with his breast pushed out and pecking the dirt with such vigor that she was sure he might crack the dry ground open revealing a gorge that plunged all the way to the earth’s core. Annie envied him, she could barely eat anymore, her nerves had twisted knots in her stomach.

***

Eli arrived at 10, wearing nothing but a tattered pair of cutoff jean shorts. He was thirteen, tan and lean. His yellow hair was long and unruly, and his bare feet look battered. His eyes were pink and puffy.

Annie was trying to get milk from her last cow. The others had either died or run off in search of greener pastures. Or just were gone, just like folks around the country. Gone. As if God were plucking them right from the earth and taking them up to heaven. Some reason though, Annie suspected God didn’t have anything to do with this.

“Mama was gone this morning.” Eli said. “Same as papa last week. Just gone.”

“You check the barn?” Annie said.

“You think I’m stupid.” Before all this, everyone knew Eli was going to age into a real heartbreaker. Now, he just looked sad and angry, the sort of angry that turns potential into disaster.

“No, Eli.”

“They just are gone. Papa was in the middle of fixin’ the tractor last week. I went to look for a wrench he asked for, and when I come back, he was gone, and the oil was running out the engine into the grass.

“And your mama?”

“She was frying the last of the bacon. I could hear her humming while I was laying in bed. It smelt so good. I must of dozed off because the next thing I knowed there was smoke all over the house. She’d never just leave with bacon on the stove like that. It was burnt as black as charcoal. I looked everywhere for her.”

“That makes six on the road.”

“Aye.”

“Did you go tell Charlie and Millie?”

“I was gonna, but I was scared. I thought for sure I was the only one left in the whole world.”

“I guess we better let them know.”

***

Charlie and Millie lived a mile east in what they called their retirement home. Their son, Angus lived in the farmhouse a farm block over and managed the family’s three hundred acres and a hundred head of cattle. At least Angus did until two days ago. Angus was gone now. Charlie was unretired, he’d told Annie yesterday, but there was no charm or humor in it. Just heartbreak.

Millie was a thinning, gray-haired woman, who’d already lost one son to the war and a daughter to the big city. Since the radios and phones and anything with an engine went down a month or so earlier, Charlie and Millie didn’t know anything about their daughter. Just like all of them out in country didn’t know what was going on with the rest of the world.

“I prayed for six hours last night,” Millie said, her hands wrapped around a cup of cold coffee. She hadn’t taken a sip since making it hours earlier. “I think whatever all this is has shorted out the prayer waves to God.”

“Where’s Charlie?” Annie said. She hadn’t asked for coffee or cookies, something the two women had shared almost daily as neighbors for the last five years. No one had any extra to share. Besides, Annie couldn’t eat.

“Over at the farm,” Mille answered. “Don’t know what for. Angus let all the cattle go, and we can’t get the crops out anyhow without a combine even if they weren’t all burnt to sunder.”

“Maybe Eli and I should stay here. Just till Charlie gets back.”

“Suit yourself,” Millie shrugged and then didn’t say a word while they sat there for the next hour. Annie and Eli set back out for her farm later, not knowing what else to do.

***

Annie’s husband had died before all this, thank the Lord. A sudden heart attack at the age of thirty-one. Healthy as an ox otherwise. Annie hadn’t known how she was going to make it, but routine had got her through, and she’d become the lone female farmer in three counties. She’d survived her husband’s death. She’d made it through the tornado that cost her half a crop two years ago, and even a bad case of pneumonia last winter. This though. She suspected this would get her like it was getting everyone else.

***

Eli insisted in sleeping in the same bed, terrified if he left her side that one of them would be taken. He’d had a pungent odor until she made him take a warm bath and put on some of her husband’s old clothes. They were too big, but at least they were clean.

“I don’t know the last time I really slept,” Eli said. The room was dark and humid. The moon was big and round outside the window, even its light seeming to add another degree or two to the stifling heat.

“Me neither.”

“When it takes me, I’m going to scream,” Eli said. “That way you can run and try and see what happens.”

“Okay. What if I go first?”

“Will you scream?”

She didn’t know how to answer, worried she might just drown in the thick air before a scream got out.

***

Charlie came in the night, brandishing a shotgun. Millie was gone.

He walked off down the road and they heard a blast shortly thereafter.

***

They killed a hen in the morning, deciding the meat was better than empty eggs. It ran around without a head for three minutes and then fell in the dirt. It barely bled at all.

Eli cleaned it of its feathers and carved off the cuts of meat. Farm boys learned such things. She cooked the breasts on the stove top and served them for lunch.

Neither of them ate a bite.

***

That night she woke to a scream coming from the yard. Eli must have gone out to use the outhouse.

She rushed to the window, but couldn’t see anything in the dark.

She called his name for an hour. And sobbed.

***

It rained the next day, fat plops of water were swallowed by the scorched earth in mere seconds, and Annie took it as a sign.

She let the chickens free from their coup and led the cow from the barn. She packed a bundle, what little she had left of value and that was edible.

She started walking.

Leaving behind her life, hoping to walk until she found someone, anyone, or until she was gone.

Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 2: Over the Hills and Far Away (1991)

 

“Many is a word that only leaves you guessing/Guessing bout a thing, you really ought to know.”

-          Over the Hills and Far Away by Led Zeppelin

Maggie assumed changing her hair caused this. Clipping her tangled blonde locks to a stubble and bleaching the remaining fuzz white had felt right after the blowout with RJ, knowing how much her husband adored her hair. Well, it wasn’t going to stick around much longer anyways, she might as well have it go out in style. She didn’t stop to consider how every change disrupted the fragile constitution of her son’s nerves. RJ liked to blame that truck ride a few years back, but the fact was that their son was always emotionally high-strung. She cranked the window down, letting the damp spring air into the stale climate of her Honda. Her son was descending the stone steps of Jordan Middle School, his dark hair matted to his skull. He wore a black t-shirt tucked into his blue jeans, a pair of generic sneakers, and black gloves. It was April, and still he wore gloves. Maggie knew that RJ would blow a fuse seeing it. She was more forgiving of Richie’s picadilloes than her husband, but she couldn’t help but worry that other boys would pick on Richie.

 Richie opened the passenger door, dropped into the seat, his bookbag falling to his feet, and crossed his arms, hiding each gloved hand under the opposite arm. His face was pale, his eyes dark, and his shoulder blades pointed sharply out on each side of his t-shirt. He was slightly undersized for his age, and very undersized for his peers, who were all older after she and RJ had been convinced to bump him up a grade several years earlier before all the behaviors were noticeable and before that damn truck ride. His grades never slipped, but his moods and habits grew extreme over time.

“Well?” She asked. She was still figuring out the liberal parenting techniques she had embraced after seeing how terribly her parents’ ultra-conservative approach had pushed her out the door when she was seventeen. Well, her parents’ style had pushed, and the Led Zeppelin tour of 1977 had lured her away for good. Those two forces combined had meant she’d seen her parents twice in the last fourteen years.

“Well, Richie?” She asked again, when her first attempt didn’t yield a response.

“Rich, I’ve told you, call me Rich,” he mumbled. She ignored the statement and waited. “I was washing my hands.”

“For twenty minutes?”

Unable to watch him stare at the dashboard any longer, Maggie turned the Honda’s key and the engine coughed to life. Pulling away from the school, Richie cranked his window down and then made for the radio dial.

“No,” she slapped his hand away. “We need to talk.”

“I was washing my hands, that’s why I was late to class. We were outside in gym, throwing that stinking germ-infested rubber ball around. I had to wash it off.”

“For twenty minutes, Richie, that’s crazy? Are you smoking?”

“Call me Rich, and Christ, Mom, smoking? Shit.”

“Don’t curse at me,” Maggie could drive with one eye on him and one on the road, it was a skill she’d mastered over the last few years.

“I don’t smoke,” his gloved fingers smashed the radio buttons, and the speakers burst to life, playing her Houses of the Holy tape. The volume was cranked, as it often was when she’d been out driving alone.

They came to a stop sign and to their right was a cemetery, most known for its monument to a Civil War veteran, who had fought for the South despite being from Illinois. Why anyone wanted to honor the man in Jordan was lost on Maggie. She’d volunteered for a group devoted to the removing the monument, but so far, they had garnered little support from the community. People like their monuments and hate change.

“I shouldn’t have called you crazy,” she said. “That was wrong of me.”

“Why? I am crazy, that’s why you send me to Dr. Bitch.”

“Don’t call her that, and no, you are not.”

“Whatever, I washed my hands for twenty minutes and then I told the teacher to get bent when he asked me about it.”

Someone honked behind them, and Maggie flipped her middle finger out the window before pulling over to the shoulder and killing the engine in the middle of a Robert Plant vocal. The guy behind them, driving a big Chevy, kept honking as he passed, and the word ‘bitch’ trailed in the air. She embraced the term, when it came to her driving and her son, she could be a Grade-A Bitch, and she felt no reason to apologize for it.

“So, now you’re suspended?” Her voice came out hoarse.

“Yeah, two weeks.”

Quiet followed with only the traffic resonating in their ears and the lingering smell of fast food assaulting Maggie’s nose. She tried to be a good mom, a good cook, a good housekeeper, but often they ate crap from McDonalds or Hardees in the car as she raced from one cause to another.

“Well, then you’re going to the doctor with me tomorrow?”

“Doctor? For what?”

“For me.”

“You?”

“Yes, honey, your father and I have been putting off saying anything until we knew more, but you’ll know now, I guess.”

“What is it?”

“A lump, honey, on my breast.”

Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 1: Orange Blossom Special (1988)

 

Intro: I have been wanting to incorporate a tie-in between my blog and my Facebook group: Playlist Pandemonium. The group is a place where the members generate a playlist each week based off a theme or prompt. I thought about doing a Thursday ten, featuring ten songs from a single band or artist, but struggled on how to make that a challenge for my writing, which is the purpose of this blog. So, I thought I’d create a serial series inspired by songs. I admit I cheated here a bit, as the piece below is inspired by a NANOWRIMO project I did a couple years ago. I put 50,000 words down in a month, but the overall story sort of floundered and I haven’t found the right angle to fix it. The below is a new take, new writing, coming at the story from a different point of view and new starting point. My hope is to add a new episode every week or so and keep each post at about a thousand words. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to leave your comments below. Dan.

 

Pandemonium Season 1, Episode 1: Orange Blossom Special

https://open.spotify.com/track/28KTisZDzhDBALLSvRf4wv?si=b677a8e2ee1e48c0

“It's the Orange Blossom Special

Bringin' my baby back”

-         --  Orange Blossom Special by Johnny Cash

 

Reckon it was when that Orange Blossom Special sped by his trailer out on Highway 20 just after lunch that Friday in the fall of 1988 that Ricky Dean Glenn felt the itch again. For two years, he’d been straight, maybe not so much like an arrow but thereabouts. He’d done some scrappin’ of old steel and such to get by. The kind of junk straight folks don’t have much use for anymore, but don’t know what the hell to do with. Washing machines. Rolls of barbed wire. Rusty farm implements. He took care of that concern for those folks with their pearly white teeth and yards with freshly cut grass and flowerbeds, the sort of lives that politicians spew on about being the American fairy tale.

Ricky Dean Glenn’s life was no such fairy tale, no God-damn way. He ate crackers with splotches of peanut butter on them for his lunch and had two Marlboros for desert while sitting on his stoop, thinking about how very big the sky always seemed now that he was out of the pen. Almost too damn big. Sometimes his cigarettes would burn down and singe his fingertips when he got to looking at that big old damn sky with its waves of white clouds and that flaming sun. He’d curse, toss the cigarette away, but it wouldn’t be long before the sky entranced him again. Too damn big.

He heard the truck’s engine rumble from miles away before it streaked by in a blur of orange and cream broken only by the blaring reflections of the sun off the windows. Behind the wheel was Joe Elliot’s boy. Ricky didn’t know the boy’s name, just knew he was too damned young to be driving such a cherry automobile. Course the boy’s daddy hadn’t gone to Korea like Ricky Dean Glenn. No, Joe Elliot had foot pains, as Ricky understood it, a symptom he supposed was caused by the streak of yellow down his back. Joe Elliot stayed home, had a mess of kids, this one the youngest, and cleaned up selling seed corn and crop insurance. Joe Elliot was one of those fairy tale folks, which goes to show those folks aren’t all they are cracked up to be.

“Forget about it,” Ricky whispered, puffing on his cigarette. The engine echoed in his ears. The Elliot place was just down the road a spell, over the bridge that spanned the river where Ricky had once swum naked with Pauline Appleton and taken her cherry. He suspected that then, at least, but figuring back, she sure seemed to know what the hell she was doing more than him. Ricky took another drag considering Pauline Appleton’s virginity back in the day, the big damn sky, and that mighty fine hunk of orange metal that had so recently passed his place. He’d look mighty fine behind that wheel.

“If you want it, just take it,” his father’s voice echoed in his ears. Earl Richard Dean had been dead for more years than Ricky could remember, but the bastard’s rough voice still growled from time to time in Ricky’s head. Mostly when Ricky was drinking. Then the bastard was calling him names while beatin’ the shit out of Ricky before moving onto Ricky’s mama. When Ricky wasn’t drinking, he’d hear the old man’s sage advice. Things like, “Don’t take shit from no one,” or “Might as well fuck those with nice things before they fuck you.” Those were the sort of gems he’d get when they would escape to the shack in Wisconsin each fall for two or three days of huntin’ and fishin’. Ricky wondered if that old shack was still standing, be something to see, if it was.

His knees popped as Ricky rose, his cigarette disappearing in the dust under his boot heel. Inside the trailer was a war zone of junk, discarded clothes, and empty cases of beer, among the rabble was his white Stetson, which he’d swiped after getting out of the pen, and his Colt, which he tucked into the waistband of his jeans. Putting on the hat, he peered around the trailer one last time and thought about Pauline Appleton’s breasts glistening in the river water. Maybe that was the best day of his life. She’d been a beauty, one all the rich boys had been chasing, but she chose the bad boy that night. They always did. Well, sometimes they did. He’d gotten it enough, even tied his hitch to a post for a time, but prison had ended that setup. He was all but sixty now, not a boy, and women didn’t think of him as bad anymore, just reckless, dangerous and over the hill.

Well, he wasn’t dead yet, so he wouldn’t say such a damn fool thing as that day being the best. That Orange Blossom Special zoomed through his mind. Mighty fine automobile. He supposed he’d been straight long enough. Time to get right with a few things before it was too late.

“It’s the Orange Blossom Special. Bringin’ my baby back…” He sang. He knew the Johnny Cash catalog by heart.

A semitrailer hauling a load of corn or soybeans whipped past as Ricky Dean Glenn’s boots struck the gravel shoulder of Highway 20. He walked with the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled just above his forearms and his hat low on his eyes. He walked like a man with a destination, one about an hour down the road by foot. He’d cross that bridge and that river, leaving Pauline Appleton swimming naked in his bittersweet memories. He was after his Orange Blossom Special, and one last day on the run.

“I don’t care if I do-die-do-die-do-die-do-die-do-die.”