Writing a Promo

One Hundred and Fifty Million Zombies.

Sixty Million Dogs.

All of them hungry for warm human flesh.

The dead have risen and are killing anyone who gets in their line of sight. The living know what’s caused it—a vicious contagion. But it’s too late to halt the spread. For now, what remains of society are busy shutting down nuclear reactors and securing chemical plants to prevent runaway reactions in both. There’s little time for anything else.

Failed comic book artist Rick Nuttman and his family have joined thousands of other desperate people in trying to find a haven from the madness.

Perhaps refuge can be found in the village of Sparta, led by a rotating Council of citizens, sitting high in the North Carolina mountains and standing as a refuge for the weary and ragged people heading for the hills.

Or maybe there is salvation in The City of Ruth, a community raised from Carolina ashes and run with an iron fist by Preacher Chase who plans to make a godly stand against Satan. They’re armed and ready to retool the world in a proper image--even if it means a holy war against Sparta and any other errant village.

Nate Stockman, tasked with protecting Sparta, holds a secret that may end up tearing it down.

In the low country before the hills, a monster named Danger Man lurks and causes a sea change.

While watching over it all, the mysterious figure of BC, moving his gigantic canine pack westward, into lands where humans think to find safety.

And always, the mindless hordes neither living nor dead, waiting only to destroy.

There will be a reckoning.

THE LIVING END: A Zombie Novel (with Dogs)

By
James Robert Smith

Approximately 97,000 words.

Represented by Robert Fleck

Professional Media Services.

Riding 666 to the Garden

One of the places on our list to visit was Burke's Garden. I don't recommend a trip to the area if you're expecting tons of stuff to keep you busy, as in shopping or lounging about an inn or something like that.

Because there's nothing remotely like that in Burke's Garden.

Part of the incomparable Burke's Garden.

What you have with the place is a 20,000 acre valley that sits at 3,000 feet above sea level. This valley is drained by a single tributary, which prevents the place from being Burke's Sea. The entire valley, save for that one water gap, is surrounded by mountains that tower anywhere from 4,000 feet to almost 5,000 feet above sea level. Burke's Garden itself is very sparsely populated, with only around 250 humans living there. It's an agricultural community with lots of farms and many head of livestock. Parts of the place must be quite ripe in warmer weather. I wouldn't drink the water in Gose Creek (which drains the cattle-heavy expanse).

I took this video standing beside what seemed to have been, at one time, the single elementary school in the valley. It was a school day and empty, so I assume it's closed down, these days. In addition, the community has located a series of garbage dumpsters on the site, so I guess they don't expect the children to return any time soon.

There is only one shop of any type to be found there. It's a quaint general store with some food and beer and a small grill, etc. The lady running it was very sweet. They have a single gas pump. Unleaded regular, I reckon, but I didn't need gas, so I didn't look to see what they had. We bought some firewood there and some chocolate-covered peanuts that totally rocked. I do recommend a stop there--the people who run it were most kind.

There is one paved road leading into the valley. I would suggest that you take that one if you are driving a conventional two-wheel drive auto. We came in from the east on a Forest Service road, and even with my four-wheel drive and high suspension Frontier it was pretty rugged. I guess the budget for Forest Service road repair is rather tight in recent months.

Another reason I wanted to see this remote community was for a single road sign. I'd heard about it and seen one photo of it and I wanted my photo taken standing under it:


I'll be heading back to Burke's Garden in the future. The Applachian Trail skirts the south side of the valley and there's a really isolated wilderness area there called Beartown Wilderness. I'll definitely return. Sooner, hopefully, rather than later.

(South)west(ern) Virginia

We've returned.

Still unpacking. The travel trailer's parked and put away. The critters are happy to see us. I'll post more stuff about the trip later, probably tomorrow.

We had a great time, as usual. I bagged some peaks and saw some waterfalls. We had a very peaceful stay at Stony Fork Recreation Area in the Jefferson National Forest. All in all, it was a great getaway.

Camp Creek Falls, West Virginia.

The Long Goodbye to The Wonderland

I've posted about the Wonderland Hotel before. And as I get ready to head off for another vacation, I felt like putting up a few more photographs of the old Wonderland--a photographic record of the place as it falls into the Earth.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was cobbled together from various undeveloped and developed tracts of land. In several cases, entire communities had to be bought out and moved (Cades Cove and Cataloochee). In Elkmont, close to what is now the border between the Park and the city of Gatlinburg was a group of vacation homes and a hotel called The Wonderland. The Park Service worked out a deal whereby the owners of the cottages could keep using them until such time as the original owners died off. This meant that some of the vacation homes were in use up until the 1990s. You can still see these homes in the Elkmont area of the park. Some of them have collapsed, some are decrepit, but others are in amazingly good shape.

The Wonderland was an old-style wilderness experience hotel. Much like some of the hotels in our western National Parks. It wasn't grand on any level, but it was in a beautiful location and had decent, if rustic, amenities. Built around 1911, it was composed of mainly local materials and was a huge, rambling structure.

Upon learning that the hotel's concession would be terminated, my wife and I decided to rush up to the park to stay a couple of nights before the contract was ended and The Wonderland closed, possibly forever. When we stayed there, the concessionaires were taking a fatalistic attitude toward the lodgings. They provided only the most base of service, so parts of the hotel that had been historically open and operating were shuttered and dark. But the main sitting rooms were in order and the sleeping rooms and shared bathrooms were as I'd imagined them to be.

The beds were huge and soft. We pretty much vanished into the mattress in the room we had rented. Outside our window were hemlocks and poplars and it was strange and wonderful to be staying in a hotel completely surrounded by protected National Parkland. We had a good time at the place, even knowing that it was soon to be closed up, possibly for good.


And now, of course, the Wonderland it almost no more. Much of it collapsed in the past few years, and only about half the old structure is still standing. You can walk up the old staircase from what was, at one time, a spur railroad and is now a park road. Carole and I walked up those steps with our luggage once upon a time.

These days, the old parking lot and yards are filled with young hemlock trees that have been chemically treated to resist the infestation that's sending their species to extinction. You can stand around and look at hearths that once stood in large sitting rooms. One can walk up to the decrepit hotel rooms and look in to see the place slowly going to rot. On one level it's kind of sad. But on the other hand it's very good to see the land reverting to its natural state. All around the park you are aware of what happens to land that is unprotected and open to the exploitation that humans call "progress". It isn't progress at all, really, to see the trees sawn down and the earth heaved up, hills cut down to fill streambeds, buildings slapped up, and native flora and fauna trampled underfoot.

So I don't really mourn the slow destruction by neglect of The Wonderland.


Let the moisture and insects and bacteria do their work.


Let gravity pull down the weakening timbers.


Let birds raise their generations in its rubble and angles.

Let the wasps and hornets anchor their homes along the old hotel as we say our last, long goodbyes.


Our own goodbye for about a week--off we go with our Casita to the mountains of southwestern Virginia.

Phil Ochs

Courage.

Guts.

Intelligence.

Insight.

Phil Ochs.

A Mensch.

"It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win."--Phil Ochs.



"In every political community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times. Ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally."--Phil Ochs.



"Leave the old and dying America and use your creative energies to help form a new America, which would be de-militarized, more humanistic, where the police are less hostile and closer to the community, where the wealthy are not given unleashed power for the exploitation of the people. And, mostly because it's now a matter of life and death, reassert an ecological balance with the environment, which means the people in the oil companies and the car companies and the space industry and all the other industries will have to be brought into account, so that there will be a new definition of government which has to be closer to the people and less close to special interests which are far more harmful than any revolutionaries."--Phil Ochs.





Phil Ochs was a great man. I didn't really know much about him until I was about 50 years old. The guy had more courage than most. His lyrics were amazing and are still as powerful today as they were when he wrote them.

Like so many creative folk with a revolutionary mindset, he flamed out early and led a tragic life. I'd only barely heard of him when I was a kid--I assume because I'd listened to some of his music when I was in grade school. But I do recall when he died. My mom said something like, "Well, they finally got him."

I have to agree, of course. He may have technically done the deed himself, but what she said was true. They finally got him.

The world generally can't tolerate guys like Phil Ochs. Societies have a tendency to kill off men and women who fight as fiercely as he did. He was a great human, based solely on the work he left behind. I shake my head in wonder whenever I hear his lyrics.

What the Hell is This?

Whenever I'm camping or hiking I always keep an eye out for the little things that one tends to encounter in such places. Nature can be pretty damned strange.

Take, for instance, this leaf that fell out of the live oak over our campsite at Little Talbot Island State Park in northern Florida last month. It fluttered down from the tree one morning and landed on our picnic table. That's our table cloth under it. The leaf was dry and dead, but on the underside of it were four orbs attached to the leaf. What were they? Were they some kind of tumor? Were they the sign of insect infestation? Bug eggs? Cocoons? I have no freaking idea.


I decided not to muck about with them. They could have been full of mold spores, for all I knew. Or I could be killing something by piercing them, and who am I to do something like that just out of curiosity? Life is a bit more important than my curiosity. So I just took a photo to show to folk I know who are far more knowledgeable about such things. I may find out. Or maybe I won't. Time will tell.

And what the hell was this?



I've posted a photo of this character before. We bumped into him (or maybe her--or it) at Rainbow Springs State Park in Florida a few days before we headed over to Little Talbot Island. What is it? Yeah, it's some kind of caterpillar. That much I can figure. But what does it change into? A butterfly? If so, what kind? A moth? The world's a giant mystery of species variation! Every patch of grass a different culture!



Next time yer out in the wilderness or taking a walk in the park or in yer front yard or even down the freaking street--take a moment and look around. You never know what kind of weird biological or botanical shit you'll find.

Kerouac Slept Here

Everywhere I travel in the southeast I encounter old fire towers. These were important structures for decades, used by the parks and various forest services to spot fires by use of triangulation. In the world before satellites and GPS it was the best and most effective way to pinpoint the location of fires.

These days, the Forest Service uses the old eye in the sky. And these tall buildings are mainly being left to decay where they stand. In some cases they've been dismantled, leaving little or no trace that they were ever there. Sometimes when I'm hiking I will encounter the concrete pads that once supported a fire tower. In one case this past year I hiked past a spot where I'd stopped at a fire tower as a teenager not far from the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Now, the fire tower is gone and all that remains are some concrete footings.

Abandoned fire tower in Florida.

In the west, some fire towers are being preserved for historical reasons. Additionally, some fire towers can be rented as overnight lodging. Here in the East, for some reason, every fire tower of which I'm aware is being destroyed through neglect. Almost all of them are shuttered up and locked, and the ones that aren't are targets for vandalism and the general decay. It's pretty sad.

I assume that none are being preserved for the simple reason that the budgets won't allow for it. And there's no serious consideration of upfitting them as overnight lodging here as there is in the West. One reason, I assume, is that the design of eastern fire towers was so much different from those in the Rocky Mountain west. Here, the towers had to be made tall enough to see over the tree-shrouded areas and summits on which they were perched. This required small cabs at the tops of very tall towers of wood, or stone, or metal. Western lookouts could be perched on treeless rocks and bare peaks and stair access was minimal. This makes the eastern towers tougher to sell as an overnight lodging to Forest and Park services frightened of lawsuits.

Desolation Peak Lookout, manned for several months by Jack Kerouac. You can see the difference in construction with eastern lookout towers.

I reckon all of our fire towers in the east will soon be gone. They'll preserve a few of them, I guess, as historical curiosities. Just one more thing that you need to get out and see before they're all dust and rust.

Altered fire tower (turned into lookout platform) on Moore's Knob, North Carolina.

Mountains of Southwestern Virginia

Gettin' ready for another Spring trip!

The Spring Fever's hittin' hard right about now. Time to head for the high country. We're getting the Casita prepared for our next trip. This time we'll be in a part of the mountains of southwestern Virginia where we've never been.

Our Casita in the yard with azaleas in full bloom.

We can't get her packed and out of town fast enough.

This is one of the new places I plan on hitting next week. A moderate hike to the summit of a rocky peak with an old fire tower site that's now used for spotting migrating raptors. We'll do some exploring and hiking in both Virginia and West Virginia.

Mitt Romney, Racist Sack of Shit

Mitt Romney is an evil, racist sack of shit.

How evil and how racist?

When he decided to begin pandering to the RepubliKKKan base (aka racist dogs), to try to prevent Massachusetts from becoming the first state to approve same-sex marriages, what did he do?

He and his fellow racist dog minions pored through the state laws to find something, anything that would help them put a stop to such marriages.

What did they find?

They found a 1913 statute that prevented the state of Massachusetts from recognizing marriages that would be illegal in other states. It sounds fairly straightforward and basically innocent and logical. Unless you think about it.

First of all, look at the year in which it was approved. In those days, the Jim Crow laws of the southern USA were in full bloom and African Americans were placed in the position of having to endure life without human rights. This law, upon only brief reflection, is obviously one that was passed to prevent interracial marriages. It was a purely hateful law passed by a bunch of fucking asshole racists. Yeah, they have racists up North, too. As I like to point out, Yusuf Hawkins wasn't lynched in Alabama, and Howard Beach ain't in Georgia.

Secondly the law was also passed in a hideous and negative reaction to the marriage of the first black heavyweight champion of the world (Jack Johnson) to a white woman:

"The 1913 law grew out of the national backlash over the interracial marriage of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, Rushing said during the debate. At the time, 30 of 48 states banned interracial marriage, and many other states, including Massachusetts, enacted provisions that would keep interracial couples from crossing borders to marry in their jurisdiction. In 1970, when states were urged to repeal the 1913 law (so-called because that was the year it was enacted), legislators in Massachusetts, said Rushing, must not have realized the law was on the books."

So here we have Mitt Romney the cultist hate-monger stooping to using a racist law to stop the harmless union of two human beings. I can only hope that this is pointed out again and again and again and again if this piece of human excrement continues to try to run for the highest office in the land. He and his racist wacko beliefs need to stay within the confines of the insane asylum formed by his ancestral cultist shitbags.

Romney: Sexist, racist asswipe.

Romney's use of a 1913-era pro-racism law proves that he's unfit for not only national office, but any office at all. Maybe they can kiss his ass in Utah. He needs to stay there.

Favorite Backpacking Destination

The Black Mountains of North Carolina.

I took this shot from the foot of the Black Mountains the last time I camped in the area. The rocky peak just to right of center is Potato Hill, a really impressive eastern peak. To the right of that, just out of sight, is Deep Gap where I always camp when I'm backpacking the Black Mountain Crest Trail which runs along the crest of the highest range of peaks in the eastern United States of America.

Me and the Ticks

Just before I went on the hike to Buckeye Knob I was reading the comments on a tree society board that I frequent. They were posting technical information about how DEET doesn't really stop ticks and that for ticks you need to use something called Permethrin which is highly toxic (even more toxic than DEET) and should only be put (sparingly) on clothing.

I always take DEET with me when I go into the woods. It's one of the items in my pack that's with me wherever I go. I use it when gnats and biting bugs are getting on my nerves. Since I wasn't being bitten by such critters, I didn't use the stuff.

However, everyone else decided to use DEET when some nagging (but not biting) flies began bothering us, and after I found a tick on each of my legs.

"DEET doesn't do any good for ticks," I told everyone. Hey. I'd read it on the Internet. It must be so. To my credit, I'd also read something similar in print, so I felt I was standing on something like solid information. To their credit, everyone else figured I was full of shit and used the DEET.

By the end of the hike, I'd pulled no less than eight ticks off of my body. Everywhere from my knee to my right butt cheek.

All of the folk who used DEET on the hike made it out of the woods without a single tick.

I, the lone hiker who failed to use DEET, was food for the little bloodsucking assholes. I learnt my lesson.

Afterwards, I read the fine print on what people were saying about the DEET. In a nutshell, what they (and even the companies that produce the stuff) say is that DEET doesn't "kill" ticks. However, it does a decent job of "repelling" them. Fuck me for a moron.

One thing that had me unconcerned as we tackled this peak is that, in all of my 30+ years of hiking in the southern Applachians, I had only ever gotten one single tick on me, and that was on Pinnacle Mountain in South Carolina. Before that, none. Before Buckeye Knob, one. The day of Buckeye Knob, eight.

You'll pardon me if I conclude that global warming has been an influence on this. Scientists have been telling us for some time to expect the spread and increase of certain vermin into places where they had never (or sparsely) lived. Seems like the real deal to me.

My friend Jack Thyen took this shot of me near the summit of Hickory Knob. We were all busy taking photographs at one of the few breaks in the forest cover where one could find a long range view.

Here I was on the summit, exhausted, feeling every ounce of the 20+ pounds I'd gained since 2007. I'm really out of shape and hope to get back into my regular hiking condition as I hit the trails more often this summer. I suspect, also, that this was the spot where the ticks really jumped aboard the Good Ship Bob. (Another Jack Thyen photo.)

As I lay prone on the top of the mountain, this tree was looming over me. I don't know what it was. If you can ID it, let me know. (Click to embiggen to see the bark.)

Another view of the tree and limbs. The tree encroaching in the lefthand side is some type of maple (not sure which species), but that's not the one that concerned us.

Here's a closeup of the newly opened leaves. I assume these will get larger as Spring proceeds. These had just appeared and were very fresh. Many of the trees on the ridges were still bare.

Here's another one. If you know what this is, let me know. We see it often in the Southern Appalachians, but none of us know what it is.

Visit Vermont!

A couple of days ago my wife told me that a couple of our acquaintances were boycotting the state of Vermont.

"Why are they doing that?" I asked.

"Because Vermont has approved same-sex marriages."

Jove!

I swear I will never understand the mentality of right-wing assholes. I will admit that, when I was much younger, I was as much a homophobe as the next straight. In those days I was an ignorant bastard. But, no more. Some of my good friends turned out to be gay. Many of the people whose careers and works I'd always admired were gay. These days, like many others, I don't give the first molecular speck of a rat's ass if someone is gay, or not.



It doesn't fucking matter.



It all boils down to hate-mongering and scapegoating. Who's the current mark to be the target of scapegoating? You can't do it to Jews, because they aren't going to play that game anymore. Not after the last one you filthy right wing bastards instigated. You can't do it to black people, because they aren't going to stand for it anymore, either. Not since Dr. King and Malcolm X and a host of other brave men and women gave their lives in defense of their human rights.

So where is the right looking, now?

Oh, they never stop looking. The corporate power are always searching for a victim to use on the ignorant foils who prop them up. They need some group to focus the anger of their asswipe plurality. Their RepubliKKKan running dogs have to have someone to hate. They must have some single target on which to focus their own white-hot loathing that should be aimed at their puppet masters.


Arabs? Too far away.

Mexicans? Well, maybe. They've tagged them with "illegal alien", conveniently forgetting that we stole half the land mass of Mexico and it really belongs to them. (Basically, what they're actually doing is just coming home.) That group might work for the RepubliKKKans, but I sincerely hope not.

Then what are they left with? What group is large enough, but politically powerless enough to target for scapegoating?

The gays.

So the reactionary right go after the homosexuals. The completely harmless. The easily targeted. I mean, everyone seems to hate them. They're the subject of jokes, easily formed into caricatures, and basically peaceful. Sound familiar? It should, to all of us who are packed to the gills with hatred. It looks like Kristallnacht and Jim Crow all over again.

To fucking HELL with the right. You RepubliKKKan assholes can all (in the words of Dick the-prick Cheney) go fuck yourselves. Strangely, many of you seem to be self-hating closeted homosexuals, which adds another layer of mystery and loathing to your whole hate-mongering operation. You Mormon monsters can curl up in your withered kingdom of pernicious hatred and die the death of extinction while you scapegoat your way to oblivion.

Visit Vermont. It's an amazingly beautiful place. Apparently in far more ways than in mere geographical and geological and biological. There's something, obviously, deeper going on in that singular state.

Many of us--a growing and soon to be majority of us--call it justice.





Comic book writer Len Wein (creator of the "new" X-Men) lost his home (and his collection of comics that he's written) in a fire. Everything was a total loss. He's trying to rebuild the comic collection, and there's a movement afoot to donate copies to the gent what wrote 'em. If you think you can help, you can see an updated list HERE. It's not tax deductible or anything, but despite having created much of what we now see on the big screen in the form of the X-MEN and WOLVERINE movies, Mr. Wein and his wife ain't rich. So he needs help regaining a set of the comics he wrote. Help out, if you can. Especially if the things Mr. Wein wrote entertained you when you were a kid (as they did for me).

Chapter Seventeen

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

of the novel-formerly-known-as-BEAUTIFUL BOY
copyright 2009
By
James Robert Smith

Rebecca Tow stirred and rose from bed as soon as the engine from her husband's truck faded down the drive. She threw the sheets from her and sat up, feeling nauseous. Every time she felt sick this way, fear went through her like a mild electric shock. There was no way she was ready to face another pregnancy. Not after the first one had done such a number on her body. Of course the nausea was now nothing but the fear itself, but it still left her cold, all the same.

She looked down at her legs. Those were still good. Men still stared at her legs when it was warm enough to wear shorts or a dress. But she doubted that she'd ever get that pot to leave her stomach. It made her sick to look at the sagging bulge. Not even the exercises from that video she'd bought had helped her. She'd done sit-ups and gut crunches until she'd almost driven her husband crazy. She could feel the muscles building up under her skin, but damned if the post-pregnancy bulge had subsided a fraction of a goddamned inch.

The stench from the dirty diapers hit her when she sighed. So the first thing she did was start hauling the pails of them out of the bedroom where she carefully dumped the foul loads into a big black plastic bag in the kitchen. She needed to get it out of the house, and she didn't feel like getting dressed to do it. If she went back to the bedroom to retrieve her robe, she'd likely wake the baby. So far, Gowdy had not awakened, and she wanted to keep him asleep as long as possible. For once he did stir, her waking hours would not be pleasant. It would be one long day catering to that constantly howling, needy little bastard.


God, how she hated him.

Every day she asked herself why she'd not only gotten pregnant, but had carried the child to term. She could have kept the pregnancy to herself and gone to one of the free clinics a county or two away and gotten rid of it while there'd still been time. But, no--she'd gone through with it. The whole experience had been horrifying for her. The morning sickness had ravaged her stomach for months. The water retention had warped her legs. And despite the daily bouts of vomiting, she'd gained forty pounds during those horrid nine months. Opening the door, she sobbed, dragging the heavy black bag across the threshold and onto the rickety deck where once she and Philip had grilled steaks and hamburgers and hot dogs.

No more steaks, now. These days, it was peanut butter sandwiches and fried bologna. The thought of that, and the creeping stench of the shitty diapers made her gag.

Carefully, Becca pulled the bag across the deck, hoping that it wouldn't snag on a nail or a splinter. She'd pull, then rest. Pull, rest. After a while, she had the mass across the deck and maneuvered it down the six stairs to the ground that was once grass, but now red dirt and gravel. This was the hard part. She hadn't even put on slippers or shoes, so she was standing out there in the morning air, all but naked, trying to tug the eighty-pound sack of disposable diapers and baby shit to the edge of the woods.


All because, she reminded herself, they'd stopped paying for garbage pickup and so the edge of the forest was where they'd chosen to toss the trash. Just beyond a line of anemic pines the forest floor was lined with the garbage of the past six months of their lives. There were two broken wooden chairs, yellow paint peeling in long acrylic strips; a hundred plastic sacks of varying sizes and color failing to rot in the sun; rusting bits of truck parts removed and discarded; the air conditioner that had once been in the kitchen window and which had coughed its last before the end of summer. And a million other pieces of crap they'd tossed behind the evergreen screen of trees.


Pulling on the bag once last time, trying to get it over a patch of dead branches, Rebecca strained, doing her best to get the stinking bulk out of sight. She grunted and all but screamed. A thick oak stick seemed to reach up and snag the black plastic skin, tearing it. The bag went over, into the bit of forest, but not before disgorging a portion of its contents across her right leg and ankle. Looking down, she saw that her foot was all but coated in a cold, oozing, brown paint of baby shit.


There stood Rebecca Tow, once Rebecca Romney, once a girl in the running for Homecoming Queen (but too poor to be seriously considered), once the favorite of many of her teachers (but too poor to be encouraged as college material), once with dreams (but too poor to ever take them seriously). Now she was angry, cold, tired, beaten, her foot covered in human excrement as she stood almost naked in the pocked and diseased yard of the decrepit mobile home that she shared with a roving husband, an unwanted baby son, and a goddamned worthless hound dog.

She stared at the creeping shit on her foot. She raised her face to the blue sky. And she screamed.

All but howling, she tried to run back to the trailer, but her bare feet kept her from moving as fast as she'd have liked. She kept thinking that, to cap off the event, the rural letter carrier would choose now to pull into their drive to drop off the mail in the red box that was hanging almost loose on its rotting post beside their place. There she'd be, in her dirty skivvies, stinking of crap, her hair a wiry mess in the dry air, her gut hanging out horribly.

But she was spared that, at least.

At the deck she paused just long enough to survey the filth on her leg and foot, deciding that she could hop to the bathroom without getting any of it on the floor. And it was just then that she noticed Purdy, Daryl's damned bird dog. The last of the six they'd once owned. Daryl had thought that he would breed high quality bird dogs and sell them for a profit. But they'd never sold a single pup and had been lucky to be able to give away the ones that had been born. This was the only one remaining. Daryl insisted on keeping her-the best of the lot, he'd said. He all but loved the dog. And so Rebecca hated it.

"Fuck you," she spat at the dog who had crept out from its pen under the deck to investigate the possibility of a filled food dish. No such luck.

Becca bounded up the stairs, narrowly missing a couple of rusty nails jutting out of the gray and weathered steps, pulled the door open with a curse, and went to one foot and hopped inside. There was no possible way that she'd be able to get to their single bathroom without making noise, so she didn't even attempt to make the maneuver quietly. Disgusted with herself and her situation, she hopped one-legged to the bathroom, her one hundred and twenty-five pounds shaking the trailer from aft to port. Dishes rattled on the counter. The windows shook in their loose frames. Chairs bounced on the floor of the dining nook.

Gowdy awakened with a howl.


"Good goddamn," she muttered. She ignored the crying child, though, and hopped like a wounded moron into the bathroom and sat on the side of the tub. Daryl had told her about the floor, so she was careful not to bounce on the soft spot in front of the sink. Settling down, she turned on the spigot and waited for the water to get hot. Daryl had left one of his bars of Lava soap on the side of the tub, and she used that to scrub viciously at the mess on her leg and foot.

Gowdy was getting cranked up, now, and his cries were almost sharp enough to cut eardrums.

The warm water felt great on her leg, so she put the clean one in beside the dirty one and let the warmth flow over it, too. The yellow-brown nastiness came slickly off of her and she let it flow down the drain. "To Hell with it," she muttered, and peeled off her underwear and stopped the tub to let it fill.

Gowdy screamed for a tit or a bottle. It didn't matter to him. Rebecca ignored him.
She turned the water from warm to hot and let it fill the tub beside her. She watched it creep silkily up her ankles. She lay back. The water began to flow over her thighs, still taut and firm; it crept up into the dark thatch of her pubic hair. She looked down and saw her potbelly become an island of flesh in the clear water. "Fuck," she whispered. Daryl would cheat on her if she let herself go. She was sure of it. He would be disgusted by her sagging body and go and find a more desirable woman. He would. There was no doubt about it.

Gowdy wailed, creating a sound of outrage that Rebecca could almost reach out and touch.

She closed her eyes, splashed the water over her milk-swollen breasts, into her face, over the top of her head. She leaned back until her face was submerged in the hot water, her knees jutting out into the chill air.


Gowdy's screams reached her, barely dented by the inches of water.

"Okay!" She rose from the tub, grabbed a towel from the rack and began to scrub at her body with it until her skin went from pink to livid. She wrapped it around her head, turban-style, and stalked back to the bedroom, which now only faintly stank of shit. There was a glare of total rage on her own face as her small feet stomped down the narrow, prefab hallway of flimsy wood and vinyl to where her baby waited, yelling for food and for attention.

And then, she stood over the second-hand crib, looking down at the red face of her son as he screamed, his eyes so tightly cranked shut that he was unaware of the presence of his mother. Rebecca stared blankly down at him, her hands curled into semi-fists, into claws. She reached down, her fingers making contact with Gowdy's soft and yielding flesh.

"God, I love you," she whispered into the infant's tiny ear. She buried her nose in his downy dark hair, so obviously the color of his father's thick shocks. She could see that his nose was the same as Daryl's, the chin the same. Only his green eyes were like hers. Rebecca pulled the baby to him and kissed him. He became quiet, and was very calm, very happy as she began to nurse him, her breast warm and sweet in his little, suckling mouth.

"I love you, little Gowdy. Your momma loves you more than anything," she said.

It truth, it was so.

Dogwood In Hemlocks

Dogwood amidst hemlocks.

I know that people get tired of hearing me bemoan the loss of our native hemlock trees. It doesn't seem to bother the average person to see two species of once-dominant trees go extinct, but it galls me beyond description.



As I was at the end of the hike to Buckeye Knob, and we were once more at the trailhead, I looked back to see this brilliant splash of white standing between several apparently healthy hemlock trees. The reason these hemlocks are still alive and thriving is that they were treated with an insecticide, probably Merit, but perhaps Safari. And so they're still putting out new shoots and are green and healthy.

Chapter Sixteen

I've almost completed my newest novel. Just a couple dozen pages left, I reckon.

In celebration of getting so close to the end, I'm going to post a couple of chapters of the book here at the blog. One today and one tomorrow.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Of the Novel-Formerly-Known-As-BEAUTIFUL BOY

Copyright 2009 by

James Robert Smith

Daryl Tow was the last head of his line. The families who were at their genetic end in Daryl and son had come to North America via colonial ships filled with debtors in the mid-1700s. In various ways the differing branches of the Tow family had made its way from the low country of South Carolina to the highlands of Appalachian Georgia. In the more than three hundred years since the desperate European Tows had set foot in the New World there had been quite a number of them who'd ended up in prisons, toiling away in mills, digging in the dirt in various farms as they crept their ways up from the swamps and into the rocky ridges father west and north of where they'd landed. And there had been a few of them who'd done well, who had made plenty of money, had owned small factories, become prosperous merchants, gone to schools of higher learning, and some who had even held important positions in national office.

But Daryl Tow knew none of these things. All he knew was that he worked on the line at the Tryon chicken plant slicing feet off of dead poultry and sometimes laboring on the table where he sorted the edible innards from the stuff that would end up as cat food or fertilizer. He'd lost most of two fingers of his left hand to various blades and the first knuckle of his right pinky finger to a pair of stainless steel scissors. He was only twenty-five years old, looked forty, but still held on to some of what had been very handsome features in his youth.

Of the family history of which he was aware, Tow knew who his parents were and that they had both been born and raised in the same county where he currently resided with his wife Rebecca and their newborn son, Alex Gowdy Tow. Daryl could read well enough to understand simple directions and could write well enough to sign his name, but he was totally ignorant of the origins of his family, and of why they'd been forced out of Europe so long ago to find its seed composed by his day of himself and a six-months old infant.

Indeed, the Tow Family's journey had been a long way and a very long time pretty much for nothing.

In the mornings when he'd rise for the short drive to the chicken plant, he would look at his wife, sneer at the stench of shitty diapers in pails around the bedroom, take a quick look at his new boy, then go the bathroom to wash and shave. His hair was very thick and very brown, and one of the few pleasures he'd ever had in life was when various girls and women would run their fingers through it and tell him how nice and thick it was, and how good looking he was. One time a man had done that and said the same thing, but Daryl didn't like to think about that one too much; he'd been quite desperate then.

At the bathroom sink he scowled at the peeling panels of the cheap wallboard and wished that he could afford to move out of the singlewide. The floor was a little soft under his feet there and he knew that sooner or later it would either give way or he'd have to crawl under the trailer and shore it up before then. He was figuring on the floor caving before he did the job. Time would tell.

After a cursory examination of the bathroom, he looked into his blue-green eyes and took stock of his very thin, very pale features. Lips all but invisible. When he'd been in the tenth grade, shortly before he'd reached his sixteenth birthday and legal freedom from that total waste of time, another student--a smart ass college-bound jerk--had said that his face looked like "a blank". When he'd merely stared at the rich kid who'd uttered the words, the fellow had continued, "like a penny that wasn't quite stamped hard enough". The fight had been brief and he'd been suspended for a week, but he hadn't minded. It had been fun to punch the rich kid's face.

"Thar," he said to himself, recalling the incident. "Now yore face looks like a pussy on tha rag."

The other boy's comments had made no sense to him then. But now he wondered about it, from time to time. Girls had often told him that he reminded him of this fellow or that guy or some movie star. But it was never the same man they mentioned. Every time he'd been told that he looked like someone else--someone different than the time before, and it was that way with every single girl or woman who'd run her fingers through his hair or tugged on his belt or scratched his back in the throes of sex.

"Goddamn it," he said. Flinching, he realized that he'd uttered the words aloud, almost waking his wife and, probably, the boy, too. He wanted to do neither of those things. When his wife was awake she was generally arguing with him, and when Gowdy was awake he was almost always crying. He didn't want to deal with either of those things and just needed to get himself shaved, his teeth brushed, his clothes on, and his ass out the door. The job was a nasty one, and he often wondered what it would be like to work in a Wal-Mart or at the Western Auto downtown. But that was about as far as his curiosity took him, and he was generally happy to be out of the trailer and into the guts of the plant before his family could stir.

There was always a cup of coffee to be had at Whitaker's and maybe a microwave biscuit in the freezer there. One with cheese and sausage sounded like a good idea. In fact, it sounded so good that he did precisely that, and soon was standing in front of Whitaker's microwave oven heating up just such a tasty morsel while he sipped on the good black coffee the merchant always had ready and hot on a workday morning.

"Hey, Daryl." The voice came from the front of the store, from behind the counter. Tow recognized the voice, but turned in that direction to greet the speaker.

"Hey Mr. Whitaker," he said, and waved. The microwave pinged lightly to announce that the biscuit and its contents were warm and ready to be consumed. Tow reached into the machine and drew out the food, and walked to the counter.

"Headed in to work early?" Whitaker asked him.

"Yes sir," Tow said. "I figured I'd stop here to get some breakfast first and then drive on in."

Ben smiled at the youth. He'd seen him grow up in poverty, had watched the blush of physical beauty fade on the boy as Life hammered it down. He'd always taken an interest in the Tows for the simple reason that they were cousins of the Brauns. On Martin's side, somehow. But now Daryl's parents were both gone--killed off by bad hearts and clogged arteries, from what he'd heard. And here was young Daryl headed down the same path. He felt sorry for the guy, but short of adopting him, there wasn't much he'd ever been able to do to help. Even Martin hadn't been able to help out the family too much, other than lending them small amounts of money from time to time. It was a sad situation.

"How's your wife and son? Gowdy, right? His name is Gowdy?"

"Yessir, Mr. Whitaker. They're both doin' fine. Gowdy's doin' great. He's probably kickin' up a fuss right now for some breakfast himself."

"Rebecca back at work?"

Tow's face turned, as if he'd taken a sip of spoiled milk; the expression told Ben everything. "Naw. She ain't. She says she just wants to stay at home and take care of Gowdy."

"Well, that's probably best," Whitaker said. "How are things at the plant?" He was eager to change the subject and take Daryl's mind off of the singlewide and the troubles that were obviously contained in those paper and aluminum walls.

"Same old stuff. You know. Just chickens is all. Chickens and chicken guts. Every day's the same." The stench of that place was somehow suddenly in his sinuses and his face showed that, too.

Ben figured that there wasn't much he could talk about that could possibly cheer the young man up, but he spoke too soon, grasping for straws. "What about hunting? Don't you go hunting with Billy Sothern sometimes?" Inwardly, he winced, and tried to keep the emotion from showing on his face. The last thing Daryl likely needed just now was interaction with Sothern, who was obviously quite disturbed.

"Naw, I ain't seen Billy for a week or two. But now that you mention it I might hook up with him and go shootin'. Maybe bag some squirrel or a raccoon or two. I ain't had any squirrel in a while. My mom sure could cook up some squirrel and rice with pepper." He smacked his lips. "Damn, I think I will call up ol' Billy and see what he's doin' on Saturday."

And it was for this reason, over this small talk, that the idea of going hunting with Billy Sothern stuck in Daryl's mind all the rest of the morning, and into the afternoon, and which dogged him enough on the drive home. The first thing he did after he'd stepped through the front door of the chicken plant was go to the phone, the one in the little dining hall, so that he could dial Sothern's number.

That was how it started.