Side Trail
From satire to science fiction.
I hope you enjoy your ride down the Side Trail.
Cul
by Bill Miller
Copyright 2011
Synopsis: After energy went away, city boundaries became defined by streets and Culs. No one dared venture far beyond the end of the block. If they did, no telling what they might encounter. This is the strange tale of one such Cul.
The first thing that strikes you, the very first thing, is the smell, the awful stench. It hangs around the end of the street, over beyond the Whitehead's place by the only maple tree we've got left. Lurking. Then wham. It's got you. In your clothes, your hair, your ears, your pockets. It grabs.
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29 palms
Maureen Gilmer
He wanted a beer but it was too early in the morning. He always craved it after a night lying awake in the silence that was too much like the hush that preceded a shit storm of body parts and blood mist. In the villages even the chickens ceased to cackle, people ducked inside their homes and the stray dogs huddled in doorways. He had a sixth sense about it, and silence just made him nervous as hell. He'd barely slept at all after returning from Iraq, so Warren was real punchy and reacted to even the smallest surprise as if it was a life or death event.
The black bands reminded him every day. He'd tattooed them on his arm to remember the ones he'd lost. An IED threw him off the top of the Hummer to land flat on his back in a dune. The rest of his unit were inside the vehicle.
Winds often blew in the desert around the 29 Palms Marine Base and they brought voices whispering as the curtains fluttered like ghosts above his bed. He could hear each one of them whimpering of pain and shock, then louder cries weaving in and out of the dry gusts as sand spattered the walls like buckshot.
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Padre Antonio’s Daughter
Maureen Gilmer
Word came by a Chumash runner in the early dawn that a ship had wrecked on the coast. Padre Antonio knew it was one of those from Boston that worked their way up the bays trading silver dollars for dry hides stripped from the wild cattle that ran wild throughout Alta California. Antonio knew the cove was not easy to navigate under ordinary circumstances, but on this moonless night at high tide, normally visible pinnacles of rock disappeared into the surf.
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Red Ghost
Joe Mogel
Miles and miles of red sand, Joshua trees and distant canyon walls encountered their eyes. The jeep rumbled along the mesa-encircled highway. Asphalt hummed beneath the car.
“Dude, I’m getting hungry. Are there any sandwiches left?” Brian asked. He was a shaggy haired twenty something with a California accent and a sunburn, sitting shotgun. His tee shirt, like his three traveling companions, bore the Greek letters Rho Delta Chi.
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Fourth of July Homecoming
Tom Sheehan
The old mill had given off odd sounds since the day it closed down. Now it gave off a sense of passage.
All the way back to the last Fourth of July the boys had saved a cache of fireworks, the three pals, Snag and Chris and Charlie B, all twelve years old within three days of each other. "Pals to the end," they had said, squirreling away the fireworks in Snag's Aunt Lil's barn leaning away from one century and into another. And many times those same hidden articles promised to smoke and explode from their secret hideaway, the boys' want for noise and excitement so strong at times, at times like hunger tantrums. But they had saved them for a special occasion. "Promise made is promise kept," Snag had said on Veterans' Day, his voice hard as wire, though the tantrum pummelled alive in his gut.
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THE BLACKOUT AT THE NOT SO OK CORRAL
John Duncklee
Downtown Tombstone was unusually quiet. A few sounds from pianos were faint at best as Wyatt Earp and his two brothers, Virgil and Warren, accompanied by the infamous dentist, “Doc” Holiday walked four abreast down the middle of Fremont Street, not for the Not So OK Corral, but to an empty lot where the Clantons and McLowerys waited for the showdown that would become the most famous event in not only Arizona history, but in the entire West.
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THE EVOLUTION OF PICKUP TRUCKS
John Duncklee
I learned how to drive a motorized vehicle in an old International pickup truck that one old cowboy on the ranch referred to as a “binder”. A binder is a now an obsolete farm machine that makes its way pulled by a team of horses or mules through a field of grain. This resulting marvel from some engineer’s acute imagination cuts a swath of standing wheat, oats or barley and guides it all into the bowels of the machine where it is skillfully tied into bundles with binder twine and tossed out on the ground behind. The bundles are then shocked by hand and left to cure in the field until threshing time. But, that’s another story. I am talking about pick up trucks but I couldn’t resist describing a grain binder because there are few people around these days who have a clue about binders. Grain is now harvested by those monster combines that zip through the grain fields and vomit the kernels of grain into large truck beds. The old cowboy called my old International pickup truck a binder because International Harvester made binders.
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Have You Read the Cowboy Book Monte Walsh by Jack Schaefer
Tom Sheehan
Have you read Monte Walsh, a book by Jack Schaefer?
Friend Frank Welton did, by the fireside and camp light,
in the Tumble Inn Diner amid coffee and egg sandwiches
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Silent Retrieval
Tom Sheehan
The day had a head start on young Liam Craddock, he could feel it, and all that it promised. Across the years, on the slimmest sheet of air, piggybacking a whole man’s aura on that fleet thinness, he caught the sense of tobacco chaw or toby, mule leather’s hot field abrasion, gunpowder’s trenchant residue, men at confusion. If it wasn’t a battlefield in essence, or scarred battle ranks, he did not know what else it could be. And it carried the burning embers of memory.
The yellowed pages of a hand-written Civil War journal had fallen open at Liam’s feet, almost 146 years since the first shot was fired in that war. The calligraphy grabbed at him first, faded in areas and yet sweeping with an old-line flourish making him wonder about the tone and meter of the language, sensing an initial presence of old-fashioned pompousness or posed dignity. Practically nudging it aside at its birth, he quickly discarded this hastily formed opinion. With deep interest pushing at him, coming from an unnamed and limitless source, he had been scrounging in the attic of the old farm house in Bow, New Hampshire, a long way from battle sites near Richmond in Virginia, Baker’s Creek in Mississippi or Shiloh or Spring Hill in Tennessee.
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The Hermit of Breakheart Woods
Tom Sheehan
Over millions of years ago Breakheart Woods, between Saugus and Wakefield in Massachusetts, had been bookmarked by boulders and blow-offs and earthly cataclysm, and to this day, somewhere in its innards from those first struggles of granite and earth fire, from violent fractures and upheavals to be known again only at the end of it all, was a cave, a cave as dark as a heart, a cave that once, I believed, pulsed with a heart. Now we were searching for that cave, in earnest.
Nobody I knew growing up had ever seen or visited the cave, but I knew it was there; I’d been told. The old man of the benches told me, the reclusive reader told me, this late and distant friend told me. Once he had said, as we sat on a Breakheart bench under the sun, books swapping owners, time spilling its nearly empty cup for us, that we were in a syzygy with his home, his place of rest, the word syzygy perhaps salvaged from his reading. He twisted his stiff neck, eyes dark as hidden sin or pain, it seemed, as they rolled across my face, the breeze twisting his hair into a small errant banner. Over one slightly muscled shoulder he had looked with what appeared to be unerring accuracy into the depths of Breakheart Woods. I had no idea how far into the woods he looked, how far knowledge and familiarity took him, but I felt the astronomer’s true line of that course; he and I and the cave were fatefully cast in a spatial line of supposed sight. He knew and I didn’t, not as yet, that I was part of that syzygy.
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Sci-Fi
The World Within
Andrew Stuchlik
All that follows is what I can hopefully depict as an accurate description of a story as told by a very good friend of mine. Though, it may be taken as a work of fiction, I hope that it will be infinitely more than what is prefaced. For this story was taken from the remnants of a diary of someone far more ambitious than I. But I hope that one day, not too far from now, this will not be so.
Maybe, ambitious is such a poor choice of words for a man such as he. He was destined- if you would so permit me to say as much- for these things. He was always keen to these sort of things, but for me to say that it was meant to be, would be far too foreboding, and at the same time, much too underestimating for me to speak it in the same breath.
He was a man, these were the things that he’s seen, and these were the feelings that he felt. That is all that I really know for sure, and if nothing else is taken from this- other than he has felt a life fulfilled- that is surely enough. All that I know now, for sure, are that these are the notes that were left to me.
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The Harem
John Duncklee
On a rather cool evening in November one of the most famous western writers of all time stepped out from the airport terminal building and into the limousine furnished by the Heber City Writers of the West to bring him to their annual convention. He arrived by invitation to be the keynote speaker to the hordes of writers and wannabe writers attending the annual event for its second anniversary. Along with his luggage containing all his needs for the weekend, he carried another valise full of brand spankin' new copies of his latest book. The convention committee had made a generous offer to reimburse him for his time and effort to be their keynote speaker, but he was not about to overlook the opportunity to sell as many books as possible during the weekend event. Arriving at the convention hotel, he saw attendees lining the entrance, smiling broadly with awe and adoration at his presence. Most of these onlookers carried clip boards and pens in order to capture every word the famous western writer spoke during his stay in Heber City.
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The 2nd Battle Of Cibeque Creek
John Duncklee
Roberto and Julio rode their Sicilian burros into Cibeque Creek to cool the burros’ hooves. It was only five more miles to the Apache camp, where they hoped to engage the Indians in one last battle. This battle would hopefully prove that two Italian mercenaries could do the job better than the U.S. Cavalry in time of war or peace whatever the case might be. It was late in the year and the two warriors from Rome figured the Apache would be out harvesting piñon nuts and preparing for winter that was coming soon in the land of the setting sun where deer and antelope go to Florida for the winter.
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Boredom, Love Birds, and , Whatever happened to the Aztecs?
By Mike Massey
Some occupations carry with them the likelihood of given bouts of boredom. That
being said, I spent a couple years driving big trucks for a living, and as I have been known to experience boredom, on occasion, perhaps as a general condition; one such episode stands out in my mind.
I was transporting a load of super-sonic-crotch-rockets, a.k.a., Thoroughbred race horses, out of New Orleans’ Fairgrounds Park, destined for Chicago’s Arlington Park for the start of their racing season. The carrier I drove for was known for their very shiny, chromed-up rigs, as well as us, nothing-but-the-best, highly-knowledgeable-horseman drivers. It was a real classy outfit, and as such prompted other truck jockeys to request information via the C.B. radio as to the purpose of our mission, and “What the hell are you haulin’ there driver?”, type questions.
Now, after about the eleventh, or ninth time such inquiries were leveled at me, I tended to, as I alluded to earlier, become somewhat less inclined to repeat the same response over and over again every couple of miles,
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Puppy Soup!
Kent Hanawalt
I had again been asked to take a temporary position as administrator of another nursing home this time on the Crow reservation - and of course my Australian Shepard, Max, went along.
As I was leaving the Care Center for the day - and as usual - Max beat me to the door. As I was walking toward the door to catch up with him, one of the residents called me over.
“Make good stew,” said Doreen, pointing at my dog.
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Town without Butter
Tom Sheehan
It happened in the town that had no butter, a town in the foothills of the Rockies where little popcorn was sold and nearly every person was thin. Most people living there liked to run, out on the flats or on the slow inclines. On a snappy dawn some of them ran marathon distances without breaking a sweat. If butter was in town, the butter packers brought it, illegally.
Pearl Trimm came into the square from her morning run, five miles out and back, and saw three men standing beside the bank looking suspicious. It wasn’t that they were fat or just overweight, but they looked like unhappy bankers. Pearl had an idea of what they were up to, conspiring some way to repeal the butter law or trying to skirt it: butter was not allowed across the town border. The three men, a bit hefty, were in charge of the three banks in town.
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OFF THE TRAIL
A Politically Correct Western Story
John Duncklee
Ezekial Fairday, foreperson of the Slash Exuberant Y Ranch, walked casually into the housing facility down by the structure built for retaining animals. The bovine persons were sitting around the table playing bridge. They looked up as Ezekial came through the door." Well, people," he said. "Tomorrow we start the autumnal gathering. We must arise earlier than usual in order to accomplish as much as possible. There is much to do because I have observed that we have a lot of young bovine to place the Slash Exuberant Y mark of ownership on."
One of the bovine people, dropped his cards on the table. "I am going to retire now, in order to be able to arise before the sun."
The others followed suit, and Ezekial left for the foreperson's dwelling.
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Swan River Daisy
Tom Sheehan
Chester McNaughton Connaughton, aptly named for both sides of the family, landowner in the new world, squeezer of pennies and nickels at the very corpulence of coin, embarrassed at times by his own good fortune where his roots had once been controlled and ordained by potatoes and turnips or the lack thereof, gazed over the latest acquisition of a two-acre parcel abutting his prime abode and wondered how he could best utilize it. Mere coinage, he had early assessed, would apply the jimmy bar under Carlton Smithers and separate him from the land in their town of Saxon. Carlton was old, alone, susceptible. It would be a piece of cake. It was, subsequently and as he had forecast, a swift steal, and papers and proper process moved the property under the shield of his name.
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LETTER TO A WRITER
John Duncklee
Behind the light in your eyes I saw the anxiety and urge to spill forth your deepness and ideas. I saw that well-known fear as well. Fear that diverts and stifles. Fear that turns creative instinct into nervous procrastination that pushes your mind to wander through anything but molding words together.
I know it well, dear friend;
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BROKEBACK FOOTHILL
John Duncklee
Historians, writers of the West and Earpophyles are dashing about in various states of quandary, amazement, and downright denial. It is all about a bundle of love letters found in an old, time hardened leather saddle bag, discovered in one of the myriad mine shafts in Tombstone, The Town Too Tough To Die. The question now posed is Was Tombstone really tough?
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THE LONER
John Duncklee
A loner she was, always in her own piece of country, never with the rest.
Went to water at night, she and her calves; every calf she birthed a bull.
I would have liked a heifer to carry on her genes, but gentle, easy to work,
not like her mother.
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PIG BI'NESS
John Duncklee
The classified ad announced "'weaner' pigs for sale". A "weaner", in pig circles, is a youngster pig recently weaned from its mother. I called the phone number for directions with hope I could purchase a pig or two to use the bountiful milk from "Pamela", my Alpine goat. My wife, at that time, had disdainfully announced at the dinner table, "This milk tastes like goat!" After that the three children refused to touch the milk they had been enjoying for a month. A "weaner" pig or two might provide a solution for this surplus.
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Bootless in Arizona
Tom Sheehan
The troop train stopped for a fifteen minute layover in Winslow, Arizona. It was March of 1952 and they were returning from Korea, riding the train the right way … back across the mountains and fields of America. The train commander said they could hang around outside but not to wander off and everybody had to be shod going to the dining car for the next five or six days. All of them wore brogans, weighing about three pounds a piece, buckles included, the best boot in the world, but too heavy for after-combat aboard a lazy troop train heading home.
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The Invisible Assassin
S. M. Harding
The smell of old grease hit me as I stepped into the aluminum-skinned relic. The screen door slammed behind me and I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust from the bright sunlight outside. I scanned the place quickly. Two old guys in ball caps and jeans in a back booth, hunched over coffee mugs. Long counter with stools for midgets, empty except for a grey-haired woman on the third from the left. Grill man behind the order window, sweat staining his white T-shirt.
So where was my contact?
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Doggonit!
Leslie Johnson
It was about eight in the morning, I had taken a shower and discovered when I peered out the curtain, there were no towels. There were some in the dryer, but nobody was home to fetch me one, and the laundry area was two rooms over and right by the back door, which was open for the breeze.
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Blue Glacier Beer
Tom Sheehan
And so it had come to this… nothing would ever take him from his steely promise to extract, once and for all, total redemption from his old pal and teammate, Geg Lumbada, payment of the highest order, Amontillado on the instant air. So be it.
When Danton Fuller took his first taste of Blue Glacier Beer he experienced, that very night, the first of his memorable dreams. It did not take him long to discover the beer was the instigator of his wild dream of comeuppance. This was a brew he could always count on for diversion. The quality taste grabbed him with an old-world power, bringing back memories of beer in a crock his father had kept in a back hall, “for visitors,” as the old gent had said. To himself he said, “It has deep character.” To begin with, he acknowledged, the dread amber was a knockout color in a tall glass, the words eye shattering, staying on his tongue. The sun jumped through Blue Glacier Beer at crazy angles, made assumptions of deeper prisms and geometric shapes, sometimes loosed curves in the straightest world. Did he find things he was not initially looking for, or did they find him? He was not sure. Yet it was like a collar had been snapped about his neck, as if all had been ordained. And in all of it, Greg Lumbada came second to none in ceremonial matters. Life had deemed revenge appropriate, though it need be covert and consume years of planning.
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Cabesa de Muerte
Leslie Johnson
In the part of the country I’m from, they don’t like bald faced horses, especially ones with a blue eye, or two. They call them Cabesa de Muertes, or “Deaths Heads”, and they are bad luck and bad news. No vaquero or his American counter part will pick one in a remuda, no matter how trained it is supposed to be, and to do so is to court sure disaster. No wrangler kept such a horse around, and the wise ranch owner didn’t insist on it. If he or she did, it would always be the horse they got, and nobody wanted to ride with them. Just superstition, but it was a firmly grounded as any other, such as throwing a hat on a bed, or breaking a mirror. It was just better not to do such things, that was all.
My Yankee husband wasn’t aware of such wisdom as this...
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A Rattlesnake Hat Band
Leslie Johnson
The whole time we’d been riding, Mac had done nothing but whine about getting a rattlesnake hat band. If he could get one of those bad boys, he’d be punchy for sure, and people would start taking him seriously about being a cowboy.
“I’m not sure a hat band is what makes a cowboy.” I mused, letting Siego step over the log the shorter Quarter horses had hopped over. “Maybe you shouldn’t wear Doc Martin’s and a surfer shirt, if you think clothes make a difference.”
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Hotshot
Leslie Johnson
The rage around gaited horse shows was mule racing, and it was a serious sport to those involved. A mule can run, despite rumors to the contrary, but being a sensible creature they don’t bother with it unless absolutely necessary.
Like a quarter horse race, the course was fairly short, usually three laps around the show ring (depending on it’s size, of course), with barrels marking the penalty zone to keep the thundering pack from cutting across, or cutting into a turn to shallow to be fair. It was a lot harder than it sounds, mules don’t have a problem with shouldering or ramming another mule if they get in the way, and they are running flat out and hot. Long ears peeled straight back, neck stretched, teeth bared and eyes glaring, they were a thrilling, though sometime comic sight to see.
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The Greatest Horseback Ride I Never Had
by Terrell Brown
(from Range magazine)
Over forty years ago, through some remote acquaintances of my mother, I got a job on a cattle ranch on the eastern plains of Colorado. I traveled north out of New Mexico by Greyhound bus through Raton Pass and was picked up from the Colorado Springs depot by my employer and his wife in what was even then an old Chevy car. He and his wife were in their mid-70s and the lonesome spread of 17,000 acres southeast of Colorado Springs sprawled across the undulating range miles from the nearest town.
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The Mean Black Bull
John Duncklee
In the early sixties, my partner and I bought some registered Brangus cattle from a breeder in Yuma. We leased a bull to service the heifers. The day the cattle arrived via truck from Yuma I was not at the ranch, but doing errands in town.
Seeing the truck parked at the loading chute when I returned, I drove to the corrals eager to see the heifers that we had purchased in order to start a breeding herd to hopefully sell registered bulls to Mexican ranchers from Sonora. The ranch bordered the highway between Tucson, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico.
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Pay Day Poker
John Duncklee
I was nineteen years old in 1948 and working on the E4 Ranch near Big Horn, Wyoming. Every pay day I went to Sheridan to cash my hundred dollar check, put eighty dollars from it into my account at the bank, ten in a separate pocket for Bull Durham, a couple of beers, and other expenses. With the other ten I would try my luck at some poker table.
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Dnieper Pass
Hunter Liguore
“We’ll not spare either our souls, or our bodies to get freedom, and we’ll prove that we brother’s are Kozak kin.” Palvo Chubynsky, 1863
The sky was clear over the borderland, where golden hills, covered in sunflower and lavender, could be found in plenty. From the alpine forests and snowcapped mountains, down through the grasslands, the Dnieper River traveled south, cutting a natural boundary through the east and west. The land near the river was highly prized for its black, fertile soil. Farmers fought to keep their land, despite Tartar raids, or the high taxes imposed on them by noble landlords.
Tucked away beside the dense cypress forest, past the castle ruins, through the grove of apple trees, there lived a family of peasant farmers. Two brothers, Erich and Semerin, tilled a new tract of land to plant a crop of watermelons. Semerin, older by a year, wore a gun strapped to his back, as he planted seeds in the smooth rows. Erich, kept a pouch of iron darts fastened to his belt, always fearful of a raid, as he steered horse and till across the plot.
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THE ADVENTURES OF BURTON AND BERNICE
John Duncklee
The two buzzards were members of a flock of buzzards that were soaring through the sky searching for carrion. But, there was something special about these two. They had paired, but so did others. They flew together, but so did others. They could communicate, but not like others. They could actually speak. They could also read. However, they never learned to write.
Burton and Bernice Buzzard were deeply in love, and shared every moment of their lives together, whether it was soaring looking for carrion, or making a nest for the winter in Mexico. They had seen a lot from their vantage point high in the sky, and their memories served them well. So, when their eggs hatched they had lots of bedtime stories to tell their children.
One of their favorite stories happened one day when...
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FLYING PIGS
John Duncklee
High in the Sierra Madre Occidental the streams are small, finger-width where they begin. As they trickle their way down they join to form larger streams. Then the larger ones join others to become rivers. This pattern of stream marriage happens all the way to the Gulf of California. Only then does it stop. This pattern streams make from the summits of mountains to the gulf or ocean is called a watershed.
Erosion constantly changes the watershed. Erosion is a natural occurrence unless something unnatural like humans interferes. Sometimes a stream may meander down a mountain slope and where there are curves, caves can be found.
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