“Yeah, I told him that Little Rock has lost it’s curb appeal.”
“That’s stupid.”
I get that a lot too.
Told I’m stupid.
Told it’s crazy.
And I get it.
I know all these things.
It takes an idiot to run a marathon.
Hello, Apex Predator, what’s chasing you?
It takes a special kind of idiot to run an ultra-marathon.
And I’m not even sure there’s a word for the kind of dummy who runs three in one year.
Not normal, maybe.
Deluded? Possibly.
Maybe the kind of delusions that think writing a note to the mayor of a mid-size town will actually make an impact.
Because anybody can bitch about where they live, or how something is being run.
Offering a simple, easy solution with low cost options, well, sometimes, that’s just the kind of idiocy this world needs.
Take Pine Bluff, for instance.
They have spent over two million dollars rehabbing, updating, and beautifying Main Street.
They have spent millions more in a new Art Center, a gorgeous library, and a new Aquatic Center.
There are flowers and streetlamps and new asphalt in front of dilapidated haunted house looking buildings.
And there is hope.
Now they need people to fill the streets, and tourists to bring their dollars to town.
I wrote the mayor and the head of a committee about building a mountain bike trail in a bottomland park.
The head of the committee wrote back, said he brought it up to the Mayor, she remembered the note and they put it on a wish list to be explored with the City Council.
I don’t build Mountain Bike Trails. I ride them, sometimes.
I just thought, it’s a growing industry, and a cool trail next to the River would bring people to town every weekend.
People who would eat at new restaurants or stay at hotels and AirBnB’s.
I don’t know if the idea will be executed, but it’s out there.
It’s shared.
I did the same for the Mayor of Little Rock.
I do not think he’s doing a good job. He has had a tough go of it.
Covid. Police brutality. High crime rate.
After a lot of conventions were cancelled in 2020, Little Rock needs visitors.
Except the DOT turned getting to LR into a nightmare.
And when you do get downtown, the streets are not paved with gold.
Hell, they are hardly paved at all.
It’s like riding a washing board, if that board was pitted with axle busting, back wrenching gullies and blacktop ditches that pound any car into submission.
The news asked him about street repair.
His response was akin to what we’re hearing in the rest of America.
Covid shut down a lot of street work, which was worse this year because of the big, long deep freeze we had back in February.
You remember the one that shut down the Texas electric grid?
It left behind a legacy of need.
Need for alternative power systems and a string of potholes, cracks, humps, bumps and turtle shell roadways.
He also blamed unemployment benefits for street workers who were dismissed in 2020.
But those were shut off in June in AR.
He’s good at blaming.
My suggestion was to up the curb appeal in Little Rock.
One crew working a blacktop truck every day.
And a second crew working landscape detail.
Because that’s worse than the potholes.
Knee high weeds in every patch of dirt on the way in and out of town.
It’s one thing to ignore all the empty and vacant buildings in downtown LR, but they look all the worse for the lack of street and curb appeal.
My question was, how do you expect people to want to come to a place that looks like trash, especially when you make it so difficult to be there?
I didn’t get a response.
But it makes sense, right?
If you live in a home, you try to keep the yard cut, the weeds low, maybe plant some flowers.
Some folks decorate for the season, so that the house looks good.
Why?
So the neighbors will be impressed with the house?
So it looks welcoming and inviting?
Because we get a sense of pride when people like how our homes look?
I hate it.
I hate we live in a world that judges so much on appearance.
And yet, we do.
As much as we might like to point out that it’s what’s on the inside that matters, looks matter too.
We trust a good looking person more than a not so good looking person.
Why?
We trust a good looking place more than a shady looking place.
Why?
There are psychological and evolutionary reasons behind it, I know.
There are also real world examples, where groups have gone in and painted abandoned houses, mowed the yards and edged and generally cleaned up blocks of dilapidated structures.
And all of the sudden, crime goes down in that area.
Other houses start getting spruced up.
People begin to take pride in things.
Like neighborhood. Like community.
Last Friday, we stopped for a few drinks in downtown North Little Rock, just across the river from downtown LR.
They shut off a few blocks of Main street once a month, bring in a band to play music, set up tables under tents and serve from a few restaurants in the area.
I watched a little girl dance in front of the trio playing music while some high school kids practiced twirling fire twirling.
The songs were good, the beer was cold, and it wasn’t as crowded as I would have liked, but it was also the end of a hundred degree day.
Dog days of summer are tough on a festival.
But there was appeal. Flowers in pots hanging from streetlamps.
No weeds in the sidewalks, and even the empty buildings were powerwashed, white washed or just plain clean.
Everything had some curb appeal.
I wrote the mayor and said put down new blacktop and mow.
Two steps to making the place look a little better.
I forgot to do something last night that was going to set something free for you today, but it slipped my mind.
Which was occupied with surviving.
Which was full of grateful thoughts for surviving.
Surviving an encounter with a monster.
We live a hundred yards from a lake.
Maybe less.
It is not much, as far as lakes go.
Don’t picture in your mind skiing and boating and weekend party coves.
This is a fishing lake, connected to a swamp and bottomlands that stretch for miles.
It’s probably not more than twelve feet deep at the lowest point, and it’s full of trees and stumps and secret fishing holes.
There are no motor boats allowed on the lake, which makes it a perfect place to cast a line, or kayak and look at nature.
It is also the perfect place to dump creatures.
Like reptiles.
Like pet snakes.
And there is a resident alligator who cruises the waters from the swamp to the lake and back.
I think they call him Sam.
He’s had his picture in the paper with rare sightings and admonishments from local businesses who border the area.
“Just leave him alone.”
Good advice for dinosaur descendants and bad neighbors.
Once, when driving on the road on the far side of the lake, I saw a giant snake.
A python or boa, curled up near a gutter.
It had to be six or seven feet long, thick body slimy in the headlight tinted twilight.
I pulled a U turn at the next road and raced back to check it, and just watched the last few feet slither into back into the gutter.
Lost to the wet darkness.
I was thinking of this yesterday.
You may recall my statement, I am not a gardener.
I can mow. I can weed. I can rake and scrape and hoe and saw.
I pack the trimmings into a big pile and the city picks it up on Fridays.
But I don’t do flowers so well.
Which is how the rose garden on the back fence came to be an overgrown mess.
I ignored it. I planned to get to it next time. I thought, “Do it later.”
I took the advice of business owners and “just left it alone.”
So between us and our lake view was a five foot stretch of overgrown thorns, weeds, leaves, thick brush and a solid wall of vegetation calling my name.
Because really, what else does one do when it is 107 outside in August?
My to do list became the get it done today list with a stern warning from the taskmaster.
I dove in.
Not literally, but with the frame of mind that it would all be over in a few hours, and a cold beer waited on the other side.
I am always careful in the backyard because of the lake.
I have uncovered rabbits, possums, king snakes, garden snakes, and once, three juvenile copperheads curled up together.
Thoughts of all of these running through my head as I pulled and tugged, and stacked and ripped weeds out of the earth and made the raised rose bed aright.
Then it got me.
A Titanboa makes an anaconda look like your grandma’s pet corn snake.
They roamed the earth and ate dinosaurs.
Legend states they are still in the wilds of the Amazon, lurking and waiting on the unsuspecting village fisherman or kid swimming.
Who are we to argue with that? Villagers don’t keep birth or death records and people go missing all the time.
A Titanboa roamed into a lake in Arkansas. A huge monster at least twelve, maybe fifteen feet long.
I couldn’t tell exactly over the noise of my shout.
It crawled across the back of my bare hand, startled, and snapped at me with huge fangs. They were dripping with something.
Poison?
I jumped back as it moved toward the ground and burrowed into some fresh turned earth.
Burrowed?
Do snakes burrow?
I know they live in dens underground, but usually they let the little furry creatures do the burrowing, then move in for dinner and a sleep.
From a few feet away, where I landed after a jump, I watched the tail disappear.
Then reason took over.
My twelve foot rampaging Titanboa was really more like a twelve inch nightcrawler earthworm.
Impressive, yes. Deadly?
Only in the retelling.
I laughed at me, and said I was being silly.
The sound of the weedeater would have driven a giant man eating snake mad, and he would have attacked in rage and I’d be sitting in his belly like Jonah in a whale.
Whole.
This was just a big worm, perfect for fishing.
But then I heard the splash and looked out at the water.
All I saw were ripples spreading out in giant circles a few meters off the shore.
But you and I know what it was really.
Cheers,
Chris
Some fisherman tell tales about the one that got away, but I wanted to talk about the one that almost got me.
The Titanboa near attack made me forget to schedule a few free cozy mysteries for you, so I wanted to give you this instead:
Plus:
This is the week of AUDIOBOOKS.
I have 25 codes for BEACHHEAD INVASION EARTH and if you don’t have Audible yet, you can use the free trial to test it out.
It’s funny when a fifty year old offers a suggestion to a twenty year old.
All sorts of judgments come into play.
And people, most people, are excellent at judgments.
Especially in the South.
It’s the way we were raised.
Sent to Church and told let God do the judging.
Then went to school and divided into cliques and talked down to the kids who didn’t have Izod or Levi’s or Nike’s.
At least until The Breakfast Club came out and we realized we could all get along.
Because there’s a rebel, a nerd, a prep, a jock and a weirdo inside all of us.
Five wolves fighting in your soul, according to old Cherokee legend.
Which one wins?
The one you feed the most.
(Hint: it’s the jock. They’re always hungry.)
John Hughes was older when he gave that cinematic advice to a bunch of teams.
He even signed the film with a signature shot and song.
Don’t you forget about me.
But we did forget.
And we kept on judging.
Because, let’s face it, it’s fun.
We are human.
Competition is in our DNA and making judgments is a way to measure how we’re doing against “that poor So and So.”
I have not detached myself from material possessions.
I can’t imagine my life without a laptop, a smartphone, a warm bed and food in my belly.
But I have suffered.
And been judged for suffering because I only talk about the times I paid for it.
Sure, there are brief mentions of the way I grew up.
If you were raised in the South, you can read between the lines.
I suffered on purpose because learning to persevere when it’s hard, makes it easier to build grit.
Once you learn to recognize grit in others, it gets easy to see the world from their perspective.
You realize that you have very little idea of what anyone is going through.
Or you see the signs and know where they are in that particular stage of life. (or race)
I saw a sign once that said,
“If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience a different life run a marathon. If you want to talk to God, run an ultra.”
A hundred mile run will teach you many things about yourself.
And yet, I can’t help snorting at the guy on the side of the intersection holding up a sign saying he’s hungry.
I get frustrated because there’s a Salvation Army serving three hot meals a day six blocks from where he’s standing, and another mission eight blocks away doing the same.
But I don’t know his life.
I don’t know what he’s going through, his mental state, the things he endured that broke him.
I don’t know what stole his grit.
I fail at judgment all the time.
I just wish I was a better learner from it.
Learning how to recognize it when it’s happening, how to clamp it down and shut it off.
That’s the hardest part about running long distance.
The walls come down after eighteen miles or so, all those weak intellectual defenses we put up to shut down the voices in our heads.
After that much sweat and that many steps, the voices get loud and the feelings rush up like a tsunami.
Then we start the worst thing of all.
Judging ourselves.
Nobody knows you like you do.
And nobody can press your buttons better than you can.
You can be your own worst enemy at times.
You know exactly what to say/think/do to knock you down and kick yourself around.
No one can steal your grit faster than yourself.
When that happens at 18 miles (and roughly four or six more times in longer runs), there’s only one way to stop it.
Keep going.
Keep your head up. It’s easier to breath when you don’t drop your head and block your windpipe.
Breathing brings oxygen to the brain, which fires neurons in parts of the gray matter that aren’t working so well because your body is trying to stay alive.
And focus.
Focus on the good things. One step in front of the other. The next aid station. The sun on your face.
Drink water. Or beer.
I was eighty three miles into the Key West 100 and done. My body was wiped, the 110 degree heat and 100% humidity knocked down the walls fast and my back was gone on the 7 mile bridge twenty miles back.
A Course Marshal saw me stumbling along in a zombie phase and pulled over.
“What do you need?” he asked. “I’ve got water, juice and two beers.”
He popped the tailgate on his Tacoma, propped me against it and cracked open a cold Mich Ultra.
“I think this will help.”
I leaned, and drank and listened to him talk about the race.
How close I was to the finish, how fast seventeen miles can go. Things to look for on the side of the road as I did.
Five minutes on a tailgate, drinking a cold one with a new friend, changed my perspective.
Changed my attitude and I finished the race.
It was four more hours of hell and torture, but it got done.
So never discount the power of a beer and a friendly ear.
Even if you’re not the one talking.
This started out to be practical advice for my twenty year old.
Save 10k as fast as you can and put it in an ETF indexed to the S&P 500. Don’t touch it until you retire.
Travel as much as you can across the US.
Treat the earth nice.
Don’t eat at chain restaurants if a local option is available.
Things like that.
Things a twenty year old might not want to hear from a fifty year old.
But like a lot of things I start, it turned into a lesson for me.
A reminder.
Don’t judge people.
Because there are souls out there who will stop and help, who will smile and wave and nod and acknowledge.
Maybe the best advice I can offer anyone.
Don’t judge yourself.
You’re not qualified to do it, because you’re too close to the subject.
Leave all the judgment until after you’re dead.
Then you’ll have a lot of experience to compare it to.
Because throughout your long life, you’re going to be…
Probably the reason for a lot of health problems in America.
I’m not going to yell about it.
I drink it in my coffee via creamer.
Why would I holler at you about something I do?
You wouldn’t listen anyway, because it’s yelling.
And yelling never works. Unless it’s the aforementioned safe word.
He’s a runner. Runs a ton of marathon’s and half marathon’s.
He says it’s dumb to run ultra marathons.
He was a lawyer in his career. Can you tell he’s opinionated?
Why is it folks like to share their opinion so much, even when it’s wrong?
I find myself doing it.
Everyone else is a bad driver, except me.
When I drive bad, it’s just a mistake.
Or politics. Or religion. Or beer and soft drinks.
Just about everything is an opinion. Even gravity if you believe Richard Bach, though that’s one I won’t try to argue with.
Or taxes either. Get that opinion wrong and Uncle Sam will toss you in jail just to make a point.
Everything else is fair game. I got a couple of reviews this week. One said I sucked. One said I was their favorite writer.
Which one should I believe? I have an opinion though!
Today, I think I’ll try to be more open to other people. Not their wrong opinions, but their right to have them.
I had a soldier friend tell me once he didn’t believe in a lot of what people took a stand for, but he would fight like hell for them to have that right.
Damn, I respected the hell out of that opinion.
I’m going to try to listen better. Try to not stress so much about right versus wrong.
Even when someone is screaming at me.
They may not be right, but they aren’t wrong.
Except about beer. I’m going to have to drink on that, I think.
I took Tristan to Pine Bluff today, the city where I spent most of my childhood.
We rolled into the Bluff when I was four, or the verge of the Bluff since my 23-year-old mother was trying to skirt past the city on our way to California.
But her old car broke down and the only people she knew in Arkansas was my dad’s mother and step-father, Mamaw and Papaw.
She called Papaw and told him we were stranded on the side of the road. He drove out to pick us up, piled us into the back of a giant Buick and dropped us off in the front half of a duplex he owned, a place I remember as home for most of the first decade of my life.
My mom always talked about California like it was some sort of golden land of opportunity, but I wondered why Arkansas wasn’t also?
After all the plates on the cars called the state the land of opportunity.
The duplex was tiny, two bedrooms, one bath.
It didn’t have air conditioning for the first couple of years, then Papaw put in a window unit.
There was an old Formica table in the kitchen, a giant oversized space heater in the living area and two tiny bedrooms that maybe measured 10 x 10.
My brother and I shared one bedroom in the back while my Mom had the front bedroom.
I remember on Saturday mornings we would get up to watch cartoons and eat cereal, and at 10:00 when Soul Train or American Bandstand came on, my Mom would escort us out either the front or side door, lock the screen and we were on our own until dark.
In winter we wore coats and sometimes tube socks as gloves, in summer we wore shorts and little else.
We played with the neighbors who had two little girls, one my age, and one a year younger than my brother.
We climbed trees and rode bikes and played in a shed that her father had bought as a playhouse for her.
The house was only two blocks from my grandparents, so their home became like ours and is a central part of my memories growing up.
My mom, always in search of something, moved us away almost every other year.
We tried Birmingham, and Atlanta, and Warren AR, always spending a school year in someplace new and then coming back to Pine Bluff.
Maybe there were better opportunities in those places, or maybe she fought with my Papaw on how to raise the boys.
It was tough for an uneducated single mother going through a string of men in the seventies, each with some weird peccadillo.
They were all drug users.
My mom was an alcoholic and cigarette addict who smoked at least two marijuana joints a day.
The kinds of people she brought through the door on a consistent basis define the words white trash.
That’s the basis of my opinion about Marijuana.
If it’s so good, why do so many losers use it?
I associate the drug use with it.
Some of her boyfriends beat us, some tried to molest us, some ignored us and tried to get her to pawn us off onto my grandparents.
And my mom, so young and desperate to be loved, uneducated and mostly scared, opened her heart and our doors to a lot of people.
She couldn’t qualify for a job that paid much.
She had a high school degree but consigned herself to secretarial and office work and didn’t try to improve her lot in life.
She worked as a bartender, for awhile, while my brother and I were watched by a black family, who called us their other kids.
The bartender job paid cash, which allowed her to get out from the duplex, and we moved into a trailer on the south side of town.
She had a velvet painting of a Senorita on one wall, whose eyes watched you as you walked across the room.
One Saturday, I was left to watch my brother.
I couldn’t have been four or five, and he two or three.
He was hungry.
So I poured the last of the cereal into a bowl, but we didn’t have milk.
I used water on the Frosted Flakes and we shared the bowl.
After an hour or so, he was hungry again.
All we had were eggs.
I carefully cracked two into a bowl and whisked them with a fork.
I got the pan out of the cabinet and put it on the stove.
Then I needed to light the burner.
I wasn’t allowed to use matches, so I rolled up a piece of paper, just as I had seen her do, and lit the paper.
I turned the front burner on and moved the paper to it and it lit with a whoosh. Flame spread up the paper and singed my finger.
I dropped the paper onto the linoleum floor and it caught fire.
The plastic linoleum burned fast. Like it was made from solidified gasoline.
I jumped off the chair I had been using as a stool and got water from the sink.
I poured it on the floor and put out the fire, but now there was a big patch of ruined linoleum.
We avoided disaster, but I knew I was going to get a spanking when
Mom got home from wherever she was.
And my brother was still hungry.
So I scrambled the eggs and fed him.
I cleaned up the water off the floor,
And when Mom got home I got my ass beat.
I know now it was because she was afraid of what might have happened. Perhaps she was even mad that she had been at work, or out with friends while we were home with so little.
I can’t even say she tried.
Maybe in kindness I could say she tried her best.
But food was never a priority in the house.
The shopping list ran cigarettes, beer, weed, bills, then food.
In that order.
I can’t fathom not putting kids first now that I’m a father, but I see it still when I go to the store, or see other people. It must be a white trash or poor people mentality.
Beer, cigarettes and whatever’s left use for life.
It doesn’t make sense to me.
My father was the same way.
We moved back into the duplex shortly after the fire incident. As an adult I realize that the proximity to my grandparents allowed them to check on us when we were left alone.
That proximity was also the reason my mom constantly ran away.
Papaw didn’t approve of her lifestyle or choices and was constantly trying to help her, with conditions.
And like I said, Mom was not very good an making good choices.
“That’s my old high school,” I told Tristan. She wanted to know more about me, where I came from and my side of the family. She didn’t feel connected to them and why would she? We moved to Florida when she was only three years old, and my father made it clear he didn’t approve of her mom. It was easier to cut ties and close that chapter in my life than deal with the constant little digs and reminders that he didn’t like Tristan’s mom.
For some reason, people feel like they’re stuck with family and they have to put up with the abuse they heap or the way they treat them. People will cut out bad friends, they will cut out bad habits, but they will cling to family members that weigh them down like anchors all for the simple title of “family.”
My mother and stepfather placed their addictions over the needs of their children. My father did the same. As an adult I came to learn these things and as a Father I came to wonder about the reasons behind them.
And my discovery, my decision was to eliminate that from my life.
I can see it replaying though, as just another version of my father’s life. I hardly knew my grandfather (my dad’s dad) who had another family in Jackson MS and I didn’t feel a loss for it.
I had Papaw and Mamaw as a constant in my life, rocks to cling to when the waters of mom’s stormy relationships threatened to drown us, or once I was a teen and moved in with my dad, his constant absences.
I mentioned my mom’s poor choices, but don’t think she was alone in making them.
My father was only 21 when I was born, barely more than a hippie child himself. What could he possibly know about being a dad?
Especially when he was consumed with being a rock and roll star, or poet, something other than staying home and taking care of the children.
Except that as I grew older and learned, he didn’t really have a problem taking care of children, just his own.
When I was fourteen, I moved in with my dad.
He travelled every other week to Oklahoma or Louisiana or Mississippi to work on an oil rig.
Seven on, seven off they called it.
He did this for years until I was fifteen.
We always seemed to struggle for money.
There was just enough for beer and cigarettes for the adults, and chili and lasagna and bologna for the kids.
My step mom would make a big pot of chili on Sunday’s and we would eat off it for a couple of days, then a lasagna on Wednesday which would carry us to Friday. Friday or Saturday she would make homemade pizza with a Bisquick crust.
But the priority was the same.
Cigarettes first, two cartons.
Beer next, one case.
Then bills.
Then food.
At sixteen we learned Dad had another family out of state.
A young mom and her two children, neither his.
He was supporting them too.
So it turns out the priority was cigs, beer, other family, bills then food.
My stepmother left him and moved back to her home state.
Her daughter moved in with friends so she could graduate from high school in Pine Bluff.
I’m not sure how my dad reacted.
His attitude was always stoic to me, a feigned toughness.
I’m not even sure he felt guilty about it, but perhaps just bad that he was caught.
Then the oil industry took a header and he was out of job.
My junior and senior year of high school was my dad looking for work, working in a factory or working at a gas station.
He did make an effort to go back to school and learn electronics, and he graduated from trade school at the same time I graduated from high school.
He and my brother moved to Texas after I graduated to start a new a job at Texas Instruments.
When I came to visit later, it turns out my brother was raising himself, working at Applebee’s and going to high school, while Dad was settling in to his new job, and supporting a new single mom he had started dating.
Order was established, at least the order of cigs, beer, new family, bills and food.
My brother could pay for his own.
Rich’s Hamburgers was crowded.
I wanted to take Tristan there but she was hungry now and we missed beating the lunch rush by thirty minutes.
Cars were stacked and there were two lines ten people deep.
We got caught up in a detour downtown.
A year ago a building collapsed on Main Street downtown, and the city shut off a couple of blocks while they determined the structural integrity of buildings around it.
Turns out, not only is Pine Bluff dying, the Main Street is rotting at the core.
The politicians came out in force against the state of Main Street, but a year later, not much is being done.
I’ve read reports of buildings changing hands, and one building owner who keeps pushing back inspection dates and meetings with the City Council.
Simmon’s Bank rode to the rescue with a ten million dollar fund, but the big question is, why?
Why are they trying to save the main street of a dead downtown.
Business won’t move there, and people won’t go.
Pine Bluff is rife with examples of poor business ownership, and I think a lot has to do with my parent’s generation.
I compare them to my Papaw’s generation and my own.
Papaw was a carpenter.
He built things.
When the Pine Bluff Arsenal was being built, the government needed houses moved or torn down on the property.
My grandfather heard about it, bought six houses for ten dollars each, plus moving cost.
He then bought land out in the country south of Pine Bluff, and two lots he owned in town.
He drove out to the arsenal, jacked up each house onto a trailer, and moved them through town.
Three went to the land in the country, three went to the lots in the city.
He used his carpentry skills to fix up the houses, and then rented them out.
Papaw was a deacon in his church, which he and other parishioners built on their own.
The Church was located four blocks from the house where he lived, which he and his Dad built in the late 60’s.
As I think back, Papaw owned eight houses plus twenty acres.
He was constantly building in Pine Bluff.
He knew carpentry, plumbing, welding, electrical work and grading, and he knew the movers and shakers who built and expanded the town.
My Dad and Mom’s generation did not.
They built businesses that were unsustainable and refused to evolve with the town.
As I grew older and see how much politics comes into play in small towns like Pine Bluff, I can also see how the Boomer generation there refused to learn basics, and subsequently made a series of failures that led to a cascade of defections in my generation.
The Baby Boomer”s kids didn’t want to stay in Pine Bluff and departed in droves, leading to a decline in almost fifteen thousand population since 1988.
Those left behind haven’t built anything in the city, rather they’ve moved it further South along Highway 15, and Highway 79 toward Watson Chapel or further north into White Hall, edging closer to Little Rock.
When people left, it created a vacuum and Pine Bluff had an abundance of trash to move in and fill the void.
“There was a house there when I was growing up, it’s torn down now. And there. And there. And there.”
We drove down 32nd Avenue past my grandparents old place. The house my grandfather built belonged to someone else now, a stranger.
The house beside it, where his mother and then sister lived out the last years of their life was gone, as was his barn and two storage sheds along with a lot of history from the property.
My aunt, uncle and dad were always complaining about what a pack rat Papaw was, and it was true.
The barn was stuffed with material and memorabilia, the two car garage only had room for Mamaw’s Buick and the storage sheds were stuffed to overflowing with what they all saw as junk.
Papaw would go to estate sales and auctions sites, and make low bids. Sometimes he won, and he would bring it back, pack it tight on a just in case I need it basis.
Anyone who studied the Great Depression or lived through it knows that mindset.
You find uses to fix almost anything.
When Papaw died, everyone agreed that all of his stuff was garbage, so they rented a dumpster and shoveled everything in from each of the buildings, the garage, barn and his office.
It’s an example of extremely short sighted thinking on their part.
They used money to pay for a dumpster and hauling, when if they realized what they had, they could have turned his junk into six figures or more.
At the time of his death, a new store was coming online called ETSY. Vintage and handmade items were listed and sold to collectors.
Papaw had over a thousand postcards sent to him by his travelling sisters, and ones he collected as he and my grandmother travelled. He packed them all away and after he died, they were thrown away in mint condition.
It was junk to them.
I can see now they resented him.
He was a harsh man.
He was a know it all and a story topper, meaning if you did something, he did it better, faster or had seen something more.
He hated to loan his equipment because it often came back broke, and the family would argue over the state of the equipment and who was responsible for repair.
But if they had expanded their minds beyond Beer, Cigarettes and just cleaning out the house cause Mamaw wouldn’t be able to, they would have seen so much opportunity it was insane.
But they were lifelong residents of Pine Bluff, except for my Dad, and as such couldn’t think that way.
Their generation destroyed the town, just as they destroyed the opportunity to make money from “collections” my Papaw held on to.
Magazines, political pamphlets, little slices of historical bric brac secreted away in drawers and crannies since the early sixties.
Furniture that had been purchased in the seventies, and when gone out of style moved to one of the houses in the country was now back in vogue.
Rather than categorize and list on Etsy or Ebay, his kids just tossed it in the dumpster. Instead of cleaning up and listing on Craigslist, they just tossed it all away.
That was a bad mentality.
As if the folks who came before them couldn’t understand this new world, and therefore all the rules need to be tossed out.
It’s as if the principles were ignored, and then my generation absconded from Pine Bluff because our parents made such a mess of it.
Better to build our own version of tomorrow somewhere else.
Even now I wonder why I was so anxious to get out.
I travelled the State, travelled the States and set my sights on far flung parts of the world.
I also married young, made my home in the state capitol and even though I graduated college did my best to avoid the corporate track.
I considered law school, I considered sales management, and all the while I wrote books and movies, and short stories and comic books.
I never once considered becoming a home grown film and authorprenuer. Downtown Pine Bluff, in decline since ’88, and honestly if you’re looking at building occupation, probably since the late 70′[s was a ripe plum for plucking up old buildings for a song.
I never asked Papaw what he thought of buying a building or a block downtown.
I wondered what advice he would have offered.
Forty year old me considers urban redevelopment a priority, though looking at Little Rock they’re not doing it any better than Pine Bluff.
Main Street in LR is so slow to develop because a bunch of Dallas immigrants bought up abandoned property, jacked up the prices and waited.
Now buildings are so expensive to buy and rehabilitate into new property, it takes a consortium of investors to pull it off.
Then they jack up the rent so high, small businesses can’t cover the overhead on the meager foot traffic that Main Street generates.
It becomes a revolving door of new experiments, where want to be business owners try to open up their restaurant in the same spot where three others failed.
There are success stories, and those are the ones people pin their hopes on, but one cafe on a corner of the block with limited hours and mostly serving the business lunch crowd does not a mogul make.
It’s like hunting for gems at the crater of diamond state park when looking for what works.
It takes a lot of digging and there might be more to the story than just the fifteen dollar cheeseburger on the menu.
At least Little Rock can rely on the convention traffic and annual visitors to keep the businesses in the River Market District afloat.
And LR has done some wonders between the Clinton Library and the Broadway Bridge.
The Splash pad is a popular summer attraction and turning two of the old railroad bridges into pedestrian paths linking North Little Rock and Little Rock as arteries of the River Trail was genius.
Little Rock has something to offer as the state capitol of Arkansas, and even if there is still so much work to be done my generation and my children are left to wonder still, is Pine Bluff worth saving?
Papaw may have suggested buying up a block at a time in Downtown PB.
He may have said rent out the bottom to a coffee shop or Starbucks knock off, and turn the top two floors into loft apartments.
He would have suggested that with the completion of the 530 corridor that turned old 65 into an expressway to Little Rock, PB could have set itself up as a bedroom community, much as Conway and Mayflower did. They’re the same distance, and they’re both close to the AR River, both attributes shared by Pine Bluff.
Can you imagine driving into PB from LR, turning off at the gold domed Courthouse and parking because Main Street is now a pedestrian walkway?
Art Galleries and small cafes line the street, a photographer’s studio, and museums, with residents who call the upper floors home populating the area for the first four blocks to the train tracks that cut through the middle of town.
The entire downtown area is served by free wi-fi towers hidden discreetly on top of the buildings, nestled among the solar panels and bee hives that pollinate the rooftop flower gardens and the window boxes on every building.
A street band plays, street performers show up on weekends to wow the small crowds that gather for a farmer’s market in the parking lot outside of the courthouse.
When Tristan and I were driving around, ideas popped out on almost every corner, and with the assistance of UAPB and the Pine Bluff High School, the mayor and city council have a real opportunity to make a difference.
Unfortunately there’s too much infighting and bickering among the generation of politicians that has to this point failed the city, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.
Even the announcement of a new billion dollar plant moving into the south of town is tempered by the reality that PB is just one location in the possible running.
That announcement translated means that “maybe” the company might pick Pine Bluff.
But if those business leaders hit Main Street today, do you seriously think they would pick the city?
Main Street on Monday was still blocked after a year of deciding who was responsible for the building that fell into the street.
Was it the building owner?
Was it the city?
Piles of bricks shut off one of the forgotten main corridors of the dying town while the city tries to decide who should clean up the mess.
A leader would have sent trucks and workers to clean up the bricks, hauled them to an empty lot at least, and billed the building owner.
The problem is downtown Pine Bluff building owners are absent and allowing the buildings to fall into decay and disrepair.
I told Tristan about eminent domain and an eleven year old child gets it.
When the city finds abandoned and derelict property in residential areas, they can order the property torn down because it’s a nuisance and danger, and bill the owner of record for the service. Why doesn’t a leader in PB do the same? This creates a vacant lot problem and a number of studies have shown that vacant lots lead to an increase in crime and decrease in property value, but again, a real leader would see this as an opportunity instead of a problem.
In six months time, a real leader could make serious inroads in repairing PB and it’s image.
1. Establish a timeline with a move it or lose it deadline.
a. Create an immediate list of all property owners who owe back taxes in the city on residential and commercial property
b. Create and send an immediate payment due certified letter to the business owners with a fourteen day response window.
c. Track response rate. Property owners who contact the tax office can make payment arrangements, or sell the property to the city for back taxes owed. This relieves the property owner of the financial burden of maintaining the property.
d. Property owners who do not respond in fourteen days get a certified “intent to sell” letter. The city will sell the property for the cost of back taxes.
e. The tax office lists each property for sale for the tax cost. The real estate contract stipulates that the property must be built upon within 60 Days. Failure to live up to the terms of the contract reverts ownership back to the city with all monies forfeited.
But what will the new owners build on their new property? And why would they want to build in PB? The death of the middle class across America and the decline of affordable housing options for new home owners that is plaguing the rest of the country doesn’t need to apply in Pine Bluff.
Tristan asked, “What’s the crime like in Pine Bluff Dad?”
“Now or when I was growing up?”
“Now?”
“It’s pretty bad,” I told her. How do you explain to an eleven year old that the small town you grew up in was not only dying, but making top ten lists of the most dangerous places to live in America.
It wasn’t always so.
In the 70’s, Pine Bluff had it’s share of crime and criminal activity. I should know, my mom and stepdad were a part of it. At one point in 1980 -1983 they were two of the biggest pot dealers in Southern Arkansas. People would drop into the house, stay for an hour, smoke a joint with them, and buy a dime bag before leaving. There was a steady procession of people just showing up.
They bought their weed in bulk from some guy with a beard who grew it on land out by the Arkansas River, who would show up with a black garbage bag full of dried plants that my mom and stepdad would break down into smaller bags.
They weren’t criminal masterminds by any means, so the extra money they earned selling weed just allowed them to upgrade the type of beer they bought. We didn’t have a nice car, or a nice house, or new clothes, or great Christmas presents. So I can only surmise that they were about as good at being criminals as they were at being parents.
The weed business went away in 1983. My mom had lost an office job and moved on to work as a waitress/bartender at a very small cafe on Blake Street in Pine Bluff just in view of the swinging girl on the Sunbeam sign. My stepdad was a very jealous man, insecure in so many ways that they are legion to list. But he could drink for free, so when he got off second shift from the factory where he worked, he would drive to wait with my Mom and give her a ride home. He waited at the bar and drank free beer and it’s anyone’s guess as to who drove home.
My brother and I, 12 and 10 at the time, were left to watch my two younger half siblings, 3 and 1while they both worked from 3:00 – 11:00.
On one particular evening they came home fighting. The stepdad was mad that some guy was flirting with my Mom, they were both drunk and high, and let words fly. He slammed the front door and busted out the window, then grabbed Mom and threw her into the wall. I jumped in his face, shoved him and he shoved me back. Mom grabbed his arm to jerk him away from me. He slapped her. I balled up my fist and punched him. He knocked me down, sat on my chest and pinned my arms with his legs, and used both hands to beat my face. Punch after punch crunched my nose, bruised my cheek, hit my eye.
After a moment, he realized what he was doing and started crying. He lurched up off of me, stumbled down the hall to their bedroom and reached for a loaded shotgun, screaming he was going to kill himself.
We should have let him.
Instead Mom yelled at me, yelled at him, and grabbed his legs. He tripped with one hand on the twelve gauge on the rack, jerked it down and the gun went off. It blew a hole through the wall.
The gunshot seemed to sober them up.
That shot could have gone through one of the interior walls and hit a kid, or he could have really sprayed his brains across a window. Or turned it on me, or my Mom.
He sat on the floor by the end of the bed and sobbed, and my Mom wrapped her arms around him to comfort him.
I grabbed a towel and wiped the blood and snot off my face, and threw a towel at him. They both had cuts that needed stitches, I had scrapes, bruises and a bloody nose, along with swollen eyes, but no split skin, except for one gash on my head.
Mom decided they were going to go to the ER, get stitched up, then come back for me after they had sobered up, since showing up drunk to a hospital with a beat up kid could get child services involved.
She wrapped a rag around his cut, held a bandage to hers, and I opened the busted front door so they could go through.
I stared down the barrel of a service revolver. The black hole gaped at eye level and I couldn’t breath.
“Freeze,” the cop said in a calm voice.
Which I had absolutely no problem doing. I wasn’t sure I could do anything else. My Mom and stepdad were behind me, freezing also. My brothers and sister were crying as they stood in the doorway of the hallway and watched.
“Stand back,” the cop instructed.
They were responding to shots fired, and a beaten kid answered the door with two bleeding adults behind him. He couldn’t know what he was walking in to, and domestic situations are always the worst kind.
I stepped back and he stepped into the living room.
My mom and stepdad started telling him a version of the story. It involved falling and tripping and me fighting at school, all lies and all told so easily it’s as if they were prepared before hand.
No one was pressing charges, and no one was going to jail so the cop left after twenty minutes or so. My Mom and step went to the hospital, and I calmed the kids down and got them into bed.
Maybe there was crime in PB when I was growing up, only I didn’t notice it, or it seemed far removed because of the way we lived. We were the criminal element, or a part of it.
I didn’t tell Tristan any of this.
Who tells their eleven year old kid about the dark side of growing up ghetto?
“I don’t think there was much crime worse than normal in Pine Bluff,” I told her. “But it was the seventies in a small town. In the 80’s it seemed to get worse. And by the time I decided to leave Pine Bluff in 1988, it was worse still.”
I don’t know if statistically it was really that bad at the time. Fistfights in the parking lot at Jefferson Square had turned into gunfights. Going downtown after dark had always been an iffy proposition due to the proximity to bad parts of town, but that was a block by block determination. One block was full of working class families, the next block had bad elements on it. Turns out my family growing up were part of the bad element.
In the 80’s and early 90’s, states like California enacted “Third Strike” laws. In essence, these laws were designed to permantly removed habitual criminals from the streets. So if you got caught doing something against the law the first time, you got jail or probation. If you got caught a second time, you were looking at some time in jail. And if you got your third strike, you were in for life.
In retrospect this seems to be legislation written and lobbied for by private prison contractors who were paid by the head of each person incarcerated. But it played right into the fear mongering of early 90’s California, and with the unrest in Southern Los Angeles, along with racist cops, and drug laws, a lot of gang members quickly found themselves two strikes up.
An idealist would say all those criminal types had to do was change their bad ways.
But a cynic could argue that even as they were incarcerated, they could not be rehabilitated because rehabilitation costs money and eats into the profitability of private contractors.
Regardless of how it happened, it created a situation where more experienced criminal elements from California, Illinois and other states moved to Little Rock and Pine Bluff where they found fertile ground for the drug trade, for gang activity and the attendant crimes that ride along with it. Murder. Rape. Arson. Robbery.
A third or forth tier gang member in LA could show up in Pine Bluff, prey on the infatuation with gang culture that was permeating the airways thanks to NWA, Dr. Dre, and other rappers, and become the top dog in their new locale. When another low level gangster moved in to town it created friction and started the gang wars.
Little Rock got so bad an HBO documentary called “Bangin in the Hood” was shot and aired.
Pine Bluff got little airplay, but the gang problems were just as prevalent and up through 2015 when it was named one of the top ten worst cities for murder per capita.
Which makes my bad element growing up pale by comparison for what some kids see in PB today.
The blame falls squarely on parents, but any child who goes through the public education system learns right from wrong, so after the second, third and forth grade, it then becomes about choice.
There are consequences for making the wrong choice.
I’ve tried to stress this to my kids, and when I look at Pine Bluff, I see the direct result of a series of wrong choices made by the city government and by the residents of the city.
A number of psychological studies show that fear of loss is a greater motivator than fear of gain. Therefore we must put the fear of loss into business owners, residents and every single city official starting with the mayor and the impossible city council who has allowed this travesty to occur.
They must start making right choices or face the consequences of the wrong ones they make.
As I drove through the old neighborhood where Papaw built his house in the late fifties, I noticed a lot of houses were torn down leaving weed lots.
Each weed lot was covered in trash. Bags, bottles, plastic and debris grew among the brambles and long grass. It looked trashy.
An immediate action would be to enforce the laws upon the books, but change the punishment. Pine Bluff (and other cities in Arkansas) have a litter law. It’s a $500 – $1000 fine for littering.
How often is that law enforced?
Maybe in gross violations, but I’m suggesting a shift in an entire city’s behavior through immediate law enforcement.
If you litter, you owe $500 – $1000 fine OR 50 – 100 hours of community service where the violator is picking up litter and cleaning the weed lots. Each hour should produce one bag of garbage.
If the PB police took one day to enforce that law each month, you would create a work force putting in hundreds of thousands of hours cleaning up the city.
Imagine if you enforced the litter law for cigarette butts. That’s littering by definition, but so many smokers are selfish and mentally retarded that they don’t consider flicking a butt on the ground as trash.
Turn the police loose to enforce the law as it is on the book, and you will soon have bodies enough to clean every nook and cranny of the city.
You can argue that speeding is against the law, and though police catch and ticket speeders, that doesn’t change the behavior of drivers.
You would be correct in that argument.
But what does change the behavior of drivers?
Some cities have elected to take old police cars and place in discreet locations so that speeders slow down as they see the cop car. We’ve all had that momentary heart palpitation where we round a corner and there’s a cop. We glance down at the speedometer to see how far over we’re going, and sigh in relief when they don’t pop the lights and drop in behind us.
But if enough people spend their Saturdays and Sundays or three hours every night after work doing community service, then the fear of loss, in this case time, would begin to modify the behavior.
Ask yourself one question: Would you text and drive if you knew that getting caught meant losing your license?
Would you speed through a school zone if you knew getting caught meant losing your license?
It seems like such a harsh punishment, except for the alternative: texting and driving not only endangers you, it endangers everyone around you, therefore removing your ability to drive reduces the threat to others.
The same thing works in a school zone. When you speed through a school zone you are endangering children of others. Removing your ability to drive keeps others safe.
“Sure, but people will just drive without a license.”
And when they are caught driving without a license, they are sentenced to 500 – 1000 hours of community service. That’s three months of 8 hour workdays doing labor to make the community better. Or if they have job, it’s a year of Saturdays (62.5 for 500 hours) or nights and weekends.
When people think that the consequences of their wrong choices will lead to the sacrifice of their time, they will begin to modify the behavior.
The community would benefit from the punishment. People will either give up their time, or give up their money, and the fines can be used to fund the supervision of the community service effort. The entire effort can be automated through email, and computer systems to track and monitor time, and a master plan for the city can be used to develop a timeline and deliverables.
In Pine Bluff, where Main Street has been blocked off for over a year, the police could set up a litter sting on one Saturday and find enough people in that one day to clean and maintain Main Street by the end of the week.
The Community Service could clean up all litter from weed lots by district.
They could paint low income and senior citizen houses.
They could clean and maintain the city parks.
They could remove and paint over graffiti.
They could plant and maintain community gardens growing fresh fruits and vegetables for food deserts.
The limit we face on what a workforce can accomplish is the lengths by which most people will go to avoid loss. So long as people are willing to make the wrong choice, a strong leader can do right by the community.
“This doesn’t look so bad,” said Tristan. “Just kind of dirty.”
We drove past Forrest Park Elementary school. It was surrounded by an eight foot chain link fence now, but when I was a student here the rooms had glass walls and doors that led to the outside of the building. Those windows were covered over with stone now because who wants kids distracted by blue skies and green grass.
I know it’s all designed to keep children safe.
The walls went up because bullets can go through windows. The fence went up because predators could grab kids off the playground and drive off.
We create traps and jails for ourselves to protect us from the evil on the street, surrendering our freedom to the criminal element. We move further and further away from the source of the crimes, tearing down nature, paving it over in cookie cutter subdivisions and crime follows us out into the suburbs, seeking to escape the same nameless terror.
It is because we do not punish properly.
There are entire cottage industries that have cropped up around defending criminals. It’s not PC to say something to the effect, “If you do the crime, you surrender your rights.”
The PB Police Department keeps the public defender necessary. It’s easy to find abuse cases all across the country where police have framed the innocent, railroaded small crimes into major penalties and ran roughshod over the constitution.
The problem is in both cases, we allow it to happen.
I don’t know that there is an easy solution to end criminality.
I think a solution to lower criminality is to increase literacy and create opportunity through education, and not necessarily the K-12 education system that trains up corporate drones.
If you increase literacy rates among a population, you can increase the opportunities they can expect.
Most people don’t know about the world that exists outside of their small sphere in town. They watch the news which is filled with horrors, and think that’s how the world operates.
Based on some emails I’ve received, a lot of you do.
But it was twenty years ago, and time is a cruel mistress for the memory.
I was in Los Angeles, following almost the same routine I follow today.
With a few exceptions.
I wake up, prepare a pot of coffee and write down some ideas or notes as I read the paper.
Now, I do it on my phone, but two decades ago, I had the LA Times delivered.
I sat on the couch, turned the television on with the volume low and read the paper.
I saw a newsbreak with footage of planes flying into the Twin Towers.
If you saw it, you remember the feelings.
Anger. Fear. Rage. Terror.
Turns out, seventeen Terrorists from Saudi Arabia carried out an attack on US soil.
In response, the politicians in charge decided we should attack Iraq and Afghanistan.
Where we stayed.
For twenty years.
Did it work?
One could argue that it was an effective tactic. We killed a lot of bad men in the Middle East, cut off the heads of a lot of snakes.
And there have been no attacks on US soil since.
A lot of defense contractors got really rich off the wars as we privatized them.
A lot of Senators who voted to go to war left the office to work for those defense contractors after they awarded big cushy contracts with their votes.
Before we went into Afghanistan, we provided guns and training to the men who would become the Taliban when they fought against Russia.
Russia pulled out, left a lot of guns and military hardware and those same men we trained used the guns we gave them and the ones left behind to fight their new American invaders.
We tried to put in public works, like wells, pumping stations and roads, but they were bombed and sabotaged, and we weren’t sure who to trust.
The people we occupied or the people who fought our occupation.
It cost the US Billions of dollars and what was our return?
Safety?
We had Homeland Security to keep us safe at home, and the FBI and the CIA and the ATF and NSA and three more off book operations that had no initials.
Do you feel safe?
Now the Taliban are taking Afghanistan back, province by province.
It feels a half a world away and has nothing to do with our day to day lives.
Does it?
There are think tanks in DC, businesses who pay people to plan out scenarios, and play war games and determine how international policy should be decided.
I wonder, do these people think twenty years into the future?
Do they plan for what happens after the end of the story?
Historians will tell you that WWII was a direct result of how the end of WWI was handled.
That conflict in the Middle East is the result of what happened after WWII ended.
That the friction between Pakistan and India is a result of the end of British colonialism, the divisions westerners don’t understand that stretch back a thousand years.
In 2001, were we thinking about 2021?
What if we started planning today for 2041?
What if we made decisions today to create the best results for tomorrow?
Or is it even possible to know how that will play out?
Waking up never felt so good. I rolled over on the blankets I had turned into a nest and stared at my two children sleeping back to back. The morning sun was lighting up the room and I watched their faces begin to form out of the shadows. Asleep they looked younger, less worried. Too thin, but then didn’t we all.
There was only one thing missing.
Number three, my youngest daughter. She was born with my second wife, and lived with her mother and stepfather in Florida. When the government announced the mandatory evacuation, they climbed into a car and drove north into the Carolinas.
I stayed in Orlando in a sort of vapor lock.
By the time, I decided to do something, like go find my children, I was torn.
I still was. Maybe going to Arkansas first was a mistake?
But then maybe had I gone to the Carolinas, it would have been an argument with her mother while my oldest daughter starved to death tied to a tower and my son was turned into a zombie waiting for her to come back.
They were safe, the two with me.
Luck had been on my side. It would stay with me when we went to look for T.
Some might say luck was being cruel even if she was on my side. I had scars from my journey, and the fight yesterday with a couple of giant’s hell bent on me dying didn’t help.
I wished for aspirin and morphine, and maybe a healing massage from Anna. Her tender ministrations had pulled me through worse.
I watched the Boy’s eyes flicker open, and when they focused on me, he gave a tiny little grin.
“You’re still here.”
I nodded.
I wanted to tell him always. But that hadn’t been the case while he was growing up. I was there once a month during the school year, for six weeks each summer and a week over winter break.
Never enough time.
I could blame work, or the second ex. But that just made me mad.
They say if you want to control your life, take full responsibility for everything that happens in it. I said it. I repeated it. I wanted to live it. I just didn’t until after the Z apocalypse.
My control now came from focus. I was going to find my kids and keep them safe. I was two thirds of the way there.
And nothing was going to stop me from reaching one hundred percent.
Bem stirred at his voice. I never called my kids by their real names, but nicknames based off their actuals. Bem was my fifteen-year-old. World wise and a lot like me, she looked just like her mother. Long brown hair braided in a plait down her back. Short, gymnast build. She was wicked smart and little miss popular at school.
Had been.
“I’m hungry,” she said in a low voice.
“Trapped on a tower will do that to you Rapunzel.”
She lifted on one elbow and dug in a pack with her other hand.
“Beans,” she sighed.
“Get used to it.”
I took the can from her and opened it by twisting a metal opener. It was a heck of a lot easier than using the tip of a knife.
“Cold beans,” she gagged.
“No time for fire. We’re getting out of here.”
I almost went over the plan with them, but they just nodded.
“We were waiting for you,” said the Boy. “We almost thought you weren’t going to make it.”
I ran a finger along the scar on my head.
“Almost didn’t.”
Someone tried to shoot me there and missed. Gave me a nice new part for my hairstyle.
I divvied the beans up into three helpings that were little more than a couple of spoonful’s each. We had enough for dinner, but we were going to need to make a scavenger run again soon.
I grew tired of convalescence after just three days. It could have been the drugs. Anna directed Byron’s Boys, as she grew to call his Brigade, on what items to seek and return during their forays for treasure. Their hunts went well, not only into cabins along the riverbanks but houses in a small suburb miles out, and tiny little bergs in a radius of our short-term home.
The Z were plentiful, and they brought back a group of six more survivors, another cobbled together family who avoided me with a studied effort.
Anna said they were shy, which is what she told me about Tyler, the scout.
I caught sight of my reflection in the master bedroom mirror and knew she was lying to spare my feelings. The road rash left red scars along one side of the etched and roughhewed face that stared back at me, and a mottled yellow and purple bruise dotted the opposite cheekbone, a gift from Harriet’s hand when I returned without her daughter.
The fever had built huge circles under my eyes, the heat and low food melting away the pounds until my skin stretched like parchment over my skull.
I looked the part of a walking dead man, and wondered for a moment how she could even bring herself to play nursemaid. But the drugs managed the pain of the burns across my back, which rippled and itched as they began to heal, and though I looked worse for the wear I still had full use of my body, which in the Z world was a blessing.
Byron reported to me each night after hunting, as he called it, keeping me up to speed on the happenings in his kingdom. The self-declared boy King.
“He’s not in charge,” Brian told me one night.
“Who is?” I asked.
Right now, we were a collection of survivors, a motley crew looking for way more than a good time.
Brian stuttered and hemmed.
“Zombie got your tongue?”
“That’s not funny,” he shot me a look then grinned. “At least not appropriate.”
Given the circumstances I was less than concerned about appropriate. We were surviving, but just and a power struggle between Brian and a fourteen-year-old homicidal psychotic wasn’t going to help anyone sleep at night.
Especially me.
“He needs to rest,” Anna came into the back bedroom.
I was the only one who got a room all to myself, and Anna by virtue of being my nurse got to share it with me.
She shared the bed too, though we had yet to share each other.
I was only a little concerned about it.
She had a story, but hadn’t told me yet. I figured she would share it in good time, or the way things had been working out, in bad time just before something awful happened.
She was right though.
It had been three days of Vicodin, and though I’d cut it down to half pills I was still tired. Maybe it wasn’t just the drug. My body was tired from being beaten, battered and blown up. More than once.
Anna put me on a regimen of yoga and stretching twice a day. I wasn’t good at it. Even before the Z my muscles were tight from running, like coiled springs I liked to say, but I couldn’t touch my toes.
She wanted the muscles to stretch and heal in my backs and legs, and prevent scar tissue from building up. I listened to her.
No one should ever be in an explosion. It rattled things around, brain and gibbly bits, and the consequences of shock wave damage only showed up later.
I’d read an article about it before the apocalypse.
Now I spent some time wondering about concussions and burst blood vessels. Guess I didn’t really have to worry about long term damage though.
Between the Z, the militias and now each other, we’d be lucky to last through winter.
I blamed the motorcycle. I would blame the kid, and if I was a little more advanced in the brain department, I’d blame myself, but it was totally and completely the motorcycle’s fault.
A dirt bike has a distinct sound when locked in at fifty miles an hour. The road rolls under you in a blur, and if you’re on a highway that once aspired to be an interstate running from Alabama all the way up to Memphis, there is no traffic to contend with.
It’s a deadly combination that caught better bikers than me and turned them into road rash warriors.
I left Fort Jasper at dawn, a good-bye kiss and wave to my second family before pushing the bike outside of the gate and kick starting it as the sun lifted over the trees. I had two jerry cans strapped to the back of the bike with fuel, a backpack with food, a rifle, pistol and ammunition all with me on my steel horse. I couldn’t help but think cowboy thoughts as I navigated the five miles to I-22 that ran from Birmingham into Memphis. My hope was the low travelled corridor would be free of cars, and Z, passing through and around mostly small towns in the rural hinterlands of Mississippi all the way up to the large city.
It was.
I locked in at fifty miles an hour over the gently rolling asphalt, close enough to the line in the middle that I could cut across the median if needed, or work my way to the shoulder on the right.
I had it all planned in my head, and at fifty it would only take four hours to reach Memphis, find a way to cross the bridge, and then two hours or three to Little Rock.
In the head is the wrong place to be after the world war with Z.
It’s where the memories stay, and random snippets of cowboy movies played out thanks to my monkey mind’s thought bubble about steel horses, which led to a Bon Jovi song playing over and over until it was usurped by Toby Keith. Then titles of movies, and bits of dialogue.
“Reap the whirlwind.”
“I’ll be your huckleberry.”
“I did bad things boss, and I don’t like to think on them.”
Which made me miss the actors I once loved, and hoped some of them made it. Kevin Costner took the mantle of cowboy movies and did a damn fine job, and I listened to an interview with him once where he talked about how hard he worked his ranch. He could have survived if he prepped it.
I watched his movies with my son, trying to instil in him a love of Westerns. I wasn’t sure it worked, but I planned to ask him.
That thought sent me on playing out different plans on how to find them, how the reunion would go, what excuses I would make for being late.
Which carried me to the outskirts of Southaven Mississippi, a suburb just before the state line and Memphis city limits.
I pulled off to pour gas into the tank, shook out some of the dead legs caused by vibration and decided to move West over to 61, the old blues highway and come in from that direction.
The interstate through the magnolia state had been empty, but the closer I got to Memphis, the more shells, abandoned cars, and small jams I saw. The road south from the city glittered like pieces of candy as sunshine bounced off windshields of stalled automobiles.
I assumed it would get worse, so took the rural two lane west.
I thought it was a good decision, and was congratulating myself as I turned north puttered up 61, and tried to decide if the 55 bridge or the I-40 Bridge was the best choice to cross the Mississippi.
Then I remembered the old railway trestle had been turned into a bike path that not only crossed the river, but ran through twenty miles of Arkansas and spilled out in a trailhead outside of West Memphis.
The eight-foot-wide trail would be all blacktop so the motorcycle could make it. There would be no cars to block the way through mostly wooded areas and progress would move unimpeded.
I twisted the throttle, jumped back up to fifty. Now that I had a plan it was just a matter of making it happen.
It took twenty minutes to navigate through town and see the two bridges lined up from the old steel museum on the bluff. From up there the pedestrian bridge looked clear while 55 was a parking lot.
I congratulated myself on a good decision as I raced down the hill toward the bridge.
I didn’t hear the shot that took out the engine.
One minute it was whining, if not quite cranked into the red, a steady rumble roar that dulled the sense. The next minute it stalled, coughed and the pistons locked.
I fought a wobble as it slid to a stop, and that’s when I heard him.
“Nice of you to finally show up.”
The bastard was in a wheelchair made from a bobcat loader. One of the small one’s used by landscapers in tight spaces, little more than a seat on treads with detachable blades that can be changed out.
He was strapped to the seat with a rifle in his lap and a line of his soldiers stepping out across the road to block the way.
How the hell had he found me?
“I bet you’re wondering how I found you,” he grinned and used the joystick to wheel forward.
His squad lock stepped behind him.
Son of a beach was psychic too. Did the fall give him new powers when I tipped him off a building in Alabama?
“You’re building quite a reputation for yourself, Dad.”
He grinned again.
I yanked the pistol, sent three shots his way and dropped the bike. One pinged off the cage around his bobcat but he didn’t flinch.
I’d be impressed with the bastard if I didn’t want to kill him so badly.
I lifted the rifle and sent a shot in his direction as fast as I could pull the trigger.
His men began returning fire.
Automatic weapons versus my seven shot Winchester.
It was no contest.
I started dodging toward some cover, somewhere back the way I came.
Except it was all uphill. Not even a decent bush to crouch behind. I bolted right and headed toward the river.
A baseball bat hit me in the back.
Or at least that’s what it felt like.
I tumbled down the riverbank ass over elbows and slammed into the bridge footing. Bullets chewed into the concrete, dust and chips filling the air like snowflakes.
I crawled behind the concrete edge of the bridge as their bullets chewed away at my hiding place, and slithered out of the backpack. No hole all the way through. The cans, the padding had stopped the bullet, but left me with a bruise that was going to hurt for days.
If I lasted that long.
Their guns went silent after a moment, just the memory of their echoes and a cloud of gritty dust floating off in the wind.
“You want to give up,” the General cackled. “Or us come in after you?”
They had the high ground. I remembered that lesson from one of the Star Wars movies. I’ve got the high ground Anakin.
I did not feel like pulling a Darth Vader, because frankly, I was already so close to the dark side Vader would be like, “Damn, that’s an evil mofo.”
So, I did as many men who had come before me had done and looked to the river for an escape. The brown muddy water was full of debris and muck from floods further north. It roiled and rolled against the black mud shore and shot downriver at twenty miles an hour or more. If I had a boat it’d be perfect. I could wallow off in the water and duck down as they tried to shoot the bobbing craft.
“My kingdom for a boat,” I muttered.
There was the crack of a branch to the right of me and I aimed at the thick bushes and sent a shot into them.
It looked like the General got tired of waiting and was sending his boys to flank me. Which meant there would be another on my left, so I sent my last bullet that way and didn’t let them hear me cuss when I ran dry.
I dropped the gun and ran for the water.
In the movies, it would have been a perfect dive, judges holding up ten cards as I knifed into the water and held my breath to swim far out of range into the middle of the river.
I’m not that graceful or lucky.
I took three steps into the muck before my boot got stuck and I tripped face first into the stinking mud. A bullet splatted next to me and I did my best belly crawl the last ten feet and spluttered into the water. Bullets churned up the ground and waves around me, and planted itself firmly in my ass, a million-dollar wound according to the Army. It burned in the nasty water. I dragged myself along the bottom as far as I could go and bobbed up to turn back to shore.
Seven soldiers lined the shoreline drawing beads on my bobbing head, and I could see them grinning. I didn’t get a chance to see the General or the look of victory on his face as something plowed into the back of my skull and sent me under.
I came up sputtering next to a driftwood log, and grabbed on the backside of it, putting the log between the soldier’s and my head.
Bullets chunked into the wet wood with a scratching plop and hit the water around me as I drifted out and away fast.
I could hear the General shrieking but couldn’t make out his words as the log carried me along the river and Memphis rapidly shrank on the horizon.
Georgia is a big state. When I drove this direction to go visit my children, it was a straight shot up 75 to Atlanta, just six hours or more depending on traffic. From Atlanta, I’d take the bypass around the south side of the city and hook up with Interstate 20 to roll into Alabama and points west. Atlanta was only forty something miles from the Alabama border, so when I travelled to Arkansas the trip seemed shorter when we flipped over into Central Standard Time. The clocks reset to an hour back and it felt like you gained something, even if the trip was nine hundred fifty-six miles no matter which way you drove it.
We stayed west of I-75 as we crossed into Georgia. There was a brown sign on the side of the road in a pine forest that told us one minute we were in Florida and the next second it was Georgia. No change in the landscape, no change in the atmosphere, nothing to let you know it was anything different except for a sign.
A half mile down the road we found another sign. This one made us stop. It said GO BACK. Written in red that ran down the whiteboard looking for all the world like bloodstains.
Brian pulled the car over to the side of the road. We could have stopped in the middle of the two-lane highway without much worry because we hadn’t seen anyone or anything since our last encounter at the Church. After rescuing Hannah from religious nuts determined to sacrifice her to God, we were attacked by a militia General bent on revenge. He wanted me dead for killing his best man. One of our group, Julie, blew herself and several of his soldiers up with a hand grenade to buy our freedom.
We stopped just enough to clean up and get some supplies, and a second time to change cars when the first one started to run low on gas. But no one spoke.
Brian kept the speedometer locked at twenty-five, just fast enough to keep us making good time and still be able to stop if something popped up.
Like a sign on the side of the road telling us to turn back.
“What do you think?” he glanced over his shoulder to where I sat in the rear passenger seat.
Anna had been sleeping on my shoulder, with Hannah sprawled against hers, but both stirred when Brian shut off the engine.
I shrugged, checked the rifle by my side one more time to make sure it was loaded and stepped out of the car.
The air smelled like rotten meat.
Not a good omen, I thought. But then most of the places smelled like that now. Towns were full of rotting corpses walking around. I called them Z. Some may refer to them as the walking dead, or zombies, but I was linguistically lazy and just trying to act cool when I came up with Z.
Z’s stink.
So the odor I was smelling could be coming from the woods, or carried up the road on what might otherwise be a pleasant breeze. It could be dead bodies of people, caught in an ambush, their blood used to make the sign. It could even be in my imagination, the stench of this new world just stuck in my nose and no way to get it out. Not enough water in the world to shower it off, like a skunk spray that clings to you until a long bath in tomato juice cleanses the pores.
But I had smelled Anna in the car. Fresh soap and water made her smell clean, nice, and stolen deodorant from the medicine cabinet added a powder scent to her as she slept against me.
I was sure the stench was coming from outside.
“How’s it look?” Brian called through the open window.
“You can see what I see, right?”
“Yeah, but you know, your eyes might be more practiced.”
“At what?”
“Seeing Z.”
“If I see a Z I’m getting back in the car.”
“What about Marauders.”
“Do you see any?”
He peered through the bug crusty windshield and then craned his neck out of the window to double check the road behind us.
“I don’t see any.”
“Then we’re both looking at the same thing.”
“What about an ambush?” Peg called over him.
Peg was Brian’s partner, though I don’t know what they were to each other before the Zombie apocalypse. I think they got together at a house where a group was hiding until a kid got sick and died in his sleep. He went Z and killed a couple more and their hiding spot was no more. I ran into them on Hwy 1792 when they were running from a herd of Z.
I was hiding in between rows of stuck cars from my own herd, and when the two merged I thought we were in trouble.
But we worked together and stopped them.
Blew them up actually, though I can’t recall exactly whose fault it was blowing up a couple hundred cars to kill a couple of hundred zombies. It really seemed like overkill, even if it was accidental.
The woods looked safe to me. Or the same, if not safe.
If someone was hiding there, the camo they were using was effective. I gave a moment’s thought to another militia and recalled that Valdosta was near by and home to a military base.
“I don’t see anything,” I returned to the car after walking around and watering the ground past the trunk. I really hoped no one shot me while my pants were unzipped. I mean give a guy a little bit of dignity.
Besides, I had already been shot in the head. Technically it was a deep graze, stitched up now with Frankenstein stitches courtesy of Anna who I learned after got all of her medical training from binge watching Scrubs on Netflix. But a bullet wound along the skull is still being shot in the head no matter how you want to get technical about it, so I was going to wear that particular badge of honor with distinction.
I climbed back in the car.
“Well?”
“Did you see any other roads back there?”
The last one I recalled was thirty or forty miles ago and it was pointed southwest. If we turned around now we’d lose daylight, lose gas and lose miles, and that thought alone made me anxious. I was trying to get to Arkansas to reach my kids, and going backwards was not in my plan. A sixteen-hour drive had already taken five days, mixed with walking, running and fighting with militia and religious groups. I wasn’t ready to add turning back to find another route to the list.
“It’s probably safer to go back.”
A Z lumbered out of the woods and began to slip and slide up the side of the road toward the car. A second followed from the tree line and lumbered our direction.
“I don’t think anywhere is safe anymore,” said Harriet.
Brian cranked up the car and dropped it in gear.
“We’re going to have to change rides soon,” he said as he pulled back onto the road and sent up a twirling whirlwind of leaves in our wake.
I nodded as we kept going forward and wondered what exactly we were driving ourselves into.
Chris Lowry Books 