Not Bad For A Tuesday...........

I've never much liked Tuesdays. On their own, they have no significance. They merely hold place between Mondays, during which I am full of energy and a weekend's rest but bereft of motivation, and Wednesday, hump day, which, usually, is as completely bereft of humping as Monday is empty of motivation.

But this particular Tuesday finds me on holiday. Holiday Tuesdays are by far to be preferred to working Tuesdays. I get up when I want, do what I want, when I want, and go to bed when I please. But, as wonderful as all that is, I've found that the purest form of bliss to be found on holiday is the complete lack of rush.

Today I stood on the curb and just felt the wind from a nearby rain shower blow past me. Time dilated, slowed, and wrapped itself around me. I lived just inside that one single moment. Life is lived inside the moments it's said. I tip my hat to whomever it was who said that first. He couldn't have been more right...................

Today Begins..............

Today begins the serialization of my latest novel. I will publish one chapter a week until the work, such as it is, is complete. As it is a work in semi-progress all feedback might very well be both gratefully appreciated as well as occasionally ignored.


North Wind

Chapter One


“Explain to me again why it’s so cold all the time,” Tina said drawing figures on the fogged window pane.

I reflected for the millionth time on the fact that with the money I’d spent on triple glazed windows there shouldn’t be any fog on the inside for her to draw in.

“The current theory is that the North Atlantic conveyer shut down last year, and, even though this was predicted, what was not expected was the cascade effect the shutdown would have on other major oceanic circulations. But you know this better than I do.”

“Yea, I suppose.”

“But the kicker is that, for reasons that probably no one will ever understand, a couple months after it shut down we experienced a small but significant decrease in solar radiation output.

Basically we’re screwed and getting screweder every day.”

“Screwder is not a word.”

“True enough, but there’s not likely to be another meeting of the Committee for the Defense of the English language anytime soon.”

“True enough,” she said in her best imitation of me. “So, when are we headin south big daddy?”

“Tina, you know I hate it when you call me that.”

“I can think of one particular time when you didn’t seem to mind too awfully much. I know this because you said yes repeatedly for maybe two or three minutes.”

“Ouch, that hurt.”

“No it didn’t.”

“I’m hurt that you didn’t think that hurt.”

Tina laughed, threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. “So, what you’re saying is that you have no idea what we’re gonna do next?”

“I guess I haven’t decided that we actually need to do something next.”

“Baby it’s maybe twenty below out there without the wind. Yea, I think we need to do something.”

“It’s January it’s supposed to be pretty cold outside.”

“Not this cold, not in Houston anyway.”

“Good point.”

“Besides, practically everybody else has already gone to Mexico.”

“Only on their way to Brazil probably.”

“Exactly my point.”

“I don’t know. I never could stand summer….”

“Come on Jack.”

“Think about it. If we went south we’d wind up in a refugee camp somewhere. The natives, whoever they happened to be, would hate us and most probably treat us like shit. The food would be garbage when we could get it and we’d probably have to squat over a hole in the ground and live in a tent.”

Tina turned back toward the window. “It’s just so goddamn cold; I hate being so fuckin cold all the time.”

“Outside or in the house?”

“Both,” she said without turning around.

“Inside the house I can fix pretty easily.”

“Oh yea, how?”

“We can put in woodstoves, get any room you’re in to eighty degrees if you want.”

Tina turned from the window and slugged me in the shoulder with her fist. “If it’s so easy why the hell haven’t you done it already?”

“I didn’t know you were cold. It doesn’t bother me.”

“Why is it that by the way? I mean even when you go outside you barely wear a coat.”

“I don’t know. I guess it got cold gradually enough that I just got used to it.”

“Nobody gets used to that kinda cold.”

“I guess I did, something genetic probably. Good ole northern European stock.”

“Why haven’t I?”

“When was the last time you actually went outside?”

“I hate it out there. I tell you what; let’s get to work on the woodstove idea. I pretty much have to go outside to do that don’t I?”

“Yup. Why don’t we get one or two and heat up the kitchen and the living room.”

“What about the bedroom?”

“It seems plenty hot in there to me.”

“I guess I’ll take that as a complement.”

“That’s the way it was meant.”

“If you don’t put a stove in there, it’ll stay too damn cold in the morning. I hate that, it starts my whole day off cold. That’s why I’m freezin all day.”

“I can fix that.”

“Thanks big daddy.”

“Tina……..”
____

“C’mon Tina let’s get up, okay? We got a lotta work to do today.”

“It’s still dark, what time is it?”

“It’s almost seven-thirty.”

“In the morning?”

“Yea.”

“Shit. I cannot get used to the sun comin up so late,” she said getting out from under the covers. “Damn it’s cold.”

I handed her her sweats and said, “Well, hopefully today we’ll be able to get somethin done about that.”

“But won’t it still be cold in the morning? A fire’s not gonna last all night.”

“You are, as always, correct.”

She was smiling when her head popped through the neck hole.

“But, as I usually get up earlier than you…”

“Usually? Always.”

“As I get up before you, I can get the fire going when I get up so that when you get up the chill should be mostly off the room. I wish you’da said something sooner.”

She looked at me then like she’d seen something new she hadn’t expected. “Maybe I did okay.”

“Did okay?”

“Yea,” she said nodding. “What’s the plan for today anyway?”

“Well, I’ll get us together something to eat, and then we’ll go out and see if we can find two or three woodstoves.”

“Here in Houston?”

“I’ve got a couple ideas where to look.”

“How cold is it?”

“Not bad, about five above. No wind.”

“A regular heat wave.”

“Yea, I guess so.”

“You look worried, what’s goin on?”

I shook my head and turned to go to the kitchen.

“Jack, stop.”

Without turning around I said, “Go ahead and get dressed, breakfast’ll be ready in about ten minutes.”

“Sure, like I’d stand around in this freezin room in my underwear,” she said under her breath behind me.

When I installed the gas stove I’d hoped it’d be the only major change I’d have to make because of the weather. By the time I got it in, the last of the families in the subdivision had been gone more than a week driving an old pickup and pulling a new trailer just like everyone else. I guess I knew even then that things had changed so irrevocably that it wouldn’t ever be the same again.

“When’d you put in the propane stove?” Tina said putting a hand on my waist as she walked by.

Turning with a plate in my hand I said, “Just right before I met you out there on the interstate.”
“Like a day before?”

“Two at the most, why?”

“Things in life seem to work out the way they’re supposed to.”

I’d barely heard what she’d said. “What?” I was growing to hate her cryptic comments.

“I said that things work out like they’re supposed to most of the time.”

“So you runnin outta gas out on 45 was meant to happen?”

“Seems pretty obvious to me.”

“So that’s what you meant earlier when you said you did okay?”

Again she stared up at me with that same curious look on her face.

Nodding she said, “Yea, that’s right.”

“You know I always have wondered….”

“Why I stuck around with an old man like you?”

“How do you do that?”

“Know what’s goin on inside your brain?”

“Yea, exactly.”

“You’re just a man big daddy. That and the fact that without you God only knows what snow drift I’d be frozen to death in right now.”

I stared at her then. “I never have been able to figure…”

“Why a hot little piece of ass like me would wanna be with an old man like you.”

“Somethin like that.”

She must have seen the hurt on my face because she stepped to me, put her hand alongside my face and said, “It’s gonna take some time for you to get used to me. I always say what I think. Didn’t you wonder why I was by myself when you found me?”

I shook my head.

“Well, mostly it’s because the way I tend to piss people off on a pretty regular basis.”

“You don’t really seem all that bad to me. And, ah, I’m only forty-four.”

“Like I said, you have to get to know me better.”

“Wow.” I figured the best thing for me to do at that point was to change the subject, so I said, “Let’s eat, we’ve got a lot of wandering around to do today.”

“Jack, I really like you, okay? I said what I said to try to let you know that.”

I looked at her then. At her eyes. There was strength there. I could sense that she wanted me to see her strength. Her eyes never moved from mine. I smiled, and so did she.

“Jack, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I said as I started to eat.

“Why haven’t you found someplace out in the country to live?”

“You mean why did I stay in the city?”

“That’s what I said.”

“I don’t know. I thought about leaving a few times. Every time I did I needed something that I’d just have to have come back here to get.”

“Like the stove?”

“Yup.”

“So what do you do for money?”

“Well….”

“Oh my God…”

“Yea I’m a thief. Burglar I guess.”

“Where’d you get it? And more important where’d you hide it?”

“I was in an abandoned grocery store about a year ago when I saw that it had one of those little banks you know?”

“Sure, what’d you do?”

“I slid my butt over the counter and went in and looked around.”

“And the sacks of money were just sittin on the floor?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, what’d you do?”

“I went out to the truck and got some tools. I really wanted to see what was inside the locked drawers.”

“No shit?”

“Yea. But there was no money in the drawers. All I found was office supplies.”

“Where’d you find the money?” She’d drawn out the words slowly one after the other.

It was in the cooler in the back of the store with the meat.”

“What?”

“No kidding, I was just wandering through the warehouse in the back end of the store when I stuck my head in the milk cooler and there it was, just sitting on a rack in between the skim and the two percent. There was a half dozen bank deposit bags so I grabbed em and got the hell out of there as fast as I could.”

“Why?”

“At the time I was pretty sure that whoever’d left the money had just stashed it there and would be coming back to get it.”

“What was in the bags?”

“Two of em had checks that I threw away; the other four had cash in bundles, maybe fifteen thousand dollars all together.”

“That’s all?”

“Worse than that it was just cash, I didn’t even get to spend it.”

“Because nobody’d take cash.”

“Toilet paper was all it was good for after a while.”

“So what are you doing for money now?”

“Don’t need it. I get everything I need by trading. I hunt and trade meat for the other things I need.”

“Are there that many people left here?”

“I don’t think there’s that many Houstonians here any more, most of the people here are from up north.”

“Like me.”

“You never have said where you’re from originally.”

She didn’t look up or say anything. When the silence continued too long I continued, “Anyway we need to go find the stoves we need today.”

“What’re you gonna trade for them?

“I’ve got an elk hung in the garage that should be frozen by now. We’ll take it in case we find someone to trade with.”

“Elk? Are you serious?”

“Yea, the cold has driven all kinds of wildlife down from the north. Those that can stand this climate didn’t go any farther south. My worry is that if it stays as cold as this for much longer they may move on. If they do we’ll have to follow them.”

“What if we don’t find anyone to trade with?”

“We’ll take what we need and bring the elk back.”

“Won’t something like a woodstove be pretty hard to find right now with everybody freezing their asses off?”

“Maybe so, we’ll see I guess.”

“What’ll we do if we can’t find any?”

We I thought. “Good question. What do you think we should do?”

“We might have to follow the animals outta here.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

Tina cleared away the dishes while I went outside, loaded the truck and got it warmed up. Tina came outside and handed me a cup of coffee. "

“Might as well finish this up,” she said wrapping her arms around her middle.

“Thanks.”

“We ready to go?”

“Think so. You got enough on to keep warm?”

“Does the heater in the truck work?”

“It does, but you never know if it’ll break down or get stuck.”

“I’ll go back inside and get a couple more layers. You want me to make some more coffee? I saw a couple thermoses under the sink.”

“That would be outstanding. Latte with a shot would be great!”

She was smiling as she turned to go back inside the house. Twenty minutes later we were out driving down snow covered, deserted roads. Tina looked uncomfortable, constantly staring through the windows wiping at the condensation with her hands.

“Doesn’t it bother you that there’s nobody around any more?” She looked tense, worried.
“Not for me. I’ve never been all that much a fan of people.”

“You don’t like people?”

“I have liked individual people from time to time; it’s big crowds I don’t care for. I hate bein crowded.”

“Then why did you ever live here, if you don’t like to be crowded?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Look around,” she said waving a hand back and forth.

“Long story sort I had a family, a wife and two boys. They were killed by two men who broke into my house while I was gone hunting.”

“And you know it was two men because?”

“They were still in the house when I got back digging around for God knows what. The bigger one of the two came at me so I shot him. Right square in between his eyes, just like in the movies. The other one ran off when I started shooting at him.

When I found Ann she was nearly dead, bleeding on the bed. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, the walls, the ceiling for Christ’s sake. I took her to the hospital but she was dead by the time I got there. She just lay there staring up at me on the hospital bed. Her face was so messed up. All I could think of then and now was that I should have been there. I should’ve been there, I coulda done something. We shoulda left south like she wanted to.”

“Ann was your wife?”

“Yea, she was. My boys were Jack junior and Lee.

Neither of us said anything after that for hours. We checked out every big box store we could find with no luck.

“Jack there aren’t any stoves and I am seriously freezin my ass off, can we just go home?”
Home. It’s just a house I found because I couldn’t stand to be in my old house even a day more after I buried Ann and my boys.

“You’re thinking about your family.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

“Yea.”

“Like I said before, I can’t figure out why you’re still in the city.”

“Where else would I go, south?”

“North, south, what difference does it make? Anywhere out in the country would be better than here.”

I stopped the truck, and turned to face her. “You got any place in particular in mind?”

“No,” she said turning to look out the window next to her.

“Might be easier to live out in the country,” I said looking past her out the window.

Turning back to face me she said, “Have you thought at all about where we could go?”

We again. “It’d make sense to go up north of town.”

“North?” she said turning back to face me. “Are you kidding?”

“Not that far. Just far enough to get out into the woods, maybe fifty, a hundred miles.”

“Why would that be better?”

“I’d be willing to guess that there’d be more wildlife up there so hunting would be better, and with all the trees it’d be easier to get wood to burn.”

I could tell she was thinking about what I’d said from the look on her face. “There’d be a lot of empty houses up there wouldn’t there?”

“Even when it was still hot here there were lots of vacation houses up there. We could probably find one that has lots of fireplaces.”

“Well, there’s no reason why we couldn’t start on this today is there?”

“You’re that ready to go?”

“I just can’t see any reason to stay to in the city any more, can you?”

“No, you’re right, there isn’t. But I’m not sure we can start today.”

“What time is it?”

“About 2:30.”

“How long will it take to get back to the house?”

“From here, maybe two hours.”

“How close are we to Galveston?”

“Thirty or forty miles maybe.”

“Can we go there?”

“You wanna go swimming?”

“Jack. I’m curious about whether or not the Gulf is frozen.”

“Whaddya think?”

“Some maybe, I don’t know how much. They only way to know for sure is to go see.”

“And when you find out what will that tell you?”

“I’m just curious.”

“So you’re not gonna tell me until you’ve seen it, and you’ve had time to process the information.”

“Well let’s go. The sooner we get started the sooner we can get on the road.” She squared herself up on the seat and waited for me to get going. I had a smile about halfway started when I realized why I was leaving the city. I put the truck in gear and started moving down the road.
We spent the rest of that day packing up clothes and food for the trip up north. As soon as I got a few things packed I was ready to get the hell out of Houston.

“Do we have the coffee pot?”

“And the coffee. Do we really need a tent?”

“I think we do. If for some reason we can’t find a house to spend the night in I don’t want to have to sleep in the truck.”

“Okay. I’ve got all the food we can possibly eat for at least a couple weeks. Hopefully we can find something or shoot something before we run out.”

“You really don’t want to come back do you?”

“No, you want to drive?”

“Sure.”

I got out and walked around to the passenger side as Tina slid over to the driver’s side. She eased the truck down the driveway and out onto the road.

“Up 45?”

“When you see an exit that looks good….”

“There’s a map on the dash in front of you. I think we oughta check out the lake first. You think it’s frozen?”

“I doubt it. It’d have to get a lot colder than this for a long, long time to freeze. Whether or not the fish that live in the lake will live much longer is a whole nother question.”

“Wow! Look at that,” she said pointing out through the windshield as she slowed to a stop.
“Elk. There’ll be more. More deer, more elk, moose, bears, caribou probably eventually.”

“And wolves, too right?”

I looked at her.

“Hey I watch the discovery channel too. I’m not as dumb as I look.”

“I never said you were dumb.”

“You didn’t have to. You seem to have a pretty poor opinion of people in general, and unless I’m wrong, and I’m almost never wrong, women in particular.”

“What?”

“You and I have been hanging around each other for what three weeks, a month?”

“That’s about right,” I said having no idea where she was going.

“And in all that time exactly how many times have you asked my opinion, asked me for my input, and God forbid asked me what we should do?”

“I did about five minutes ago as I recall.”

“What?”

“You picked where we’re goin, remember?”

“Yea, but that doesn’t nearly make up for all the rest of the time.”

“You really think I think you’re stupid?”

“Hell, half the time I’m not even sure you even know I’m around,” she said starting the truck down the road.”

“Hey stop the truck. Let’s eat.”

“Right here in the middle of the freeway?”

Digging out the coffee I said, “It’s not like we’ll be holding anybody up.”

She looked at me as she started opening a couple cans of soup. I looked right back at her. “You lettin you hair grow out?”

Tina handed me a can and said, “I guess so, I mean I really don’t have much choice.”

“Me too I guess. Unless you or I figure out how to cut hair.”

“At some point all I’ll have to do is reach around, grab it, and cut off the bottom couple inches. Cutting hair is only complicated if you want it short which I do not ever, anymore. I do not miss all the shit I had to go through every morning rolling, and blow drying. Hell, I don’t even shave any more, and I don’t miss that either, trust me.”

I rubbed my hand against a few days growth of beard on my own face.

“If you’re wondering, I don’t like beards.”

“I’ve actually never seen it.”

“What? Your beard?”

“Yea.”

“Never?”

“Nope. This is about as long as I’ve let it go.”

“Well you won’t mind getting rid of it then. Okay?”

I looked at her realizing she was right. I had no idea even what color her eyes were. She’d been around for a month, but I hadn’t really wanted to acknowledge she was there.

“What color were Ann’s eyes?”

I stared at her. Somehow she must’ve known what I was thinking, read my mind somehow.
“Green,” I said, remembering that both my boys had had their mother’s eyes. I realized a few seconds later I was staring out the window at a bull elk. I pulled myself back into the truck and saw Tina looking over at me. Her eyes were welling up. Her brown eyes. I didn’t know what else to say.

“I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said. I thought I knew then what she was thinking, but as it turned out I had no idea.

____

We sat there in the median of the interstate, Tine said she just couldn’t relax in the middle of the road, eating cold soup and just warm coffee. The elk grazed about a quarter mile away, pawing at the snow to get to the grass underneath.

“We better get goin,” I said pitching the empty cans out the window.

“What’s the hurry?” Tina said screwing the top back on the thermos.

“I’m worried about the weather.”

Tina looked out the windshield up at the sky. “Is it gonna snow?”

“I don’t know, the sky’s just looked weird all day. And it’s been getting warmer since we left.”

Tina reached out and put the backs of her fingers against the glass. “You’re right.”

I started the truck, pulled it back onto the pavement and started north as fast as I thought I could get away with. There were cars and trucks every so often but with a very few exceptions they’d been pulled off the road into the median or the ditches. They were all pointed south, in both the north and the southbound lanes. We stopped and talked to a couple families heading south. They asked us why we were heading the wrong way as they looked longingly at the elk in the back of the truck. I was more than glad to trade meat, which we could easily get more of, for gasoline, which, the farther north we went would be much harder to come by. At forty miles an hour the sixty gallons of gas we had would last for as long as it took us to find more.

“Whaddya think Tina?” I said pulling over onto the shoulder.

“About what?”

“You’ve been looking at the map, where do you think we should look?”

“Well, we have three places we can go I think. We can either go down any one of these exits and get us a place in one of the millions of subdivisions, we can go on up to the lake and see what we can find there, or we can go into any of the three or four small towns around here and find us a house in old town.”

“Old town?”

“Yea, you know the part of town where all the old houses are.”

“You know that’s the one part of livin here in Texas that I never did like.”

“That towns had old houses?”

“Nah, that towns really didn’t have any really old houses, no history, no past.”

She looked at me with a curious look on her face for a moment and then said, “What?”

“I know. I’m strange.”

“No, not strange. Just different from what I’m used to.”

“What sorta guy are you used to, besides younger?”

She hit me on the side of the head and said, “I’m used to guys who are prettier than they are smart. What was your job before you became a burglar?”

“Guess.”

“I have no idea, that’s why I asked.”

“Believe it or not I used to be a professor.”

“A professor? Where, of what?”

“Architecture, up at A&M.”

“What’d you do, drive up there everyday?”

“Three days a week. I was able to get my classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

“So you only had to work three days a week?”

“Three long days.”

“Still, that’s a pretty good deal.”

I thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Yea, it was just about the best deal I ever had.”

“So that’s why you said there’s no old houses?”

“I just really like Victorian residential architecture.”

“Oow, there’s some big words.”

“Don’t give me that crap; you did the same damn thing up at UNT.”

“I guess I musta mentioned that, huh?”

“Yea. About twenty or thirty times on the way back to the house when I picked you up on the freeway.”

“Sorry about that.”

“I was glad that we had something in common right off the bat.”

“Me too. And by the way, I was not and never have been an architect.”

“No, you were, and I guess you still are, a climatologist.”

“Paleo-climatologist, thank you very much.”

“My apologies. Let me guess, your specialty was tropical climates.”

“Absolutely correct.”

“Anyway, on your three choices, this is what I think. I hate subdivisions, I doubt any older houses would have what we need to keep warm, and I’m afraid most of the nice lake houses, while very nice, will be too large to heat effectively.”

“So what’s choice number four?”

“There’s probably many other choices. I really want to be on the lake, so that narrows things down some.”

“Like the water?”

“Tends to have a breeze most of the time, but the most important is the fact that it’ll be the easiest place to hunt, and it limits people sneaking up on you from that direction. I guess an island would be ideal.”

“So we’re facing a real cave man and woman sorta situation?”

“Times have to change along with the climate I guess.”

“Well I’m all about change."

“That is a very good thing.”

The Onrushing Inevitability of Tomorrow

It seems to me that as one year follows another and the decades begin to accumulate that it the inevitability of tomorrow that seems to weary me the most. I know, I know, I can hear you thinking out there that I should just be grateful that my supply of tomorrows has not yet run out, and to be honest, I mostly am. But, the difficulty, my difficulty with tomorrows is that they cannot be put off or delayed in any way.

The fact, now that I’ve finally surrendered to the certainty that it is a fact, is that bad days, the ones you want to go by fast don’t, and the good ones, when there are good ones, you know the ones I mean, the ones that just feel good, emotionally, physically, or on those rare occasions when all the planets align themselves, both, disappear with an unmatched rapidity that no amount of prayer, begging, or complaining can delay one nanosecond.

I will then ride the tide of time as it drives me inexorably into tomorrow which, I'm sure, will crash upon the beach of my consciousness long before I've created any new thoughts worthy of blogging herein.