I was going to insert the Dragon*Con logo as the introductory image for this particular post, but when I did an image search for Dragon*Con, this popped up, and it wowed me so much I HAD to use it. Whoever this young lady is, she’s awesome. And I’m sure I saw her in passing at some point during my many years of attending Dragon*Con, but there’s sooo many people at the Con and sooo much to see, well… I probably saw her and didn’t think much of it. But this picture. Wow.

In a recent post I said I was “flailing around”, trying to figure out what to write about. And then a couple of days ago while I was in the shower, it dawned on me that Dragon*Con was right around the corner and that I could write about it!

I get a lot of ideas in the shower.

Anyway, Dragon*Con starts TODAY, and it is fully my intention to give you my immediate impressions through Tweets and Facebook posts. I’ll post pictures, too. Last year, I’d vowed to be diligent regarding my “journalistic” approach to the Con, and I failed utterly - I just got so distracted by how FUCKING FUN it is that I let the journalism slide. This year will be better, because I have better resources for keeping connected - laptop, smart phone, etc.

The immediacy of today’s technology astounds me. Perhaps even more than the picture of the vampire nurse does.

As an appetizer for my future broadcasts, let me start by saying that it is possible that Dragon*Con is my favorite five days out of every year. My friend Eddie says it’s his, hands down, but he doesn’t have kids at Christmas and stuff like that. Still, the more I think about it, the more I think he may be onto something. Kids at Christmas are fun. But not Dragon*Con FUN.

It also helps that this year, my birthday falls on the Sunday of the Con, and that this is one of those special birthdays for me.

So here we go. Introductory post. And yeah, I’m gonna be shameless: it’s my birthday party, folks. Buy me presents.

• Chapter 1, Part 1
• Chapter 1, Part 2
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3, Part 1
• Chapter 3, Part 2
• Chapter 4, Part 1
• Chapter 4, Part 2
• Chapter 5
• Interlude 1
• Chapter 6, Part 1
• Chapter 6, Part 2
• Chapter 7, Part 1
• Chapter 7, Part 2
• Chapter 8, Part 1
• Chapter 8, Part 2
• Chapter 9, Part 1
• Chapter 9, Part 2
• Chapter 10, Part 1
• Chapter 10, Part 2
• Interlude 2
• Chapter 11, Part 1
• Chapter 11, Part 2
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14, Part 1
• Chapter 14, Part 2
• Chapter 15, Part 1
• Chapter 15, Part 2
• Interlude 3

Earlier this week, my wife’s Aunt Paula brought over a recent Time magazine - the one with novelist Jonathan Franzen on the cover. She thought the article about him and the current crop of literary novelists would give me some insight, and I’d be a liar if I said that it didn’t. It was interesting to read that article while I’m simultaneously reading last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner - Paul Harding’s Tinkers - and last year’s National Book Review winner - Colum McCann’s Let The Great World Spin - is sitting on my nightstand, next in the queue.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Instead, it’s sort of about two other articles in that particular issue of Time, both op-ed pieces toward the back of the magazine that I read after I read the cover story Paula wanted me to read. The first was an analysis by James Poniewozik about the increasingly small regard we have in our society for facts. You know, those things that are pretty much documented and undeniable, but which somehow get denied when they go against what we WANT to believe. The second was Joel Stein’s take on our increasing insistence in America on mediocrity. You know, that false ideal which so many of us have: that we all should have an equal chance at something, when in fact, we all shouldn’t. Not unless we work for it, maybe have a talent for it, maybe get a little lucky. I will never have a good jump shot, so why would I deserve a shot at an NBA team? Or as Stein pointed out: I didn’t go to Yale or Harvard, so how could I ever expect a Supreme Court nomination? Stein’s main point is that, if you want something done, you want the best you can get to do it, right? You want your brain surgeon, your plumber, your babysitter, to be competent at the bare minimum, and at best highly skilled. So why are we settling for less than that so often in America?

The reason these two articles struck me was because they echoed trains of thought that I myself have had in the past several months. I’ve been frustrated watching people I regard as intelligent and well-read deny things that are blatantly true. And I’ve watched mediocre people function (poorly) in certain jobs while more skilled people languish in unemployment. And as I witnessed both circumstances, I began to ruminate and ruminate and ruminate over them.

Now, look at this page. Check out this blog. Flip through a few older posts. Did I WRITE ABOUT these things which I have been ruminating over? No. I left that to James Poniewozik and Joel Stein. But check this bit of irony: for the past several days, I’ve been flailing around in my head, trying to figure out what I was going to write about for my next post.

I didn’t want to follow on a novel podcast too closely. I didn’t think the details of my trip to Disney World would interest any of you. And while I may be obsessing about this whole P90X thing I’m doing, writing an entire blog post about it just seemed boring and redundant. Meanwhile, as I am considering THESE things for a potential post - and rejecting them - I’m THINKING ABOUT the same things as Poniewozik and Stein. The difference is, they’re writing about them and I’m not.

I’m just not. And I could be. I have this forum, and even though it isn’t Time magazine, it’ll do for putting down thoughts like Poniewozik’s, Stein’s, and mine. You know, for whomever wants to read them to read them.

So here I have another post, and really I have no point to it, other than to say: look at me, thinking big thoughts and spinning my wheels not putting them down for posterity.

Why am I doing (or rather, NOT doing) that?

A War Between States Part 29: 

Interlude

Sheriff Robert Boyd sat in his patrol car and gazed out across the field of cotton next to him. He was parked on a dirt road that ran perpendicular to the Cauley Highway. A stand of thinning loblolly pines hid him from view, and he watched the road in front of him, waiting for the speeding teenager or teacher he knew would come flying down the paved road any minute. They always sped down this road on their way to the high school. They always got faster the later it got.

The morning light came in through the windshield and would have shined in his eyes, except for his mirrored shades. Thank God for mirrored shades.

As he sat and stared at the cotton, with its buds still closed against the late August heat — he thought about a few things. He thought about Soames’ encounter with the Granger woman. She was trying to open a bar right here on this highway, and although he agreed with Soames that such a thing was bad, he simply couldn’t agree with how Soames had gone about dealing with her. Still, what was done was done.

It was only a matter of time, though, before Soames’s enthusiasm got them both into hot water. Boyd was sure of it.

He thought again about his own encounter with Bill Wells back in July. Thinking about it, he didn’t approve of how he’d handled that situation. And the spite, the disgust, in Wells’s voice had bothered Boyd more than his slack, expressionless face had showed.

Thank God for mirrored shades.

It was a bit of a blow, listening to Wells’s rant. Especially after being so blatantly shut out of the GBI’s raid on Coach Williams’s Underground. He’d called the state police’s offices in Atlanta the next day. They’d stonewalled him.

That made him furious. But it also made him sad — sad that to them, he was only a podunk backwoods sheriff with droopy drawers who didn’t deserve to know about things that were happening in his own jurisdiction.

And now over a month had passed. Williams was out on bail, along with his little helpers. Boyd had seen Jamal Jenkins, Elgin Blalock, and the Green boy around town. No sign of Williams, though. But Boyd figured — he hoped — that the GBI sons of bitches knew where the man was.

The sheriff scowled at the fields of cotton and gripped the steering wheel tight. His wedding band glinted in the morning sun.

And then Terminius Green’s infamous white Mustang buzzed by him on the Cauley Highway. The top was down and two black men sat in the front seats.

Boyd checked the radar gun. It read 57 MPH.

“Dammit,” he muttered. Two miles over the speed limit wasn’t enough for him to pull anyone over - not even Terminius Green.

But then something compelled him to start his car and shift into gear. He felt suspicious for some reason. And his suspicion didn’t come from the oddity of those two being awake so early. It didn’t come from the oddity that the Green boy wasn’t speeding. It didn’t even come from knowing who it was driving down the road in the early morning light.

These things didn’t even occur to him. It did briefly occur to him that he might be following Green’s car because the drivers were black — but he shook his head and dismissed the thought. A backwoods sheriff, maybe, but he wasn’t Soames.

He just knew that it was important for him to follow Green. At a distance.

He followed them for ten miles, until they turned off a little side road just past the lot Tamara Granger had purchased. A sign at the intersection read County Maintained 51. He’d been to visit Tamara earlier that morning, had given her some paperwork that she demanded (and that might turn into the pot which boiled the hot water for Soames and him to get in). He noticed again how Tamara’s contractors had already cleared the most of the trees from her lot and had begun erecting a long, low building under the sparse shadows of the giant oak which she hadn’t had cut down. The building - the bar - would be finished soon.

There had been workers out earlier, but no one was out there at the moment - no one that he could see. And no one was coming down the highway in either direction. He was alone out here — the backwoods sheriff and two probable felons. Boyd thought about calling in, but decided to wait until he saw where Green was going.

A couple of miles down County Maintained 51, he saw that Green had pulled up to a white trailer parked up the hill from the access road. No one was in the Mustang anymore.

“Must be in the trailer,” Boyd said to the trees and the red dirt all around him.

He pulled to the side of the road and radioed in. “Boyd to Home Base One,” he said. “Sonny, you there?”

Sonny Doswell’s bright, tinny voice crackled back at Boyd. “Hey, Sheriff. I read ya’. How can I help you?” Sonny’s unbridled enthusiasm was unsettling.

God, but that boy needed to get laid, Boyd thought.

“Sonny, who owns the white trailer on County Maintained 51? It’s about two and a half miles from the Cauley turn-off.”

“Dunno, Sheriff. Lemme ask Jessie.”

Boyd nodded. If anybody knew, Jessie Hays, his office’s obsessive-compulsive records-keeper, would know.

“Sheriff?” Sonny’s voice cracked like a fourteen-year-old’s.

“Go ahead.”

“Uh. Eh. ‘Scuse me. If that trailer’s the same one Jess thinks it is, it belongs to Kay Williams.”

“Kay Williams? Coach Jeb Williams’ wife?”

“Ex-wife, Sheriff. But that’s the one.”

Boyd squinted at the building in front of him. Both it and the Mustang seemed to glow in the sunlight. Opalescent haloes surrounded them.

“Sonny, send Barry out this way, wouldja?” Boyd said.

“Sure, Sheriff. What’s going on? Should I call them GBI fellas?”

Boyd scowled again, and Sonny Doswell must have sensed the scowl through the radio.

“I gotcha, sheriff,” he said nervously. “I’m on it.”

Boyd nodded again and let the radio intercom drop from his hand onto the seat beside him. Then he put his car back in gear and began to creep toward the trailer.

He edged onto the upward sloping driveway. He could hear the crunch of rocks and clay under his tires. He debated about turning on his flashers, but decided against it — after all, this could only be a “friendly” visit. He had no proof that the people in the trailer were doing anything wrong.

For a moment the sun rippled across his windshield, blinding him, but then it moved out of his eyes and he could see, although his vision had little yellow sunspots playing across it.

Through the sunspots he could see that in the instant he had been blinded, someone had thrown open the door to the trailer. That someone, a dark figure against the darker interior of the building, stood in the doorway, pointing a rifle at him.

There was a sound, sharp and distinct in the morning air, and then Sheriff Robert Boyd watched his windshield crack. A spider web of shattered glass started at a point just in front of him and spread outward, its growing branches and strands glinting and shimmering in the morning sun.

He was caught at the center of that web. And even as he thought that very thought, he felt the spider’s sting on his neck.

The Cast

• Sheriff Boyd - Dennis Maguire
• Narrator/Sonny Doswell - Will Kenyon 

Lemme tell you a little bit about it, and see what you think.

As many of you know, I don’t have an 8 to 5 go to the office dress in slacks and a nice shirt job. I haven’t had a job like that for 12 years - the closest thing was probably the stint I did at Cisco, where I had to log on from my home office at 8 in the morning and had to be available until 5 or 6 in the evening. But even then, I was at home, and I attended meetings in my underwear and blasted Beastie Boys sometimes while I worked. And then there were the years I worked part time at Maizie Hale PR. I had to go into the office at 10 or so and stay until 2 or 3, and I had to dress up a little. But that was part time, and most of the week I was doing my own thing. And I rarely had to deal with rush hour traffic.

So the difference between me and MOST people, I suppose, is that they have a set routine and a place they have to be every day, and having that pattern day in and day out probably gets to them, such that when they get their vacation time - those precious 2 weeks in the summer, those most excellent of days during the holiday season - they are more than ready to get away from all their stress, and either laze around on the beach with a few cocktails or spend some time hanging out with their family.

My thing is - the longer I stay on vacation, the more stressed out I get. I simply cannot settle into lying around all day on the beach, or going swimming whenever I like, and NOT doing the things I usually do on a daily basis. By the time a week has gone by, I’m cranky, lethargic, and ready to go home. And my stress is usually higher than it was when I left.

I think I’m this way for two reasons. First is that, because I DON’T have a routine imposed on me, I have to impose one on myself. I keep running lists of things to do, and I always, ALWAYS have something that needs to be done. These things include editing my current story or novel, updating this site, finishing client work, doing odd jobs around the house, and running this errand or that to make sure my household operates as smoothly as a household can. When I’m actively doing these things, and I can see the to do list disappear every day I feel good about myself. And let’s face it, doing things like that is just about impossible on vacation. Most people look forward to leaving stuff behind for a little while, but I thrive on all that stuff - it’s in my nature. When I don’t have a list of things to do, I feel sort of empty.

The second is that I am capable of taking little “mini-vacations” every day. If I wanted to right now, even as I write this post, I could get up and turn on the Wii and knock out a few levels of Mario, or a few gigs of Rock Band. If I wanted to, I bet I could give one of my friends a call, and we could either hook up and play a game, or swing over to the Tavern and have a beer. So I don’t feel the need to “get away from it all” that most people do. In fact, when I “get away from it all”, that usually means I have to leave behind all the things that I get to do on my mini-vacations.

I recently went on vacation with my family to Disney World, and that’s what’s prompted me to write this. While we were there, sure, we had a great time riding rides, eating expensive food (and not cooking!), swimming in fake volcanoes, and sleeping in. But every day that went by, I kept thinking of all the things I had to do at home. And when I got home, the stress that had been building up while I was away all but disappeared. After I post this, I’m going to go outside and mow the grass. And that will make me feel better than any poolside cocktail could.

That’s messed up, and I know it. But that’s the way it is.

OK. Fuck that. That’s an excuse. The truth is that I’m almost out of material, and I’m so busy that creating MORE material for this podcast is becoming a problem. I’m gonna keep at it. But, well, there’s cause for some concern….

Anyway, here it is - the second half of Sarah and her friend Pammy’s encounter with a villain? Antagonist? Red herring? I think I know, but I’m not sure yet.

A War Between States Part 28: 

Chapter 15: Skirmish: Sarah, Part Two

He turned in such a way that Sarah didn’t know whether to get scared or laugh – his movement was an obvious show. Beside her, Pammy sucked in her breath.

Still, when she saw his face, she knew she was in some level of trouble, laughable or not. Robocop was after her now and that would be her DOOM! She really wasn’t scared of fat boy Soames, but she knew Pammy was, and she was beginning to feel like she’d overstepped her bounds - and brought Pammy with her.

“Mrs. Dobson. It is not for you to inform me regarding the law. And what Miss Roberts did was run that stop sign back there.”  He nodded, scowled, and continued to his car.

They watched him, and Pammy began muttering to herself again. Sarah heard what she was saying this time: “Did I stop? I’m sure I did. Should I say so when he gets back?”

By chance, Sarah glanced at her watch. It read 12:35. Then she peered over her shoulder, across the backseat, and through the rear window to see what Soames was doing. He had climbed into his car and was sitting at the steering wheel, his stern face gazing at something in his lap. At first Sarah thought he was probably writing on one of those ridiculously weighty pads that cops used.

Then, as timed passed and the afternoon wore on, she began to imagine that what he was concentrating on was his dick. Pulling people over and giving them arbitrary tickets and unnecessary anxiety probably turned the creep on - so much so that he had to take care of business right then and there.

Sarah stared hard through the rear view to see if his shoulder was moving a certain way, but the interior of his car was shadowy, and she couldn’t tell. She glanced at her watch again. 12:55. So much for getting to Bill’s on time. What was taking so long?

A few more minutes passed. “Crap. I’m almost out of gas,” Pammy said, randomly, as if she was afraid that she might really run out of gas less than a mile from a fill-up. She had already turned off the car and the air conditioner, and they had instantly begun to sweat - Pammy was a big woman, and it was hot outside.

Finally, Soames climbed out of his car and started toward them. Sarah looked at her watch: 12:59. A half hour wasted on this idiot. For her part, Pammy bit her lip and turned to greet him with a face Sarah was sure would satisfy Soames completely.

“Here you go,” he said, offering Pammy the big ticket pad. “Please sign here. This is to acknowledge that I’ve pulled you over and given you a ticket for failure to obey traffic control signage.”

“Barry,” Sarah said as Pammy reached for the pad. “Pam didn’t run the stop sign. She didn’t even do one of them rolling stops that ya’ll like to harass folks for. She came to a complete stop. I know it. And you do, too. So what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Soames looked like he was about to smile. If he would have gotten angry or been surprised, Sarah would have been comfortable with his reaction. But this look actually scared her.

Bill Wells always swore that Soames was a good man. “A little too serious, maybe,” he had said. “Maybe a little too into what he does. But okay by me.” All the same, Sarah had heard people talk about how Robocop tended to pick on black people and women, whether they’d done anything or not. Bill dismissed it as an excuse for people to claim they were innocent when they weren’t. But Bill was white, and male, and here Pammy was - female, and pulled over for no real reason at all.

“Well, Mrs. Dobson,” Soames said, “We can always go into the police station and discuss who’s right and who’s not in this scenario….”

“NO,” Pammy said, grasping the ticket pad with one hand, leaning its heavy metal frame against her car door for support. With her other hand she hastily - crazily - scribbled her signature.

Soames leaned in and took the pad away from her. “Your signature is not an admission of guilt, simply acknowledgement that you and I had our little talk here. You’ll have your say in court, if you want. You can come, too, Mrs. Dobson. If you want.”

Sarah stared at him, and he smiled now. It was a smile full of import and meaning, and it haunted Sarah as she and Pammy finally drove off in the direction of Bill’s.

The Cast

• Sarah Dobson - Jennie M.
• Pammy Roberts - Sylvia Krebs
• Narrator/Deputy Soames/Bill Flashback - Will Kenyon 

Anyway, this “counts” as one of the first few short stories I published. It’s pretty good actually, or at least I and that woman think so. And the magazine had deep pockets, as I recall, so this story actually had a circulation of somewhere around 5000 - higher than some subsequent magazines I’ve been published in.

Consider this the final tale of King Arthur. What happens here isn’t that well known, so it was never included among the other Arthurian legends…. 

The Message
 

White light, and the guards and mourners closed their eyes to sleep. One fell to the floor face-first, a crash of metal armor, his shield dented beneath his weight. The light increased. An ancient nun propped against a windowless wall began to snore wheezily, and the dirty, tattered slave child beside her twitched nervously as his dreams unfolded in his mind.

Slowly the light filling the richly appointed room darkened to red — the deep fiery red common to the cloaks of knights. Music sung by angelic choirs echoed in the tiny cubicle, unheard by anyone except the old man whose chamber this was.

The old man’s eyes opened fearfully as his mourners’ eyes closed. His lips moved weakly apart and a trail of his last blood seeped out between them, decorating his scraggly, ashy beard. His hands moved to his frail but armored chest and clutched at his heart while his tongue rolled about in his bloody mouth, reciting in terror the Lord’s Prayer.

The red light faded and his sea-blue eyes opened wider, transfixed.

“You!” the old man whispered, spattering blood on his silken bedcovers.

Before him stood a man dressed in stainless ivory-hued armor, cloaked in none else but scarlet trimmed with ermine, a shield strapped to his arm. The shield bore no crest common to the kingdom — only a red, lustrous cross on a white background. The knight, gorgeous beyond earthly comparison, smiled warmly and stepped to the old man’s bedside.

“Yes, your Majesty. It is me.”

The two stared at each other while the angels sang.

“Why?” questioned the old man. “Why do you come now, after all is over and done?”

“Because all is not over. I come from my Master to tell you of your reward in Heaven. You have stored up much wealth in the Streets of God, and your life is but beginning. I come only to assure you of your fate, and of the fate of my father and your Queen.”

The old man jerked and coughed. Blood flowed.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“They are apart and shall see neither each other nor you for several years. But the three of you shall be together again, after a time.”

Then the knight in white armor started to fade away, and the angels’ voices diminished.

“I must return now to Heaven, dear King. I shall see you there, soon.”

And then he was gone.

“Goodbye, Galahad,” the old wounded king said, listening in wonder to the last harmony of the angels’ song. His bleeding, failing heart beat slightly faster and his eyes glowed excitedly beneath his wispy brows. He smiled a bloody last smile and trailed off into sleep, content with this final encounter. His friend, his wife, and his own tired soul would find eventual peace, and there would be no more shadows of guilt.

The mourners had not yet awakened, but in the silence of his chamber, he suddenly heard voices.

“Here. Here lies Arthur.”

“Take the whole bed. Together we can lift him.”

In a daze, the old man rolled his head to one side and saw only the misty vision of a face he thought he recognized, a face belonging to the seductress called Morgan.

“N-no…” he stuttered.

“Yes,” said the face. “Arthur, we are taking you to Avalon. It is a long trip, and by God’s grace you will not die on the way. But Arthur. Oh, Arthur. If you go there with us, you will live forever. And never need fear the Gates of Hell — or Heaven. Ever.”

“No…”

He stretched his feeble arm out in protest and let it fall limp, dangling over the bedside, when his head began to spin.

“Don’t you want to live forever?” Morgan asked.

But all the old man could hear was a far too distant choir of angels, and all he could see was black as he fell unconscious riding to Avalon, helpless in the hands of eternity.

I had a great time, but I’m not going to say much about it, because I’m ready to get back to the grind. I have a novel to edit, a game to design (yep), and two children to entertain.

Plus, I want to share a short story with you next post, and I owe you a podcast.

Many thanks to: Aaron and Cecelia Tubbs, Janet Smith, Michael Buccheri, Zev Schlasinger, and Steve Avery. You guys rock!!!

This time around, my friend Steve “Holt” Avery and I are going on a gaming road trip up the East Coast, just stopping in on friends we have along the way to trounce them in the various games we love and misunderstand the rules to. I’m dragging my laptop along, AGAIN, and hopefully the WiFi in the various stops we make will be vastly superior to that which encountered in Aspen and at Mom’s. That way, I can maybe periodically Tweet or Facebook or even blog about our experiences.

Here’s the itinerary.

Friday, July 9th - Drive from Atlanta to Raleigh, NC and stay with our friends Cecelia and Aaron and their new baby. They just moved there, so I don’t know how settled they are in their house. And I don’t know if the baby’s sleeping through the night yet. It ought to be interesting. I estimate we’ll probably be relatively tame, since it’s our first day out and we’re probably gonna play some lighter, Euro-y games. And since there’s a baby….

Saturday, July 10th - To Baltimore to throw down with Michael “Malloc” Buccheri and his stud farm, which includes Peter Putnam, Rob Olsson, and fucking Ben Stephenson. Malloc has promised a fully stocked fridge, including a celebratory Dogfish Head 120 Minute for me, and we’re definitely playing Twilight Imperium. So I’ll probably get to the early morning hours from the wrong side.

Sunday, July 11th - STEVE will drive. I WILL not be driving, I don’t think, to Mahopac, NY, where dwells the illustrious gaming guru Zev Schlasinger, purveyor of the mighty Z-Man Games. Zev’s having lots of people over and we’re gonna play even MORE games - although I don’t know who’ll be able to stay up late considering that the next day’s a Monday. And I don’t know how I’ll be feeling….

Monday-Tuesday, July 12th & 13th - We will return home. Like hobbits who’ve just destroyed the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, we will come back victorious and wiser, but with scars and wounds that may never heal.

So look for my updates on Twitter and Facebook and here.

I’ll have another “literary” post up on Friday - either a podcast or a short story - but after that, this trip will take precedence.

A War Between States Part 27: 

Chapter 15: Skirmish: Sarah

Pammy Roberts was skittish as a squirrel whenever she went to Dothan. All those cars going in all sorts of directions, people careening through the mall parking lot, all those stoplights put her into such a frantic tizzy that it sometimes looked like she was going to pull over to the curb, traffic be damned, and just sit there and cry. Sarah had known better than to go along when Pammy invited her, and now that they were back from their morning of shopping, Sarah found the wide, empty streets of Marionville a quiet blessing.

Still a little jittery, Pammy drove her beet red Mercury Cougar over the bridge which spanned the Chattahoochee and separated the state of Georgia from the state of Alabama. Sarah sat beside her, silently trying to send waves of calm across the car’s interior – which was faded to pink – at her friend. As soon as the thump thump thump of the bridge’s joints stopped and she saw the first few whitewashed houses of Marionville looming over the bluff, she breathed deeply and smiled. Pammy relaxed.

Now that their morning adventures were over, they were headed to Bill Wells’s convenience store for Bill’s big announcement. Sarah couldn’t imagine what Bill would be announcing that would gather folks together like he was, but when Pammy – who worked the counter and sort of managed Bill’s place – called her to tell her Bill wanted her to attend, she’d been flattered. Maybe it was the flattery which had so clouded her judgment that she had also agreed to go to Dothan with Pammy before the announcement.

Pammy’s Cougar cruised up the hill of Monument Street toward Bill’s store, and Pammy stopped at the stop sign there at the top of the hill. There were no stop lights in Marionville.

Thank God, Sarah thought with a sideways glance at her friend.

Then they rolled on, headed for Bill’s.

Suddenly, a siren whooped behind them, and blue lights flashed in the rearview.

“Wha-?” Pammy said, tensing again. Sarah herself was instantly filled with a strange and sudden animosity – a common reaction among people in the South when they see the lights from a police car in the rearview. When Southerners see police lights flash they often flush with rage and fear. Especially when, like Sarah and Pammy, they have no idea why they’re being pulled over.

Muttering to herself in a way that made Sarah nervous, Pammy tugged at the Cougar’s steering wheel and came up parallel to the curb. The police car – a brown sheriff’s sedan by the looks of it – fell in behind her. It stopped, its door opened, and Deputy Soames bustled out.

Barry Soames had a way of standing that made him always seem taller than his average height, with his shoulders thrown back and his feet planted flat and straight and exactly the same distance apart as his shoulders. Those shoulders were broad, which belied his considerable beer gut and made him seem more powerfully built than he probably was. His medium brown hair was cut with an old-fashioned part on the side, and he wore the tan and beige uniform of his office – including slick, black boots, a shiny badge, and a fully decked-out and heavy-looking utility belt, complete with a billy club and a pistol.

“Well, damn,” Pammy said, with a sour and dark expression on her face – a look not unlike the one Sarah imagined was probably on her face as well. No one that Sarah knew liked Barry Soames very much.

But by the time Soames was at Pammy’s window, she was all smiles and bright eyes. “Hey, Barry,” she said when her window was halfway down. As it slid the rest of the way down, she looked up at the deputy. Sarah squinted at the sun’s glare off of his badge. His face didn’t change when Pammy said his name – it stayed hard as stone and stern as a school marm’s.

“License and insurance, ma’am,” he said. His lips scarcely moved. Pammy hesitated under Soames’s gaze. She glanced back at Sarah and her smile was gone. She fumbled with the glove compartment to retrieve her insurance card, and then began to fumble in her purse for her wallet, not saying anything – unable to say anything.

So Sarah said something for her.

“What did we do?” She shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand, unconsciously hoping to see something in his expression that would help explain why they were on the side of the road.

“You know what you did,” Soames admonished her. “Don’t play games, Mrs. Dobson.”

After Pammy gave the deputy the information he’d asked for, he took a step toward his vehicle. And for a passing instant, Sarah felt confounded enough just to let him. But then indignation swelled in her and she said to his back, loudly enough that he could hear it, “No. I don’t know what we did. And I think it’s the law that you tell us.”

Soames froze.

He turned in such a way that Sarah didn’t know whether to get scared or laugh – his movement was an obvious show. Beside her, Pammy sucked in her breath.

The Cast

• Sarah Dobson - Jennie M.
• Pammy Roberts - Sylvia Krebs
• Narrator/Deputy Soames - Will Kenyon