Last Call Read Free

rocks down the gravel road
    I said Oh Mama Mama
    don’t even promise that might be so
    it’s a whole live world
    inside that lucky man
    you and all the rest of this town
    don’t even know
    one sweet covenant
    you caint never understand

Kay Stokes’ First Visitation
    I’ll buy that sculpture from you
    It’s not for sale
    but you deem it a sculpture
    Everything’s for sale and yes I do
    Not everything
    Yougn about name your price
    I won’t sell it but I also
    can’t sell it, it’s not mine
    Whose is it?
    My son made it
    I suppose he owns it
    or my wife
    or even my daddy the original provider
    maybe we all do
    or maybe none of us
    maybe it owns itself
    What would you do with it?
    I’d move it over to my place
    If you could get it there
    It wouldn’t fit
    it was made to be right here
    Maybe I could make it fit
    Ign hire a way to get it there
    Maybe you couldn’t make it fit
    then it would be neither useful nor ornamental
    about like an erection on a mule
    They say you got a way with words
    They
    Yep
    The great arbiter of all knowledge
    opinion and attitude in the known world
    extending to the Texas borders
    Pretty much
    some say furthern that
    You caint tell me you couldn’t use the money
    even if you are a retired perfessor and all
    No I can’t tell you that
    But you won’t sell it
    Why do you want it so much?
    when you first noticed it you were quoted as saying
    it was the ugliest thing you’d ever seen
    Changed my mind
    Why? Isn’t that a rarity?
    Cause there aint another one around
    I’d like for it to belong to me
    I’d just like to say it was mine
    Like about everything else in Garza County
    Pretty much

Overheard Conversation Between Billy Klogphorne and his son William, age 16, a Few Years Back
    Being your own man
    is a good thing, Willy
    it’s a first step
    towards economic
    independence
    which is an oxymoron
    and self-reliance
    which may be a status
    more attainable
    at this juncture
    but you need to understand
    being your own self-reliant man
    means one thing:
    making a map ahead of time
    to find your way out of Hell
    which is damned close
    to the sum total
    of everything on earth I’ve learned
    up to this particular juncture
    in the process

At the Sign of the Flying Red Horse
    1
    Monroe Newberry
    coming down the street pushing his bicycle
    front tire flopping like a wet flag
    into Johnny Bert Ezell’s filling station
    What you got there, Monroe? he said
    Monroe pointed at his bicycle, then at the tire, nodded
    I can see that
    it’s a green one that uster be a Western Flyer
    by its looks
    before it got to be a personal modified
    version of something else
    you want to use the bay
    yougn go back and patch that tire
    Monroe shook his head
    You don’t know how to fix a flat tire?
    Monroe shook his head
    Your daddy he never shown you how to?
    again
    Well
    Come on back then
    it aint too busy this morning
    I’ll give you a lesson in how to do it
    brang that back here
    Okay lay it on its side and turn it upside down
    standing up so wegn get to the wheel
    now you take a pair of pliars and a monkeyranch
    you just uncrack that nut like this
    loosen it up to where the wheel comes off
    you don’t have to take the nut all the way off
    it’s a little harder on a back tire
    you’ll have to work it around the chain
    you just aloosen it right here and slip it off the cog wheel
    then it’ll be pretty much the same thing with it, too
    Okay you take and bring the wheel
    over here on the bench and get you a flat head screwdriver
    put it right here under the tire edge
    prize it up like this over the rim
    so now work that screwdriver down
    lifting the whole tire edge over the rim, see?
    if it’s giving resistance and closing back up behind as you go
    take and put the pliars handle up here
    holt it open and now work that tire
    all the way around until it’s off the rim all over
    Okay
    you reach in underneath
    get