Western Swing Read Free

gonna set these chokecherries on fire and shoot anyone that comes by.” The guy probably rhymed fire with jar and drew faces in the dirt when he peed.
    Jimmy Stewart wouldn’t wait long and neither could I. I edged my knees up under my chest, raised onto my toes, and hesitated a moment to see if he’d shoot my ass off. When he didn’t, I said a little prayer to God knows who and took off.

2
    The summer I turned fourteen, I decided dogs and cats were agents of God, angels who spied on us and reported unclean thoughts and screwups to the man up top. Actually, dogs reported to cats, who spoke directly to God. Dogs can’t talk to God. Just cats.
    The episode was discovered when I attached notes to Him onto neighborhood dog and cat collars. I know what you’re doing, but it’s okay. You can trust me not to tell anyone. Please let me go.
    Neighbors complained to Mom and my stepdad, who sent me to a county extension analyst, who said the problem was artificial flavors and coloring and if I ate better I still wouldn’t be happy, but at least I wouldn’t bother anyone.
    We—Lana Sue and I—own two dogs and two cats now: Rocky, Josie, Fitz, and Zelda. I still won’t do anything in front of the animals that I don’t want God or Lana Sue to know about.
    â€¢ • •
    My mother is a beehive hairdo cocktail waitress in a jukebox and bingo club in Victoria, Texas. She wears fake gold earrings shaped like the Texas A&M logo. She keeps Coronet facial tissues between the cups in her bra. She chews three sticks of Trident at once and fries everything she eats.
    Mom royally botched the job of raising me and my two brothers. Patrick grew into a real estate magnate in Corpus Christi. He’s a swamp drainer. Garret is a Jesus freak serving ten to twenty-five on a heroin charge in the Georgia State pen in Reidsville. There was also a baby sister, Kathy, who got herself killed by a Texas Ranger during a race riot in Houston. They caught her looting a Woolworth’s department store. She died with her arms full of Barbie dolls.
    My stepfather, Don, works on an offshore rig in the Gulf, bowls in the low 200s, and has worn white socks every day of his life. He sleeps in the same underwear he bowls in. Mom told me my real dad was an evangelist for the Southern Ministry, but I don’t believe her. I doubt if she knew.
    If I ever sell another book, I’m going to a plastic surgeon to have my navel smoothed over. I don’t want any reminders that I was ever connected to that woman.
    â€¢ • •
    Writing books is what I do—or did. Lately, I’ve been thinking there may be more to life than pretending I’m somebody else. In ten years of almost daily typing I sold two formula Westerns and one of those sentimental novels where you make the readers like a character, then you kill him. After I met Lana Sue, I wrote a vaguely true, mostly lies book called The Yeast Infection. All the carefully veiled characters recognized themselves and I found myself embroiled in two lawsuits and a fistfight. I won the lawsuits. Would have won the fistfight, but Jimmy Stewart doesn’t hit women.
    Movie rights sold, amazingly enough, and Lana Sue and I suddenly arrived in Temporary Fat City. Lana Sue’d been raised upper tax bracket, so she handled it okay. I went nuts—Super Bowl tickets, eighty-dollar bottles of sherry, Nautilus machines, personalized license plates on the Chevelle. After a quick trip to Carano, Italy, in search of Max Brand’s first grave—he had two—I still maintained enough cash to support us without hourly work at least through the summer.
    A summer in Jackson Hole without money thoughts is the gift of a lifetime and gifts should not be pissed away on idleness. I decided that in order to stay with Lana Sue I had to resolve my past and in order to do that I had to give up Buggie.
    Lana Sue said, “Loren, no disembodied voice up in the