Back Side of a Blue Moon
Excerpt
THEY WERE MORE like shadows in the night, two lone figures
shuffling their way down an empty street of an empty town. The day had long
departed, but the sun on its way out of town had not taken the stifling heat of
August with it. Doc Bannister removed his straw hat and wiped the sweat from
his face. He waited for a gentle wind to cool his head, then figured death
would catch him before the winds came.
He could see both ends of the
street without turning his head. A hound dog lay sleeping on the top step of a
pine-board sidewalk that connected the three-story Maizie Thompson Hotel to a
general store. The sign out front said it belonged to Asa Hathaway, Esquire,
and sold everything from candy and ladies notions to caskets. The sign was
hanging crooked above the door, and the paint was peeling. If anyone had
checked into the hotel, they had already gone to sleep for the night. The
windows were dark. If Waskom had not been smoking a hand-rolled cigarette,
there would be no lights at all in town.
Doc Bannister’s eyes shifted from
one store to another. He made a mental note of a corner café, a newspaper
office, an ice cream parlor, a bank, a dry goods store, a doctor’s office, and
the New River of Life Baptist Church. The street ran into a dead end at the
front door of a two-story rock courthouse presiding with a certain dignity over
the northernmost end of Ashland. Doc grinned. The law did not exist beyond
Ashland.
Waskom
puffed his cigarette down to a stub, dropped it to the gravel street, and
ground out the dying embers beneath the heel of his work boot. “I’ve heard
about it all my life,” he said. “Just didn’t think I’d ever live to see it.”
“See what?”
“The edge
of the earth.” Waskom shrugged. “When you get here and want to go someplace
else, you gotta jump off to get there.”
“All roads
lead somewhere, Waskom.”
“Road stops
here.” Waskom removed his World War I military campaign hat and began fanning
his face. The street was empty of wind. If there was any breeze, it had
remained hidden back among the bramble brush and pine thicket.
“Maybe it
does for us.” Doc dropped his valise in the dirt and stretched his muscles. He
ached like a man who had been on this earth for too long already and didn’t
recall any days past his thirty-fifth birthday.
Waskom slapped the dust off his
twill trousers. “Doc,” he said, “I seem to recall something you happened to
mention a couple of weeks ago,”
“What’s
that?”
“It was the
night you drank one shot of cheap whiskey too many, got yourself distracted by
a broken-down brunette who danced for her supper, and lost the car at a poker
table, holding a full house, aces high.”
“I was
cheated.”
“He had a
royal flush.”
“He had a
.38 Long Colt.”
“Hard to
beat a royal flush.”
“Hard to
outrun a .38 Long Colt.”
The dog
opened one eye and yawned. Behind them, the rusting voice of a wooden windmill
groaned in agony, lying in wait for the wind.
“You said
we were headed for easy street.”
“Took the
wrong fork in the road.”
“Hell, Doc,
you took the wrong road. It didn’t have no fork, and came to this godforsaken
town.” Waskom flopped down on the porch beside the dog.
Doc
shrugged and jammed his hands in the pockets of his white jacket. “I guess we
could have gone to Bossier City,” he said.
“Why didn’t
we?”
“You said
you were tired of walking.”
“I said I
had a hole in my shoe.”
“Same
difference.” Doc sat down beside Waskom and scratched the hound dog’s ears.
He waited
for the dog to bite.
It didn’t.
Good sign,
he thought.
He and
Waskom had been in town less than ten minutes, and no one had asked them to
leave.
It was a
good thing they didn’t.
Doc would
make them all rich before he left.
He was sure
of it.
“I’ve got a
good feeling about Ashland,” Doc said.
“You had a
good feeling about Ardmore.”
“Preacher
wasn’t too neighborly.”
Waskom
frowned. “If I remember, you also had a good feeling in Pine Bluff.”
“I made a
slight miscalculation about Pine Bluff.”
“What’s
that?”
“I didn’t
think Mary Alice would remember me.” Doc shrugged. “I didn’t know Mary Alice
owned a shotgun. I didn’t know Mary Alice had married the Sheriff. I didn’t
know he was a jealous man.”
“She was
fat and ugly.”
Doc
grinned. “You should have seen her before she married the Sheriff.”
Waskom spit
in the dust.
“What you
got planned for this town?” he asked.
Doc leaned
back and gazed at the sky. The stars looked close enough to come and sit down
on his shoulders. “Ashland is where dreams are made,” he said.
“My dreams
or yours?”
“Mine.”
Waskom
sighed and shook his head. “I was afraid of that.”
“Look on the
bright side.”
“This
town’s got a lot of sides,” Waskom said. “None of them’s bright.”
Doc pulled
a handful of dollar bills from his pocket and slowly counted them. “Waskom,” he
said, “we walked into Ashland with thirty-eight dollars and fourteen cents.
It’s not much, but it’s enough. I promise you one thing.”
“What’s
that?”
“When we
leave Ashland, you’ll be hauling a wheelbarrow full of money.”
“Not me.”
“Why not?”
“When we
leave here, somebody will be shooting at us, and I won’t be moving slow enough
to worry about hauling no wheelbarrow.”
“You’re
selling me short, Waskom.”
“I’m not
selling you short, Doc. I can’t even give you away.”
Doc
Bannister stood suddenly and walked toward the newspaper office. “Let’s find
out what this one-horse town has to offer a couple of out-of-town and
God-fearing businessmen.”
“Near as I
can tell,” Waskom said, “Ashland offers three things. It’s got a church to save
your worthless soul. It’s got a jail if the salvation doesn’t work out for you.
And it’s got a burying ground if somebody shoots a second too fast or you run a
second too slow.”
Doc
laughed. “We haven’t even seen a graveyard,” he said.
“Maybe
not.” Waskom let his voice trail off. “But I know one’s out there in the dark
somewhere, and I’m sorely afraid it has a hole already dug with my name on the
stone.”
Meet Caleb
Caleb Pirtle III is the author of
more than seventy books, including four noir thrillers in the Ambrose Lincoln
series: Secrets of the Dead, Conspiracy of Lies, Night
Side of Dark, and Place of Skulls.
Secrets and Conspiracy are also audiobooks on audible.com. All of the novels
are set against the haunting backdrop of World War II.
Pirtle also wrote
Friday Nights Don’t Last Forever, the
story of a high school quarterback whose life spins into turmoil during his
entanglements with illegal college recruiting, and his most recent novel is
Back Side of a Blue Moon, the story of a
con man who comes to a dying East Texas town during the Great Depression,
promises to drill for oil, and falls in love with a beautiful woman who just
may have killed her husband.
Pirtle is a graduate of The
University of Texas in Austin and became the first student at the university to
win the National William Randolph Hearst Award for feature writing. Several of
his books and his magazine writing have received national and regional awards.
Pirtle has
written two teleplays: Gambler V: Playing
for Keeps, a mini-series for CBS television starring Kenny Rogers, Loni
Anderson, Dixie Carter, and Mariska Hargitay, and The Texas Rangers, a TV movie
for John Milius and TNT television. He
wrote two novels for Berkeley based on the Gambler series: Dead Man’s Hand and Jokers Are Wild. He wrote the screenplay for
one motion picture, Hot Wire, starring George Kennedy, and John Terry.
Pirtle’s narrative nonfiction, Gamble in the Devil’s Chalk is a
true-life book about the fights and feuds during the founding of the
controversial Giddings oilfield and From
the Dark Side of the Rainbow, the story of a woman’s escape from the Nazis
in Poland during World War II. His coffee-table quality book, XIT: The American Cowboy, became the publishing
industry’s third best selling art book of all time.
Pirtle was
a newspaper reporter for the Fort Worth
Star-Telegram and served ten years as travel editor for Southern Living Magazine. He was
editorial director for a Dallas custom publisher for more than twenty-five
years. He and his wife, Linda, live in the rolling, timbered hills of East
Texas. She is the author of two cozy mysteries.
Here's where you can find Caleb:
Twitter: @CalebPirtle
E.E.: What’s your favorite kind of story to get lost in?
Caleb: I prefer a
mystery or thriller set during an earlier time. I am fascinated with the past
and particularly with the novels of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and
John D. MacDonald.
In historical
fiction, sleuths have to solve crimes by piecing scattered clues together like
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Most
present-day detectives solve their crimes with machines: fingerprints in
computerized databases, surveillance cameras, facial recognition, and DNA.
It’s easier to create suspense by having your heroine
running down a dark alley during the 1940s with a stalker right behind. It’s
night. She hears footsteps closing in behind her. She’s out of breath. Her
throat hurts. She staggers. She must find a pay phone. It’s her only hope.
Today, she would just whip out a cell phone. And suspense flies right out the
window.
E.E.: What was the first story you remember writing?
Caleb: I was in the sixth grade. I dreamed up some tale
about jungle explorers being lost in Africa as they tracked down the mysteries
surrounding a hidden gold mine. I still remember my first sentence. It was that
bad. I wrote: “The story you are fixing to read is incredible but true.”
It was neither incredible nor true. And after my English
teacher finished chastising me, I never used the word “fixing” again – even
though it’s a good, down-home, honest, East Texas, farm-country saying.
E.E.: How did you come up with the idea for Back Side of
a Blue Moon?
Caleb: The book has been a lifetime in the making. As a
small boy, I grew up Kilgore, which was home of the Great East Texas oilfield.
A crazy old wildcatter came to town with forty-five dollars in his pocket and
said he would drill for oil and break the back of hard times. No one believed
him. No one trusted him. He was little more than a con man, they said, come to
town to swindle them out of their money. But the old wildcatter sweet-talked a
widow into letting him drill on her farm, and he beat the odds, discovering the
greatest producing oilfield in American history. Happy days were here again. During my growing up years, Kilgore had eleven
hundred oil derricks rising up within the city limits. The skyline was a spider
web of steel.
I’ve known the story all my life. My father came to East
Texas in 1931 to work in the oilfield. I lived amongst the oilmen telling their
yarns. I packed away the tales they told on street corners and in early morning
cafes, and finally decided to sit down and write the book. It’s pure fiction.
But the stories and many of the characters are embedded in fractured nuggets of
truth.
I began the novel as a romance. But before I ended it, the
story had evolved into a mystery. I guess my mind is simply bent that way. But
then, I’ve always believed that every good romance has a mystery, and every
good mystery has a romance.
E.E.: How do you think you have evolved creatively?
Caleb: I began my career in the newspaper business in an
era when we wrote cold, hard facts without expressing any opinions. We were
only interested in telling the who, what, where, why, and how of a story. Then
I moved on to magazines and began building stories around the people I met and
interviewed. I quoted them a lot, and their voices added spice to the stories.
Most of my early books, and I wrote more than sixty of them, dealt with history
or travel. I quoted a lot of diaries, old newspapers, family histories, and old
timers.
When I began writing fiction, I had the privilege of being
schooled by a Hollywood screenwriter who hired me to write a couple of
teleplays for CBS television and TNT. That’s when I realized the power of
dialogue, and I learned how to turn quotes into passages of conversation. I began
to write a narrative that set the scene, then turned it all over to the
characters, who drove the story from start to finish.
When I began writing novels, I took that characterization
one step farther. What makes a book better than a movie? It’s internal
dialogue. In a book, we know what a character thinks or feels or fears. We
learn his or her ambitions and motivations. We mine the depths of their
emotions. The character becomes multi-dimensional. On the screen, we know what
characters say but never what they think. Internal dialogue makes the
difference. If my writing has grown at all, it’s because of my concern with
what lies deep within a character’s consciousness.
E.E.: Do you work to an outline or plot or do you prefer
to just see where an idea takes you?
Caleb: When I begin a novel, I know the base story, but I
never outline the book or a chapter. I always write the beginning and the
ending at the same time. It’s like traveling with a road map. I know where I’m
leaving and where I’m going, but the real joy comes in taking the story down
every back road, crossroad, or side street I run across.
Just when I think I have the story figured out, it almost
always takes a sharp left, and we’re off and running into the unknown again. I
wouldn’t write a mystery or thriller if I knew what happened ahead of time. I never
know how my hero is going to get out of trouble until the readers do. We can
all be surprised together.
E.E.: What’s the hardest thing about writing?
Caleb: Typing the first word. When that word is hammered
out on the screen, I’m committed for the next 300 to 400 pages. I will clean my
office. I will straighten my desk. I will even go outside and pull weeds. I
will do anything to keep from writing that first word.
But I’ve found a solution that works for me. I sit down and
begin every novel with the second word.
Caleb is giving away a $25 Amazon gift card to one lucky commenter. Just leave a comment and enter the raffle.
"I’ve always believed that every good romance has a mystery, and every good mystery has a romance."
What are some of your favorite mystery/romances or romance/mysteries?
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BLOOD OF CHAMPIONS
