NEWS & EVENTS
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Be sure to check back often on this page. I am currently focusing on a new novel, "Rhodesville", and have started two others. Below you will find information on each of the works-in-progress. Their desciptions are listed under my working titles for the 'works in progress' and those titles may not be the titles I publish.
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01
Rhodesville
Two twelve-year-old boys decide to spend part of their summer camping on the Tennessee River in northern Alabama. One of them dies in what is ruled an accident. The other boy knows the truth behind his best friend's death. He moves away after graduating high school and returns for his thirtieth class reunion, where he is confronted with the secret he has kept most of his life. It is a story of friendship and revenge.
An exert from Rhodesville
I pulled my rental car into the abandoned drive. Weeds and grass poked their way through cracked asphalt and pointed toward the late afternoon sun. I looked through the windshield at the shadowed opening where once a door had stood. Barred windows on either side of the doorway smiled with jagged teeth of broken glass. Above the door and windows, faded black letters across the whitewashed front of the cinder block building quietly announced the place to be a Family Grocery.
I got out of the car. Four bent, threaded bolts stuck up from a crumbling concrete base; the only thing left of where a gas pump had once stood. I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I let my wife talk me into coming back here for my high school’s thirtieth class reunion. I had not been back in over twenty years. Not since my grandma had died, just eight months after burying my grandpa. After the death of my grandma, I had no family left in the area and saw no reason to come back. At least, not until my wife retrieved the class reunion invitation from our mailbox.
I stepped through the open doorway of the grocery store and waited for my eyes to adjust to the shadowed interior. The first thing I noticed was the emptiness. But closer observation revealed the place to only appear empty because the last time I had been in the store it had been crowded with shelves stocked to overflowing with grocery items. A live minnow tank, with its aeration hose bubbling away, had sat along the back wall. The minnow tank was now gone. The barren wooden shelves had been knocked over. Bare wires dangled from the ceiling where once fluorescent light fixtures had hung. Just inside the doorway, under one of the broken windows sat an old Nehi chest cooler now empty and lidless.
The old Nehi chest brought memories flooding back. This was where the idea had formed. The idea that would ultimately lead to the death of one of my closest friends. I walked up to the chest and dug a pop bottle cap out of the catcher mounted on the side of the case just below the opener. I looked at the bottle cap and could not quite make out the faded name of the drink on top of the rusted steel cap. I held it up to the light coming in through the window. The extra light helped my forty-seven year old eyes read Chocolate Soldier as the name of the soft drink painted on top of the cap.
This had been Tommy’s favorite drink and it was his idea on the last day of school so many years ago that would ultimately lead to his demise.​
02
Killer On The Loose
Set in Kingfisher Cunty, Oklahoma. Sheriff Robert Johnson, haunted by a tragic accident that cost the life of his young son and drove him to drink in excess, tries to catch a serial killer who seems out to discredit the sheriff's bid for reelection.
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An exert from Killer On The Loose
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Karen wrung the mop out after one final rinse and emptied the mop bucket into the toilet. After flushing, she jiggled the handle and smiled. No matter how many times he tried, her husband, a plumber he wasn’t, could not get the toilet fixed so they didn’t have to jiggle the handle.
She looked at her watch, an Avon exclusive given to her last Christmas by her mother-in-law.
“Eleven-twenty-six,” she said, looking around at the empty store. “Guess I’ll restock in the morning.”
She flipped off the lights in the convenience store she and her husband Jerry owned as she walked to the back door. Married eighteen years, and no children to show for it, she and Jerry, opened the convenience store four years ago. In nineteen seventy-three, when Karen and Jerry opened for business, convenience stores were a new concept. Theirs was the only one in Kingfisher. It offered the best broasted chicken in town, self-serve gas pumps, another new idea, and a drive-thru window, this idea stolen from the Dairy Land next door. Customers could drive up to the window, pay for their gas, get cigarettes and beer, something a couple widows and a Baptist minister appreciated because of the discretion the window offered when they made their beer purchases, and also a few groceries and broasted chicken, all from the comfort of their cars.
Karen stopped at the back door and looked around, doing a mental checklist of the closing down for the night routine. Normally she opened and her husband closed. But Jerry had been under the weather for a couple days and she had the place for all sixteen hours a day it was open. Karen stepped outside. Lightning flashed off in the distance west of town. She sniffed the air. Karen could smell rain in the air. When she turned to lock the deadbolt, she noticed the outside light next to the door had a broken bulb. Probably some kids, she thought. I will replace it in the morning.
Just as she reached for the door handle of her four wheel drive Ford pickup, her legs gave way and she fell to the ground. It was as if her feet had come unhinged. She turned to look at the back of her legs and saw deep cuts on both just about ankle high. A searing pain hit her but before she could scream she was shocked into silence by a gloved hand that reached out from under her pickup, grabbed her by the hair and jerked her partly under the pickup. In wide-eyed horror, she watched another gloved hand plunge a long, thin, sharp knife into her chest. The last thing she thought was – my husband kept telling me to park in front where it was safer.
03
Jarrod
Set in Indian Territory just after the Civil War had ended, sixteen-year-old Jarrod decides to leave the family farm in order to escape his cruel father. He ends up in Indian Territory, encountering Wyatt Earp and several of his deputies.
An exert from Jarrod
Jarrod lay on his back. The afternoon sun pressed right through his closed eyelids. He laid a forearm across his eyes and waited for the cobwebs to clear. His nose hurt and he tasted the raw, iron taste of blood in the back of his throat. Slowly he opened his eyes and peeked out from under his arm, squinting against the glare of the sun.
Twenty feet away stood his dad, chopping cotton as if nothing had happened. Jarrod reached around with his other hand and found his hoe lying at his side. He pushed it out of the way and rolled over, getting up onto his hands and knees was a chore. His nose felt like it was broken and it throbbed with every beat of his heart. He spat out blood and stood up. When he bent over to pick up the hoe at his feet he became so dizzy that he staggered a step toward the row of young cotton plants that he had been thinning just a few minutes earlier.
Jarrod’s dad turned toward him.
“Get your ass back to choppin’ that cotton boy,” he yelled at Jarrod. “You’re more worthless than the laziest buck nigger I ever had slaven for me. Maybe next time you’ll think twice afore you open your mouth.”
As his head cleared, Jarrod remembered a glimpse of his dad’s hoe handle as it smashed across the bridge of his nose. They had been arguing, about what Jarrod couldn’t remember because they were always arguing about something, and when he had complained about not being his slave, that the war was over for five years now and there were no more slaves, that’s when he got smashed by the old man’s hoe.
“You hear me, you worthless piece of shit, get back to work. Hell, your momma worked twice as hard as you and she weren’t nothin’ but a lazy injun.”
Jarrod stood there gathering himself. He thought of his momma. He never knew her. She had died giving him birth. In fact, he didn’t know much about her or her family. He did know she was a Cherokee named Rising Fawn and that she was only four years old when she and her mom had escaped from the army encampment here in Waterloo, Alabama while they were waiting for the fall rains to raise the Tennessee River to a navigable level.
The army was in charge of moving the Cherokees out of Georgia and into lands set aside in Indian Territory west and north of Ft. Smith. When they had arrived at the Tennessee River in July of 1838 the river was too low to navigate so they had set up camp in Waterloo. His dad had told him this was when his momma and her momma had fled the camp. He had taken them in and hid them until the army moved on. His grandma died a dozen years later from the fever and his dad had married his momma. At least that’s the way his dad had always told it to him.
Talk was his dad had stolen them from the camp and had worked them like he did the rest of his slaves. It was also rumored he had killed momma’s mother after his momma had grown into a beautiful young woman and he started bedding her.
His dad threw his hoe down and walked toward him. When he got close enough Jarrod swung his own hoe at his dad’s head. The hoe caught him right across the forehead, breaking the handle. His dad’s one good eye, his left eye had been pierced by a Union officer’s saber at the battle at Shiloh Church, rolled up and the old man dropped to the freshly hoed dirt of the cotton field.
“The war’s over and you lost, you mean son of a bitch,” Jarrod yelled at the prone man. “And I’m sixteen years old and am no longer going to be your slave.