Jim left the office and damned if he didn’t go straight to his house, fetch Laney and his wagon, and ride out to his father-in-law's farm before the sun had reached noon.
“Coward,” Caleb muttered. “Lost his nerve for fighting and now he’s going to raise sheep.”
“Jim Murratt is a lot of things,” Ardiss said reaching over and taking half of Caleb’s sandwich, “but a coward is not one of them. It took grit to come here and tell me he was leaving. He could have left on his own and no one been wiser.” He took a bite. “No,” he said around a mouthful of ham and bread, “Big Jim Murratt was and remains one of the bravest men I know.”
“Fucking sheep” Caleb spat out and ate the rest of his sandwich.
IV.
“Fucking sheep,” Caleb murmured on his porch. His coffee had gotten cold, and he had emptied the bottle of whiskey. “Fucking sheep fucking fucker.” He reached for the mug, but it wasn’t quite where he saw it, and he lost his balance, falling face first on his table. “Fuck.”
“Bet that little bastard’s part sheep, too. Wasn’t nobody around to see the little shit slide out of his mother’s crotch.” Caleb looked out at his brother’s back yard. “Fucking sheep boy!” He yelled, then slid from the chair to the floor of the porch. “Sheep fucking sheep boy bastard.” He mumbled, then sank into oblivion.
Someone was shaking him, or maybe the world had switched directions. He could feel something spinning around his head. Then he felt something snake in under his armpits and start pulling him up.
“Malright,” he mumbled. “Lemmbe.”
A booming voice rang in his ear. It sounded like God.
“You ain’t done it,” The voice said. “Get your ass up and moving before I jail you for vagrancy.”
Caleb swam out of his stupor and opened his eyes only to have them stabbed by a shining golden sword. “Fuck Jesus,” he said more clearly, “I’m goddamned blind.”
“You’re goddamned hung over is what you are.” God sounded like Ardiss now. He managed to lift Caleb by his armpits and walkdrag him over to the porch swing where he gingerly laid him sprawling across the bench seat.
“Holy shit don’t put me here,” Caleb said, coming more to himself and speaking more clearly. “The world is dancing enough on solid ground. I don’t need the swing, too. Unless you aim to readjust my fuids as well.” He pulled himself up from the swing and stumble walked to the door. “Come on in,” he said. “Make me some coffee, and I’ll be just fine.”
“I suppose you told the little shitwit all about his dear old dad, din’t you?” Caleb asked as Ardiss filled his mug with fresh black coffee.
“That I did,” Ardiss said as he poured himself a cup.
“Probably dressed it all up for him. Told him something pretty?”
“Well, I didn’t start off with ‘Your dad was a coward son of a bitch.’ No. You tried that tactic yesterday, and we all see where it got you. Your eye looks better today, by the way.”
Caleb raised his mug and nodded.
“No. I tried a different tactic.” Ardiss took a swallow of his own coffee, holding the mug with both hands. “I tried telling him the truth. Figured I’d see how he’d react.”
“How’d that work for you?”
“Quite well, in fact. I even learned a few things, too.”
“Such as?”
“Jim spent more time away from home than he spent tending sheep. The boy thought he was out here riding with us. So, too, apparently, did Laney and the old man.”
“Huh.” Caleb looked at his brother over his mug as he took another deep swallow. It burned his throat going down, but Caleb found that was a sure way to wake up and shake off the hangover grogginess. “So where was he if he wasn’t there or here?”
“No idea,” Ardiss answered, “but you have to admit that once again my way yields more and better results than yours.”
“Drink your coffee and go fuck yourself, Ardiss.”
Ardiss chuckled as a knock, and a holler came from Caleb’s front door. “Ardiss?” the voice yelled. “Caleb? Any of you in there?” It was Bedford Devere.
Caleb started to rise from the table, but Ardiss motioned for him to keep his seat as he went to answer the door.
“Well, Bedford,” Ardiss said as he opened the door, “this is a surprise. Pray tell me what brings you to us in such a state of fluster? Have the Indians taken to the warpath again? Bad men robbed the bank? It must be truly a thing of note to rouse you from your midmorning nap before the sun has yet passed nine o’clock. Have the clouds opened up and sounded Gabriel’s trumpet perhaps?”
Bedford tilted his head quizzically at his boss, then shook his head as if to clear it. “No sir,” he replied breathlessly. “Boris and Gary Wayne are back, and Gary Wayne’s hurt something awful. We are done drug Doc Todd out of bed to look at him, and he ain’t at all sure of his prospects. Says you better get there quick.”
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Afterword and Acknowledgements
This collection of my first two Guns of the Waste Lands novellas has been almost twenty years in the making. In the mid 1990's, while researching for my Master's thesis in American literature, I came across an old college reader from 1968 titled Heroes and Antiheroes: A Reader in Depth. In it, editor Harold Lubin claimed that the cowboy was America's answer to England's knight in armor. He made a fairly convincing argument comparing, among other things, the so-called “code of the West” to the chivalric code of medieval times. The idea of how the Arthurian legends would have played out as a spaghetti Western immediately occurred to me and clanked around my head for several years until I finally put fingers to keyboard about four years ago to hammer something out.
I had assumed (foolishly it turned out) that I could finish all four novellas (structured loosely around the four books of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) in a year or two if I was diligent and wrote every chance I got. For such short novellas, however, it proved harder than I thought to balance my paying job with my research for and writing of the story. It took me two years to finish Departure and another two to complete Diversion, and I still have two more novellas to go (though the ideas seem to be coming at a more rapid pace these days).
Oddly enough, I never cared for the Western as a genre until writing this book. Since beginning my research on it, though, I have become a fan of Little Big Man, True Grit, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and the HBO series Deadwood.
However, I have been fascinated with Arthurian literature since almost as long as I’ve been reading. One of the first “big” books I ever read was a bowdlerized version of the King Arthur legends, Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur. My parents gave it to me because our family is descended from his in some way (I think his sister married into our family way back in the hereyonder, but I forget).
I later read Malory's Le Morte d’Arthur in middle school, but my love for all things Arthur really began in high school when I came across two books. In 10th grade, my first girlfriend, Laura Sears, lent me her copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon to read. This book did two things I had never seen before: it told the Arthur stories from the points of view of the women characters, and it made everyone, from Guinevere to Morgan le Fay sympathetic. I enjoyed the idea of telling the old tales from new perspectives, but I especially loved reading a story where there were no real bad guys, just misunderstood motives.
After that, I read everything I could find about King Arthur, from Mary Stewart’s Merlin series to T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. I even found John Jake’s attempt at a King Arthur novel, Excalibur! And read it, disappointed though I was that it wasn’t the inspiration for John Boorman’s film.
Then, as a senior in high school, I stumbled upon Richard Mona
co's Parsival series, and it became my absolute favorite retelling of the Grail legend. Monaco draws heavily from Eschenbachh’s Parzival, but he adds a more realistic touch and modern sensibility to the characters, making his version seem oddly more mythic even as it works as a metaphor for modern man’s struggle between materialism and spirituality, between obtaining power over the self or inflicting power over others.
When she lent me her copy of The Mists of Avalon, Laura told me she wanted me to dedicate my first fantasy novel to her. While this isn’t a traditional fantasy, it is probably as close to a fantasy novel as anything I’ll ever write. Sadly, however, Laura passed away a few years ago, and we had fallen out of touch long before that. I’m dedicating this first volume of a proposed quartet to her just in case somewhere on the shores of Avalon, where the time is always summer, and the apples are all in bloom, she finds it.
I would also like to thank Richard Monaco, for his constantly nagging me to get on with the book. He once wrote a screenplay for a Western version of the Parsival story and saw it mangled beyond recognition by Hollywood, so I suspect he really wants to see someone who respects the source material do it without outside interference. Richard, I hope you like it at least a quarter of how much I like your Parsival books.
Finally, I want to thank my wife, Tina, for proofreading the manuscript, helping me design the cover, and listening patiently (or at least pretending to) while I ramble on at inopportune times about my book ideas. I’m afraid it’s not over yet, darlin’. We got two more of these novellas to do, and I’ve only just started the next one.
About the Author
Leverett Butts teaches composition and literature at the Gainesville campus of the University of North Georgia. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Eclectic and The Georgia State University Review. He is the recipient of several fiction prizes offered by the University of West Georgia and TAG Publishing. His first collection of short fiction, Emily's Stitches: The Confessions of Thomas Calloway and Other Stories, was nominated for the 2013 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Short Fiction. He lives in Temple, Georgia, with his wife, son, their Jack Russell terrier, and two cats (one is antisocial, but the other’s just dead).
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