by George Wier
Here is the dark and quiet wood, now, below us.
But what is this? A flicker of light through over-arching branches now mostly barren of leaves. Fall has come to this part of the world. And here, borne on the gentle breeze is the sickly-sweet smell of wood smoke.
It is a fire.
Three figures sit about the fire, their bare knees folded Indian fashion.
We come closer and listen.
They are Boy Scouts. One of the three speaks while the other two listen with round eyes.
Stories. They are telling stories, each in turn.
We listen close.
“And then they slowly, without making so much as a sound, carefully... entered... the barn.”
But we are done with this tale and with this place.
There are other tales than these in the dark woods. Other lives that have been lived, and there are even grander tales of those who never lived, except behind the twinkle of a storyteller’s eye.
Let us depart this place, then. Let us leave it where it is. There are darker and brighter days, more terrible stories and pleasant yarns, and even greater secrets to ferret out.
For adventures begin and end and begin again, and we are on the cusp of a new one now.
Finis
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Some may see this book as an attempt at social commentary. There was no such attempt. I simply wrote a story. What came out, on the other hand, is definitely reflective of my stance on some issues. I’m an author that way.
For those who don’t like social commentary in their fiction, I suggest you not read Gulliver’s Travels, Fahrenheit 451, Logan’s Run, or anything, for that matter, by Upton Sinclair or Ayn Rand, to name but a few. Even more recently, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo proved to be a very vocal social statement.
An author should definitely have something to say about the things he’s seen and the places he’s visited. I have visited each of the places named in this book many times throughout my life. I also count myself fortunate to have spent a good deal of my adolescent years in the woods, homes, streets, shops and on the roads and highways not far from the events of this story, and many of the impressions and characters herein are drawn from those rich experiences.
The cities of Hearne, Franklin, Calvert, and Hilltop Lakes are very real places, as are both Robertson and Leon Counties. An author sometimes must, for the sake of story, take certain liberties with the real world. While I have done my best to represent these towns and some of its peoples as truthfully as possible, from the viewpoint of any local I may have well missed the mark. My apologies where I have done so.
To set certain records straight, a World War II POW camp did once exist near Hearne on the site of the current Municipal Airport. Both Italian and Japanese POWs were held there until the their governments’ surrenders. Many locals are the offspring and grandchildren of those freed from the camp at the end of the war. Why return to a war-ravaged homeland when you have already sunk down roots elsewhere? We are fortunate they stayed.
I’m sure the current Robertson County Sheriff is an honest and upright person, and could not possibly bear any resemblance to Sheriff Scott Noonday, except possibly for Noonday’s good points. Likewise, I hope the gate guards at Hilltop Lakes will forgive.
Camp Creek Lake and Camp Creek Community are two separate locales entirely. David A. Williams, author of Strings (a wonderful Texas love story) set me straight on that after reading my first draft. Thanks for that, David, and for all the pictures of old barns you sent me. I have used one of them here.
To readers of the Bill Travis Mysteries, I thank you.
George Wier
June 10, 2012
Read the opening chapter of George Wier’s next thrilling Bill Travis Mystery:
After The Fire
Coming soon
PROLOGUE
Out of the night the two come as if they are now born fully clothed and in that precipice-edged time between teenager and adult. They hold hands, not like kids but like old lovers, long familiar and natural in one another’s company.
In the cold illumination from the street light above them the two wear expressions that could part a throng of street toughs. The girl’s face is set as if chiseled in stone ― no expression and a fixed stare. The young man’s aspect is more that of the determined fighter, ready in an instant to take care of business. His probing gaze penetrates the layers of darkness along the street.
This night, at this late hour, the two would be stopped and questioned by any law enforcement officer spotting them, but the night is a wholly owned expanse of time and space and exists for these two only ― this boy and this girl.
“Don’t worry,” he whispers to her without turning to regard her face. He knows her thoughts as if they are his own.
“If they come, they come,” he says.
This time he looks at her as they enter another cone of light from yet another street light. She stares straight ahead, and yet she nods faintly.
“If they do come for us, I will hurt them,” he says. “Badly.”
One block they walk. Two.
“Molly. Say something.”
“I love you,” she whispers.
It is enough for him. She is there with him, although at times he feels she is very far away. On the dark side of the moon, perhaps.
A pair of headlights stab out at them from directly ahead ― malevolent, blinding bright eyes that have finally found them.
The two stop in their tracks.
“We’re not going to make it,” she says.
The engine ahead of them growls and the headlights cant slightly under the torque of hundreds of horsepower held at bay. The vehicle is a ravening beast preparing to rend them.
“What are they waiting for?” he asks.
“Our fear,” she says. “They want to see it.”
The field to their right is open and bare, a construction project here on the edge of town, never culminated. Beyond the field, he knows, the pine forest begins in the far darkness. There will be no running that way. To their left and behind is the broad and long street.
“I’m tired of running,” he says. “Here. Here we stand.”
“Jeff,” she says, “whatever happens, don’t forget me.”
“Never,” he says, as the engine lets loose another loud growl. The growl becomes a roar complimented by the high whine of tires spinning on the pavement.
“I think ―” she begins, but then there is no reason to finish it. The headlights lurch forward, and the pent and enraged animal is loosed upon them.
*****
The summer of 2011 was the worst Texas summer in living memory, not merely because of the heat (which for over two months stood above the century mark and felt much like living in a blast-furnace), but because of the drought; a ground-cracking, aquifer-killing, lake-desiccating and seemingly endless period of ten months with no ― that is to say zero, zip, nada, the empty set and a big, fat goose egg ― precipitation. Ranchers prayed for rain as the shores of their stock tanks slowly crept further inward to the center to become dry holes in the landscape, and with each passing day of continued drought, Texas waterways came to more closely resemble meteor craters ― perhaps of the Moon. The ranchers, at their wits-end, began paying out every cent of their meager savings to have potable water trucked into water their livestock at an all-time premium. The farmers, on the other hand, had little choice in the matter. They threw up their hands at the scorched brown wastelands their fields had become. Even the wild grapes, the hardiest of southern creepers, withered on the vine.
Texas became a fire-free zone. There would be no trash burning. There would be no camp fires. There would be no barbecues in city parks. No fireworks would be volleyed into the sky on the Fourth of July, and the fireworks sellers bellyached at c
ity council meetings and commissioners courts across the State. But their pleas fell on deaf ears. The answer was “No.” No fire of any kind. It became illegal to strike a match out of doors.
Water rationing began in earnest. Fire breaks were cut across vast tracts of land as a fore-measure, just in case. And everywhere the only real news was the drought. Gatherings of people tried to find something else to discuss, but there was only the one element in common among any two people, and a conversation that didn’t mention the drought became an endangered species of a sort. People watered their lawns late at night, risking the prying eyes of their neighbors and potentially heavy fines, but they knew they had to keep the ground around their homes safe in the event the woods across the way became filled with smoke.
No matter the prevention, there was only the one sure saving grace. That grace was above, somewhere perpetually elusive and out of sight ― clouds bearing rain. But that grace was not to come.
And then the fires came.
In the ordinary run of life, when all is clam and quiet, people tend to rely upon an established order of things and come to think that rules and the following-of-rules will see them through. The rest their faith and trust in elected officials and the laws and codes they enact in the hopeful belief that the disaster they feel in their hearts is a mere breath away may be averted thereby. However trusting and hopeful the mind must be in order to continue a semblance of everyday existence with the pressing threat of loss closing in, no such law or code was ever contrived that could, with the slightest chance of success, prevent nature from taking her course. In the instance of the Lone Star State and its parched landscape, there was no prevention for either lightning or mishap. And it was these two conspirators, working in concert as if it had all been carefully plotted beforehand, which spelled doom for thousands of homes, dozens of lives, and hundreds of thousands of acres of landscape in a brief one-week period that October.
The news of the Texas fires made headlines across the surface of Planet Earth, larger than life: TEXAS ON FIRE.
In the ensuing aftermath the headlines perceptively changed in timbre, as they invariably do, from the steady shock and surprise which the purveyors of the chaos which compose the news are want to spread, to that of a more sympathetic and ultimately pathetic tone.
And because of the myriad news stores of the devastation, the property damage, and the individual tales of uprooted lives and lost livelihoods, those stories which could or should have been brought to the fore in the days and weeks following the fires never saw the light of day.
This is one of them.