“How’s it going, Jeremiah?”
“Royy. I’m Royy. Jeremiah died a long time ago.”
Grimes nodded. “In that delivery room, you told me once.”
Jason and Mariana had been friends from their time at the police academy. She had introduced them at the wedding. Mariana and Jason had stayed in touch after that, and Bean had stayed in touch until his life crashed down around Mariana’s death.
“I gotta take you in, Jerem—Sorry. Royy.”
“For?”
“Anthony Gilmore was my partner.”
Bean shrugged. “And he was?”
“Wearing a sombrero when you killed him.”
“Sombrero Man was a Fed?”
“We’ve been looking for you since you left Barefield. Kept yourself well below the radar.”
“It cost me a lot of money.”
“I’ll bet it did.”
Silently, Jason held out a badge. In the last bit of light from Langtry West, it winked.
Mariana’s Ranger badge.
“I heard about it pretty quick after you lost it. Took me a year to track it down, another three months to steal it.”
“You stole it?”
“From the idiot you gambled it away to? You bet I did. Broke right the fuck into his house and took it.”
“You’ve had it ever since?”
“Until I could give it back to its rightful owner.”
“She’s dead.”
Jason grimaced. “You know what I mean.”
Bean took it, reveled in the warmth. “How’d you find me?”
“Timothy Matthews.”
Digger’s son.
“Had himself some trouble behind some weed. Possession, intent to distribute.”
“So squeeze him to squeeze Digger?”
Jason nodded. “Shitty way to do business, but...You can’t fault Digger. He was trying to save his child.”
“I don’t fault him at all, Jason, but we all swim in shit.”
“That we do.” He looked around the flat horizon but very little was visible in the half-moon. “I’m sorry about Angela. And Digger. Who was the girl?”
Bean gave him the quick version.
“Swimming in shit.”
Bean nodded. “Swimming in shit.”
Jason held out a pair of handcuffs.
Bean shook his head. “I’m not going to jail.”
“Don’t be stup—”
“I’m going to Mexico. I’m going to grieve my wife and my daughter. I’m going to grieve my friend Digger. Will you let me do that? Why can’t I do that?” He spat on the road in Jason’s direction. “If you want to arrest me, you’ll have to beat me bloody to get those cuffs on me. Or just shoot me in the back. Either way, I don’t really give a fuck.”
The men stared at each other for a few seconds. With a curt nod, Bean turned away from the Fed and kept walking.
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“WHAT THE HELL IS IT?”
Barefield, Texas...don’t just pass through.
It’s on a centennial plate, the letters styled out of a lariat. There weren’t too many plates, maybe five hundred, and the town’s centennial was the same year as the American bicentennial so it didn’t get much media play, at least outside Barefield.
But for those people in Barefield, Barefieldians, I guess you’d call them, it was significant; mostly because few of them believed the town would survive a score of years, much less ten decades. It was just a watering hole, after all; another jerkwater stop on the steel-horse line running from Fort Worth to far west Texas where locomotives choking on the desert sand could take on water.
In reality, even today not many people think about the survival of the town. With bills and few jobs, with an economy that contracts more than it expands, with troubles and headaches eating at their edges, Barefieldians simply don’t have time for accoutrements to their civic life like commemorative plates. Barefield simply exists; yes, in the past and maybe in the future, but definitely in this moment.
Barefield is a hard town.
Where hard, sometimes ugly, things happen.
In this town, men have killed fathers and sons, mothers have chosen to take bullets to protect children. People have died and killed, both for love and hate. In this town, a thirteen-year-old girl was raped and killed not far from where a man later discovered that biology does not necessarily equate to fatherhood. And from the first days, all over this town, in resplendent homes and fanciful hotels and foul-smelling alleys and closed backrooms, deals have been made for all reasons and all things.
In this town, souls burn under the aroma of cowshit and oil refineries and barbeque sauce that will just as soon bite you as sit quietly on the hot links.
Yet it is also a beautiful town, nestled deep in the west Texas of shades of brown and tan, beige and yellow and sun-bleached white—my mama’s beloved earth tones. Some see only rocks and sand, the bones and carcasses of animals caught in the heat, unable to find shade or water, but others see the beauty of Barefield. The town’s beauty is that of the desert, as fluid and eternal as a sea. In Barefield, families sprout and grow as thick as hundred-year-old trees, loves are found and nurtured and fulfill lifelong spiritual quests, friendships ask nothing but give everything in return.
It is both of those places, damned and blessed. It is a place where, if you catch the light just right, sometimes late in the afternoon and sometimes just after the coolness of sunrise has been burned off by the harsh summer sun, you can see your own soul.
The beauty is in people like Halford and Hanford Turnbull, born and raised here, or in Darcy, also born and raised and who found his soul while standing next to his father, or in Judge Royy Bean, II, and his wife Mariana and their daughter, Angela.
Barefield, Texas...don’t just pass through.
It’s the town’s motto, written by a forgotten Chamber of Commerce member decades ago. It’s never been updated and it was used on those centennial plates back in ’76. Check your boxes and attics and Aunt Tillie’s basement and Grampa Nickie’s barns because you might find a plate or two and they might be worth something on-line.
Well, actually...probably not.
Because Barefield, while real enough on the page, is a construct from deep in my head. Or heart. Or soul. Or somewhere.
All writers bring baggage to their work, it is the reality of that tired old trope: write what you know. And let me say for the record I think that trope, as it is understood, is horseshit. If writers wrote only what they knew we would never have had Shakespeare’s histories, Dante’s hell, Stoker’s count, or Asimov’s robots.
Writers have to bring imagination to their work, not just what they know. Imagination and interest in the human condition and humanity’s soul. I don’t write to tell you what I know but to show you what I imagine, what I see when the movies are running in my head. Maybe you find that interesting, maybe you don’t, but either way, it’s much more than simply what I know.
That imagination is tied, many times, to emotional and spiritual baggage, and my baggage is the town where I grew up: Midland, Texas.
I hate it.
And I love it.
Emotional bipolarism, I guess.
Worse yet, I have no real reason for either. It was neither horrible nor incredible. It had racism and homophobism, but it also had students my age and younger who generally saw no color line and who couldn’t have given two shits about who someone was in love with. Nothing terrible happened to me while I was growing up, but neither did I grow up rich or even particularly comfortable with all the toys I wanted. I was involved in the minor, petty crimes of youth, but around me were the real crimes: domestic violence and shootings, stabbings, people flung off buildings.
Call it a dual-view of Midland.
But that dual-view is also why I write about it, though I call it Barefield. It allows me to use, or exploit, the best and worst about the place. That is exactly what I need in my novels: the ability to juxtapose those extremes—l
ove and hate—and bend them to whatever the story needs.
Here’s the thing: knowledge is easy. Writing what you know is easy; reach back into memory and haul out whatever shit you want to write about. Imagination is a more difficult, more treacherous reach.
For instance, knowledge is that my elementary school, Anson Jones, was on a street called Shady Lane, that it was a one-storey school and that an enterprising kid could climb onto the roof via trees that were planted in semi-open notch between classrooms but that still had a roof over it.
That’s knowledge. Easy peasy.
But imagination and baggage is understanding that whoever that enterprising kid might be would have to have some big ol’ balls because that was a scary fucking climb. They were small trees because the space was limited and the head only about ten feet high. Small trees generally, and specifically in this case, means less-stout branches. So whatever kid might decide to make that climb had to have some steel.
So if I were banging out that scene, the knowledge (writing what I know) is that the trees were there and the roof was just...right...there.
The imagination is making that climb. How does it look from the first branch? What about the second? What about from the top branch, which is the thinnest and weakest and is going to weave more than the rest? How does the world look from there? And how does the world look when that enterprising kid is standing on the roof and thumping his chest victoriously?
But the baggage is that I, the real Trey in 2nd or 3rd grade, never had balls enough to make that climb, even in the face of taunting from 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, who then teased me mercilessly about being a sissy (or, as the kids and language got older, a pussy).
You can see, in that scene, both love and hate. Love of that school, which I absolutely adored and at which I had a fucking blast. But also hate in that it was the scene of one of my worst childhood humiliations (and yes, elementary school is the scene of nearly everyone’s worst childhood humiliation except for all the others).
Another example: lawns and house colors.
Knowledge, again, is easy. Right now, Midland is in the middle of a drought that’s run damn near forever. So the average lawn is brown, dried and dead, mostly dirt. And houses, at least in the area where I grew up, are almost uniformly painted in colorless earth tones, but the last couple of trips I’ve made home have seen most of that paint chipped and peeling, at least where I grew up (which was lower middle class at best...starter homes or homes for single mothers). Thus everything looks old and tired.
That’s the knowledge.
The imagination and baggage looks at that and remembers how insular Midland was when I was growing up; afraid of, or too elitist for, outside ideas and different points of view. So if I were to write about that now, it would—superficially—be the drought, but more deeply it would be about relationships dying for lack of blood and vitality.
In fact, look closely and that death for lack of vitality can be seen, to different degrees, in every relationship in all three Barefield novels: 2,000 Miles to Open Road, Exit Blood, and Death is Not Forever.
So when Eric Campbell, my constant publisher—a mensch if ever there was one—asked me recently “What the hell is Barefield,” there was no easy answer.
Ultimately, between knowledge and imagination and baggage, Barefield becomes a geographic test tube that allows me to experiment with whatever is stuck in my head at the time. In 2,000 Miles to Open Road, it was the relationship between two brothers. In Exit Blood, it was the relationship between a mother and her son and his need to discover his biological father. In Death is Not Forever, it is the relationship between a father and husband, and the women in his life.
Those three relationships were stuck in my head because they were, at their most fundamental, my relationships while growing up; certainly damaged but not necessarily dying. Barefield, a cloaked and hidden Midland, allows me to explore those in a way that real life never did. I can fix mistakes I made, I can see what might have happened had I chosen Trapdoor 2 rather than Trapdoor 1.
I can climb that damn tree and have the cops called because I’m running around yelling and laughing on the roof of Anson Jones Elementary.
Or, more my speed, I can have fun with a bit of righteous vengeance.
(Read the Barefield novels carefully, if you’ve pissed me off, chances are you’re in there somewhere, getting killed over and over...and over.)
However, Barefield is not just about knowing and imagining and having baggage about the setting. It’s also about having knowledge and imagination and baggage about the people.
I was talking to a friend of mine recently, a native Midlander now transplanted to Chattanooga, and we talked about the TV series Black Gold. It was set in Midland and followed oil rig crews as they drill. We know those men and women, though they are unmet strangers, because we’d grown up with them and their parents and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters. They are the exact same crackpots and visionaries, the exact same cops and criminals, the same sinners and saints, as the rest of the world, but the difference is I grew up with these crackpots and visionaries and criminals.
There’s a guy I went to high school with who, at age forty-eight, is still working hard on oil rigs. He’s a fervent Christian and does not hide that belief. That’s knowledge. But imagination is wondering why he’s still working so hard out in the field doing exploration and what drives that ferocious Christianity? If I were writing that Midlander as a Barefieldian, there would be a backstory that has him fighting with another roustabout when they were in their early twenties. Maybe my guy killed the other one and stuffed his body in the dry hole that had just cost them half a mill and left them massively in debt.
So now, in a desperate attempt to find salvation and peace for a tortured soul, he’s found Christ and prays relentlessly. That would be his emotional search. His psychological search, unrecognized in his heart and soul until deep into the book, would be scouring the insides of the west Texas desert for oil...and the friend he’d killed and left inside that very west Texas desert.
Granted, that’s almost a French Absurdist Theater example, but it is what Barefield is: the ability to take something I know, mix it with something I imagine, and spice the entire thing with my own baggage. For different writers, it’s a different spice. Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, or the bayou of James Lee Burke’s Louisiana, Craig Johnson’s Wyoming, or Dennis Lehane’s Boston. We all have a particular place that we use to salt and pepper our novels. Midland, transmogrified into Barefield, is mine...the place that allows me to navel gaze for three hundred pages at a shot and call it literary art.
Of course, this could all be bullshit. It could just be that I want to tell a story with broads, boobs, whiskey and guns, and do it without getting sued.
Hence all the name changes, especially yours, when I killed you off twenty-seven times for laughing at me when I couldn’t climb that fucking tree.
—Trey R. Barker
January 25, 2015
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Acknowledgments
As ever, I didn’t do this alone. For all manner of help, from content to style to grammar, I would like to thank Sandi Loper, Alison Evans, Judge Scott Madson and his boots and hat, Analisa Nash, Christy Campbell, and John Purcell. For musical inspiration, thanks to Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and David Allan Coe. Lastly, a huge thank you to my dogged and intrepid publisher, Eric Campbell, who keeps taking a chance on a little ol’ boy from Texas.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trey R. Barker is the author of 2,000 Miles To Open Road, Exit Blood, and Road Gig, all published by Down & Out Books, as well as Slow Bleed, The Cancer Chronicles, and Remembrance and Regrets. He’s published hundreds of short stories, plays, poems, and thousands of articles as a former journalist. Currently, he is a sergeant with the Bureau County Sheriff’s Office, and an investigator with the Illinois Attorney General’s Internet Crimes Against Children task force.
http://www.treyrbarker.com/
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Also by Trey R. Barker
The Barefield Novels
2,000 Miles to Open Road
Road Work (novella)
Exit Blood
Death is Not Forever
The Jace Salome Novels
Slow Bleed
East of the Sun (forthcoming)
Other Books
The Cancer Chronicles (non-fiction)
Remembrance and Regret (short stories)
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Other Titles from Down and Out Books
See www.DownAndOutBooks.com for complete list
By Anonymous-9
Bite Harder (TP only)
By J.L. Abramo
Catching Water in a Net
Clutching at Straws
Counting to Infinity
Gravesend
Chasing Charlie Chan
Circling the Runway
By Trey R. Barker
2,000 Miles to Open Road
Road Gig: A Novella
Exit Blood
Death is Not Forever
By Richard Barre
The Innocents
Bearing Secrets
Christmas Stories
The Ghosts of Morning
Blackheart Highway
Burning Moon
Echo Bay
Lost
By Eric Beetner and JB Kohl
Over Their Heads (*)
By Eric Beetner and Frank Scalise
The Backlist (*)
By Rob Brunet
Stinking Rich
By Milton T. Burton
Texas Noir
By Dana Cameron (editor)
Murder at the Beach: Bouchercon Anthology 2014
Death is Not Forever (Barefield Book Book 3) Page 27