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Patrick
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, January 14, 2002 - 03:47 pm: |   |
I am seeking a certain noise here, so I'd appreciate any/all contributions to the short story (maybe 10-15 post) from anyone here. My only request is that you maintain the "western sensibility." That means don't move the characters to the Bahamas or even Philly. Feel free to inject other characters. Male lead is a ragged cowboy by the name of Bob Maureen and the lead female is a spunky woman by the name of Darlene New Zealand.
"Hot chili peppers
in the blistering sun..."
- Bob Dylan
1.
Bob Maureen hated surprises. He was the sort of man who sincerely believed all news heard outside a motel room was the work of the devil. Here had come his ex-wife with a ditty about her mare being pregnant and wouldn't Bob call his friend the vet and have him take care of what Louella now called "the damned thing."
He stood atop annoying leafy spurge near the droopy barb-wire fencing that ran and did not run full-across his front yard, watching Louella's bright-red Ford El Camino lead a happy cloud of dust off his ranch property.
"So much for Judge Judy," he mouthed toward the main highway, the road Louella would take back to her job at the water department, where she ran roughshod over delinquent accounts. He looked at the falling sun and then at his watch. Judge Judy was his favorite television show and it would come on in another ten minutes. His friend George the vet would shut down his office about that time, so Bob waspretty sure he'd miss the first segment of Judge Judy.
There was a ragged map posing as the national conscience and he, too, knew that Judge Judy would again be on top of the issues troubling the great land from sea to shining sea. He especially enjoyed the segments involving men being sued by girlfriends who'd handed-over their credit cards and now stood stunned before Judy Sheindlin, each and every one of them seeking payment from the court.
He'd caught that segment last week featuring a Black stud from Houston who'd run-up a $15,000 charge on the American Express card owned by a dizzy-looking blonde from Dallas. It was the chit-chat between Judy and the aggrieved that absolutely mesmerized Bob.
Judy: "Didn't you wonder why this idiot wanted to use your credit card? Duh..."
Plaintiff: "He said he loved me."
Defendant: "HEY, HEY,HEY...I said it one time. - and I was drunk."
In his own way, Bob Maureen handed-out his own TV viewer justice and when it had come time for a verdict, Bob had mumbled something about the defendant winning that one if only because the blonde had been, well, stupid as all Hell.
He walked inside his mobile home and headed toward the telephone in the small kitchen. With his free hand, he poked at the TV set remote and found the channel he wanted. On the big screen, Judge Judy's bailiff was handing her the case's file. Another couple going down the tubes.
"Hey, you," he said in a flirty voice to the woman who answered the telephone. "Is George in, by any chance?"
...
(this is free-flow, so don't think too much about it. KEEP THE TITLE IN MIND, HOWEVER.) |
Claudia Turner VanLydegraf
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, January 19, 2002 - 12:30 am: | |
"Why, Hello Bob," answered the voice, much happier than he thought she should be at the office. He wondered if she had been thinking about him and last weeks roust. That was a good term, roust. sort of leads ya' to believe that som'thun took place, but don't exactly tell ya' what. Yea, she probably had been thinking in her mind about what he'd told her about calling, and now here he was calling. But this was business, and so he said, "Hi Ya, Carole, (yea, Carole with an E, sort of uppity for the small dusty town of Durango, but what the hell, she was pretty) "Sorry to be calling so late in the afternoon, but I gotta talk to George for a minute, ya' know, about that stupid mare that my ex's got. She got herself preggers, and now that ex wants me to take care of it for her. Is he about, and I'll talk to you later Sweetie" Well, now he knew that she musta' been thinkin about him, cause her voice turned slightly icy when he said he wanted to talk to ol' George, but she said, "Yea, he's here, Honey, let me get him on the horn for ya, but be sure to come back to me after ya' talk to him, OK?" |
LaurieAnne Cruea
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, January 19, 2002 - 09:44 am: | |
Patrick,
I have attempted many times to add to this collaborative, but unfortunately, western is something I have difficulty with. Give me Spy tech, underworlds of Columbia, Victorian era, or a slavery setting, I can do. Just plain western--not yet. Maybe sometime in the future, but not now.
LaurieAnne |
Patrick
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, January 19, 2002 - 02:25 pm: | |
(forgot this important instruction note: Please record each of your entries as NEW CHAPTER beginnings. Do not merely tie-into the previos post. Claudia: I liked the verve of your contribution. It appears that the characters are headed straight for the sack if you have anything to say about it, eh? LaurieAnne: don't give up so easily. Try it. It's an experiment in "hearing" the writing...)
3.
Bob cut across the town plaza grounds holding his strawberry ice cream cone in one hand at a position between his waist and mouth, at the ready, while knowing he was headed for one of those romantic showdowns he always lost. His latest girlfriend, Darlene New Zealand, waited on him at the DuVaughan Hotel snack bar and, as he eased past the rear-end of a slow Chrysler, he recalled she'd said something about his last name.
That had been a problem with his women. Few of them had seen his last name of Maureen as something they wanted to be attached to, especially that one Black girl he'd befriended while at a rodeo in Lubbock. They'd corresponded a bit and all had been what he liked to call "peachy," except that there about the time he offered his usual come-see-me invite she'd come out and said, seriously, "I could never go through life as LaToya Maureen. Sorry, it's, well, too damned White for me!"
A few of the others had been just as silly.
But it was his feeling that you had to take the bad with the good. It was a sun-splashed day and so he walked onward in as relaxed a manner as he could muster. Already, he could hear Darlene's gravelly voice: "You want me to go around here as Darlene Maureen? Are you friggin' crazy?!"
His ex-wife Louella had been no help. She'd taken an advertisement in the Abilene Intelligencer and told the world of her decision to leave him. Later, she told him she had paid good money to see the ad placed right below the town's divorce notices. For days, women called him at his office at the airport to laugh and make snide remarks. Bob took it in stride. One had even come out to the airport grounds and knocked on the metal door of the hangar that housed his office and his beat-up airplane.
When he opened the door, Bob said, "Yes?"
"See, that's your damned problem right there," the pretty girl had thrown back at him before turning around cutely, like a Flower Power gal, and skipping toward the hangar's parking lot in the direction of a Volkswagen bus.
Inside the hotel, he asked the clerk behind the registration counter about the snack bar's luncheon special.
"Oysters Rockefeller," he heard.
"That's a stunner," he lobbed back as he took the last of his cone and tossed it into a trash can set on the lobby side of the counter.
"No really," the high-throated clerk added. "We're upgrading all around."
Bob nodded and started to walk away, his eyes dancing from wall to wall and up and down the hall that would take him to the renovated snack bar. He thought a Van Gogh print was all wrong for a wall next to a men's room.
"Things are always starting over in this damn country," he said in a low voice. "What's next for this place, a young shoeblack?"
"Yessir?" he heard from the other side of the candy vending machine.
(to be continued...) |
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