I’m one of those rare souls who likes to shovel snow . . . unless it’s a heavy, wet snow. That’s work. That’s when you should follow the Old Farmer’s Almanac on how to shovel snow efficiently: Invite your son over for dinner and, while he’s there, hand him the shovel.
My brother, in contrast to me, well, a shovel won’t do it. A decade ago, he bought a snowblower, then a bigger snowblower, and now he uses a tractor with a huge bucket on the front of it to clear his driveway.
It got me to thinking, what if the neighbors became competitive about this snow removal business? To see what could happen, read on . . . this month’s short story, “Snow in your eye.”
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I wrote my first Christmas story nine years ago. It was a chapter in a novel that never saw print, a novel titled Wings Over the Mountains. I set that story in the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee in the year 1927.
I sent the story to family and a few friends, as a Christmas gift. And that launched a tradition, but not at my initiation. The next year, a couple friends asked, “What’s the Christmas story you’ve got for us?”
So I wrote “Cedar Trees”; the next year, “The Santa Train”; and the following, my favorite—“The Search for Pooch”—how a guy who plays Santa Claus runs down a Vietnam war vet who’s gone into hiding. The trigger? A boy tells the Santa he wants only one thing for Christmas, to see his dad.
I wrote my first James Early Christmas story three years ago. And as my Christmas gift to you this year, here is the second, “A Night for Miracles.”
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I don’t like needles.
I had to get a blood test before I could get married the first time. This vampire came at me with an empty syringe that, I swear, was the size of a gallon jug. She filled it with my blood and sent it off to the lab, for testing, to see what horrible diseases I might have.
I staggered out of the doctor’s office, and Sallie had to drive me home.
Now needles don’t bother her, so siphoning her blood, she’d hardly noticed it.
The vampire called the next day. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but somebody in the lab dropped the blood samples and one of yours broke. We have to get new samples.”
To which Sallie said, “Honey, it had better have been mine because, if it was Jerry’s, he’s not coming back.”
Whew, it was Sallie’s.
The other day, I went in for my flu shot. It is the season.
Flu shot.
Needles.
Oh my.
* * *
I once lived in Montgomery, West Virginia, where adults liked Halloween as much as children do.
One guy—from Smithers, the next town up the valley—galloped down our street on a dappled gray one Halloween evening, he dressed as the Headless Horseman.
My neighbor across the way dressed as a witch each year. She’d sit stock-still on a bench on her front porch. The kids had to walk past her to get to the doorbell. They’d eye her, thinking, wow, isn’t that fake witch something. Then they’d turn away, to the doorbell, and, as they pressed the button, she’d reach out and put her cold, cold hand on one of their shoulders, and the kid she touched would rise up as if he or she had been shot through with electricity.
I dressed as Frankenstein. When a trick-or-treater rang my doorbell, I’d whip the door open and trigger sound-effects screams in the bushes behind the kid. Candy went everywhere.
Oh, such sweet times.
My fellow Montgomerians provided the inspiration for the short story you are about to read, “The House on Humbleberry Lane.”
Hold onto your socks.
* * *
Somewhere in my files I have a clipping of a newspaper story about the mysterious deaths of six people in a rural church. An unsolved mystery.
I figured there was a story there.
And there is.
And now you are about to read it.
Enjoy.
* * *
Rural taverns are special places in Wisconsin. This is where friends gather for a beer and talk, billiards and burgers, and, on Friday nights, Wisconsin’s famous fish fry.
I once went up to a county in the northwest part of the state when I worked for Farm Bureau, to work on a story with our director from there. He told me to meet him at the Crossroads, that it was easier to find than his farm.
You guessed it. The Crossroads was a country tavern.
We sat at the bar, me nursing a root beer and him a Leinenkugel, and he said, “We hold our county board meetings in the back room here and our annual meeting in the side banquet room. It’s the only place in the county where we can seat a couple hundred people for dinner.”
The Crossroads wasn’t Cheers, but everyone there did know everyone’s name. They were, after all, all neighbors. I was the stranger. But the director vouched for me, so I was okay.
Read on now to “Hard Day on the Road,” a story I set in a tavern down in my part of the state—Tubby’s Two.
Enjoy.
* * *
I once lived and worked in West Virginia, a state that’s perpetually broke. The legislature created the lottery, then a revolutionary idea for funding state operations. Money for the schools was the sales pitch.
I worked for Beckley Newspapers and one of our story assignments was to report on the stores in our area that sold the winning tickets and the people who bought those winning tickets. I was opposed to writing those stories because, as I told my editor, it’s promoting gambling and gambling’s wrong.
It’s news, he said. When the assignment comes to you, get the story or get out of here.
And there were some good stories, and some tragic stories of people who squandered their winnings, who, two years later, were as poor as they were before they won.
But there is forever the hope of those who buy the tickets that this time, this time... and thus the story that follows.
Enjoy “Movies, Lies and Lottery Tickets.”
* * *
Our economic hard times inspired a writing challenge for my writers group: Put a well-known fictional character in the soup. Example: Willy Loman’s worried about his pension plan.
I selected Dudley Do-Right. Surely you remember the inept but good-hearted Mountie from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle Show. How would he handle the adjustment when Inspector Fenwick has to sell Dudley’s horse because there’s no more money in the budget for hay and oats?
Enjoy “Dudley Do-Right Gets a Downgrade.”
* * *
Regular readers of my short stories know my writers group has a writing challenge as a part of our social events: write a short story, poem or essay on “X” subject. No more than 500 words. One, a couple years ago, came at this time of year when two of our younger members were graduating from high school. So we all wrote pieces that touched on graduation.
But to make the writing a bit more difficult—really, to drive us nuts—we all had to use a selected set of words somewhere in our stories. The words? Tulips, metronome, diploma, sword, boffo and any reduplicative. Reduplicatives are words that come in pairs.
Now you can see if I did it. Enjoy “The Hot Seat.”
* * *
My writers group has a writing challenge as a part of our social events: write a short story, poem or essay on “X” subject. No more than 500 words. The latest challenge was: We’re in hard times. Put a well-known fictional character in it. Example: Willy Loman’s worried about his pension plan.
We had to be miserly with the words . . . 250 maximum. That is real flash fiction.
I cheated on the subject. I selected historical characters: What if Christopher Columbus were trying to get a ship today?
Enjoy “Before Travelocity.”
* * *
Marge, my good wife, was proofreading a chapter I had written for the second James Early mystery, Early’s Winter. In this chapter, Early and a friend are in a wild poker game with a bunch of Kansas City gamblers, a game that starts with straight stud and progresses to Mississippi stud—a complex game with all kinds of weird rules.
Marge said to me, “I didn’t know you knew so much about poker.”
I don’t. But I can Google it.
To write the flash-fiction story you are about to read, I didn’t have to know anything about poker, yet the game is in there. I started with the premise, what if your refrigerator were haunted? Read “Is There Anybody In There?”
* * *
Remember the old Topper series, from the days when television was broadcast in black-and-white, a handful of years before RCA introduced “living color,” decades before the invention of cable, and a half-century before television screens covered a living room wall?
Leo G. Carroll? Robert Sterling? Ann Jeffreys?
Neil, the alcoholic Saint Bernard?
Stephen Sondheim, later of Broadway fame, wrote 19 episodes for the show’s first season. That was in 1953.
Everybody, into the Wayback Machine.
Sterling and Jeffreys played ghosts—and Neil, too—who inhabited Carroll’s house.
Several Februaries ago I got to thinking about that show and out poured a Valentine’s story, “Spirited Solution.” Enjoy.
* * *
You know that you’re on the back side of winter when, on December 21, you open the mailbox and there looking out at you is the first seed catalog of the season.
Up here in Yankeeland, that’s either Jung’s or Henry Fields’.
I whipped that sucker out and flipped through the pages, stopping on 49 where I was captivated by a picture of baby Craig Clark reclining on the leaves of a Megatron hybrid cabbage plant. A big, BIG plant. Produces 20-pound cabbage heads, the copy said. Well, I’ve got to get me a packet of those seeds. Only $2.25 for 50.
Further back in the book, there on page 66 I spotted this little guy, Sammy Wynons, who looked to be about age 7. He was standing next to a Dill’s Atlantic Giant pumpkin, and the boy could barely reach the top of it. What a jack-o-lantern a Dill’s Atlantic would make for the front porch, if I can find a forklift at the U-Rent to get it up there. Ten seeds, $2.95.
But it was and always is the roses, pages and pages of them all in rich colors, that had me scrabbling for the order form.
Several years ago, my writers group established a writing challenge for our very first social event. Because it was our first, we didn’t theme the challenge, just said write a story of no longer than 500 words that you will read in front of the group. No critiques. This is just for fun. I rolled out a piece I titled “Rose Planting,” read it for the group and a year later read it for a group of late-nighters at the Love Is Murder mystery writers conference in Chicago. Now you get to read “Rose Planting.”
Enjoy.
* * *
I love Christmas.
And I guess I love writing Christmas stories.
The first I wrote was a retelling of the Mary & Joseph story. I set it in the 1920s in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, where the only way to travel any distance was by train. JJ—Joseph Jeremiah—and Bettina Marie Jones, both employed by a logging company, he as a teamster and she as a camp cook, are making their way down to Knoxville for Christmas with Bettina’s parents and where she is to have her baby. An avalanche blocks the train, so Bettina gives birth in a railroad depot in the mountains, attended by the train’s engineer and his conductor. A preacher and some of his flock, on their way home from church, stop in and sing Christmas carols. And there’s a baptizing, and well...
I wrote that story eight years ago and gave it to friends and family as a Christmas gift. Several asked, “Are you going to write another next year?”
I did. And I’ve written a new story every year since.
You are about to read this year’s. I set it in and around Manhattan. Now this is the Manhattan of the West—Manhattan, Kansas. The year is 1960. A single mom with six kids needs a job.
Enjoy a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie at Bernie’s.
* * *
I’ve voted in a lot of places—schools, fire stations, libraries—but the two most interesting were the Grange hall when I lived in Sedalia, Colorado, and the Johnstown Town Hall when I lived outside of Janesville, Wisconsin. Both were small precincts. The poll workers had worked the elections for years, and they knew just about everyone who walked in the door by their first names. Coming to vote in those places was fun. It was a social time, a time to get a cup of coffee with your neighbors and gas about the kids, the high school football team and the crops.
Once, while waiting with my unmarked ballot in hand at the Sedalia Grange Hall, a fellow stuck his head in the door and asked loudly, “Is this where I’m supposed to vote?” The voting judge stared at him a moment, then blasted back, “Hell no, Harley, you vote up the road at the school. Now git!”
That judge inspired the election day story you are about to read, “My Name is Truman, T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N.”
* * *
This is where life started for James Early, in two short stories I wrote for a contest sponsored by the Great Manhattan Mystery Conclave in 2004.
Rereading these stories now, it’s interesting to see how Early has changed. He started out as Jim Early, a failed rancher turned lawman because he needed a job. He’s known to his closest friends as ‘Cactus.’ Why Cactus? Well, everybody has to have a nickname.
In the novel Early’s Fall, Early became James Early. Why, I don’t know. But I do know this, because he grew up in the county where he is now the sheriff, everybody’s known him for a lifetime, so his wife and his friends call him Jimmy—his childhood name. He was Jimmy as a kid and he’s Jimmy today. We never let our children grow up. Still to Early’s closest friends, he is, as he was in the short stories, Cactus.
In Early’s Winter, the second novel which you may see in about a year, Early becomes more sensitive about his name. An example: he makes it clear to a group of people he meets in Kansas City that he is James—the name his father and mother gave him—and not Jim or Jimmy. However, to his old friends he remains... well, you know.
I determined at the outset that Early would use his brain to solve crimes and talk to catch the criminals, that he wouldn’t use a gun. But it became clear as I wrote Early’s Fall, that since Early grew up on a ranch, his father would have trained him to be a dead shot—to kill rattlesnakes and coyotes. Second, it became clear that, because the book is set in 1949, Early would have been in World War II—a foot soldier, an infantryman—that he would have known killing intimately and would have absolutely abhorred the idea of doing it again. Yet it seemed to me that would not stop him from taking down his rifle or getting out his pistol when he had to go after someone he knew to be armed. Early is a man of contradictions.
The first short story, "Dead Pool," is a straight-forward who dunnit. But Early surprised me in "Big Dam Foolishness." Yes, he solves the murder, but he lets the murderer go because, despite the law, he believes the murder was a righteous killing. Early’s willingness to bend the law “for right reasons,” you just know one day that’s going to get him into deep, deep trouble.
Enough said. It’s time to open the two stories and enjoy the read.
"Dead Pool"
"Big Dam Foolishness"
© Jerry Peterson.
