A final blast from Dallas Festival of Books & Ideas

Did you miss your chance to register for the Mayor’s Summer Reading Challenge at the Summer in the City portion of this year’s Dallas Festival of Books & Ideas? It’s not too late to sign up online or at the nearest branch of the Dallas Public Library. Because what is summer vacation without a stack of books to get us through the long, hot days? As essential as a run through the lawn sprinkler or ice cream cones dripping down our fingers! (And, as always, the reading challenge isn’t just for kids.)

Listening to authors’ panels at the festival added some books to my want-to-read list. Books like The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD, by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis.

Opening long ago in a galaxy not so very far from our own, President Richard Nixon feels surrounded by enemies. The bombings, fires, explosions, and calls for his execution might try the soul of a lesser being, but "even worse, as far as Nixon is concerned, are the attacks from the Democrats and the media that threaten to undermine his reelection campaign.  He has decided to strike back, to wage war and do it hard."

I must pause for a moment to note that although Minutaglio and Davis's description of Nixon's paranoid search for something – better, someone – to distract the country from his Watergate troubles sounded presciently topical, Minutaglio and Davis insisted that since their book was completed in 2016 (although not published until 2018) they had no contemporary parallels of political paranoia in mind.

The problem, Treasury Secretary John Connally tells Nixon, is that “You are not identified vis-à-vis an identifiable character or an identifiable incident, something that stays in the minds of people.” (Seriously? Yes, this strangely-worded statement was indeed captured on Nixon’s secret recordings.)

But who to choose as this poster child anti-Nixon? Should it be a Mafia warlord? No, they need someone still worse. And so, began a 28-month manhunt for a psychologist, a Harvard don of the effete elite, a person as violently nonviolent as -- Timothy Leary.

Having finished a follow-up of the John F. Kennedy assassination (Dallas 1963), Minutaglio and Davis were ready for another take on the 1960s. 

“We decided Timothy was a really wonderful prism to look at this time period,” Minutaglio said, of the “pope of dope’s” odyssey from Harvard to the Black Panthers’ embassy in Algeria to Folsom (as well as numerous other prisons), like “Mr. Magoo on acid,” Davis said.

Not to mention that the authors had the interest of Minutaglio’s personal connection to Leary. 

“I had met Timothy Leary in Houston in the early ’80,” said Minutaglio, and the pair stayed in touch. When Minutaglio, then a Dallas Morning News reporter, found himself assigned to a story about the Dallas Cowboys during one of the team’s low points looked for offbeat comments, he contacted Leary. Things would have been better for the football team, the godfather of the counterculture said, if the Cowboys’ longtime coach Tom Landry “was still alive.”

Landry was in fact, still alive at the time, and the DMN was flooded with outraged letters from fans.

The Most Dangerous Man in America (be sure to get the Leary version, not all those books about other characters foolishly deemed “most dangerous”) is available (of course) at the Dallas Public Library, as well as in bookstores near you. 

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While Minutaglio and Davis revisit the mid-20^th century, another Texas writer, Melissa Lenhardt both revisits and revises the mid-19^th in her latest book, the female outlaw Western, Heresy.

Make that the women-oriented, gender-bending outlaw Western. 

“How hard is it to discover what women really did in this time?” Lenhardt said in her interview during the Festival of Books & Ideas. The answer is, very, but she took the liberty to assume that if there’s no official record of events, there’s no reason women couldn’t have been involved in them.

After all, she noted, to an appreciative audience, “Women can be just as murderous and conniving as men.”   

And her characters are based at least loosely on historical figures. Her favorite is Hattie, a freed slave based on real-life Buffalo Soldier Cathay Williams. The first enlisted female U.S. soldier, Williams is also the only woman known to have served in the Army while posing as a man. 

And about the gender-bending sexuality? How hard was it to write about that while staying true to the post-Civil War period?

“Writing about people in love – that’s universal,” Lenhardt said. As for the rest, “They didn’t think of themselves in the way people think today. . . It is hard,” (she admitted) not to put a 21^st-century take on it."

Again, for those who want to add Heresy to their summer reading list, it’s available at the Dallas Public Library, among other locales.

Across the wide Rio Grande: the classic Western smashup

Whether it’s the Rubicon, the Jordan or the Rio Grande, the finality of crossing a river inevitably engenders drama. If good fences make good neighbors, a big, bad river can make really bad ones, as the tumultuous relationship between Texas and Mexico attests. I occasionally post one of my previously-published short stories on this blog, and I’m returning today with one of my earliest. This Civil War-era Western, “No Place to Run,” was a finalist in Moonlight Mesa’s 2011 “Cowboy Up” contest, published at The Western Online December 1, 2011, and reprised in November 2015 at Frontier Tales.

 NO PLACE TO RUN

Fredericksburg, Texas, September 1862 

It took until dark for Peter Schoenfeld to push the runaway heifers out of the river bottom and back to the home place. The severed ears of the longhorn bull his grandfather called the old Mexican, the bull who had lured the heifers from their corral, swung from his saddle horn, knotted with a thong cut from the bull’s own hide.

Tomorrow he and his grandfather would take a yoke of oxen into the bottoms to haul out the renegade longhorn’s carcass. Tomorrow they’d eat beef. Tonight, he looked forward to the frying pan of squirrel his grandfather had promised for supper.

But the house was dark and there was no smell of cooking as he penned the heifers and replaced the top pole of the corral they’d escaped from. He unsaddled his riding mule, Schatzie, and turned her loose. Instead of meandering into the pasture, she followed him, nipping at his shirt as if begging for turnips. Her long ears, darker than the starlit skyline, pricked toward the house.

There was no welcoming hail from the dogtrot house where he and his grandfather lived in isolation from their neighbors. Neighbors whose eyes followed them when they drove to church on Sunday, muttering against the young man who stayed safe in Texas when their sons were dying at Shiloh or languishing in Yankee prison camps. Neighbors who turned away without greeting since this month’s news about bloody Antietam. Old Schoenfeld had begun to speak of joining the other German settlers who fled to Mexico to escape the wrath of Confederates against Union sympathizers.

The night was moonless. As Peter Schoenfeld climbed the porch, his boot toe struck an obstacle where no obstacle should be. Something solid but yielding. The strangeness made the stubble of his young beard prickle.

He dropped to one knee to examine the thing, running his hands over it in the dark. It was the body of a large dog, his grandfather’s bull terrier. He started to call out in alarm but found his mouth suddenly too dry to form words. He was close enough now to make out the gleam of broken teeth where someone had pried the dog’s jaws open.

And close enough to make out a figure slumped in the doorway behind the dog. The body of a man, his homespun shirt gummed to his chest and side with deeper darkness.  Young Schoenfeld didn’t need the smell that stung his nostrils to know the darkness was blood.

He bent over his grandfather’s body, running his hands gently over the dead face, over the coarseness of an old man’s beard, over the dribble of tobacco and more blood from the mouth. The eyes—he closed them, pressing his fingertips against the stiffened lids to hold them down.  

He didn’t think to swipe at the tears running down his face.

image: wikimedia commons

His grandfather’s hair no longer waved back from his temples in thick white wings. The top of the old man’s head was a scalped stickiness that made bile rise in his grandson’s throat. But there had been no scalping Comanches here in the Texas hill country since old Schoenfeld and the rest of Jack Hays’ Rangers pushed them out in ’44, before Peter was born. When his father, dead of the yellow jack last year, was still the one called young Schoenfeld. 

The men who killed old Schoenfeld scalped him to hide their own identities. But he could guess who they were. And that they would return for him.

At a singing bray from the mule Schatzie, he looked back to the yard. Her ears swiveled toward the road. 

By the time he reached Mexico, swinging southwest to cross the Rio Grande, he had evaded Confederate conscription agents, a band of comancheros—the mestizo outcasts who traded with Comanches—and the ragtag forces of Mexican president Benito Juarez retreating before the army of invading emperor Maximilian.

He dropped the mule’s reins, letting her pick a way through the thickets of mesquite and creosote. The scrub-covered dunes were packed snug as honeycomb cells in a hive. When he had looked over the countryside from the mountains beyond the river, the dunes covered it like herds of gray-green beasts.

The dunes rose head high in this country he had entered. The country in which, except for carrion birds wheeling overhead, he and the mule seemed to be the only breathing creatures.

As the sun neared the zenith he halted. The air was hot during the day even this late in the year. He dismounted and unsaddled Schatzie before nicking a vein in her neck.  She stood exhausted, not heeding the tiny wound. He put his mouth to it and sucked. But he had drawn barely enough to wet his tongue before the flow clotted and ceased.

A fly appeared as if out of thin air and fastened itself on the last drop of oozing moisture.

Schoenfeld lay down in the shade of the dune, his hat over his eyes, and slept until a faint breath of coolness roused him. The mule was nowhere in sight. He lay back again, eyes closed, sensing the ebbing daylight. When it was full dark he would rise, hoping for a star to guide him through the cool of the night. But where it would lead him, he couldn’t guess.

He woke to the sensation of being watched but could see no one in the darkness.  The night air was cold on his face and he reached drowsily for his blanket, only to find something heavy encumbering his arms and shoulders. A fleece, he thought, from the smell of wool fat on it. As he raised a hand to touch the fleece, wonderingly, he became aware of a darker shape beside him.

He gripped the butt of his revolver. His empty revolver.

Who's talking? And why should the past be perfect?

Let me make one thing clear up front:  those mysterious lights baffling pilots at D-FW International Airport this week were not lasers.  They were the sparks of glee I gave off when writing friend Robin Y. announced that, for the duration of NaNoWriMo, she was giving up first person and present tense.

Those of you who've tried it know that writing from a first person point of view -- letting a character, in all her shameless self-aggrandizement, tell her story straight to readers without letting them hear from other characters who could diss her -- is like running a marathon with arms tied behind your back.  Add writing in the present tense (think:  I go to the store) instead of the more common past tense (I went to the store) and you've got the equivalent of running in leg shackles.  It can be done.  Just don't expect to set any word count records.

Don't get me wrong -- there are wonderful reasons to use either a first person POV or present tense narrative.  First person is almost required for some genres, such as young adult, although the Harry Potter series stuck to third person and it seemed to do okay.  Harry Potter, of course, was a likeable kid.  Which brings up another major reason to write in first person -- making an unlikeable character palatable.  I used first person in my short story "Eight Seconds" to let a protagonist's questionable actions slide down, like a bitter dose sweetened with sugar.  Is that why it won a Western fiction contest prize?  Maybe, but I've also sold shadyside characters written in third person.

How about writing in present tense?  It's got video game-style immersion in the action to recommend it.  It also lets you write scenes that really are in the character's past in straight past tense instead of the cumbersome past perfect tense (I had gone to the store) that will get dings for slowing your narrative pace to a crawl.  But your inner editor will have to be turned to high, because present tense isn't how people usually talk.  And do you want an editor looking over your shoulder during NaNoWriMo?

Still insist you can't forego the intimacy of first person, the immediacy of present tense?  That's okay.  Because after you've logged your fifty thousand words and won your NaNoWriMo t-shirt, you can add them in revision.  It will require close reading of your manuscript.  But you'll have time for that after NaNoWriMo is over.  For now, though, lose the shackles.