georgewier.com

Bobby Byrd & George Wier
--SMU Barnes & Noble, Dallas, Texas

Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas
(Under a tent in the center of South Congress Avenue near the Capitol--left to right: Bobby Byrd, Sarah Cortez, George Wier, Jesse Sublett, and the incomparable Tim Tingle)

Sarah Cortez reading with elan'
--Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas

In Memoriam

MILTON T. BURTON
Author, Historian, Friend

Photograph by Sallie Wier

Milton Burton passed away in the early morning hours of December 1, 2011 at a hospital in Tyler, Texas. He will be sorely missed by his family, his many friends, and his many thousands of readers.

What made Milton stand out as a writer was his way of succinctly capturing the essence of a person such that it reflected their entire character. It might be one little thing that one could hang a tag on to define that person and draw a definite--and colorful--picture of in the mind of the reader. That's just one. The other was his unique ability to capture the essence of the culture and the environment in a few well-placed words. He was a wordsmith, natively, of a calibre that has largely disappeared from the Earth.

What I will perhaps recall most fondly about Milton is his abrupt and genuine laughter. He saw humor in all things, great and small. His laugh was large and full and matched his frame and his agile, keen, wizard-like and professorial mind.

I would like for people to know that a man walked in their midst who was both larger-than-life and yet was down to earth. He was a common man and he surrounded himself by common men and women. He took exception to pretentiousness in any form, whether it was a politician--whom he could, with a laser scalpal wit, divorce from any reason--or an article-writer who spoke much and said little. He was first and foremost a friend upon first meeting with everyone.

Texas has lost an honored son and the world has lost one of its precious treasures.

--George Wier

Viewers of this site are welcome to a free copy of Letters To The Galaxy, a science-fiction short story. You may copy and distribute freely. A bit of fun. I hope you enjoy!--GW

Currently Reading:

Ganymede, by Cherie Priest (Folks, I highly recommend The Clockwork Century books. They are steampunk thrillers of the highest order. Where else can you find zombies, blimps and Civil War revisionist history in an action-packed thriller?)

Recently Read:

Dreadnought, by Cherie Priest
The Terror, by Dan Simmons
Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest
Abraham's Bones, by Joe Prentis

Sneak Preview to The Evil That Men Do - A Shane Robeling Mystery

Chapter One

I’m Shane Robeling, and this is the book they said I would never be able to write. First of all, I’m no author. I am, however, the only person who could possibly do the job, or at least do it justice, to thoroughly abuse a word, so here goes. How I came to be the Chief of Police of the population 27,934 town of Whamper, Texas, is a whole other story, but it is part of this one in that I couldn’t have gotten Benjamin Lefren sprung from Death Row had I not held this position. I’ve only been Chief for ten years, but the Fogel murder goes back thirty-three years, Lefren having been convicted in the Fall of 1977. Fogel had been murdered in early March of that year. And what was I up to around that time?

As nearly as I can approximate the dates I had just moved to McLean, Virgina, the not-so-little town outside the D.C. Beltway, for my initial training with the Bureau. I was twenty years old, having graduated from Lubbock High School at sixteen and having crammed four years of college at the University of Texas into three, and in the top one percent of my class--well, they came looking for me.

Also, as nearly as I can approximate, about the same month and week if not the same day that a twenty-four year old debutante named Delores Fogel was savagely raped, murdered and cut up in the sleepy little town of Whamper, Texas in the great tradition of that 19^th century Londoner, Jack, one wet-behind-the-ears son of Maxwell and Lydia Robeling--yours truly--entered his first day of training for a job he would hold for twenty both mundane and horrific years.

At the time I would know nothing of the grisly events occurring back home until weeks later when I picked up a newspaper and saw the headlines and the mention of a small town eighty or so miles west of Austin, thus setting up my eventual obsession with the murder and the supposed murderer. No, about the time I imagine an alleged Ben LeFren--how’s that for onomatopoeia, as in “Ben LeFren ain’t no friend of mine”--allegedly cut up and took his trophy samples, I was paused in the act of stepping out of a shiny new Lincoln in McLean.

“So when does my training begin?” I distinctly remember asking Spencer Hayward, my new control agent.

Spence’s Lincoln Continental Mark VI idled at the curb outside my rented, perfectly landscaped home in McLean. Spence was in his mid-fifties, already dusky gray, ever clean-shaven and smelling of Old Spice.

“It already has,” he said, and turned to regard me with those cold, raven-black eyes of his. Spence’s face had little bumps all over it, the first telltale signs of the cancer that would later devour him from the inside-out in a slow, painful demise. That day, though, sitting there with Spencer Hayward with his idling Lincoln and his You-don’t-know-shit attitude, I shivered at his answer, but just for show forced a chuckle.

“Sure it has,” I said, and got out of the Lincoln and stepped into the deepening Virginia night, twenty years old, the ink not yet dry on my UT diploma, a Stanford-Binet IQ of 182, the promise of the brightest of futures behind quick, brown eyes. The way I’ve got it figured looking back on it now through the backwards telescope of the thirty intervening years, at about the moment I got out of Spence Hayward’s Lincoln, Delores Fogel’s body was already beginning to cool. But I would not know the back story to this until twenty years later, three days after my retirement.

After twenty years in the Bureau and my hasty departure, I came back home to Texas on Christmas Day, 1997, driving an old Dodge pickup I’d bought at a used car lot outside the D.C. Beltway. I listened to the hum of the well-tuned 8-cylinder engine across the remainder of Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas, and I stopped off in Texarkana to visit Ned Persling, an old friend who had retired from the U.S. Marshall’s Office ten years before at the ripe age of sixty-eight. When I knocked on the door of Ned’s fourteen-by-seventy foot trailer house I was greeted with the baying howl of a hound dog. I’d never known that Ned had a love for dogs. On the business end of things when you’re working opposite someone, there is rarely time to discuss the finer things in life, but that could be true in any line of work.

“Is that Shane Robeling?” a tired voice called out through a dust-laden screen door. The dust was red dust, and I figured the screen door for no more than a filter for the billowing red cloud wake of every truck or car that passed by the small trailer community on the county road five miles south of town.

“The one, the only,” I replied.

“Come on in, old son,” Ned said.

I pushed a wobbly button on the screen door and it whined open. Ned sat back in a leather easy chair that had seen better days, an unwashed half-height glass beside him with an amber liquid in it. Possibly it was tea, but looking at Ned’s red face and bulbous nose, I took it to be something a little stronger. You know, they say that it’s tea the actors are drinking in those old western movies as a stand-in for whiskey, but looking at some of those guys when they got a little older, such as Duke Wayne, for instance, you have to wonder.

“Hey, Ned. I was passing through and thought I would drop in.” I petted Ned’s dog, who was suddenly very friendly with me.

“I’m glad you did. I was thinking of you the other day when I saw the news that Dutch Holcomb died in a shootout down in Laredo.”

“Yeah,” I said, leaving it clear that I had no desire to hold forth on the subject.

“Have a seat,” Ned said and gestured expansively, as if his living room were some vast chamber. I took a seat in the empty chair next to Ned and glanced at a TV screen that showed a football game in progress but emitted no sound, at which point I recalled that back in the old days Ned Persling never had been the kind of fellow who could abide idleness, to say the least for sitting and watching a television, sports events notwithstanding.

“Yep,” Ned said. “I heard it was a hell of a fire-fight.”

I’d heard the same thing, but was not in the mood to discuss it yet. Sour grapes? Maybe.

The whole nation had been on a manhunt for Holcomb since he had bombed an abortion clinic in Tennessee two years before. Holcomb had been on my personal list and Ned knew it. The shootout with Holcomb and half a dozen Federal and State law enforcement officers had happened the day I retired. And I hadn’t been there for the final showdown. During the two years Holcomb was on the lam there were a few right-wing extremist fringe cells whom I personally believed had squirreled Holcomb away, had moved him around from backroom to basement and from pillar to post the way the U.S. Marshall’s Office moves around the otherwise faceless in the Federal Witness Protection program. But Eric “Dutch” Holcomb was no hero. Not in my book, not in anyone else’s. I personally knew that he couldn’t have given any less of a damn for anybody’s baby, unborn or otherwise. Holcomb was a contract killer, and someone had paid through the nose for his services. And now the son of a bitch was dead.

“But you’re not here to talk about Holcomb,” Ned said.

“Just visiting,” I replied.

Ned hefted his glass, took a sip. “Sure,” he said, in a breathy whisper. Yep, it was whiskey, alright.

“Actually, I’m not sure why I stopped by,” I said, and looked through Ned’s living room window as a truck drove past, geysering dust in its wake. “I’ve turned in my badge,” I added.

“Shane,” Ned began in a soft voice, and I knew that something deep and profound was coming my way. I listened. “There are three professions which are uninsurable after the age of about fifty. Those are dentists, psychiatrists and cops. The odds are a little too good that they’ll eat a bullet after retirement. Do you have any idea why that would be?”

I sat there and watched someone make a silent touchdown on Ned’s TV screen and realized I was watching the Army-Navy game.

“It’s Christmas Day, Ned, although you couldn’t tell it from the eighty-five degree weather outside. So where’s your family? I thought I’d be crashing a party here for sure.” I turned and regarded him.

Ned grinned. When he did he reminded me more of a ghoul than an old man.

“Trying to change the subject. Alright, that’s fine. I don’t have any family. My wife left me two weeks after I retired. She couldn’t stand me not being on the road, shuffling prisoners around from state to state and I suppose I couldn’t stand her for more than two nights straight. The kids and the grandkids go see her whenever there’s a holiday, like today. Oh, I get a phone call every now and then, and that’s fine. But really, Shane, I love ‘em all and everything, it’s just that I no longer give a shit. You know?”

“I’ve got some idea,” I said. “Sorry to hear it, though.”

“Well, thank you kindly.” Ned gestured towards the kitchen. “There’s food in the ice box, if you’re hungry.”

“Nah,” I said. “So, I can see the dentists doing it, if they realize that they’ve been hurting people their whole lives. I guess it’s probably the same for the other two.”

“Bullseye. You know, a fellow who isn’t helping somebody with something, somewhere, just ain’t even worth shooting.”

“Like you and me?” I asked him.

Ned raised his glass to me, tipped it my direction briefly, then tossed off the last of it.

“But,” he said after the moment it took to catch his breath. “I happen to know a little something that you don’t.”

I waited.

“First, there’s a little something that I would like somebody to look into. I can’t do it myself any longer. Age and infirmity and all that good horse-shit, you know. But a fellow with nothing to do and nowhere in particular to go and lots of time on his hands--a fellow like that could check into things without stirring up too much trouble.”

“Tell me what the matter is,” I said, and Ned then spent twenty minutes laying out the details of the murder of Delores Fogel and the subsequent trial, sentencing and incarceration of Benjamin LeFren for the crime.

“Now there’s a big clamour going on about the case,” he said. “There’s a cadre of these liberal lawyers and self-styled do-gooders and their ilk raising a ruckus about the original investigation. I have to admit, LeFren was convicted on the strength of some sketchy testimony and a single fingerprint. And he has maintained his innocence all along--but please will you find me one son-of-a-bitch broke dick convict anywhere in the prison system that doesn’t and I’ll show you somebody who’s given up and is about ready for embalming.”

“Now how could I get close enough to this case to make any difference, being as I am a mere former Bureau agent?” I asked Ned Persling. My whole future was to turn on his answer.

“Whamper,” Ned said.

“Whamper?”

“Whamper needs a Chief of Police. It’s the town where the Fogel murder occurred. These small Texas towns have a tradition of hiring their chiefs from anywhere but home. That way if they have to get rid of the guy--or girl--at some point, then it’s no hard feelings for a local.”
“Interesting,” I said.

"Ain’t it? For guys like you and me, though, it sure as hell beats eating a bullet. Because let me tell you something, Shane--and this is the real reason: a cop just ain’t any damned good at all unless he’s a cop. And that’s all there is to it.”

And at that exact moment I knew I was not going to just take the job, no matter how much it paid--after a quick run up to Lubbock to visit a few folks I hadn’t seen in twenty years, I was intent on heading for Whamper, Texas, where I was going to woo the town until they begged me to take the job.

A Bit of Art, for those of you who have called upon me to put it back up. Thanks!

Fall,
pencil by George Wier

Tree
pencil by George Wier

Feedstore
pencil by George Wier

Gaston's View
oil on canvas by George Wier

    We met at the City Lake around 1:30 a.m. As promised by the weatherman the sky was clear and shone with a million stars. The moon would not be putting in her appearance until sometime around five a.m., so there would be no obscurity. We’d be getting the full effect.
    I pulled my old Ford off the gravel roadway, expecting to have to wait, but a set of headlights pulled off the highway and turned down the narrow road a quarter of a mile back. Twin spears of light penetrated the settling cloud of dust I’d left behind scant moments before. I wouldn’t even
have time for a cigarette.
    After a minute of watching the headlights bounce and dodge all over creation Matt and Mandy and the kids pulled up beside me, their windows rolled down.
    “Probably won’t see anything,” Matt said from the driver’s seat.
    “Hey Bill,” Mandy said to me. We couldn’t see each other worth a damn. We were two ghostly faces in the night, mere feet away from one another. She had her arm hanging outside the minivan.
    “Hey, Amanda,” I said. “Are you bored yet?”
    She laughed. I’d always loved her laugh. Matt was a damned lucky man and I’d often wondered to what depths he knew that singular fact.
    “I am,” a voice intoned from the back seat. That would be Stuart, the eldest. Stu was a lot like his father-- he saw the rust-lining in everything.
    “Did you bring the booze?” Matt asked me as he got out and slammed the door behind him.
    “Hush, Matt,” Mandy said. “Get the chairs.”
    I waited while the Prescott family disembarked. An onlooker might have thought we were all up to no good--a single man meeting a husband, wife and kids in the dead of night in a closed lake park miles from town. We’d had it figured that there would eventually be cops coming by on patrol. They’d see the vehicles, run an obligatory check or two of the plates, then start to nose around and see if they could find us and run us off. Maybe even give us a ticket. Or two. But the plan was that if that happened I was supposed to flash my badge and magically make everything alright.
    I fished the beer out of my trunk and Matt and Mandy and the kids each had their hands full as we trudged across the mown grass, up a hill and around the stand of trees down to the lakes edge. We’d be out of sight from the road, so truthfully, anyone wanting to find us could, but it might take them awhile. I estimated we were a couple football
field lengths from the cars.
    Mandy and the kids opened up the lawn chairs. Matt clicked on a flashlight and inspected my cooler.
    “Coors Light,” I told him. “And a little something-something for us hard-core drinkers.” I pulled out a flask and handed it to him. Matt unscrewed the lid and sniffed.
    “Scotch,” he said. “How old?”
    “Older than you,” I said.
    “Bill,” Mandy said, “you’re contributing to the
delinquency of a major.”
    “I know,” I said. “With malice aforethought.”
    “Just so’s you know.”
    I took the flask back, screwed the cap on.
    “It’ll keep till later,” I told Matt and then tossed
him a cold beer. “In the meantime, shut off that damned light so we can see.”

*****

    You can see the stars on the water on a clear night with no wind, no tide and no moon. And the silence is its own presence.
    “There’s one!” Suzie, the youngest Prescott exclaimed and pointed. Our eyes had adjusted, so we could see her arm.
    A line of light lasting about half a second traced
itself across the sky just west of Leo.
    “Oooo. . . Ahh. . .” Stu said, clearly unimpressed.   What more can you expect from a fourteen year-old?
    “Shut up, Stu,” Matt said.
    “Good one, Suze,” Mandy encouraged. “You be nice, Stuart.”
    “Hey, Bill. You heard about that water truck we
crashed out at the Extension Service?”
    “Nope,” I said, and sipped my beer. “But I’ve got the feeling I’m about to.”
    “You sure are,” Matt said, and went on for five minutes about how he orchestrated a fully loaded truck crash into a concrete barrier at sixty miles per hour and managed to catch video from ten different angles for study purposes. The whole time he talked I nodded, watched the sky, and kept
Mandy’s perfume in my nose.
    Three more lines came into the sky in rapid succession. This time the ooo’s and ahhh’s were real.
    Then, for five minutes, nothing.
    Matt was my best friend. I’d known him all our lives. But I wondered what Mandy saw in him that I didn’t. What stars in their courses had brought them together? And why were they still together?
    Mandy had always kept me at arms length, but at the same time she had always treated me with a deference I could not fathom. A certain softness found its way into her voice whenever Matt wasn’t around and we had a moment to talk, which happened at least once every few weeks. She would never know that I lived for those brief encounters. And not for the first time, as I watched the night sky and breathed
in her perfume and her presence not three feet away, I wondered if something was there.
    “Say, Bill,” Matt said. “I brought something I meant to show you, but I left it in the van.”
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “It’s a surprise. I’ll go get it.”
    “Matt, can’t it wait?” Mandy asked.
    “I’ll only be a minute,” he said and got up. “Stu,
walk with your dad.”
    “Oh hell!” Stuart said.
    “Stu!” Mandy admonished him. “Do what your father says.”
    “Alright,” Stuart said, the way only a fourteen year-old who knew everything there was to know on God’s green Earth could say it.
    “Be right back,” Matt said, and the darkness swallowed them.
    The silence came again.
    I breathed in Mandy.
    “Mom,” Suzie said. “I’ma gonna wade in the water. Is that alright?”
    “What do you think, Bill? Can anything get her?”
    “Anything that could get her will run from her,” I
offered. “Suzie, make sure you don’t go deeper than your knees. This lake drops off pretty quick out there.”
    “Cool!” Suzie said and darted toward the shore, ten yards or more away.
    Silence again, but for little feet making gingerly, quiet splashes.
    “Mandy,” I said. “How are you doing?”
    “I’m okay. You?”
    “You know me. I’m fine.”
    “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
    Silence once more.
    There came a thudding. A fatalistic thumping as of some oil well a mile away broaching the earth. After a moment of careful listening I decided it was my chest.
    “Are you happy?” I asked her.
    A moment appeared, stretched itself out, and flitted away.
    “I’m not unhappy,” she said.
    “That’s not an answer.”
    Another moment.
    “I know,” she said.
    A spray of meteors thirty degrees up visited us and our breaths caught as one.
    “Did you see that?” I asked.
    “Yeah,” she said. “He found me first, Bill. It should have been you.”
    “I know,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do about that. Ever.”
    “Ever.”
    I stood up, turned away.
    “Thank you, Bill,” she said.
    “For what?”
    “For not saying it. Those words.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Those words. Any time, Mandy. But if Matt ever hurts you, I’ll hurt him pretty bad. And then I’m coming for you.”
    “I know, Bill,” she said. “I know.”

*****

    The Leonids quit the sky around four, or so the
newspapers say. But these Leonids--Bill and Matt and Mandy and Stu and Suzie--we quit long before then.
    I moved to Grapevine, Texas and took a job with the Sheriff’s Office ten years later. Matt had a heart attack and died after coming home from work one cold January night. My new wife comforted me while I cried, offering solace for one who rarely showed emotion.
    I walk out in the back yard some nights and study the night sky. Sometimes I feel like I can distinguish the relative distances between the stars, and can even tell which ones are closer and which are farther, and let me tell you, it has nothing to do with brightness.
    And once or twice in a blue moon I’ll catch a shooting star. So brief they are. So very damned brief.

finis