Howdy, y’all! Dewey Lynne Bugler here, the teller of the true tale about Uncle Boog and the dogfight. How ya doing? I hope things are going well for you. I have news that maybe some of you are interested to hear, maybe not, but I reckon it won’t burn anybody’s eyes or brains out for taking a few minutes to glance at it. It’s not fake news, but it is new news, and here is
how I came to be in possession of it.
So, last night, I was at the sale barn here in Stone County. Maybe, some of you don’t know what a sale barn is. It’s a livestock auction, a place where people take their cows, hogs, goats, chickens, and horses and parade them around in front of potential buyers and see what kind of price they’re offered in the form of bids. First, an auctioneer sets a won’t-go-below low price, and then the bidders throw out numbers by signaling with secret hand waves and enigmatic head nods until none of them will gesture for the price to go any higher, and the auctioneer announces what the price is that has been offered to the seller for the purchase of their animals. Most often, though few people know what they have actually been offered, the seller accepts the price that the auctioneer agreed with, and the livestock is hauled off to other stockyards, the slaughterhouse, or to different farms, and everybody is happy. It’s good business for a small town to have a sale barn. People come from all over the country to the local sales to see if they can get a bargain. I have a pretty good interest in local and regional sale barns myself as I have about three or four hundred head of beef cattle scattered across three counties, and my cattle are sold from Clinton, Arkansas to West Plains, Missouri, but I don’t really know anything about the price of cattle or what a steer, heifer, or mama cow are actually worth because I have people who take care of that business for me. I sure as hell don’t know what a hog, goat, or chicken is worth, and, furthermore, I don’t care. No, my trips to the sale barn here in town are not for monetary interests or animal husbandry but for one reason and one reason only. The café/restaurant at the livestock auction has the best cheeseburgers in the whole county, maybe even in this part of the state.
It’s been a little over a year now since Flo started me on a strict diet to get my weight and cholesterol down. I get to eat my fill of such fine dining products as oatmeal, bran flakes, green leafy salads, baked chicken, and quinoa, you know, foods that really make a feller want to quit eating all together because of their bland taste. So, of a Thursday night, I’ve become a regular sale barn cowboy. I deck myself out in my iron-creased blue jeans, western button-up shirt with arrows on the pockets, gray ostrich skin cowboy boots, and my black felt hat, and I go to the sale barn just to eat me a cheeseburger. Now, truthfully and only to make appearances, I may go sit up in the auditorium when they run the cattle through, but I mostly just hang out in the café area and watch the human traffic. Whatcha gonna do?
Since I know that every calorie that I ingest will be seared off my flesh eventually in Hell or some earthly semblance of the actual place, I never order any fries, onion rings, or chips, or even a Coke with my burger. No, I get me a half-pound of fresh ground beef just off the hoof and made into a patty, salted, peppered, and cooked on a flat, greasy grill with a slice of yellow cheese all melty on top and served on a buttered and toasted bun with a big ol’ dollop of mayonnaise spread on the top side—and a glass of water. I don’t like water much, but for the heavenly taste of that cheeseburger, I’ll drink it. Also, I don’t take any tomatoes, lettuce, pickles, or onions on my slab of beef and cheese, not even on the side. I get enough salad at home, and I don’t need vegetable salad soggying up the entire plate. I hate to ruin good food, you know.
Anyhow, I am a sitting in a booth in the café part of the sale barn last night after eating my cheeseburger slowly and deliberately, and it’s all gone but the drippings on the white paper, and I’m a wondering how desperate I might look if I licked those delicious cheese drippings off the greasy paper that the burger had been sitting on in the red plastic basket when in walks my ghost writer, editor, and technology expert. This guy is wearing blue athletic shorts and a Marvel comics t-shirt, tennis shoes, and a baseball hat. He couldn’t possibly look anymore out-of-place amongst the duded-up ranchers, farmers, and cowboys wandering in and out of the restaurant area than if he were at a formal funeral service, but it never seems to occur to him that his mode of attire is inappropriate because, like me, he’s not here to shop for or sell livestock. He’s only here for the same thing that I am, the best cheeseburger around. As he strolls across the café area, he sees me and waves in recognition, then points toward the counter to let me know that he is going to get something to eat, and I nod back. He goes to the counter and places an order, then comes back and squeezes his large frame into the small booth on the side of the table opposite me, leans back against the green painted cement block wall, and puts both his legs up on the red faux-wood bench seat.
“What’s up, Dewey Lynne?”
“Nothing much. Eating my one decent meal of the week. You all right?”
“Fine, just fine. I’m getting my one cheat meal a week in too.”
It’s pretty easy to see that he’s cheating on his diet more than one time a week, but there’s no point in doing a diet check on him.
“Damn good cheeseburgers here. Definitely worth the wait.”
“Yep. You ever notice how the quality of a cheeseburger seems to be in direct correlation to a restaurant’s distance from a butcher shop?”
It was true the butcher shop was two blocks down the street from the sale barn. In fact, some people bought steers for slaughter here at the barn and had the butcher shop boys pick them up from the sale without ever even handling the livestock themselves. Pretty convenient.
“The fresher the beef, the better it tastes.”
“Farm to fork, so they say.”
I had never heard that before, but it seemed to make sense. Still, I wasn’t interested in talking beef with a man who had never raised any type of livestock to my knowledge. He teaches some kind of college courses, I think. The area of his expertise I was concerned about was more literary in nature.
“You…uh…doin’ any writing?”
“Kickin’ some ideas around is all.”
“So, are we gonna do any more of my stories?”
My straightforward question, put so bluntly, caused a cloud of concern to drift across his otherwise untroubled face. He turned in the seat so that he was facing me, took the salt shaker in his suddenly needing-to-be-busy hands, and started spinning it on the table, just annoying the hell out of me with the whirring glass-on-plastic noise. He tried to look up into my face, but even though I can’t imagine I had any sort of stern look about me, he couldn’t meet my eyes.
“I’ve got to be honest, Dewey Lynne. Um…hmm…nobody’s readin’ our stories.”
“What do ya mean, nobody?”
I was frankly shocked and surprised by this revelation.
“Have you ever seen Facebook?”
Actually, Flo was on her phone or on the laptop at the dinner table a looking at Facebook all the time, at least two or three times a day, and, when she was staring at it on the laptop, she was always a hollering at me to come and take a gander at something like somebody’s kid’s birthdays or funny pictures of cats. Many times, I had, in a rather uninterested manner, watched her scroll up and down looking at pictures of some people she knew and people she didn’t know and clicking on recipes and what not, doing things I couldn’t figure out the appeal of, but, yeah, I was familiar enough with it that I could say I had seen it without seeming a fool or a total novice, which are about the same thing in most instances. Still, I wanted to be cautious, not knowing exactly where he was headed with the question.
“Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
“Well, you see, I post our stories on a blog that I have created. On this blog, people can read the stories that we fashion together like we did with Uncle Boog and the Dogfight or they can read about my poetry and other literary things that I post …”
“Damn,” I thought, “He’s associatin’ his stupid poems with my stories.” But, of course, I didn’t say anything aloud.
“Anyhow, I post them on the blog first, but then, I switch over to Facebook, and I post the connection to the blog there called a link. On Facebook, people can give a thumbs up symbol to posts that they like. Every time I post a part of our story to the blog and then post the link in Facebook, we get between fifteen and thirty thumbs up on average.”
“That’s seems pretty good, thirty people liking the stories. That is good, ain’t it?”
“No, not really, not really all that good at all. When people are really liking something, you’ll get more than a hundred people, even in the thousands, liking it. And what is worse, we may have fifteen people who give our posts a thumb up, but then there is this thing called engagement. It tells how many people actually clicked on the link to go to the story. The average number of clicks on the link who went to the story is about four for each posting. Only four people are even going to where they can see the story.”
“So, only four people have read the story about Uncle Boog?”
“No, four people looked at the story, but that doesn’t mean that they read it. I can’t really tell how many people actually read it.”
I have to admit that I was very surprised. Maybe I was too much of a novice, and all of this literary output was only making me seem the fool. I mean, with all the family and friends and people who know me and who spend half their days on Facebook and the Internet and then to find out that only four people are reading our stories, and it might not even be family and friends, why that was flabbergasting. I had highly, highly overrated how interesting my thoughts might be to others. And then-that wasn’t really the worst of it. I had to assume that of the four people who had read the story, one was Mabel Vines because she seemed to know all about Uncle Boog and the Dogfight in the Piggly Wiggly that day that I told you about, and the other was Ardell Ginn. That’s Ardell who can barely even read. He wasn’t getting nothing from the stories I can assure you. Both of those two were probably just reading along to see when they might show up in the action. I suppose they both have already. That left two other readers. Who are the two others? I sure hope Flo isn’t one of them.
“What about…”
And I started reciting a list of all the people that I knew and asking my literary partner why all these people weren’t reading it. He just sat and spun the glass salt shaker on the tabletop, annoying the hell out of me and shaking his head as I named one name after another whose faces, kids, grandkids, vacations, and pets I’d seen on Facebook.
“Listen, Dewey Lynne, you can go visit with those folks or call’em and ask’em to like the posts and to click on the link and read the stories too, but I don’t think we’ll gain much if you do. We’ve got to find an audience, a niche of readers, people who would be interested and fascinated by this rural country noir kind of stuff. I don’t know how to do that. You’ve got money, don’t you? Maybe you could pay for advertisement.”
“You mean, we’ve been doing all this writing and publishing on the Internet, and we’re not payin’ for any of it? And nobody is payin’ us for it? No money is going one way or the other? Seems to be you’ve left something very important out of this equation. It’s money that makes things work in this world.”
Just then, the door to the sale barn manager’s office opened and Jolene Turner stepped out. She was the daughter of the sale barn owner, and we stopped talking when we saw her. Two orders were sitting on the counter over by the kitchen, and she walked over like she was gonna pick them up. One of them was bound to be my partner’s, and both of us were a hoping that she would carry them over just so we could admire the way that woman walked. Before she got to the counter though, Betty Turner, Jolene’s mother, grabbed up the two orders and carried them off behind me, and Jolene went back into the manager’s office with the door left open. We both knew that there was a good chance that Jolene would pick up the next order. With all that thinking about Jolene, we had both lost track of the conversation, but already the sight of Jolene had sparked some ideas in my brain.
“What if we put more sex in the stories? People like to read about sex, right?”
“I don’t know. Facebook is a public domain without much for filters, and kids can read whatever we post and click on the link to the blog too.”
I hadn’t thought about that. My mama could read it too. I wonder if she has read Uncle Boog and the Dogfight? I kind of hope not. I mean, she’s knows I’ve been in trouble, but to find out that I was such a liar back then when she still thought I was a good kid, I don’t know how she would take it. I don’t know how I would take her finding out. I figured sex wasn’t really the way to go anyway, and I told him why.
“Well, for the most part in all the stuff that has happened in my life, sex was incidental and not very memorable unless it was with somebody that I was really in love with who had been holding out on me, and then after we started having sex, it only seemed special for a week or two, maybe a month.”
“You mind if I write that down?”
“What?”
“For the most part, sex is incidental and not very memorable.”
“Is that what I said?”
“Yep.”
“Have at it. It’s all yours.”
“Thanks.”
Right then, the cook working behind the counter in a white apron and a black trucker cap set a red plastic basket lined with white paper onto the counter top with a cheeseburger and fries in it, and he slapped the little silver dinger with his flat silver spatula, grease and bits of meat visibly flying off of it onto the countertop and floor. This was our call to attention because Jolene Turner strode out of the office, scooped up the basket, and headed toward our table.
Jolene is practically considered a goddess in this part of the state. She’s a rodeo queen who is always in her court. She has thick, rich, golden blonde hair that curls out from beneath her white cowboy hat and bobs and bounces whether she’s walking or riding astraddle a prancing pony. She is tall, long-legged, and athletic with curves in all the right places. Last night, she wore a tight white t-shirt with the sale barn logo on it that accentuated her pert breasts that sit way up high straight between her arm pits instead of hanging down below like most women with breasts of that large a size. She has a flat stomach and wide hips that swing six inches in either direction in time with her slightly bow-legged steps. She has thick, strawberry-like kissing lips that pout and purse when they’re not drawn back across her straight white teeth in a full face smile speckled with dimples. Her green eyes twinkle, and she doesn’t have to do a thing to make them do so. Even her voice is so darling, so angelic, so southern.
“Cayn I gitcha anythin’ else, sweetheart? Maybe a drank?”
If I was thirty years younger, I’d find a way to get that gal in a freshly baled summer hayfield under a big full moon a sitting on my tailgate and a listening to some romantic music while sipping on a cold beer. Yes, sir, I would!
“No, ma’am. This’ll do.”
My buddy said.
I didn’t say a word. I might have groaned or moaned as we both watched her sway away from us and back into the manager’s office. Every male in the room did too, and some women as well. Not a one of us was embarrassed by the staring. Heck, you couldn’t help it. When Jolene was out of sight, I remembered what I was talking about before.
“What about putting in more violence?”
“Huh?”
“In the stories--What about more violence? People like violence.”
He took a bite of the juicy cheeseburger, and grease dripped down his chin into the white hair of his goatee beard. I took one of his fries, turned it in my hand weighing the benefits of the taste against the vast amount of calories contained in the hot and crispy potato wedge, broke off a small bite of it, and stuck it in my mouth. It needed salt, and it was a bit too mushy in the center. I wished I didn’t have to swallow it because of all the calories in it, but I couldn’t spit it out. He started speaking with his mouth full before I could quite understand what he was saying. Here is what I made out.
“People like to watch violence. That’s a fact for sure. They like to see it on TV or watch it live in an arena or a stadium, but I don’t know that they like to read violence. It takes too much imagination to read violence and really feel it and understand it.”
I thought about how hard it was to write about when Uncle Boog fought the Mexican Victor Sanchez in the arena that Gopher Lewis and I had built. That was some real live violence, but what I had written and how I described it did not do a bit of justice to what it actually felt like being there. I guess he was right. I stuck the rest of the fry in my mouth and wished that I had eaten the cheese from the paper instead of this barely decent mushy French fry.
“So, are you sayin’ that you wanna quit?”
“Quit what?”
“Quit writin’ the stories. What are we talkin’ about?”
“Hell, no! We’re not goin’ to stop writin’ stories.”
I was again surprised by the revelation of his thoughts. I had figured he was trying to talk me into forgetting our project. Obviously, there was no gain in it for him, and if nobody was reading, there was no gain for an audience since there is no audience So, what was the point of continuing, at least for him? I already told you why I was putting my thoughts down on paper in my last short story, but I had no idea why he was now so adamant about continuing, and I needed to know.
“I am confused. It seems like you are tryin’ to convince me that our writing is not bein’ read or paid any mind to so that it is not worth any more our time.”
“No, sir. Dewey Lynne, I’m just coverin’ my tail. You’ve got a pretty rough reputation. You don’t waste your time on projects that don’t make you money, and people don’t mess with you and get away with it. I wasn’t prepared to have this conversation, so I may have said some things that didn’t come out right. I just want to be clear that you shouldn’t have high expectations. I can’t make you money on this deal. I’m a writer and maybe not even very good at that. I don’t see a path to fame and fortune for either one of us just sticking with what I know. You’ve gotta be clear on that. I don’t know much more about this writing and publishing business than you do or anybody else does. I just know where to put a comma.”
He pushed what was left of his fries and cheeseburger off to one side and leaned in over the red table top like he had something to whisper. I obliged him by tilting in and turning my good hearing ear toward him. No way anyone was gonna hear his hiss of a whisper over the constant buzz of the sale barn café with the added clamor of cattle constantly bawling and squalling off in the back.
“I was afraid if the stories weren’t successful that you might have me killed.”
I jerked back up in my seat, trying not to laugh out loud, but then doing the best job of acting I have ever done by keeping a straight face in spite of the utter ridiculousness of his concern.
“Have you killed?”
“I’ve heard things, Dewey Lynne.”
“That I have writers killed?”
“Shh…no…I suppose that sounds pretty ridiculous when you say it aloud.”
“Yeah, I reckon it sounds downright silly.”
“So, um…you’re ready to keep on doing this?”
“I’m ready if you are.”
“Where do you wanna start?”
“Well, whether any of our readers care about why I went to prison, and I know that neither Mabel Vines nor Ardell are clear on it, I think that is a good place to start. Uncle Boog’s comments after the fight set me off on the wrong trail. My days in prison convinced me to stay on it. People who want to know about me need to how I got there.”
And that is the big news, y’all! I thought that we might have been at the end of the telling, that there might not be another Dewey Lynne story ever. I was prepared for the entire exposition to be over just like it had begun, out of and into nothing, and what did I find out? That my ghost writer, editor, and technology expert is afraid that I might kill him if we don’t make money. Now, all of you people who have been reading all of the stuff I have written know that I never was in it for the money. Hell, I’ve got enough money to last me three times as long as I’ll live. I don’t need any gawddamned money from this venture. So, this gap in the postings on Facebook and on the blog, it was just a fluke, a misunderstanding born of fear and mistrust, but now, my literary partner and I are back in business. Whatcha think about that?
That leaves me with a big question: What is it that you wanna hear?
Yeah, I said I was gonna start with why I went to prison, but if you would rather start somewhere else, you just let my buddy know. He’ll be a looking for your responses at that there poetry blog. And, folks, please read the blog so I don’t have to have the poor man killed.
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