Home Country

By Slim Randles

The weather warmed up the other day. On the week­end, where it would do the most good. And Dud Camp­bell dressed warmly and went out for a walk. His eyes saw our town, the old, dead, brick drug­store on the cor­ner with the clock that hadn’t worked since the inven­tion of day­light sav­ings time, and the spread white fields and frozen trees.

But his mind was in Europe, but there at the base of the big hill where the duchess’s cas­tle stood. Dud had fig­ured out how to cut out most of the mur­ders in his book “Mur­der in the Soggy Bot­toms,” (which every­one else called “The Duchess and the Truck Dri­ver”) but there was still so much to do. Truth be known, there were many times when Dud thought how easy it would be to just give up on the novel and con­cen­trate on living.

It wasn’t the writ­ing that was so hard for him. In fact, he kinda liked it. It gave him an excuse to sit up late with the radio play­ing qui­etly so as not to awaken Anita, and play with peo­ple in a book the way he had played with small tin sol­diers when he was a child. No, the hard part was to fig­ure out what the story should do. It isn’t easy.

For instance, we know we want the duchess and the Amer­i­can truck dri­ver to be happy together and kill off their ene­mies by the end of the book. So this means find­ing out why we should kill the three peo­ple, and which three peo­ple we should kill. The guys at the Mule Barn told him sev­eral years ago to kill off no more than three unless it was a war novel.

And then, there was the love story. The duchess, you see, didn’t real­ize that the truck dri­ver had been her lover 20 years ago and the trucker didn’t know he was the father of a daugh­ter. He just thought he had a son by his late wife. Well, she wasn’t late when she had the son, of course. She had a … mal­ady of some sort. We can ask Doc for a sure­fire mal­ady that’ll do in a trucker’s first wife.

And then, as the duchess and the truck dri­ver fall in love for the sec­ond time, not real­iz­ing they’d already done it once, the trucker’s boy comes over and falls in love with the duchess’s daugh­ter. And there has to be a way of mak­ing the duchess and the truck dri­ver real­ize they’d actu­ally re-found each other, and head off a dis­as­trous romance between semi-siblings…

Or maybe we could just walk down to the Mule Barn and have cof­fee with the guys.

———

Brought to you by Home Coun­try (the book). Read a sam­ple at www.slimrandles.com.

Here we are:

Slim Ran­dles

Home Coun­try

7308 Painted Pony Trail NW

Albu­querque, NM 87120

505–306-6009 cell

ol_slim@yahoo.com

www.slimrandles.com

Posted by Guest 1 Columnist on Feb 25 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.