Mole stood grimacing at the bar and blocking the waitress station at Clayt’s Horseshoe Tavern. Taller than a gun cabinet and just as broad, his stringy, greasy hair the color of fresh-poured asphalt hung below double-wide shoulders. The beard looked like a bramble bush with dead sparrows trapped in its branches. Mole’s nose looked like […]
Sopping up a puddle of spilled beer with a week-old rag, the young bartender heard a gravelly voice and thought the customer had lost his mind. Skeeter sat on his barstool repeating his name over and over. “Skeeter Dillon. My name is Skeeter Dillon. Hi, I’m Skeeter Dillon. Skeeter Dillon’s my name. Outlaw country music’s […]
Skeeter sat in his tow truck and wrote the lyrics to a country song on a ketchup-stained Bunny Burger wrapper from the Red Rabbit Drive In. Titled, “Hello Ma,” Skeeter knew the tune would hit the charts. Singing softly to himself in a voice that sounded like rust looks, he put the finishing touches on […]
Playing Chicken John ate chicken wings until his heart blew up at the best table in the American legion. Pouring Pabst draft beer down his gullet that night as fast as sea water must have rushed into the Titanic, he only took a breath to shove one spicy morsel after another into his mouth until […]
At his end of his retirement party, Shorty stood onstage at the microphone and tried to be funny. No, he said, I’m not giving away my stock portfolio. The crowd roared its appreciation. Samantha and Jason, his children, clapped the loudest. Soon they would run their father’s pea soup empire. Soon they would know the […]
