Seven Miles from Cool

Novel-Excerpt

Winds picked at the onionskin earth over a town nobody knew about, as a yellow bus began its daily drive, almost thirty miles to the nearest schoolhouse over in the Killdeer Mountains, trying to reach its way over the canyons of the South Dakota skies. They blew along the Red River Valley, and over Red River, a place that had lost its serpent soul ten years ago. Two freckled-faced little boys missed the bus, and their parents would find out about them later, as they bounced their red ball in front of the Blue Dog watering and pisshole bar.

Red River had two bars, the Blue Dog right across the street from the Red Dog. Two stop lights, one funeral home, a church, a bank smashed between McDuffy's Barber Shop and Rex's Drug Store, serving tasty root beer floats. A town sheriff by the name of Sy Malloy cruised in his truck between the hardware store and prostitutes arriving on the Greyhound out of New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado. Coca Cola-sipping tourists dropped by sometimes to get a crowning taste of the West, or how it used to be when there were gunfights right in the middle of the streets in the early 1800s.

One man owned up most of the stock, property, and bodies in the town. He was big Jim Tillman, and he was a crazy, white-redneck, hairy-backed, mean, son-of-a-bitch, from a long line of big, mean, white-redneck, hairy-backed white men, from a generation that settled the West by killing.

The Dakotas had plenty of men like him, but they didn't have many men like Rufus Long, a half-Indian, half-black cowboy, who lost his way in the dust and gold landscape of what was real and what might get you killed today. His face was as broad as Webster's Dictionary from the storytime shelf. Heavy eyelids fried you like an egg in pearl white yokes. He carried himself like a middleweight boxer with husky shoulders. He stood about six-two and had just gotten back to town after sleeping up in the mountains on different Native American reservations for almost six years. In essence, he was like a slim toothpick sucking on the day in the mouth of a mean wind. He was a man who just sat in silence, eating his steak and French fries with plenty of catsup dabbed on them.

Rufus sipped his beer in the Blue Dog. A yellow day with white clouds. He smelled smoky, whiskey breaths of old friends and old enemies coming to greet him. He had a cowboy hat on his head with a three-button-down cowhide jacket, blue shirt, old blue jeans, and a good pair of cowboy boots. He also had door-hinge hands accused of strangling the life out of a dream of fate if he didn't agree with it in the first place.

Long's world was stuffed in a blender. He didn't need it anymore. He was trash in a world of the past, a curious man placed upside down on the wrong shelf between American History and Cajun Cooking. They had his number, confidentially. He didn't know the time of day in the bottom of the Blue Dog. And if it wasn't for his long­time buddy, he would be dead right now for even stepping through the door.

His best friend Injun Joe's face was a truck with no brakes. Braids falling on each side of his shoulders, he kept a big knife on his hip and loved to throw it at snakes. He had the almond-shaped, brown eyes of a cat. A short guy with a degree from UC Berkeley in geology and a penchant for smoking good weed, Johnny Walker Red whiskey was really Joe's best friend. He never met a bottle that talked back or even shot at him. He had a mean penchant for killing every white man who had stolen land and money from his people since the sixteenth century.

Rufus Long was high; what a shame. He was glad to see his friend, who woke him up in the middle of a goddamn dream.

"You okay?" Injun Joe asked. He knew Rufus had always had the pride of kings. He was a man who robbed time. But he had left behind a lot of bad blood in Red River for not dying with them boys in Southeast Asia.