Chapter 1

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

If I left now, it would take me 34 minutes to get to the Dodge dealership. Maybe two hours for them to run a credit check and get me in a new Hellcat. After all, I wouldn’t really haggle, or maybe I would. Really ruin the salesman’s day before I left. Black, with a red interior, that’s what I would get. Maybe even trade in my F-150—I wouldn’t need it anymore.

From there I would run it hard, all the way up 101, the Pacific on one side of me, until I finally found a cliff.

I would throw it down a gear and stomp the pedal, and hit the guard rail at 130 mph. The car would buckle, but momentum would carry me over, and I would tumble through the air, a jumbled mass of fiberglass and steel. If I hit it fast enough, the guardrail wouldn’t matter, and I’d make it to the water. I would disappear in the black maw of the ocean, lost at last to the sea, my body given back to the chaos, and I could be free.

This is what I had thought about every day for the last year. The most dramatic, most obnoxious ways to kill myself.

It was a game we used to play in the unit, this was how we wiled away the hours on a long deployment, or during night shift. We came up with the most intricate, obscure, and offensive ways you could kill yourself, and then trotted them out in front each other as if we were in show and tell. We would howl with laughter for hours, snorting and choking, at the images of our best friend hanging themselves from an industrial warehouse ceiling fan. On a long rope, of course, so that when they found the body, he would be whipping around the giant room. Suicide was like going AWOL, except they could never catch you. It was the only real way to say “fuck you” to the world. I think that was the attraction.

I had made my first suicide joke a week after I started at CORPOSUCKCOCK, and my new co-workers’ reactions had been awkward requests to see if “I needed help,” or was “doing ok.” That was the first time I regretted leaving the Corps.

I stared at the fluorescent lights above my cubicle. They buzzed and flickered. Sometimes I swore they flashed messages, but whenever I noticed, they stopped, and the light held droningly steady. I resented being trapped there, held under artificial light while the California sun gleamed brightly outside.

The thing I realize now, is that in the Corps, they were really just jokes. Out here they were an attempt at self-actualization.

I worked for a start up, they had moved out here a year ago, fleeing San Francisco. The company was called Artificial Spaces and was supposedly working on using machine learning to generate virtual spaces. I worked in the finance department, and they were bleeding cash, but it didn’t matter. Most of America is an optical illusion that way, if you cross your eyes, and maintain the proper emotional distance to most of the buggery, you can sort of see what should amount to a culture and a country. Businesses don’t have to be solvent as long as you can sell the vision.

Artificial Spaces had bought out an old aerospace building, and converted it to offices, so the windows were heavily glazed to prevent the soviets or whoever else they thought had been spying at the time from spying, but the Cold War had been over for the better part of 30 years now. So, it just dampened most of the natural light, and turned the inside into a depressing cave of fluorescents and cubicles.

I had worked here a year, and every day seemed a lifetime. The work was tedious. I spent most of my day answering emails, and chasing down spreadsheets, comparing cost proposals and receipts. I often wondered how I ended up here when I had so many other options. But in reality, all options had led to here, or a version of here.

“Let’s meet in the Inspire room,” Luke said, startling me from my thoughts. He stepped into the center aisle. He was a small man, with a well-trimmed beard, and dark rimmed glasses. He was also my boss. His hairline was receding, but I could tell he had not quite given up on it yet.

Three days ago, at a bar, he had confided in me that he was in an open relationship. I don’t know why he did this, but he did, probably because he was sad and drunk, alone at a bar, and saw a familiar face. He also confided in me, that while his wife had slept with several new men, he had been unable to “score” at all. Even worse, he wasn’t completely sure he wanted to. “I still love her,” he had said. Although she apparently thought he was fine with the whole thing, he had only given in to her, because he was scared she would leave him. And who says men aren’t the real romantics.

At the end of the night, he had tried to explain how freeing it all was, and that the experience had really taught him a lot about himself, and how to overcome his insecurities. How he desperately loved his wife, and letting her be with other men, was the surest act of faith in that love. He had told me this teary-eyed, and drunk, without the slightest hint of irony. That’s when I realized the man had spent the whole night convincing himself of the idea. The experience turned my stomach. However, I had glimpsed a mirror image of myself in that instant. Always talking myself into the “right” course of action, the life that was expected, until I too, expected it.

“Actually, the Inspire room is already booked,” Lisa said. Her voice was a cast iron grate scraping over concrete. Her perfume gave me a headache, and I imagined in several different lives she had been the girl to raise her hand at school and remind the teacher about the homework.

Luke looked exasperated at this scheduling mix up. I swallowed my disgust. He overreacted to everything. He acted neurotic, like a beaten woman, flinching at the slightest creak in the house.

“Ok, lets meet in the Believe room,” Luke said at last, finally finished panicking. His voice weak and estrogenic, as if his diaphragm was perpetually compressed.

This was my manager. This was our fearless leader. A man in an open relationship. A man who feared the most basic decisions. He was made for middle management. Born to it, the way a Khan is to the steppe. If only he had ever read Jocko’s Extreme Ownership then he too could command the platoons of corporate America.

The Inspire Room, the Believe Room, I don’t even hear them anymore, it’s normal now. The lights flickered again. They sent messages out in morse code. When I looked up, they stopped.

Everything in a corporate office, in corporate culture, in corporate anything is designed to extract your soul. I had heard startups were better, and if that was true, then I would likely not make it a day under the normal bureaucracy of a fortune 500. They break you down more thoroughly than bootcamp ever had, but never go through the trouble of building you back up. There was no crucible at the end of this mountain. Only a rock, that rolled backwards. An Outlook inbox that never filled. Call me Sisyphus. Somewhere in the distance of my mind’s ear a hellcat savages pavement.

They pair brutalist architecture with stock images of sunrises and grassy hills, and then those are overlaid with inspirational words. Motivate. Learn. Achieve.

They give you pointless tasks. Approval loops that take a day to navigate before you end up back where you started. A tracker for updating the tracker. And then there is email. Thread after thread, of confusion, the shirking of responsibility. You learn other people’s jobs just to tell them how to do it. Zoom meetings that go nowhere.

You think if you gut it out long enough, smile just right and talk at the perfect pitch you will get promoted. And often you do. But it’s never for the reasons you think. It’s never because you had a great quarter, or because you fixed a system and saved x hours of time. No. It’s because you were there. It was your time. You were the one dumb enough to sign up for this, dumb enough to stick around.

And then you get promoted. A whole level. That’s a step up. Your 70k a year becomes 83k a year. But somehow you only see $100 extra a paycheck. That can’t be right, there is a mix up you think. But there wasn’t. The step up puts you in a new tax bracket, which means the government gets its share, and since your health benefits are calculated on a company-wide curve, you are now expected to pay more of the premium compared to the company.

Your yearly raise will be 2-3% if you are lucky, and the company did “well.” Whatever that means. But real inflation (use shadowstats.com and not that CPI calculated garbage) is running hot and has been year after year. If you calculate from three years prior, your dollars go 19% less far.

Quicksand. That’s your life, and every day you are sinking.

But the one rule, and one rule only, is never bring any of this up to anyone ever. To break the illusion, just for a second, to shine a light in the dark corner, or mention that the king has no clothes, is a hard no. They are automatons and programmed to kill.

Why I can’t disappear into collections of poorly made plastic figurines like everyone else, is a question I could never answer. They know it’s bad. Caring just makes it worse.

The Believe Room is white walls, a laminate wood table, circular, the carpet dirty blue. My coworkers shuffle in, pick their spots with strategic precision. Which chair will let them extricate themselves the quickest.

Luke sets up the overhead projector while Lisa tries to help by giving him directions. Small men and wine moms are the slave drivers of the 21st century. They keep the machine moving. They are the ghouls that work for Master. Instead of whips they use empty smiles and nurturing voices, but eyes are empty, and bosoms cold.

“Today, boys and girls, we are learning about diversity, can anyone tell me why it’s wrong to use N***** to describe Terrel?” my boss asked.

He didn’t say this, but it’s what I heard. My mind’s ear again.

I make eye contact with Terrel. He had heard it too. I feel vindicated. Maybe, my boss did say it.

I zoned out for the rest of the meeting, bronze age warriors sack villages in my mind’s eye. Red-bearded Scythian steppe nomads sitting atop squat, muscular ponies as their prey flees before them—the merchants, and the farmers, the self-domesticated. Scalps hang from their intricately decorated saddles, and their helms glittered with rubies. Swords flashed and men fell. One has a black-haired buxom beauty tossed across his saddle.

I wondered if my ancestors would disown me when I got to Valhalla, then I remembered that you had to die with a weapon in your hand. I’d have to rethink my suicide.

I should have died in Iraq. That had been my chance. But they had forced me out, I went to college on the G.I. Bill, after I was too jaded to enjoy it. I got a finance degree.

I had hated the Marine Corps, but in the way you hate a toxic girlfriend—you drive each other wild. She drives you nuts, keys your car, but when it’s good, you are going eighty down a two lane road, smoking a cigarette, and her head is bobbing up and down in your lap. It’s no long-term way to live, but it is a great way to die. She didn’t have to break up with me.

Lunch was at my desk, and I spent the rest of the day sorting emails. When your job is wasting time, your time is wasting.

A black hand waved in front of my face. It was Terrel.

“Smoke?” he asked. Terrel and I were the only two people at the company that smoked.

“Alright, you got a lighter?” I asked.

“You know I do,” he said.

“Cool.”

We had to smoke fifty feet in front of the building. We knew this because we had been chased away from the front door more than once, by more than one sad, strong matriarch.

“This shit is gay as fuck, man.”

I inhaled the cigarette. “I know, I hate it.”

“For real, I would quit if it didn’t pay so well,” Terrel said.

He was doing the thing too, talking himself into it. Talking himself into life in the 21st century.

* * *

I pulled up outside the Palm Vale Apartment complex and waved my key card in front of the access panel. The iron gate grumbled open, and I pulled inside. I drove my F-150 through a maze of drives, cell block after cell block towering over me. My own cell was nine hundred square feet of white walls on the second floor that I paid the jailer $1500 a month to live in.

I parked the car and rolled down my window. I lit another cigarette. The sun had reached that place in the sky, where the palm tree outside of my apartment shaded my specific parking spot, at exactly 4:05 p.m. when I got back from work. I figured it only happened once or twice a year like this. I took a long drag on the cigarette, basking in the serendipity of the moment. This was my summer solstice.

I found a package left by the front door. It was from MedTest Industries. For $150, you could take your own blood work. I set the package on the counter. Sarah had left a note asking me to get groceries. A little smiley face drawn at the end. Sarah was the only reason I was still here, in the country, in the universe, which were not great reasons to be with someone.

I tacked her list to the fridge with a magnet that said, “I love you”. We hadn’t had sex in a month and the problem was me. It had started a year ago, right when I switched jobs, my libido died, or at least that’s what I thought. At some point later in this story I’d realize it was just depression, but alas. My junk works fine now.

I scanned the chore list and wondered why she couldn’t do them. They were always simple things, things that could have been done in the time it took to write them down. Everywhere, my life was managed by women. Things that just a generation ago no woman in her right mind would dare suggest her husband do. But then again, a single man’s job would have kept her fed, and clothes on her children’s backs. I guess ultimately, this was the problem.

Instead, she worked a job. She was a certified girl boss, making twenty eight dollars an hour as a “manager.”

I sat on the couch and googled low testosterone. I had tried it all, raw eggs, working out, vitamin D. Nothing had worked. I googled boxing gyms in my area. I found one ten minutes away, I would try it. Fighting would give me my life back. I ordered a pair of gloves on Amazon.

I boxed in the Marines. We even had to settle a few disagreements that way on deployment. All I knew was I needed something. I was dying. Withering. I could feel my soul leaking out of my ears and I had no way to stop it.

Sarah came through the door. “Did you do anything on the list?” she asked.

“No, I just got home,” I said.

She huffed and disappeared to the bedroom.

I flicked the tv on and looked for a game. Every five minutes an ad for an antidepressant came on, and then one for a new diet, and then one with a mixed-race couple, the white guy cowering beneath the ire of his beautiful ugly afroed wife. Interracial marriage or sex, or whatever you want to call it, had never offended me until it was meant to be offensive, and by then it had become illegal to say it was offensive. What luck. Also what the fuck is with everyone in ads having vitiligo. I’ve never seen one in real life.

* * *

My gloves came three days later. I tore into the amazon box and tried them on. They were black, shiny, and new. Begging me to break them in. I gleamed.

The gym was in a brand-new shopping center. I pulled up and parked. I stared at it. My class started at 7 p.m.

Inside, there were rows of heavy bags. The place gleamed. Pop music blared overhead, and my heart dropped. It was full of women—yoga pants, and athletic wear—the entire gym reeked of anti-septic. I scanned the place quickly, there wasn’t even a place to spar. This wasn’t a boxing gym; it was Pilates with gloves.

“Welcome to Boxer’s,” the woman at the front desk said, “have you been here before?”

I glared.

But it was too late, I couldn’t turn around now. I feigned interest in her droning, and ten minutes later I was signed up for three free sessions. Five minutes after that, I bobbed and weaved, as “our” homosexual Puerto Rican instructor led me and “the girls,” through a series of routines. He wore an earpiece, his spiky hair gelled, and instead of actual work out clothes he bobbed around in an overly tight red polo shirt that had the gym’s logo embroidered on it—Boxer’s.

He looked like he should be selling ShamWow. I imagined the bag was his face. His energetic voice, frenetic over the gym’s speakers, urged all of us on, and by the end of it I was convinced that this class was equal to, if not actual—sodomy.

I walked outside. My bubble of motivation burst, the wave that had given me new hope, dashed upon the fake and gay reality of the 21st century.

When I returned home, I threw my gloves in the corner. I pulled a glass container full of leftovers out of the fridge and sat on the couch. I had thrown all our plastic containers out three months ago and bought glass. I lived in fear of micro-plastics and waged a losing war on parabens. I refused to touch the receipts at the store, convinced that they contained dangerous phytoestrogens. Despite all this, my testosterone still hadn’t improved, or so I thought.

I scrolled on my phone. Wondering why I did it. Every two posts was some sort of ad for a testosterone booster, or a course that would make you a millionaire. Every day, the answer box showed women how ugly they were, and showed men how poor they were.

Again, I googled boxing gyms in my area, but this time I pulled up a crime map of my city. I found a couple streets where the dots clustered, and then searched for a boxing gym in the triangle. I found it, Lion’s Gym. That was my spot. That’s where I would try next.

* * *

I trudged my way through Walmart, gathering the things on the list. I went to Walmart because it was close, and it was cheap, but also because I am a masochist.

Small family-owned grocers gave their life for this. For cheap foreign made bullshit, picked over by white trash and their black neighbors. Obese women, freed from their duties to husband and family over fifty years ago, and given the authority a name tag carries, deputized by Sam Walton himself, now roamed the aisles, some would call them the commissars of a new age.

“Excuse me,” a voice from behind me says.

I have zoned out in the middle of the aisle. I scooch my cart over awkwardly, the wheels groan and creak, I’m suddenly confused, as to how I was even in the way. But then I see the rest of her. She smiles at me as she passes, her smile another fold in her giant neck. She’s a blob, a mass of flesh. A monstrosity of sagging skin stretched to its breaking point underneath pound after pound of pork fed flesh.

She waddled past.

At the front of the store, I went to the self-checkout. There were only two registers manned by human cashiers. Part of me longed for the days when you were forced to talk to an awkward teenager, or the lonely grandma, forced to participate in the community you lived in. Instead, they had replaced all of them with these infernal machines, the ones that beeped at you when you didn’t put your items on the scale fast enough. I finished checking myself out, and bagging all my groceries.

I headed to the exit.

The commissar was there. I tried to avoid eye contact as I wheeled past her.

“Sir, I need to see your receipt,” the woman said.

I stopped the cart, white knuckling the handle.

“The receipt is in that bag,” I said, and pointed to the sack on top of the cart.

“Can you take it out for me?” she asked.

“No, you take it out,” I responded. I have a thing about phytoestrogens remember.

“But we aren’t allowed to touch your things,” she said.

“Not really my problem is it,” I said.

The woman huffed and picked the receipt out of the bag. She scanned it, pretending to check it, never comparing it to any of the items in the cart. She went to hand it back to me, but I pointed at the sack. She huffed again.

“How do you know that what is in the bags is on the receipt, if you aren’t allowed to touch any of my stuff?” I asked as earnestly as I could fake.

She stared at me, her eyes glassy, and then said, “Sir, we do this at every Walmart.”

“Why do I have to show you my receipt if there are CCTV cameras in literally every aisle?” I asked.

At this the woman grew visibly frustrated. “Sir, please leave,” she said.

“That’s what I was trying to do before you stopped me,” I said.

“Sir, if you don’t leave then I will call security,” she commanded.

I wheeled my cart outside.

Available Now

Currently only available on Amazon, but if you prefer KOBO, Apple Books, or Barnes and Noble, it will be available there in a few weeks. It just takes time to distribute.

Complimentary Ebook included with Paperback

I’ve also done something a bit different with this release. If you buy a copy of the Paperback, you will find a QR code at the beginning that links you to a download page for a complimentary ebook version. Mostly because I wish every paperback purchase came packaged this way. If this seems to be popular, I might do it for future releases as well.

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If you listened to the latest episode of TFABS, you heard the news… is narrating Medicine Woman, soon to be available as an audiobook on Audible, Amazon.com, and iTunes.

We’ve mostly wrapped production and are currently doing final checks for quality.

Hoping to release sometime in the next few weeks, but no official release date just yet.

I will also be dropping the first chapter as a sample in a couple days so make sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss.

It sounds awesome, McGinty is a pro, and I’m super excited about how the final product is shaping up.

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It is almost here. A second Frank Kidd novel.

It’s blood soaked, brooding, and dark humored. Tonally, there is perhaps a chance that only vets and people with bad childhoods will find it funny, but that’s a risk we take.

I also channeled my inner Taylor Sheridan and tried to make something of my own “Tacticool Western” see Sicario and Lioness.

As for content, OUATIA is a neo-western/military thriller that follows seven mercenaries tasked with killing Chinese fisherman illegally fishing off the coast of Argentina. It’s a little bit merc hangout novel and a little bit old school shoot em up pulp. And if it’s something of a deconstruction of the military thriller, than I hope it’s simultaneously a reconstruction of the Western.

Official Blurb

Every year, thousands of Chinese fishing vessels descend on Argentina’s territorial waters to fish them dry causing billions of dollars of untold ecological and economic damage.

Ryan McGowan, a disgraced Marine Raider, yearns for a second chance at adventure before fluorescent depression kills him.

Enter Mike Hudson, a private military contractor with a murky past.

Mike recruits Ryan and a team of similarly disgruntled operators for a maritime security detail in Argentina—policing illegal fishing with deadly force.

Part military thriller, part hangout novel, part neo-western… OUATIA is an old school shoot ‘em up.

Mar Argentino

One of the problems with using a working title for a draft is that anything else I come up with just feels wrong. Title may change, but the first draft is already written and fairly clean. An edit and some brushing up and I’m hoping to have this out sometime this year. It’s a bit military thriller, a bit hang-out novel, and a bit neo-western.

Working Blurb:

Every summer, hordes of Chinese fishing vessels descend upon Argentina’s territorial waters, plunders its fishing grounds, and leaves the surrounding ocean on the verge of ecological collapse. Hamstrung by Chinese debt-trap diplomacy, Argentina looks for a kinetic deterrent, one with deniability.

Ryan McGowan, a disgraced Marine Raider, day walks through corporate America as a financial analyst, that is until he meets Mike Hudson, the head of a shadowy private military company. When Mike offers him a chance to return to the fight and join a team of former operators, Ryan seizes it. Their mission: become Argentina’s deterrent.

But when their maritime security detail results in a bloody massacre, Ryan and his team find themselves proxies in a shadow war between the United States and China. With Chinese Special Forces intent on killing them, Ryan and his team have only one job—live to fight another day.

A Man Called Farmer

This is my current work in progress, and I expect I’ll be done with the first draft by June. It’s sitting at about 70k words now, and I’m thinking I have another 10k or 20k to go.

I don’t really have a cover mockup or a proper blurb yet, but this will be another western.

The story follows Billy Farmer, a Seminole Indian whose family and people have been relocated to the Indian Nations (present day Oklahoma). As the Civil War begins, the United States Army pulls out of its frontier forts and the territory descends into guerrilla fighting. But more than that, the lack of soldiers prompts a Comanche uprising further out on the plains. When a Comanche raid results in the kidnapping of Billy’s grandson, he sets off to get him back.

As always thanks for reading and your support. If you feel like supporting my work, please consider upgrading to become a paid member. Every little bit helps me fund editing and cover art costs.

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Paperbacks are also available in Mass Market size!

Levi Thurston: mountain man, wanderer, Indian fighter. He haunts the wide open spaces of a newly opened West. His only companions… a reluctant coydog and a Hawken rifle.

When he is ambushed by Ute warriors, Levi takes shelter in a sacred burial ground. Convinced he has caught a curse, he must seek out a Blackfoot Medicine Woman, the young and beautiful Apaniaki, daughter of Chief Black Crow to help lift it. But what starts out as a simple-enough quest devolves into a fight for his life and an unexpected love as Levi finds himself caught in the middle of warring tribes.

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Chapter 1

Death Trees

Levi Thurston woke wet, miserable, and in pain. It was the morning’s dew that first woke him, having soaked through his buckskin pants and into his bones, but it was the arrow still lodged in his shoulder that brought him to full consciousness.

His breath rattled and he coughed into his hand. He squinted in the lowlight of dawn and searched the phlegm for blood. He found none, a good sign. The arrow had only pierced his shoulder, not a lung.

He ran his fingers over the jagged remains of the arrow’s shaft. He’d broken it off last night, just after he’d made a run for it. His horse was gone, stolen by the same Utes that had tagged him with an arrow.

Around him, the mountains were still. Too still, with only the faint whisper of the wind moving through the treetops. With the sky just beginning to lighten.

Just above him, a skeletal hand hung delicately off the side of the burial platform he'd apparently spent the night beneath. Finger bones held in place by little dried bits of gristle.

He fumbled around for his rifle then, and let out a sigh of relief as his hand closed around the smooth maple stock of the Hawken. Come what may, he still had his rifle. He struggled to his feet, ignoring the ache in his bum shoulder.

He was in a small canyon of sorts, more platforms woven into the trees around him like so many floating tombs. Skeletons wrapped in blankets, some of them still wearing their beads and feathers. They stared at him from their floating beds, gaping eye sockets following his every move. Ragged ceremonial feathers shifting slightly in the small breeze, ghostlike, almost alive.

This was a bad place and he’d just spent the night in it.

He hadn’t known where he was last night, dark as it was, but it explained why the Utes had given up the chase. Damned things buried their dead in trees and let the birds and buzzards pick them clean. Something about bringing their spirits closer to the sky.

They’d stolen his horse, and his mule, or rather he’d left them. Took off on foot as fast as he could when he caught the arrow. It had been just nigh of dark when they’d come upon him, and he kicked himself for not picking a better camp. But the Utes had always been friendly enough with him, even traded a time or two, and he hadn’t seen any fresh sign for days. He'd let his guard down, and had paid the price.

And that was the thing with Injuns—you could never quite figure out what one was thinking or planning. At all times, a man had to be on the lookout. There'd only been three of them. He figured they were just young bucks looking to count coup and prove themselves and not a proper war party.

He started off then, with the burial trees and their dead residents providing constant company. He followed a dry creek bed up into higher country, and finally found his way clear of the place.

Levi paused under the shade of a cottonwood to scan the way he’d come. Nothing stirred.

He took stock of his weapons—he still had the Hawken which was chambered in .53, a horn of powder, and a bag of caps and balls. His hatchet and his scalper knife still hung on his belt. Everything else was with his horse, and by proxy the Utes, to include a brace of pistols and a smoothbore flintlock he kept loaded with buck and ball.

He wished he had those pistols now. The Hawken was the best, but when the fight got up close and personal, nothing beat having a pistol or two. If those braves came back looking for him, he’d get one good shot out of the Hawken, maybe two if they were a ways off, and then it would be hand to hand. And that smoothbore, loaded with both buck and ball, was no finer weapon to stop a charge, for he'd often cut down two or more Indians with a single shot.

Working diagonally up the mountain, he found a small spring and a place where the water pooled. He threw himself into the water in an attempt to wash off the stink of death. Though clear of the graveyard, he still felt dirty, as if death was communicable.

It was about midday when he found the cave, and the pain in his shoulder finally outweighed the urge to put distance between him and any potential pursuers. Less of a cave and more of an overhang, wider than it was deep, he figured that a fire in the back of it would be okay. The smoke would diffuse across the rock ceiling and travel upward, scattering along the face of the mountain. And he was so high up that any smell would be carried away on the high country winds and dissipate over miles.

As he inspected his shelter, he noticed the dead branches scattered about the back of it, in an unnatural sort of way, as if they'd once been gathered. He wondered at that, for if they were gathered, it had no doubt been by a man. But a long time ago by the looks of it. This country had a way of fooling a man into thinking he was the first to ever see it, but that wasn't ever really true.

He gathered the sticks together and piled on the leaf litter. Sparks caught the spoonful of powder he poured from his horn and a bright orange flame flashed to life. He added small twigs, nursing the flame to good health.

He sat there for a while, just warming his hands, dreading what he needed to do.

But when the fire was going hot, he set the blade of the scalper knife in the beginnings of its coals. Then, shrugging out of his shirt, and careful to guide the remains of the arrow through the hole where it had pierced his buckskin, he examined the wound.

He hoped to God they’d used a stone head. Some of the tribes had started to use iron arrowheads, cut from pig iron that they traded for. He’d seen a few men snatch such an arrow and the results were always ugly. They bent inside the body, or bunched up next to a bone, and made for a hell of a time getting them back out. Did more damage on the way out than in.

Taking the buckskin shirt, he used it to grip the arrow shaft, now slick with blood, and wrenched the arrow out. It came free in a blaze of white-hot pain and anger climbed his gut. Pain made him mad, and he sucked wind through his front teeth. But it felt good too. The same relief one got from plucking a splinter, and it came in equal proportion to the size of the splinter.

He felt consciousness fade, but he refused to go, refocusing on his breath. Breathing controlled the pain. Steadied the mind.

He refocused his attention on the arrow in hand. It was bloody and short. About four inches in all—with a stone head.

He slapped the hot blade over his wound and clenched his eyes shut, counting to ten in his head. He only made it to five before removing hot iron from flesh, so he slapped it back down and started the count over.

Such was his way of discipline. There was no room for weakness of the mind. The body was its own thing, wanting what it couldn’t have. But he could allow none of it. He had to be in charge if he was to survive. Nothing could run him, not pain, nor fear.

With the full count complete, he removed the knife and collapsed backwards on the stone floor. He lay there panting and sweating for a long while. His vision narrowed. He found faces in the rock ceiling above him. Waves of heat and pain washed over him. Sweat beaded, burnt flesh nauseated.

And in those dim moments, where all was silent, and the walls of consciousness pushed in on him he wondered if he was to die alone. Here, in this cave where no one would know the better. The idea of it scared him.

He looked and smelled like an animal. His hair was dark brown, long and knotted, and his fist-length beard matched. At just over six feet tall, he was panther lean and bigger than most men. He had always been proud of his size, even though he’d not had a hand in it. It had made fighting easier, and getting on with women was never a problem, even though they mostly cared about the size of his purse—at least the kind of women he'd ever had access to. Yet here, lying on the cave floor, he felt small. Small and insignificant.

The moccasins he wore were Shoshone. His deerskin pants traded for off the Crow. Same as his fringed buckskin shirt. All of which, besides his weapons, now seemed the limits of his possessions.

His age lay somewhere past his twentieth birthday but not yet his thirtieth, he knew not which was closer for he’d lost track. He’d trapped, hunted, and fought the mountains for over a decade, and each year he made it further West. It was his fourteenth birthday when he ran off from his father’s farm in the middle of the night. He called it a farm, but you could hardly call what they did in the Smoky Mountains farming. And he wondered then if the old bastard he'd called a father was still alive.

When the Company had set its eyes on the plains, he’d been one of the first to ride a keelboat up the Missouri, or at least second since Lewis and Clark. Which was not at all true, but made for big talk around a campfire.

But they were only stories. That was the sum of him. Stories about silent places that no one would remember, about a life that no one would mourn. It had always been a lonely life, of that, he was sure. He’d thought often of taking a wife, but the opportunity never came, and if it did he doubted he could stay in one place. This was the measure of him. The measure of a man who ended up cornered and dying in a dirty cave, dying like some wounded animal, and no further along than the earliest of his forebears.

Then sleep—or unconsciousness—found him.

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Release Date: March 3rd, 2025

BLURB: Levi Thurston: mountain man, wanderer, Indian fighter. He haunts the wide open places of a newly opened West. His only companions… a reluctant coydog and a Hawken rifle.

When he is ambushed by Ute warriors, Levi takes shelter in a sacred burial ground where he becomes convinced he has caught a curse. To lift it, he must seek out a Blackfoot Medicine Woman, the young and beautiful Apaniaki, daughter of Chief Black Crow. But what starts out as a simple-enough quest devolves into a fight for his life and love as Levi finds himself caught in the middle of warring tribes.

Special Thanks:

Shoutout to the fantastic @skunk_artworks for the original artwork. He was incredibly gracious and professional. Would highly recommend you give him a follow and for any commissions you have in mind.

As always, thank you for your support.

I recently received back the edits on my novel Medicine Woman and have commissioned a cover. This will likely be the first novel that I publish. It follows a mountain man named Levi Thurston as he stumbles headlong into a war between the Blackfoot and Crow tribes. Expect more to come as I pick a release date, struggle through writing back cover copy, solidify the cover, and figure out how to start publishing.

Pulp Contest Runner Up

I also participated in the Pulp Fiction Contest for Man’s World magazine and I was honored to have my Vietnam War Horror story chosen as one of three to be published. It should be available in Man’s World sometime in October.

New Fiction

I also submitted a short story to The Double Dealer which was recently published in their thirteenth issue. This story follows a young man who has been cheated on, and is subsequently drawn into conflict with a mysterious biker gang that call themselves The Sons of Chiron. This is my first paid short, and I couldn’t be happier for it to have been with the folks over at The Double Dealer.

The issue is available for purchase here: The Double Dealer Issue 13

Going Forward

The last year has been busy. I am working on finishing a BFA in Creative Writing, which will be my second degree. Graduation is set for October. It has been a significant amount of work, and I will be happy to have completed it, and happier to be done with it. At some point, I may write an essay on what I thought of the experience, the pro’s and con’s, and whether its worth doing (its not, unless you have some portion of GI Bill gathering dust).

Up to this point, I have primarily published fiction on Substack. I plan to continue doing that, as I write more shorts, but I will also be branching out a bit, with novel and movie reviews, author updates, and the occasional essay like the one last week (The New Western Myth).

Again, thank you for subscribing, and all of your support! I could do none of this without you the reader.

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And yes this is sort of an announcement post, or a celebra…

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