Bruce McCandless III's Blog: From Here to Infirmity, page 2
July 14, 2019
House of the Rising Sun (Book Review)
How can a writer as great as James Lee Burke write a novel as bad as House of the Rising Sun? I just didn't buy it. A giant of an ex-Texas Ranger batters, bashes, maims and murders a whole host of Mexican soldiers, white racists, white arms dealers, white thugs, and other objectionable white people, all the while battling guilt and raging alcoholism, searching for his son, protecting the Holy Grail, and engaging in witty, occasionally amorous, mostly sonorous, eventually tedious banter with three highly intelligent, dangerous, enterprising, and beautiful females who find him mysteriously compelling. Seriously? Burke's writing is so good that it's easy to think he's actually saying something in these pages. He isn't. And I conclude this even though the book contains one of the very best paragraphs I've ever read. I'd give it three stars but for a sequence late in the novel in which our protagonist seems to wander into a Laurel and Hardy movie, with an extended, apparently-intended-to-be-humorous bit involving a fancy car and a corn field that I thought was completely out of place and out of character. Someone tell me what I'm missing here!
July 11, 2019
The Early Years at NASA
I was five years old in 1966, so I don’t remember much of those early days in Texas. Maybe my first memory is of hearing the news on the car radio about the Apollo 1 fire and the deaths of Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee. It was January 27, 1967. I recall not so much the news itself as the reaction it elicited from my mom and dad, who discussed the event in the front seat of the Jeep in shocked, hushed tones. The crew had been practicing for launch of Apollo 1 on the pad in Florida, fully suited and deployed in the command module as they would be at lift off, which was scheduled to take place just a few days later. The atmosphere in the cockpit was pure oxygen. When a short in the wiring caused sparking, the atmosphere fed flames that spread through the nylon netting and foam pads. The crew tried to get out, but the hatch was designed to open inward, which was made impossible by the sudden rise in air pressure in the cabin caused by the fire. All three men died. In my mind the event seems to take place on the same night my parents stopped on the side of NASA Road 1 to rescue a stray dog—a basset hound, I think. The Apollo 1 fire set the space program back, of course. It would be a year and a half before another American crew left earth. But more importantly it cast a large shadow over the men who were waiting to fly—and their wives. Just as many of us can remember where we were when we saw Challenger breaking apart in a brilliant blue sky in January of 1986, my parents always remembered that launch pad fire.
The dangers didn’t stop him, of course. They didn’t stop any of the men waiting to fly. Eventually the pall faded and the program started up again, this time with the oxygen content in the command module significantly reduced and the escape hatch modified to open outward instead of inward, so that the increased cabin pressure that would be generated in the event of a fire wouldn’t impede a rapid exit. In the meantime those involved shared the mounting excitement of being involved in the greatest engineering project in history. The astronauts trained for all sorts of contingencies. In June of 1967 many of them flew to Iceland for training in how to survive on the surface of the moon—central Iceland’s desolate terrain being adjudged the closest available stand-in for lunar conditions. In August of 1967 my dad traveled to Washington State for a United States Air Force Survival School training session focusing on desert conditions. The aim was to prepare for the aftermath of an emergency landing of a spacecraft somewhere between 45 degrees north latitude and 45 degrees south latitude. Fieldwork took place in an area northeast of Pasco, where, a schedule said, “the astronauts as a group will learn to make emergency clothing from the parachutes which lower their space vehicle to earth. Their knowledge of navigation will be reviewed. Emergency ground-to-air signals will be constructed and later evaluated by School personnel flying above the training site.” My dad also went on a survival trip to Panama that year, where, in typical fashion, he made a spectacle of himself by capturing and bringing back to the States a fer-de-lance, one of the most poisonous snakes in the world, in a gunny sack. He later donated it to the Houston Zoo.
I have a photograph of him in 1969, standing with Jim Irwin and Charlie Duke outside a Ramada Inn, lean and beautiful, an advertisement for adrenaline and aviator glasses. He wanted the world, and the world wanted him. He was five nine, slender, with dark hair and blue eyes, a fighter pilot and an astronaut, brilliant and dashing. In that bad, frenetic era, at a time when the nation seemed to be coming apart, torn by the hatreds engendered by Vietnam and racial inequality, the astronauts were establishment eye candy, rock-jawed, streamlined, and unafraid. It was a year of airplane hijackings and student protests. John married Yoko. The Cuyahoga River caught fire. Richard Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, and almost twelve thousand American servicemen would be killed that year in southeast Asia, fighting an elusive enemy in the service of an even more elusive cause. But NASA forged ahead. In July of that year Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins visited the Moon, as John F. Kennedy had promised they would, and the country had something to celebrate again. My dad was intimately involved with the mission, as one of three capsule communicators—“CAPCOMs,” in NASA-speak—along with Charlie Duke and Ron Evans. In the 2019 documentary Apollo 11 he shows up repeatedly, clad in a turtleneck sweater, looking intense and somehow glamorous, head down, gazing intently at whatever is on the screen in front of him, at one point scratching out calculations related to the flight. Serving as CAPCOM is sort of like being the back-up quarterback who relays plays in from the sidelines. You’re intimately involved in the action, but no one’s going to remember you after the game. On the other hand, he did gain one distinction from the service when he became the first human being ever to speak to someone on another celestial body—Neil Armstrong, of course.
The dangers didn’t stop him, of course. They didn’t stop any of the men waiting to fly. Eventually the pall faded and the program started up again, this time with the oxygen content in the command module significantly reduced and the escape hatch modified to open outward instead of inward, so that the increased cabin pressure that would be generated in the event of a fire wouldn’t impede a rapid exit. In the meantime those involved shared the mounting excitement of being involved in the greatest engineering project in history. The astronauts trained for all sorts of contingencies. In June of 1967 many of them flew to Iceland for training in how to survive on the surface of the moon—central Iceland’s desolate terrain being adjudged the closest available stand-in for lunar conditions. In August of 1967 my dad traveled to Washington State for a United States Air Force Survival School training session focusing on desert conditions. The aim was to prepare for the aftermath of an emergency landing of a spacecraft somewhere between 45 degrees north latitude and 45 degrees south latitude. Fieldwork took place in an area northeast of Pasco, where, a schedule said, “the astronauts as a group will learn to make emergency clothing from the parachutes which lower their space vehicle to earth. Their knowledge of navigation will be reviewed. Emergency ground-to-air signals will be constructed and later evaluated by School personnel flying above the training site.” My dad also went on a survival trip to Panama that year, where, in typical fashion, he made a spectacle of himself by capturing and bringing back to the States a fer-de-lance, one of the most poisonous snakes in the world, in a gunny sack. He later donated it to the Houston Zoo.
I have a photograph of him in 1969, standing with Jim Irwin and Charlie Duke outside a Ramada Inn, lean and beautiful, an advertisement for adrenaline and aviator glasses. He wanted the world, and the world wanted him. He was five nine, slender, with dark hair and blue eyes, a fighter pilot and an astronaut, brilliant and dashing. In that bad, frenetic era, at a time when the nation seemed to be coming apart, torn by the hatreds engendered by Vietnam and racial inequality, the astronauts were establishment eye candy, rock-jawed, streamlined, and unafraid. It was a year of airplane hijackings and student protests. John married Yoko. The Cuyahoga River caught fire. Richard Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, and almost twelve thousand American servicemen would be killed that year in southeast Asia, fighting an elusive enemy in the service of an even more elusive cause. But NASA forged ahead. In July of that year Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins visited the Moon, as John F. Kennedy had promised they would, and the country had something to celebrate again. My dad was intimately involved with the mission, as one of three capsule communicators—“CAPCOMs,” in NASA-speak—along with Charlie Duke and Ron Evans. In the 2019 documentary Apollo 11 he shows up repeatedly, clad in a turtleneck sweater, looking intense and somehow glamorous, head down, gazing intently at whatever is on the screen in front of him, at one point scratching out calculations related to the flight. Serving as CAPCOM is sort of like being the back-up quarterback who relays plays in from the sidelines. You’re intimately involved in the action, but no one’s going to remember you after the game. On the other hand, he did gain one distinction from the service when he became the first human being ever to speak to someone on another celestial body—Neil Armstrong, of course.
April 26, 2019
A Team Made Up Entirely of Quarterbacks
NASA recently held a tree-planting ceremony in remembrance of my dad's work with the agency. I was invited to say a few words. Here they are:
Tree-Planting Ceremony for Bruce McCandless II
Remarks by Bruce McCandless III on April 24, 2019
Thank you.
That’s a phrase you’re going to hear a lot of from me today. Because looking out at this group, I am genuinely amazed and gratified at the good fortune that brought us together.
I’m grateful to my stepmother, Ellen Shields McCandless, and Stephanie Castillo of NASA for getting us here and organizing this wonderful tribute.
I’m grateful to my sister for sending her best wishes from Florida, though she couldn’t be with us today; and to my dad’s sister Rosemary for flying down from Dallas. If you really want to hear some stories about my dad, she’s the one to ask!
I’m grateful to my mother, Bernice, for bringing me into this magical mysterious world and teaching my sister and me that even though dad wanted peace and quiet at dinner time, it was okay to sing and dance immediately afterward. It’s my mom’s birthday. She was born on April 24, 1937 and she would have been 82 years old today. God bless you, Mom, and thank you for everything you did for us. We miss you every day.
I’m appreciative that my wife Pati and my daughter Carson, could join us today, even though they weren’t actually given a choice. Carson even made the ultimate sacrifice of missing her Physics and Pre-Calculus classes, so hey—wait to take one for the team, sister.
I’m grateful to the family friends of fifty years and more who traveled down to Clear Lake to join in this little celebration. I’ve known the Smiths and the Morrises, the Taylors and the Geehans and the Sienkowskis, since I was five. They don’t like to admit it, but they were a second family for us, and helped raise Tracy and me when my mom and dad were in the Soviet Union or Japan or wherever they went to get away from us all those times.
And I’m grateful to NASA and the men who preceded me here today. You can’t have Hollywood without movie stars, and you can’t have a space program without astronauts. I’ve known Fred Haise since the early Seventies. His son Steve was one of my best friends, and a fellow member of the Clear Lake High School Russian Club. We learned something very important in Russian Club. We learned that chicks don’t join the Russian Club.
Thank you also to Hoot Gibson. You all have seen that famous photograph of my dad piloting the MMU, a pure white ghost emerging from the haunted house of space. The man who took that photograph was none other than Hoot Gibson. He may not remember, but we met in Florida in 1990 before the launch of the Discovery flight that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. He was kind and considerate to my mom and me and all the other families that day, and I’ve always remembered him for it.
OK, so I’m a lawyer, and as if to prove it, I’ve just spent five minutes talking and I haven’t even gotten to the point.
What I came to talk to you about today is my namesake, Bruce McCandless II. And in particular, something we tend to forget about my dad. Not the belt buckle that spelled out PEACE in orange and red letters. Not the groovy turtlenecks he wore in 1969 or the red Volvo he drove for 24 years without washing. I’m talking about perseverance.
You’ve heard my dad was a smart, capable guy. A Naval Academy graduate, salutatorian of his class. A fighter pilot. He earned a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was just a dissertation away from his doctorate. But guess what? Everyone in the astronaut office was smart. Everyone in that office was smart, and confident, and capable. It was like being on a team made up entirely of quarterbacks. It was like being on a team consisting entirely of Tom Bradys—only skinnier, and a whole lot nerdier.
So one thing people don’t remember so much anymore is that for a while there, it looked as if my dad wasn’t even going to get in the game. After being inducted as the youngest member of astronaut Group 5 in 1966, he waited 18 years for his first spaceflight. There was a point, after the Apollo missions ceased, and the Skylab flights were over, and Deke Slayton came back off the disabled list to claim a spot on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, when the media described him as a forgotten astronaut.
Here’s what one newspaper had to say about him in those days, in an article called “Rookie Still on Earth”:
He sits in a swivel chair confronted by winking lights and flickering digital clocks, a rookie who never got a mission, the Mission Control console his closest approach to space. Declining budgets, changing national priorities, and the cruelty of time lengthen the odds he ever will exult in the thunder and fire of launch, float weightless or wear the gold astronaut pin that separates the ‘been theres’ from the ‘some days.’”
My dad didn’t care much for journalists. He ranked them just a little above lawyers and flight surgeons. So you may think that little article didn’t bother him. And you may be right. But I found four copies of it in his files, and I think it did bother him. I think it made him work harder. He latched on to a project initially called the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit and he, along with Ed Whitsett of NASA and Bill Bollendonk of Martin Marietta, willed that magical backpack, which Mike Collins called “far out” in 1973, into existence. I have a picture of him from those early days, testing the unit while grasped in what looks like a giant robotic claw. (As I mentioned to Rob Chambers of Lockheed Martin a little earlier, I think that would be considered an OSHA violation these days.) And finally, in 1984, after hundreds of hours of testing and designing and engineering and re-engineering, with Hoot Gibson and Vance Brand, Bob Stewart and Ron McNair, he got to fly it. And the rest is history—perhaps the most important and beautiful and compelling photograph of the entire Shuttle program—a contender for greatest space photograph ever—a sort of shorthand for human ingenuity and daring.
He went on to a less celebrated role in a more important project in1990—deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, an orbital instrument that for decades now has captured stunning images of galaxies previously undreamt of, and allowed us to look back into time itself to try to understand who we are and how we got here—and, maybe more importantly, where we’re going.
The Hubble is still up there, 340 miles above earth’s surface, orbiting fifteen times a day, and we’re going to be studying the images it’s provided us for many years to come. Images like the odd, hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula, several thousand light years away; and the shimmering pillars of the Star Queen Nebula, like fingers on the hand of God; the teeming galactic petri dish of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field; and the asymmetrical stellar tentacles and glittering, luminous gas fields of the McCandless Anomaly, which, oddly enough, seems to be located just down the road in Pearland.
That last phenomenon, by the way, is made up. But isn’t that kind of the point? All of this seems like it could be made up. The size and shape and sheer spectral weirdness of these images simply boggles the imagination, and makes prophets and dreamers of us all. My dad was immensely proud of that little satellite, and his part in bringing it to life—and, later, repairing it.
We all remember the successes, of course. That’s what we’re here for today. We’re proud to know we had a part in them—as friends, as colleagues, as family. But the thing I’m proudest of I think is my dad’s refusal give up—to give in—to let go of his dream when people whispered that the dance was over. As missions came and went. As platoons of new and shinier astronauts arrived in Building 4 and the years went slowly by.
We all know he didn’t give up.
Instead he got up, he did his job, he paid his dues, and he waited. And when the time came, he was ready.
I think we’re all ready. We all know NASA dreams big. We all know as well that a lot of those dreams have been deferred for an awfully long time. No longer. Now’s the time for us to fuel those dreams with the finances and the political will to see them through. Now is the time for Americans to stop having to thumb a ride to the international space station like a bashful hippie heading for Woodstock.
My wife and I are trying to do our own small part. Some of you may know there’s a new documentary out about the Apollo 11 mission. I can’t say enough good things about it. It really is magnificent, and I’m not just saying that because my dad shows up in his crazy turtlenecks, working as one of the CAPCOMs on that historic mission. We liked the movie so much that we decided to rent out a theater to show it to 46 of our closest friends. There were two thirteen year-old boys there, one of whom was the son of a former colleague of mine. The mom was a little apologetic about asking if she could bring them. They like to play video games, she said. Violent ones. One of them—her son—is an avowed Marxist. (What can I say? We live in Austin.)
But we said no, that’s fine, that’s great, bring ‘em. We want kids in the audience. So she did. And sure enough, even after the movie started, those kids sat there whispering to each other, watching undoubtedly inappropriate videos on their phones and probably trying to figure out how to dispose of all the grownups in the world without getting grounded.
But not for long. Because when they saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins started suiting up that day in July of 1969—calm, contemplative, but their eyes wide with a quiet apprehension they couldn’t quite mask—they stopped talking. And they were silent when the Saturn V rocket erupted in smoke and fire in front of them. And when Neil Armstrong put the lunar module down on the moon’s surface, with fuel running out and the world holding its breath, I looked over and those two boys were cheering like grade schoolers at a KPop concert. It was beautiful, man. So what I’m trying to say is, that spirit is still out there, just waiting to be rekindled in the hearts and minds of a massively distracted nation.
So we need to buy the NASA bumper stickers. We need to wear the t-shirts, and tell everyone we know about the movie, and the anniversary of the day we Americans accomplished the greatest engineering project in the history of the world. And sure, we can put mulch on my dad’s tree. By all means, as he would have said, Mulch away. But if we want to honor Bruce McCandless II’s legacy, and John Young’s vision, and Fred Haise’s daring, let’s not look down. Let’s look up. To the moon again. To Mars. And to every corner of the great dreaming undiscovered country beyond.
The End
Tree-Planting Ceremony for Bruce McCandless II
Remarks by Bruce McCandless III on April 24, 2019
Thank you.
That’s a phrase you’re going to hear a lot of from me today. Because looking out at this group, I am genuinely amazed and gratified at the good fortune that brought us together.
I’m grateful to my stepmother, Ellen Shields McCandless, and Stephanie Castillo of NASA for getting us here and organizing this wonderful tribute.
I’m grateful to my sister for sending her best wishes from Florida, though she couldn’t be with us today; and to my dad’s sister Rosemary for flying down from Dallas. If you really want to hear some stories about my dad, she’s the one to ask!
I’m grateful to my mother, Bernice, for bringing me into this magical mysterious world and teaching my sister and me that even though dad wanted peace and quiet at dinner time, it was okay to sing and dance immediately afterward. It’s my mom’s birthday. She was born on April 24, 1937 and she would have been 82 years old today. God bless you, Mom, and thank you for everything you did for us. We miss you every day.
I’m appreciative that my wife Pati and my daughter Carson, could join us today, even though they weren’t actually given a choice. Carson even made the ultimate sacrifice of missing her Physics and Pre-Calculus classes, so hey—wait to take one for the team, sister.
I’m grateful to the family friends of fifty years and more who traveled down to Clear Lake to join in this little celebration. I’ve known the Smiths and the Morrises, the Taylors and the Geehans and the Sienkowskis, since I was five. They don’t like to admit it, but they were a second family for us, and helped raise Tracy and me when my mom and dad were in the Soviet Union or Japan or wherever they went to get away from us all those times.
And I’m grateful to NASA and the men who preceded me here today. You can’t have Hollywood without movie stars, and you can’t have a space program without astronauts. I’ve known Fred Haise since the early Seventies. His son Steve was one of my best friends, and a fellow member of the Clear Lake High School Russian Club. We learned something very important in Russian Club. We learned that chicks don’t join the Russian Club.
Thank you also to Hoot Gibson. You all have seen that famous photograph of my dad piloting the MMU, a pure white ghost emerging from the haunted house of space. The man who took that photograph was none other than Hoot Gibson. He may not remember, but we met in Florida in 1990 before the launch of the Discovery flight that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. He was kind and considerate to my mom and me and all the other families that day, and I’ve always remembered him for it.
OK, so I’m a lawyer, and as if to prove it, I’ve just spent five minutes talking and I haven’t even gotten to the point.
What I came to talk to you about today is my namesake, Bruce McCandless II. And in particular, something we tend to forget about my dad. Not the belt buckle that spelled out PEACE in orange and red letters. Not the groovy turtlenecks he wore in 1969 or the red Volvo he drove for 24 years without washing. I’m talking about perseverance.
You’ve heard my dad was a smart, capable guy. A Naval Academy graduate, salutatorian of his class. A fighter pilot. He earned a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was just a dissertation away from his doctorate. But guess what? Everyone in the astronaut office was smart. Everyone in that office was smart, and confident, and capable. It was like being on a team made up entirely of quarterbacks. It was like being on a team consisting entirely of Tom Bradys—only skinnier, and a whole lot nerdier.
So one thing people don’t remember so much anymore is that for a while there, it looked as if my dad wasn’t even going to get in the game. After being inducted as the youngest member of astronaut Group 5 in 1966, he waited 18 years for his first spaceflight. There was a point, after the Apollo missions ceased, and the Skylab flights were over, and Deke Slayton came back off the disabled list to claim a spot on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, when the media described him as a forgotten astronaut.
Here’s what one newspaper had to say about him in those days, in an article called “Rookie Still on Earth”:
He sits in a swivel chair confronted by winking lights and flickering digital clocks, a rookie who never got a mission, the Mission Control console his closest approach to space. Declining budgets, changing national priorities, and the cruelty of time lengthen the odds he ever will exult in the thunder and fire of launch, float weightless or wear the gold astronaut pin that separates the ‘been theres’ from the ‘some days.’”
My dad didn’t care much for journalists. He ranked them just a little above lawyers and flight surgeons. So you may think that little article didn’t bother him. And you may be right. But I found four copies of it in his files, and I think it did bother him. I think it made him work harder. He latched on to a project initially called the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit and he, along with Ed Whitsett of NASA and Bill Bollendonk of Martin Marietta, willed that magical backpack, which Mike Collins called “far out” in 1973, into existence. I have a picture of him from those early days, testing the unit while grasped in what looks like a giant robotic claw. (As I mentioned to Rob Chambers of Lockheed Martin a little earlier, I think that would be considered an OSHA violation these days.) And finally, in 1984, after hundreds of hours of testing and designing and engineering and re-engineering, with Hoot Gibson and Vance Brand, Bob Stewart and Ron McNair, he got to fly it. And the rest is history—perhaps the most important and beautiful and compelling photograph of the entire Shuttle program—a contender for greatest space photograph ever—a sort of shorthand for human ingenuity and daring.
He went on to a less celebrated role in a more important project in1990—deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope, an orbital instrument that for decades now has captured stunning images of galaxies previously undreamt of, and allowed us to look back into time itself to try to understand who we are and how we got here—and, maybe more importantly, where we’re going.
The Hubble is still up there, 340 miles above earth’s surface, orbiting fifteen times a day, and we’re going to be studying the images it’s provided us for many years to come. Images like the odd, hourglass-shaped Southern Crab Nebula, several thousand light years away; and the shimmering pillars of the Star Queen Nebula, like fingers on the hand of God; the teeming galactic petri dish of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field; and the asymmetrical stellar tentacles and glittering, luminous gas fields of the McCandless Anomaly, which, oddly enough, seems to be located just down the road in Pearland.
That last phenomenon, by the way, is made up. But isn’t that kind of the point? All of this seems like it could be made up. The size and shape and sheer spectral weirdness of these images simply boggles the imagination, and makes prophets and dreamers of us all. My dad was immensely proud of that little satellite, and his part in bringing it to life—and, later, repairing it.
We all remember the successes, of course. That’s what we’re here for today. We’re proud to know we had a part in them—as friends, as colleagues, as family. But the thing I’m proudest of I think is my dad’s refusal give up—to give in—to let go of his dream when people whispered that the dance was over. As missions came and went. As platoons of new and shinier astronauts arrived in Building 4 and the years went slowly by.
We all know he didn’t give up.
Instead he got up, he did his job, he paid his dues, and he waited. And when the time came, he was ready.
I think we’re all ready. We all know NASA dreams big. We all know as well that a lot of those dreams have been deferred for an awfully long time. No longer. Now’s the time for us to fuel those dreams with the finances and the political will to see them through. Now is the time for Americans to stop having to thumb a ride to the international space station like a bashful hippie heading for Woodstock.
My wife and I are trying to do our own small part. Some of you may know there’s a new documentary out about the Apollo 11 mission. I can’t say enough good things about it. It really is magnificent, and I’m not just saying that because my dad shows up in his crazy turtlenecks, working as one of the CAPCOMs on that historic mission. We liked the movie so much that we decided to rent out a theater to show it to 46 of our closest friends. There were two thirteen year-old boys there, one of whom was the son of a former colleague of mine. The mom was a little apologetic about asking if she could bring them. They like to play video games, she said. Violent ones. One of them—her son—is an avowed Marxist. (What can I say? We live in Austin.)
But we said no, that’s fine, that’s great, bring ‘em. We want kids in the audience. So she did. And sure enough, even after the movie started, those kids sat there whispering to each other, watching undoubtedly inappropriate videos on their phones and probably trying to figure out how to dispose of all the grownups in the world without getting grounded.
But not for long. Because when they saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins started suiting up that day in July of 1969—calm, contemplative, but their eyes wide with a quiet apprehension they couldn’t quite mask—they stopped talking. And they were silent when the Saturn V rocket erupted in smoke and fire in front of them. And when Neil Armstrong put the lunar module down on the moon’s surface, with fuel running out and the world holding its breath, I looked over and those two boys were cheering like grade schoolers at a KPop concert. It was beautiful, man. So what I’m trying to say is, that spirit is still out there, just waiting to be rekindled in the hearts and minds of a massively distracted nation.
So we need to buy the NASA bumper stickers. We need to wear the t-shirts, and tell everyone we know about the movie, and the anniversary of the day we Americans accomplished the greatest engineering project in the history of the world. And sure, we can put mulch on my dad’s tree. By all means, as he would have said, Mulch away. But if we want to honor Bruce McCandless II’s legacy, and John Young’s vision, and Fred Haise’s daring, let’s not look down. Let’s look up. To the moon again. To Mars. And to every corner of the great dreaming undiscovered country beyond.
The End
April 20, 2019
More Space Stuff
Hi all. Here's my review of Chris Hadfield's An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth.
I think I enjoyed this book a little more than Mike Mullane's somewhat similar Riding Rockets. It's hard not to like Chris Hadfield. He's apparently the uber-Canadian: personable, humble, friendly, and competent. And he can play the guitar! His made-for-social media persona, along with his PR-savvy son, have changed the stodgy old NASA publicity machine for good (and, as far as I can see, for GOOD). His descriptions of the time he spent on the International Space Station and, even better, his trips to and from the Station on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, are fascinating. My only quibble is that our narrator is a little too perfect. It's as if Reese Witherspoon's character in Legally Blonde decided to skip the law and try space travel instead. Hadfield is relentlessly cheerful and positive, though, and in this case I find it contagious. Five Stars! And hoorah for our neighbor from the North!
I think I enjoyed this book a little more than Mike Mullane's somewhat similar Riding Rockets. It's hard not to like Chris Hadfield. He's apparently the uber-Canadian: personable, humble, friendly, and competent. And he can play the guitar! His made-for-social media persona, along with his PR-savvy son, have changed the stodgy old NASA publicity machine for good (and, as far as I can see, for GOOD). His descriptions of the time he spent on the International Space Station and, even better, his trips to and from the Station on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, are fascinating. My only quibble is that our narrator is a little too perfect. It's as if Reese Witherspoon's character in Legally Blonde decided to skip the law and try space travel instead. Hadfield is relentlessly cheerful and positive, though, and in this case I find it contagious. Five Stars! And hoorah for our neighbor from the North!
April 17, 2019
A Lawn As Big As Botswana
Hey y'all here's an excerpt from an essay I've been writing about my mom and dad and growing up in the 70s. Let me know what you think!
In those days, kids were seen primarily as a source of cheap labor. We washed cars and swept driveways and—in my case—mowed the lawn. We had a big, lush, man-eating lawn. It was, to my eleven-year-old eyes, about the size of Botswana. And that wasn’t even the main problem. We lived twenty miles south of Houston. Every year the sun would descend from the heavens in April like an angry god to float just above the refinery stacks in nearby Baytown and super-heat the atmosphere to a consistent ninety-seven degrees, just warm enough to entice the rich aromas of benzene and toluene from the steel tanks. This, combined with the prevailing eighty percent humidity—roughly the same level as a marathoner’s sweat socks—meant that St. Augustine grass grew at alarming, inexhaustible rates. As did the fire ant beds. And the swarms of ravenous, sparrow-sized mosquitoes. There was a section of our side yard that was slightly lower than the rest and frequently wet as a result. This is where the crawdad chimneys were located—and the crawdads, presumably, though they always had enough sense to stay underground while I was mowing. A crawdad, incidentally, is a small, reddish-brown, lobster-like creature that thrives in the warm, rainy climate of the Gulf Coast. In drier weather it burrows down into the earth to find moisture and the soil it excavates forms a sort of funnel sticking up to mark its abode. The burrows weren’t a serious menace; they were just glutinous enough to clog the mower and slow me down. Thus there would be days when, by the time I finished the front yard, both side yards, and the backyard, it would be time to mow the front yard again. I was like Sisyphus, only instead of a huge rock I was pushing a three and half-horsepower Craftsman lawnmower and being chased by wasps. Over the years I happily donated approximately four hundred square feet of property to our neighbors, the Smiths and the Geehans, in a vain attempt to get someone else to mow the damn grass. All my donations were politely declined. I feigned illness. I lost parts. But here’s the problem with having an engineer for a dad. Equipment failure was not an option. My dad could fix anything. So even if the lawnmower wouldn’t start, there was no cause for celebration. Maybe I wasn’t pulling the cord hard enough. Maybe the fuel line was clogged—easy enough to repair. Or maybe someone had removed the spark plug and hidden it under the left rear tire of the Chevy until the Astros game was over and the sun was no longer an imminent threat to my postpubescent health and sanity. No problem there either—my dad always had a few extra plugs lying around.
In those days, kids were seen primarily as a source of cheap labor. We washed cars and swept driveways and—in my case—mowed the lawn. We had a big, lush, man-eating lawn. It was, to my eleven-year-old eyes, about the size of Botswana. And that wasn’t even the main problem. We lived twenty miles south of Houston. Every year the sun would descend from the heavens in April like an angry god to float just above the refinery stacks in nearby Baytown and super-heat the atmosphere to a consistent ninety-seven degrees, just warm enough to entice the rich aromas of benzene and toluene from the steel tanks. This, combined with the prevailing eighty percent humidity—roughly the same level as a marathoner’s sweat socks—meant that St. Augustine grass grew at alarming, inexhaustible rates. As did the fire ant beds. And the swarms of ravenous, sparrow-sized mosquitoes. There was a section of our side yard that was slightly lower than the rest and frequently wet as a result. This is where the crawdad chimneys were located—and the crawdads, presumably, though they always had enough sense to stay underground while I was mowing. A crawdad, incidentally, is a small, reddish-brown, lobster-like creature that thrives in the warm, rainy climate of the Gulf Coast. In drier weather it burrows down into the earth to find moisture and the soil it excavates forms a sort of funnel sticking up to mark its abode. The burrows weren’t a serious menace; they were just glutinous enough to clog the mower and slow me down. Thus there would be days when, by the time I finished the front yard, both side yards, and the backyard, it would be time to mow the front yard again. I was like Sisyphus, only instead of a huge rock I was pushing a three and half-horsepower Craftsman lawnmower and being chased by wasps. Over the years I happily donated approximately four hundred square feet of property to our neighbors, the Smiths and the Geehans, in a vain attempt to get someone else to mow the damn grass. All my donations were politely declined. I feigned illness. I lost parts. But here’s the problem with having an engineer for a dad. Equipment failure was not an option. My dad could fix anything. So even if the lawnmower wouldn’t start, there was no cause for celebration. Maybe I wasn’t pulling the cord hard enough. Maybe the fuel line was clogged—easy enough to repair. Or maybe someone had removed the spark plug and hidden it under the left rear tire of the Chevy until the Astros game was over and the sun was no longer an imminent threat to my postpubescent health and sanity. No problem there either—my dad always had a few extra plugs lying around.
March 27, 2019
Riding Rockets
Here's my review of Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut, by Mike Mullane. Spoiler: I liked it!
I'm going to go ahead and give this 5 stars, even though Mullane's favorite thing about himself--his sense of humor--is mostly awful. Still, the man can write, and he does a great job of chronicling how the astronaut's special blend of obsessive competitiveness, huge self-confidence, and gut-churning fear can land him in the back seat of a space craft, wearing a urine condom and praying the weather will clear so he can be blasted skyward even as he counts the various ways he can end up dead in the very near future. Unexpectedly, given the author's insistence that he hails from the Planet AD (Arrested Development), he's also a great champion of the beauties of Earth, which he was able to observe during three Shuttle missions and describes wonderfully in the book. There's much more to enjoy in Riding Rockets, including the barbs Mullane aims at NASA management in general and one bureaucrat in particular, but I won't spoil the fun. This is one of the very best of the astronaut books.
I'm going to go ahead and give this 5 stars, even though Mullane's favorite thing about himself--his sense of humor--is mostly awful. Still, the man can write, and he does a great job of chronicling how the astronaut's special blend of obsessive competitiveness, huge self-confidence, and gut-churning fear can land him in the back seat of a space craft, wearing a urine condom and praying the weather will clear so he can be blasted skyward even as he counts the various ways he can end up dead in the very near future. Unexpectedly, given the author's insistence that he hails from the Planet AD (Arrested Development), he's also a great champion of the beauties of Earth, which he was able to observe during three Shuttle missions and describes wonderfully in the book. There's much more to enjoy in Riding Rockets, including the barbs Mullane aims at NASA management in general and one bureaucrat in particular, but I won't spoil the fun. This is one of the very best of the astronaut books.
March 2, 2019
Remembering Austin
Remembering the old Austin today with a passage from my novel The Krottkey Chronicles. There's still plenty to love about this town, but brother it ain't cheap.
There wasn’t a lot of money to go around, but it didn’t matter. Austin was an oasis for the impoverished. Mrs. Nguyen and her extended family sold eggrolls for fifty cents apiece on the Drag. The Hare Krishnas fed all comers a meal of rice and steamed vegetables for the price of only a little simulated interest in the avatars of Vishnu and the consolations of herd behavior. Sister Cindy and the Reverend Frank preached on a more or less continual basis at the foot of the West Mall and you could watch them haranguing the girls from Tarrytown Methodist for hours at a time. You could wander up to the fourth floor of the UGLy, the undergraduate library, and listen to Django Reinhardt albums all day if you wanted. Weekends were better. On any given Friday you could see a dozen movies on campus for a buck a show. Howard Hawks and Ingmar Bergman. Harold Lloyd and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Only a buck. On Saturdays you could head east of I-35 and drink fine strong coffee and eat migas with tortillas and refried beans at El Azteca for a couple of dollars a plate. Barton Creek was running that Spring. The stream came tumbling down from the hills west of the city to the crystalline pool at Barton Springs, and it didn’t cost a dime to sun yourself on one of those slabs of limestone beside Twin Falls and watch idiots go shrieking over the drop. As the weather warmed up there were free festivals and concerts, a Spam cook-off, a citywide tug o’ war, foot races, pun-offs, and a massively stoned celebration of Eeyore’s birthday. The next Stevie Ray lived in every van. Frisbees freckled the purple sky and sometimes the city seemed like a massive conspiracy mounted by those who didn’t have any cash to annoy the people who did.
There wasn’t a lot of money to go around, but it didn’t matter. Austin was an oasis for the impoverished. Mrs. Nguyen and her extended family sold eggrolls for fifty cents apiece on the Drag. The Hare Krishnas fed all comers a meal of rice and steamed vegetables for the price of only a little simulated interest in the avatars of Vishnu and the consolations of herd behavior. Sister Cindy and the Reverend Frank preached on a more or less continual basis at the foot of the West Mall and you could watch them haranguing the girls from Tarrytown Methodist for hours at a time. You could wander up to the fourth floor of the UGLy, the undergraduate library, and listen to Django Reinhardt albums all day if you wanted. Weekends were better. On any given Friday you could see a dozen movies on campus for a buck a show. Howard Hawks and Ingmar Bergman. Harold Lloyd and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Only a buck. On Saturdays you could head east of I-35 and drink fine strong coffee and eat migas with tortillas and refried beans at El Azteca for a couple of dollars a plate. Barton Creek was running that Spring. The stream came tumbling down from the hills west of the city to the crystalline pool at Barton Springs, and it didn’t cost a dime to sun yourself on one of those slabs of limestone beside Twin Falls and watch idiots go shrieking over the drop. As the weather warmed up there were free festivals and concerts, a Spam cook-off, a citywide tug o’ war, foot races, pun-offs, and a massively stoned celebration of Eeyore’s birthday. The next Stevie Ray lived in every van. Frisbees freckled the purple sky and sometimes the city seemed like a massive conspiracy mounted by those who didn’t have any cash to annoy the people who did.
February 19, 2019
The Feeble in Pemberley House
The Evil in Pemberley House by Philip José FarmerMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
[CAUTION: MILD SPOILERS] You've got to be kidding me. I didn't think I'd be able to finish this homage to the Doc Savage series (is a really cheesy homage called a fromage?) after I'd read the first 30 pages or so, but it did get slightly better when the leering let up and the mystery started. Still, it's a silly tale, full of creepy psychological hangups, preposterous happenstance, and gratuitous couplings. I give it an extra star just for the full-out lunacy of the climactic fight scene, which features air guns, girls punching girls, numerous dead bodies, and our naked protagonist maneuvering through a forest in the rain by swinging (I think) through the treetops, a skill her father taught her. Bottom line: I can't recommend The Evil in Pemberly House, unless you're eleven, it's 1974, and you just found this book under the sofa in your Uncle Leonard's guest room. Careful, though. Some of the pages are stuck together.
View all my reviews
January 15, 2019
Beatrice at Bay
Hey y'all, it's done. If you liked Beatrice and the Basilisk, you're gonna love this one!
Here's the Amazon description: Beatrice at Bay is the second installment of the Beatrice McIlvaine Adventure series, which features the fiery, feisty, and somewhat telekinetic Beatrice growing up in a world of increasingly sophisticated threats and menaces. The saga started with Beatrice and the Basilisk, a modern-day fairy tale that resonated unexpectedly with readers young and old. Beatrice was twelve. She’s fifteen now, and facing different challenges: a potential step-father; her own immense and unwelcome powers; the weird kids from the Academy; and—possibly most importantly—the end of the world as we know it. Can Beatrice channel her troubling destructive energies in the service of something greater than herself? Who can she trust at a beautiful school for gifted kids that isn't quite what it seems? And what’s with this Lester White Bull kid creeping on her Instagram account, anyway? Clocking in at 25,000 words, a combination of “Stranger Things” and Pippi Longstocking, Beatrice at Bay is a fast, funny, exciting read for kids—especially girls—between the ages of ten and, oh, seventy-four.
Here's the Amazon description: Beatrice at Bay is the second installment of the Beatrice McIlvaine Adventure series, which features the fiery, feisty, and somewhat telekinetic Beatrice growing up in a world of increasingly sophisticated threats and menaces. The saga started with Beatrice and the Basilisk, a modern-day fairy tale that resonated unexpectedly with readers young and old. Beatrice was twelve. She’s fifteen now, and facing different challenges: a potential step-father; her own immense and unwelcome powers; the weird kids from the Academy; and—possibly most importantly—the end of the world as we know it. Can Beatrice channel her troubling destructive energies in the service of something greater than herself? Who can she trust at a beautiful school for gifted kids that isn't quite what it seems? And what’s with this Lester White Bull kid creeping on her Instagram account, anyway? Clocking in at 25,000 words, a combination of “Stranger Things” and Pippi Longstocking, Beatrice at Bay is a fast, funny, exciting read for kids—especially girls—between the ages of ten and, oh, seventy-four.
December 30, 2018
Sequel to Sour Lake?
Well it's more of a prequel really--an extended introduction, by way of hideous horror and gripping gunplay, of Texas Ranger Jewel T. Lightfoot, who plays an integral role in ridding East Texas of the unnamed terror that runs amok in 1911 in my novel Sour Lake. This tale takes place in 1908, a little further to the west. Here's the first chapter of what I'm calling In the Land of Dead Horses. Let me know what you think!
In The Land of Dead Horses
1. The Mine
A Miraculous Discovery—Assessing the Trove—Complications Arise.
J. P. Kelso allowed himself a half-slice of optimism. It was working. The rock was almost out. Ramon’s mules hadn’t been strong enough to budge it—not even with Paco and Norberto pulling alongside them. So Kelso had reluctantly reached into his wallet and sent two of the Mexicans off to buy a horse in San Luis, six miles to the west. The purchase cost him fourteen dollars and most of the day. The horse was a sway-backed old thing, gone in the teeth and ill-tempered to boot, but big and still plenty strong. And now, with the horse, two mules, and four men pulling—four men, because Kelso himself grabbed one of the ropes and heaved against the great weight—the stone was starting to move. It was a massive slab of limestone, cleverly wedged into a three foot-by-three foot aperture in the earth. A ton of dead weight. Maybe two.
But now it was shifting.
Gravel and dirt showered down around it. The mules stamped and danced and Ramon’s quirt snaked out to pop the flesh of the nearest animal. Ramon, tall and sullen, had a habit of whipping the animals. Sometimes it irritated Kelso, who had a soft spot for beasts, particularly horses.
Now, though, it seemed appropriate.
“Pull!” said Kelso. “Halar, goddammit!”
Paco grunted as he strained at the rope. He was a big man—the biggest Mexican Kelso had ever seen—and his fleshy shoulders shook with the intensity of his effort. Slowly, ever so slowly, the megalith shifted. It slid toward them. An inch, maybe. Now two. And coming faster. At last the rock stood up on one end and fell toward them in a cloud of dust. The sound was a god’s footstep, a distant thunder clap. The entrance to the little cave stood like a black eye in the side of the arroyo.
The men paused to consider their work. They’d spent three days trying to find the rock. They’d spent another two digging and hacking at the native brush to get to it, several hours hammering a set of steel pins into the boulder, and most of today attempting to pry and pull it from its resting place. It was clearly the right stone—the glyph was unmistakable, and matched the map—but it couldn’t have been any harder to move if it had been cemented in place. Kelso had seriously weighed the possibility of blasting it out, but dismissed this idea for fear of what the dynamite might do to the cave that was supposed to be hidden beyond the rock. And now they’d done it. The entrance was open, but he had no clear plan for what to do next.
Other than the obvious, of course.
Go in.
Paco and Norberto glanced at Kelso. Normally sedate, the Mexicans now seemed fully alert. Funny how the prospect of sudden wealth could boost a man’s faculties, thought Kelso. Only Ramon, their leader, remained reserved. Kelso blotted the sweat from his forehead, ran hand through his greasy hair. He wanted to say something enthusiastic and stirring, but the words eluded him. He was too damn tired. And too damned sober.
“Take the traces off,” he grunted, between gulps of warm water from his canteen.
“Ahora?” answered Norberto. The scrawniest of the Mexicans, further distinguishable by his ruined teeth and the wispy moustache that clung to his upper lip, Norberto was also the hardest to tolerate. He seemed unable to follow a direct order, and echoed every one of Kelso’s commands with a question. He was a skulker. An ingrate. A cutter of corners. Kelso was going to be glad to be rid of the rat-faced sonofabitch when they found what they’d come for.
“Si. Now. Let the animals rest.”
They sat for a while in the dust, contemplating the toes of their boots and waiting for their hearts to slow. The sun had set below the western rim of the little arroyo and the canyon floor, choked with achiote and mesquite trees, was shading from purple to blue. In a few minutes the sweat in their shirts would start to cool as the evening grew chilly. Kelso wasn’t going to wait for that. He’d never been able to sit still. Since the age of sixteen, he’d spent his life on the move, always searching, sometimes fleeing, perpetrator and victim both of a seemingly endless series of small scams and disappointments, from the frozen fields of the Klondike south through the teeming foothills of the Comstock in Nevada and now down into the harsh brown badlands of the Chihuahuan Desert. Though he wasn’t always as honest as he might have been with his partners and investors, he nevertheless believed in his soul that treasures rested beneath the earth, just waiting for the man with sufficient energy, intelligence, and good fortune to find them. Most of the time, that man wasn’t him. But maybe his luck was changing. He was nearly destitute deep in the middle of nowhere, sweltering in the autumn sun of west Texas and surrounded by the gloomiest sons of whores he’d ever had the displeasure to work with. The Mexicans he traveled with didn’t even drink, for Christ’s sake. He’d never known a Mexican to refuse a tipple. And yet faith strengthened him still. He was John Patrick Kelso from County Clare, by way of the Bowery and a dozen more sordid neighborhoods to boot. But on the way up. Watched over by saints. IMPRESARIO OF THE UNDERWORLD, his business card said. MINER OF THE WORLD’S LOST WONDERS. TREASURE FINDER. He had a well-heeled client waiting for news back in Austin—a client who’d shown no qualms at all in funding his dig in the first place. Incredibly, the cave was right where the Mexicans’ battered old map had said it would be. And now it was open. So maybe it was his turn at last. Fortune and glory. Champagne and chocolates. Women stroking the soft skin on the back of his neck. The entrance to the cave loomed like an invitation. Or a challenge. Was it one more rat hole in a long line of ruined prospects? Or was it finally, after so many disappointments, the dark portal to his own prosperity?
There was only one way to find out.
“Listo?” he said at last. He stood and swatted the dirt from the seat of his pants.
“Si,” said Ramon. “But I enter first. Primero.”
Kelso shook his head at the absurdity of the suggestion. In truth, though, he might have guessed. Ramon was the undisputed ringleader of the three Mexicans. He was slender and observant, and he rarely spoke. He wore his long hair in a ponytail that fell to the middle of his spine. By some invisible but unquestioned authority his word was law. Paco and Norberto made sure he ate first. They carried his personal effects—two leather satchels and a duffel bag, the contents of which Kelso had never managed to see. Ramon had been carefully deferential to Kelso all during the trip. But he’d clearly had to think about it on several occasions. Now, perhaps, he was thinking again. The Irishman knew he had to respond decisively. “Not a chance. I’m first.”
“Nosotros carta, senor.” Ramon said this as if it settled the question. “Our map.”
“Your map. Mi plata.”
“Yours?”
“As far as you’re concerned, yes. I obtained the funds. I paid for the provisions. Therefore, it’s my expedition. I go first.”
Ramon glanced at his companions before he gave a small shrug. “As you say.”
“You’re damn right as I say. What about you, Paco? You ready?”
Paco remained impassive. In the twilight the big man’s mouth looked like a gash across his face. Kelso recognized this as his time-to-do business demeanor. In less focused moments he smiled easily, the better to show off the gold caps on his two front teeth.
Kelso wrinkled his nose and spat.
“Saints preserve us. I’ve had livelier company in a graveyard, so I have. There’s something dead in there, if you hadn’t noticed. Smells like Satan’s arse. Light the torches, amigos.”
The sound was unmistakable. It was the sudden deep drumming of hooves. The pack animals were running. Leaving.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. They weren’t hobbled?”
“Just tied, jefe,” said Norberto. “But they don’t go far, I think.”
“You’d better hope not. We’re gonna need ‘em to haul off whatever we find in here. Let’s take a look.”
The entrance to the cave was so small that they had to crawl for several yards, but it led to a narrow passage that was almost five feet tall. The passage proceeded gradually downward. Holding his torch directly in front of him, Kelso couldn’t see more than a few feet forward. He heard the commotion before he could spot it, and was therefore startled when a swarm of bats came churning past them, all frenzy and confusion. Kelso ducked and pulled his chin to his chest. The skinny man at the rear of the file dropped flat on his stomach. Kelso looked back and couldn’t help but laugh.
“Need to change your trousers, Norberto?”
The Mexicans either didn’t get the joke or didn’t think it was funny. Perhaps they were too busy surveying the cave. Just a few yards further in, the passage opened up into a rectangular chamber, roughly the size of a rich man’s library and at least thirty feet from floor to ceiling. Variations in the darkness indicated there were gaps in the rock that formed the roof of the cave. Against the near wall of the chamber stood two piles of bones, many of them broken. Two bronze helmets lay nearby, alongside an ancient halberd.
The torches flickered in a sudden draft. Silence hung like a shroud from the distant ceiling of the cavern. The smell of bats and bat shit and foul water weighted the air. And beneath it, like the piers of a crumbling house, the stench of death.
“Mother of Mercy,” Kelso whispered. “What is this place?”
*
Near the far end of the chamber stood what looked, at first glance, like a row boat hewn from an outcropping of the native rock. Kelso moved toward it, stumbling over the remnants of a wooden shield as he did so. Squinting in the gloom, he used the torch to inspect the images carved into the stone. Once he’d focused, he recoiled involuntarily from the bizarre iconography. Strutting demons held daggers as they drove tiny human figures in chains before them. A snake coiled around the legs of a naked woman, its monstrous head looming directly above her, its mouth open wide as if to swallow her whole. A creature with the body of a man and the features of a bat held a severed human head as if to display it as a warning to any viewer who should happen upon the scene in the long centuries to come.
The Irishman realized with a shudder that he was looking at something unbelievably strange and ancient. His Catholicism had been beaten into him by a grandmother who was fond of lashing him with a leather strap as she recited the names of the saints. It was her voice he heard now, screaming at him to look away, to hide his eyes. The dark doings of pagans, she shrieked. Abominations in the eyes of the Lord! But something about the pictures held Kelso in place. Lurid and unsettling as they were, it was several minutes before he could break the stares of the figures that gazed out at him from the carvings, cold and implacable, amused at his horror, frozen forever in their acts of carnage.
It was the odor that brought him back: the smell of mortality, rank and cloying, like an invisible poison in the room. A voice in the back of his brain suggested he get back to business and out of this temple of shadows as quickly as possible.
Kelso’s vertebrae crackled as he straightened to examine the wall of the cavern in front of him. Unlike the other walls, which were rough and unfinished, this one had been planed to geometrical perfection, and elaborately sculpted to mimic the facade of a massive palace, with columns and doors, a symmetrical roof line, and a giant throne carved into the rock. A stack of weapons—spears, staffs, and a pair of strangely shaped clubs—stood to the right of the throne. A mound of skulls rose at its foot. The wall receded into darkness where it joined with the cavern ceiling, but every foot of it seemed to have been decorated with the intricate carvings. Kelso realized he was gaping. A scrap of burlap drifted away from his torch and the Irishman followed its path to the floor. This brought him back to the contents of the little boat. But it wasn’t a boat, he realized. It was a sarcophagus, fashioned so the halves of each end curved to meet the other like the bow and stern of a ship.
Kelso took two steps forward and gazed down into the sarcophagus at the figure of a man—or what might have been a man at some point in the past. The mummified corpse was naked but for a black loincloth around its midsection and a crown of beaten gold encircling its head. Age and decay had eaten away the thing’s features, leaving its face looking grotesquely angular and vaguely threatening, with pronounced cheekbones and enlarged nasal sockets. Through some trick of the arid environment here on the eastern outskirts of the Chihuahuan Desert the eyes were intact and open, though yellowed and sunk deep in their sockets. The lips were drawn back in a grinning rictus of death, exposing age-darkened teeth filed to sharp points. The figure’s arms rested beside it on what Kelso guessed was some sort of soft scrim or sheet, though it looked almost as if the material was fastened to the mummy’s inner forearms. The hands lay open and unlined, ending in long black fingernails. The lid of the sarcophagus, also cut from solid stone, lay broken in pieces on the far side of the vessel.
Looting bastards, thought Kelso. They’ve been here before me. Such was the case in Egypt. Kelso had read that after centuries of theft and plunder, there was precious little left in the tombs of the pharaohs to be carried off. But if looters had been active here in central Texas, they’d missed something important. Kelso’s attention drifted to the dark jewels in the cadaver’s crown.
Finally.
Treasure.
He was two feet away from a fortune. After all these years of dirt and doubt and dismay it was suddenly right here in front of him. His heart was pounding in his chest. He felt tears start in his eyes. He reached for the diadem without quite realizing what he was doing. Just before he could touch it, though, his arm was seized and held by a dark brown hand.
Paco.
The Irishman chuckled. He’d jumped a foot at the unexpected contact. But the big man’s grip was powerful, and the next thing Kelso felt was a surge of anger.
“You daft brute. What are you—?”
He raised the torch with his other hand and glanced at the men around him. They were contemplating the figure in the sarcophagus with rapt attention.
Almost devotion.
“Who gives you leave,” said Ramon, “to steal from a god?”
It wasn’t the shock of hearing Ramon speak his suddenly unaccented English that raised the flesh on Kelso’s forearms. It wasn’t even the words he spoke, which made little sense to the Irishman. It was the realization that the three Mexicans who were his only company in this underground chamber were gazing at him with unmistakably bad intentions, their dark eyes glittering in the flickering light of the torches. It was the sense that he’d misjudged his companions, and that this misjudgment was going to be awfully difficult to remedy.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Kelso. “And what manner of mischief is this?”
The Mexicans were silent.
“Let’s not louse this up, boys. Hermanos. We’ve come too far. You want a bigger share? It can be arranged. Sure, and these items—” Kelso gestured at the weapons and stone statues around them—“will bring a fortune back east. They’re five hundred years old, at the least. My client has already offered...”
“We don’t give a damn about your client.”
Kelso tried to work up a companionly chuckle. He’d been in tight spots before, and he knew the drill. He had to keep talking, first of all. Nothing too awful could happen as long as you kept talking. “Aw, hell. Neither do I, if you want the truth of it. He’s got the soul of a bookkeeper, that one. So let’s forget him and get down to brass tacks, as they say. Is it the gold you’ll be wanting? Hey. Listen. You fancy the crown?”
Ramon shook his head.
“There is only one thing we want from you, Senor Kelso.”
Paco placed one of his huge hands on Kelso’s shoulder.
“It is a great honor,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
Norberto chuckled behind him. He was so close that Kelso could feel the little man’s breath on the back of his neck, sticky and warm, like an unwanted kiss.
“But maybe,” he whispered, “you don’t like it so much.”
Kelso wondered if he was going to throw up. But he persevered.
“I’m not opposed,” he insisted, “to any reasonable offer.”
To this statement he added a wink.
*
Say what you will about the Irish. Centuries of madness, mud, and starvation have toughened them up. They don’t die easy. Paco stood six feet four and weighed two hundred and forty pounds. Despite his great bulk, he and Norberto had trouble pinning Kelso’s arms to his sides. When they finally did, the Irishman flailed so violently that he extinguished one of the torches. His screams were an assault all their own, piercing and pathetic. Finally, though, the Mexicans managed to spread the Irishman out on a large, flat rock just a few feet from the sarcophagus. Norberto shattered his knee caps with a chunk of limestone, which ended the kicking, though it did nothing for the noise. Paco finally shoved a wad of burlap into his mouth, which lowered the volume considerably. And now Ramon fished into his woven bag and brought out a thin knife unlike any J.P. Kelso had seen before. The handle was fashioned of wood, elaborately curved, like a question mark, and the blade was hewn from jagged dark stone. The Irishman fought even harder when Ramon ripped open his waistcoat and shirt, and he shrieked and sobbed through whatever invocation Ramon spoke to the skies that couldn’t see them, the heavens beyond the rock roof that hid them from the world.
Ramon, Kelso thought—insofar as he was still capable of thought. Of course. He knew he’d been the leader all along. The man with the mysteriously acquired map. The man with the silent comrades, the muscle, willing—at Ramon’s bidding—to do as the gringo commanded. He’d been watchful, Kelso recalled. As patient as a spider. But no more. Now Ramon’s face was flushed with victory and anticipation. He nodded at the Irishman as if they were partners in an enterprise of secret and terrible significance, and this was when the swindler realized his run of luck had finally expired. He started singing then, an old song, as Irish as the streams of Bunclody. Of course it didn’t sound like a song. Beneath the burlap stuffed in his mouth, Kelso’s ballad sounded more like the cries of an angry baby. Ramon paused, momentarily puzzled. He exchanged glances with his companions. Then he reared back and raised the dagger over his head. The gag popped out of the Irishman’s mouth at almost the same moment, and the cavern filled with the ancient music of fear and misfortune as overhead, in the darkness, a storm of bats filled the air with the voiceless panic of their sudden flight.
In The Land of Dead Horses
1. The Mine
A Miraculous Discovery—Assessing the Trove—Complications Arise.
J. P. Kelso allowed himself a half-slice of optimism. It was working. The rock was almost out. Ramon’s mules hadn’t been strong enough to budge it—not even with Paco and Norberto pulling alongside them. So Kelso had reluctantly reached into his wallet and sent two of the Mexicans off to buy a horse in San Luis, six miles to the west. The purchase cost him fourteen dollars and most of the day. The horse was a sway-backed old thing, gone in the teeth and ill-tempered to boot, but big and still plenty strong. And now, with the horse, two mules, and four men pulling—four men, because Kelso himself grabbed one of the ropes and heaved against the great weight—the stone was starting to move. It was a massive slab of limestone, cleverly wedged into a three foot-by-three foot aperture in the earth. A ton of dead weight. Maybe two.
But now it was shifting.
Gravel and dirt showered down around it. The mules stamped and danced and Ramon’s quirt snaked out to pop the flesh of the nearest animal. Ramon, tall and sullen, had a habit of whipping the animals. Sometimes it irritated Kelso, who had a soft spot for beasts, particularly horses.
Now, though, it seemed appropriate.
“Pull!” said Kelso. “Halar, goddammit!”
Paco grunted as he strained at the rope. He was a big man—the biggest Mexican Kelso had ever seen—and his fleshy shoulders shook with the intensity of his effort. Slowly, ever so slowly, the megalith shifted. It slid toward them. An inch, maybe. Now two. And coming faster. At last the rock stood up on one end and fell toward them in a cloud of dust. The sound was a god’s footstep, a distant thunder clap. The entrance to the little cave stood like a black eye in the side of the arroyo.
The men paused to consider their work. They’d spent three days trying to find the rock. They’d spent another two digging and hacking at the native brush to get to it, several hours hammering a set of steel pins into the boulder, and most of today attempting to pry and pull it from its resting place. It was clearly the right stone—the glyph was unmistakable, and matched the map—but it couldn’t have been any harder to move if it had been cemented in place. Kelso had seriously weighed the possibility of blasting it out, but dismissed this idea for fear of what the dynamite might do to the cave that was supposed to be hidden beyond the rock. And now they’d done it. The entrance was open, but he had no clear plan for what to do next.
Other than the obvious, of course.
Go in.
Paco and Norberto glanced at Kelso. Normally sedate, the Mexicans now seemed fully alert. Funny how the prospect of sudden wealth could boost a man’s faculties, thought Kelso. Only Ramon, their leader, remained reserved. Kelso blotted the sweat from his forehead, ran hand through his greasy hair. He wanted to say something enthusiastic and stirring, but the words eluded him. He was too damn tired. And too damned sober.
“Take the traces off,” he grunted, between gulps of warm water from his canteen.
“Ahora?” answered Norberto. The scrawniest of the Mexicans, further distinguishable by his ruined teeth and the wispy moustache that clung to his upper lip, Norberto was also the hardest to tolerate. He seemed unable to follow a direct order, and echoed every one of Kelso’s commands with a question. He was a skulker. An ingrate. A cutter of corners. Kelso was going to be glad to be rid of the rat-faced sonofabitch when they found what they’d come for.
“Si. Now. Let the animals rest.”
They sat for a while in the dust, contemplating the toes of their boots and waiting for their hearts to slow. The sun had set below the western rim of the little arroyo and the canyon floor, choked with achiote and mesquite trees, was shading from purple to blue. In a few minutes the sweat in their shirts would start to cool as the evening grew chilly. Kelso wasn’t going to wait for that. He’d never been able to sit still. Since the age of sixteen, he’d spent his life on the move, always searching, sometimes fleeing, perpetrator and victim both of a seemingly endless series of small scams and disappointments, from the frozen fields of the Klondike south through the teeming foothills of the Comstock in Nevada and now down into the harsh brown badlands of the Chihuahuan Desert. Though he wasn’t always as honest as he might have been with his partners and investors, he nevertheless believed in his soul that treasures rested beneath the earth, just waiting for the man with sufficient energy, intelligence, and good fortune to find them. Most of the time, that man wasn’t him. But maybe his luck was changing. He was nearly destitute deep in the middle of nowhere, sweltering in the autumn sun of west Texas and surrounded by the gloomiest sons of whores he’d ever had the displeasure to work with. The Mexicans he traveled with didn’t even drink, for Christ’s sake. He’d never known a Mexican to refuse a tipple. And yet faith strengthened him still. He was John Patrick Kelso from County Clare, by way of the Bowery and a dozen more sordid neighborhoods to boot. But on the way up. Watched over by saints. IMPRESARIO OF THE UNDERWORLD, his business card said. MINER OF THE WORLD’S LOST WONDERS. TREASURE FINDER. He had a well-heeled client waiting for news back in Austin—a client who’d shown no qualms at all in funding his dig in the first place. Incredibly, the cave was right where the Mexicans’ battered old map had said it would be. And now it was open. So maybe it was his turn at last. Fortune and glory. Champagne and chocolates. Women stroking the soft skin on the back of his neck. The entrance to the cave loomed like an invitation. Or a challenge. Was it one more rat hole in a long line of ruined prospects? Or was it finally, after so many disappointments, the dark portal to his own prosperity?
There was only one way to find out.
“Listo?” he said at last. He stood and swatted the dirt from the seat of his pants.
“Si,” said Ramon. “But I enter first. Primero.”
Kelso shook his head at the absurdity of the suggestion. In truth, though, he might have guessed. Ramon was the undisputed ringleader of the three Mexicans. He was slender and observant, and he rarely spoke. He wore his long hair in a ponytail that fell to the middle of his spine. By some invisible but unquestioned authority his word was law. Paco and Norberto made sure he ate first. They carried his personal effects—two leather satchels and a duffel bag, the contents of which Kelso had never managed to see. Ramon had been carefully deferential to Kelso all during the trip. But he’d clearly had to think about it on several occasions. Now, perhaps, he was thinking again. The Irishman knew he had to respond decisively. “Not a chance. I’m first.”
“Nosotros carta, senor.” Ramon said this as if it settled the question. “Our map.”
“Your map. Mi plata.”
“Yours?”
“As far as you’re concerned, yes. I obtained the funds. I paid for the provisions. Therefore, it’s my expedition. I go first.”
Ramon glanced at his companions before he gave a small shrug. “As you say.”
“You’re damn right as I say. What about you, Paco? You ready?”
Paco remained impassive. In the twilight the big man’s mouth looked like a gash across his face. Kelso recognized this as his time-to-do business demeanor. In less focused moments he smiled easily, the better to show off the gold caps on his two front teeth.
Kelso wrinkled his nose and spat.
“Saints preserve us. I’ve had livelier company in a graveyard, so I have. There’s something dead in there, if you hadn’t noticed. Smells like Satan’s arse. Light the torches, amigos.”
The sound was unmistakable. It was the sudden deep drumming of hooves. The pack animals were running. Leaving.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. They weren’t hobbled?”
“Just tied, jefe,” said Norberto. “But they don’t go far, I think.”
“You’d better hope not. We’re gonna need ‘em to haul off whatever we find in here. Let’s take a look.”
The entrance to the cave was so small that they had to crawl for several yards, but it led to a narrow passage that was almost five feet tall. The passage proceeded gradually downward. Holding his torch directly in front of him, Kelso couldn’t see more than a few feet forward. He heard the commotion before he could spot it, and was therefore startled when a swarm of bats came churning past them, all frenzy and confusion. Kelso ducked and pulled his chin to his chest. The skinny man at the rear of the file dropped flat on his stomach. Kelso looked back and couldn’t help but laugh.
“Need to change your trousers, Norberto?”
The Mexicans either didn’t get the joke or didn’t think it was funny. Perhaps they were too busy surveying the cave. Just a few yards further in, the passage opened up into a rectangular chamber, roughly the size of a rich man’s library and at least thirty feet from floor to ceiling. Variations in the darkness indicated there were gaps in the rock that formed the roof of the cave. Against the near wall of the chamber stood two piles of bones, many of them broken. Two bronze helmets lay nearby, alongside an ancient halberd.
The torches flickered in a sudden draft. Silence hung like a shroud from the distant ceiling of the cavern. The smell of bats and bat shit and foul water weighted the air. And beneath it, like the piers of a crumbling house, the stench of death.
“Mother of Mercy,” Kelso whispered. “What is this place?”
*
Near the far end of the chamber stood what looked, at first glance, like a row boat hewn from an outcropping of the native rock. Kelso moved toward it, stumbling over the remnants of a wooden shield as he did so. Squinting in the gloom, he used the torch to inspect the images carved into the stone. Once he’d focused, he recoiled involuntarily from the bizarre iconography. Strutting demons held daggers as they drove tiny human figures in chains before them. A snake coiled around the legs of a naked woman, its monstrous head looming directly above her, its mouth open wide as if to swallow her whole. A creature with the body of a man and the features of a bat held a severed human head as if to display it as a warning to any viewer who should happen upon the scene in the long centuries to come.
The Irishman realized with a shudder that he was looking at something unbelievably strange and ancient. His Catholicism had been beaten into him by a grandmother who was fond of lashing him with a leather strap as she recited the names of the saints. It was her voice he heard now, screaming at him to look away, to hide his eyes. The dark doings of pagans, she shrieked. Abominations in the eyes of the Lord! But something about the pictures held Kelso in place. Lurid and unsettling as they were, it was several minutes before he could break the stares of the figures that gazed out at him from the carvings, cold and implacable, amused at his horror, frozen forever in their acts of carnage.
It was the odor that brought him back: the smell of mortality, rank and cloying, like an invisible poison in the room. A voice in the back of his brain suggested he get back to business and out of this temple of shadows as quickly as possible.
Kelso’s vertebrae crackled as he straightened to examine the wall of the cavern in front of him. Unlike the other walls, which were rough and unfinished, this one had been planed to geometrical perfection, and elaborately sculpted to mimic the facade of a massive palace, with columns and doors, a symmetrical roof line, and a giant throne carved into the rock. A stack of weapons—spears, staffs, and a pair of strangely shaped clubs—stood to the right of the throne. A mound of skulls rose at its foot. The wall receded into darkness where it joined with the cavern ceiling, but every foot of it seemed to have been decorated with the intricate carvings. Kelso realized he was gaping. A scrap of burlap drifted away from his torch and the Irishman followed its path to the floor. This brought him back to the contents of the little boat. But it wasn’t a boat, he realized. It was a sarcophagus, fashioned so the halves of each end curved to meet the other like the bow and stern of a ship.
Kelso took two steps forward and gazed down into the sarcophagus at the figure of a man—or what might have been a man at some point in the past. The mummified corpse was naked but for a black loincloth around its midsection and a crown of beaten gold encircling its head. Age and decay had eaten away the thing’s features, leaving its face looking grotesquely angular and vaguely threatening, with pronounced cheekbones and enlarged nasal sockets. Through some trick of the arid environment here on the eastern outskirts of the Chihuahuan Desert the eyes were intact and open, though yellowed and sunk deep in their sockets. The lips were drawn back in a grinning rictus of death, exposing age-darkened teeth filed to sharp points. The figure’s arms rested beside it on what Kelso guessed was some sort of soft scrim or sheet, though it looked almost as if the material was fastened to the mummy’s inner forearms. The hands lay open and unlined, ending in long black fingernails. The lid of the sarcophagus, also cut from solid stone, lay broken in pieces on the far side of the vessel.
Looting bastards, thought Kelso. They’ve been here before me. Such was the case in Egypt. Kelso had read that after centuries of theft and plunder, there was precious little left in the tombs of the pharaohs to be carried off. But if looters had been active here in central Texas, they’d missed something important. Kelso’s attention drifted to the dark jewels in the cadaver’s crown.
Finally.
Treasure.
He was two feet away from a fortune. After all these years of dirt and doubt and dismay it was suddenly right here in front of him. His heart was pounding in his chest. He felt tears start in his eyes. He reached for the diadem without quite realizing what he was doing. Just before he could touch it, though, his arm was seized and held by a dark brown hand.
Paco.
The Irishman chuckled. He’d jumped a foot at the unexpected contact. But the big man’s grip was powerful, and the next thing Kelso felt was a surge of anger.
“You daft brute. What are you—?”
He raised the torch with his other hand and glanced at the men around him. They were contemplating the figure in the sarcophagus with rapt attention.
Almost devotion.
“Who gives you leave,” said Ramon, “to steal from a god?”
It wasn’t the shock of hearing Ramon speak his suddenly unaccented English that raised the flesh on Kelso’s forearms. It wasn’t even the words he spoke, which made little sense to the Irishman. It was the realization that the three Mexicans who were his only company in this underground chamber were gazing at him with unmistakably bad intentions, their dark eyes glittering in the flickering light of the torches. It was the sense that he’d misjudged his companions, and that this misjudgment was going to be awfully difficult to remedy.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Kelso. “And what manner of mischief is this?”
The Mexicans were silent.
“Let’s not louse this up, boys. Hermanos. We’ve come too far. You want a bigger share? It can be arranged. Sure, and these items—” Kelso gestured at the weapons and stone statues around them—“will bring a fortune back east. They’re five hundred years old, at the least. My client has already offered...”
“We don’t give a damn about your client.”
Kelso tried to work up a companionly chuckle. He’d been in tight spots before, and he knew the drill. He had to keep talking, first of all. Nothing too awful could happen as long as you kept talking. “Aw, hell. Neither do I, if you want the truth of it. He’s got the soul of a bookkeeper, that one. So let’s forget him and get down to brass tacks, as they say. Is it the gold you’ll be wanting? Hey. Listen. You fancy the crown?”
Ramon shook his head.
“There is only one thing we want from you, Senor Kelso.”
Paco placed one of his huge hands on Kelso’s shoulder.
“It is a great honor,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
Norberto chuckled behind him. He was so close that Kelso could feel the little man’s breath on the back of his neck, sticky and warm, like an unwanted kiss.
“But maybe,” he whispered, “you don’t like it so much.”
Kelso wondered if he was going to throw up. But he persevered.
“I’m not opposed,” he insisted, “to any reasonable offer.”
To this statement he added a wink.
*
Say what you will about the Irish. Centuries of madness, mud, and starvation have toughened them up. They don’t die easy. Paco stood six feet four and weighed two hundred and forty pounds. Despite his great bulk, he and Norberto had trouble pinning Kelso’s arms to his sides. When they finally did, the Irishman flailed so violently that he extinguished one of the torches. His screams were an assault all their own, piercing and pathetic. Finally, though, the Mexicans managed to spread the Irishman out on a large, flat rock just a few feet from the sarcophagus. Norberto shattered his knee caps with a chunk of limestone, which ended the kicking, though it did nothing for the noise. Paco finally shoved a wad of burlap into his mouth, which lowered the volume considerably. And now Ramon fished into his woven bag and brought out a thin knife unlike any J.P. Kelso had seen before. The handle was fashioned of wood, elaborately curved, like a question mark, and the blade was hewn from jagged dark stone. The Irishman fought even harder when Ramon ripped open his waistcoat and shirt, and he shrieked and sobbed through whatever invocation Ramon spoke to the skies that couldn’t see them, the heavens beyond the rock roof that hid them from the world.
Ramon, Kelso thought—insofar as he was still capable of thought. Of course. He knew he’d been the leader all along. The man with the mysteriously acquired map. The man with the silent comrades, the muscle, willing—at Ramon’s bidding—to do as the gringo commanded. He’d been watchful, Kelso recalled. As patient as a spider. But no more. Now Ramon’s face was flushed with victory and anticipation. He nodded at the Irishman as if they were partners in an enterprise of secret and terrible significance, and this was when the swindler realized his run of luck had finally expired. He started singing then, an old song, as Irish as the streams of Bunclody. Of course it didn’t sound like a song. Beneath the burlap stuffed in his mouth, Kelso’s ballad sounded more like the cries of an angry baby. Ramon paused, momentarily puzzled. He exchanged glances with his companions. Then he reared back and raised the dagger over his head. The gag popped out of the Irishman’s mouth at almost the same moment, and the cavern filled with the ancient music of fear and misfortune as overhead, in the darkness, a storm of bats filled the air with the voiceless panic of their sudden flight.
From Here to Infirmity
Thoughts, drafts, reviews, and opinions from Bruce McCandless, poet, amateur historian, bicyclist and attorney. I'm partial to Beowulf, Dylan, Cormac McCarthy, Leonard Cohen, Walt Whitman, Hillary Man
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