Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward

Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       BOOK ONE

       (the recent past)

       LUNA WAXWING AND THE NEON MONSTER

       Chapter 1

      There are many versions of how that Fourth of July celebration in Stony Mesa, now known as the Apple Days Riot, unraveled but all agree that it started when Otis Dooley hit Bo Hineyman square in the back with a fresh horse turd. Splat! And the rest is history.

      Bo’s stallion was handsome enough to lead the parade but was placed by parade organizers at the rear because his rider was not nearly as handsome or well-liked. Bo’s sensitive ego was somewhat massaged when he was given a flag to hold and the organizing committee described his role as the “grand conclusion.” So when the turd-startled horse bolted forward it crashed through the high school marching band, upended a chain of sequined cheerleaders, galloped through the Boone County wiener dog club, crashed through the boy scouts in their best brown shirts, and sent a ripple of alarm and confusion rolling from the back of the parade to the front.

      The skittish horse then stopped short in front of the Daughters of the Stony Mesa Pioneers float. Hineyman was thrown forward and landed in the large gingham lap of Dee Hardsmith who was representing a pioneer settler sitting in a rocking chair. Bo rolled off the float and hit the ground. A moment later he was growling obscenities and charging Otis Dooley.

      What happened next and who hit who is a matter of who tells the story. The tuba player in the high school band remembers a horse’s chestnut chest in his face and a bystander remembers a tuba hitting him smack on the bridge of his nose. The members of the Boon County wiener dog club remember stepping on their wieners and the dogs remember getting stepped on. A surge of screaming and frantic ducking was followed by yelling. Pockets of scuffling erupted among the crowd but the main action was at the rear of the column where bystanders had to wrestle Bo and Otis away from clawing and choking one another.

      Separated and held in check by four volunteer firemen, one on each of the combatant’s arms, they leaned forward and shouted. Otis accused Bo of deliberately turning his horse’s rear end toward Otis who was standing on the side of the street enjoying the festivities when a juicy green bomb exited the nervous steed, splattering his pants. Bo, in turn, promised to leave Otis penniless and begging for mercy. It was pretty clear there would be none.

      But perhaps it is best to backtrack to the beginning. Why Otis Dooley was so ready to take offense and throw that turd is more important to this story than the chaotic consequences of its return trip. The feud between Otis and Bo had been simmering for a long time and that plump green missile merely marked the boiling point.

      Let’s start with Bo Hineyman, a rich man with an unfortunate name, more so since his rump was plump and girlish. When visiting his ranch in Stony Mesa he fancied himself a cowboy and favored those loose-fitting jeans so popular with pear-shaped aging boomers. He covered the elastic stretch band with an elaborately tooled leather belt fastened by a silver and turquoise buckle the size of a dinner plate.

      The buckle, his tailored western shirts, and an immaculate Stetson hat cost more than most of his Stony Mesa neighbors made in a month. There was no telling what he wore when visiting his houses in Maine and in Florida, just outside of Miami, where he bribed and cajoled venal politicians to do the bidding of his rich clients. Maybe he dressed up as a pirate when on his yacht and maybe he wore a musket and three-cornered hat when in New England. Nobody in Stony Mesa knew because nobody ever visited him there. He had few friends in town but had purchased much goodwill from local contractors, vendors, artists, taxidermists, and any other local who had something to sell. If townsfolk were critical of him they kept it to themselves because money was tight in Stony Mesa and they couldn’t afford to be cut off from Hineyman’s largesse.

      Bo’s birth name was Richard Boris Hineyman. If his last name alone wasn’t bad enough, his first names made his situation worse. He tried using Richard but people always shortened that to Rich Hineyman, which elicited jokes, and much worse was Dick Hineyman. His middle name was given to him by his father in memory of Bo’s grandfather, Boris Hineymanskaya, a Russian immigrant who made the family’s original fortune long ago by supplying other immigrants to sweatshops in New York City. Boris shortened his surname when he arrived in America so that his status as an immigrant would not be so obvious. Unfortunately, his command of English was not great at the time and he did not understand that “hiney” was slang for the human butt and, thus, his descendants would be the butt of many jokes.

      Richard Boris Hineyman made Bo out of Boris and although it didn’t match the dignity and respect he felt he deserved, it sounded friendly and down to earth, qualities that helped him sell whatever he was selling at the moment. Whatever charm the name conveyed was wasted on a man who had only three modes: he was either seducing you or totally ignoring you, unless he perceived you as a threat or as an obstacle, in which case he resorted to his bully mode.

      Bo raised thoroughbred horses on his cattle ranch, or rather his ranch hands did because The Hineyman, as they called him, only flew in on weekends. His ranch was a place he visited, often with clients who were impressed with how the man they knew in the city, who arrived at meetings in a limo and dressed in thousand-dollar tailored suits, was also this earthy cowboy guy. At least it appeared so to clients who had never actually touched a horse or been any closer to the American West than a national park vacation or a movie. Bo hired real cowboys to work his ranch estate but didn’t associate much with the local folks, as his valuable time was invested in corporate clients from oil and gas firms that most of the good people of Stony Mesa had never heard about. There wasn’t much profit in neighbors so Bo ignored them unless he wanted something.

      It was harder for his neighbors to ignore him, however, since a few years after developing his horse and cattle ranch he built the biggest business establishment Stony Mesa had ever seen. The Wild West Museum and Mall was a hobby, or perhaps a stage where he could pretend he was not just a well-dressed whore for oil executives and Florida condo developers, but a laid back country and western dude with a stable full of thoroughbred horses. Local women were hired to greet customers while wearing skimpy cowgirl outfits, cowboy hats, and holsters with fake six-shooters. The museum featured guns, a fake stagecoach, a barbed wire collection, and cowboy memorabilia. There was a shop, a café, and a game room where wannabe buckaroos could shoot it out with video villains.

      Stony Mesa sat on a sage-covered bluff above a river valley floor. It was aptly named. The valley that rolled out beneath vermillion cliffs was polka-dotted with black basalt boulders that had been pushed off the neighboring mountains by glaciers eons ago. Try to dig a foundation for a house on top of that glacial debris field and you will hit pods of stone whales clustering beneath sand and sage waves. Stony Mesa was almost impossible to farm. Enterprising pioneers planted orchards on the shoulders of the thin river that meandered through the town but pasture land was scant and the soil too sandy. They called it Poverty Meadows in the days before you could market scenery and make more money by putting a retired dentist on the land than by putting cows out there.

      Stony Mesa was the edge of civilization for most of its hundred-year history. It was far from other communities and perched on the rim of a vast basin of redrock canyons just a few miles downstream. The mail was delivered by mule until the 1950s. The