A Western in 30 Working Days--a national holiday

The town of Urayasu (where Disneyland is) from across the Bay.

July 15, a public holiday in Japan. A day when the western writer who built his own yacht and started out to sail solo around the world goes to his little 21-foot sloop and sails out onto Tokyo Bay for the first time in two months. Aaaaaaah.

Still, Stryker #3--Stryker's Bounty--pushes ahead. Word count 4332 words.

The view through his field glasses showed nothing hopeful. The station house had one wall standing. Molly’s Royal stove stood among the smoldering remains of the house. Stryker focused on the mounds in front of the station. Dead horses. Looked to be still in their traces. Steel rims showed where wheels once were. The body of the stagecoach was little more than a pile of ashes.

Nothing moved but the zopilote vultures tearing at the dead horses with hooked beaks. Stryker scanned along the path to the granary and tack room. Curls of smoke from the ashes said the barley was still smoldering. The barn and its hay loft also lay in ashes, but the pole corral still stood. Stryker studied it carefully. No tack hung from the top poles. No horses waited to be harnessed to the next stage. No movement of any kind, except for the buzzards.

zopilote 

A wash gouged through the land behind the corral. A man might could use it to get close without being seen—a man like Matt Stryker. He tethered Saif to a mesquite bush and made his way to the bottom of the wash. The sun was just about at its meridian. The heat burned into the land around Miller’s Well, only those with something bigger to do than just filling their bellies moved. A small striped lizard moved, else Stryker would have stepped on it. A redtailed hawk moved, his pinions spread to catch the thermal rising from the heat of the land. A man moved, Matt Stryker, as he worked his way up the wash to the granary that smoldered in the heat. Maybe he’d find something, maybe not.

He lay against the lip of the wash for a long time. Too much hurry can get a man killed. Little left standing. The corral. A wall of the house. The outhouse. Stryker came up and over the bank of the wash, keeping a paloverde between himself and the burned out buildings. Nothing moved. He couldn’t see the zopilote. He held his Winchester ’73 cocked and ready. The Roper, he left in its saddle scabbard on Saif. The redtail screeched.

Stryker slowly turned a full three-sixty as he walked carefully to the burnt-out station. Molly’s Royal stove still had a pot on it. The zopilote buzzards flapped away as Stryker approached, landed no more than ten yards away, and stood watching, wings held high and ready to carry them back to the dead horses. In the ashes of the house, Stryker found four bodies. Burned and shriveled, they showed teeth in macabre smiles through burnt away lips. Three men and a woman. Driver and shotgunner? Passengers? Molly? Dodge Miller? The bodies were so badly burned that Stryker couldn’t tell who they were.

A Western in 30 Days -- Zilch

Saturday--Sunday--Monday,  a long holiday in Japan, and a busy weekend with church activities. Results on Western. Nil. I'm not counting these days. But rather than leave you with nothing to read, here's something from a few years ago. Needless to say, I was not feeling up to snuff on that particular day.

The face, in a former day.

The face

The road, paved with intentions; the face fresh, with unwrinkled brow and forthright blue-eyed gaze. He decided to be an electrical engineer, but flunked calculus and organic chemistry in the same semester; played baseball instead. He joined the Marines, thought he'd make the Corps a career. Two years later, he was back in school aiming for a degree in history. He learned Japanese, went to grad school, fought with his advisor, quit. Worked to support a wife and son. Gave marketing a whirl, became export manager in Hong Kong. Fooled around. Sailed to the Chinese border and got turned back by CHICOM gunboats. Worked with Vietnamese refugees. Philandered, divorced; threw away two sons; wept, and gladly paid support. He jumped into the ad game, met that girl; eloped despite her parents' rage. He dreamed of sailing endlessly from bay to bay. She had a baby girl. He spun records until midnight, hawked ads by day, and tried to learn to write. Voyaging remained a dream. Two years of rejections, then an article to Dog Fancy, another to Scholastics, and a third to Highlights for Children. He wrote a novel. No one was interested. Scripps League Newspapers hired him as a reporter. He covered the voyage of the Hokulea, from Oahu to Tahiti and back. He won prizes. She was an only child and her parents were aging; they returned to Japan. They both wrote copy. She won prizes, and bore another daughter. He did more copy, and a TV series for a cable channel. He wrote short stories. No one was interested. Newsweek bought his advertorials, Japan Intersect ran his profiles, Tokyo Journal did his crime articles, Photonics International hired him to write on high-tech solutions, the International Herald Tribune came to him for news. He wrote poems and senryu. No one was interested. Another daughter came, and another. PHP took his book on business letters; Jitsugyo published the one on English loan words; he edited a series on Living in Japan; he wrote a book on English for Japanese scuba divers. He wrote a novel; no one was interested, so he wrote another. Same result. The face in the mirror, wrinkled and splotched, grew extra chins; the blue eyes now rheumy, myopic, squinty -- not the face for a book jacket. But the paved road remains, and he still tries. Still.

An artist's conception of what The Face may look like now.

# # #

(c) Charles T. Whipple

A Western in 30 Days -- Day Two

Charlie shoots a Colt Dragoon sixgun

When you write, things happen. I had it all planned out. How the Dents were going to arrive at Miller's Well, do in everyone but Molly, make off with the strongbox while dragging Molly by her hair (or some such cruel way).

Didn't work out that way, so far. Because one of Dent's boys wouldn't play along.

Here's a bit to show you why.

“Missus?”

“Oh!” Molly fairly jumped at Wee Willy Dent’s voice. “You startled me, young man. It’s not good to sneak up on people, you know.”

“Beans, please, missus, and some bread, if ya’ve got it. And I never snuk. My pa says we gotta walk quiet-like, so he makes me wear moccasins. I clomp in boots. Cain’t help but clomp.” He held out the empty bowl Molly had left at his place at the table. “Beans? ‘N bread?”

Molly took the bowl and emptied the bean pot into it, but the beans came nowhere near filling the bowl. “Sorry,” she said, and handed him the bowl.

Wee Willy had to stoop to stand in the doorway. He looked at the half-full bowl and then turned tear-filled eyes to Molly. “I gets hungry most ever’day,” he said. “But pa makes me eat last, after him and Finn and Rob. Ain’t never enough.”

Now we get the idea that maybe one of the Dent boys is not all bad.

Here's some more.

The big man turned into a little boy right before Molly Miller. He filled the doorway, but still seemed hardly old enough to wear shoes. “Come in here to eat,” she said. “Stand over there and use the cupboard.”

Wee Willy came in, nearly filling the room. Molly handed him a spoon. “Go ahead and eat the beans, Willy,” she said gently.

A half loaf of sourdough bread remained in the breadbox, so she swiftly cut a two-inch slice and slathered it with a thick layer of apple butter. “Eat this, too,” she said, and set the bread beside the beans.

“Wee Willy!”

“Yeah, pa.”

“You leave missus alone now, ya hear?”

Molly went to the doorway. The other three Dents sat with their elbows on the table, empty bowls before them, along with the empty bread plate. “Lester Dent,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourselves. You hog down beans like you’ll never get another meal, and your youngest hardly gets a full bowl. And you call yourselves a family? Families share and share alike.” She turned her back on them and went back to the stove.

“Wee Willy, you hear me?”

Wee Willy swallowed the last of the sourdough. “I’m hearing ya, pa.”

“Get’chor ass back in here with the rest of us. Now.”

Wee Willy flashed a frightened look at Molly. “Coming, pa,” he said.

Remember that Dodge Miller is in the Catalinas, hunting.

Further on, Molly finds out how ruthless Lester Dent can be.

She didn’t realize Wee Willy had returned until she heard the splat of wood on flesh. Willy didn’t cry out, but Molly could tell by the little grunts that came with the smacking sound of whatever stick he’d found was used to beat him for whatever imagined shame he’d brought to the Dent family. The two Dent boys giggled at Wee Willy’s beating, then laughed out loud.

“Finn. Rob. Shut up. Just shut up,” Lester Dent hissed. Molly decided that if a rattlesnake could talk, it would sound like Lester Dent. She wondered how Wee Willy could accept the kind of beating she heard.

Thwacks of wood against flesh and little grunts of pain continued. Molly realized she was holding her breath and the lack of air made her dizzy. She sucked great gulps of dry air into her lungs, and still the beating went on.

Dear God, she prayed, please help that poor simple boy.

The stick broke. Molly heard it break. She held her breath again.

“Now Wee Willy. Can you hear me when I speak? Huh?”

Wee Willy’s answer was hardly more than a whisper. “I hear ya, pa,” he said.

“We do not bring shame upon our family. Never. Never. Never. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear ya, pa.” The answer was still hardly above a whisper.

“Good. Now take that poor excuse for a stick—it broke in two—so take it and burn it in the stove.”

“I hear ya, pa,” Wee Willy said, his voice a little stronger.

Molly breathed again. She had her back to the door when Wee Willy came in. He said nothing. She didn’t look. He found the handle to the burner lid and Molly heard him grunt as he lifted one of the lids out and stuffed the “stick” into the stove. “There,” he said softly. He put the handle back in its place and retraced his steps to the door.

Molly turned her head to catch a glimpse of Wee Willy as he entered the common room. She took a huge breath to keep from gasping. How could any father beat his own offspring like that?

Lester Dent appeared in the doorway. “Now ya see, missus. Now ya see what happens to them as don’t listen to what I say, don’cha?”

“I must tend to the beans and wash the dirty dishes,” she said, and whirled away.

Lester Dent’s horn-hard left hand caught hold of her right arm. He jerked, spinning her around. As she turned, his doubled fist broke her nose and splattered blood down her dress. “Ye’d best listen to me,” he said, and smashed his fist into her face again.

A Western in 30 Days--non-Day

This is not a photo of the author

Today was a client day, with little time left for working on the novel. The first chapter is nearly finished, however, with close to 2500 words on the clock. Tomorrow, if I'm lucky and I don't succumb to heat prostration, I'll give you the beginning of Chapter Two, but not the conclusion. Can't give away any secrets, can we?

For your entertainment, here's a little story.

A Wish

Exercise, Dr. Motoyama says, lose weight or your family will lose you. Walk, she says (Dr. Motoyama's a woman), walk every day. So I don my Nikes and walk down twenty-three steps to the roadway. It's eleven at night. The neighborhood is silent, but not dark. Streetlights illuminate the tarmac, the tiny yards, the front doors. There are no sidewalks. Concrete utility poles stick up from asphalt streets like dead trees. Geraniums and pansies hang from fences in planter boxes. Wisteria arc over gateway frames. A dog voices his irritation at my late-night passage.

summer night

      with no moon

fresh-cut grass

I dodge the barriers and walk beside by the creek. I say creek, but I cannot see it. Brick-paved pathways run down either side, and the water trickles toward the bay, bordered by iron sheet piles. What once was a swampy creek bed is now a suburban residential neighborhood, and, deep within an iron-bound canyon, the gummy water of the creek, full of detergents and waste and filth, rarely sees the sun.

A man, with all his possessions strapped to an aged bicycle, spreads cardboard on a creekside bench, his bed tonight. He pulls the brim of his hat low to shade his eyes from the glare of the streetlights that keep the pathways safe at night. I walk past as if he is not there.

Farther on, a housewife huddles over her cell phone. I wonder why she's come outside to talk. Illicit conversation? She speaks so low that I can hear none of what she says as I pass. I turn the corner, circle back, and the same dog barks again.

deep-fried ginger pork

            open kitchen windows --

    midnight stroll

I wish I could see the stars, but streetlights get in the way.

# # #

(c) Charles T. Whipple

A Western in 30 days -- Chapter One

Lots of other things to do today. Nik says 1800 words a day will get your book finished in 30 working days. Today I did about 1500, in and around all the other stuff I was doing. Here's a segment. What do you think?

Stryker's Bounty

Chapter One

Lester Dent and his three boys rode up to Miller’s Well a good two days before the stage was due. But then, they had no intention of riding that stage at all. They just wanted its strongbox, and Molly Miller.

Miller’s Well supplied Ridges and Hale stages with fresh horses and the driver, shotgun, and passengers with alkali-tinged water and Molly Miller’s good cooking. Molly and Dodge Miller operated the station from the time the company set up its run from Globe City to Tucson by way of Camp Grant. At first, the stages came once a week, then the silver strike in Tombstone put two stages a week on the run.

Molly kept a truck garden year round, watered from Miller’s deep well. Dodge kept a shotgun on a rack and a long-shooting Creedmore for taking pronghorns, whitetail deer, and sometimes an elk, to put meat on the table at Miller’s Well.

With the stage not due for two days, Dodge took the Creedmore off up in the craggy foothills of the Santa Catalina mountains just south of the stage station. With luck, he’d have fresh meat by nightfall. Molly weeded the truck garden, her calico dress’s hem brushing the ground as she hoed. A bonnet tied securely under her chin shaded her face from the vicious Arizona sun, but it still got to Molly’s skin enough to raise a rash of freckles that she didn’t like but men thought made her look like a girl. A tiny frown of concentration showed that Molly Miller was dead serious about keeping unwanted weeds from stealing precious moisture from her vegetables. In fact, she was so focused on the weeds that she failed to notice until four men reined their tired horses to a stop near the well and hollered, “Hey, missus.”

Molly’s head came up and she turned to see who called.

“Hey, missus!”

“I hear you,” Molly called. “Be right there.” She patted the Pocket Colt in her apron and let the hoe fall between rows of string beans. She lifted her skirts a mite in front and walked quickly out of the garden patch and across the stage road to her home, which doubled as the stage station.

“Missus.” The same man called.

“Coming.” Molly rounded the corner of the house. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

“Awright to water our hosses?”

“Help yourself,” she said.

“Bite to eat?”

“Beans and sourdough,” Molly said. “Two bits a head.”

“Sounds good.” The man doing the talking put a finger to the brim of his hat. “I’ll be Lester Dent,” he said, “ and these’uns’re muh boys.” He pointed at each as he intoned their names. “Finn, Rob, n’ Wee Willy. Ya’d do good to watch out for Willy. He’s a bit crazy some say.”

“You’re welcome, gentlemen,” Molly said. “Water your horses. Beans are on the stove and I’ll pop a loaf of sourdough into the oven to warm up.” She turned her back on the horsemen and went into the house.

Lester looked at his brothers. “Reckon she’s the one?”

“More’n likely,” Finn said, standing in his stirrups so he could scratch his butt. “Don’t see no other woman around.”

“Then she’s the one what knows. Water the hosses, Willy. Then come in ‘n’ eat.”

“How come I gotta do all the work?” The youngster called Wee Willy Dent pouted. He was big, bigger as any of the other Dents, but somehow looked younger, naïve, kinda like.

“Make yerseff useful, boy. Cut out the bitchin’.” Lester Dent swung off his black-legged bay and dropped the reins to the ground. The bay stood obediently ground-tied. Finn and Rob followed suit. They’d been riding with Lester long enough to know he was always a step ahead of them when it came to planning and getting things done.

The overgrown boy they called Wee Willy clambered off the three-color paint he rode, dropped the reins to ground-tie the paint, and fairly stomped over to the well. He took the wooden bucket off its hook and dropped it down the well. Seconds later, a faint splash came, telling Willy that the bucket had hit water and was probably full. The rope ran over a pulley that helped hoist the bucket full of water up out of the well. Willy poured it into the horse trough. It hardly covered an inch of the bottom. “Goldam,” Willy muttered. “I’ll be here all day just pulling up enough water for the damn hosses.”

Finn threw a comment over his shoulder. “Get a move on, kid, else you’ll miss out on the grub.”

Willy tossed the bucket back down the well.

Lester led the rest of the Dents through the door into the main room of the Miller’s Well stage stop.

“Missus?”

Molly stuck her head out the kitchen door. “Won’t be more’n a minute or so,” she said. “Sit yourselves down at the table there.”

“Reckon we might as well eat,” Lester said. He waved the other Dents to places around the big table. “Smells right tasty, missus,” he called.

Molly’s voice came from the kitchen. “Some says my beans’s good. Ain’t been nobody died of them yet.”

Lester leered at Finn, then winked at Rob. “We’re a waiting,” he called. “Hungry as we can get.”

Molly came in with an armload of bowls and spoons. She plonked one down in front of each Dent and one where the one called Wee Willy would sit. “I can load them bowls up with beans soon as you’re ready to eat,” she said.

“Any time’s fine,” Lester said, drawling out his words. “Say, missus, you heard of a woman called Sharon Sue?”

Molly’s hand paused for the barest second before she said, “Sharon Sue? Nope. No one here at Miller’s Well but me, and my name’s Molly.” As she disappeared into the kitchen, she said over her shoulder, “Why?”

“Kinda wanted to talk to Sharon Sue,” Lester called.

Molly came back with a steaming kettle of beans held between two hot pot pads. She set it on the table, took up the ladle, and began filling the bowls. “Sourdough’ll be good and warmed up,” she said. “Sorry we’ve got no butter for you. Don’t have a milk cow.”

Lester grabbed a spoon and dug into the beans. “Damn good,” he said. “Oh, ‘scuse me, missus.”

Molly grinned. “Glad you like ‘em.” She went again to the kitchen and came back with good warm sourdough bread, sliced an inch thick, piled on a platter, and ready to eat. She put the platter in the middle of the table. “Help yourselves,” she said.

Finn and Rob reached for the same slice of bread. Finn glared at Rob, who drew back. “Yours,” he said.

“Damn right,” Finn said. He was soon dipping hot sourdough into the beef and beans Molly had served them. He said nothing, but the speed of his eating said a great deal about what he thought of the food. The men settled down to serious eating.

Lester called toward the kitchen. “Any more of them beans left, missus?”

A Western in 30 days, Day One (.5)

In the little time I had today, between client meetings and dinner appointments and so on, I bashed out the protagonist's profile.

Matthew Stryker

Tall. 6’2”

Well built. Broad shoulders, thick body, muscular legs, walks leaning slightly forward as if pushing against fate.

Scarred face. Left eye socket crushed by Jake Cahill’s lead-filled fist. Tears leak from the damaged socket continually.

Clothing. Wears gray, clothes and hat. Tends to blend with any background. Flat-heeled boots in the Hessian style made popular by the Duke of Wellington.

Judgment of good and evil tends to be black and white, although Stryker is fully aware of human frailties.

Love interest. Catherine de Merode, born to a prince’s family in Belgium, now a thoroughly capable Western woman.

Weapons. Stryker carries a .44 Colt SAA, a Winchester ’73, and a 4-shot Roper 12-gauge shotgun.

History: Like Abe Lincoln, Matthew Stryker was from Illinois. His was not an easy life, and he left home to make his own way in the world when he was fourteen. There were just too many mouths to feed and the Stryker farm could be run well by his partially crippled father (war wounded) and his two younger brothers. The girls would not be old enough to marry for another ten years or more, so Matt’s ma slipped him ten dollars from her hideaway stash and pointed him downriver, saying she had a cousin named Dick Hunt who worked at a ranch owned by Montford Johnson in the Indian Nations.

Stryker never found Dick Hunt, but he found a job with Ed Mott’s freight train, one of the last to use the Santa Fe Trail. At first, he helped herd the extra oxen, then he began riding out in front of the train as it moved onward. A mountain man named Ned Gump taught Stryker how to hunt and how to scout, and soon Stryker was Bump’s partner. They ranged far from the painfully slow train, but always came home with meat for the cooks to serve the hundred and more men who walked Mott’s Murphy wagons from Independence to Santa Fe.

But railroads came in the ‘70s, and the era of the long haul came to an end. Ned Bump retired to a little cabin high above the Uinta Basin. Matt Stryker, pushing 20, joined his friend Fletcher Comstock in Virginia City. Prospecting didn’t work well for Stryker, but his comportment during a standoff between town marshal Tom Easter and a group of outlaws headed up by Roy Bob Jenks earned him a job as Easter’s deputy.

From that time on, Matt Stryker began to build a reputation as a no-nonsense lawman/gunman.

Reputation: Tenacious. Dangerous. Straight-laced. Fair. No give. Tough. Smart.

(more to be added as characteristics become visible)

A Western in 30 days

Day 1

Today, I’m supposed to be getting what Nik calls a “plot-plan” constructed. Whew. I usually get an image of the first scene and an idea of the last scene and then sit down and write from the seat of my pants. But the ongoing exercise is profitable. Here’s what I found out.

Desired emotion (from the reader)

Abhorrence for violence and brutality to women.

Theme

Reward for some kinds of evil can only be death.

Main character’s emotional drive

Matt Stryker is a professional who does whatever is necessary to bring criminals with a bounty on their heads to justice, dead or alive.

Main character’s purpose

To do the job he’s been hired for, or must pursue due to circumstances, because it’s the right thing to do.

Possible causes of conflict

- weather

- geography

- opponents’ skills and/or cunning

- the need to help others

- pain

- wounds

- old enemies

- terrain

- the job

- the situation

Initial clash

- Stage station at Miller’s Well burned

- Stagecoach burned, horses, driver, shotgun rider, passengers killed

- Molly Miller missing

(Stryker must decide whether to pursue the perpetrators in hopes of rescuing Molly or to continue on his hunt for jailbreaker Loren Blake.)

Dramatic high point

Standoff/shootout with three Dent sons (Stryker has killed the father)

Additional conflicts

- Getting Molly Miller back to her husband

- Quarrel with Sheriff Bucknell in Tombstone, March 1883

- Face off with Dirty Bill Cronen, a man always looking for a test

- Figuring out the reasons for the Dents’ continual abuse of certain women

What the antagonists want

- Money

- Sex

- The ability to “pull it off”

- Major objective: abuse and disfigure every Yankee woman possible, leaving them breathing and alive in a living hell (revenge for what happened to their own women when Sherman marched to Georgia during the Civil War).

Final conflict

Stryker caught by Dents. Disarmed. Must watch as the Dents have their way with another woman. Must find a way to get loose. Must use unusual weapons to kill Dents one at a time. (Perhaps he kills the woman to put her out of her misery, I don’t know yet. Or he allows her to kill herself.)