Have you read Sal Cruz’s ‘Legend of the Boy‘? Now’s your chance—FREE!
TODAY Fri 8/18, Sat 8/19, Sun 8/20
A young man raised without a mother by a distant father and alcoholic relatives has to grow up and find truth and meaning in a world he has little experience with. Legend of the Boy tells that tale from his point of view, a fascinating, compelling adventure that pushes him to the limits of strength and faith, and leaves you totally captivated.
“A brutally honest and fresh read. A compelling story.” ~ Artie Windstrum, Reviewer
SAMPLE CHAPTER:
Well, Dad was fishing. I was just wetting my hook, as he would say. I was as far removed from angling as some poor sap born in the desert. That’s how Dad would say it. Or, “You should have been born in the desert because I have no idea what’s wrong with you.”
“I just don’t know how I can’t catch anything,” I would say in frustration.
“You don’t know how to do much of anything,” he said.
“I know.” At ten years old, my life wasn’t that complex, but I wasn’t good at school, and it appeared that I wasn’t much good at anything else. I sat in the boat and watched the cork on my line do absolutely nothing. My eyes and ears wandered to the surroundings. The river was beautiful. I loved being on the river. Dad was usually the nicest to me when we were fishing on the river. It was lined on either side by dense forests of trees and scrub oaks and underbrush. Only a few feet into the woods, it became dark. Lost in my thoughts of wanting to explore the woods, Dad said something that startled me.
“Do you know how to shoot?” he asked.
“Do we even own a gun?” I asked.
“Don’t sass me, boy,” he said. “Why would you talk to me like that? What is wrong with you?” His eyebrows furrowed, and he shook his head. It was not my intent to be sassy or disrespectful, but his emphasis on wrong was an indication of how upset he would be. I knew the wrath of his disappointment far too many times. I was never really able to communicate with him in the way I wanted, to talk to him as one adult would talk to another.
Contrary to my fear, he did not continue his berating. Instead, he reached into the cooler, grabbed a beer, and handed it to me.
He started talking to me about this guy he knew, someone he worked with. Dad repaired fuel lines at the naval air station, and this guy he knew had been arrested for drinking and driving. He had been driving drunk but what got him into trouble was that he fell asleep at the wheel, and his car veered over and hit a car with a woman and her child. This was long before car seats and any realistic expectation of wearing seat belts, so the woman and child had died. I was sad for the woman and her baby and thought of her husband, and how sad he would be. I even felt sorry for this guy Dad knew. What was more amazing was that Dad was telling me a story. He was talking to me. Stories like this were usually reserved for sharing with my uncles. I forgot about the useless cork and listened intently.
Then he told me he had better never catch me behind the wheel with the slightest degree of intoxication, or else he would take care of me before the judicial system had any chance to implement punishment, which, in his opinion, would be far too light.
In spite of the warning, I was still in awe. I had never heard him speak in such a way to me or even tell me a story. He was telling me a story about a guy at work. Was it his friend? My mind wandered, wondering what my dad was like at work and then I remembered he was talking. He continued talking about the bad habits of drinking. Drinking and driving was equal to armed robbery in his opinion. He expressed sorrow for his friend and his irrational decision to drink and drive, but sorrow doesn’t bring a man’s wife and baby back. He said the law was too light on drinking and driving. So, my dad had thought about the husband, too. I liked that we had thought about the same thing.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with drinking, like there ain’t nothing wrong with shooting the head off a moccasin. But you don’t point a gun at no one, and you don’t drink and drive; pointing a gun at someone, that’s just like drinking and driving.”
“Now,” he said, and he placed his beer and fishing rod down onto the boat, steadied his hand on the rod to make sure the vibration didn’t make it down to the hook so as not to scare the fish (he always had three rods going at the same time and managed all three better than I ever did with just one; the other two were already perfectly balanced against the edge of the boat) and ensuring the rod was steadied against the boat, he carefully opened and reached into the well of the boat with both hands, and managed, not easily, but ever so quietly, to release and pull out a gun.
“This ain’t just no gun,” he said, somehow knowing what I was thinking.
“This, son, is a semi-automatic .22.” This meant absolutely nothing to me.
“Do you even know what that means?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“Boy, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but all right, just listen up. First of all, when I ask you a question, you answer it with an answer, not a question.”
He was still upset about me asking if we even had a gun. “I knew this guy. He was from New York. This is when we were over in Korea,”– Dad was in the navy during the Korean War– “and this joker would always answer a question with a question. He was some type of smart aleck. Son, you listen. When someone asks you a question, you just answer the question with a sentence, not a question. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“That kid, that smart aleck from New York, no one liked him–he got beat up bad. One time I came back to the barracks from furlough, and it was late, like three in the morning, and he was up, and I said, ‘Hey, Baxter, did you have a good week?’ and he said, or asked, ‘Did you have a good week?’ Well, I had enough, and I pulled him off the top bunk there and laid into him. He was eating soup for a week. So you answer right. People don’t like people who answer questions with questions. And it didn’t help that he was from New York.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And second, you don’t point guns at people. You only point a gun at what you intend to shoot. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Now, the gun is loaded. You’ve seen enough John Wayne movies, and you know what a gun can do. Now, you see that moccasin over there behind you?” He pointed off the bow of the boat where I sat, and sure enough, there was a moccasin about sixty feet from where I was sitting. I hate water moccasins.
Water moccasins, sometimes called cottonmouths, like to sit on top of the running river and just look at you. They wait for you to turn your head, and then they edge up, waiting to get close enough to attack. I usually had a stick to chase them off when they got close enough.
One time, I poked at a moccasin, and he bit the stick and hung on. Instead of letting go of the stick, I just banged it against the boat, which infuriated Dad because I was scaring off the fish. He kept yelling at me to let go of the stick, but I didn’t want to lose the only stick I had. Finally, Dad yelled loud and long enough that I let the stick go, terrified that the moccasin would enact some type of revenge on me.
Moccasins also like to sit on the high branches of trees and wait for unsuspecting prey–usually us. Many times I would be staring off the bow of the boat when I would hear a thump. I would turn, imagining it was some moccasin wanting to take out his revenge on me for hitting it with a stick. I would sit mortified, but Dad would grab his stick, pick it up and toss it overboard and then tell me how worthless I was. I don’t care, I hate moccasins. I hate everything about them, and looking at that cursed thing, I was about ready to pee in my pants. Dad handed the gun to me, and I pointed it offshore, and then I looked at Dad, waiting for instruction.
“Just line up the rear sight with the front sight, then line it up with moccasin’s head and pull the trigger,” he said. I sat there waiting for more instruction, and he finally said, “For crying out loud, son, go ahead.” That was it? Those were my only instructions.
The gun, or rifle, wasn’t that heavy. I had always imagined they would be heavy, they seemed heavy in the movies. I held the rifle up as I imagined John Wayne would. I closed my left eye, aimed up the two sights, and moved the gun until the moccasin’s head fit into the sights. The moccasin was coasting in the flowing river. It was probably protecting its nest, but it sure seemed like it was staking us out for a kill. I hate moccasins. Hate. Hate. Hate.
I looked at the moccasin long and hard. I wanted to wait for him to open its mouth. The inside of a moccasin’s mouth is white, like a ball of cotton, hence the common nickname Cottonmouth. This one was about four feet in length, so a little larger than average. I could hear my dad talking to me, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Usually, when he was teaching me something and I wasn’t doing it to his specifications, he would say things like, “Come on, son,” which usually came out like, “C’mohn, son,” the c barely audible. He could have been saying, “We ain’t got all day. We got fish to catch,” which I found to be discriminating since I was ineffectual at best at fishing (maybe the moccasins were eating all my fish). He was probably saying, “You are as slow as a grandma, son,” which was a typical epithet to me for any task I was working on.
At this point, it did not matter what he was saying. All I knew right then was that if I missed that bugger’s head, I wouldn’t have a second chance, for one, because the snake would be gone, and two, because Dad would say something like, “Aw, I should have known better than to give a gun to a little panty-waste,” or “Ab…so…lute…ly worthless, son, you are absolutely good for nothing.” Those were his sentiments most often expressed.
But no matter. I had never shot a rifle, but it was my intent to make my first shot the best shot of my life. I held it steady. The sights were rightly aligned. The snake was in view. Our eyes locked. I could sense that it knew I was there. It lengthened its body and then scrunched, moving closer to me, about a foot. I wanted to smile but did not. I did not want to expose my intent. I wanted the venomous snake to move a little closer so that it would open its mouth in defense, and when it did, I would blow its head right off to smithereens.
I felt a sense of authority holding the gun. I had never held one, had never shot one, but I felt clearly a foot taller. I basked in the superpowers befallen upon me. The snake ever so slightly cocked its head up, looked up into the tall scraggly scrub oaks above us there on the banks of the Choctaw River, and then looked back at me. I did not budge or flinch. I did not blink. And it again lengthened its body and scrunched and moved a foot closer.
When he cocked his head, I realized at that moment that I would have to make two shots. I would shoot the snake in the river, which I now realized was the mother, not a “he” as I had previously thought, and then, as soon as I shot the mother, the father, who was up in the tree, would fall down either onto me or close enough to attack me. They were working together. She was a sly one. She was a snake. She was giving me confidence. She would get closer to me, then go into the defensive position, I would react, and then her male counterpart would fall from the tree and attack.
I, again, about peed in my pants, thinking of the falling snake.
The male would be five to six feet in length, and about two inches in diameter. For the glory of repetition and in a manner that my dad often spoke of me, I ab…so…lute…ly hate snakes. I heard my dad whispering from behind, but I paid no attention. But the silence between his whisperings was getting shorter. And then I heard a branch snap. And I knew what that was.
Father snake was inching closer to the ends of the branch above us, and his weight was bearing down on the thin branch which caused it to snap a little. My time was short. I told myself that I would wait for her to open her mouth, then count to three and shoot mother snake, stand up, and then turn upward and shoot father snake before it had a chance to fall from the tree.
What I then decided to do was to go ahead and shoot the head off the mother snake before she recoiled into her defensive stance and open her mouth. This would throw off the attack of father snake. That would give me enough time to point the semi-automatic .22 upward, shoot his head off, and hope that it did not fall on me.
One.
Two.
Three.
Want to know what happened next? Read the book.
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