Who hasn’t burned down a field? or singed off all their facial hair at least once in life? Am I right? Or am I right?
With the good ole’ Fourth of July just a couple days away, I thought it fitting to stoke the campfire and invite us all to share our past tales of narrow survival. With any luck, history won’t repeat itself, as it tends to do.
I’ll get us started with a tale of the little DMB and one of the few times he didn’t heed the wise words of his old man. While I spent much of my time on my family’s cattle ranch, we actually lived a few miles away from the ranch on a few acres outside of Aledo, Texas. One of my chores was to collect and burn dead wood.
Now, you have to understand. We had some 100 trees on our property—hackberrys, pecans, oaks. So collecting dead wood was an actual chore. Some of you may come from rocky biomes, and your equivalent would have been picking rocks. I pity you. Not that collecting branches and dragging them into a big pile was super fun. But at least dead wood burns. And what little boy doesn’t like starting bond fires with parental permission?
There I was, probably around the age of ten, dragging branches into a heaping pile in the middle of the pasture. I wisely selected a spot far from standing trees, fences, and other structures. I doused a section of the branches with a judicious amount of gasoline. Everything on the up and up.
Just before I lit the stack, my dad hollered down from the house—something about maybe wanting to finish piling up all the branches before lighting the fire. Meh. I knew what I was doing. After all, I was ten. This wasn’t my first rodeo. The quicker I got the pile lit, the quicker it would burn down, and the quicker I could scurry off to do something else. (Whatever else it is that ten-year-olds did back in the 80’s.)
I lit the stack. And I lit it quite effectively, I might add. (I’ve always had a gift when it comes to fire.) The whole pile, some ten foot high, lit up quick and even. Now all that remained was to toss on the final branches and sit back to babysit my handiwork.
Problem was, the last branch was a bit unwieldy. Looking back, it’s possible I shouldn’t have saved one of the biggest branches for last. Anywho, I hefted that bad boy up into the air the best I could and leveraged it onto the burning stack. Now, many of you might see what’s coming next a bit quicker than I did in the moment. Turns out, my dad had been to a few more rodeos than I had.
My best effort only managed to heave that last big branch part way onto the burning pile. As a result, a section of the stack of branches flipped over on top of the all-business, ten-year-old version of little DMB. That might have been fun and games had these particular branches not already been on fire…
Suffice to say, at this point in the story a little ten-year-old boy spent the next few minutes running around the pasture waiving his hands in the air and screaming that his hair was on fire. (In actuality, his hair wasn’t on fire. Only his eyebrows, eyelashes, and a small bit of his crew cut had been singed off.)
While the boy’s mother has gone on record that she was quite concerned over the health and well-being of the little boy, the father in this story was overheard chuckling and mumbling to himself, “I warned him.”
And so he had. And perhaps this little story can serve as a warning to us all—it’s best to finish your business before setting it on fire.
Introducing the Lost DMB Files!
(The 2nd Season of The Green Ones will start up soon!)
During the month of July, this email update will take an intermission between the end of Season 1 of The Green Ones and the start of Season 2 of The Green Ones. I’m using this intermission to expose all of you to my Lost DMB Files series (set in the same Schism 8 universe as The Green Ones). So for the next 4-5 weeks, you’ll be receiving updates that will introduce you to the Reefer Ranger, Chancho Villarreal, and others from these pulpy, western stories. I hope you enjoy them!
If you want to read the Lost DMB Files in addition to (or instead of) The Green Ones, you’ll need to sign up for the separate https://lostdmbfiles.substack.com/ substack. After the intermission, this email update will go back to streaming The Green Ones. The https://lostdmbfiles.substack.com/ substack will send out a weekly update for the Lost DMB Files.
Read Reefer Ranger, Scene 1 — Scene 6
[Start with the introduction to the series.]
DARKNESS FELL QUICKLY AND without contest during late winter in Matamoros. Striding across an alley ripe with urine and decay, Ranger J.T. McCutchen leaned against an adobe wall. Once situated, he stilled his breathing and listened for the echoing voices of the three men he’d tracked to this unmarked cantina. Soon he heard a familiar chorus buoyed into the night air by shots of cloudy mescal.
“La cucaracha, la cucaracha, ya no puede caminar porque no tiene, porque le falta marihuana pa' fumar.”
It was a revolutionary verse, one he had heard before. Unclear about the reference to marihuana, he knew the song to be sung often by Poncho Villa supporters. The following verse could indicate something important about the men he sought.
“Cuando uno quiere a una y esta una no lo quiere, es lo mismo como si un calvo en calle encuentra un peine.”
It was nonsense, a farce. Something about unrequited love being as ridiculous as a bald man with a comb. No matter, he hadn’t suspected these men were Villistas anyhow, nor the rivaling Huertistas. The actions of Villa and Huerta only mattered to him when they spilled across the border, which after three years of revolution was happening more often.
These were most likely simple bandits, cattle rustlers, but he hadn’t followed them across the border for a goodnight kiss. He sniffed the air, the end of his nose curling. As his eyes adjusted to the scant light, he spotted a crate of rotting cabbages across the way. He covered his nose with the crook of his elbow and breathed deeply.
It seemed unlikely he’d take the men into custody without bloodshed. For a second he regretted not jumping them before they reached town.
Realizing the singing had stopped, he instinctively reached for one of his Colt .45 Flat Tops. The crunch of a boot on gravel sparked the silence. He spun to confront it, but for the first time during his ten years of service with the Texas Rangers, he was too slow. The business end of a shovel struck his brow, his skull compacting with the force of the blow. Popping lights blinded him. Spasming, he dropped his .45.
Strange, but he thought first about the condition of his hat rather than his head. He listed and would have fallen, but another attacker shoved him hard against the adobe wall. He smacked the back of his head against the mud brick, bracing himself and wondering where his hat had gone. His vision rolled left and right as if he pitched on a boat.
“Un rinche solitario. Usted debe haber permanecido el hogar, el diablo tejano.”
McCutchen steeled himself against the coming onslaught. Bloodshed was a certainty now, most likely his own. “Wherever I’m standing is my home, you dirty—”
A fist shot out of the shadows, connecting with his jaw. He thanked God for the support of the adobe wall. Stay on your feet, he thought. Reaching beneath his duster, he drew his second Colt Flat Top. Now or never. Before he could focus and aim, the shovel swept back into view. As the shovel smashed into his hand, he forced off a round. Then he forgot about God altogether.
“¡Dammit, el tiro híbrido yo!”
A din of angry voices rattled in his head like bees in a tin can before a fury of blows broke against him. Desperately he tried to whistle, to call, anything, but his jaw had swollen shut. He covered his face the best he could. Finally, someone pulled him from the wall and threw him to the ground, where a boot to his temple ended the nightmare.
Two gun shots brought a sudden end to the violence.
“La prisa, el Villistas está viniendo. ¡De nuevo a la hacienda! ¡Viva Huerta!”
Men scurried down the darkened alley echoing the refrain, “¡Viva Huerta!” The man who gave the orders paused at McCutchen’s body, limp and lifeless. He holstered his gun before stooping to pick up a single Colt .45—the second smothered by the Ranger’s body.
“¡Rápidamente!” He followed the others, leaving a stillness behind.
Filthy water trickled down the center of the alley and mixed with McCutchen’s blood. A black cat pounced from a stack of crates, chasing cockroaches past where he lay face down in the dirt. An hour later a slumped, old lady exited the cantina carrying a tablecloth full of rags slung over her shoulder like a sack. So diminutive was her stature, the bundle settled behind her knees. When she turned, there in her path lay the rinche.
“Ay, dios mio,” the lady whispered as she bent to check for a pulse. Her wrinkled face, round eyes peering from deep furrowed caves, was dark and ruddy like blood and chocolate. She straightened. Muttering to herself, her sack over her shoulder, she scuttled away.
Thirty minutes later, the old lady returned with two goats dragging a litter. Grunting, she rolled the Ranger’s upper body into the makeshift basket of rope and clicked her tongue. The goats obediently tugged the limp body of the Ranger, cowboy hat now resting on his chest, to her house on the edge of town. Without slowing, they pushed through the heavy fabric that hung over her doorway.
Glancing over her shoulder, the old woman followed them in. A chill settled into the trough of night beneath winking stars. Moments later, the goats reemerged to scavenge for scraps of garbage.
Slits of greasy light poured into the street from around the curtain door. Inside, the bent lady wrung a rag into a basin of water. Humming to herself, she dabbed crusted dirt and blood from the Ranger’s face. Unconscious, he rested upright in the basket of the litter. In the flickering light of an oil lamp the woman crossed herself in the Catholic manner while growing more rhythmic in her tune.
She lifted McCutchen’s eyelids. His eyes had rolled back into his head. She bent close to his face to block the wavering light. His eyes and the corner of his mouth twitched. She pulled down on his chin to open his airway and listened as his breath came in raspy, labored draws punctuated with irregular shudders. She massaged his face and neck before feeling again for his pulse.
Instead of beating slow as it should, it increased in tempo, his muscles tensing. Nimbly, she jumped onto the bed and rummaged on a high shelf tucked under the thatched roof. On finding a small bowl of crushed leaves, she returned to McCutchen’s side. Transferring flame from the lamp to the leaves, she breathed it to life before allowing the fire to turn to smoke.
She placed the Ranger’s hat on his forehead and draped a wet rag over its brim to cover his entire face and chest. She sat close to him, holding the bowl, allowing the smoke to rise alongside his neck up into the tent she had created. The Ranger snorted and coughed. As she kept the smoke rising steadily with her breath, his quaking muscles relaxed.
“Ah, marihuana sagrada.” Sacred marijuana.
McCutchen groaned. He felt he'd awoken in the back of a dark, pulsing cave. He wrestled with his senses until he heard a soft chittering, like quail hiding in brush. The sounds were incoherent.
He focused on smells, quickly wishing he hadn’t—manure and smoke the only two odors he could distinguish. What the hell? He tried to open his eyes. At first they refused, as if sewn together. Gradually a thick crust cracked and broke.
For several blinks, he saw nothing but a flickering blur. As the scales fell away, he recognized his surroundings as the inside of a chink house. Plaster had fallen in several areas, revealing the wooden structure packed with gravel and mud. It wasn’t a jacal or adobe, common housing for poor Tejanos and Mexicans. It was the traditional housing for Indians.
The realization seized him with panic. He jerked, reaching for his Colts, but they were gone. Pieces of memory returned in random order. He remembered hearing the chorus to La Cucaracha, discovering the trail of two horse thieves at the edge of a thicket, and the dark shape of a shovel cracking him in the skull. He remembered the scrape but had no way of knowing twenty-four hours had passed.
The chittering sounds returned. Lurching, he realized his arms were tangled, or tied down. He swore, his eye and mouth twitching. His headache throbbed with his increasing pulse.
“Usted no debe maldecir tanto, cursing no good por tu health.”
He flinched as an old woman, bearing no signs of fear or menace on her ancient face, pushed through a curtain that served as a front door. He flashed his eyes around the room. Nothing jumped out at him. Nothing seemed to indicate any sort of danger. His arms had only been laced through the ropes of a rudimentary litter, which, upon closer inspection appeared to be the source of the manure smell infusing him.
“Pardon my French,” he said as he freed himself and sat up.
“Français?” The woman looked puzzled.
“No, no. Never you mind. English will be fine. Now if you don’t mind me asking, where the hell am I? And what happened?”
“En mi casa. Los bandidos le dejaron para los muertos, pero dios sonrió en usted. ¿Entienda?” The old woman paused to let him catch up.
“Bandits. Yeah, I understand.” He slowly looked himself over. Everything appeared to be intact. He was cut, bruised and bloodied, but not so bad off, considering. His left hand had swollen stiff, most of his face an ill-fitting mask. Two thoughts occurred to him. “My hat? My guns?” She nodded her head, but stood there silently. He tried again, “Mi pistolas? Ah, sombrero?”
“Si.” She pointed with her lips to his right side.
He looked down. His hat, his grandfather’s Stetson, rested beside him. Crushed in the front and dirty, it was no worse off than him. He popped his neck, reached down, and took the hat to straighten it. A cockroach scurried from beneath the brim.
“Mi pistolas?”
The woman smiled and nodded in the affirmative.
Before he could try again he caught a whiff of something strange coming from his hat. “What’s that smell?”
“Marihuana.”
He narrowed his eyes at the old woman and waited for her to continue.
“Marihuana para sus asimientos y su asma. Le ayudó a curar. Marihuana, good medicine.”
McCutchen bolted upright, pain shooting along his spine. “You pumped me full of loco weed? To make me better?”
“Si.”
“You crazy old hag! What the hell did you do that for?” He could hear his grandfather’s words echoing in his brain, lecturing him about the limitations of men who depend on stimulants and alcohol for courage.
He’d taken a vow when he first became a Ranger that nothing stronger than a good glass of wine would violate the sanctity of his body—temperance seeming more reasonable than prohibition considering his Scotch-Irish, Presbyterian upbringing. His father may have been a spineless, religious nut, but he made a dang good wine.
As he tore into the woman again, the muscles in his face jerked and twitched worse than before. “Not now.” He pressed his fingers to his face, breathing deep. Nervous tics had affected him since youth and were intensified by stress. While studying the latest criminal justice methods in Austin he’d developed successful means to discipline and control his body. He lost them among his alien surroundings.
He tried to stand. “Look, woman. I need my damn guns, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
The woman clucked softly and shook her head. She positioning herself to support him. Struggling to fend the old woman off and stand without help, McCutchen flopped backward into the litter. She shushed him with a slashing gesture across her throat. He didn’t argue. He heard it too.
Stilling himself, he struggled to slow his heart rate and control the spasms in his face and throat. Swallowing came hard while a humming rose in his ears. Relax, dammit. But it was no use. The old woman reached under the mattress to pull out a slick Winchester rifle, lever action. She eased a bullet into the chamber.
“What the—”
She held a finger to her lips.
Boots scuffled the dirt outside the chink house. He gestured for the woman’s attention, mouthing the same question from before, “pistolas?” She stared intently at the heavy curtain hanging in her doorway as a shallow bleat from a goat ended in gurgling.
“Santa María, Madre de Dios.” She kissed an amulet hanging from her neck and steadied the rifle. It would’ve been comedic, if his life hadn’t depended on this shriveled, old woman leveling a rifle longer than she was tall.
Still trying to regulate his breathing, McCutchen scanned the room for his pistols. He heard more movement outside. The edge of the curtain bulged inward. This is crazy, he thought. I’m being hunted by bandits in Mexico with only a raisin and some goats to protect me. The only thing he could find within reach to fight with was a kettle. Cast iron, it would have to do. The curtain moved again.
A goat poked his head through the opening and bleated, blood dripping from its muzzle. A roar and flash ripped the stillness in two as the old woman pulled the trigger on the .30-30 and worked the lever action to reload.
“¡Diablo en infierno!”
The shack danced with the impact of hot lead. McCutchen slammed onto the earthen floor, abandoning the idea of the kettle. Plaster ripped off the walls and shattered in clouds of rock and dust in the air above him. “Son of a bitch!”
The old woman stood in the middle of the room. “¡Dios en cielo, trae su fuego para quemar Huerta y a sus diablos!” She shoved the barrel of the rifle into a hole in the wall and worked the lever, burning the night air with gunpowder and lead.
McCutchen dragged himself through an increasing pile of rubble, searching for his Colts while his throat continued to tighten. His right eye twitched so rapidly he could barely use it. Smoke filled the upper half of the room—the thatched roof on fire. In another few minutes the fight would be over one way or the other.
The woman stomped next to his right hand, and he looked up. “¡Pistola!” She pulled one of his Colt .45’s out from under her skirts, handing it to him.
“I’ll be a son of a—” He spun the cylinder. It was fully loaded. Outside, the gunfire lulled as the bandits waited for the flames to do their work. With nimble fingers the old woman reloaded the Winchester. She pulled a tin out from under rubble on her bed and threw it to McCutchen.
“You take. Good medicine.”
He ignored her. Twitching, he leveled his Colt toward the door where the torn curtain dangled in the opening. But it was little use. He couldn’t steady his aim. His face and neck yanked to the left. He’d be able to kill a man at ten feet, maybe. At least it was night. But the fire would make it easy for the bandits to see him and the old woman when they stepped from the burning house.
The woman bent down and took the tin. She shoved it into McCutchen’s chest. “Okay, Okay.” He tucked the tin into an inner pocket of his duster.
Without waiting longer, she surged through the curtain and into the night air before McCutchen could respond. Gunfire blazed from all around. McCutchen lurched toward the opening, chapped he was following an old woman’s lead. But a bullet struck the doorpost.
As shards of wood and rock knocked him off balance, he hit the jam hard. Quaking, the remains of the burning roof collapsed inward.
In a shower of sparks, a roof support struck him on the shoulder and drove him to the ground. The smoldering support pinned his left hand, cooking the flesh. Smoke burned his lungs. Rolling onto his back, he heaved the beam off. Above, he saw night sky where the roof had been.
Unbelievably, gunshots continued as the old woman called down fire from heaven while the Winchester delivered it. He pulled himself into the chill night air on his belly, bear-crawling away from the illumination of the flames. A hot slug struck him in the thigh like a hornet. He gritted his teeth and rolled onto his back.
A flash, followed quickly by a pop, originated from the brush beyond the clearing the goats had grazed. Dirt kicked up next to the Ranger’s boot. He steadied his aim toward the source of the flash and let his Colt roar. After tearing off three quick shots, he continued toward the shadow of a cement trough.
He threw his back against the cold cement, gasping for breath. His head spun. Lights danced and popped in his vision as the night fell quiet. The gunfire ceased, but he couldn’t stop the spasms. Overwhelmed by pain and unable to breathe, he passed out.
McCutchen awoke to several sensations at once. Scattered drops of rain chilled his exposed skin and hissed among the burning embers of rubble. Numbness alternated with electricity throughout his extremities. An orange sun brushed the belly of the clouds on the horizon. A snuffling beside his head jerked him totally awake.
A goat, one of the twins belonging to the old woman, nuzzled at the crusted blood in his hair. Snorting along his shoulder, the animal tugged his duster open and sniffed the tin in his pocket.
“Alright, that’s enough. Shoo.” Lying flat on his back, McCutchen tried to wave the animal off, but even the slightest movement was difficult. He found his hat lying next to his head, brim down and relatively dry. Well that’s a stroke of luck. He propped himself up and discovered his Colt digging into his back. “Hello pretty.”
He checked the cylinder. Three bullets. No sooner than the blood returned to its normal circuits, his nervous tics began. His right eye twitched, and his neck jerked his whole head to the left worse than as a child. A crackling sensation returned in his shoulder and hand, like his frame had been shoved into skin three sizes too small.
He’d forgotten about the burn. Picking at the charred edges of his duster, he glimpsed the white puss forming in and around the wound. His left hand had swollen and cracked, first degree burns covering the back of it. The flesh trapped under his ring blistered and continued to cook. He tried to spin it, but it stuck fast, his meaty hand much too swollen. He shook his head. Elizabeth, why can’t I let you go?
He remembered the gun shot to his thigh. Cringing, he checked behind the torn flap of bloodied denim. “Hot damn, I’ll live yet.” It had merely scratched him, taking nothing more than a bite of flesh. Coming full circle, he remembered what had brought him to Mexico in the first place. The poison of the night’s events flowed through his veins, strengthening him with hatred.
The goat lapped water from the trough. The need for drink gave McCutchen immediate purpose. “Mind if I join you?” Sweeping flotsam aside, he cupped his hands. After several scoops he steeled himself against the pain and rose to his full 6’3” height. He had some killing to attend to, but first…
He scanned the senseless carnage around him. A warm slice of sun burned the gap between cloud and horizon, blinding him as he peered toward the remains of the old woman’s house. He shaded his eyes and moved closer. Remnants of a pool of blood and drag marks in the dirt indicated where the old croon’s first shot had struck home, most likely a kill.
He refused to think about the woman herself. There could’ve been only one outcome for her, and thinking about it made his eye spasm.
He skirted the edge of the rubble into the clearing between the woman’s house and the wilderness beyond. The first grisly sight he encountered was the companion goat, throat slit from ear to ear, his side half charred. Pattering raindrops dappled the thick dust, disguising the blood trails. But he found one that started in the center of the clearing and worked its way toward the brush.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read these scenes of Reefer Ranger, Season 1 of The Lost DMB Files. I’ll be publishing FREE daily scenes from The Lost DMB Files until…I die…or something terrible happens. Seriously, I’ve got over 400 scenes written so far, and I’ll be writing more until the story reaches its natural ending. You are totally welcome to read the entire story for FREE! If at any point you decide you would rather finish the story in ebook or print format, just click the buttons below and you can do that as well. If you enjoy reading the serial releases, BUT you would also like to support me as a writer (my kids need wine!) please subscribe to my premium content for bonus scenes, exclusives, and insider access to my process. And of course, I’d be grateful if you would share this post with any of your reader friends who you think would enjoy The Lost DMB Files. Happy reading!