Chip Ward

Stony Mesa Sagas Excerpt

Stony Mesa Sagas, 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 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 chocking 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 benone.

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 the Caribbean and in Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C., 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 Virginia. 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 big Wall Street 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 saloon and restaurant Stony Mesa had ever seen. The Bull and Stallion was a hobby, or perhaps a stage where he could pretend he was not just a well-dressed whore for hedge funders and credit card companies, but a laid-back country-and-western dude with a stable full of thoroughbred horses. Local women were hired to wear skimpy cowgirl outfits, cowboy hats, and holsters with fake six-shooters. The menu featured steaks and beer with corny names that Bo made up himself. The Betty Sue Cheese Burger cost eighteen bucks and it was the cheapest item on the menu. Most of the kitchen help couldn’t afford to eat there.

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 town got indoor plumbing, paved roads, phone service, electricity, and television within living memory. Prompted by tourists who became apoplectic and hyperventilated when their cell phones could not pick up a signal, cell service had only recently been enhanced by the addition of a cell tower disguised as a gigantic flagpole. It stood on the bench above the Six Shooter Motel. Residents could see Old Glory from most vantage points in town. Even so, Stony Mesa was on the edge of technology’s reach. Venture five miles down the road and you leave the digital realm and enter the primordial world of silence where one must navigate by one’s senses alone. A GPS device may tell you where you are in a maze of wilderness canyons but it doesn’t tell you how to get out. The county’s search and rescue budget was often overdrawn.

A handful of families endured by running cattle on public land and growing fruit to sell to miners in the next county, fifty miles away. Homes were modest and the general store had a front porch where tourists on mountain bikes rested, sipped lattes, and soaked in the quaint atmosphere. The town hall was barely more than a closet and the post office was in the back of a gift shop. There were three motels in town that opened seasonally but they had fewer than thirty rooms each. In the past few years a couple of bed-and-breakfasts opened and there were two RV parks. There was a single restaurant and a couple of places to buy burgers and ice cream except in the winter when everything closed down. The town’s most memorable feature was not its enterprises but the thick and venerable cottonwoods that lined the road through town and cast welcome shadows in July.  

The Bull and Stallion Saloon was so out of scale with the rest of town that it made the adjacent buildings look like munchkin architecture. Out front was a neon monstrosity that flashed and pointed at the saloon. The marquee in the middle of the blinding beast announced specials on steaks and beer. Above the marquee shined a row of dancing bison that changed colors and pulsed incessantly. On the very top of the structure some thirty feet up was a crown of light so bright that townsfolk joked it could be seen from outer space. But the place provided jobs waiting on tables, serving beer, and cooking various kinds of meat for tourists, so most residents conceded that although it looked like an invasion from the planet Neon, it was one more draw for tourists in a town that depended on seasonal traffic to survive economically.

Stony Mesa was a gateway to a national park that drew a million tourists annually to its honey- and bone- and amber-toned canyons. In all seasons but winter they stumbled from tour buses, transfixed by the wonders of light on stone. Several times a year motorcyclists missed turns on the twisting two-lane blacktop through the park, mesmerized by a landscape of naked rock in pastel shades unlike anything they had ever seen. They discovered abruptly that the buff-colored rocks and faded sagebrush were not nearly as soft as their colors suggested. The more fortunate visitors carried away cameras stuffed with digital beauty that would inspire them long after they had departed.

The trick was to get the tourists to stop along the way. By winter the tourists would be gone and the town shut down. Many of Stony Mesa’s residents would leave for warmer destinations, too. Those who stayed would have to drive twenty miles for a jug of milk. There wasn’t a traffic light for a hundred miles in any direction. So you had to make your nut while the traffic was heavy.

Bo discovered that doing business in Stony Mesa was cheap and easy. There were few rules and the ones that had been passed couldn’t be found since the storage shed where the town’s records were kept burned down when lightning struck a nearby pinyon tree. If there had been rules, they would be hard to enforce. Stony Mesa didn’t have a real cop, just a dummy that sat in an old police car parked on the side of the road at the entrance to town. People saw the cop car and the figure sitting inside and they slowed down. When they realized the policeman was actually a mannequin they often stopped and took photos. Locals referred to the dummy as Officer Parker Dolittle. There were no lawyers in town and people generally shopped and did their banking “up-county” in a town not much bigger than Stony Mesa. The nearest Walmart was fifty miles away over a mountain pass that could be treacherous in winter.

Tourism and recreation kept Stony Mesa going while the rest of Boon County raised cows and grew alfalfa for cows. Some timber was cut and milled locally but most of the nearby forests were protected by the feds. There was a uranium boom long ago and some old-timers hoped mining would come back but it never did. Greasing the skids with county commissioners on any project Bo wanted to pursue was easy. Any questionable enterprise could pass unquestioned by commissioners starved for revenue and desperate to create jobs for the children of large families, including their own, who had to move away to find work. Most of the local politicians had never seen so much as a power-point presentation and were impressed by a man who dressed and talked like them but swept in on a private jet. Stony Mesa was easy pickings for a man of Bo Hineyman’s power and stature. Until, that is, he crossed Otis Dooley.

Otis was mayor by default. Nobody else in the town of a few hundred wanted the office. There was no pay and little status attached to a job which was widely regarded as thankless. Being mayor meant that your neighbors constantly complained to you about low water pressure, barking dogs, and abandoned trucks in weedy yards. Then there was Crazy Kitty who was convinced that the new laser-read water meters could monitor her political and sexual activity. Most people in town cringed at the thought of that last bit of unwanted information. Kitty binged on Fox News and had a rude streak whenever she sensed the black helicopters were about to land.

There was not much that could be done to keep Kitty from endlessly bringing up her complaints about the water meter conspiracy at town council meetings and so most of Stony Mesa’s citizens stayed away. There were other eccentric people in town who were also tolerated but not pleasant for a mayor to handle. Like old Ezra Pitts who liked to roam town at night looking into lit windows with binoculars and Theda Bringhurst who kept two dozen cats in her small cabin that smelled like a litter box. Otis had concluded that Stony Mesa was too small to have more than one town idiot so they had to take turns.

There were several competent people in the community who could be mayor but they lived outside the town’s narrow formal boundaries and so were legally unqualified. A small retirement and second home community had sprung up on the outskirts of the village. The few retirees who actually lived in town moved there to relax and escape such mundane matters as refereeing squabbling neighbors and keeping the town’s one fire truck running. They could care less what happened on Main Street.

Except for that sign in front of the Bull and Stallion. The sign was an affront to all who lived there. Otis Dooley hated that sign more than anyone. Otis was an amateur astronomer. His days were consumed by plumbing and carpentry but his nights were devoted to stars and Stony Mesa had more stars gleaming in the night sky than almost any place on the planet. Far from a city and sitting beneath black-shouldered mountains and rimmed by tall canyon walls, Stony Mesa had almost no ambient light. The desert air was dry and clean.

On most nights one could easily see an awesome lattice of pulsing light divided by the faint phosphorescent trail of the Milky Way against an obsidian black sky. Otis converted a small cabin behind his home into an observatory for a large telescope that was his pride and joy. He named his telescope Spock after the television character in Star Trek.

Otis might be on his knees with dirty hands during the work day but at night he could shed his coveralls, sit back and squint through Spock at the sublime heavens. Most nights he floated out of himself and into a universe of stars, galaxies, planets, comets, and nebulae. He marveled at the vast array of color. Yellow, red, and blue are most common but the deepest views Hubble allows reveal giant clouds of interstellar dust and gas that shimmer like the inside of a lustrous abalone shell. During the Perseid meteor shower, scores of shooting stars slid across the summer sky. Full moons were so bright he needed sunglasses to look at them.

There was always something new to see and yet the night sky had fixed points that had been emitting light for a billion years. In fact, he knew that the light he saw when he looked up at stars had been traveling toward earth for so long that anything he might see through Spock today actually happened before he was born, maybe thousands of years ago. The scale of time and space was humbling.

When Otis mapped the heavens with his eye, he saw the same night sky that the ancient Pueblo Indians saw. To think that he was linked to the mysterious strangers who had littered Stony Mesa’s landscape with arrowheads, shattered pottery, and shards of stone tools was humbling. A black stump of petrified wood sat by his doorstep, creviced with crystals and marbled with orange, red, and yellow veins. To think that when that stone stump was a green and living tree the night sky was much the same as the sky he was looking at right now, well, that was more than humbling, that was mind-boggling. But knowing that he was here now to participate in this amazing universe was also inspiring. I may only be alive for a moment, he thought, but this is my moment.

As he stargazed he became a participant in the grand human quest to pierce the invisible and perceive the secrets of the universe. Squinting through a microscope at the hidden microbial world or squinting through a telescope at galaxies beyond the cave of the naked eye, one was opened to wondrous life and infinite possibility. It was this curiosity, this need to know the world beyond the physical limitations of our species, whether we mapped the stars, DNA, or the bottom of the ocean, that made us worthy of our unique place in the order of life, Otis thought. When he put his eye to Spock, he took part in the grand pageant of civilization. There was a kind of dignity to it. Compared to that, neon was just a gaudy trick at best, a reckless cataract of light made by fools to blind the enlightened.

Such reflections about time and space made Otis Dooley modest, grateful, and reverent. The balm of his nightly skywatching also helped him to be a good and generous neighbor, a dependable and honest worker, a patriot who was even willing to take on the tedious and thankless job of Stony Mesa mayor.

On the first night that the sign in front of the Bull and Stallion was lit, Otis retreated from a day of low-back pain and aching fingers to his telescopic lair. He sighed, swung his barreled lens skyward, and pinched his face into the eyepiece only to discover that his beloved night sky had faded under the celestial bleach emanating from the saloon’s pulsing sign.

He was immediately thrown from his nighttime zone of awe and reverence into the arms of a bottle of bourbon that he hid behind the observatory wall. They woke up together the following morning. After a restless afternoon of grieving and steaming, it was clear. He’d be damned if that rich faux-cowboy Bo Hineyman would wreck his precious view of the stars. And as the town’s duly elected mayor, it was his duty to confront the offender.

He marched into the Bull and Stallion. Hineyman stood at the kitchen door reminding a couple of waitresses to greet customers with “howdy partner.” The night before, Kimmy Jo Roberts greeted a handsome and very buff male customer with a big smile and a salacious “Bang! Bang!” Bo overheard her. Now, he was telling her that the six-shooters were a part of a costume that might make some people, all the French people and the tourists from New York, for example, a little nervous. No need to draw attention to them. Kimmy Jo stole a glance at her cousin Starla Huggins and rolled her eyes while Bo’s head was turned. She started to make the sign for crazy but ended up fingering her hair when he turned her way.

“Oh, and never hand them the menu before telling them there’s a selection of fifty beers to be had.” He tried to smile to soften the criticism and come across as a good guy after all. It was a heavy lift for Bo as it required pushing his cheeks up against the tide of a perpetually furrowed brow.

Otis couldn’t wait. “Bo, that electric bonfire you call a sign is ruining a precious resource.” Diplomacy was not Mayor Dooley’s strong suit.

“What resource?” Hineyman huffed. “The night sky, you moron!”

“What?”

“People come from all over the world who have never seen the Milky Way, heck, never seen more than a few stars. They look up and they are awestruck. When they go home they tell all their friends who want to come here and see the same, maybe even eat a bison burger at your damn saloon. But when that sign of yours is on all they see is a bunch of friggin’ buffalo dancing, the word ‘steak’ over and over, and a big red arrow pointing at the door.” His anger was peaking. “It’s an abomination! Damn thing needs a dimmer switch!”

“The only thing dim around here, Dooley, is you. That sign cost me fifty grand. It has state-of-the-art digital controls, the whole works. It's about time someone stepped up the hand-lettered crap that passes for signage here. That arrow doesn’t point to my door, knucklehead, it points to the future!”

“Oh bullshit, Bo, it doesn’t fit here and neither do you. Do you think you can just push in here and take over the night sky—own it?”

“I don’t have to stand here and listen to some squat gnome who cleans grease out of pipes for a living. Get out of here before I call the police!”          

“We don’t have any police. You ain’t in your office in Washington now, dickhead.”

“We have a Boon County sheriff and if ever you walk your sorry ass into this establishment again, I’ll call him. Now get out!”

The two men were mindful that they were arguing in a public place so they politely refrained from shouting. They delivered their insults through clenched teeth and red faces. A bystander may have mistaken them for contestants in a vein bursting contest.

Otis left as he was ordered to but the following week he wrote a guest column in the county’s weekly paper. It read, “Our pioneer ancestors who settled Stony Mesa were rugged individualists but they understood that nobody can stand alone in a wilderness like ours. Neighbors stepped up and built an irrigation system that still keeps our desert valley fertile. They built a school, a town hall, and a church together. They understood that as tough and self-sufficient as a person might be, he still needs a community to make life good. It is our turn to step up and keep Stony Mesa from being gobbled up by the highest bidder.”

Bo Hineyman was never named but everyone understood who Otis was talking about. Bo was livid. He called his lawyer, Brad Rugby, and asked if he could sue for defamation. “Are we aiming to win or just teaching him a lesson?” asked Rugby.

“Teach him and any other hick motherfucker who wants to mess with Bo Hineyman that they better not start,” he replied. Rugby chuckled and said he would get right on it. Intimidation and Harassment were full partners in Brad Rugby’s law office. Bo hired them often.

A week later Hineyman’s horse pooped on Otis’s shoes and Otis returned the moist bomb to its rightful owner. The feud was out in the open for all to see.

When Bo Hineyman’s strangled body was discovered two weeks later, Otis was the prime suspect.

Published in Stony Mesa Sagas, Torrey House Press, 2017. Published with permission from Torrey House Press.