You'd Have to Know the Land

About the Book

There is not a man on the face of this planet who has not played the romantic game and either been burned or been burned and stayed burned. The courts are full of love horror stories. Hollywood has made a mint out of infidelity and romance writers claim it as their vehicle to the moon.

You’d Have To Know the Land is the tale of one man’s stroll into that all-electric arena.

Joe Bravo has come to cheap and dusty West Texas from Santa Fe, New Mexico by way of California, where – and this is no ethnic slam, but merely fact – he has lost a woman he thought he loved to an Asian man, not exactly a rarity in Lotus Land, but there it is anyway.

As with handsome men in a small town, women aren’t hard to come by for Patrick. The search for a pretty one, however, is the challenge. Dixie Allyson Fields looms as Joe’s main squeeze as the novel opens and the tale begins to unfold. He is laboring for peanuts as a reporter for The San Angelo Daily Waltz, a newspaper that has just won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for its Team Coverage of the annual chili cook-off  in nearby Terlingua. Dixie Allyson is a prize only if you must spend any amount of time in a hardly-amusing town like San Angelo. She has few social skills other than lifting a beer bottle and applying way to much red lipstick, although her breasts can sure warm the cold and lonesome heart, as Joe has discovered.

Joe dreams of finding that lost vein in his emotional river that will deliver him to a place where he again finds the sort of happiness he enjoyed as a young man in his native Santa Fe. Of late, he has been on a treadmill to nowhere, for the most part failing at various ventures and wondering why things never pan out as he expects. He lives in a small apartment while trying to break into the aerial field of crop dusting. To that end, he has dropped much of his life’s savings into an ancient bi-plane he has painted bright yellow and christened “Cloudboy.” It begins as a money-losing idea. But, boll weeveils being what they are to cotton growers, there is the prospect of riches coming for sure. It’s a shot in the dark, yet he feels good about the idea, so much so that he educates himself on the profession. It’s a life, too.

Then comes a chance meeting with the beauitiful Angelette Barneburg, a woman so pretty that he bowls over like a pin being knocked down by a boxer’s oversized medicine ball. Angelette is the proverbial West Texas mirage, a gorgeous sight to behold and someone worth pining for in summer heat that clears the 109-degree range every damned day. Joe, himself, carries a lousy tape of his own past. He pleases women after pleasing himself. He invites them into his world and then pushes them out. He treats them like queens and then demotes them to maids. He takes them high into the sky and then drops them to the streetcurb. Love? What is love? To this point, Joe has accepted the proposition that he is a man and that women are for men. He is here, he will say with pride, to offer something a little different. Nothing more; nothing less.

As the story begins, we find that there already is a string of women in town who have tasted his brand of carnal love. Several in the lot have left lasting memories. Most of the others have come and gone, choosing to forget the adventure, the one-way ride down the hot-metal slide. It’s okay. It’s okay to run into a woman you’ve had in town and merely say, “Hell-o.” Why not? You know pretty much everything about her, no? Why string it along by creating anger, by ignoring a woman who did her part, who came over and undressed for you, who did her best to pleasure you when you needed pleasuring, who didn’t ask for money, who played her part and then left with a bit of dignity you must honor by saying, “Hell-o.” You do it and you leave the joint with your head held high and your feelings riding a state of grace. It’s not hard to do. It would be much harder to take a punch to the face, to

About the Author

Three men grabbing for the same rope may be a losing proposition, except that when a man reaches the ripe age of 40 that rope may be all he wants. Life along the Texas-Mexico border, where chili means nuclear chili, comes with alcoholed mornings, harsh days, and wild nights that magnify all visual frames into full-blown dramas. It is in this setting that Patrick Alcatraz, narrator of this contemporary tale, scoots the reader into a world where whiskey brings better movies than Hollywood. Things may be falling apart from coast to coast. But, for the characters of this novel, the romantic heart has never been about feeling a skipped beat. It’s been all about racing past the ticking stage and exploding into so many frayed feelings that gathering them for burial would be missing the damned point. A man can, indeed, dance his ass off on burning coals…