Ken Hada is a fourth generation Oklahoman, descendant of Danish and Hungarian immigrants: Gypsy poets, barn dance aficionados, art lovers, amateur philosophers, wheat farmers, preachers, teachers and common-sense craftsmen.

“These poems, acting as spare parts themselves, go into the making of one smooth-running, powerful engine.”

 - Diane Glancy

Author of Pushing the Bear

In a Texas Minute | by Page Getz

 

Miles Wayside was alone for almost two-thirds of his life. The other third he was directing the least authentic moments of strangers’ lives, strangers who were either too poor or too cheap to go to the mall two towns over. Usually both. Miles was a photographer at K-mart in Rockingstar, Texas, on the poorest side, near Fort Bliss, so he had spent ten years staring at one of three plywood K-mart backdrops: The Alamo, the Lone Star Flag and a Christmas nativity scene with a Virgin Mary everyone said was the spitting image of Loretta Lynn. Miles had been staring at them for so long that when he closed his eyes, he still saw them.

“Warm beer!” Halley Bell Rollins nodded a Texas nod, tossing Miles a bottle from the back of her father’s faded Ford Ranger when he came out of the K-mart doors. The parking lot was almost deserted as all of Rockingstar was either halfway through the barbeque ribs at the lazy potlucks of Southern Baptist churches or standing in line at the new International House of Pancakes on East Alamo Road.

“You smell like Christmas,” Miles said as he almost dropped the beer.

Halley Bell shrugged as she stood over a cooler full of warm Lone Star beer, the National beer of Texas according to its label, with her German Shepherds, Cujo and Goodnight. “We need ice,” she said.  

“I’ll get it,” Miles said, looking nervous as he turned and headed back around the sun-stripped plastic horses on the mini-carousel towards the ice machine between the inflatable Hannah Montana swimming pools and the Veteran’s Day display. Miles was always nervous before a rally.

“You’re gonna have to hold the dogs today,” Halley Bell said. “I’ve got fliers.”

Miles nodded. He was used to the way of Rockingstar women, especially the Rollins ones, whose pumpkin patch bordered his family’s backyard. Though his own small farm had gone to Johnson grass since his parents passed on to that pumpkin patch in the sky, he didn’t mind the way the ivy always stretched over the rusted barbed wire and into his empty backyard.

Rockingstar women married the summer out of high school and Miles had been so uncool at Rockingstar High that when there were no girls left to ask to La Vida Loca prom at the Elks Lodge, he braced himself to die alone. During his breaks he would share blue Icees on the little faded carousel with Halley Bell, who worked in cosmetics. She had just turned sixteen and wasn’t yet cool enough to notice how remarkably uncool Miles was. They would talk about what they were going to do with their lives when things changed. Miles and Halley Bell shared an astonishing capacity for always saying the wrong thing, but in Miles case he always seemed to find the worst thing possible, while Halley Bell had a certain Texas flair about it.

Once the ice was stocked and the duct tape was distributed to all the necessary parts, Halley Bell went to work decorating the truck while Miles fidgeted with the cap on his beer, unable to open it. “Aren’t you drinking?” he asked.

“I’m off carbs,” Halley Bell said, winking a Texas wink as she took Miles’ beer, opened the cap with her teeth and then spit it out. “Twelve grams of carbs— can you believe that?” she asked as she dug through a cardboard box full of picket signs and flags.

There were no American flags in Rockingstar Texas. There were two flags, one was Confederate and the other was the state flag, the Lone Star. “The lonely star,” Halley Bell called it as she hung her father’s worn flag over the top of the rusted truck for the weekly vigil on Patriot Road. There were only Lone Star flags left since the Confederate ones made a little black girl named Millie cry in 1985 and the city council had an emergency meeting at the biggest Southern Baptist church in town with one agenda item and that was, what would Jesus do about the Confederate flags around town that seemed to make little black girls cry? The council voted unanimously over Evadna Kramer’s biscuits and gravy to ban Confederate flags in Rockingstar, they were “Baptists after all,” the mayor said,” and Southern ones at that.” Reporters from the capital came down to cover it, making Millie famous for a while before she married herself a GI and they got stationed in Giebelstadt, Germany.

And that just left a town of Lone Star flags on every mailbox, every church and every truck east of the Alamo. According to the welcome sign on the city limits, Rockingstar was “home of the best beef jerky, biggest trout and the loudest church bells in Texas.” It was also the home of the largest concentration of Texas Nationalists in the state.

Halley Bell stood on the truck bed handing out leaflets while Miles drove slowly to the protest, blasting a bootleg of the Rawhide theme song that a DJ from the Panhandle had looped into Rage Against the Machine screaming “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.” Her father did not approve, but he was glad to see that she had a passion for “the most important issue there has been for 100 years.”

“Bring your flag and your dogs,” Halley Bell nodded under her cowboy hat, as she leaned out of the truck bed to hand a leaflet to some half-lit GI’s in the car next to them at a red light, “We’ll bring the beer and the bug spray.”

“What’s this about now?” one asked, interested only because of the way her sun-stained Texas hair fell down her slightly sunburned Texas back. On the drive over from the Nation of Texas Little Baptist Church, she had changed out of her JC Penny Sunday dress and into Daisy Dukes, boots and a wife beater that read “Texas Tough” for the vigil. At sixteen, she was skinny for twelve, and though every inch of her was Texan, not an inch of her looked tough.

“It’s the Texas Nationalist Movement,” Halley Bell said. “Secession!”

“What is that little girl going on about?” another GI asked.

“We want to restore the Republic of Texas,” Halley Bell said. “Secession— you know, secede from the union.”

“What union?”

“The union of states. U-nited States— America.”

“Honey, if you wanna get a following around here you sure gotta find an easier word for folks than secession.” They laughed as they drove away.

Halley Bell didn’t mind being misunderstood. Her family was big enough she didn’t need to make any friends, which was convenient since she didn’t have any.  The Rollins family had been in the secession business for 139 years. That meant that every Sunday for 139 years, her family gathered in front of the post office, with picket signs and lemonade to protest “being America’s bitch,” according to her father, Caddy Mills Rollins III. There was never much drama because the post office was closed on Sundays, but it was the only federal building in Rockingstar and everybody worked too much and had too many kids to protest any other day.

Nobody wanted to stay in Rockingstar. Nobody but Halley Bell. While other kids were planning their escapes to college or the military, Halley Bell followed her father around, dreaming about the war of secession. The other kids spent their weekends on road trips to the mall or to Dallas, but Halley Bell preferred the family shooting range to the mall. And when she wasn’t firing at rotten pumpkins, she was elbow deep in cinnamon and ginger, baking pumpkin pies for the farmer’s market.

Caddy, as he was known from the Lord’s house to the roadhouse, restored Harleys while his wife, Dixie Jr. ran the farm. It was her family’s land and she and her seven sisters ran the pumpkin patch in fall, Christmas trees all winter and fireworks stand every summer, while the men opened jars, fixed things and still found time to run the secession campaign. They were more ambitious than most folks, which Dixie Jr. attributed to Jesus and a lot of homegrown Angus beef. The Rollins family had so many acres of Virginia Pines that they all smelled like Christmas trees all the time.

“This ain’t a state,” Caddy said through the bullhorn to a crowd of whistling Texans, waving paper fans made up of copies of the Joint Resolution of Congress for the Annexation of Texas dated March 1, 1845. “This here’s a colony and I tell you what, there will be blood in the Yankee streets when we take back the Republic of Texas! Blood-in-the-streets!”

The crowd erupted from their lawn chairs where they ate fried pickles, funnel cake and hot dogs on paper plates. “Remember Waco!” somebody screamed, and fired a rifle into the Texas ethers where Caddy imagined ten generations of Rollins angels with white wings and wingtip bullhide boots, brass halos over their cowboy hats, and above them, Jesus himself, with a Stetson hat and a rifle, watching proud, like a Texas Messiah.

There were dogs everywhere. Rockingstar was a town that loved its dogs. Big dogs. And the Rollins family had the biggest dogs. Each of the kids had two of their own and Caddy’s five dogs, Ford, Raider, Ranger, Chevy and the baby, a pit bull called Charger, were circling the grill waiting for a mistake.

While the crowd sat out on their lawn chairs with their barbeque and their rifles, their big Texas dogs and the Texas sun in their eyes, Halley Bell and her six brothers went to work handing out leaflets with stars and eagles and rifles all over them to promote their annual protest at the Rockingstar Veteran’s Day Parade.

As his wife sold homemade beef jerky out of the back of their Ford, Mil Tumble, the resident loose cannon, took the bullhorn. “When we came into the union in 1845 we had a deal! We had a deal that we could leave anytime we was good and ready,” Mil said. “Well, we’re ready now!

“They call us a terrorist state. Well, around here we know who the real terrorist is and that’s China! America is China’s hostage and Texas is America’s bitch.”

There was a lot of hollering after that. Everyone in Rockingstar hated China. All the shelves of the local chain stores were lined with Tupperware from China, salt and pepper shakers from China, a certain Charlie’s Angel’s Scalloped Floral Blue 16 Piece Dinnerware set made in China and most offensively, hoodies that said Texas on the outside, but their labels said, “MADE IN CHINA” on the inside.

Caddy passed the bullhorn around like they did every Sunday until they were all losing their Texas voices and then they would finish grilling up the hot dogs and go home to watch football when one of the wives finally said, “let’s call it a day, boys.”

Miles went to the secession protest every week, but he never spoke, not since they handed him the bullhorn ten years earlier and he stuttered in such an un-Texas  stutter that all the women shook their heads in a very Texas way all at once, saying, “Bless his heart.” The men towered over him and even the women looked like Teamsters standing beside him. He was pale like a secret with the thread-thin, crooked look of one of those palm trees that don’t make any sense to gravity. Not the kind of trees growing around Rockingstar.

What Miles didn’t know was that Caddy had a little too much Lone Star Beer that day on account of his arthritis acting up. “Why don’t you ask your little K-mart friend if he wants to say something about this great nation of Texas,” Caddy told Halley Bell and before she could talk him out of it, Miles found himself behind a bullhorn that seemed as big as Dallas.

A curious Texas hush of anticipation came over the crowd as no one ever forgets anything in a town as small as Rockingstar. Miles cleared his throat and then stood stiff as an icebox full of frozen game. It seemed all of Rockingstar and even Caddy’s redneck angels hung in suspense. There were crickets in the silence. There was a rattle of Texas wind against the picket signs. And in the waiting the silence got louder until they could hear even the sad sun give up on him. Nothing could be worse than the silence, Halley Bell thought.

“I like Texas,” Miles finally said in the fragile voice of a crack in a Victorian teacup.

And it was worse.  

Because they were Baptists— and Southern ones— even the children held their breath to keep from laughing and therefore burning in the vicious fires of Satan’s wrath for all of Texas Eternity. So the silence returned and finally Dixie Jr. intercepted, grabbing the bullhorn to howl, “Well, I like Texas too,” which segued mercifully into a “Free Texas” chant. The men shook their heads at the tragic public display of failed Texas masculinity until they lost themselves in a particularly emotional rendition of “Deep in the heart of Texas.”

“That’s what happens when you’re an only child,” Caddy told Halley Bell later as they watched Texas A&M lose to the Arkansas Razorbacks. The family wore matching Aggies hoodies made in Texas and sat behind TV trays while the dogs slept under their feet.

“He’s just shy s’all,” Halley Bell said. “That’s no crime.”

“Listen up, Halley Bell,” Caddy cleared his throat with a swig of Lone Star beer to indicate wisdom was coming, though his eyes didn’t stray from the TV. “There’s two kindsa people in this world. There’s folks who makes things happen and there’s folks who watch things happen.” Caddy nodded the Texas nod to signify the end of the conversation, confident that this talk would inspire her to marry Texas big and manufacture a Texas army of Rollins children.

Rockingstar families had even more children than dogs. The way they figured, it was cheaper to have more kids than it was to hire Mexicans. So they did. They had as many as their wives could turn out and that way they could stand to spare some for daughters to marry away, sons to get stationed away and the inevitable unspoken loss to the Lavender Exodus that took one every few years off to Austin or San Francisco, rarely to be heard from again. Everyone thought Miles would be one of them, but it turned out he was of a different persuasion. He was just “an odd duck,” as Caddy put it. “No harm in that.”

Caddy was the kind of sturdy man used to sitting at the head of a table that proved you couldn’t fight with a Texan because they talk way too slow. So Halley Bell kept her Texas mouth shut hoping her father wouldn’t notice that she suspected she was an even odder duck.

*

The next day was a typical Texas day on the range. Even through the K-mart elevator Muzak you could hear the familiar rolling artillery fire from Fort Bliss where the boys were in the field, the scattered barking of dogs, the sweeping of early October leaves and the occasional jet, the only planes that seemed to fly over the soft-spoken town.

 “I think loneliness is the most dangerous emotion there is,” Miles told Halley Bell as she was stocking Wet n’ Wild lip gloss during his break.

“Loneliness ain’t no emotion,” Halley Bell said.

“What is it then?”

“A mistake?” Halley Bell shrugged. “I don’t know. Seems like some kinda bad habit to me.”

Miles chewed on his blue Icee straw making a faint and wobbly howling noise, like the sound of something plastic dying.

“Are you trying to tell me you’re lonely?” Halley Bell asked, “You want me to hook you up with another one of my cousins?”

“It’s not that kind of lonely.”

“What other kind is there?”

“I just want something.”

“What do you want?”

“Something. I don’t know what, but I need something.”

“Prozac, maybe.”

“No.”

“Maybe you’re not getting enough red meat.”

“I eat beef jerky everyday.”

“Maybe you should try one of those macrobiotic diets. My aunt tried it and she won the lottery, like a thousand dollars.”

“No way. Folks already think I’m gay. That’s all I need.”

“Maybe you should get a dog.”

 A dog. Miles knew immediately. That’s exactly what he needed.

*

The Rockingstar Animal Shelter was on East Patriot Road between a Denny’s and the Velvet Elvis Flea market. Though no rabbit, no bird or fish, not even the squirrels were safe from Rockingstar’s hunting season, no dog could be touched. The people of Rockingstar were more impassioned about the welfare of dogs than they were about their teenagers. So the town’s only refuge for dogs was a no-kill shelter.

As a result, the prison-like cages were mobbed with dogs. Very big dogs. Texas dogs. Little dogs never seemed to survive in Rockingstar. Occasionally the locals would find dead puppies in the creek, usually Chihuahuas who were sickly and not the kind of dog any Texan would have a use for.

“What kind do you want?” Halley Bell asked as they wandered through aisles of Pit bulls, Labs, German Shepherds and Dobermans that seemed to be writhing in chronic Texas despair.

“I was hoping to find something a little smaller.”

“We don’t really get little dogs here,” said Winsel, the short guy who was cleaning out cages as part of his community service for a DUI.

 Miles tried walking the smallest dogs, but they all over powered him, either knocking him over, dragging him or breaking loose from the chain. When Miles had tried every dog in the pound and found he couldn’t handle any of them, he cried sitting on the side of a bench knocked over by a bloodhound that had escaped him and was now being chased by Halley Bell and several staff.

 “You want a little dog?” Winsel said. “Don’t cry, man. I can get you a little dog if you’ve got cash.”

Miles stopped crying. “It’s gotta be really small.”

Winsel had friends who ran an illegal puppy mill that bred small dogs. Not just small dogs, the smallest dogs. Teacup Chihuahuas. It was an underground operation on the outskirts of town and it was surrounded by armed guards.

Late Saturday night, Miles met Winsel outside the abandoned grain elevator on the edge of Rockingstar. They drove down several dirt roads, parked and then walked for a Texas minute (an hour) through idle Johnson grass and spurred weeds until they arrived at the puppy mill. It looked dark and vacant, but as they approached, five armed guards masked like Zapatistas ambushed them in the dark.  “It’s okay, it’s me, Winsel.” One guard pressed a flashlight against Winsel’s face and then nodded at the others.

Inside, there were thousands of wobbling, trembling, howling teacup Chihuahuas, crammed into narrow cages with faces so hungry and scared, Miles thought it would break even the heart of a feral cat to see them. He picked out the one that wobbled and trembled the most. “I’ll call him Cracker Barrel,” Miles said, “It’s my favorite place in the city.”

“Whatever,” Winsel shrugged. “Let’s hope you can handle this one better than them bloodhounds down at the shelter.” Winsel wished him luck with the dog as he dropped him off at the grain elevator and promised him that if he breathed a word about the puppy mill to anyone or tried to return there without him that he would personally cut off his fingers and let the Zapatistas have their way with him.

That night, Miles couldn’t sleep. Cracker Barrel slept on his head, still trembling in his sleep while Miles cried over the sad state of the other dogs. Winsel said they sold the dogs through the internet, while the cops looked the other way for a price. It was the largest puppy mill in the Southern half of the U-nited States. Most of the Chihuahuas ended up in West L.A. or on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan, if they survived the grueling conditions at the puppy mill. By morning, Miles knew what he had to do. He had to free those dogs, no matter how many fingers it cost him.

Miles called in sick Sunday morning. When Halley Bell called about the weekly secession vigil, he tried to come up with a convincing cough, but she could tell he was faking it. Finally she got the truth out of him.

“You can’t go in there alone,” she said.

“I’ve got my grandfather’s six-shooter and my night vision goggles and my lucky flashlight.”

Halley Bell thought for a minute. “Fuck,” she said.

“I’ve gotta go,” Miles said. “Will you take Cracker Barrel if I don’t come back?” “If I can change his name,” Halley Bell said.

Miles hesitated. “Just promise you won’t name him after a truck.”

“What about Hummer?” Halley Bell asked.

“No,” Miles said, startling her. In all the years she had known him, he had never said no to her and she was pretty sure he had never said no to anyone. There was something very Texas about it.

“Well now, hold your horses,” Halley Bell said. “If you’re really fixin’ to do this, then your gonna need an army and we got one.”

An hour later, Miles found himself standing on top of a cooler with Cracker Barrel in his pocket, in front of an army of cowboy secessionists waving his six-shooter, talking about the blood of innocent dogs spilled on Rockingstar soil. This time he didn’t need a bullhorn. He just closed his eyes and pictured those trembling puppies and his fear dissolved into the Texas winds.

“These little dogs are being starved so that rich folks in Beverly Hills like that Paris Hilton can use them for accessories! Well, I’m not having it!” he said. “I’m going in there with or without you, but if you love your dogs, you boys will grab them guns and follow me down there, ‘cause we got some Chihuahuas to bust free!”

At first, the crowd stood in shock at the transformation in Miles, but as he kept talking they put down their signs and picked up their guns. Even Halley Bell watched Miles in disbelief. When the cowboys saw how fragile Cracker Barrel was, some of them were driven to tears.

“You heard him, boys,” Caddy said. “We got some dogs to see about!” With that he fired his rifle into the Texas sky and they tore through the town like feverish horsetailed fire crackers and whistling bottle rockets on the Fourth of July. As they were charging through the streets on Harleys and trucks, the cowboys got on their cell phones and called every trigger-happy hillbilly they knew. Since they were always prepared for the war of secession, their guns were already loaded and the mob became an army, not stopping until they found the puppy mill.

With the army behind him, Miles shook as he faced the prison-like walls of the puppy mill. Through the bullhorn, with a voice as big as the Fort Worth airport, he told the guards, “Might as well make this easy on yourselves and put your guns down, fellas, ‘cause we got a hundred men and twice as many guns and we ain’t leavin’ until every last one of them puppies is free!”

They didn’t wait for an answer. The cowboys rushed the building, and as they did, ten guards surrendered without a fight.

“We’re tearing this place down,” Caddy told them, “And if you build another one, we’ll tear that down too!”

While some of the cowboys stood over them with guns, dozens of the militia, including Miles, stormed into the puppy mill to open the cages. As the cage doors opened, thousands of Teacup Chihuahuas scattered everywhere. Many more of them were too scared to move, so the giant Texas cowboys loaded up their pockets and arms with the little dogs until every last man was covered in Teacup Chihuahuas, crawling, shaking and clinging to them. Miles smiled as he watched the puppies scamper out into the arms of these giant cowboys, leaving a hundred empty cages behind them. Halley Bell came through the door of the Puppy Mill looking for Miles. She had a white tea cup Chihuahua in one hand and her rifle in the other. He put down his six-shooter when he saw her and gave her a Texas nod.

 

THE END.