From my dry perch in the tallest building in Marysville, my twenty-forth toothpick swirling, I watched with fascination as the motor home lifted slightly, listed and then disappeared behind the levee with a huge gush of water.

I watched in shock as Yamelda, goddamn, Keating got knocked to her knees and washed out of sight. I wished I could do something, but on second thought, maybe not. She’d been a thorn in my butt for years. She’d relentlessly dogged me ever since the Tenican disaster. Because of her, I’d been on the news more than the weather and she hadn’t painted a pretty picture. Good riddance!

The gap in the levee widened allowing water to gush toward downtown.

I’d worked out all the details. I counted on the flood. When the rains hadn’t stopped, I celebrated. With each rising foot of water I toasted to future success. When the far side of the levee, the freaking wrong side, gave way, my buildings were not going to be flooded. Never mind that the entire WASS news team was washed over the side and probably drowned. I didn’t consider that most of upper class Marysville was going to be under water. It was the biggest disaster in fifty years yet all I could think about was what was going to happen to my extremely overextended investments.

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I was tired of waiting out the rain. I was fed up with sitting around watching TV and drinking beer. Breast fondling was the only thing I wasn’t tired of, but Tammy’s breasts were becoming tedious. I’d been inside the house for the better part of the day. Tammy and me had spent most of the morning practicing Billy inspired sex positions. Although I only drank two six-packs so far, I felt thickheaded and numb.

I picked up the phone and hit the re-dial button. The number rang my best bud, Sundog Anderson. He was the only person I ever called.

As the phone rang, I thought for the hundredth time that no sane mother would ever name a guy Sundog, but in the five years I’d known him, I never weaseled any other name out of him. Sundog was his name and I’d come to accept it.

I re-dialed twice and let the phone ring four times each call. It was The Dog Man’s secret code.

He answered with his normal gruff voice. “What the fuck you want?”

I tried to match him. “Hey Dog, what the fuck you up to?” Continue reading →

Billy F. Marlin
Last week, of all things, I, the great Casanova of the North Valley, Billy F. Marlin, oh so quietly turned thirty-six. The big three-six was too close to over the hill. That birthday forced me to notice my long, straight, surfer-blond hair was thinning. Last month, holy shit, I found three strands of gray in my silky blonde mustache and one in my goatee. Unnoticed during the last year, my skin had turned from the healthy tan of my youth to a humbling pallid gray. My jet-black eyes were glazed and dull, probably from smoking too much pot. My good life was catching up with me. My devil-may-care lifestyle was tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “you’re getting older, Billy. You’re no longer a spring chicken.”

All week I’d ignored that naggy little voice. I’m only as old as I feel. I’m in my prime. I looked at myself in my chipped wall mirror and flexed. As a result of working out every day at the Marysville Fitness Center, I admired my perfectly formed biceps and patted my rippled, flat stomach. My first fitness objective was to keep my body looking good, but mostly the fitness center, along with Clancy’s Bar and Grill, was my place to find what me and the boys called babes.

One week after my pivotal, I’m-getting-older birthday I sat mesmerized on my avocado green, poly-vinyl couch. I held a cold beer in one hand, while the other hand fondled one of the budding breasts of my latest score, Tammy Fae Ballinger. In front of me in living color, though only thirteen inches of color, on a matching green plastic milk crate I’d borrowed from Safeway, I watched my number-one entertainment; daytime television.

Next to the couch sat an empty cardboard box on which to set my beer. The box, TV, couch and milk crate were the only pieces of furniture in my dinky living room. My two-room cabin was nestled in a quiet little out-of-the-way corner of town, backed up to busy interstate seventy. What else could a red-blooded American guy want?

The television story of the never-ending rain sparked my interest. The newscaster’s dire predictions of flooding gave me hope of future income, but what really caught my attention, what had me staring with open mouth wonder, was the television news anchor’s, what me and the boys at Clancy’s so fondly called hooters.

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Author’s Note:

Flamenco Flood came to me in the early spring of 1996 when the trees were heavily laden with snow, the skies were dark, and it had been raining and snowing for a month. As it is most every year in the lower parts of the Sutter/Yuba counties, for a week the news people had been hot on the trail of another potential flood in Marysville at the confluence of the mighty Yuba and Feather rivers.

In our county, as with most, there are a number of different kinds of people including the hardworking hero’s who battle traffic each morning to get to their jobs, the upper crust shakers and movers, the more leisurely work-at-home crowd, then of course there are those brave souls who believe they are special and above the mandates of social behavior. In this county we so lovingly call that special breed the ‘Outlaw Renegades’. There are entire sections of our county dedicated to the socially inept misfits who literally live beyond the reach of the law.

In my search for the next novel and because I felt childishly goofy that particular day, I thought how fun it would be to bring the different types of people together in a playfully awkward way where they not only had to face the fact that each other existed, but unlike real life they were forced to interact. There are those characters you will love and those who you will love to hate, but they all have a story to tell.

Notes on your favorite hero’s or your most memorable scenes will be much appreciated, but understand that this rough version. Although I’ve personally edited this manuscript a dozen times, it has yet to be professionally edited and thus with be riddled with errors of various types. I release you of any responsibility of ferreting out misspelled words, grammar snafus or punctuation travesties. Please, just enjoy the story.
NIK

CHAPTER #1 CHICKEN HAVEN

I glared through the bay window of my grandmother’s house, combed my long, black hair and wished I had the guts to drop an A-bomb on my idiot neighbors.

The sad remnants of my expansive view left little for me to enjoy since the Tenican Heights housing development popped up, surrounding my property like mushrooms after a spring rain.

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