In May, when we still lived in the US, I said to Jonathan, "I really don't feel like writing anything for a while now." In June, I said, "Yeah, I'm done for good with writing books or, really, anything at all." In July (while I was doing the Text Log for the book that is coming out this June), I said, " I am so OVER this!" In August, I said, "If I ever talk about writing another book, promise me that you will SHOOT me!" In December, after I had submitted every last thing to the publishers, I said, "Thank god that is done! Never again!!!"

Yesterday, I started a new book. It is one of six (6) that I currently have on the drawing board, like planes waiting to take off at O'Hare. I blame Italy. 

So here is the first draft of the first few pages of it. It is a murder mystery. It will go through a million re-writes, of course. But this is the beginning as it stands now:

Dollar Store Robitussin and Starlight Mints

By Kathy Giuffre

January 2023

 

            It all started with the first armadillo. That was back when Clyde still lived in his trailer on the farm out in Babbitt, Arkansas. Well, he called it a farm, but he didn’t grow anything on it except for weeds and, I guess, armadillos.

            We should have recognized that first armadillo for the evil omen that it was, but sometimes I’ll admit that we’ve been known to be the little tiniest bit slow on the uptake. If we had of been a tad speedier, we would have caught on sooner. If we had of been a tad speedier, I wouldn’t be dead.

            What happened was that Clyde was living out on the so-called farm, like I said. Give the man his due, he kept himself busy out there making improvements on the place. Like for example, he put a great big handicap access ramp onto the front of the trailer and nailed down a piece of paisley-patterned indoor-outdoor carpet on it so that the ramp wouldn’t ever be at all slick in rain or ice. Nailed it down good and tight all over.

            And, Lord, he sure kept that pasture out there mowed. I bet there was nothing he like better than getting out there and mowing on that pasture. He had a John Deere riding mower with matching cap, but also a regular just walking around mower that he used more up close to the trailer. That was where he said he was doing his precision work. Also, one time he rode the big John Deere into a ditch that he didn’t see across his path and it was hell to get it out. It made him kind of cautious of using the big mower in tight places after that.

            He mowed and mowed those weeds, hoping it would somehow turn them into grass, I guess. It never did, but you can’t blame a man for trying. He had neighbors out there and I wondered if they were ever bothered by the noise, the pretty near constant whine of the lawn mower. But if they complained, I never heard about it.

            I guess you can tell that he was a house-proud man and so it was no surprise that he did not take kindly to a damned armadillo that showed up that spring and started coming around the place digging up roots and grubs and leaving holes all over the yard. Looked a sight, he said. Not to mention the personal safety hazard. Clyde had a good many years behind him and his night vision wasn’t all that it used to be. Day vision wasn’t so great either, if you come to it. Some people might even call him a blind old coot, in fact, but probably not to his face. So stepping in an armadillo hole and breaking his leg was not the distant danger for Clyde that it might have been for his more sprightly neighbors. We all remember the John-Deere-mower-hidden-ditch incident, after all.

            When it came to issues of personal safety, Clyde was always a stalwart believer in the simple efficacy of a dependable shotgun to fix whatever ailed you. A magic cure-all for any problem, large or small. You could have tried to argue with him about it if you didn’t mind completely wasting your breath (and possibly getting shot). So, naturally, Clyde took as much defilement of his well-mowed weeds as a house-proud man could take, which wasn’t much, and then he got old Bessie locked and loaded and set himself to wait.

            Clyde staked out the yard three nights running, drinking coffee and slapping himself to stay awake, but armadillos are wilier varmints than you might think from looking at them. Maybe its dumb instinct or maybe its sheer animal cunning, but they steer well clear of anything or anyone who smells like that much Aqua Velva. There are plenty of fully grown human women who would be a lot better off in their lives today if only they’d had the sense to do the same.

            The fourth night, Clyde figured that the armadillo must have moved on to greener pastures and went on to bed, although he kept Bessie loaded and leaned up against the wall right by the trailer door, ready just in case. Clyde was a man who liked to be prepared. And sure enough, that very night just as he was getting to the good part of the dream, Clyde was woken up by the noise of that durn armadillo out there, rooting around again, digging up the yard, bold as brass. Fortunately, Clyde had gone to bed in his underwear and mud boots just in case. He was up and out and on that critter like a duck on a June bug, blasting away in no time flat.

            Well, naturally, the armadillo was surprised. You would be surprised too if a blind old coot wearing nothing but tighty-whiteys and mud boots interrupted your dinner by shooting at you. Even in Babbitt, Arkansas, this is not the norm. No matter that on account of being pretty near blind out there, the old coot was missing by a mile, with all the pellets flying, it was almost inevitable that something was going to end up shot. The armadillo could see that as well as anyone and I guess it kind of lost its head and started running around all over the yard while Clyde was firing on it as fast as he could reload.

            Here’s thing you may or may not know about armadillos: their hides are hellaciously tough. So tough that a shotgun pellet can actually ricochet off them. This is a true fact. There was a story in the paper not too long ago about a man who accidentally shot his mother-in-law in the back with a small-caliber handgun while she was sitting in her chair inside and he was trying to shoot an armadillo outside. The bullet ricocheted off the armadillo, went in through the screen door of the house and then on through the back of her chair where she was sitting watching TV. It didn’t kill her, but I bet it shut her up. The armadillo may not have known that about itself, but Clyde probably did. It didn’t matter, though, because by that time Clyde had lost his head, too.

            The armadillo probably figured that no one would be stupid enough to fire at an armadillo sitting right in front of a propane tank right up against the side of their own trailer, especially not a house-proud man like Clyde. But that armadillo had figured wrong, because in the heat of the moment Clyde had not any qualms left at all and, having invested the better part of a whole box of shotgun shells already, he went all in. He aimed by the moonlight gleaming off the metal tank and I’ll be damned if he didn’t miss the tank and hit the varmint. It was a one-in-a-hundred shot and just goes to show what can be done if you steadfastly pursue your dreams with grit and determination.

            The armadillo squealed and ran under the handicap access ramp and there, dug in as far back as it could squeeze, breathed its last breath on this earth and passed on to those grub-filled pastures in the sky.

            Clyde’s blood was all riled up now with his victory and, being a no-time-like-the-present type of person and also having smelled his fair share of rotting armadillo carcasses in a long life filled with wholesome country living, he decided to go ahead and get the thing out from under his trailer while the getting was good and it was still fresh. Lord, the armadillo hadn’t made it easy, though. It had crawled up under the ramp as far as it could go and then had even dug down some before it expired. There was no reaching it from any side, even with the long-handled barn rake.

            Clyde hated to do it, but right then that very night he went ahead and pulled up each and every one of those carpet nails, all the way around the whole length of that indoor-outdoor carpet. He couldn’t risk tearing it because he had got it cheap from a friend of his at church who worked at Home Depot and there was no telling when he could ever get such a good deal again, especially since his friend had been let go under unfriendly circumstances not too long after the carpet had luckily become available to him.

Then Clyde started prying up boards on the handicap access ramp. It was almost sunrise when he finally got hold of the dead armadillo itself. He had to dig it out some with the shovel there at the end and then he grabbed onto its tail with a pair of pliers and dragged it out from under there. He pulled it on across the pasture and up into the edge of the woods. He left it there, just lying on the ground and went back to repair the damage to the handicap access ramp.

            By the time the sun was good and up, he had nailed all the boards back from where he had wrenched them free and was re-stretching the carpet so that it would lie down flat and tight again. You couldn’t hardly tell it had been taken up at all. He thought at one point that he might be going to run out of nails, he used so many. But it turned out okay and he saw the buzzards up in the early morning sky, circling and circling there at the edge of the woods where that dead armadillo’s body lay festering already. He figured there wouldn’t be a single trace of it left by afternoon.

            Now Clyde told this story to my mother and my mother told it to me and she didn’t have any answers to my main question about the whole episode, which was, “Where the hell were all the neighbors while all this was going on?” I mean, a blind man in his drawers shooting enough buckshot to kill ten armadillos and then doing major outdoor carpentry in the middle of the night is bound to raise a commotion. There was the family up at the big house – a nice couple and their three kids, all in grade school. And right across the road (technically, it was a state highway, but it only had one lane in each direction) was Denny Sims and his widowed mother who moved in with him after his daddy died. Everyone said Mrs. Sims didn’t sleep much at night anymore. And right smack next door was Travis, who was Clyde’s stepson from his third marriage, who was staying in Clyde’s old trailer until he could get his feet back under him after he lost his job at the chicken plant for being caught with unauthorized gizzards on his way out after his shift. You know he stays up late every night. But even with all the gunfire and the digging and the hammering going on in the middle of the night and even with those buzzards circling and circling up in the sky all day long, not a one of them so much as made a peep about it. That’s pretty telling, when you come to think about it. That’s the part that we should have noticed. That and the buzzards.