A Spitting Image

Guest post by Shaherazade Budreau   his morning, I saw Faith sitting out on the porch in front of the Wilbur County Feed & Seed. She had a cane standing between her legs and was resting her hands on top of it. She was wearing a cap and sunglasses.  “You mind if I sit down here with you, Ma’am,” I asked her.  “Sit yourself right down, Shaherazade,” Ms Applegate said to me. “What brings you to this dusty old place on this fine summer day?”  I plopped myself on the bench beside her, and I told her the Wilbur County Feed & Seed was my favorite place in Germaine.  “Why is that?”  “I like the way it smells and that it’s sort of dark and I like the wood floor even if it is splintery and I have to wear shoes.” It smells like leather and grain from all the…

McCoy and Madam Zorro

pedaled my bike out to the McCoy spread this morning. Big mistake. Morning was a pleasant sojourn, but the return ride in the hot afternoon sun turned out to be a killer. The lessons Susie learned from this experimental outing: take a bottle of water (duh); if you are out of shape, start with shorter trips; grease your bike now and then (another big duh); there is a downside to downhill when on a round-trip; and don’t take long bike rides in the desert in 95 degree weather. Okay, I survived, and I do intend to push on with the bicycle routine. It’s the right thing to do.  The drive down to the McCoy house is a long, sloping grade, perhaps a mile or more. To the north are rows of modern greenhouses, and industrial buildings sit like ghosts on a southern ridge. The small, unassuming house comes into view…

My Dis-ease

keep thinking about those uniformed men at the park back in May, and on my trip to Joseph, and stories I hear around town about military-type excersizes out in the desert. I was chatting with Donnie Wicker just the other day, down at the Germaine Cafe, when he mentioned seeing a convoy of Hummers, complete with mounted guns driving the backroads of Harney County. When I questioned him further, he told me that he had been out “messing around” with Zach Sweet, cruising the hundreds of miles of rough dirt and cinder roads that criss-cross the Eastern Oregon prairie lands.  Of course, I immediately think about drugs when the name Zach Sweet comes up. The sheriff’s son has been in and out of jail since the age of sixteen, mostly for things one associates with drugs and drug addiction. I have to say, I was disappointed in Donnie. He has…

Room 17

Room seventeen of the Restin’ Easy,” Shaharazade said the other day out of the blue, as she browsed back issues of The Germaine Truth. I looked up from my laptop and gave her a curious glance. “Remember you told me that’s the same room Uncle Charlie was in,” she continued. It took a second for me to realize she was referring to The Incident. I started to say, everybody knows that, Shaherazade, but then I remembered that, of course, everybody doesn’t know that. It is an unspoken fact that some people might talk about in whispers, or others might just mention in imagined conversations, and enough folk have thought about it so that it seems like common knowledge. It is the kind of knowledge that is forgotten, because there doesn’t really seem to be any relevence, except to those who are superstitious: The Unlucky Room Seventeen, or The Notorious Room…