Beneath the Sands of Monahans

Charles Alcorn

Description

• National review and feature outreach to print publications (Texas Monthly, NYTBR, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe) and online (NPR, Literary Hub, Buzzfeed, The Millions)
• Local coverage outreach to Texas Monthly, Dallas Morning News, KERA, D Magazine
• Bookseller mailings with emphasis on stores in Texas region
• Promotion at/events pitched for Texas Book Festival, Dallas Literary Festival
• Events: virtual and in-person events with Texas bookstores and venues

The tale of a stone-cold frontiersman blasting across his beloved Texas highways in an attempt to retain his sense of daring and independence among friends, family, bookies and under-reported enemies.

Beneath the Sands of Monahans introduces Archie Weesatche, a hard working orphan who’s recently sold his oil field hot shot company, Keep On Truckin’. With money in his pocket and time on his hands, Archie launches a long-planned Tour of Texas with best friend Okinawa Watkins, betting with a colorful cast of hand-picked boosters and bookies on high school and college football games.

Enter Mexican heiress Josefina Montemayor, who convinces her long-ago lover that Archie’s the only man she trusts to raise the $650,000 she needs to release millions in unrecovered cartel cash. 

Set in a map’s worth of Texas locations, this quest narrative explores cultural minefields, the precarious nature of oilfield booms and busts, and the tricky world of cash money gambling during a legendary winning streak.

Sujets

• Literary
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Date de parution: 22 août 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781646052455
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Beneath the Sands of Monahans
CHARLES ALCORN
La Reunion Publishing, an imprint of Deep Vellum
3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226
Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.
Copyright © 2023 by Charles Alcorn
First edition 2023
All rights reserved
Support for this publication has been provided in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture, the George and Fay Young Foundation, and the Communities Foundation of Texas.
ISBNS : 978-1-64605-219-6 (hardcover) | 978-1-64605-245-5 (ebook)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Alcorn, Charles, 1961-author.
Title: Beneath the Sands of Monahans / Charles Alcorn.
Description: Dallas : La Reunion, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022058841 | ISBN 9781646052196 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781646052455 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3601.L3429 B46 2022 | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/20221209
LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022058841
Cover design by Dubzeey Wu and Justin Childress
Interior layout and typesetting by Haley Chung
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To Charles and William
¡Mis hijos!
All-Time Texas Wingmen
May the Road Rise Up to Meet You
May the Wind Always Be at Your Back
It’s not the pot of gold;
It’s the rainbow!
Kinky Friedman
CONTENTS PROLOGUE – A HOLY GHOST’S LAMENT KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ OKINAWA TAKES A POWDER A MAN WITH A PLAN A COUGAR RED CADILLAC ROLLS TO THE GARDEN JOSEFINA WEARS A ONE-PIECE TRIPPIN’ TO THE LUCKY EAGLE HOW TO AVOID AN HONOR KILLING A TALE OF TWO VICTORIAS ON MY G5, G5 NEGOCIOS TOM TERRIFIC LET THE GAMES BEGIN SIX-MAN BORDER BRAWL MOON OVER OJINAGA ARCHIE GETS THE MIDDLE FINGER IN OVER YOUR HEAD FAST EDDIE AND THE MUSTANGS PISTOL-PACKIN’ MAMA ¡OYE PAYASO! MPFB GONE TO TEXAS FRANCIS MCCOMBER HANGS IN MCCAMEY YEARNING FOR TALLULAH OAK BALES A COTTON FARMER GOLDEN TORS TO THE RESCUE GUNS UP! GUN PLAY IN PYOTE WILD TIMES AT THE WHITE ELEPHANT THAT WAS SELF-DEFENSE RETURN TO PUNCHER DOME FULL MOON FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH UNA HISTORIA DE VICTORIA ENTER SAND QUEEN WALTZ ACROSS TEXAS SHARP-DRESSED LOBO WITH AN RPG FALCONS FLY! DIAMOND DAVE IN THE HOUSE YOU KNOW IT’S GONNA END SOMETIME FULL COURT PRESS H-TOWN TAKEOVER! SISTER ERNESTINE SETS SAIL MAMA TRIED KNOCK-DOWN DRAG-OUT KARAOKE DEATHMATCH SUNSET ON THE VEGAS STRIP VAYA CON DIOS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Prologue
A HOLY GHOST’S LAMENT
BIG SPRING, TEXAS
JULY 24, 2015
Archie Weesatche is alive, well, fit.
Not yet mingling with his kin beneath the sands of Monahans.
In full, long-boned stretch he flexes his well-marbled frame in the creamy pink light of dawn. Luxuriates on his fancy new mattress of high-tech foam. Floats in that nether space between wake and sleep.
A motion picture memory of crystalline lucidity projects on the back of his orphan’s eyes. A reoccurring dream; a meticulously archived sliver of time where the adult Archie peeks in on his long-lost parents.
Lucky Room 7 at the Starlight Motel surrounded by undulating oceans of oil and sand.
A scene to which Archie returns again and again. Obsessed, some would say.
He can hear, almost touch, his beloved mom and dad.
Archie sees himself clearly; the buck-toothed boy. Eyes closed and smiling. Peacefully awake and aware; focused on the sound of Big Arch and Bunny rustling the bedsheets above him.
Sharp inhales. Breathless sighs.
Archie feels for the little guy, tucked carefully between the folds of a tidy roll-away. Wearing his favorite silk pajamas, a long-ago gift from honeymoon Hong Kong.
Archie reaches … strains for a touch; his sweet, beautiful parents … a fingertip away.
As the smell of Chanel and Old Spice drifts over the West Texas waif, a holy ghost’s lament floats on the gusts of a softly rumbling swamp cooler.
A survivor’s prayer … forever and ever … Amen.
KEEP ON TRUCKIN’
BIG SPRING, TEXAS
JULY 24, 2015
Archie Weesatche was running late.
After selling his oilfield hotshot company, Keep On Truckin’, Archie gave himself three weeks to get all the paperwork cleaned up, but there he was, sitting in his banker’s office in Big Spring, waiting to sign one more document when an Outlook alert popped up on his phone:
KOT Exit Meeting
10–11 a.m.
Mesa Building/Room 113
UTPB – Odessa, Texas
As he sped down Big Spring’s main drag, then out to I-20 West, Archie felt better. A large manila envelope with seven truck titles and eight bonus checks sat in the passenger seat—a little buffer for his drivers before their near-certain unemployment.
Admiring the otherworldly array of bone-white wind turbines spinning away atop the hogback ridges that rimmed his adopted hometown, it dawned on Archie that this was it—the last hurrah of his adult life’s work. He never imagined when he started Keep On Truckin’ out of his mom’s garage that delivering oilfield equipment would keep him productive, happy, and solvent for fifteen years—most of it, anyway.
Archie sold Keep On Truckin’ to a publicly-traded logistics firm out of Omaha that offered $2 million in January 2015. During the negotiations, another OPEC-instigated oil bust picked up steam. It was looking like a bad one—as in, no end in sight. He closed the deal, six months later, at half the original ask—$1 million.
The front page of the morning Big Spring Herald reported that Saudi Arabia was dead serious about opening up their oil taps. The new head of the House of Saud, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was playing hardball. As the world’s long-time swing producer, the Saudis were doing everything they could to claw back market share from the U.S. shale producers. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude was dropping daily, from a ridiculous high of $104.92 a barrel when Archie received the Nebraskan’s initial offer, to $38.24 a barrel on the Monday before July Fourth.
Drillers weren’t drilling. Service company budgets were slashed. Keep On Truckin’s total deliveries were down by two-thirds year-over-year. Archie had experienced similar downturns during the Great Recession of ‘08 and ’09, but felt fortunate—and guilty—about not having ride this one out.
The upshot: after retiring KOT’s considerable debt, paying off the trucks, and cutting bonus checks, Archie cleared $600,000.
Not bad; but about $400,000 less than he’d hoped to assemble for his long-awaited gambling odyssey. Suddenly, the Tour of Texas Archie’d planned for his one-year non-compete felt lazy. He needed to generate cash flow; not float around the blue highways of Texas looking for sucker bets.
After a forty-five-minute drive, Archie rolled through the entrance of the sprawling UT-Permian Basin campus in the no-man’s land between Midland and Odessa. He certainly admired the gumption of the UT administrators for building a public research university in the middle of one of the roughest ecosystems on the planet.
He’d decided to hold the final meeting at the regional hub of higher education because it was convenient for his far-flung drivers, but also because Archie was curious about the university’s new football team. Nobody knew how good—or bad—the UTPB Falcons might be. Just the edge a football hustler needed when it came time to lure some lucrative hometown betting action.
As his faithful F-250 came to a stop in front of the Mesa Building, named after Panhandle billionaire T. Boone Picken’s oil company, the fall of 2015 was looking bleaker than the parched chaparral surrounding the UT System’s least glamorous campus. He grabbed his hand-tooled Mary Alice Palmer portfolio, a dandy present from a long-ago girlfriend, and rushed into the building, still worried if he was doing the right thing.
A lot of KOT’s short-timers went for the easy money during the boom days of 2013 and 2014. Every oilfield outfit in the territory hired man, woman, or child—no questions asked. But the eight souls waiting for him had driven ten plus years for KOT. Four of ’em had worked for Archie the entire fifteen years.
When he pushed through the classroom door, Archie immediately noticed Ida Schustereit, KOT’s long-time dispatcher, was on the job—as always. The hot glazed doughnuts and spicy sausage klobaseks she’d laid out were picked clean. The tray holding a wet array of fresh-cut fruit sat tooth-picked and undisturbed.
“Howdy, howdy,” he said, setting his portfolio underneath the podium microphone. He adjusted the mic, then instantly felt silly. He turned off the speaker, pulled up a molded plastic chair in front of the lectern, turned it backward, and had a seat.
Six large, unshaven men in too-small T-shirts and oil-stained Dickies and two large women in too-small T-shirts and oil-stained designer jeans milled about in the fluorescent-lit room, a geology professor friend’s unused classroom.
Archie asked everybody to take a seat.
“Don’t really need a microphone,” he said, laughing, as his employees went dead quiet. “How’s everybody?”
Archie quickly checked his datebook to see how long it’d been (three weeks) since he’d told everybody to hang tight, that he was selling.
“Come on Arch, cut the crap,” said Ida, a rail-thin chain-smoker and possessor of the tightest hairdo in Ector County, courtesy of a weekly wash and perm at the Kut ‘N Kurl.
“Alright, alright,” he said, waving off Ida with a big smile. “Damn, I miss you guys.”
“Well, at least you ain’t dead broke,” said Bubba Howard, a native of Turkey, Texas, and one of the larger, stronger human beings in captivity. “Had me a helluva weekend out on Lake C-City. Noodled me a catfish as big as Ida, but that’s about it. Let’s get to work.”
“Glad to hear it, Bubba,” said Archie, giving the man mountain a wave. “It’s really good to see everybody.”
“Oh hush,” said Ida. “What’s up?”
“What’s this Good News/Bad New stuff, boss?” asked Lonzo Hinojosa, KOT’s Human GPS. A man with absolute encyclopedic recal