Excerpt from Thomas Sparrow’s crime noir Northwoods Standoff.
Dedicated to the brave souls of the Occupy movement. May their resolve maintain.
PART FOUR
Mustering out, he enrolled in journalism school at the U of Wisconsin on the G.I. Bill, where he “smoked a lot of reefer and fucked a lot of white girls.” A few years later, after discovering that the local TV stations were bending over backwards to hire “people whose skin wasn’t white,” he jumped at the opportunity.
Then followed a run of a couple years as an on-air personality where he became somewhat of a local celebrity known for his provocative stories as well as his womanizing. The bottom fell out of his little dreamland when the old temper flared up again and he punched out the station manager for cracking too many Indian jokes.
Now he was a lone wolf, who no longer thought much of reservations or big cities and was happy out here living off the land and staying away from trouble and troubling people.
That night he talked fervently about the ancient wisdom of his people and how he’d recently gained much knowledge of the “old ways.” Occasionally he’d refer, with much vitriol, to a group of people he called “the Locusts,” how they were growing in numbers in the cities but couldn’t get to him out here—at least not yet.
It seemed that “living off the land,”—at least like Roy was doing—was suiting him very well. Except for the need of some dental work, it looked like he was doing all right.
I never did say very much about Randy Slade or John Flint or Keith Waverly, my trinity of aliases. Just mentioned that I was originally from Minneapolis and was out here living off an insurance settlement for a damaged leg I’d suffered as a result of a car accident. Trying to find myself, after the accident and a terrible divorce, you know, just drinking and getting high… Someday I have to find a job….
(To be continued)
