From Donald Seger's Radio Weblog : A Fiction Blog for the 21st Century.

Original © Copyright 2004

This work of social science fiction tells the story of the Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood Compound from the point of view of a guardsman stationed there in the early 2030's. The Compound is a domed and gated city of the New Republic, situated in the old Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area in central Kansas, near what was Great Bend. The heart of the country has been turned into a giant national park of sorts, as severe drought over the course of a decade* has forced the government to withdraw federal aid and support from the area. Result: very few people live there any more. But there are a number of gated cities like the Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood Compound that the government sponsors.

*And nearly five years of unusual tornadic activity in late spring and early summer (which might have been the result of global warming or not) which literally laid to ruin over a hundred towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, and Missouri.

Note: these journals probably would have never been made public if the government had not showed reluctance to help members of Troop C of the 167th Calvary plan a reunion for those who served at Cheyenne Bottoms in the Heartland; that fact, yes -- and also a chance conversation I had with a stranger about that same time. Direct inquiries of any nature to paperbkwriter@paperbkwriter.com. Any similarity to actual persons, places, and things without satiric purpose is not intended.

So I told my friend and fellow guardsman, Johnny Ray Murphy, that I was certain that we were being watched there on the Kansas Prairies in the thirties, and that if they could have found someone to do it, they'd probably sift through our shit to see if we had been stealing anything from the Compound that we could eat. I had read that ancient Egyptian masters regularly ordered slaves to dig through the excrement of other slaves assigned to gardening duty, just to see if they had been stealing produce from the royal garden. So why wouldn't Uncle Sam? I was always looking over my shoulder, and Johnny Ray said that he was, too, and the truth of it was if we had had shit sifting duty, he and I would probably have drawn it. On a weekend. At night.

As it happened, we did do some gardening there in the Heartland -- out of necessity as it turned out-- a little stealing (leftovers from what we believed to be the cafeteria, and some over-the-counter medicines), and we even kept a few head of cattle. We also did a bit of poaching (the occasional buffalo, and an elk or two -- more on this later). But what we did mostly during our tour at the Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood was guard the Compound. That's what we did. From whom or for what reasons were never completely clear to us. And that was the great puzzle. Very confusing.

And the great challenge -- besides figuring out how to protect mostly unseen people from mostly unseen dangers -- was survival. Ours. It wasn't easy, and it sometimes seemed as if the government was making it more difficult for us to discharge our duties than necessary. And of course there was the occasional wolf who wandered into camp and disturbed things pretty much. And other intruders.

I served at the Bottoms for nearly three years just after my stint as a public school teacher, and just before I went to Fort Omaha to do some rather unusual work for Uncle Sam, and then ending my government service with a tour in Kansas City as a disc jockey. But back to the Neighborhood for now.

The Neighborhood

Some say that the Civil War we fought during that time started with the great droughts in the western two-thirds of Old America the second decade of the twenty-first century. Others blame global warming and the rapidly advancing seawater levels that had our southern seashore somewhere in the vicinity of the Texas-Oklahoma border.

Still others blamed it on politics. Maybe it was all of the above. Some people held onto the idea that a president elected by a conservative Christian movement in the early part of the century, and who ultimately convinced clergymen to insert the words, "Our Leaders", into the Lord's Prayer (in much the same way the words "Under God" had been inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance years before), was the straw that broke the camel's back for democracy in the old America, so to speak. No matter. What was done was done. We will not see the old America again.

You know the history of it. The stock market crashed, the government collapsed (there were no national elections in 2028), we withdrew our troops from wherever. . . no jobs, no economy, no social security, no health care except for those privileged few who lived in the Gated Cities of the country (and those who guarded them). . . desperate food and water shortages, riots in the streets, a decaying military composed of mostly middle-aged men and women conscripted from the National Guard. And Homeland Security's aborted attempt to unite with the FBI and CIA and seize control, and ultimately anarchy prevailing for many years.

A lot of people entertained the horrifying possibility of foreign invasion in those days. But I wasn't sure about that, because I didn't know what a foreign nation would have to gain by attacking us. What would be the point? Sure, we were vulnerable split up the way we were into a half dozen or so warring factions, but still -- what did we have that anyone wanted by that time? Not a whole lot, sadly, including major league baseball. This hurt a lot because I always thought the Chicago Cubs would win a World Series if given enough time.

But these are well known facts that any school child could recite for you. What I thought I would do is show you what it was like in the trenches, so to speak, from the viewpoint of a soldier for hire who was fighting what was essentially a class war from square one. This story has not been told.

The Journals

Water

If you've ever been thirsty -- really thirsty -- you'll know what I mean when I tell you that thirst is one of the strongest memories I have of my time in the American Midwest during the great wars of the early thirties. You couldn't find an uncontaminated water supply to save you. Period. I took to drinking what canned soda there was, and while it was probably fine enough, what I wanted was real water without flavoring, without sugar, without additives of any sort... cool, clear, thirst-quenching, life-saving water. And out of glass, not aluminum cans, even if they were lined with some kind of plastic. And I sometimes went a month or more without that real water.

The Locals knew where the good water was, that's for sure. They didn't look thirsty to me. And my guess is that they made a lot of money out of us occupying forces from those damned pop machines you'd find outside of every hydro station. You had to fill your tanks a couple of times a month, right? And it was natural to run your card through that scanner and take a six pack of whatever with you. Even if that was not exactly what you wanted, even if you didn't like the taste of it, even if what you wanted was... well, you know.

My Arrival

I didn't come onto the scene until late in the second year of the war, and it took me several months before I figured all this business out. Now, you'd like to think that we were there for love of country and all that patriotic stuff, but it wouldn't be true. There just wasn't a whole lot to believe in at that time. I certainly wasn't loyal to either party -- the politicians had made such a mess of it, most of us in the Third Brigade had enlisted because of the benefits package. Or because something or someone was chasing us. Full health care, a reasonable monthly salary, a place to live, and I had student loans to pay off and you got 10% dismissal of your total outstanding loan for each year of service in the Heartland. Yeah, I still owe some on that.

Being stationed there at Cheyenne Bottoms as I was, it became simply a matter of survival and nothing more. Anything I could do to see the sun rise again, I did. Of course, I was there to provide protection to the Neighborhood. And I did that dirty work for them along with my mates and expected to be compensated in a timely manner.

And, on those fairly common occasions when the pay was not there for us, I'm sure that I would have left the service right then and there if I had had somewhere else to go and something else to do. But I didn't, so I stuck it out for three years* until an armistice of sorts was agreed on. Those talks went on for quite a while, and I didn't have much to do with them, so we'll let someone else tell that particular story.

*I told you in a previous journal entry about my decision to enlist -- and why -- but the truth was that they were going to draft me any way, and by enlisting, I was told that I had some say in where they sent me. I requested the Heartland and that is where I spent most of my time in the service.

A Brochure

Taken from an old brochure I found, probably published just after the turn of the century: [A more complete detailing of the story of Cheyenne Bottoms can be found at Radio Userland.]

The primary management goal of Cheyenne Bottoms is to provide a diverse marsh habitat for waterfowl and shore birds during the migrational periods. This includes providing food, water, and resting places. A secondary goal is to increase the production of waterfowl and shore birds that nest on the area. Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area lies two miles east of U.S. Highway 281, midway between Great Bend and Hoisington. The 19,857 acre area is part of a 41,000 acre natural land sink just northeast of Great Bend, Kansas. During the 1950's, the State of Kansas acquired the land, and dikes were constructed to impound water in five pools. Canals and dams were built to divert water from the nearby Arkansas River and Wet Walnut Creek to supplement water provided by two intermittent streams, Blood and Deception Creeks. During the 1990's, extensive renovation divided some of the pools. Manipulation of water levels in the pools is a major tool in managing the marsh for water birds. Each year, one or more of the pools is drained as deemed necessary. Often these areas are seeded to millet and/or wheat and undesirable vegetation is controlled by burning, mowing and disking while the pools are dry. This, of course, was before the great drought beginning in about 2010. Things have changed some since then.

The Enemy

As I said, our basic duties were to protect our Neighborhoods from penetration, which means that we were supposed to keep out anyone who didn't have proper identification. If you drew daytime duty, that was pretty much the job and this was no problem. The Rockies* out there may have been desperate, but they weren't stupid. (*Enemy soldiers so called because their stronghold was in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains near Denver.)

But it was a different story at night. This was not just checking vehicles and their passengers' ID's, opening a gate, bringing down the drawbridge, and ushering residents and visitors on in to the safety of the Compound. Nighttime was when the gangs would move in, attempt to overwhelm us with force and/or diversion, penetrate the perimeter, loot, and run.

And this nighttime duty could be dangerous, largely because they were more of them than there were of us. And they were armed with Lasacs and we weren't. And they had some degree of military training. I didn't have a Lasac and I didn't have much training. Just National Guard Stuff. What I did have was that nighttime patrol from midnight until 6 a.m. for the first nine months of my tour of duty. I'm lucky to be alive. Of course, the only reason I survived is that I developed a reasonable attitude towards the looting.

The Compound

The Cheyenne Bottoms Compound which I guarded for most of my active duty in the service was a walled Neighborhood in what had been Central Kansas entirely surrounded by a thirty-foot wide, six-foot deep moat extending for its full two mile perimeter. It was essentially a gated city of some 5,000 (we were told). There were supposed to be fifty of us on guard duty at any one time at night (half that during the day), equally spaced around that perimeter. Right.

My friend and fellow guardsman, Johnny Ray Murphy -- who served with me at the Cheyenne Compound back in those days -- now says that were derelict in our duty, that we weren't very good soldiers. I pretty much agree with him. We weren't very good soldiers. But then again, we're alive today, and many of those we served with aren't, or at least we don't know where they are.

Dead Hero

And I don't think the country is much worse off because of us. This idea about being a dead hero never did appeal to me. I never understood it. I wanted to live, and if I had to break a rule or two here and there, it doesn't really bother me all that much to be honest.

Johnny feels the same about this dead hero stuff -- and he says that this attitude really made us not soldiers, but mercenaries: soldiers for hire without an emotional attachment to whatever cause we were fighting for. He's probably right about that. That's what we were. Mostly. I just wish the pay had been better and more regular. I think that what Command wanted us to do was to steal and loot just like the Rockies we were protecting the Compound from. I really do. How else could you read it? Most of the money we were always expecting wasn't really going to be good until after the war -- and, of course, we had the government's promise on that. And we went weeks at a time without proper rations. It's almost like we were prisoners, free ranging prisoners to be sure -- but kind of like prisoners, with jobs, and a promise of some level of meager pay at some point in time when we were released -- I mean discharged. And I've already mentioned the water shortages. We had to steal and loot to survive. And other stuff.

Transportation

So that Yamaha that we had reworked came in handy. It wasn't a really big bike, but the motor pool had adapted the carburetor to burn hydrogen and it had been fitted with a good-sized fuel tank behind the seat. It had big, knobby tires on it as well, and those came in handy for sloshing around the perimeter of the Compound. Five speed, and you didn't have to find true neutral to bring it back to life again, either. If you killed it, just draw that clutch handle in, kick, and twist that throttle!

I found that cycle in an old barn there in the Heartland and with help from the Guard's motor pool, we returned it to working condition. I used it every day there at the Bottoms. Sometimes on patrol, sometimes searching for food and water.

A Wetlands

The Cheyenne Bottoms had been a wetlands that attracted hundreds of thousands of migrating birds to central Kansas every spring since whenever. It had dried up just a few years into the century, and there was a lot of sand and still some amount of muck here and there.

In fact, when I was leaving the Bottoms in early 2032, there was some evidence that the great drought might have been broken, what with nearly a month of incessant downpours.*

As it happens, I lost contact with Cheyenne Bottoms when I was reassigned and I've always kind of wanted to go back, just for a visit you know. Maybe I’ll get the chance.

As it happens, I lost contact with Cheyenne Bottoms when I was reassigned and I've always kind of wanted to go back, just for visit you know.. Maybe I’ll get the chance. I would like to see how all this new homesteading was working out.

Anyhow, this semi-arid marshland had provided the government of the New Republic an ideal place to build Cheyenne. It was flat and it was isolated. And there were still enormous deposits of water under the ground which proved helpful for the civilian population living there as both a water supply and protection in the form of that all-encircling moat.

If you're wondering what the trouble was with a water supply for me, why I spent most of the time on duty thirsty -- well, first of all, the moat was poisoned (in fact, that was one of my duties). And secondly, members of the military were not allowed inside the Compound except to defend it against intruders. Absolutely no access to a faucet or a hydrant.

There was certainly more than one time when I had peeked over the barrier (this took some effort as the wall was constructed of concrete building blocks and was some twenty feet high), and watched children playing on green grass and swimming in backyard swimming pools full of blue water and wondering just when I was ever going to get to swim again, let alone have a drink of pure, cool H20. Of course, I was always tired and hungry and thirsty, so I learned to distrust even my own eyes.

The Rockies

As I mentioned, the Rockies were so called because they were stationed in the foothills of the Colorado Mountains, some three hundred miles to our west. Several attempts had been made to drive them out of their mountain strongholds by the regular army as I understood it, but there were too many of them and they were well armed. Mostly ex-military -- rebels, really -- I think they actually enjoyed making fools of National Guard units like ours. They would wait for night and then fly in to the Bottoms, and then deploy on the ground, since the Compound did have the Tasiter Defense, which pretty much would obliterate anything flying over. That's what we were told, and for the first few months of my duty there, I had no reason to question it.

Well, such technology as the Tasiter Defense was truly awesome, and I was grateful for it. But that just put this war back a couple of hundred years in my estimation, and made the infantry all that more important. Which put me in harm's way. For example, they hit us particularly hard one night after absolutely no activity for over a month. That hiatus was unusual and they kept us guessing as to what they had planned.

It turned out that what they had planned was a major attack on the central entrance gate, and I'm kind of proud to say that we turned them back. But, of course, as we found out later, all that turned out to be a diversion, and a certain number of the Rockies penetrated the moat near the Southwest quadrant and made off with quite a few groceries from a supply warehouse. So, because of our successful attempt to defend the main entrance, we had left that section of the perimeter unguarded.

The supply depot that the Rockies pillaged had been moved twice in six months, and camouflaged really well and I'll be darned if I can figure out how they knew where it was. It could have been blind luck, or their surveillance procedures could have been more extensive than what we had been thinking. Another possibility is that they had an inside presence. Probably blind luck most likely.

Wounded

I took a hit when the Rockies attacked. Straight through the right thigh. No bone damage, so I was lucky there. Still, it was a nasty wound requiring some first class medical attention and some R and R. The government had taken over the health care industry many years before, and being a member of the National Guard and all, I got the treatment I needed. Fast and complete. Mostly.

And I also got a one-week furlough in Branson. Great country music, gambling, women, and you name it. Branson is, of course, east of Cheyenne Bottoms in the state of Missouri and to the south a bit, about a two hour journey what with debriefing, deplaning, and so on. It had been a tourist Mecca for many years in the past, and was now maintained by the New Republic mostly for the Guard's wounded, convalescing, recovering... and we were treated well. (Branson, by the way, miraculously escaped the ravages of the New Madrid Earthquake just a couple of years after the hostilities had ended. More on this later.)

Branson was located just outside of what had become known as the Heartlands, a sort of buffalo commons area carved out of the old Great Plains (from the Missouri River on west to the California border). Situated east of that once mighty Missouri and still somewhat civilized, it was a far cry from my existence at the Bottoms, where settlements were few and far between, and where Uncle Sam had reintroduced free ranging buffalo to the great prairies that the animal had once owned with impunity... Where federal aid of any sort had been cut off earlier in the century, forcing a vast migration to the West and East. Elk and wolves had moved back in, deer had always been there, and you'd see an occasional black bear and on rare occasions, the grizzly. But not a lot of people. My back pay mysteriously found its way to me during my stay, and I had plenty of food, and water. Ah, yes -- pure, clean water directly from the aquifer, running stunningly cold right out of the tap in my room. What luxury! The entertainment was great, too. Willie Nelson imitators as well as the usual crop of Elvis clones. And Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. And Merle Haggard. For the most part the singers were pretty good and true to their mentors, but while the guy doing Cash sang well enough, he just didn't have the spirit and the soul that I had heard on those old CD's. Still, it was really nice to hear live music again.

Women

And I mentioned the women earlier. Lots of women there in Branson. But I'll remember that time there, and my thigh, and the food, and the ice water, for that special woman I met there. Mary. Mary turned out to be the best thing about getting shot while protecting America's elite that I could have hoped for. She was a brunette - tall, just a touch chubby, and had a laugh you would kill to hear. And mystic, brown eyes. I'm not sure why I was so lucky in making a connection with her, but I'm not going to worry about it. (Well, it turned out that we were both originally from the Heartland - Nebraska - so we had something in common there.) No, she wasn't my nurse. She was a hostess at the House of Nelson there in Branson.

Yes, it was Mary's job to make guests feel welcome as they were settling in for an evening of Willie Nelson tributes, but from the moment I spotted her at the bar in an off duty moment, I knew we had something. It was the kind of magic you hear about. But the week was over before I knew it, I was shipped back to the Bottoms, and I didn't see her again for - I think - it was nearly four months. Until the next time I got shot. Really. When I come to think about it now, that was how I got to be with my woman for two years of my tour of duty: getting wounded. I began to think I had a target pinned on my back or something, you know. All in all, I was shot seven times in three years there on the Kansas plains (four of those were old-fashioned bullet wounds, the remaining three were laser burns of some sort). And then there was the chemical burn I had - but they didn't send me to Branson for that.

My wounds were nothing serious mostly, all flesh wounds if you can believe that: two in the legs, two in the arms (the right arm twice); I actually lost a toe on the left foot there near the end of my tour of duty; also twice in the right foot (one of these did not require extensive treatment -- The medic on duty and my CO decided that I didn't need anything other than a band aide that time. Besides, we were running short on men, and I was needed. Right.

Drinking

I won't say we drank a lot on duty, but we did drink some. Johnny Ray could polish off a twelve pack and not even be fazed in the slightest. I will say he had a lot of body weight, which could have had something to do with it, but I was never that kind of drinker. Sure, I enjoyed the buzz you could get - and God knows we all needed that high now and then. And just being with some of the guys maybe in a relaxed mode. You've heard of designated drivers? We had a designated sentry in each sector surrounding the Compound. One guy who would agree not to drink at all on a particular shift, and keep his eyes open. That role rotated and when my name came up, I wasn't particularly happy.

Most of the stuff we drank was what people used to call 3.2 beer, that number representing the percentage of alcohol in said beer. It was fairly hard to get really drunk off that, and maybe that accounted for Johnny Ray's legendary drinking bouts. But it was good beer, we usually got it cold for some reason, and it made up for the fact that the water supply…well, you know. I'm hoping that you don't think less of me because of this. It was really hard on us pulling that guard duty night after night after night, fearing the Rockies were coming. Or who knows who else? And knowing that when they did come, your life was pretty much up for grabs. Lucky for us that they weren't as blood thirsty as Command made them out to be.

Fort Riley

Fort Riley was only an hour or so away by military transport, to the east of the Bottoms, and that's where we would get our new recruits from. Three weeks training and they'd be in the trenches with us at Cheyenne Bottoms. Their mission, they were told as we were told, was to protect "government families", which meant - we decided - the wives, husbands, and children of high ranking government and military officials. And that's what my commanding officer, Lieutenant Summers, believed. I think.

I decided that a lot of very important people's families were living inside the Compound and that's all I needed to know. Maybe the New Republic had nothing else to do with them, because of the situation. Maybe they weren't safe anywhere else. And every once in a great while, I had a wave of patriotism sweep over me and I almost thought that we were doing some earthly good there in the Heartland in the thirties. But a lot of things didn't add up, as you will see (like what we took to be emergency copters landing in the middle of the Compound in the dead of night - and this with the Tasiter defense. What, could they turn off those magic rays on a whim?) Eventually I came around to the truth of it, my version, anyway.

The new guys were all gung ho, the way you would expect them to be, I guess. This caused some amount of trouble. Many of them didn't want to drink or play cards on duty, and they spent a lot of time driving back and forth patrolling the perimeter and surveying the flat, barren landscape for the enemy. Go figure. I found this behavior amusing, since I knew that they only had so much of a hydro ration for whatever they were driving. But they kept up their constant patrolling for about a week and a half or so, until their fuel would run out and they were informed that they would get a new ration that next month. (The option was to spend their own government credits on fuel, if they had any in their account.) All of a sudden their enthusiasm and their dedication began to fall by the wayside.

Smoking

I'm ashamed to say it, but I smoked in those days. I rolled my own and I never lit up indoors - well, I didn't spend a lot of time indoors as you can imagine - but it's a filthy habit nevertheless. Most of the guys smoked. Generic tobacco, of course. From some place in South America, I think. But I also should say that I enjoyed the nicotine, and the activity of rolling, and settling down after maybe a clean-up session with my M-16 and just lean up against that Yamaha and watch the moon rise over the Kansas prairie.

Yeah, the M-16 was still around, believe it or not. Of course, some of the old timers in my unit preferred the M-14 and if they could lay their hands on one, they were allowed to use it. I don't know: plastic stocks didn't bother me as much as some, and although I had been told time and time again that the 16's had a tendency to jam, I had never personally experienced it. That's probably because the ammunition that we were given was strictly rationed, and so I never fired off more than six shots at a time anyway. Honest. I got a dozen rounds each month, and that was it. If you wanted more, you found them yourself. Some of the guys I served with got really adept at acquiring extra ammo, and they were good guys to know, it turned out. Trigger happy, but good guys to know.

So I liked nicotine, and I liked the process of rolling. And I liked the beer, too, when I could get it. And many nights that's what I'd have for supper: cigarettes and beer. I wasn't gaining weight, that's for sure. I had a lot of time to think, and in one of my more delusional moments, I decided that maybe we were pretend soldiers in a pretend war, staging a play of some sort for God knows who. And then the Rockies would stage another of their blistering attacks, someone would get hurt, someone would disappear - killed? - and I would get all confused. This seemed real and then it didn't. The part about me having a target on my back that I mentioned earlier was real, but so many other things didn't fit together

The Locals

I've also mentioned the Locals, but don't confuse the residents of the Neighborhood with these Locals. The ones we called Locals were people who had very definitely fallen through the cracks, but they pretty much were in charge of the underground out there on the plains of Kansas. They lived in a make-shift shanty town along the Arkansas River, in the general vicinity of Cheyenne Compound. That's where the tobacco, and the beer, and extra food beyond what MREs were issued to us came from. And, as I have already noted as well, the hydro for my bike. And this came to you at a premium price - unless, that is, you had something of value beyond government credits that they wanted.

I got to know one of these Locals pretty well because we were always trading with him. They called him White Buffalo and I suppose that was because he had a mane of thick black curly hair on him, and he was mostly white skinned. I don't know. He fit right in with the rest of them - did I mention that most of them were Cheyenne Indians, but not really dark skinned ones with the blood line having been watered down for nearly two centuries? - and he called himself Italian, but - as you can tell - he didn't look Italian to me. Still, he turned out to be a fairly decent scout and was also one of the very few who claimed to have slipped inside the borders of the former city of nearby Great Bend, Kansas and knew some secrets he wasn't revealing.

White Buffalo was our source of beer most of the time, and many other food stuffs. He would never take government credits. He wanted aspirin, mostly, and some ibuprofen and the like, too. Occasionally some cough drops, and toothpaste and hair spray, stuff like that - for the women, he said.

I Lose a Toe

I've mentioned that I got to see Mary when I had been wounded and sent on furlough to Branson. And I've mentioned that I got shot a lot. Seven times. Well one of those times my good friend, Johnny Ray Murphy, was the one who shot me. God help me, I'm embarrassed by all this. What happened is that we both had been drinking and I said that I wanted him to shoot me and he says what and I say that a flesh wound to my calf would be enough to be sent away to Branson again, and I could be with Mary. And he said that was stupid and I said I was serious and I grabbed his revolver and we struggled and before you knew it, the fourth toe on my left foot had been nearly shot off completely. Yeah, stupid, I know. But I guess I was lucky.

Residents

So the deal of it was that we sometimes saw women and children (and the occasional adult male) just inside the Main Gate living what appeared to be a quiet and good life on Main Street USA as vehicles would be admitted. And of course these cars and trucks always had black-out windows and so on so we couldn't ever see who was inside the vehicles. And if the driver could produce the proper documentation - and that was done electronically - we weren't supposed to question the entry. No searches. Ever. Period.

In all the time that I was stationed at the Bottoms, we didn't turn one car away because they always presented the proper identification in the form of an electronic signal of some sort to the Main Gate sensors. That worried me, but orders are orders. No one, and I mean NO ONE ever rolled down the driver's window and produced actual paperwork. It was just spooky, kind of. Whoever was on duty in the guard house would monitor the signal received by whatever vehicles, and then inevitably push the magic button that would begin to lower what amounted to a sort of drawbridge and the entrance procedure would initiate. Every time. No irregularities.

From time to time, the rumor would have it that we were expecting particularly important guests, like the family of a senator and like that. We went on what was called a code 7* alert in these situations, and that meant they'd ship more guards to us and we'd maybe have a hundred sentries on duty at any one time for a week or so. And the cars would keep coming and going and we would never notice anything special except our state of heightened alert. (*Originally we used colors to designate the level of alert, like red, blue, green, and so on. A lot of us couldn't really figure out the nuances in these color codes, so Command eventually went with a numbering system. Still confusing to a degree, but it worked better than the colors.)

After awhile, as I said, maybe a week or so - Command would order the extra troops away somewhere else and things would settle down for a while. But I don't believe that the Rockies every staged an attack at these times - you'd expect them to, wouldn't you? That was pretty much unbelievable, actually. Maybe they really did want just groceries and supplies, like one of them told me when I was briefly captured and then released unharmed in my first six months duty there. Maybe they didn't care who was at Cheyenne Bottoms. They never took any prisoners as far as I know. Well, again they captured me, but they let me go that next morning, so maybe that doesn't count.

The Rangers

Well, I better tell you about the Rangers* before I get much further into this story. The Heartland had been designated a National Park a few years before I came to the Bottoms, and like any national park I've ever heard of, you had your Park Rangers protecting the environment, the animals, and people from other people some times. We didn't see these guys too often, but they were there. And they could pop out from behind a rock or bush or cactus at the most interesting times. Like when an elk or buffalo had been killed. That kind of thing.(*Not to be confused with the Rockies - yeah, I know - baseball teams, right? Nah, just a coincidence.)

It's pretty strong to say that it was us against them. I mean, these Ranger guys were probably decent guys - and they had a job to do. Unfortunately, they came between me and starvation a number of times, so we worked really hard to outwit them when that need for good protein in the guise of a buffalo or elk steak became important. As I mentioned, we were allowed to keep a few head of cattle - but, although we had started with a dozen head in the beginning - what with our appetites and all, and a couple of thefts in the middle of the night while we were on patrol (we suspected the locals), we eventually got down to a herd of one. And that was depressing and Command wouldn't say when we might get more cattle, so we made the one remaining steer sort of a pet and turned our attention to poaching. Which put us up against the Rangers because that was one of the reasons why they were there.

Here Come the Buffalo

Shortly after the Heartland had been declared a National Park and most people moved or were moved off the property, the government turned the buffalo loose. They bought a huge herd of the animal from the estate of some guy named Turner, who had been raising such a herd up north in the sand hills of Nebraska for many years for some purpose. They just turned them loose at designated locations throughout the Heartland and proclaimed this action in the best interests of the New Republic and that is when the federal aid stopped coming, mostly, and folks were left pretty much on their own. And the buffalo, too. It became a buffalo commons, to be sure. And it was nearly impossible for the remaining few farmers to grow crops without government aid, and without water, of course. Water was always an issue. (Of course, it's also true that those who tried farming near one of the few rivers that still ran wet in this vast area were pretty much defeated by these buffalo, as the scant crops that were growing would eventually be stomped down and crushed by the roaming bison.) And without the crops there was no economy, and it didn't take but five years I am told to return the Heartland to what it had once been two hundred years or so before: A Great American Desert.

The buffalo was said to taste maybe a bit stronger than beef, but really leaner and probably healthier for you. That was my experience. These abundant animals would graze through our area in and around the Bottoms constantly, and we would get hungrier and hungrier and we would look at our pet steer, and we would look at those buffalo, and we would look at our concave stomaches, and before you knew it, a plan would be formulated. Now I never killed a buffalo, not that I wouldn't have done it if I had had to. I had worked briefly in a meat market as a younger man and my skills (such as they were) had been reserved for the carving up of such carcasses as were provided me. And I did fairly well. We didn't have a grinder, so the fattier and tougher portions were left for what we called our stew meat. Simmered at low temperature for a long time in our makeshift kitchen outside the guard station at Quadrant Number Two with a few spices and some beans of some sort provided by the Locals, it made a rather savory chili for a cold fall evening. All the other cuts we classified as steaks, although some were more roast like than I would care to admit. And some we just cut into thin strips and hung out to dry under the Kansas sun for our jerky. For a time, we didn't have an effective method of refrigeration, so basically in the beginning we had to decide what we were going to do with the various cuts within a day or so of the kill. We made out all right and threw very little away. (The Locals took the bones and skins off our hands in exchange for those spices I mentioned.) The biggest problem was Command and the Rangers. The rules clearly stated that the poaching of wildlife from Heartlands National Park was strictly forbidden and those who chose to violate this regulation would be dealt with swiftly and severely.

So, we had to be careful if you know what I mean. Kills were always made at night for obvious reasons, and we dug and camouflaged a sort of storm cellar/food storage area* right there near the Main Gate and covered it with yucca plants and other brush. One of the reasons why we stored our bison meat, etc., more or less out in public and near that Main Gate was the thought that #1) we had noticed that the Rangers generally stayed away from that area for some reason, and #2) we had the idea that the Rangers wouldn't think we would be so stupid as to hide our contraband right under everyone's noses. It worked. Mostly.(*Well, if you know about Kansas, then you know about tornadoes, and we used that facility more than once to save ourselves when one of those violent funnels dropped suddenly out of the sky on us in early summer. In fact, we decided to dig a half dozen of these storm cellars around the perimeter of the Bottoms, for safety's sake, of course, and Lieutenant Summers approved this himself. They eventually became clubhouses of a sort, and drinking and smoking and playing cards were the regular activities of the "clubs". And, although we stored beer and chips - when we could get them - in these cellars, we stored our dried Buffalo meat only in the first one we dug by the Main Gate.)

Storm Cellars

Of course, as I said, although we were in a desert and water was hard to find, digging these storm cellars was not without an interesting discovery or two. One of these discoveries was that the Cheyenne Bottoms area still had a lot of water available under ground, and another of these discoveries was that most of the cellars filled up with this water if given half a chance. And we had to bail out several of these water logged cellars about once a week. Another interesting discovery we made was that this water was really strongly alkaline and tasted horrible, but that old burlap soaked with small, reserved amounts of it could be used in some manner to help preserve our buffalo meat, at least for a couple of weeks after the slaughter, and once we figured this out we were more likely to keep the cuts fresh and not make so much jerky. But there was a problem. We traded the skin and bones to the locals for spices and such, as you know. And we also traded some amount of jerky to them for our beer. (I don't know where they got the beer.) Less jerky meant less beer. So, the conundrum: Did you want steaks tonight, and did you want beer? Some chose the latter, and some chose the former. We had to compromise.

The River

Johnny Ray was always going down to the Arkansas River - this is how we got to know White Buffalo and his family - and doing some trading. he'd bring back stuff like peanut butter, crackers, gelatin every once in a while (although this turned out to be really hard to fix out there on the plains) - stuff like that. Now my thinking on this was that the nearby city of Great Bend had to have been the supplier on these items. Even though entrance was forbidden, where else could the Locals be getting all this packaged food? Yeah, the few times I had ventured near the city, I had seen great red and yellow barricades, and some warning signs, but no guards. In fact, no sign of human life at all. We were told that there was very little population there time and again had heard enough and seen enough that I believed that the city of Great Bend had secrets. What they were for sure I did not know, but I believe that a lot of our food came from there, through White Buffalo and his people to be sure, but from Great Bend.

Now all this food from the Locals (packaged in containers, produced in another time, actually!), surely enriched our lives. (They weren't making this stuff any more.) Antique food. And boy, did it ever taste good! We had to steal from the Compound's commissary -- which was not an easy thing to do -- give the stuff to Murphy and a couple of the other guys, and they'd do our trading for us. As I told you, White Buffalo usually wanted over-the-counter medicines and cosmetics, but some of his fellow Locals wanted other things, and we did our best to supply them. This turns out to be a mistake on our part, but we didn't know.

Clothes

Uniforms? I had one Guardsman coat, six government issue tee shirts, and two pair of camouflage pants. I wore several tee-shirts over each other in the winter, scrounged an old pair of leather gloves, and traded a fellow soldier for a booney hat. That's it. Well, a few pairs of khaki briefs. I guess it was enough, but it was kind of hard to keep them clean, and after a while you just give up on it.

So we weren't really a sharp looking outfit. My idea on it was that was what Command wanted. Otherwise, they would have issued us more clothes, and seen to it that we had laundering facilities wouldn't they? Of course, we had required inspections twice a month when I first came to the Bottoms, on Mondays, and everyone made an effort to make every thing shine, glisten, and sparkle. But honestly, no one was written up except rarely, and then it was just a slap on the hand and it was over and you went back to your un-army-like, slovenly ways, particularly near the end of my tour of duty there.

The only people around who were dressed worse than us were the Locals. And they were pitiful. Rag tag clothes, decaying shoes - if they wore them, and their women often went topless and their small children naked, at least in the summer. Which was interesting, because while trips over to the River might bring in a sight or two of the normally absent female anatomy, these people were dirty and smelled, and were only a level or two above being absolute and outright beggars. Not that a desperate individual soldier hadn't sneaked over to the Arkansas a night or two and taken advantage of what was a rare commodity. A woman.

Now this sort of thing - guardsmen sneaking over to the Arkansas River at night for you know what - this sort of thing caused so much trouble and had Command paying off the Locals any number of times in terms of some sort of grant or such that it was hardly worth it. And any of the troops who were caught indulging in a liberty or two with a Local Woman were immediately shipped off and we never saw them again. Court martial? Don't know. We just didn't see them again.

Food

Spam for lunch was a favorite in those days. And Velveeta - when you could get it - probably at least ten years old, if not more! I'm sure they were old packs, because that part of America was gone, and the New Republic wasn't producing a lot of processed foods any more. And it turned out that the Locals might be getting much of this type of food from a supplier within Great Bend*, but those items were shipped to Great Bend from the limestone caverns along the Missouri River under what was left of the old Kansas City. Missouri or Kansas? Don't know.(*Just because many of these food items were stored in old Wal-Mart buildings does not necessarily mean that that corporation was in any way involved in the distribution of the foods mentioned. As a matter of fact, I don't think that corporation was actually doing business anywhere in the Heartland during my time of service.)

We were provided with protein as part of our regular rations - issued irregularly - but you got sick of that brown, gooey paste that was GI peanut butter. Snickers candy bars, French's shoestring potatoes, Atomic Bombs (the candy kind, OK?) - we got those every once in a while. But water was still a problem. Could you drink out of the Arkansas River? Yeah, but it was pretty thick and it was best if you could scoop up a bit in your canteen and then let it be for a while and let the mud and the muck settle before you tried to force it down. That was the value of Koolaid: it masked the taste of some amount of impurities we found in most of our water. And grape was the flavor that, for some reason, did the best job of it.

Fresh bread - forget it. We got some tinned crackers every once in a while, and were grateful for them. Obviously, most of what we ate, in addition to the MREs, was snack food, finger food. Well, okay, some would call it junk food. And the only times I had a hamburger worth anything during my tour was when I was recuperating at Branson. And those were actually very good, with mustard, ketchup, pickles, onions, relish - the works. Cooked by an older lady named Helen something or other who claimed to have spent some time of her life before the wars frying burgers up in a small cafe in Montana. Worked for me.

Mail Call

Mail call was infrequent, and I don't think I got more than a half dozen letters during my time at Cheyenne. One from the Reader's Digest - something about a contest, one from a military surplus company in Minnesota - and a few more from Mary, God love her. The Reader's Digest mailing was kind of funny since I knew that there weren't more than three or four magazines in total being published in the New Republic in those days. A digest of what? I didn't know and didn't care. (It turns out that their editions were digests of stuff from the last years of the 20th century!)

And the letters from Mary - well, talk about a breath of fresh air! Command was supposed to search all incoming mail, but I don't think they did. Mostly. One time Mary managed to get some Milky Ways to me in one mailing, and - as kind of a joke - sent me a box of condoms another time, telling me to bring them along on my next trip to Branson. Amazing! And I did.

Lieutenant Summers always wanted to get involved in mail call, so he'd stand there proudly while his corporal would shout out names. Kind of like that he was personally responsible for these contacts from home. Mostly it was a good time and I think he needed to see us laughing and talking and so on. He was a nice guy who tried to do right by us, that much I am sure of - but I don't think that military life was really rewarding for him. He was mostly in a sour mood. News from home was mostly good for us guards. Oh, occasionally, there would be the Dear John letter whereby a fellow would find out that his sweetheart wasn't being nearly as true to him as he was to her. (Never mind that there were precious few opportunities for him to cheat!) But normally mail call was something we looked forward to.

Retrospect

Johnny Ray Murphy looked at some of these journal entries the other day and confessed that he didn't understand why I was doing it. And I said that it made me feel better to put down my thoughts on paper and maybe he should try it, too, and he said he didn't think so. He also said that if I was trying to write a story that I was doing a piss poor job of it and he thought that a fellow would have to read quite a few entries before they got a feel for it and then maybe it would make some sense. And I said that was the idea and someday maybe I'd publish them all together where people could understand what was going on there at the Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood. And I told him that I didn't know if it was a story or not. One thing, the plot would be pretty hard to follow although some of the characters might be interesting to the reader and the theme was certainly decipherable if you stayed with it long enough. We left it at he might want to read more at some point and tell me if I was doing anything worthwhile. I told him that would be OK with me and perhaps he would have an idea or two that I could include. He said maybe.

Yes, in answer to your questions, a book is in the works featuring the Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood Compound journals published on the Net for the last three years. Watch for upcoming details, and thanks for your acceptance of this project.

The Barton County Fair

I've got to tell the story of the Barton County Fair in this journal. It had been a tradition to hold this affair yearly in mid August in the old America, and in 2030 - the first year I was stationed at Cheyenne Bottoms - several of the locals organized a revival of that practice on a rather small scale, but that following year they went all out and held a revived county fair that turned out to be a lot of fun. And believe it or not, I actually got Mary to come out from Missouri and spend a weekend with me. Tractor pulls, animal and crops exhibitions, a few games of chance, some entertainment - and a booth that actually sold candied apples and cotton candy. And the buffalo races. Wow!

Well, the Buffalo races turned out to be just about the wildest thing I've ever been involved with. The locals were allowed to keep a small herd of buffalo for their own use by the Rangers, perhaps as a concession to some long-ago inked treaty. They could do what they wanted with this "herd", and one of the things they did (besides eat a couple now and then), was stage a rodeo a couple of times a year. One of the times of the year that they held a rodeo turned out to be at Barton County Fair time, and it was, well - I used the word, "wild" earlier, and I can't think of a better term.

It turns out that the county where Cheyenne Bottoms was located was named after Clara Barton, the lady who started the American Red Cross during another Civil War that was fought way back in the 1800's. I'd read about her in school many years before. It was strange that, in a county named for the founder of the Red Cross, health care was only available several hundred miles away. Which brings me to White Buffalo the man and White Buffalo the animal were both represented at the Barton County Fair while I was at the Bottoms. If you know anything about real white buffaloes, then you know that there aren't very many of them, and they are considered sacred by many Indian tribes. Which led to an interesting development. White Buffalo the man was a high spirited individual and he was always clamoring for attention for some reason. So, when he entered the Buffalo Races at the Fair, he was determined to ride a White Buffalo. A perfect tie-in, right? But lacking that animal, he and a few of his buddies bleached a somewhat tame normal buffalo in an attempt to make him into a white one. Yes, they had a bottle of bleach from somewhere, and they dumped that on the poor animal. Didn't work real well.

Yes, White Buffalo tried to bleach a normal, everyday, kind of dark brown and black buffalo and it didn't work. He was also drunk at the time and fell off this dismal looking animal before the races even started. And if you think that I'm trying to portray Native Americans as drunks, you would be wrong. I think there were a couple dozen of us guardsmen who somehow managed to make it to the Barton County Fair that year, and everyone of us got falling down drunk at some point on the fair grounds. And most of us were Anglos. I'm not proud of that, by the way - that's just what happened and I thought I should mention it.

Yes, those individuals who raced buffalo rode them bareback, and White Buffalo had ridden his steed about ten feet before his drunkenness forced him to tumble to the ground. He somehow managed to get mixed up with this sad looking brute's rear feet and got a broken right leg and a punctured lung out of it. The locals had some sort of health plan agreement with the government, probably from a long-ago signed treaty, and they shipped him off to, where else?, - Branson - for surgery and convalescence. I saw it all and when I knew they were going to air-evac him to Missouri, ran up to him as they were loading him up and told him that Mary would be back in Branson in a couple of days, and she would look him up and make sure he was well taken care of. And she did, although he was gone from the Bottoms region over a month, and the black market kind of dried up during that time. I understand that he tried the races again that next year, this time with a painted buffalo, and he fared a lot better. I was gone from the region by then, but I did hear some news now and then.

Mary and I at the Fair

Well, at any rate, Mary and I had a really good time walking around what there was of the Midway and I did win her a bear, a giant old fashioned black and white teddy bear. What did I have to do to get this great prize? Tossed darts at balloons, that's what. I got six darts for five bucks, and broke a balloon with every one. Pure luck, I suppose. The guy running the booth, a local, was not real happy with me. But that's all I won, even though I threw baseballs at wooden clowns, hit golf balls through some sort of a net, and even shot a bit of pool - all to no avail. I quit when I ran out of cash, and it's kind of embarrassing to say it, but it was Mary's cash. We guards were lucky to get our credits assigned to our account, and there were precious few ways to actually obtain cash. I told her that I would pay her back when I visited Branson again. That's kind of ironic, since I was never sent back to Branson again. We had to devise other ways to meet.

Cotton candy - the blue kind that I think is supposed to taste something like rasp berries and absolutely vivid red candy apples flavored with cinnamon - that's what we ate. A couple of each. And yeah, I had a stomach ache after. But Mary was okay since she only had one of each and I had… well, never mind. Just another way to spend Mary's money. But we also had something without sugar in it. Strips of buffalo meat smoked over an open fire on a stick. And the Rangers really would have liked to say something about this, but the locals were allowed to kill buffalo and cook it and it was a close call as to whether or not they could also sell it as well legally. But the Rangers held off on that, simply walking around the fair grounds scowling.

Well, I could say that Johnny Ray had a good time at the fair, and that would probably be true. He and I and Mary spent some time together on the midway. But he did get drunk and got into an altercation with the guy running the weight guess booth and the rangers had something to get him on. (Jay R was real sensitive about his weight and my idea on it was that the gentleman's guess was insulting, at least to Johnny. Don't know for sure.) And Johnny disappeared for a couple of days and came back with a story that basically told us nothing. He did not know where he had been held, but it was a jail of some sort. And he never saw a judge, and they did not feed him regularly. But after the last meal he did have, he woke up near our little canvas-covered theater on the outskirts of the Compound. We all decided that he had been drugged and then transported back to us.

A Rebirth

Well, what happened with this fair - what was born out of breathing new life into the old fair - was that the locals petitioned whatever government agency controlled them, and they were allowed to open a sort of a casino right there on the Barton County Fairgrounds after the fair had officially ended that last summer I was stationed there. Games of chance like the old days of fabled Las Vegas, and some entertainment, right in that huge exhibition building. And the guardsmen became regular customers of course, and some tourists as well. I haven't talked much about the tourists up to this point, and I should really mention them.

And the tourists did come. Bus loads of them, through Wichita I think. Mostly middle-aged and older - probably from the south and east - those areas of the country least affected by the wars. They came to gamble and to drink - all day, into the night, and then the bus would head on back south somewhere and a new bus or two would arrive that next morning and repeat the cycle all over again. Now I have never been much of a gambler, before or after the coming of the casino. Oh, maybe a game or two of poker late at night on duty with a smoke and a cup of coffee. (Coffee also masked the taste of what mucky water was available to us, much like Koolade and wine, but as you know, wine was definitely the preferred mixer -on duty at any rate -and coffee was hard to get. What wasn't?) I just have always figured that life, itself, was enough of a gamble that I didn't need to push my luck. Also, I've never had enough money at any one time to put it out there somewhere and risk losing it. Not everyone felt that way, that's for sure. The casino got very popular my last six months at the Bottoms, and both guardsmen and tourists kept them in business.

Casinos

One of the more interesting developments of this casino project, which again was actually a byproduct of a rejuvenated county fair, was that while guardsmen from the Bottoms went there regularly, even if they won, they didn't win. What I mean by that is that whatever government agency that was intact enough to issue the casino permit to the Locals also had decreed that any winnings had to be processed by a representative of the Internal Revenue Service. Yeah, those guys were still around. So, say you won fifty dollars at a slot for example, even that didn't come to you directly - one of the feds who was always walking around the casino with a clipboard recorded your name, address, so on and so forth, and told you that your winnings, minus an up front withholding fee of course, would be sent to you directly. Well, the casino was in operation the last six months of my duties there, as I have told you, but I don't know any guardsmen, at least, who ever got a penny that was coming to them.

Drinking

Well, I drank too much at the fair - like Jay R. - and three or four other guardsmen there that particular night drank too much, but Mary didn't. She doesn't drink. So she was the one that got us back to our base there at the Bottoms. She and a couple of other women who were visiting their guys for the weekend were staying in a small tent next to the theater to the south and west of the main entrance. The Lieutenant knew, I'm sure - but he did not regularly come near that quadrant on the first weekend of the month - that was one of those tacit agreements you hear about - when women were most likely to be visiting. And particularly he did not go near the theater when the Fair was going on that summer. Got to love him, you know. I'd really like to know what happened to him. He was transferred out of the Bottoms just a month or two before I left as well. Again, I never saw him as a soldier… and I'm willing to bet that he left the service as soon as he was able. I did. And Mary was able to spend another day at the Bottoms that summer, and then she went on back to Branson to her job and to make sure that White Buffalo was being taken care of. It would be a half year or so before I would see her again - when I was being transferred - and it was not at Branson.

My Past

I had been a teacher before that kind of fell apart on me and I re-enlisted in the Guard. I had originally enlisted out of high school, served my time, and then used the benefits to go on to college. I then settled into the classroom for the next twenty years, before circumstances forced me to leave education and re-up, as they say. Hey, if they can't pay you for your work, would you stay? I had a stomach to feed and student loans to pay and... the truth is that, like about everything else in those days, the education system of America was going down the tubes. The only teachers that stayed on were the ones that didn't need the money, the ones that had a spouse or other family member earning some amount of money doing something. And there were other issues. Time to go onto something else. And I did. And they sent me to the Cheyenne Bottoms.

No Love Story

Hey, I know Mary's name turns up every now and then. But don't think I'm writing a love story here. Well, maybe that's part of it, but in truth I'm trying to show you what my life was like during this period of time that I was at the Bottoms, and when I talk about food, or the fair, a friend, or Mary . .. these are the things that got me through all that.

When we had the time off from our duties at the Bottoms, Johnny and I would go exploring in the flatlands of central Kansas. We'd hop into his VW Bug* and motor off mostly to the south and east of the Bottoms where we found any number of abandoned farm houses just waiting to be explored. We had a lot of fun doing this and we found some surprises, of course. One of the surprises in store for us was that not all of the abandoned buildings in the area were actually abandoned.

*More on the Bug later

Finding Stuff

We found lots of stuff that would interest you, I think -- among the prizes were canned vegetables in a storm cellar or two, some home-made wine in a barn (yes, sweeter and stronger than that White Buffalo had procured for us), a dog -- mangy mutt though he was -- still alive and eating something or other. Very friendly. Not too big, some sort of cocker spaniel, I believe.

And then, of course, we also found his owner. Alive. And eating something or other, semi-regularly. An old man, really, dressed in overalls and a straw hat and cursing constantly. He really had a filthy mouth. His last name turned out to be the same as Mary's -- Turner -- which precipitated many conversations as to if they were related in any way. I was able to use the satellite phone we always had with us -- although I think there was only one satellite up there working and you sometimes had to wait a half hour or so for access --to call Mary and get her in on these conversations. I don't think it turned out that they were related, although the old man was convinced that they were. That might have been to my advantage.

Old Man Turner

It was strictly illegal for Turner to be living there in Heartlands National Park as he was (even if you believed that what he was living in was his "own g..d.... house, bought and paid for"), as he described it. And I find it hard to believe that the Rangers didn't know he was there. After all, Johnny and I found him, without even looking, and it made me wonder how many more refugees from the old days might be clinging to some sort of life on the Kansas prairies. It turns out that the Locals knew about Turner, and several others like him, but they didn't talk much about that sort of stuff, at least with us guardsmen.

Turner was one of those old guys who hated just about everything, except whiskey and such. And he didn't have much of that so he joined us in drinking our wine and water mixture and told us a few stories, mostly about how wicked and evil women were. If you could get around his one-sided view of things, and the cussing, and the coughing, and the scratching -- well, he was certainly a change of pace. And his place is where we eventually had a vegetable garden my second and last summer there in the area. It was out and away, and we only shared it with a few mates. All he asked for were a couple of special favors. He was a MASH fan, you see -- and we had to sneak him into the theater a few times in return for the use of his land. And, oh yes -- we had to share the crops with him.

He'd been to war as a youth, this old man. And he talked often about those glory days -- and it turned out that he had been involved in that Korean War, the one that MASH revolved around. No kidding! No wonder he liked our theater so much. And what he got out of that war was not making the world safe for democracy, or anything like it. He claimed it was a great adventure for a young man, and as he had suffered no wounds to speak of, he wasn't sorry for the experience at all. Of course, he admitted that there were others who weren't so lucky and he felt badly for them. But it had worked out for him all right and he loved to tell stories of those days. This, by the way, was also when he began suspecting that all "wemmin" -- as he called them -- were evil. He had his reasons.

And then the damn dog died. Yeah, Pooch died somewhere in the middle of the week, and when Johnny and I got out there to check our garden, the old man still hadn't buried him yet. He was really upset. It was like Pooch was a human or something, and I guess I could understand that. Turner had been all alone from what we could figure -- maybe four or five years. And this mutt had been his only companion mostly. Turner was just really non-functional at this point, and Jay R. and I buried the dog out behind the barn, put up a sort of marker from a few bricks we found and went back into the house and fried up some bacon and eggs for the old man. Yeah, he kept a couple of hogs and several chickens. We also ate a bit with him as we didn't want him to eat alone. Well, maybe we were hungry, too.

It turned out that Turner not only hated women, but he hated politicians - all of them. He claimed that they were the reason why we were in such a mess and that he wouldn't give them the snot on the end of his nose for any of them. Except for a guy named Jimmy Carter, who was President sometime before the turn of the century. Turner's eyes would mist up and he'd stare off into space when he talked about this Carter guy, claiming that he was a good and a kind and an intelligent President, and that the only reason that he was a one-time President (he was not re-elected) was that he came to Washington from the outside and never learned to play the games that his predecessors had. Don't know about that, but I do know that Carter got mixed up in some sort of an international hostage situation with a group of terrorists in the Mid east. I looked it up in a library on one of my stays in Branson.

So, if Turner hated politicians, and he hated women, what did he like? Well, you already know that he liked to drink, and he did smoke some, and he liked a good meal. And he loved that dog. And talking about the Korean War, and watching old MASH episodes with us in the theater tent outside the compound. And swearing, and spitting. And he liked the idea of being related to my woman, Mary Turner. I don't know why, but he was absolutely convinced that my Mary was a niece to his cousin Tony - or something like that - and I didn't know much about her shirttail relation, so I finally decided that the truth of it wasn't important so I said that he was probably right. And he talked with her on more than one occasion on the satellite phone and she finally gave up too, seeing that for some reason it was important to him - and she had finally said that yes, we're probably related. But neither she nor I thought that there was much chance of that being true.

Process

I've been blogging the story of Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood for three years now, and I hope you are enjoying it. Obviously I am editing entries from the original journals, and sometimes a blog is directly related to the previous entry and sometimes it's not. Remember that you can go back and check on previous entries any time you want if you have a question about what's going on. Johnny Ray Murphy thinks that a person would have to read quite a few of these entries to get a true sense of the story. He may be right, and I encourage you to do so.

Again with the Rangers

One of the ways that the Rangers had of watching us was the fact that they controlled most of the old grain elevators in the region. Once storing all sorts of grain from the nation's bread basket from season to season, these mammoth structures were all but abandoned when Uncle Sam started moving people out of the Midwest and began moving animals back in, declaring it Heartlands National Park. The Rangers were ever vigilant and you had to really watch yourself most of the time. But of course they were only human like the rest of us, and they could be fooled.

The Rangers not only had a really good view of the entire Cheyenne Bottoms area from these grain elevators, and therefore a excellent look at a sizable area of Heartlands National Park, they also used psychology on us. Just about every elevator in the area had an impressive looking bronze plaque stating that the particular structure was owned and operated by the Department of the Interior, and No Admittance was granted. The deal was we never knew just how many Rangers there were, and when and where to watch for them -- I don't really think very many to be honest -- and the lights were always on at these facilities*: you couldn't tell if there was anyone in there or not.

*Not a lot of power was available out there on the Kansas Plains, except the Compound itself. I believe that the Rangers had some sort of solar panels on top of the grain elevators that supplied power for their lights, etc. I saw some evidence of this when we flew over a couple of the storage units on the way to Branson and back.

Johnny Ray and his Superstitions

Johnny Ray is a friend of mine, and a fellow guardsman, as you know. But he drives me crazy every once in a while with his superstitions. Really. We had a Friday the 13th at least once during my years there as I recall, and he refused to get out of bed and attend to his duty. I had to take a double shift for him - including the midnight to 6:00 a.m. slot - just to keep him out of trouble. And then it didn't work because he claimed to have some sort of headache most of that time and he just felt miserable. Well, not as miserable as I did that night - it rained, the wind came up, and there was lightning everywhere. I'm the one who came back to our makeshift barracks wet and cold and miserable. I announced my presence and wondered aloud why I should have done him the favor and he just let out a groan and turned over.

So this superstitious streak of Johnny's showed up in a lot of ways. The "3 on a match" thing for one. Dating back to a Civil War in the mid 1800's, lighting three cigarettes on a single match at night supposedly gave the enemy time to identify your location, aim, and fire by the third light up. True or not, Jay R. held this one close. Everybody lights their own smokes when they're on duty with him. No exceptions. And this one kind of made sense in an odd sort of way. There were other superstitions, however, that were a bit more on the edge.

Johnny and I had a talk about all this superstition stuff and I told him that he needed to grow up and get ahold of it and stop all this nonsense. And he said that most people were superstitious and he wasn't all that unusual. And I said nah, and he said what about religion and I said what? And he claimed that all religious people were superstitious and I said that I didn't understand that. And he said, well, they are, and I can prove it. What's your proof? I asked and he began one of those long diatribes that I had become accustomed to over those last several months and I didn't see his point and he went on and on and eventually I just walked away from him on down to see a film that evening. Religion is not a good subject to discuss with folks, I think. And politics. And sex.

Religion at the Bottoms

So, speaking of religion - we had regular worship services at Cheyenne Bottoms most Sunday mornings. There would always be a few of us guardsmen, and maybe a half dozen of the Locals as well attending. It was basically what I would call a Protestant congregation and - lacking a full time minister assigned to our area, we would get a lot of traveling clergy men and women for a week or two at a time. Several of them turned out to be Baptists, which was okay with me because I had been raised Baptist. And then there were a few Methodists as well, which was okay with me since I had converted to that religion as a teen ager. And then there were an odd lot of Presbyterians, Church of God, etc., etc., that came through the area from time to time. I like the Baptist ministers the best. We would - of course - have to listen to a sermon about God's will and how he was busy striking down evil people - even if I didn't believe it. But we got to sing a bit, and we sometimes had a guitarist in who would sing a few songs and we could sing along and that was fun. Kind of took your mind off what else was going on for an hour on so on Sundays.

On the rare occasions when one of the itinerant preachers couldn't make it, someone from the area was expected to conduct the services, and in many instances, that person was White Buffalo. He was, indeed a born-again Christian and he preached about as good a fire and brimstone sermon as I would have expected to hear. Of course he claimed to be a hybrid of some sort, since he had converted - as I have said to Baptism - but he still followed many of what he called "the old ways" in terms of the religious culture of the Cheyenne. Which made for an interesting mix at the services he conducted, as you can imagine. Let me just say that we did - or were expected to - a lot of what to me was unintelligible chanting instead of singing old fashion hymns at his presentations. I might as well have been at a mass with the full Latin dialogue going on for all I understood from White Buffalo.

So White Buffalo always brought along a bunch of pamphlets when he was preaching, and he distributed them among the faithful under the canvas there on Sunday mornings and read from them. He'd read a few words, then put the booklet down, and attempt to interpret what he had just read out loud. He would even occasionally ask a fellow worshipper for his/her opinion and he called on me more than once. As I remember, he asked me once if it was "hard" or "easy" to go to Hell. I think the first time he asked me I said that it was easy. And I know for sure that he asked me again at some future date and I changed my answer to hard. I think that's the answer he wanted.

Johnny Ray says that the answer White Buffalo was looking for is that it's both "easy" and "hard" to go to hell -- that was the point of it if you read the pamphlets, he said. I wasn't so sure about this, but if that were the case, then I had pretty well covered my butt by choosing both answers at one time or another. I didn't go to church much after these question and answer sessions with White Buffalo, but on the other hand, I hadn't really been much of a church goer any way. But the plains of central Kansas were really not friendly so you were always looking for some sort of diversion when you had time off.

God at the Bottoms

I asked Johnny Ray one night near the end of our tour of duty at the Bottoms if he believed in God and his answer was, "Do you believe in God?" He was always doing that sort of thing to me, so it was fairly hard to figure out what he was really thinking. At any rate, we were leaning up against the outside of one of our storm cellars on a starlit night there in central Kansas, smoking home rolled cigarettes, and you just couldn't help talking about things of a cosmic nature while experiencing all that depth in space. We talked on through the night and it made it really hard to take 6:00 a.m. duty that next morning. But we did decide that there was a plan, an order to the universe, and that it had to created, and creation implied a creator, so Yes -- we both believed in God.

Kansas is an Interesting Place

I've read my history so I know that the state of Kansas was one of the first states to require that the theory of Creationism be taught in the public schools right along with Evolution. Yeah, really. I suppose the people of Kansas -- in those days before the government started moving people out south and east -- could do what it wanted along these lines. It's not like you couldn't move on somewhere else if you didn't agree with the government. I just wondered then and I still wonder now how they justified this particular point of law. Remember, Johnny Ray and I had decided that we believed in a god, but this creation stuff was beyond us for sure. We agreed on that. And the only place you'd find a Bible of any sort among the guardsmen was at the chapel on Sunday mornings.

Well, yes -- I had spent some amount of time in Kansas before re-upping with the service. I taught for a time in a small town near Pittsburg in southeast Kansas. Bible thumpers all over the place, there you know. And I don't really mean to make that sound derogatory, but there were so many people down there trying to tell other people how to live their lives that I knew I needed to get out of that environment, and as you know I did. That isn't to say that I didn't know some very nice people down there, of course -- but by and large, my brief stay in Pittsburg turned into just a money making proposition and nothing more. Hate it when a job turns out that way.

Artillery Range

Have I mentioned that Cheyenne Bottoms was used as an artillery range during what was called World War II back in the 1940's? Yeah, and you could walk out any day when I was there, scrounge around a little, and come up with cartridge casings for sure. Johnny Ray even got ahold of some kind of an old metal detector that he took out into the field now and again and found as many of these things as he could carry, often at the surface of the Bottoms, or just underneath. Nothing to do with them? -- Well, White Buffalo would take them in trade by the pound for stuff, and we came up with a few luxuries that way. Have no idea what he did with them.

Where'd the Water Go?

So, when I was there, almost all the naturally occurring water was found underground. Very little surface water except for that which we pumped from underground into the moat surrounding the Compound. What happened? Well, drought for sure. But if you do your reading, you'll find that a lot of people believe that overuse of the water resource by a variety of factions is probably what did that in. Now, remember that I've already told you that The Bottoms was making a recovery when I was transferring out with the drought breaking and everything. (And some migrating birds were coming back!) Yes, the drying up of Cheyenne Bottoms could have been prevented, in spite of the drought. I hoped we learned something. Here's hoping that the renewed resource will be allowed to nurture wildlife and humans once again on through the years.

Oil Fields

The Cheyenne Bottoms area was surrounded by lots of old oil wells, all silent. And plenty of storage tanks, too -- with a rumored system of underground pipe lines connecting many of the oil fields themselves. Some of the guards had done some exploring of these fields, and were always bringing back some sort of tool, or barrel, or something like that that they found. And then one mate discovered that not all the storage tanks were empty, and that raised a host of possibilities. One thing that worked was, since we had electricity available to us at our camp on the edge of the Compound only a few hours a day, we fashioned a sort of oil lamp that burned that surplus oil brightly throughout the night for us. And that made us all feel more comfortable. Of course, if you remember the story of Johnny Ray and his "3 on a match" fears, you need to know that we only used the oil lamps in and around the camp itself, never on patrol.

Fort Leavenworth

Kansas had a federal penitentiary called Fort Leavenworth in years past. It was maximum security, forty feet tall and forty feet underground if you can believe that (according to the information that I have available). I've never seen it, but I understand it's still there, although God knows what the government is doing with it now. We actually had a guy show up at the Compound one day asking for help who claimed he had escaped from Leavenworth, and he told a convincing tale. He was dressed like a prisoner, that's for sure, with a bright orange coverall being his only clothing. I have no idea why a federal prisoner would turn himself into the Guard, though. He was definitely disoriented. It's true that we guardsmen did not really know what to do with him, and the lieutenant stepped in and the guy disappeared wherever, but not before he told us an interesting story or two.

White Buffalo and God

So White Buffalo always brought along a bunch of pamphlets when he was preaching, and he distributed them among the faithful under the canvas there on Sunday mornings and read from them. He’d read a few words, then put the booklet down, and attempt to interpret what he had just read out loud. He would even occasionally ask a fellow worshipper for his/her opinion and he called on me more than once. As I remember, he asked me once if it was "hard" or "easy" to go to Hell. I think the first time he asked me I said that it was easy. And I know for sure that he asked me again at some future date and I changed my answer to hard. I think that’s the answer he wanted.

Johnny Ray says that the answer White Buffalo was looking for is that it's both "easy" and "hard" to go to hell -- that was the point of it if you read the pamphlets, he said. I wasn't so sure about this, but if that were the case, then I had pretty well covered my butt by choosing both answers at one time or another. I didn't go to church much after these question and answer sessions with White Buffalo, but on the other hand, I hadn't really been much of a church goer any way. But the plains of central Kansas were really not friendly so you were always looking for some sort of diversion when you had time off.

A Cookbook?

Since I write a lot about food and drink in these journals, it has been suggested that I come up with a cookbook of some sort for gosh sakes that highlights the type of foods we ate there at the Compound. Well, I first thought this was pretty far fetched, but after giving it some thought and talking it over with a couple of my mates from those days, I think I just might do that. You'd need a can opener, that's for sure. But we did do a lot with the fresh meats we obtained, and Old Man Turner's vegetable garden, and I think I might just work on this and see what I can come up with. The recipes will have to be simple, and although most of them were either served cold, or mildly heated over an outdoor fire of some kind, I think I might be able to adapt a few of them to kitchen cooking.

Okay, take a can of sardines, open them up and eat them. That's a joke, okay? While that is what I had many a time, I know folks looking for recipes from me want a little bit more. How about heating the sardines a little, placing them on a plate with some boiled carrots and raw spinach, with a dressing of whatever you've got? Salt and pepper if you wish. That sounds good, and we actually had that exact meal more than once, except that we never, never ate the sardines as anything but as cold as they came out of the can. And salt and pepper? -- give me a break. No. Non-existent.

I'll try to get a little more creative with this one. Take a can of Spam, open it, and eat it. Another joke. I couldn't resist. Really, take the Spam, slice it into 1/4 inch slices, heat it up a little with any kind of fruit -- this is always a great combination: pork product and fruit. My favorite is any kind of pineapple you can lay your hands on, and it wouldn't hurt to put just a bit of sugar in the pan with this. We made sandwiches with this concoction, probably because we didn't always have plates available, and wrapping a slice of any kind of bread around Spam and pineapple with that sugar and you've got yourself a nice meal. While we didn't always have an unlimited supply of canned meats, figure on feeding one person per can, unless you’ve got some sides handy. Again, we mostly ate this cold, but if you’ve got a kitchen handy, be my guest.

Drugs?

I think I mentioned way early on in these journals the fact that I wouldn't have put it past Uncle Sam to check our shit to see if we had been eating anything that we shouldn't -- like food from the commissary and such. Well, they never did that to us, but they did some drug testing for a time when I first got there. They never told us what they were looking for, of course, and several of my mates regularly smoked pot and still passed every test. Which surprised them. Ditchweed - really low class marijuana - surviving from a time when they tried to grow hemp for ropes and stuff many years before flourished in Heartland National Park, and guys picked it at will that first summer I was there, processed it, rolled it, and smoked it - off duty and on. I tried it once or twice, but to be honest, really preferred actual tobacco.

We guards decided that they were actually looking for harder stuff in our systems, but if they found anything that would be news to me. The stronger stuff just wasn't available to my knowledge, and no one was sent to the brig or anything like that for a drug offense. Oh yeah, guards transferred in and out and we were never told that there were any specific reasons why someone was leaving us. Oh, unless you count the half dozen or so who disappeared after sneaking down to the Locals' camp to be with women.

A Survivor

This old guy Turner, as I have said, was kind of hard to figure out, but Johnny Ray and I enjoyed spending some time with him and his vegetable garden. It turns out that he never left his farm after the decree from the government that basically ordered people off their lands, and - to his surprise - no one came looking for him. So he stayed. He'd lost his wife in some sort of a farming accident around the turn of the century and had just devoted himself to growing a few crops, watching TV, and feeding that dog of his since that time.

He didn't have a lot of good to say about anything or anyone as far as I can figure. Except that he was certain that he and my woman Mary were related, which they were not, but that's another story. He did talk politics every now and again, and he blamed the current state of affairs on the "guvment" as he said it, and on religion. What he says happened somewhere around the turn of the century was that… " all those guys in Washington got greedy and decided to screw the rest of us". That's what he said. And he added, "And then they got holy, too, and that was the end of it."

He also said that our country would never be the same. Ever. And then he changed the subject and it was a couple more visits before he wanted to talk about politics again. I think that's an interesting point of view, and I'm not sure how that lead to basically a one-party system ruling the New Republic, but if he's right about greed and holiness, then maybe there's something to what he was saying. I didn't get too philosophical most of the time at the Bottoms, maybe just on night patrol leaning against my cycle, smoking, and looking up at that wondrous Kansas sky. But he did cause me to wonder if the New Republic could have been avoided.

A History of Barton County

Since The Bottoms was in Barton County, and in the general Great Bend, Kansas, area, I've spent some time researching the history of the region. It's kind of interesting to me.

It turns out that for a short time, Great Bend was a railhead and a major destination of many Texas cattle drives. But after just three years or so, the city passed a law which banned Texan cattle, most likely because of the class of people that accompanied the drives. This is about the time that the drives switched to Dodge City and made that city famous.

When I read that, I definitely thought of the Barton County Fair that I've described previously in these journals. Wild, for sure, and rowdy -- and I wonder if many of the people whom I saw at the fair would have been approved by the Great Bend City Council all those years ago. Probably not. Johnny and I and Mary had a good time, and most of the guards present had a drink or two or so. Mary didn't drink. But there were others who did.

Traffic Cop Duty

I think maybe I haven't mentioned it, but all of us guards had to do a couple of days a month traffic cop duty. Yeah, I know - the Rangers pretty much patrolled the area of Heartlands National Park, but they didn't do traffic control. So we did. On Highway 281, a major North/South. Very little traffic, as you can imagine. We had to use our own vehicles, so I used that Yamaha cycle you know about. No, I didn't chase anyone down. We set up a barricade near an unmanned Hydro Center and stopped every one coming by. This could range from a car or two, or a truck or two - I never personally had more than six vehicles in one day. Quota? Sure. Everyone got a ticket. Period. That was understood. That was my job on those days. Find something to issue a citation for on each individual vehicle stopped. A speed trap? Well, not exactly. I didn't have radar, so my citations were mostly of the equipment variety. Find something wrong with the vehicle, catch the occupants out of their seat belts - that sort of thing. This did not make us guardsmen any friends, but on the other hand, most of the people we ticketed were just passing through on government permits, and their papers clearly stated the risks they were taking on their journey near Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood.

Farmer Brown

It was on one of these traffic cop assignments that I first met the guy who called himself Farmer Brown. And the petite Blond who traveled with him - Cleo. They were driving an ancient, smoking Winnebago going south on 81 towards Oklahoma as I recall, and of course they had to stop at my barricade. He was a pretty big guy and I hesitated writing him up for -- hmmmm, I think it was unsafe tires -- no or very little tread. I handed him the ticket, he looked at it, roared out a laugh, and threw the ticket on the ground. "Son", he said, looking down on me. I don't have the money to pay you guys, so forget it."

I actually was about to pull my gun at that point, but he went on, gesturing wildly with huge arms. "But I'm a rassler and if you guys want a little entertainment, invite us into your camp and I'll give you a show you won't forget. Got any big guys in your unit?" And he winked, and the blonde giggled.

And I thought, well -- why not? And I invited the two of them over to our shelter tent near the Bottoms's barricade and introduced them to the Lieutenant. And a deal was struck for that coming weekend.

Farmer brown traveled throughout the great plains in those days, rassling where he could -- usually up against a big, local boy. And money changed hands for sure on these bouts. That's how he made a living. We set up an event for that following weekend, and circulated it around the post by word of mouth. And sure enough, come Saturday night, we sure weren't going to be watching MASH re-runs. Three guardsmen turned out to challenge him.

The loud speakers mounted atop the motor home blared "The Fightin' Side of Me", courtesy of Merle Haggard, as Cleo came prancing out about sundown that Saturday night. She was an act all to herself as she paraded out in the audience of some four dozen guardsmen and assorted locals before the evening's entertainment, selling a program that featured her colleague's life story to date. The World Champion, it said. From Oklahoma. Yeah, I bought one.

And I shared it with White Buffalo while we were waiting for the Champion to leave his Winnebago and come onto the hastily constructed ring we had made out of some old mattresses. We laid out about ten of these in a generally rectangular configuration, and didn't bother with ropes as such. Johnny Ray had agreed to referee as opposed to challenging the traveling giant, but the lieutenant had over ruled him at the last minute and jumped onto the mats himself, with a whistle hanging around his neck, no less. I think that Summers just wanted to be a part of something. So, a disappointed Johnny Ray came over and sat down beside me to watch the matches.

The Match

We were all sweating buckets that evening. And swatting mosquitoes, because even if that darn moat was poisoned, it didn't seem to bother the insect population at all. We had set up the folding chairs we used for movies and such, and for church. Some of us were standing as there were not enough chairs to go around. And others were sitting on the half dozen or so bales of hay that the couple had pulled from a back door of the Bago. And Merle sang on about having ..."Ramblin' Fever".

Cleo was wearing a bright red bikini trimmed in gold, which looked really nice on her tanned and slim body -- even though she was no youngster -- and which matched the Farmer's overalls (He was now standing in the shadows just outside of their vehicle, watching proudly as his woman got the crowd going by doing a few gymnastics: hand stands, mid air flips... that sort of thing. She was an athlete, too, it turns out.)

The Farmer wore big black leather boots that came halfway up his calves to round out his outfit, and Cleo wore soft black leather sandals of some sort. I'm saying he was about six feet four inches, and one of the challengers -- a young man from back east, I think -- definitely had him in the height department. But I am absolutely certain that Brown weighed at least four hundred pounds, as wide as his shoulders were. I don't think I would be too far off on that. And she would have been lucky if she had hit 100 on the scales. They were an engaging couple.

The music changed to Haggard's "Momma Tried", and The Farmer made a quick entrance onto the mat, doing a couple of mid-air somersaults, which for a man of his size was quite remarkable -- and picked up where Cleo had left off in terms of getting the small crowd into the evening. And even though he was a bit on the heavy side, you could see the muscles rippling underneath just a bit of flesh that the years had put on. And the champion quickly dispatched each of his three challengers in turn -- using a full nelson, an atomic bomb drop (it was described in the program as one of his favorite moves), and a full body slam on the third challenger.

No contest really, with his partner moving in and around the spectators, sitting on laps, teasing and flirting and urging her man on as each short match progressed. He just tossed our fellow guards around at will -- helping them up with sportsmanship and good humor once the lieutenant had counted them out, and patting them on the shoulders and smiling. The Farmer was quite a gymnast, and politician.

One More Time

And then, when all three of the challengers had come and gone in various states of shock and embarrassment -- The Farmer raised his hands in the air and asked the crowd if they wanted to see more. And he grabbed a towel from Cleo as he was sweating profusely, and wiped at his head and upper body. (The evening was no more than a half hour old at this moment, and the July heat of the Kansas plains was only just starting to fade.) Haggard was singing "Are the Good Times Really Over?" about this time.

Yes, we yelled, caught up in the moment -- let's see more. And then he made the offer to rassle all three of the challengers again, only at the same time. And the crowd was in awe. Bring them on, he said. And any other takers as well. And at this, I sensed that Johnny Ray was fidgeting and might possibly rise out of his seat to volunteer, but White Buffalo put a hand on JR's thigh and gently restrained him just long enough for the focus to go back to center ring. Lucky for Johnny. And Farmer Brown beat his chest with his huge hands and growled like a lion. (Of course, I didn't know where his unlucky foes had gone, probably somewhere off into the dark to nurse their wounds and their pride, but I didn't think they were coming back any time soon.) And he continued to wipe copious amounts of sweat from his body.

Cleo

And at this offer Cleo turned all worried and concerned and quickly got down on her knees and pleaded with the Farmer to go back home (wherever that was?), give up rassling altogether as he was getting older and eventually was going to get hurt, himself, real bad, and she couldn't live like that any more. And she moaned and she wailed and she pleaded and she cried what looked like genuine tears, and White Buffalo, Johnny Ray, and I all exchanged glances -- was this for real? Lieutenant Summers was shuffling nervously over at the edge of the mat.

And the Farmer turned away from her, making some derisive comment about women in general, as I recall, and walked away in disgust, hands held out palms up as if to say what can you do about women any way? I'm sure Merle was singing about something or other at this time, but I don't remember.

But now the tiny Cleopatra jumped up from the mat, grabbed ahold of his suspenders from behind -- this small female effectively turning the giant around quickly and abruptly, and continued to plead with him not to take on three men at one time. (No one doubted at this point that he would have easily prevailed, but again -- the vanquished were nowhere to be seen.)

With an exaggerated and obviously fake punch to her head then with his right hand (he missed her by a mile, and I'm sure that all the spectators could see this), the Farmer immediately became contrite when Cleo reeled back from the force of this false blow and slumped to the mat. The giant immediately walked over to her apologizing, and looking at God above.

And the crowd was confused there for a moment and I believe that we were all standing at this point, but I don't remember for certain, and we knew he hadn't actually hurt her, but there she was on the mat, seemingly out. And he walked around the perimeter of the ring, looking up at the heavens and out at the crowd, asking for forgiveness and lo and behold behind his back -- the mighty midget slowly got up from the mat, quietly and quickly ran into the crowd, shoved a guardsman off his chair and took that chair and hit Brown squarely in the back with it, center stage. And he staggered around the ring, seemingly in a daze and Cleo quickly grabbed hold of one his legs, bit in, and held on.

Farmer Brown let out a giant cry of anguish and attempted to shake Cleo loose from his body -- and we were laughing at this point, so exaggerated were their movements -- we were watching a dance of sorts, for certain, between an elephant and an insect -- but she held on, eventually tripping him over backwards where he hit his head really hard, and seemingly losing consciousness.

At this point, she threw herself fully upon his outstretched body, holding down his shoulders, and motioned to the lieutenant to get over there and count the champion out. By now the crowd was hysterical, knowing full well that they were seeing high drama, a play of sorts, and nothing was for real. I've told you that's how I felt on duty at the Compound at times, and I certainly felt that way at this match.

Lieutenant Summers, caught up in it all, hesitated for a moment but Cleo yelled at him to get over there and count this SOB out. And he did, and Cleo jumped up and danced around the ring, and we yelled and applauded and screamed and were really entertained for sure.

Which, of course, is what it was all about. Cleo circled around the mat for a minute or two, hands held high proclaiming victory, and then suddenly as the Haggard sound track went silent, and the giant's groans were more clearly heard, she turned soft and loving, approaching her man lying prone on the mat, and gently helped him up. She then lead him back to the motor home with her hero holding one hand to his head and stumbling every step of the way. All eyes were on them.

Just as they were about to disappear into the bowels of the Bago, a light went on just above that side door, and the speakers suddenly belched back to life with Haggard belting out "Okie from Muskogee".

Both performers turned around acknowledging the crowd -- he rising to his full height, grasping an old American Flag in one hand and then doing a sweeping, formal bow, and she smiling broadly and performing a lady like curtsey, an