Lizards, Rhinos, and Waffling

That’s me, but the critter on my shoulder is not Leine, the star of my last novel, A Different Dragon Entirely. 

Smaug is the critter’s name, and Smaug hales from Australia and belongs to my grand-nephew Archer.  Smaug is not a Texas horny toad as Leine is, he’s longer and has no horns at all on head or torso. He can scuttle with great exuberance across the carpet, and he does cling with authority to one’s shoulder with his spatula-type feet and claws. He has holes in the side of head, which I suppose are ears. But he doesn’t squirt blood from his eyes to deter predators like Texas horny toads do, and he certainly isn’t cabin-size and able to float and fly like Leine. And as much as I tried to commune with Smaug via telepathic Latin, I never got so much as a grunt from him/her.

For all those differences, I found Smaug to be a delightful faux-Leine during our weekend visit to Archer’s house. Archer is named Archer because his parents are both nuts for fantasy books, a genre in which a good archer is pretty much required for any company of main characters who take on all sorts of beasties. So, we have a teenage Archer in our McBride clan now, and Archer has his own mini-dragon named Smaug. I don’t know if Archer can handle a bow and launch an arrow that will take out the eye of a charging warg, but he beat me in a chess game when he was ten, and was on his school’s chess team.

Since this post started with a lizard named Smaug, Part 2 features a nameless two-headed rhino I found on the internet.

 I showed this one to four-year-old grandson Jackson who couldn’t wrap his head around it until I used two of his identical toy woolly mammoths to demonstrate the illusion of a big critter who doesn’t seem to know if he’s coming or going.

Not knowing if one is coming or going is one of the norms of modern life in which we all face too many demands, too many choices, and too many magical electronic gizmos we call ‘devices’ these days.

‘Which way to go’ was also a decision made every day for a few months for the three ranking Confederate generals in Louisiana in the spring of 1864. That’s where my company of main characters (who are archerless) find themselves in With Might & Main. They are marched hither and yon, all over much of Louisiana for weeks, as the Confederate brain trust grapples with how to stop an invading Union army that is three or four times its size and supported by a strong fleet of river-born ironclad gunships.

The climax of With Might & Main reflects the surprising historical outcome of those Rebel generals’ dilemma. Rather it will, as soon as I quit acting like a two-headed rhino and make my own final charge to get the climax written.

 I tend to waffle when it comes to letting my fingers on the keyboard finally decide which of my beloved characters needs to die in battle.

I hope August starts well for you, and I get down to business and finish WM&M before Labor Day.

Me & American Outlaws

Twenty years ago, or maybe it was nineteen, I worked one day as an extra on the movie set of American Outlaws. My ‘co-stars’ were Ali Larter (of a memorable scene in Varsity Blues), Scott Caan (son of James), Colin Farrell  (Alexander the Great himself), Timothy Dalton (a once-only James Bond), and the glorious Kathy Bates (who made us all cringe when she used a hammer on James Caan’s knees in Misery).

American Outlaws cost $34 million to produce--$125 went to me for my day’s work. I suspect my named co-stars worked at a higher pay grade--and brought in $13 million at the box office. Wasn’t exactly a slam-dunk movie, but I have the disk and it is fun to watch every now and then.

My appearance is visual only, and only for a few seconds, while the fellow in front of me made a much better daily wage speaking a few lines to Colin Farrell who was portraying Jesse James, telling him that General Lee had just surrendered in Virginia.

My son Ben was working at the local movie theater in Lockhart when the film came around in 2001, and the theater owner obligingly snipped a couple of frames from the reel and gave them to Ben to give to me, since I was a hometown guy and a star in the film. There I am, on celluloid and the silver screen with brushed-on grit and grime on my face and wearing my Confederate reenacting uniform.

There were thirty or more of us extras in the line of dirty Rebs marching along in that scene. I heard one fun comment from the staffer in the costume trailer who was handing out artfully ragged Confederate uniform costumes to the guys who answered the call for extras, but didn’t have their own outfit like we reenactors did. He said those uniforms had been hanging in a studio storeroom since they used in the fantastic wide-angle scene of the Confederate wounded lying on the ground in Atlanta in Gone With the Wind some sixty years earlier. Maybe that was BS or maybe he was telling it straight. I dunno, but it was a great line.

Anyway, I was near the front of the line of extras, with my mug visible, with directions to dare not look directly into the lens of the camera, and to look grim and weary. How I came to be in front of the line and behind the actor who spoke is a mystery. I confess I did figure out that those guys in the back would likely not be seen in the final movie version, but I didn’t fight to move up in the column, like the third monkey in line to get on the ark. Maybe I did growl once or twice and shove a little bit, though. After all, nobody was going to call me by name to go to the head of the line, so a man had to look out for his fame and glory.

 We did at least fifteen takes of the tiny scene, enough to make me wonder how a whole film is ever finished. We were on a remote location at Camp Swift near Bastrop, thirty miles east of Austin. There were innumerable vehicles, generators, shade awnings and comfortable chairs for the real actors. We Rebs waited in the shade of some trucks, sitting on the grass, likely getting chigger bit. There were numerous young pretty women darting around on important errands. We were fed well. I never laid eyes on Ali or Kathy or Tim since they weren’t in our scene.

I’m glad to have the two frames of film as a memento of a long, hot enjoyable day seeing how Hollywood works out in the backwoods, near Bastrop, Texas.

There is a geographic link in this memory, as my new novel in progress, With Might & Main, features a couple of historical characters who were from Bastrop. One was Colonel R.T.P. Allen, a West Pointer, who opened and ran a military academy in Bastrop before the Civil War. He served as the first commanding colonel of the 4^th Texas Infantry regiment in Virginia, and then the 17^th Texas Infantry regiment, which fought in Louisiana, the outfit the novel is about. Unfortunately, while Allen was acknowledged to be an exceptional drill master, he must have been a very difficult man, for he was removed from not one, but both of his  regimental commands during the war, including the 17^th.  Allen finished the war commanding the POW camp in Tyler—Camp Ford.

The other fellow from Bastrop was an attorney before the war, Captain Elijah Petty. He wrote dozens of letters home to his wife that have been published, and provided me with wonderful ‘behind the scenes’ snapshots of life in a Confederate army regiment.  Reading his anecdotal, sometimes lengthy and detailed letters about his personal daily activities and what was going on around him, was similar to working that day as a movie extra—seeing how sausage is made, so to speak. Petty was a handsome guy and his historical fate is part of the climax of With Might & Main, so I’ll leave you guessing.  His letters reveal a devoted husband and father who was very concerned for his family back in Texas, as well as loyal Confederate officer.

I hope to have the manuscript of With Might & Main completed by the end of August. More later.