The Muse Only Wakes After Midnight: A Collection of Stories Written While You Slept

By Tony Martin

The Muse Only Wakes After Midnight; A Collection of Stories Written While You Slept contains six short stories compiled over the last five years. They come at you from all directions, from the tale of a fleeing survivor of the World Trade Center attack to the life of a young man who left his home to accompany Jesus and his disciples during their trek into history in Jerusalem. In between, there is the story of a first car and another about a first job as a real cowboy in West Texas. There is one about the JFK assassination in Dallas and a humorous look at a young Connecticut scientists experience living in an East Texas town.

The title of the collection comes from the authors habit of retiring early, sleeping until the early morning hours and rising at one or two oclock to write and complete research while others sleep. Most distractions are absent at that hour, particularly the telephone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 20, 2007
• ISBN: 9781469112152

Tony Martin

Tony Martin has published six books; two under his own name and four others writing as Matthew Bonnet. He is the manager of a private lake community in East Texas. His career has been spent in planning, development, construction and public management. He is a veteran of Vietnam where he served as a combat platoon leader, advisor and staff officer. He was born in Tyler and raised in Dallas, and is a fifth generation Texan. He earned degrees from the University of Texas-Arlington and Southern Methodist University.

Book preview

Copyright © 2007 by Tony Martin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

37404

Contents

AN UNPLANNED LIFE

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

MINIMUM WAGE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE CLAMSHELL PORSCHE STORY

CARL’S STORY

PROLOGUE

DAVID

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

A YANKEE’S STORY

AN UNPLANNED LIFE

A Story Co-Written by Tony Martin and Jeanne J. Evans

Prologue

On November 1, 2002, Eric Lipton wrote in the New York Times News Service that the World Trade Center victim count nears completion. He stated that there were 2,819 murdered whose remains had been identified, but there were 78 people missing whose cases were unresolved. I am one of those people, and this is my story.

Chapter One

I’m Cory Johnson. I know that most people don’t believe me, since I was only two years old, but I can clearly recall the small cemetery on a treeless flat plain of West Texas in 1970. It was cold and everything was brown. I can clearly see the faces and uniforms of the three soldiers who fired their rifles three times in unison as a salute to my Dad. I even remember watching a hawk soaring in the distance, and wondering what we looked like from his vantage point.

My mother, Sandra, was wearing a black dress and was crying. She held my hand too hard but I didn’t say anything. I remember the army officer who gave my mother the folded American flag that covered the casket, and gave me a padded square containing three beautiful medals that I later learned were a Purple Heart and two Silver Stars. Trey Bartley, the man who would become my stepfather, stood behind me and placed his hand upon my shoulder.

My father was killed in Vietnam in the tenth month of a twelve month tour of duty. My Mom remarried when I was three and I spent my childhood being dragged all over west and south Texas by my Mom and stepfather, Trey Bartley. Trey was an oil field worker who had been my Dad’s best friend. He was a drilling rig foreman whose specialty was going after deep deposits. Trey’s skill and experience placed him in high demand. By the time he finished drilling a well, he always had another job impatiently waiting for him to arrive. My Mom could have picked a place and settled into a regular home and routine, but she was determined to stay with her husband, whatever might be required, even when that meant a couple of excursions to Libya and Kuwait.

Seldom did we stay in one place longer than six months, and most of the sites in the western expanses of Texas placed me in daily contact with Hispanic playmates and friends. The second language came naturally. I always signed up for Spanish classes in school and college because I could pass with little effort. All I really learned in the classes was to refine the rough border Spanish I grew up with. It was a common thing for the teachers to become extremely agitated with me. You are in a classroom, Mr. Johnson! Not in some alley!

The oil patch was the only life I and my younger half-brother, Cable, had ever known, so we thought nothing about being constantly uprooted and changing schools. Before Cable was born, when I was only four years old, my Mom had the foresight to mitigate the potential problems she anticipated for me in our nomadic lifestyle.

We were living in Andrews, on the Texas-New Mexico border. She visited a local doctor who practiced out of the first floor of his home. He spent his life caring for the oil patch workers and when my mom appeared in his office requesting a birth certificate, he was understanding and happy to go along with her. Of course he could tell that I was three or four, and not two as she claimed. She said I had been born at home and that a Mexican midwife had assisted. There was no doctor involved, so no birth certificate was ever filed. The story was false. Cory Johnson was born in a small clinic in Eagle Pass in 1971, and she still had the birth certificate. The doctor knew what she was up to and he gave her the necessary documents, attesting that I had been born in 1973.

The result of the subterfuge was that I was always the oldest and biggest kid in my classes at school. The former gave me an edge academically and socially, and the latter kept me safe from the normal mandatory ass kicking by the class bully in every new school.

She did not do the same thing for Cable when he came along in 1975. She preferred having the two of us as close to the same grade as possible. It worked out well, since I was always around to look after Cable. I did that with a passion. No one messed with Cable Bartley. Not while Cory Johnson was around.

I was not aware of my Mother’s manipulations until I was near graduation from high school, when my stepfather related the story to a buddy over beers in front of me.

You mean I’m really twenty? I said.

My stepfather nodded with a smile. But you ain’t gonna be street legal till you’re twenty-three! Then he burst out laughing.

Trey loved the role of an independent contractor who could tell his employer to go to hell and walk away to another job. When he accepted an assignment from a driller, he made a big deal out of the handshake agreement that things would be done his way or he was gone. The drillers always accepted the terms. He was the youngest man around in his position, and many thought he was the best.

I was amazed when I heard that he uncharacteristically accepted a long-term contract with a San Angelo exploration company in return for their agreement to pay all college expenses for my brother and me. The owner stipulated that we would attend the University of North Texas, his alma mater, and Trey agreed.

I had always imagined and accepted that Trey cared more for Cable, his natural son. But despite the fact that Trey never adopted me, I could not recall him ever treating me with any less care, interest or concern than he gave Cable. Trey always spoke of my real father with complete respect.

Once, on a rare fishing trip, while sitting around a campfire on the Pedernales River, Trey told Cable and me, Your daddy was a hero, Cory. He was a better man than me. He was a helluva man. You remember that, son. You always remember that. That’s why I never adopted you. I wanted your daddy’s name to live on. I didn’t want to take that away from you.

In the beginning of college, most of my bookies were classmates, and betting on college and professional sports was an important part of the male bonding ritual at the university just north of Dallas. The college bookies demanded immediate payment for bets and were quick to adopt a cash-up-front policy for clients they suspected were getting over their heads.

The bets were a very public thing, and we all gathered in front of the TV in the dorm lounge and laughed at each other’s lost wagers and celebrated each other’s wins. Loans between buddies to make bets were a routine thing. After all, if one of your friends did not have the money to wager, he was cut out of the weekend’s fun. The price paid for the loan was a share of the winnings or a guarantee of reciprocity when your funds were lacking.

At first, the wagers centered on the college team. That quickly spread to betting on the conference teams, then the nation. That soon broadened into betting on the professional sports teams, and that’s when the fun began. That is when we began to study the point spread and to track team injuries. With so many bets and so much money at stake, the gambling took on a new importance.

It became a business. Some of the fun was left behind, but it was replaced with the rush of being at risk. At that point, most of my friends jumped ship and found new ways to entertain themselves. But some, like me, signed on for the voyage. We were addicted to the rush, and our lives became centered on the games. We were players.

I usually came out ahead. My bets were well planned, conservative and intelligent. I actually quit my part time job in the college library and devoted my working hours to studying my wagers. Except for a couple of small hiccups, I made considerably more money gambling than I did working. I made enough to buy a car. A buddy drove me to Dallas where I purchased a red 1959 clamshell Porsche with rolled white upholstery for six hundred dollars. It had twin carburetors that could be tuned to run smoothly at speed and die at idle, or idle smoothly and stumble and miss at speed. There was no in-between. Of course I chose to constantly gun the engine to keep it from dieing while stopped, in order for it to run like a striped-ass cat at full speed.

By the end of my freshman year at my new college home, I developed a welcomed sense of permanence. I had never lived anywhere that long before. But my world was shattered early in my sophomore year when I received a call from my stepfather telling me that Cable was dead, and that I had to get home as soon as possible to be with him and especially my Mom.

They were near the Guadalupe Mountains in Culberson County, one of those huge, sparsely populated expanses in Texas whose only purpose is to hold the world together. It is as bigger than a lot of states, but has only one person for every ten thousand acres. The only high school is eighty miles away and Cable died when he and another boy crashed their car on the way to classes in the early morning darkness.

When I arrived at the modest rent house where Trey and my Mom were living during this particular drilling job, I quickly realized how much Cable and I really meant to them. I knew they loved us, but not how much. They were both completely devastated. The light had left them both. They were like shells and the only thing that could create a spark in their eyes was being near me.

I took on the task of performing the funeral arrangements. Trey and Mom were happy to let me do it. I signed all the papers and took possession of all the certificates and documents provided by the funeral home in Van Horn. My parents showed no interest in seeing any of them. I contacted the friends and the hand full of relatives and took all of the calls and expressions of sympathy. I was so determined to handle it all and handle it well, that my grief was postponed.

It was a closed-casket funeral and for that I was thankful. I knew I could not gaze upon the face of my brother and keep it all together. I focused myself on steering my parents through the ordeal. They were both like zombies and I only wanted to hold them. They clung to me and never wanted me beyond their touch. I could not remember two more pitiful creatures in my young life. The local landing strips were overloaded with private airplanes owned by the drillers and oil and gas investors whom Trey had made very rich, who flew in to pay their respects.

I withdrew from school for the remainder of the semester to remain close to them, and to deal with my own sense of loss. I had so been looking forward to living and going to school with Cable in Denton . . . to showing Cable the shortcuts and introducing him to our new home.

After a few weeks, Trey finally went back to the rig and I worked diligently to keep Mom’s thoughts on other things. The holidays were particularly emotional and totally absent of the joy I always remembered in our home during that season.

My parents insisted that I return to school in January. In February, Trey finished the Culberson well and they moved almost a thousand miles to his next project on the opposite end of the vast state, near Longview and the Louisiana border. Their new home, in the small town of Tatum, was only three hours’ drive from my college, so I was able to visit them a couple of times each month.

I anticipated Mom’s depression, but not Trey’s. Trey changed from a fun-loving rounder, into a quiet, sullen man who spoke almost in whispers and called me late at night to ask if I was planning to visit the next weekend. I was not surprised at all when Trey was diagnosed with cancer and refused treatment. He died in my last semester before graduation.

Carol and I met each other in our senior year on a blind date arranged by my roommate’s girlfriend, who was Carol’s sister. Carol flew down from Penn State to visit her sister and flew home with my heart, as she often told her friends.

My Mom moved home to San Angelo, but only lived three more years before she too succumbed to another form of cancer without ever telling us she had the disease. By then, Carol and I had graduated, married, had a son, Jason, and were living in San Antonio. Carol helped me through the ordeal of selling the house and dealing with the possessions. We carefully boxed the family records, though I was not sure why I kept them. We moved the boxes and the furniture and keepsakes that we did not want, but that I could not bring myself to sell or donate, to my Aunt Gracie’s barn near Sonora. Gracie was Mom’s younger and only sister and my sole living relative. She never married, taught public school, and lived alone on a small spread miles from town. I was glad that Mom had lived to see and hold her grandson, but sad that Jason was too young to remember her.

Chapter Two

The investment brokerage firm that hired me wanted to move their New York office into the international marketplace as quickly as possible. They put out the call to every branch office demanding the names of all account personnel who spoke a foreign language, regardless of tenure or experience. They yanked me from my relatively peaceful and comfortable newly-wed existence as a very junior account executive in San Antonio, and shipped me directly to the Big Apple.

Simply due to the intimidation factor that New York City posed to a country boy, I probably would have turned down the transfer, except for Carol, who was excited about the prospect of moving back closer to her home and family in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The call to New York could not have come at a better time for me. There was absolutely nothing holding me in Texas. My family was gone, and Carol’s family was very much alive. It made sense to move closer to them. I was thankful for the chance to give my son an extended family. The company, after reviewing my fluency in the Spanish language, assigned me to the clients in the Caribbean and Central American region. They felt that my language lacked the refinement needed to deal with customers in Spain. But it was the plainspoken, simple, street smart nature of my language, I think, that endeared me to most of my contacts. I moved into the new assignment easily and soon became a steady and reliable member of the New York international corporate team.

We were quickly accepted into the social fabric of the Rockaway neighborhood. The insurance money from Trey’s death and the profit on the sale of Mom’s house barely gave us the down payment on a large old house. Thanks to Carol, Jason had not developed a Texas accent and had no problem becoming an extroverted member of his kindergarten, readily and proudly proclaiming his teacher’s entitlement of Class Clown. Carol had taught him to read by the time he was four, so