My Year in the Barrel

By Stephen P. Scott

Charlie Marlowe is an award winning writer who has gone too far and offended too many people. He finds himself exiled in a tiny Central American country that time and the rest of the world have forgotten. And he has a price on his head. Before he can return to the civilized world and the good graces of his readers, he must journey into the heart of darkness and interview an almost mythical freelance missionary. But first he must survive the climate, the flora and fauna and the local cast of expatriate characters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen P. Scott
• Release date: May 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476254395

Stephen P. Scott

I was born in 1954 and grew up on a farm in the Ozarks of Northeastern Oklahoma. I've traveled extensively through the American West, Northwest and Southwest, with one side trip to Florida. I have a BA in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma. I've worked as a poke picker, dishwasher, roofer, goat farmer, printer, warehouse person, country singer, standup comic, bookbinder, photographer, writer, housepainter, editor, dumptruck driver, playwright, landscaper, teacher, janitor, graphic designer and computer technician. I'm a really good janitor.

Book preview

My Year in the Barrel

a novel

by

Stephen P. Scott

Mudpuzzle Publishing

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Stephen P. Scott

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any butchering of geography, geology, biology, history, theology, customs, names, places, dates, sports, languages, interpersonal relationships, literature, physics or almost anything else is intentional and meant with humor and affection, so stop picketing my house!

All rights reserved

Copyright 2012 Stephen P. Scott

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the author.

Cover painting by SScott

Cover design by Nancy F. Furner

[e-mail]

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is dedicated to my Mom, who always hung my pictures on the fridge, metaphorically speaking.

My Year in the Barrel

Chapter 1

Here I sit, smoking strong Mexican cigarettes, drinking endless shots of rotten-cactus-stench tequila, eating who-knows-what wrapped in moldy corn tortillas and chasing it all down with some of the best damned coffee on Earth. I probably look to you like the typical expatriated American: sweaty, broke, disillusioned; dehydrated from alcohol, heat and dysentery; and shaking from a combination of malaria, delirium tremors and god-only-knows-what. Well, maybe I am, but a year ago I was somebody else. A year ago, I couldn’t have even imagined somebody like me.

Okay. Brace yourself for the flashback. I down another shot of bitter green cactus bile for good measure and stare into the blue-white smoke snaking up from an El Morte burning in the ashtray. This dark, funky little cantina, somewhere in the asshole of Latin America, fades out and we fade back in, somewhere in the asshole of Midwestern America.

I’m sitting outside the office of my boss, Justin Weemer, in the international headquarters of Allegiance Publishing. Behind the reception desk sits Bernice Mingus, Weemer’s secretary, a singularly unattractive woman with long brown hair twisted into a tidy cinnamon bun on top of her head. She wears no makeup (for religious reasons), her face is pinched up into a prudish expression (probably also for religious reasons) and all traces of a body are covered up by a long navy-blue skirt and white cotton blouse. That old movie cliché enters my mind and I imagine Bernice letting down her hair, taking off her glasses and unbuttoning the top two buttons of her blouse. I shudder.

On the table in front of me (since we don’t drink coffee--for religious reasons--we don’t call it a coffee table) are about two years-worth of back issues of our various publications. I sort through the pile in search of some distraction, but I realize I’ve read every single page of every single magazine. My attention drifts to the simulated rubber tree appearing to grow in a pot beneath the coat rack. It isn’t much to look at, but at least the ersatz vegetation is more interesting than Miss Mingus. On the simulated-wood paneled walls in the waiting room are various awards for various articles, recognized in various categories by the Christian Publishers’ Association. About half of those awards are mine, which is why I’m not here to be fired. The awards are probably the only reason I’m not here to be fired.

I don’t want to bore you with a lot of inane background information, but I have to, so here goes. I’m a writer. Or, I used to be a writer. No, that still isn’t accurate. I used to be a Christian writer. I wrote for a popular Christian periodical. Since you’re reading this, you probably don’t have the slightest clue what I’m talking about, so I’ll explain. In the world there are many, many different religions. All of these different religions hate and condemn each other because, basically, they are in competition. No one really knows what they are competing for, although head count seems to be the standard they use to decide who’s winning, but that doesn’t matter right now.

Within each of these different religions there are different factions and within those factions there are a bunch of different denominations and within those denominations there are different branches and so on, right down to parishes and fellowships.

The religion we’re concerned with is Christianity. As you probably know, unless you’ve been on Mars for the last two thousand years, the two major factions of Christianity are Catholic and Protestant (there are a couple of other factions who probably consider themselves major, but I’m sure they’re perfectly content having me leave them out). I can’t tell you much about the Catholics except that according to the Protestants they’re doing everything wrong and they’re all going to burn in hell. The Protestants, on the other hand, are, to my understanding, divided up into a vast number of denominations. Each of these denominations were splintered off from the Catholics, or (as many claim) the original First Century Church (or some derivation thereof) due to some minor differences of interpretation of some passage or another in the Bible. Each denomination claims that it has the one and only true interpretation of the Bible and that it is the one and only true means of entry into Heaven. The denomination we’re concerned with is the Purists.

Really easy so far, right? Now it gets a little complicated. The Purists somehow trace their origins (not that I doubt them--I just don’t remember how all that begetting stuff works out) to Jim the Purist. You know the guy who started it all with the practice of nearly drowning people in a muddy Middle-Eastern river in order to wash away their sins and cleanse their filthy souls? Well, anyway, there are about 249 different branches of the Purists. There are the Purists, the First Purists, the Southern Purists, the Northern Purists, the Trinity Purists, the Bible Purists, the Faith Purists, the Reorganized Purists, the Fundamental Purists, the Rapture Purists, the Literal Purists, the Liberal Purists (two words not normally seen together), the Testament Purists--it just goes on and on, but we’re almost done here.

Each branch of Purists (which is in competition with every other branch and believes all the others are doing everything wrong and they’re going to burn in hell) has its own set of beliefs which is called a doctrine. Because each doctrine is different and theoretically unique, each branch must have its own hymnals, prayer books, literature, plaques, pot holders, key chains and in some cases even its own translation of the Bible. Therefore the parent church of each branch is like a corporate headquarters with a management division, an advertising division, a marketing division, a manufacturing division, a distribution division and--the one we care about--a publishing division. These publishing divisions aim to produce everything that any faithful church member will ever need to read, including, but not limited to, bumper stickers, greeting cards, pamphlets, newsletters, inspirational biographies, novels and--the one we care about--magazines.

Which brings us back to Miss Mingus and the office of Justin Weemer, editor of Allegiance Life, a monthly magazine of news, entertainment and inspiration for Lost Lambs and Members of the Allegiance Purist Church.

I should probably point out that, as I used to boast, the Allegiance branch is the seventeenth largest Purist organization in the world. Which probably doesn’t seem all that big, unless you consider that, besides having over 20,000 churches in the United States and Canada, we also have missionaries working to convert the heathen non-believers in over 17,000 towns and villages in 237 different countries worldwide.

As branches of the Purist family go, the Allegiance Purist Church is one of the most--possibly the most--conservative. Sometime in the last century, the Allegiance branch splintered off from one of the other branches (we don’t talk about which one), because we disagreed with that other branch’s tolerance of such sinful indulgences as caffeine, roller skating and stage plays (since everybody knows that anyone guilty of being an actor is going to burn in hell, and the playwrights with them, then we believe it is sinful for us to watch while those theater people are engaged in the act of dooming themselves). As we have grown and developed our own doctrine, the members of the Allegiance Purist Church have kept up with technology and found many new forms of entertainment to condemn. Board games and yoyos have been added to our list alongside such classics as stand-up comedians and bad jugglers (although we don’t generally believe in different levels of eternal damnation, we do believe that there is a special place in hell for ventriloquists).

Of course, there are plenty of other sins we don’t tolerate: high-fiber cereal, spicy foods, anything on television before 7:00 pm or after 9:00 pm, California, Nevada, Utah, the color red (except in its proper religious context), loitering, divorce, and sugarless gum, to name a few. But don’t get me wrong, we do have our wild side: pot lucks, quilting bees, coed Bible studies, bake sales and league bowling. Our magazine is in the top 200 in circulation of all magazines, religious and secular, in the entire U.S. of A. That means that our readership is greater than all but about 199 other publications in the country. So, out of all the other choices available, ours is one of the first 200 that a reader is likely to buy or subscribe to and one of the first 200 allotted space on the magazine racks. You’re not following this, are you? Have you even been to a newsstand lately?

Okay, look at it this way. When you go to the checkout stand at the grocery store there are twenty magazines, not counting tabloids, right there within reach. The magazine stand in the store probably carries another 250 different magazines, your local Hastings or Barnes and Noble carries another 2000 or more--oh, to hell with it, let’s just stipulate that the magazine I write for is a Big Deal and leave it at that. So, anyway, here I am a Big Deal Christian writer, with a Big Deal Christian magazine, with a bunch of Big Deal awards on the publisher’s wall. I’ve been writing for this Big Deal publication since I graduated at the top of my class from the Big Deal Allegiance Purist University, what seems like about a century and a half ago.

I’d always been what the guys at APU called a Jesus Nerd. I was conservative even by Purist standards. I mean, when a guy whose life goal is to be a gospel librarian calls you a goody-two-shoes, well, you get the picture. But somewhere, deep down inside, I must have had some burning desire to be an investigative reporter or an opinion columnist or some similar kind of troublemaker. Either that or the devil made me do it.

My articles had always been so letter perfect, so inspirational and so precisely fitted to my assigned space that Weemer had long since quit reading them before they went to press. Which turns out to have been a mistake. I don’t know what got into me, but one day I found myself sitting at the keyboard pounding out this opinion piece critical of certain Allegiance church members who had taken to firebombing video game stores. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking but Charlie, the devil lives in those video game stores! (Or at least that’s what you’d be thinking if you were one of my normal readers). But somehow I forgot my Christian values and started thinking about love and forgiveness and tolerance and, well you know, all that liberal stuff. So, the article went to press without being tempered by the red ink of any right-thinking editor and the rest you can well imagine. The outcry was deafening.

And that’s what brought me to this chair outside Weemer’s office. I knew he wouldn’t fire me. Well, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t fire me. All of this was bound to blow over in a couple of years and I’d be back to winning awards for the magazine. Sure, that’s it, I thought, I’ll just keep a low profile for a while. The intercom buzzed.

Miss Mingus, please send in Mr. Marlowe, and bring me another glass of lemonade. Bernice motioned toward the door and then followed me in with the lemonade. I saw that there were already half a dozen empty lemonade glasses on Weemer’s desk. In a world that shuns alcohol, caffeine and carbonation, that’s a very bad sign.

Justin Weemer’s office was a vast space, at least as many square feet as my modest suburban house, with real simulated-walnut wainscoting and brown, deep-pile wall-to-wall carpet you could lose a briefcase in. The walls were papered in a finely detailed pattern of old rugged crosses and fishes and loaves. Floor-to-ceiling windows at one end of the room, bordered by Shroud of Turin drapes, looked out on incredible expanses of waving Kansas wheat. On the wall behind the boss was a huge picture of Jesus in a rustic simulated-wood frame, with the words Our Founder engraved on a brass plaque at the bottom.

Weemer signaled for me to sit down and waited ‘til Bernice had closed the door behind her before beginning his tirade.

Charlie, what in the name of Job were you thinking? he demanded, his thick, black eyebrows gesturing like a faith-healer’s hands. I’ve gotten calls from practically every reader we have. Do you know how many readers we have?

Well, we, uh--

We have the two hundredth largest circulation, religious or secular, in the entire U.S. of A. That’s a lot of gosh darn readers!

I was shocked and stunned at Justin Weemer’s use of the substitute expletives gosh and darn. By Allegiance Purist standards he could go to hell for that. If he was willing to risk the fires of hell and eternal damnation just for emphasis, Weemer must really be angry.

I’m sorry, I stammered, I don’t, I just don’t, I won’t, I didn’t, I just, what I really--

I appreciate that, Marlowe, Weemer rose from his chair and paced to the window, resting his hand reverently on the drapes as he looked out, but the damage is done. You’ve alienated a goodly portion of our readership--good hardworking, church-going people with good families, good hearts and a good mind not to renew their subscriptions. Now what do you suppose we should do about it?

I’m not, it’s really, I guess, I mean--

"You’re right, Charlie. The Christian reading public may be unforgiving, but it has a short memory. I think this will all blow over in a couple of years and then you can get back to winning awards for the magazine. In the meantime, I think