Philco by Ken Mansfield

Author:Ken Mansfield [Mansfield, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781682615706
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2018-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

OLD SCHOOL

[PHILCO]

THREE ROUNDS OF COLD BEER and rye whiskey…maybe more. Oh yeah, and one branch water back.

I wake up with a Wild West hangover and the echo of Levi’s gritty voice ringing in my ear. The mind fog lifts and I discover that I am lying on dead grass in the middle of an abandoned high school playing field. How I got here from The Sundance is a mystery, especially if I did, in fact, travel any appreciable distance from that watering hole wearing a scuffed shoe on one foot and part of a sticker encrusted sock on the other. I feel something in my hair and reach up to find something dead that looks like a cross between a lizard and a frog. As I look around I can see that the main school building is still intact though badly neglected and boarded up. It also appears that there are other structures in the surrounding empty fields. Irregular bumps in the ground and the way some of the weeds are growing lets me know that they have been torn down, fallen away, or buried by the dust and wind over the years. I try to sit up but find that everything hurts except my belt buckle, so I lie back down on the ground and look up into the big country sky. After a while I roll over to my side and notice a washed out sign leaning against a large post. I surmise that it was probably an old entrance sign to their football field or baseball diamond.

I reckon (rye whiskey talkin’?) this must be Hurricane Hills High because the letters on the sign are designed to represent a branding iron font and feature a creative arrangement of “HHH.” Beneath the letters is part of a painting that was probably the back of some animal mascot—a horse, a donkey, or maybe even a dog—the head is broken off, but who knows what animal they found dominating and worth fighting for in this lonely place? I wondered if there was a town located high up in those faraway mountains that surrounded this flat place named something as unlikely as Hurricane Hills—maybe something like Venetian Valley. I can see the scoreboard in my mind:

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