(Heres the first page or so of a novel I first drafted in 1984, now revising again:) THANKS FOR BREAKFAST Chapter One: Star Over Blue For the first time since his boyhood, Jimmy Thunder saw Estes Park one a spring morning when he drove his faithful old Dodge Power Wagon across the pass from Boulder, and he could not believe his eyes. He exclaimed aloud to himself, “Geeze, this place looks like Shangri-La! If I go on down there into that valley, I may never leave again.” That turned out to be sort of true. Not to put a sinister spin on anything on such a beautiful day! A dazzling panoply of dazzling snow-laden peaks marched across the west where the Continental Divide snaked along higher altitudes of the summits. The Never Summer Range much farther away in that direction spoke silently of even deeper timeless mysteries. And tucked below all of that splendor, the little resort village nestled where two rivers converged and together filled a lake. In fact, Jimmy never really intended to go there. That day he was just exploring, and after all his late, mother had lived there for years, which he felt was a perfectly good reason to avoid the place. In his distracted rambling he had almost forgotten that. He had no idea how literally true what he said upon first sight of the place would turn out to be. It would prove to be a kind of earthly paradise. Plus once he settled down there, he never left. In fact, the place is the location of the actual Overlook Hotel reputedly haunted by all sorts of malign spirits. In reality, those ghosts are benign. Yet the whole valley would turn out—for him at least—to be something like the Hotel California of rock n roll fame: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Or as a different ’60s icon put it, “No one here gets out alive.” That’s how he came to live high up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. At the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park, in a rambling neighborhood called Eagle Cliff, with money from his mother’s estate he purchased a small dilapidated house. He fixed the place up—sort of. Now for twenty-three years he had kept a secret: the boy-sized rifle that his mother gave him for Christmas all those years before. The rifle kept him too. Though he hardly ever looked at it, in fact it had been waiting in the back of a cluttered closet for years. The little rifle had unfinished business with him.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 21:08:05 +0000
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