One Man
Photograph Copyright 2009 by George Wier - All Rights Reserved

Newcomers! Welcome!

There have been an increasing number of viewers of this site. All readers who would like to contact the author may do so by email at: texaswier@gmail.com. All comments are welcome, and I will try to respond to each. Additionally, invididual sample chapters of books are available just by asking. If you've gotten hooked into a story and desperately want to finish it, please drop me a line. And thanks for stopping by!

You are welcome to view any sample completed or in-progress Bill Travis Mystery. Click a link above and left. All samples are in Adobe .pdf format.

News!

Update: "Duckweed", a short story, is to be published in an anthology called Lone Star Noir.

Bill Travis #5, Death On The Pedernales, is complete! Caddo Cold is under re-write, and it won't look quite the same as before.

I have just posted the first twenty-five pages of Slow Falling, which is proving to be a helluva lot of fun to write. The Prologue is to your right.-------->

Popular Texas crime and mystery author, Milton T. Burton and I are collaborating on a Texas crime novel, currently untitled. I have posted the first two chapters here. Enjoy!

Additionally, I am welcoming every visitor to check out Milton T. Burton's blog at obscuredestinies.blogspot.com for insights into literature, history, and a good chaw-bite of Texas

Thanks go to the following individuals who have helped Bill Travis get along this far:  Sallie Wier, Mary K. Selby, Danny Bresset, Lee Spiller, David Potter, Alex Potter, Jeff Fischer, Ray Fisher, Megan Creel, Deborah English, Milton Burton, and David A. Williams. Each of these folks are early readers, and their comments and advice has been invaluable. And a special thanks to reader and friend Rocky Molidor for your enthusiastic support. Since several of you folks have proofread them all, I suppose I'll have to learn to write much more quickly.

-gw

The Accounting Firm of Bierstone & Travis (possibly)

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The other Bill Travis:  

    Some guys don't know when to quit! And that's a good thing for the rest of us. Imagine what the world would be like if this guy had given up. I shudder to think.
   This is William Barret Travis, the defender of Alamo fame. A Texas icon, the original rabble-rouser. The kind of guy that would spit in a tryant's eye. And did!

   This guy, and 182 other men, held off Santa Ana and his Mexican Army for 13 days, giving General Sam Houston enough precious time to recruit and train an army. The lives of these men were bought dearly.  The Bill Travis Mysteries bear no relation to this man in any form.

    In an excerpt from Arrowmoon, Bill says the following:

            "The name’s Bill Travis. No relation.
            Well, maybe some relation. Who knows? I’ve been too busy to try
         and track it down and there are few relatives outside of my 
        immediate family that I’m close to enough to ask about it.
            The other Bill Travis, defender (and loser) of the Alamo, that’s
        another guy entirely."

    The original Bill Travis does, however, deserve a great deal of our respect. Where would we be today without him?

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Notes From Central Texas:

[Excerpt from "Author's Note" in The Devil To Pay]:
    "One of the chief problems any author has is with his characters:  what they say and what they do.  A very good friend of mine and early reader, Megan Creel--a fantastic author in her own right--once informed me as to the degree Bill Travis miffed her by what he said and did.  And while she didn’t put it in those exact words (Megan is far more plain-spoken than that) I thought I clearly understood what she was saying until I realized she was looking to me for some explanation--as if I had something to do with what Bill Travis said and did!  I told her: “Yes, Megan, I feel exactly the same way,” or words to that effect.  All by way of saying that Bill Travis, his family, his friends, and even his antagonists, are prone to say and do just about anything, and what they say and do is, and I suppose, always will be beyond the scope of my control.  And that is as it should be. 
    When I began this series of books in about the Fall of 2004, I had every intention of writing no more and no less than what these characters told me to write.  I didn’t want any pattern, any script, any formula.  What I wanted was something approximating the quality and texture of fine-grained sandpaper--I wanted “reality”, with all its grit, its stains and splotches, its prevailing winds and currents, and its propensity to exceed the expected.  A casual look at any great work will clearly show a disdain for formula.  In a word I wanted “organic.”  But even that concept falls far short of what I wanted.  What I really wanted was Bill as we find him here.  I wanted him as alive as I was.  I wanted him to feel the same air as me and my eventual readers felt. I wanted him to taste the same weak tea, to feel the same Monday evening tiredness and the self-same Friday night expectancy we all feel.  And I wanted something else--that other element that keeps us all hanging on, even in the darkest hour:  I wanted him to win in the end.  I wasn’t sure if he was going to (and I’m still not) but I sure as hell was pulling for him then when I typed out those first words:  “All the hell started on a Monday...” 

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THE GRID
a short story

       Todd and Janine Weathersby were a couple of kooks who lived over the hill and down the dirt lane from me and the missus. When I say kooks, I really mean it. You might know the kinda folks I’m talking about. Used to be this guy who picked up cans on the side of the road all the time going into town, day-in, day-out. Had him a little four-wheeler with a big basket on back for the thirty gallon sacks he’d fill up and a little pole sticking out the side for those spools of plastic trash bags they sell for a buck-fifty at the value-mart. A real goony-bird, that one. Never waved, never did nothing excepting pick up those cans with a long stick with a bent nail on the end of it. The Weathersbys were like that can-guy. Only the Weathersby’s were mad about the grid. Getting off of it, that is.
      Point of fact, I stopped by the Weathersby’s once to see how they were getting along after the tornado came through and tore the hell out of half the county, and there they were, not a shingle out of place, Todd filling up a five gallon jerry-can from this spigot on the side of this grain silo-looking contraption, and I asks him first had the tornado come through his property--to which he nods “no”--and second asks him what the hell he is doing--to which he replies, “filling my gas tank--what’s it look like?” A real smart-aleck, that one. Mad about the grid, I’m telling you.
       See what I mean? Now at that time gas was less than two bucks a gallon. Maybe it was about a buck fifty. And the Weathersby’s weren’t the kind of folks to give their hard-earned money over to the oil companies. Hell, if it was up to me, all those oil executives would be strung from the power lines along the highway, which in itself brings up another topic completely: the Weathersbys didn’t take any electricity from the cooperative. None! I don’t mean they didn’t burn their lights at night or something, what I mean is there wasn’t even a wire running from some pole somewhere over to their property and into their danged walls! How’s that for kooky?
     “Self-sufficiency,” Janine once told me. She was as mad as hatter, that one. They didn’t buy nothing from town but raised their own food on their little postage stamp south forty out back which wasn’t really south but north and not really forty, but more like six. Acres, that is.
      So when my missus took them over a cherry pie for Thanksgiving--on account of we’re such Christian folks and Thanksgiving is an official Christian holiday--why those Weathersbys just opened the front door and looked at my missus queer-like, as if maybe she had horse ka-ka all over her shoes or something, which she didn’t. Anyway, they wouldn’t take the pie. They just smiled these cheesy, fake smiles and told my missus how they don’t eat refined white sugar. Let me tell you it was like a slap to the missus. She got redder than a beet and high-tailed it home with that pie and wouldn’t say anything about it until well after midnight. Nuts, I tell you.
     Anyway, the grid. Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m all for being sufficient by one’s own self. I’m very strongly for it. But I’m not a bit strongly in favor of being a kook.
     Which brings me to what I’m telling you about exactly.
     Todd Weathersby, you see, wasn’t just a kook. Nossir. He was what you might call a genius kook. Had himself all these contraptions you can’t find at the Farm-all place or the John Deere place. Likely half of those things come from kit-plans ordered through mail-order catalogs for kooks like Todd. You know the kind I’m talking about. Where they’ll have pages and pages of little kooky things like radio-controller helicopters next to ads for how to blow up the government by ordering a book and such things as “build your very own air car”. Kooky shinola like that. Only I expect, as does the missus, that the other half of the stuff you can see out on his property--and let me tell you, that ain’t likely half of what’s hidden!--was funny stuff the old kooky beanpole invented on his lonesome. A bona fide Frankenstein’s nut case, that one. But slick in the brains department, if you discount the social graces, of which Todd and Janine has the cube root of zero to work with.
      The Weathersbys took themselves not only right off the grid a few months back. In fact, they took themselves right off the map!
      Here’s what happened.
      That morning Leroy Samuels comes by and takes coffee with me and the missus and says something strange. Samuels is our postman and he’s a stout fellow, so he’s all the time drinking our coffee before it gets too green and eating up all the spare pies before they go bad, so he’s alright. Safe to have around I mean. Anyway, Samuels says to me and the missus: “what are they gonna do, I wonder, about that hole.”
     “What hole?” I asks him.
     “The Weathersby’s hole,” he says. I swear the missus very nearly spilled her coffee on herself. A nervous girl, that one.
      “Samuels,” I says, “just what in the sam hill are you referring to?”
      “You ain’t been down the lane lately?” he asks me.
      “Nope,” I says. “No call to.”
      Then Samuels tells me about the hole. So, being of an inquisitive nature, and having Christian concern for my neighbors, I took myself and the dog and a shotgun with extra shells and went to find out.
      The Weathersbys. Real goony-birds, I tell you.
      There wasn’t no place left to speak of. There was this six acre hole, only it wasn’t six but more like ten because parts of the Weathersby’s neighbors’ cow pastures was missing on three sides, and a good piece of the dirt lane as well. It was a good thing that lane ended at their property, let me tell you.
      The hole was a deep one, too. Perfectly round. Must have been a few hundred yards down there, and there was nothing but smooth bedrock at the bottom.
      A real ‘vestigator is what I am. Maybe I should hang out a shingle and charge folks for finding their lost pets or something useful like that. By way of saying that I went to the source and got the straight dope on what the Weathersbys gone and done.
      I knew that old Neil Bear, the county agent, hung around the auction barn on a Saturday, so that Saturday I took myself and old Blue over to the barn and jawed with Neil a bit.
      Neil told me the whole story.
      It was the night of thunderin’ lightning two weeks back when the missus and me was certain another twister was coming through. The rain was coming down horizontal like and there was these great flashes of lightning that made you want to unplug everything in the house and break out the candles just in case. Weathersby had these funny-looking poles in the center of his compound--that’s what you properly call a place like that, a compound--and both them poles was wrapped around with about a thousand turns of spool copper wire, twelve gauge, I’d say. On top of the poles he had these two shiny steel balls about six feet across. The missus told me it was “modern art”, but I remembered something from grade school, and old Neil Bear confirmed it. He called it a Tesla coil. Them things were thirty feet tall if they were two.
      “They gone and done it,” Neil says.
      “Done what?” I asks him, real private ‘vestigator-like.
      “They took themselves off the grid. Only they took part of the Earth with ‘em when they did.”
      “What in the sam hill?” I asks him.
      “You see,” Neil says, “I went inside their place ‘bout a month back when they was in town closing up their post office box.”
      “You trespassed?” I asks him.
      “I was ‘vestigatin’,” Neil says.
      “Gotcha,” I says, and drops Neil a wink.
      “Anyways,” Neil says, “there was this strange book open on the coffee table. Talking about other dimensions and ‘stantaneous travel, which is faster than the speed of blink.”
      “Ya don’t say,” I says.
      “Real kooks,” Neil says, and I couldn’t have agreed with anybody more strongly when he says that.
      So me bein’ a semi-professional ‘vestigator, I puts two and two together, and guess what I got? It’s like this, see. What I figured happened was this: since at the height of that last thunderstorm there was this clap of thunder what shook the whole house--and me and the missus was certain it was one of our fruit trees done been hit by a big bolt of lightning, but the next morning I couldn’t find anything like that, but, I promise you, it sounded like it was ten feet from the house, only it wasn’t though--it was them kooky Weathersbys. The weatherman on TV says that thunder is just a bunch of air. It’s air rushing back in to fill the place where the lightning bolt has turned the air to nothin’. And that’s what we heard, only it was the air rushing back in to fill up the whole dad-blamed Weathersby place, a mile down the dirt lane.
      So that’s what they gone and done. They took themselves right off the grid, by which I mean the whole gol-durned map!
      Just this morning the missus was fussin’ at me, wanting to know what I was readin’. I showed it to her and she fair took herself into her room and slammed the door and commenced praying. A powerful pray-er is my missus. I can’t recollect what set her off so, I’m here to tell you. It was just an innocent little thing. A circular I got in the mail--Samuels delivered it himself--titled something like: “How to save a little extra in gas mileage.” Something like that.
      I wonder sometimes what sets a woman off so.

-gw