Out of the Ashes by William W. Johnstone Page A

hadn’t called. They always called early.
    He glanced around his empty, silent house, the joy of the moment becoming sullied just a bit because he had no one with whom to share his one day of celebration.
    He shrugged it off and locked up the house.
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    The term “country boy” once more entered his mind as he walked across the yard to his pickup. He hummed an old country song as he walked, one of the few country songs he liked: “A Country Boy Will Survive.”
    Ben thought that ironic, since he was beginning a novel of disaster—Armageddon. The end of the world.
    Getting into his pickup, he remembered both his mother and father kidding him about his return to trucks; his father saying, “Boy, you started out in trucks when you was just fourteen. Held that damned old rattletrap together with spit, prayer, and baling wire. Hell, son—you remember. It didn’t have any doors! You had the first seat belts in Illinois. You had to tie yourself in with rope to keep from falling out going around curves. Now that you’re goin’ to be a big-time writer, damned if you haven’t gone back to trucks. You’re just a farm boy at heart, Ben. Can’t ever take the country out of the boy, eh, Ben?”
    And his dad would laugh in that big hearty way of his. Good, solid country people.
    Ben missed his parents, knew he would have to take some time off and visit them—soon. They were both getting up there in years. Both in good health ... but, one never knew when the hands of time would grow too heavy and lose their grip.
    Ben didn’t like to think about that.
    As he drove, Ben looked at the countryside, and at the houses he passed. Something seemed . . . well, odd about them. They looked . . . deserted, if that was the right choice of words. He shook his head. “My imagination,” he said.
    Ben wasn’t a rich man—far from it. But he made enough from his efforts to live in comfort. His home was paid for, he had nice furniture, deep, rich carpet, and all the other accouterments that made life a bit more than merely an existence.
    Ben Raines also drank himself into a quiet stupor every night of the week. Including Sundays.
    But he was one of those rare people who never suffered a hangover. He could not remember ever having one. And he hedged whenever he would question himself about why he drank so much. He never would admit his was a lonely life.
    Writers drink, he would say.
    Bullshit, his mind would reply.
    It was never a very stimulating or productive self-conversation.
    Sunday morning radio programing in most parts of the rural South is, at best, dismal—alternating (depending upon the stations one chose) between hillbillies yodeling praise to the Lord, black gospel groups shouting and stomping praise to the Lord, and nasal preachers hem-hawing and gulping praise to, or from, the Lord. Some of them speaking in tongues.
    Ben never turned on his radio on Sunday mornings. And TV was just as bad. It was one of his great gripes that public broadcasting, in radio form, did not get into the area in which he lived.
    Ben lived out in the country, literally. About ten miles outside of Morriston, a small town located at the bottom of the Delta of Louisiana. The town had a population of eight thousand: fifty percent black, fifty percent white. No industry. Lots of bars, black and white; never the twain shall meet. Music in the bars was soul or country. That was it. So, Pavarotti, do not waste your time coming to the Delta, unless you first appear on “Barbed-Wire Hoedown,” yodeling; or on “Boogie Funky Wagon,” beating on a drum and shaking your tushie.
    It was gracious Southern living at its best and worst. Half-million-dollar homes and two-hundred-dollar shacks. Cadillacs and food stamps. Cotton, rice, soybeans, and wheat.
    And football.
    Ben cut his eyes to the ditch by the side of the road and his thoughts were abruptly returned to the present. He