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Sam Flood was born in 1951, delivered by a Coahuiteco Indian midwife in a 3 room tar paper shack on the Pitchfork Ranch, a 234,000-acre spread in the Texas Panhandle.
His old man Will worked as a cowhand on Pitchfork Ranch, and his mother Anita, who's Mexican, cooked for the Chas Middleton family who owns Pitchfork.
At 5 years old, Sam's a kindergarten student.
It's 6 AM, a school day, Anita wakes him, kissing his forehead and saying,
Jesús te ama niño.
She stacks his school clothes neatly on a kiddy table— a striped T-shirt, green jeans rolled at the cuffs, underpants, socks, and PF Flyer gym shoes.
After dressing and cleaning up, Sam walks half-asleep to the kitchen table, sitting with his dad Will for a breakfast of, hotcakes, fresh farm eggs, tortillas, rice, beans, coffee, and cocoa. Cooked and served by Anita, a warmhearted, soft-spoken mother, and wife.
Sam's reared in a coddled household, but later, during his twilight years, things get out of control.
At 8 AM a rusted Ford bus shows at Pitchfork. The ranch employees' offspring, ages 5 to 17, flirt and roughhouse as they board the bus for the 35-mile trip to school in Kingsville, Texas. A rough ride over dirt roads and asphalt sprayed crushed stone highways.
The children and teenagers on the bus are poor. Some dream of escaping small-town life and getting ahead, but most are preoccupied with hot rods, sex, and Saturday nights.
The 50s is a parental stone age, a freewheeling time for kids growing up, allowed to go into territory that would be considered dangerous today.
Sam lived to run free with his young pals around the ranch after school and on weekends— tossing dirt balls at cows, catching insects and placing them in bottles, hunting Garter snakes, wading in the stock tanks, climbing trees, and rusted windmills towers.
The cowboy kids living on Pitchfork Ranch are encouraged to play rough because ranch life is rugged and challenging.
In 1968, Sam's a junior at Kingsville high school— a shadowy figure who's a chronically shy, poor student, with alopecia, and an acne-scarred face.
He is more at home on the vast prairies of the Pitchfork Ranch than in a schoolroom so he quits high school to work on the ranch.
Sam asks Pete Nash, the foreman, for a job and Pete hires him on the spot because he knows the Flood family are good people.
He shows for work the following day at 7 AM and Pete tells him,
son, I'm sendin you and Custer Willcup out to ride fence on the northeast arm. Custer's a seasoned hand and you can learn cowboying from him. He's waitin for you at the bunkhouse.
Thank you, sir,
call me Pete.
Sam runs into his new partner in front of the bunkhouse, and says,
you must be Custer Willcup,
yup, that'd be me, unless in you're the sheriff.
Howdy, I'm Sam Flood.
the cowpunchers shake hands and laugh, then Custer says,
Let’s head out to the run and get us a couple of horses and a mule.
Ranchers kept mules with cattle and horses to protect the herds from coyotes and snakes. Mules are wiry and tough with a mean kick, more clever than donkeys.
Custer's pint-sized, in his 30s with long blond hair and a handlebar mustache. He contrasts young Sam who's bald with a red beard, 6’3 and strong as a bull.
Both the cowboys wear Showdown straw cowboy hats, bent at the rims, jeans, Levi shirts, and boots.
At the run, Custer chooses two quarter horses he's familiar with and the cowboys secure them with rope leads. The horses are built powerfully, tall at 16 hands, white, and spotted like Indian ponies. Then he tells Sam,
go bridle that big mule over there with a lead, that's Buckshot, he's a good ole boy, tough as they come.
The painted ponies and the mule are tied on the run's wood fence. The cowhands saddle and rein the horses and strap a couple of empty framed canvas packs on Buckshot over a square piece of wooly lambskin.
They mount the majestic geldings, riding cooly out of the run with Buckshot in tow, careful to close the metal gate behind them, a cardinal rule on a ranch.
At the supply shed Custer requisitions supplies — bread, powdered eggs, beans, dried beef, jerky, flour, chocolate bars, water, and, coffee and whiskey.
Then, work supplies including— a claw hammer, 2 rolls of barb wire, baling wire, a set of screwdrivers, heavy-duty work gloves, 12 inch bolt cutters, u-nails, a post digger, and 2 Browning A-Bolt rifles to take out coyotes and rattlesnakes,
At times cowboys riding the range would take pot-shots at goofers jumping up and down in their holes from 40 yards off, similar to playing Whack a Mole, but the goofers were too fast to hit.
The cowhands ride with Buckshot in tow, following the fence line, it's 9 AM. Custer pulls a Coahuiteco Indian pipe from his boot made of deer horn and fills it with ganja, lights it, taking a pull, passing it to Sam who takes a deep draw saying,
woo ah, ain't that something now.
As the cowboys ride the open plain, an uncommon feeling engulfs them— serene, and otherworldly.
The balmy scent of Buffalo grass in the air stirs up a soft feeling inside them.
By 1 AM they notice a torn-up stretch of barbwire spaning 20 feet between 2 wood posts over a stream.
The cowboys cool down and water Geronimo, Jigsaw, and Buckshot in the stream, then hitching them to a tree.
They easily cut and remove the faulty barbwire with 12 inch bolt cutters. Then, attach 3 strands of wire evenly spaced on one post, securing it with u nails and rolling the wire to the next post, u nailing it loosely then tightening it with a Texas wire stretcher.
30 minutes later they're riding the fence, moving lazily. Custer abruptly pulls his Browning A-Bolt out of a saddle sheath and fires 7 caps up range, saying,
cowboy, we got us some supper!
He rides Geronimo to the dead prey and jumps off, picking up two bleeding Black-tail Jackrabbits.
The cowhands are riding as the sunsets. They pass the deerhorn pipe, toking and grooving on the colors the earth's brother star radiates through orange clouds.
That night they camp in a grassy area, near the fence they’ve been following all day like a map.
The cowhands remove the tired animal's saddles, bridles, and packs, securing them with lead ropes and tying them using bowknots to a half-fallen mesquite tree.
The dry mesquite tree is a good source of firewood. Sam starts a small fire.
Custer skins, guts, and cuts the rabbit meat into pieces like you would a chicken, placing the meat in an iron skillet on the low burning fire. The mesquite smokes adds a wild, aromatic flavor to the rabbit meat.
After eating rabbit, Indian fry bread, and beans, the cowhands sit around the fire and bullshit as they sip Rebel Yell. The whiskey warms them on the cool prairie night.
In the close distance, they see a haunced figure walking towards them covered in an Indian blanket wearing warn gym shoes, dusty trousers with long unwashed white hair that has a single Golden Eagle feather tied in with a strip of rawhide. He says,
Boys I’m lost, I got drunk a few nights back in Kingsville and have been following this here fence ever since, thinkin it leads somewhere. Sam says,
How bout a drink chief? The lost Coahuiteco Indian sits cross-legged around the fire with the cowhands saying.
They call me Pecos Will, when I’m sober, which ain’t often, I run a sweat lodge on the reservation.
Sam hands Pecos Will the bottle of Rebel Yell, the Indian takes a long swig, grimacing and saying,
to the mighty Great Spirit.
The cowboys look at one another. They have plenty of whiskey, but they know the Indian will drink every drop of it if they offer him more.
Pecos Will finishes what's left of the bottle of Rebel Yell. Custer brushes off the wondering Coahuiteco saying,
Chief, We got a shit load of fence to ride tomorrow and need to get some shut-eye. Walk the fence south till you hit Pitchfork Ranch. From there, you can take a bus to the reservation or Kingsville.
The old Indian stands, his legs make a cracking sound and he silently walks south following the fence, swaggering from side to side.
The following day Custer and Sam spot a herd of wild mustangs. They cut Buckshot loose and give their quarter horses free rein, running them all out with the mustangs, a breath-taking experience.
In a few days, the cowboys return to Pitchfork Ranch.
50 YEARS LATER
Sam Flood lives alone in a run-down tar paper shack like the one he was born in. It's 60 miles from Kingsville and off the grid— no phone, TV, with a wood-burning stove for heat and to cook with, and a Honda generator in a pallet-covered cement pit for power.
He had worked for Pitchfork Ranch till 5 years ago when a horse rolled him, busting up his leg so badly that it had to be amputated at the knee.
It’s no secret cowboys are underpaid. When Sam left Pitchfork, he didn’t get retirement pay, a watch, or handshakes from his long-time employers, the Chas Middleton family.
Being an amputee did qualified Ole Sam for government disability pay and Medicare provided him with a prosthesis, cane, and wheelchair.
The disability pay, 1475 a month wasn't a lot, but Sam didn't need much.
He'd drive to Kingsville once a month in his 1960 Chevy pick up, a space-age looking rectangular vehicle puttied with Bondo and power sanded that was unpainted.
At Walmart, he'd buy bacon, eggs, ground chuck, beans, chicken, instant potatoes, canned fruit, vegetables, soup, instant coffee, a case of Lone Star beer, and 3 quarts of Rebel Yell.
Sam wasn't much on hygiene and didn't take to soap. Back home he'd clean up by rolling his wheelchair down the ramp of his wooden shack to the well, pulling up a bucket of water on a rope pulling, and dousing himself with cold water a few times.
As for razors, he didn't need them either, he hadn't shaved in 50 years and his beard was waist long.
And, he didn't need a toothbrush because he was toothless and didn't have dentures.
At the Walmart checkout counter, a chubby cashier recognizes him with his long beard, overalls, Texas A+M t-shirt, and cowboy boots. She says,
why Sam you get more handsome every time I see ya. He laughs with a toothless smile saying,
I'm just another weirdo in this here Walmart freak show.
Sam had taken physical therapy seriously and had learned to walk stably using his prosthesis.
He pushes his shopping cart to the parking lot, loading up the supplies in the back of his pick-up and driving to Ed’s Place, a dive outside of town, parking in the dirt parking lot.
Inside he sits at the bar. Ed, who doesn't weigh a pound under 450, is behind the bar and he says,
Why it’s Ole Sam, howdy cowboy,
Ed, you're wastin away, don't your old lady feed ya? I’ll have a Jack and 7 and ounce of the flavor of the month.
Ed dealt dope in his bar, everybody in town knew it, he paid the sheriff off monthly, in weed. Texas is a state that’s unhip to the health benefits of herb, famous for busting people with a single joint in the 70s who are still rotting in the can 30 years later.
Ed reaches into a cabinet under the bar, pulling out a paper bag which Sam promptly pockets in his overalls.
He finishes his drink, standing and paying his tab for the last few months, 200 dollars, a sizable chunk out of his disability check but weed soothed his mind and took away his pain. He simply says,
adios Ed, see ya next month.
He walks out of the bar and gets into his pick up, pulls out of the parking lot, and drives west on an asphalt highway.
7 miles out of Kingsville he turns south on a dirt road, driving the 53 miles home as his tires spin dust into the air. At times his windshield is covered with soot so he reaches out the driver's side window and wipes a patch clean with a handkerchief.
Sam’s alone day after day, his only distraction is a vintage Grundig radio that he listens to country music broadcast out of Claude, Texas on.
He couldn't call 911 because he didn't have a telephone. If he dropped dead at home his body would rot where it fell, decomposing.
No-one visited Sam to say howdy or check on him. His only friend is Ed, who tried to visit once but could find Sam's place.
His parents Anita and Will Flood had died years ago, and he didn't have any relatives he knew of.
His pal Custer died driving drunk one night, rolling a Willy Jeep out in the sticks of Pitchfork Ranch.
As time moves on, the booze and dope no longer mask the wretched situation he lives in, and reality begins to haunt him.
Eventually, Sam stops driving to Kingsville monthly, going every three months instead, buying canned hash, beans, soup, beer, and whiskey. Merely, opening the cans of food without warming them, eating with a spoon.
Then, he stops burning and burying garbage, leaving empty booze bottles and half-eaten cans of food around the place for his only companions, flies, ants, and cockroaches to finish off.
Soon, he's rotting inside and his shack reeks of decay. He lays in bed for days with his Grundig radio on, giving off static electrical sound.
Finally, It's the ninth inning, Sam's out of options.
With pronounced effort, he gets out of bed, grabbing a shotgun that's leaning against the wall, hopping on one leg to the front porch, and sitting in his rocking chair.
He looks outwards into the dusty expanse, remembering his mother Anita waking him for school, kissing his forehead saying,
Jesús te ama niño,
an apparition of serenity.
Sam calmly loads a shell in the chamber of his shotgun,
placing the barrel to his temple, squeezing the trigger. The force of the blast scatters brains and skull fragments backward through the open front window of his house onto the floor inside.
6 months later, his friend Ed calls the sheriff, worried because he hasn’t seen Sam.
The sheriff uses GPS, driving out to Ole Sam's shack in the afternoon, rattled to find a skeleton with a fragmented skull and shotgun laying in its lap sitting in a rocking chair.
The forensics were so obvious a 5-year-old could figure them out.
A week later Sam Flood's skeletal remains are buried on Atascoso's County's dime in a paupers graveyard outside of Kingsville, Texas. A preacher, Ed the bartender, and the chubby Walmart clerk look on as his cheap pine coffin is lowered into the ground by a crew of gravediggers.
