Excerpts from Blood and Mud
On the Levee
Billy was in the front yard of the little two-room house when Busey, who owned the land they lived on, pulled up in a blue pick-up truck, the thing gleaming against the yard’s brushed dirt.


Eddie Muenster in Georgetown
Out on the street, 2 am. Winter wind biting my face. Attempting to deposit that evening’s $400 into the ATM with fingers red from cold. Deposit it now or spend it before dawn. Too much fun to have, too much trouble to get into.
Singing Fiddles
Mama was off on a shopping trip to New York and it was just me and Daddy in the little D.C. garden apartment where we lived when I was tiny. Daddy had some Louisiana friends over he knew from home, friends my mother did not approve of, and I was a little concerned. “Those boys hold you back,” I had remembered her saying to him, even though I couldn’t yet have been five years old.
