Bottom Feeder

“THE DREAM”

AND OTHER MUSINGS

The genesis of this story is a recurring nightmare that started when I was about nine years old. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, a bit of background.

The chapter where Colin and his family go camping is actually about me as a child. When I was a youngster, from May to September my father, mother, younger sister, and I would camp on the weekends. Sometimes at Caney Lake, or another campground in northern Louisiana. When not in Louisiana, my family could be found in the Ozark or Ouachita mountains up in Arkansas. We started our camping adventures using an old Army surplus canvas tent (which leaked like a sieve) and eventually progressed to a pop-up trailer (which I fell out of one night and rolled all the way down to the edge of the Cossatot River in Arkansas). Then, one spring day, dad came home with an all-metal body, Shasta “Starflyte” trailer. To me, it looked like a knock-off on the Air Stream trailers.

I slept in a loft bunk above the folding dining table (where my sister slept). Up in my bunk above hers, the metal of the trailer was just a few inches above my head, and during rain or thunderstorms (it was Louisiana after all, where it rains all the time, all year-round), the metal roof of the trailer would make a tremendous amount of noise as the raindrops pounded down. The racket was unreal.

Frequently, while sleeping or trying to sleep during these heavy rains I would be in the shallowest of sleep cycles which, of course, is the place where bizarre dreams and nightmares grow. Mine were always vivid and colorful. The one that has stuck with me all these years generally followed the same pattern and was the genesis for this novel. In my nightmares, there was some kind of monster living on the bottom of the lake and perhaps the monster was the muddy bottom of the lake. During heavy rains, it would rise up from the bottom and go searching for people to eat. Thus – the name “Bottom feeder.”

With my nightmare never far from my mind while camping, I learned how necessary it was to use the bathroom before bedtime at a very early age. Conversely, I also learned how to hold it until daylight arrived. Rarely did I open the ventilation windows on either side of my loft, given my belief that the monster might be able to reach in and snatch me through the window screen.

One of the chapters that got cut was titled the “fly fishing” chapter. That chapter was cut from the manuscript because I was approaching a “word count” number that was sure to give my publisher angina. So, it got chopped. However . . . you can read it here, on my website. In it, you will read about my I Aunt Ada, who was real and would dip huge wads of snuff while she wove rugs out of old Wonder Bread wrappers and raised chickens. She lived in the country just south of Shreveport, Louisiana, in what to me seemed to me to be a wasp-infested house. Every time we’d go there, I’d end up getting stung by one or more wasps, and Aunt Ada would dig clumps of brown, wet snuff right out of her mouth to plop them onto my red wasp stings. This happened more than enough times to convince me that I never wanted to dip snuff.

My “Uncle A.C.” was A.C. Morgan, a local water well driller and dirt track racer who lived next door to us. It was at his house where I first tasted beer (Hamm’s) and had my first puff of a cigar (at the tender age of five I might add).

I inserted Diane Chase into the story because as I was finishing the manuscript, a friend, Manda Morris, asked me how many women were in my little monster story. I had to pause, because her question made me realize that I had written some female characters into the story, but not in a significant way. So, after finishing the book, I went about the process of creating a new character and finding spots where she and her colleague could alter or impact the action. Frankly, that was fun to do. I can’t help it that my reporter turned out to a driven professional who wasn’t prepared to accept less than the best from her cameraman.

Now, you may question my ideas about how the news media operates. In brief, I began my professional career as a videographer/remote producer for the CBS affiliate in Shreveport, KSLA-TV, Channel 12. The television station that Diane works for in the book, Channel 3, was our direct competition, and we loved beating them in the ratings all the time. That is, until Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune killed our advantage and tanked our ratings. But that’s another story for another time. After joining the federal government in the late 1980’s, I left Louisiana and journalism behind and spent the next twenty-five years in and out of D.C., doing crazy fun things for Uncle Sam and traveling all over the world. So, yeah, been there, done that.