The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Read online

  The Turbulence of Butterflies

  A Max Howard Series Novel

  Book 6

  By Fischer G. Hayes

  Text copyright © 2019 Fischer G. Hayes

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, schools, churches, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Authors Note

  The way I understand it, Chaos Theory involves the study of the unexpected and the unpredictability of events. Some refer to it as science, but it’s not at all like the down-to-earth science of predictable things we learned in school such as gravity or electricity. In the realm of non-linear unpredictable phenomena, like snow flurries or the stock market, our ability to understand the complex nature of a closed system or its connectivity to other systems rests on complex fractal mathematics and is well beyond most of us, well, at least me. So when it comes to the normal day-to-day chaos in everyday life, be it a winter snow storm or the gyrations of my miniscule and totally inadequate retirement portfolio, I can only say with any real certainty, that I should expect the unexpected.

  One of the Principles of Chaos Theory, which the main character in this novel embraces wholeheartedly and uses frequently to give his behavior some explanation, is called the Butterfly Effect. That scientific allegory requires a leap of faith on our part in that it asks us to accept that a butterfly flapping it wings in a pine forest in East Texas can cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. The idea being that if the butterfly had not flapped its wings at that exact moment in the time-space continuum we exist in, the hurricane wouldn’t have happened. For the more scientifically inclined that’s saying a small change in the initial condition within a closed system can lead to a huge change. Put another way, the Butterfly Effect merely confirms what we all suspect but aren’t really sure of. Deep down, we all want to believe that what we do, no matter how insignificant, has an effect somewhere or on someone. And vice versa: might not what someone else does, affect what we do or at least have an effect on us?

  The fact that we can’t verify every inch of the world to determine when a flapping of wings might have occurred and to measure the collective intensity, energy, etc. of said butterfly renders any type of prediction of the outcome from one butterfly useless; which brings us back to the idea of faith, not science. If you believe in the premise behind the Butterfly Effect you have to have faith that you can influence outcomes. Who is to say a loving kiss on the cheek of a young child, won’t have a positive, but unscientific, outcome at some future point in time for that child?

  This novel is dedicated to all the good people of this world, and especially my daughter, Jenn, who go through life believing that what they do matters even if they can’t see the outcome and flap their wings anyway.

  Table of Contents:

  Authors Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 1

  “It’s a helluva thing when a man’s own daughter has him arrested,” I mused loud enough for Sunny to hear me in the bedroom. I was in the bathroom shaving.

  My wife came to the bathroom door and paused to eye me in the mirror over the sink. I knew the look well. “I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

  She wasn’t arguing that my point wasn’t well taken; it was just not in her nature to concede that I had a point at all. I wasn’t prepared to be dismissed so easily, though. My feathers were still ruffled over the incident and I had yet to fully express my opinion on the matter of what constituted trespassing.

  Lester Pender had made the story of my arrest the lead story on the morning news. He was a local kid that had come up behind me in high school and enjoyed poking me in the eye whenever he could now for some imagined slight back then. Nobody had liked him then and still didn’t, but his wife owned the radio station so we had to put up with him if we wanted to hear the news. KJBA was the only radio station in Solms County, Texas, still broadcasting in English.

  Sunny had this weird notion that she was somehow judged by my actions in the small town of New Haven, which was the County Seat of Solms County, and about as nice a place as one could find in the Texas Hill Country to live. She thought that because I had been arrested by the New Haven Police Department it reflected on her and her former career as a police officer and Police Chief of the Lummi Indian Tribal Nation out in Washington State; no matter that she had been retired for several years, the Lummi Reservation was thousands of miles away, and no one in Texas had ever given any thought to or even heard of a small Washington coastal tribe called the Lummi Nation. Sunny was beyond any assurance from me that this incident too would pass and she would not be forever tainted by the actions of her husband.

  She was still upset from my previous run-in with the Solms County Sheriff’s Department a few months before involving a murder in the county of someone I knew. She had come to the conclusion after a minor dustup with the local Sheriff that we lived in the lawlessness of the Old West in our little part of the Texas Hill Country. In her opinion, Solms County was inhabited by outlaws, murderers, gunslingers, desperados, and crazy people. She was ready to move back to the civilized world of the Lummi Reservation. It was hard to argue with her at times, as she tended to look at reality more objectively than I did. At my age, I was less critical of a man’s bad behavior than she was, given my own past. And, I also believe that a man who lived in a glass house shouldn’t be throwing stones at others, so I tried not to be judgmental. I usually stuck my thumbs in the pockets of my jeans, stood there and mentally waltzed around the dance floor with her in a nice Texas two-step, and let her have her say. I was an easy husband to get along with.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. The man staring back was not an old man with shaving cream on his face, but a younger and handsomer man still in his prime. I know, some would say I was delusional, but I preferred to think of myself as still a young buck even if I was in my seventies. I might look like Clint Eastwood on the outside, but inside, I sure didn’t feel that bravado I remembered from his movies. I had been feeling more like ol’ Bill Clinton’s better half and ready to blame just about everybody else but myself for the incident at my daughter’s house.

  Elizabeth was my oldest daughter and we had been estranged most of our lives. Her younger sister, Emily, had begged me not to go see Elizabeth and I hadn’t listened to her. I tended to do that-not take advice from my children-so I knew I really had no one else to blame but myself. Despite that minor shortcoming, I tended to see a positive side to the incident at Elizabeth’s. I had loosened a few more stones in the wall that she had built between us. Besides being a born optimist-a trait some in my family characterized as foolhardy-I was a man that believed in doing what was right. Getting square with my daughter even if she or her husb
and didn’t want to, was the right thing to do.

  Two days ago, in a serendipitous mood and feeling my oats after solving a serious crime of murder and greed in Solms County, I had driven over to Elizabeth’s house unannounced. I wanted to reach out to her to end the forty-plus years of estrangement between us. I only failed in the execution. The minor skirmish with her husband that ensued and the altercation with New Haven’s finest were of no consequence to me and my subsequent arrest bothered Sunny more than it did me.

  “Did you hear about Rebecca Haas?” Sunny asked as she hung up her nightgown on the hook next to the shower. I lingered a moment to take in my gorgeous wife, but she would have none of it this morning. She was still outdone with me. She turned her back on me. I didn’t tell her it was okay with me-I liked the rear view as much as the front one. I had accepted long ago that life’s little pleasures were often fleeting and that I should enjoy them wherever and however I found them. I enjoyed the moment until she closed the shower door.

  “She’s probably in Mexico by now.” I said with some hope for Rebecca Haas. She might have been convicted in the murder of her aunt, but I felt she had gotten a raw deal during her trial a few months ago. The fact that she had escaped from prison gave me a sense of admiration for the woman. Of course, I kept that to myself, what with Sunny being a former Chief of Police and a woman who tended to see the nuances of a life of crime in black and white. Rebecca’s ability to escape her incarceration was an admirable quality in the woman’s character in my mind, even if she was a convicted felon. Not everyone appreciated the irony of her escape, like I did. Her aunt’s escape from a senior living facility had been what roped me into the whole mess to begin with.

  While Sunny showered, I finished dressing and then went outside to the front porch to enjoy my second cup of coffee for the day and think about whatever came to mind. Of course, Elizabeth came to mind as soon as I sat down in the porch glider swing. She was my first born and her sister, Emily, followed her two years later. Those girls were as different as night and day and yet they were both still a force in my life as much as they had been half a century ago.

  . . .

  The last time I had spoken to Elizabeth was right after she turned seventeen. It was before I had remarried a second time. I was new to the art of being an adult back then and still wet behind the ears. Vietnam had done little to make a man out of me or prepare me for dealing with life as an adult. At the time, when Elizabeth came out to see me on the ranch, I was eating chili and peaches out of a can and staying in the old family house my grandfather had built; licking my wounds from the vagaries of life; and, generally feeling sorry for myself.

  I tore the old ranch house down a few years ago after Sunny and I were married. I did it for a whole lot of reasons that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Elizabeth, but you never know about things like that. I sure didn’t. I didn’t know beans, if you believed my children and Sunny. A young Mayan girl named Angelina, who we had taken in after we found her wandering alone and scared on the ranch, had told me that most of the bad things in my life had its origins in that house. It was the evilness in the house sulking around behind the walls and beneath the floorboards that was making Sunny ill and the reason for her postpartum depression after Katie was born. That was the real reason why I demolished the family home and built the Meeting Center Complex over the site.

  When I last saw Elizabeth, her visit had caught me by surprise that day. I had no idea she knew I was even living on the ranch. Back in the seventies the ranch was still remote and a good way from the small town of New Haven. It was a period in my life that was a complete blur to me at times and even now I can only guess at what might have happened during those years. I do remember the day she came to see me, though. When I think of her, it was like it was yesterday.

  The morning she showed up on the ranch, the air had been heavy with moisture from the previous night’s torrential rains. Gray clouds still blocked the sun and fog clung to the ground in the low places on the ranch. It was going to be another good day to work inside the house, I remembered saying to the horse as I came in from my morning ride to find any feral angora goats. They liked to bed down in stands of cedar trees that had overtaken the ranch since my father had died. Those that I was able to roundup I sold at auction for pennies on the dollar and BBQed a few to sustain me.

  I lifted one leg over the saddle horn and slid down, landing square on two feet, for no other reason than that was the way I did it as a kid and it used to drive my father nuts. The muck from the goat shit and rains was six inches deep in the pen area. I tied the horse’s reins to the fence and loosened the saddle cinch and unsaddled the old mare. I walked her inside to the barn and gave her some feed. I hosed off her hoofs and dried them with a burlap sack. One good thing from all the rain was the tank in the back pasture was overflowing. The winter rains had come to the Texas Hill Country after a long dry summer and every inch of rain helped.

  I took off my hat and wiped my brow with my shirt sleeve feeling like the rancher my father had always said I’d never be. He used to do the same thing. That memory made me wondered what the hell I was doing back there on the ranch. I hated my boyhood home. I had been on the ranch for only a few months. I was repairing the ranch house and taking stock of things while I decided what to do with the rest of my life. Vietnam and my divorce had left me adrift from all that I knew of life, which was not much back then.

  I had sold off most of the angora goats I could find, but even so the stench of their former presence remained after it rained. The pens my father and his father before him had used to coral the goats at night had turned into a quagmire of goat shit. I swore with each rain I was going to pave the old pen over with concrete and make a basketball court out of it, but that was only wishful thinking, I had no money. As I walked from the barn toward the house I damn near lost my boot in the muck.

  After pulling off my boots at the back door, I went inside for a cup of coffee. I heated myself a cup from the pot I had made that morning and then walked back outside to the rickety chairs on the front porch. It had taken me several weeks of hard work to clear out my old man’s junk and get the house cleaned enough to live in. All of his stuff was boxed up in the tack room in the barn, yet his mean cantankerous spirit lived on in the house, I could feel it.

  I saw the pickup coming up the road from the highway while I was sitting on the porch in my socks. I didn’t recognize the truck. It was a Ford with a white toolbox in the back. A mongrel looking dog rode on the tool box. Whoever was driving was in a big hurry. I hoped the driver would see the dip in the road where the gravel roadbed changed to dirt and then I heard the back of the truck bottom out in the mud. The truck came to a sliding halt. The driver jumped out to inspect the damage. The driver looked like a young kid from where I sat.

  The driver got back in the truck and floored the accelerator, spewing mud as he spun out. I remembered the feeling when I was his age‒the feeling of real horse power under a hood, not those little light four-cylinder jobs they passed off as pickups back then. Not many people knew the pleasure of real unimpeded horse power of a V-8 under the hood. That kid did, though. Several yards from the fence he applied the brakes and the truck began to slide. The kid let up off the brake pedal, turned the wheel into the slide, and goosed it. The dog had jumped from the toolbox down into the bed of the truck instinctively. The truck slid sideways toward the stone fence that surrounded the ranch house front yard. I watched in admiration as the truck slid sideways to a stop within a few feet of the fence gate, the dog perfectly balanced in the back looking over the side of the truck at me.

  The kid stepped out of the truck and into the mud. He tipped his straw hat in acknowledgment to me and pointed at the dog to stay in the truck. He waited by the cab for the other passenger, but she refused to come out and step down into the mud. The kid lifted the young girl from the running board on the driver’s side and carried her up to the gate and the dry concrete sidewalk.


  By then I had stood up out of curiosity and had moved off the porch toward the gate. It was my daughter Elizabeth. I would have recognized her anywhere. My heart beat so hard in my chest it hurt. I could feel my blood pressure rising, my face getting flushed. The young driver placed her down gently on the sidewalk. She was dressed in jeans and a white puffy sleeved blouse. Her hair was pulled back into a single braid that hung to the small of her back. She was a beautiful young woman. Were those my genes? Surely not, I’d told myself, as we eyed each other.

  I remained where I was in my socks as they walked up to me. Elizabeth and the boy eyed the absence of my boots. I think she was embarrassed, but by then I’d learned to stay cool in the face of what other people thought of me. I was eager with anticipation and there was joy in my heart at seeing Elizabeth, except you wouldn’t have known it by looking at me. I was not one to give my hand away, even as a young man.

  “Hi,” she said with an unsure note in her voice.

  “Hello,” I replied back. This was her move and I decided I’d wait to see what developed.

  “It’s me, Elizabeth.”

  “I can see.”

  “Oh, this is Roy Kuykendall. We’re engaged.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Roy stepped forward and offered his hand. “How’s it going, Mr. Howard.”

  I nodded and shook his hand. “I’m doing okay. You?”

  “Alright.”

  “That was some nice driving.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You Randy Kuykendall’s boy?”

  “Yes, sir. You know my father?”

  “No,” I had said. It was a lie. We had crossed paths in the Solms County jail, but why start Elizabeth’s visit off on the wrong foot? “What can I do for you guys?”

  Elizabeth looked at Roy. “We’re getting married.”

  “Congratulations, again,” I said.

  “Thank you. I... we want you to come to the wedding,” she said. She pulled Roy close to her and held his hand tightly.