It was a song that started it. “Opal,” by Dave Stamey, and released in 1999.

After hearing the song several times over the years, it was in 2010 that I began the hunt to find the couple that was the subject of the song. It would take me nearly four years.

“Opal lives in Opal Canyon,” is the first line of the first verse. I talked to old-timers across Nevada and the Eastern edge of California, hoping to learn if anyone knew Opal or where the canyon might be.

Finally, one 88-year-old miner pointed me to the northern edge of the Mohave Desert in California.

“There’s a canyon called Opal about 45 miles west of Lone Pine,” he said. “But don’t ask me to recall how to get there.”

He did know that a woman and her husband had lived in a trailer in the area and that he was a pocket miner. It was the best lead I had had in months of searching.

Taking U.S. 395 south of the Nevada-California border, I pulled into Lone Pine. A man at the hardware store pulled out an old folding map and pointed to Opal Canyon, showing a thin line of a road leading there.

Armed with this knowledge, I headed north about a mile, turned right off the highway onto a well-graded dirt road, and headed southeast into the high desert. What had started as a relatively smooth track turned into a washboard full of three and four-inch rocks jutting from the ground.

Eventually, I had to stop, pulling to the side of the road because it had reduced to a four-wheeler paradise. I grabbed my pack, buckle on my sidearm, and Ka-bar knife and proceeded on foot.

By 4:30 p.m., the sun was beginning to hide behind the peaks to the west, and I decided to set up camp for the night. Shortly after sunrise, I was back at it, hiking to Opal Canyon.

It was nearly noon when I saw the glint of silver reflecting in the sun. A few hundred more steps and there was the upper-front bubble of an old Airstream that had seen better days. The old trailer was sitting on blocks some 75 feet up a small gully.

As I approached the structure, I stopped and hollered, “Hello, the camp.”

A five-foot-nothing, round woman pointing a double-barreled shotgun at my chest greeted me. Feeling obliged, I raised my hands over my head.

“Whatch’ya want?” she barked.

“I’m looking for Opal and Henry,” I answered.

“Whaddya want with them?”

“I’m a writer.”

“A writer?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Whatcha write about?”

“Anything and everything,” I answered. “Right now I want to do a story on Opal and Henry.”

She stood there in the shade of the trailer for a half-minute before saying, “Okay, put yer arms down and come on in. “Bout to have some coffee, you too, if ya like.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said nervously, still a bit taken aback by having a gun aimed at me.

“Tell me what this is all about,” she said as she poured coffee into two old battered metal cups.

“So, you must be Opal, and this must be Opal Canyon,” I said.

“Yup. But there ain’t no Henry, no more. Went looking for the place he had found gold the day a’fore and never came back. Guessin’ he got hisself lost and died back there somewhere. We never found him.”

I sipped at my coffee, a miserable-tasting brew, swallowed, and said, “I have something I’d like you to hear.”

From my pocket, I withdrew my cell phone.

“That’s one of them wireless phones, ain’t it?” she asked. “Haven’t seen many of them, beside I have no use for one up here.”

I selected my music app, opened it, and pressed play.

As Opal listened to the song, a toothless smile crossed her face. I could tell she recognized the story.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” she exclaimed. “I never knew anyone wrote a song about us. It’s pretty much true, ‘cept the teeny-weeny waist part and me rubbin’ his feet.”

We both laughed at that.

The song got her talking. She had lived in the same spot since 1956, coming to the canyon when she was 37.

“Left a good payin’ bank job to come to live up here,” she said. “Haven’t ever wanted to leave since.”

After several hours of talking, her giving me a show-and-tell presentation about her property, and a short hike up the mouth of the canyon, it was time for me to say goodbye. She also showed me where ol’ Roy, the “one-eared hound dog,” was buried alongside the “calico cat.”

Before I left, I asked if she needed anything from town.

“Nope, gotta neighbor lives about three-quarter a mile that way that gets me stuff when I need it,” she answered.

“Take care, and thank you for the hospitality and the conversation,” I said as I hefted my pack onto my shoulders.

“Thank you for lettin’ me hear that song,” she smiled.

It would be a long walk back to my truck and another night sleeping in a cold camp. I couldn’t help but feel sad knowing that her being ninety years old at least, I would never see Opal again.

My idea of a Super Bowl is a self-cleaning toilet.

One week after being hired, she arrived on set. Carrie Fisher’s personality and charisma drew people to her, including me.

It was the same day I learned I was to do a stunt with her because her double was busy getting her knee looked at in the emergency room of Seaside Hospital. Not only was I to fall off a stationary “speeder,” I had to fall in such a way that Carrie would land atop me, face to face.

Timing and coordination are the keys to stunt work, and never having worked together, we took four or five takes before we got it right. We landed perfectly and froze in that position until someone yelled, “cut!”

We made eye contact and held it for that space, enough time to tell us we were sexually attracted to one another. She smiled and rolled off me.

“What are you doing after work today?” she asked.

“Nothing really,” I answered.

“Well, you do now,” she said. “Because you’re coming with me to my room, where you get to fuck my brains out and I get to fuck yours out.”

I must have blushed ruby red because Carrie followed her statement with, “That is if you want.”

“I do!” I said a little too quickly.

Nine hours can feel like a lifetime when one is anticipating something. But finally, Carrie’s limo arrived, and she pulled me into the back seat for the half-hour drive to the Ship-A-Shore resort.

She opened the door to her room and hustled me inside. It didn’t take long for us to get naked and find the still-made queen bed nearest the doorway.

She cum first with a violent shudder that left me surprised. I shot my load into her a few seconds later.

We lay on the bed, breathing heavily and trying not to laugh. What we found funny, I do not know — perhaps it was a release of nervous tension that comes with strangers fucking each other simply for the pleasure of the new sexual encounter.

“I need a cigarette,” she said. “You smoke?”

“No,” I answered.

“Do you mined?”

“Nope.”

“By the way, what’s your name?”

“Tom.”

We lay quiet while she finished her smoke.

“Let’s take a shower,” she said. “We can have sex again or go get dinner.”

“Can’t we do all three?” I asked.

She smiled and rolled from the bed. I followed.

Under the showerhead, I lost myself as I soaped up her tits. My dick came to attention, and I repositioned myself, picking her up and sliding my cock into her pussy.

I took my time as I thrust myself into her. She sighed lightly and pressed her hips forward, squeezing my cock as if it were in a warm, generous vice.

We kissed and nipped at one another’s lips, ear lobes, and neck. And as we frenched, Carrie released again.

Withholding my jism was hard, and it made the head of my dick even more sensitive, and it also hardened. She felt the change, pushed herself off me, moved to her knees, and mouthed at my hard-on, sliding her lips up and down my shaft before licking and sucking on my lollipop.

Looking down, I lost it. The feeling of getting sucked off, and at the realization it was Carrie Fisher sucking me, I felt my body rattle as I shot into her throat.

She never lost her rhythm and swallowed everything I gave her. Finally, too sensitive to let her continue, I pulled away, and she looked at me and smiled.

Next, Carrie had my ball sack in her mouth and a finger in my asshole. I relaxed, leaned back against the show wall, and let it happen.

Before I knew it, she had me hard again, working her mouth between my nuts and dick. She made me blow a wade of cum across the tub, causing my legs to buckle.

As I slid to the tub floor, Carrie gently laid against me, her head on my chest, letting the spray from the shower rinse us off. We remained there for another fifteen or twenty minutes before I finally climbed from the tub.

We toweled off and dressed, her in a floral dress, me in my old jeans and white tee from that day. She wore no makeup as we walked across the parking lot to the restaurant.

“You know I have a boyfriend,” she said.

“I was supposing you did,” I replied.

“It won’t bother you being my plaything for a while, will it?”

“Not if you don’t mind being my plaything, too.”

It was the first and last time we spoke of being a plaything because it wasn’t true. We both fell for each other and knew it on Carrie’s final day on the set.

My heart felt like a piece of clay as we returned to her room that night. There was no wild sex like the first day, but instead, we lay quiet, holding each other, allowing ourselves to feel the coming emptiness.

She softly felt my face, and I did the same, wanting to remember each line and curve. It was yet another facet of a relationship neither of us had experienced before.

The day Carrie left, I found it hard to focus on my job, as I couldn’t get the image of her face, tears in her eyes, and wet stains on her cheeks out of my head. A near-confrontation with her boyfriend knocked me out of being heartsick for too long.

“So you’re the asshole’s that been fucking my fiancee’,” this short dude yelled as he crossed the bar room floor.

As he walked towards me, I got up from my stool and went to meet him, ready to throw punches. It was Paul Simon, the musician.

Before I could reach him, his two bodyguards intervened, stopping whatever altercation there might have been. One of them picked Simon up and tucked him under his arm, carrying him out the door as Simon shouted names at me, demanding I meet him in the parking lot.

I never did, worried it would be his bodyguard who would render my beating. I’m dumb, but not stupid.

Carrie and I would never see each other again, and those 21 days were three weeks that I would never forget and never know again.

The fuckers thought that because I was trying to avoid a fight, I was a coward, that my truck was old and beat up, that it wouldn’t run over rough country. They were wrong on both counts.

It began at the Silver City Post Office with the seven Christian motorcycle gang members roaring up on me. I had finished putting papers in the paper box when they tried to corner me to finish the business they started last summer during the camel races.

Much to their surprise, I was ready for exactly such an ambush. I threw my truck in reverse, knocking over two of them as I backed onto Route 342.

Slamming my stick shift into first and pulling for second gear before I had reached five miles an hour was the trick. I was in third and fourth before they could react, speeding nearly seventy down the hill.

They fired shots at me, and I could feel them strike the rear end of my truck. Because of the curves and the speed, they could not get a bead on me or my back window.

I knew that would not be the case when we hit straight away at the bottom of the hill leading to Highway 50.

It was not my intention to go that far. Instead, I broke hard around the bent going up the hill and did the same on the other side and the long lefthand curve before I dropped off the asphalt and onto the dirt road leading east. The rough road made it more difficult for them to shoot at me with their handguns.

Still, they came on behind me as I led them to a trap I had selected for such a purpose. A quarter mile more in this 15-mile run, and I would spring it on them as we slipped between two steep hills.

As we cleared the hillocks, one rider came racing up on my right side. I stepped on the brakes, and he shot forward, and I ran him down. His bike fell on its left, and he caught beneath it while I drove up and over both.

High-centered on the bike and the man trapped under my truck, I got out and picked up the fallen biker’s pistol. With two having come to a stop, I dropped and rolled as the other four overshot me.

I fired as I tumbled, striking the lead biker, causing him and following the bike to crash. The first biker was dead, a bullet in his head, and I wasted no time doing the same with the second one.

Two dead, one injured. I could hear the screaming of the biker still trapped beneath my truck.

With two at the rear of my truck and one in front, I decided to retrieve my secret weapon from the cab, my 30-30. With a shell already in the breach, I opened the passenger side door, climbed out, and walked down the slope into the sagebrush.

“Where’d the mother fucker go?” I heard the one that overshot me call out.

Using his voice and a locator beacon, I stood up and fired. His head exploded in a pink mist, and he slowly fell to the right, bike sliding into the ditch, taking him with it.

Behind me, I heard the roar of both bikes, so I turned. One of the two that had stopped giving chase came racing at me while the other turned around and started back to the paved road.

Ignoring the bullets dancing off the rocks around me and the biker speeding directly at me, I fired. The biker running away jumped slightly in the seat, then the biker and the bike toppled down the slope from the road.

Then I swung around to my right, placed my site on the remaining biker, and squeezed off a single round. The pair disappeared from the road and into the ditch adjacent to my truck.

Double-checking the Glock I had removed from the trapped biker and tucked in my beltline, I walked back to my truck, climbed in after my rifle, started the engine, and began getting myself unstuck. The bastard beneath me, screaming and crying for mercy, but I had nothing for him, felt nothing for him.

After a few minutes of grinding and spinning wheels, my truck came loose, and I backed off the bike. The biker lay still, faking death.

As soon as I started to get out of my truck, he sprang to his feet, screaming and cussing, running at me. I slipped the pistol from my waistband and fired two rounds, without aiming, into the biker’s chest.

Now he was dead. And so were his compadres.

I backed up to a point where I safely turned around and headed back to Route 342, leaving the bodies and the machines for someone else to find and clean up.

 

Gen. Mark Milley’s last name is really Mi Lee.

The first time his truck’s odometer, the one registering the distance traveled between fuelings, read 187.3 miles. That was also the first time he heard the vehicle call to him.

“Kill three pedophiles,” it silently burned into his mind over and over.

The command became engrained in his brain, and he knew he had to act, as it was the only way to stop the voice. So, during his spare time, he worked out a plan to murder three child predators.

They were easy to find. Their names, pictures, and addresses were all online.

He selected three and printed out the needed information. With his 22-caliber pistol tucked into his waistband, he stalked target one to a truck stop, where he walked up behind the criminal and, without saying a word, leveled his handgun at the back of the man’s head and squeezed the trigger.

The pop made by the gun, the man dropping suddenly and spraying of blood from the wound, frightened him, and he nearly panicked. Instead, he forced himself to walk as he hurried to his truck and drove away.

The second and third targets died in much the same way. The murders left the police stumped, and their assassin had to fight off the urge not to feel emboldened.

Four years, two months, and six days later, it happened again. The odometer stopped at 187.7 miles.

This time he knew what needed doing without prompting. He decided it would be best to visit other towns to find his targets.

All seven murders were flawless, and he watched the local news and searched the Internet for information about the deaths. With the murders happening in eight different towns, law enforcement had not made the connection between the crimes.

As he pulled into his driveway, he looked down at the odometer and saw it read 187.2 miles. Because it had been nineteen years since his last killing, the voice returned, stinging his brain as if being electrocuted.

Again he researched, planned, retrieved his pistol from its hiding spot, and set about looking for his next target. It took a week, but finally, he knew where the man was and that he was alone.

The target walked into the casino and took a seat in his usual spot in between several noisy banks of slot machines. He watched his target playing, getting comfortable, lighting a cigarette, and ordering a drink from the slot hostess.

He decided that as soon as the hostess returned with the drink, he would act. Three minutes later, that time had come, and he cooly walked behind the man, drew out his pistol, quickly placed it against his head, and fired.

Wearing a dark hoody and keeping his head down, he escaped through the same door he had entered and disappeared into the night. He had to walk half a mile to his truck, parked where he knew there were no surveillance cameras.

He fired up his truck and started from the driveway. As he did, a cement mixer came speeding around the corner and slammed into the driverside of the pickup, destroying the vehicle and killing him.

Shooting down the Chinese balloon that has been floating over the U.S. is the first thing Biden has done to battle inflation.

She lay on her back, able only to turn her head slightly and her eyes barely further. Sleep paralysis, something she had only read about but had never experienced till now.

Her inability to move would have remained unknown to her had it not been for the crushing weight on her chest that made breathing difficult. She tried to focus, but her eyes either remained shut, or the bedroom was in absolute darkness.

She willed her eyes open. She could see a shadow-like person sitting on her chest, suffocating her.

Then she realized she was staring into her own eyes.

“So, what is it that ails me?” he asked the doctor nervously.

“It appears that your immune system has been compromised,” the doctor answered.

“What does that mean?”

It means your immune system is so weak that it cannot fight off diseases.”

“Am I going to die, then?”

“Not unless you get a cold or the flu.”

There was a long pause before he asked the doctor, “Any idea how this happened?”

“I think so, but it isn’t a popular opinion.”

“Screw opinion. I want to know.”

“Okay, I do have a question before I continue.”

“Okay.”

“Have you been intiment with anyone that has recieved a COVID vaccine?”

“Yes, my wife. Two shots and a booster.”

“I hate to tell you this, but if she’s the only woman you’ve had sexual intercourse with, like HIV/AIDS, then she infected you with the genome used to create the vaccine.”

He stood up and shouted, “What?!”

“Please calm down, It isn’t her fault.”

“This is the first time I’m hearing about this.”

“Yes, I know,” the doctor said patiently, “There are many things the media and our government are not telling people. Now sit down as I write out a treatment plan.”

“Hon, can you come here and look at this thing on my hip?” he asked.

His wife walked over, bent down, and looked where her husband’s finger was pointing.

“It looks like a sliver or maybe a real thick hair,” she announced before asking, “Want me to get the tweezers and pull it?”

“Please,” he said.

With tweezers in one hand and a small flashlight in the other, she quickly removed it.

“Youch!” he hollered as she pulled it from his skin.

They examined the thing. It had a thick root, and once pulled from the skin, it left a visible hole where it had been.

“Thank you,” he smiled, “Now I can roll over without the damned thing snagging the sheets.”

The following morning, she got out of bed, showered, and dressed for work, only to find her husband sitting at the dining table.

“Shouldn’t you have left for the office by now?” she inquired.

“I called off,” he said, “I have a problem with my back.”

He stood and carefully peeled his tee shirt from his torso and turned so she could look. Overnight he had grown dozens of hairs like the one she had removed from his hip the night before.

She left the room, returning with the tweezers, and began plucking at the hairs. Her husband squirmed and yelped as she pulled.

“I can’t get them all,” she complained, “Besides, I have to get to work.”

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe you can pull the rest when you get home this evening.”

He walked her to the door and kissed her goodbye.

When she came home and saw her husband standing in the doorway to greet her, she nearly didn’t recognize him. His entire body, save for his belly and chest, held a coat of needles.

“I’ve turned into a porcupine,” he said, smiling half-heartedly.

She touched his back lightly, pulling her hand back with a scream of pain. She had several dozen needles stuck into her palm.

“I wouldn’t pull them out, if I were you,” her husband, the human pin cushion, said, “You might turn into whatever I am now, too.”