My career consists of 35 years in community journalism, the last 15 as editor and publisher of a small weekly newspaper and commercial print shop in northern Maine.

I have been inducted into the Maine Press Association Journalism Hall of Fame and also inducted into the Maine Franco-American Hall of Fame.

I am also a founding member and past president of https://www.associationlevesque.com

Welcome to My Writing Blog

Here is my first short story:

The Color Blue

He was dressed in blue: a very dark blue shirt, buttoned to the collar, topped with a slightly lighter blue vest that buttoned unusually high, no tie, a very light blue sport coat, all four buttons buttoned, a cowboy hat that was so light blue as to be almost white.

His pants were either very dark blue or black, it was hard to tell. His shoes or boots, it was also hard to tell which they were, were of the same very dark blue or black.

A small gold chain trailed from inside his sport coat and down into the left-hand pocket. There was no noticeable bulge in that pocket, so whatever was attached to the small chain couldn’t have been very big. I figured it might have been a small flat digital imitation railroad man’s watch but I never did find out what it was.

He was clean shaven, his smile natural and warm, his face kind of pudgy and there was a hint of a double chin squeezing out of his shirt collar.

His eyes were partially hidden by large glasses, the lenses tinted from the top to the bottom, dark blue at the top and almost clear at the bottom. It was hard to tell exactly how old he was but I guess he might’ve been in his mid-40s, maybe early 50s. His hair was trimmed very short on the sides and he had no sideburns but there were no visible gray hairs. He never removed his cowboy hat, so I don’t know about the rest of his hair or even if he had any on top.

His gun had a dark blue plated handle. I don’t know anything about guns but I took it to be a Colt, like the ones the good and the bad cowboys carried in all those old black and white westerns we used to watch on Saturday afternoons as children.

We talked on the porch of my cabin for an hour or so about everything and anything, sitting on either side of a small table placed there years earlier. We sipped lemonade I had made the day before. He was very friendly, funny and engaging. He had shown me his gun while telling a funny story about almost shooting himself in the groin when he was just starting to learn how to use it a few years earlier. I thought nothing of it, although, in hindsight, it should have probably triggered some sort of alarm in my self-preservation center.

After a little while we went for a stroll along the dirt road that ran between the barn and the tool shed. The road was narrow and bordered by a barb-wire fence on the left that kept a few cows from straying and by a large field of newly mown hay on the right.

He walked with a slight limp and carried a cane which he kept hung on his left arm. However, sometimes he’d let the cane handle slide down into his hand if he needed a little assistance in walking, which didn’t seem to be very often.

Our conversation wandered over a variety of subjects and eventually worked its way to a discussion of highwaymen in the old west. He described about how an old experienced robber would sometimes gently toss a pretty good-sized rock underhand at a potential victim. The old robber would draw his pistol while the intended victim was busy catching the rock and too pre-occupied for a few seconds to draw his own revolver. We discussed the cleverness of this simple ploy used to gain a few seconds’ advantage over an opponent who might be a slightly faster draw than the thief.

I stopped to shake a small stone out of my loafers. When I looked up, he tossed me a rock underhanded. I laughed, caught it easily and then realized that I was staring down the barrel of his revolver. I laughed uneasily, remarking on how effective that stone toss was. He laughed too and said, “How much money do you usually carry on you?” I smiled and said I didn’t know. He ordered me to empty my pockets, no longer smiling.

I tossed the rock back at him pretty hard and took off running. I figured I was dead anyway, so I might as well see how far I could get. I knew I couldn’t outrun a bullet. Besides, he’d told me how he practiced shooting almost on a weekly basis at a home-made shooting range behind his house.

After a few seconds I looked back and he was smiling, still holding the pistol at his hip, pointed straight at me.

I considered running a zig zag pattern but thought it would only make the run back to the cabin that much longer. So, I kept running in a fairly straight line. I glanced back after a little while and he was standing in the middle of the road, holding the pistol at arms’ length with both hands, his feet shoulder-width apart like he was at a firing range.

I started to run a small zig zag pattern and heard him laugh loudly. I kept running, expecting to feel a bullet enter my back at any second. The gun roared and I braced myself for the bullet while maintaining my awkward and apparently amusing zig zig pattern. I didn’t feel a bullet in my back, I didn’t hear it hit anything nor did I hear it go by. I kept running, picking up the pace considerably now that I had proper motivation.

I also considered running in the ditch in order to offer him a smaller target but the ditch was rough and I was afraid of stumbling. I also didn’t want a bullet crashing through my skull, which I figured would be his main target if I ran in that ditch.

I thought about taking off across the newly mown field of hay but thought that would only slow me down. It also offered no place to hide.

He fired twice and missed twice. Was he toying my me? I glanced back. He had started to half run, half hobble after me, his cane in one hand, the pistol in his other hand, held straight out at shoulder level, still aimed at me.

I was struggling for breath and my calves ached. My heart was pounding and I was covered in sweat. I rolled up my shirt sleeves, unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it out of my pants as I kept running. My glasses kept sliding down my nose, which was annoying, but I didn’t want to take them off. A small stone exploded into a small cloud of dust to my right. I hadn’t even heard a shot, which concerned me.

I had been told by combat veterans that, during a mortar attack, you heard all the mortars coming except that one that will kill you because that one was coming down directly over your head. I decided this probably didn’t apply to bullets. Maybe the opposite was true of bullets, that is, you only hear the one that will kill you.

I was finally able to duck behind my small 2010 Hyundai Accent. I knew that car doors normally don’t stop a bullet, having seen it on MythBusters a few times. I thought of hiding in the cabin, the shed or the barn but was afraid of being trapped there. I had to get as far away as quickly as possible. I fumbled in my pockets and found my car keys. I peeked underneath the car and could see him still coming, hobbling at a pretty good rate, the revolver still held straight out at shoulder level, still aimed at me in a general manner.

I climbed into my car through the passenger door and started it while lying across the seats. I then slowly dragged myself into the driver’s seat, scrunched down as low as I could, peeking carefully over the steering wheel through the windshield to see him quickly gaining ground, the revolver pointing straight at me.

I jerked the car into reverse and floored the gas pedal, hoping to put some quick distance between myself and the pistol. But I backed into the ditch. A bullet struck the side of the car. I cut the front wheels sharply all the way to the right and gunned the engine. The tires spun backwards, the front end quickly slid to the left, pointing somewhat downhill and away from that maniacal northern Maine cowboy.

I slammed the gearshift into drive and floored it again. The small engine whined pathetically as a bullet took out the rear window on the passenger side. The car suddenly leaped clumsily out of the ditch and I had to do some fancy steering to prevent it from pitching nose-first into the ditch on the opposite side of the narrow road. In doing that I nicked the rear bumper of his huge light blue car which I took to be some kind of older Cadillac or someting like that. In my rear view mirror I saw that it had neither a rear license plate nor an emblem identifying the make and model.

I heard two more shots but didn’t see or hear if the bullets hit anything. I kept the gas pedal glued to the floor. That’s when it occurred to me that I didn’t even know the name of the guy who was trying to kill me, where he was from, nor did I know why he was trying to kill me.

Me, of all people.

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