Junkyard Dogs

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Around twenty years ago when I arrived back in Wyoming the second time, the only going retail concerns in Ucross were the Ewe-Turn Inn, a dilapidated Sinclair service station turned bar, and Sonny George’s junkyard. His father’s salvage operation had been transplanted to the fork of Clear and Piney Creeks, when the founding fathers of the county seat figured that the first thing you should not be confronted with when you exited the new interstate highway just outside Buffalo was a junkyard.

Sonny was a legend and a great source of car parts and home-grown philosophy. Other than derelict automobiles, the tiny corner where Wyoming routes 14 and 16 part ways had goats and dogs aplenty, and it was Sonny who was responsible for the addendum hand stenciled at the bottom of the UCROSS POPULATION 25 sign, which read DOG POPULATION 43.

He was cantankerous, so periodically people would call me and ask if I’d go over and barter with him. I would, because I liked him. He might have been obstreperous to those he considered outsiders, but he was always soft-spoken and dealt with me in an even- handed manner. There was an ongoing battle between Sonny and the Ucross Foundation, who desperately wanted to get the junkyard out of their backyard, but he held on until a massive coronary whisked him away via Flight For Life to Billings and beyond.

I sometimes stop at the corner, pull my truck over to the side, and look at the beautiful job that Ucross Land & Cattle did in cleaning the place, with the cottonwood trees and high-plains wildflowers—but I miss Sonny’s junkyard. I never envisioned myself as one of those guys nursing a Rainier, sitting around the Ewe-Turn Inn, and starting all my statements with, “You know, back when . . .” Hey, things change, and the bar, like the junkyard, is gone, but I remember.

People ask where I get the stories for my novels and little do they know—I get them from the memories.

There are a few timeless models I’d like to thank for making not only this book possible, but all the others to boot. Gail Hochman, the ’61, flat-floor Jaguar XKE, Series 1 of agents; Kathryn Court, the ’59 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud of publishers; and Alexis Washam, the ’66 Ferrari GTB/4 of editors—all of whom continue to check my oil and keep me aligned. A free windshield wash with fill-up for my good friends Maureen Donnelly, the ’59 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz of publicity czars; Ben Petrone, the ’68 Hemi Dodge Charger R/T of senior publicists; and Meghan Fallon, the fuel-injected ’63 split-window Corvette of publicists.

But most of all, to my wife, Judy, the ’65 Shelby, MKIII 427 Cobra of my life—a true classic, and cherry.

See ya on the road,

—C.