Download to your Nook (eBook) Amazon Barnes & Noble.com Official Author Website Amazon Kindle Category:  Action/Thriller Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing and Right Company ISBN-10:  1622127064 Type: Fiction Pages: 207 Copyright: 2012 ISBN-13: 9781622127061 208 pages, 15 short stories, 25 story poems, 53,300 words and all with a message, that humans can be noble creatures. Short stories and story poems that are filled with messages about proper treatment of others and the most noble way to handle life's many test.  Perfect for any gifting occassion it can even be used for those struggling with the loss of a loved one for several stories deal with death in a tasteful and victorious manner. Especially useful for person living a self-destructive lifestyle or a teen getting wrapped up in a world of negative influences, this book reinforces love, respect, self-sacrifice, devotion, reconcilation and many more topics that show the best way to deal with life's painful test. Also, to those who love to read and are looking for a breath of fresh air, this book is for you. This book is in solf cover print, ebook formats and soon mobile phone applications. Excerpt Weldon’s Stupid Kid (A True West Texas Oilfield Story) By William M. Cooper Chapter 1 - Odessa 101 I was living in the west of my state in the city of Odessa, Texas. I’m told it began as a tent city mostly made up of Russian immigrants. Odessa and Midland grew so close to each other that some said a day would come when they would become one big city named Midessa. I think it would be okay to call it Midessa if you’re heading west on I-20, but if you’re heading east, then you should call the place, Oddland. The news stations we watched dubbed this union, the Petroplex, because the region offered its inhabitants sandstorms, tumbleweeds and lots of oilfield work. Just a few miles down the road is a sizable desert with nothing but sand dunes for miles in every direction. The old folks called this place, ‘the end of the world’, but to an imaginative twelve year old, the place wasn’t half bad with a little fixing up. I know I did my part when I built a rock dam across the Pecos River underneath a bridge close to the town of Pecos. My dad was a roughneck in the oil business, as were many of my friends’ dads. It was common practice for parents to take their teenage sons out on drilling locations in order to break them in on all the sights and sounds of the drilling process. This was done in order to give them an upper hand when it came their time to get a job. Both my older brothers had been out with my dad several times and so it was assumed that I was ripe for training. Someone should have asked me if I were ready before jumping to such a grand assumption, because as you will soon learn, I wasn’t even close. Chapter 2 - Just Getting There I was on top of the world when my dad told me I was going out the next day with him to a drilling location. My dad liked taking us places, because my mom always sent him with a lunch that was made for a king. No little sack -mind you- it was a big grocery sack jammed full of goodies. My mom was very protective of us and she didn’t take any chances on us getting stranded out in the desert without enough food to last us until we were rescued. I don’t blame her either, for if I had to go through all the trouble she did to have and raise me, then I’d put some safeguards in place to ensure I made it out alive. We were standing outside next to the road, waiting for the chauffeur to pick us up. I later found out that his name was Mr. Tool Pusher. Mr. Pusher seemed like a really nice guy and all, but he had this really fat cigar in his mouth that smelled up to high heaven. I’m still unsure how he got such a huge cigar between his lips and what’s even more puzzling is how anyone understood what he said when he talked. The car we rode in was so well air-conditioned, that beef could have been safely stored inside with us. Luck was on my side, because I got to sit in the back with two chunky guys who kept me sheltered from the frozen wind, thus making the trip, tolerable. We rode for some forty miles before taking a dirt road that led to the drilling locations. We were pulling the day shift which made things even better for what I had in mind to do. We exchanged crews, but there was no rush for the men to scramble to the drilling floor because the drill bit was slowly cutting its way through a difficult layer of rock several hundred feet down and the night shift had taken care of all the chores. Because of all this, the men decided to avoid the blistering heat and so they hung out inside their large tool shed they called the ‘doghouse’. I for one wasn’t interested in anything adult, but was totally committed to finding free stuff, so I could take it home and show everybody my artifacts. My dad really hated for us to bring anything home, because he was afraid we may have taken it from someone’s yard. He had a firm policy that if we brought anything home, then he would send us away to put it back where we found it. This was different though, because this would be skull bones of dead cows and arrowheads from Apache tribes that roamed the area long ago. Chapter 3 – Oh Man As I was racing down the steps away from the doghouse, I heard my dad shout out to me, “Stay away from the creek!” I ran as fast as my imagined ‘bionic legs’ could go and just as straight as they could go to the creek. “Creek,” I thought to myself, “This would be a great way to cool off and go swimming”. We didn’t get to go swimming much in Odessa, unless someone took us to the pool at the County Road West Park. When I got there, I realized that my dad’s version of a creek was vastly different from that of my own. This wasn’t a swimming creek at all, but a mud creek used to catch all the sludge that came up out of the drilling hole when it pressured out. However, the mud was new to me and I wanted badly to take a sample back for further evaluation. As I stooped over the edge, I reached down to scoop some out; when all of a sudden, the embankment collapsed causing me to slide on my back into the miserable goop. “Oh man!” I cussed as I lay there on my back. I thought to myself, “What was a nice kid like me doing in a bad place like this?” I tried the spider method of escape by picking my mid-section up and walking on all fours with no success. Finally, reality set in and I rolled onto my stomach and crawled out of my personalized pit. I started the long trip back to the drilling rig anguishing over the thought of how my dad was going to clobber me. I slowly made my way up the steps that led to the entrance of the doghouse and when I came into the view of the men inside, I heard them drown out the machinery as they all burst into a roar of laughter. I suppose my dad didn’t feel comfortable beating me in front of the other men because I had made them all so wonderfully happy; instead he just said, “Come on boy.” He escorted me through the doghouse and onto the drilling floor, where to one side was a water hose neatly rolled up and waiting for me. While my dad was spraying me down, one of the men rudely interrupted our quality time and said, “Gee, Weldon, you sure have a stupid kid.” My dad chuckled and said back, “Yeah, he’s pretty stupid, isn’t he?” When the shower ended, my dad ordered me to take all my clothes off except for my underwear so he could hang them on a muffler to dry. While this happened, all seventy-five pounds of myself sat in a steel doghouse (in my dripping underwear), listening to a bunch of hole punchers torment me about my IQ level. Chapter 4 – Déjà Vu The clothes dried out really fast and I wasted no time in getting my gear on. I was heading down and away from these oddball people, who obviously knew nothing about what it was like to be a twelve-year-old boy. As I ran down the steps, I heard my dad shout at me once again, “Stay away from the creek!” Yeah, yeah, what did he think I was - stupid or something? I actually had every intention of staying away from the creek, but I really needed to know what went wrong at the accident site, so I could return with my findings and forever clear my name as, Weldon’s stupid kid. There I was, at the exact location of my mishap, utilizing my TV detective skills. As I was singing the Hawaii Five 0 theme song, I determined that the ground was loose where I had stood and that it wasn’t able to support my weight. As I continued my experiments, I stood over the same place where I first fell in and pushed with my feet, with nothing happening. “This sure feels like it’s firm enough,” I thought to myself. Frustrated at this, I began jumping up and down on this spot, but there was no cave-in, which proved that I had done everything humanly possible to keep mud off me, but fate would not let me be mud free. Before I darted off to tell the crew about my findings, I squatted down and reached over to get myself another nice big scoop of mud that I tried to get earlier. Just as success was in my sight, the ground crumbled below me. I tried to kick my way back, but the earth just swallowed me up and there -for a second time- I lay on my back, in a bed of mud. “Ah, rats,” I cussed. I was really mad at myself this time and I wasn’t looking forward to getting out, because the water hose was through the doghouse and on the drilling platform. As I lay there trying to figure out the best way to fix this new problem, a snake slithered by me, giving me more than ample motivation to roll over and scramble out of the creek. On my long walk back to the drilling rig, I was evaluating how much I hated mud. I was also thinking how much I didn’t want to be me anymore as I slowly made my way up the steps to the doghouse door. When I reached the top of the steps, an explosion of laughter and howls came rushing out at me. I knew these people didn’t have anything else to do out here, except to pry into my own personal business, so it was really working out to be a long day. My dad was gleaming with pride before the rest of the men. As he walked towards the water hose I heard him say once again, “Come on boy.” I knew the routine well enough by then and began the rotisserie chicken while my dad performed an authentic Indian rain ceremony called, Water Weldon’s Stupid Kid So He’ll Grow Up Quicker.” The men who worked with my dad were beyond the realm of annoying as they spent the whole wash time making smooching noises and catcalls at me. My dad just laughed along as every last roughneck went out of his way to remind my dad just how stupid he thought I was. “Man-O-Live,” I huffed, “these old dudes are really getting on my nerves.” I took off all unnecessary clothing and draped it over the muffler pipe. In my soggy underwear, I sat down inside the doghouse with my head between my legs and my hands covering my ears, but my skinny hands failed to provide enough meat to block out the their voices, so once again I found myself as the sole ray of happiness these men could reflect on, out in the middle of nowhere. By this time, my dad realized I was unable to keep mud off myself, so he grounded me to the doghouse for the rest of the day. How bad could life get for a boy with a need for speed? Here I was, at a noisy drilling rig, grounded to the confines of a large metal tool-shed, being inhumanely caged in the middle of a desert, with fat guys poking stupid jokes at me every chance they got. I swore a holy oath on that day, that I would never become a roughneck when I got older. Chapter 5 – Say It Isn’t So When my clothes dried out for the second time, I attempted a desperate move to get away from all these jolly jokesters, so I told my dad I had to use the number one. He granted me leave and as I was flying down the steps to reach Mother Earth, I heard my dad yell out to me, “Stay away from the mud pit!” “Mud pit,” I yelped to myself in utter horror! There’s not a fat chance in Pecos I’d go near anything that begins with the word, ‘mud’. To my great delight, there in front of me was a dirt clod mound made for a king’s son. The mound must be from the pit my dad was warning me to avoid and sure enough -just as I had suspected- there on the other side of the hill was a real-to-life, square mud pit. I’m not sure what the mud was for, but I had no intentions of ever getting close to it to find out. Staining my clothes and reputation twice, was the only cross that anyone my age should ever be expected to bear. Needless-to-say, there were some really nice dirt clods scattered all over the mound and I found them all too irresistible to walk away from. I climbed to the top of clod hill and imagined that my dirt clods were rockets that I was shooting at enemy troops. As they slammed into metal objects, they would explode into trillions of pieces and the excitement of my missile barrage only intensified. Nothing was spared from me pelting it with a clod rocket. I got so caught up in my rocket war that I lost all track of time and what I had actually come outside for. Without any warning, my dad surprised me as he began yelling at me. I flew off the top of the hill away from him and (you guessed it) into the mud pit he earlier told me to stay away from. As I entered the mud, one of my arms grabbed the side of the pit and when my head came out of the mud, I screamed, “Daddy save me!” My dad rushed over and reached down and jerked me out like I weighed nothing to him. He continued to hold me as he kicked me across the rear end. I somehow broke loose and began running for dear life and it was my dad I feared who was going to end it. He was yelling while attempting to kick me at the same time, but because I was covered in mud and in motion, he was never able to establish a good hold on me. I beat my dad to the steps that lead up to the doghouse and when I reached the top, I dashed through it in full view of the men who were still inside. Before my dad could reach me, I grabbed the water hose and turned it on, spraying myself vigorously. As I turned, I shouted out to the men watching, “Y’all come out and take a look at Weldon’s stupid kid.” My dad and the rest of the men were laughing so hard that they had to lean on each other just to keep from collapsing on the floor. I never heard a pack of coyotes howl as much as they did that day. For the third time I failed to get the belt lashing that was customary for such offenses. Perhaps it was too messy to beat me covered in mud and it was clearly inappropriate to beat me in soggy underwear. Regardless of the reason why, I was glad that by the time my clothes had dried out, he had calmed down enough not to care about the punishment phase. By then, the men had things to do and one by one (after they poked fun at me) they disbanded; giggling like a bunch of girls at a valentine’s dance. I’d pop my head out just to see the world I was missing and everywhere one of the men were working, I’d see them stop, burst out laughing, then work some more. I was in the midst of insanity. Chapter 6 – Angels We Have Heard On High Although I never got the beatings I knew I deserved, I was never again allowed to go on a job site with my dad. He knew better than to think I was capable of being anything other than a kid who got into more trouble than he could get out of. Many times after our one time outing, my dad would walk by me and say with a big smile on his face, “How’s it going, Muddy?” It was his special way of not letting me forget that horrible day at the drilling rig. As time moved on, both my parents became sick and died. Dad died when I was seventeen and Mom passed when I was twenty-one. I was driving home one rainy day when I had a blowout. “Ah, rats,” I cussed, “the back right tire is flat!” Instead of waiting for it to quit raining, I got out and jacked up the truck, unbolted the tire, but the tire wouldn’t slide off the lug bolts. There just happened to be a deep trench behind me with no grass to cover it and when I jerked the tire to get it off the hub, I lost my footing and there I went sliding down the mud creek once more. As I lay there on my back, I stared into the heavens and pondered just how loud they must be laughing it up –up there. I’m almost sure that when I finally get to those pearly gates, I’ll see my dad standing at the door waiting for me, with a water hose in his hands.

Coop's Corner Collection: Inspirational Stories and Poems
“William Cooper is a wonderful dreamer. He puts together his little stories like the child with the still impressionable mind that dreams of a better world for all of us. And you can tell he writes his stories so that everyone can read them … adults and children alike. Parents don’t have to worry about their youngsters reading questionable material. But most importantly, the stories have their own little messages. They’re stories of honor, strength, kindness, and love … even love for enemy. And Cooper’s writings are vivid … you see things, places, and people so clearly, yet without long passages of descriptive writing. A talent in and of itself.”

– Robert G. Christie, filmmaker, RC Feature, Columbus, Ohio