Canto 8 – The Slink
On the car ride home, Maria worked up the nerve to ask her stepfather a few things.
“Why did you lie to those people, Stan?”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You were pretending to be that woman’s friend. You never met her before. How is that not a lie?”
“I only said I knew Brittany from her charity work. When I researched her, I found that information about the charities. So, that was exactly how I knew about her. I can’t help it if he interpreted my words differently than that.”
“So, you really want the man and his little girl to think of us as friends and call us?”
“We need to listen to anything they have to say. If we are going to learn anything about why this woman was struck down in this way, it will come from what they want to talk about when they want to talk about the incident.”
“But why bother at all? It doesn’t really have anything to do with the case we really want to solve. We need to find out about Rogelio and Yesenia.”
“Strange things have been happening in and around that toy store for a long, long time. I have a suspicion we will need to find out how more than one of those things happened in order to figure out what your boyfriend is caught up in.”
“So, what do you really think happened to Mrs. Nguyen?”
“I don’t know anything for sure yet. You have to be open to anything as a possible clue. Once you find some things out, you follow those leads and try to eliminate them as paths to the answer. You eliminate all the false paths, and the one you are left with is the one that will lead you to the answer.”
“It makes you sound like Sherlock Holmes.”
“It should sound like logic. In fact, it is the methodical application of logic that Sherlock might’ve called “ratiocination.”
“What ratio-whatsit do you already have about Rogelio?”
“Well, you said he seemed to be hearing voices in his head before he disappeared.”
“Yeah. He seemed to be talking to a papier-mâché skull. You know. One of those Day-of-the-Dead Mexican holiday things.”
“Did you hear it say anything?”
“No. It was just a toy on a shelf.”
“But was it really? Do you know for sure he wasn’t talking to someone, somehow?”
“Like how?”
“A miniature radio?”
“ESP?”
“Ghosts?”
“Be serious!”
“I am. At the start, you don’t throw out any possibility. It is the weirdest ones that make it hardest to find the real answer. You can’t discount anything without evidence.”
“Okay. I see your point. I hope it’s ghosts, actually. That would be more fun than a miniature radio to contact Yesenia in the alley.”
“Yes. We might want to see if we can eliminate the radio thing first.”
“You going to that toy store to check on it?”
“We are going. I need your eyes and ears and brain there too.”
So, it was settled. The investigation had a new lead to track down.
Catch a Falling Star 
The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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Tagged as autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, Wyatt Earp