Flycatchers & Fireflies: Chapter 1

Hubie Flynn questioned, perhaps just a little too late, how he had come to be standing on an abandoned trestle in the middle of the woods with Ulysses Sherman “Slick” Hogg, a ferret-like man who seemed more nervous than the situation demanded.

The young man was getting nervous, too. Why was he here, close to the edge, 100 feet above the forest floor, as Hogg pointed and squeaked and seemed to inch ever closer. It was like a game of Red Light Green Light. Every time he glanced back Hogg froze. Yet he still came closer. Maybe it wasn’t Red Light Green Light at all. Maybe it was King of the Hill? The young man began to sweat.

****

It had been a strange day. Young Hubie had knocked on Hogg’s door early that morning, hoping to learn more about the power company’s purported plan to build a dam that would turn his family’s land and half of Forrest County into a lake the size of Amarillo, Texas. 

Google Maps had led him to Hogg’s isolated, modest house, and he’d been impressed. He’d expected gates and a long driveway, maybe a security guard with a paunch and a pistol. But it was just a ranch-style brick house that looked like it was built in the ‘50s and got its last coat of paint during the Nixon administration.

Hogg had surprisingly welcomed him inside and introduced him to his wife, Mimi, a large woman in an avocado-and–orange mumu who looked as much like a Mimi as a person can look.

“Oh, a visitor,” she said, as thrilled as one could expect from a Mimi in a mumu welcoming unexpected guests on a Sunday morning. 

He declined her offer of coffee or Grapico and gaped at the sight before him. On every surface, on coffee tables and bespoke shelves, on top of a vintage oak RCA television console – everywhere he looked – were ceramic figures of pigs. Pink stoats, husky hogs, silly piglets, scary sows and a boar in clown makeup that bore a startling resemblance to Mimi herself. It  was among the most disturbing things Hubie had ever seen.

“This,” snorted Mimi, “is my menagerie.”

She waved her arm, like a pillowy Vanna White revealing her vowels, and seemed to float in the mumu. Hubie could think of nothing to say.

“I have 6,321 pigs,” Mimi said. “When your name is Hogg, you better own it.”

She was a nice lady, charming in her way, the young man thought. But if he had to stay in that house much longer he knew he’d start drinking again. 

The day somehow got weirder from there. Hogg listened nervously to his questions before insisting, suddenly and objectively inexplicably, that he must take the young man to show him the “real situation” the fake news would never report. He ushered Hubie into his yacht of a car – the kind of Buick that went extinct after the ‘70s oil crisis. He turned the ignition, shifted into reverse, and with eyes darting skittishly everywhere but behind him, he stepped on the gas.

And rammed into young Hubie’s car. Or his mom’s if you want to be technical about it.

“Sorry,” Hogg grunted, lurching forward again, still without looking back. “I’ll pay for it.”

Then he slammed the car into reverse again, stepped on the gas and … BAM! He hit the young man’s mom’s Honda Civic a second time.

“Dang it,” Hogg said, without getting out to look at the damage or allowing Hubie to do so. He threw the boat into gear and sped out the driveway, spewing a rooster tail of gravel behind. 

“Where are we going,” the young man asked, confused and shaken by the damage to his car, wondering how he would break the news to his mother. 

“You’ll see, you’ll see,” Hogg chirped. 

And off they went.

****

Ray-Ray Headley was in the shadows, relieving himself under the canopy of an ancient magnolia tree, when Hogg and that young man walked out of the house and climbed into that monstrosity of a Buick.  He was just zipping up as Hogg crashed into the fellow’s little car. Ray-Ray shook his head in wonder when it happened again. He’d once worked for the DMV and he’d seen a lot of bad driving, but he’d never seen anybody have two wrecks before leaving his own driveway.

“Hide your wife and kids,” he thought. “It’s big Buick bumper cars out there.”

Ray-Ray was glad he’d had to pee, glad to be behind that tree. He could be fairly confident that he had not been seen by Hogg, whose vision was clearly not his greatest asset. Ray-Ray didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be anywhere near that guy. Slick Hogg was trouble.

Ray-Ray had worked at just about every department in city government. But now he was with the BCWA – the Bedford City Water Authority – which was infested with more rodents than any swamp he’d ever tromped. He had been instructed, ordered by his bosses, to come to Hogg’s home early this morning. He was told to park a quarter mile up the street, so as not to draw attention.

“If anybody sees you, you’re just marking water lines for later work,” his boss told him. “Or for mapping. You’re there for mapping.”

Ray-Ray didn’t need to ask questions and he didn’t want answers. Sometimes it’s better not to know. Even when you really know.

He’d arrived early, before the young man. He had measured and calculated and sprayed a blue X on the browning grass in the spot where another crew would dig. They would come later, also discreetly, also parking up the street, and reroute Hogg’s water line to bypass his water meter.

All so he could water his lawn as much as he wanted in the searing Southern Summer, during a drought when water was rationed and rates were higher than even the humidity. 

Ray-Ray knew how things worked. Hogg was a former county commissioner, a possible candidate for the state’s public service commission. He knew all the palms to grease, all the backs to scratch, all the dirty secrets of every gas, water and power utility in the region and every bond dealer and contractor likely to kick back a little of the take.

Hogg looked like a rat, dressed like a slob, lived in a nondescript house, drove that gargantuan car and pulled strings behind his curtain that nobody saw unless he wanted them to. He’d once been indicted for orchestrating a scam that misdirected – the federal grand jury said “converted for personal use” and the newspaper said “stole” – 27 air conditioning units meant for inner city elementary schools. He sold 21 back to the supplier and donated six to churches like his own, which needed cool air as it abandoned the city and moved to the suburbs. Eighteen people were convicted in that scheme, but Hogg beat the rap after five men of the cloth and one buxom blonde woman with a cross wedged in her cleavage testified that he was a god-fearing man who supported his church. No sweltering second graders had been asked to take the stand.

Ray-Ray knew Hogg had two obsessions: his ability to manipulate others, and his lawn. He was as nutty about his zoysia grass as his wife was about her pigs. Ray-Ray had been inside the house once, to replace the water heater at city expense, and he liked it just fine outside. Dead grass or not.

He watched Hogg careen away down the road, feeling sorry for that pale young man in the passenger seat. He waited to make sure they were gone before packing up his things. Ray-Ray hated people like Hogg. Best to steer clear of him.

****

Hubie Flynn felt Hogg’s tiny wet hands touch his back, and he flinched, prompting Hogg to laugh. A kind, reassuring laugh.

“Relax, there son, I just want you to see the expanse,” he said, his hand still on the young man’s shoulders. “Just look out there and imagine it all, covered in beautiful water. Lakeside houses will start at a million bucks.”

“But I don’t have a million dollars,” Hubie said. “And my family’s house will be at the bottom of the lake.”

“Well,” Hogg said, “I wouldn’t ask you to leave it.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Of course not. It’s way too late for that anyway,” Hogg said. “But I’ll do you a special favor.”

“You will?”

“I will.”

With all the force he had in his rodentine paws, Hogg shoved Hubie in the back.

The young man hurtled off the trestle and into the abyss. Before Hubie hit the forest floor he had one final thought.

“What a jerk.”

Hogg had the exact same thought. 

Chapter 2: NoW Swimming

The title on Salem Khalidi’s business card read “Deputy Director of Telecommunications Security” for KMX & Associates, which sounded great to his mom. But his one job, his one real responsibility, was a shabby rented storage unit in rural Forrest County, and more to the point its contents. 

KMX & Associates was a dummy company that existed only on that business card, but in Khalidi’s mind it functioned as a subsidiary of Rapier Communications with or without the pesky paperwork.

Khalidi had been hired six weeks prior, after a job interview in which he promised Lafayette Rapier he would never ask questions and never, ever reveal anything he was told to any living soul, including his mother or girlfriend, if he had one. He had signed a non-disclosure agreement, although he did not as yet know that because he had not read the fine print on his employment agreement and Rapier had not pointed it out. The financial consequences of running his mouth would ruin him, but – Rapier sensed this all along – his real concerns did not fall within the confines of the law.

“What happens at Rapier is highly classified,” the boss said. “If you speak of it, I will know. And you don’t want me to know.”

Khalidi did not want Rapier to know. He was happy with his title and his salary, which paid him more in a month than he’d made in two years as an Uber driver. He was afraid of Rapier because he was not as stupid as his father so often shouted. Hell, the mayor was afraid of Rapier. The governor was afraid of Rapier. Everyone who was anyone was afraid of Rapier, so if you weren’t afraid of Rapier you weren’t anyone. Fear was the man’s greatest asset, and the company’s primary commodity. If he were ever to say out loud what the company actually did – which he told himself he never would – he would say it trafficked in fear. 

The day he was hired, after acknowledging he understood the consequences of laziness, loose lips and disloyalty, Khalidi was given keys to a white panel van filled to the brim with brand new, in-the-box pay-as-you-go cell phones of dubious origin. He was told to find a safe, climate controlled location for the phones. A place that could never be traced back to Rapier or Rapier Communications or any of its mysterious subsidiaries, real or imaginary.

“I don’t want to know where,” Rapier told him. “Never tell me how or where you do what I tell you to do.”

He told Khalidi to store the phones safely, preferably in a remote location, to wipe down the van and dispose of it in a place it would never be found.

“Dispose of it? Like, dispose of it?” Khalidi had asked.

“Not sold, not traded, not stripped,” Rapier said, so calmly it scared Khalidi to death. “Gone.”

Rapier then gave Khalidi a list of 12 addresses, all run-down houses in skeezy neighborhoods. The properties were numbered from one to twelve. Each week, after receiving a coded message, he was to wrap one of the phones in parcel paper and deliver it to one of those homes. 

“Got it?” Rapier had asked.

“Got it,” Khalidi had it. But Rapier explained it over and over until he was convinced that Khalidi really had it.

Every eighth day at dawn, as Rapier prepared for morning Tai Chi on the pier below his intentionally forgettable lake home, he would pull out his current phone to text Khalidi a seemingly random phone number. Then he would throw his old phone into the Chickamauga Lake, a man-made body of water said to be so deep that a diver on the bottom would have to guard against the bends on the way up.

The phone number is irrelevant, Rapier told Khalidi. Don’t call it, don’t save it to contacts, don’t ever text it. The only significant thing about the phone number would be the last two digits. Those digits would correspond to the numbers assigned to the 12 houses.

“For instance,” he told Khalidi, “if I were to text you 867-5309, which house would you go to?”

“Number 9?” 

“Number 9.”

“But what if the last two digits are 16?” Khalidi asked.

“They won’t be.”

So the system was set. Each delivery day Rapier would text Khalidi a phone number, and each of those evenings Khalidi would delivere a new phone to the corresponding address. It sounded complex, but it was simple. Brilliant, Rapier thought. But it took planning.

On his first day on the job Khalidi rented unit B4 at Dixie Storage outside Bedford, behind the strip mall that used to hold the tanning salon and the video store, but now held what was left of The Bedford Bee, a once-proud community newspaper that now operated out of an old Radio Shack. Khalidi rented the unit in the name of KMX & Associates, and paid six months in advance with cash Rapier had provided. It took all day to stack all the burner phones inside. But when it was done Khalidi was pleased with himself, pleased with his own sense of order. He turned his attention to ditching the van.

He had dreaded this part. Rapier had been very clear that disappear meant disappear. No trace. No trouble. He drove to a junk yard, the kind where they crunch cars into blocks, but the lady at the gate asked for all kinds of paperwork and ID, so Khalidi backed up quickly, sputtering that he’d forgotten his wallet. He drove to an old quarry, past the “No Swimming” sign that had been altered with spraypaint to read “NoW Swimming,” but it was teeming high schoolers and beer bongs and bathing suits. Khalidi couldn’t beat it out of there fast enough. He drove and drove until it finally dawned on him. A quarter of this county would soon be underwater.

Khalidi drove the van far into the hills, past reclaimed strip mines and pine forests, beneath kudzu vines that looked like Godzilla as they consumed telephone poles and power lines. He passed a shuttered old gas station, a mom & pop diner and a decrepit “gentleman’s” club called “The BooBu Patch.” He hadn’t seen a gentleman in 30 miles, and considered stopping there to see what it was all about. He thought better of it. The van first, the Patch later, he made a note.

So he drove until he found an old, abandoned railroad trestle leading into the woods. A sign said “No Trespassing," but it too had been edited with spraypaint to read “No TrespIssing,” which Khalidi thought was kind of funny. He did not see the “Bridge Out” sign, for it had been removed by the graffiti artists, who thought that was kind of funny.

The trestle looked relatively safe to Khalidi. At first. He slowly pressed the gas, and eased onto the expanse, wheels straddling rusty railroad tracks above a whole lot of nothing. It was an ancient thing, built of wood and creaking like a melting glacier. Khalidi inched along, bouncing up and down as the tires struggled with the spaces between the crossties. He began to believe with every downward dip the bridge would collapse, that he would fall to his death, never to be found as the valley filled with water. Or worse, that the van would be stuck on top of this trestle and he would have to call Rapier. He felt sick, overcome with terror and motion sickness and vertigo as the ground dropped away beneath him. The bridge shook. His stomach churned. 

Up and down and up and down and up and down. He’d been so distracted, so busy concentrating on his fears and his feelings and the tracks before him that he did not look up to see the abrupt end to his trestle. For a flit of a second he noted the steel rails twisting toward the earth, and thought them beautiful, like sculpture. And then plunk. 

The wheels of the van crossed the final tie, and Khalidi heard metal grinding metal as the front axle met the rails and began to slide. Khalidi slammed on the brakes and stared straight ahead, gripping the steering wheel like a life preserver. Before him lay the lush forest floor, and a whole lot of air between it and him.

The van lurched forward, but stopped as the back tires dropped, blessedly, into the space between two of the last slats. Khalidi shifted into Park, pulled the emergency brake, unclasped his seatbelt and opened the door to nothing but emptiness. He slammed it shut, and felt the trestle groan beneath him. He scrambled to the back of the van, tripping over empty phone crates and until he reached the double doors. He twisted the handle and pushed, but gravity had begun to work against him. The doors seemed to weigh a ton.

He focused suddenly, like he had when he took the SAT’s in high school. His score might not have gotten him into Harvard, but it was enough to make his mom think she might be wrong about him, and everyone else think he’d cheated. He grabbed a crowbar, leveraged one of the doors open, shoved his shoulder into it, pushed with all his might and fell, hard, onto the trestle.

Khalidi was face down above the deepest part of the gorge, eyes squeezed shut as pain radiated from his elbows. He did not actually see the van plummet into the abyss. But he heard the sound.

Screeeeeeeeeeee. And then the crash, the rending of branches and limbs. Then a thump, and creaking as the van settled somewhere far below. 

Khalidi stood up, shaky. He was about to turn to go when he heard a sound from below.

“Hey!” someone yelled. “Little help down here?”

Khalidi felt a cold chill rise from the stomach and climb his spine. He vomited over the side.

He heard the voice again.

“What the hell?”

Chapter 3: Lafayette Rapier

Lafayette Rapier had dreamed of a future in politics when he was a student. He wanted to change the world, to give voice to the voiceless and opportunity to those who had been denied it. He wanted to right wrongs.

And then he met Joe Dale Comer.

Joe Dale approached Rapier their junior year at State College and asked him –- begged him, really –- to manage his campaign for president of the student government association. Rapier had planned to run for the office himself, but Comer would be hard to beat. He was the son of a wealthy lawyer, who was the son of a wealthy planter, who had started the secret society within the Greek system that controlled all of student life and politics. Joe Dale wasn’t just the BMOC, he was royalty. He was tall, good-looking in a ruddy, wholesome way. He was reasonably intelligent from an academic perspective, leaned unexpectedly progressive, was surprisingly kind and inexplicably, stupidly honest.

That race in college changed Rapier’s life. And Comer’s too. Rapier agreed to manage the campaign on one condition: that Comer tell him everything he had ever done that might reflect badly on him. Girlfriends, boyfriends, pornography, drugs, fights, embarrassments, crimes, kinks, secret desires and shames.

“Write down anything that might come back to haunt you,” he told Comer in their first meeting. “I need to know everything. So I can protect you.”

He never thought Comer would actually do it. But Comer nodded. Solemnly. The next day he came to Rapier’s dorm and handed him six pages of confessions hand written on a yellow legal pad, beginning with the first time he touched himself and ending with a three-way that included his sister-in-law and a tight end on the high school football team. Comer withheld no details. He described awkward sexual encounters, petty thefts and a couple of drunken fights that read to Rapier like 2nd degree assaults.

“Don’t tell anybody,” was all Comer said.

“Of course not,” a stunned Rapier replied. “This is for your own protection.”

Rapier had managed that campaign well. Comer won easily, as he likely would have done if he had simply put his name on the ballot and held a kegger. He’d gone on to win a seat on the local school board, with Rapier’s help, and then State Auditor, though he was mediocre at math and unsure what the responsibilities of that job entailed.

“What does the auditor audit,” he’d asked Rapier.

“Nothing, unless I tell you to,” Rapier said.

Rapier had known from the moment Joe Dale handed him that pile of yellow paper that he, Lafayette Rapier, would never run for office himself. He wanted real power, and he knew in that moment that he held the blueprint to it in his hands. Joe Dale might someday reach high office, with his help, but he would forever be beholden to his old friend. Lafayette abandoned political ambition, even his ideology. Politics was just a commodity like any other, subject to the whims of the fickle masses. He would rise above the throng to trade in it, manipulate it. He opened Rapier & Associates right after graduation, and began to manage small races, from constable to city council.

Every time he was approached to run a campaign he began with the same sentence he’d said to Comer.

“Write down anything that might come back to haunt you. I need to know everything. So I can protect you.”

What a bunch of saps. Politicians. They were desperate to please, even more desperate to be loved, prone to sex addiction and drug abuse, pathological in their ability to lie and dissemble. Rapier built files on each of them, at first color coding them by the psychological disorder he imagined them to have.

Narcissistic personality disorder was yellow. Antisocial personality disorder was blue, and green folders were reserved for those he diagnosed as both narcissistic and antisocial. Eventually, all of his folders were green.

Very few candidates were as forthcoming as Joe Dale, but they all wrote down something. A dalliance with a co-worker, perhaps, or a long-hidden criminal record from a misspent youth. Pictures of boys, and girls, and drugs. Lots of drugs and financial crimes.

Rapier got most of those men and women elected with anti-drug, tough-on-crime platforms approved by trailer park Jesus himself. With every campaign, win or lose, he filed those secrets away in his safe.

His business, branded with a logo of a sword, grew over the decades. Rapier was good at what he did. He hired data analysts and social media savants, old school private eyes and experts in military intelligence. He got a few good men and women elected to office, and many more bad men and women. It did not matter to him. They were but a commodity, and he would control both the supply and the demand.

Rapier protected his clients from political foes and journalists looking to drag up their embarrassing pasts, and he would use his knowledge of their misdeeds to control them, subtly or not, when necessary. He got plenty of repeat business, too, even from those he controlled. The politicians began to realize what Rapier had known since college. They had hired him, paid him good money, and handed him the very information he could use to destroy them. But he could make them kings if they kept him happy. And on retainer.

Rapier had managed Ulysses Sherman “Slick” Hogg’s run for the public service commission, which was created to regulate the state’s utilities but was ever packed with industry lackeys who stood staunchly for deregulation. He had urged Hogg to drop the Ulysses and the Sherman and run simply as Slick Hogg on the ballot, because a Slick Hogg is better to voters than a Yankee marauder any day. Hogg refused as a matter of principle, not his only principal but one of only several, and lost. But he came to understand what Rapier did, and how he did it. He decided that he, too, could play the game. He began to do favors for Rapier, who in turn used his influence to place Hogg in strategic but invisible positions of power.

Rapier was a kingmaker and a puppet master and in some cases an executioner. He enjoyed the mystique. He reveled in it, and treated it as an art. He turned half of the office into a dojo. He taught new employees Tai Chi and proven veterans Shaolin Kung Fu. They in turn called him Sensei and bowed when he entered the room. He made all his operatives, including Hogg, read Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” The sign above his door, carved in Asian dragon wood, read “Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

Rapier kept his own secrets close, and prized the fact that nobody knew them, or him. He was happy not to be a household name. He could shop at the grocery store without being noticed, dine unmolested in the finest restaurants. His homes were plain, his cars boring. He thought himself a simple man, though he had become the most feared operative in three states.

He smiled about that as he drove to pick up his new burner phone, if Salem Khalidi had managed to find the right address. Rapier wondered out loud if it was time again to move to a bigger office.

“I need a bigger safe,” he thought.

Make Room for Growth

Confidence doesn’t always arrive with a bold entrance. Sometimes, it builds quietly, step by step, as we show up for ourselves day after day. It grows when we choose to try, even when we’re unsure of the outcome. Every time you take action despite self-doubt, you reinforce the belief that you’re capable. Confidence isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about trusting that you can figure it out along the way.

The key to making things happen isn’t waiting for the perfect moment; it’s starting with what you have, where you are. Big goals can feel overwhelming when viewed all at once, but momentum builds through small, consistent action. Whether you’re working toward a personal milestone or a professional dream, progress comes from showing up — not perfectly, but persistently. Action creates clarity, and over time, those steps forward add up to something real.

You don’t need to be fearless to reach your goals, you just need to be willing. Willing to try, willing to learn, and willing to believe that you’re capable of more than you know. The road may not always be smooth, but growth rarely is. What matters most is that you keep going, keep learning, and keep believing in the version of yourself you’re becoming.