Sparring Partners

It’s a different format from what I recall. No, the settings are familiar, lawyers, crooks, the corrupt south, and death row. Just the structure, like three different tales, say, a hundred pages each, roughly?

Maybe that’s not it, exactly, a novella, an overly long short story, and the titular tale, which might be a short novel in itself.

I’m not sure.

One of my older rules about travel, especially air travel? Always carry a book to read. In the last decade, or thereabouts, I’ve gotten more accustomed to reading novels on a tablet, but this was a Costco book. I started reading in the San Antonio airport, boarded a flight to Dallas, read the whole way, paused to land in Dallas — Love Field — get an expensive breakfast sandwich, then line up for a flight to Austin. Got some Jo’s Coffee in the Austin airport, got back on the same plane, and continued reading while passing over West Texas, with the oils fields looking like cosmic pin cushions from 30,000 feet up. Southwest pulled a fast one, and routed the plane funny like that, but we arrived on time, and I was part way through that last section of the book.

We’ve got a copy of Ford County at home, and I’m pretty sure I read it. I finished the last section, Sparring Partners as the New Mexico coyotes were echoing in the dry arroyo behind the house in Santa Fe.

Airport reading at its finest, I must say.