Despite his reputation as a foul-mouthed, beer-guzzling heathen with a sixth-grade education and an insatiable addiction to hot chile peppers, Clarence W. Boggs, AKA Uncle Bud, is one of Noah Odell’s favorite people. When the fourteen-year-old Noah and his widowed mother leave rainy southern Oregon to live with Bud on an isolated ranch in the New Mexico desert, however, neither could never have even imagined the alien world they were about to enter. Bud’s newly acquired “kettle wrench”--surrounded by a parched landscape that routinely boasts temperatures of 100 degrees in the shade--is the ultimate in rustic. The only livestock in sight are a dozen scrawny cattle seemingly on the verge of starvation. Rattlesnakes compete for slither space outside the dilapidated, 150-year-old ranch house, while a tyrannical rooster with the personality of Attila the Hun dominates the weed-filled yard. When Noah’s uncouth but benevolent uncle presents him with a hot-tempered mule named Brimstone, the misadventures begin. Accompanied by his trusty steed, Noah encounters an extraordinary cast of desert characters--from mysterious flying objects to eccentric Apache professors, to U.S. Army lawyers and military police trying to confiscate the Boggs Ranch in order to expand a top-secret rocket testing facility at nearby White Sands Proving Ground. Buddy Mays’ first novel, set in the American Southwest during the late 1950s and based on events real and imagined, is a coming-of-age story that pits the tenacity and determination of a modern-day Tom Sawyer against the power and greed of the U.S. Government. Funny and frightening, spiked with tales of lost outlaw gold, Apache folk lore, and ghostly Spanish maidens, it is an irresistible portrait of southwestern Americana in a simpler time and place.