People complained that Libertarian wasn't even big enough to support a good scandal. Daphne and Brick running off together was a pretty good one for a while, but it didn't have much staying power in light of the fact that it was all resolved in a matter of a fortnight, and Daphne's parents were too well-respected in town to make for a good whisper campaign. That, and all Libertarians knew it wasn't cool to lose the friendship of the only undertaker in town.
With no scandal, very little commerce, and a miniscule population, the long, hot summer could be pretty insufferable. People stayed at home unless they had a specific task to perform. Not many houses were centrally air conditioned, so the buzz of window air conditioners could be heard all over town. Summers were not only hot but oppressively humid, and there was no town swimming pool or even a decent town park to offer relief. There was a park of sorts, that is if you liked to picnic on a cement slab under no trees. When an old filling station a mile or two out of town finally burned to the ground a few years ago, someone put a little round table with an umbrella and two chairs on the remaining pad, and the joke around town was that it was the picnic ground the town had always wished for. Various people would tend this little piece of land, put artificial flowers on the table all summer, removed the faded flowers in the fall, and put down the umbrella on windy days. Nobody in particular. Just whoever happened to think of it.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Chapter 1
Raylene lived on 14th Street in Libertarian, Kansas, which she always found amusing since there were only three paved streets and a couple of gravel ones in the whole town. Coming from the freeway exit, once you got past Main Street there was nothing but a little alley and then Raylene's street. Raylene kind of liked it, though, because when she mailed things off to other places -- magazine subscriptions, Visa payments, the car payment to Chrysler Financial -- she imagined that those people who opened the envelopes thought she was a city girl when they saw her address, not just a hick from a speck of a town in Kansas. It didn't always occur to her that Libertarian wasn't exactly world-renowned, and when it did occur to her she quickly pushed it out of her mind.
When the kids ran out the door and into the street on this particular Friday afternoon, alerting Raylene with yelps of "Daddy's here! Daddy's here!", it jerked her out of one of her deeper reveries, this one examining the thorny question of why, with the whole town surrounded by lush soybean fields, it was impossible to buy raw soybeans in the shells at any of the markets in Coffeyville, and she had to go all the way to Whole Foods, an upscale "healthy" food market in Tulsa which both fascinated and frightened her. She was contemplating whether it would be feasible to just steal some from a farmer's field, but then she wouldn't know the exact time they should be picked in order for them to be the right degree of ripeness. Raylene's new passion was for steamed-in-the-shell soybeans, steamed, salted, and then pulled open with salty fingers and the beans eaten warm with no adornments. She had read about this in the winter issue of "Healthy Cook" magazine. It was a Japanese delicacy called edamame and it was low in fat and everything else bad for a person. If she could only find a convenient source....
Anyway, Debbie and Kevvie were already across the street by the time Raylene got to the screen door, and Carl was maneuvering into his gravel resting place, window open, giving the thumbs-up sign to the kids. A blast of the deep, resonant horn on his semi and the final squeal of brakes indicated that he was home at last. He signaled Kevvie to move so he could swing the door open, then descended and stretched before he took one child in each arm and squeezed them with genuine love and gratefulness in his eyes. This was the best part of life for all of them.
Raylene came out on the porch and stood demurely until Carl and the kids crossed the road, her smile paving the way for the embrace she knew was coming. Carl shook free of the clinging children and took her in his arms, one hand surreptitiously cupping her breast as he kissed her lightly on the lips.
"Hey, Babe", he growled in her ear. "Been gone too long, been missin' too much around here." He squeezed her breast again. He'd only been gone a little over a week this time, but as Carl had often told Raylene, "My private parts start to stiffen up by the time I'm passing the toll at Exit 241 'cause I know I'm only five miles away from seeing you."
Just catty corner across the street from Raylene's house, next to the gravel yard where Carl parked his rig, was a plain, one-story brick building with a flat tin roof. Divided down the middle, there was a door on each side. Above the left hand door was a sign reading "Margaret's Unique Ceramics", and on the right side, in similar lettering, one that said "Peg's Safe Tanning". Peggy Wimmer owned the building and was the proprietor of both establishments. It was her generosity that allowed Carl to park his truck on her vacant lot for several days every month. Peggy was a 50-something widow of the man who owned the gas station that once stood on the corner just south of Raylene's house. Bud Wimmer had died of cancer five years before, leaving Peggy with a tiny nest egg and a strong incination toward entreprenurial ventures. Both of Peggy's businesses were marginally bankrupt, but the determined Peg plugged away. Her regular clientele at the tanning salon numbered less than a dozen a week, as well as an occasional one-shot drop-in. That, plus the sale of suntan lotion to town folks, produced enough for Peggy to have made almost half the payments on the tanning bed she bought two years ago.
Peggy's ceramics studio fared far worse. She had sold her grandmother's beautiful old player piano in order to buy a used kiln which only occasionally did what a kiln was supposed to do. Peggy and Raylene were best friends, and Raylene occasionally helped Peggy out at the ceramics studio. The "unique" in "Margaret's Unique Ceramics" referred mainly to Peggy's perverse ideas of coloration. If Peggy molded a Mickey Mouse statuette (and a large percentage of her ceramics came from Disney molds) she would, as she said, "get creative and wild"" with it. Where Mickey's ears should be black, she would paint them with orange stripes. Where his face should be white, in Peggy's hands it would be green. Peggy was as proud as a mama hen when she produced one of these creations, despite the fact that nearly every single one of them remains on the dusty shelves of her shop, except for the large number that broke in the kiln.
Peggy also taught ceramics classes once a week to local ladies, but since by now everyone in town had had already taken the course two or three times, attendance had fallen off considerably in the past year. Suffice to say that there was nary a living room in Libertarian that didn't contain an odd-colored Donald Duck or Cinderella.
Raylene thought it was nice that after ten years of marriage and two kids, Carl still had a yen for her. She figured a lot of it had to do with his being on the road so much. But although he wasn't reticent about telling her nasty tales of truck stop hookers and $5 blow jobs that some of his coworkers thrived on, he never gave Raylene any reason to believe that he would ever indulge in such things himself.
And it wasn't because of religion, either. Some truckers belonged to Truckers for Christ, and wore crosses on their t-shirts and religion on their sleeves. They prided themselves on never veering off the straight and narrow, in the name of Jesus himself. Carl wasn't like that. He had no religion. He was simply a good guy. He didn't need Jesus to remind him that he had a pretty wife at home and a couple of nice kids that needed him. Although Raylene and Carl were undoubtedly whispered about for not attending church, Raylene was convinced that Carl's values were about as high as any healthy 34-year-old man's could be.
On the other hand, Brick Thompson, the only other long-haul trucker in Libertarian, had taken a whole other path when Daphne Farrell moved to town. Daphne was the 15-year-old-daughter of Reg and Ann Farrell, who bought, Powell's Funeral Home after Mason Powell retired and moved to an assisted living place in Brownsville, Texas. Nobody knows for sure how Brick and Daphne met two years ago. Brick was nearly 52 by then, married to Sally for 30 years, no kids, and he kept about the same schedule as Carl, being home about three days every two weeks. Folks speculated that Brick started entertaining Daphne in the cab of his rig, which he parked out at te Stop 'n Go next to the freeway entrance. Daphne and her other friends started hanging out at the Stop 'n Go a lot, just as soon as the first of them turned sixteen and they could get a ride out there. For restless town teen-agers, just seeing all the license plates from faraway places assured them that there really was a world outside of Libertarian. Thus, the Stop'n Go was the place of dreams, as well as a place to slurp sugary drinks and chew on hunks of jerky.
All the town speculation points to the idea that Brick invited the ultra-restless and horny Daphne into his truck one day when he was out there cleaning the cab in preparation for his next run. The rest is history.
According to Sally, Brick came into the kitchen one morning, sat her down, and told her that he no longer loved her. When she tearily pressed him for a reason why this came on so quickly, Brick matter-of-factly told her that she hadn't kept herself up, her breasts were starting to sag, her pussy lips were getting baggy and soft, and she never did anything creative any more, like shaving her crotch or or piercing a nipple. Since she had never done either of those things -- she'd never even considered such things -- she thought the "any more"was a bit ironic. She had gotten a toe ring once, but it rubbed a blister that had to be lanced by Dr. Smith at the clinic. So, ear piercing was about it for body-altering adventures. As soon as she recovered from a sudden bout of vertigo, she laughed and told him that she'd clean up her act and see what she could do to make herself more seductive. Surely this was just one of his phases, she thought. When they went to bed that night, Sally prayed to Jesus that Brick's "phase" would be past in the morning. By seven the next morning, Brick was gone. Not coincidentally, so was Daphne Farrell. Daphne's parents found a note saying that their daughter had taken off with "the love of her life", and wasn't coming back. It took two days of unpleasant interrogation for one of Daphne's friends to finally confess to Reg and Ann that it was slightly-over-middle-aged Brick Thompson that Daphne had run off with. The Farrells, being well-educated and backed by a bit of inherited family money, found a private detective who located Brick's truck in a rest area near McLean, Texas. Brick and Daphne were curled in each other's arms -- that is, until the Texas Ranger clamped the handcuffs on Brick and drove Daphne back to Kansas.
The trial moved right along, and Brick would be spending a good deal of time in jail on an array of charges. Daphne came home for a couple of months then disappeared again, this time with a handsome trucker who was only 25 years old. The Farrells decided they didn't want to go through all that again, so this time they just let her go.
Raylene knew nothing like that would ever happen to her. Carl Haag's father had brought him up to have an almost unnatural respect for women. Carl's father had been the son of a German immigrant who lived with the family all through Carl's childhood. Between his father and grandfather, their down-to-earth German outlook on life more than made up for the fact that Carl's mother kept a bottle or two of wine behind the flour canister on the top shelf of the cupboard over the stove, and partook of it quite liberally when she thought no one was looking,, which was almost every night. Everyone knew, of course, and even if they had never found the bottles years before, it was quite obvious when Carl's mother would pick a fight, then slink off to the bedroom near the end of dinner every night, leaving the three men to discuss manly topics while completely sweeping Carl's mother's problem under the rug.
Carl's father believed in respecting women at any cost to himself or his family, which is why he maintained a semblance of normalcy during his wife's nightly huffs. Even at a young age, Carl wondered if it was respect or just plain wimpiness that motivated his father. Carl's grandfather, being overwhelmingly old school, with German sternness and a lack of human emotion, apparently felt it was his duty to ignore his daughter-in-law in the interest of avoiding family scandal. And, when he grew up, Carl's respect for women undoubtedly had to do with his gratefulness at finding out that they were almost all better than his mother.
In finding Raylene, he felt he'd done just about as well as a man could do. She was the young niece of an elderly fellow who played poker with his grandfather every Tuesday night, and Carl had heard about her endlessly for months. When Carl was home on a Tuesday (since he had started his career in the long haul trucking business at the early age of 21) he would sometimes sit in on the poker action. Poker Night coincided with Carl's dad's Elks Club meeting, so Carl, the other man at home, would boil up fat bratwursts in beer and serve them to the old German codgers while they played. Carl's mother had already sulked off to her room and passed out on the bed with TV blaring. The house was redolent with the aroma of simmering beer. The cold beer was flowing around the poker table, although because all the players were gentleman of fine Bavarian propriety and upstanding moral character, overindulgence was never an issue. Carl served the brats on soft buns he'd warmed in the oven, with dark brown mustard slathered on each, and all five men agreed that it was the best meal they ate all week, which is why the venue of the poker game rarely moved from the Haag house. That is, unless word got out that Carl was on the road on a Tuesday, in which case the game moved to Bill Schmidt's house, where Tilda would serve them frozen pizza that was never fully cooked.
Bill Schmidt's favorite topic around Carl was his sister's daughter, Raylene Smith. Although John never entirely approved of his younger sister's marriage to Buck Smith, a papergoods salesman from Wichita, he very much approved of their issue, the then 19-year-old Raylene. Raylene was just out of high school and taking correspondence courses from Kansas State because her parents had moved from Wichita to the little town of Rickner, about 20 miles from Libertarian. Carl and Raylene might have gone to high school together except that the county line ran between the two towns, so even in this sparsely populate corner of Kansas they had never, to their knowledge, laid eyes on one another. But Carl had heard endlessly about her charms, and Bill Schmidt was determined that one day they would meet, marry, and afford him with a passel of great nieces and great nephews. This didn't sound like the worst scenario in the world to Carl, who was about ready to consider settling down. There wasn't anybody from his old high school crowd who either appealed to him or wasn't already married, and the girls he'd met on the road weren't anything he'd consider bringing home to Libertarian. Between high school and truck driving school , Carl had spent a year working at the refinery down in Bartlesville, and had enjoyed an 8-week fling with the first girl who ever really lit his fire much, Donna Bascomb, a waitress in a diner near where he worked, but the romance fizzled early, which was probably good since Donna was quite a bit older, had two kids by a young marriage, and her life was complicated with baggage galore. Carl was too young for all that baggage, even if he surely did enjoy Donna's willingness to leave the kids with a sitter and jump into his bed at the drop of a hat.
But Carl was just a plain old nice guy looking for a plain -- or maybe not that plain -- nice girl. It didn't really surprise anyone much when one Tuesday night Bill Schmidt arrived on the Haag doorstep with a young, flaxen-haired woman on his arm, and introduced her to Carl's grandfather. "I'd like you to meet my niece Raylene where's Carl" is how the introduction sounded. At the moment, Carl was in the kitchen opening a package of Wonder buns, but since the house was quite small, he'd heard every word of the introduction. He quickly put down the buns and wiped his hands, unnecessarily, on his jeans. The water/beer bratwurst broth was on the stove but not boiling yet. The brats, which Carl bought in quantity on his trips to Kansas City or Chicago and froze in batches, were thawing on the counter. He had just popped open a Heinekens for himself and one for his grandpa and Walter Mifflin, who had already arrived and was sitting at the poker table arranging cards and chips.
When his grandfather and Bill Schmidt ushered Raylene into the kitchen, Carl's life changed in that intstant.
Raylene lived on 14th Street in Libertarian, Kansas, which she always found amusing since there were only three paved streets and a couple of gravel ones in the whole town. Coming from the freeway exit, once you got past Main Street there was nothing but a little alley and then Raylene's street. Raylene kind of liked it, though, because when she mailed things off to other places -- magazine subscriptions, Visa payments, the car payment to Chrysler Financial -- she imagined that those people who opened the envelopes thought she was a city girl when they saw her address, not just a hick from a speck of a town in Kansas. It didn't always occur to her that Libertarian wasn't exactly world-renowned, and when it did occur to her she quickly pushed it out of her mind.
When the kids ran out the door and into the street on this particular Friday afternoon, alerting Raylene with yelps of "Daddy's here! Daddy's here!", it jerked her out of one of her deeper reveries, this one examining the thorny question of why, with the whole town surrounded by lush soybean fields, it was impossible to buy raw soybeans in the shells at any of the markets in Coffeyville, and she had to go all the way to Whole Foods, an upscale "healthy" food market in Tulsa which both fascinated and frightened her. She was contemplating whether it would be feasible to just steal some from a farmer's field, but then she wouldn't know the exact time they should be picked in order for them to be the right degree of ripeness. Raylene's new passion was for steamed-in-the-shell soybeans, steamed, salted, and then pulled open with salty fingers and the beans eaten warm with no adornments. She had read about this in the winter issue of "Healthy Cook" magazine. It was a Japanese delicacy called edamame and it was low in fat and everything else bad for a person. If she could only find a convenient source....
Anyway, Debbie and Kevvie were already across the street by the time Raylene got to the screen door, and Carl was maneuvering into his gravel resting place, window open, giving the thumbs-up sign to the kids. A blast of the deep, resonant horn on his semi and the final squeal of brakes indicated that he was home at last. He signaled Kevvie to move so he could swing the door open, then descended and stretched before he took one child in each arm and squeezed them with genuine love and gratefulness in his eyes. This was the best part of life for all of them.
Raylene came out on the porch and stood demurely until Carl and the kids crossed the road, her smile paving the way for the embrace she knew was coming. Carl shook free of the clinging children and took her in his arms, one hand surreptitiously cupping her breast as he kissed her lightly on the lips.
"Hey, Babe", he growled in her ear. "Been gone too long, been missin' too much around here." He squeezed her breast again. He'd only been gone a little over a week this time, but as Carl had often told Raylene, "My private parts start to stiffen up by the time I'm passing the toll at Exit 241 'cause I know I'm only five miles away from seeing you."
Just catty corner across the street from Raylene's house, next to the gravel yard where Carl parked his rig, was a plain, one-story brick building with a flat tin roof. Divided down the middle, there was a door on each side. Above the left hand door was a sign reading "Margaret's Unique Ceramics", and on the right side, in similar lettering, one that said "Peg's Safe Tanning". Peggy Wimmer owned the building and was the proprietor of both establishments. It was her generosity that allowed Carl to park his truck on her vacant lot for several days every month. Peggy was a 50-something widow of the man who owned the gas station that once stood on the corner just south of Raylene's house. Bud Wimmer had died of cancer five years before, leaving Peggy with a tiny nest egg and a strong incination toward entreprenurial ventures. Both of Peggy's businesses were marginally bankrupt, but the determined Peg plugged away. Her regular clientele at the tanning salon numbered less than a dozen a week, as well as an occasional one-shot drop-in. That, plus the sale of suntan lotion to town folks, produced enough for Peggy to have made almost half the payments on the tanning bed she bought two years ago.
Peggy's ceramics studio fared far worse. She had sold her grandmother's beautiful old player piano in order to buy a used kiln which only occasionally did what a kiln was supposed to do. Peggy and Raylene were best friends, and Raylene occasionally helped Peggy out at the ceramics studio. The "unique" in "Margaret's Unique Ceramics" referred mainly to Peggy's perverse ideas of coloration. If Peggy molded a Mickey Mouse statuette (and a large percentage of her ceramics came from Disney molds) she would, as she said, "get creative and wild"" with it. Where Mickey's ears should be black, she would paint them with orange stripes. Where his face should be white, in Peggy's hands it would be green. Peggy was as proud as a mama hen when she produced one of these creations, despite the fact that nearly every single one of them remains on the dusty shelves of her shop, except for the large number that broke in the kiln.
Peggy also taught ceramics classes once a week to local ladies, but since by now everyone in town had had already taken the course two or three times, attendance had fallen off considerably in the past year. Suffice to say that there was nary a living room in Libertarian that didn't contain an odd-colored Donald Duck or Cinderella.
Raylene thought it was nice that after ten years of marriage and two kids, Carl still had a yen for her. She figured a lot of it had to do with his being on the road so much. But although he wasn't reticent about telling her nasty tales of truck stop hookers and $5 blow jobs that some of his coworkers thrived on, he never gave Raylene any reason to believe that he would ever indulge in such things himself.
And it wasn't because of religion, either. Some truckers belonged to Truckers for Christ, and wore crosses on their t-shirts and religion on their sleeves. They prided themselves on never veering off the straight and narrow, in the name of Jesus himself. Carl wasn't like that. He had no religion. He was simply a good guy. He didn't need Jesus to remind him that he had a pretty wife at home and a couple of nice kids that needed him. Although Raylene and Carl were undoubtedly whispered about for not attending church, Raylene was convinced that Carl's values were about as high as any healthy 34-year-old man's could be.
On the other hand, Brick Thompson, the only other long-haul trucker in Libertarian, had taken a whole other path when Daphne Farrell moved to town. Daphne was the 15-year-old-daughter of Reg and Ann Farrell, who bought, Powell's Funeral Home after Mason Powell retired and moved to an assisted living place in Brownsville, Texas. Nobody knows for sure how Brick and Daphne met two years ago. Brick was nearly 52 by then, married to Sally for 30 years, no kids, and he kept about the same schedule as Carl, being home about three days every two weeks. Folks speculated that Brick started entertaining Daphne in the cab of his rig, which he parked out at te Stop 'n Go next to the freeway entrance. Daphne and her other friends started hanging out at the Stop 'n Go a lot, just as soon as the first of them turned sixteen and they could get a ride out there. For restless town teen-agers, just seeing all the license plates from faraway places assured them that there really was a world outside of Libertarian. Thus, the Stop'n Go was the place of dreams, as well as a place to slurp sugary drinks and chew on hunks of jerky.
All the town speculation points to the idea that Brick invited the ultra-restless and horny Daphne into his truck one day when he was out there cleaning the cab in preparation for his next run. The rest is history.
According to Sally, Brick came into the kitchen one morning, sat her down, and told her that he no longer loved her. When she tearily pressed him for a reason why this came on so quickly, Brick matter-of-factly told her that she hadn't kept herself up, her breasts were starting to sag, her pussy lips were getting baggy and soft, and she never did anything creative any more, like shaving her crotch or or piercing a nipple. Since she had never done either of those things -- she'd never even considered such things -- she thought the "any more"was a bit ironic. She had gotten a toe ring once, but it rubbed a blister that had to be lanced by Dr. Smith at the clinic. So, ear piercing was about it for body-altering adventures. As soon as she recovered from a sudden bout of vertigo, she laughed and told him that she'd clean up her act and see what she could do to make herself more seductive. Surely this was just one of his phases, she thought. When they went to bed that night, Sally prayed to Jesus that Brick's "phase" would be past in the morning. By seven the next morning, Brick was gone. Not coincidentally, so was Daphne Farrell. Daphne's parents found a note saying that their daughter had taken off with "the love of her life", and wasn't coming back. It took two days of unpleasant interrogation for one of Daphne's friends to finally confess to Reg and Ann that it was slightly-over-middle-aged Brick Thompson that Daphne had run off with. The Farrells, being well-educated and backed by a bit of inherited family money, found a private detective who located Brick's truck in a rest area near McLean, Texas. Brick and Daphne were curled in each other's arms -- that is, until the Texas Ranger clamped the handcuffs on Brick and drove Daphne back to Kansas.
The trial moved right along, and Brick would be spending a good deal of time in jail on an array of charges. Daphne came home for a couple of months then disappeared again, this time with a handsome trucker who was only 25 years old. The Farrells decided they didn't want to go through all that again, so this time they just let her go.
Raylene knew nothing like that would ever happen to her. Carl Haag's father had brought him up to have an almost unnatural respect for women. Carl's father had been the son of a German immigrant who lived with the family all through Carl's childhood. Between his father and grandfather, their down-to-earth German outlook on life more than made up for the fact that Carl's mother kept a bottle or two of wine behind the flour canister on the top shelf of the cupboard over the stove, and partook of it quite liberally when she thought no one was looking,, which was almost every night. Everyone knew, of course, and even if they had never found the bottles years before, it was quite obvious when Carl's mother would pick a fight, then slink off to the bedroom near the end of dinner every night, leaving the three men to discuss manly topics while completely sweeping Carl's mother's problem under the rug.
Carl's father believed in respecting women at any cost to himself or his family, which is why he maintained a semblance of normalcy during his wife's nightly huffs. Even at a young age, Carl wondered if it was respect or just plain wimpiness that motivated his father. Carl's grandfather, being overwhelmingly old school, with German sternness and a lack of human emotion, apparently felt it was his duty to ignore his daughter-in-law in the interest of avoiding family scandal. And, when he grew up, Carl's respect for women undoubtedly had to do with his gratefulness at finding out that they were almost all better than his mother.
In finding Raylene, he felt he'd done just about as well as a man could do. She was the young niece of an elderly fellow who played poker with his grandfather every Tuesday night, and Carl had heard about her endlessly for months. When Carl was home on a Tuesday (since he had started his career in the long haul trucking business at the early age of 21) he would sometimes sit in on the poker action. Poker Night coincided with Carl's dad's Elks Club meeting, so Carl, the other man at home, would boil up fat bratwursts in beer and serve them to the old German codgers while they played. Carl's mother had already sulked off to her room and passed out on the bed with TV blaring. The house was redolent with the aroma of simmering beer. The cold beer was flowing around the poker table, although because all the players were gentleman of fine Bavarian propriety and upstanding moral character, overindulgence was never an issue. Carl served the brats on soft buns he'd warmed in the oven, with dark brown mustard slathered on each, and all five men agreed that it was the best meal they ate all week, which is why the venue of the poker game rarely moved from the Haag house. That is, unless word got out that Carl was on the road on a Tuesday, in which case the game moved to Bill Schmidt's house, where Tilda would serve them frozen pizza that was never fully cooked.
Bill Schmidt's favorite topic around Carl was his sister's daughter, Raylene Smith. Although John never entirely approved of his younger sister's marriage to Buck Smith, a papergoods salesman from Wichita, he very much approved of their issue, the then 19-year-old Raylene. Raylene was just out of high school and taking correspondence courses from Kansas State because her parents had moved from Wichita to the little town of Rickner, about 20 miles from Libertarian. Carl and Raylene might have gone to high school together except that the county line ran between the two towns, so even in this sparsely populate corner of Kansas they had never, to their knowledge, laid eyes on one another. But Carl had heard endlessly about her charms, and Bill Schmidt was determined that one day they would meet, marry, and afford him with a passel of great nieces and great nephews. This didn't sound like the worst scenario in the world to Carl, who was about ready to consider settling down. There wasn't anybody from his old high school crowd who either appealed to him or wasn't already married, and the girls he'd met on the road weren't anything he'd consider bringing home to Libertarian. Between high school and truck driving school , Carl had spent a year working at the refinery down in Bartlesville, and had enjoyed an 8-week fling with the first girl who ever really lit his fire much, Donna Bascomb, a waitress in a diner near where he worked, but the romance fizzled early, which was probably good since Donna was quite a bit older, had two kids by a young marriage, and her life was complicated with baggage galore. Carl was too young for all that baggage, even if he surely did enjoy Donna's willingness to leave the kids with a sitter and jump into his bed at the drop of a hat.
But Carl was just a plain old nice guy looking for a plain -- or maybe not that plain -- nice girl. It didn't really surprise anyone much when one Tuesday night Bill Schmidt arrived on the Haag doorstep with a young, flaxen-haired woman on his arm, and introduced her to Carl's grandfather. "I'd like you to meet my niece Raylene where's Carl" is how the introduction sounded. At the moment, Carl was in the kitchen opening a package of Wonder buns, but since the house was quite small, he'd heard every word of the introduction. He quickly put down the buns and wiped his hands, unnecessarily, on his jeans. The water/beer bratwurst broth was on the stove but not boiling yet. The brats, which Carl bought in quantity on his trips to Kansas City or Chicago and froze in batches, were thawing on the counter. He had just popped open a Heinekens for himself and one for his grandpa and Walter Mifflin, who had already arrived and was sitting at the poker table arranging cards and chips.
When his grandfather and Bill Schmidt ushered Raylene into the kitchen, Carl's life changed in that intstant.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
