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From West by Northwest.org
eBooks
Banjo Lane: Chapter Four
By Norm Maxwell
Apr 4, 2006
Banjo Lane: Chapter One
Banjo Lane: ChaptersTwo and Three
Chapter Four
It was a bright sunny morning in the middle of February. If you closed your eyes you could just feel warmth from the sun on your face and sense growing things underfoot getting ready to burst from the ground. Mom’s bulbs planted years ago, were sticking bold green blades out of the mud and daffodil stems were starting to streak with yellow.
Steam rose from the cracked pavement of Banjo Lane and the ruptured bags of garbage in front of the Loveless house. Starlings sounded mating calls from the trees.
No morning people resided on the Loveless place. The night before Larry and Hayes drank tokay and Olde English until it counteracted the meth they smoked in the crack pipe. They swapped lies and ground their teeth and scratched invisible bugs into the wee hours and finally crashed without turning off the death metal CD that played over and over and over again in the house.
Next door, Bruce and Keith had rolled out their Harley-Davidsons from the back of their big garage and prepared to fire them up. Bruce checked the tire pressure with a precise gauge while Keith plugged in the air compresser they bought on sale at Jerry’s.
The Road Kings lacked kick starters and electric motors groaned to wake the stone cold 88 cubic inch V-twins.
“Unh, unh, unh-BLAP BLAP!” Went Keith’s Road King. Bruce had religiously trickle charged the two bike batteries throughout the winter but it was still a strain.
“You almost had it, Keith!” encouraged Bruce as he opened the petcock on his fuel tank.
Both bikes shuddered and spluttered and fired briefly. They stayed lit longer each time until they attained continuous ignition. The little valley rocked to a duet of heavy metal a cappella through the throats of Vance and Hines tuned exhausts.
Bruce and Keith lightly revved the big engines. They had bought the pair of Road Kings at the same dealership Larry had shopped three decades earlier. They had spent nearly half again the purchase price of the bikes having their performance identically enhanced. The dealership ripped them off shamelessly. It didn’t matter. They didn’t care. They never pushed the big cruisers even close to their max capability--but the option was always there. The bikes were loud and sounded good when they moved through the gears.
Larry had made it to the moldy mattress in his bus in the barn. He was dreaming that he was riding a big Hog through an empty desert on an open road. The dream was totally convincing and he was there grooving on the thumping beat of his machine with a foxy babe on the pillion pad of his righteous chop.
He grew confused. The clean wind in his face was turning into a grimy mattress that smelled like stale tokay and meth mouth. Was this a dream? Couldn’t be. He clearly heard the thunder of his bike as he hurtled through the desert.
Larry struggled but he could not regain the reality of the dream. He was lying face down on a smelly mattress. He wasn’t really awake but he knew he wasn’t asleep. He definitely heard the V-twin thunder of a hog. No. TWO hogs. That was it. He was awake now, and sad that he didn’t get to finish the dream. The throttle he had been twisting was really the neck of a tokay bottle.
The bikeless biker turned on his side and opened his eyes. Light filtered in through the cracks in the barn walls and then through the bus windows. He stood up at a crouch and shuffled through a sea of empty green glass that rattled and clanked.
One bike steadied down to an idle of blub-blub...blub-blub...blub-blub but the other still rumbled up and down the scale.
Larry stumbled down the steps of the bus and stretched. He sat in the easy chair on the carpet he had put on the barn floor by the bus door to pull on his boots. He lit a half smoked filter cigarette from the night before and headed for the barn door to see who had ridden up. He stopped to recycle some tokay at his favorite spot just outside the door and then walked through the mud to the house.
The bikes revving hadn’t disturbed Hayes in the least and he was still in the deep sleep of the unemployed. In fact the bike noise melded with the death metal track that played all night long.
Larry crunched over the broken glass by the back door as he walked through the little house to see who had ridden up on such righteous sounding bikes. There was nobody in the little parking area. He still heard bikes.
A big V-twin shifted into gear and then another. Almost unwillingly, he turned and looked in time to see the backs of the Seautons’ leathers and helmets as they pulled onto Banjo Lane and blasted away from him towards the Cottage Grove-Lorane Highway.
His mouth dropped and he looked like Mister Toad of the Wind in the Willows upon witnessing his first motorcar.
“Vroom, Vroom.”
Realization struck hard. He was a pathetic poser. He had the boots and the leather jacket and the beard and the tattoos--and even an HD sticker in the rear window of his car. He had an old rigid Harley frame in the back of his bus with the numbers filed off...but the gay neighbors were out riding on the first half ass nice day in February.
“Vroom Vroom.”
He could hear the Seautons slow and stop at the beginning of Banjo Lane and then roll on massive power in each gear as they accelerated away from the Grove. Their exhausts bellowed west into the distance. They were going to do the Timber Ridge and Wolf Creek loop and maybe stop for a microbrew in Lorane.
It wasn’t right. He needed to get “up” again. All he had was a very old HD frame. He had heard that if you stuck with it, eventually the DMV would issue you a stick on Vehicle Identification Number for an old motorcycle frame.
If he could do that, perhaps he could steal an operational HD and transfer the running gear to his legal frame. He was pretty sure he had a Knucklehead skeleton. It was not likely that a modern Evo unit would fit in the old frame.
He pondered stealing one of the bikes from next door. Any way you cut it, that was entirely too close to home. He wandered over to his car and retrieved a fresh bottle of warm tokay from the back seat and cracked it open.
Steam rose in wraiths and you could hear the grass growing. It would soon be apparent why the Willamette Valley was called the Emerald Empire.
Larry took a big chug of breakfast just as Dee Dee McCally came running in perfect form to the end of Banjo Lane. Her platinum pony tail bobbed as she nodded in agreement with Rush Limbaugh in her headphones.
A wary look crossed her eyes as she noticed Larry standing in the weak sun by the junky white car with a cheap wine bottle in his hand. It was not yet noon and “Charley Manson” was pounding it down.
She always ran all the way to where the pavement ended and the BLM dirt road began before turning around. Normally, she started a little earlier in the morning and the low life at the end of the road was passed out or tweaking indoors as she jogged by.
Larry waved and Dee Dee rendered her artificial smile and half wave and kept the pace to the very end of the pavement where she U-turned around the steel post that held the little metal sign with the BLM road number on it. Somebody had shot the triangular BLM insignia with a .22 several times.
Dee Dee looked good in her new white spandex with little blue shorts and expensive running shoes. Nothing sagged or flapped. A jog bra stabilized her amplified balcony. Today’s cap with oversized bill read VENICE BEACH. Larry admired her form as her new white shoes patted by. He farted and belched at the same time without thinking about it.
“Gawd!” thought Dee Dee. “It is truly a pity these inbred hicks don’t move to California.” She glanced at the garbage in the front yard as she passed the Loveless mailbox. Dee Dee continued to run with Rush while Larry stood in the luke warm sunshine and watched her butt.
Finally he sighed and started back to the barn. He could hear Ronnie stirring in the fifth wheel trailer. The toilet flushed. He had hooked up the trailer’s water system to a hose from a spigot near the house. The wastewater discharge hose went into a ditch covered with blackberries. It would probably smell pretty bad this summer but that was too far in the future to worry about.
The plantation out back must be a success. If everything went right, Larry would pay cash for a big Road King this fall and Dee Dee would follow him anywhere. He guzzled tokay to confirm the fantasy as he looked down the empty lane where she had disappeared around the corner.
Ronnie was awake and out of alcohol in any form. Nothing else mattered. She must fix this problem immediately. She had passed out in her clothes the night before so getting dressed wasn’t an issue.
She put on her shoes and opened the door of the fifth wheel and was surprised by the thin bright sunshine. It made her feel happy and sad at the same time although she could not say why.
Larry was standing by the barn facing the sun with his eyes closed with a bottle in one hand. She thought about asking for a slug but didn’t want to have to talk to anybody and didn’t like warm tokay that much.
Veronica Felders squished through the mud to the back porch of the house to retrieve her one speed Schwinn. The front tire was low again so she added air with the K-Mart pump that stood by it. She packed the old bike down the steps and pushed it around the house, through the mud and gravel parking area, and onto the pavement of Banjo Lane. Larry watched her stand on the left side pedal and push herself rolling before swinging her right leg over the seat of the too big Schwinn “Tiger,” and pedal off after Dee Dee.
The sun intensified and Larry ambled through the mud to the front porch where he sat rocking on an old metal spring chair from the 1950s to enjoy the first day of spring.
Car noise approached and he looked to his left to see a little silver pickup round the corner and slow to a stop at the end of the pavement. The driver looked at a map and then at the BLM road sign. He paused to engage the 4 wheel drive and then proceeded up the rutted gravel road in low gear.
Larry squinted at the rear license plate of the little rig. It wasn’t an Oregon plate he was pretty sure, although there were half a dozen variations of Oregon license plates you could pay extra for now.
No, it must be a federal license plate. This was the first time he had seen a BLM employee travel the disused road. He would ask Hayes about it when he got up. Hopefully the Bureau wasn’t going to do a timber sale or something next door while they were trying to grow dope undisturbed. That would suck.
He could hear the little truck bouncing up the washboard road a ways and then stop. After a few moments the sound of an axe rang through the damp stand of timber. A tree must have lost its footing in the recent heavy rain and fallen across the road.
Five minutes later, the truck started out again and kept going until Larry could no longer hear it. He needed to walk up there soon and find out what was going on. The BLM picked a hell of a time to start some major project next to the remains of the old Donation Land Claim.
He had no tailor mades on him so he parked his bottle on the porch and dug in his jacket pocket for a foil packet of Top while idly rocking in the rusty spring chair, thinking of nothing.
Scary Larry smoked and drank and listened to the log trucks jake brake out on the old highway before they reached the big bend. He would be 55 years old in a week or so. Where had all the time gone? Maybe he should have done something differently. Oh well. It was too late to make any radical changes in his life now.
The sun got stronger and slanted under the roof of the porch. It was vaguely exciting in that another cold, wet Western Oregon winter was fading away and another sunny season of extended light was in the wings. He wasn’t going to piss this one away. This year things were going to be different.
He definitely needed to get busy and cook up some meth. To do that, he and Hayes needed to cover the ground and buy a bunch of cold caps. He had heard a disturbing rumor that the State of Oregon was soon going to force all purchasers of cold medication with pseude ephedrine to show ID and be registered. If this turned out to be true, it was going to be very difficult to acquire enough cold caps to take care of business without the police wanting to be part of your life.
Larry bounced slowly up and down in the chair and then used the momentum to stand up and walk down the steps and the sidewalk onto Banjo Lane. The pavement was dry now from the sun and he examined the cracks and flattened beer caps that had become part of the surface.
Ronnie came flying around the slight downhill turn on her Schwinn Tiger with a clutch of forty ounce beers and some raman noodles in a paper bag in the wire bread basket over the front wheel. Larry was in a position close enough where she felt she had to stop and talk a minute even though she didn’t want to.
“Hi, Larry,” she said as she leaned her bike over so her left foot was on the ground, being careful not to drop her beer on the asphalt.
“Hi, Ronnie, How you doing this morning?”
Veronica stared at the ground. She didn’t like to look anybody in the eye. She was short, and fat and flabby from her liquid diet. Her hair was dishwater blond and stringy and she wore Farmer John overalls with the cuffs rolled up and a grey sweatshirt with the hood down her back. Her face was pale with huge dark circles under the eyes. She never wanted to talk about herself. She knew she needed to make some sort of small talk with Larry. She really was thankful that he had helped her find this fine trailer to live in when she was evicted from the rathole apartment she had occupied for not paying the rent.
She finished dismounting and held her bicycle vertical, looking for a way to politely terminate this conversation.
“Motorcycle for sale.” she finally extemporized.
“Really? Where?” Larry’s interest was piqued.
She turned and pointed the way she had come. “Here. On the road.”
“Yeah? What sort?”
“Don’t know. Harley?” Veronica shrugged. “Mailbox says Brand.”
“Is that right?” Larry knew the house and mailbox. It was a cozy little home with a big shop and everything looked freshly painted and in good repair. He admired the old four dour Dodge Dart in the driveway that was the same kind his parents had when he was drafted.
“I’ll go check it out.” he decided.
Veronica nodded and decided that protocol had been met and she could go now and start in on her liquid crack. She pushed her bicycle towards the back porch.
Larry took off walking up Banjo Lane. He passed the Seauton’s house and saw two cats sitting in the livingroom window. They were really big for house cats and they watched him pass in front of their yard with unblinking eyes.
The mud fell off of Larry’s boots as he moved along. His breath came short on the incline as he never exercized and smoked lots of drugs and tobacco. He was wheezing as the pavement leveled out and wound briefly through some big second growth timber. His lungs did better on the downgrade and his heavy boots lengthened their stride.
A pair of boys were shooting arrows at straw bales away from the road and stopped to stare at the bikeless biker as he walked past their double wide mo-beel home. Larry waved and they waved back before resuming their archery with little fiberglass bows. A bubba truck stood in the driveway with no hood or motor. A new Korean car was parked in front of it. A half dozen sizeable fir trees were limbed up around the trailer.
The grade rose again and Larry passed an old tarpaper "fer-now" house back in the trees with a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign by the road. A Lincoln Town Car with a magnetic realtor logo on the door bottled up the driveway and some older woman in an expensive suit was arguing with an retired logger type in suspenders on the porch. The man’s dog watched him for permission to bite the woman, wagging its tail.
Larry was getting into the swing of walking when he finally wound up in front of the Brand driveway. Sure enough, there sat a motorcycle in the yard with a cardboard FOR SALE sign taped to the handlebars.
It wasn’t a Harley Davidson. To tell the truth, Larry had been expecting some sort of Jap bike--a Honda most likely. It was British--a Triumph or BSA from the look of it. Larry walked up the steep part of the driveway and out onto the greening lawn to look at it. He could hear somebody puttering around in the shop 20 yards behind the house.
He walked behind the bike and saw that it had a blue plate with white letters that said "Oregon and Motorcycle." They were all yellow with blue letters now and had been for decades. They were all the way up to M-5 now for the fifth series of the same old numbers. Oregon. Motorcycle. The tag was 20 years expired and the bike’s center stand perched on a scrap of plywood.
“Hullo, Young Man.” An old timer in blue Dickies work clothes had walked up behind him from the shop. “That didn’t take long. I swear I didn’t roll that thing out here more’n half an hour ago. Name’s George.”
“Uh, Hi. I’m Larry.” They shook hands.
“Seen ya drivin’ by lately. You must live at the old Loveless place at the end of the road.”
“Um, yes.”
“I’ve been here a long time. Knew Cletus since he first moved here. Knew his daddy too. Shame him dyin’ so young.”
“I never met him.” Larry flashed on the photo of Gramps with the airplane.
“How’s Hayes doin’ these days?” I’ve known him since when he was a boy.”
“Oh, he’s doing OK. He’s looking for work”
The old man’s blue eyes laughed but his mouth said nothing.
“What size bike is this?” Larry asked to change the subject.
“This here’s a 1969 BSA Royal Star--500 cc.” George informed him. “Bought it new in 70 on end of year clearance sale in Talent, Oregon.”
“Does it run?”
“It do now. It hadn’t run for a long time but I broke down and bought a new genuine Taiwanese battery and put some fresh gas in it and it started right up.”
George was a small man, about Hayes’ size. He pulled a key on a piece of leather shoe lace from his pocket and inserted it in the ignition on the left side near the forks.
“Hadda replace the corks on the petcocks-- too. That was a dumb design. Surprised you could still get ‘em.” He opened a petcock by sliding it forward and pressed down a button on the carburator for a minute, shaking loose gasoline off his finger when the float chamber filled.
“You kick it over. My leg’s been broke. It didn’t used to bother me much but it does now.”
Larry put a leg over the saddle and checked the location of the kick starter. He pushed the bike forward off its stand, unfolded the heel bit and put the arch of his worn boot on it.
A vigorous downward stab with his leg and the little bike burst into vibrant life. Its hollow shell mufflers produced an incredible amount of tenor sound--nearly on par with the bass of the Seautons’ Harleys. He held it at quarter throttle for a while and reveled in the glorious noise. The odometer read almost 30,000 miles but the overall condition of the little BSA was excellent. George clearly knew something about mechanics. Larry removed his hand from the throttle and the motor idled steadily with a loud and even pum pum pum pum. He closed the petcock and switched off the key, returning the machine to its stand on the plywood.
“How much do you want for this bike?” Larry asked in the sudden silence.
“I’ll take a thousand dollars for her. I got the title somewhere. I haven’t looked for it yet.”
Larry thought about that. He had a little more than eight hundred dollars left of Evelyn’s rent money and his disability check should be here soon. He wanted this motorcycle. It wasn’t a Harley but it wasn’t a Japbike either. He could style on it without people laughing at him. It would be a great ride for the summer until he could sell bud and buy a Road King.
“I got eight hundred dollars--will you take that?”
“Young Man, this bike is worth at least a thousand dollars. When’s the last time you’ve seen a BSA up and running? If I have to resort to selling it through an ad in the Red-Guard, I’ll ask two thousand just to minimize the damned tire kickers. I sold a pickup once like that and you wouldn’t believe all the chee chockers who come by to waste my time. I don’t think they wanted to buy a truck. It was more like free entertainment. Maybe they just wanted to see what I had worth stealing.”
Larry knew a thousand dollars was a bargain price for the Royal Star. It had no rust and everything was present. And the awesome sound of the little bike! He didn’t want to piss off George and lose the chance of owning a classic Brit bike .
“I’ll get the money somehow.” he told George.
“I’ll look for the title.” George replied. The old woman and I have to move to town soon. We sold the house but we gave ourselves a couple months to make the move. I haven’t even thought about the title for many years but I’ll be sorting through all the crap in the office. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.
"Used to ride this old bike a lot. I rode all the way past Orofino, Idaho once. Fraser, off of Greer Grade. Got family buried there. She’s a little light for freeway riding but I’ve always took good care of her. Redone the motor twice, I believe.
"Quit ridin’ when the police state ram rodded that damned helmet law on us again back in 87, I guess it was.”
“Right on, bro!” agreed Larry. “Can I ride it?”
“You ever ride a bike?”
Larry didn’t feel like lying about all the shovels, flatheads and pans he hadn’t ridden and built from scratch. The old man looked like he could smell bullshit a mile away.
“Yes, I can ride a bike.”
“Yeah? Well this one shifts on the right. One down, neutral and three up. The tires are old, the plate’s expired--I got no helmet. But yeah, you can ride to the end of the road and back a couple times. Can’t remember the last time the cops came up here.”
Larry rolled down the driveway and was pleased at how the drum brakes firmly stopped the little BSA. He looked both ways and shifted into first with the sole of his boot. The vertical twin moved out with surprising purpose and the air was filled with crisp, crackling sound as he cranked the throttle. He was soon rolling in third gear and the twin sausage mufflers made a wonderful din. He grabbed high and wound it up to fifty miles an hour before downshifting and the bike made a thunderous chuckling noise.
This was stone excellent. He was coming up on the McCally house before the stop sign. Hopefully the hot blonde was watching and would be suitably impressed.
Dee Dee was out of the shower in a bath robe, drying her hair when she heard the bikeless biker approaching on George Brand’s old Birmingham Small Arms. She rushed to the front window to see who was going where, why, and with whom.
“Kenny! Come look at this! Charlie Manson is riding a little clown motorcycle. It’s the one the old man down the lane had for sale on his lawn. Charley must have stolen it.”
Ken McCally hurried to the window from his office/den. He caught Larry’s act this time.
“Why, that’s an old Triumph. I had a Trophy when I was a kid. Looks in really good shape too.”
Ken had a big flat twin BMW that he rode on the open road during high summer. Dee Dee had some expensive black leather that she didn’t mind modeling occasionally on the back of Ken’s Beemer.
Larry remembered to brake with his left foot and brought the BSA to a nimble stop. He revved the motor a couple times and checked for traffic on the old highway before swinging out and doing a 180 and accelerating back up Banjo Lane just as fast as the half liter bike would go. Ken appreciated the fine sound of the BSA through the glass but it was just noise to Dee Dee.
“He looks like a gorilla fucking a football on that thing,” she sniped.
Hayes was awake and had a kettle going in the kitchen. He spooned the last of the Western Family instant coffee into the KRB mug and hit it with boiling water.
The dishes in the sink were getting really vile. It was a good job that there was a constant draft from the hole in the back door glass to keep the smell from building in one place.
Oh well, it was almost spring. The bedroom closet was full of little dark green pot plants. In eight months or so he would be in the money.
A little silver pickup eased down the dirt road onto the pavement of Banjo Lane. Probably the BLM out looking for Woodsy Owl or something, Hayes shrugged. The driver turned a switch to shift out of four-wheel drive and rolled away leaving red mud tire tracks on the faded blacktop.
Hayes carried his coffee out to the front porch to enjoy the post noon sunshine. By the old spring chair stood a half bottle of tokay without the cap on it. It wasn’t like Larry at all to leave tokay lying around. He looked up the road towards town and saw Scary Larry approaching on foot.
“What it is, Dawg.” he called and took a sip of instant. The air was cold despite the bright sun and he drew Cletus’ old robe tighter around him.
Larry came up the steps and sat heavily in the spring chair. He took a charge from his tokay and set it back on the porch and bounced gently in the old chair. His hands rolled a smoke while he looked around at the promise of spring.
“We need to get out and smurf up some cold caps today, bro. I need to brew an ounce of crank so we can sell some. We’re stone out too.”
“We’ll do just that,” declared Hayes. “Gimme a smoke, Dawg.”
Larry handed him the one he had just completed and started in on another. Hayes sipped his coffee. Larry swiftly produced another Topper and lit up with a flick of his Bic and held it out for Hayes. An errant breeze directed the smoke around the side of the house.
“So where ya been, Dawg?”
“I walked down the road and checked out a motorcycle Old Man Brand wants to sell.”
“Ah, no shit? That little loud one? He’s had that thing forever. I remember him riding it when I was learning to bicycle with training wheels on the lane here.”
“He says he sold the place and he and the missus are moving to town. They must be getting old and wanna be closer to hospitals and such.”
“Damn, time flies. I don’t think he’s gunna like living in town. He’s always been fixing or building something in his shop. He’s restored some fine classic cars. Always cut firewood too. Kinda sad. His wife never would learn to drive so I guess they need to move to town.”
Hayes finished his coffee and went into the house to get dressed. Larry idly bounced on the spring seat and watched the day.
They had started buying cold pills in Springfield at “Tweaker Mart.” That isn’t the convenience store’s real name, but it might as well be.
Hayes parked the Buick in the trashy parking lot and walked in while Larry sat in the car.
It wasn’t likely that anybody was fooled for half a second or even cared
about scruffy looking white males with no body fat buying cold remedies here. The little 24 hour store carried racks of disposable lighters made in China, “energy drinks” of caffeine and sugar, factory cigarettes and a large assortment of rolling tobacco.
The beer cooler was filled with forty-ounce bottles of tweaker malt liquor with strange names. Racks of candy bars and cookies filled one wall. The magazine rack featured periodicals dedicated to tattoos, monster trucks, big V-twin motorcycles and death metal guitar.
The traffic roared on Springfield’s main drag and Larry watched the urban tweakers, with bad tattoos, ride by on little bicycles. Somebody had too much fun and had blown a major pile of chunks in the parking space next to the Buick. Looked like some sort of pasta mixed with liquid crack.
The sun was going down and candy bar wrappers with expended lottery tickets roamed the parking lot in the squirrelly breeze.
Hayes returned to the car with half a dozen packets of cold pills with the magic ingredient of pseudoephedrine.
“Bad news, Dawg. Tyrone says that next month the police state is gunna make you show ID and be registered when you buy anything with pseudoephed.”
Larry nodded. “I heard that was coming. I don’t know what the hell we’re gunna do. Guess we better stock up while the getting’s good.” He got out of the car and went into the store to buy a half dozen packets.
Tweaker Mart’s policy was half a dozen packets of cold pills per customer. If you tried to buy more the clerk would advise: “Put some shade on it, Dude.”
Danny Joneser’s piggy bank produced almost eighty dollars in change when broken with a hammer. Nobody thought twice about “employmentally challenged” individuals buying cold medication with handfulls of nickles, dimes and quarters at Tweaker Mart.
After the bikeless biker scored his “limit,” he and Hayes rode around and bought single packets of cold cap at the less tweaker friendly drug stores and supermarkets.
Larry dug deep into Evelyn’s rent money in order to lay in a good stash before the supply line was gated off. He was a competent meth cook but no chemist and couldn’t make precursor compounds from scratch. No one could. He knew that people smuggled pseudephed up from Mexico and it looked like he was going to have to learn more about that in the not-so-distant future.
“Where’d you get all the scratch, Dawg?” Hayes asked after the chump change had been spent and Larry kept pulling twenty dollar bills out of his big wallet on a chain to buy more pills.
“Been sitting on it, bro. Waiting for just this situation to arise.” Larry handed Hayes another couple of 20s as they were getting ready to take on a drug store and a supermarket side by side on 18th Street. “Let’s do it.”
Hayes entered the drug store and Larry headed for the supermarket. When they came out, they would switch and Hayes would shop the supermarket while Larry toured the drug store.
It was getting dark when the pill buyers turned into Banjo Lane. Dee Dee got out on the porch in time to see Hayes take a big suck off a forty ounce bottle as he drove by in the Special.
Larry checked the Brand yard to see if the motorcycle was still there. George must have rolled it back in the shop before the dew settled in. He was going to get busy cooking directly. He had enough iodine crystals for one batch but he was going to need more. Feed and seed stores were getting soggy and hard to light about tweakers wanting to buy big bottles of iodine. Life was getting tough for a hard working meth cook.
Ken McCally was out in the big garage shining up his new BSA Royal Star. He had walked down Banjo Lane and found the Beezer sitting in the Brand’s yard. George wanted two thousand dollars for the little bike now and he had peeled off 20 hundred dollar bills without comment. He sat in an old rocker while George dug around in his den/office and found the old green title. George signed it off and Ken put it in his pocket and rode home without a helmet. Oregon. Motorcycle.
Maybe tomorrow he would order up some new Metzler tires for the little bike. It was fun to ride and reminded him of the old Triumph Trophy he had ridden in his youth. He could use it to buzz to the Grove and maybe Dee Dee would learn to ride it. He had heard that there was a course in motorcycle riding offered at Lane Community College.
Larry got busy reducing the cold pills with alcohol and a hotplate on the back porch. Hayes drove off to acquire a big bottle of iodine solution from a feed and seed store. It just kept getting harder for an honest meth cook to gather the needed material to cook a batch of crank. He looked at his cooked down iodine crystals. Yeah, that should do it for one run.
Somebody drove up in the little gravel area and parked by Cletus’ old pickup truck. At first Larry thought Brandy had come to visit but this Honda Civic was much newer and its red paint had been washed and even waxed recently.
A young woman was driving. Two small children dozed in child seats in back. Larry didn’t know the driver from Eve and wasn’t looking forward to the company of strangers while cooking.
Larry approached the car on the assumption that the driver was lost and he could tell her how to get where she wanted to go and be rid of her.
“ Hi, I’m Jody. Is Hayes Home?” The woman was short and muscular and smiled like a tooth paste commercial. She opened the back door of the car and hauled one of the babies out of the seat and carried him around to the other side of sedan and opened the back door and repeated the process.
Larry didn’t know what to think. Jody didn’t look like a tweaker. She was clean and her car was not a self propelled dumpster. She obviously exercised regularly despite being the mother of new twins. Hayes had never mentioned A Jody.
“I’m Larry. Hayes isn’t home right now.” He suspected the woman might be a DEA agent but it was hard to get past the two children. He was pretty sure the DEA wouldn’t allow the use of infants as camouflage. He couldn’t decide if he was being paranoid or not.
Jody had a baby in each arm with practiced ease and closed the car door with her hip. She was heading for the beaten path along the fence to the walk front door.
“Grab the diaper bag out of the passenger seat, Larry, and bring it with, please.” Her copper braids danced pleasantly on the back of her blue wind suit as she spoke over her shoulder.
Larry looked dumbly at her and took up the mammoth shoulder bag from the passenger seat and followed. He didn’t like this at all. He suspiciously eyeballed the car. It was not the sort of car a deadbeat tweaker would drive. It had four matching tires with plenty of tread. It had no dents or scrapes and none of the light lenses were so much as cracked. He closed the car door and followed Jody into the front room of the little house.
Jody managed to put the twins on a baby blanket on the wasted couch without waking one. The other fussed but drifted back to sleep as she rocked him gently with her hand and hummed briefly.
Larry was flummoxed. He had an operation going on the back porch and he did not need a stranger in the house.
“Um, who are you?” he finally asked.
Jody made a “shhh” sign with her forefinger in front of her perfect smile and took Larry’s hand and led him out the front door.
“Give the kids a minute and they ought to be fast asleep. I heard Hayes was out of jail again. I couldn’t believe he didn’t call me.
Hayes and I go way back. We went to school together.”
Jody had followed a different path than Hayes but still had fond memories of time spent together chugging beer in the parking lot of the high school in the Grove.
She had married a chump with a job and had made a career out of being a housewife and recently a mother.
Hubby Chuck the Chump had a rare job that allowed him to work all the overtime he could possibly stand. Jody constantly steered him into more and more double shifts by replacing furniture that didn’t really need replacing and buying the very best of everything. This kept Chuck the Chump to a minimum in her life
Chuck was twice her age and spent most of his life asleep or at the office. There was no real love in their marriage but Jody appreciated not having to work a job. Chuck enjoyed having a good looking wife who refused to blimp out and also kept a neat house. Dinner was usually waiting for him when he finally got home from the salt mines. Theirs was a relationship similar to the McCallys at the beginning of Banjo Lane, albeit on a much humbler scale.
“The house is a sty!” remarked Jody. “Where’s a broom? I can’t stand to look at this any longer.”
This was bad. She clearly planned to start in on the kitchen and could wander out on the back porch and then she would undoubtedly see and smell the cold pill residue simmering in alcohol.
Galvanized to action, Larry opened the closet where the old shotgun leaned and passed Jody a broom. Thinking fast, he cut a sheet of cardboard with his folding knife and found a roll of duct tape and proceeded to casually cover the broken pane in the back door in such a manner that a short individual couldn’t see over the side of the Olde English box that he pressed into service. He used lots of Duct tape.
Jody swept up an impressive mound of dirt, trash and broken glass in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then she started piling rancid dishes on the drain board and scrubbed down the old sink wearing rubber gloves she had found underneath with the dish soap and scouring powder.
At that point Bruce and Keith came thundering home and Larry could hear them rev their bikes briefly in their driveway before switching off. Their voices and laughter were just audible from the front porch although it wasn’t possible to follow their conversation. Larry dumped the dust pan full of dirt in the flowerbed in front of the rickety porch and frowned. Life wasn’t fair.
Jody was finishing mopping the kitchen when the twins started fussing. This was good. So far she hadn’t attempted to exit the back door and it looked like her children would keep her distracted until it got dark. Larry went out the front door and circled around back where he unscrewed the back porch light bulb just enough so it wouldn’t work.
Hayes’ Buick rolled up in the deepening twilight and Larry moved briskly between the back of the house and Ronnie’s trailer. Her lights were on and the TV was going.
“Who the hell is Jody and why is she here?” demanded Larry as Hayes got out of the car. He stood a couple forties of Olde English on the Buick’s roof and urinated in the gravel.
“Jody’s here? I wondered who’s car that was. She must have convinced her old man to spring for a new one.” Hayes finished flooding the gravel by the truck’s tire and zipped his pants.
“Got a jug of iodine, Dawg.”
“That’s nice. Now who’s Jody? I got pill mash simmering on the back porch and I don’t need people with no need to know checking it out.”
“Aw, don’t worry about Jody, Dawg. She just comes by to lay pipe once in a while. She keeps her old man working two jobs and double shifts so he is out of her hair for the most part. She likes to shoot a little crank sometimes. Won’t smoke it though. She cleans house when she’s straight. She really cleans house when she tweaks. Never seen anything like it. Lays a lot of pipe when she tweaks, too. She was pregnant the last time I saw her.”
“Well, she ain’t now.” said Larry, feeling somewhat better about the whole deal. ‘Hey, what happened to the car?” He stooped to look at the shattered plastic grill of the Buick. The chrome on the front of the hood was no longer straight either.
“Hit a damned deer on this side of the Grove, Dawg. Missed the first one one and hit the second. It ran off. I don’t think it did much more than break the plastic. Oh well. It still runs good as ever. We need to go hose some gas. The gauge is touching empty.”
It was still light enough to read a newspaper and you could even feel a little warmth left over from the early spring day. Hayes froze and grabbed Larry by the wrist.
The neighbors were going for a walk. Bruce and Keith were holding hands and strolling towards the end of the road. They were talking quietly and each held a leash with a pair of the world’s biggest house cats on the other ends.
Larry stared. It was getting too dark to really study the felines but they were not Siamese or plain old tabbies. They looked like small cougars. The gay Californians walked briskly to the end of the pavement and continued up the rutted BLM road. The cats padded eagerly at the extent of their leashes until they were all out of sight up the hill.
“What in hell are those, bro?” asked Larry in a low voice as if there was some reason to worry about the Seautons hearing him.
“Those are Savannah cats. They’re half-African wild cat. The fags came by the last time I was out of the slam and asked me not to shoot them. They let them loose in the summer and they come over here sometimes. They don’t bother anything. They are some big-ass house cats.”
They walked around front and into the little house. Fog rose suddenly out of the ground like a cheap black and white monster movie.
“Hayes! Lover!” Jody sat on the ruined couch with an infant breast feeding in each arm.
“Hi, Gorgeous Girl! Will you look at that! Twins!
“Chuck thinks they’re his, but they’re not. They’re yours! Isn’t that a riot?”
Hayes had to step back and think about that one. Yeah, the timing was about right. Could be.
“This one is Blaine and this one is Isaak. They’ll be off the tit one of these days and I can indulge once in a while.”
Jody was one in a thousand when it came to using meth and taking care of business. With most tweakers, using meth and taking care of business became one and the same within a month or two of becoming acquainted with the drug.
Hayes and Scary Larry stood on the porch smoking home rolleds. Jody wouldn’t hear of smoking in the house with the twins. It was almost really dark now but the eye still believed it had enough deep purple to plumb the night. Flashlights bobbed down the BLM road as The Seautons walked Oscar and Gertrude home on their leads.
“I swear, there’s never a dull moment around here, bro.” Larry exhaled acrid Top smoke.
“’At the End of Banjo Lane’--Somebody oughta write a book.” Hayes nodded.
It was cold and dry and the ground was hard. Hayes let out the clutch of Dad’s truck again. The big pickup charged forward and the chain came taut with a bang and the old Fairlane moved backwards out of the brush. It had sat for so long that it had become one with the earth and was reluctant to leave.
The bald rubber of the Chevrolet gained traction and the Fairlane rolled on flat tires with berry vines trailing from the front bumper. It left a big bare spot in the red clay where it had communed with nature these many years.
The old car tacked hard against the chain but generally followed the truck. A rear brake had rusted solid and its rotten Uniroyals made scrunching sounds. The pickup was able to drag the car behind it despite the friction and Hayes moved onto the pavement of Banjo lane headed towards the Seautons’ driveway. The car’s steel wheels made grinding noise on the worn pavement.
Scary Larry disconnected the chain and laid it over the truck’s tailgate. Hayes turned around in the Seauton’s driveway and repositioned the Chevy in front of the Fairlane. Larry managed to work the chain behind the front bumper and hook it back on itself. He climbed in the ruined driver’s seat and took the wheel and gave Hayes the thumbs up.
Dad’s pickup surged against the rusty chain and the front bumper pooched out as the old car followed along. The increased traction on the pavement caused the frozen brake on the car to suddenly break free and the wreck clattered along behind the the truck.
Hayes reached the end of the pavement and fed the truck gas. Its fuel gauge needle rocked back and forth between E and a quarter tank. Dozens of empty tokay bottles clanked and rolled on the split, warped hardwood deck of the pickup bed as they climbed the disused BLM road.
The truck’s glasspacks thundered up the steep grade and the old Chevy worked harder to maintain momentum. The big back tires skipped once in a while but Hayes kept the tow moving in second gear. The truck had a 3/4 ton suspension but rode like a Fleetwod compared to the Fairlane with four flat tires.
Larry had a hard time seeing through the green slimed windshield. He thought he heard packrats scampering around in the trunk although it was hard to tell over the racket of the steel wheels on the fist-sized logger special rock that hadn’t yet sunk into the neglected roadbed.
The old BLM road leveled out and grew dark from the second growth timber. Hayes remembered playing up here with his brother when they were children. The area had been logged and replanted before they were born and had been "pre-commercially" thinned about 20 years ago. The dark green firs had suppressed everything but the occasional volunteer hemlock and cedar tree. Soon it would be time for a commercial thinning. Some of the trunks were 20 inches at the butt.
They passed the fresh axe work where someone had hacked a log from across the road and descended a little bit before Hayes turned off on a dead end spur road. The Fairlane could almost roll on its own downhill but the chain still drew it along. Hayes reached the landing at the end of the spur and stopped. The old car rolled just enough more to remove the tension from the chain. The brakes didn’t work. Larry shifted the transmission into Park and got out.
“This must be the place all right.” He rubbed his ass with both hands. “That’s one hard riding bitch with flat tires.”
“No doubt about it, Dawg.” Hayes unhooked the chain and tossed it on top of a couple green bottles in the back of the truck. They broke with impressive noise.
“Oh yeah, forgot about those.” He began to stand the empty tokay fifths on top of the long dead Fairlane. Larry saw what he was doing and helped.
It took a little doing but Hayes was able to maneuver the big pickup around and squeeze it past Cletus’ old Fairlane. He drove it thirty yards past the junk car and parked it in the middle of the road. He took down the old Mossberg shotgun from the easy rider rifle rack and inserted a cheap, low base dove and amp; quail load in the chamber to top off the two in the magazine. Scary Larry took down a rusty .22 rifle from the passenger side. He had received the stolen gun as part of some nickle dime dope deal and had lost the detachable magazine but it could still be loaded one round at a time. He had gleaned a pocketful of .22 cartridges from the filthy shag of the deck of his bus.
Hayes drew down on the back window of the Fairlane and fired the old Mossberg. They both stared as the light pellets deflected upwards off the sloping glass. Larry put down his tokay in the pickup bed and took aim with the old .22 and drilled a hole through the back window and windshield. The rear glass spiderwebbed everywhere.
“Now try it,bro.” Hayes chambered another bargain basement round and let fly. This time the back window collapsed into crumbs of glass. Larry assumed a kneeling position and shot the interior rear view mirror. He had always been good with a rifle.
The two shot out all the tail lights and mirrors and windows. They stopped to smoke and then circled the old car and started in on the front, concentrating on the windshield and the green bottles on the hood. The old 20 gauge shotgun was disappointing when it came to shooting the heavy metal of the pre-oil-embargo automobile. It would dimple the paint and even dent the steel at close range, but the light loads could not pierce the sides of the old Ford.
Scary Larry’s .22 made a satisfactory whap! sound when its bullets struck sheet metal and punched neat little holes in the car. He tapped the trunk a few times and they could hear the packrats scamper wildly as their cozy home was ventilated. He let Hayes have a turn with the rusty gun and stood back and nursed his bottle.
“You suppose there’s any gas in the tank, bro?”
“I dunno. Let’s find out.” Hayes rooted around in the pickup cab and found some paper bags and candy bar wrappers and other trash. He wadded it all up and placed it under the gas tank of the old car and lit it with his Bic lighter. He stepped smartly away and Larry lay on his right side in the dirty rock road and neatly punched the little bit of visible gas tank with a high velocity conical hollow point.
Ancient gasoline poured out of the smallbore hole. It took a minute but eventually it connected with the burning paper and a brisk fire blossomed under the rear of the wasted car.
“Cool!” exclaimed Hayes. They both oohed and ahhed as Cletus’ Fairlane brewed up. Half a dozen bushy tailed packrats flung themselves out the back window holes of the flaming car and ran for the woods. Hayes threw up the shotgun and pulled the trigger but nothing happened. He had neglected to eject a spent hull. Larry had his gun at the ready but didn’t shoot.
“Run you little bastards!” The car was burning merrily now. Black smoke billowed. Cletus had bought the 66 Fairlane brand new in Eugene. He had occasionally made noise about restoring the hardtop after Hayes sabotaged it, but the noise had come at longer and longer intervals with less and less intensity. It was moot now.
Larry worked on his tokay while Hayes fired off the last of the .22 bullets into the flaming hulk. They put their firearms in the gun rack of the truck and climbed in.
“Lookit this, Dawg! There’s a bullet hole in the metal beside the rear window.”
“Musta happened when we were shooting the bottles off the hood of the car. Look! here’s the bullet on the dashboard. It had enough zing to puncture the metal of the cab but not enough to bust the windshield. I’ll be damned.”
Hayes started the truck and put it in gear. It had been a couple of hours well spent. Good clean fun. The gas needle wagged back and forth as the old Camper Special wallowed home over the ruts and rocks of the BLM road.
It was a dark and rainy night and Hayes and Larry were out stealing gasoline. Larry had brewed up more than an ounce of crank and the two were wired and paranoid. They were working the Grove again, only a few blocks from where they had hosed the big Suburban.
Hayes had brought some chunks of wood that Larry had carefully cut square with the old chainsaw. With a small hydraulic jack, he planned to rip off a set of Honda tires for Brandy’s long suffering Civic. The little “for temporary use only” spare had finally worn through and gone flat--fortunately in the parking lot of the Section 8 complex where she lived.
Brandy had borrowed the only neighbor’s phone that wasn’t turned off at the moment and called Hayes.
“Hayes, Honey, I’m in an awful jam. My car needs tires in the worst way and I don’t have a dime to my name. The battery has gone completely dead too. Can you help me out?”
They both knew that she was asking him to go out and steal a set of tires for the car. It wasn’t like Hayes had a problem with stealing. He might even be able to wrap the theft in a mantle of altruism while still getting the warm glow of ripping somebody off. The thought of some sucker stumbling out of the house on his way to work, only to discover that his car had received the “concrete wide oval treatment” made Hayes smile.
He was skulking along in the shadows looking for a Honda car with good tires. Hondas were a dime a dozen in the Grove but new tires were rare except on Bubba trucks. Larry was industriously syphoning gas while Hayes ranged about, looking for Brandy’s rubber.
Finally, just as he was about to hang it up, he spotted an old Civic parked in the deep shadows not far from the square dance hall. He had wandered a long ways from the original scene of action. Oh well. He squatted in the rain and felt the right front tire. It was so new that it still had the little rubber whiskers on the tread. This could be it. He checked the other three and found them to be in like condition.
No dogs barked and nobody was up and around. He could feel evil presences in the darker shadows but they wouldn’t bother him on this plane. This would be it.
He walked with a purpose the ten blocks where he had left Scary Larry filling the old white car with plastic five gallons. Larry had managed to steal another pair of jugs out of the back of a pickup truck and so was able to lay in a supply of motor fuel whenever it rained hard. Larry was standing in the shadows. He saw Hayes and pointed up the street to the dead man’s Fairmont.
They climbed in the old car without a word. The interior light didn’t come on when the doors opened. Larry started the motor and drove away with the windshield wipers on high.
“I found a Honda car with good tires, Dawg! It’s over by the dance hall. I’m gunna rip it off.”
“Okay, bro. Hope you know what you’re doing.”
“No problem. I haven’t bought a tire in my life. Just drop me off in the middle of the block where it’s darkest and I’ll do the deed and be ready to split in 20 minutes.”
They both dripped heavily on the Fairmont’s seat. Larry lit a store bought smoke and took a drag before passing it to Hayes who sucked on it before passing it back. He was ready to rock.
Larry pulled to the curb and Hayes exited the old car and passed four rounds of wood, a hydraulic jack and a small four way tire wrench onto the soggy grass in seconds. “Got it,” he breathed before shutting the car door as Larry smoothly pulled into 10th Street.
Hayes moved at a crouch with his tire tool in one hand and hydraulic jack in the other. In a minute or so he circled the Honda and loosened all 16 lug nuts. The stamped steel wheels had no hubcaps which made it easy.
He placed the jack under the back bumper by the curb and lifted the wheel off the ground and spun the lugs off with the four way. The wheel came off and a round of wood went under the hub. One down.
He was soaked to the skin and the rain was sheeting. He looked around and removed the second rear tire. He moved to the front of the Honda and soon had a neat stack of car wheels standing in the shadows. He didn’t wear a watch but it probably took less than fifteen minutes. His heart pounded under the cocktail of crank and adrenalin.
All seemed quiet so far. It was hard to filter out reality from the heavy meth Larry had cooked but he was pretty sure he was undetected. The rain was cold and heavy and nobody should be outside at this hour.
The old white Fairmont turned the corner with its lights out and rolled up behind the Honda. Instantly Hayes had the back door open and was throwing wet tires in the back seat. He remembered his jack but forgot the chrome fourway.
“HEY ASSHOLE! WHAT IN HELL ARE YOU DOING?” a man’s voice roared from the front porch of the nearest house. “SIC ‘EM, PEE WEE!”
A great dark dog, possibly a Rottweiler, came flying over the fence. Hayes was just able to jump in the passenger seat and shut the door as a head the size of a volley ball barked savagely against the streaming glass. White teeth shown in the darkness.
“Hit it!” yelled Hayes and Larry patched out, the back door shut itself off the dog or possibly the Honda car. Larry stepped on it and turned on the lights after half a block. He made a left and then a right, angling south and west.
The citizen was probably on the phone right now calling the police. This was bad. They needed to get past the police station to leave town on the old Cottage Grove-Lorane Highway. Larry floored it. They went shooting across deserted Highway 99 and rocketed ten blocks at sixty miles an hour. The bikeless biker then pulled up behind the west side of the old church with the cross of Saint Andrew and turned off the headlights.
Sure enough, ten seconds later--five blocks away to their right, car lights moved rapidly out of the CG police parking lot, headed north east on Main Street. Larry let it get out of sight and then started the car and turned sedately south west onto Main Street and drove the speed limit out of town.
“Holy shit, bro! That took a year off my life--I shit you not. Did you see the size of that damned dog? Light me a smoke. God, that was stupid. We got crank on us and everything!”
Hayes ignored the smell of gasoline seeping forward from the trunk where Larry’s wild driving had sloshed the jugs around and lit up two cigarettes from a crumpled pack on the dash. Yeah, whatever. He had ripped off a citizen and seemingly had gotten away with it. He rolled down the window to vent the fumes and enjoyed the smell of the pounding rain and gas vapor with his generic smoke.
The word was out that you could score good meth at the end of Banjo Lane! Worn out automobiles leaked oil in front of the Loveless house for ten or fifteen minutes while worn out tweakers were inside leaking hard stolen cash for Larry’s product.
“No, I don’t want to trade crank for a riding lawn mower.”
“No, I don’t want to ball your old lady for a gram-or half a gram.”
“No, I don’t need an old shotgun.”
“What kind of mini van? No title? The plate expires next month? I don’t think so.”
Dee Dee watched the 21st Century Grapes of Wrath automobiles turn in front of the McCally house and accelerate to the end of Banjo Lane. She could spot a car headed to the Loveless house instantly.
They were usually Japanese brands. Almost always 20 years old or more. The sheetmetal was always dented and missing trim. Never washed, with broken tail lights and worn out exhausts. Bald tires with missing hubcaps and cracked glass were mandatory. The tweaker mobiles never received any maintenance unless they absolutely refused to run.
Oil change? A quart of oil costs the same as a quart of malt liquor. No contest there. These Toyotas and Hondas had been bought new and traded in and bought used as Johnny’s first car and driven by college students and dead-end job workers.
Jane would get her degree and a job and buy a new Miata and the old cars would be sold again by newspaper ads and cardboard signs as they had no trade in value. Eventually they would be sold for a hundred dollars or given away and finally the junkers would get Joe Tweaker around on a couple gallons of gas at a time.
Inevitably they wind up abandoned and shot full of holes on BLM land where they sit in mute tribute to the incredible manufacturing ability of the Japanese. Lastly, a BLM employee like your author comes and hauls them off to the steel yard where they are recycled and come back as new Lexus.
The occupants were always shiftless and looked like they belonged on a post office wall. Many, in fact, did. Deirdre could smell rank tobacco smoke when one drove past her running on the lane. In fifteen minutes to half an hour, the same car would return from the end of Banjo Lane.
Ken and Dee Dee sat at the Seauton’s kitchen table. The kitchen was of professional grade with Italian marbel, handmade ceramic tile and lots of stainless steel. It cost more than the Loveless house was worth.
Keith pulled draft Heinekens from a tap in the side of keg fridge. Dee Dee had a glass of Zinfandel from Lorane. Gertrude the Savannah cat sat by her water dish and watched the strangers with huge yellow eyes. Oscar was hiding.
“I’m glad you could come,” began Bruce. “We’ve been trying hard to ignore the people next door but the sudden influx of junkies in junk cars coming and going at all hours is trying at best, and it isn’t getting any better.”
“I’ll say!” chimed Dee Dee. “I’m tired of all the damned riff raff racing up and down the road when I’m jogging.”
“We called the Sheriff about it but were told that we need to have proof that they’re dealing dope.” Keith shrugged. “I suppose we could go over there and try to buy whatever they’re selling--that ought to be proof.”
“You’d probably get thrown in jail for buying whatever they’re selling,” observed Ken. “The legal system doesn’t make a lot of sense here in Lane County sometimes.”
“I’ve talked to Kathy the realtor about buying the place often enough,“ said Keith. "Clete Loveless doesn’t even respond to offers to buy. We figured we could raze the old house and turn the land into a tree farm. Maybe have a big new house built and sell it to somebody moving up from California. It could make a decent investment.”
“We’ve tried that, too!” Dee Dee was animated by the wine and love of gossip. "I want that shithole torn down and all the garbage hauled away. I get tired of looking at it when I jog. It’s disgusting! That Charlie Manson clone was swilling Night Train before noon when I ran by the other day. The other loser pees off the front porch like this was Arkansas or something.”
Bruce shook his head. “Oregon would be such a nice place if it weren’t for all the Oregonians.”
“Everybody I’ve talked to says that it sounds like they’re selling meth next door,” Keith nodded. “Meth heads are bad news any way you cut it. The people driving in and out are undoubtedly casing our homes.”
“When we bought our lot five years ago, nobody was living in the Tobacco Road house next door,” began Bruce. “If we would have had a clue about this activity going on then, we would have bought and built somewhere else.”
“Jesus Maria is going to cut a little hole in the corner of the hedge over there so we can see in front of Tobacco Road with field glasses and record license plates--at least when it’s light out. We could get a hidden security camera installed there so we can keep an eye on things from the house.” Keith frowned. “I just don’t understand how people can live like that.”
“It’s disgusting!” Dee Dee pronounced judgement. “We didn’t move all the way up here so we could watch ugly poor people drive up and down our road.”
Dierdra Devereax enjoyed looking down her nose at white trash. It was her secret shame that she had been raised in a trailer park near Bakersfield. Born Donna Dolores Dever, she swiftly discovered that the road of life is graded, paved and red carpeted for beautiful women.
As a child, Dee Dee lived in a 1959 Paramount trailer with her mother and two younger brothers. Its two-inch walls kept it hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Late at night when it was quiet, you could actually hear people snore in the next trailer over.
Her brothers slept in a 12-foot camp trailer parked by the 10 by 50 foot Paramount. Dee Dee introduced them both to the world of sex. Incest is best. Their mother pretended not to know.
Mom liked to drink cheap beer and smoke cigarettes. She knew all the welfare angles and avoided working the menial jobs she was qualified for. She was a blob in stretch pants and only the drunkest deadbeats in the trailer park would come around when she collected her welfare check.
She married a loser out of high school and soon figured out that she did not want to waste her life in a trailer park (5 doors away from Mom) pitting puny paychecks against an unending barrage of bills.
Her friends from high school blimped out and practiced saying “Do you want fries with that?” Donna Dolores dumped the chump and moved to LA where she got a temp office job. She made a religion of working out. The bathroom scales and mirror were her altar.
She invested her meager salary in expensive clothes and elective surgery. It was patently obvious that toned legs, flat belly with mini skirt and heels would get you way, way further than being competent, diligent and conscientious at office work. There were a dozen cows in her office who were good at shuffling paper. Dee Dee got to go out of town on business with the important people.
There were always perfectly valid justifications why only Dee Dee needed to accompany Bob the business owner on conferences in Chicago, meetings in Monterey and training in Tacoma. His wife didn’t care--the longer he stayed away the better. Dierdra learned when to act like she might put out and when it would advance her career to actually do so.
Eventually Bob the boss decided to upgrade and play ditch the bitch with his current wife, Tiffany. It wasn’t the first divorce for either one of them and Tiff was able to make it hurt. She would live comfortably on Bob’s dime without having to waste a day of her life working a job.
Bob had found Tiffany in his office the same as Dee Dee. Now that she was a wizened crone of 45, it was time to trade up to something younger and more glamorous.
Dee Dee viewed Bob as a booster rocket, something to take her up, up, up into the ionospere of gracious living and when his momentum was used up, she would detach and let him crash back to earth while she hitched her star on someone who would take her even higher. It was purely a business relationship taken to another level for both of them.
The Seutons’ kitchen was at the back of the house but you could see across the vast living room and through a two foot gap in the front window to Banjo Lane. Dee Dee could hear a noisy old car slowing to park next door even through the double insulation. She craned her head to see who, why, what, when, where and how.
“There’s another wretched old car full of junkies!” Dee Dee announced. “Let’s call the police!”
Copyright ©2006 by Norm Maxwell
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