My Story Place

Twenty Seven

   Otis had a girl named Enid. She was the one he mostly did not want to face.

   Manheim Brattwhiler knew about Enid. He was amazed Otis would consider going off to the service when Enid Copwhithle was available to him if he stayed in Johnson County. He could not imagine Otis deserting any girl who would have him.

   "Otis spends most of his time at the pig barn," Manheim thought aloud. "What's he going to do in the service?"

   "He'll end up burnin' down the barracks with an arc welder," Manheim thought, even louder.

   Judge Fussbender gavelled Manheim to silence.

   Manheim Brattwhiler was Roscoe's much younger brother.

   He was also the biggest coward in three counties, as everyone knew. He was in a huge pickle since his Otis had beaten up his brother and his nephew.

    "You got to go try some of him on," his sister Elenora told him. "You can't let him jest strut around all proud with two of our menfolk wearin' patches a'cause of him."

   Manheim did not want to be the third Brattwhiler in patches. 

   "Otis has no neck," Manheim told Elenora. "He all shoulders and chest and bullet head. I don't know where to hit him. He has no neck," Manheim repeated, bleating.

   "Please send me to the service now, Jedge Fussbender," Otis told His Honor. "If'n ya sen' me now, I'll be more glad to go."

   Judge Fussbender did not care if Otis was happy or unhappy by this point. Judge Fussbender just wanted Otis to go off to the service in place of his sister Myra's son, Milo, whose happiness he did not much care about, either. Judge Fussbender wanted peace in his own home, where his sister, Myra, Milo's mother, served as his cook and housekeeper, though, since Milo's draft number had come up at 85, Myra had not done much cooking or housekeeping, since she was so worried Milo might be drafted and go off to war.

   "I tell you, I simply have the vapors, what with this talk of my only child, going off to war, what with the draft and all," Myra told Judge Fussbender over and over again.

   Judge Fussbender did not know what the vapors were. He did not know how one could get the vapors, except, possibly, by eating spring beans too much. Judge Fussbender did not know why vapors or spring beans or the draft should serve as an excuse for not washing his socks or cooking him pot roast on Sunday, with potatoes and carrots in the big roaster and sweet rolls with honey on the side.

   Judge Fussbender liked to take his meals at home, breakfast, lunch and dinner. If he ate at the diner or at the hamburger counter, people would often bother him about some case before him or some case about to come before him or some case they thought should come before him. They often upset his digestion. He liked to eat at home, breakfast, lunch and dinner, every day. 

   He liked to go down to his Episcopal church on Sunday. He had been raised a Baptist but the Baptists had gotten so loud, he moved over to the little Episcopal church. He did not mind the kneeling or the beads they handed him, this being a High Church Episcopal Church, with an organ and no choir. He liked the Book of Prayer, though he never read it, because it fitted so nicely in his hand. He liked the hymns in the hymnal because most of them were set to waltz time and were easy to keep time to.

   "The Episcopals had sense enough to skip the Reformation," Judge Fussebender often told his Baptist friends, who knew no more of church history than he.

   "They don't get loud or shrill. I can think in church," he added.

   "I go to the Baptist Church so I don't have to think in church," his old friends often told him. 

   Now, Judge Fussbender had to decide how to keep Milo Sloan out of the draft. He went to church more often than year. He really needed to think.

 

Twenty Six

   Otis dreaded telling everybody he had to go to the service. He did not dread going to the service. He just dreaded telling everybody about it.

   "Do I go now, Jedge?" Otis asked Judge Fussbender.

   "What's that?" the judge wanted to know.

   "Do I go on to the service now?" Otis responded.

   "No, no. You don't have to go now, young man," Judge Fussbender replied. "You have ninety days to get your affairs in order."

   "Wall, yer honor, truth is," Otis was getting the hang of things in the court, "I really ain't got no affairs to put in order, one way or the 'tother."

   "What's that?" the judge was starting to repeat himself.

   "Wall, ya see," Otis answered, though it was now plain the bony old man on the high seat did not actually see, did not see at all, even if Otis gave him every chance to catch on.

   "See what?" the Judge was ready for all this to be done. He needed to get home. Tuesday night was pork chop night. He had not had pork chops, not for the whole month of February, while his draft quota languished, morbid and unfilled.

   "I just cannot bear to cook while I think of my poor, poor Milo getting nearer and nearer to his draft number," his widowed sister, who was also his cook and housekeeper, told him. 

   She had gone slack on the laundry, as well. Judge Fussbender was reduced to washing out his socks in the sink in his increasingly cluttered bathroom. 

   Myra, Milo's mother, mumbled to herself a lot now. She spent hours in her rocker on the sun porch, knitting thick socks for Milo.

   "I cannot let my baby go off to war without proper stockings," she muttered to the neighbor's cat, a black and white tabby, who came to sit on the porch rail in the sun and watch her knit.

   Tonight, however, if the Judge could get to a phone and tell her the good news, Myra still had time to get down to the market. She could get some thick, center cut pork chops. She could broil them carefully in the bottom of the double oven. She could do some laundry, perhaps even clean the clutter out of his private bath on the second floor, now full of damp, black socks, some with thin heels in them.

   Judge Fussbender had coaxed Otis out of jail, where the county would have to feed him, and into the Army, where the United States government could feed him. Judge Fussbender had two more promising cases behind Otis. He could dispense with all three before lunch, if only Otis would stop talking and go off with the bailiff.

   Granted, the next young man in jail clothes, waiting with the trustee and paying no attention whatsoever to the proceedings, did not seem like army material. He was wheezing loudly in a decidedly discouragingly high pitch. The army might not use that one but Fussbender would send him, regardless. He would help the wheezer see how he might help his country. Fussbender would have his enlistment, along with this fellow who beat up the Brattwhilers and burned the Ag barn. He would get the third one, too, coming down from the jail now, lately arrested and even more recently made sober. 

   He would have all three of them, if only the first one would topple.

   "Young man, choose the Army or the Jail."

   "I already picked the Army, jedge."

   "Maybe you was sleepin', " Otis added.

   Judge Fussbender was not sleeping. He was listening intently. The effrontery of this barn bunner was almost too much to bear.

   "Choose again," Fussbender thundered.

   "I'll take the Army," Otis answered. He was perplexed, though he would not have known to call it perplexity. He did not know the Judge was effronted by his behavior. He would not have known about effrontery, either.

   "But I have to go right now," Otis told him.

   "And just why must you go  now, young man?" Fussbender fumed.

   "I got to go before my daddy finds out I'm goin'," Otis lied.

   In truth, Otis did not want to tell his girl.

   "She sure is gonna be mad at me," Otis thought to himself.

   "I made a mess of it this time," Otis thought to himself.

   "She's gonna be made fer sure," Otis thought to himself.

   "Young man, who is She? And what does She have to do with telling your father?" Fussbender wanted to know.

   As it turned out, Otis had not been thinking silently, even though he had been thinking to himself. Now, Fussbender wanted to know about his girl.

  The bailiff wanted to know, too. And the trustee. And the Wheezer in the chair perked up, too.

   And the recently drunken fellow just brought up from the jail wanted to know about Otis and his girl, too. He had other reasons than mere curiousity. He had revenge on his mind.

   He was, after all, a Brattwhiler. And all the Brattwhilers hated Otis.

 

 

Twenty Five

   "Young man," Judge Fussbender sighed, aloud, his high pitched voice whistling through his dentures. "Young man..."

   His voice trailed off. He ran a bony hand through his thin comb-over. He twisted in his long black robe, seated on his hign bench behind the dark oak dais with the county seal set on it.

   "Young man..." he tried to continue.

   "Yessir?" Otis offered, when the Judge kept trailing off.

   Judge Fussbender was going through a moral dilemma. At heart, Judge Fussbender was a Liberal of the old school, a Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt kind of Liberal.

   He was probably the only person in the courtroom who knew the etymology of the word liberal, how it came from the Greek word liberos, meaning "generous, open hearted, compassionate to a high degree, sensitive." If anyone else knew, they were certainly keeping it to themselves.

   Judge Fussbender was  a real, old time Liberal, perched on the precipice of a historical cliff, where Liberals were about to go into free fall because their free spending ways were about to bankrupt the nation financially. Tax and spend, tax and spend, would the cry against the Liberals for decades to come. "

   All you Liberals do is tax and spend," they would be told.

   Or, so some thought.

   Judge Fussbender had voted a straight Liberal ticket all his life. He worshipped Franklin Roosevelt, adored Harry Truman and stomached Adlai Stevenson. Adlai seemed to think he had only to sniff to win the national election. He was too much the effete snob, a man with good ideas but no stomach for the tough decisions.

   Judge Fussbender did not think John Kennedy was a Liberal but he voted for him anyway, out of habit. Of course, no Liberal could ever vote for Richard Nixon. Nixon was hated just  for being Nixon. He would never be president. Never. Never. Never.

   Kennedy rewarded him with large tax cuts, a balanced budget, a giant military and a foreign war. 

   Then, Judge Fussbender got Lyndon Johnson. A practical politician of enormouse energy, LBJ had a giant heart set to one point on the dial; Liberalism. He would have the Great Society. Race relations would be changed in practice as well as theory. The poor would eat and live in decent housing. LBJ would out-liberal FDR.

   Judge Fussbender was in love with life again. He loved the lop-eared Liberal from the Hill Country. He loved all the things LBJ thought and did.

   Except for that jungle war half way around the world. It was an undeclared war, initiated by the French and inherited by Eisenhower. Kennedy was going to get out of Indo-China, except on the days when he was going all in to win, followed by the days when he was going to follow George Kennan's Containment policy until the creaky Communist system fell in on itself sometime in the next thirty years.

   John Kennedy was not good at making up his mind. He was pragmatic idealist except when he was wire tapping Civil Rights Leaders and Union organizers. He was mostly a rich man's son who wanted to be president because he thought it was his birthright.

   Of course, none of this made any difference to poor Otis, who did not know anyone named Citizenry and was worried about someone taking a sponge to his record. Was this good or bad?

   Idly, Judge Fussbender wondered where Otis would score on an IQ test Would Otis be considered slow or even retarded or just plain stupid? At what point had the education system failed Otis? Was Otis the failure?

   How was a well meaning Liberal to deal with a young man like Otis? Was he to be fodder for the cannon, grist for the mill? The term collateral damage was not popularly known when Otis burned down the Ag Barn. 

   People would come to know the term before too long.

   Fussbender remembered Munich and Neville Chamberlain's neat moustache, his folded umbrella tucked under his arm. Chamberlain flew off to meet with a madman, Adolph Hitler, and announced Hitler was a man whose word could be trusted.

   And a whole world went to war. The greatest Liberal president of all time had to become the premier war leader in American history. The War killed millions and pushed America out of its darkest economic period. Boys who would never think of voting for anyone but FDR were slaughtered in hundreds of thousands. The survivors would still not think of voting for anyone not in the Roosevelt party right up to the moment LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act.

   But, mostly, there was that war. JFK would not lose it and, so, LBJ could not leave it. 

   And, now, the Liberal dilemma came down to a judge with a widowed sister and her asthmatic son. Judge Fussbender's Liberal, moral dilemma came down to the scene behind the scene, and the victim would be a squat, pale boy who had been rejected by a plain girl named Elenora Prattwhiler and then burned down the Ag Barn with an arc welder, in two completely unrelated events.

   Judge Fussbender had to have 18 more soldiers from his country for that year. He had to have them, regardless of how he got them.

   "Young man..." Judge Fussbender whispered in his agony.

   "Yessir?"

   "Young man..."

   "Yessir?"

   "Choose."

 

Another Otis Installment Coming Soon

   Probably tomorrow, another Otis installment. I started off with just an idea about an older fellow falling out of his truck, one day when I did not put on my seat belt and my door did not close right.

   I am not Otis but the idea made me feel something. Like silly, for not wearing the seat belt and lame for not fixing my truck door.

  Alas, right now I have pneumonia, which just makes me feel like someone is sitting on my chest. This is my fourth time around when this and I am determined to beat it this time for good. Enough is more than enough.

  So, meds and fluids and rest for most of this week. God let me speak Sunday and I plan to speak this Sunday. In between I am just getting better. And better.

   But I have come to like Otis. And I plan to finish his story, or at least continue it.

 

Opinions here are mine alone.

Twenty Three

   Otis did not end up in the US Army just because he beat the living daylights out of the Brattwhiler family. He got probation for his fisticuffs with the Brattwhilers. In a better day, he would not have gotten even a slap on the wrist for his manly act of unmanning Jacob and Roscoe.

   No, Otis finally got sent to the army because he burned down the Ag Barn with an arc welder. He did not mean to burn down the Ag Barn. He loved the Ag Barn. He did  not mean to burn it dwn but burn it down he did, down to the ground, not a flatboard left unsinged. He burned the Ag Barn to a cinder.

   "Dang," he said, as he watched the Ag Barn burn. "The one thing they tole me fer sure was to take care not to burn down the Ag Barn."

   Judge Fussbender of the Second Precinct Criminal Court had already given Otis probation for his various fights with the Brattwhilers. Now, he added a criminal mischief charge to the allegations against Otis and offered him a choice.

   "Young man, " Judge Fussbender said from his bench, "you can go to jail or you can go to the US Army. I can't have you assaulting the citizenry and burning down school property. To the jailhouse or to the barracks you go. Take your pick."

   Otis did not understand the word "citizenry." He could not remember assaulting anyone by that name, or anything close.

   He had had two fights, one with Jacob Brattwhiler and then the second one with Jacob's dad, Roscoe. He had kicked the dickens right out of both of them, being a stout lad with thick, short arms and solid hands, bone buried deep beneath layers of muscle. He was stout and strong, he struck without much warning if he thought somebody was coming after him but he could not, for the life of him, remember beating up anyone named Citizenry.

   "Thet sounds like a Spanish name, er I-talian, Judge, " Otis answered. "I just been fightin' with the Germans, ya know, the Brattwhilers."

   The bailiff shuffled his feet at this one. He looked at his shoes in embarrassment for Otis. He noticed his black work shoes were scuffed and felt embarrassed for himself, then, since one of his duties was to look sharp when he brought a citizen before the judge for trial or sentencing.

   "Young man," Judge Fussbender snorted, "none of your insolence. I will say again, pick the jail house or the service. It is your choice."

   Then, thinking Otis needed a sweetener, he added, "If you go to the service, I will expunge your record, of course."

   If "citizenry" had been a cipher for Otis, "expunged" was a code beyond his breaking.

   Otis had paused in his answer because everyone else in the courtroom paused. There were not many people there to start with but Otis thought everybody was just way too quiet. The lady at the table with the little typewriter stopped her clattering after the judge made his last offer. The bailiff seemed awful interested in his shoes. The next boy waiting to see the judge sat still in his jail outfit under the watchful eye of the Trustee who brought him into the courtroom but neither of them dared say a syllable.

   Otis had already made his choice. He just had not announced it.

   He did not know what the judge wanted him to say. Jail or the Army? Otis could not go to jail. He knew they would keep him inside most of the day, in a small space and feed him whenever they felt like it. He would not get a Coke or a Baby Ruth when he wanted one. They would keep his chewing tobacco from him.

   No sir, jail would not do for Otis, not for any length of time. He just did not know what to do.

   In school, whenever he was asked for an answer, he had learned to ask some question about the question put before him. He would ask the teacher to repeat the question, or some part of it, or tell her he  did now know what some word meant in the question. The teachers were always women, except in Ag, which he could not go back to now because he had burned down the Ag Barn, or in football, which he could not play anymore, because they feared he would somehow ignite the Fieldhouse.

   Otis was too old to go back to High School, anyway. He should have graduated a year ago but could not pass Algebra I, let alone Algebra II or Geometry. 

   Otis was not so good with English either.

   He fell back on his old ways.

   "Is thet good er bad?" Otis asked. "I mean, thet thang about the sponge. Is thet good er bad?"

   Otis really did not know the word "expunged." He did not know about a record, other than the 45's of Hank Williams or Ferlin Husky his daddy used to play before the flu took him, back in '59.

   Judge Fussbender had heard enough.

   "Choose the Jail or the Army," he roared.

   Judge Fussbender did not usually yell in his own courtroom. He was at the end of his tether, though, from the pressure of his various duties and from the scoldings delivered to him by his only sister, Myra Fussbender Sloan, the widow of the man who had been judge before him.

   Judge Fussbender had never married. His widowed sister lived with him in his big house on Elmira Street in Reece's Prairie, with her only son, Milo. She served Judge Fussbender as house keeper and cook. 

  Lately, she had also made him suffer through her incessant nattering. The subject of her nattering was her son, Milo.

   Milo was the biggest source of his present stress, then. Milo Sloan, his only sister's only child, had reached draft age.

   And Judge Fussbender, in addition to his duties on the bench, was head of the Johnson County Draft Board. He chose who would go to war and who would stay at home.

   And Myra Fussbender Sloan wanted her only son, Milo, to stay home with her.

   "Milo is my only son," she would say, night after night, as if Judge Fussbender could not count heads as well as the next fellow. "I want my baby home with me."

   Judge Fussbender had a quota. All the country draft boards had quotas each year. The quotas were based on a dense formula of population, number of eligible males between 18 and 26, the number of citizens from the country who had gone to the service the year before and the number of that number who had been wounded or killed in action.

   Judge Fussbender had to find 26 young men willing to go to war. If he did not find 26 who were willing to go that year he had to make some more of the citizenry ready to serve. He had to incentivize the citizenry.

   In January, four citizens volunteered. Two more were drafted, their numbers being in the top five of the Selective Service lottery. Judge Fussbender was off to a good start. One month gone and already he had nearly a quarter of his quota.

   In February, no one volunteered. In March, Mr. Nixon moved into Cambodia, ratcheting up the war to drive the communists out of their safe haven and force on them "peace with honor."

   Mr. Nixon was going to incentivize the citizenry.

   "Kin ya tell me one more time 'bout that sponge?" Otis asked once more.

   Judge Fussbender sighed.

 

 

 

 

 

Twenty Two

   Otis watched Roscoe Brattwhiler come huffing up and knew it was not a social call.

   "Ya want to skip the singin' and go straight to the dance floor?" Otis asked, as Roscoe got within five steps of him.

   Roscoe was not any smarter than his progeny, so the musical allusions made him stop and think for a second. He did not want to sing or dance with Otis. In fact, he was mad at Otis because Otis had beaten up his son, Jacob. Otis beat Jacob up so bad he could not eat his corn on the cob that night. Roscoe had to peel the corn off the cob, squash it up in some milk and stir the corn mash in Jacob's whipped potatoes. This took a long time and kept the whole family mad, every time they looked at Jacob's swollen face.

   So, no Roscoe did not want to sing or dance with Otis. Roscoe could not sing much anyway, though he had a nice enough baritone kind of voice. He could not stay on pitch, though, or match tones, or remember lyrics.

   When they sang "I'll Fly Away," on Sunday mornings down at the Holiness Church where Miz Brattwhiler dragged Roscoe three Sundays out of four, the words often came out, "Some bad mornin' when this wife is o'er," or some such, instead of the real lyrics. whatever they were. No one noticed because the Holiness People sang like Roscoe's dad taught him to play pool, when his pa told him, "If ya can't shoot good, shoot hard."

   But he did not want to sing with Otis. He surely did not want to dance with him, not any kind of dance. Men did not dance with men in those days, not in the Holiness Church or any other Church. 

   Of course, Roscoe had grown up in the Baptist Church, and they did not dance with anybody. This gave them more time to get to the best sparking places with their girls, because, while they would not dance with their girls, that did not keep them from loving on them. 

   All this went through Roscoe's head as he stepped up to whip Otis for making it hard for Jacob to eat corn. Otis had meant to ask if Roscoe wanted to talk for a minute before they went to fighting but he had a certain whimsical strain in him, which would come out from time to time. 

   This was one of those times.

   "Weall, I didn't come here to sing..." Roscoe started to say and Otis hit him.

   Hard.

   Otis hit Roscoe so hard he went to wearing dentures when he woke up and could not eat corn or apples without great difficulty ever again. 

    This is how Otis ended up in the Army and, finally, how he came to fall out of his pickup truck on a hot day in July.

Twenty One

   Otis had been quite a brawler in his younger days. He had a hair trigger temper, as they said in those days, and a big over hand right that landed quick and hard. Wherever his giant fist landed it broke something, or tore something, or generally made his opponent want to do something other than fight Otis.

   He usually stopped when his opponent stepped back and threw up his hands. He did not do that one day, though, when he fought the oldest Brattwhiler twin, Jacob. Otis never like the Brattwhilers, none of them, and he liked Jacob the least. Jacob's plain sister, Elenora, had spurned Otis' advances in the fifth grade. Otis carried a grudge, all the way through Junior High and then through their first four years of high school.

   Otis and Jacob were not all that bright in class. Otis could tear up an engine and put it back together for you or plow a straight row. He could not, however, sit still in a class room. Shakespeare was lost on Otis, as were Euclid and Pythagoras. 

   The Ag teacher finally made Otis an Ag Aid, so he could spend his days out in the shop or down at the pig barn. He liked the pigs because they seemed to understand him. He did not mind cleaning out the shop or showing the freshmen how to strike an arc on the welder without setting fire to the shop.  Otis ordered the beef jerky and soft drinks they sold the students to finance some of the Ag trips. 

   "I'as always happy out'n the pig barn," he told his buddies in Viet Nam. "I liked bein' out thar whar I could move around and do stuff."

   Otis might still have been out in the Ag barn if he had not beat up Jacob Brattwhiler and then worn out Old Man Brattwhiler when he came to defend the family honor.

Twenty

Twenty

 

   Otis broke his tailbone when he hit the black-top.

   He sat there, upright, stunned and sad. His old truck continued into the nearest barbed wire fence,w here it paused, wheels churning, paint scraping, for a time. Then, for some reason he did not immediately discern, the old truck coughed three times and died.

   Otis sat on the black-top in his blue bib overalls and white tee shirt. He did not want anyone to see him, just then. He felt like a fat old man with a broken bone in his sit-down, stranded in the middle of a one lane road out in the country between Lipan and Brock, his truck dead, his dignity deceased and his spit cup all over him.

   "This is shore a sorry way to end up," he thought and started to tear up around his eyes. The pain was not so bad he could not stand it but the comination of dead truck, drying spit and broken behind were a bit much, even for him.

   He found he could not actually get up off the ground. He was going to need some help but this stretch of road was mostly unoccupied during the busiest of days. 

   "I may set here awhile," he thought and the thought dried his tears right away.

   After a moment, Otis decided he might better get up from his stomach. He could push himself up with his stubby arms, if he could just roll over to his stomach and give himself one good hard shove.

   "I got one left in me," he told the sky.

   The error in this thinking was the spit cup contents, splashed all over his bib overalls. Otis got to his stomach without blacking out but then the smell of the tobacco cup hit him full in the face, triggering his gag reflex.

   Otis vomited, then some more, then again and dropped his face with the last effort. The sick, sweet smell overcame him. He had to roll over again, this time with his bare, red neck and head stained with vomit. When he hit his back the pain of his broken bone hit him again.

   This time, Otis really cried.

Nineteen

Nineteen

 

   Otis did not always close the door to his old truck hard enough. He almost never wore his seat belt.

   So, it was inevitable he would one day fall out of his own truck.

   If he had worn his seat belt the day he fell out of his truck he almost certainly would not have fallen out of the truck  because it was the seat belt catching in the door that kept it from closing. The combination of an open door and a knotted belt were too much for the Muse of Transportation, whenever she paid attention to the School of Old Trucks on One-Lane Black Top roads. She put a cardboard box in the road.

   Otis would not run over a cardboard box. Not a small one or a large one, not one in-between size, like the one the Muse of Transportation dropped off just beyond the ill-placed curve in the deep grade turning up after the one lane bridge. 

   "What in the..." Otis grunted when he saw the box, swerved hard, lost his grip on the wheel with his left hand, which was the only hand he had on the wheel, the other being occupied with his half-full spit cup, full of the heady broth of spit and tobacco. He lurched left, the door flew open, he lost his grip on the cup with his right hand, grabbed for it clumsily with his left and fell out the door of his old truck.

   He should have worn his seat belt.

   He hit the road pretty hard, rolled a couple of times and came to rest next to the cardboard box. He was stunned, shocked and sore. He was also a bit sad. He had made it all the way through his service and not fallen out of a truck. Now, here he was, an old man on a hot day, lying in on a black-tar road with his spit cup all over him and his truck churning through a barbed wire fence.

   Otis laid in the road for awhile. 

 The road was not much, anyway, one lane black-top, part of the crumbling American infrastructure; bridges falling into polluted American rivers, roads filled with pot-holes, hungry, overweight people who didn't know how to use carbs and couldn't get protein.

   The one lane asphalt road trailed off from Otis' double-wide over toward Lipan, down to the Farm to Market Road connecting to President Eisenhower's inter-state highway system. Otis did not like the inter-state, for there were too many semis and vans with alien drivers and people running drugs up from the Southwest to the metroplex. They drove at 80, though the speed limit was clearly marked at 65 most of the way Otis would have come. 

   Otis did not want to drive 80, anywhere, least of all on the inter-state with the drug runners and the illegals. He had to drive fast in the service, what with people shooting at him all the time. He bad to crane his head around so much he had a permanent crick in his neck. Otis never went to the VA to get his neck checked out, no sir. If everybody went to the VA with a sore neck, he thought, no one who really needed treatments would ever get them. He preferred to take Advil and turn his head more slowly.

    He had done his service in Quang Tri, a little hamlet in the now defunct Republic of South Viet Nam, up near Hue, in the north. There were roads with pot-holes up there, too, back in '70.

   "They did not have to draft me, neither," Otis liked to remind the slackers around him. "I stood up and signed up. I served."

   The other Super Patriots around him would hang their heads. None of them had served a lick. Most of them had never left the country, let alone gone in country. Their service to the country was mostly paying taxes, which was mandatory, anyway, and hating the Democrats, which was voluntary, but an obligation they gladly performed. 

   They listened to Right Wing radio in their big trucks. Otis never turned on the radio in his old truck. He only liked Country and Western music, which no one ever sang anymore, not really. He could almost forgive Alan Jackson and accept him but the rest were just hippies in big belt buckles and straight leg jeans. The girls singers were pretty enough but they just sang folk music, not real C &W. 

   "Not a Tammy or a Loretta among 'em," Otis would snort.

   So, the day he fell out of his truck, Otis was paying good attention. He did not fax or text or make calls from the cell phone his grandkids gave him for Christmas. He did not take pictures on it, either, or try to email anything from it. 

   "I jump ever' time the thang rangs," Otis would drawl. He performed a heavier drawl, put it on thck and molasses sounding, when he spoke about technology, to show his compelte disdain for new things in the world. 

 

Eighteen

Eighteen

I found a bench, 

set in the sun

and set myself upon it.

The February wind lashed at my face

and harshly stung and burnt it.

It was the winter, though,

and winter cannot be trusted.

For even in the sunny day

the cold, north wind blusters it.