Chapter 135: Kathy Lynn and Sunny

Tuesday, June 15, 1971

We made our way through Albuquerque to Old Town. This was the location of Albuquerque’s historic town square, and the one time La Casa de Armijo which was built on the east side of the square in the 1700s. It served as a fort during the Indian uprisings and later a trading post before falling into disrepair. In the 1930s, the town decided to do something about the unsightly old ruin, and completely restored the casa along the lines of the original.

The La Placita Dining Rooms leased part of the building in 1931 for a small Mexican restaurant, and it was still there today, forty years later.** My mouth was watering as I thought about it. When we arrived, I told the hostess that we had a party of twenty-two people. She told us it would be a thirty-minute wait while they set up for such a large group. So I turned around to tell everyone, but the only one there was Anna.

“They’re all in the gift shops,” she said without waiting for my question. “Will you promise to stay right here if I go take a quick look?”

“I promise I will not leave the restaurant. And I just scanned and found nothing threatening. They said they would be ready for us in thirty minutes,” I told her.

Anna Carter was a doctor, a head trauma specialist, a CIA agent, and for now, my lover and protector. She was also a woman, and there was shopping available and time to kill before we ate. How could I tell her no?

I looked around for a place to sit, and finally wandered back out front to see if there were any benches. There were, so I took a seat on the shaded porch and started scanning again. Finally locating all the girls, spread out over three different shops on the Old Town Square, I turned my attention to the other people exploring the square.

One couple, dressed as can only be described as hippies, caught my eye. I watched as the young man kicked an already beat up looking old car parked at the curb, some fifty feet away.

“Ow! That had to hurt!” I thought to myself as I began to watch them. It was a young couple, maybe mid to late twenties. I discovered that they were not married, but had been living together in a commune.

She was wringing her hands as she cringed at the vicious kick. When she went to him, he backhanded her across the face, sending her sprawling out into the street. An older couple wearing jeans, western style shirts, and boots were walking by. The woman went immediately to the young girl’s aid, as a child cried out from inside the car. The man placed himself between the angry hippie and the two women, as if to protect them. Some words were spoken, but the older man refused to move, blocking the young hippie. After a moment, he stopped trying and returned to the car, where he reached in and pulled out a gun.

“Kip! Penny! Trouble out front. Guy with a gun, fifty feet to the north of the restaurant. Protect the girls!” I thought to them.

Then I began walking cautiously towards the man. I knew I could drop him at any time, but I hoped it wouldn’t go that far. The young hippie began waving the old revolver, and threatening the older man. So I simply walked up behind the hippie, and grabbing his neck with my fingers, I pinched as I put him to sleep.

The older man looked at me. “That was some trick, partner,” he said. “It looks like you put him right out. Will he be okay, you reckon?”

“He’ll have a nasty headache when he wakes up, but he may have a bigger headache explaining the assault with a deadly weapons charge,” I replied.

Penny arrived as the cops pulled up. I went to stand on the sidewalk beside her and replayed what happened while we watched the cops do their thing. Some of the girls saw us and congregated around watching the scene in the street. The cops debated for a few minutes on calling an ambulance, then one of them talked to the older man while his partner spoke to his wife and the young woman who was now standing there holding a small child in her arms. She was refusing medical treatment, and clearly afraid of the still sleeping hippie.

“They are not married, but have been living in a commune together. He’s not the kid’s father, but he had been taking care of them before he was evicted from the commune for fighting yesterday. They made it this far in that old piece-of-shit car, before it finally broke down. This is not the first time he has abused her, but it is the first time with witnesses. She has no money and nowhere to turn,” I told Penny and the girls as we stood there on the curb. I was sure the police would get around to me shortly.

Finally, the ambulance arrived and they loaded the still sleeping hippie. When they tried to get the young woman to get in with him, she refused. “I’ll never go anywhere near that bastard again!” she cried.

I stepped off the curb, covering the few feet to where they were talking.

“Miss? My name is Michael, and I’d like to invite you and your child, and this other couple to be my guests for lunch at the La Placita,” I said, nodding my head in the direction of the restaurant. “While we eat, I was thinking, that maybe we could put our heads together and come up with an alternative plan for getting both of you where you want to go.”

She just looked me up and down without saying anything. You could see the fear in her eyes.

“This is the young man who put the sleeper thing on your ... er, friend. He probably saved his life, because I would not have been that easy on him!” the rancher told the young girl.

“What did you do to him?” asked the Officer.

I did my best teenaged shrug as I said, “Just something I saw on TV.”

“Well, I need your identification. Just for the report. There will be no charges filed,” he told me. “That is, unless this young lady wants to file assault charges on the guy. There were too many witnesses that have backed up your story.”

I turned to Penny, to see if she was going to get involved.

“There’s no need, Michael. It would just muddy the waters,” she thought. “Just show them your I.D.”

While I was giving the officer my information, the older couple was talking to the young mother. I saw the cowboy reach in his pocket and pulling out a twenty, he slipped it to his wife to give to the girl.

“Missy, you just go have that lunch. We’ve got livestock to tend, so we have to get back. I’m sure that nice young man can help you come up with something,” the wife said. Then she hugged the mother and child, slipping the twenty into her hand.

“C’mon, Justice, there’s critters to be fed,” she told her husband. Justice smiled as he tipped his cowboy hat and followed after his wife.

“By the way, we won’t be eating alone. I have my family with me,” I told her. Jessica, Hanna, Vickie, and Amy all surrounded her and began talking. Pretty soon, we were seated in the courtyard at the restaurant.

When the building had been restored in the 30s, they also restored the courtyard. Because there was no air conditioning at the time, patrons would eat their meals under the shade of a large tree growing in the center of the courtyard. When air conditioning was finally installed, they enclosed the courtyard, but left the tree growing in the center.

So we ate our lunch beside the historic old tree. As we ate, I let the girls do most of the talking. I did tell them about one of the descendants of the original occupants who went on to become governor of New Mexico, serving three terms.

I also told them the story about how one of the previous owners of the hacienda, back in 1872, had a daughter that was getting married. She was adamant about walking down a grand staircase in her wedding gown. Well, that’s a little tough to do in a one-story home, so Daddy had the roof knocked off and had a second story added over part of the hacienda, complete with an ornate grand staircase, all the way from Spain.

About halfway through the meal, Kathy Lynn began to open up a little. She had introduced herself earlier as Kathy Lynn Stephenson, from Craigsville, West Virginia. She was twenty-two, and had run away from home five years ago, when she found out she was pregnant. Her father had been a GI in post WWII Japan, having met and married her mother there, before bringing her back to the family farm to live.

Kathy Lynn was their oldest daughter, and she had four younger sisters. They had lived a hard life, scratching out an existence on the farm, before her father had gotten a job at the feed store in town. Over time, he had worked his way up, so when the owner was ready to retire, he sold the store to her daddy. They moved into town then, and the whole family began working in the feed store. She had hated the farm, and now she hated the feed store as well. It wasn’t the hard work. It was just that it was so dirty, and she felt confined in the small town with its backward ways.

Homer Littleton was the Mayor’s youngest son, and had talked Kathy Lynn into going out with him one Saturday night to the local barn dance, shortly before the end of school. Later, in the back seat, Homer had sweet-talked the young Kathy Lynn into a little more, and then a little more, until the next thing she knew, she was naked and Homer was between her legs. She decided that she liked sex, but didn’t care for Homer, when he wouldn’t acknowledge her at school on Monday.

When she missed her period a few weeks later, she knew that there would be trouble from her family and the community. She knew that unmarried seventeen-year-old girls who became pregnant were treated like dirt for the rest of their lives. It had happened to the Jenkins girl a few years ago. So, she ditched the one-horse town and began hitchhiking west. She fell in with a group of hippies, and ended up at a commune in California. Her daughter was born there and she named her Sunshine, calling her Sunny for short.

She realized that the commune was nothing more than a farm and she began to think about leaving. But with Sunny, she needed someone to take care of them. Stan Blinkman was a hothead, but he seemed nice to her, when he wasn’t drinking. He was always talking of leaving the commune for some wild scheme or the other, so Kathy Lynn had put up with the abuse because he had promised to take her with him when he left.

Saturday night, with too much to drink in his gullet, he had picked a fight with a young guy and roughed him up pretty bad. Unfortunately for him, it was the last straw, and the commune voted to expel him. They gave him the old clunker to drive, so he loaded Kathy Lynn and Sunny, along with their meager possessions, and headed east, presumably to find another commune. However, Kathy Lynn had decided to ride as far east as she could, and would call her folks to come get her when she got close to Craigsville. If they’d even speak to her.

As the last of her story came out, the girls all crowded around her with hugs and tears of support. Finally, Nicky looked at me as she asked, “What can we do for Kathy Lynn and Sunny?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Do you suspect you’d be welcome at home if we could help you get there?” I asked.

“I really don’t know,” Kathy Lynn replied. “My father is from a very old-fashioned family. My mother is still considered an outsider. My sisters and I were always considered half-breeds, because of our Japanese ancestry, and my mother was from an even more conservative family in Japan. Although she lost her parents and most of the rest of the family in the war. They were from Nagasaki.”

“Isn’t that where they dropped the bomb?” Vickie asked. “Oh, I’m sorry. I wasn’t meaning to be rude!”

“You’re cool,” Kathy Lynn told her. “I wasn’t hip to it, since it was before my time.”

“So you don’t know if you’d be welcome if you just arrived on their doorstep with Sunny?” I asked. “Why don’t you give them a call?”

“Before that lady gave me the twenty, I didn’t have a dime to my name. Stan kept all our money,” she said sadly.

“Well, it seems that before we can make a decision, we need more information. I saw a payphone in the lobby. Nicky, why don’t you and Amy take Kathy Lynn and my credit card and make a call. Tell her folks that the foundation will be glad to help her get a couple of plane tickets home,” I told them.

The group of girls left as I resumed eating my second order of sopapillas. They were fantastic. In fact, all the food was great. While they were gone, the server brought the check. But since Nicky had taken my last credit card, I looked to Penny for one of my others. However, she had gone with them.

Jessica saw my dilemma and laughed as she pulled out one of my errant cards. “You gave me this to buy my supplies on Saturday. I’ve been meaning to give it back, but I actually think I am becoming attached to it. Every time they came back from calling on it, they always treated me with so much more respect,” she giggled as she handed me the card.

I handed it to the server, along with a request for one more glass of iced tea. Soon the gaggle of girls came back from the phone call. I could tell it was not good news.

“She spoke to her sister. Her parents wouldn’t even come to the phone,” Nicky said indignantly. “Of all the nerve!”

“Yeah. Kathy Lynn doesn’t deserve to be treated that way. Hell, they didn’t even care they had a granddaughter. If I was them, I’d do anything to get my daughter and granddaughter back!” Vickie seethed.

Kathy Lynn’s eyes were red as she tried hard not to cry. “Now what am I going to do?”

“There, there. Michael will think of something,” Abby said. “He’s good at that!”

“Okay gang, Listen up! We’re headed to the ranch tonight and there are no more big towns with airports between here and there. Since we can’t take her to the ranch, does anyone have any ideas?” I thought to my family.

Everyone was silent as they searched for a solution.

“Why can’t you take us to this ranch?” Kathy Lynn asked.

Catherine looked at me, trying hard not to laugh. Anna was grinning. While Penny, Karla, and Kip were used to our mental dialogues, they didn’t catch the implication of what had just happened. I’m not sure about the three sisters; I still had a hard time with their thoughts since they were still thinking predominately in Haitian. The rest of the girls all looked from one to another, as they began to giggle. They had figured out what it meant.