Prologue

Doobee doobee do Dondoobee doo-bee

Doobee doobee do Dondoobee doo-bee do

I remember the day my life changed clearly. Having been a fuckup for 22 years, I had a lucid moment.

Mother was driving me out to the farm. The christmas trees needed shaping and I had succeeded in offending the Michigan Licensing Bureau yet again.

A few months after daddy had died, mother had treated herself to the movies and there was a fifteen minute Featurette about crazy Finns racing the clock at a place in Finland called 1000 Lakes. She was impressed no end by the drivers.

Mother is a Minnesota Finn and she drives like the very devil. She had taken the bridge at Spaulding Drain at speed and flew past Yallup's Cutoff, shifting down to crest the hill just before the Stony Creek Bridge ... and Stony Creek Elementary.

Stony Creek Bridge was a narrow iron girder affair and a car even slightly sideways would strike either end of the body on the ironworks.

She was setting up for the Ess curve just after Centerline Road. As fast as we were going, Centerline was mere seconds away.

"Mom?"

"David," she said, "You know better than to bother me when I'm trying to drive," as she began her gravel spewing slide so she would be traveling sideways when the road switched from north south to east west and back to north south.

Putting her foot in it, the car, a new white and blue 1964 Volvo 122 with the dual side draft Solex carbs, four speed and one hundred and ten horses under the hood, slid around the Ess and straightened out doing 85 miles an hour. She clutched and nailed fourth and a hundred mph, shifting down, down, down, using engine compression to brake for the corner at Dewitt and Price.

The hill in front of the family farm netted a good fifty feet of horizontal air and a slide in front of the Migrant Housing. Catching a gear and power sliding left at Airport road, she came to a stop at the trail back to the tree farm, she slapped the timing chronometer on the dash.

"Fifty five miles an hour average from the house," she exulted. "Now ... what did you want?"

"Mom, what's wrong with me?"

"That would take all night, David."

"Could you write it out?"

"Too many trees."

"What?"

"That much paper would kill too many trees," she said ... with laughter in her voice.

"How about in a nutshell?"

"You were a mistake ... an infatuation that got out of hand ... one time," she said.

"I'm a bastard?"

"I was married ... your birth certificate plainly states that Charles William Austin is your father ... even if he wasn't.

"He never knew," she said.

"Mom, you have dark brown hair, Daddy had coal black hair until the day he died. CharlesB has black hair, Grace and Maryanne have black hair," I ran my hand through my white blond hair and squinted through the only ice blue eyes in the history of the Austin clan. "How could he not know?"