Chapter 9: White Line Fever

14 September 2014

I made it to the Pacific Ocean the second week of September and spent a couple days camped at Newport. I’d made my lifelong fantasy trip across the country. I needed to decide what to do next. I headed north on the Pacific Coast Highway, slowly making my way back to Seattle. I spent a weekend in the Siuslaw National Forest campground about a mile from the beach and since I was feeling a little isolated ever since Alice left, I decided to go to Church on Sunday.

I do that every so often. I’m terrible at bars. If you are a man in a bar by himself, you are obviously either a drunk or on the prowl. I suppose it is different for women, though they’ll say they just went out to have a drink and a little fun. The truth is women never go to a bar alone. If you happen to be one of the guys who goes to the bar alone on the prowl, you not only have to compete with the other guys who are on the prowl, you have to separate a prospect from her herd and then try to speak cleverly at a volume she can hear over the music and shouting at the ballgame on the big screen TV.

Tom Twain had me edit his book The Real Man’s Sex Book. I admit that he was a lot more successful at picking up women than I was. He’d never been married. He did a lot of traveling around the world and seemed to have a successful engagement with a woman in every port of call. He had advice on picking a girl out of the crowd.

“Pick up the wingman,” he said. “First of all, she isn’t as pretty as the main target at the table. Usually, though, she’s a little starved for attention. Her friend, the pretty one, always has guys trying to get her to dance, buy her drinks, feel her up. The wingman isn’t getting attention. So chat her up. Make wry comments about the way guys are falling over her friend and how well she’s putting them in their place. And then slip in that you think those guys are missing the opportunity to get to know someone really sweet by wasting their time on her friend instead of her.”

Tom swears that this has gotten him laid every time he’s tried it. It’s also left a few very startled and suddenly alone debs in bars abandoned by their wingman.

Me, I find that getting laid is only part of the attraction. I don’t mind that part, for sure, but I just like to talk to people and if the person happens to be a nice or pretty woman (not necessarily both) it just ups the enjoyment. Churches are a great place to meet people. A single man of an appropriate age, who is intelligent and enjoys good conversation over coffee after church, becomes a target for eligible women and/or their mothers. I think Tony Stevens wrote a baseball story about that. If you haven’t read his Take Me Out to the Ballgame series, read them all.

So I went to the Unitarian Church that weekend because Unitarian Universalists tend to have a very liberal outlook on life, relationships, and politics. I remember the first time I went to a Unitarian Church after having been disillusioned by the church I’d been raised in and had thought was so liberal. When they refused to ordain gay ministers that was all she wrote. Rev. Barbara, the minister at the UU Church, who was also obviously gay, had greeted me after the service and listened to my complaints.

“Well, Ari, you know what they say about Unitarianism. It’s the halfway point on the slippery slope from Methodism to Golf.”

I don’t play golf, so I figure I reached the bottom of the slope on a free fall.

Oh, yes, I was telling about the service at the UU Church near the beach in Oregon. The speaker for the day was a woman who worked in social services and counseling. She talked about dealing with depression. I was dealing with that.

It wasn’t that I was particularly depressed. Having Alice for that wonderful week together and then being three weeks on the road alone with my thoughts and my characters, certainly left me with a wistful feeling. But overall, I was excited about what was brewing in my head. I was thinking I’d write a sequel to Redtail. I’d always planned on that being a one-off, but since I visited Laramie and Centennial, Wyoming, I had become enthused about going back.

The depression I was dealing with was Hannah’s. LNDtH was only posting around chapter fifty, but I was writing Chapter 107. Hannah was dealing with her guilt and depression and Brian was struggling to ‘fix’ it. The speaker started talking about developing our own ‘mental health first aid kits.’ Brilliant! I got to thinking about what I’d put in my own mental health first aid kit. Besides a condom. And a Viagra. The recommendations weren’t for substituting something physical for something mental. Some people joked that their kits were filled with chocolate. But the speaker was talking about having things like a CD with a piece of music that always makes you happy, an uplifting poem, a baby picture of your child, or a ribbon you won at the 4H Fair. It was to be filled with things that would remind you that life is fundamentally good, even if you are having a bad day, and that you are fundamentally a good person, even if you don’t feel like it.

‘The Kit’ was born. It would be months before I wrote the chapter it appeared in and a year before it posted, but the first—very first—image in my mind of my kit was of walking into the trailer and finding Alice standing naked in a box marked, ‘Mental Health Kit.’

Some old guy, who said he planned to write the story of his life because it had been very interesting, monopolized all my time during the coffee hour after church and I was afraid that I would hear the entire story before I could get out of the church for lunch. I didn’t care, though. I had a new idea.

I kept going north without anything significant other than the thousands of words I was writing. I would be finished with the writing of LNDtH1 before November and able to focus NaNoWriMo on my Redtail sequel. I was still struggling trying to find a title, but it would come.

I did have a bit of a surprise when I went to explore Tillamook, the home of Oregon’s premier cheese. I saw the sign and turned into the Tillamook Creamery, only to discover that I’d misread the sign and it was the Tillamook Crematory. Tillamook Dairy was a couple miles farther on.

I got to Seattle in time for the various poke and prod appointments that men of a certain age need annually. Doctor, dentist, eye doctor, accountant, lawyer, and daughter.

Maddie and I have always had a great relationship, even though neither one of us is good at sending regular messages to the other or picking up the damned phone. Nonetheless, as soon as we meet at Red Robin and start consuming a hamburger and a beer, our literary conversation is likely to go all over the charts. God help the person who overhears.

“Dad, I need to kill a guy with something that would be found in an artist’s studio. It has to be something the artist would normally be handling every day so that everyone would expect her fingerprints on it. What’s sharp enough? And should I stab him in the heart or in the neck?”

We hammered that issue out for a good long while and I caught a couple raised eyebrows as our server came by with more fries.

“So I’m thinking that the brother and sister are really close to each other and would be totally in love if it weren’t for the fact that they are related and society says no,” I said. “But the characters they are sent back in time to occupy have fallen in love with each other independently. Now, brother and sister are riding in the heads of these two lovers as they consummate their marriage. Are they committing incest?”

“You’re going to torture your characters again, aren’t you, Dad? I love it!”

Well, you get the way our conversations go.

Maddie and I agreed long ago that it wasn’t appropriate for her to read her father’s porn. But we’re happy to discuss the characters and plot twists. When she found out that I intended to write my Redtail sequel from the perspective of the girl involved, she said I needed help.

“Those librarians in Laramie said they’d help, didn’t they?” she asked.

“Yes, but the issues I’m having with this are scarcely historical details. I’d come off as an old pervert if I tried to conduct interviews of college women to find out what they call their genitals when they are with their girlfriends.”

“So get someone else to ask the questions.”

What questions? We worked out an entire interview questionnaire that would help me think and talk like a ranch girl in Wyoming.

Like Mitch when he wanted to know how I knew so much about ranching and cattle in Redtail, many of my readers have asked how I know certain things. Many have also pointed out mistakes that I’ve made. A few have been surprised to find out I was a man instead of a woman and have asked how I write women so well. One email I got said, “If you are a man, you know women better than most women do!” I wrote back, “If you are a woman, I take that as a compliment.”

Here’s the basic truth. Research. I’d never been to Wyoming when I wrote Redtail. I filled notebooks full of descriptions I found, dates of railroad construction, homesteading, legends of old Laramie, wildlife behavior, how many bales of hay it takes to winter a beef cow, and the difference between the amount paid per pound for a cow versus a steer. I have friends who are ranchers and they took me out on a horseback ride in the mountains hunting a bear. They filled my head with stories of ranching problems, the difference between grass fed and grain fed beef, the difference between ranch grown beef and buying yearlings to fatten up for slaughter. And wolves. They had a lot to say about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone.

By the time I left Seattle and worked my way back east to Laramie to do on-location research, I had a three-page interview questionnaire and an appointment at the University Library to discuss how to go about conducting the research.

The questionnaire was to get discussions started, not to get a bunch of yes or no answers. So, the forty bullets each contained several questions. Some of it was simply to get context and to listen to how the women sounded. Other parts were to get some explicit information from young women that they would not normally share with an older guy—or any guy for that matter.

1. What type of music do you enjoy and listen to? Who are your favorite artists? What are your favorite songs? Is it different if you are dancing instead of listening?

2. Where do you go to dance? What kind of music is played? With whom do you dance? Are there school dances? Name the top three places for nightlife.

3. Do you ride (horses)? Were you raised with them nearby? Where do you like to ride? Describe the training your horse received.

Those were pretty innocuous as a warmup for the interview.

6. Describe high school dating. What do you define as dating and is it common? When did you begin? What did you do on a date? Were there social pressures surrounding dating? What were your favorite places or activities for a date? Did you become serious with a person you were dating? How quickly? Are you still seeing your high school sweetheart?

7. How does college dating differ from high school dating? Is it easier to find a date? Do you have a ‘steady’ that you date? Are you engaged?

Of course, the really interesting stuff came later in the interviews. I could only hope that the interview would get this far.

24. Are you sexually active? When did you begin? How do you reconcile your sexual behavior with your religious beliefs if any? Do you consider yourself to be permanently monogamous, serial monogamous, pluralist, polyamorous? Is sex important in a relationship? Do you have experience with same-sex relations? How did it work out? Do you have favorite sex acts? Absolute sexual no-nos?

25. Are sex and love always together for you? What are your views on sex outside of relationships?

26. What is your opinion of romance? Is it important to you? Do you want a permanent long-term relationship (as in husband or wife)? How soon?

27. Do you have siblings? Same sex or opposite sex? Are you close? What do you love about your brother/sister? What do you hate? Do you think it is okay for siblings to be sexually attracted to each other—regardless if they ever act on that attraction?

I had high hopes for my research trip to Laramie, but few expectations. However, when I sent a copy of the questionnaire to Alice to get her opinion, she sent back nearly twenty pages of detailed answers, some of which we used for a mutual masturbation session over the phone. I’m still pulling gems out of that little document.

It was windy in Laramie. Most people had already pulled out of the KOA campground, but they still had a section for winter campers that had power and insulated water pipes. I was warned to disconnect my hose at night. There was no way I’d be able to use my awning without turning my trailer into a kite. Every time I tried to cook on my gas grill, the wind blew out the flame. I would be cooking inside the trailer for my two weeks in Laramie.

“You know how Laramie was founded?” the campground host asked me. I’d told her that I was in town doing research for my new novel.

“I’ve read about the coming of the railroad,” I answered.

“Well, that’s only part of the story. The first settlers were actually headed to California. They came over the ridge of the mountains there to the east of us and got hit by this wind. As soon as they got to the river here, they decided to make camp and hunker down to wait out the wind before they continued on,” she said.

“Oh.” I’d never heard that story. I guess it made sense as being how the Union Pacific decided on this location for their station.

“Yeah. They’re still down there,” she deadpanned.

I’d been had.

My first research stop was at the Union Pacific Station Museum. I got lucky. The museum is run by volunteers and is normally only open by reservation. I happened to pull into the parking lot about six blocks from where the original station had been just as a volunteer was opening the door to do some maintenance. He let me in to tour the exhibits, which included a variety of information about the creation of Laramie City, Wyoming.

The Union Pacific had vast land grants along the route from Chicago to Promontory Summit where it met up with the Central Pacific Railroad and the famous golden spike was driven. The land was much, much more than the right of way for the tracks. It included land for stations, water and coal depots, forest land for ties, gravel pits, and even towns. The UP began selling lots at one of the major termini for the railroad in April of 1868 and in two weeks Laramie City had 5,000 residents. The railroad arrived on May 9 and on May 10, hundreds more people, goods, and supplies arrived on the first train. Laramie City was the staging point for the construction of the long grade that moved the rails over the Rocky Mountains.

I’d found the perfect time and place for my characters to come to their climax, so to speak.

There were still a number of the original or restored storefronts and businesses in Laramie, including the first building made of brick and a few mocked up saloons and brothels. Brothels were a big business in Laramie. They were still legal until the 1960s when the City finally did away with them. Some of the most colorful characters of the 1860s were associated in some form or another with the brothels, which included most of the music halls and bars in town. Some were no more than tents with a line of workers waiting outside to get their shot at one of the prostitutes.

It was when I got to the Coe Library at the University of Wyoming the next day, though, that I started on the true road to discovery, and the nature of my research changed.

“May I help you with something today?” the librarian in the rare books room asked. She was a nice woman in a business suit sitting at the first desk. I guessed that she was about thirty—one of the professionals and probably not a student. Though she had no trace of accent, I’d met enough people of Mexican descent since I got to Laramie that I recognized her Latino heritage.

“Hi. My name is Aroslav. I’m doing some research.”

“The author,” the librarian said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I read Redtail after your last visit.”

“Really?”

“Yes. We had a lottery and I lost.” She had a bright smile when she said that and I hoped she was joking.

“Uh…”

“We knew from the listing on Amazon and what you told Ms. Cooper when you were here that it was a dirty book and I volunteered to read and review it before the pure eyes of any of my colleagues were forced on it.”

“I hope you didn’t consider it dirty or offensive,” I said.

“Anything that says erotic is assumed to be pornographic until proven otherwise. We order copies of everything that we discover has mention of Laramie or historical Wyoming in it. There are some sexy scenes in the book, but nothing that made me masturbate. Not everyone in the department has read it, but several have,” she said. “By the way, I’m Aubrey Diaz. How can we help your research? Are you writing a sequel?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. Since I wrote the first book without ever having visited Laramie, I thought that I’d spend a couple of weeks doing research before I started this one. I’m jumping back a few years in the time travel sequences for this one and my characters will arrive about the same time that the railroad does,” I said. “I’ll see if I can heat up the sex scenes for you and make them more satisfying.”

“Oh, it’s not as if I wouldn’t have done Cole if I’d met him in a study room,” Aubrey laughed. “I can see already that you are going to make me a character in your next book.”

“How can you see that? I only have a rudimentary sketch of what will happen in this book,” I said.

In fact, I’d only figured out the title and the role of the raven while I was in Seattle. My editor, Jay, had looked at my potential titles which included “Wapiti”, “Bugle”, and “Chogan” and shook his head.

“What are these?” he asked.

“Well, Redtail refers to a type of hawk. He’s the catalyst for Cole’s time travel. I’m not settled on the catalyst for this one. The first two refer to elk and the third one is the Algonquin word for raven. I’d prefer something to do with a raven, but there’s no reason to have Algonquin language in Wyoming. Unfortunately, the Cheyenne word is kohkahycumest.”

“Redtail is also a descriptive term. Why don’t you think of something distinctive about the animal and use that? Like if it was an elk, you could call it Elevenpoint.”

Brilliant. This is why we have editors and story consultants. Blackfeather.

“I’m psychic,” Aubrey said. I looked at her. “Seriously. My mother was a Mexican spirit reader. I’ll read your cards, your tea leaves, your palm, or your fortune. Oh. Sorry, you don’t have much of a fortune, do you?”

“You pegged that part right,” I said. “And I think you are right. You just got a role in the book. How would you like to be a sixteen-year-old virgin selected for the sex-act that starts the time travel?”

“I wasn’t a sixteen-year-old virgin even when I was sixteen. It sounds like fun! Now let’s get the rest of your research underway.”

I started describing the basics of what I planned and Aubrey started bringing me resources. They were spread out over two tables with my laptop open on one and resource books next to it. Aubrey spread out original plat maps and directories so I could take pictures of them on the other table. Nice, short, tight skirt.

I didn’t stop for lunch and worked until the special collections room was ready to close. I had enough historical data collected to keep me sifting through things for days. Aubrey brought me a history of Laramie City written in 1875 that said,

of those [5,000 residents], a thousand were strong, earnest, daring men, ready to face any danger or ready to undertake any perilous task if they could, in any honorable way, better their fortunes. Another thousand were ready to adopt any policy, honorable or otherwise, so that they got money, and ran no great risks. The balance, with the exception of a few good and noble women, were made up of gamblers, thieves, highwaymen, robbers, cut-throats, garroters, prostitutes, and their necessary companions, who made their living by preying upon the poor laborers who, as soon as their month’s wages were in their pockets, would rush into town from the road and timber, and sport while there was a penny left. (“History and Directory of Laramie City, Wyoming Territory”, By J. H. Triggs, Laramie City: Daily Sentinel Print, 1875.)

I packed up my dead computer, dead cell phone, and dead camera. Everything needed to be recharged, including me.

“Aubrey, you’ve been so much help today, I don’t know how to thank you. May I buy you dinner?” I said.

“I knew you were going to ask that, so I cleared my calendar,” she said. “Let’s go to Rosie’s. Tomorrow is the Border War and you’ll see lots of students there. Probably Pistol Pete and the cheerleaders, too.”

Maybe she was psychic. Maybe I’d get lucky, too. That skirt… When she’d been leaning over the table in front of me spreading out maps, I’d had some distinctly pornographic thoughts about her bending over.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Aubrey said. “And the answer is definitely… maybe.”

I might actually have found a woman crazier than me.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson about crazy women when I found Belle wandering around the house in the middle of the night with a butcher knife. Even neurotic Paula who couldn’t go to sleep at night if she had to get up in the morning. Once when Treasure had gotten testy over something and I responded calmly, she laughed that she needed to write a thank you note to Paula and Belle for making her look normal. Then there was the groupie, Jodie. Or Becky in Florida, or the nudist Nona, or Val the leech in Tennessee. I’d had experience with crazy.

Or Georgia. Remember her? None of them could compete with Nicki, though. Which was worse, the sickness or the cure?

A Long Time Ago: Stalker

“You are in so much shit!” Nicki said as she approached me in my workshop. As a sophomore, I’d been given a work study grant to put in ten hours a week in the theater scene shop. Carlos, who took care of the school stage at Ben Davis, had been hired to design the shows, but I was his assistant technical director, so I had a lot of work to do on the fall production of Hamlet.

“Are you on my crew today, Nicki?” I asked. That was about the only thing I could guess that might be deep shit. I liked Nicki, but she scared the bejeezus out of me. She was just… batshit crazy.

“No. I just came over to inform you about your troubles and wait to watch you explain it to Paula,” she laughed. Nicki’s laugh never sounded funny. It was the kind of laugh you expect the psycho in a horror movie to have, only it wasn’t fake. It was the simple enjoyment of something purely evil. Paula and I were still kind of feeling our way around a relationship. We were sort of boyfriend/girlfriend, but we didn’t really go out. We just hung out together on campus most of the time. Who had money to go out?

“How about just telling me what kind of trouble I’m in,” I sighed.

“You have a secret admirer. Or maybe she’s not a secret to you and you’ve just been hiding her from the rest of us,” Nicki said.

“How do you know this?”

“I saw your picture on her mirror during dorm inspection.” The color drained from my face. I sat down.

“Maybe she is on a freshman scavenger hunt,” I suggested. “They have those for orientation, don’t they?”

I didn’t doubt that Nicki had seen a picture if there was one. She was the freshman dorm monitor. That was a sophomore who could act as a big sister to the freshmen and perform the duty of room inspections once a week. Personally, I believe Nicki got the job because it included a private room and there was not a woman on campus who would share with her. She’d gone through four roommates during our freshman year. The last one had withdrawn from school three weeks before finals. Apparently, she was flunking out, but rumors had it that she simply couldn’t stay three more weeks in a room with Nicki.

“Mmm. It’s not just one picture,” Nicki continued. “I recognized you right away, so I investigated carefully. There’s a newspaper article that looks to be about three or four years old with a picture of you getting mud in the face and a description of your musical based on Origin of Species. I didn’t know you did that! Nice notices. There was a prom picture and a series of you onstage. Couldn’t tell the production. And she cut your photo out of the yearbook with pinking shears. Who cuts up a yearbook?” Nicki asked.

I was wracking my brain trying to come up with an answer. Prom? Had Deb transferred? If so, Paula and I probably wouldn’t last the month. But Deb wouldn’t be housed in the freshman dorm.

“She has lipstick hearts and kisses all over her mirror with ‘Mrs. Aroslav’ and ‘I ♥ Ari’ written in them.”

“My god! Who is this crazy woman?”

“Her name’s Georgia.”

It’s a good thing I was sitting down. Georgia, the crazy girl who gave me her panties after the Valentine’s Day Dance my senior year. The last time I’d seen her, she had found out I was assisting at the Summer Theater Institute and had enrolled for a week. She’d popped up near me every time I turned around. I don’t think she ever attended any of her own classes that week. I kept sneaking around the campus trying not to run into her. The last night of her week there, she’d shown up at my dorm room and knocked. We didn’t have peepholes or anything like that. I just opened the door and she pushed her way in. She was wearing a diaphanous gown that showed clearly there was nothing beneath it.

You have to understand that I thought Georgia was seriously cute. I’d spent an entire evening staring down her dress at her tits and finally managed to get hold of one of them. They were just about perfect. But she was also scary. For three weeks after that date, I received a card from her in the mail each day. Some of them were expensive cards. They all had hearts, or messages like “Love is running your fingers over the cracks in someone’s heart and soul while looking into their eyes with a smile that says ‘I’m staying’.” Where do people find these kinds of things? She started calling once a week until my mother asked her to stop. I thought it was funny at first. Deb even thought it was funny and wanted to act out what I’d done with Georgia. Then it got spooky and then stalkerish.

She stood in the middle of my room at Institute and dropped the gown, confirming my notion there was nothing under it.

“Take me. I want you, Ari. I can’t stand waiting any longer. We’ll have such beautiful children together.”

Oh, fucking shit!

“No! You’ve got to get dressed, Georgia. You’ve got to leave. I’ve got a girlfriend. This room is monitored. I have to get up in the morning. You have to go!”

It was so painful to do that! Those little titties… I couldn’t take my eyes off of them the whole time she was there. They were so perfect, I just wanted to suck on those little nipples! But coming to my room? Have my children?

I’d waited until I thought it was safe, packed an overnight bag and ran for my car. I drove the seventy-five miles home, snuck into the house, and slept on the sofa. I didn’t really have a room in this house because my folks had just moved there with my baby sister when I left for college. I had my sleeping bag with me and Mom found me there in the morning.

Now Georgia had followed me to college? Just shoot me!

Why did such perfect little titties have to be attached to someone so creepy?

“Nicki, you have a master key, right?” I moaned.

“I am not going to let you into her room so you can have your wicked way with her. You want in the freshman girls’ dorm, you come to my room.”

“That’s not what I was thinking. I was wondering if you could go in late tonight and sort of smother her in her sleep,” I groaned. “Or me. I’ll give you the key to my room and you can sneak in and smother me.”

Nicki seemed to consider it a minute.

“I was kidding, Nicki. I was kidding!”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not really a serial killer. But I might be able to classify this as ‘just cause’. Well, I could do you if you promise to fuck me before I kill you. I hear that men have an incredible orgasm while they are suffocating,” she said.

“Nicki, please. This is serious. I have to figure out a way to solve this. She can’t just follow me around for the rest of my life. I’ll have to talk to her,” I complained.

“I’ll figure out something for you, but you’ll owe me big time.”

“No violence. You know how I feel about violence,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah. Like I’d go to prison for you. Ha!”