Wendy
Copyright© 2018 by Old Man with a Pen
Chapter 17
I mean ... even the animals don’t shit where they eat or sleep. Animals routinely cleanse themselves ... almost ritually ... get that spot first and on to the next.
Humans revel in filth ... at least ... the ones I met. Ask a cowboy when their last bath was and they’ll proudly mention the sixteenth of August, two or three years ago. Of course, they’ll mention that it was from falling in the creek ... accidentally.
The past was disgusting. Horses ... the means of transportation not involving feet ... dropped road apples every 45 minutes. In the mining district ... the whole of Nevada ... men ... and women ... rode or traveled by horsepower. And don’t even think about walking down a street after a cattle drive.
Raised boardwalks, a convenience supplied by individual store owners, were far less prevalent than the movies would suggest. Many stores were tents and no store owner was going to waste money on a raised sidewalk when the lumber could be used for shelving or false fronts. Towns moved almost as fast as the miners and lumber was a labor intensive endeavor. Nails were blacksmith made and expensive.
A beer was two cents ... and damned awful ... while a bath in first use hot water was a buck. Fifty beers were more enticing than a bath. Besides ... a buck was an all night fuck. (a two dollar whore was high class.) So ... people stunk ... stank? ... smelled of dirt, incomplete wiping, sweat and bad food. This was before the Saturday night bath ... Cologne and perfume? Hoyt’s Nickel Cologne was two and a half beers ... and thirty years in the future.
However ... Seven and I were walking down a dusty, musty street of a no name town on the eastern slope of Mount Davidson. The Comstock Lode had yet to be discovered. I had a thought and Seven said, “Sure. Why not?”
“What?” I asked.
But she was too busy making plans to answer.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.