Chapter 1

Hell, I was a happy go lucky kid. I had it made in the shade and I knew it. My Dad was a big cheese in town. He owned the biggest Department Store in our hometown and it was actually the biggest in the county. I know it wasn't saying much for Cass County Texas wasn't such a much to start with, but it was something.

We also owned and operated "The Red Barn" a grocery store that was a part of the Affiliated Food Stores sorta chain. Of course Affiliated Foods was merely naming rights. It was a big grocery concern and warehouse and it was where we bought the groceries we sold at "The Red Barn."

Of course "The Red Barn" was a made up name for the place and it came about when my Dad had his cotton warehouse painted Barn Red, put up a big sign, and got started. It wasn't a Supermarket by any means, but it was a large grocery store for our town.

The part of the Cotton Warehouse he'd converted into a grocery store was rather impressive for a town as small as ours. The Red Barn had nearly seventy-five hundred square feet of selling space. It was bigger than the local Safeway store and the butcher shop was bigger by far than Safeway's model. We also had a Piggly-Wiggly in town, but it wasn't even in the running, even if the manager did have two blonde daughters who were something special.

Mickey and Meg were both as pretty as pictures and from the little contact I had with them they seemed sweet as pie. I always thought it was too bad they were both three or four years younger than me. Oh well, I'll have to admit they were a little out of my league anyway.

I spent my junior high and high school years employed by the Red Barn on and off and by virtue of a prostate malady of the lumberyard's manager I became the default manager there. It was a job I wasn't exactly prepared for, but I made do.

Luckily for me most of the lumberyard's customers or the largest one by far was my father's building business. I had to make sure we had enough lumber, plywood, and wall studs to keep turning out three bedroom bricks. It was fairly easy in fact. Each one of the units took about an equal amount of materials and due to the fact they were all being built to be purchased with FHA loans the materials were fairly standardized. The framing was all #2 Southern Yellow Pine, and the decking was always 1/2-inch CD plywood.

The forming material wasn't grade specific and the forms were routinely torn apart and cut into shorter lengths to be included in the roof framing. Hell, it all looked great after the decking was applied and the shingles were in place. If an occasion did come up where the FHA inspector was going to take a look at things during construction we could always run out to my Uncle's sawmill and borrow the grade stamps and apply the requisite marks to the lumber we used. So, no harm, no foul. Not where the money was concerned anyway. Once the bricks were laid it didn't mean shit anymore anyhow.

The lumberyard actually did pretty well during this time. We had a captive builder who used what I bought and the ultimate customers were always happy from the excellent work of the cabinetmaker we always used and our finish carpenters did great work. How many people who are buying a house do you think want to get up into the closed up attic and check the lumber the place is made from for grade stamps anyway?

The main type of lumber used was the wall studs anyway and they were too damned hard to cut up out of framing lumber. We always bought them in straight trucks from stud mills in Arkansas, and the lumber they were cut from would easily grade out as #1 Dense, a step above anything that the government required.

The only place where something bad could happen was where a rafter was made of a long, 22' or longer 2x6 or 2x8 anyway, and since we had a normal crew of everyday hands and an excellent foreman they always made sure to pick an excellent example of long length stock for longer stretches.

The plywood we used for decking helped out here too. It was rated for 16/32 use, which allowed it to be used for sub floor as long as the joist were on 16" centers and for roof decking the joist could be on 32" centers. Our foreman always used them on 12" centers for sub floor and 24" centers for roof decking so they were easily strong enough to pass muster.

Hell, I even picked up an extra grand about every other weekend by painting the exterior of the houses after they were in the dry. It was little skin off my ass to paint a few doors, some window trim, and the boxed in soffit. I was lucky that our normal inside painter didn't like to do outside work. He actually appreciated not having to mess with it while he was busily smearing the mud on the sheetrock joints and painting the house's interior.

I'd also breakdown and do the wiring if the normal electrician wanted a couple of days off too. Actually, there is nothing to wiring a house, especially if you do it while the house is going up. You just nail on the boxes for outlets and for light fixtures. Once you're looking at a room that's been roughed out it's easy to see where they should go, and then it's a little like tinker toys running a length of 12-2 Romex with/ground from the breaker box to the light or plug. You have to run a switch leg from the light fixtures to the wall switches and then it's over until you finish up by stripping the ends off the wires and plug them into the ez-wire slots and finally tie them into the breakers.

It was almost no work at all after I got rolling and it was simple to pick up an extra $2500 a week. It felt mighty good to go down to the Chivalay place that August and lay $13,500 on the table and speak for a six-wheel drive Silverado. I just loved those dual wheel pickups, especially with the four door cabs.

I wasn't through there though. I added a one hundred and fifty gallon extra gasoline tank that rode right up against the cab in the bed and I did a little carpenter work of my own.

Of course I'd leanred to put on cedar shake or shingle roofs during my normal job and so I'd built my own camper onto the back of my pickup. It didn't look like those shitty little fiberglass campers either. I'd finished the walls inside and insulated it of course. I even built the add-on gas tank a little compartment of its own, along with plenty of ventilation for the gas fumes. Hell, I had a nice custom looking Outback cruiser, before I was done, even if the North East Texas Piney Woods was as close to the outback as it would ever get.

My last major add-on was a Warn Bumper and winch to replace the front bumper. I swapped out the normal twelve volt pickup battery for a 12 volt model intended to fire up an over the road truck and then no matter how much I used the winch I couldn't run the battery down. I had fucked around and put together a nice camping truck for one summer's worth of odd jobs and it really did look fine after I had the front wheel wells modified to take a set of 12x36 Monster Mudders. The rear wheels were another problem. The wheels were not made to fit together side by side and still allow a pair of 12" inch wide tires to work together.

I ended up buying aluminum wheels all around and those for the back had to be looked up in the back of a very thick parts book. I finally got it right though, but not until I had a two-inch thick spacer made to go between the dual wheels to keep the tire's sidewalls from rubbing against each other. This also caused me to have to find some three-inch long wheel studs, but hey, I got it done.

The first weekend my new maxi-truck was ready I was in hog heaven. I prowled around the rough areas of Lake Texarkana just looking for bad roads to take and deep ditches to cross. The truck, the winch, the tires, the wheels, and I all got a workout. And it all happened on Saturday afternoon. That was the good part, because it gave me all day Sunday to wash the muddy water out of the works. I still had to replace one front wheel disc and pads setup.

It was a costly lesson, but I took right to it. No matter what your truck can make it through you'd be best advised not to do it unless there was no other way out. None of the parts under there were made to operate in muddy dirty shitty water, and they wouldn't do it for long.

Still, I wouldn't trade it for the world. It looked so Kewl sitting on those giant ground grippers. I knew I had to have a camping trailer for it at once. I looked around on the net searching for one and found what I knew I had to have almost right away.

It was a popup that fit in a pickup bed. You know what I'm talking about. It looks a little like a tent and you just slide the whole thing into your pickup bed and raise the walls when you get ready to camp.

Now there was no way I could use it in my pickup, what with the extra fuel tank, the fifth wheel hitch I wasn't even using, and the other shit I carried back there. Not to worry, I'd seen the cure for my troubles made once out of the bed of a wrecked out pickup.

I went by the local junkyard and bought a wrecked 1972 Chevy fleetside long bed pickup. At my local welding shop I had the cab and the frame beneath it cut off and had a trailer hitch put on. I had what amounted to a trailer built out of the backside of a normal pickup. It was just right to mount the popup in and with a little connecting I had my trailer for not much more than the popup tent costs. I even bought two more of the aluminum wheels like before and had another pair of Monster Mudders put on the ground.

I'll admit it didn't look exactly normal. It gave the impression there was some way for the monster Mudders under the pickup trailer to lend pulling power to the rig. That didn't bother me one damned bit. I wanted it to look impressive and to look like something out of the ordinary.

No matter about the false impression the bigger tires under the trailer gave, the whole setup was just right. The trailer pulled especially well and the truck had plenty of power to pull it. No doubt the 454 engine had something to do with that, besides the four eleven differential gears in both the rear end and the front end. The transmission was automatic and the higher numerical gears in the differentials gave it a smoother takeoff with plenty of power.

I'd only had it one day and was already chomping at the bit to give it a short trial. A weekend out in the woods should do fine.

"Hey, Jake, how you gonna pull your horses with that rig? I don't see a trailer knob on the back of the popup trailer, even though it had a bumper back there already drilled for one." Charlie Lisle asked.

"I've still got to get a ball for it, but I've checked it out to make sure it'll work fine. I've even got the brake lines connected and a set of quick disconnects for the horse trailer brakes too."

"You'll need those all right. One thing you don't want is for your back trailer to pass you while you're coming down over a few switchbacks."

"Who you think you're telling? Don't you remember coming to get my ass out of a mess just like that I cooked up two years ago?"

"That's why I brought it up, Jake."

"Where you planning on camping this weekend?" Charlie asked.

"I thought I'd take a spin up past Bentonville, nearly to Pea Ridge," I said.

"Would you take a word from the wise?" Charlie asked.

"If I knew someone who was wise to share a word I might." I said.

"Well, even if I ain't all that wise, I'm gonna steer you right this time. I heard Vanina talking about a couple of lovely young Green girls who were doing a little camping this weekend up near Lowell. He said they'd found a nice spot right off the southeast end of Beaver Lake, right where it takes off to the south. They're supposed to be staying in that little campground just out of Rogers. You really ought to go up and at least say high to them."

"Their folks gonna be with 'em?" I asked.

"No, it's one of the reasons I recommended it. They're dead set on staying out by themselves. They ain't really girls no more, not size wise anyway. Both of them are long tall drinks of water. One is six feet and the othern is five eleven. They ain't afraid to stay out at night by theyselves cause they can both shoot, good."