Chapter 5

It would be possible to be very detailed about the time that Bessie and I spent in bed over the next few months. There was a lot of it. Looking back on it now I don't think Bessie was a nymphomaniac although at the time I was pretty sure she was.

The important thing that I learned from Bessie, and learned right from the beginning, was that she liked sex. I'll be honest, I had pretty much figured that women did sex because men wanted them to, because that had been my experience, mostly with Myukio but with some observation thrown in as well. It hadn't really entered my mind that a woman could not only enjoy sex, she could crave it, hunger for it, and be demanding about it. Which Bessie could be.

Over the course of the next several months we tried every position we could come up with and some of them we liked an awful lot. I sure learned a lot from Bessie, or we learned a lot from each other.

The problem was that she was hot to trot about ninety percent of the time. Now, while I learned to like sex a lot, there were other things I had to do, too. Things like going to class and studying, for example.

I did manage to come up for air now and then long enough to register for classes, go to them, and hit the books. My classes weren't anything real special, just the normal English and history and math and science that all freshmen get stuck with. It was a little strange to be back in a classroom, but the work wasn't anything I couldn't handle.

It really wasn't your normal college experience. Well over half of the students were vets studying on the GI Bill like me. There were relatively few college-age kids right out of high school, and as far as that went I was young enough that I might have been one of them. But even as young as I was, I had more of a veteran's viewpoint – I wasn't enjoying my first chance to be away from home, after all, I was trying to learn something that would let me lead a better life than being a free farmhand. I studied hard, I got pretty darn decent grades, and I didn't really participate in college life very much beyond that.

Besides, I was trying to save some money, since the 52-20 club wasn't going to get me through all four years; my GI Bill money was only good for tuition and books and like that. When I'd proved to myself that I could handle the work and decided that I needed another excuse to not have to fuck Bessie every few hours, I decided to go out and find a part-time job. It wasn't long before I was pumping gas and busting tires at a Conoco gas station a few blocks away.

"Pumping gas?" I just heard some young voice say. "What's that?"

We never had self-service gas stations until into the 1970s. Before that, when you pulled into a gas station an attendant came out, pumped your gas for you, checked your oil, cleaned your windshield, and even checked the air in your tires sometimes. If anything was wrong they'd take care of it for you on the spot, since gas stations were also repair shops instead of grocery stores. Being a gas station attendant was a pretty good part time job for a high school or college kid and that's how you often started out as a mechanic in one of those service stations.

It strikes me I was paid fifty cents an hour and worked about twenty hours a week, so that covered my basic expenses. What with everything I was pretty busy through the winter.

Winter out on the plains lasted pretty long and was uncomfortably cold. As the days and weeks went on, I began to realize that I wasn't really satisfied with what I was doing. The biggest thing was that, while Chadron was a lot bigger than Hartford, it was still a little town right out in the middle of nowhere. I still wanted to be a part of the lights and action and opportunity of a big city. There would be things to do and people to meet in a big city; in Chadron, the only thing I could do with my free time was fuck Bessie.

Back when I was in Okinawa I never thought I'd find myself saying that there were times that I wanted to do something besides fuck, but the winter of '46-'47 changed that. Like I said, Bessie was ready to go all the time, and I don't think we ever did it less than a dozen times a week or so; sometimes it was lots more than that. As the winter of '47 dragged on I was getting a little tired of it because there are other things in life. To this day I don't know if how much Bessie wanted it reflected on what she'd gotten used to with her Mel, or whether she was trying to make up for lost time, or what, but after a while I began hanging around the gas station after I got off work just so I could get some studying done.

Eventually it began to settle in on me that I couldn't go another three and a half years like I'd been going the last few months. I began to realize that it wouldn't take too much to turn the relationship I had with Bessie permanent. I didn't want that for any number of good reasons: Bessie was quite a bit older than me, she was fat and not very pretty, and she could give dumb lessons to fence posts. Plus, I'd known right from the beginning that she was crazier than a loon. To top it off, getting latched up with her meant that I'd probably be stuck around Chadron.

That took the fur lined pee pot – I had to get out of there.

But, I decided that I had to do it carefully, to keep from screwing up my grades and credits for the year I'd spend in school there.

After thinking about it a little I began to realize that I needed some wheels. This business of getting around by thumb and shank's mare and buses was pretty inconvenient and could make it hard when I went to make my escape. I figured that I was just going to have to disappear sometime, and it was better if I could do it on my own schedule.

Fortunately the new postwar cars were coming out. Right at first the '46s were mostly '42s 'cause their tooling had been shoved to the side when the auto plants went on war production, and the same tooling was just started up again to produce cars quickly. But the '47s were new, and a lot of people had been dreaming for years about new cars. That meant that some of the reliable old beaters were pretty cheap, and you couldn't get anything for them on trade-in.

We had this one old boy in the station every now and then who'd bought a bright stinky new '47 Nash the previous fall. He had a '37 Ford coupe he'd bought new and nursed all the way through the war. It had a V8-60 in it, and people weren't too thrilled with them since it was underpowered for a car as big as the coupe. The dealer wouldn't give him anything for trade-in, so it just was sitting out in his yard with a for sale sign on it, and he had a note stuck to the wall of the Conoco station, too.

Well, one day I happened to ask him about it and how much he wanted. He said his wife had been on his butt to get it out of the yard, and I could have it for five bucks if I wanted it. I caught a ride out to his house with him and looked it over. We had to push it to get it started since the battery was dead. It didn't run too good and was blowing some oil smoke, but I figured that if it ran at all it was worth five bucks, so I gave him the money and drove it back to the station.

I had a discussion with Homer, the old boy that ran the station, and he agreed to let me work on it there in the evening when I wasn't on duty if I would help out the on-duty guy if it got busy.

You get right down to it, that old Ford needed a lot of work. It had a lot of miles on it, around ninety thousand, and in those days that was a hell of a lot. The big thing is that the engine needed to be torn all the way down and rebuilt. However, it wasn't a complicated engine, and it wouldn't be the first one I'd done.

Over the course of the next couple weeks I tore the engine down all the way, put in new rings and bearings, ground the valves and things like that. I had to spend a few bucks on parts, but they were worth it. The tires on it were thin as tissue paper. We'd just got over tire rationing, so people were trading in crappy old tires on new ones, but sometimes I'd take one off a car that wasn't too bad, and by the time things were said and done I had four pretty decent used tires on it. By the time I got done I probably had twenty-five or thirty bucks in it, and it would have been worth a hundred to the right person. I drove that car for years and put a lot of miles on it, and never had much trouble with it.

All the time I was working on the car I was looking for some other place to go to school. I got lucky and had the help of several people on campus, and I wrote a lot of letters. I'd rented a post office box in town so that Bessie wouldn't know that I was looking around, and by the time the term had ended I had pretty well settled on Milwaukee State Teacher's College. Milwaukee wasn't quite Chicago, but it was pretty close, and from the distance of Chadron, Nebraska there wasn't a whole lot of difference.

In the end, I decided that I couldn't bring myself to just disappear from Bessie – I at least had to tell her goodbye somehow. I wasn't about to tell her the truth, though – that she was driving me apeshit. I finally decided that lying is the better part of valor. The day after the semester was over with I told her I was going to go back to Hartford and see if I could patch things up with my folks and my brother, and I might have to stay and work on the farm for a while, so I didn't know when I was going to be back. She said that it really wasn't good for me to be pissed off with my family, and it was probably a good idea for me to go, so we had a long, leisurely goodbye roll in the hay and I hit the road.

Of course there was no way I was going to Hartford. In fact the closest I got was on US-20, about fifty miles. I didn't hurry; the road wasn't all that great, and I was in no hurry. Besides, the Ford wasn't all that fast, and I was still breaking in the rebuilt engine. In a way I was sorry to be leaving Chadron – I'd had a good time there, learned a lot, and really had changed the course of my life. And that doesn't include all the good sex, and for the most part it was pretty good. I remember driving through the Sandhill country and being amazed at the fact that I had to have had sex with Bessie a good three hundred times at a minimum and probably more than that, never with a rubber, of course. How she didn't get pregnant is beyond me, and I guess I was pretty stupid about that. Then, on the other hand, if she had fucked the other Mel as much as she fucked me and still didn't have kids maybe she couldn't have them, and maybe that had something to do with how come she was so crazy.