1. It is said, Now that Linda’s rug-rat — name of Jay — is one year old or more, She ought to feed it something more than that soy-protein pap. Some real food, they say.
2. Ever since Elly passed out at work and got fired because the boss knew it was from too much tooting of crank and moved back to Gillette to live with her 18 year-old son’s 20 year-old pal; and ever since Sally got suicidally depressed and conceived a crush on a guy she thought she wasn’t good enough for, with the result that she grew embarrassed and moved back with her ole man who beat her and took away her car, Linda’s two most trustworthy babysitters are no longer there to switch off with.
3. So now Linda switches off with Sally, who’s a pariah for being a member of the drug-scandal-tainted women’s commune (and married to a dealer yet) the girl we traced a the source of (1) above. Linda chewed out Elly pretty hard for letting Jay dive down the stairs and then spanking him; Elly pals around with Sally and apocrypha has them in a significant scene discussing Welfare, maltreatment, and Linda.
4. Linda’s been sort of staring at everyone she knows ever since she got the call from Welfare which detailed what they planned to do with her now that they’d been tipped off.
5. So how many truckloads of gravel can the company move in three days if Ed was the piano player?
* * *
1. Mention of Sarah before she had been forgotten used to bring on a shaking of heads. Her only close friend was the fellow who worked for Mountain Bell and parked a Harley outside the motel room right on Main Street; he had speed and they both worked hard on the ABATE anti-helmet lobbying effort.
2. Bill says that Sarah’s former ole man in Phoenix put the law onto her, which was why we heard she had been crying in the bars she was kicked out of Christmas eve and thereabouts for a week, before she got fired.
3. He overheard her explaining how they came and took away the child.
4. Jack and Dave used to go over to her house with weed and party when they got off work, but they never porked her, of this I am sure. She did not earn the same leers as some others AH HAVE KNOWN.
5. The last we heard she’d been arrested for stripping off her clothes in a bar in Gillette and dancing nude on the pool table. Shades of somewhere in Massachusetts. She was always planning to go to the doctor about the rash on her arms.
* * *
1. Jimmy hit town again a while back and surprised us all by playing a good game of Chess; we’d never found out since we never asked him. After the games one night we all got drunk and he insisted on calling his girlfriends around Utah and Colorado, collect. I got to talk to May. He said she had six children and gave a pained expression.
2. Jeff is going to Hong Kong this week after failing to make enough money to live on in the National Guard. He’s the unofficial Chess champ of the town. This trip will use up his savings, and we’re sorry to see him go, but he has to get out of America.
3. Jimmy wanted to give me advice; Jeff told me to count my blessings.
archive: minifictions
