To read this serial novel from the beginning, go here.

The Pickup Line

Damned blast scraped up my boots, Cardinal thought. I should know better than to wear lizard skins the first day out of jail.

The first day out of jail is score-settling day. Work boots are best. Day two is find-the-old-lady day. Day two you can wear lizard skins, unless of course the old lady is shacking up with your best friend, in which case it’s work boots again.

He walked away from the smoldering camp, following the dirt road. A desolate, dry place, with nothing but sand and shrubs all the way to the horizon. Why is it that when a guy is released from prison, it is always in the Texas desert? For once, he’d like to be released from a prison in Vegas. Doesn’t seem like too much to ask.

He climbed a sandy hill up to a ridge, and then saw the ridge was a road. A road that ran from nowhere to nowhere. The helicopter must have taken him further out than he thought.  Then again, Texas nowhere is not always as boring as it looks. Maybe he could hook up with some Branch Davidians or something and have some fun, just like in old times.

Over his shoulder he heard the breathy hiss of an approaching car. A light blue '72 Cadillac convertible, and as it got closer he could see three oval faces behind the windshield, and flames of gold, brown, and red hair streaming from them. Either he was looking at three extremely hot women,  or the kind of men no guy wants to get close to.

The car slowed, then stopped. Yeah, women. Legal, too.

“So whatcha doing out here?” a casual, youthful voice said.

“Waiting for you.”

“C’mon, really.”

“Oh, I can guarantee, as a certified Grade A American Male, I have been waiting for something like this to happen to me all my life. So where are you ladies headed?”

“Work,” they all said, almost together. Then the golden-headed one: “We work at Chester’s, a bar in Waco.”

Well, that explained the matching hot pants and tops that leave no tattoo to the imagination. “I wouldn’t mind spending the evening in Waco myself,” he said.
 
“Hop in,” the red-headed girl said. The golden-head motioned to open the car door, but Cardinal lightly leapt over it and slid in to the back seat next to the brown haired one. Brown-hair angled her tanned thighs toward him and leaned her shoulder against the opposite door.  Her toned arm hung over the door in the open air, a half-dozen bracelets gathered at her wrist. “So where you are you coming from?”

Cardinal looked at these three perfect females. This was a hot streak, an incredible hot streak. He figured he was so lucky today he might as well be reckless.

“Prison.”

The girl laughed. “Cool.” He couldn’t tell if she believed him or not.

For the next few miles, the three girls said little, which was fine with Cardinal. It gave him time to check them out, to linger over cleavage, freckles, bare calves, and those delicate, ungathered hairs on the napes of their necks that danced in the wind. Strangely enough, the radio was tuned to the Bush Limburgher Show. Cardinal would have thought three chicks like this would be listening to Billy Ray Cyrus or something, but no. Conservative talk. Cardinal wondered if he should tell them that he met Limburgher during his recent adventure in the death chamber. He decided to skip it.

Looking down the road, he saw a 50s-style motor hotel off to the left. It was obviously a rest station in the old days when  this road was the only path through central Texas, and forgotten now that the interstate was laid down. But it was still operating, probably through the donations of customers paying by the hour.

“You ladies got time before work? Because we could always stop at the hotel there.”

Redhead, driving: “Sure, no problem.”

Goldie: “I’m up for some fun.” Redhead eased her flip-flopped foot off the accelerator and pulled the car into the motel parking lot.

Cardinal was more than a little surprised — he had mostly intended the remark as a joke. Was this the luckiest day in his life? Nah, too easy, he thought. Something is wrong here. But he didn’t intend to find out what until somebody had taken off some clothing.

 Next episode: A Boy Gets His Education

Starting June 30, I will resume my long-lost serial novel, The Blistering. My plan is to publish at least one chapter a week, sometimes two. The series will last at least until the end of the year.

If you cannot remember how the series started (why would you?), you can go here to review the four chapters I published last summer. 

My mother-in-law undergoes surgery for laryngeal cancer today. It is a radical surgery that will probably result in the loss of her voice. I haven't, until learning that she would need this surgery two weeks ago, thought much about how much a person's voice is bound into our sense of that person's identity, but it is. So often we say "she found her voice" or "she has a strong voice" when we mean that a person has found direction and purpose. We use the word voice to indicate identity or character almost as much as we use the word see to mean "understand."

So today she loses her voice, but I trust not her voice. 

My mother-in-law is the most supernaturally patient person I have ever met. Her voice has always reflected this: soft, weathered, concerned. She is a practicing Sikh, an Indian monotheistic faith that teaches, among other things, wise patience with the difficulties of life. It would seem that her whole life has been a preparation for the patient forbearance of cancer and all the suffering it involves. It does not seem possible that anyone could have borne the burden better.

There is no doubt that she would have chosen to let the cancer take its course and face death as patiently and peacefully as she has lived if it had not been for her grandchildren. She feels she owes it to the children in her family to live on. Having lost her own mother when she was very young, she wants her grandchildren to grow up feeling loved. And that is why she will spend 12 hours today under the knife.

This past weekend I spent some time with her, and could not help but think that I would not hear her speak ever again.

Her last words to me? "I cooked you up some catfish so you would have something to eat while I was in the hospital."