The Ladies Temperance Club's Farewell Tour.

 

    Chapter 4    

 

    Vonda awoke to the aroma of freshly made coffee and the sight of the inside of her queen sized ‘master suite’ in the rear of the motor coach.

    Looking around the chamber’s imitation wood grained paneling and cheery, Herculon upholstered furnishings, she was struck by just how surreal the past thirty-six or so hours had been.

    Less than a day and a half ago, she was standing in Jack’s office with one foot covered in dying German Shepard feces, clubbing the man over the head with a football trophy he never even earned and spreading what little brains he possessed all over the room.

    Of course she felt bad about what happened; few people on the planet actually deserved to be done in by another, and there were miles of difference between Jack’s simple, larcenous no-goodnikness and, say, Hitler, Saddam Hussein or your run-of-the-mill corporate raider.

    But looking at it in the light of a new morning, Vonda managed to convince herself that physically removing Jack Thibideau from the census rolls had been an act of self-defense.

    Because after living with that bitter, abusive, impotent, alcoholic and thieving bastard for twenty years, it was really a case of kill or be killed. If she hadn’t exercised a little extreme prejudice on Jack, she would have had to do herself in, just to be finally free of his special brand of long-term charm, goodness and warmth.

    And like those old Highway Safety public service commercials used to say, “The life you save may be your own.”

 

 

*                              *                              *

 

    Five years have passed since Aunt Eula Belle’s passing. 

    And Barstow High’s Class of ’65 has descended on the local Ramada’s High Desert Ballroom & Conference Center for their ten-year reunion.        

    Jack Thibideau is there, pounding down shots of Wild Turkey at the no-host bar and staring right through every female who walks into the room, as he waits for Vonda to show up. 

    He’s just traded in his Corvette for a brand new repoed Caddy El Dorado, which is a good thing for a couple of reasons.

    First, business has been good and he can afford to flaunt it a little.

    And unlike the ‘Vette, the El-D’s a sedan, so there’s no top to put down. So, there’s no road wind to waft through what little remains of his still thinning hair.

    Which means, his carefully arranged ‘comb-over’ is still relatively safe.

    Especially from Vonda.

    Because while the rest the Class of ’65 are all getting down and funky in Barstow, she’s three thousand miles away in The Big Apple, celebrating her graduation from airline flight officers to ad agency account guys.

    Vonda has just won an internal contest sponsored by her employer, a photographic search for the six stewardesses who best embody the airline’s new ad campaign.

    Three months later, Vonda’s smiling photo will kick off her airline’s nationwide ad campaign and her particular ad will carry the headline, “I’m Vonda. Fly me.”

    A couple of hundred airline pilots, co-pilots, flight engineers and Madison Avenue marketing types will look up from newspapers and magazines featuring her ad and warmly smile, remembering Vonda and how she coaxed each of their seats into a fully upright position. 

    And large numbers of those smiles will also fade a little when their owners also recall the course of antibiotics that sometimes resulted from a trip aboard Air Vonda.

    Weaving slightly as he lets go of the edge of the bar, Jack unsteadily raises his arm to check his watch. It’s a little past midnight and once again, his Vonda Mae is MIA.  He buys the remainder of his bottle of Wild Turkey from the bartender and lurches off in the direction of his two-day old El Dorado.

    And right now, he’s not quite sure who he should be more angry and disgusted with.

    Vonda, for missing both Aunt Eula Belle’s send-off and their class’ ten-year reunion. 

    Or Jack Thibideau, for making that stupid freakin’ promise to himself that, come Hell or high water, he was going to impress Vonda, make her fall in love and marry him some day.

    He fires up the engine and gobbles down another couple of swallows of Wild Turkey.

    Of course, that promise wasn’t nearly as dumb as the other vow he made to himself -- to save his virginity for her. 

    Jack angrily stomps on the gas pedal and sends the Eldorado fishtailing across the gravel of the Ramada’s parking lot, barely clipping the side of a parked Chevy pickup as he careens toward the entrance.

 

 

*                              *                              *

 

    They sat around the coach’s kitchenette table long into the night, killing two bottles of wine trying to figure out their next move. 

    Still firmly convinced that terminating Jack’s life functions actually qualified as a service to humanity, Louise spent the night refusing to let Vonda turn the RV around, hightail it back to Newbury Park and surrender herself to the Ventura County carabinieri.

    Her plan was to put some serious mileage between themselves and their home town, then find a suitable place to tuck Jack in for a long, undisturbed dirt nap.

    “Yeah, sure.  Why not?” Vonda couldn’t really find any fault with Louise’s idea.  After all, since the passing of his uncle a couple of years earlier, Jack really had no family left.  No one to notice he was no longer present, miss him or raise an alert over his taking a permanent powder. 

    Let alone even care.

    Besides, she was in no real hurry to get back and have to deal with the payment promised this guy Benicio for looking after all eight of the dying dogs.

    Kay, with a legal background gleaned from decades of faithfully tuning in to MURDER SHE WROTE, MIAMI VICE, LAW AND ORDER and CSI, raised the group’s only voice of dissent.

    Not only was what Vonda had done to Jack anything but legal, their help so far probably made them accessories after the fact. And if caught, she and Louise could be in for some long vacations themselves, as involuntary guests of the State of California.

    To which Louise pointed out that the locals, state and federales were probably way too busy hunting terrorists and drug dealers to worry about some missing two-bit insurance scammer.

    “Yeah, sure,” Kay finally threw in the towel. “Why not?”

 

 

    Vonda adjusted her robe, slid open the accordion door that closed off the bathroom from the rest of the coach and moved toward the front of the vehicle.

    Louise was at the kitchen counter, pouring herself a cup of coffee and Kay was still under the covers in the bed that doubled as the RV’s love seat - which she shared with Louise the night before - and she was just beginning to stir.

    “Well, good morning,” Louise said to Vonda. “You sleep good?”

    Vonda nodded.

    “Want some coffee?” Louise held out a mug, which Vonda silently accepted and began filling. “How about a little breakfast or something?”

    “Thanks. Just coffee for now.”

    Kay moaned, threw off her covers and stood up. She sleepily scratched at her head as she squeezed past Louise and Vonda.

    “Louise, you snore,” she complained, heading for the bathroom.

    “That’s OK, honey,” Louise chuckled. “You fart,” she called after her. “But you don’t hear me complaining about it.”

 

 

    With breakfast out of the way, they all decided to engage in a little personal hygiene before hitting the road.

    Vonda grabbed the first shower, warning the other two that capacity was limited in both the fresh water tank and the waste tanks that held the runoff from the sink, toilet and shower.  So, please try and keep your showers short.

    While Louise was waiting her turn, she went outside to retrieve one of her duffels from the storage compartment.

    Just to be on the safe side, she lifted the lid of the freezer and rapped her knuckles on the bundle of green plastic trashcan liners inside, checking to see how their stowaway was holding up.

    After about a day and a half in the freezer, he was not only the late Jack Thibideau, he was also the incredibly cold Jack Thibideau.

    The man was frozen solid.

    A Jacksicle.

    Climbing back up into the motor coach, Louise set her duffle down, unzipped it and fished out a few things to wear.

    “Hey, while I was down there,” she said to Vonda as she rummaged. “I checked on Jack.”

    “Everything OK?”

    Louise nodded.  “Oh yeah. That boy’s as hard as a rock.”

    “Yeah,” Vonda snorted in mild disgust. “Well, I guess there’s a first time for everything.”

 

 

    A little more than an hour later, Vonda merged the motor home onto the freeway, and the Newbury Park Ladies’ Temperance Club was back on the road.

    They were headed East on Interstate 10, a ten-lane wide, concrete holdover from the Eisenhower administration, built to let cars, buses and trucks motor swiftly and smoothly from one end of the country to the other. It was also engineered to make it easier to convoy the infantry and all their playthings from coast to coast, should those pesky Soviets ever decide to come ashore in Santa Monica.

    Ahead lay towns and cities with exotic names like Fontana, Yucaipa, San Bernardino and Palm Springs.

    This was the Inland Empire, the sand, sagebrush and trailer trash capital of the state. 

    To either side of the freeway lay mile after mile of truck stops, railroad tracks, dilapidated strip malls, rundown old houses and tittie bars playing to almost deserted parking lots.

    “Jeez,” Kay sighed, looking out her window, not bothering to hide the depression in her voice. “Just look at all this.”

    “Yeah,” Louise agreed. “Honey, if California has a sphincter, we’re driving through it right now.”

    They motored on in silence for another half hour; it didn’t even make much sense to fire up Louise’s roaring drunk tape, since they were all stone cold sober.

    Kay suddenly perked up at something she saw outside.

    “Vonda, Louise - you’ve gotta see this.”

    Louise followed her gaze and then tapped Vonda on the shoulder.

    “Pull off at this exit, honey. We’ve got to check this out.”

    Off to one side of the highway, a smiling, full size Tyrannosaurus Rex appeared to be frolicking with fifteen or twenty yards worth of prime Brachiosaur. But since both were made out of concrete, they weren’t cavorting all that quickly.

    At the same time on the other side of the highway, a large billboard was directing passersby to the parking lot of Hadley’s Nut House, the world’s largest purveyor of dried fruits, nuts, dates and figs.

    “Yup, fruits, nuts and concrete dinosaurs,” Louise chuckled. “Welcome to Cabazon.”

    She wanted to commune with the Triassic playthings first, but was thwarted by democracy in action. Outvoted, Louise joined Kay and Vonda as they walked across the parking lot and into the Nut House.

    Inside, the place was a Birkenstock or Earth Shoe wearer’s idea of heaven on Earth.

    Everywhere the three women turned their eyes found row after row, table after table and bin after bin of delicacies one usually had to scale a tall tree in order to sample.  It was the kind of place that could drive the average squirrel to believe in a benevolent and loving God.

    “Is this place amazing, or what?” Kay caught up with her fellow travelers at the end of a row of tables piled high with a mind-blowing assortment of dried fruits. There were so many different types and flavors of desiccated fruit chunks, slices and pieces, she just knew that somewhere out there, there had to be a fruitcake feeling empty and unfulfilled.

    Kay was struggling to show an extremely independent-minded shopping cart – piled high with bags of nuts, trail mix and several pounds of dried apricots and figs – just who driving whom here.

    “You believe these prices?” This was the most animated either of them had seen Kay in years. “It’s like they’re giving this stuff away!”

    Then she noticed that neither Vonda nor Louise were clutching any of Hadley’s low-priced natural foods to their respective bosoms.

    “Aren’t you guys going to buy anything?”

    Vonda shook her head.  After seeing all of Hadley’s fruits, nuts and other natural goodies up close and personal, she decided they just weren’t her cup of chamomile, after all.

    “C’mere, sweetie. I want to show you something.” Louise pulled a large bag of organically raised dried prunes and a five-pound container of candied figs and dates out of Kay’s shopping cart. “See this?”

    Kay nodded.

    “Honey, what you’ve got here is almost ten pounds of USDA prime natural laxatives. And, pardon my French, but a shitload of fiber. Trust me, you don’t want to be mixin’ these.  And I sure as hell don’t want to be sleepin’ in the same room when you do.”

    “Well, I like this stuff and I’m going to buy it. And if ‘somebody’ has a problem with it, then that’s their problem.”

    “OK, then I don’t care whether it’s you or your rabbit chow, babe.  But until all of this stuff is gone, one of you is gonna be spendin’ their nights downstairs with Jack.”

    “Fine.”

    Louise took off for Triassic Land, leaving her two friends to check out, and then stow Kay’s purchases in one of the luggage compartments under the motor coach.

    “Hey, man. You ladies find everything you’re lookin’ for?”

    Their checker smiled broadly – and just a little too warmly for comfort.  In his Birkenstock sandals, tie dyed T-shirt and headband, the skinny little man looked like some 60’s throwback who’d gotten lost on his way to his last Vanilla Fudge concert.

    And with his slightly bulging and bloodshot eyes, piercing stare and slightly demented grin, he also gave the impression that, at the time, he’d probably been way too loaded to ask anyone for directions to the concert, anyway.  

    Kay paid for her purchases and, still smiling his creepy little grin, the checker placed all the bags in her shopping cart.

    “Wow, you ladies have a really cool day.”

    “Thanks. You, too.”  It didn’t make a lot of sense to antagonize their newfound space cowpoke, or even have that much contact with him. 

    After all, who knew where that cranium had been?

    Then he did something Vonda hadn’t seen since a hot summer night in 1969, while driving her rented car along the Sunset Strip during an LA layover: he held up his index and middle finger, and flashed her a peace sign.

    “Do you believe that guy?” Vonda said to Kay as the two struggled to pilot the loaded shopping cart through the potholes and gravel of the crude parking lot. “Somebody ought to tell him the 60’s are over.” 

    “I know.“ Kay laughed. “Heck, he could have been one of my ex-husband’s frat brothers. And did you see those eyes?”

    Vonda unlocked the storage compartment door and pulled it open.

    “Jesus, carve a swastika on his forehead and you’ve got Charlie Manson’s long-lost twin brother.”

    Kay paused in the middle of tossing one of her bags of dried apricots into the luggage compartment and a perplexed look came over her face.

    “Vonda, you don’t think Manson has an evil twin somewhere, do you?”

    “Tell you the truth, I probably could have gone my entire life without ever giving it a single thought.  Not even once.”

    She stood up and slammed the compartment door back down.

    “Now, where the hell did Louise wander off to?

    They caught up with her at the checkout counter of a gift shop built inside the belly of the Brachiosaur, settling up with the clerk for her stash of Triassic postcards and tchotschkes.

    “Here, sweetie. These are for you,” she handed Vonda a pair of tiny ceramic salt and pepper shakers, shaped and colored to resemble the gigantic smiling concrete roadside attractions that had lured them into the parking lot.

    “The Tyrannosaurus is named Rex and the other one is Dinney.”

    Then she presented Kay with a small stuffed Brachiosaur covered in fluorescent green rubberized fabric.

    “Here you go, honey.  Guaranteed to keep Tyrannosauruses away, or double your money back.”

    “Really?” Then Kay thought about it for a second. “Wait a minute. How do you know this thing really works?”

    Louise looked over to the sales clerk, a matronly looking woman who glanced back at them over her reading glasses and smiled warmly. 

    “Been here twelve years, dear.  And we’ve never been attacked once.”

    Returning to the motor coach, Louise made a long-overdue dash for the bathroom, while Kay grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and Vonda climbed into the driver’s seat.

    She started up the rig and let the engine warm up for a few moments, just as Jack had showed her.  Apparently, few things make a diesel engine as cranky as starting it up and immediately getting one’s act together and taking it on the road, without giving it a chance to really wake up.

    While the engine idled, Vonda turned a knob on the dash and a small TV monitor came to life, showing what was going on directly behind the behemoth.

    What it didn’t show was the wide, deep pothole, camouflaged by the sun-dappled shadow of a large oak tree.

    Which Vonda discovered the hard way after shifting into reverse, backing up and landing the motor coach in a depression deep enough to instantly lower the left side of the unit – the side on which the bathroom had been installed – a good twelve inches.

    “What the hell was that!?” Louise came flying out of the bathroom, her shorts still down around her ankles and her thighs bathed in the toilet holding tank’s highly perfumed chemical solution.

    “Omigod, I hope I didn’t hit anything!

    Vonda threw the transmission into Park, hit the emergency brake and the three of them bounded down the steps, each entertaining visions of having backed over some poor animal, pedestrian or small vehicle.

    She breathed a huge sigh of relief on seeing the dual set of rear wheels buried up to the rims inside the pothole.

    “Jesus Christ! For a second there, I thought I killed somebody else!”

    It took about ten or fifteen minutes to break the motor home free of the pothole, a feat accomplished by rapidly shifting between Drive and Reverse, and rocking the thirty nine-foot home on wheels loose. 

    It also shook free everything in the unit that wasn’t firmly fastened down.

    Including an old, hard-sided briefcase down in the luggage bay, that had been cleverly wedged up and out of view between a frame member and part of the floor overhead.

    Vonda quickly pulled the RV onto a better-surfaced portion of the parking lot and the three women spent a few minutes putting back everything that tumbled loose in the struggle to overcome the pothole’s grip.

    “Alright, new rule, ladies.” Louise slid one of the kitchen cabinet drawers shut. “Nobody – but nobody – drives this beast into or over anything while any of us is in the crapper. OK?”

    Within a couple of minutes, everything had been put back in place and Vonda was preparing to shift into Drive.

    “Wait a second,” Kay sounded a little concerned. “You think one of us should check down below and make sure it’s all OK?”

    “What the hell, I’m closest to the door,” Louise volunteered. “Be right back.”

 

 

    Louise opened the freezer lid and checked on Jack, who appeared to be none the worse for the whole experience. 

    Then she went over the entire freezer, making sure the motor coach’s recent shaking, rattling and rolling hadn’t damaged it or its mountings.  The last thing they needed now was to have to pull into the nearest RV dealer for a service call on the freezer, with Jack still riding inside.

    Just to be on the safe side, she went around to the other side and opened the luggage compartment door to check on her duffels and Kay’s stupid bags of fruit, nuts and fiber.

    That’s when she noticed the beat-up old briefcase sitting on top of Kay’s recent purchases.

    The one with the initials “J.T.” by the handle.

    Curious, she grabbed it by the handle, closed the doors and went back inside the motor coach.

    “Hey, you ever seen this before?”

    Coming up the steps, she hefted the briefcase up so Vonda could see it.

    ”Musta gotten shook loose when you were trying to get out of that pothole.”

    “Yeah, it was Jack’s,” Vonda answered. “But I haven’t seen it in years.”

    “What do you think’s in it?” Kay was caught up in curiosity.

    “Hey, all I know is, the damn thing weighs a ton.” Louise set the case on the dinette table and then spun it around to face Vonda. “Honey, since this thing was Jack’s, maybe you better do the honors.”

    Vonda reached over, flipped the locks and lifted the lid.

    “Jesus H. Christ on a cracker...” Louise was stunned at what she saw inside.

    “Oh my Lord..!” Ditto for Kay.

    “That thieving son of a bitch…” Vonda chuckled warmly.

    Inside the briefcase case were a couple of dozen neatly wrapped bundles of bills. 

    And each packet contained a stack of a hundred portraits of the man who had been the country’s first postmaster, Ambassador to France and founder of the Saturday Evening Post -- all counted and wrapped by a different bank.