The Trouble Way Read Online Free PDF Page B

times during that windy-ass hundred plus miles back along the Columbia River to home. She disappeared from his life for the second time, forever, for all he knew.
     
     
    Jake had begun asking girls out the first Friday after he passed his driver ’s test. Mostly, he took girls to a drive-in movie down near the ocean or, if he was short of cash, which he nearly always was, to the local Finnish Cemetery. All the girls, he soon realized, were nearly as eager to go to the Cemetery as he was, even those uppity church going Lutheran girls. In fact, two of the churchiest girls even suggested the Finnish Cemetery before he got the courage to broach the subject. Nobody bothered them there, except for the one time when a County Mountie came nosing around with his flashlight and caught in him at the exact moment he was about to mount a frontal assault on Alice’s blouse. Jake was so occupied that he hadn’t noticed the patrol car pull up beside him. Boobs can be pretty, pretty, pretty distracting.
    Alice taught him to kiss. Bernie taught him rejection ... bitch. And Janis taught him the meaning of real Trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for Phucking. That Bitch with a capital B that rhymes with P that also stands for Pregnant which, in anybody ’s Phucking language in 1963, stands for Marriage.
    So, travel down Trouble Way resumed once again and continued for four more years while Jake spent his time, first eloping with Lunatic Janis to Idaho and then, on the expert advice of her equally Lunatic father, joined the Air Force.
    As it turned out, th e advice of her Lunatic father wasn’t such bad advice after all. Jake hadn’t had the fortune to become the hero he’d always dreamed of being but he accumulated some veteran’s benefits which came in handy when he attended Oregon College of Education.
    Her father was eventually exposed as a child abuser, wife beater, and cross-dresser who came out in grand fashion by getting spotted by a state patrol officer while he was running down a county road wearing Janis’s favorite fuzzy white sweater and her dark pleated skirt.
    Jake went through ten months of excruciating misery and three additional years trying to extricate himself from his legal commitment to Janis. Those three years of nearly constant anxiety was followed by a relatively calm period of college years and on to several years more of working as an assistant manager and finally a manager of Big Richards, a discount retail store.
     
     
    Jake walked into the interview room and shook hands with a man who had an uncanny resemblance to a man of Jake ’s past. He studied the man for a moment, but he couldn’t place him. It was Mr. Hedd’s nose, he was sure that was it. He’d seen it before. Jake found it difficult not to stare. When he walked out of the interview with Mr. Hedd from the Big Richards Corporation, he was confident, and actually felt grateful he wouldn’t be offered the job. He would never be talking to, not to mention looking at, Mr. Hedd in his black and white hounds tooth jacket with the nametag with red lettering that looked like they had been stuck on by a one and a half year old. And then there was that nose.
    Judging from the nametag, Big Richards is tight with a buck. I see where the low-ball salary offer fits right in .
    Being an Assistant Manager of a Big Richards discount store was definitely not his first option, it was his nineteenth choice. His first option had been to be an accountant but with his final GPA of 2.61 there was not likely to be any of the Big-Eight accounting firms would be offering him any lucrative signing bonuses anytime soon.
    Jake was a half a block from the placement office when that nose became perfectly clear in his mind. Mr. Peter Hedd looked like the desk clerk of a hotel Jake and his new bride, Janis, stayed at in Portland eight years earlier. Like that unforgettable clerk, Mr. Hedd’s nose was enormous. The nose could have been the twin to the nose