Falling In Love

You would be correct in thinking that I would not have an uneventful trip home. It seems I was developing a habit of finding bizarre situations to seek me out and my trip back to Arkansas was no exception.

I'd been up with Dorothy most of the night and I was beat, so I went to the rear of the bus and lay down across two seats and flaked out. My fitful sleep was interrupted, however, by what looked like hundreds of Colorado State Police. It seems they had erected a roadblock between Cheyenne and Denver and was looking for the serial killer Charles Starkweather. Although it took some convincing, I guess I resembled Starkweather a bit, we were back on our way to Arkansas.

For someone who vowed never to return to the little south Arkansas town when I left for the Air Force, I had broken that promise twice. I would break it many, many more times over the next fifty years. The first days back in Taylor was fraught with paranoia and self consciousness. Small towns are very gossipy and I had no doubt that I was the topic of many a supper table conversation. (I don't know to this day if dinner has replaced supper in Taylor for the name of that last meal of the day.) When I ran out of what little money I had from my Air Force pay I went to work at the Nations Brothers Packing Plant in Springhill, Louisiana, about seven miles from Taylor. Nasty and cold work, and beside it being a meat packing company, they also slaughtered what meat they packed. I didn't last long. Have you noticed I am finding something wrong with most jobs I have, not that there have been many. Actually, I don't think it was the job so much as me being back in Taylor.

Ah, but things were about to pick up for the better shortly I would find out. I got to bumming around with Billy Willis at this time and he had a Hillman Mink and one night we drove to Magnolia, the country seat of Columbia County where Taylor was located. There, on the floor of a skating rink I lost my heart to Marionette Slaughter. (That is her in the picture, with me and Steve, my brother.) She, in turn, blessed me by falling in love with me also and life was good. I didn't have a vehicle so Billy and myself would double-date quite often. Eventually I managed to talk my parents into letting me borrow their Mercury and I'd drive the nineteen miles to Magnolia to see Marionette.

We were so young and inexperienced. Both of us wanted to get out of our respective situation. Me, because that seemed to be my life's ambition, getting out of my situation, and it took me many years to realize that all the running I was doing was really myself running away from me, not mother or daddy or Taylor. I finally figured that out years and years later with the help of a very special person, Dorothy Jean Bridges, who would eventually become Mrs. Jerry Pat Bolton. Marionette was wanting to leave her home, like, I suppose, most teenagers do, and there I was, more than ready, more than willing. By the end of Chapter 29 I will have asked her to marry me. She squealed and said, "Yes."

My Novels:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742