hillcrest

Vernice and I get back to Hillcrest every couple years or so. We don't have a timetable. We don't pick the season. We just up and go. The sign is still there from when the Highway ran by this part of town. Before it moved south spawning competing gas stations with conveniences. Now the former thoroughfare is called the Wall Dump Road. You can't even get to Quinn on it anymore. Not that a lot of folks need to get to Quinn so much as past it these days.
The Hillcrest Motel survives, barely. It's the same as it ever was. Home to itinerants and the local poor. A few tourists in the summer. They don't typically stay more than one night. Maybe it's the abandoned vehicles or the boarded up buildings. At one time an area of industry and commerce, now in disrepair and decrepit. The weeds grow unchecked. The town's people complain, but the owners live far away and could care less.
Vernice and I don't care either. Hillcrest is where we started our life together. We raised a toddler in the shotgun duplex across the lot from the 'showers'. The 'showers' was a place for truckers and others on their way someplace else stopping just long enough to wash the dust off. See, this was a dusty road before cars had air conditioning. The biggest fortunes in town would be made on the cooling principle.
Vernice and I made do with swamp cooler and a propane gas stove. The swamp cooler was the size of a refrigerator and moistened but hardly cooled the air. The gas stove had to be re-lit each time it was used and this could be a dangerous endeavor.

In the summer of that year, we got ourselves a dog. You can just make him out in this old picture. With a baby on the way and the 'showers' full of travelers, the dog beat out a gun in Vernice's thinking. I got my way part-way by naming the dog 'Shotgun". He became a true son of a gun just to spite me.
Shotgun was a well-named dog if only for his outhouse habits. Perfecting a well-timed scatter-gun approach to all things offensive, eaten or expelled, Shotgun was moved to a corner of the duplex that had once served as the home of an alcoholic octogenarian who finally wandered into the Badlands and fell into the sewer pond.While it was of course a tragedy, it did free up some room for an equally vile and unhealthy dog. The dog's propensities as well as his love for Vernice and hate for me nearly led me to kill him with a coal shovel one late winter's evening. But I missed my first shot and Vernice caught me mid-swat on the second. It was a long cold winter punctuated with weekly dog-poo-removal exercises while a beagle-sized canine barks incessantly in my ear.

But the good times outshine these trivial incidents. Vernice blooms into a young mother and I get a job with Boeing building Minuteman Missile Silos.

To be continued?