Slim Randles'  Home Country

Back on the road with the duchess and the trucker

[October 03, 2009]  Dud and Anita Campbell were driving home from the store when they saw the two horses ahead, walking patiently side by side, so their riders, Katie Burchell and Randall Jones, could hold hands. Dud reached over and took his wife's hand and they smiled.

It hit him a block later. Like a thunderstorm that sweeps over the horizon. Like a tsunami, or at least like Dud thought a tsunami would be like... overpowering. He sped home and ran into the house, forgetting to help Anita with the groceries.

Anita heard the typing going on in the next room and brought her husband a cup of coffee. She had a peek over his shoulder. Oh, yes, it was the duchess and the truck driver again.

"The duchess looked up from her cup of coffee at the truck stop in Budapest," he had written, "and there he stood, like a knight of old, holding his trucking coffee mug, and with a copy of the local paper under his arm. She had no way of knowing, right then, that he couldn't read the paper, being an American trucker on special assignment, but he liked to look at the cartoons.

"Is this seat taken?" he asked.

"Why, no," she replied, lowering her pince-nez so she could see him better. "Won't you join me?"

"'Aah,'" thought the trucker, 'she speaks English. She's probably not from around here.'"

"But he was wrong on that. How did he have any way of knowing that she came from that castle up on the hill outside of town? He'd noticed that when he hit the jake brakes coming down the incline, sending rabbits and red stags scurrying for cover. If he'd known then what was coming, the murders, the child of their love, how cold that castle was in winter, would he have sat down with the duchess? Who knows?"

Dud looked up at Anita and smiled. She handed him the coffee. "Back on track with the duchess?" she asked.

"And the truck driver," he said. "And the truck driver."

[Text from file received from Slim Randles]

Brought to you by "Sun Dog Days," by Slim Randles, now available at www.unmpress.com.