Armageddon Yellowstone: Hell Unleashed

Armageddon Yellowstone: Hell Unleashed

By

Terry Rich Hartley

Copyright 2011 Terry Rich Hartley

Smashwords Edition

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Chapter 1

Tom Havyn

Tom Havyn awoke in a gloomy motel room on the outskirts of Wells, Nevada. When he flopped onto the quilted bedspread at three a.m. he crashed and burned, and didn’t come to until ten in the morning, oblivious to the rumbling truck stop across the parking lot. He shuffled into the bathroom, paid respects to the porcelain, and looked into the mirror at six hundred miles of bad road. For five seconds he thought about unpacking his shaving kit, shrugged, and headed off to the lobby for a cup of coffee.

Thought you advertised free coffee, he mumbled to the clerk while staring at a sign that said, FREE COFFEE.

We’re out...I guess.

A gallon can of generic grind sat open on a shelf under the Mr. Coffee drip machine. A plastic measuring spoon rested on a stained napkin. Tom opted for a large Gearjammer Caff Max at the truck stop, filled his Camry with regular, and drove north. At noon he pulled over at a convenience market along Highway 93 passing through the berg of Clarkson. At noon plus nine he left there with a cold beef sandwich and another Styrofoam cup of sludge. The road was clear and that was good; he’d had enough of the weather gods’ mockery. The Texas panhandle had been tornadic, New Mexico had been nightmarish with thunderstorms, and Nevada had been...well, Nevada; miles and miles of highway hypnosis.

After turning west, he drove through Idaho’s version of Mayberry RFD, replete with a speed trap and some facsimile of Barney Fife to enforce it. Barney was too busy irking another motorist to notice the Camry cruise by at nearly ten over the limit, and forty minutes later Tom saw the ranch off to his right. This was where he would do it. He wasn’t arriving because of any of the reasons dear Muriel, the ranch’s housekeeper, thought he was. Sure, the old foreman and manager Will Lowry had broken his foot—mashed is the way Lowry put it—and was quitting. So, Tom, who had recently inherited the ranch, could possibly be coming to hire a replacement manager, nothing more. It was remotely possible Tom might be coming to tell Muriel he couldn’t grow in his profession and own a ranch, too, no matter how much he loved it. In that case perhaps he’d put the place up for sale and give Muriel her choice of walking out or waiting to see if the new owner would need her. On the other hand, maybe he was driving cross country to say everything was just ducky, that he’d be taking over the ranch and running it the way the old man, his grandfather, always had. But none of these circumstances formed Tom’s motivation. He came to blow his own brains out. And he didn’t plan to waste much time getting it done.

Muriel Shasta and the Havyn Ranch

Muriel Shasta was green willow. Life could tie her in knots but it couldn’t break her. When discovering she could draw early Social Security retirement while continuing to pull a smallish wage for caretaking the empty old Havyn place, she reacted like it was found money instead of a lifelong investment taken from every check she’d ever earned. The fact that her voice had a raspy, chicken-cluck quality to it since that time her late husband cracked her larynx with a beer bottle didn’t trouble her much; she just wouldn’t be an opera singer. And the Havyn place with its haunted-house reputation? Well, those disembodied voices that had driven old man Havyn to the Thorazine Theme Park were in his head, not hers. She actually enjoyed the random noises that the old man thought were voices from beyond. Water gurgling through twisted pipes and wind through rock formations seemed a fit accompaniment to dusting, sweeping, caulking, and repairing. Didn’t scare her, though. Neither did the earth tremors that were becoming more frequent and forceful.

Muriel wasn’t even frightened that Tommy (okay, Thomas Jr., or Tom, now that he was in his mid thirties) was coming in from Texas to deal with business at the house and two hundred and ten acres of rangeland it stood on. Her job was already in his hands. He was the sole heir. The old man died years ago of aging organs overstressed by a psychiatric chemical stew. Before he was mentally disabled, the old man (Everett, actually) signed a will, giving Thomas Jr. and only Thomas Jr. the ranch. Tom’s dad, Thomas Sr., never gave a hoot in hell about the property, or ranching in general for that matter. No sir, when Senior made it on his own as a liability lawyer back in New York state he all but forgot his western roots. Not Junior, though. Tom came out every summer during his school years, and had been out at least half a dozen times since growing up. He loved the West and idolized his granddad. He was so unlike Senior it was hard to believe they were related; he even scorned his dad for signing papers that put the old man into the permanent care of pill pushing, needle sticking quacks.

Muriel felt it was unfortunate that when Everett passed, Tom couldn’t come out and run the place. But, he had a life of his own, an important position as a research psychologist in the Behavioral Medicine Labs in Dallas. With that occupying his time he did the best he could from long distance: kept his granddad’s grizzled foreman aboard as ranch manager to tend the cattle while Muriel tended to everything else except bills and payroll. A local accountant saw to that. In fact, Muriel hadn’t heard a peep from Tom since the old man’s funeral over three years ago. Then, just last week, things changed abruptly. The ranch manager, Will Lowry, up and quit after getting the shit stomped out of his foot for the fifth time in a long career. Fuck cattle, he said. Fuck bulls. Fuck cows. Fuck steers. Fuck anybody who likes ‘em. Then he fucked himself up with whiskey and oxycodone. And that was that. Didn’t leave Tom much choice but to come back and take care of matters.

The thought that Tom might need to sell the ranch occurred to her but she didn’t dwell on it. She’d roll with that punch if it came. If he kept the ranch, no doubt he’d keep her on. After all, he loved the land and no one in the world with his intelligence would want to usurp her chores, which weren’t really chores to her, they were part of her essence. Muriel was as much a part of the ranch as the fences were. She went all the way back to when the old man actively ran the place. The first owner, John Nunemaker, got the land through Desert Entry, where the government allowed settlement on a hundred sixty acres of bare land, provided a settler improved the property, meaning made it suitable for a white man. Civilized it. Nunemaker drilled a well. A big one. Big enough to turn sagebrush land to grass. Then he imported twenty head of black angus. They bred and his ranch did just fine, thank you, and within three years he’d built the first house here, a two room rock building with a shake roof. Everett Havyn was just thirteen and had graduated eighth grade when he began working on the ranch as an all around hand, and by eighteen he was ranch foreman and a damned fine rodeo cowboy. Short, wiry, and tougher than a bag of bobcats, his specialty was bull riding. Rodeo purses, along with being tight fisted with his ranch earnings paid off. In 1947 when Nunemaker grew old and infirm, Everett bought the ranch at the age of twenty five and it remained in the family ever since. It even grew by fifty acres.

Everett was twenty nine when he married Eunice Babble, who died when Thomas Sr. was a snot-nosed teenager. And that’s where Muriel came in. If psychological battering inviolably reduces a person to worthlessness, then Muriel’s life after marriage should have amounted to something like Custer’s cluster fuck at Little Big Horn. Her husband, a middle-aged reprobate named Clem Sollers, drank with consistency, browbeat with equal consistency, and applied the back of his hand with nerve jangling inconsistency. Shortly after Clem died face down on concrete doorsteps, which somehow caused a cerebral hemorrhage in the back of his brain, the young widow Muriel, not quite twenty and with few skills, answered Everett’s newspaper ad for a housekeeper and caretaker. From then on she never looked back. Okay, almost never. Burying a no good peckerhead and finding lifelong employment in the same week left an esteem-boosting impression that intruded on her thoughts every now and then. So much for the Custer syndrome.

The Kinghorns

Things frequently went bump in the night at the Havyn ranch, and throughout the Glensford area in south central Idaho for that matter. The bumps also came in daylight. They were random and pretty well accepted. Most folks just said, There goes the Air Force, which meant the flyboys were laying down brimstone and hellfire on the sagebrush steppe known as Saylor Creek Bomb Range. Back in the fifties and sixties the big booms were usually of the sonic kind, but bad press and lawsuits laid that issue to rest. Now the rumbles mostly reverberated through the earth instead of the sky. And rumbles proved more acceptable than the stark, plaster-cracking sonic booms. Of course, it didn’t hurt that patriotic Idahoans understood bombing practice was essential to freedom.

Nevertheless, spokespeople representing Mountain Home Air Force Base denied any part in these mysterious rumblings. They did so with straight faces. Except once, when a weekly newspaper reporter’s question spurred First Lieutenant Katherine Oneida to crack a snarky grin and say, If I don’t know what causes the rumblings, how can I know if they’re related to cattle mutilations? Then, to a burst of derisive laughter from other reporters, she added, Perhaps you should interview a...mutologist?

University of Idaho seismology experts said they could not clearly identify the cause of these sporadic tremors, but there was nothing much to worry about. Strata in the Snake River Plain wasn’t conducive to large earthquakes, unlike the strata not very far north in the Sawtooth Mountains or south in northern Nevada. So, yes, some tremors might, indeed, be bomb caused (despite denials), some probably resulted from commercial explosives used at numerous gravel pits and construction projects throughout the area, and some—well, who knows?

Vern Kinghorn knew. Vern was the owner of Mystic Hot Springs: Olympic-sized pool and thermal baths, fueled by one-hundred-twenty-five degree geothermal water that bubbled from the earth where the Snake River Canyon spreads its walls to form Mystic Valley. Vern operated a mostly cash business, kept two sets of books, and had a barb wire hardon for government or anything resembling it. Family history taught him that authority and corruption were conjoined twins. His late father, Buler Kinghorn had purchased the hot springs and two hundred acres from the bankruptcy trustee back in 1925 for the sum of one thousand dollars and an additional two hundred and five dollars trustee fee. The trustee fee was as generous as it was unscrupulous. Moreover, the trustee, Walter Goodwell, gave Buler five years to pay up because canyon land was rocky and not good for much. Or maybe it was because Goodwell was Kinghorn’s first cousin and best friend. And as Goodwell said, That sulfurous boil’s never been good for anything except heathen Injuns soaking away bad spirits, most of which came from whiskey barrels.

Buler knew better: he knew that people craved immortality, and short of immortality, they would pay for anything that might make them healthier in spite of their own base habits. Or at least anything that would keep them breathing longer than they would without said anything. Buler knew this because his widower dad had been a hellfire itinerant preacher who could pack a tent tighter than a Country singer’s britches. The man didn’t exist who could squeeze godly contributions from pocket books more efficiently than the Reverend Kinghorn. It was easy as juice from a press. Buler himself didn’t possess that mighty gift of rhetoric, but he did have a mind for what people craved. The canyon’s bottom land had enough sandy loam in between the big, water-polished boulders for a fair sized orchard. Apple, peach, and cherry trees grew like weeds down there. And the canyon made for a much longer frost free season than above on the flats. Hard rock miners eighty miles north in the Wood River Valley paid a king’s ransom for fresh fruit (Contrary to popular belief, all their coin did not go to licentious endeavors.) and Buler drove truckloads there as fast as the fruit ripened late each summer.

Profits from that and the fact locals grudgingly paid to soak their aches away in the geothermal water, which pooled in smooth, basalt depressions, kept Buler, his wife Griselda and son Vernon in food and clothing, and put a small roof over their heads. Luxuries, though, were few. This was not the cash rich business saving souls was. That’s for sure. Having failed to follow his father in the eternity business, Buler was left to lay awake nights scheming up means to replace the labor intensive vocation of orchard tending. And to think Buler was once destined to receive a legacy. For years his Reverend dad had squirreled money to send the boy to college. You’re not a real good talker, son, so you better get book smart, the Rev would say. And when he died, there should have been a handsome inheritance. That was whittled some by a shameless woman here, another one there who required something more than a wink and a shhh to forget what transpired in private prayer sessions. Reasonable extortion was an acceptable part of the game it would seem. At least it was before the incident in Silver City, Montana. That one involved an underage girl who described a botched circumcision, Freemasons who moonlighted as vigilantes, and a noose. So here’s the deal the vigilantes generously offered: Show us that Gabriel’s horn you persuade the ladies to play. If it ain’t what the girl described, you can button up and ride out. Or show us your money. Or grow considerably tall considerably fast.

The Rev chose option two. The vigilantes couldn’t be bought off with just one bankbook, either; they got them all, including Buler’s college fund. Indeed, they sucked on the Rev like ticks on a dog. It was all for the girl and her future baby, they said.

The Masonic Temple gained two Tiffany windows and a new piano shortly afterward. And what was left of the Rev’s funds? Apparently, just enough to send Buler off to boarding school before the Rev drank himself into a grave. Yessir, young Buler woulda been on easy street if not for those vigilante parasites. But now was now and reality didn’t give a shit about possibilities. So as the years passed, Buler was left mainly with two things: hard work and hope for an epiphany.

They say that serendipity favors a prepared mind, and Buler’s was certainly prepared to hear just about anything to make his life easier. The first of two opportune events occurred just above the bluffs near the top of the canyon’s west side. That side sloped rather than sheered like the east side across the river and Buler used to walk a game trail up to a rocky outcropping, where more often than not he’d bag a sage hen or two. Hunting restrictions didn’t have much force in those days. Neither did environmental protection. And that’s why on one of those excursions when the idea struck him to build a slaughterhouse, he had no concern about government paperwork. A wing of his land went upslope and over the rim, and he could do bloody well with it what he wanted, especially since it had ingress/egress rights to Highway 30, a quarter mile west. Yes, something told him this would be a profit maker. Ranchers raised cattle in the area, then shipped them by rail 120 miles away to Pocatello for butcher. That made meat painfully pricey on the local market. So why not just butcher them here? A small loan from local banker, Joe Walker, brought the idea to fruition.

When Joe, or anyone else for that matter, asked him how he came up with such an idea, Buler just said a flash of inspiration. He’d never admit that his dad had appeared in the rocky outcropping and planted that notion in his head. Of course he wouldn’t admit it. The Rev was dead.

The second—and bigger—moment came seven months later on a Tuesday pre-noon. Son Vernon, six at the time, was at the country school and wife Grinelda was over to Glensford on her weekly shopping trip. Buler was in his clapboard shop grinding away on a shovel blade when Blackfoot Bill drifted into the doorway. At five ten he looked six-six in buckskins, Tony Llama boots, and a ten gallon Stetson. Salt and pepper locks flowed from his hat to cover thick, round shoulders like moss on a rock. Steam from the hot springs, backlit with golden sunlight, billowed behind, giving a heavenly backdrop to an unheavenly guy. An Old Crow bottle filled his left hand. He right hand pointed back toward the geothermal pools. How much to soak in your fart water? he asked.

My what?

That fart water boilin’ out’a the ground.

Oh, the sulfur. Well...I live here. Don’t smell it anymore. Besides that, you can dip water out of those pools, let it sit for a spell and the sulfur’s gone. All you’re left with is min— Buler froze like he’d seen a ghost.

Min? Bill asked. Min what?

Min...Mineral water. For chrissake, mineral water!

Right there and then Mystic Springs Mineral Water Company was born. And so was the next chapter in Kinghorns vs. authority.

Chapter 2

Tom and Muriel

After turning onto the private lane leading up to Gramps' frame and brick house, Tom watched the dust boil in his rearview mirror and wondered why no one had ordered gravel this summer. But then he didn’t really give a rat. Dust was dust and dead was dead. Muriel was there at the house washing the front window with a long handled squeegee. From a distance she hadn’t changed much. The rump of her blue jeans had widened, and her French braided gray blonde hair hung down farther on her broad back than last time he’d seen her, but time had not stolen her confidence of motion. Tom slowed to let the dust settle and not send any her way, then turned and crept up the graveled driveway. By the time he stepped from the sedan, Muriel was standing there, holding the squeegee handle across her ample chest like a rifle at order arms. The look on her face was a mix of perplexity and disgust.

You look like somethin’ the cat crapped and the pig cooked, she said.

Well, good day to you too, Muriel, Tom quipped, stepping from the car and unrolling his five ten frame, tall for his family. And don’t worry, I won’t hug you.

Muriel wanted to say, You sure as hell won’t, but resisted. It wasn’t that she was shy about saying anything—anything at all—it was that her recognition node had a glitch. She’d expected—or wanted would be more like it—to see the Tom she’d known, the boy grown into a young man, lean, hard, dark, and handsome. But this Tom was...defeated. Old. Looked like...well, like somethin’ the cat crapped and the pig cooked.

We got plenty of time for huggin’ after you get a shower, she said.

Tom exhaled a hollow laugh, reached back into the car and the trunk lid popped open. I’ll second that, he said, stepping to the back, where he pulled a bulging green duffle from the trunk, set it down and grabbed for a pair of roughout hiking boots. So, Will broke his foot? There was no bounce in his voice. It sounded more like a person trying to fill a void with conversation: They’re calling for rain today or Hot enough for you? Stranger conversation.

Did a fine job of it, to. Too danged stubborn to carry a cell phone, and he was a far stretch from his pickup when that steer spooked and landed smack down on his foot. By the time Will hobbled to the truck and drove hisself to the emergency room over to Aurora Springs the swelling was so bad they had to cut his boot off. Losing the boot hurt him more than the break. Muriel shrugged and grinned. They say there’s no fool like an old fool. If he’d just stopped at the house, I could’ve called the EMTs. But I guess that would’ve hurt his pride some.

Guess so, Tom said, striding toward the front screen door, luggage in hand. He’s a tough S-O-B. Not as tough as Gramps was, but tough.

Inside, the place looked the same: cedar paneled walls that matched the furniture, fifties-style cotton drapes (tan), tight wool carpet (gray, speckled with blues and greens), and the air smelled like Old English furniture polish. Tom couldn’t help noticing the screen door didn’t squeak, either a miracle or WD-40. Probably WD-40, knowing Muriel. If it squeaks, spray it; if it squawks, cook it. She’d told him that as a boy to stop his squawking—and it worked. A large coved opening lay straight ahead—the kitchen entrance—and a smaller one cut into the wall on the right leading to the hallway, where the only bathroom sat in between two bedrooms. Nothing fancy, but everything functional, just like the old man who’d built it mostly with his own hands after razing the original rock structure. In the bathroom was a free-standing cast iron tub to which a chrome pipe rose and hooked down to end with an enormous shower head. The shower was a 1960-something addition, along with the chrome stand that held a wrap-around shower curtain on rings. The curtain was decorated with rainbow trout. Watch so they don’t bite your worm, the old man used to joke.

After a half hour in that room Tom emerged several coats of grime lighter. He was freshly shaven and dressed comfortably in a short-sleeved, white T-shirt and Levi 401s. His thick, black hair was combed straight back. When he walked into the kitchen Muriel slapped her right hand over her heart and clucked, Lordy, if I was twenty years younger and you were single!

Tom grinned and said, You could do better.

Muriel didn’t like the grin. Her histrionics should have cracked his face into a big ol’ Tommy Havyn smile that lit up the room. You are...still married, aren’t you?

Tom didn’t answer, just shrugged. That cheesecake for me?

Who else? She handed him the wedge on a saucer and said, Fresh cup of coffee over there, pointing to a ceramic mug embossed with John Deere logo resting atop a flowered table cloth. The cloth covered a gray and green speckled Formica table on chrome legs, more decor compliments of the mid twentieth century. Tom thanked her, started to sit down, then saw the coffee cup shake just before feeling vibrations on the soles of his feet. There was a brief rumbling sound like the bass on a distant boom box. Then it was over.

You’ll get used to them, Muriel said. Probably bombing practice over to Saylor Creek.

As long as they’re on our side, Tom said, dropping into the chair. Then as an afterthought, added, It seemed to reverberate through the ground.

Oh, yeah, and that was an average one. You ought’a feel it when they use bunker busters. Those things-

The Air Force tests those around here? Tom interrupted.

"Well, no one can prove it, but that’s what everybody thinks. What else would send a buzz right through the soles of your feet?

Tom shrugged, then yummed after biting into the cheesecake. But the yum seemed obligatory, as bland as everything else about him.

Muriel had a thousand questions she wanted to ask but felt pretty sure she wasn’t going to play Aunt Bea to Tom’s Opie on this particular day. Anything more I can get you?

Uh...no. No, nothing could beat this. Think I’ll just eat and nap.

Well, I’ve been here since seven and, as the big boys say, got places to go and people to see. Stew in the crockpot’ll be done by six. Muriel strapped a handbag that looked like it could hold a hay bale over her right shoulder and rattled some car keys in her left hand. See you in the morning? She didn’t know why she put that as a question, it just seemed appropriate.

Sure...Um, on second thought why don’t you take tomorrow off. With pay, of course. I’m dead beat. Think I’ll sleep all day and you might as well do something fun.

If you insist. See ya day after. She stood there a moment, like she was expecting Tom to break out in song, then slipped away in a sense of dejection. Where were the hugs that were supposed to come after the shower? This guy was not the Tom Havyn she knew. And that worried her. A lot.

Drew Stewart and Connie Benkula

Drew Stewart was getting to him. Six months of sobriety was getting to him. Living with his Alzheimer’s stricken mother was getting to him. His domineering older sister moving back in to nurse their mother was getting to him. And losing two cows in as many months on his mom’s eighty acre farm—that ate at his guts. Cows cost money, feed cost money, and feeding a cow to adulthood, then finding it dead and mutilated was a money busting bitch for any small farm. Connie Benkula was on the brink—and he looked it. To most folks he looked that way even when he wasn’t on the brink. Connie was six eight, lean, strong as a bull, and was the spitting image of the proverbial Wild Man of Borneo. His front teeth were missing, upper and lower, compliments of a mare’s hind hoof. He seldom showered, and only trimmed his beard maybe every six months, maybe not, depending on whether he felt like it. Same with his coal black hair laced with streaks of white. Going blond, is the way he described the streaks.

Connie tapped the backside of his paw on the passenger window inside a cramped, pale green Ford Ranger marked with the logo, Emerald Valley Canal Co., and said, I toldja I don’t feel like gettin’ diddled with today. Why don’t you shut the fuck up?

Aw, does your pussy hurt? Drew Stewart taunted.

No, but yours is gonna, ya don’t shuddup.

Connie, mid forties, had been the irrigator for a flock of farms in Emerald Valley at one time or another, and had been chief irrigator eight years for the multinational packing company, TransAgCorp, on the corporation’s thousand plus acres of owned and leased land. The regular paycheck was essential. Eighty acres wouldn’t support a monk these days, much less he and his ma. The Westline water master of Emerald Valley Canal Company had wanted to hire him for years. Harry Stanton had known Connie Benkula since their Glensford High days, and knew him to be basically honest, inarguably the best irrigator in the county, and a lifelong user of weed, whiskey, and any mind altering substance he could ingest, but mostly weed. And alcohol. Both together whenever possible. That was the problem.The canal company had a pee-in-the-cup drug policy, both pre-hire and random. TransAgCorp did not. That kept him at the conglomerate. But then one day the bad thing happened, just as Connie knew it would. Over the years he’d trained more and more low paid migrant workers to do various parts of his job until one day TransAgCorp offered him longer working hours for less money. They could fill his position cheaply with migrants if he didn’t take the deal. So, take the offer or fuck off. He fucked off. But, with no other full-time job opportunities (largely because of his grooming habits) than the one Stanton kept open, he was forced to dry out. That was half a year ago and he still craved the delightfully screwed up state known as substance abuse.

I’d give my nut for some good dope right about now, Connie thought to himself. Then, moaning out loud, he did his trademark hands on each cheek headshake, shaggy locks whipping like a mop.

Hey, inbreed, whatsamatter with you? Drew said.

Don’t ever call me that.

Drew pulled the Ranger to a stop. They were a quarter mile up a farmer’s lane surrounded with eye-high corn. To the front of the vehicle was a bend in a canal lateral where the water poured over a weir and flowed west. Three feet before the weir a steel v-notch gate opened for a farmer’s ditch that flowed north. The gate’s angle iron uprights were twisted and bent. Drew jumped out, looked at the gate and said, Stupid sonofabitch farmer should hire Mexicans who know how to steer a tractor. Bring that torch to me, inbreed.

The acetylene torch kit amounted to a single one-gallon gas tank, same size oxygen tank, hoses, and torch assembly, all tucked into an open wooden box with a handle. It weighed north of forty pounds. Connie effortlessly lifted it with one hand, walked over to where Drew Stewart was standing, and dropped it on Stewart’s right foot.

You cocksuckingbastardsonofabitch!, Drew screamed, grabbing onto the angle iron with his left hand and raising his boot to cradle in his right one. Dirty motherfucker!

You been raggin’ me all morning, Connie said. I ain’t no pussy just cuz’a my name. And I ain’t no inbreed. Next time you shoot your mouth off, the pain’ll be in yer head, not yer hoof.

The mouthing had been ceaseless, a steady stream of vindictiveness since seven thirty this morning. That’s why Connie did everything he could not to draw Drew as a partner. Harry Stanton knew what Drew Stewart was like; everyone knew what Drew Stewart was like. If he wasn’t trashing you to your face, he was trashing you behind your back. And he chose no favorites. He was one of those guys who can be on a job for a year and know more than every seasoned employee and, for sure, more than the managers, the president, and the entire shit-for-brains board of directors. Worse, he let everyone know that he knew. Insufferable as he was, he’d never get fired because his uncle sat on the board. That was that. And, unfortunately, every member of the Westline crew had to take their rotation partnering with