man.”
I don’t have to tell you what frisky means.
Dad rarely uses vulgarities and Mom never does. That particular genetic streak ended with me, I’m afraid.
I wondered if Cliffie knew anything about this. Muldaur was not only a religious bigot but a ladies’ man as well. Two motives had already surfaced for his being killed. There would likely be more. There usually are in homicide investigations. You take a guy like Muldaur, you might find six, seven people who’d considered killing him, each with very specific and unique reasons of their own.
Part of my mom’s long john got
soaked and fell in her coffee. She used her spoon to rescue it, then ate it like a piece of cereal. I’m more careful with my dunking. More timid, I guess. I’m well aware of how pieces get too wet and fall off. I don’t want that to happen to me.
“Where’d Walter move to, anyway?”
“Cedar Rapids. Penick and Ford plant.
He’s got a brother-in-law there who’s a big shot in the union.”
“He didn’t happen to move because of Muldaur, did he?”
“Heck, no. Walter? He knew what he
was getting into when he married Jinny.”
“What he was getting into? What’s that mean?”
“You know,” my dad said, as if we were telepaths. “Her, uh, bosoms.”
“She had big knockers, as the men like to say,”
Mom said, “your father included.”
“Yeah, now that I think about it,” I said, “I guess she did.”
“Guys were always gettin’ frisky with her,”
Dad said. “Muldaur was just one more. His wife was the one who thought the snake stuff was so neat, anyway. So when she told Walter about Muldaur askin’ her to meet him out to the old Tyler farm, he just told her that he didn’t ever want her to go back there to church.”
“You know who you should talk to,” Mom said.
“Who?”
“Kenny Thibodeau.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. He wrote a long article on
Muldaur and his church, back when he worked for The Clarion.”
Kenny Thibodeau was a local kid who graduated from the University of Iowa journalism school in 1955 or so. He came back to town here, became the assistant editor of the local paper, got himself married, had a son, took up golf, and could even be seen ushering at the Pentecostal church on Sunday morning.
Then he read On The Road by Jack
Kerouac and claimed to have the same kind of vision St. Paul had on the road to Damascus, or wherever he was going. Well, not exactly the same, of course. Paul claimed to have seen God and renounced all sin. Kenny Thibodeau, on the other hand, claimed to have seen Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassidy. And instead
of renouncing sin, he embraced it. All kinds of sin. He left his wife and child and moved to the West Coast. He reappeared a year later, his wife and child long gone, no longer the buttoned-down, crew-cutted Kenny we’d known and ignored. He was a beatnik. I hate that word, it’s a press word, but that’s what he was.
He had the goatee, he had the black horn-rimmed glasses, the black
turtleneck, the black chinos, the black socks, and, worst of all, the Jesus sandals.
I’m no fashion plate but there’s something about socks and sandals that rankles. At least he’d spared us the beret.
Kenny had been coming and going ever since. He went to London, Paris, San Francisco, New York. And always returned. He
supported himself by writing pornography, or what the moralists called pornography, anyway. Paperbacks with sexy covers and suggestive titles but virtually nothing explicit inside. Lesbo Lodge was one of his, as was Life of a Lesbo. Kenny
lived in a trailer near the west end of town.
We had coffee whenever we ran into each other. I enjoyed him without quite approving of him. And I disapproved of him because I was probably jealous.
He traveled, he supported himself writing, albeit somewhat scandalously, and he was always going to Iowa City on the weekends and coming back with wild tales of undergraduate English majors who “know how to
I don’t have to tell you what frisky means.
Dad rarely uses vulgarities and Mom never does. That particular genetic streak ended with me, I’m afraid.
I wondered if Cliffie knew anything about this. Muldaur was not only a religious bigot but a ladies’ man as well. Two motives had already surfaced for his being killed. There would likely be more. There usually are in homicide investigations. You take a guy like Muldaur, you might find six, seven people who’d considered killing him, each with very specific and unique reasons of their own.
Part of my mom’s long john got
soaked and fell in her coffee. She used her spoon to rescue it, then ate it like a piece of cereal. I’m more careful with my dunking. More timid, I guess. I’m well aware of how pieces get too wet and fall off. I don’t want that to happen to me.
“Where’d Walter move to, anyway?”
“Cedar Rapids. Penick and Ford plant.
He’s got a brother-in-law there who’s a big shot in the union.”
“He didn’t happen to move because of Muldaur, did he?”
“Heck, no. Walter? He knew what he
was getting into when he married Jinny.”
“What he was getting into? What’s that mean?”
“You know,” my dad said, as if we were telepaths. “Her, uh, bosoms.”
“She had big knockers, as the men like to say,”
Mom said, “your father included.”
“Yeah, now that I think about it,” I said, “I guess she did.”
“Guys were always gettin’ frisky with her,”
Dad said. “Muldaur was just one more. His wife was the one who thought the snake stuff was so neat, anyway. So when she told Walter about Muldaur askin’ her to meet him out to the old Tyler farm, he just told her that he didn’t ever want her to go back there to church.”
“You know who you should talk to,” Mom said.
“Who?”
“Kenny Thibodeau.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. He wrote a long article on
Muldaur and his church, back when he worked for The Clarion.”
Kenny Thibodeau was a local kid who graduated from the University of Iowa journalism school in 1955 or so. He came back to town here, became the assistant editor of the local paper, got himself married, had a son, took up golf, and could even be seen ushering at the Pentecostal church on Sunday morning.
Then he read On The Road by Jack
Kerouac and claimed to have the same kind of vision St. Paul had on the road to Damascus, or wherever he was going. Well, not exactly the same, of course. Paul claimed to have seen God and renounced all sin. Kenny Thibodeau, on the other hand, claimed to have seen Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassidy. And instead
of renouncing sin, he embraced it. All kinds of sin. He left his wife and child and moved to the West Coast. He reappeared a year later, his wife and child long gone, no longer the buttoned-down, crew-cutted Kenny we’d known and ignored. He was a beatnik. I hate that word, it’s a press word, but that’s what he was.
He had the goatee, he had the black horn-rimmed glasses, the black
turtleneck, the black chinos, the black socks, and, worst of all, the Jesus sandals.
I’m no fashion plate but there’s something about socks and sandals that rankles. At least he’d spared us the beret.
Kenny had been coming and going ever since. He went to London, Paris, San Francisco, New York. And always returned. He
supported himself by writing pornography, or what the moralists called pornography, anyway. Paperbacks with sexy covers and suggestive titles but virtually nothing explicit inside. Lesbo Lodge was one of his, as was Life of a Lesbo. Kenny
lived in a trailer near the west end of town.
We had coffee whenever we ran into each other. I enjoyed him without quite approving of him. And I disapproved of him because I was probably jealous.
He traveled, he supported himself writing, albeit somewhat scandalously, and he was always going to Iowa City on the weekends and coming back with wild tales of undergraduate English majors who “know how to
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