Chapter 2

Posted: July 15, 2008 - 09:09:32 pm

Tommy effortlessly tossed the fifty pound sack of Purina fortified feedlot grain onto the pallet resting on the forklift’s blades. Then he pulled the order ticket from the bib of his denim apron and compared the number of sacks on the pallet to the number on the ticket. The count matched, so he took his pen out of his shirt pocket and carefully made a check mark next to feedlot grain. The grain was the last item on the ticket, so Tommy climbed onto the forklift and carefully maneuvered it through the warehouse to loading dock two.

Driving the forklift was something Tommy had been doing for only a couple of weeks. He was extremely proud that Mister Fricke, the owner of Brantley Feed and Seed, taught him how and then trusted him enough to let him drive it unsupervised.

A mud splattered Silverado pickup truck was backed up to loading dock two. Tommy raised the blades and inched the pallet forward until it was suspended over the bed of the truck before he turned off the forklift. He climbed out of the driver’s seat and hopped into the back of the truck. From the truck bed, he plucked the bags of grain, oats and cracked corn off the pallet, and stacked them neatly between the wheel wells.

When Tommy finished loading the grain, Horace Fisher, the owner of the truck, stepped out of the cab with his hand extended.

“Good job, Tommy, tell your stingy boss I said he needs to give you a raise,” Fisher said jovially.

Tommy only hesitated a second as he shook Fisher’s hand.

“I’ll tell him that right away, Mister Fisher,” Tommy replied with a grin of his own.

Tommy had hesitated before answering Fisher, because he was trying to figure out if Horace was joshing him or not. Tommy still had problems with figuring out when adults were serious or just kidding around.

Tommy checked the time on his cheap plastic Timex watch as Fisher drove off. It was five minutes before five in the afternoon, and Brantley Feed and Seed closed at five. Tommy pulled down both loading dock overhead doors, parked the forklift and disconnected the propane tank. Then he grabbed a broom and quickly cleaned up around the stacks of bags from which he’d been pulling the feed. He swept everything up into a pile, scooped up the pile with a coal shovel, then dumped the sweepings into a twenty gallon trash can. Tomorrow, Mister Fricke would take the can home and scatter the dirt and feed mix around his chicken coop. Mister Fricke did not waste anything!

It was five after by the time Tommy pulled off his apron, hung it in his wall locker and picked a few stray hay straws off his Levis. He walked across the warehouse and passed through a double set of swinging doors into the showroom, then down a short hall to Mister Fricke’s office. It was Friday, and this particular Friday was payday.

Mister Fricke waved Tommy into the office and pointed to the chair beside his desk while he finished taking a telephone order. Before he could sit down, the occupant of the other desk in the room stood up and hugged Tommy’s neck. Fricke shot the breeze with his customer for another minute or two, before hanging up the phone. He picked a couple of envelopes off his desk blotter and handed one of them to Tommy.

“You are the best worker I’ve ever had, Tommy. Business has picked up since you’ve been here, and much of that is because of how good you treat folks. The raise is me and Missus Rita’s way of thanking you. Oh, and here is your customer service bonus, I had some good reports on you this week,” Fricke said, handing over the other envelope.

The customer service bonus was only seven dollars, and was really just money people had given Fricke for Tommy, because Tommy absolutely refused to accept tips for doing what he was already getting paid to do.

Rita Fricke beamed him a big smile and ruffled his hair. Harold and Rita Fricke, for all practical purposes, adopted Tommy three months ago, when he showed up with the help wanted sign in his hand that Harold had just put on the outside of the front door. Harold Fricke had been leery about hiring the young man because of the halting way he spoke. Rita Fricke had no such problem, as everything about Tommy and the story he had told them tugged at her heart strings. Tommy ended up filling a big void in their lives, since their own children had grown up and moved off to Dallas and Houston.

Tommy proved to be a tireless worker who needed little supervision. Harold or Rita simple gave him a list of things they wanted done, and Tommy made it happen. After he learned how the warehouse worked, Tommy started taking the initiative and the daily list grew shorter. Tommy also learned about the feed store’s products and customers. His cheerful good nature was infectious.

Tommy walked out of the Feed and Seed, crossed the street, doffed his brown straw Stetson hat and entered the Brantley Savings and Loan Bank. He stopped at one of the courtesy tables and carefully filled out his deposit slip, then stood patiently in one of the teller lines. The bank stayed open until six on Friday evenings, and did a brisk business. The line Tommy was in wasn’t the shortest, but the teller at the window was his landlady and mother of his best friend. Her name was Betty Lou Grimes.

“Good afternoon Mister Bledsoe, it slipped my mind that today was your payday,” Betty Lou said with a smile.

“Good afternoon to you too, Missus Grimes,” Tommy said, barely stuttering at all.

Tommy loved the way that his friend Bucky’s mother talked to him. She never talked down to him or treated him like he was a dummy. Bucky didn’t either, for that matter, but some other people sure did, including Bucky’s older step sister. Of course, she never did it around Bucky or his Mom, and Tommy never ratted her out for it. How could he tattle on her when he was totally in love with the beautiful older girl?

Tommy completed his transaction at the bank and headed home. It was only a couple of blocks to the Grimes’s house over on Spring Street. In 1969, in the sleepy little town of Brantley, Texas, pretty much everything was only a few blocks away.

Tom whistled the new Merle Haggard song that he’d been hearing on the radio lately as he walked home. He liked to whistle or sing, because the rhythm of it came effortlessly, unlike his speech. Tommy also reflected on the last three months as he swung down the sidewalk. Even a dummy like him knew how lucky he was when he jumped off that Greyhound bus in front of the Brantley Post Office. It seemed that good things just kept happening to him here.

For instance, on the bulletin board at the post office the day he’d arrived, he found a three by five index card with a neatly typed message. The card said:

Basement room to let.

400 square feet with private bath & entrance.

$25 weekly-paid in advance.

Apply in person to Mrs. Grimes, 27 Spring Street.

Tommy pulled the card off the bulletin board, and after having to ask for directions twice, finally found the modest two-story home. When he rang the bell, the door was answered by a boy near his own mental age. The boy limped and had a brace attached to his right shoe that disappeared up his trouser leg. The brace was almost exactly like the one Tommy had worn for seven months when he first regained consciousness.

Back at Brantley Savings and Loan, Betty Lou was thinking along the same lines as she reconciled her drawer. Her spontaneous decision to take in the shy and soft-spoken young man was so completely out of character for her, that it defied logic. As a fairly young and attractive widow, she had always been very careful she didn’t provide grist for the gossip mill. In fact, the boarder before Tommy had been a sixty-six year old spinster. At first there were some raised eyebrows, but once her neighbors met Tommy, their tune immediately changed. Tommy Bledsoe’s indomitable spirit and gentle good nature in the face of all his adversity, won most folks over in one meeting.

Then there was the positive effect Tommy had on her son, Bucky. Well, his real name was Richard James Grimes, Junior, but Bucky was the nickname his father hung on him while he was still in the womb. Bucky had contracted polio at the age of two. As polio went, it was a mild case, but that was a moot point to a young boy who could only walk with the aid of a heavy duty brace. Bucky couldn’t do most of the things boys his age did, so he became an unhappy loner. Tommy cured him of that attitude in less than a week. It was hard to feel sorry for yourself when you were exposed to a person who was worse off, but didn’t let it get them down.

Betty Lou had been delighted when the Frickes took a chance and hired Tommy down at the feed store. Betty Lou and Rita talked almost every day when Rita came in to do the store’s banking. She was as proud as if it were Bucky that Rita was bragging about. And why not? After all, she and Bucky considered him a member of the family within a week of his arrival. Tommy started eating every meal with them. He insisted on paying an extra fifteen dollars a week to help with the food. Also, at Tommy’s insistence, she gave him chores like Bucky had. To Tommy, anything that gave him responsibility was a victory for him over those who thought he was hopelessly retarded.

The only friction that Tommy caused in the Grimes household was with Betty Lou’s step-daughter, Regina. Regina was her deceased husband’s daughter by his first wife. When Richard divorced his ex for running around on him, the ex was awarded custody of their infant daughter. When Regina was ten, the ex suddenly decided a child was too much trouble, so she gave Richard custody and disappeared. Regina was sixteen now, and a beautiful young lady. Unfortunately, she was also a stuck up snob. She oscillated between being embarrassed by Tommy, to lording it over him as if he were a servant. Betty Lou kept a close eye on Regina, so she didn’t try to take advantage of Tommy. She knew that Tommy secretly mooned over Regina; he was too guileless to hide it very well.

For all the difficulties of being a twelve year old boy in a twenty-four year old body, Tommy was as adaptable as a chameleon. He was talking and acting as if he’d been born and raised in Brantley by the end of his second month in town. If you didn’t know him and you saw him walking down the street, you’d swear he was a cowboy fresh off the ranch.

Yes, Tommy was doing even better than he had expected in his most optimistic twelve-year-old moments. But there had been a few bumps along the way. One of those bumps was his sister. Beth was very concerned when Tommy called her and said he was staying in Texas for a while. After that call, Beth had tried to find a way to force him to return to his childhood home in Palmdale, Florida. She called the McCulloch County Sheriff, the Department of Veteran Affairs, and even Major Wilcox from Ward 4B at Brooke Army Medical Center. The VA determined that he was competent enough to make his own decisions. The sheriff knew Tommy was in excellent hands with Betty Lou Grimes and the Frickes.

It was a shock to Margie Wilcox to find that Tommy had jumped ship. The very next Saturday, she gathered up a young nurse new to the ward and drove over to Brantley to personally check on Tommy. She had a year and a half invested on ex-Lieutenant Bledsoe; he was a most special case.

Tommy only worked half a day on Saturday, so he was at home when the two nurses rang Betty Lou Grimes’s doorbell that Saturday afternoon. Regina answered the door and left the women standing on the porch while she called for Tommy.

“Some one’s at the door for you, Tommy. I think they are here to take you away,” she yelled before flouncing into the living room.

Tommy came up the stairs from the basement with Bucky right behind him. At the same time, Betty Lou came dashing in from the kitchen. Regina’s teasing hadn’t really affected Tommy, but it had Betty Lou’s undivided attention. She was just about to say something when Tommy gave a whoop and dashed out onto the porch.

The young nurse with Major Wilcox, Second Lieutenant Barbara Owens, went moon-eyed when a big handsome cowboy burst out the door. Her eyes grew even bigger when he snatched the Major off the ground in a big bear hug and spun her around. Introductions were sorted out and the two nurses ended up having a very pleasant visit with Betty Lou as she filled them in on how Tommy was doing. By the time the nurses bade Tommy, Betty Lou and her family goodbye; Margie Wilcox was convinced that Tommy was in the right place. She told her young protégé just that as they drove off.

“I think Tommy will do even better here than with his sister. I think his sister is too worried about something happening to him, to let him blossom as he seems to be doing here,” Wilcox mused.

Lieutenant Owens nodded her agreement.

“You are probably right about that. One thing I know for sure, though; is that is a terrible waste of a fine looking man.”

Margie snorted in laughter.

“Take it from someone who has probably given him fifty sponge baths. It is a waste of a whole lot of good man.”

The second bump in the road was actually caused by someone taking advantage of Tommy’s immaturity and trusting nature. That someone was a no account cowhand named Walter ‘Shifty’ Luznar. Luznar was at the bank one payday Friday, and saw Tommy take a hundred dollars cash when he deposited his check. Since he just spent his last thirty dollars on a money order to pay a traffic fine he had hanging over his head, Shifty decided on the spot that he was just the person to help the dimwit spend all that cash.