"And Jesus said, 'Come to me all you . . . (blip) . . . dangling chads that were found . . . (blip) . . . on President Clinton's desk . . . (blip) . . . in your septic tank. Try . . . (blip) . . . Molson Motors for your best . . . (blip) . . . Christmas dinner specials and . . . (blip) . . . professional eye care needs . . . (blip) . . . constipation fast . . . (click)."

Once again, Trey shook his head as his hand came back down from shutting the car radio off. It had been a damn stupid thing to do. For now, there was nothing much to do but listen to nothing and drive while his mind rolled on. He'd paid good money to have the CD player put in his Cougar when he'd bought it back in Ft. Riley, but he'd left the case with his CDs sitting on his desk back in the dorm, and that was better than halfway back across the state of Misery. Besides, the dorm would be locked up by now, and there was no way he could get to the case until he was back in Marienthal three weeks from now. He hadn't noticed it at first because there had been a Bob Marley and the Wailers disk in the player, and that had done the job for a while. But, about the fourth time I Shot the Sheriff came by, he was ready for something else. For now, there was nothing else to do but keep hitting the seek button every time he heard someone talking, and it seemed like all they did on AM or FM was talk. Even when he hit a classical music station, he'd managed a good six or seven minutes of Mozart before some damn announcer who loved the sound of his voice came on and started droning on with useless commentary about it, and he'd hit the "seek" button again.

PTFM, he thought. Just play the freaking music. But, it was the hour break and everything was filled with people in love with the sound of their own voices, so the silence from the speakers sounded good.

It made him wonder just how bad he wanted to go into radio after all. Not very, right now. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but when he actually listened to the damn thing he wondered why anyone would want to put up with all that gabble. Sure, he'd talk a little when he put in his time on the board at the 15-watt campus radio station, but he tried to PTFM. Oh well, there were fallback positions, and he didn't have to make up his mind for a year or more. There was a lot he could do without moving back to Indiana.

Like a lot of kids from small towns, Trey had counted the days until he could see it in his rear view mirror; now he was heading back and not looking forward to it. Oh, it would be nice to see his folks again -- it had been a while -- but he knew his idiot sister and her doofus husband and screaming kids were going to be there, and that would take a lot of fun out of it. It didn't look like Robbie was going to be there. He'd have liked to have seen his older brother, but from what he'd heard he was going to have trouble getting away, and if he could he and Shirley were heading to her folks.

It wouldn't actually have been so bad to just hit the road for a long weekend, spend a couple days with the folks, and then drive back to KC, but it couldn't happen. They locked the dorms up tight for the holidays, and the students had to find something else to do. Since most headed home, it was no big deal. But damn it, this was the busiest time of year at his part time job at the airport; if he'd been able to stay in town he'd be working full time, maybe overtime, and stacking up the bucks. He'd sort of hinted to Justin that he needed a place to stay over the holidays, but Justin hadn't taken the hint. Without a cheap place to stay in or around KC, he couldn't do it; there was no way that the extra income at work would cover the cost of a motel or something for him to stay in while the campus was closed up. It was nice that the supervisors cut college student part-time workers a lot of slack on their schedules, even at the Christmas rush, but damn, three weeks in Bumfuck, Indiana was going to seem like forever.

That wasn't the town's real name of course, but that's what the kids called it clear back in high school. That was what he'd called it all the time he'd been in the Army and people had asked where he was from, too. As far as he was concerned the best thing about being from the place was being as far from it as possible. He'd only spent a few days there in the last six years and change, and this would be his longest stay in that time. Bummer.

Back when he'd been in high school, he hadn't thought a whole hell of a lot about college one way or another. That was something the rich kids and the smart kids did, and he really wasn't much of either. He'd sort of hoped that they'd take him on at Square D but they weren't hiring when he graduated. The best thing he'd been able to find was rounding up shopping carts at the K-Mart in Kokomo. That shit got old in a hurry, and it made him wonder just how much he'd like spending eight hours a day for the rest of his life running a machine at Square D. Besides, it was his home town and there had to be something better.

It wasn't a big jump to joining the Army. The recruiter had talked about the Montgomery GI Bill and how the government would send him to college after he got out. In the back of his head he thought he might use the program for some kind of bennies when he got out, a trade school or something, but that had been neither here nor there. That wasn't the big selling point -- it was that it would get him out of Indiana. He hadn't given much thought to the Air Force. There were a lot of Air Force people around, what with the big air base not far away -- if he joined the Air Force there was a small but existing chance that he'd wind up there, and that wouldn't accomplish anything toward getting out of Indiana.

So he wound up going infantry. That was the point of being in the Army after all. He didn't particularly care if he learned anything that would be of use to him as a civilian, and he figured infantry was where the action was, if there was going to be any action.

As it worked out there hadn't been much. He'd spent a couple years down at Ft. Stewart, then was sent to Kosovo with his unit for the peacekeeping force. Some peace; he'd been shot at a couple of times, nothing much. It would be hard to say if it was actually him who had been shot at or whether it was just stray bullets going by. It hadn't been particularly good duty, and he had been damn glad to get out of there, even though there were some interesting experiences and he had brought home a few souvenirs.

The best one of those was an old Nikon F2 with a couple lenses that he'd picked up on the gray market for a few bucks one afternoon. It had been something to take a few snapshots with, but years later when he was talking with a guy at Marienthal who really knew cameras, he'd found out it was one of the best cameras ever built. Somebody must have needed money, he thought. Well, it might have been stolen too, but there was no way of telling, and Kosovo was far away and far in the past now.

Not long after he got back from Kosovo, he'd been transferred to the Big Red One, out at Ft. Riley, west of KC. By then he was giving some thought to staying in. The Army wasn't all that bad a life. It was interesting, you got plenty of exercise, and there was some adventure. The pay could have been better, but it was OK, and the bennies were pretty good. He was a Speedy-4 by then, and it seemed like there was going to be a pretty good chance that he'd make buck sergeant on another hitch, maybe more. But while life as a sergeant was better than being a troop it wasn't that much better, and he could see the officers had it pretty soft by comparison. And, they got paid better. He'd never really thought about it much, but knew that officers had to be college graduates. He had that Montgomery GI Bill money laying there for after he got out; after four years in the service it would be enough to cover all regular expenses and then some. If he decided not to go back in and take a shot at OCS, he'd still be a college graduate. That had to be worth something.

Marienthal had an extension program at Ft. Riley. He got involved in that, picking up a few freshman-level classes, actually a little better than a semester's worth. He was a little surprised at how well things went. He hadn't been all that good a student in high school, but the classes went pretty well. So, when he got out, heading off to Marienthal for his college career seemed like a good idea; he already had a running start there.

It wasn't until he'd been at Marienthal for a while that he realized that not only was he four years older, he'd picked up some maturity and motivation along the way. The kids right out of high school who were freshmen along with him -- well, they were kids! It was really irritating; they had some dumb ideas, no self-discipline, full of horseshit. They had a lot of growing up to do, even Justin. Especially Justin. He slowly began to realize that the Army had been good to him in lots of other ways besides just paying for college.

As the years passed at Marienthal the notion of going back to the Army and going OCS was still there, but had faded a bit. He'd learned that unless you were a real hotshot, OCS officers were not considered the top of the line in the Army. There weren't many who had long careers, or even got in their twenty. If he got RIFed, he'd have to finish up his twenty starting as a E-4 again, and he figured it would be tough to do after having been an officer.

He also had given some thought to another way of doing it. He could go OCS, spend a few more years on active duty, then wind up in a guard or reserve unit somewhere. The retirement wasn't as good, but people didn't get RIFed from them either. But that still wasn't a done deal in his mind; he'd been out long enough that he wasn't sure how much he wanted to go back to some of the service bullshit. Well, he had another year. There were alternatives, and all were better than rounding up shopping carts at the K-Mart in Kokomo.

College life had been pretty good to him, all in all. Living in the dorms was a lot like living in the barracks, but without the inspections and horseshit. It could get noisy, but he was used to that. A lot of kids bitched about the food in the cafeteria, but they'd never had to live on MREs for months on end, so he didn't have any complaints about the food. He didn't have to worry about the college costs at all what with the GI Bill money, so his only expenses were for odds and ends -- gas, the occasional meal off campus, the odd piece of clothing, an occasional album or book, stuff like that. His job didn't eat up that much time, but covered the odds and ends and the payments on the Cougar and still left something stuck back for a rainy day. He had some money in the bank and could spend it on something if he needed to, but he knew he had to be careful with his money so he usually was.

Without a lot of direction, he'd decided on being a business administration major -- it was the type of thing that he could do a lot with, whatever he decided to do. But, he'd also decided to have some fun, too, and an "Intro to Theater" class in his first year on campus got him interested in theater arts. He wasn't big on being an actor or anything like that, but he liked hanging around with the theater people, some of whom were pretty cool although some of them set off his gaydar pretty bad. He had done a couple of bit parts, nothing earth-shattering, but had gotten interested in lighting and stage management and sound systems. Sound engineering was in the theater arts program at Marienthal, for whatever reason. He'd spent some time with that, thinking it might be neat to be a radio broadcast engineer or something, and he'd tried to concentrate on that.

But then, there was all the gabble on the radio, hearing people in love with the sound of their own voices. Maybe that wasn't such a good idea; after all, if he went to work as a DJ he would have to talk more than he wanted to, rather than PTFM. Oh, well, there was still a year, and it was nothing that had to be done right away. It wasn't like he had a family or a girl friend or something. Maybe he'd head out to the coast. California sounded like it might be interesting, and he'd never been there. It would probably mean city life, and while he was a small town kid he'd learned that he could handle a city if he had to. Whatever happened, happened.

He glanced at the gas gauge; holding up pretty well, but maybe he ought to stop sometime soon, anyway. He made a mental note to get gas at a good truck stop. The good ones usually had a rack of CDs, sometimes real cheap ones. Usually the music was junk but it would be cheap junk, although if he could find the right Jenny Easton album he'd be willing to pay full price for it. It'd be neat as hell to find At Home. Even better, maybe Back Porch, which Justin didn't have in his collection at college, although he said it was pretty good and had more of that neat harp music like Dr. Harris had played at the off-the-cuff concert a week ago last Thursday. And then, that Saturday Night album was supposed to be on sale but somehow he didn't think he had much of a chance to find that in a truck stop -- it was too new.

Damn, Dr. Harris was an interesting woman. Smart as hell, or she wouldn't have been a college professor, after all. Not bad looking, either, when she didn't dress like a dyke. The way she talked -- well, it showed that she was way the hell out of his league, but an interesting person in any case, and she could play the living hell out of that blue harp. All around, a nice lady, even if she was way too much woman for him.

She'd said she was heading up to Jenny Easton's place right after classes broke. He'd hung around the college as long as he could, getting what hours he could on his job, so she was probably with her right now. Damn, what would it be like to be friends with someone famous like Jenny Easton? Well, Jennifer Walworth, Dr. Harris had said. Either way, it had to be pretty interesting. He'd never gotten to know anyone who was even moderately famous or important, even know them a little. He'd gotten to shake some senator's hand back there in Kosovo, but that didn't count for much of anything. What was she like? If she and Dr. Harris found each other interesting, there had to be some kind of common ground, but what he knew of Jenny or Jennifer or whatever her name was didn't seem much like Dr. Harris. What did they talk about? Music, probably. Did Jenny awe Dr. Harris the way Dr. Harris awed him? Or were they just good buddies, swapping gossip and being friends?

God, it'd be neat to be able to play music like that, to be able to stand up on a stage like that and hear the applause. It took some talent, and he sure didn't have that kind of musical talent. Oh, he appreciated the music, knew what he liked, knew what he didn't, and had a pretty good idea of why he'd like something and not something else.

He looked around, taking his eyes off the road for a moment. This was boring damn countryside; he knew from having made the trip several times before that it looked pretty much like Indiana all the way to Indiana. The fact that it was December, the leaves were down making the trees look gray and naked, with gray skies that looked like they might puke snow at any minute made the countryside about as attractive as hell with the fires out. He wasn't in any huge-ass hurry to make it back to Indiana; he could waste a few minutes. Maybe he could find an exit with a mall right close by, where there might be a good music store with a good CD selection. That might make the trip go a little quicker, not that there was a lot to hurry for. There might be something up in the outskirts of St. Louis, which wasn't far off now. About a third of the way home for what it was worth.

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