It would be possible to be very detailed about the time that Bessie and I spent in bed over the next few months. There was a lot of it. Looking back on it now I don’t think Bessie was a nymphomaniac although at the time I was pretty sure she was.

The important thing that I learned from Bessie, and learned right from the beginning, was that she liked sex. I’ll be honest, I had pretty much figured that women did sex because men wanted them to, because that had been my experience, mostly with Myukio but with some observation thrown in as well. It hadn’t really entered my mind that a woman could not only enjoy sex, she could crave it, hunger for it, and be demanding about it. Which Bessie could be.

Over the course of the next several months we tried every position we could come up with and some of them we liked an awful lot. I sure learned a lot from Bessie, or we learned a lot from each other.

The problem was that she was hot to trot about ninety percent of the time. Now, while I learned to like sex a lot, there were other things I had to do, too. Things like going to class and studying, for example.

I did manage to come up for air now and then long enough to register for classes, go to them, and hit the books. My classes weren’t anything real special, just the normal English and history and math and science that all freshmen get stuck with. It was a little strange to be back in a classroom, but the work wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.

It really wasn’t your normal college experience. Well over half of the students were vets studying on the GI Bill like me. There were relatively few college-age kids right out of high school, and as far as that went I was young enough that I might have been one of them. But even as young as I was, I had more of a veteran’s viewpoint – I wasn’t enjoying my first chance to be away from home, after all, I was trying to learn something that would let me lead a better life than being a free farmhand. I studied hard, I got pretty darn decent grades, and I didn’t really participate in college life very much beyond that.

Besides, I was trying to save some money, since the 52-20 club wasn’t going to get me through all four years; my GI Bill money was only good for tuition and books and like that. When I’d proved to myself that I could handle the work and decided that I needed another excuse to not have to fuck Bessie every few hours, I decided to go out and find a part-time job. It wasn’t long before I was pumping gas and busting tires at a Conoco gas station a few blocks away.

"Pumping gas?" I just heard some young voice say. "What’s that?"

We never had self-service gas stations until into the 1970s. Before that, when you pulled into a gas station an attendant came out, pumped your gas for you, checked your oil, cleaned your windshield, and even checked the air in your tires sometimes. If anything was wrong they’d take care of it for you on the spot, since gas stations were also repair shops instead of grocery stores. Being a gas station attendant was a pretty good part time job for a high school or college kid and that’s how you often started out as a mechanic in one of those service stations.

It strikes me I was paid fifty cents an hour and worked about twenty hours a week, so that covered my basic expenses. What with everything I was pretty busy through the winter.

Winter out on the plains lasted pretty long and was uncomfortably cold. As the days and weeks went on, I began to realize that I wasn’t really satisfied with what I was doing. The biggest thing was that, while Chadron was a lot bigger than Hartford, it was still a little town right out in the middle of nowhere. I still wanted to be a part of the lights and action and opportunity of a big city. There would be things to do and people to meet in a big city; in Chadron, the only thing I could do with my free time was fuck Bessie.

Back when I was in Okinawa I never thought I’d find myself saying that there were times that I wanted to do something besides fuck, but the winter of ’46-’47 changed that. Like I said, Bessie was ready to go all the time, and I don’t think we ever did it less than a dozen times a week or so; sometimes it was lots more than that. As the winter of ’47 dragged on I was getting a little tired of it because there are other things in life. To this day I don’t know if how much Bessie wanted it reflected on what she’d gotten used to with her Mel, or whether she was trying to make up for lost time, or what, but after a while I began hanging around the gas station after I got off work just so I could get some studying done.

Eventually it began to settle in on me that I couldn’t go another three and a half years like I’d been going the last few months. I began to realize that it wouldn’t take too much to turn the relationship I had with Bessie permanent. I didn’t want that for any number of good reasons: Bessie was quite a bit older than me, she was fat and not very pretty, and she could give dumb lessons to fence posts. Plus, I’d known right from the beginning that she was crazier than a loon. To top it off, getting latched up with her meant that I’d probably be stuck around Chadron.

That took the fur lined pee pot – I had to get out of there.

But, I decided that I had to do it carefully, to keep from screwing up my grades and credits for the year I’d spend in school there.

After thinking about it a little I began to realize that I needed some wheels. This business of getting around by thumb and shank’s mare and buses was pretty inconvenient and could make it hard when I went to make my escape. I figured that I was just going to have to disappear sometime, and it was better if I could do it on my own schedule.

Fortunately the new postwar cars were coming out. Right at first the ’46s were mostly ’42s ’cause their tooling had been shoved to the side when the auto plants went on war production, and the same tooling was just started up again to produce cars quickly. But the ’47s were new, and a lot of people had been dreaming for years about new cars. That meant that some of the reliable old beaters were pretty cheap, and you couldn’t get anything for them on trade-in.

We had this one old boy in the station every now and then who’d bought a bright stinky new ’47 Nash the previous fall. He had a ’37 Ford coupe he’d bought new and nursed all the way through the war. It had a V8-60 in it, and people weren’t too thrilled with them since it was underpowered for a car as big as the coupe. The dealer wouldn’t give him anything for trade-in, so it just was sitting out in his yard with a for sale sign on it, and he had a note stuck to the wall of the Conoco station, too.

Well, one day I happened to ask him about it and how much he wanted. He said his wife had been on his butt to get it out of the yard, and I could have it for five bucks if I wanted it. I caught a ride out to his house with him and looked it over. We had to push it to get it started since the battery was dead. It didn’t run too good and was blowing some oil smoke, but I figured that if it ran at all it was worth five bucks, so I gave him the money and drove it back to the station.

I had a discussion with Homer, the old boy that ran the station, and he agreed to let me work on it there in the evening when I wasn’t on duty if I would help out the on-duty guy if it got busy.

You get right down to it, that old Ford needed a lot of work. It had a lot of miles on it, around ninety thousand, and in those days that was a hell of a lot. The big thing is that the engine needed to be torn all the way down and rebuilt. However, it wasn’t a complicated engine, and it wouldn’t be the first one I’d done.

Over the course of the next couple weeks I tore the engine down all the way, put in new rings and bearings, ground the valves and things like that. I had to spend a few bucks on parts, but they were worth it. The tires on it were thin as tissue paper. We’d just got over tire rationing, so people were trading in crappy old tires on new ones, but sometimes I’d take one off a car that wasn’t too bad, and by the time things were said and done I had four pretty decent used tires on it. By the time I got done I probably had twenty-five or thirty bucks in it, and it would have been worth a hundred to the right person. I drove that car for years and put a lot of miles on it, and never had much trouble with it.

All the time I was working on the car I was looking for some other place to go to school. I got lucky and had the help of several people on campus, and I wrote a lot of letters. I’d rented a post office box in town so that Bessie wouldn’t know that I was looking around, and by the time the term had ended I had pretty well settled on Milwaukee State Teacher’s College. Milwaukee wasn’t quite Chicago, but it was pretty close, and from the distance of Chadron, Nebraska there wasn’t a whole lot of difference.

In the end, I decided that I couldn’t bring myself to just disappear from Bessie – I at least had to tell her goodbye somehow. I wasn’t about to tell her the truth, though – that she was driving me apeshit. I finally decided that lying is the better part of valor. The day after the semester was over with I told her I was going to go back to Hartford and see if I could patch things up with my folks and my brother, and I might have to stay and work on the farm for a while, so I didn’t know when I was going to be back. She said that it really wasn’t good for me to be pissed off with my family, and it was probably a good idea for me to go, so we had a long, leisurely goodbye roll in the hay and I hit the road.

Of course there was no way I was going to Hartford. In fact the closest I got was on US-20, about fifty miles. I didn’t hurry; the road wasn’t all that great, and I was in no hurry. Besides, the Ford wasn’t all that fast, and I was still breaking in the rebuilt engine. In a way I was sorry to be leaving Chadron – I’d had a good time there, learned a lot, and really had changed the course of my life. And that doesn’t include all the good sex, and for the most part it was pretty good. I remember driving through the Sandhill country and being amazed at the fact that I had to have had sex with Bessie a good three hundred times at a minimum and probably more than that, never with a rubber, of course. How she didn’t get pregnant is beyond me, and I guess I was pretty stupid about that. Then, on the other hand, if she had fucked the other Mel as much as she fucked me and still didn’t have kids maybe she couldn’t have them, and maybe that had something to do with how come she was so crazy.

But it didn’t matter anymore. Chadron had long dropped out of sight in the Ford’s rear view mirror and I was heading for Chicago.

I’d never been to Chicago before; the biggest city I’d ever been in was San Francisco and I wasn’t there long. Although I didn’t have a lot of money in my pocket I did a few things that I’d always wanted to do, like I saw a Cubs game, and decided to see how the other half lived and caught a White Sox game. They were the first pro ball games I’d ever seen, and I have to say that the announcers on the radio made them seem a lot more exciting than they were in the flesh. I happened to notice a flyer that the midgets were going to be running at Soldier Field, so I went and got a grandstand ticket. I sort of wondered if Frank or Spud might be there, but they weren’t. Those little doodlebugs were a lot of fun to watch, and I figured I might like to drive one sometime if the opportunity arose.

I only spent a few days in Chicago that time, since I figured I would have plenty of chances to do that later. Finally, I got in the Ford and headed up to Milwaukee. I checked in at the college and found out that everything was all right for my transfer, and that I could get a dorm room and charge it to the GI Bill. The only problem was that school didn’t start till the end of August and it was now the middle of May.

That wasn’t any real problem; I found a boardinghouse and got a room. There wasn’t any question of screwing the landlady here; she was older than God, ugly as hell and a nasty bitch at best, but the place was cheap. From there, I hunted around a little and got a job, this time full time, as a gas station attendant and mechanic. All that worked pretty good; I was making more money than I had been making in Chadron, and while the room and board was more it wasn’t all that much more.

Milwaukee in the summer of 1947 was a pretty decent place to be. It had the Brewers, which was a minor league team at the time, but a pretty good one. There were a couple racetracks right near streetcar lines that ran midgets and sprint cars, and sometimes hot rods and modified stock cars. I didn’t go to a race every week but often enough to enjoy it more than I enjoyed baseball. My boardinghouse was only a couple blocks from a beach, and I used to go there once in a while to check out the young ladies in their bathing suits, which was always fun. And, of course, there was what Milwaukee was really famous for: Millers, Blatz, Pabst, Schlitz, and a bunch of other breweries. This was still back in the time of the nickel beer, and while I never got drunk on my ass I enjoyed having two or three from time to time.

If there wasn’t anything in Milwaukee that happened to interest me, the North Shore Line ran interurban trains to Chicago every hour, downtown Milwaukee to downtown Chicago in ninety minutes. And if there wasn’t anything to interest me in Chicago, I was just flat out of luck.

I think it was over that summer that I discovered that I was really a country boy. While a lot of us kids in places like Hartford dreamed of bigger places like Chicago, sometimes the dreams didn’t really measure up to the reality. Chicago was dirty – the air was especially dirty from the steel mills. This was still the era of steam trains, and however pretty steam engines may have been, the fact of the matter is that they blew cinders all over the damn place, and any place near a railroad line was going to be dirty – and Chicago had more miles of railroad line per square mile than anywhere I can think of. The place was crowded, and a lot of the people it was crowded with were people you’d rather not be around. A lot of it was run down and beat up. There may have been a lot of opportunities there, but sometimes the country boy in my mind wondered if it was worth the price.

The summer went by quickly. Pretty soon it was time to move into the dorm at Milwaukee State. I still didn’t have a lot of stuff, and what there was would fit into the Ford’s rumble seat pretty well with space left over. It turned out my roommate was a guy by the name of Herm Cholame. He was a vet like me, a year or two older. He’d married a gal before he headed out to the Pacific in 1943. From the stories he told she had to have a lot of Bessie’s tastes, and she exercised them hanging around Ft. Riley where she had some job. Herm found out about it from some guy he met in the Philippines, and when he got back to the states the fur flew real bad. He was lucky to not go to jail, but it took him a while to think of going to college.

Both Herm and I were pretty serious about the studying, but when the time came to put the books down and take a break he was more than ready to make up for lost time. Beer was plentiful in Milwaukee and even though it was cheap you had to be pretty damn dumb to think you’re going to drink the town dry, so he concentrated on having a good time, rather than try to get shitfaced. For a guy not all that great looking he sure had talent at finding girls who wanted to go to bed with him, and all I had to do was hang out with him to pick up some of his leftovers. Some of them were darn good looking women, but to be honest I never found one of them that put the effort into it that Bessie did.

Along in the fall the guy who ran the gas station where I worked was getting more and more upset about the fact that I was a college student and had to attend class when he wanted me to work. One day we got into a yelling match and I walked out. That cut the partying down quite a bit since I was back to living off what little savings I had, but before long I came up with a job filling steins at a beer bar, washing them, mopping the floor and cleaning out the toilets. I had to do that quite a bit since it was a Schlitz bar, and in my opinion Schlitz was the worst of the Milwaukee big four – cleaning up piss and puke is not real fun, and that beer caused a lot of it. There was one advantage to that job, it was a lot warmer than pumping gas through a Wisconsin winter, so I stayed with it until the weather warmed up, then quit and got another job pumping gas.

My classes at Milwaukee State went pretty good. I wasn’t an all-A student but I was up near the top of my class. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got out of college, but decided to go ahead and work toward being a high school teacher in social studies, history and like that, where I had a little talent and interest. Back in those days before the teachers’ unions got real powerful it wasn’t all that great a job money wise, but for the most part was inside and clean in the winter. You got three months off school in the summer, time I figured I could use for other things.

We got through that year, Herm took off to wherever it was he went in the summer, and I just pumped gas, had the occasional beer, sometimes went to ball games or races, occasionally with a date but nothing special. When Herm got back in the fall we mostly picked up where we left off; when the weather started to get cold I decided to quit the gas station and get another job in a beer bar. The new one was a Miller’s place, and there wasn’t anything like as much piss or puke to clean up. I pumped gas again the next summer, then went back to school as a senior.

That fall I had to do my practice teaching out in Waukesha plus keep my classes going, so I quit the gas station and just lived off my savings for the next few months. The final semester went by pretty quickly. I got a job in a gas station along in the winter and put up with the cold. In the spring of 1950 I graduated. I more or less had a job lined up at a school in Chicago, but it wasn’t in a real good neighborhood, and the pay was nothing much, either, so I’d pretty well decided to spend the summer sending out applications to just about everywhere else I could find. I was sharing an apartment with a couple other guys in the same boat.

One day along in the middle part of May I was standing out in front of the station, filling a guy’s tank but mostly thinking about other things. The first thing I was thinking about was that now that I was a college graduate, what the hell was I doing pumping gas? Though I’d worked toward being a teacher, I really wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to do. I was twenty-four now, and not real sure I wanted to settle down all that much. I’d been seriously shacked up with Bessie for about eight months, and that had given me a little perspective on the subject of getting married. I hadn’t been ready for it then, at least not ready for her, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for even the right girl, if she happened to come along. Let’s face it, the wild goose was still calling me, I could feel there were places out there I needed to see and things that I needed to do before I settled down, but I wasn’t sure what they were, yet. Mostly I was worried that I’d never figure it out – it seemed real likely that in the next year or two I’d meet someone involved with a school in some way or another. I’d get married, settle down, have kids, and never have the chance to find out what those places and things were. I didn’t know what to do to avoid settling down, or what to do to find out what the wild goose had been calling me toward.

I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention when a car pulled in to the other side of the pumps. I was about done with the car I was filling, so I shut off the hose, put it in the pump, and turned toward the new car. "How may I help you today, sir?" I asked automatically.

"Son of a bitch, Mel Austin!" I heard the reply. "How the hell are you, Mel?"

I glanced up to see a smiling Frank Blixter, who I’d never expected to see again.

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