Chapter 1 / by David Rutter
The deepening summer of 1927 eased on toward sunset.
Nothing much unusual about it. Hot. Steamy and baked on some days. A million summers before it had done the same thing.
All lazy and quiet except for the occasional swarm of bees humming and the clanging of a back screen door being slammed enthusiastically against its hinges to note the flight of a child. The young human gazelles would leap the steps in full gallop, land with a balanced oomph in the grass and never break stride.
It was summer in town.
There was never enough time or inclination to be careful, but that never stopped moms. “Be careful,” moms yelped from their kitchen’s screen door and, just as the young gazelles had for a million years, none heard the call to caution. Careful? Not enough time. Not nearly enough. Had to run. Had to go. Must fly. “Be back later, mom,” they yelled over their shoulders.
Summer breathed with deep sighs. Summers were good. When summer winds seemed to breathe a gentle whisper, not seeking your attention but just gently inhaling life.
Corn ripened in the fields as they had for a hundred years. Baseball was being played. Tellers at the State Bank made change carefully and took deposits. No one hardly ever took money out of the state bank on the main drag.
For adults, summer was too hot for them to be loud. Nobody raised their voice much unless it was mother yelling from the porch that dinner was ready. That usually was near the cusp of daylight when a hint of cool tiptoed into town. At dusk, the world seemed to inhale gently and then exhale a cool breeze that announced the coming evening.
Breezes are the earth breathing.
Leaves fluttered, almost tsk-tsking that they had survived another summer day and would spread out before the dark sky and relax until the dawn came again.
The life of a small town breathes with the same gentle rhythm of the giant trees that sway over the house tops.
Quiet.
Quieter.
And then the evenings when it was so still that only the breeze interrupts the town’s slumber.
This, then, was the Cynthiana, Indiana, of 1927.
If quiet defined the town, trees often defined the town’s quiet.
The trees of Cynthiana were not merely biological adornment. They were part of the population, and they held their stately place in line. Four hundred humans. Two thousand trees, some which had existed on this exact spec of land where American settlers had come 50 years before the Blue and Gray ran the country red. They had offered shade before that to the Chippewa.
If places are important because important people live there or because important events occur there, then there was nothing important about Cynthiana. But the place possessed a definable personality, and the town’s dimensions had nothing to do with it.
It was quiet except for the bark and chug of Model T’s, but it never seemed small. And no one who ever lived there could deny it. It was a place where a man and a woman could stretch out and build a family without interruption or interference. No need to shove or push. Plenty of room.
It was a place where you could breathe without feeling you were breathing someone else’s left over air.
It was a universe of sublime, undemanding summers where the trees – mostly towering maples and oaks – also sighed wistfully in their own turn asthey waited for autumn’s approach. The breeze often was unseen and unfelt nearer the ground, but 40 feet aloft there were eddies and whispers of air that touched the leaves and made them hiss softly. It seemed almost a blush of embarrassment.
The trees and branches and sprigs had their own palette of emotions. It was musical. The rustling of summer leaves weaving and dancing high above every corner and plot in town would shrug as if to admit that summer was ending, but it wasn’t their fault.
They would hold to it as long as they could.
All that summer, nothing much happened in a place where nothing much ever happened, and that was exactly what made it the most perfect time of all. The most perfect place of all. The Depression had not yet come, nor the war that would follow.
In this moment and place of summer perfection, John Rutter was as troubled as he ever got, which is to say he rubbed his chin in slow, pensive thought and decided that, yes, he was of a mind to finish business on one issue. He hardly ever left leave business undone. But the method? That had eluded him for weeks. But the law was immutable, and it must be served.
The town constable darkened the front screen door. He was a round, low man who sweated enough that his semi-official uniform of office was seldom dry after Memorial Day. The dark, wet stain seemed to arch from his underarm all the way across the bridge of his back and then down to the belt of his pants. His sweat circumnavigated his attire.
Jewell F. Sprinkard had a pinched, unhappy, wretched and thoroughly constipated look on his face, and John Rutter figured he knew why. He’d seen it before. He’d come to expect it. John would stifle a grin as good as any man could, and he did so now.
None knew what the “F” stood for, or had ever asked. It would have seemed rude.
“Same thing as before?” John asked as he stepped out on the porch and brought a glass of ice tea for the constable.
“Yep,” the constable said, and then paused for the grand effect that was his custom.
“Watermelons.”
“Watermelons,” John said with a weary sigh. “Well, how much this time?”
“ ’Bout a buck fifty ,” the constable said.
“More than last time.” John Rutter ever cussed within earshot of his wife, or anybody’s wife. But this moment seemed to call for it. “Son-of-a-BITCH.”
“Yep. Reckon so,” the gendarme said without any rancor or emotion of any sort, for he had no resentment about the affair. It gave him a regular opportunity to stop by
John’s tidy gingerbread palace where Pearl always had lemonade at the ready. So John and the constable would sit on the porch, discuss the universe and assess the role of crime in their lives.
On July 13, 1927, the going price for crime in Cynthiana, Indiana, (pop. 400 Baptists asd Methodists plus a smattering of Petecostals give or take a few) was about those six quarters which John had fished from his metallic lock box in the upstairs office of the blue and white ginger bread Victorian home and had stashed in a drawing room desk. He always had six quarters in that parlor desk, held at the ready for such occasions.
It wasn’t that this particular crime had produced six quarters in loot for the miscreant.
Through custom and experience, it appeared that six quarters was more or less the upper end of the standard price. It was a cumulative total for the last month, which made it a fair bargain.
In fact, the price – which seemed to be a regular rotating bail for the offense – was pre-arranged between John and the constable because it made such transactions more orderly and possessed an added benefit. John would not have to explain the matter to Pearl, and the constable would not need to note the transaction in any official ledger of criminal deeds. Mischief could be accommodated gently.
The issue at hand was not only Fred Arthur Ratter’s desire for watermelons but more fundamentally that none of his three best male friends – The Watermelon Gang they had named themselves proudly – possessed a father with the financial and moral solidity plus the intellectual balance to address such matters. At least they could not deal with such matters without erupting into some crimson-jowled, vein-bulging tirade.
Fiery fatherhood was the custom of most American males in 1927. John had never struck his children in all his years of fatherhood and never would. It was simply not in his soul to do such a thing, for violence required levels of frustration and disrespect he did not have. John was a calm man. A funny man if you listened carefully. A smart man. His anger, when it came, was mostly a sad reaction to vanities that occasionally intruded here in Cynthiana.
It took a lot for the outside to intrude here. It took extra effort for the outside world to even know “here” existed.
Cynthiana was not a place for crime sprees. Or for any crime of much note. And hardly ever for sprees. There had been the usual cow tippings and outhouse crossings. But the only recent social excitement of note had been Beulah LeMay, the church organist who ran off to California with a traveling piano player and left her husband beached and dismayed. It was not merely that she left her husband, or that she fled to California, a place Cynthianians read about only in movie magazines. No, it was that she skipped town with an itinerant piano player. The town gasped, and it hardly ever gasped.
But once it gasped, Cynthiana and the people and trees that lived there quickly went back to breathing in a more regular, measured way.
No use making Mister LeMay feel worse about it.
So when crime occurred, it was some cause for reflection though no one would run from house to house announcing that crime had occurred. After all, the town was modern. There were telephone partylines to pass along such news. There was the “Cynthiana Argus”, the hometown newspaper that came out every few weeks or whenever the editor could arrange all the ads and news in an orderly and timely manner.
Further public fulminations about the LeMay Matter would seem unmannerly. Plus, it was bad manners.
When the constable had first relayed the news of Fred Arthur Rutter’s crime spree to his father, John thought at length about the issue and what he should do. He came eventually to decide not to respond with punishment.
Temperance was a more natural response for him even though he was a Methodist. His religious affiliation was more a matter of genetics, like being tall or having hazel eyes. Being a Methodist was not a statement of oral philosophy. It was fate.
If you had insisted on talking with John about religion, it would jot have been clear that John had wanted to be a Methodist. There had not seemed much choice about it.
Pearl had not pressed him deeply about his ultimate religious preferences in advance of their marriage. He and his family had always attended the Methodist church, as did Pearl and her family. Her preferences were deeper and clear enough. John had no reason to debate her preferred pathway to the hereafter.
He acquiesced because one religion was as good as another to him. He was at least glad they weren’t Baptists or Holy Rollers. He feared he would ever have the energy for either.
Religion was a social function that had ever energized his soul.
So he was a Methodist, too, the same way some people are Kiwanians or Masons as a condition of their social and sociable duty.
John worried most about Fred Arthur – just plain Fred to his friends and almost everyone else in the universe – because of all the Rutters, they seemed most alike. That was both good and bad for both of them. It was a special gift that a son can give a father to be enough alike that the father could anticipate who his son might become.
And exult in the possibility. It was a hopeful relationship.
But it also was a special burden because nothing such a son might do would be a surprise to a father, particularly a father keenly aware of his own youthful failures.
The father might be appalled but not surprised.
To John’s way of thinking, and related to this particular event, this meant that John knew how time and the events attached to time would move so agonizingly slow for Fred. It was that appreciation for his son’s temperament that drove John to patience.
Though perfectly temperate for most, Cynthiana was social molasses to those with a taste for faster-moving entertainments. Most people who lived there did not sense this slow-motion migration through existence, but for those few who had lived elsewhere, the sheltered nature of Cynthiana was perfectly obvious.
Though John had lived his life in Cynthiana, he had seen some of the world, too. He had been a “letter thrower’ in the railroad postal cars that raced down the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad lines. Up from Evansville, and then eventually in both directions for hundreds of miles. He could sail a letter marked “Cleveland” or “Chillicothe”” or “Cucamonga” 10 feet across the open expanse of the rail car’s main compartment to the exact mail slot in the massive, wooden receptacle that faced him.
All the while the C&EI postal car was sailing along at 60 miles per hour behind a high-stepping steam engine and just ahead of shiny passenger cars. The entire conveyance was rocking like a drunken horse at full gallop.
And though he became a rural carrier – with an elderly Dodge sedan for transport instead of a roaring steam engine — when family life summoned, he knew what it felt like to have the highway wink at a man and say, “Come here, handsome.”
He knew Fred would feel the lure of that wink.
Thus, if this was to be the worst Fred Arthur could achieve to counter the slow motion drip, drip, drip of life in Cynthiana, it seemed a good bargain, at least in the short term.
And so, he decided to keep the peace secure, and hold the matter entirely to himself unless, or perhaps until, sometime in the future when Fred Arthur Rutter committed some transgression that WOULD require intercession.
John had no clear idea of what circumstance might occur that would force his hand, but neither was he totally sure that such an event could not occur. The cosmos rolls the dice. Better to be prepared when your children are concerned. Yes, especially with Fred Arthur.
John was a man of simple means and a temperate heart. He ran a household of books and music. Fred learned the perils of Tom Swift and the joys of the trombone. John did such service to all his children because that is what a father does.
But he knew the limits of his universe. He could not give the world to his son for that was beyond his means, but he could give him room to flex his soul and stand on his tiptoes to look out into the world. Until the time came when Fred could no longer endure the molasses life of Cynthiana and would need other places. Those times were to come. He was sure of it.
His other children were of no great concern on this particular count. Elder son Walter would be a lawyer or a minister or hardware store owner or some such thing, John figured, and unlikely to ever get in much trouble or even think about the topic. Being a person of rational calculations, Walter would be a success in life. He would make money. That, John knew, was without question and it made him sigh. It made Walter’s horizons as comfortable as a pair of old Florsheim wingtips and just as uninteresting.
The youngest, Lois, was a spritely charmer with a deft, exceptional touch at the piano. She would be an artist and would have to marry a smart man, or one at least nearly as smart as she was. She would find no happiness with a man who failed her respect. And he would have to earn that devotion with his mind as well as his heart. It would be a shallow pool into which to dip her seine.
But Fred, as John often told Pearl but without embellishment of the relevant supporting facts, was a whole other kettle of fish. Fred was often the family’s “whole other kettle of fish” on issues related to school, religion and manners.
He was as good at all three regimes as the times and tasks required of him. But he was the one who decided how sternly to lean into the job of social equilibrium.
Even now at 10, he tended to be a man of his own ways and attitudes. Because of this, confederates gravitated to him without being summoned. He had a natural diffidence that required no organization. Girls would be a mystery for years. But, as for the other boys in his Cynthiana realm, they regarded Fred as the natural repository of reason and leadership.
The Watermelon Gang had no official hierarchy, but Fred Arthur was the titular commander. That was clear.
Besides Fred Arthur, there was Clarence Jarvis, Willard Oeth and John James Gengelbach. All were either 7 or 8 when they first noticed they were part of a gang, and the alliance would remain intact for another decade until high school graduation sent them spiraling into different orbits.
The triggering mechanism was that no child could live in the far southwest corner of Indiana in 1927 without succumbing to watermelons. Oh, how gorgeous and sweet they were. How indescribable. Between the Posey County of Cynthiana and adjacent Gibson County, there wasn’t a way to escape them, even if anyone had a hankering to escape them, and who in their right mind would want to do that?
Watermelons would be the proximate cause of Fred’s criminal enterprise.
Chapter 2
It’s difficult to imagine it now but “Posey County Watermelons” actually had made the place famous nationwide by 1927 for the value and the luxurious quality of its ripe, splendid, sumptuous melons. They were widely known to be remarkable and unique at a time when amazing agrarian feats were often hailed as a source of community pride.
But there was a problem. It was all a lie, or at least an uncorrected error. And as lies will, this one produced hard feelings.
Unearned victories are seldom happy victories and, this was a sullen triumph for Posey Countians, most of whom knew that the most famous of “Posey County Watermelons” weren’t actually grown in Posey County. Soil was just a smudge off for perfection. Perfect melons were the product of perfect soil as much as perfect weather. And though Posey County could and did produce a fine crop of corn and more than passable melons, the joys of great melons were lost to them.
And it was a mighty hard bargain to accept.
The great, rich, sweet melons – the real humdingers – were all grown in adjacent Gibson County, a reality that spawned dyspeptic relations between the two populaces for a century. True, the watermelons were mostly shipped from Posey County because that’s where the Chicago & Eastern Illinois trains were, but it seemed revoltingly unappealing to be labeled as the “Watermelon Shipping Capital of the World.” Marketing is not truth. It’s the impression of truth. It was as if they had been labeled the “Tallest Sheet Metal Salesmen in Indiana.”
Gibson County never got credit for its crop. Not really. But it’s hard to untell the first lie, and no one was quite sure who told the lie or whether it had been misplaced marketing enthusiasm . It just got started, somehow. Posey County never found a way, or a valid reason, or the right moment, to correct the record.
So both counties experienced a low-grade pissiness that went public only at county fairs and Kiwanis inter-meetings. The blush of embarrassment seeped from county seat to county seat.
By the time everyone figured out the marketing mistake – or lie – was irreversible, the two counties metaphorically threw up their arms in surrender and just decided to ignore the whole mess.
Thus Posey County and Cynthiana lived with the indignity of the truth, and tried not to let anyone outside the county boundaries know of it.
But political intrigue aside, there was nothing ambivalent about the watermelons.
The fruit was so ubiquitous that a person could acquire a 30-pound example of the soaking sweet green-on-the-outside, red-innards fruit for a dime. Thousands of acres nearby were crawling with the vines, and each acre could produce 3,000 or so in a season.
Going into a field to pick the melons seemed, well, too much work under an unblinking Hoosier sun. Especially if you weren’t being paid to visit the field and work the dark, moist soil.
But paying for watermelons in Posey County was even worse, an unnecessarily complex transaction. Actually paying for watermelons? It was a prissy, citified ostentation. A dime was a lot of money for a juvenile gang member in 1927, and amounts that significant needed to be saved for important purchases like a basketball and sneakers. And it didn’t help that you would never steal a Posey County melon when one from Gibson County was available for the same effort.
Between the desire to avoid work and equally attractive “why-pay?” alternative, there was another choice, and this one was fun. Besides it was well known that melon producers wasted almost as many melons as they got to market and saving a watermelon from “being wasted” seemed a rather noble calling, at least to The Watermelon Gang. It was almost like a Crusade to save the Holy Land.
Cynthiana, which was not the center of anything in the universe that counted as far as Fred Arthur Rutter could tell, was at least on a truck route for area melon farmers.
It was an accident of bad civic planning. Some towns were planned. Others just happened. To reach the railhead 10 miles away in Poseyville, the trucks lurched through town at a crawl, turning three times on the hairpin street that dissected the heart of the “business district.” The “business district” consisted of two churches, one grocery store, one small hardware store, the Mason meeting hall, and a barbershop that advertised “free haircuts for your father if he’s older than 90.” That drew customers from around the county. A town of 400 doesn’t need many options from its “business district.”
No stop lights were required in downtown Cynthiana.
The Watermelon Gang, which meant primarily Fred, had scouted the truckers’ travels through town so precisely that they knew within five feet where the truck would slow to its slowest so the grinding gears would downshift before angling hard right past the Methodist church. But waylaying a truck in town was too great a risk.
Better to use the slight hill that marked the road’s passage past the old brick school that housed every child of educating age within the town. At this point, two willing lads would not have to throw the watermelons from the back of the flatbed truck; they would need only gently roll them like massive Easter eggs into the waiting arms of their two confederates running behind the vehicle.
The maneuver required a degree of athletic dexterity. Timing. Angles. Flexibility. And strength. This was teamwork at its best.
The take was always the same. They would do four, and no more.
Four gang members. Four watermelons.
They also knew to execute this maneuver only against commercial trucks, and not too often, thus maintaining the truckers’ illusion of random bad luck Commercial drivers would not stop the truck to leap from the cab and chase after the young thieves. Not their melons. The schedule yelped at them. Time was money and no drive-for-the-man’s-wages trucker had enough money to waste it on chasing delinquent boys. Farmers defending their own trucks would. And they would be angry.
Thus, the gang chose its targets with self-interested intelligence.
The Watermelon Gang was gentlemanly, almost courtly, in its thieving. Only enough for a delightful afternoon. Only enough for the gang. This wasn’t commerce. It was joyful subsistence criminality, and greed was regarded with a dim countenance.
The activity was regular enough in its occurrence that every few weeks or so during the summer, the constable would stop at the Rutter gingerbread house and dun John for the running tab. The tacit agreement implied that the farmers would get reimbursement and, if not, then there was always a family in town who needed bread or milk and had no means to acquire them.
In that place and time, small-town constables not only arrested drunks; they also looked out for children who had too little of their own.
While never having found quite the right moment that summer to thwart Fred’s budding life of crime, John knew it was unwise to leave this field untended. John knew his son well enough to anticipate he might become good at anything he enjoyed.
There was no benefit in Fred becoming too adept at thievery, however manageable and understandable its motives.
Pearl had finished the breakfast eggs that late August morning and had washed the dishes. The breeze played at the ruffled kitchen curtains. Lois was playing Bach on the upright in the parlor with her legs dangling under the piano bench. Walter had already left for school. Mom was outside watering her flowers.
John and Fred were untended at the table which was a rare and precious event.
“You know, son, there are better ways to get watermelons than by stealing them,” John said, as he bit into a slice of toast. He said it without tone or color much as he would announce that it seemed like it might rain later.
There came a loud, overwhelming, empty silence in the room, fueled by the engine of Fred’s shocked amazement. Caught! Caught like a rat in a trap.
“But….,” Fred started and then stopped himself. His mind leaped at lightning-bolt speed from dot to dot to dot and, by the time his brain reached the last dot, he knew that John knew. Yes, he definitely knew. Probably everything, because John tended to know everything worth knowing.
If that were true, Fred could not guess, even if his very life depended on it, how this moment possibly could end well for him. He had never been spanked or even been threatened with it, but Fred already knew that the most absolute rule of the universe was true, until it wasn’t true anymore. That’s why people are always surprised when bad things happen to them. And this might be one of those moments.
Fred’s mental calculations were humming faster than any computer that had not yet been invented.
But in less than a second, Fred announced with resignation, “Yes, I know.” Surrender. Sad, forlorn surrender. He looked as sad and repentant as he could, and neither were his best or most natural facial expressions. He was not even sure he could hold his face in this configuration long enough to withstand a laugh building somewhere deep in his diaphragm. But even Fred knew that if that laugh exploded out of him, all bets were off.
“Well, then” John continued, “if you really like watermelons that much, you could learn to grow your own, son. It’s not as though folks around here don’t know how. All it takes are seeds. And we have millions of them. I am sorta surprised you didn’t think of this yourself anyway. Aunt Ida over in Owensville has her own garden patch. I have plenty of friends all over the county who grow their own.”
“In fact,” John added for deeper dramatic evidence, “it might be some of theirs that you stole.”
The gaze between father and son lasted another eye-to-eye full tick of the clock. One of those seconds that seems immeasurably longer. Now what? Fred wondered. Now what, John wondered
In that gaze, Fred’s budding life of crime essentially ended, but not for reasons that normally apply to such career moves. Fred had never been much afraid of getting caught, because, at least in his own estimation, no one would have the skill to do that. He was athletic and talkative and smart, and frankly, there was not a tight spot he had encountered that could not be escaped by foot speed or fast talking.
The thought of getting caught had never been an impediment because Fred was a planner and organizer even at age 10 and getting caught was not in his current repertoire.
He had never been afraid of punishment and he was unburdened by guilt. As with John, Methodist theology passed easily over him without clinging to any spot. Stealing watermelons seemed a natural diversion that produced no real victims but very obvious beneficiaries.
But now he had run against a totally unexpected barrier.
He could not have known in advance what embarrassing his father would have done to his father or to him. This was the first time in his life he had even thought of such an event. And now that it had been thrust upon him, he was not feeling quite so emboldened by his escapades.
When John lectured his children – which was not often because there was Pearl who was enthusiastic to take that moral and spiritual role – he often did so as if were describing a third person who could have been himself, but not need to be for the story to have merit. He told stories. He described good and bad as a morality puppet show which was useful because John was not immune to his own rare anger, but he seldom let his children see it. It seemed an unmanly thing.
So, this was the tiny dramatic interlude to serve the function. He wanted them to do right but had never screamed at them, as far as Fred could remember.
Everybody’s dad screamed and turned beet-faced crimson and considered themselves lucky the fury did not lead to violence. Father’s everywhere used physical punishment to make their point. Except Fred’s dad. Fred’s friends marveled at that and were jealous.
So John was telling him gently but as directly as the times and cultural custom could afford that his dad would be hurt by such an embarrassment. Hurt in many ways, both obvious and also in less visible ways. He would be hurt by the fact of it, and because his son had caused the breech without thinking of the pain it might cause. “Do you think it’s important that your neighbors know you are trustworthy?” John said.
“That’s how a man comes to know what place he has in his town. People trust your, or they don’t.”
John was a rural mail carrier at a time when such a job was substantial and important. People looked with admiration at John’s steadfastness and reliability. Mail was not a convenience, any more than pure well water was a convenience. Communities are built on common necessities, and mail was necessary.
It was the one way Cynthiana’s streets and homes and people were fused together by a common language. The scribbles on those pages made a community. Books came in the mail. Bibles came to the Methodist rectory. Letters came from relatives in Owensville and Mackey and even the big city – Poseyville. Of course, there was the telephone, but each line was draped with at least 10 neighbors and a person might not bear her soul if there was a chance a neighbor might hear. The “partyline” lasted until television came along.
Men never trusted the telephone for personal talks. That’s why the Masonic Hall existed. But letters were private. Letters were intimate messages. Letters were important.
John was the bearer of those messages, an affable, generous, wise caretaker. John was the cement in a complex social adhesive.
Fred had never considered the idea of causing his father pain. And now that the thought blossomed in his heart, it was a shocking thing to him. An evil thing. It was a hurt that a son could not inflict without causing even more pain to himself. This was a family thing now.
“I’m sorry, dad,” Fred said at last. He looked steadfastly at John.
“I know, son,” John said.
Fred had learned very early that John seldom had these heart to heart discussions idly. John wanted the matter settled, and he didn’t wish to turn the event into continued difference of opinion. When John said, ”Are we done?” he meant it in the most literal way. He was not only asking if that were true; he was announcing that it was, and this was the last moment at which a “however” could be considered. Years later, Fred would repeat the conversational conjunction with the same effect.
And so, Fred would not do such a thing again. Fred actually was sorry even if his role as penitent was shaped by capture. At age 10, there is only so much deep philosophical sorrow a person can summon and Fred had just about tapped out his supply.
Not ever.
John had an intuitive sense of that but decided to refrain from more comment. No use embellishing on an event that had enough gristle to be a long-lasting mouthful.
Besides, the exchange had a useful finality to it. They would not even speak of it again for there was no reason. Everything worth saying had been said. Everything worth settling had been settled.
But life was turning more complex. And considerably more interesting.
Summer was coming to an end. The deep breath of Cynthiana’s trees sighed and tried to soak up as much sun as the dimming summer sun would allow.
Now Fred had to figure out how to grow watermelons. He could feel the rising sweat and aching muscles the decision would generate.
Fred seldom spoke before he had something to say.
“Son-of-a-BITCH,” he said quietly to himself.
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