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    Jerkwater: The Town, The Story
    Jerkwater: The Town, The Story
    Jerkwater: The Town, The Story
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    Jerkwater: The Town, The Story

    By Rose Lobel

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    About this ebook

    For the citizens of Jerkwater Montana, the 1970’s are a time of challenges and discovery. From the parent of a severely injured Viet Nam soldier to the hippie invasion and a revolution by high fashion, these people face life with compassion and humor - mostly.

    Join them in the comedy/drama that is the soap-opera we call life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRose Lobel
    Release dateApr 12, 2018
    ISBN9781370715848
    Jerkwater: The Town, The Story
    Author

    Rose Lobel

    K. R. Lobel has had poetry and short stories published in The Blue Moon Review, The Porter Gulch Review and Matrix Magazine. More of her poetry can be read at the national poetry site Locuspoint.org (Volume 3, San Francisco.) She spent seven years doing research for The Flower Daughter.

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      Book preview

      Jerkwater - Rose Lobel

      PART ONE

      CHAPTER 1

      Rude

      I suppose you want to know how I came to live at the Crawlback Inn back when I was twelve. New people always ask about that. It’s simple really.

      The name’s Rudolph Crawlback, though a lot of people call me Rude. They have their reasons I guess, you might come to agree with them. Don’t make much difference to me.

      My ma died in 1932, and by 1933 my father, Larry, and me were at loose ends. So Larry decided to try and get in touch with his older half-brother, Jubilation Crawlback, out here in Montana.

      It turned out that Old Uncle Jube had fallen on hard times for the previous fifteen years. But now that Larry was about to enter the scene, Jube had a plan to renovate an old trading post that had been abandoned since 1867. (The year the Jerk River had decided to move itself three quarters of a mile southwest: leaving itself open to being renamed the Cloudy Jerk River, and causing great consternation to the community of twenty-three who thought it was the end of the settlement.)

      They survived though, and by 1933, six months after the end of Prohibition, Larry and Jube reckoned that the crumbling structure was in the perfect location for getting drunk; close enough for anyone in town to walk home and far enough removed so that the option of sleeping it off in a car wouldn’t raise the attention of local law enforcement.

      We spent all of July and most of August cleaning and rebuilding that dump, and when we finished, Larry and me moved into the office upstairs. Larry made sure my keister showed up in school every day so nobody ever questioned where I lived.

      Uncle Jube donated some tintypes from the good old days and settled in the shed on the side of the building. That turned out to be his one-and-only rent payment until he died in nineteen-sixty-six, the week before his hundredth birthday.

      Now, you gotta understand, The Crawlback Inn isn’t the snazziest place in Jerkwater, Montana. That honor goes to The Gold Bar & Yellow Room, which is located more conveniently across from the railroad station, and offers individual paper doilies for every place-setting, along with a reputation for having silverware that’s clean enough to pass.

      There wasn’t much polish at the Crawlback when I was growing up, just peanut shells and swilling beer. It was rough in the beginning. For the first ten years or so, the bar counter was an upturned water trough connected end-to-end with a pig-feeder that was also in an unaccustomed position.

      Obviously, the dark end of the bar smelled worse than the front, and there were enough brawls and cuss words to make sure I will never be mistaken for a guy who went to manners school.

      It wasn’t until I took over as manager and installed my large cast-iron skillet behind the bar, that I was able to establish a policy that prohibited cliques and the saving of seats near the front door. Only then could underlying hostility leave the premises.

      I never had to actually hit anyone. The first time I slammed that baby on the bar, everything stopped. After that, all I ever had to do was reach for The Pan.

      Still, even after I ordered a hardwood bar, which came pre-sanded and everything, the skillet remained hanging at shoulder level between the wall of pictures near the entrance and the red banner with the white capital M, just to maintain the memory of rougher times and younger days.

      CHAPTER 2

      Emmett Tyler Soapinski had always been in the center of everything, the middle-pick on every team, tenth in his high school class of twenty.

      He had been a wild one racing tractors and tipping cows, even smoking cigarettes he’d swiped from the jar on his parent’s coffee-table. So it was a surprise when he was the first in his graduating class to be drafted in 1970.

      Six weeks after he entered Vietnam he was airlifted out, a disk of land-mine shrapnel embedded into his skull and no conscience response.

      CHAPTER 3

      Unis

      We traveled to that Vets Hospital every week for seventeen months before they said we could take Emmett home. Even then, they couldn’t say if he would ever be fully cognizant. That was the word they used.

      My husband, Mort, stood in the parking lot yelling at the doctors inside, and then at the government, but when he started blaming The Lord, I cut him short.

      Stop it, Honey, I said. What if Emmett came around and started talking this minute? How would you feel? How would he feel?

      That damn doctor says he won’t ever come all the way back. Mort fumed.

      No Mort. I put my hands on his shoulders. They said they don’t know, nobody knows. That’s the best thing we’ve got going. We need to be strong and have faith. You’re the bravest man I know, Honey, we’ll find a way for our son to have a good life, don’t give up yet.

      We stood with our arms around each other for just a moment, and then we drove home.

      Even before Emmett got out of the hospital, I signed up for the free monthly newsletter put out by the VA. I began a correspondence with two other women; mothers with soldier-sons who also had severe brain trauma.

      I tried to share these exchanges with Mort, but mostly he turned away saying, Those women aren’t doctors, you’re not a doctor, don’t pretend you know how to reach inside of my son and make him well.

      It pained me to hear the anger in his voice, and I felt helpless to change it. But I saw that Mort was still grieving over what our lives had once been and might never be again. I understood him because I was fighting the same emotions. It’s just that my Polish mother had ingrained in me not to indulge in grief, it wasn’t Our Way.

      So I trusted Mort to find his way out of this hopelessness. For his son. For all of

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