How was the trip from San Antonio to Fort Leonard Wood?  Let me be honest.  I don’t know.  I slept for most of it.  I’d wake up from time to time to note our progress.  The cars, Millie & Juan, moved north until we reached Oklahoma City. After a night in a motel east of Oklahoma City, we got up early and then had a day of more driving and long naps.  Once out of Oklahoma, we entered southwest Missouri.   It wasn’t much.  I could see why Mother Earth hates it and Oklahoma so much that she made a habit of dropping tornadoes on the land.

When we got to Saint Robert, mike got us to the house he had rented from the Swindling Housewives of Saint Roberts, a group of women with a guy boss whose business was feeding on soldiers coming to Fort Leonard Wood.  The house wasn’t as bad as I expected.  It was large with a huge partially finished basement that had a view of the garden, a large patch of grass with a fire pit that sloped away from the house until it dropped into woods.  The top floor had lots of room.  Bart, Fielding, Quine, Chicago, and I made ourselves at home.  After a couple of days, Yellow Knight’s truck arrived.  A new ensemble of squires commanded it.

They carried the furniture into our new place.  It was a challenge for them. They had managed to mangle a lot of it but reassembling put them to a test of devilish complexity.  They failed.  Roberta had to show them how to put the bed back together. As the squire charged with reassembly looked on, stupefied by the bed’s unfathomable geometry, without comprehension. 

Roberta called Yellow Knight to complain about the quality of the move and the addition of various never mentioned charges.  Yellow Knight, with his uncanny ability to detect an incoming complaint, dodged Roberta’s calls for almost a week.  When she reached him at least, he took full advantage of the fact that he was in Texas and she was in Missouri.  Once again I saw that the best way to avoid losing a fight is to stay as far (literally) as you can from it.  Yellow Knight understood this.  Don’t cheat people staying in town.  Cheat people who are at a safe distance from you.

Roberta thought she had a job lined up at a Fort Leonard Wood Clinic.  They offered her a pay packet that would have embarrassed Ebenezer Scrooge to put on the table.  Voila.  Roberta lined up an associate nursing dean’s gig in Saint Louis, a couple of hundred miles down the road that paid well. She took a flat in Webster Groves, whilst mike took on the habit of weekly visits to Saint Louis form Saint Robert, a grubby town beyond the gates of Fort Leonard Wood, but adjacent to Waynesville, yet another grubby town, but one that had a perfect bar in its favor.  The Lost Cat Tavern was a secret watering hole of my friend Wolverine Lawless and his buddy Tucker Snarlson.  Tucker liked to sneak away for long binges. He’d get drunk drinking Campari, sometimes Dubonnet. Keep in mind that Snarlson was still wearing bow ties back then.   Wolverine stuck to whisky or triple gin martinis with a side of pickled herring.  I drink in moderation and tend to stick to Amaretto and cream cocktails, though Wolverine would sometimes treat me to a White Russian.  But why would a guy like Wolverine be drinking in Waynesville? And why did he have a passion for Michigan athletics?