Dad never was in any kind of trouble to hear him tell it. There was little in the way of drugs in those days except the occasionally bennies they got from the long haul cattle truckers making runs north to Dallas and Ft. Worth stockyards. Bennies now a days would be called speed or meth but back in Texas they were just an end to a means, getting through a long night after partying in some honky tonk east of town without tipping over an eighteen wheeler on some curve and spilling a big load of prized beef all the way from Nacogdoches to Kilgore.

Daddy ran with a few choice friends, some he'd rodeo with around the amateur circuit. A few of them grew up to be mighty good cowboys, winning gold buckles from Calgary to Cheyenne and a couple even stepping up into world class types, even one making it to world champion. Most of Dad's buddies though were more interested in looking up a girl's skirt or getting past first base than winning gold belt buckles.

R.J. Reed, Charles Tipton and Bobby Runsdale ran with him most of the time with Bobby being his bestus friend and R.J. being the wild man of the bunch. When some hard stuff was needed it was always R.J. slipping into the corner super market and slipping a pint bottle under his jacket and walking out like he was king of the hill, never showing an ounce of fear.

Growing up in a small town was akin to living in a fish bowl, everybody knew who you were and all about your ancestry. Now R.J. came from some pretty solid stock, his old man had one of the biggest lumberyards in town. Midway through Dad's acquaintance with R.J. his family moved out of the tract housing close to where the other three friends lived to a six acre spread with colonial columns out front and one of them lawn jockeys out there looking like a hitching post for the local K.K.K. to ride up on and dismount.

Still R.J. still attended the same high school as the rest which wasn't that big a deal, it was the only high school in town unless you went across Spring Creek on Pineville road over to the Catholic high school but who would do that being a God fearing Southern Baptist and all. No growing up in small town Texas like Seven Oaks was surely like being on view in a big picture window most of your life, trying to overcome your past.

Not your own personal past so to say, but the past of every jack legged kin that ever set foot in that small town and who had shit in his flat cap as Dad used to say. I later understood the old time swabbies used to have flat navy caps they wore instead of the little Dixie cups and if you screwed the pooch, another East Texas saying, in the Navy you'd done shit in your flat cap.

So not only did you have to account for every fart in church you made but also every indiscretion everybody hanging from your family tree had made over the last God knows how many years. You were prejudged, pre-classified and slotted into a subculture depending on just where your family lit on the social order of the Seven Oaks hierarchy.

Now R.J. had climbed that social tree, his breeding had been held to be above the normal riff raff and average Joe's populating most of he town. He had been held to be a fairly likeable kid, always quick with a grin or a wiseass remark but not too offensive to piss off those you should never piss off. The cops knew him and his dad and were more prone to give him a break when his straight exhausts blasted through town or he was caught speeding off of Second Street on the way to a party.

R.J. graduated high school and went off to England in the Army. Somewhere over there on one foggy night he wrapped a jeep he'd checked out of the motor pool around a tree and killed a young English military officer, female of course. That ended R.J.'s military career and he came back and began working in the company lumber yard, first doing scut work his Dad gave him to show there was no favoritism for his wayward son and then moving up to desk jobs.

One thing R.J. hadn't outgrown was his love for alcohol though. One night coming home from the country club he decided he wanted just a few more drinks and after whipping around the traffic circle on the main highway leading the way southward he pulled into a median turnaround. Unfortunately for R.J. he was going a mite too fast, his alcohol fogged brain misjudging the distance in the median and not noticing the family station wagon sitting there also waiting to turn around on the pitch dark highway.

The impact from R.J.'s pickup pitched the Ford station wagon out into the highway, the man and his two daughters returning from a church social event screaming as they realized suddenly the bright headlights piercing into the dim of their auto were attached to a huge eighteen-wheeler roaring down on them at seventy miles and hour. ......(cont)