French Fries In The American Southwest

By Fredric L. Rice

As if growing up in the American Southwest in the 1970s wasn't difficult enough (what with the Freeway Killer, Son of Sam, and other serial murderers out trolling California highways looking for kids to kill and dumping their bodies out in the desert) two brothers decide to float around the Mojave attempting to see just how much trouble they can get in to – after loading up on french fries and extra salt.

This is a true story about how Tecopa Springs used to be, about how Baker, California used to be back when there were much fewer people living in Southern California. It's the story of how two High School-aged students hiked from muddy seep to muddy seep, starting fights in haunted fast food dives, and avoided getting their faces kicked in by irate fathers, crazed bikers, drugged-out hippies, and the rest of the non-mainstream men and women that climbed out of the daze of the 1960s and hit the road.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fredric L. Rice
• Release date: Feb 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311205308

Fredric L. Rice

Aging hippie, avid backpacker, hiker, bicycle rider, surfer, I have lived on and off the fringes of society for decades, at times dropping out of civilized society for years at a time. Now that I'm older with responsibilities I no longer live among the displaced, the homeless, and among those hiding from others however in my writings I hope to describe something of what life has been like for me up until now.Currently I am a software engineer getting paid very good wages working on maintaining and repairing transportation infrastructure within the United States, putting my self-taught skills to work doing something positive for society in an effort to give back something of what I took when I was living on the streets, stealing food, being a public hazard. In this respects I am highly respected and well thought of among the nation's elite software engineering professionals, and have the approval and admiration of the outdoors community where I also volunteer my time and effort for the benefit of future generations -- assuming there are any.

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French Fries in the American Southwest

Written by Fredric L. Rice

Published by Fredric Rice at SmashWords

Copyright 2006 Fredric Rice

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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I'd like to screw your woman, I heard my brother inform somebody as I followed him in to the dark room, sun-dazzled eyes working hard to adjust. From the outside, leaking through the plywood walls of the dilapidated restaurant and bar, Hank Williams or some other shit-kicking cowboy wannabe was moaning about some woman, railroad tracks, or maybe the farm back home. Among the noise we had also heard talking, laughter, and yelling from outside and had decided on the spur of the moment to enter the dark pit for a cold one.

The talking had ceased, leaving Hank or Conway or whoever it was screeching from the jukebox, injecting his sole voice into the hot, stuffy, smoke-filled and dark room.

As my eyes became adjusted to the lighting -- or more appropriately the lack of it -- I could see that as my brother and I had been entering the bar stuck out here in the middle of the Mojave Desert, a man and a young woman had been about to leave. There, standing abruptly face-to-face where ingress and egress meet, my brother stood with arms crossed, smiling up at the man, the man himself standing there clutching a soggy and already grease-stained bag of hot food, round O of surprise on his face.

Whu... he began. What?

Your woman, my brother repeated, smiling quickly at the girl and back to the man. I'd like to fuck her.

I took a step back, wondering quickly if I should reach back behind me and exit through the door, back into the burning desert, to the old broken-down pickup truck, retrieve the keys from under the rag floor mat, start her up and abandon my brother once and for all to whatever came next, whatever his well-deserved fate brought him this time.

I looked around. A man at the jukebox had turned around, hands poised above the selection keys, a line of quarters laying against the brightly lit glass from which the country caterwauling came. Dusty and dirty men crowded into a series of booths along one wall had looked up from their piles of fried food and mugs of watery beer, beards covering smiles in anticipation of the violence about to come.

Sitting on bar stools were five or maybe six dark and huddled, fuzzy shapes clutching -- usually in both hands -- a chipped and filthy glass of beer. Just a bar with a grill serving up bacteria and cold beer