The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [47]
At the time Art arrived, Malinda was dating Evan Wright, a local who kept a small farm on the outskirts of town and also ran a construction firm. One of the ways she had enticed Art to come down to Texas was by convincing Wright to give Art both a construction job and a place of his own to live—an unused trailer on the side of Wright’s house. Since Art had construction experience from his days working with Morty Bello, he took to the work quickly. Young and pissed off at life, he could lug siding all day long, pushing for that moment when his anger momentarily dissipated through his sweat glands. He’d spend his days framing houses in nearby towns like Frisco and Plano, and at night he’d return to the trailer exhausted, sit outside on a lawn chair, and pound beers until he felt himself falling up toward the stars. He’d gone from inner city trash to trailer trash and it wasn’t so bad. The stars were lovely, and Texas had other, more earthly distractions as well.
One of Wright’s next-door neighbors was a blond, country-bred girl named Lucy Rasmussen. Art first glimpsed her when she stopped her car to say hello to Wright as they passed on the road. Evan introduced them and her Lone Star hospitality kicked right in. She dropped by a day later with some food, and after a few more visits he finally confessed some selective yet emotionally honest details of how Karen had shattered his heart beyond repair. He was convinced that it was a hopeless situation. If true love, the only good thing in the world, could be broken, then what was there left to believe in? Lucy sympathized completely and, with a solemn sense of purpose, set out to restore femininity to its rightful place.
“Oh, God, was she something,” Art muses. “A wild-ass country girl who knew how to have fun. Blond, big tits, slim waist, a deep drawl. She was always happy and really, really sweet. She’d even wear Daisy Dukes with her shirt tied up and everything.” Evan Wright’s ranch was ten acres, and on one corner of it sat dozens of old cars—a real redneck garden. Art’s favorite activity was to take Lucy out among the Chevys and Fords at the end of the day, when the cars had cooled and the sun was setting. She’d let her Daisy Dukes slip into the dust, perch herself her up on one of the hoods, and they’d go at it like demons while the glass and metal around them glowed gold.
Moments like those snapped Art back into the present, but Lucy quickly realized that Art’s broken heart was beyond even her capacity to heal. A few weeks after the rehabilitation project started, she confessed that she already had a boyfriend, but wanted to introduce him to some friends of hers from the nearby college town of Denton, home to Texas Women’s University. At a party later that week, he found himself sitting with Lucy and three new women, all of them Texans. The new girls—Janet, Susan, and Natalie—had not only also been raised in the comparatively Spartan cultural confines of North Texas, but had the added insulation of having been brought up as conservative Christians, ingrained with the kind of sensual and moral taboos that Art happily violated on a regular basis. At the party, sensing their curiosity, he doled out generous portions of South Side grit and tales of his urban adventures. “We’d never met anyone like him,” says Natalie, the youngest of the three girls. “You gotta understand that I was raised in the middle of a bunch of pastures, I’d never left the country, and I’d only left the state a few times. He starts going on about Chicago and gangs and getting shot, plus he’s really cute. I mean, he was different. His world was like an alternate universe.”
To Art, so were the girls. Their accents, naïveté, and country breeding were delightfully new, and they were much less psychologically serrated than the