Ted McCedric, Master Painter, stood in The Center's Lobby, surveying his world. It had been a sobering week. The governator of California had come clean with the media, admitting to having had six secret children with 12 female members of his garden club. They had not each bore one child...some bore more, some bore less. Still it was an epic political event. Then came the other news. Social research news. It was announced that a Princeton study found nearly 95% of men were the sons of Republican governonrs.
Ted stood mute. Cletus McCedric must not be his father. What a sham. What a subterfuge. Whata heck? Ted thought it over. What governor might be his dad? Looking at timeframes, one name stood out above all others. Ronald Reganator, the 1938 political appointee named as acting California governator by then-US President J. Edgar Hoover. The Master Painter sighed and walked on.
As he went about his rounds later that night at The Center, Ted passed through the 8th floor Womens' Restroom. He like the facilities there. Nice mirror. Ted, as was oft his case, smiled a big cheesy grin at the mirror. Like a Chesire Cat. Teeth clenched, corners of his lips wide apart. There they were! His carbide-tipped canine teeth. Just like Cletus' canines. Carbide-tipped. Cletus WAS his Dad! There was no room for doubt. Sure his baby teeth canines were tipped, too, but that could have been done at the birthing suite. But his permanent teeth he'd watch grow out of his gums, those sparkling carbides glinting in the sun, glinting under the floodlamp of his farmhouse bathroom. Ted was a Cletus!
Sgt. McCedric was riding with some other Marines south on North Carolina State Highway 24. Going from Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point to Jacksonville's Camp LeJeune. In some sort of Chevy maybe. It was a hot day in 1978 or '79. Along the rural highway Ted saw a burial going on at a hot, sandy cemetery under scrub evergreen and other trees. Sad scene. The Marines had been on a NATO exercise in the Mediterranean for 3 1/2 weeks and now were going to LeJeune to be "debriefed". Soon they passed mobile home park where Ted had left his '77 Ford Pinto ("Rally Pinto") with Beverly before heading overseas. He'd hoped to pick it back up from Beverly after going to the debrief and had written her from a Navy ship that he'd be swinging by to pick up the car. The letter itself had probably been rather cold. Out at sea, Ted had quickly grown tired of her cheating, wild and confused ways, and dreamed of older, stable, maybe more boring girls back in his Wisconsin past. Beverly wasn't much of a girlfriend, and didn't claim to be one either.
Ted's Rally Pinto wasn't in the mobile home's driveway. Fresh tire tracks, though, were in the sand. Seemed odd for some reason. He'd fully expected to see his olive drab prize Ford parked there. Beverly didn't work. Just looked after her 4-year-old son and then farmed him off at night to go party with her favorite girl cousin. Let guys shoot angel dust into her ankle veins, she'd told Ted, and drink wine. "I don't want no needle tracks in my arms," she'd said. Beverly Carol Rogers had chopped off her hair short in front of a mirror in a period of self-loathing and was waiting to grow it back out and then join the daytime world of church attendance and such. Meanwhile she was wearing a bandana scarf and hating herself. Ted sat in the grunt base debrief, feeling distracted and uneasy.
On the way back from LeJeune, the Jar Head driver pulled in for Ted to pick up his car, except it wasn't there. "Beverly's not here, she'd getting _arried," the neighbor boy told Ted. "Married!", Ted was shocked. "Beverley's getting MARRIED?" "No, she's getting BURIED!" the kid announced. Silence. Dumbfoundness. Lack of words to speak.
Soon the boy's mom came over. "Did you own that green car that Beverly was driving?" she asked.