“In all, it was a good winter. Because the Norwood’s oldest boy, Graham, was also pulling security, we had the relative luxury of only eight-hour shifts. Graham carried an M1 Garand and an old Smith and Wesson Model 1917 revolver, chambered in .45 automatic. He was pretty good with both guns, and even better after we gave him a few pointers on combat shooting. The kid was incredibly fast at reloading the revolver using full moon clips. I swear, he could reload that gun faster than anyone I’ve ever seen reload a revolver using a speed loader.
“Fortunately, we didn’t have any encounters with marauders that winter. We did hear that Belle Fourche, which was about twenty-five miles away, had got shot up pretty badly by a whole army of bikers before they were finally driven off.
“We left the Norwoods in late March. We rode out on horseback with Graham. He rode with us as far as Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where they had relatives. There, after delivering a few letters and renewing acquaintances, Graham had to head on back to the ranch.
“He, of course, took the two horses that we had borrowed, plus his own horse and the packhorse, back with him. We gave Graham a half a box of .45 automatic for his Model 1917 as a thank you and as a birthday present. He turned seventeen while we were on our ride to Scottsbluff.
“We stayed overnight at the Norwoods’ relatives’ place. It was there that we heard tremendous news. They had heard that their neighbor, named Cliff, was planning on taking a drive out to northern Utah. I was just dumbfounded. ‘Taking a drive?’ I asked. They said,‘Sure. We can go talk with him tomorrow.’
“The neighbor, Cliff, was indeed ‘taking a drive’ in a real live internal com-bustion engine automobile—a crew cab Ford pickup, no less—from Scottsbluff to Coalville, Utah. He was going there to visit relatives, and perhaps to stay. We couldn’t believe it. This guy, Cliff, we never found out his last name, was a real lunatic. He had most of the back end of his truck filled with gas cans. He said that he hadn’t heard from his cousins since before the stock-market meltdown, and wanted to look in on them to see if they were all right. He also said he had extra copies of a lot of genealogy and family history documents that he wanted to deliver to them. We didn’t question his judgment, though, at least not to his face. He was happy to have someone well-armed along to ‘ride shotgun.’
“I spent a day checking on the mechanical condition of Cliff’s pickup, to be sure it would get us there in one piece. I replaced the fuel filter, replaced the lower radiator hose, adjusted the belt tensioner—it had one of the later type serpentine belts—and then I lubed the chassis, and changed the oil. Oh yeah, and I tracked down a spare belt for Cliff before we left, just in case it broke. If one of those serpentine belts breaks, you are totally out of luck, because that one belt drives just about everything under the hood.
“We left before dawn the next day. Most of the way, Terry sat in the back and I sat directly behind Cliff in the jockey seat of the cab. Compared to walking or riding horseback, as we’d been doing for the past two years, it seemed like we were flying in a spaceship. The landscape just roared by. Most of it was real lonely unpopulated basin and range country. Cliff played a Hank Williams Jr. tape—I think it was his only tape—over and over again. I don’t know how many times we heard ‘Tennessee Stud,’‘The Coalition to Ban Coalitions,’ and ‘A Country Boy Can Survive.’ I was singing along with ol’ Cliff after a while.
“Surprisingly, we didn’t run into any trouble in all that distance. I suppose that the Good Lord was looking out after poor naive Cliff. The only signs of disorder that we saw were a few burned down houses and a lot of cars that looked like they’d been stripped to the bone.
“When we got to Coalville, we thanked Cliff dozens of times, and gave him twenty rounds of .223 ball to use in the folding stock Mini-14 Ranch Rifle that he carried in his pickup. He just yelled, ‘Thanks for the amma-nishun pardner!’ and roared off up the road. What a lunatic.
“Once we got to Coalville we were on foot again. We were just outside Morgan City when I developed a bad blister on my left foot. We decided to rest up for a couple of weeks, using our usual modus operandi as security guards.
It was there that Terry fell off the ladder and broke her kneecap. It just didn’t want to heal properly, so we had no choice but to ask to stay on. That’s when we started sending you letters via any means possible. I guess that you know all the rest.”
CHAPTER 20
Goodbye
Digging T.K.’s grave began early the next morning. Todd picked the knoll above the LP/OP for the grave. He commented, “You can see half the county from up there. I think Kennedy would prefer this spot. It’s a real ‘reach out and touch someone’ kinda spot.” Nearly everyone wanted to help with the digging.
As they dug the grave, everyone shared their favorite stories about their experiences with T.K., and a lot of tears. At one point, Mary stopped digging to lean on her shovel. She said wistfully, “T.K. would have called this ‘an excellent form of catharsis.’”
Mike was the first to get everyone into the storytelling mood. He recounted, “I remember one time just after he got out of college, T.K. and I were out for a drive in his 300-Z. He had just traded in his old car, and was really letting that car loose. I don’t think he was trying to show off—that wasn’t his style—he just wanted to see how the thing handled at high speed. We were zipping along about ninety.
“All of a sudden, he started to slow down because he had spotted a state trooper pulling onto the road. The trooper pulled us over a couple of minutes later. He walked up to the car and told T.K. that he had clocked him at eighty-two miles per hour in a sixty-five zone. He asked him to show his driver’s license and car registration, so T.K. hands them both over, along with a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card from a Monopoly game. The trooper started laughing so hard I thought that he was going to bust a gut. I guess that we caught the trooper when he was in a good mood, because he didn’t write Tom a ticket. He just gave him a warning to slow down.”
After the laughter died down, Todd cleared his throat and chimed in. “One time just after T.K. graduated from college, he brought me along with him to a rifle match at a range outside of Palatine. As usual, T.K. kicked butt. He had the second highest score, and there were more than sixty people shooting that day. I ranked thirty-seventh. As I recall, T.K. tried to make me feel better about it by blaming it on my HK91, which is not quite as accurate as his glass bedded Garand with match sights. It was a nice gesture, but I knew that it was my shooting ability that was at fault, not my rifle. I never do as well in competition as I do when I’m just out at the range for fun. I get all nervous and even a bit shaky. Not T.K. though. He always had nerves of steel at high-power matches.
“After the match, we drove back to my apartment to clean our rifles and split a pizza and drink some root beer. As we were walking from the parking lot to my apartment, we ran into a guy who lived two apartments down, a real stoner type. Pointing to our Pelican rifle cases, he said, ‘Hey Todd, you didn’t tell me you were into music, man!’ Apparently he thought that our rifle cases were guitar cases. Just as I was about to explain to him what was actually in the cases, T.K. interrupts and says, ‘Oh yeah, man, we’re with The Group Standard. We play gigs two or three nights a week.’ “My neighbor said,‘Cooool. I’ve heard about your band, man! A friend of mine heard you play once. I think it was at the U. of I. pub. He told me you were pretty awesome.’ Then he pointed to T.K.’s case and asked,‘What instrument do you play, man?’Without cracking a smile, T.K. says,‘Bass staccato.’ The guy just nodded his head pretending like he knew what T.K. was talking about. After we got inside my apartment and closed the door, we got into one of those hysterical laughing fits. I was practically crying.