The Trouble Way (38 page)

Present

I have known a few women in my time. Like I said, I’ve been around the shed a few times, if you get my drift. I’ve always been sort of curious how they think but it wasn’t until I met Bella that I began to get an idea of how they got so darn smart so early on in life.

I had been under the impression before I turned seventeen that most all women were similar in character to my mother and my,
“Give the other kid the bigger half of the candy bar,” grandmother. That’s a good example of what a dumb shit I was for a major part of my early life.

After seventeen, I began to gradually develop the idea women just might be a manipulative lot. It really slammed home during the short while I became involved with, who turned out to be my first wife, Janis. She was not the last manipulative woman, but she was not only the first, she was the best of them all. She could manipulate the pants off me, literally. I even knew I was being manipulated as I was removing
my jeans and couldn’t do diddly about it. She was one smooth motor scooter, to use a phrase of the times. Upon reflection, I should say she was one rough, intimidating Harley Hog and that’s an understatement.

She used her talents at manipulating to the point where she actually used the discount retail business principal of high turnover for huge profits. She
’d have fit in perfectly with upper management at Big Richards. Her expertise was in turning husbands rather than merchandise and her profits were measured in houses.

I
’d accidentally met her in a grocery store parking lot after we’d been divorced for years. She’d just got word of her final settlement, a fourth house, after the fifth divorce. She was in soaring spirits.

“
Except for you Jake, I got a house out of each one of my ex’s,” Janis told me in that Safeway parking lot. She had a good chuckle over that; me, not so much.

Luckily, when I divorced her, the only thing I had was a
‘51 Chevy worth a hundred fifty bucks and I begged her to take it if she would sign the divorce papers.

I heard on the street that one of the husbands said,
“Those two years with Janis were the worst ones of my life, including the year I was humpin’ it in the bush in Nam.”

Another husband became a hopeless alcoholic. He drank every day and couldn
’t complete a sentence by high noon he was so far gone after less than a year with her. He was a schoolmate of ours; one year behind us.

Ex-husbands, to her, were a lucrative retirement strategy.

To this day, I have no idea whether she was actually pregnant when we got married or whether it was a sick ruse she used to get me to marry her and get her out of that asylum she lived in with her family, led by the head lunatic, her dad.

I remember her saying,
“Do you want to screw me again or not? Don’t you think I know when I can get pregnant and when I can’t?”

How
’s a horny seventeen-year-old supposed to answer questions like that? The first wasn’t rocket salad, it was a no brainer. I wasn’t on solid ground with the second if I said yes to the first. I took her at her word and went with her on that one. As it turned out, it was indeed rocket salad.

She had a damned good reason for what she did, manipulating me into eloping with her to Idaho before dust had a chance to settle on the new wingtips. My mom bought the new shoes for my victory walk in a procession across the gymnasium floor during the graduation ceremony. Within a week of that stroll, those shoes would get be instrumental in another rite, a stroll down the aisle of a tiny, whitewashed church in Weiser, Idaho.

Janis’s home life sucked. Sucked donkeys. The answer to that second question was she had a pretty good clue as to when she could get pregnant. As it turned out, it was irrelevant. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. At the end of one steamy night, she convinced me she was knocked-up and the trip to Weiser entered the early planning stages.

Hell, I was so stupid when I started dating Janis, I didn
’t even know what a Tampax was, for crying in the night, for nearly another year. How in the heck am I going to question whether a girl is pregnant? I certainly had reason to believe she could be, having an intimate knowledge of our daily activities.

I knew how dogs got pregnant. However, not to get too far astray of the subject, I did not understand how they got stuck butt-to-butt. I saw plenty of them that way; I just never witnessed the sequence of the mechanics on how they ended up that way.

I had inside knowledge Janis had a good case to convince someone she could be pregnant. I just didn’t know all the intricacies involved in how and when a girl went from not pregnant to pregnant. It was the very early 60s ... people were stupid back then. Maybe ignorant is a better description. Secretive, even better. She should have worked the midway in a circus. She was that good. I didn’t even question her much at the time. She intimidated me. So, off we went, on a journey that would last a horrific ten months and then an additional, marginally less horrific, thirty-two months until I extracted myself from that happy-crappy predicament.

After I experienced seeing a little girl, Bella, grow from zero years to four, I am getting a fairly good idea of just how early women learn manipulation. I know they are not even aware of the things they are learning. At least, Bella couldn
’t put it into words what she knows. Since she can’t articulate it, I have to assume she is getting it from older women around her. I’m not sure if it is from grown-ups or from the other kids her age who are passing on their wealth of information, those with more experience than she has.

It may have been earlier, in fact, it surely must have been earlier, but when I actually realized her manipulative behavior, Bella was three. She had a pretty good grasp on how to get what she wanted without ever saying the exact thing.

Often times, what she wanted was to not go to bed or to take a nap. She didn’t realize it, but she was actually ready to take a nap or go to sleep for the night. She would get really hyped up and would start flopping around and stumbling when she walked. But, I couldn’t convince her to take a nap. I know, I’m bigger and stronger, but a person wants to convince another by logic. Well, she wasn’t buying what I was selling because she invariably had something else in mind that she’d rather do.

Bella learned early on, maybe when she was one, she couldn
’t just come out and say she didn’t want to do something, she couldn’t talk. She would cry or fuss but that works for a short time only to the point when she learned how to talk. She no longer had a need to get her point across by screaming and crying. Then it was time for me to watch out.

“
Papa, will you read me two stories?” she would say.

Simple enough. Who the hell can argue against that? Everyone says to read to kids and when they actually want to be read to, you
’re sure as heck aren’t going to turn them down are you? Not me. No nap till two stories are read. She never asked to read stories when it wasn’t bedtime. That was “doll time.” Bedtime was “read me two stories” time.

It used to be,
“Papa, can you read me a story?” That lasted precisely as long as she realized that reading one story for three-year-olds does not take long.

One time I was reading a
“princess” story to her and she said, “Pause it.” She needed to go potty. She’d watched enough “Dora,” to know what the pause button was on the remote. What astounded me was her ability to transfer that pause concept to reading a book. So I stopped reading and waited for her to go potty.

Sometimes, it would be,
“Papa, can we go into the kitchen for two minutes?” Three-year-olds don’t know how long two minutes are until they hear the timer ding and it is not nearly as long as they envisioned two minutes to be. Right, “Papa, can we go to the kitchen for five minutes?”

“
Papa, can I have a half a bottle of milk?”

Obviously you
’re not going to starve a baby. Like I’ve said, stuff like that is not rocket salad.

After that half bottle is finished off, it
’s, “Can I have a tiny bit more milk?”

I know how much a tiny bit more means. It will be gone in seconds. Who
’s going to deny a little girl a “tiny bit more milk?”

“
Of course, sweetie, you sure can have as much as you like.”

Also, that tiny bit more milk is just enough to trigger,
“Papa, I have to go potty,” the minute the covers are tucked around her sweet little cheeks in her cozy little crib.

See what I
’m getting at? Women manipulate and I’d bet you a quarter they can’t pinpoint where or when they learned it. I can pinpoint when. It is when they are about one and a half. They get really good at it around three years and after that, they keep getting trickier and trickier.

I
’m sure Janis was a grand mistress of trickiness by the time she blew out sixteen candles.

By the time I was seventeen and ran into her, I had two chances of successfully surviving that encounter and they were both zero. The best I can say about the outcome of my relationship with Janis is that I unsuccessfully survived the encounter. That may even be an optimistic assessment of the entire fiasco.

Events build on things that happened before. So, the only good thing about Janis is if it hadn’t been for her and my youthful stupidity, I’d never have met Bella. For Bella, I’d endure it all again.

I hadn
’t a clue what I was in for when Janis ripped me by the roots out of my innocence. Janis was an A-student in high school so I know what she had planned for me just didn’t develop mysteriously out of the humid Oregon air. She had been working on her technique since she was one and a half. I know that now, forty plus years later. It finally dawned on me after I’d met Bella. Weird, I know.

Hell, I was well into my third score of years before I even knew how truly ignorant I was back there in my late teens. It was Bella who taught me I should have paid a lot more attention when I was two and three. I should have learned a whole lot more than I did those many years ago. Even at that, I probably would not have known enough to avoid the lure of that lunatic, Janis. I wasn
’t anywhere near smart enough. Not nearly as smart as Bella and certainly not anywhere near as intelligent as Janis. I’ll admit that freely. When it came to my relationship with Janis, it was like I was an eight-pound Road Island Red cock emerging exhausted from the henhouse and getting caught off guard strutting between a two-hundred fifty pound wild boar sow, Janis, in an aggravated frame of mind, and her ten overweight, newborn piglets after a grueling five-hour birthing session. Janis was that mean and I was that overmatched, I shit you not.

Had Bella been around forty years ago, I might have had a better chance, but even if that were the case, I probably would have been nothing more fierce than a one-legged duck and would have suffered the same gruesome fate as that Road Island Red rooster bumbling into that boar sow.

Another thought just came to mind about Bella convincing me that she shouldn’t go to bed. It’s original. Reminds me of my ol’ buddy Roy from high school; he was original as hell.

She said,
“Papa, it’s only a little dark, but it’s not really dark.”

Everyone with any sense knows you go to bed when it is dark outside. Roy would have appreciated her logic. That one worked pretty well for her until we got into the spring and daylight savings time began. By that time, she had other ruses she could pull out of her little Britney Spears look-a-like cap. I fell for them all. She was only three. I wasn
’t about to stifle her creativity, for cripe sake. You know, make her color inside the lines. Her preschool teachers will take care of that before she hits six.

I
’ve only had one pet in my life, a little brown mutt with a white chest and three white paws and a short tail. He was the only male brown pup in a litter of six. All the others were black and white with long tails. My sister gave him to me just after our dad died; it was to make me feel better. I was twelve at the time and Lonesome lived until I was discharged from the Air Force when I was twenty-two.

When Lonesome was a few years old, he killed a neighbor
’s duck and the neighbor shot him. His aim was off and he hit him in the left hind leg. The vet had to take the leg off at the knee. The disability didn’t slow Lonesome down much.

The only trick of many he couldn
’t do that he could before was sit up. He could do it for a few seconds until he collapsed to his left, long enough to get a treat. It was funny to watch him try. I had him try just for the laughs. I guess I was mean-teasing him. I’m sorry I did that now that I think back on it. Lonesome refused to do any tricks unless he knew you had a treat for him. He had to see it; he didn’t fall for the old ruse of holding a fake treat un-seen in your fist. He’d just sit and look off to the side until you could prove to him you had a treat.