{It took me a long time to get back into this story. I wrote it once before but it got mixed up with another and posted in error with someone else's text. Here is my attempt at the conclusion, sorry, there isn't any sex in this one. And I don't think there needs to be.}
Life on the road, it's always something new around the next bend. I didn't need to be on the road, but there was that loss in my life that filled my mind with pain each and every day.
That loss? A woman named Katey. I had thought I loved her but I wasn't sure, I let myself get distracted, I guess the term was obsessed.
Rich people, Cary and Darla, they thought that they could do just about anything they wanted to and most of the time they were right. It was a stupid accident that I even met them, an inch or two one way or the other, a second in time difference and I would never have even known that they existed.
So I found myself with a broken leg, being more or less kept and taken care of, just like a pet that got hurt. I also found myself doing things that just was not me.
The day I went up to Cary's office and found Amiko, the woman that I had thought I was falling for there, it was obvious that they had been having sex. That was a shock. It took me awhile to understand that this was just Cary's way of letting me know who was in control, who had the power. He even suggested I go up to the house and be with his wife Darla.
Even that was with his permission, and totally in his control. Darla was the same way, to her sex and money was a means to control, too.
I couldn't stand it, I loaded up my Van and drove away. Then in a few months came the next surprise, an inheritance from my Uncle. I was suddenly rich by my standards. Suddenly Cary was in the picture again, trying to take what was mine, to show me that he had the power.
I came to realize that he had known all along about the property next door, and he had made plans to take it from me, put me in my place. The one thing he just could not stand was anyone defying him.
Adverse possession, it seemed to be a silly law to me, but it was the law. Cary had me removed from my own property, that made me furious. I had to fight him in court to prove it was still mine.
There was that long battle over my inheritance, I had no chance in court and they knew it. Except I spent over a year teaching myself, by the time we finally got the case to court I was an expert in the field of real estate law.
In the end it all came down to some simple photos. My Uncle had posted the property, and he was smart. He took some photos to prove it, I found them in the stacks of documents he had left.
Normally I would have simply looked at them, they were just photos. But I had studied the laws, and I knew what they meant. I will always think my Uncle left those for me, figuring I would understand.
It was as close to perfect as it could be, Cary's lawyers entered their photos into evidence, showing the property and the open gate, tracks where Cary had ridden his bikes for years, they said.
Open and continuous and notorious, they said several times. I just entered my own photos, date stamped, showing the sign reading "No Tresspassing" clearly, both of them misspelled.
His lawyer's photos showed the same scene with no signs. But the holes where the sign had been were clear as a bell. Not over seven years as they had claimed but just three.
I saw the Judge try to stifle a smile, kept a straight face myself. Then he banged his gavel and said adverse claim is dismissed.
I won that day, all by myself against probably a quarter of a million dollars of the best legal team money can buy.
I should have been overjoyed, as I walked out of the courtroom it hit me that I didn't even care. I wanted to be back at that tiny cafe, back with my Katey that I had neglected for so long. I drove down there expecting one thing, arrived to find her lost to me.
Married to someone else.
I left the house I inherited vacant, I left the land, over 100 acres of fine property to just lie there and I became a tumbleweed. It is tough to describe my world other than to say that nothing much mattered during that time.
Looking back, those times were just a blur of faces and places.
I seemed to be able to always find work, the time I had spent at Katey's little cafe had made me into a fine short order cook. Every little town seemed to have a small cafe that wanted me. I would stop, work for a few months, then hit the road. I also worked for a few weeks in a Gas Station, once I worked stacking boxes of something on top of other boxes of something. There were a lot of those boxes, too. A week of that and I was on the road again.
There were women, not many. I found them here and there. All of them were moments, all of them became hazy memories when I left for the next place.
I never had a clue where the next stop would be or why. I spent several years doing just that, belonging nowhere, needing no one.
I did keep up with the taxes, I noticed the taxes on the house I owned kept climbing but the bare land always stayed about the same. I would drive back to the town where I kept a post office box a couple of times a year.
There would be the bills, and some junk mail, not much since I never wrote any letters or subscribed to anything it was mostly just boxholder junk.
I pulled up to the post office to check for the tax bills I knew were due. The house was up again but not much, the bill on the land made me blink.
It was up by around 2000 percent. That had to be a mistake so I drove down to the assessor's office.
The bored looking old lady pulled the files, then told me that had all been rezoned as residential, annexed into the city.
I figured I had better drive out there and take a look, it had been over four years.
The first thing I noticed was the road was wider and freshly paved. I passed row after row of homes, all new. They were all paved driveways, to expensive looking homes. When I got to my property, It all looked pretty much the same except for stakes with flags all over it. It hit me that someone had mowed it, too.
I pulled in, looked around. Then I walked down by the creek and sat down to think. I was there for about an hour when a car pulled up and two men got out and walked over to me.
"Mr. Magnusan?"
"Yes, that is me."
"We are happy to find you, we need to talk to you."
"About what?"
"We want to buy this property from you."
"I don't want to sell it."
"It might be to your benefit, the city is going to take part of it for a school up there." He waved his arm towards the fenceline bordering Cary and Darla's place.
