Clearing the breakfast table that Friday morning, Cora was uneasy. Over breakfast, her husband Vern had gone into one of his rages over how the 'Low Bellied Jackass' and the Jews in Chicago were responsible for the wheat price dropping. She hadn't expected that because he'd ranted about all that the evening before. Then seeing the newspaper lying on a chair next to where he had been sitting, she mused, "Could there have been something in the paper that set him off?"
The first thing that occurred to her was to look in the Notable Locals column on page 4. That's where the Samsford Times printed notable news of locals who'd achieved something or other, e.g.: Edgar R. Klugscheisser has graduated from Short Cut Barber College; Airman 1st Class Ronald G. Dreckschleuder was pumping fuel into F-4 Phantoms at Elmendorf AFB in Alaska; etc.; etc.
A couple years earlier, articles about Charlie had begun appearing in the Notable Locals column: 'Private Charles A. Dalman is assigned to the 4th Infantry Division headquartered at Camp Holloway, Pleiku, Republic of Vietnam; Private Charles A. Dalman was wounded in action and has been evacuated to a military hospital in Japan; While serving with the 4th Infantry Division, Private Charles A. Dalman was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant; etc.'
In a puzzled mood and leaning over the table, she scanned the Notable Locals column of yesterday's paper but didn't see a thing concerning Charlie. Maybe something else in the paper had soured Vernon. Flipping on through, she saw that there was! A full half page! She sat down at the table, her hands and legs shaking. Had he been killed? At the top, a color photo of Charlie in a blue uniform receiving a medal from who but LBJ himself! She didn't read the whole article, just skimmed through it. One sentence stuck out: "Disregarding multiple wounds and danger to his own life, 1st Lieutenant Charles A. Dalman exhibited courage beyond the call of duty in evacuating wounded members of his platoon." Her heart rate jumped.
She lay down the paper and with her eyes fixed on the photo, she reminisced.
Now, even years after she and Charlie had gone their separate ways, albeit at her parents instigation, her husband Vernon was still jealous of Charlie. Since their marriage, Vern's jealousy had grown from a nagging irritation to something of a mania that they had never discussed. Consequently, she didn't understand why his jealousy was so persistent. On their wedding night, she had done a very good job of using her vaginal muscles to make him think his penis was penetrating virgin territory. What she did know was that Vernon still harbored suspicions that she had let Charlie play with her breasts, breasts that would never lactate as a consequence of semen he shot into her. According to the lab test report, Vernon's semen contained almost no sperm cells whatsoever. Of course Vern didn't know this because she had sampled his semen surreptitiously and hadn't dared tell him the result.
Cora was convinced that the stories about things that she and Charlie had done had never really taken hold in the local gossip circles. That was not the case with the affairs that Charlie had had with Mary Ellen Rauchmeier and Carol Ann Nordbauer. Their mothers had been a little too vociferous in denouncing him and supported by the old adage; 'where there's smoke, there's fire,' the gossiping public around Samsford more or less accepted the fact that Charlie Dalman had done some things with Mary Ellen and Carol Ann -- things that should have been done only under the auspices of holy matrimony. Of course no one in the gossiping public knew 100% for sure -- but it made for lively conversation, especially among females who happened to be jealous of Mary Ellen's curly blond hair and curvy profile. Cora knew 100% for sure - she had had one-on-one, heart-to-heart talks with both women.
The breakup with Charlie had been very hard on Cora. When her parents had confronted her with what they knew and what they thought they knew about Charlie and told her to end it, she had refused. It was her father who had met Charlie outside in the driveway and told him he needn't ever come back. Peeking out her bedroom window she had seen the devastated look on his face and his defeated shuffle as he walked back to his mother's old Plymouth. She had cried far into the night. Many times she was in tears in church as she thought of what could have been, but never would be -- Charlie converted to her religion, sitting beside her in church, good engineering job, children, helping her father on the farm on weekends and of course, fantastic wild uninhibited sex with Charlie in a real bed.
After her father cut off the loans for Charlie's studies at U of I, he had enlisted in the army. As the months went by, Cora had slowly put Charlie behind her. Then Vern asked her out and for a time memories of Charlie faded. After the wedding and the beginning of awkward sex with Vern, memories of Charlie started coming back. As weeks and months went by, she found herself daydreaming more and more of a life with Charlie. Every bath was a masturbation session with dreams of Charlie satisfying her in a manner that she knew Vern could never hope to emulate. She had known full well that her mental state was not in order, but she would never have admitted it to anyone, let alone seek therapy.
Then one day she was surfing through the TV channels and happened onto the 'Ask Dr. Phil' show. The subject was LLS (Lost Lover Syndrome) and the list of symptoms fit her state of mind almost perfectly. Dr. Phil had presented various therapeutic approaches. One key element of any effective therapy was for the patient to shift her attention away from her own real or imagined experiences with the lost lover. To do that, the patient would need to shift his/her thoughts to things the lost lover might have done or was doing with other partners, past or present. And the more graphic these thoughts were, the better. Dr. Phil recommended having intimate conversations with the other partners and squeezing out as many nitty gritty details as possible.
Cora had known of only two sources of that kind of information: Mary Ellen Rauchmeier and Carol Ann Nordbauer. In the year before Cora had started going with Charlie, he had gone steady with Mary Ellen and later with Carol Ann. Neither relationship had lasted longer than several months and there hadn't been more than a month or two between the two. That Charlie had gone all the way with both Mary Ellen and with Carol Ann, Cora hadn't doubted at all. Naturally she hadn't known any details - Charlie wasn't a kiss-and-tell type and neither Mary Ellen nor Carol Ann were going around giving graphic descriptions of being naked with Charlie.
Mary Ellen Rauchmeier
Mary Ellen had gone to SIU, gotten a teaching credential and met the man she would later marry -- Pastor Thomas V. Heiliger. Now married and living in Sugar Creek, Missouri, she was far enough away to be out of the local picture and no longer of gossiping interest. But that wasn't all that worked in her favor. The gossipers with cleaner minds started doubting that Charlie had deflowered her. After all, would a pastor accept a piece of used goods? The ones with dirtier minds figured that even if she was a piece of used goods, the pastor's holy penis would purify Mary Ellen's deflowered vagina.
The drive from Sugar Creek, Missouri to Samsford, Illinois is almost all on 4-lane highways, most of it Interstate, and takes a little over 5 hours. Thus, Thomas and Mary Ellen Heiliger were able to visit her parents and other relatives several times a year. On one of those visits she had run into Cora Gieriger in the Samsford IGA and the two had gone to the Down Home Café for coffee and a remember-when chat. This was right after news of Charlie receiving a battlefield commission had been in the Samsford Times and the chat had pretty quickly turned to the subject of Charlie and wasn't limited to discussing his military achievements.
Cora: "Wasn't it the first real girlfriend-boyfriend thing for both of you?"
Mary Ellen: "You could probably say that. But you know, I really think Charlie had had a thing with his cousin Julie. Not real boyfriend-girlfriend stuff but, well - I don't really know, it was just a feeling from the way he was."
Cora: "You must mean he and Julie had one of those you-can-see mine-if-I-can-see-yours' things. Why'd you think that?"
Mary Ellen: "Wouldn't surprise me a bit if he and Julie had had a little show party, just from the way he wasn't shy about things." Responding to Cora's questioning look, she went on, "Like well, talking about stuff most guys wouldn't or couldn't talk about. His body, body functions."
Cora could see that Mary Ellen's face was getting reddish. She wanted to hear more but she knew she had to be careful in encouraging more out of Mary Ellen. "Yeah, I know how guys can be. When I was dating Vern, he'd come over to our house and go the whole evening without having to pee. Like he was embarrassed to say he needed to use the bathroom. Good grief but that must have been uncomfortable."
Mary Ellen: "Well Charlie sure wasn't that way. On our first date we went out by the reservoir and parked. We just got there and he says he's gotta pee. Then he gets out of the car and pees in some bushes. Afterwards back in the car he's like nothing's happened. Like he wasn't just out in the bushes with his thing in his hand."
Cora, after a quick giggle: "And then, in the car? You made out with a guy who'd just peed and not washed his hands? That didn't bother you?"
Mary Ellen: "Of course not. By then I'd been in love with Charlie so long, he could have stuck his hands in pig manure and I'd have let him hold me."
