An Unhappy Ending

This isn't a pleasant or erotic story, but it is a true one; only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. There are no sex scenes in this one. I even omitted dialogue.

Rather, this was just something I thought about when I woke up this morning, a tale not of a BTB consequence and not of reconciliation, but what actually happened to a couple I knew.

oo0oo

Rick was a hard luck guy. You know that line from the song on Hee Haw, "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all"? Well, Rick should have had that tattooed on his forehead, 'cause it was sure true of him.

It was the spring of 1990, and things weren't going well, financially for Rick. He'd gotten out of the Army in 1986, but while he was a decent enough worker, once he had a job, he wasn't particularly good at finding jobs. He worked for a print shop, making a couple of quarters above minimum wage, after having changed jobs, once again, for another nickel an hour.

What kind of luck did he have? I had to help him, twice, in the period of a couple of months, change the alternator in his car. The original one failed, so he bought a remanufactured one, with a 30 day warranty on it, which I helped him put in.

OK, OK, I put it in for him while he helped me.

Then about two months later, it crapped out, and it was another remanufactured alternator, with another 30-day warranty. From the same auto parts store. At least he'd get a few bucks back on the core charge.

Rick was married. His wife, Laurie, was the kind of girl you'd say, "Yeah, I'd fuck her," about, but you wouldn't say, "Man, I'd like to marry that girl." Reasonably cute, dishwater blonde hair, but the mom bod had struck her early, probably because she was a mom. Rick had knocked her up, and they'd gotten married. Staying home to take care of their daughter, Jennifer, Laurie didn't work. Laurie was one thing every man wanted in a wife, though: she just loved to fuck!

Of course, Rick did like to brag about his wife, to the extent that I wondered just how true some of his claims were. She could suck the chrome off of a trailed hitch, he had claimed, and she took it up the ass. She was a constantly horny little bitch, so Rick got laid, a lot, and didn't have to work for it at all; she'd jump his bones more often than he started things off. I guess if a woman is going to have only one real talent, sex is the talent most men would want her to have. I did see that keeping a clean house was not one of her strong suits.

Rick and Laurie had an apartment off of Jefferson Avenue in Newport News, the kind furnished by Rent-A-Center, and they were barely squeezing by. So, in the spring of 1990, Rick went to the Army Reserve recruiter, to sign on as a weekend warrior. He hadn't liked the Army when he was active, but figured that he could do his one weekend a month to bring in some extra bucks. He'd been assigned to 7th Transportation Brigade at Fort Eustis - EUSTIS: Even Uncle Sam Thinks It Sucks - at the north end of Newport News, before, and figured he could slide right back into position.

Which he managed to do. He was an easy recruit for the Reserves, already having had Basic and AIT under his belt, so he once again became SPC (Specialist, an E-4 rank) Howard. The money wasn't much, but when you don't have much to begin with, every little bit helps.

On 2 August 1990, Saddam Hussein sent his Republican Guard troops into Kuwait, conquering the country in a day. President George Bush condemned the invasion and said that this would not stand. He put together an international coalition to force the Iraqis to leave Kuwait, got a Security Council resolution to authorize it, and started preparations to move American troops to the Middle East to prepare to expel the Iraqis. And, as you might have guessed, it's the Transportation battalions which are first in, and last out. SPC Howard's unit got called up early, for deployment to Saudi Arabia.

On September 23, 1990, his last day before deployment, Rick knocked Laurie up. They didn't know it at the time, but that was when he did it.

It was November when Laurie told me that Rick had told her that he knew she couldn't keep her horny little nature under control for all of the months he'd be in Saudi, and that if she just had to have it, she could, but to just keep it unemotional, and be honest with him about it. I knew that she was fishing, but I was married myself, and Emily, my wife would never go along with me fucking Laurie, even if it was "just sex." I didn't like the idea of being Jody, having been in the Army myself - though I'd been out since '82 - and I cut off that discussion before Laurie could make a real proposition to me. November is cold in eastern Virginia, and their apartment had cheap windows and was kind of draughty, so Laurie was fully dressed, heavy sweatshirt and jeans, which made her easy to resist.

It was cold again in December, as it's supposed to be, when Emily and I were visiting Laurie at her apartment. That is, visiting Laurie and Jennifer and some guy who must have been around thirty, but still had a pimply-faced kid look about him. We didn't stay long, excusing ourselves as having something we had to do, because Laurie was almost doing the pee-pee dance she was so obviously horned up and wanting to fuck the guy who was there.

To say that Emily was disgusted would be an understatement, but she knew what Laurie was like all along. Yeah, she knew that Rick had given Laurie 'permission,' though Emily thought Rick had done that more to have the option to screw around himself while he was deployed. We found out, many months later, that not only had Rick not scored when he was in Saudi, but that the country was really, really hard on him. The winter months weren't too bad, but when spring arrived, and it got hotter than the hinges of Hell, he was really physically suffering. Even in the Transportation battalions, there were like ten males to every female, and while I never heard just how much 'fraternization' occurred, there were apparently a lot of guys there who were more sexually attractive than Rick was.

At any rate, it was only a few days later that I heard the story. Laurie had called me over, to fix something, and she was practically in tears. Yeah, she'd been honest with Rick, and they'd had a phone call, and she told him that she'd gotten laid. Good, old, understanding-of-her-needs Rick had been in tears. She had regretted it, she said, because even as 'just sex,' it wasn't very good sex. As horny and worked up as she had been, he still couldn't get her off. Of course, maybe if he'd lasted more than 55 seconds, he could have. She tried to get him up again, but apparently he was a one-and-done.

What had she done, she wailed. Yeah, Rick had told he that she could take care of her needs, but when she actually did it, and told him like he had insisted, he was devastated. I listened to her, as I changed the rubber washers in her kitchen sink faucets - the sink had gone from a drip to a steady stream of water - but I thought I detected a hint that, if 'Jody' hadn't been able to take care of business, she thought that I could.

I got myself out of there as quickly as was decently possible.

Laurie didn't wear a whole lot of clothes in warmer weather, something Rick always liked, but being knocked up she wasn't quite as appealing as would normally be the case. What had been nice, creamy C-cup tits the previous summer, tits frequently unrestrained by a bra - release the hounds! being replaced by release the puppies - were now D-cup tits resting atop a nine-month swollen belly. Her nipples were darker now - something that pregnancy frequently causes in white women - where they had previously been almost the same shade as the rest of her skin, but that was the only positive. And here it was, Sunday, 23 June 1991, and I found myself in Mary Immaculate Hospital, being Laurie's birth 'coach.' Emily was supposed to have this duty, Rick still being in Saudi, but she was in Columbus, Ohio, where her family lived, and I got the call that morning.

The hospital had gotten a call through to Saudi, and Rick was on the other end, crying like a baby himself while Laurie was in labor. I kept myself silent in the background; I really didn't want to be wasting a sunny, summer day inside in the hospital, when I could be looking at the cute summer babes on Virginia Beach.

Eventually, little Richard Isaac Howard made his appearance into the world, about as ugly as a newborn baby can be. I knew, without saying so, that he was going to have a hard life.

It was 1996, and I knew that the end was coming for Rick and Laurie. He'd gotten out of the Reserves as quickly as he could after getting back from Saudi; bad luck had turned him from making a few extra bucks as a weekend warrior to a year active in Hell's sandbox. He never made E-5. America Online was providing 'chatrooms' that frequently turned into flirt rooms, and both Rick and Laurie were spending inordinate amounts of time therein. Rick would sometimes disappear overnight, and Laurie, well sometimes she'd disappear during the day. She had a part-time job in a corner grocery store now, while Rick was, once again, working in a print shop, and the kids were in school. That left Laurie some free mornings, and I was convinced that she was stepping out again.

Was there a big fight? If there was, I wasn't privy to it. Rick and Laurie were just sort of drifting apart. Yeah, he'd given her that hall pass when he left for the Middle East, but she shouldn't have used it, and never have told him that she did use it. They'd been together for five more years after he got back, but I could tell, things were different.

Rick never bragged about his wife again. While there was no question that his son was his son - you could see it in the kid's face - things had simply changed, and not for the better. One day, Rick just left, dropping off the grid and out of sight. He packed up some of his stuff and drove away, leaving his wife and his daughter and his son, taking off for parts unknown. Whether he took a girl with him, I never knew.

Laurie? Without her husband there, no alimony or child support, she couldn't survive on her own. She moved in with us for about a month, making a very crowded house and pissing Emily off one time too many by walking around in just a t-shirt, one which barely covered her lady parts as long as she stood straight up. The message was clear: if I had wanted the pussy, I could have the pussy, or even her ass.

But I just wasn't interested. Laurie was 29 now, a nice age, but with two kids, a mom bod, and, to be honest, an IQ of about 85. Emily and I had a son ourselves now, she was smart, an RN making good money, and in every way a better catch. Rick and Laurie might have been stupid, but I was not, and hardly disappointed when Emily 'suggested' that Laurie needed to find another place to live. The last I knew - I didn't actually see it, because I was at work - Laurie had packed up the beater car Emily had bought her and headed back to wherever it was in Alabama her family lived.

It's been 24 years now since Laurie took off. Rick's and her kids are adults now, and Laurie is 49 years old. I sometimes wonder what happened to her, and to Rick, but I know that I'm better off not knowing.

It was an unfortunate circumstance, Hussein invading Kuwait, that led to such a drastic personal consequence, even though Rick was never in real danger in Saudi. Would their marriage have survived without that, and his 'hall pass' for his young and horny wife? There's no way to know, but this was a marriage that ended with, in the cliché term, not a bang but a whimper.