The Beginning

Garithin lay just on the outskirts of the city having the population of a struggling suburb with little class and little hope of attaining any in the near future. The inhabitants of Garithin are law abiding citizens. They drink, do drugs, and have premarital sex as most free Americans are want to do.

On the particular day that our story takes place, the sunset fell on the buildings and trees with a red hue on the clouds and a blue dusk lying down on the rooftops. Men moved from the bicycle factory owned by old Martin J. McGraver Jr., which had been started in order to curb the tide of oversized vehicles. Old McGraver, as everyone called him, had been a wealthy oil tycoon his whole life. He had worked for the big companies as a supplier having acquired lands with oil wells in Texas several years after the war. He had been raised Christian, and was neither a tall nor a short man, but commanded respect wherever he went. He was a kindhearted soul, which accounts for his turnaround in business at such an old age.
McGraver had, at one time, been a ruthless business man, despite his personal politics of befriending everyone he met. Once he stepped into his suit and into the meeting room, he changed. It was buy, buy, buy. Send the geologists out, bombard the earth with aerial shots, find the oil, and buy the land. Then send in the mercenaries and drive the inhabitants off. He had been quite good at this, received the designation from his colleagues as "Oil General" and dedicated his life to the exploitation of the Earth’s most valuable resource.
Until He met Molly.
More about McGraver later. The important thing to note is that he changed, and invested his time in making bicycles and other free-powered vehicles for sale for the greater good. There will come a time when the story of McGraver's assent from hell will be necessary, and you will awe at the turnaround of this tycoon. And how Molly brought it about.
Now working at the bicycle factory was a young man in his late twenties named Steve. Steve drove a brand new Chevy pickup truck that burned precious fossil fuels. Steve was not a bad guy contrary to his lack of support for the company. Actually, most of the employees at McGraver's bike factory drove cars to and from work. Most of the bicycles were shipped to Seattle and Cleveland, where people abandoned the cars roadside for the freedom of wind-through-the-hair bike riding. Steve, however, did not. He enjoyed listening to the country music radio station to and from work, and considering he lived seventeen miles away, he quite enjoyed the warmth of his cab when December and January rolled around.
Steve also had a history with Molly. Every Thursday after work, Steve drove past the corner store, grabbed a pouch of Bali-Shag smokes, and rode over to Molly's place. In all actuality, it was not Molly's place, but Burt Stanson's Motel on RT. 9 just a little more outside of the suburb, outside of the city. It was a nice, remote location that received a plethora of sunlight during the day. Steve drove up to the front of the motel building every Thursday at almost exactly the same time. He knew this not because he looked at the clock radio that adorned his dash board, but because of the way the sun slid over the hood of his truck as he drove into the second parking spot from the manager’s office. The only Thursdays he was not exactly sure of the time were the days when it rained or snowed. The latter of the two rarely happened and the former every so often. On this particular day, the sky sparkled red and Steve turned the ignition, killing the engine, and took a puff from his cigarette. He still had about fifteen minutes before he headed up to her room, so he just sat on his freshly vacuumed cloth car seats and slid down in the chair a little. He rolled down the windows and breathed deeply the fresh Garithin air. Steve had never really breathed in much of the earth’s other air except for a couple locations in Europe, Iraq, and Kentucky. Aside from those times, Steve had been a dedicated breather of Garithin air for the past twenty-five years, and he liked it that way. He was quite pleased with the air, its rich, humid, full of freshness, with a tint of coolness in the spring and fall, and the robust, sometimes sweltering, thick air of the summer.
Steve puffed from his rolled cigarette and held in the nicotine for a bit. He hadn't always smoked. He hadn't even smoked while in the army, but he had always hung out with the smokers. He hadn't really started smoking until he dated Betty. Betty had smoked three to four packs a week, and Steve had been around her nonstop every day for almost a year. When you spend that much time with someone, it is inevitable that you pick up some of their traits and habits. For Steve, it was smoking, and he hadn't quit when they broke up, and that was several months ago. Steve still missed Betty, and had not decided to move on as of yet. Molly was a good place to start but nothing serious, and he knew it. She had her place in his life, and in the town, and everyone knew it. There was nothing more there than what he would have with her in ten minutes and that would only last ten minutes or so after that. He was okay with that. She, Molly was okay with that. The whole town of Garithin was okay with that. That is just how it was, and how it had been for as long as they could all remember. Some of the housewives might think it a crude way to make a living, but Molly was no crude girl, nor were her figures. She was fast approaching a middle-aged woman, but she possessed the desire, will, and passion of a teenager. She was giving, and sharing, and she cared deeply about her daughter.

All this Steve knew, and so did the town. Steve spent the next two minutes thinking about Betty, the two minutes after that thinking about his dog, Belly, the one minute after that about what he was going to have for dinner, and the five following about Iraq. Steve had been a homegrown American boy who believed in fighting for his country. That hadn't changed, but beliefs inside of him had. It is interesting that in the eighteen months that he marched from Fallujah to Bagdhad, he had passed Old McGraver five times, on five separate occasions, and didn't even know it. For the Old McGraver's part, he did not know it either. The lives they lived touched more often then some lovers for two strangers, yet their own conscious connection of the facts was less then none.

After Steve had finished running the story of his friend Miller (who had died last year due to a land mine exploding off the side of the road in Iraq) through his head, he sighed, put out his cigarette in the ashtray, and slid out of the truck onto the parking lot floor. As Steve locked --an unnecessary precaution-- and shut the door, he thought about Miller. He walked to the stairs that led to the second story of the motel and remembered how Miller had been the bully of the platoon. Somehow, Steve had managed to avoid this abuse despite his lack of size on Miller. Regardless, Miller had always found in Steve something amusing and fun, which saved Steve from a world of hurt and bruised eyes. Steve walked along the balcony and looked over his right shoulder to the setting sun. Two dormitories on the college campus besmirched it, which loomed liked the legs of a giant in a forest with no torso. Steve loved to look upon the mixture of man and nature and the sun's last blessing of the day on them both. He breathed deep again the mixture of steel, wood, and wind that gently rushed by his face and through his hair as he stepped outside of room 4C. He looked out across the parking lot, into Sergeant's Field, across the stadium, through the dorms, and into the mountains. A thought entered his mind as the sun cusped away. He chuclked, turned towards 4C, turned the door handle, and entered the room.