Ron has a new agenda. Couple of days ago, it was drinking and fishing. Now, it’s intimidating Mal into giving up on his relationship with Shelly. Easy to see how he might switch from one to the other. Fish. Mal. Both are things he’d like to catch, then toss into a lake.
Mall and Shelly’s bunch are living in the past. You can’t keep focused on what you want out of the next ten minutes when you’re focused on what was going on before you came into a hole-in-the-woods bar.
Buddy’s there to help them keep some perspective. What HE wants out of the next ten minutes is to make several hundred dollars on the sale of alcoholic beverages and stay in business. See how easy that is? You can’t worry about ten minutes ago when there were no brand new customers in your hole-in-the-woods bar ten minutes ago! You need Focus! Focus on drinking alcoholic beverages!
Gotta focus on what good ol’ Buddy is saying.
It’s good that Mal is finally entering a wider world, making friends and doing new things, don’t you think?
Ry’s buddies sound nice. I guess Mal might wind up knowing a lot of new people and new skills after this weekend.
Assuming, of course, that nothing goes sideways on him.
Oh, Houghton Hollow. That’s the little valley at the end of Houghton lake (named for the famed explorer Sir James Houghton-Houghton) where the dam was built way back in the 1970s. There were some steep banks in the hollow that made the engineers grin with glee as they contemplated their gorgeous new dam. Plus, they got to flood half a town after it was built. Three of the engineers went in on a scuba diving company where you can dive down to “Lower Houghton Grove” and sit in a submerged van, and photograph yourself in a submerged school playground, and swim vaguely near the cemetery and then swim away again fast because it’s freakin’ creepy as hell, with all the drowned trees around it and the headstones and statues and all.
They used to tell a whole bunch of different ghost stories about the submerged town, but eventually they all got smooshed into one big ghost story about a Wukilar that was the mayor’s cursed son (or the cursed Mayor’s son, whichever) and who lived in the church next to the cemetery (graveyard, really, but who keeps track) where he lost his hands or his head in a boating accident. And now he either wanders the graves hoping a statue will lose its head that he can take for his own, or is listening to a walkman and can’t turn it off ’cause he’s missing… well, it’s a weird ghost story anyhow.
That got away from me.
…What I was going to say was “Ron ain’t wrong. Gonna be a lively weekend.”
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