Desert Trading Post

  Contents

  Title Page

  Forward to Book One -

  Content Warning -

  Turn The Page -

  Chapter 1 - Rest Stop

  Chapter 2 - Food and Shopping

  Chapter 3 - Motel

  Chapter 4 - Who are we?

  Chapter 5 - Cleaning up

  Chapter 6 - Settlements

  Chapter 7 - Stewardship

  Chapter 8 - Connection

  Chapter 9 - Traveling No Pants

  Chapter 10 - Wilderness

  Chapter 11 - Wildness

  Chapter 12 - Provisioning

  Chapter 13 - Married by Elvis

  Chapter 14 - Homeward

  Chapter 15 - Reverie

  Chapter 16 - Reconnecting

  Chapter 17 - Reeducation

  Chapter 18 - Family Zones

  Chapter 19 - Family Connections

  Chapter 20 - Family Recall

  Chapter 21 - Family Adjustments

  Chapter 22 - Family Dining

  Chapter 23 - Family Arrangements

  Chapter 24 - Transition

  Chapter 25 - Moving In

  Chapter 26 - Church

  Chapter 27 - Habitation

  End of Book One -

  About the Author -

  Other Series by The Author -

  Honest Attractions: Book 1

  Desert Trading Post

  Marilyn Foxworthy

  Copyright © 2019 Marilyn Foxworthy

  All rights reserved.

  Forward to Book One

  My name is Marilyn. I have written before about some of the remarkable men and women of the Jensen Family and others. This time, it’s a man named Dave Raskin and the girl who jumps into his car as he pulls out of a roadside rest stop on his way to a vacation out in the desert. He was hoping to visit some of the desert attractions, but he didn’t expect this. This is the first book of his story.

  I call it “Honest Attractions Book 1: Desert Trading Post”

  Ready?

  Content Warning

  But first, before you turn the page, be aware of several things that you’ll find on the other side of this door. I warn you now. Here’s what you should know before you decide to read the story of our hero and his wonderful life:

  1. The story is at times highly sexual. It is all consensual. If that isn’t what you want to read, stop right now. Return the book and get your money back. There’s a lot of sex. It is all portrayed as respectful, consensual, and loving. There is often a harem element where multiple women are in love with the same man.

  2. This is a romance. There’s no sexual humiliation, sexual violence, bondage, or anything like that presented in any erotic way. If that’s what you’re looking for, something darker, this isn’t for you.

  3. The story is a fantasy. It isn’t realistic. The Heroes are good guys. They win. The Bad Guys lose. Magic and miracles happen. There are allegorical elements to the story if you read it that way.

  4. The story is revealed to a great extent through dialog. The characters talk a lot. Sometimes they talk as if they are in a play. They have fun with language.

  5. Allegory alert: If you read the story as intended, many of the people, especially the women related to the primary hero in the story, actually represent different aspects of the same person. As people, we are complex beings. You will find explanations of the “oneness” of the characters, so keep in mind that what may sound polygamous, may actually be an allegory of one monogamous relationship. Or don’t. You can read it however you want to, but it was written in many respects as an allegory. That doesn’t make it any less fun. It does make it more like “eroticism for philosophers” though.

  6. The story is written as if our hero had kept journals of his adventures and I just edited and published them. It’s the style I enjoy right now. I was a fan of the great pulp writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I think it influenced the language and style to some extent.

  7. You may notice frequent references to quoted movie lines, song lyrics, and passages from other books. They may seem obscure. If you find something that one of the characters says to be a bit weird, it’s probably a movie line. You can look it up on the Internet or something if you want to. If you get it, that’s part of the fun.

  Turn The Page

  Well, ready? Our story starts as Dave pulls out of a rest stop in northeastern Oregon…

  Chapter 1 - Rest Stop

  I was pulling out to hop on the freeway when I heard a loud thump. Stopping quickly, I looked in my rearview mirror, but there wasn’t a car behind me. But there was a girl at my passenger door, pulling it open and starting to climb into the seat beside me.

  She was in a hurry. Slamming the door closed behind her, she yelled, “Take me with you! Go! Please!”

  I didn’t even hesitate. I don’t know why. Maybe I do know why. She was in a hurry and that was enough, I guess. She wanted me to take her with me. So I gunned the engine and pulled out of the rest stop that I had been at for the past 20 minutes and headed east.

  If she’d said, “Take me to Portland,” or “Take me to Idaho,” or “Take me to” some other specific place, maybe I would have questioned her. But what she had said was to take her wherever I was going. That was easy. I could find out why later.

  She was in a hurry. At least to get in my car. It seemed like she was in a hurry to put some distance between herself and something at the rest stop. Probably “someone” at the rest stop. I popped my tiny car into the fast lane and accelerated to what I figured was the fastest I could go without getting pulled over for speeding. I hoped that it wasn’t the police that we were getting her away from.

  Neither of us spoke yet. She looked back as if to see if we were being pursued, and then flopped into the seat and slouched low, pulling on the seatbelt. She gave a sigh, maybe relaxing just slightly, but not much. She was sweating from adrenaline and fear; I could smell it.

  The car was small. Essentially a two-seater. There were actually seats in the back, but the car was so small that you couldn’t really use them unless the front passengers were really short. It wasn’t a sports car, but it was light and fast, and it was a kick to drive. I loved it. It was like driving a go-cart. And it got good mileage. The gas tank was small though. It had a range of about 280 miles without running it dry. I’d need to gas up about 200 miles from here.

  She wanted me to take her with me. But the thing was, I didn’t know where I was going. I was just driving. I was just getting away.

  We’d just finished with the lawyers, my brother and sister, and I. We’d had my dad declared dead. He’d disappeared in a freak storm, flying a glider plane out of the airstrip where he took lessons, west of Portland, Oregon. He’d gone missing about two and a half months ago. He was on a solo flight and apparently a crazy updraft got hold of him, and threw him out into outer space or something. Not really. But close enough. It was actually more like he got tossed really high, high enough that he’d have gone unconscious from lack of oxygen, and then his plane disappeared. The official report suggested that the wings had probably come off the plane and his body dropped who knows where. They thought that the emergency whats-it malfunctioned. The thing that sends out the emergency location signal. Anyway, the signal data didn’t make any sense and they hadn’t found any wreckage at all.

  So, we had him declared dead. It was stupid. It was at the same time that the lawsuits over my mom’s death in a car accident finally got settled. The same crappy time. And now it was over, except for getting used to it. I had a fun little car, no parents, enough money to retire at 28, nowhere in particular to go, and a strange girl on the run from something slouched low in the seat beside me.

  You know, as I thought
about it, it wasn’t so bad. I guess, if I wanted to look at it this way, what I had right now was an adventure. I was headed off on a journey of self-discovery, kind of, to figure out what life was like for me now, but hey, when the universe shoves a strange girl in your car, what are you supposed to do? Hell, I could just go with it, I guess. It did occur to me that she might be in some situation that was not only uncomfortable for her, but potentially dangerous for me, and I hoped that it wasn’t too bad.

  She’d been watching the mirrors of the car as we drove. Both the side mirror and the rearview. And suddenly, she gasped in horror.

  She grabbed my arm and yelled, “Oh shit!” and at that moment a car pulled alongside us and a man in the driver seat started screaming at us.

  I couldn’t hear what he was saying. But he was livid. Maybe a bit crazy. His window was down and I saw him actually reach for the door handle of my car and try to grab it, like he was going to pull it open or something. We were going maybe 70 or 75. When he’d appeared, it had startled me and I’d punched the gas pedal and we were still accelerating.

  I tried to keep my eyes on the road, but the girl was screaming now and I got a glimpse of at least one other person in the other car. And the girl kept screaming.

  I don’t know what happened, but the next thing I knew, the car had slammed on its breaks and swerved into the lane behind me. I watched with unexpected calm as the driver over-steered and drove the car off the road on the left side of the highway and plowed into a tree. At 80 miles an hour. My first thought was, “I wonder how his family will take his death. At least they’ll know what happened, but probably not why.”

  I certainly didn’t know why. Why was he chasing us? Well, because of the girl, obviously. But why? Had she stolen something from them?

  The girl was thrashing around in her seat, trying desperately to see where the other car was now. And it was hard to keep driving with the nails of her left hand digging into the flesh of my right forearm.

  I didn’t stop the car to see if I could help them. I simply slowed down to the speed limit, maybe a bit below, and pulled over to the right lane. I kept driving. No, I didn’t stop. I did assume that maybe we didn’t have to be in so much of a hurry though. It took a while for my nerves to even start to calm down. I knew enough to expect that I’d be a wreck for the rest of the day, at least. And there was no way to tell what the girl would experience over the next days or months, depending on how she’d gotten here.

  After we’d driven on in silence, after she’d quit screaming, having realized that the other car was no longer anywhere in sight, for maybe 10 miles or so, I finally talked to her for the first time.

  I said softly, “Do you need to go to the police?”

  She hardly reacted at all. I thought that she might look surprised or something, at least. I had expected some kind of emotional response. But all I got was a simple, almost monotone, matter-of-fact answer to a simple, seemingly insignificant question. It seemed like it was insignificant to her. As if I had asked if she needed us to stop to go to the restroom.

  Slumped in her seat, she said, “No,” and that was it.

  After several seconds, I said, “Um…” and let that hang in the air, like it needed a response.

  Finally, the girl looked over at me. She took me in with her eyes for a second and then straightened up in the seat.

  Looking down at her lap for an instant, she said, “What happened? To the other car? Did you lose them? How far back? Are they following us?”

  I said, “They hit a tree. Did you know them? They didn’t seem to be friends of yours.”

  She frowned in anger and said, “They used to be. At least I thought so.”

  She paused for another half a minute and then started to talk.

  She said, “They weren’t wearing seat belts.”

  I said, “They were probably both thrown from the car when they hit the tree. They were going at least 75.”

  She said, “Don’t be sorry for them. So, they probably went right through the windshield? Do you think they’re dead?”

  I said, “There’s a good chance. We can go back if you want to. I didn’t know what to do for you, so I just kept driving.”

  She said, “Thank you. For everything. Can we just keep going for a while? Just without talking about it?”

  I said, “Sure,” and I shut up and drove.

  It was about 10 minutes before she spoke again. It didn’t matter to me. I wasn’t really even trying to figure this out yet. I was driving. That had been my plan this morning when I left from the meeting with the lawyers. I was already packed. I had clothes for a few days. I’d brought my laptop, a whittling knife, and a few books. I was going to learn to carve little animals or something. I always liked learning new things and taking up new hobbies. Since Dad had disappeared, I hadn’t done much. Nothing at all. But now the plan was to drive off into some sparsely populated places and stay in dive motels and watch the road go by. That’s what I was doing now. The only thing that had changed was the fact that the passenger seat wasn’t empty now.

  The girl was young-ish. Maybe my age. I wasn’t a great judge of things like that. Maybe between 25 and 30. She might be pretty. It wasn’t like she looked homeless, but maybe she’d been a day or to without enough sleep, enough food, and enough time to shower. Her hair hadn’t been brushed today, but she didn’t have dreadlocks. No, she might be in trouble, but she wasn’t homeless. And I didn’t think she was a prostitute. I could only see her out of the corner of my eye, so I couldn’t get much of a look at her, but she wasn’t homeless. And she wasn’t out for a day of shopping at the mall with friends either.

  She took a deep breath and said, “So they’re probably dead?”

  I said, “Or headed to an emergency room.”

  She said, “I guess I should um, tell you about it. If you want to hear it. You can dump me out anywhere if you want to.”

  I asked, “What do you want? Do you want me to take you somewhere? I’m just on a vacation, kind of, so if you need me to take you somewhere, I can. I don’t have a schedule to keep right now.”

  She turned in her seat and looked at me. It seemed like some thought came to her, but she swallowed it back and sat facing forward again.

  She said, “Um, this is weird, right? I hijack your car and then these guys chase you and then they hit a tree and you have this stranger in your passenger seat.”

  I said cheerfully, “Well, except for whatever trouble you’re in, it’s kind of an adventure. I don’t want to get shot at or tortured or anything, but to tell you the truth, I don’t mind the company. Where are you going? And are you sure we don’t need to go to the police?”

  She said, “No. I don’t need to go to the police. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know anything. What’s your name?”

  I said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Dave. Dave Raskin.”

  She said, “I’m Amber, I mean um, Courtney. Well, my real name is Courtney. I sort of went by Amber. I got used to introducing myself that way. As Amber. But my name is Courtney.”

  I said, “I’m glad to meet you, Courtney. Hey, really, I’ve got nowhere I need to be. Look, I’ll tell you my story first, if you want. Then you can decide what you want to tell me and where you want me to take you. OK?”

  She nodded.

  I said, “OK,” and I related the story about my dad and the search for him and my meeting that morning, and my plan to drive off somewhere civilized but remote for a while.

  She said, “Damn, that sounds nice. You want to know about me? How far to the next town?”

  I poked at the GPS on the dashboard and it looked like about 90 minutes to the next town with more than a single gas station.

  She said, “OK, here goes. Dave, those guys were…crap, I don’t know what to call them. This is hard. Dave, I’m not a good person.”

  I said, “Hey, it’s OK. You aren’t going to rob me though, right?”

  She laughed as she cried in the seat beside me and sai
d, “No. I won’t rob you. You aren’t going to um, do anything to me either, right?”

  I said, “Courtney! No! I told you. I will take you where you want to go. I want to help you. You certainly won’t own me anything, no matter what. I’m not looking for any favors from you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  She said, “I’m sorry about your dad. That’s hard. OK. What the hell? I’ll tell you. Then you can decide what you want to do with me. You can dump me out any time you want.”

  I said, “Courtney, I’m not going to dump you out anywhere.”

  She said, “We’ll see. Is there a rest stop coming up?”

  I said, “Yeah. We can stop. It’s about eight miles.”

  She said, “OK. I guess I can start. No, do you mind if we wait till we stop? It might be easier that way. You’re sure those guys are dead?”

  I said, “No. But I’m sure that their car is.”

  She said, “That’s probably good enough. Let’s wait till we stop and then I’ll spill my beans.”

  Pulling into the rest stop less than 10 minutes later, I parked right in front of the restrooms and we got out of the car. But as we walked up the ramp to the building, Courtney stopped. She seemed to freeze, staring at the women’s restroom, unable to make herself move.

  I said, “Courtney, what’s wrong?”

  She said, “I…I…I’m afraid. I…need to use the bathroom though. But I can’t go in there. Not by myself. Shit. Shit. Shit. Dave, listen, this is weird, I know it is, but um, I need you to do something for me.”

  I said, “Of course. What can I do?”

  Courtney looked around at who might be nearby and then grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the side of the building, toward the handicapped restroom, where it was more private. Opening the door, she let go of me and started to go inside, but once again froze at the threshold. She groaned loudly and then grabbed my arm again and pulled me inside with her.

  Locking the door behind us, she said, “Turn around and keep your eyes closed.”