The Greatest of These by Greg Wendleton (booksvooks txt) 📕

“Sure. It’s a small consolation prize for what I was hoping for.”

Fonda just smiled and cracked some eggs saying nothing in response. She was an interesting woman. Athletically built, standing 5’ 8” and a few years younger than me. Her parents were big fans of the movie “Easy Rider”, hence her name. I’m pretty sure her mom had a crush on Peter Fonda. She grew up tough in the rough towns of west Texas where her father worked in the oil fields. She was a lanky kid who developed into a strong distance runner and earned a scholarship to UTSA, where we met her sophomore year. She wasn’t so lanky when we met after practices one Wednesday afternoon bumping into each other in route to the student union.

She thought I was a meathead and I thought she was hot! We were both right. I was at least a gentleman and picked up the duffle she was carrying. What I mumbled wasn’t really important, but I apologized and offered to escort her the rest of the way. A few minutes later, when we arrived at the student union, I told her I was going to grab a pizza and asked her if she wanted to join me. To my utter amazement, she said yes. We’ve been together ever since.

We were married four years later and tried to have kids, but it just didn’t work out. So, Fonda focused on building her client base as a physical therapist and I built my career as a sales representative for a major retail packaged goods company. At least that’s the cover that I use to hide my true profession. I work on a contract basis hunting down and neutralizing traitors to our country for an alphabet agency of the United States government.

After my dreams of playing professional football were dashed by my stature, and maybe my limited talent, I took the sales position to pay my student loans and to look respectable for Fonda’s parents who had high expectations for their daughter, despite their limited means. I loved her, so I was happy to do whatever I needed to do to please Rich and Jodie Murphy. Sadly, they were killed a few years after our wedding driving on a long, dark stretch of I-20 between Big Spring and Midland returning home from a Dallas Cowboys football game. Fonda was devastated having lost her entire family in a single event. The Murphy’s had only Fonda and she was alone, except for me.

I wasn’t much of a help. Instead of providing her with a strong shoulder to lean on and strong hands to pull her through the hard times, I let her suffer in her depression and sink into some heavy drinking. It was during this time that I met Conrad through a mutual friend of ours.

With no last name offered, Conrad became a sounding board for me to talk about Fonda’s depression and how it was making me sad and unfocused. Conrad reminded me that Fonda’s loss wasn’t about me and I needed to be supportive and try to refocus her depression into something positive.

I convinced her to go to the gun range with me one day and we found a mutual passion that rekindled the flame we felt for each other. The range also led me to my second career. Conrad was an excellent marksman and he worked with me to develop a keen eye and a steady hand. After many months of working together he asked me to meet him at his farm outside of Helotes, a small town west of San Antonio. He had a modest house sitting on about 200 acres of sand and scrub. What I didn’t realize at first was he also had enough armament to outfit a third world army that he kept in a secured basement.

Shit was about to get real!

CHAPTER THREE

I don’t want to bore you with details that don’t really matter in the long run. I could tell you about all the different weapons Conrad had in his cache, but do you really care? Let’s just say it was more than I could have imagined and included hand guns, automatic rifles, sniper rifles and shit I have, to this day, no idea what they are.

The main thing you need to know is that instead of going to the gun range with my beautiful wife and watching her get all geeked up and then whisking her off her feet and making wild animal love, I was out on a sandy, hilly farm with a 55-year-old armorist. What the hell was I thinking. I was way too young to be having a mid-life crisis and you don’t have the seven-year-itch with a gun toting middle aged white guy named Conrad. I didn’t even know if that was his first name or his last name! To this day, I still don’t know.

I just know I needed the excitement that this man was offering to me. Maybe I was compensating for the lost glory of my mediocre football career. Did I mention that I’m originally from San Antonio? So, I didn’t even leave home to chase my NFL dream. UTSA was the only partial scholarship offer I had. Truth is, I probably should have been seeing a psychiatrist. I have a totally hot wife that made my knees wobble and I’m traipsing around with snakes, scorpions and a mysterious man with a shaved head.

Anyway, Conrad taught me a lot about weapons, weapon care, tracking game, searching for clues in what I observed and how to become an expert marksman. I would make excuses to Fonda why I needed to be gone for a weekend every three or four weeks and spend time at Conrad’s farm, sleeping on an old army cot, curled up in a stinky, sweat soaked surplus sleeping bag. We generally ate MRE’s (meals-ready-to-eat) and drank Jose Cuervo straight out of the bottle. Hell, I’m lucky I didn’t catch something