The Last Laugh

    I placed my hands over my face to close out the light, then slowly uncovered my face and looked around. Nothing had changed. Sitting there I shook my head wondering what had happened to me and my dreams I had years ago? What had gone wrong? Something has gone wrong in the way things were supposed to have gone for me in my life. Here I sit in this cell, and why? All I wanted was what was rightfully mine. A place in the mountains with a nice little cabin, that's all. My father and step mother owned the land and the cabin. They had willed it to me. It should have been mine forever.

Each day now for ten years, I've awoken with that nagging thought. I eat with it. It's on my mind all day each day, and I go to bed with it on my mind. Why did it all fall apart like it did. If it hadn't been for my step mothers good nature on taking people in when they asked, this would not have happened. Just like every other day my thoughts go back to before it all happened, and I try and analyze it all over again. Trying to find the flaw that in my case can free me from this cage they have put me in....

------------------

I was young when I first saw my fathers and step mothers place in the mountains and I fell in love with it. It was on Sugar Loaf Mountain in Colorado about ten miles out of Boulder, Colorado, if you went up Boulder Canyon. You can get to it from other directions, but the best road was up Boulder Canyon.

My father Sam Starr had bought a four wheel drive truck so he could get up to the cabin from the back way. There was a very steep road that led up the back side of the mountain to the cabin. You could make it up there in a car or truck if the road was in good condition and not slippery from rain or snow. But when it was slippery it wasn't an easy hill to climb without a four wheel drive car or truck.

The first thing he did when I got there one year on vacation was to take me around the mountain and up the back side in his new four wheel truck. You would have thought he was me. I was the one that was always messing around with cars and running cars at the drag races. But here he was taking me for a ride up the steepest road in Colorado, and it was said the steepest road in the U.S.A.

My father grinned when we got to the top and he stopped. He told me that he was bringing some furniture up to the cabin a couple months earlier and he got half way up the hill in his old truck and it wouldn't make it the rest of the way up. He had to go all the way back to Boulder and come up the other way. He went down the next day and bought the four wheel truck. He wasn't going to let any steep hill get the best of him. We both laughed about that. I still find it funny for my father to have done that. It was not like him and I still find a grin on my face whenever I think about it.

My step mother would just smile when my father would talk about it to others. She had been born in the Sugar Loaf Mountain area and owned the property that their cabin was on. She had walked to school during the winter when the snow wasn't to deep. When it was an old horse they had would be used to get them there. But there were days when the horse couldn't make it and they would have to stay home. To some this was a blessing but to her she didn't care to much for missing school.

She later became a school teacher in the small village where she had gone to school. Later she would take a job in the small town where I had been born and my father was living. He courted her and they soon were married. I would say as he would, it was the best thing that ever happened to him in his whole life.

My father worked in the coal mines almost all of his life. He retired not long after they were married and worked as janitor at the same school where she taught. This made it nice for both of them. They both retired together and had a good time living up in the mountains.

My being in Arizona kind of kept me out of touch with what was going on all of the time. My father had had a heart attach when I was overseas, so I really didn't know to much about it. He looked older after that, but I paid it no mind as I thought that nothing would ever happen to him.

The drive was kind of quite from then on. We pulled up to the cabin about an hour later and Eva came out to meet us. "I'm so glad your here Eddie," she said as I hugged her. She turned to Dale. "Thank you also Dale."

"You're welcome Eva, Dale replied. "I'll be going now."

"Thank you again," Eva said. Dale nodded and turned and walked over to his motorcycle, got on it, started it, and drove off waving at both of us.

"He's a nice boy Eddie," Eva said turning and walking toward the cabin. "He's leaving for California in the morning and I sure was glad he was around today so he could pick you up for me."

I followed her shaking my head. But she seemed to know who was to be trusted and who was not. Who was I to say anything about what she did,,,,