Hoosier Daddy Read online

  Bywater Books

  Copyright © 2013 Ann McMan and Salem West

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61294-099-1

  Bywater Books First Edition: January 2017

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

  Hoosier Daddy was originally published

  by Beddazzled Ink, LLC

  Fairfield, CA in 2013

  E-Book ISBN: 978-1-61294-100-4

  By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Bywater Books.

  Cover designer: TreeHouse Studio, Winston-Salem, NC

  Bywater Books

  PO Box 3671

  Ann Arbor MI 48106-3671

  www.bywaterbooks.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events described by the author are fictitious. No resemblance to real persons, dead or alive, is intended.

  This book is lovingly dedicated to the memory of our late fathers, Jimmie and Eddie—and to our mothers, Wanda and Rebecca. Thank you for the lessons you taught us.

  “For now we see through a glass, darkly;

  but then face to face:

  now I know in part;

  but then shall I know

  even as also I am known.”

  — I Corinthians 13:12

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  This is the city: Princeton, Indiana.

  I live here. I’m a Hoosier.

  This small prairie town is the heartbeat of America. It’s populated by wholesome, corn-fed men and women: folks who work all week from sunup until sundown, then clean up and go to church on Sunday.

  Hoosiers are hearty types. They listen to country music, eat fried catfish at the VFW, and never apologize for buying cars that can pass anything but a gas station.

  I work for Krylon Motors—now Ogata Torakku of Indiana. We make trucks. I’m a line supervisor, and I carry a clipboard.

  I am from here, but not of here. I fit, and I don’t fit. I’m a riddle in three syllables.

  My name is Jill Fryman.

  My friends call me Friday.

  Ogata, or OTI, as we call it, is new to the landscape of southern Indiana. The manufacturing plant had formerly been one of the flagship production facilities in the stalwart Krylon Motors family. The Princeton plant produced Krylon’s top-selling Outlaw pickup—the lauded “Workhorse of the American Farm.” But when the economic tsunami hit back in 2008, Krylon became one of its biggest, Midwest casualties. The undercapitalized, debt-ridden mainstay of the American automotive industry bravely soldiered on for a few more years before collapsing like a rusted-out Yugo. Unlike GM, Krylon wasn’t too big to fail; it was just the right size.

  Fortunately for me and the other 4,499 employees who had grown up and grown old walking its production lines, Ogata Torakku swept in at the eleventh hour and acquired the Princeton plant lock, stock, and impact wrenches. It wasn’t so much the people of Krylon that Ogata wanted: it was the Outlaw—a gas guzzling, monster pickup that managed to lead the pack in domestic sales for six years running. Outlaws were only built at the Princeton plant, and when Krylon went under, we were the pick of the litter in its corporate selloff.

  None of us really knew how much our lives would change once the Ogata transition team arrived. We had heard rumblings that they planned to implement the same “lean manufacturing” techniques that were common in other Japanese transplants—and even that they might move production of their all-new Mastodon monster truck to Indiana. Beyond rumor and innuendo, we knew next to nothing else, and the transition was probably still weeks away. Most of us were just grateful to still be getting a paycheck, and we took things one day at a time. That pretty much summarized life in a small, Midwest manufacturing town.

  Wednesday started out like any other hot, summer hump day. People were already cranky because of the record heat and humidity, and that made them even more inclined to fuss about all the overtime hours and extra shifts that kept getting tacked on after the sellout. I did notice, however, that the loudest complainers had little to say when they picked up their fat paychecks.

  I’d already been on the line for nearly six hours without a break, and my bladder was about ready to burst. I knew it had been a bad idea to drink that whole Bigg Swigg of Diet Dr. Pepper I picked up at Huck’s on my way in that morning, but hindsight is always 20/20. I waved my clipboard at Buzz Sheets, the shift foreman with a bad comb-over, and pointed in the direction of the bathrooms. He made a face at me, but I walked off the floor anyway. Enough was enough. I’d been on my feet since seven, and I needed a break.

  When I came out of the stall, I heard a familiar voice.

  “Hey, Friday? You get a new watch?”

  My best friend, T-Bomb, was pointing at my wrist with a crinkle cut French fry.

  I looked down at my watch. I’d lost my Ironman at Grammy’s a few weeks ago when I took it off outside to give my dog, Fritz, his biannual bath. When he broke loose and hightailed it for the cornfield across the blacktop, his leash snagged the stack of towels—and my watch—and drug them halfway across the front yard. I didn’t see Fritz for about three hours, and I never found my watch again, either. And I’d been working so much that I hadn’t had time to get to Walmart to pick up a new one.

  “Nope.” I held up my arm. “It’s Grammy Mann’s vintage Seiko.”

  T-Bomb bit off half of the drooping fry. “Thought so, that one’s awful girlie.”

  Terri Jennings had a way of boiling things down to what Grammy Mann called brass tacks. She’d been that way since grade school. And she never eased herself into any situation. She just sort of exploded in the middle of it. That’s how she got the nickname “T-Bomb.” She was one of only a handful of people at Krylon who officially knew I was gay. But that was not really saying a lot. Around here, it was kind of hard to tell the difference.

  I tore off a sheet of paper towel and dried my hands.

  “Why do you always eat in the bathroom? It’s gross.”

  “It ain’t that bad unless one of them corn crackers drops a bomb.” She snagged another fry out of her red-and-white gingham boat. “Besides, if these dip wads gave us more than ten minutes to pee and eat our lunch, I wouldn’t have to bring my food in here.” She dipped this one in ketchup before shoving it into her mouth. “Ain’t this what you managers like to call multitasking?”

  A stall door banged open. Luanne Keortge squeezed out, struggling to hike her drawers up over her mountainous backside. She was already chewing on the end of a Viceroy. You couldn’t smoke inside the building, so Luanne was multitasking, too. Every time I saw her with a cigarette, I worried that her hair might go up. Luanne tended to use a lot of product.

  “You got that shit right,” she rasped. “I have to decide whether I want to use my breaks to eat or smoke. Ain’t got time for both— the wait in the ca
feteria is always too damn long.” She glanced at T-Bomb. “How the hell do you always get Pauline to make those? She won’t do ’em for nobody else.”

  Pauline Grubb ran the company cafeteria, and you pretty much got whatever she felt like serving. Ten minutes to load your tray and wolf down your meal didn’t leave a lot of time for discussion or argument.

  T-Bomb paused in mid-chew. “Hell, I don’t know. It’s probably because I didn’t marry her idiot son.”

  It was hard to argue with that. Pauline’s boy, Earl Junior, was thirtyeight years old and still lived at home in his mother’s doublewide out on Peach Bottom Road. There had never been an Earl Senior, as far as anyone knew. So there was pretty wide speculation about how Pauline actually ended up with her big, dim-witted son. There were lots of theories, however, and I had my money on Buzz Sheets. Earl Junior’s hair was already starting to recede, and his comb over was beginning to look eerily familiar. Earl Junior worked for Krylon as a stock chaser. He pretty much sucked at it, and I’d had to follow behind him more than once to move skids loaded with lug nuts out of harm’s way. Most of us just learned to shrug things like that off, and accept that Earl Junior was “special.” That was generally the safest way to ensure that you’d get something other than creamed corn for lunch if you ate in the cafeteria.

  Luanne headed toward the door. “See you back on the line, T-Bomb.”

  I felt like an underachiever, since I was only in there to take care of one kind of business.

  “You goin’ out after work?” T-Bomb asked. “Bobby Roy’s band is playing tonight at Hoosier Daddy.”

  Hoosier Daddy was our local bar. Most of the people who worked at Krylon stopped in there after their shifts for codfish hoagies and five-dollar pitchers of Old Style. Bars in Princeton pretty much fell out along company lines. That meant if you worked at Krylon, you went to Hoosier Daddy. If you worked at Millennium Steel, you went to Pood’s. If you weren’t sure where you belonged, you just looked at the types of trucks that filled up the parking lots. Outlaws meant it was a Krylon hangout. F-150s meant Millennium.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not? You got some PBS telethon you can’t miss?” T-Bomb tended to get louder when she didn’t get her way. “Come on. You gotta quit hiding.”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  “Well, what do you call it, then? Nobody’s seen hide-nor-hair of you outside this place for the last month. All you do is sit at home with your dern nose buried in some old book that nobody’s ever heard of.”

  “I’ve just been busy.”

  “Busy my butt. You ain’t done nothin’ since you caught Misty Ann hittin’ it with Jerry behind that stack of Duelers in the warehouse.”

  I looked around the bathroom to be sure nobody else was there. “Would you mind lowering your voice?” I ducked down and took a quick peek beneath the stall doors.

  T-Bomb was still eating her fries. “Relax . . . there ain’t nobody else in here.”

  “Well, hold your voice down, anyway. I don’t want everybody knowing intimate details of my business.”

  “Girlfriend, nobody in three counties gives a twat about your business—including you. And if you don’t start using it, it’s gonna dry up and drop off.” She wiped some ketchup off her fingertips. “I told you that Misty Ann was trash. She’s nothin’ but a steamin’ pile of hot mess. You know she was just using you to get back at her husband for knocking up that Turpin girl again.”

  I hated it when T-Bomb was right. Misty Ann Marks and I had only been “seeing each other” for a few weeks when I caught her with Jerry. I felt ridiculous for allowing myself to get involved with a straight woman. I always knew it wasn’t going to go anyplace. Still, I was amazed by how much it unsettled me when I discovered that she had just been using me, too.

  “It was never serious,” I said. I knew how lame it sounded as soon as the words left my mouth.

  “Yeah? And if a frog had wings it wouldn’t bust its ass hoppin’ around.” She ate her last French fry and tossed the empty paper boat into the trash can. “Donnie has the twins tonight, and I want to go out. It would do you good to go, too.”

  “Look, I’m just busy, okay? Don’t bug me.”

  “I think you’re a lying chicken shit. You need to get back out there.”

  “Why? So I can humiliate myself all over again?”

  T-Bomb picked at something lodged between two of her front teeth. “Nith twy. Ith not nobody’th fault that thu make bath thoithes.”

  “What on earth did you just say?” I asked. I glanced down at my watch again. “Never mind. If I don’t get back out there, I’ll have to let Buzz grab my ass again so I won’t get docked for being late.”

  She’d finished picking her teeth, and was examining whatever it was that she’d removed. I headed toward the door.

  “I’ll wait for you in the parking lot after work,” she called after me. “You can go for just one drink. It won’t kill you.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I headed back out to the line.

  The rest of the shift was pretty uneventful. Five minutes before I was ready to hit the time clock to punch out, Buzz caught up with me.

  “Got a second?” he asked.

  I sighed. Buzz’s “got a second” questions always meant I was in for at least another hour of work.

  “Not today, Buzz. Okay?” I tried my best to look stern. “I’m dead on my feet and I really need to get out of here on time for a change.”

  Buzz ducked his head closer to me. That always made my skin crawl—and not just because he was a letch and thought that every woman in the plant wanted to get horizontal with him. Actually, vertical would be more accurate. Buzz seemed to prefer upright hookups—usually back in the warehouse, where I saw Misty Ann with Jerry Sneddin. He also wore too much cheap cologne. The smell of it, mixed in with the ambient odors of axle grease and polymer, was probably giving us all some kind of nasty lung disease that would someday get Krylon nailed in a class action lawsuit.

  I took a step back. He didn’t take the hint, and moved in closer again.

  “There’s a film crew here from Channel 14. They need to shoot some footage for a piece they’re doing about OTI maybe bringing the Mastodon here.”

  If OTI decided to ramp up the Princeton plant to produce the Mastodon—a quad-cab, full-size pickup with thirty-two inch Sidewinder radial tires and a twin six engine—it would mean adding four-hundred-and-fifty jobs, and four hundred million to the local economy. This would be a real boon to the tri-state area. It made sense that a TV station from Evansville would come here to get the story.

  “Oh, come on, Buzz. Where’s Jerry?” Jerry Sneddin was supposed to be our plant’s public affairs rep. But the only thing public about Jerry’s job was the affairs part. The rest of the time, he was pretty much M.I.A. “I’ve covered his butt the last three times we’ve had reporters in here. I’m beat, and I wanna go home.”

  “Jerry cracked a molar on a pistachio nut, and he’s out getting a crown.”

  “A pistachio?” I waved a hand toward the line. “Who in the world around here has time to eat pistachios? Most of us don’t get long enough breaks to use the restroom.”

  Buzz was losing patience with me. “This won’t kill you, Fryman. You’re always mouthing off with that high and mighty women’s lib crap about not getting promotions, then when we ask you do step up and do something, you complain about it.”

  “That’s a load of b.s., and you know it. When have I not done anything you’ve asked me to?”

  “You mean besides today?” he asked.

  What a first class dick Chiclet, I thought. “Okay. Fine. But this time, I expect to get paid for the overtime.”

  “Management don’t get overtime pay. You know that.”

  “Oh, really? Last time I checked, I still punched a time clock.”

  He shrugged. “You wanna dance to the music, then you gotta know when to fold ’em.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”


  “It means you play the cards you’re dealt, without biting the hand that feeds you.”

  I sighed. This was going no place fast. “Whatever.” I looked around. “Where are they?”

  He gave me a crooked smile that was more like a leer.

  “They’re setting up on the catwalk.” He jerked a thumb toward the rafters. “Just give ’em the standard spiel. You know the drill.”

  I ought to. I’d pretty much been doing this ever since the OTI buyout got announced.

  “Okay. I’m on it.”

  Buzz reached a stubby hand down to his crotch and adjusted his package. “From your mouth to god’s little acre.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re a sick man, you know that?”

  “Come on, Fryman . . . anybody who hits it with Misty Ann Marks can’t be all that picky.”

  “Screw you, Buzz.”

  “Any time. Any place.”

  I gave up and turned away from him. He wasn’t worth the effort it would take to convey my contempt.

  “You know where to find me when you change your mind,” he called after me.

  I knew all right. Behind a dumpster, where he belonged.

  I headed for the maze of catwalks that ran along the rafters above all the production lines. They crisscrossed the plant in complex patterns that reminded me of Grammy Mann’s tatted lace dresser scarves. The Channel 14 film crew was already in place. It wasn’t hard to identify the talent. She looked like she’d just walked out of a display window at Ann Taylor. I had no idea how she’d managed to climb up here in those shoes, or where they found a hardhat big enough to cover her hair. She smiled when she saw me and held out her hand.

  “Are you Jill? I’m Mona Simms. Mr. Sheets said you’d be giving us the tour. I can’t thank you enough for doing this. I promise we won’t take too much of your time—we just need some background footage.”

  I nodded. “No problem. What would you like to see?”