11

While Gloria Gardner was reading about poisonous toadstools, the engine in Ellis Hodge’s Ford pickup sputtered once, then twice, then died, stranding him and Miriam on Interstate 65, smack in the middle of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge, spanning the Ohio River, connecting Indiana and Kentucky. Semitrucks blasted past them, rocking their Ford back and forth.

“Darn Democrats,” Ellis muttered. “I knew this was bound to happen.”

“What do the Democrats have to do with it?”

“It’s a Democrat bridge,” Ellis sputtered. “They’ve been laying for me.”

“I told you fifty miles ago to get gas, but you didn’t. Don’t blame the Democrats for your poor judgment.”

Within a few minutes, a police officer pulled up behind them, asked to see Ellis’s driver’s license, wrote him a ticket because it had expired the month before, then radioed a tow truck to bring a gallon of gas, which cost Ellis ninety dollars, the same amount he was trying to save by driving straight through and not getting a hotel room.

They pulled into their driveway a little after midnight, grateful to be home and not crushed in a tangle of metal over the Ohio River, while people inched past them in the left hand lane, slowing to view their mangled bodies.

“I’m never leaving the county ever again,” Ellis said. “I’ve had it with travel.”

He lay in bed, rehashing their trip, enumerating his many disappointments, from the price of gasoline to souvenirs made in China to state police and tow truck drivers, who he suspected were in cahoots and getting rich on unsuspecting tourists.

He finally fell asleep, but Miriam lay awake, thinking it might be time for Ellis to take up residence in the barn. Maybe set him up with a cot, a recliner, and a small refrigerator, like the one they bought for Amanda to take to college. Miriam never dreamed it would come to this, but it was either that or homicide and as a Quaker she was opposed to violence. Moving Ellis to the barn seemed the lesser evil.

So it was, that in the wee hours of a new day, two virtuous Christian women, Gloria Gardner and Miriam Hodge, were respectively contemplating how best to knock off one man and banish another.