Wild Bill selected what he supposed would be the most isolated area, so as to have privacy while planning the search for franksolich, when much to his disappointment, an automobile with California license plates pulled up next to them, out from which emerged a woman with distinctively Italianate features, who looked to be in her mid-50s.
It was obvious she had once been very beautiful, as if an Etruscan goddess or a Messalina or Agrippina, but then she had gone to pot, probably recently. She seemed giddy, spaced out, and unsure.
"Hi, I'm Beth," she said, laughing.
"I'm from California," she added, laughing.
"This is one really weird place, Nebraska," she commented, laughing.
Mrs. Alfred Packer thought she laughed a rather lot.
"I'm out here looking for somebody," Beth said, laughing again.
At which hippyhubby Wild Bill arched his eyebrows; they didn't know this person, so best to keep his own motives to himself.
While everybody was setting up, another car pulled in, this one with Connecticut license plates, and a surfboard strapped to the top.
Out from which sprung a tall blond guy, early or mid-50s perhaps, and just now beginning to show the flaccidity and superfluity, the barely-perceptible sagging skin, of those going into old age after a lifetime of too comfortable, too secure, too affluent, of an existence.
He looked at the Packers and at Beth, and sneered, but decided to stay anyway.
Mrs. Alfred Packer got the idea he was contemptuous of them, but she didn't think much of him either; he seemed too much the never-grown-up frat boy type. And his body-odor was most peculiar, similar with that of dead fish. She didn't like this guy.
"Well, I'm here looking for somebody," the frat boy said, "but he's hard to find."
Beth, gobbling down a fistful of pharmaceuticals, interrupted, "Yeah, because
everybody looks alike; they're all so, so, so.....tall and blond, all of them.
"They all look alike, they're all blonds," she repeated, laughing.
As the evening progressed and suppertime approached, other cars pulled up; one with Massachusetts license-plates bearing a
New York Times best-selling author, another with Texas plates plastered with bumper-stickers promoting abortion, some big fat guy with a bandana around his head and his belly sagging out and down in front of him as if an apron, who said he was from Illinois, a short little lad with the elongated fingers of a pianist, from Ohio, a tall slightly-overweight older man of the Italianate type with a sinister gleam in his eye and a snarl in his voice, from Maryland, &c., &c., &c.
They all frankly admitted they were there "looking for someone."
Wild Bill decided to keep his own counsel; after all, they didn't know these people.
But that was no call to be unsociable with them, and so as Mrs. Alfred Packer started the campfire, hippyhubby announced, "Hey, I've got some steaks here, some great steaks. Most of them are Ozark steaks, but there's still a little bit of Native American steaks, and some Chinese steak too.
"You're welcome to the chow, but I'm hoping that by this time tomorrow, I can offer Nebraska steak."
"Oh, the world-famous Omaha Steaks," the frat-boy said.
"No, even better than that--Nebraska Sandhills steak," Wild Bill said.
Beth chortled and cooed and laughed.
