The Estate

Well, we spent a week there. It was a mess. An apartment building that was taking in less money than its mortgage, a deserted house in town that my Great grandmother and Great Aunt had lived in but had sat empty and closed up for years. A ten-acre plot out in the middle of nowhere that Glen had held on to because he had tried to drill a crooked well there into someone else's oil field under the nearby property. A privately run cemetery, a big piece of very good farm land that was being share-cropped. A lot of unrecorded stuff. Property that he had owned that was not his any more. The big house in town that was part of the trust that my Uncle Alec had owned was gone, and the land was sold and a few cents were put into a bank account as part of the trust. Glen was a frigging idiot. He always thought he was smarter than the rest of the world. I took this opportunity to find out the truth. The records were all there. The story was that he had quit school to enlist during the war. The truth was that he flunked out, and then enlisted in the army, tried for Army Intelligence, flunked that and was mustered out for weak eardrums and he re-enlisted for a little tour with the Air Force and the war ended before he actually went anywhere or did anything. He went to work for Eli Lilly and was there into his forties when Uncle Alec died. To this day I do not know what he did there for 20 years. He was probably a bean counter or a shipping guy. Don't know. I should ask my mother.

Anyway, he could have sold off the trust and we would have gotten the trust and found nothing in it. Like duh. I could've been a better criminal than my old man who thought he was the con man of all time. (Come to think of it, I probably have been.) I'm basically an honest sort- want to do the right thing, but when those around you are miserable people, who gives a fuck if you do the right thing.

I, and my god-fearing brother, who I love like the dickens, did the right thing in Paris Illinois.