Free When Horses Had Wings by Diana Estill Page A

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    A uniformed officer approached my car, his hand on one hip. “Evenin,’ ma’am. May I see your license?” As if I could have said no, and he’d have gone on his way to the nearest coffee shop.
    I reached for my purse, fumbled with its zippers, and handed the policeman my driver’s license. The ID still listed my parents’ address and my maiden name.
    “Your car’s riding a bit low,” the officer observed. He’d already begun writing.
    “I guess.” I didn’t know exactly why I felt the need to agree with him. I wondered what the legal limit was. My hands trembled. Grasping the steering wheel, I tried to steady my shakes. Kenny would never let me drive again if I came home with a ticket. “Is this going to take long?”
    “You in some kind of rush?”
    “Well, yeah...kind of.” I looked away and then back at the patrolman. All I could think to say was, “My baby’s at home with my husband, and we’re out of milk.”
    “Young lady, driving fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit could make your baby out of a whole lot more than milk.” The deputy pushed his pen against the front brim of his Stetson, setting his khaki-colored hat slightly askew. “Step out of the vehicle, please.”
    I climbed from the driver’s seat. “I’m sorry, Officer. But I really do need to get back soon. Could you please just let me go without giving me a ticket?”
    He ignored my question, strolled to the rear of my car, and kept scrawling. “Carrying anything in your trunk?”
    Good Lord, I had no idea what was in that trunk—probably some soda bottles, tire tools, and maybe somebody else’s trash. Kenny had a knack for hauling home stuff he found on the job. I shrugged.
    But before I could respond, the officer asked, “Mind if I take a look?”
    “No. Go ahead.” I stood back to one side of the vehicle, curious myself.
    The officer motioned toward the trunk. “Open it.”
    I slipped the key into the lock and popped the latch.
    The policeman shined his county-issued mega-light inside the storage cavity and shook his head. “What do you plan to do with all... this ? They printing good nursery rhymes in Hustler these days?”
    I moved to get a better view. Sure enough, there they were: hundreds, maybe thousands, of glandular freaks, women with bosoms so large that they must have had feet like kangaroos to keep from falling on their faces.
    From the way it looked, Kenny had been digging those magazines out of trashcans for months. A few of the cover pages had what appeared to be grape seeds stuck to them. The front of one issue pictured a topless blond woman in a pair of unzipped hot pants seductively leaning over a hardened pool of catsup. If Kenny had emptied an adult bookstore, he’d have collected less material than what was inside that trunk. His wish books had so completely filled the Fury that, with the rear compartment closed, there couldn’t have been more than two inches remaining between the trunk lid and the top layer of breasts.
    The patrolman must have been expecting something more or less exciting, depending on how you define that adjective, than what he’d uncovered. He flipped through a few magazines, and then handed me a warning slip before saying he had to respond to a call across town.
    At home, Kenny tried to explain away his secret stash. To hear him tell it, he was only being an astute businessman. “Guys pay good money for those magazines. Even used ones.”
    “So you’re telling me you sell these things?” Good grief, he’d been running a cottage porn industry from his vehicle. And all I had to show for it was a lone twenty-dollar bill I’d stuffed in the sugar bin.
    “Mostly. Get a dollar a piece for ’em, too.” He smirked. “Not counting the ones I give Ricky for free.”
    ~
     
    Some mothers record their baby’s first milestones in satin-covered books chockfull of candid photos and cute phrases. But I didn’t document all that much because I didn’t own one of those