Loneliness of a long-distance dress salesman, Wyoming, 1949

The opening paragraph of the opening story, "Roadkill," in my story collection, "The Weight of a Body:" 

The shapes grew out of the smoke and fog -- three pronghorn antelope, running hard. Matthew Kincannon mashed the car's brakes and swung the wheel hard left. He missed the first two, collided with the third on its white-tufted rump which rose like a balloon before its rear legs smacked the windshield, its hooves scraping the glass like sharpened fists.

I set the story in the summer of 1949 on Hwy. 189 just north of Kemmerer, Wyoming. The morning was foggy and smoky, the latter due to a stubborn forest fire in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. I hit the rear end of an antelope that came out of nowhere. It tumbled to the side of the road, creating a dust cloud. I pulled over and ran to what I thought would be a mortally wounded creature. Nothing. I searched up and down the shoulder and came up empty. It was just dawn so no traffic. I returned to the car and investigated the front bumper. Nothing. My first thought was, "Did I imagine this?" But it was just a mysterious encounter along a deserted Wyoming road, of which there are many. On my way to a noon lunch meeting with arts patrons in Jackson, I thought about my father. In the late 1940s, one of the many jobs he tried post-war was a traveling salesman selling women's dresses for a Denver clothier. He sold one dress. He quit when he returned to Denver. He laughed when he told us kids the story. I laugh about it now. Dad was no high-pressure salesman. Still, he kept at it, first as an insurance salesman in Denver's Five Points neighborhood and the he joined Armour Meat Company to sell beef. The first thing the company did was transfer him to their Albuquerque office. He sorted mail at the Denver post office when I was born in 1950. Mom said he woke up with war nightmares when we got into Korea thinking the army would drag him into the fight. He spent four years in the army in Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and German occupation duty. After Mom died, we had drinks at his favorite watering hole and he said, "I always wanted to be a monk." I almost choked on my gin and tonic. "Too late Dad" I told the father of nine. As I drove the state for the Wyoming Arts Council, I often thought of Dad and his rack of dresses hanging in the backseat of his pre-war Dodge. He was engaged to my mom the nurse and just wanted to make good so he could marry her. I reckon that most of his thoughts were on Anna and not on sales tactics for dress store proprietors in Pinedale and Ten Sleep. I turned my imagination loose and came up with the fiction in my story. This blog is for you, Dad. 

Copies of "The Weight of a Body" are available on Amazon (book free with Kindle Unlimited membership). Tell them Father Tom, Father of Nine, member of the celestial monastery, sent you.