Rory is loosely based on my own mom's cousin's son.
He was never in a "nut house," as far as I know, but he does build custom cars from scratch, he eats organic-only (out of necessity, not choice), and he most likely has never struck a yoga pose in his life--not on purpose anyway.
DeLorean was never supposed to see anything remotely attractive about the unfortunate Rory, her distant cousin. But he keeps insisting he's hot stuff (not to her, but to the author). Dang. Rory.
I'm having a hard time sustaining the idea that Rory is a creepy-weird hermit in the desert, worse than that husband Dwayne who DeLorean has set out to escape. Freewriting has that effect: upsetting "intentions" and liberating crazy ideas from God only knows where.
Sorry. The clock ticked and I never did get to the yoga scene. But I have pictured it.:)
Part 7 - Prompt: "Batter" ended like this:
"Where's your mama?"
"None of your business. You want a car, let's talk cars and get it over with."
Pursing her lips, stifling a sigh, DeLorean planted her feet and crossed her arms. "Actually, I want something bigger than a car. Tell me what ya got."
Rory flashed his first smile at her
when she said that. It was a much better smile than DeLorean expected. His teeth weren't rotten or neglected. They were quite decent, really. Not a dazzling white, but straight and even, like a perfect ear of sweetcorn. His cold blue eyes took on a boyish twinkle, with laugh lines radiating like the inaptly named "crow's feet" at the corners.
A pity he hid a perfectly fine face behind that massive, grizzled beard. A pity he smiled about once every ten years, if that. His features were small and even, like his mother's--and on a short, skinny guy with a name like Rory, that had led to enough persecution ("girly" Rory) to put him into the nut house for a spell.
Come to think of it, the beard hanging down to just below his belt must be a defense mechanism. Nothing remotely girly about that beard.
"Come."
She almost snarked at him that he'd best not try bossing her around like that, but he was heading out the door, his smile still lingering, and DeLorean felt like she must have said or done the first thing in years to brighten that man's miserable day.
"I gotta warn ya, it's a gas hog," he said.
Junked cars with scattered parts lay all over the backyard, if you could call sand and cactus a yard. He kept walking until a big metal shed with a rusty, corrugated steel roof blotted out half the sky.
He pulled a mass of keys from his pocket. Still had the bear-gun bullet attached, she noted, as he had since they were ten years old and he claimed to have laid waste to a black bear. Where was the evidence? Rory was like Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, based on words an angel dictated to him on golden plates, but of course, nobody ever found those plates. They mysteriously vanished, Smith said. And yet people believed. Unlike that Smith zealot, Rory's tales attracted no following other than police cars.
The sliding doors groaned mightily as Rory pushed them with a casual finger. He had always been stronger than he looked. The cool, dusty darkness inside the shed came into view. Then the shapes of large mechanical objects with wheels.
"You been stealing from Uncle Sam?" DeLorean scoffed in ill-concealed admiration.
"The saddest sight on earth is a military junkyard. Unless you have the maddest mechanical skills in Arizona." He waved a hand toward a colossal metal hulk with tiny, tinted windows. "If you were to go online, you'd see for sale everything from British tanks to Russian reconnaissance trucks, all available for purchase and delivery via the Internet. I just drove five miles south-southeast of downtown Tucson to the Davis–Monthan Air Force Base."
Rory was one of a half-dozen people on the planet who could build a custom car from scratch, pillaging parts from junkyard vehicles. He ranked up there with George Barris, who built the ’49 Mercury that James Dean drove in Rebel without a Cause. Or so Rory would say. But he was cheated by a business partner and lost everything, and that was why he moved back to take care of his widowed mother Lenna when she first got that cancer diagnosis.
"Rory. I have no idea what I am looking at."
That smile again. Clearly, she had touched upon the one thing in life that brought him great joy.
Unless perhaps there was some other thing, and she hadn't touched upon that. Yet.
Five Minutes Are Long Gone
I haven't gotten to the part yet where Rory has to take a deep breath to keep from throttling DeLorean and then segue into some unexpected yoga poses to manage his temper. It was all part of the program, back at the "nut house." Conventional meds failed, but going organic (no more nitrites and processed food and MSG) and taking up yoga was the trick for Rory's anger management (and I'm stealing the psycho-experimental sh^t straight from a 1970s experiment with felons at a state penitentiary in Anamosa, Iowa).
--What?
Why not?
I've been reading Craig Johnson's "Longmire," Book One, in which a Wyoming sheriff quotes Shakespeare, and waxes philosophical, which upends all the cliches to the point that some readers say "No way," but writers say "way," and Longmire is now a TV show. Me, I had a nurse who likes NASCAR racing in my second novel, and internet writing workshoppers scoffed, saying nobody with a college degree or any level of education or class could be passed off as a NASCAR fan in fiction. Ha. HA! Those writers don't get out much, I say.
Now, to get Rory a shave and a haircut....
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I picture the fictional Rory to be like Jesse James (this is a younger version, but you get the crazed look of the zealot):
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