Willie Read Online Free

right ahead and smoke all the weed you want. Can’t nobody bother you here, Willie—not in your own town with your own sheriff on duty.”
    Carl Cornelius, however, owned a real town and his own gang of law officers who dressed like state troopers.
    Until eighteen months ago, Carl’s Corner had been just a big truckstop and cafe. But Carl dreams big. He took the circus-size, ten-foot polyurethane musical frogs down from the roof of a fancy Dallas disco and put them on the top of his truckstop. He erected a drive-in movie and a sauna and a swimming pool and surroundedthem on three sides with a bunch of mobile homes—“changing rooms,” Carl said.
    Carl found some backing in Dallas and bought a couple of thousand acres of the flat farmland around his truckstop. He made it easy for 180 people to move onto the land in mobile homes and stay until they qualified under state law as local voters. At that point they called an election and voted themselves an official town called Carl’s Corner with Carl as the mayor. Carl owned the liquor sale permit and the water well and held notes on the land. The only other business was Paula’s Pet Boutique.
    Approaching the town of Carl’s Corner in my Mercedes, I saw a thirty-foot advertising billboard rising up from the highway—a huge painted cutout of three figures standing arm in arm and peering out at the landscape. The figures were Carl, Zeke, and me.
    â€œAh . . . there’s something I ain’t told you yet,” Zeke said.
    I parked my Mercedes in the lot crowded with trucks. Zeke led me though the back door.
    Inside the truckstop I could smell chili, an aroma of cuminos that watered my sinuses. There, in front of a big projection TV screen, were a dozen truckers eating chicken fried steaks and cheeseburgers, watching soap operas.
    A burly fellow with a big open country face approached me, his cheeks blooming with whiskey flush, a straw cowboy hat pushed to the back of his head, his belly hanging over his big silver belt buckle on crumpled jeans over lizard-skin boots. He had a wide, yellow-tooth grin and eyes that looked like they had just been through a sandstorm.
    Carl is not bashful. He cut straight to the meat of the matter.
    â€œHi, Willie,” Carl said. “Let’s have your 1987 Picnic right here in my town this Fourth of July. Carl’s Corner is ideal. There is not a single tree to block the view of the stage.”
    I wasn’t real sure I wanted to have a Picnic this year. I say that every year, and I always mean it.
    â€œWhy don’t we start off with a beer and a bowl of chili?” I said.
    Carl served Great Depression chili, the greasy red ambrosia that used to cost a dime a bowl with all the soda crackers you wanted. Dish of pinto beans on the side. Jar of jalapeño peppers on the table next to a bowl of chopped white onions. Not a trace of tomatoes or celery or other foreign objects that over the years have drifted into what people who don’t know better call chili. Chili was invented in South Texas as a dish to make tough stringy beef taste good, and soldby vendors on the streets on San Antonio before the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Chili is a serious matter to any native-born Texan old enough to remember when a ten-cent bowl of red would keep you feeling feisty all day.
    After our chili and a couple of beers, Carl drove me and Zeke to the Picnic site he had picked out—177 acres of grassland at Interstate 35E and FM2959 four miles north of Hillsboro. Like Carl had said, there was nothing to block the view—or to block the sun and wind. But the site was within easy driving range of maybe four million people, counting Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, and Austin. We went back to the truckstop and played dominoes in Carl’s office where he kept glancing at his empire on ten television monitors
    Carl is a good domino player. I am better than good. Zeke is better than me. We all