Incident in San Francisco

When she returned home later that evening, the clothes and all traces of Bryan were gone. When she got to work on Monday, her voicemail had a brief message from him: “Laura, I’m sorry about the apartment not being kept up to your standards. I do really care about you, but I find it hard to make the top priority in my life the picking up of every single item I use and returning it to its proper place immediately. I’m sorry it didn’t work out - and thank you for some very wonderful times. Goodbye.”

That was the end of the relationship, and Laura had thrown herself into her work to help forget it. Whenever regrets set in, she had only to remember the humiliation she had felt that Saturday morning to feel that she had done the right thing. Overly obsessive or not, she was stuck with this need to have her surroundings kept orderly, and she methodically went through the rooms now, putting everything in order as she waited for the cab which would take her to the airport.

The final items to be picked up were on top of the dresser. She gathered up the plane tickets and the sheet her printer had spit out at work, confirming that she had a ticket for the evening performance of the Grand National Horse Show and Rodeo at San Francisco’s Cow Palace Wednesday 7:30 PM, Section 12, Row GG, Seat 1. As she put the items in the purse, she thought fleeting that the show might provide a little excitement to offset the work of the seminar.

She had no idea that it was going to provide more excitement than she had ever experienced, or would ever hope to.

Chapter 7

Ranny was still fuming from the incident with the horse trailer at the front gate when he went into the office to clock in and get his work assignment. He almost spat in disgust when he saw his name listed with the group who had responsibility for the horse show barn today. He could tell from the style of rig that that blond broad who had cut him off this morning was one of the horse show people - the cowboys drove trucks which looked like they were actually used for work, and they usually had a cow dog in the back, one of those strange-looking little Queensland Heelers with blue eyes and speckled gray or brown coat. Their trailers also looked well-used, and usually came in the white or rust-brown they’d been painted in at the factory, not some custom color painted to match the truck.

So he had to spend his day cleaning up crap around those people. He always found it hard to keep from sneering at them, dressed in their prissy riding clothes. In some of the classes, the men actually rode in black formal suits and little bowler hats, and the women always looked pretty butch to Ranny in their tailored riding jackets, pants with leather insets at the knee, and the tall boots they wore.

He would have much preferred to spend the day down in the lower barns around the cowboys and cattlemen. They always seemed to be relaxed, laughing and joking around, not treating the competitions as matters of life and death the way the horse show people did. He had overheard conversations about $20,000 cutting horses and was in the auction barn when the bidding on a prize-winning range bull was up to $8,000, so he knew that at least some of these people had money, though they sure didn’t flaunt it.

Ranny also much preferred the women in that area, too. Of course, he didn’t do anything but look, and he had to do that on the sly, because the supervisor had spent an hour one day preaching to them about sexual harassment. It didn’t just apply to the female office workers, or the women who were on the maintenance crew, but to the participants or spectators as well. The men were warned that if they were caught standing around staring at some well-built young lady in tight jeans and T-shirt as she stretched and bent doing her chores, they’d be in trouble. He also warned that if there was another incident like the one last spring at the Junior Grand National, involving a peephole in the wall of the women’s shower room, they’d all be in trouble. Security hadn’t been able to prove that it was one of them who had done it, but they had their suspicions. Not only did they need to ensure that they didn’t do anything like that, but they each needed to watch for any incident which looked like it could be construed as sexual harassment and report it immediately. The management of the Cow Palace did not want to find itself involved in a lawsuit involving big money and bad publicity.

And Ranny didn’t want to find himself in jail. Not for just staring at girls - if they caught him and gave him a couple of documented warnings, they could fire him. But that peephole deal could have landed him in jail, as seriously as they took things like that nowadays. He had come very close to getting caught that time.

The Junior Grand National in the spring brought in all the young country kids, the 4-H and FFA members with their prize animals to show and later auction off, and their riding horses for the rodeo competition. They were mostly between 15 and 19, the boys ranging from skinny, awkward farm kids to cocky, well-muscled young men who were football heroes as well as rodeo riders. The girls also were a varied group - from tomboys who had always done a man’s work, to shy young girls just blossoming into womanhood who focused their attention on the animals they were raising, to self-assured and fully-developed young women who were prom queens and cheerleaders back home in high school. But male or female, they all had a fresh, healthy look, a sharp contrast to the teenagers seen in the streets around the Cow Palace, where the girls were dressed and painted like young hookers, the boys trying their best to look like tough young gangsters. The men Ranny worked with privately referred to the country girls as jailbait, and most contented themselves with admiring glances for a few of the more spectacular older girls, but Ranny was driven to distraction by that week of being surrounded by hundreds of young female bodies.

Ranny didn’t remember his father - few people have many memories of events which happened when they were only 6 months old, and that was Ranny’s age when his father decided that being around a colicky baby was no way for a young man to spend his time. He was a truck driver, and just didn’t come home one night. After a couple of days, his wife reported him as missing. The police found that he had quit his job, but couldn’t find out what had happened to him. Missing husbands were not high on the list of priorities for the SFPD. A week later, the mail brought a money order for a couple of hundred dollars in an envelope postmarked in LA, and Ranny’s mother knew that she wasn’t going to see her husband again. The money orders came from different cities, so she knew that he was now a long-haul trucker. The money he sent also was not enough to pay the rent and utilities and buy food for a mother and child, so she had found work as a cleaning woman for the school district. Embittered toward men by her bad experience, she had tried to raise her son so that he would be a better person than his father.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lot of raw material to work with. He was neither very intelligent nor very good-looking. When he reached school age, his mother was able to get moved to permanent day work in the school he attended, and she continued this as he moved through the school system. Once she had to trade sex for the transfer she wanted, a transaction which only furthered her low opinion of men, but which she endured with a pretense of enjoyment because she felt that she had to be there to keep an eye on her son.

Ranny’s school years had not been a lot of fun. He had trouble learning the material, even though it was watered down to allow the lowest-achieving students to get passing grades. His surly disposition and unappealing appearance had earned him few friends, and when he did find some who would let him hang around with them, his mother quickly put a stop to it if she felt that they were the wrong kind of friends. Like a young wolf cub taught to submit to the alpha male, Ranny had been raised to fear and respect his mother, and her physical presence in the school building kept him from engaging in much of the activity enjoyed by his peers - petty vandalism, minor fights, seeing how far they could go in harassing teachers, and either flirting with or insulting girls, depending on the attitude of the girls. His exclusion from any interaction with teenage girls had resulted in the arrested development which had driven him now to satisfy those longings, although he did nothing but look.

The peephole idea had come to him when he was part of the detail cleaning up the shower room before the event. Because handling animals or riding horses was often a dirty job, but young girls always wanted to look their best for the young boys, a large shower room had been provided in the barn area, and it was always in use. Ranny noticed that one end wall formed the outside wall of the building, and that it was only the thickness of the exterior covering. A shelf had been fixed to the wall about four feet up, to hold the hair dryers, bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and the myriad other items required to transform these young ladies from working cowgirls into rodeo queens. It was here, hidden by the overhanging shelf, that Ranny had quickly and furtively drilled a half-inch hole one night when he purposely lingered in the area, at the end of the shift when the other men had headed back to clock out. He had prepared a half-inch wooden plug with a small nail driven into its center, and when he went outside and fitted it into the hole his preparation was complete. Grasping the projecting nailhead, he popped the plug out and pressed his face against the wall, satisfying himself that he had an excellent view down the length of the room. He couldn’t wait until it was filled with young, naked, female bodies.

After the first night, when he had spent hours in the dark with his eye pressed to the hole, his heart racing from the enjoyment of such forbidden pleasure and the fear of being discovered, Ranny became obsessed with his creation. The next day, he rolled a nearby large wheeled garbage bin into a position against the wall, close to the innocent-appearing nail, where it provided shelter from the eyes of people walking past on the main walkway in front of the building. Whenever he could , he would swing by that container with some trash to put in it as an alibi, and quickly steal a peek into the shower room. Sometimes it was empty. Sometimes there were only a couple of girls, and sometimes they were clothed and just fixing their hair.

But other times, and these were the times when Ranny felt himself glued to the wall and almost unable to tear himself away, the shower room was indeed filled with young, naked, female bodies. Some of the girls tried to keep themselves covered as much as possible, whether from shyness or because they had bought into the image of beauty presented in the teen magazines and didn’t like the way their own bodies looked. But others, who were used to communal nudity from their team sports shower rooms, or who were proud of their bodies and had a touch of exhibitionism in their makeup, made no effort to dress quickly. Ranny loved them all, but he was especially appreciative of those young goddesses who strutted around the room, displaying their tanned young bodies with high, firm breasts, flat stomachs with trim waists, and perfect hips and legs. Under cover of darkness, he hid undetected behind the trash bin and feasted his eyes on sights that went beyond anything he could ever have imagined being allowed to see.

His actual experience with women had been very limited. In his high school days, his mother had been a constant presence in the school, and she insisted that he spend his time at night doing homework and not hanging around with evil companions. That, combined with his appearance and manner, had meant that he hadn’t had much of a social life involving girls, and certainly not with naked girls. In boot camp, he had accompanied some of the recruits on expeditions to the nearby town where an evening of drinking had been climaxed by sex with some of the cheap whores who hung around there. Those incidents were dimly remembered, filtered through the alcoholic haze they’d been experienced in. It was probably as well that the details were clouded, because girls who would do anything with anyone for a $20 bill were not exactly the cream of young womanhood in appearance.

Although the encounter with women here was only visual, the sights Ranny saw through the peephole were etched so clearly that they pushed those dimly-remembered physical experiences with prostitutes to the dark recesses of his mind. The hours of voyeurism at night and the desperate moments snatched through the day supplied him with images that he would be able to call up and enjoy for years to come. He had no illusions about ever enjoying any physical sex with these girls. Besides being underage, none of them would be at all interested in a man twice their age who was not particularly attractive, and he had no desire to force sex on a woman who wasn’t willing, so rape wasn’t something he considered. He did fantasize at night in bed that one of the young lovelies he had seen that day would walk up to him, in her tight T-shirt and tighter jeans, and say, “Mister, I’m really horny and I’m tired of these young boys who don’t know what they’re doing. I want a real man, and my pickup has a camper shell with a bed in it. Would you please come back there with me and see if you can satisfy me?”. But he knew that was a fantasy with much less chance of ever becoming a reality than his dream of winning the lottery, so he contented himself with accumulating more unforgettable images.

It all came to an abrupt end, though, and Ranny was very lucky to have escaped without being caught. The knowledge of what might be hidden on the other side of that wall drew him like a magnet, and he had taken risks time and again in going out of his way to take trash to that particular dumpster so that he could enjoy one more vision. He had been there during his shift one night, breathing heavily, his eye pressed to the hole. One hand clutched a crumpled cardboard box as alibi and rested on the edge of the open trash bin, the other hand slowly rubbed the bulge on the front of his pants. Suddenly he heard a truck coming down the alleyway toward him, and he had barely had time to pull his head away from the wall and make a show of cramming the cardboard box well down into the bin and closing the lid when the truck stopped beside him. It was the foreman, and he yelled, “ Come on, Ranny, the boss wants a bunch of us up at the main building right now! Jump in, and let’s go!”.

There had been no time nor opportunity to replace the plug, the plug which provided the innocent appearance of a knot in a board, a knot which happened to have a small nail stuck in it. Ranny was so shaken by the close call that he went home right after his shift, and was almost asleep when he remembered that he hadn’t put the plug back. He reset set his alarm for 10 minutes earlier, so that he’d get to work on time tomorrow to replace it then. Unfortunately, when he clocked in the next morning there was the palpable excitement and tension in the air which told him that something was up, and when he whispered to a co-worker to ask what was going on, he was told, ”There’s going to be hell to pay! The boss found a peephole in the girls’ shower room wall, and they think one of us did it.”.

When it was his turn to enter the office being used for the interrogations, Ranny immediately noticed the incriminating plug , which was sitting squarely in the center of the desk. Forewarned, Ranny was able to keep his eyes off it and to protest his innocence when questioned, although the boss grilled him longer than some of the others, pointing out that Ranny had been seen in that vicinity just last night. Apparently, the crew foreman for that area had arrived at work even earlier than Ranny, and had been driving past the shower building when he noticed a thin stream of steam trailing up the end wall. It was a cool morning, and the place was filled with girls getting ready for the day, a preparation which took some of them an hour or more. The continual cascades of hot water had filled the room with steam, which escaped out the unplugged hole and exposed Ranny’s secret. One quick glance into the hole told the foreman that this was not just a natural knothole, and the regular dimensions of it and the plug found lying on the ground just below verified that.

This foreman had a 16-year-old daughter himself, and he was outraged that some pervert had been spying on these innocent young girls. Had he been less upset, he might have thought to catch the perpetrator by hiding nearby and waiting until someone showed up to make use of the hole, but he was too upset by visions of some deviate staring at his own daughter while she was in a shower room to think clearly. He was able to realize that it was in his interest to keep this out of the papers and contained within the ranks of the Cow Palace staff, so he brought in the head of Security and impressed upon him the need for keeping it quiet. But one of the maintenance men overheard the conversation, so word spread rapidly among the men and any hope of nailing the guilty party was lost. The Security boss tried to flush out the perpetrator by informing them that they were going to take fingerprints from the plug and they had everyone’s prints on file, so the guilty one might just as well come clean. But Ranny knew that they couldn’t get prints from the nail, and he wasn’t about to confess to anything, anyway - let them prove it if they could.

Although he had narrowly escaped being caught, Ranny still regretted the loss of that peephole into such a world of forbidden delights. He deeply resented the foreman for having found and exposed his secret. If it hadn’t been for that busybody, Ranny could have replaced the plug the next morning, and now six months later he could be feasting his eyes on the sight of more mature women taking showers - and there were certainly lots of these barrel racers and cattlewomen who he would love to see naked. Their lifestyle of physical work and play kept their bodies in shape, but Ranny wasn’t going to get to enjoy watching them unclothed.

Still thinking bitterly about the loss of what had been the best part of this job, and had provided Ranny the most excitement he’d experienced in his life, he trundled a handtruck to the haystack and loaded a bale of hay to deliver to stall 17 in the show horse barn. Many owners brought their own hay, but the Cow Palace sold it to those who didn’t want to bother trucking their own supply. This was excellent quality alfalfa from a top Central Valley grower, and the price charged was just double the cost. There had been a near disaster one season when a new manager had attempted to maximize profit by buying inferior hay, when a couple of horse owners had found a few dried yellow star thistle plants in the flakes of hay and had threatened lawsuits.

Star thistle wasn’t a native California plant but a Mediterranean import, probably introduced accidentally when some of the microscopic seeds emigrated along with some legitimate imports. In its native land a natural form of control was provided by an insect which laid eggs in the flower bud, and the resulting worm ate out the material before it could mature and turn to seed. Integrated Pest Management was being tried in California as an alternative to chemicals, but there was fear that introducing that insect here might lead to decimation of the state’s artichoke crop, and that was a very valuable thistle species indeed. The hot, dry climate in the New World’s west coast, which allowed alfalfa to be cut every 28 days for up to ten crops a year, suited the newcomer perfectly, and now the noxious weed could be found all over the state. In its early stage in pasture land it was devoured by cattle, who loved the tender green leaves and whose systems digested it with no ill effects. In the hot summer, it grew spindly stems which ranged from single stalks less than a foot high in poor conditions to thick, rangy bushes up to three feet tall in excellent soil. The bright yellow flower gave it part of its name: the dozen inch-long needles which projected out from and below the head gave it the star nomenclature. It was a very nasty plant for animals or man to walk through in its ripened form, but it wasn’t that aspect that made it so feared by horse owners.

When eaten in sufficient quantity, yellow star thistle caused irreversible neurological damage to equines, leaving them in a condition in which they would stand around with a vacant stare, head down and tongue hanging out. Like all animals, they instinctively avoided poisonous plants in pasture or rangeland provided that there was adequate other forage. However, if they were confined by fences, they would eat plants such as star thistle rather than go hungry, once the good plants had all been grazed down. Hay growers had a constant battle to keep the plant out of their fields, since clean hay could be sold at a premium to horse owners. People raising dairy or beef cattle didn’t care if there were a few such weeds in the hay, since cows had no problem with it. But horse owners, knowing the possible damage and with considerable investment in money, training time, or emotion in their animals, were very upset if they purchased hay and found star thistle plants mixed with the alfalfa.

The Cow Palace had survived the incident and their guarantee of top-quality hay, at a premium price, had regained the trust of owners, so Ranny now found himself delivering bales of hay to these people he despised. Although indoors, this area resembled nothing so much as a mediaeval encampment set up for a jousting tournament. There were no bare, exposed stalls when the horse show people were present. Instead, they brought their own materials which covered the stalls to give the appearance of tents, in rich colors of royal blue or purple, chocolate brown or deep forest green, with scalloped trim in white or gold. They always rented an extra stall which was similarly tented and held the tack, with gleaming metal and highly-polished leather. This room, with the flap closed, doubled as a changing room. They also brought metal stands and ornamental chain or rope so that they could fence off an area in front of their encampment: this was decorated with a few live plants in boxes or stands, and had a couple of chairs and a small table to hold the champagne bucket and the gourmet deli lunches. It was all quietly festive, very upper-class and very rich in appearance, and Ranny loathed it intensely.

As he steered the hand truck through the opening into the enclosure in front of stall 17, Ranny’s glance took in the ornate crest on the canvas wall ahead of him, a crest which seemed strangely familiar. Just as his eyes took in the name, “Windmere Farm”, etched on the side of a leather-bound tack chest, Ranny realized that he was delivering hay to that bitch who had cut him off at the gate this morning. As he started to tilt the handles forward, his blond nemesis stepped out of the tack room in front of him, startling him so that he let the hand truck snap to an upright position too quickly. He had been carrying the bale in a vertical position for better balance and maneuverability, and also because he could only take one bale at a time that way and so kill more time. But when the bale was tilted upright too suddenly, it overbalanced before he could grab it and it fell forward, the 130-pound weight of the tightly-compressed hay causing a very loud thud as it crashed to the concrete floor.

Unfortunately for Ranny, the bale was about four feet long, and a little Pekinese was eating from a dog dish which was slightly less than four feet away. The corner of the bale struck the dish, flipping it over and causing the dog to race, yipping in terror, past its mistress and into the safety of the tack room. Bits of kibble were scattered across the floor, and Cynthia was livid.