Sue Rose Richtop owned Roxy’s Ultra Car Wash in Cairo, Illinois, just a couple of blocks up from the new Quality Inn. There was a second Roxy’s Ultra in Fulton and a third in Mayberry kitty-corner from the sheriff’s office. A second wave feminist, she hired only women and they had to be intelligent, competent, trustworthy, blonde, buxom, and wear the Roxy Car wash uniform—blue jean short shorts, and red plaid, tied-in-a-knot shirts ala Daisy Duke. It was a joy watching them in high heel shoes soaping roofs; scrubbing white walls yielded heart attacks in healthy males. Judge Lester Brevet Ardon washed his Buick three times a week even before his wife died.
Her first marriage was to a used car salesman. Roxy thought that checkered vests, white plastic belts and two-tone shoes were the height of fashion and the mark of a gentleman, so she was fifteen and pregnant. Her husband, Carl, euphoric, wouldn’t stop saying “bun in the oven” on the way to an ultrasound at Doc Simmons. Carl was driving a car that had just come on the lot, and since the brakes were faulty, he drove straight into a John Deere combine harvester. Roxy climbed out with a couple of scratches and wasn’t pregnant anymore, but Carl had exited through the windshield directly into the combine’s rotor and he wasn’t any more. At seventeen she married Carl 2, the general manager of Rockin’ Rudy’s Ford and Mercury Automobiles and Trucks. With the insurance money from Carl 1’s death and advice from Carl 2, “With all this dust down here, you’ll make a pile”, she opened a car wash. After the third car wash in Mayberry, and a particularly powerful homily on the glory of love at a tent revival meeting, she divorced Carl 2 and married Pastor Beau Gators Enbred.
“Washed in the blood of the Lamb I tell ya ain’t nothin’ more powerful than preachin’ the Lawd’s word to sinners savin’ souls from Satan.” Beau and Roxy were lying in the sawdust behind the baptizing tank. “Didya know my pappy were the pinball champion of western Tennessee coulda bin a contender at Nationals if he hadn’t shot himself In the hand robbin’ the First Union Bank up at Mayfield cost him four years in the pen so by the time he gets out pinball is passed by Pac Man but havin’ nothin’ ‘n his left hand anymore he was slow at the buttons so he jest sets on the porch with his govment welfare check and goes huntin’ with old Red and Opie mainly for rabbits but gets a buck now and then.” His soliloquy was followed by getting Roxy pregnant.
The Reichtopf family emigrated to Appalachia when the family fortune was wiped out in the 1837 religious war between Lower Silesia and Upper Silesia over which end of a soft-boiled egg was the right one to cut off to honor Good Time Charley. The Reichtopf family being top-enders lost their estate to the Lower Silesia victors, obviously bottom-enders. Shortly thereafter the extended Reichtopf clan, dependents, retainers, and free loaders emigrated as all the Reichtopf lands were confiscated. Gone were large feudal holdings, villages, farms, the Reichtopf mansion, the cottages, the stables, and even the guest outhouse where Baroness Greta Reichtopf had carefully hidden her jewels, personal letters, and some precious erotic woodcuts from Italy. Sue Rose Richtop was fifth generation Reichtopf.
“Pastor, fer a fella from Piedy Hollor, ya suh doin’ okay.”
Sue Rose Richtop was doing okay too.
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