It's All in the Game Ch. 01

Silly me.

"That won't be any problem at all, I'll leave her with the Geek," she said and again took Tony's cock once more into her mouth.

My heart utterly broke at that moment.

Becky left with Tony the next night. I never heard her leave nor did she say anything to me in the way of a goodbye. There was a short note, but it didn't really say very much. I put it into my wallet and read and reread it 20 times a day for the next year or two but never discovered any secret or hidden meanings within it.

Olivia and I were now alone together. She had left our checking account untouched; I guess compared to Tony's new millions our petty $57.38 held no attraction to her.

It was enlightening, to say the least, to discover that very few folks in town felt much in the way of pity for me. Tony was after all the local town Hero, the local boy who had made good, and nearly everyone thought it inevitable that Becky would eventually choose him over me. He was now going to be a star in the NFL and I was just a local nobody... a geek with his head permanently wrapped inside a computer. He had a future; I didn't.

The unparalleled joy of my mother-in-law finding out that her wayward daughter hadfinallymade the 'right choice this time', unfastened the last real bolt that held me to this town and its people. I waited for the divorce papers to come and signed them immediately; they confirmed that I was now Olivia's sole legal guardian. Ten minutes later, all of Olivia's things were in the back of my beat-up old car and my few possessions packed along with them.

The first northerner of the season had blown in the night before and I was chilled to my bones. Without even thinking about it, I aimed my car south and drove aimlessly until the next afternoon when my junker broke down for good in a little small town near the coast called Lovett. I'd never heard of it, but it had to be better than where I had come from.

I sold the car for barely above scrap value and used the money to pay the first months rent on an old beat-up house near the old Towne Centre. The house looked vaguely Victorian with perhaps a hint of an extra Gothic feel to it. In a big city it would have sold or rented for a lot of money, even with its broken floorboards, leaky roof and highly suspect plumbing. In desperately poor Lovett, even my pitiful rent was money that my equally impoverished landlady was pathetically eager to earn. Nearly every house on my block had either a For Sale sign or a notice that the property was available for rent, some had both.

I put out my shingle that I was a computerized bookkeeper and I pressed the flesh with every single one of the handful of shopkeepers in town until I had enough potential customers tomaybebe able to play the next months rent. Just to be safe I spent the next week stalking every local farmer and rancher as well, offering to handle their financial recordkeeping for starvation wages. I don't know if it was the utter look of desperation on my face, but a few of these kindly rural folks gave me a handshake deal, some paper bags full of random invoices and receipts, and remained incredulous for years that I could make some kind of proper financial order out of the mess.

Olivia and I settled in and began to call Lovett home.

********

There are at least a thousand stories about Lovett, and an awful lot of them might actually be true. Certainly the strangest thing that took getting used to was that about one-third of the town on the northern and eastern sides towards the beach was in fact a registered Nudist Colony. Frankly, the vast majority of the townsfolk's liked it that way. The resident naturalists paid their taxes and kept the remaining surviving businesses alive. During the summer, a small but thriving crop of northern snowbird tourists rented houses and further supported the depressed local economy. I learned pretty quickly that the happy smiley faced 'Sun' emblem on many of the doors and mailboxes meant there was a better than average chance that the person opening the door might not be wearing any clothes. I soon discovered that the Colony had become the #1 money maker for the county as slowly folks that enjoyed the naturalist lifestyle discovered the town, its warm gulf coast climate and friendly neighbors everywhere and more visitors started to put down roots to stay.

At the actual center of the town in the old business district was a hodge-podge of old and mostly unrestored dilapidated Victorian, Edwardian and Art Deco office buildings and retail shops over an extended, and peculiarly laid out two block radius that constituted the 'Town Centre'. The vast majority of the shops were closed and shuttered.

Most rural Texas town are build on nice and neat square grid patterns, but not Lovett. At least not near the Town Centre. From the tall black basalt rock pillar monument to something or another which was right smack in the center of downtown, the streets were laid out in a pentagon shape for five blocks. The first two center rings being the commercial district and the latter three pentagonal streets being residential. At each the five points, a two lane road headed out from town to connect to the local farms and ranches, and surrounding points of interest to the edge of the county line,exactlyfive miles away.

Apparently Lovett is its own independent county, as well as being a town. Its borders are perfectly round, exactly five miles in each direction from that large and unsettling pillar that was planted in the exact center of the pentagonal Towne Centre. Even to the casual observer, this bizarre configuration hinted loudly at pentacle magic, as if the town had been created inside some sort of vast protective circle. The locals never speak of this and the best way for an outsider to find themselves completely ostracized is to ask too many question about this sort of think. Lovett, and its people, like to protect their secrets and live their lives as much out of the sight of strangers as possible, but when they trust and befriend a newcomer they give that respect completely and without reservation.

Supposedly, the town was founded in 1832 right before the War of Texas Independence from Mexico, by a very peculiar and semi-mythological individual possibly of Balkan origin called Alexandru Lovettiu. He and a few followers assimilated nicely into this brave new world and promptly Americanized his name into Alexander Lovett. According to popular legend, he was alleged to be a wizard or sorcerer of such repute that even after Texas became a State his 'Lovett County' retained exceptionally unusual freedoms from most State regulations. Stories of weird mumbo-jumbo aside, Lovett does enjoy an unusually independent status from the state government.

Allegedly Lovett, like Romulus and Remus the founders of ancient Rome, plowed an exact furrow planting silver dust into an exact and complete circle around the county in just a single night. The town quickly grew and soon developed a reputation for welcoming immigrants from unheard of eastern and southern European countries, particularly ones with odd or unusual religious customs. This trend continued after Lovett's death, or rather his disappearance sometime around 1890, with fresh waves of immigrants arriving well into the 20th century. The latest wave of newcomers was during the late 1960's and early 70's, as disappointed hippies and 'alternative lifestyle' families discovered this Mecca of religious and social tolerance and came in droves, mostly to stay.

There was a nominal Mayor, and sort of an unpaid City Council that met rather infrequently and passed even fewer laws. Nominally, the County Judge was at the top of the local power pyramid and the infamous elderly lady 'Hanging Judge' Rebecka Tucakovic was accounted by all to be a benign and very wise autocratic leader. For practical everyday matters, therealtown power resided in "The Church". It was of no particular denomination, and its creed was an unfathomable assortment of antique old-world ritual and superstition combined with modern "new age" enthusiasm. It was a very odd place to say the least, but if its head preacher (a very nice middle-aged man called "Father Al") said jump, nearly everyone in the town said "how high?" I actually took quite a liking to him. He was, of course, a nearly full time nudist, but if you could actually understand what he was saying to you, then it usually made a great deal of sense. I can't think of a single piece of bad advice he ever gave to anyone.

There were several other churches in town, including very small Catholic and Baptist church buildings on the outskirts of town that were barely larger than small shacks. Nearly everyone attended The Church, at least casually or upon occasional. Even the dyed to the bone atheists and agnostics could never find a bad word to say about The Church or its doings.

It was into this strange new world of superstitious farmers and ranchers who lit occult bonfires at night, and crystal or love bead wearing ex-hippies and nudists, that Olivia and I now found ourselves drawn. The learning curve was a bit steep, but it began to feel like 'home' in no time.