Winston K. Marks

“ But I'm still not sleepy. I'm not worried about patching things up with Lottie. She's the most wonderful, understanding wife a guy ever had.
My hand feels real good now. I got it wrapped in lard and gauze, and I could drive the truck if I wanted to.
I'm not afraid of getting fired or bawled out for not coming to work on time this morning.
No, the reason I haven't turned a wheel on my beer truck today is something else.
Friday night, when Lottie wanted to wash the roaster, I saved only a cup of the jelly for my experiments. The rest she washed down the drain. ”

“ I poured some very hot tap water into the roaster and shook in the strong soap powder. "This is to saponify the oil," I explained.
"What's saponify?" Lottie asked.
"That means to make soap. Soap is mainly a mixture of some caustic with fat or oil. It makes sudsy soap."
"But we got soap," she said. "Why don't you just use the soap we got?" ”

“ It makes her nervous when I use big words which I only do when I'm talking about chemistry and the like.
"Well, uncoogalate it and dump it out of my roaster," she told me.
My scientific inquiring mind was stirred as I lifted the pan over to the table under the center light. We had here a gelatin of various cleaners, and every one of them claiming to be best ever. What would this new combination do?
I grabbed a pan off the stove that had a mess of scorched carrot leavings in the bottom. Lottie had been soaking it with about a half inch of water. As I reached for a tablespoon, Lottie objected. ”

“ Lottie makes me go to church with the kids every Sunday and I like it. If this chemical theory about life getting started is right—well, then, a lot of people got the wrong idea about things, I always figured. ”

“ Then you wring out the rags with your bare hands into a pan.
"Hey, Lottie," I yelled, "this is your roaster! It'll be hard to clean out the oil smell!"
But, of course, it was too late. I had squeezed a half-pint of oil into it already. So I went on dunking and wringing and thinking how lousy my cigarettes were going to taste all evening and feeling glad that I delivered beer instead of oil for a living.
got the stove bailed out and lit with only one serious blast of soot out the "Light Here" hole. Then I dumped the oil out in the alley and set the roaster pan in the sink. ”

“ It had drunk up the water in the carrot pot, sucked the surface moisture from my finger and then spent the past few hours feeding on the humidity in the air.
It was thirsty. Like alcohol has affinity for water, this stuff was the same way, only more so. In fact, it even reached out toward anything that had water in it—like me.
That's why it had oozed over the pan the way it did.
hat's so frightening about that, I asked myself. Plants grow toward water.
But plants are alive!
That's what Lottie had said—before she screamed. ”

“ Lottie hasn't returned and they haven't called up any more.
When I returned to the bucket, it seemed that the stuff was deeper yet, but I couldn't tell because I hadn't marked the level. I got Lottie's fever thermometer out of the medicine chest and took the jelly's temperature. It read 58 degrees F. The wall thermometer read 58 degrees, too. Room temperature, with the windows open. What kind of "life" could this be that had no temperature of its own? ”

“ I got out the kids' junior encyclopedia and looked up some things I'd forgot, and some I had never learned in the first place.
o it got to be Saturday morning. Fred and Claude phoned about the fishing trip and I made an excuse. No one else bothered me. All day Saturday, I studied. And all Saturday night and Sunday. But I couldn't figure out any sensible answers that would make peace with my minister. ”