Red Webster’s pickup truck pulls up too late. His auto parts store has already exploded, and when I said yesterday that the fireball reached 100 feet into the sky I may have sold it short by as much as 100%. Perhaps he had sticks of dynamite there among the bottles of motor oil. Whatever the case, this is destruction on a scale Jasper, Missouri has likely not seen before, unless there was an auto parts store on the land Brad Wesley earmarked for the JC Penney. Even a seasoned war dog like Dalton can only stand there and stare, rueful and aghast.
Understandably, Red Webster himself is a sight more emotional than his niece’s new fella. He expresses his extreme dismay the way anyone would, if by “anyone” you mean people who just lost at the dog track, or the coach of the rich kids camp’s baseball team in an ’80s movie, or the Mayor of River City right after learning that Professor Harold Hill has turned the townsfolk against his new pool table at the billiards parlor: He takes hat off and throws it on the ground. That’s his life’s work that just went up in a gout of flame, and his reaction is an emphatic dagnabbit.
Tags: red webster, road house