Her name was Twyla….Twyla Maline
And she is one kick ass, no bullshit, skinny, twang and drawl , sun baked Arkansas woman.
She got it from her dad, who worked the rigs from Texas to Louisiana. She learned it in the camps, watching them load the stacks of greased pipes onto the platforms. Her eyes popped open at night when she heard her dad yelling into the receiver. “Get your butt down to the rig first thing tomorrow or I’ll get my gun and run your ass over there.”
Twyla learned fast how to get things done.
She was the only child of a three day fling between a country pipeline roughneck and a wild blue blood Connecticut girl. It took sixteen years for her mom to give up on Twyla, call her dad and ship her back with a one way ticket. That did not last long. Twyla jumped on a bus for Boulder, joined the Outward Bound program and floated the Colorado.
She began late that fall buying sandwiches, mixing Kool-aid and driving over to where they were building houses. She swung up the hatch of her girlfriend’s battered station wagon, blew an air horn at the boys, passed out sandwiches and watched the money drop into the cigar box.
The tool belt and the used nail gun came from that little cigar box. She clamored up the ladder to the roof joists and started laying plywood and shooting those nails solid onto the rafters. By the end of the summer, Twyla got four other girlfriends to join her on the roof.
They called themselves “The Bangin Babes”.
Twyla and the “Babes” got big in Boulder. Soon, they were seaming sheet rock, laying concrete and brazing copper sinks for the yuppies and their ski mansions. She quickly learned how to find the junk shops and salvage yards picking up stuff at next to nothing. She could sweet talk the building inspectors, the zoning guys and push around the architects. She mastered the building and construction craft from the first pour to the roof cap.
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