Luke walked up the road in his one-dollar suit, which came with shoes but he had to pay extra for the socks. The right sock was fourteen cents, but the left cost a little more since they sewed a penny into the heel for good luck, which made them very uncomfortable for walking. As a result, Luke wasn’t wearing the socks, but he kept them stuffed into his seven-cent underwear for impressive effect.

The suit didn’t come with a shirt, a fact that Luke wished he had noticed before he’d given his old shirt to an elephant to use as a handkerchief. His old pants, those were gone too since they’d been made into a makeshift diaper for an incontinent horse ten miles back, but Luke had no worries about that since the new pants were just fine.

Granted, a dollar was a lot of money back then, I don’t want you thinking this was the kind of suit you could buy for a dollar today, assuming you could even do that. I don’t think anyone would want to wear that kind of suit; it would probably be made of Mylar and smell like Mexico. But this was way before inflation.

Luke Nood was finally out of jail, where he’d spent seven months for accidentally swallowing a rich man’s nickel in a bar melee, and now he was walking back to Oklahoma to help his family pack up the farm and all move to California where the streets were paved with gold and the trees were full of delicious oranges that were also made of gold. As a result, Luke had heard that Californians were wealthy but incredibly thirsty for orange juice, thanks to all their solid gold oranges being unjuiceable. That’s when Luke had the bright idea to load up the Nood family, the dog, and several jugs of orange juice, and set out to make their fortune.

The only inconvenient part was that Luke had been sent to a jail in Arizona, so he had to walk all the way back to Oklahoma so he could ride to the promised land of California with the rest of the family. By the time he got to Oklahoma, Luke’s suit looked like a used condom that had been through the Holocaust, which allowed him to blend right in to Oklahoma.

There they were, the whole Nood family: Grandma Nood, Granduncle Donner, Eustum, Farbney, the triplets. And a whole other lot of folks Luke didn’t recognize, on account of the time he’d been gone and their forgettable nature. There they all were, piled into the Nood family’s truck, stacked high like Nazi turtles or the Beverly Hillbillies before such a thing even existed. Way up on the very top, like the angel on a Christmas tree, sat Great-Grandma Nood, surveying the scene from her queenly perch and running interference for low-flying birds. If there was trouble on the road, Great-Grandma Nood would surely see it coming, and likely catch the brunt of it.

Luke quickly learned that the family was pissed off to see him, since they had all been waiting in the truck with the engine running for five long months, waiting for Luke to get out of jail, thanks to the family calendar being hocked for gum money at some point. As a result, the Noods had burned through all their gas money just idling the truck, and now had exactly four cents to get them to California.

“Don’t worry, everybody,” Luke reassured the already-haggard clan with a sly grin. “I made a lot of money peddling my ass in jail.”

For more of this great story, buy Jonas J. Cullogan’s salt of the earth tale The Prunes of Ignominy