Drop it! Drop it! Drop it!
It drops. Hits the road with a clang.
STEP OUT, hands where I can see them.
They are big hands. Hair on the back dirty. Stuck through the gap they look like a thug trying to do a hand puppet show. Forearms in a blue ski jacket too short for his arms, greasy but new. Door pushed wider. Mallet head, wide blonde dreds, camo bush hat. Tangled beard. A huge man stepping down off the bumper, unwilling to turn his back.
There are two more.
Hoarse shout, the voice rolling through a half ton of gravel. Blinking back the sun.
A plane that runs. Where’d you get a plane that runs? Goddamn.
Shut the fuck up. Tell them. The same. Hands first.
Baseball bat, hands, arms in an oiled Australian duster, another Mongo stepping down. Long hair in a thick braid, eyes jittery: my face, the gun, the dog, the ditch. Wants to bolt. Jasper’s growl a step lower.
You ain’t got no bullets in that thing. World ran out of fucking bullets. Hear that Curtis? Calling back. Edging west. One step two.
Captain Pilot thinks he’s gonna shoot us. Eyes skittered: the gun to the ditch.
Woulda done it already. Yes he would. Likes to talk this one.
Me thinking: So far he’s been doing all the talking.
C’mon out Curtis. This is copasetic. Man’s
Him the closest one now three feet from the partly open door. I sight with both eyes open. Always have. Advantages. I can see the door. I can feel the evening pulling taut like a twisting wire. Dreds calling my coordinates like a mortar man. Heat. The heat of pure anger climbing into my neck, pure and clean like a white gas. My finger on the smooth cold curve of the trigger.
Door swings. Open. A shadow. Edge pulling back like a curtain, light following, lighting, lit the man in motion, swinging the bow across and down. I fire. Twice. Arrow like a hole torn in air, angry thwip of a vacuum high and wide, the man blown back, bow clattering, the front wall of Cokes toppling and spilling. Silence. One Dr. Pepper rolls out hits the road.
The two on the road half crouched and frozen, arms in reflex covering their heads. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.
The can of Dr. Pepper has rolled over, rested against Pony Tail’s boot. A string of blood drips from trailer edge to the pavement where the can fell.
Look what you did. I am yelling. You fucking bonehead scum. Ruined it. Probably twenty cases of pop.
My chest, breath, vibrate with adrenalin and fury.
Killed your buddy too. Nice fucking try.
The men frozen, arms covering, crouched. This the last pathetic gesture before death. Fully expecting now to die. The gun already sighted on Dreds, finger already pressed on the trigger. Breathing hard. I hold there breathe. I will kill them.
Fuckers tried to kill me. For Coke. Well. For a not quite daily Coke. Twenty four in a case, once a month, I bring it back. The week going without—a contrived measure of want to make the next run a treat. For me and. To up my value with Bangley. Face it. Landing at the families’ place with the Sprite like a god.
One is whimpering, the blonde one. Not bothering to beg.
Have to kill them. Leave them and they will empty the truck, hide it all in the ditches, windbreaks, no more monthly treat. These few things. Few enough things to look forward to. Plus they tried to kill me.
Dreds kneels, covers his eyes with his huge hands just like a kid playing peekaboo and crying. Pony Tail squeezing his head with forearms watching me in naked terror, half wincing, quivers, bracing for the shot.
Get up.
Get it over with! Dreds screams.
Get up. I’m not going to kill you.
The words like liquid nitrogen. A moment of complete freeze.
What you’re gonna do is drag your buddy to the ditch and not say a word, not one fucking word while my dog has dinner.
The images colliding, conflicting in their terror shorn minds. Their own lives, the relief not even digested or believed, the horror of the feeding dog. Creates a vortex, a crosscurrent like the two flags at the airport facing each other in contrary winds. They both start to tremble. Hard.
I mean it. Not gonna shoot you. Like you said I would have already. Certainly would.
Hands down watching me. Kill them for a Coke. Not a staple, a luxury. The way before we killed for diamonds, for oil. Not. Not today.
You’re gonna drag your buddy to the ditch and then you’re gonna load twenty cases, fifteen of Coke, five of Sprite, and oh yeah two extra of Dr. Pepper, you’re gonna load them in the back of the plane nice and neat and then I’m gonna climb in and fly away. And you can have the rest. Because I can’t prevent it. Once I take off. Unless I kill you. Which I won’t. Done too much of that. Go on.
The kestrel is over the field. The wind is in the short grass, the sun is almost on the Divide. He will hover and hunt until past dusk. Hover and swoop, hover and swoop. In his little helmet, hovering tireless, treading air. Hunting mice and voles.
I feel sick. Want to throw up on the road but won’t. Sick of defending whatever it is I’m supposed to defend.
They loaded the cans. They dragged their compa to the ditch and I whistled once, turned my back. They carried four cases stacked at once, it went fast. I told them to load in the bow and quiver. Pony Tail swung a long necklace of shriveled leather pieces when he bent over. Both of them smelled like death.
You’re a dead man anyway, Pony Tail grumbled, passing me with a load.
What’d you say?
Nothin. Grunting the cases through the jump door.
What the fuck did you say?
He turned, passed. I stopped him with the barrel of the AR.
What was that about being a dead man?
Shoved the barrel into his ribs hard. His grunt.
The A-rabs. You can kill us but the A-rabs will kill you.
What d’you mean the A-rabs?
We heard it. In Pueblo. Ham radio. The A-rabs. They’re here. Or coming. Kill us all.
He spat. Inches from my boot.
What is that? Shove.
What is what?
That. Your necklace.
He stood straight, swallowed. His eyes gold green in the last full sun. Mocking.
Them are cunts. Dried cunts.
I pulled the trigger. Tore him open. Without thought. Left him sprawled back on the road, guts spilled. The other, the Dreds dropped his load of cases and ran. South. South between two green fields. Beneath a reef of clouds flushed rose an antic figure diminishing to a dot.
Try to do the right thing. Circumstance intervenes. What am I going to do with twenty cases of Coke? Dole them out to Bangley?
V
When I told Bangley about the encounter at the Coke truck he took a can of snuff out of his vest pocket, a
