I dont know how we got there you couldn't see anything outside. It was crazy. She was half wild when I told her she reminded me of the pink leather fringe girl with the fancy shooter who shot the side view of Crazy Horse in a shiny piece of sheet metal. She groaned from the deep buy Edgar Fucking Caycee here a drink. We were supposed to go ice fishing. We never made it. "I lived in a hail of bullets," she said, and kissed me on the lips, hard, right in front of Roy who she had just introduced me to as her husband. And just as I thought you know I think he's gonna bring one up he did and that was the last thing I remember till The Wizard brought me too still laughing saying how she had been kidnapped just that night by two guys who broke out of the pen where her husband worked and was always on about his Dodge Challenger how wasn't anything in Deer Lodge County could touch it so these guys broke out and went straight to his house cause they knew right where to find the keys and wrestled the shotgun out of her hands but not before she got off a shot. So they took her as a hostage but it was already too late as they moved under the heavy sky hoping ride ahead of the storm but the road block was there and as they slowed down figuring they'd just go back to their cells she screamed gun it you fucking dick heads or we're all dead meat and so they did just as the first rounds marimba'd into the grill and the impact rather than pulverizing them launched them up in the air, a quiet moment in the sky among the first snowflakes of a long sock and the falling tinkle of buckshot. Not a scracth she screeched, yelping back shots, not a scratch.
I didn't want to go back inside but Roy insisted he buy me some Jack. We got into how most people before they get too drunk are lucky to have more than two stories to tell, and he promised me, right then and there, no matter what, if he outlived me, he would go to my funeral. Gave me a card that he scrambled some fuzzy inkling of who he was. Like in the future, dying, I'd be like "oh, shit, better call what's his name, Roy, and tell him so he can get here before they plant me. I mean, Roy said over and over again as the shots lined up, you never know who you're gonna have to save in this shit hole paradise. I can't remember what the two stories were, The Wizard says that's because I always tell them when I get drunk, and honestly, it's been years. Years. Like, granpa used to say, it barely happened.
in public, and to clink tea cups with you, Hammer!
