The Short of it is James Brought a Pool Cue to a Gunfight

The pre-fight de rigueur hit its apex when the throwing came to involve a Banquet bottle and the ceiling. Quite a bit of peacocking is required to demand real attention around here and it takes more than shattered glass on the concrete. But we know an overwrought cue when we see one.

So out the bar and into the parking lot we go to make a ring of the floodlamp light. This guy from elsewhere (not a one of us knew his name) stood right in the middle, ghost boxing his way into a sweat. Yelling obscenities and kicking at phantoms, he had the desperate form of a veteran mirror watcher, a lover of screen violence, nary a foot on the earth or a hand on the wheel. He went so far as to actually fall over the bucket of cigarette butts, spreading sand and filters all over the pavement. Regardless of the offering, God was clearly not on his side. And yet, we gave him his due: he threw himself full-ass into battle. What more could we ask for?

James. We wanted James, though don’t deserve the like. James is what we got. He burst into the ring wide-eyed as a loon, shirtless and hirsute, spittling and bellowing his blurry rage. He’d brought with him a crooked pool cue, which he spun over his head and behind his back and even between his legs like a drunken master. Only in the highest of dudgeons do we witness such proprioception falling all over itself. We cheered. We hollered. We ducked out his way.

Our boy had become such a splendor in fact that we let the other guy leave the ring and return with a rifle from his truck. There he suddenly was, at the very center, locked and loaded. “Time to pay the piper,” he yelled, standing wide legged as a would-be Rambo. We could have died laughing. What piper, my friend? But the air did sober up. Men grabbed at men. Women grabbed at pearls. We couldn’t breathe. We didn’t want to think.

James alone held the baseline, spinning that cue and panting his blood alcohol content like a tornado full of drooling bulldogs. Thuswise he made his way around the edge of the ring, closer and closer to the other guy, agonizing to behold.

This is what we’d come for: whirling and stumbling on the home side; threats and tears on the away. Cheers flew up and down like vampire bats. Was our friend not playing the holy fool? Was he not a venerable, veritable ascete for the Almighty? Are there not indexes in heaven, as well as on our side of the dirty earth, that holler clear as day God’s (pretty consistent) favor for the reeking and the wild?

They met. They altercated. There was a swipe and a bang and then all parties were on the ground or screaming. Or both on the ground and screaming, in the case of the other guy. Throw in some gore, for good measure. Somebody called an ambulance. The rest of us returned to our drinks. As the paramedics rolled their eyes and loaded him into the wagon, James was already yelling, “Leave the scars! They shall be my Imitatio Christi!” He was still plenty drunk.

There would be no surcease of laughter that night or any night. Not among us believers.

***

Not only was James not murdered — not only did James return to work within a week — point of fact: turns out it was only buckshot. James was left with a perfect Madonna limned of the flesh on his chest. Her blessings are wanton and scattered, sure, but they are undeniable, too, especially when the drinking brightens the skin lines. We can see it any time we want at whatever Baptist Church or VFW, where his talk has picked up mention of holy escutcheons and transfigurations. He even holds tentless revivals between the Taco Bell and the cornfields. Word is he might be quitting Dollar General any day, so healthy is the holy windfall.

The other guy, on the other hand. He fell so hard he never could walk again. Which, if you ask anyone around here, is simply how it goes when you wave a gun in the face of what you don’t understand.