CHAPTER 15

.....The dice game at The Larkspur had gone and went unfriendly at some point. No amount of buying rounds could ease the glares being thrown Cooper’s way by the Larkspur faithful that were looking at him as if he had just called the President of the United States a fag.
.....Which is pretty much was what he had done. Actually there was no pretty about it, he had. There was no going back, and so he plowed on.
.....“Look,” he explained patiently. “The man was a cheerleader in college, right?”
.....“Where in the hell are you pulling that one out from?” demanded the beefy one in the John Deere cap, his dice gathering dust. Vernon, he had offered up as his name when the first game had started.
.....When the point of game had ended with Cooper being the first to lose all of his dice, Vernon had been smiling when he and the boys were bought a round. Their Pabst and High Life bottles had been upgraded to shots of Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. They were taking to Cooper just fine after the first couple of games, and especially after the first couple of rounds.
.....They weren’t smiling now. Vernon was eyeing him like he was weighing out the amount of asswhupping he was going to lay down on this Cooper character. The scales were dipping pretty much towards a serious one.
.....Cooper could smell the thought on Vernon in the way a dog can smell fear, but truth be told he really didn’t much care. These good ol’ boys probably fought the way most civilized men shook hands, but there had been a time when trying that kind of shit with him would have resulted in more than a little unexpected blood and pain.
.....Granted, he was a little rusty but in his day he had been taught certain tricks, tricks of his trade that came in handy in a situation that required a man to throw away the rulebook and just walk away from the mess. But him walking away would also involve leaving some other men not being of much mind to try and follow.
.....The lessons had been of the deep-learned kind that a man like him never forgot.
.....It didn’t help that he had started in on the Cuervo. He knew better than to indulge in the tequila, but Cuervo wasn’t really tequila and they didn’t have a decent Irish whiskey in the house. If he was going to drink shit, then by god he was going to drink shit.
.....The problem was, tequila made him either a little horny or just plain antagonistic... and although the bartender was a faded prairie rose, giving him the eye and being generous with the pour, she was still not something he wanted to waste his traveling time on.
.....That left speaking his mind as the only option on hand.
.....All of which wasn’t exactly endearing him to Vernon and his friends. Mandy was their faded desert rose, the head cheerleader from back in the seventies who as time had passed become a little looser with her affections than she had been back in the day. But they weren’t about to sit around and watch those affections being wasted on some out-of-town liberal who was talking shit about their Commander in Chief.
.....To a one, none of them had ever been any closer to serving in the military than walking by the recruiter’s office on their way to the video store to rent a John Wayne war movie. Even though with that whole War on Terror thing going down, they had all been — to a one — tempted to finally step up and volunteer to show them Iraqis what for. Too bad they were — to a one — too old to be taken up on their patriotic offer. That is, if they — to a one — would have actually tried.
.....Cooper shook his head mournfully and slammed back his shot. No salt, no lime, there was no reason to bother trying to make the wicked nastiness taste like anything other than what it was.
.....“Shit,” he chuckled darkly. “Just Google his name along with the word ‘cheerleader’ and you’ll get back plenty of pictures. School photos of our boy with a bullhorn in his hand and him sucking on it like it was a giant --”
.....“Hey,” snarled the redneck in the FBI: Female Body Inspector tee-shirt. From his looks, he’d been pink-slipped from that job a long time ago. “There’s no call for that language with a lady present.”
.....“Sorry, Mandy.” Cooper offered the frowzy bartender a smile in apology as he slid his empty shot glass towards her.
.....“Thanks, Lyle.” Mandy nodded to the redneck, but her smile and the bat of her blue eyeshadow was thrown towards Cooper. She cocked the bottle and poured another generous shot of the amber nastiness. Actually, she sorta liked that kind of talk. It made her wonder what the stranger would have to say if he were to hang around until closing time...
.....Cooper nodded his thanks and turned back to the boys. “That, and have you ever actually ever listened to the man talk? He uses the word ‘fabulous’ way too much for a straight guy. Everything is fabulous to him. The guy should have been an interior decorator, not appointing the Secretary of the Interior.”
.....“You’d know, wouldn’t you?” muttered Lyle.
.....Cooper chuckled at the comeback and tossed back the shot. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand in Larkspur style and winked at Lyle. “Hell, he probably thought up until he became the president that the Secretary of the Interior was responsible for decorating the inside of the White House.”
.....Vernon and his boys bristled, their red necks all but disappearing as heads slowly buried themselves into their shoulders. They were getting pretty wound up. There was no going back to the Liar’s Dice game, and the skinny one with the straw cowboy hat was probably more than a little upset, just a bit more than his friends: he still had all his dice left under the cup.
.....They jumped as Cooper smacked the shot glass back down on the bar, upside down. He’d have to ease up on those puppies if he was going to hit the road anytime soon. But at the moment, he was having himself some fun with the boys.
.....“Could I get a Corona, Mandy?” he asked the bartender, tossing her a smile as a tip. She pulled him a cold one from the rear of the reach-in cooler, not one of the warm ones that she had just restocked with. Vernon noticed and his eyes narrowed.
.....There wasn’t much you could slip past Vernon.
.....“Well,” he countered. “He’s still one hell of a better man than Clinton.”
.....“Say what you will about the man, but Clinton earned my respect from the start.” Cooper snorted. “Not for anything he did in office, but for who he was. He was a guy who was born poor white trash and busted his ass to make something of himself, like he had something to prove to the world. And that white trash boy grew up and went on to become President of the United States. He proved that anyone could become president if they were to just set their mind to it.”
.....Cooper smiled around the mouth of the Corona as he tipped it back, then leaned in towards his new friends, his forefinger stabbing out at them from his grip on the bottle.
.....“Unlike your nepotistic buddy, who seems as if he were born with a silver coke spoon up his nose, who got elected and reelected by acting like he’s straight out of a trailer park. He had to go and reestablish that pretty much anyone could be president if their daddy had all the right connections.”
.....Vernon stiffened: what the hell was wrong with living in a trailer park? His old man had busted his ass in the oil fields outside Harding through the seventies and eighties, wearing himself down to almost nothing in order to pay for the single-wide 1984 Skyline Vernon now lived in while he tended for his widowed mother. He wasn’t of any real mind to move on either, after the day were to come around that his mother passed on. God forbid. Not that he could afford to: the resale value on the damned thing now being about the same as his five-year-old Dodge Dakota.
.....“He’s a moral man, doin' his best to lead us back to being a moral country.” Vernon noted softly. The thought of his mother passing on had taken some of the fire out of him. Vernon tended to get a little weepy when he’d had a few too many whiskies. He never had been much of the fighting type, anyway.
.....“Moral my ass,” Cooper rolled his eyes. He’d long forgot about the old adage about discussing religion or politics in a bar, and here he was moving in on wrapping the two up into one argument. “All that monkey has ever had to do is wave around a Bible and say he’s Born Again, and half of America thinks that means the man is saying that he’s a Christian. He’s a politician, fer christsakes. Politics and God always make for a bad match, in that most of what God wants from us runs counter to what a politician wants for himself. Any politician that says he’s a religious man is showing you right from the start that he’s a goddamned liar. Hell, for that matter your Deserter in Chief doesn’t even pretend he’s not lying anymore.”
.....Lyle blinked and looked at around at his friends. “What’s ‘nepotistic’ mean?”
.....The skinny good ol’ boy wearing the road-weary straw cowboy hat stood up and looked down at Cooper with a dark gaze. “It means our friend is saying that the president only got his job because of his daddy, right? That and that Christians are stupider than sheep.”
.....Cooper met his gaze and saluted him with his beer. “I wouldn’t exactly say stupider...”
.....Straw Hat nodded. “I gotta go drain the lizard,” he let the boys know. “Make sure there’s a little something left of him for me when I get back.”
.....He turned and wound his way back through the tables towards the bathroom. The door to The Larkspur opened into his path as Clyde ducked under the threshold and stepped in, his aviator shades left in place after he’d traded his uniform in for mufti.
.....Straw Hat nodded in greeting, laid his forefinger alongside his nose and sniffed. Cocked his head towards the bathroom. Clyde nodded back and the two disappeared behind the swinging door labeled ‘BULLS’.

.....It had taken two more rounds and changing the topic around to about what kind of chance the Colorado Rockies stood towards taking the pennant that fall (slim to fucking none, they had all finally reluctantly agreed, even if the team did have God on their side) before the boys had finally seen him off with a toast. Even the cranky dude in the silly straw hat had seemed chummy after the last round, along with his new friend in the sunglasses. Vernon had even bought him another shot for the road.
.....As Cooper climbed back into the Monte Carlo and fired it up, his attention was on the road that had been waiting patiently outside the bar. He didn’t see two dark forms ease out of The Larkspur as he pulled away from the curb, and he didn’t see them make their way to the battered Ford Econoline. He didn’t notice the headlights that followed the Monte Carlo past the town limits sign and had eased into following at a discreet distance, as the lights of Harding faded off behind them.
.....He didn’t think about the headlights that began to move up from behind until they roared up on his ass. He wasn’t thinking about anything but the long road that lay ahead, until the highbeams exploded through his rear window and reflected light from the rearview mirror shot him in the eye...
........ and in the space of a moment Cooper was beyond even thinking about dying.
.....It is a really good idea not to argue politics or religion in a bar. It's an even better idea not to argue both at the same time.