And it was very interesting dirt. Not because it was special, or because it had some new and mystical property, but because when focused on it gave Steve an opportunity to avoid looking at anything else. It held his attention like no dirt ever had before, and for this he was more grateful than his words could express. Not that he thought he had many words left, or time in which to arrange them. They were down there, waiting, at the bottom of the hill. They had whatever it was they needed to blow up forest and, what was more, the capacity to do so silently and effectively. It all scared him but that quiet efficiency was the scary part. Anyone who could do anything right while making no noise at all deserved to be paid attention to.
Meanwhile, Sheila barked curses at The Hermit and the schnauzer, whom Steve felt had somehow split its allegiance for the time being, continued to stare at the space through which, with another explosion, it might see the besieging mob. Steve could see them without one, and they did not look happy. A line of trucks backed them, each and every one with the add-on lights atop the cab for doing God knows what with deer in the darkness. Steve, thinking about what that meant now, retracted his judgement even if the overall effect if the lights was the same and even if in front of it was thirty of the most egregiously home-brewed, denim-clad, paramilitary Associates that Steve could have dreamed up. It was not a friendly place for him, at the bottom of the hill, and he could only assume that soon the distinct lack of friendliness would be traveling up the hill with noise and great flashing lights.
He, for his part, would very much have liked to run away. Each of the carrot and the stick seemed to be pointing in that direction. He found himself hoping- and realizing it was merely hope- that the Hermit would sway Sheila and they’d be still be able to take their leave of all of it with a minimum of fuss. Clearly this was unlikely, as Sheila had literally dig her heels in, the soft earth giving way as she braced herself in expletivorous tirade. Steve decided that whatever else he might do or be doing, he should probably at least be part of the discussion, since at the end of it his fate would be sealed, and he abandoned his clump of dirt and stepped closer to the haranguing in progress.
“…these pieces of shit take my home-“
“Which,” The Hermit said, “you hate.”
“It’s still mine and nobody’s going to come and take it from me.”
“They are, in fact. Maybe not those people down there, but someone will. Maybe after you die.”
“I’ll burn it down with myself inside it!” Steve, catching this, interjected.
“That seems extreme.”
“Oh welcome back, Dirtman, did you find something down there while all this has been happening?”
“No, I just figured I’d better be a part of this, since you’re gonna get me killed.” Sheila opened her mouth, took in air for the abusive reply that had already been formed and calibrated, and then her throat caught around it as she processed the words. The Hermit looked from one to the other, his patience taken straight out of some meditation workshop he’d probably done on his own, floating above the ocean on clouds of conspiratorial vapor. Steve glared at him. “And you can go or you can stay but this yo-yo shit doesn’t work for me. Why are you back here anyway?”
“Your friend doesn’t deserve to die,” The Hermit said, unflinching. “But he may, with you, which I don’t want. And you two can be reasoned with. You’re people. He’s a beast, and that,” he pointed down the slope at the trucks and the beards, “is a umob. An army in fetus. A would-be coup. So I am placing my bets.” He turned, showing a tattered backpack, filled to the bursting seams. “But they are not large ones.”
Steve was defeated. Sheila, having been defeated and attempting to rally, was not yet prepared to make a statement in their defense. The schnauzer stared at the trees. The mob shifted angrily, a pile of ants waiting for the grasshopper to seize and tip over. And The Hermit, wary eyes shifting in a constant figure eight, watched them all.
An inflection point, no? We think so. We consider it to be of vast importance what the outcome of this tete-a-tete is, especially within the bounded lives of the individuals involved. Who are you in this exchange? Surely you must be somewhere- and we think it would be the height of folly to suggest otherwise.
We think in terms of continuance. When will this or that end is not necessarily of great value, since all things end but the actual ending of all things is the point past which nothing matters and is a once in a thingtime event. And so the question of continuance is superemely relevant: how do things continue, contributing to the overall whole? What is the overall whole? What actually matters, and which direction is the best- these are questions that have answers only after the fact. But before the fact you can always ask how, in light of a given situation, might your decision impact the trajectory of things.
And we wonder how you might respond here, in this moment of minimum kinesis. There are lives on the line, but by now you’re used to that. It’s normal now, for Steve and Sheila and the dog, and it’s always been normal for the mob as a mob, and it’s possible that it’s so routine for Rob McKenna that it doesn’t even particularly register as a Tuesday for him. So how? Do you defy the odds and stay? Do you fight the concept itself? Do you watch and growl and lick your chops without understanding the concept of projectile weapons? Or do you reason with people who think you’re crazy, understanding that whether you are or not is irrelevant in the given moment?
It’s worth thinking about, we think, given that if you have to you’ll have wanted to.
The schnauzer, silent to this point, barked. It rang out across the new clearing and the old trees and each and every person standing on the sides of it felt a tingle in their vestigial tail, knowing fear- deep and primal- that in many ways most were otherwise unfamiliar with. It stood, posture and beard majestic, and without another word sprinted diagonally away, across the wiped out wasteland’s top edge and into the trees lining the other side.
Steve chased after it, shoulder jostling and doing a real referent number on his cardiovascular system. The mob turned, as flocks do, together and gawked, following this suicidal trailing. The Hermit receded expertly, to whence it would be difficult to say for any of them. Sheila stormed into the house, into the bedroom, into the closet, and retrieved from the trunk a gun of such breadth that when she returned to the top of the hill and was noticed wielding it some at the bottom, who must assuredly die at its muzzle in a wash of meaty gore, merely smiled in wonder. It was, deadly or not, the stuff of their dreams and they were not above appreciation. Of course, it would be theirs.
Steve reached the treeline well behind the schnauzer and thought to himself that the last time the two of them had been on foot together in the trees he’d had roughly a year’s worth of protein synthesis ripped from his body. What would the mayor have to say about this, he wondered, as he plunged into the semi-darkness. Or Mary at work. Probably not a whole lot, either of them.
As he picked his way through, snatching occasionally glimpses of a fuzzy, massive haunch, he thought about how he was currentoy running through an infinity shed of timber because he’d tried to track down an old load of it just because it came sanded and from a store. He was, to put it mildly, embarrassed about that, and even in the deepest, lightest part of his forgiving heart he knew that something was going to happen to him in payment for that silliness, and it wasn’t going to account for his shoulder.
The bottom of the hill approached. Curiously, the stand of trees nearest the road had always been thicker here. Now it blocked Steve’s view, and he found himself not particularly liking that, what with the militia near by and ready to kill him and all. But he’d come as far as he had, and the schnauzer was his friend, and unfortunately The Hermit was right as shit about the dog not deserving a fate worse than a fun meal and a bath. So he pushed through, exploded onto the road decently far to the side of where the militia stood, gaping as one, and found himself face to face with a mule.
“H’dy,” said a man, sitting atop a laden cart and smiling far too broadly to be representative of the situation. “Ya’ll do any tradin’ hereabouts?”
