Lovell Wyoming, July 2016

It troubled a man to work away the day according to a lifeway he had settled for, a life divorced from his nature, his training and his ancestry.

His grandfather had been on Black Jack Pershing’s general staff, had chased Poncho Villa and served in the Argonne Forest with distinction.

His father had driven McArthur’s jeep, had drunk his whiskey, had been there in Manilla and Inchon.

Shayne had missed Vietnam, but Uncle Don had been a LRRP and had passed on the passion for elite army action to his nephew.

Rounding up construction workers on Granada, Blasting heavy metal music at Pineapple Face in Panama, bug hunting snipers in El Salvador, peace keeping in Kosovo, calling in air strikes on white SUVs in Iraq, big game hunting in Afghanistan and then managing water restoration projects back in Iraq again—where did it all lead?

To being interviewed by Black Water, Haliburton, Triple Canopy, Executive Outcomes, by all these scumbag multinational neo-con merchants of death…no, that was not my kind of army, he had told himself. And after he was told to pass female soldiers on navigation tests they had failed and he refused to do so…

Well, carpentry wasn’t that bad. At least he finished things instead of generating loose ends for needle-dicked management type, rear echelon motherfuckers to tangle up!

But the little doll here at Steve’s Diner, always with the smile and the iced coffee in summer, piping hot in winter, she made morning worth it. In fact, he returned for lunch as often as possible, just so that he could experience the granddaughter he might have had if he hadn’t misspent his life serving Uncle Sam—who just fucking turned out to be a tranny!

Two-hundred years is a long time in the closet, don’t you think!

No tattoos or piercings or feminist bullshit, just a good clean country girl with a smile for granddad to ease his aching joints and mind a little further down the road to hell.

He stood at the lunch counter, just in from a hot dusty half day and was almost tempted to wonder what if he were still young—but wiped that notion from his mind. At 65 it was time to settle the heart, not shock it into some rude reawakening.

As the rumble of four motorcycles abated outside on the street, he stepped aside to let the two old ladies place their order…

…Somedays life tests a man and it did this day.

Three, big, fat, bikers with the patched leather and denim and all that gang bullshit pushed in behind him and kept talking suggestively to the doll behind the counter, who, after 3 years, he had never bothered learn her name for fear it would seem improper. They let her know they were interested and didn’t stop at that. They started talking about “turning” her, and “bringing her over to the dark side,” just loud enough so that she could hear. She was uncomfortable, blew it off, and then grew worried when she looked up into Shayne’s eyes and asked him, “The usual?”

Then they said something about her “titties” which stoked rage in his brain. He winced and she blinked and he said, “Piping hot, darlin’”

Bikes could be heard rumbling up outside, a lot of them. Then the biggest one behind him snickered, like some sissy, “Darlin’?”

In his youth he could have turned about and laid these three fat boys down like so many bales of hay. But hell, he was so stiff these days it hurt to even take his tool belt off for lunch. And she returned, soldiering on, in the face of what was about to be a very humiliating few minutes, maybe an hour—or two, if the guts on these fuckers were any indication as to their dedication to food.

He paid absently as more bikes roared up, took off the plastic lid from the 20 ounce cup of piping hot coffee and said, “You have a nice day, miss,” left the change on the counter, turned, and splashed that cup of coffee right into the eyes of the big bearded fuck to the left, closest to the door. The creature screamed like a pig and as the eyes of his giant, sissy friends grew big, Shayne dropped the cup, thumbed the one in the center in the eye with his left as he stepped right drawing his claw hammer and sent it whistling into that blubbery jaw.

The one old lady said, “Oh my Lord,” as the big eye-poked faɡɡot clutched at his eye and Shayne caved in the center of his forehead, reaching brain with remarkably little effort.

That boy is dead, so the gloves come off. It’s end time.

Shane looked down and saw the one squirming who had his eyes seared and stomped out all of his teeth with two boot heel crunches.

The ones from outside were looking in, one unlooping a ball peen hammer and headed for the door while others went for knives and chain belts and such. So he went into psychological warfare mode, employed the claw of the hammer and hooked the bearded chin of the one who had mocked him, and no lay dead drooling face first on the floor, drew his boning knife—yes, I was to go fishing today for cutthroat trout with good old Bob—as he pulled back the slack head and had a surprisingly easy time separating that big pumpkin head from those flabby tattooed shoulders.

As he rose with the bloody knife in his left hand and the severed head hanging by the beard from his claw hammer, he looked at the first three pushing through the door and said, “Which one of you fat faɡɡots want your head on my trailer hitch—‘cause this one’s goin’ on the hood.”

They backed up. Soon, outside he kept up the scare, drawing them all as far away from the counter as possible, holding the head out in front to keep them all at bay, dangling and dripping from his best hammer, the knife in the other hand and kicking over a bike—which brought them all to bellyaching like he had tracked mud on a sorority house carpet—before he waltzed out into the center of the street and let the Indian in him get the best of the situation and gave a good Crazy Horse yell as a good half-dozen of the so-called “outlaws” dialed 911 quick as those fat fingers could type…

…As he sat in the back seat of the Sheriff’s truck looking absently at the big blubbering sissies hugging each other, crying, moaning, calling their mamma on their smart phone like some ghetto shit birds who couldn’t handle boot camp inoculation, he heard distantly the voice of the man who he had only ever called Sheriff and was embarrassed that the Sheriff had taken the time to learn his name, “Jesus, Shayne, they are just a bunch of fat perverts—don’t you think you could have stopped short of the Viking show…I was right across the street, for hell’s sake.”

The tone of the old veteran’s voice sounded sour and strange to his ear, all the more because he felt it in his throat as he spoke the words with nary a thought, having punched that last ticket, wondering absently if he had ruined her little day, or if it was the day’s fault, “War waits for no man.”

And without those fat, tattooed biker faɡɡots cried the tears of softness and ease…

“War waits for no man!” the madman screamed through the window that shielded those that deserved the righteous rope of yesteryear.