Special Beam Cannon

My cousin owns his own construction business. He does wood flooring, roofing, fireplaces, countertops and specialty custom work. He’s self-taught. He doesn’t have a business license. He doesn’t advertise. He doesn’t have a business name. Everything is word-of-mouth. If you’re a local you hire him.

He fired me once. He just fired our friend Joe. He said Joe’s loser ass can’t figure this shit out. He’ll hire Joe back. He’s hired me back then fired me again. The pay is cash-money, under the table.

We were at the local bar in town during a blizzard. The bar was established in 1886. My great grandpa, who broke in wild horses at a ranch in Colorado, beat up three guys at the same time at this bar after one of them tried to slit his throat. Some old guys still talk about it. 

Two guys robbed my cousin at gunpoint in the parking lot of this bar. One guy hit him in the head with a hammer while the other guy pointed the shotgun. But my cousin wrestled the shotgun away and put them both in the hospital. The shotgun wasn’t loaded, which was stupid on their part. People still talk about that.

The bar owner is a biker cokehead. It’s a family-owned business that doesn’t seem to care about profit. They won awards for their burgers. If you don’t order a burger, you might offend everybody, especially the owner and his biker friends.

Joe was in the bathroom doing cocaine with the owner. The bathroom is small with the urinal positioned to the left of the entrance with no divider. If you’re a local you know that when you walk into the bathroom, if you’re not looking at the upper right corner, you might see another dude’s dick and then make awkward eye contact.

Joe kept playing kid rock on the jukebox, pissing me off, but that’s Joe. Take him or leave him. He means no harm. You need to accept him. 

My aunt died a long time ago. Joe’s mom was a school teacher who died. Now my mom was dying. I got treated different since my mom’s diagnosis. Like being a new inductee into a secret treehouse club for guys raised by moms but the moms are now dead or dying. We carry around this pulsing orb of light in our chest because we hate the world.

I ate some edibles before going out. The bar was packed. Green Christmas lights blinked. The roof slowly caving in from years of neglect.

If you had a snowmobile, you just rode that. Some of the guys with jobs at the chemical plant were drinking in the middle of the bar. Wearing snowmobile suits like kids at recess. Red faced. Being the loudest. My cousin and I were hunched up at the bar. I had a crush on the bartender because I’m a lonely idiot. She was too busy to talk.

The chemical plant guys would yee haw too loud and my cousin would peer over his shoulder, annoyed. 

I looked outside, through the crowd of people, through people smoking on the patio, at the blizzard. You couldn’t tell the difference between the roads and sidewalks anymore. Everything was a level field of sparkling snowflakes.

Joe walked out of the bathroom and sat by me. He was sniffling. I don’t do cocaine. I don’t know why. It’s just something I never cared for. Joe decided to go play pool. I ordered another drink.

About ten minutes later we heard shouting and a pool cue fall to the floor. The biggest chemical plant guy, who was wearing a neon green Polaris snowmobile suit, was standing over Joe yelling in his face. Apparently, Joe had been dancing around and knocked the guy’s drink over.

The chemical plant guy was drinking a Red Bull vodka like a real piece of shit.

Joe is nonconfrontational. He’s small and fragile.

The chemical plant guy was poking him in the chest calling him a fucking druggy loser. Only my cousin can call Joe that. 

My cousin shook his head, put his face in his hands. Him and Joe grew up together. Sometimes that was a cross to bear.

My cousin ordered the chemical plant guy another Red Bull vodka. 

The heaviness of the edibles surged up and down my legs.

My cousin grabbed the Red Bull vodka from the bartender and walked it over to the chemical plant guy, who was demanding money from Joe. Joe had his wallet out. His fingers fumbling grubby dollar bills. A little teary eyed. My cousin walked between them, shoving the Red Bull Vodka into the chemical plant guy’s chest, some of it spilling on his snowmobile suit. The chemical plant guy looked up at my cousin. He took the drink, nodded, said thank you and turned his back to him.

Joe sat by me again. I ordered him jalapeno poppers with another Busch Light draft. I patted him on the back and told him not to worry about it. Told him everyone hates that fucking guy. But before long Joe danced back into the void of the drunken crowd.

At around midnight I was talking to random people about random shit I didn’t know anything about. This dude Frankie was getting evicted from his apartment and started crying. Everyone felt embarrassed for him. Every once in a while, people walked in from snowplowing and told tales of the savage blizzard outside, holding their hands waste high then chest high then neck high to show how deep the snow was in the fields and how we were lucky to be drinking in a bar.

My cousin’s phone lit up. He answered and seemed confused, asking “What?” and “Where?” I watched him talk on the phone, knowing I’d be involved somehow. He shook his head, slammed his phone down and the bar shook.

The music was loud so you had to yell. “What’s up?” I said, leaning over.

“We have to pick up dumbass.”

I twisted around on my barstool and surveyed everyone behind me. “Where the fuck is he?”

“The Tracks.”

“How the fuck did he get out there?”

“I have no fucking clue.” We stood up and we put on our Carharts.  “The Tracks are surrounded by farm fields,” I said zipping up my coat.

“Yeah, I know.” 

I told the bartender we’d be back. She didn’t care.

We walked into the fucking cold, snow stinging our faces. The snow in the parking lot was above my boot line. The cold wet soaking through my jeans.

I drove an old green Chevy Z71 rust bucket full of junk. We brushed the layer of snow off my truck and climbed inside. It rumbled to life. I put it in four-low.

The Tracks are on a backroad where a railroad track crosses and for some reason it created a ramp in the middle of the road. Like it wasn’t made properly and never got fixed. There’s no road sign indicating this, so if you’re not a local and you’re driving down that road it’s easy to launch your car into the air and die. Back in high school my friends and I would jump stolen cars out there.

My truck slowly bogged through the small neighborhood streets. Small houses snowed in with their outside lights shining.

We got out of town and into the whiteout. Just blackness without a moon. The headlights lit up the snow pounding down on us from the night sky. You couldn’t tell where the roads ended and the farm fields started. The truck bogged and drifted and floated. 

You have to know when to speed up and when to let off the gas and when to keep it steady. You can’t be taught this. If you accelerate too hard at the wrong time you sink and your tires just spin. But you have to know when to start gathering up speed to make it through a big drift.

I was going slow, then I’d gun it to power through a snowdrift, flooring it only to just barely make it out of getting stuck. I took a drink of my beer and put it back in the center console. My cousin held onto the oh-shit-bar and murmured variations of “fucking Goddamn it” every time we almost got stuck, spitting chewing tobacco into a Big Gulp cup, paper towel in the cup soaking up the brown spit.

I could see a light ahead. Not a house light. It was brighter and swayed in the wind.

As I got closer, I could see The Tracks and I could see that the light was actually a tall fire on the other side of The Tracks. My truck’s suspension bottomed out as I drove over The Tracks. I thought we’d get stuck for a split second but I kept the pedal all the way down, the engine screaming, the tires spraying snow as my back end swerved. I wobbled the steering wheel back and forth, trying to get the right front tire to grip. The tires released and the truck lurched forward. 

Joe was standing next to the fire, only wearing a hoodie and jeans. His arms crossed. His shoulders hunched. He tromped through the snow, raising his knees. My truck was an extended cab so I had to get out and pull the set forward to let him in the back. He had to move a bunch of junk over to fit. I hopped back into my truck, beers cans and random garbage fell out and blew into the darkness of the fields beyond.

My cousin turned to Joe, who was shivering in the backseat, his teeth chattering. My cousin called him a stupid fucking asshole. Joe said he was sorry. My cousin waved his hand as if to say don’t worry about it.

Joe grabbed us beers out of the thirty pack in the back seat. The inside of the truck was cozy against blizzard, like driving a NASA rover on a savage alien planet that didn’t care about our survival.

I looked at the fire burning into the night sky on the side of the road. It looked like a couch fire my friends and I would burn at parties back in the day. I looked at Joe trying to warm up in the backseat.

I pointed at the fire and said, “Joe, what the fuck is that?”

Joe, still shivering, black soot on his face. He took a sip of beer and said, “It was that guy’s snowmobile.”

My cousin tossed his head back laughing. He punched the ceiling of my truck and hooted. His teeth shining against the night.

Joe explained that he went outside for a cigarette and saw the guy’s snowmobile parked out front, so he started it up and took off. The engine started knocking then smoking and caught on fire. Joe hopped off just as the engine caught fire. He used the fire for warmth. 

The blizzard already covered the snowmobile tracks on our way to pick him up. Blizzards are good at covering up everything. They won’t find anything until April.

It was a brand-new Polaris. Bright green. It was four-stroke with reverse. We think it costed around ten grand. 

We laughed the whole way back to the bar. What a fucking idiot. We hotboxed a joint and laughed harder. My ribs hurt. I cried. I forgot I existed. We laughed imagining the chemical plant guy stumbling outside only to find nothing. I almost went off the road and into a deep ditch from laughing, my cousin grabbed the steering wheel to keep the truck on the road, and then we laughed about that. We laughed like apocalyptic raiders. We laughed like wild bucks in the deep woods. Our chest opened up and powerful beams of light shot into the night sky, signaling our motherships to pick us up.

We got back to the bar parking lot. The blizzard seemed to have died down. My steering wheel was turning hard from all the snow caked into the wheel wells. My trucks undercarriage was hard compounded layers of packed snow. Heat from the engine melting it. Water dripped down like a bad leak. I thought about leaving my truck running so the melting snow wouldn’t freeze and bend my frame, but I was too fucked up to care and my truck was already a piece of shit.

We walked back in, shook off the cold. Nobody took our seats at the bar. We sat back down, waiting for the bar to close so we could catch the chemical plant guy in the parking lot.