Soda Pop And A Piss In The Woods

There were four of them in the car. Three of them were crammed in beside each other in the front seat, drowsy and cursing intermittently and squinting into the harsh sunrise that was splattering off a windshield already made bleary with insect grease. At some point in the night they had run themselves through a hatch in some damp, low country.

Lester Chardonay, who was seldom in a mood to brook opposition, was stretched across the back seat, laboring fitfully at sleep. From time to time he would sit up and glare with the others at the new day rising towards them down the highway.

Lester Chardonay was full of words.

“Smite and quench, boys,” he said. “Smite and quench.”

“When you put the instruments of might in the hands of them that’s right,” he said, “no injustice shall go unpunished.”

“And you shall bring his gray head down with blood to Sheol,” he said.

Lester Chardonay’s enthusiasm for some vague revenge, coupled with a long night of drinking, had resulted in the present excursion, an adventure which sunlight and uneasy sobriety were making less and less explicable to the men in the automobile’s front seat.

“I’ve never known you to leave town, Lester,” the driver said, craning his head around to address Lester in the back seat. “How come is it that you’ve come to grief with this fella clear out here?”

“Shut that thick head of yours and drive, you pea-brained son-of-a-bitch,” Lester said.

“Lester,” one of the other men said. “We was drunk. This here has become a labor, and a good piece of travel as well. Speaking for myself, I was expected this morning at the mill.”

“Gob Pritchett will kiss my ass if he has a word to say about it,” Lester said. “That mill ain’t a damn thing but gerbils on wheels.”

They drove then in silence until the sun was up out of their eyes.

“Pull over there alongside of them woods,” Lester said. “I intend to go back in there to do what a man does standing up that requires of a woman a crouch. I suspect the rest of you may need relieving as well.”

The other three men followed Lester Chardonay across the road, down into a ditch, and back into a wooded lot.

“Whether or not this is something that will enrich the soil is not a thing I am likely to know,” Lester said.

“This here is an awful nice place,” one of the other men said, smiling for Lester’s approval, which was not forthcoming. “I imagine there’s a creature or two living out here.”

One of the party went off in another direction, kicking around in the leaves. He let out a whoop. “Well I’ll be damned if there ain’t a bathtub right out here in the woods,” he said.

Lester Chardonay nodded his head and pawed at the steaming leaves with his boot. “Some was sure enough living here when this world was a better place and a man was free to shoot whatever moved through his land that didn’t belong.”

“That so, Lester?” one of the men asked.

Lester stared the man down, his jaw popping beneath his ears. “Get your sorry asses back in that car,” he said. “Before every last one of you follows my piss into this very ground.”

The three men hustled ahead of Lester Chardonay and piled back into the front seat of the car.

Later in the morning one of the men in the front seat spoke up. “Lester, I’d sure like to stop for a can of soda pop.”

“That’s a reasonable request,” Lester said, and issued an order: “Stop this here car at the first place you see along the road that has bottles of soda pop. I am thirsty as the devil himself for a can of Coca Cola.”

When they had stopped a short time later, and were standing around the car stretching and drinking their soda, Lester Chardonay made this announcement: “Many times in my long life the devil has appeared to me as a horseman, taunting me with this errand undone. Up the road a piece, near the next town over, is a snake of a fella who once upon a time gave my mama a bastard child, and put my old man in such a state that life was no use without too much liquor. That good man drunk himself into the earth howling, and my mama, as you may know, went off all those many years ago to live with that child I never did see. This here man is the man that done that awful thing to my life, and I intend to boil the meat from his skull and use it for a piss cup.”

“Aw, Lester!” one of the men said, screwing up his face.

“Mister!” Lester Chardonay shouted, turning on the man with a trembling index finger. “If you ain’t got the stomach for justice, you best stay on right here, because we sure as shit didn’t come this long way for a soda pop and a piss in the woods.”

“I can’t kill a man, Lester,” the driver of the car said.

“Then you are going to watch a man who can,” Lester Chardonay said.

They took a gravel road off the highway and drove a mile or so to a place all alone at the end of a lane, a dirt yard with a chained dog, and an old camper covered from top to bottom with bumper stickers.

“Holy smokes,” one of the men in the front seat said. “It looks like this fella’s been everywhere.”

“Not yet, he ain’t,” Lester said. “You all just watch.” He leaned up over the front seat and glared in the direction of the camper. “Ain’t there one of you sorry bastards gonna help old Lester Chardonay send this fella on his way?”

The men in the front seat stared straight ahead. An old man appeared at the front door of the camper and stepped out onto the porch. He squinted out at the car parked there in his yard.

“He’s an old fella,” one of the men said. “And awful damn skinny. I don’t think you ought to do it, Lester. It don’t seem right. That there’s an old man.”

Lester Chardonay sputtered and turned red. “You cowardly sons of bitches,” he said, and sprung from the backseat.

The old man took a step forward from the porch and leaned a bit toward the visitor in his yard. “Yes?” he said.

The men in the car heard two shots, and saw the old man pitch forward from the top step of the porch. The dog let out a howl and scrambled to the end of its chain, where it jerked mightily and collapsed in the dirt. It regained its feet and crawled away beneath the camper. Lester Chardonay shouted something the other men in the car could not hear.

One of the other men reluctantly helped Lester Chardonay dispose of the old man’s body in a cistern out behind the camper.

Back in the car Lester Chardonay said, “You can’t tell me this world knows the difference one way or the other.”

The three men in the front seat were hunched towards home, squinting into the sun that was now burning down on them from directly above.

“Let’s just see what the devil has to say now,” Lester Chardonay said.