Chapter 23

the sound: the Doors – Light My Fire, Buffalo Springfield – For What it’s Worth, The Beatles – All You Need Is Love, Procol Harum – A Whiter Shade of Pale, Santana – Samba Para Ti,
REO Speedwagon – Can’t Fight This Feeling, Styx – Lady, Pink Floyd - Breathe

I whirl around to look at Boomer in all his derelict glory and he grins kinda funny and shows me a new tattoo on his shoulder…of a road and a big storm cloud and a bolt of lightening. “Got this to “commorialize” it” he says.

“That’s commemorate or memorialize Boomer” I correct and he agrees “commemorialize!”

I shake my head at him, “Let me get this straight?” I ask, “you…you got hit by lightening and lived to tell the tale?”

Boomer puffs his chest up and launches into a story of how he was riding along the highway somewhere in Wyoming after Sturgis. He’s not too clear on where exactly he was, but he’s also not too clear if this is as a result of his being zapped by lightening or 10 days of partying in Sturgis.

“Go figure?.....Probably the partying” I think to myself, having witnessed Boomer on a roll on more than one occasion. I remind him of the time he bit wee Suzie’s ass (before she became Al’s wife) while she was shooting pool in my bar and how before she could turn around and cuff him he’d lost a tooth (er in his case a rotten stump) to one of the rivets in the ass of her jeans.

Boomer ignores my shot and continues the story to tell me that when he got hit it was raining and the jolt picked him and his bike up offa the highway and threw him into the ditch and the only reason he didn’t die is cos he was too damn ornery.

“er ugly” Robert says from behind me and I almost choke on my pulled pork sandwich.

“Ugly it is” Boomer replies as Robert reaches his hand out to me. I place my hand in his and he leads me back to the firepit and my beer drinking obligation.

Robert seats himself on “his throne” as I’m now thinking of his chair and someone brings a smaller version over and settles it right beside his chair. He pats the seat and I sit down and balance my plate of food and the beer someone hands me on the arm.

“Boomer was actually in a pretty bad way when we found him” Robert murmurs, and I catch myself leaning forward to hear him over the noise. “We thought for a while that he was dead but BarnYard was able to get his heart started…and that’s why ya can’t separate them two numbskulls now.”

“Robert certainly is quiet.” I think while I watch Boomer and BarnYard grapple over a bottle of Jim Bean.