The Easterner: Part the Second

Guagina made her way elegantly across the hardwood floor. Even with her thong and pasties covered with the fawn and blue track suit, she was impressive, 5' 11" in bare feet, plus three inch heels topped by a cloud of flame red hair. She was on a delicate diplomatic mission.

The bar was empty, except for her, Lefty the one-armed barkeep, and Les. A few days in the humid atmosphere of the bar had allowed the cowpies to absorb water, beer, spit, and tobacco juice, and they were beginning to support ecosystems of their own. Lefty was losing his shirt, but at the moment was more concerned about his remaining limbs. Gaugina wasn't making any tips either.

"Hey Les, what's up with Britt?"

"She's still in El Paso. She's got the money to bail her Mom out, but Grandma wants to wait while Marjean detoxes a bit."

OK, Killer hadn't bitten her head off. She delicately broached the subject of Super Conformal field theories. Les responded immediately, almost eagerly. He was bored as hell and he thought Guagina might provide some ammo for use against the Easterner.

Guagina had spent eight months as a postdoc in the MIT theory group before deciding to seek a more financially and culturally rewarding career.

Les had more questions than usual, and even seemed to be on the verge of comprehending the connection between space-time and worldsheet supersymmetry, so she shifted right to the point.

"That goddamn cowshit is stinking up the place and driving off all the customers. It's not even good for throwing anymore - it's lost its structural integrity."

Les glowered a bit, then: "Lefty, get this goddamn cowshit out of here. And clean up the f****** pool table. Get some more, and stack it
outside this time, in the Sun."

...

Dusty had been in town for more than a week, and had yet to make a move.

In fact, he had hardly moved at all. The journey had been brutally hard, especially that last 800 miles through the howling sandstorm. He had been sand-blasted, wind-blasted, sun-blasted, gypsum-blasted, and hailstoned. He had been hit by tumbleweeds, windlofted goatheads, and even a couple of beer cans thrown by pickup truck passengers. Large chunks of flesh had been slashed by dried flying mesquite branches. A lesser man would have quit. A better bicyclist would have beaten the sandstorm.

Something might have snapped in Dusty when he passed that "Welcome to Las Cruces" sign. He was exhausted, dehydrated, starved, and largely deracinated. Somewhere inside, a "Mission Accomplished" banner had been slapped up, and he couldn't even remember what the mission had been.

We can only speculate as to what his fate might have been had he not been taken in by a kindly family of evangelical gun rights advocates. Among them, and among the congregation of the Natural Rights of Americans (or NRA) church he thought, at least for a while, that he had found ideological soulmates. Together, they prayed for President Cheney, Presidential Cheerleader Bush, and the unmoved mover (Exxon Mobile).

The NRA church encouraged audience participation, and Dusty soon became a popular figure with his fiery sermons against Communism, socialism, liberalism, climate doomsayers and Loop Quantum Gravity. OK, maybe nobody had any idea what the hell he was talking about most of the time, but he said what he said with God intoxicated passion.

...

(to be continued?)

...