Rare Air
Part Seven
Kelly was the first of us to go.
She went type one. I think most of us around the mountain had finally stopped bothering with the who made who, who coughed, who caught it, a while before that. Most just accepted it as her time. She had the cough, persistent and worsening, followed by fevers, chills, stomach ache, diarrhea, migraines. The usual full body melt down that involves type one.
No one had to call me. I came by and stayed with her as she sat up on her bunk and refused to move. I sat with my best friend and talked to her after she was done talking or doing anything else. I sat with the slow drying, tree trunk that I used to know and I stayed while the lights went out and the limbs stiffened. It was up to me to watch until the end and then Drew and I pulled her rigor taught corpse up the trail to a significant spot. We dug out a shallow grave and pulled her into it and I know we both stopped while we waited for someone else to say something meaningful.
“You remember Centralia?”
I laughed; I couldn’t help myself. How could I forget, how could he? We were sleeping in an old abandoned, by the hour, motel for the night and a group of good old boys’ road up on us in trucks. There must have been twenty of them, all armed to the teeth. Drew was looking for ways out and I was readying a last-ditch plan to shoot two of them with my shotgun and then die for sure but Kelly shrugged me off as I tried to stop her from walking out of the motel room half naked with nothing in her hands.
Kelly climbed right up in the face of their leader and started yelling obscenities and he was happy to comply until it turned into a chirp fest. The animal just wanted to look good in front of his lesser but along came Kelly to hand him his ass in front of his crew. Every worthless word he had to hand out got buried by something brilliantly mean that she was already shouting and as she reached him, she produced a nickel platted .45 out of the waist band of her shorts and that was it. Game over.
None of his boys cared anymore that some chick was sticking a gun under the chin of the boss man, because he was already the boss of nothing. Kelly didn’t even need to pull the trigger to kill him. Moreover, none of the rest of us had to get involved. The big idiot tried to play it off and back away and sure as shit we found him on the road side the next day with his cuts cut open.
Thinking back on that and a dozen or so times just like it I said the only thing I could as we stood around the grave, “She was toughest fucking person I’ve ever known.”
Drew hitched and started whipping away tears.
I reached out and pulled his hands away and stuck a small bottle of R&R into his hands. “It’s the end times. I think we can finally bury that men don’t cry bullshit.”
I guess that loosened and relieved him because Drew took a swig and proceeded to ball his eyes dry.
Drew went a month later.