It hadn’t been more than 7 hours, when I heard the sirens in the distance. The noise got louder until I could see the flashing lights and then hear tires on the gravel on the dirt road outside. How had we gotten into this mess? It had started out so simply, as these things always did. Long neck Imperials at the Monkey Bar, a few games of pool, a bar fight with some drunk off his ass local and then a quick departure before his brothers, his uncles, his amigos arrived.
This time it went sideways… Jim shouldn’t have used the pool stick, and the cue ball was just the cherry. Slung at the locals face, hard enough so that his lip exploded and I saw the man clutching a front tooth in his fingers wet with blood as he slowly recovered from the blow and then raised himself. They guy was big, and faster than you’d expect for someone weighing 230/240 pounds. We had bumped into him that morning, that day’s Mad Jesus – an term we had come to call anyone with Jesus length head and facial hair and a crappy “I own this break” attitude. He kept dropping in in front of us and things were somewhat heated on the water before he departed for work. Good fortune and good riddance, we thought.
Jedediah Paulson 
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