C. Box - Free Fire

With that, Keaton calmed himself, sighed, and settled back on his stool. “So drink up, Joe, for tomorrow we die.”

Joe looked at Nate. Nate shrugged.

“So it doesn’t matter about the tiny little things you’re concernedabout,” Keaton said, his voice moderating so he sounded almost reasonable, “your murders and your laws. Your jurisdiction.Once I realized that, the snowmobile emissions in YellowstonePark seemed so. . trivial. So stupid. So pointless. Nothing matters. We’re trivial pissants in the big scheme of things, fleas, fly shit in the pepper.”

Joe sipped his beer but it tasted bitter. He stanched a wild impulse to call Marybeth and tell her to grab the girls and flee to the root cellar.

“So I don’t concern myself with laws or causes anymore,” Keaton said. “I don’t get worked up about what used to be my passions-emissions, or recycling, or the trashing of the environment.We humans have such a high opinion of ourselves- especially my old brethren in the movement. We think we’re gods on earth, that by merely changing our behavior or, more important, changing the behavior of the heathen industrialists and capitalists, that we can actually affect the outcome of the planet. We’re so unbelievably arrogant and elite, so blind, so stupid.We think we can control the world. It’s so tremendously silly I laugh when I think about it. It would be similar to if all the germs on our bartender’s head decided to get together to prevent him from farting. It makes no difference what they decide or what they think-he’ll still fart like a heifer.”

The bartender, who’d been listening, looked offended.

Doomsayer continued, “Such efforts are beyond quixotic- they’re comically hopeless. So we take infinitesimal little actionslike preventing oil exploration, or recycling our beer cans, or driving hybrid cars that cost twenty-five times what a Third World worker makes in a year, or shaming other people for their desire to live well and prosper. .”

Keaton paused, let the word trail off, then shouted: “Ha! I say ha! Because once this baby goes,” he yelled, pointing at the floor between his dirty shoes, “ once this baby goes , none of those things matter. Nothing matters. We’re stir-fry.”

The bar was absolutely silent. Even the Zephyr employees at the tables looked wide-eyed at Keaton. Only the old drunk next to him slept through the reverie.

“So,” Joe said, “if you really believe all that, why are you here? Why aren’t you on some island in the Pacific?”

“Because, Joe,” he said in a singsong, as if explaining fundamentaltruths to a child, “when it goes I want to go with it. Instantly,in a flash of light with a drink in my hand. I don’t want to huddle, shivering, in my apartment in Brooklyn or Boston while ash and snow blankets the city until I freeze slowly in the dark. I don’t want to be on an island watching the ocean turn slowly milk-colored with ash and dead fish. I want to be here, ground zero, where I can watch and monitor the thermal activityso I can be right here ordering that drink with my so-called friends around me.”

“You mean there are others who think like you do?”

“Dozens,” he said. “We’re known as the Geyser Gazers. We serve a true purpose for the Park Service-charting eruptions and thermal activity. It used to be an easy job-sedentary- sitting on a bench waiting for a geyser to erupt and noting it in a little book. But that was in the old days, before the ground started to rise. Now, it’s crazy. Geysers that used to go like clockwork have stopped entirely. Meanwhile, long-dormant geysers-monsters, some of them-are shooting off all over the park like fifteen-year-old boys on vacation. It’s like the earth’s guts are churning, ready to vomit! The signs of the apocalypse are all around, but only a few of us-my compatriots in the Geyser Gazers-have the knowledge and foresight to realize what is happening right in front of our eyes.”

As he spoke he turned toward the bar, in profile, and Joe suddenlyknew where he’d seen Keaton before.

“So you try to keep up with what’s going on in the park, huh?” Joe asked.

Keaton hesitated a moment. “Yes. .”

“So you probably knew Rick Hoening and his buddies?”

“Savages! Nonbelievers!”

“And you like to check out visitors,” Joe said. “Is that why you and your buddy there were in the Mammoth Hotel last night? Trying to see what I was doing here?”

That stopped Keaton. His eyes narrowed until they were nearly shut. “We were there,” he admitted, “but not why you think.”

“Then why?”

“In a moment,” Keaton said. “I have to urinate. Which,” he said, sliding unsteadily off his stool, “if you take my philosophy to its logical conclusion so it applies to absolutely everything- like pissing your pants instead of going to the restroom after you’ve drunk too much beer-one would go mad while being stinky as well. But there is still something to be said for simple human dignity, despite all that.” And he staggered to the men’s room in the back.

After a few beats, Nate turned to Joe. “I thought he might have been one of them. I heard him mention he came from the north this morning.”

“I wonder what he wants,” Joe said.

“My guess is it’ll surprise you.”

“Meaning what?” Joe said, his mind still reeling.

“If we want to understand motivation,” Nate said, “we might want to step outside convention and procedure. We might need to consider that some things happen up here because it truly is different.”

“What are you saying?”

Nate shook his head. “I’m not sure. But since dozens of peoplehave studied this crime and come up with nothing, maybe we need to try and think about it differently. Maybe we need to consider that what happened was absolutely unique to this place, and for a reason we never even thought of before.”

Joe nodded. “Maybe.”

Nate drained his beer. The bartender pointed at the clock behindthe bar, signaling it was time to close.

“I didn’t like that bit about germs and me farting,” the bartendersaid. “Didn’t like it one bit.”

As if on cue, the bartender reached out both hands to grip the bar and Joe felt suddenly unsteady but didn’t know why. Then he heard the tinkling of liquor bottles on the shelf behind the bar, and he saw ringlets form in the water in the sink. Just as quickly as it happened, it was still again.

“Just an earthquake,” the bartender said. “Little one.”

“My God,” Joe whispered, turning to Nate. “So that’s who you wanted me to meet, Doomsayer.”

“No, not really.”

“Then why did you bring me here?”

Nate took a deep breath and his eyes flitted away for a second.Joe was confused.

Nate walked over to Keaton’s companion, who was still sleeping on the bar.

“You said you saw two men in the hallway up in Mammoth,” Nate said. “Two old guys. Doomsayer was one of them, I think we know now. Is this the other one?”

He grabbed a fistful of thin hair on the head of the companionand pulled his face up. Joe felt as if a lightning bolt of bile surged up into his throat. His boots seemed spot-welded to the floor.

Oh, how he recognized that face.

“Dad. .” Joe said, but the word croaked out.

Two bloodshot, rheumy eyes cracked open, wobbled, focused.

“Son,” George Pickett said thickly.

“This is why I wanted you to leave your gun,” Nate said.

Joe awoke to the sound of old faithful eruptingoutside his window, which for an instant he thought was his stomach. Assured that it wasn’t, he threw back the sheets, padded barefoot to the window, and parted the curtains to watch the geyser once again, wondering if it would ever be possible to get tired of seeing it. He didn’t think so. He marveled at the furiouschurning of steam and water, the angry noise that accompaniedthe eruption, and was struck how some gouts of water punched through the billows into thin, cold air and paused at their apex, breaking apart into fat droplets that caught the sun, and plunged back down to earth.