The Gunslinger

Just when you think you figured life out, you are constantly bombarded with images of things that blow you out of your socks. I had just come back from the island after a night of alcoholic debauchery when my buddy's ride got a flat. We had to stop some rinkey dink tire shop in the middle of Mercedes on a Sunday afternoon. You see these places all the time. A ragtag shop with the colors of the building long faded. The tools and equipment lying around to give any sort of cleanliness a big hearty fuck you. The store was manned by a middle aged man with dirty blue jeans and a sleaveless black shirt covering his muscular, yet tired body. The man was working in a sort of undying, fatigued war with his tires. With him, there was a boy of no more than 7 or 8 running around a same quiet candor as the man. At first I thought the boy was the man's son only to find out later that he was the boy's uncle. This kid was running around pulling hoses and wheeling tires around like a champ. The boy was restless in his work and the boy apparently knew how the hell to work around in a tire shop with the rest of them. He actually got the bolts off the tire by himself with no assistance from his uncle. The way he worked around it, he could have fixed the flat and had it back on in no less than 15 minutes where a couple of hungover assholes would have taken about 30 minutes to do the same. The boy was that good. Seeing a boy wheel a 40 pound jack by himself and about to jack it up until his uncle came by is definitely a sight to behold. Standing about 3 1/2, 4 feet tall where he should have been riding around the neighborhood with his friends looking for frogs to blow up was working like a bandit at a tire shop. I don't have a solid opinion about what I saw, but I will say this. The kid was a gunslinger in the most true form. I hope that boy has one hell of a life.