I Think I Win

“Oh, yea? Well, did you ever get bit by a bull shark snorkeling off Isla Morada Key? I did, and it hurts, by God. Luckily, I think he just wanted to taste me to see if I was a seal.”

“Sorry, Harley, but I’m calling bullshit on that one. In the first place, I happen to know that there are no seals anywhere near Isla Morada Key. Secondly, how do you know you don’t taste just like seal? They’re mammals, too, even if they don’t have hands like chimps. I don’t think that would have anything to do with the taste. Buffalo aren’t cows but they taste similar. I’ll bet if I cooked you up a buffalo steak and fed it to you along with a round steak, you couldn’t tell the difference… especially if I put barbecue sauce on it. I just ain’t buying the ‘taste me to see if I was a seal’ bit. Let’s see the scar. Oh, wait, he probably bit you on the dick—never mind… at least the wound would be so small it wouldn’t take any stitches. And last but not least, why was a shark snorkeling off Isla Morada Key? I think they’re pretty much good to go without any artificial help.”

“Yea, well, I don’t think sharks have barbecue sauce to dull their taste buds like one particular stupid candy-ass I know who shall remain nameless but whose initials are S-T-I-N-K M-A-X-W-E-L-L— and the bite was just a small nip, it barely pierced my wetsuit, if you must know.”

“Oh, I’m the candy-ass? Why did you have a wetsuit on, Harley? I happen to know you went to Florida in July, when the water temperature was probably close to eighty degrees. That leads me to my next question. How do you know it was a bull shark and not a mako or tiger or freaking great white, for that matter? Are you a marine biologist, too, besides being an authority on every subject who spends forty adventure-packed hours a week driving a cement truck?”

“I may drive a cement truck, asshole, but at least my wife doesn’t spend every evening wearing knee pads in the parking lot of the truck stop on I-70. Maybe if her husband had a real job instead of spending his time ripping up losing tickets at Hialeah Race Track, your poor wife wouldn’t have to spend eight hours a night burping trucker spooge!”

“Oh, really, Harley? Well, if she's not at the truck stop, where does your wife turn her tricks, then? Do you allow her to use your guest bedroom?”

Harley Leathers and Stink Maxwell stared each other down with precision perfected by years of concerted effort in the practice thereof. Conversations in the barroom continued uninterrupted, yet neither heard anything but the beating of his heart as minds selectively filtered all unnecessary sound. All movement in either man’s peripheral vision took on the appearance of a protracted slow-mo scene in some violent B-movie.

In the fullness of time as defined by the duration of the Allman Brothers rendition of “Whipping Post”, Harley Leathers blinked. It wasn’t a full blink, more a semi-blink offered in response to an external stimulus such as a fly landing on the eyeball itself or an unexpected breeze slamming into his face, but it was still a blink, and could only be ignored if unseen. The sudden grin on Stink Maxwell’s face revealed that no such ignorance would be possible.

“Busted! You lose, that’ll be one Budweiser longneck, if you please, cold and frosty and best of all, free to me. You know, Harley, you’re getting easier and easier to beat. Maybe you need a little time off to practice before you come around fuckin’ with the King. Everything okay at home?”

For his part, Harley Leathers stared into the opaque amber bottle cradled in both his hand. Without looking up, he said, “Stink, if you could do anything you wanted, what would you do?”

“I’d turn you upside down, shake you ‘til your wallet dropped onto the ground, and take out enough to buy the Budweiser I have coming, but that’s just me. Harley, you don’t really give a goddamn what I’d do, you want to tell me what you’d like to do, so why don’t you spill it. I won’t promise that I won’t laugh my ass off, but at least you won’t be carrying it around like a lost puppy and maybe we can get down to some serious drinking.”

This caused Harley to look up at the large ironworker named Stink Maxwell. “Well, thank you, Doctor Phil!” he snarled. Standing up slowly, he pulled on the chain looped around a belt loop and attached to his wallet, causing it to rise from the rear pocket of his Levis. Reaching inside, he extracted a ten-dollar bill and laid it on the bar. Pushing it toward Stink, he continued, “Here, Stink… I hope the brew is never-ending and you choke on every sip.”

As Harley turned to depart, he felt a hand grab his upper arm. “Come on, Harley, sit back down and let’s drink another beer. You know I’m just—”

Stink Maxwell probably didn’t hear the sound or feel the impact, but the small hole in his forehead and the missing section in the back of his skull ably demonstrated the knockdown power of a 9-millimeter Glock when fired mere inches from a man’s head.


As the overly muscled ironworker’s body collapsed onto the bar, Harley Leathers put his face very close to Stink’s and whispered “I want to fly to Tahiti and carve a life-size replica of Ronald McDonald… out of teak.”

Seventeen patrons of Muldoon’s Public House, along with one wide-eyed bartender, listened to a Harley-Davidson starting up in the parking lot. Stink Maxwell could no longer hear anything at all.