Johnny Reb

He glanced over at Melanie, who was just unloading an absurdly full tray of her mother's specialty-of-the-house barbecue venison ribs to a table of eight loudly appreciative truckers. What percentage of the decibels over there, Mick wondered darkly, is due to the ribs and what percentage is due to the waitress? Well, at least she was enjoying the attention. Mick believed, and fervently hoped, that everyone knew just how far he would allow such attention to go. Otherwise he'd be hanging up a trucker next to the bucks in the smoke-shed pretty soon.

She needs to see something more than truckers, pal, said a familiar voice in his head. As always, he frowned more darkly yet at that idea, and pushed it aside with the excuse of all the work to be done. When the first signs of trouble came, he was too preoccupied to notice.

It wasn't much: a chair pushed back hastily and a voice saying, "Come on, man." Anyway, maybe he subconsciously didn't care. There was a minor fight once a month or so. He had come to think of it as one of the ways the boys liked to socialize. As long as they didn't involve the furniture and didn't threaten to do any really serious damage to each other, Mick was inclined to let it go.

Unfortunately, this incident was different from the average tussle in two ways. The first difference he realized after a second or so of woolgathering: it was happening next to the table that Melanie was standing at. He saw the second difference as he looked toward the incipient fight, and it froze his blood. The man who was acting up, the man on whom Melanie was advancing with the intention of enforcing the peace, reached down to his side and drew a knife.

At that point, everything happened in slow motion. Melanie had been coming toward the guy pretty fast, and his angle hid the weapon from her. She was intending to come between him and the other man, but as she neared the aggressive trucker she made the mistake of putting a hand on his shoulder. Since he had turned away from her to get the knife, she was just outside of his peripheral vision and the touch startled him. Already angry, and thinking that an enemy had come up behind him, the man reacted by turning and slashing. For a long instant, nothing existed in Mick's universe except the gleaming tip of the man's knife and the arc it traced through the still air.

Melanie jerked her head to the left, and the knife whistled two inches past the end of her nose.

She had made several mistakes, and in the coming days Mick would be speaking to her about those oversights. She would be doing corrective drills with him in the barn for the next two weeks. One point that he would have to give her was that, after seeing that knife, she definitely did everything right.

She knew that the knife had gone past her with such speed that it couldn't possibly come back for a second or more. That meant it wasn't an important target. Instead, looking as though she was squashing an ugly insect, she struck straight at the man's eyes. She hit them with stiff outstretched fingers: not hard enough to do permanent damage, but more than enough make him jerk his head back. The man cried out and the knife did indeed come back in another arc, but his assailant didn't bother about it. Poorly aimed, it would have passed a foot away from her this time even if she hadn't moved. But in fact she had moved: straight down. The instant after her strike at the man's eyes, she had let her knees go loose and let gravity pull her straight down, getting her out of harm's way at ten meters per second squared. Which put her in an ideal position for a nice quick crotch-punch.

The man might have fallen anyway. As it was, he tried to draw his legs up in his pain even while leaning back from the strike to his eyes. The net effect was that he essentially threw himself to the floor on his back, making a sound like a gut-shot horse and half knocking down another man who had been scrambling backwards to get away from the trouble. Even as he went down, Melanie danced back up. Making sure that the knife was nowhere to be seen, and glancing around to make sure that no more crazy truckers were coming after her. None were. Her gaze had the effect of rooting the startled bystanders to the spots where they stood, in decidedly non-threatening postures.

At that point everything stopped, and the place got pretty quiet except for the guy grunting and gasping on the floor. Mick was very vaguely aware of the swinging doors to the kitchen opening and a slender figure emerging. That would be Annie, and she would be carrying the sawed-off sixteen gauge that he kept in there in case of real trouble. That had never been necessary before, and it wouldn't be needed this time either.

Mick was not really aware of anything very clearly. A large part of his mind was still seeing the arc of that knife, and his daughter's face slowly turning aside. He dimly understood that he was walking toward the man on the floor, but only because he noticed that his point of view was changing. Then he heard someone say "Shit!" and a lot more chairs were being pushed quickly back. Mick understood, from some mental distance, that he had drawn his handgun.

The trucker on the floor had just started recovering enough to open his eyes, and now they quickly widened with fear. He saw a serious-looking old man with a very serious-looking handgun pointed at his guts.

"Keep lying down just as you are," Mick said calmly, "and put your hands underneath your back." The man complied quickly, watching white-eyed as the Innkeeper knelt down next to his right side. He realized that the old man had placed his knee so that, even if he tried to get his arms out from under him, his right arm would have no place to go.

Mick heard some of the other customers and his daughter saying things to calm him down, but he continued with what he was doing. It felt almost intimate, kneeling next to someone like this. It felt like something you might do to a fallen child. Moving gently, Mick nestled the barrel of his gun in the soft spot just below the man's larynx. The Innkeeper could feel tears on his face, and he knew that was pretty bad. He realized that he was no longer aware of any voices around him, but he didn't know it that meant they had stopped trying to reach him, or merely that he had lost the ability to hear them. The young trucker's breathing was coming in short shallow gasps. Mick knew that it was time to either pull the trigger or say something, but he could not yet trust himself to speak clearly.

From right next to him, he heard his wife's voice say "Michael, she's OK." And some other things. Some time after that, Mick understood that he was going to speak rather than pull the trigger.

"You have two minutes," he said. A loud whisper was the best he could do, and he had to breathe deeply every few words to be able to continue. "Get out. You and your rig. Don't pay. Leave the knife."

After another few seconds Mick realized that, although he had finished talking, he was still holding the gun to the man's throat. "You didn't mean it," he said. Was that something he had just heard his wife say? His thumb went up to feel the back of the gun as he started to get to his feet. With a small shock he felt that the lever had been cocked. He had done it unconsciously, giving the gun a hair-trigger. He uncocked and safed the weapon as he got back to his feet. He knew that, on principle, he shouldn't turn his back on someone whom he had just threatened. But he had seen the man's eyes, and knew that there was no real harm in him. Also, his wife would be standing guard with the shotgun, and all the other truckers were there to watch his back for him. Mostly he just didn't care, and it was time to get outside. He walked toward the kitchen feeling shaken, and very old.

This is probably not the best thing in the world for business, Mick thought as he walked out. But he was wrong about that. His trucker customers came to the Wolverine Truck Stop for four reasons: a safe place to stay, a hot meal, a cold beer, and a good story. All of it was top-notch, just like the original Wolverine had been back before the Wars. But in a world with little radio and no TV, it was the stories more than anything that kept them coming back.

Sometimes the stories would be tales that their fellow truckers would tell about strange things they had seen in their travels down long empty highways through devastated lands. Half of those might be outright fabrications no matter how the man would swear by them. Then again, maybe half of the tales that you wanted most to disbelieve really had happened out there in the wild lands. Sometimes the stories would be Mick's old half-remembered yarns by ancient writers that the truckers would never have heard of otherwise. Perhaps sometimes a man would drive all night until he saw the kerosene lamps of the Wolverine parking lot because he was burning so hot with his own tale that he wouldn't sleep until he had run into the big dining room and blurted it out to everybody still awake. And sometimes, like tonight, the stories might happen right in front of you and just a table away, right here at the Wolverine Truck Stop and Motor Lodge. You just couldn't ask for anything better than that.