A week passes quickly for Troy. He mopes around the house for the first few days. He wasn’t young enough to bounce back from that many beers, but he was subsidizing with a little snort of vodka and some old ass pain pills he found rolling around in his bedside table drawer. Feelin’ easy breezy enough to bum around the house after those babies kicked in. He cleaned up the kitchen as best as he could, but there was still a crescent shaped burn mark on his fake granite countertop. He covered it with a cutting board and called it good. The only thing that articulated the week for him was around day five when some bums were stood at the end of his driveway, arguing over the beer cans he he had put in the recycling. Say what you want about Troy, but he was a good little recycler. They were shouting and raving and flashing around homemade weapons, one with the straight end of a hockey stick wrapped in what looked to be black electric tape and the other with a wooden dowel about three feet long. Troy guessed that they doubled as poking sticks for scavenging around inside dumpsters. If the stick didn’t hit you, there was probably enough caked on grease and bacteria on them to give someone a pretty good infection.

Troy opened his front door and shouted at them “Get the fuck off my property you pieces of shit! I didn’t put those cans out for you!” They both stop arguing and turn to Troy. “Fuck you!" One of them with a red stork bite on his cheek shouts, "how about I fukkin’ jam this stick up your fukkin' ass!” Troy slams the door and walks through his house to the door that opens into the garage. He selects a fine and sturdy metal rake, then presses the garage door button. They’re still there but have gone back to arguing over how many cans each one gets, and which one was there first. Then they see Troy holding the rake at port arms. He’s jittery and his adrenaline is flowing, but this he can handle. He’s not afraid of some fukkin’ bums. They both start walking toward him, yelling incoherencies and raising their poking sticks. Troy raises the rake and says “come at me motherfuckers!” They do. Troy wasn’t really expecting that. The one with the stork bite is swinging at Troy's torso, but backs off after every swing, like he’s trying to get a feel for how fast Troy is. Troy uses the rake like a long arm with a set of claws on it and aims for the face of the indigent closest to him.

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The guy must have hee’d instead of haw’ed, because it was a lucky hit that scratched his face from top to bottom. “Striped you up!” Troy shouts, which doesn’t sound very cool when he thinks about it later, so when he tells the story to his friends, he claims he said “make my day motherfucker!” Instead. That has a better ring to it. The bum feels his face. “Ow.” He says “why’d you do that for?” He starts crying. Stork bite drops his poking stick and runs to the bum to check on him, feeling his face for blood, then looks at Troy accusingly. “Why’d you do that? He didn’t do nothing to you? Mean! Mean!” The other man is sobbing still. Troy shuffles his feet uncertainly. “Well” he says “you were going to hit me with those sticks.” “No we weren’t, man, you ever seen a bear charge at something, then back away? That’s what we do. We don’t hit! Hitting is bad! Shame on you!” Troy feels bad in spite of himself and starts to walk towards the scratched up man. “Don’t come any closer!” The stork bite says, “You’re a murderer! Murderer!” He keeps shouting it, louder and louder until Troy starts to get the uneasy feeling that this scene might not look so good if someone were to come up on it right at this exact moment.

”Fine” Troy drops the rake on the driveway and holds his hands out “look. I’m not coming any closer, okay?” The sobbing man looks like a child being held by his mother. They both stare accusingly at Troy like he just came out at them with a rake and scratched up a poor defenseless man for no reason. “Jesus” Troy says “take the fukkin' cans then. I don't want them.” They narrow their eyes. The motherish bum says “how do we know you aren’t planning on coming at us with that rake when our backs are turned?” Troy shakes his head and shrugs. “I’ll just go back inside. You just take the cans and get the fuck out of here.” They watch him. Troy backs into the garage and hits the garage door button and they slowly slide out of view. “Fukkin’ bums” Troy says loudly, hoping they can hear him. He goes to the living room and looks out the front window. The one with the scratched up face has his rake now. “I left my fukkin’ rake out there. Fukkin’ shameless seagull pigeon ass hobos.” He swishes the curtains closed in disgust and sits on his couch, arms crossed, pouting.