“Tom. Tom…. Tom! Watch out!”
“Relax, Duck, I got it.” I gave her the usual sidelong smirk, the more charming half of a shit-eating grin.
I could hear her rolling her eyes but could still tell that she smiled. The truck lurched and I gave it some gas while I spun the wheel to the left. We were more than a couple miles in from the highway and the final stretch was a fairly steep incline up a dirt road that had been last maintained about a dozen flash floods ago.
“Whow, this road is kinda shit.” I started to accelerate. Should have gotten the 4-wheel drive but that was a choice to have made 10 years ago, and the truck hadn’t been new when I got it either. Considering California gas prices and the money I’ve saved over the years I probably could have made the upgrade. It wasn’t actually a ‘truck’ either, it was an SUV, but big enough that calling it a ‘car’ seemed less correct than calling it a ‘truck'.
“You know, we could have stayed somewhere on the coast. There’s a nice place where you get to feed chipmunks on the beach!”
I’m glad she brought me out of the untimely introspection. “And miss out on Tom’s patented outdoor cooking?”
“I thought it was Tom’s Trademarked scratch cooking?”
I waved my hand dismissively before accelerating through another rut up the dirt road, “Big one coming!”
She shrieked, mostly in good fun, as I gunned it up the hill as we bounced back and forth before pulling into a clear section.
“I don’t have any signal here.”
I started to mock-cackle, “And now I have you stranded and all alone! My master plan!”
She put the back of her hand to her forehead and pretended to pass out, reaching the other into the aether, “Help! Oh help this poor mai’den! Alas, where thou’t be mine han’some knight?”
An old joke between us since we had gone to the renaissance fair a couple of years ago. We’d returned plenty of times and for a few years running since that first time when we had been unwittingly drafted into a play, herself as the ‘fair damsel’ and myself as the ‘fair knight’. We had to improvise our lines on the go as the regular ren-faire people handled the rest of the story with dragon costumes, evil wizards, and a surprising amount of scene changes. It even had mock sword fights, which was a blast.
Once I had moved past the initial wall of anxiety about performing on stage, it had been a ton of fun. Probably, no easily the best date we’ve ever had. I still remember my stomach dropping 15 stories after the final kiss when we looked out at the applauding audience and saw that our spectacle had drawn hundreds. It had been closer to a thousand than anything, but that was a number I still had trouble processing and unconsciously shied away from acknowledging. Just the memory of the sweet kiss at the end capped by sweeping my arm over a massive crowd still makes me blanch from time to time.
“Ah and we’re here!” I swept my arm out my window.
“Where is… here?”
I looked around as I drove through the cleared space. Fair question, the only thing that gave it away as a campsite was the fact that there were some taller trees that provided sparse shade through the area and that they were set far enough apart compared to the surroundings. It was all dry and dusty; I looked for other vehicles, and absent that, looked for other tire tracks. I didn’t see any of either, it must have been a while since anyone had been through here.
I parked and looked over at Casey, “Alright ducky, you ready?”
Her dark hair flicked as she turned to me, her expression turned from pensive to a shy, but warm, smile.
“Yeah.”
I popped the trunk and it was easy enough to set up the tent, take out the chairs, and get everything else set up.
“Hungry?”
“Not now.”
I looked over to where the dirt ‘road’ continued past our little pull off. “Let’s take a walk around.”
As we scuffed through the dirt I saw Casey look up toward the sun, “It’s so early! We could’ve gone to the Cat Farm.” I saw her lamentations.
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“We’ll go on the way back.”
She pouted and mumbled something. Her little duck lips whenever she was deeply thinking… or pouting.
“Hmm?”
“It’ll be closed.”
“We’ll leave early.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
She scowled at that and I shamelessly grinned, I gave her a bit more.
“You have my word.”
Her sourness evaporated, promises were cheap, but she knew if I gave ‘my word’ that we would be there to pet an untold number of cats at a ridiculous ‘cat farm’, then we would be there to pet the damn things.
We had been walking down the road for a while and it continued onward to the left, riding the side of one of the giant hills. On the other side was another big hill and between them was a narrow valley more than a few miles long. I put my arm around her shoulder and hers found my waist as we stood there for a while, drinking in the view. I detached myself and pulled my .45 out of my very-oversized fanny pack with a wild grin, “You ready to learn?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Don’t pretend you aren’t excited. Did you bring yours?”
She coyly pulled out her own .38 special from the holster, I had bought her both a couple weeks prior for her birthday.
I calmly, yes, calmly approached her and calmly grabbed her wrist in only a small amount of panic, as I calmly yelled, “Finger off the trigger, finger off the trigger!”
“Ok, first lesson, finger off the trigger unless you’re ready to shoot.”
After educating her in the Great American Tradition of Firearms and the slightly less well-known tradition of Firearm Safety we fired a few rounds into the hillside.
“Why are they so loud?”
I started then sheepishly pulled out some earplugs, “Whoops.”
After that she had a great time, she wasn’t a bad shot either.
Riding the high of shooting loud death from your fingertips, I showed her how to start a campfire. After we gathered some scattered branches that I chopped into smaller chunks with a hatchet, I pulled out an Altoid tin and gingerly removed a scrap of blackened cloth.
“What’s that?”
“Char-cloth. Really flammable, good for starting fires.” It was my first time actually starting a campfire with it, typically I’d just use a lighter and random junk-mail that never managed to leave my center console until it was used as kindling. It’d be good practice.
----------------------------------------
I ladled out chili into each of our bowls and started to tuck in. I paused as I didn’t hear her eating. I looked next to me and saw that she was patiently waiting.
I itched my temple, “Ah, sorry, duck.”
“It’s ok, you don’t have to.” I knew she wanted me to.
“No, no it’s fine. I don’t mind.” I smiled at her. I actually kind of did mind, but I loved her more than ‘saying grace’ bothered me. Plus, it made her happy and that was better than being snippy to her about it and her getting quiet and sullen about it.
I sketched out a sloppy mimic of her cross, up down left right, and knitted my fingers together as I bowed my head and she spoke a few words of thanks over our dinner.
“Amen.” I choked out the word next to her. It was definitely a faux pas to be praying, especially in this day and age. Humanity was more than hollow words toward some unseen, unfelt, unappreciative for all I could tell, invisible entity somewhere *waves hands toward the sky* up there. This had been something we’ve discussed before, “how can you believe without proof?” “If you have proof then it’s not Faith. That’s just knowing, something cheaper. You have to have Faith before you get proof.”
I’d even played with that as a mental exercise, ‘first faith, then proof?’ It seemed ridiculous, but she insisted that she had seen proof. That said, her examples of proof seemed more like hopeful fantasies and lucky serendipity. Maybe not everything could be explained today, but that didn’t mean we wouldn’t be able to explain it tomorrow or the day after. Still, I loved her and if that was the only thing I had to deal with it was plenty acceptable.
We ate in silence for a bit until I broke it, “Good?”
She nodded with a grin as she enthusiastically dug into her bowl of chili, bless her she was really trying to lie to me about it. I was pretty good at sussing those out. Not always, not immediately, but pretty good.
“Needs more salt.”
She leaned her head back in relief, “I didn’t want to say it, but yessss.”
I laughed and ground some more in each of ours. After I was done she grabbed the portable plastic grinder from me and poured even more into her chili.
“Little bit of chili with your salt eh? Good now?”
“It’s perfect, thank you for making it.” She gave me a salty kiss on the cheek.
I pretended that it burned and gagged, and she laughed, “I don’t know how you eat things with that much on it, salty duck.”
“It’s good!” She made propeller noises as she pretended to airplane her spoon toward my mouth. I resigned myself and opened wide. She brushed the spoon up to wipe some on my nose afterwards. I could barely choose what to respond to first, the bit of chili on my nose or the chunk of dead sea that had just been airdropped directly onto my taste buds. I felt the sides of my jaw squeeze in tight.
“Brutal.” I coughed after swallowing it down and wiped my nose against her neck. She shrieked.
The smores were better, and unsalted.
“Is that salted chocolate?”
Well, mostly unsalted.
She cackled.