The Big Showdown

Two men, two sides. The time for talking had passed, rolled on by like a tumbleweed across a dead-end town. You see out there beyond that door shut and latched, the place where you and I belong? Out there Uncle Joe and Putin are monsters, killers by the thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions. But in that room away from all that? They were just two men: Two eyes, two arms, two lungs, two legs, and a beating heart nothing more, nothing less. I know all that now but if you were to have asked me at that moment what I thought, what I was feeling? I’d tell you to ask everybody else in that goddamn room, yourself included. Seeing those two men, those two legends finally square up and face off? It did something to me, did something to everybody else in that room, I could feel it. You know I remember listening to an old Sawbones once, he was talking to me. The whiskey had run out by then and he’d been trying to keep my mind off the pain as he took to setting my arm after I’d snapped it clean falling off Kingmaker, my horse. He said that you and me and the Blacks, the Mexicans, everybody living and breathing like we do have similarities, our brains all kind of work the same, share the same stuff. Sounded like horseshit at the time. But there in that room, surrounded by people of all colors? I knew it was true. There was like an invisible thread between us all, a current or river of some sort that connected us, got us all feeling the same thing. A kind of breathless excitement, an attention, and focus I’d never felt before. I can see everything even now, clear as day. The two men locked eyes and I reckon that at that moment, for them the entire rest of the world fell away, they were transported to a place that only they and the Lord Jesus hisself were ever made privy. Breathing slowed, muscles flexed -twitched, communicating their killing intent in their show of restraint. And the tools of their trades, the killing weapons remained inert just within arms reach of either man. “Ready!” came the voice of the j