billy smith saw himself one way and his fellow humans saw him another way.
billy saw himself as a guy who was born to kick ass and it pissed him off that he was stranded in the modern candyass world.
everybody else just mostly didn’t want to listen to him.
billy had three guys who were sort of his friends. the four of them hung out at the donut shop and the other three listened to billy just nodding at what he said and almost never actually arguing with him.
albert lived with his mother and didn’t have much to say.
cody had a wife and four kids and didn’t have much to say.
ray lived by himself and had a lot to say, mostly about football and conspiracies, but nobody was interested enough to argue with him, any more than with billy.
billy talked mostly about how the world was going to hell because it was growing soft. usually in general terms, but once in a while he saw a story in the news that illustrated his point, and he would beat it to death for a few days.
the donut shop was mostly run by two women, agnes and dottie. they were both on the heavy side, wore thick glasses, and were not getting any younger. a lot of people thought they were sisters, but they were not.
one night, after billy, albert, cody, ray, and the other customers had left and agnes and dottie were closing the shop, agnes said,
you know, those guys seem like pathetic jerks most of the time, but the world would be a better place if more people were like them.
really? dottie replied. how do you figure?
they never actually fight. they talk a lot, but they never actually fight.
maybe, dottie agreed.
the donut shop was owned by old mrs jackson, and she died. her son sold the donut shop and the little bit of land it was on to a developer and the developer closed the shop to renovate it as a nail salon.
agnes and dottie were out in the cold. they went to plan b.
agnes married albert and moved in with albert and his mother.
dottie married ray, and moved in with ray and his stacks of old magazines.
at around the same time, cody’s wife left him and took the four kids to the other side of the country.
cody decided to quit his job and live an adventurous life, and invited billy to join him.
billy readily agreed.
at the first town cody and billy came to, they checked into a motel and went out to get a drink at an establishment called the blue rendezvous lounge.
they had a few drinks and a gentleman introduced himself to them. he said his name was finley straley and he said he had a proposition for them.
finley knew of a deal that was going to go down at a jewelry store out on highway 3, where a famous painting by picasso or the pope or somebody that had been stolen from some museum in new york that maybe they had read about was going to be sold to this rich hermit who lived out in the woods and the hermit was going to pay cash. a few guys with a little nerve could move right in and take the money and the painting too. how about it?
this sounded like just the sort of thing billy and cody were looking for in their new life of adventure, and they quickly fell in wth finley’s plan.
finley gave billy and cody each a small handgun. billy had handled rifles in a two year stint in the army, and cody had used shotguns going hunting with his dad when he was a teenager, but neither of them had ever even held a handgun before.
they headed out to highway 3.
when they got to the jewelry store, the deal had already gone south for the original participants, and finley and billy and cody were greeted by a couple of state troopers.
finley made his escape, but billy and cody did not put their guns down fast enough to suit the troopers and both went down in a swift hail of gunfire.
trooper joe martindale and trooper elsie johnson stood over cody and billy and heard their last words.
cody’s last word was “sorry…”
billy’s last word was “soft…”
trooper martindale and trooper johnson both received commendations from the governor.
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