Day 4.97 - coming out of Joshua Tree.


A quiet night, the Bar contained three other patrons and a bar tender when Cletis and Billy Bob walked in.

After not thinking about it at all, Cletis tried to recount their experience for the bar tender. Joe was a retired and defrocked Marine Corps Chaplain who'd been stationed at the Twenty-Nine Palms Base until word of his unusual forays into other religions leaked back to the Vatican and further, to the local chain of command.

"You guys on some kind of religious quest?" Joe asked after hearing the vague purpose of the trip.

"Mission from Gawd" Cletis grinned al la Blues Brothers.

Still polishing the same glass he'd been buffing since Mickey Rourke stared in Bukowski's Bar Fly, Joe offered up a short cut to salvation. "Here - try these when you feel lost" he said, holding out eight wrinkled, misshapen, oversized gray beans in his upturned palm.

Cletis cuts a deal in the headlight of an '89 Taurus "Hmmm - ya?" Cletis muttered extending his hand. "what is this? some Jack and the Beanstalk thing?"

"Just a little something to get you through ... "

"Through what?"

"Through to the turth."

"Oh?" said Billy Bob, his interest suddenly piqued.

"But they don't come free" added Joe as he watched Cletis pocket the cactus buttons. "They usually run a cow, cow and half for six."

"We don't got a cow," said Cletis not making a move to retrieve the beans from his pocket.

"Leave me the casket and a hundred bucks, you can have all eight - and I'll throw in these ludes to keep you from tossin your cookies when you do the beans."

"Can you take it from this?" ask Cletis putting Billy Bob's MasterCard on the counter.

"Ya, no problem - you want me to put the beers on it too?"

"Ya, thanks."

Cletis signed for the goods, which Joe had written up as earrings and a tape, and wondered if he'd been taken - didn't matter - it was Billy Bob's credit card.

Billy Bob looked at the "ludes" on the bar and thought they looked like Gravol - didn't matter - Cletis was buying.

When they left the bar, the casket was gone - Cletis was a bit gone too.

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