“Man oh man, Red, you are a label-making machine! You have got labels on your labels!” T.R., deeply satisfied by the huevos and the coffee, was now checking out Rufus’s trailer. Over time Rufus had progressively gutted this, replacing the built-in cabinets with modular storage bins made of translucent plastic. They were subdivided into innumerable compartments. Everything was labeled. “Blue labels is drone related. Red is for gun parts. White is miscellaneous.” Most of the labels were blue.
“How’d you get to be so organized, Red?”
“Army beat it into me. Then it was the business. Being on the road, you know, the starting and stopping and the bouncing over the washboarded roads will mix up all your stuff and make a mess of it unless you got everything in its own compartment. There’s a chapter in Moby-Dick where—”
And here Rufus was all set to describe Chapter 98, “Stowing Down and Clearing Up,” where they have made a huge mess of the Pequod butchering whales, but then they put everything back where it belongs and clean it all up spick-and-span, and it’s as if nothing had ever happened.
“Read it,” T.R. said, cutting him off. “I get it, this is your whaling ship, a place for everything and everything in its place. You the Captain Ahab of this little operation, then?”
“I prefer to think of myself as being more in the mold of the harpooneers.”
“Excellent choice. More sustainable.” T.R. turned around, took it all in, peered through the milky plastic bins at drone batteries, drone transceivers, drone propellers, spools of colored wire, tiny metric fasteners, jewelers’ screwdrivers, heat shrink tubing, stainless-steel hemostats. A 3D printer where a microwave oven had once been installed. “Man,” he exclaimed, “you are the Drone Ranger!”
They went out and got in the chopper and shot pigs. These were exactly where Rufus had predicted they would be. Shooting them in this way was like a video game set to “easy.” T.R. had brought an assortment of old and new guns from what Rufus could only assume was an inconceivably expensive collection. T.R. made a point of handing Rufus a different firearm every few minutes. He always introduced it with some patter along the lines of “Hoo-ee! This one’s got quite a kick but it gets the job done!” However, when Rufus was actually operating the weapons, T.R. watched his movements and Rufus understood that he was being evaluated both as to his attention to firearm safety and as to general familiarity with different weapon types, marksmanship, and so on. At one point late in the interview—for it was clear that this was a job interview—T.R.
threw him a curve by handing him one of his antiques. It was some kind of early clip-fed rifle with a heavy military feel to it.
“I’m not familiar with the use of this weapon,” Rufus said, after glancing it over. “I’d be more comfortable if you showed me how to operate it.”
T.R. did so, enthusiastically. Rufus then copied his movements, looking up at him occasionally to verify that he was getting it right, and used it to drill a big sow from about fifty yards. He understood that if he had attempted to brazen it out and use the gun without requesting help, he would have failed the interview. T.R. would have tapped the pilot on the shoulder. They’d have flown back to the campsite. T.R. would have paid him for his time, cash on the barrelhead, and they would never have seen each other again. Conversely, Rufus’s asking for help had sealed some kind of deal in the mind of T.R. His interest in ridding the world of more feral swine tapered off sharply. Ten minutes later they were back on the ground polishing off the coffee.
“I ain’t one of those Rambo cats,” Rufus cautioned him, before the conversation got too deep. “Stayed mostly on base. Took some mortar rounds, heard sniper bullets go by. Saw IEDs go off. Saw some other shit too. But I’m a mechanic. Not a snake eater.”
“Ah, shit, I got plenty of snake eaters. I know where to find them. Hell, they won’t leave me alone, word’s got round that T.R. is hiring.”
“For the Flying S?”
“That’s right. Activity is ramping up there, as you saw. More people moving in. It is becoming a community. Really, Red, you could think of it as a microstate.”
“Like Rhode Island?”
“I was thinking Liechtenstein.”
“How’s the United States gonna feel about that?”
T.R. chuckled. “Do you know what the United States did last week, after we fired those eighteen shells up into the stratosphere?”