A Way West

by Peter Westaway

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Right on! Look pumpkin, the Little Bighorn has its own casino. What do you say we come back here after dinner and play some slots? We are on a lucky streak with this whole trip so far, so let’s convert that good karma into some cold hard cash.” With that, Pete flashes Issy his million-dollar smile beside him in the Mustang.

  “Not a chance there buck-a-roo! After what you pulled last Christmas at our last little attempt at enjoying a fun, harmless night at a casino.” Issy then deepens her voice, “I promise pumpkin, I won’t spend anymore than forty bucks, Scout’s honour.” She returns to her normal voice, “Ya right! That forty quickly turned into three hundred and forty. I’m not living through that kind of grief again. And besides Pete, we’re having more fun camping with Monica and Jeff than we’ve probably ever had any kind of fun before with another couple. These two are quickly becoming our best friends. It’s doubtful we will start any big time charity with them, or anything like that but who knows? Let’s just enjoy these last couple of days with them as best we can. And I am really jacked about hanging with them again after we all get settled.”

  Pete gives her one of his scrunched up silly faces pretending he’s angry. “You win as usual pumpkin. I have to admit it is damn fine seeing you enjoying yourself so much. Hey I may even be able to manage to hold off smoking a joint tonight like you asked. And since we didn’t get any beer I guess it

  will be cool to hang around the campfire with a clear head and enjoy this camping stuff without any chemical enhancement. In fact, wouldn’t it be awesome if we someday had a couple of our own little kids to join us. I got to admit that would be a whole lot more fun than just getting drunk or high again.”

  Issy unclips her seatbelt, twists towards Pete and climbs partly over the stick shift between them. With both knees on her seat, she braces herself with her left hand on Pete’s seat behind his shoulder. With her other hand, she rubs Pete’s inside of his thigh starting at the knee and sliding it up and into his crotch, and gently gives him a squeeze. At the same time, she nuzzles her nose below his ear and plants a succulent, lingering kiss on his neck. She then quickly retakes her position in her own seat and says, “I sure do love you, you beautiful sexy man. I tell you what. Let’s make sure we spend one more night camping alone between Spokane and Seattle, when we have to leave our new friends. You save one last big joint for that night and we’ll both get high together for the last time and then I will give you a night you won’t soon forget.”

  Pete flashes her a big smile, “Ohh Baby! Now you are talking MY language!”

  Our fearless, fun loving foursome, made real quick work of tracking down a Yamaha dealer and buying the proper gasket. After a pit stop at a grocery store heading out of Billings, they headed straight to the Little Bighorn so they could check out the site of the battleground where General George Custer and his troops met their demise in 1876 at the hands of a large band of very angry natives.

  They pull into the Little Bighorn campground with the couple on the Yamaha leading the way for the couple in the Mustang. It was just coming up to three in the afternoon and the sky was clear, and the air warm. “How about we first set up our tents, then go check out some sights for a couple of hours. Then we come back her and while Pete is showing his mastery of my bike, you two beautiful ladies can get a fire going. You saw that I undercooked the potatoes in the foil in the fire last time so make sure you leave them in longer this time.” Jeff is looking at Monica as he says this last part.

  “Sounds like a plan,” agrees Pete.

  They have picked out a perfect looking campsite. One side of it has a nice even spot under a pine tree for the small tent, and on the opposite of the fire pit is another slightly larger, but equally level and shaded spot for the larger tent. The motorcycle is parked nearby in front of the car and they look like they belong together almost as much as the two young couples are starting to feel like they belong together.

  Soon after, they are walking quietly with the men holding the hands of their respective mates. The Canadians lead the way as they approach the old tombstones that mark the burial sites of the doomed soldiers, a hundred and forty years ago. It is unclear what went wrong when the Seventh Cavalry was decimated on that fateful day in the summer of 1876. There is speculation that Custer’s supporting forces nearby should have arrived before 268 soldiers were slaughtered, along with Custer by the Lakota, the Northern Cheyenne and the Arapaho.

  “This really breaks my heart.” Monica is in front of the stone indicating it is where all the horses were buried that died in the battle. The other three are respectively silent. Monica continues, “I can’t even begin to imagine the pain and confusion they were feeling as they lay among the chaos, slowly bleeding to death from a bunch of Indian arrows stuck in their hides.”

  Issy is the first one to respond, “Ya well I bet most of the poor soldiers didn’t have much choice either about being a part of this garbage evil slaughter campaign of trying to wipeout the Indians. It is so disgusting that dumbass humans have always had this constant need to murder each other in the name of some dumbass war.”

  Jeff looks wistfully over the fields with its grasses blowing in the wind. “It is so scary to imagine that day. Terror and pain and anger, all in such overwhelming quantities. I have never stood on a known battlefield before. And the truly horrifying thing is that this is a very insignificant one compared to the major ones all over Europe and Asia. I am in full agreement with you Issy, our human race are such unbelievable dumbasses when it comes to that insane thing called war. Whether it’s in the name of religion, money, or land, it doesn’t matter. It is still humans murdering other humans.”

  “Don’t forget all the animals killed too.” You don’t have to be told who said that.

  Especially Jeff, “Yes baby, of course I am sad for the animals, but I have told you, no matter how cute or smart they are, humans will always rank higher in importance with me.”

  “Hey guys, I have always believed that absolutely anything is possible. So let’s dedicate our new charity to the ultimate goal of achieving nothing less than actual world peace itself. Now that would be about as frickin awesome as it could possibly get.” And that of course came from Pete, as he is quickly establishing himself as the one always being the biggest thinker and most optimistic.

  “Okay there big guy, one step at a time, and that is about seven billion steps ahead of us at the moment.” Issy is keeping it grounded, as is her emerging role, on this new potent little team.

  Monica puts her arms around Jeff and gives him a sweet kiss on his lips, “Kay guys what do you say we head back and make us a nice steak dinner and get the bike fixed. If we dwell on this shit much longer we’ll start depressing ourselves and the whole point of this detour was to have some more fun.”

  Our fabulous foursome were soon back at the new campsite happily paired off, with the two women working on fixing a nice dinner, and the two men fixing the bike. To all four of them it was starting to feel like they had been an efficient little team for years. It was hard to believe that they had just met only a few days earlier. Pete had put on an Elton John CD as that was about the only artist that both he and Issy were both fans of. And Jeff is about as flexible as Monica is when it comes to music, he likes just about everything, except maybe jazz.

  Pete has already managed to remove the carburetor. “See it’s no big deal at all, you just have to make sure you are careful with shutting the gas off and trying to not spill too much that is left in the carb.” Pete says this to Jeff, who is watching attentively. Pete dumps the little bit of gas that is in the carb into a small plastic margarine container. He then shows Jeff where a little crack had formed in the gasket to cause the leak. He continues the lesson, “then see? It is now just a matter of making sure both contact surfaces are clean. I would prefer a razor blade to do this but this blade from my utility knife works almost as well.”

  Jeff is impressed, “Thanks Pete, that
really looks no more difficult than fixing a bicycle, I’m not sure why it intimidated me so much.”

  Pete’s not sure either, and continues scraping the manifold’s surface. “Okay done, see? Now they are nice and shiny smooth. Now I just put this new gasket on, bolt it back together, and it is good as new.” Meanwhile the girls are only twenty-five feet away at the fire pit. They both had collected a bunch of dry twigs and small branches in the surrounding woods. They had bought a ten pound bag of logs earlier from the camp office. The first couple of logs had already caught fire nicely on top of the burning twigs. The twigs were started with only a couple of pieces of old newspaper lit by one flick of a Bic. “I had heard about cooking potatoes in the fire covered in tin foil, but my family just cooked everything on a camp stove when we were camping.” Issy says this as she joins Monica sitting at the picnic table and grabs a potato.

  Monica is already carefully wrapping a large potato with a sheet of foil, “Ya Jeff says it works best if you have lots of hot coals smoldering already, but it worked pretty good last time shortly after the fire was burning good. So we’ll wait a little bit before we bury them in the fire.”

  The two separate operations proceed as planned and, as a result they soon all sit down to a very satisfying dinner. The girls like it that the boys seem to be enjoying themselves without having any beer to drink. As a big bonus, Pete was true to his word and didn’t smoke any joints for the whole evening. The two guys are both gentlemen and do a good job cleaning up after they had finished eating. They then all go for a walk around the campground looking for a new set of sticks that could be used to roast the requisite marshmallows after dark. All four of them thoroughly enjoy seeing the many happy campers having some laughs at their own campsites. They all take particular delight in seeing the young children running around and laughing.

  “Hey Monica, Pete was even saying that he loves the idea of camping someday with kids of our own. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we got together every summer a couple of times with both of us having our own children running around having a blast.” Issy gives Pete a quick yummy kiss on his lips as soon as she says this.

  “That would be beyond amazing. That would be spectacular.” And Monica gives Jeff his own yummy quick kiss after this little declaration.

  Jeff is caught off guard with this new subject matter but has no objections, and just smiles to himself at the thought. They are soon gathered around the fire loading their sticks with marshmallows. Both girls have chosen single pointed sticks. Jeff has a stick that splits in a “Y”, and Pete feels he has to outdo everyone, so has a three-pronged stick. Issy tried to tell him that he should figure out how to roast one marshmallow properly first without setting it on fire, before he attempts to roast a half dozen at a time, or whatever he has in mind tonight.

  Monica points out the obvious, that he was probably intending to light the half dozen on fire and have a brightly lit torch going. But Pete’s in a serious mood tonight, not consuming any booze or drugs will do that for a guy like our man Pete. And is soon holding three marshmallows carefully above the flame, giving a real attempt at proper mallow roasting technique. He then dives into a subject he has been starting to obsess about on his own. “I am serious about this charity guys. I am thinking there might really be a higher purpose to the four of us finding each other, and feeling so good together in such a short time. All our personalities are different, but we seem to just fit together as if it was meant to be. Anyway, I am a pretty obsessive guy, and I am prepared to jump in and get totally obsessed with this idea of an organization that tries to unite everyone we can, in every country in the world. If the rest of you can get almost as obsessed, the four of us just may be able to do something that has never been done before.”

  Jeff is also trying harder to roast his two marshmallows properly, “Ya Pete, I’m with you, as I told you I have been wanting to be an environmental activist since I was a kid and realized our human race is ultimately doomed unless something drastic changes. Last year I sent a long email to five hundred politicians in Canada and about two hundred media people. I was trying to convince them that the Ottawa Greenbelt that is a huge tract of land in our city that is supposed to be helping our environment is actually completely flawed and is doing much more harm than any good.”

  Monica is checking her single marshmallow’s progress, “Ya I was so proud of him, he did a couple of interviews on the radio and spoke at a few meetings, but he only got a small amount of support as most people are so close minded and refuse to think different than the established way of doing things.”

  Issy is already picking at her first cooked marshmallow, “Yep you know what I think of most people, they are dumbasses! It isn’t easy to get people to change their way of thinking, but I am starting to think that Pete just might be right, and maybe it’s the four of us that can do it in a big way.”

  Pete is blowing at his marshmallows and is thinking they are starting to actually look tasty, “Way to go Jeffy boy! That is just the kind of activist shit I am talking about.”

  Monica is chewing on her own first marshmallow, “Okay guys I love the idea too. I can lead the animal division, without animals in the world life would suck for humans, even if it is just the animals that we eat.”

  Issy is careful in putting another marshmallow on her stick, “First thing we need is a good name, and since it is going to be truly international it has to be one that can easily translate to almost every language in the world yet describe its purpose in as few words as possible.”

  They all quietly mull over this important first step while they are all sitting on the ground around the fire roasting their marshmallows. Even Pete is still taking care to brown them properly, and he learns the reward. “Wow these are delicious, why didn’t you tell me they taste so good?” He says in garbled tones with his mouth full of the hot creamy treat.

  “Ya you silly dumbass that’s about the only thing I said the last time while I was eating them. You were too busy playing and setting yours on fire.” Issy laughs while chewing her own.

  “I’ve got it!” Jeff announces with some gusto, right after he devours his own hot creamy treat. “My whole obsession with the environment is about the fact that we as a species have been around for tens of thousands of years, and we are just now starting a new millennium. It is obvious that it is doubtful mankind will even exist by the end of this millennium. How about Project3000 as a name? If we can make it into the next millennium we should be able to last forever”

  They are all still staring into the fire in front of them. A burning log collapses with a thud. Countless sparks suddenly fly up into the dark quiet sky. Pete finishes watching the sparks fly harmlessly up into the infinite darkness. He resumes loading half a dozen marshmallows on his stick. Now that he knows that they are magically delicious he has a whole new motivation.

  “Yep I like it!” Issy bellows. “It’s perfect! Short and to the point, and I am sure the word project and the number 3000 are both easily translated into all of the mainstream languages.”

  Monica crawls the two feet over to Jeff, and locks lips with him for a few seconds, and then gives the chosen name unanimous approval, “then Project3000 it shall be!”