by Dan Dillard
***
While Robyn was shouting at the helicopter, Jameson Banks—Jamie to his family—was aiming for that very same helicopter. Jamie wore tan Carhartt overalls that were covered in greasy fingerprint stains and a NASCAR t-shirt with #3 on it. He, like Bill by God Shockley, subscribed to the God, guns and Ol’ Glory way of life only Jamie Banks didn’t molest boys. He made shine, and he drank a hell of a lot of it. Even though his house was just north of town and that nasty gas hadn’t filled his spirit with hate just yet, he’d had a taste all the same and found it palatable.
Along with that taste for hatred, Jamie Banks also had an air cannon. It was the kind rednecks and engineers liked to tinker and tweak so they could hurl pumpkins at Halloween. He was aiming his at that bird in the sky. In October, the cannon was painted orange and along its sixty foot barrel, the words “Jack-o-Launcher” were stenciled in black and purple. To him, it was an extension of his penis—or what he liked to call the one hundred percent all beef thermometer—and he told anyone who would listen that the cannon was his way of fucking back. To him it was the government lookin’ down on God’s own wrath and disapproving. The government was trying to intervene.
“I’ll be goddamned. Artsy liberals in that town are gettin’ exactly what they deserve. You hear me, Uncle Sam, you commie bastard. If you fuck with God, Jamie Banks is gonna fuck back,” he said.
Jamie took a swig of the shine and then sucked in some air through his teeth to cool the burn. “How you assholes like gettin’ bitch-slapped by the good Lord?”
He hadn’t loaded a pumpkin into his cannon this time. Instead he had several old coffee cans full of nuts, bolts, washers, various small plumbing fittings and when he ran out of spare parts, he’d filled them with gravel from his driveway. Each was meticulously weighed and matched at ten pounds. They were lined up on the tailgate of his pickup and ready for deployment. The compressor filled the chamber. He loaded two of the cans into the cylinder.
At 150 psi, a pumpkin flew over half a mile from the Jack-o-Launcher’s barrel. Any higher than that and they collapsed once the pressure was released, but he wasn’t loading gourds that night, he was loading steel cans. He let the pressure build to 175 psi.
Aim was only part of the equation. He needed the parts inside those cans to spray out like a shotgun blast. Jamie had fired twice with no luck, but he was dialed in now. He gulped more shine and howled. “That’s right, motherfucker! Jamie Banks is fuckin’ back for the Lord,” he said and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.