"So, what time we s'pose to be there?" Hank tilted his face upwards. The sun in preheat mode, gathering its strength before the full on broil of day set in.
The wind rustled softly through the patchy grass. A melodic morning breeze trying to find perch among the scarcity of foliage dotting the landscape, forced to settle for kicking up some lifeless soil over Hank's comfortably worked in boots.
"High Noon." Eliza responded with just the smallest tinge of annoyance tucked in to her words. "It's always High Noon. When's it ever been anything but High Noon?" That undercard of annoyance done spilled over into the main event.
"I guess so." Hank knew he'd frayed some of Eliza's emotional rope with his question. He wanted to make sure it didn't snap in two. Not this early anyhow. They may need that combativeness later. Problem was, once it broke it took a long while to retie it nicely together for another go. Hank wondered if he was maybe overusing this metaphor, but couldn't let that sidetrack him neither. "Never hurts to double check though does it, Liza?"
"No, Hank. No it don't." Eliza turned the internal dial down. She was on edge, teetering over a sheer cliff, nothing but violently roiling waters greeting her below. Had nothing to do with what Hank had said, she knew that. It was the situation they found themselves in. They done got themselves in a bit of a mess once again. Cleaning 'em up took a lot of the fun out of making 'em in the first place.
You can knock things down a helluva lot faster than you can put them up.
"You know, Liza, it's got me to thinking..." Hank's eyes flittered, an overt indication that he was indeed thinking. His mind travelling inwards, journeying through the neurons and axons and dendrites on his trusty mind steed, which he'd nicknamed Thinky. Because, while Hank was quite adept at complicated ideas and compositions, he wasn't too good at figmented horse naming.
"Hoo boy, Hank. Hoo boy." Hoo boy indeed. Whoever this boy was, he was 'bout to get himself full up on being hoo'ed at.
This was not an empty 'hoo' from Eliza, who was not prone to hoo hyperbole. She had never thrown around an unwarranted hoo in her life. Every hoo was earned. She made sure of that. She felt very secure in assigning this here moment the hoo in which she had alluded to.
Eliza had seen the end results of Hank's thinking many times. And usually, the only place these mentalations and ruminatories got them was into a whole heap of trouble. Trouble piled up real high. The first building block of trouble starting at like ground level, maybe a bit below if there was a depression of some sort, and then more and more of the trouble densely stacked atop one another till that trouble heap was taller than the tallest mountain she'd ever seen. And she'd seen some pretty tall mountains. She'd never actually measured them to get the exact calculation as to their peaks, tough thing to eyeball she figured, so, she didn't know precisely where they all sat in a personal hierarchy of mountain elevation, but that didn't matter none. Even like the ninth tallest mountain she'd seen would be plenty tall to get this point across.
Hank's thinking often led to them spending some time in a jail cell. Or fleeing somewhere in the middle of the night. Or running for their lives from some posse or another. And it takes a whole lot to do something deemed posse worthy. You don't get a posse drummed up unless you done something real offensive to the posse purveyors. At least if we're talking about a respectably attended posse. Eliza wasn't discussin' about no three person posse. Not even a four or five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. No way. To her, posse meant at least a baker's dozen or it ain't no posse at all.
Most of the time, Hank's thinking meant there was gonna some bleeding involved. Whether it be one of them bleeding, or someone else bleeding, you wouldn't find out until the whole thing played out. In the instance where Hank's thoughts got them both to donate blood because there'd been a donor shortage going around, that was all well and good with Eliza. A few times it meant ink bleeding from a pamphlet printed too quick, and that was okay in her books too. Colour bleeding from improper washing of some of their clothes was inevitable. She didn't love it, but a life lived al fresco such as theirs was bound to be hard on their toggery. It was the other type of bleeding, mostly when it was coming out of her in some form or another, that's what she didn't much care for.
