"There's a lot of trade in the stuff."

  Everyone else had stopped talking. 

  "Goat cheese?"  Lips literally smacked open and shut, parched.  A flask with core sample puddle water was handed round.  "On the Continental Divide?" A dried leathery hand reached for the flask.  Clenched then spasm'd and the brown water sploshed out in ghostly drops on the worn wooden floor.  Air travel size bottles of Vodka were quietly taken from a satchel.  Placed on the peeling paint table.  A head scarf was removed and placed atop the pistol in the sachel.  What skin was remaining, stretched taut over skull.  Bright eyes set on the bottles from hollows in the head. 

  "Are you nuts?  Fly me in that low again and I'll," the man thumbed himself like a cartoon character.  People started fishing into pockets for smoke and knives. 

  It would be moments that felt like hours before the fulcrum of the American see-saw of "freedom" was cemented into war.