~ * * * ~
“Pick it up, big cheese, we ain’t got all night.”
Munyon’s words rankled Stan. The narrow beam from the flashlight in his hand that guided them was devoured by the surrounding darkness like a match in an airplane hangar and made any rapid advancement through the thicket of woods they were attempting to navigate a laborious task. As it was, even with his sluggish pace, Stan tripped and stumbled over roots and forest rubble that protruded unseen across the nonexistent trail. He knew he was out of his element, never attracted by the lure of communing with the great outdoors, even the not-so-great ones. He tried to spend an evening once bunking down in his northern New Jersey backyard, but didn’t make it past midnight before he retreated to the comfort of his own bed after deciding the restrictive, sarcophagus-like confines of a sleeping bag were better suited for three-thousand-year old mummies. Now here he was fumbling through an unfamiliar, discomforting environment with a sociopathic crackpot behind him jabbing at his shoulder blades with the barrel of a shotgun.
“Stop poking me, I’m going as fast as I can,” Stan snapped.
“Well it ain’t fast enough,” Munyon grumbled.
Stan stopped and turned. “Okay, here’s an idea. Why don’t you lead and I’ll follow?”
“’Cause you got the light.”
“Take it.” Stan held out the flashlight.
“Can’t. Need both hands for my friend here,” Munyon said, as he tapped on the gun.
“What about me?” Stan protested. “Don’t I need two hands for the ax?”
“You’ll manage. You’re the big cheese director, ain’t ya?”
“I’m the director, yeah, so?”
“So that means you should be smart enough to figure things out when the time comes.”
Stan cocked his head. “Figure what out?”
“Time comes, you’ll know,” Munyon assured him.
“And what if I don’t?”
Munyon flicked his hand forward several times like he was brushing flies away from a dessert tray. “Best get movin’. You spot anything, give a yell.”
With a grimace, Stan turned and pushed forward through the thick hedge scrub and past bramble bushes with sharp thorns that snagged his pants and tore at any exposed skin on his arms. The crackle of their footsteps was magnified in the absence of any competition for sound in the immediate area other than the chirping of crickets, which, Stan remembered from his ninth- grade biology class, was not caused by rubbing their legs together as most people assumed, including himself. It turned out that the “songs” were generated by male crickets scraping the top of one wing against the bottom of the other. It was one other fact he recalled, however, that seemed even more apropos to Stan under the present circumstances: crickets were scavengers that, as a last resort in the absence of any other food source, ate their own dead.
For thirty more yards, the terrain remained unchanged, but Stan’s patience with the arduous trek—he had a nagging suspicion that they were roaming in a giant circle, but was so discombobulated by then that he couldn’t be certain— and Munyon’s lack of candor had worn thin. “Where exactly are we going?” he groused, without bothering to look back. “And how much farther?”
“Far enough,” Munyon said, followed by a short burst of laughter. “Whatsa matter, boy, got the jitters?”
“Don’t you?”
Munyon’s response was delayed, but emphatic. “I don’t get the jitters.”