Jango was cleaning his thirty-odd six the old fashioned way, with a wire brush, in and out, in and out. Rosa Heberdene was sighting down the barrel of her favorite bunt line and whistling, but not good; her mouth was full of cruller. Both of them were gun collectors and outlaws and had grown up listening to head banging music. They'd gotten up early that morning with plans to rob the Federal Savings downtown; They'd already taken a ride to the 7-11 in Ashton, got coffee and crullers, returned to the trailer and were waiting for the bank to open.
Jango had been reading an article about the Scalia ruling back in 2008; had them print out a copy of the transcripts at the library. He had all that spread out on their kitchen table. Spilled coffee on it as soon as he walked through the door. After he finished cleaning the thirty-odd, he picked up one of the soiled papers between his thumb and forefinger and shook it. He dabbed the worst spot with the tail of his shirt, lifted it up to the light and turned it. He could still see the stain.
"You stain it? Stain it?" Rosa Heberdene had asked the question twice. Coffee tended to hype her up. She had used a 36 ounce cup and filled it to the brim with Brazilian Dark Roast.
Jango stared at her.
"You know, you say something and I look at you and think. . . well, what I normally think is that. . . how am I going to put this; it doesn't occur to me that you're crazy in the day in, day out sense, during our business hours, I guess you'd say, but just then, I'm looking at you and I'm thinking, fuck man, she's crazy. I'll be honest. I get worried because I don't really know your agenda. It may turn out to be something very foreign to me. I know your attitude toward men. You don't need them or you need them for practical shit. So I'm looking at you, thinking you've been lobotomized at some point, at some distant time in your past; not physically lobotomized but essentially so. I see you as this lobotomized woman; but only during those brief instances, not at other times."
"Do you care? You care?"
"You're agreeing? I don't want to know if you're agreeing. And I don't know if I care. I really don't know. I don't know the consequences of what you are up to; for me, that is. I have my suspicions, after getting to know you, that you don't know what you're doing. But I have suspicions about myself too. But as much as you have told me over and over that you have thought everything through and subjected it all to critical thinking, I really doubt that. You're just winging it is what I think. You're riding the wave of your appetites. But I feel time is running out, for one thing. If it was thirty years ago, all that might concern me. But at this point you take what you can get."
Jango shook the paper again. "Scalia ruled to over turn Washington DC's strict gun control in favor of individuals bearing arms. The original intent by the founding forefathers in drafting their Second Amendment had been to allow militias to take up arms, not individuals."
"What about the stain on the library document you just made."
Jango was embarrassed he had spilled coffee on the paper. He liked his public library and returned his books on time, in good condition.
"Is it going to ruin your day?" Rosa Heberdene asked. "Tell me now."
Little things set Jango off. Little things. She was leery of his moods, his outbursts.
"Just about," he said.
"We have our guns to clean. Then we have the First Federal to rob. And to figure out what we are going to do with the money."
"Goddamn First Federal, Goddammit" Jango said. He loved to sound like a redneck.
"Decentralize the government," Rosa Heberdene said.
"So where are we going to leave the goddamn money this time?" The last time they left it in the passenger seat of the mayor's car, parked in front of city hall.
"I'd say back at the 7-11, in the donut case. I looked at it this morning. The bag would fit."
"Ok."
That changed Jango's mood. She had steered the topic away from the spill. He knew she had but it worked. The image of the stolen money sitting in the 7-11 donut case had been strong enough. He knew she would distract everybody in the store by pulling up her blouse and yelling at the top of her lungs, like an animal. Her breasts were enormous so everybody would look for the two seconds it would take him to open the donut cabinet door and place the bag inside. Then they'd leave. Her boobs had been on a number of closed circuit camera tapes.
Jango was hungry for another cruller. Each of them had bought two. He'd have to clean the sugar off his hands before they left for the bank though. The idea of holding his shotgun with sticky cruller fingers made him cringe, really cringe.
