Pink flamingos preened amid green and yellow flowers on Big Bob’s new Hawaiian shirt. Flabby around the middle but still 280 pounds solid, like a super-heavyweight boxer raising his arms in victory he thrust into the air two thick tattooed arms (one skull and crossbones and one Willie Nelson portrait). More flamingos posed amid colorful eye-catching posies on the front of the iridescent shirt.

For the first time since Betsy died, he stretched his upper lip almost ear-to-ear to show a decade-old set of cracked dentures. As happy as a man could be in the face of heartache, a man with a new look his Betsy would love, Big Bob did a little hula in front of the full-length mirror that stood in the corner of the room off the garage where he usually butchered deer and now chopped up wild coyotes.

Skinned and hanging by their hind legs from a long pipe, Big Bob went back to work carving one coyote after another, working his way down the line of a dozen adult males and females he “harvested” in a 24 hour period. Cutting select chunks of meat for various special recipes at his illegal bar & grill, he scoffed at the word harvest that made him sound like your average friendly farmer planting corn fields rather than a serial predator capitalist looking for blood and guts to provide meat for the masses.

Raking in the cash, he almost couldn’t keep up with the demand for booze and burgers that defied the governor’s coronavirus order to ban eat-in drinking and dining in licensed establishments. The order would likely end soon so he needed to make all the money he could grab selling food and drink without a license.

Thinking they were chowing down on Grade A-Prime beef, the Trump supporters loved his famous chili and made-to-order steaks. Most popular, especially among bikers, were specialty deep-fried coyote testicles he featured on the menu as imported Rocky Mountain Oysters. He told customers the meat came from American bison that roamed the Western prairie and descended from the beasts Daniel Boone killed before the Mexicans murdered him at the Alamo. Or were the animals related to the buffalo Davey Crockett hunted with the same white man’s zeal he relied on to hunt redskins?

Family trees aside, his regulars didn’t know the difference between one frontiersman and another. For all they knew Big Bob descended from Buffalo Bill and would believe him if he said so.

Shooting coyotes was easy, too easy. An army of the mangy mountain curs meandered into fields close to town. Bob picked them off with ease. Deer posed a challenge. You had to see them before they saw you. Lately they seemed to have a sixth sense for deerstalkers. Coyotes acted like lazy, stupid, easy-to-lead rednecks. To tell the truth, coyotes no doubt held higher IQs than the overwhelming majority of Big Bob’s customers.

Into the freezer went meat for the week. Big Bob popped a Pabst and turned up the volume on a David Allen Coe CD with lyrics vulgar enough to start an instant race riot. Big Bob hated people of color as much as he hated the politically correct term liberals invented to describe them. Big Bob knew one color and one color only. He didn’t care that his favorite color wasn’t a color at all. Big Bob considered himself to be a person of color. Like he always said, white is right, morning, noon and night.

Just as he closed his eyes, Buck spoke up in his squeaky cartoon mouse voice from where he stood in the half-open garage doorway.

You wanted to see me?

I have a surprise for you.

Throwing Buck a package wrapped in green and red Christmas paper left over from before his mother died a decade ago, Big Bob opened another cold one. Big Bob loved his beer almost as much as he loved Betsy. Sure, she had her faults. She drank too much. She smoked too much. She cheated on everybody too much. Nobody can be perfect. But Betsy had a good heart. So did Big Bob.

Buck opened his present.

Oh, my God, Big Bob, that’s absolutely stunning, he said.

Unfolding and quickly unbuttoning the Hawaiian shirt, he put it on over his white T-shirt.  Without thinking, with one hand on his hip and the other behind his head he twirled like a fashion model strutting on the runway.

I got us matching shirts for the rally, Big Bob said.

Buck gently ran his hands over the smooth bright fabric.

Big Bob explained.

There’s this group of white nationalists, see, calls themselves the Boogaloo Boys. They wear Hawaiian shirts. We’re tougher than them so I’m taking their uniforms for us. From now on we’re Big Bob’s Boys. If they have a problem with that they can meet us out back to sort out our differences. We’ll be on them like white on rice.

I love them, Buck said.

You love the Boogaloo Boys?

No, the shirts. I always wanted to go to Hawaii. The colors match my complexion and my eyes.

Out of nowhere, Vic ducked under the door and came into the garage. He started to speak. He stopped. He started to laugh. First he pointed at Big Bob. Then he pointed at Buck. Big Bob stood to full height. Embarrassed, Buck smoothed the tail of his lovely new shirt. Irish Setter Clancy sat up, groggy from where he had been sleeping in the corner with a coyote bone in his mouth.

Vic wiped his eyes with his fists and tried to stop laughing.

Look at the fags, he said.