COVID didn’t kill Big Bob’s Booze and Burgers.

Rancid coyote meat did.

The damn fool’s lucky it didn’t kill his customers.

More than two dozen food poisoning victims struggled through tough times at the toilet bowl as they deduced the origin of their discontent. All had eaten at Big Bob’s the night before. All moaned and groaned their way back to health before threatening the proprietor of the once-popular unlicensed bar and restaurant with various forms of bodily injury and death. All vowed serious revenge even if it took years to get even.

Faithful mutt Clancy even got sick and refused a belly rub.

How was Big Bob supposed to know poached coyote flesh would go bad so quickly and send shivers up and down the intestinal tracts of loyal customers? As proprietor of a pandemic speakeasy, Big Bob had enough problems without vicious attacks on his person. At least they didn’t catch the coronavirus from him. No way could Big Bob bounce back. Who needed this?

At least he no longer had to hunker down in the woods three-mornings-a-week waiting for some mangy coyote to come waltzing down the trail to meet his or her maker. He would miss the little coyote pups, though, that were so popular in the Wednesday all-you-can-eat special he passed off as locally raised veal cutlets.

Planning Capt. Jones’ demise was all Big Bob had left to look forward to. Just like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti western movies, he would hang ’em high. After sweating all week sanding and shellacking, Big Bob’s gallows stood ready to go and looking good. The sack of sand he substituted for that sack of shit and dropped from the trap door as a test bounced just right. The noose held nice and tight, too, wrapped around a fake head he constructed with a bowling ball wrapped in a sheet, tied at the neck and painted with two black smudge eyes, a matching nose and a crooked smiley face mouth to signify that smug scum prison guard who stole his girl.

Big Bob sure missed Betsy. Pain in the ass that she was, Betsy made Big Bob feel as good as he felt since he realized he could feed people coyote meat without them knowing what they were eating. Now Big Bob felt abandoned, used, abused, screwed, blued and tattooed. Life looked great until Capt. Jones made the scene with his open neck shirts, gold chain and musk-scented cologne. Capt. Jones ruined Big Bob’s life. Now Big Bob would return the favor.

From Capt. Jones’ perspective, Big Bob represented everything wrong with America, a big, bogus tub of shit, a hoax militiaman and primo candidate for sealing in the wall. Bricking was Capt. Jones’ original idea for handling society’s flotsam and clearing the way for a new generation of pure-bred patriots. Lots of people needed to get bricked. The Big Bobs of the world turned America into a degenerate loser world loaded with victims who chased unfulfilled dreams and swept national aspirations into the gutter. Capt. Jones might even get T-shirts made up that simply said get bricked.

The time was right so why wait?

Everything Capt. Jones needed sat stacked in the corner of his used pick-up. Bricks, sand, cement, a new trowel and a large mixing tub triggered a fascist male sense of reprisal that pounded in his gonads. Why not just drive over the Big Bob’s, smack him in the head with a two-by-four and seal him up in the wall for all time, stuck behind that great big beautiful wall to commemorate Trump’s great big beautiful whiteness?

Almost like ESP, Big Bob had an idea of his own. Why not just drive over to Capt. Jones’ trailer, lasso and tie him to the hitch on the back of his pick-up? Drag that sucker home and hoist him to the top of the gallows before springing the trap door and dropping the body all the way to hell? OK, so maybe somebody might see the ghastly spectacle of Big Bob bouncing Capt. Jones down the street, video the event and call CNN. Too bad. Call it a suicide mission but if Big Bob can’t have Betsy nobody can. OK, so Betsy’s dead and nobody can have her, but Big Bob’s life just wasn’t worth living anymore.

Leave the Boogaloo race war to the children as an inheritance. God help the little ones. Everybody needed something good to look forward to in this rotten country, didn’t they? Big Bob looked forward to liquidating Capt. Jones as much as Capt. Jones looked forward to obliterating Big Bob. In their frightening, tightening minds, getting even is a constitutional right.

Shaking with rage, Capt. Jones jumped into his truck at the same time Big Bob jumped into his. Racing north, Big Bob put the pedal to the metal. Racing south, Capt. Jones stepped on it. Cursing with four syllables, Big Bob clutched the wheel in a white-knuckled death grip. Ranting with foamy f-word spittle flying, Capt. Jones gripped the wheel in a five-fingered killer squeeze.

Goddamn, here he comes, Capt. Jones said.

Sonofabitch, he’s heading right this way, Big Bob said.

Full-speed ahead, Capt. Jones said.

Big Bob cheered his new-found courage and sense of purpose.

Yeeehaw!

I’m not budging, Big Bob said.

Capt. Jones got apoplectic.

Think I’m gonna swerve?

On a collision course at eighty, ninety, a hundred miles-an-hour, they headed straight at each other. With neither man wearing a mask, each saw into the other’s deepest most soul-searching laser-like gaping eyeball-to-eyeball glare.

With just thirty feet between them, then twenty, then ten, the moment of truth finally arrived.

Nobody characterized their deadly face-off as chicken.

Shocked, stunned witnesses called it a cockfight.