Strange occupation

For several years I made this big art show over in North Carolina. It became a routine and I always did the same thing each year. I stayed at the same motel and usually ate at the same slop shops. I set up at the same time each day and closed down the same time each night.

The days were long and tirin' and every evening after I went back to my horse stall, I'd stop at this water hole just across the street from where I was camped.

You know how it is at a good waterin' trough -- you get to know folks. About every time I stopped in for my nightly nerve medicine, I'd see this one feller hangin' on a stool and we gets to talkin'.

Now he's a nice clean lookin' feller and them threads he's wearin' didn't come from Goodwill. I like jawin' with this bird, and he's lots smarter to talk to than the average.

He fit right in with all the other routine I'd picked up there, and he'd kinda be expectin' me each year when the show opened.

We'd become pretty good friends after takin' communion together for six or seven years and he knew more about me than I did him.

You don't go into strange towns and ask strangers a lot of personal questions if you want to live long and do well. We'd hammered around on about every subject I could think of, and he seemed to be up on about anything we'd talked about.

Well, this one night we'd been takin' on quite a bit of the liquid refreshments and you know how gate-mouthed a feller gets when you do that.

Anyway, I bald-faced asked the dude what he did for a livin'. I didn't cut his earmarks as no street sweeper or dishwasher.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," says he. I comes back with the usual, "Try me."

I'd noticed that his hands were soft as a woman's with manicured nails, and them fine threads wouldn't hold up to my kind of work. He had lots of free time and he wasn't slow when it came time to buy.

Then he tells me that he's a hit man. That about knocked me off the stool. "You mean one of them fellers who go around killin' folks?"

I couldn't believe it -- but on the other hand, I could. He had been in some kind of special forces in the military and evidently did his job well.

Join the army and learn a skill. We've all heard that before. That he did!

He told me he'd been killin' people all his life that he didn't know or didn't like or dislike. The civilian job, like always, pays more than the military, and to him, killin' is killin', which pays well.

I don't go around criticizin' what a feller does for a livin' and I didn't criticize him, but I'll have to say that he's sure got a strange occupation. He ain't prejudiced; I guess he'd kill anybody.

I don't go there anymore.

COURTESY of Tom Runnels Publications. Copyrighted and registered by Tom Runnels and Saundra Runnels Revocable Trust. Printed in The Banner Press: May 5, 1988.