America is a beautiful thing…
I owned a construction company. We worked all over the country for commercial and federal government clients. Titus worked for me as a job superintendent and project manager for a number of years then left to work in the North Dakota fracking fields. They paid him more than I could afford.
Titus lasted a year in the oil business. The wife and two boys in the Twin Cities, the thirteen-hundred mile weekend home visits, the man camps, the disintegrating asphalt, the trucker-bomb litter, the crime, the drugs, the alcohol, the simmering violence (he carried a .40 caliber automatic under the seat of his pickup) were hard on the marriage. Tiffany wanted to live in Kentucky. The North Dakota money was good, they moved to Stanton. That was ten years ago.
My ride took me through Stanton. The last two years have been tough for Titus; Tiffany had a mass removed from her brain, a surgery that required the removal of much of her skull, and had both knees replaced. Her recovery has been slow and painful. The boys, Tristan and Jeremiah, are married and gone and Titus has had to manage her care alone. When I met Tiffany again yesterday, she was chatty and sweeping the stairs and laughed at my jokes.
At his house, Titus showed me one of his rifles, a Masterpiece Arms .338 Lapua Magnum with a Defiance action and Trigger Tech Diamond set at 1 pound with a Valdada Recon G2 optic 4.8-30x56mm scope. He put it on its bipod on the dining room table and after we pulled the bolt and checked the chamber, we took turns sitting on a dining room chair and squinting through the scope through the open front door at the fine lines of the reticle and the blurry green foliage beyond and squeezing off a click against that 1 pound trigger pull. He hits targets at 1650 feet with that rifle. That’s a third of a mile.
Then he showed me his Daniel’s Defense M4A1 SOCOM 14.5 in 5.56mm. He had targets set up in the woods behind his house, and after we shooed the dogs away, we each took a few shots. I hadn’t fired a rifle of that sort since, hmmmm, 1977? (We didn’t have laser sights in those days, either. Just sayin’.) When we got in the truck to leave, he shoved the M4 under the cushion of the rear passenger seat, so we had it with us.
Titus drives his Tacoma pickup on the tiny, hyper-curvy, up-and-down, no-shoulder, no lane marking, heavily treed, occasionally trafficked, can’t-see-shit Kentucky roads with a maniacal glee and no seatbelt, the seatbelt alarm taking many miles to stop beeping and restarting at every stop sign (the red warning light on the dash never goes off). After a while, he asked if I was motion sick.
We drove to Natural Bridge State Park and hiked to the top of the natural bridge. It’s a steep climb and we took our time. As we paused to catch our breath, Titus for no reason asked me who I thought would win the election. I said, “Harris.” He said, “I don’t usually vote that way.” He likes Walz, he’s not comfortable with Harris. I said, “We need responsible government.” He sighed and shook his head and we didn’t talk about politics anymore.
We stopped at a Mexican restaurant on the way back to my motel. We both ordered carne asada tacos and no alcohol and when the food arrived, he asked if he could say a blessing.
