Pecos Ward escaped from a mental institution. And he’s now in the middle of a California desert, staring at the sun, wondering who’s crazier: him or that institution that had been like a mother to him.
But that’s far ahead in the story and as these things are dictated that’s where they’ll fall. Pecos Ward had a life before his life, this life right now, and he’s struggling to remember it. But again, this is far ahead, or far behind where old Pecos is now.
You see, there’s something you should understand about Pecos, his sense of time and place has been forever scarred by two important factors in his life. One is an event and the other is a circumstance. The event was his fall while the circumstance (repeat circumstance) is his taking of pills. These pills aren’t just any pills. These tiny little black and white capsules were the iron men of the pill world, guaranteed to make you think you were pink or your Monopoly back. The side effects of the pills included excessive hair growth and prostate irregularity, so for balding men with properly working libidos, beware.
Pecos took out a plastic vial, wiped the sweat from his brow, and swallowed a handful of the meds. He than began walking along the sand, his sandaled feet making a crunch sound with every step. The sun was an overbearing tyrant, bearing down on him, Pecos being the guy he was refused to take it personally, he just blamed it on his shadow.
“Who’s crazy, huh?” Me? You? Huh?” Pecos asked, pointing accusingly at his shadow. Then, with a dismissive wave, he said “Eh,”
Pecos continued walking. As he did he noticed little creatures scuttling past his feet. Lizards, rodents of some kind, insects, all passing over his toes and feet.
What a wonderful world, Pecos thought to himself, that can use my feet as a stopover on their cosmic flights of fancy. At last Pecos made it to the highway, that asphalt borderline that was devouring the hapless beams of the Sun tyrant with voracious intensity, bringing the air around it to a visibly rippling boil. Looking left, than right as his mother taught him to do (or so he assumed someone taught him to do) he than swallowed some pills as he taught himself to do, Pecos set off across the highway.
He was doing just fine until a silver blur whizzed past him and nearly took out a piece of his backside.
The 1994 Two Door Silver Ford Escort.
One of the most spectacularly mediocre cars of its generation, this car, when aged like fine wine, only becomes more and more one with its surroundings. That’s mostly due to the fact that it leaves a piece of itself (quite literally) everywhere it goes.
Pecos, looking the part of a haggard scarecrow in an undone robe, just barely dove out of the way in time to flip off the car before he tumbled to the sand. The car stopped in a nearby asphalt square. This square was in front of a diner called “The Greet and Eat”, which was built to look like a half decapitated art deco turtle slapped upside down and drowned in pink and white paint.
Pecos, now covered in brown sand and gray pebbles due to his impromptu swan dive into the California desert, slowly got to his feet and didn’t bother dusting himself off. Rather, he just stared at the car, stared and stared until, before he realized it, he had walked all the way to the car.
Now, the driver of the car, in simple terms, he was a mob affiliated rat. His name was Ray Hill. Not a very mobster-ish name but maybe this could partly explain his rodent status. Feeling left out can generate some strange feelings after all.
Ray Hill turned state’s evidence against the much known and semi-reviled (depending on who you asked and simultaneously who you were) Mancini Family. Though far from being the elite Mafia of yesteryear, the Mancini family were very traditional in that they killed people, a lot of people, some of them not even Italian or a part of their own family.
What did Ray Hill do for this family? He was a bookie, basically he took bets. Sure, every now and again he broke a jockey’s shins or told some boxer to throw it in the fifth or risk having his hands relocated to a box in Taiwan. But, he always reasoned, what he did was nothing compared to what the actual Mancini family did.
Well, time is a funny thing. Not funny ha-ha, more like funny blow your knee caps off and pour just a dash of salt on the gushing wounds to add just a slight sting to the proceedings. Ray Hill, if he ever had a curious mind, was about to have that non-existent curiosity satisfied, he would find out what the Mancini’s did to traitors. But, Ray having that old will to live that many but not all people are lassoed with, decided to defy his apparent fate, and skip town. Town in this case being Newark, New Jersey.
Ray left his sports bar that had served as his home and business for five years on a balmy morning. The mist hung in the air like a heavy shroud, monolithic gray hands sinking into invisibility as they reached for the ground and drenched any hapless Jersey citizens with warm pressure. A week previous he had turned state’s evidence against the Mancini family. And now a week later, he was essentially fleeing for his life.
Why do this? Why turn state’s evidence against a vicious crime family? A family that in its own way, actually trusted Ray Hill? The answer is quite simple. The answer lies in Ray Hills’ testicles. His testicles had come under the firm grip of the most powerful and horrific gang of blood sucking pirates that the world had ever conceived. The I.R.S.
Ray Hill, shlubby looking Ray Hill with his skinny frame, thinning brown hair and dull blue eyes, was being audited something fierce. And facing copious amounts of jail time with very large men who would find him as valuable (and refreshing) as a fantasy woman complete with virginity and low to non-existent standards intact.
So, to alleviate his tax woes, or rather, given the opportunity to alleviate his tax woes. Ray was given a choice. Go to jail or rat on the Mancini’s with the evidence that the government knew he had. True story. This is what they put Capone away for.
Ray Hill wasn’t Italian, not even a little bit. He wondered as he exited his car if this meant his death would be that much more violent because of that fact.
Pecos Ward had positioned himself next to the Ford Escort. He then looked straight into the back of Ray Hill’s head. Not turning around to meet his pursuer Ray ignored him, chalking him up as some bum looking for spare change, and entered the diner. Pecos followed him in.
The diner was frosty cool. But with Mr. Sun blazing away just outside the uncovered windows, the interior of the diner was incredibly well lit. The smell of the air was of wet and greasy food, coupled with the chill of artificial air, created a cold and disgustingly delicious aroma. Like that of gasoline right below a lit match. A powder keg.
Ray Hill walked fast, fully aware that he was being followed. And Pecos kept walking, keeping in step right behind Ray who was still wearing his baseball cap and sunglasses.
Ray sat down at a booth and Pecos immediately sat across from him. If any of the other diner denizens found this curious, they sure didn’t verbalize it. One young man in a baseball cap, sitting at the diner’s front, raised his head, but quickly lowered it as he continued to poke his fork into the deep fried thing in front of him.
Ray quickly grabbed a menu setting it up as a visor between he and Pecos. Pecos neglected to touch his menu, he instead continued to stare right at Ray through the menu.
After a few moments a waitress arrived to take the apparent couples’ order.
“Can I get you guys some water to start with?” she asked perkily. She was a slightly overweight girl of Hispanic descent. Ray mumbled a response. Pecos, without breaking his stare, replied in rapid fashion:
“Pepsi, not Coke, Pepsi, preferably aged Crystal Pepsi if you have it which I know you don’t but I’d figure I’d ask anyway. So I want a Pepsi. Ice Cold and filled to the brim, preferably from the plastic jug or maybe in a glass bottle, none of that watered down restaurant ‘soda’ if you catch my drift like I suspect you don’t.” Pecos finished and looked up at the waitress with a crooked smile which showed his teeth which were cracked and streaked with grime. The waitress blinked twice and then proceeded to walk away slowly.
Ray put down his menu. He looked at Pecos through his cheap 7-Eleven sunglasses.
“Who are-” he began before being cut off with swordsman like precision.
“Are you anti-Semitic?” Pecos asked, his blue eyes burning holes through Ray’s sunglasses.
“What?” Ray asked.
“Do you hate Jews?”
“N-no, I mean, I have a coupl’a Jew friends but-”
“You drive a Ford brand car, you are aware of that right?” Pecos asked.
“Well, yeah, I mean-”
“Ford was a bigot, an anti-Semitic man. By driving his brand of car, you are, in some microscopically cosmic way, endorsing his beliefs and practices.”
“Look, man-”
“Pecos.”
“What? Okay, Pecos, it’s just a car, know what I mean? It don’t mean I support this or that or anything, you know?”
“I know but I’m pretty sure you don’t.” Pecos said, leaning back on the plastic upholstered booth, the squeezing and contracting of the material sounded like a wheezing fart.
“I don’t what?” Ray asked. The waitress arrived with their drinks. A water for Ray and a fresh Pepsi for Pecos.
“Are you guys ready to order yet?” the waitress, whose nametag said Maria on it, asked slowly, almost as if she were defusing a bomb verbally.
“Cheese burger, fries, and a milkshake please,” Ray said.
“That’s not kosher, but I’ll have the fish tacos, with sour cream, chives, cilantro, and no spit or feces, unless its free of course.” Pecos said. Maria was about to point out that Pecos didn’t even look at the menu but than thought better of it.
“Look, what the hell do you want?” Ray asked as Maria walked away, preparing to gossip with the cook in the back she would secretly have sex with when the diner opened and closed.
“I want…your car.” Pecos said with sudden finality.
“My…car?”
“Yes.”
“But I need that car.”
Pecos reached into his robe pocket and brought out another plastic vial of pills, this one different from the last. He threw back seven or eight pills and swallowed them. Pecos then picked up his Pepsi and slowly guzzled it until only about half was left.
“I need it too,” Pecos said, suppressing a belch and suddenly wondering why.
“For what?”
“For driving, come on keep up with me.”
“I know for driving, driving where, I’m pretty sure buddy, that I need it a lot more than you do.” Ray said with some satisfaction that his reason for needing a car superseded Pecos’.
“Is that right? Well, I just had some of this delicious Pepsi brand cola and I am suddenly thinking that what I have to do is more important than anything else going on at any point ever,” Pecos said, breathing in, he continued. “I need to get somewhere that isn’t here, and your car is a means to that end.”
“Forget you, get lost, I need the car for something a helluva lot more important than that!”
Pecos scratched his bushy hair, particles of sand and dust, and even a few twigs and various other bits of nature and ecology fell out.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom and urinate. When I get back, you’ll be begging me to take that car of yours.” Pecos slid out of the booth and began walking towards the bathroom. Ray looked shocked, confused and befuddled in that order.
As Pecos walked he passed some one who was going to suddenly become very important in his life. He was sitting at the diner and wearing a baseball cap. Yes, the same guy who looked up before. Under his hat was something weird and his name matched that weirdness. His name was Lyle Stanley Kubrick.

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