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Part II of a two part story of Fort Stockton greed and betrayal.

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Sunny downshifted and rolled forward, frowning as if he could pull the tollbooth up by its roots with nothing but facial expression. Burris tugged his cap and held out the cigar box that counted as treasury.

“Nickel for the view,” Burris said.

“I’m late for a whoopin’,” Sunny said. “Put it on my tab.”

Burris held steady. “We don’t do tabs. We do nickels and exacting standards.”

Behind Burris, on both sides of the booth, men in overalls stepped forward—calm, unhurried—each holding something from the catalog of agricultural persuasion. Their faces were friendly in the way that a fence is friendly: it means well but objects to your plans.

Sunny’s hands grew very still on the wheel.

Now, the proper thing here—the wise thing, the civilized thing—would have been to stop, pay the nickel, and say “thank you for maintaining local infrastructure” without irony. But Sunny’s blood featured a chemical that turned advice into a distant bell.

He shot Burris a look somewhere between apology and challenge. The amber coffee in his belly jangled like spurs in a dryer. He saw Conchita’s painted bruises in his head, not knowing they were paint, and felt his better judgment crawl under the seat to wait out the storm.

“Stand aside,” Sunny said.

“Can’t,” Burris said. “I’m state-certified.”

“By what state?”

“Barzón.”

Sunny grinned, and it wasn’t friendly. He reached up, tugged the brim of his hat down one notch, and let the Lincoln creep forward, just enough to make the booth groan about personal space.

The men with hay hooks stiffened. One of them, a thick fellow called Shorty because life loves irony, planted his boots and lifted his hook like a question mark ready to puncture the sentence.

“Don’t,” Sunny said, not loudly, not softly.

Shorty did.

He snagged the Lincoln’s front fender—not deeply, just a lover’s scratch—and Sunny’s soul made a noise you’d hear only in a church if someone set the pulpit on fire. The Continental was not just a car; it was the family silverware on wheels, the good suit with a V-12 lining, the proof that a boy from Pecos County could count past ten and still have fingers to spare. No man marked it and kept his reputation symmetrical.

Sunny killed the engine, slid out slow, and stood up into his full, unreasonable height. The wind came up the creek, tugging his jacket like a friend with doubts.

“Which of you,” he said, voice low and warm as engine oil, “wants to explain to Conchita why I’m late?”

Burris, who had coached little-league manners at the church, decided to contribute. “We’re just askin’ you to respect the process,” he said. “The process keeps us from hittin’ each other with farm things.”

“Your process,” Sunny said, “needs a different booth.”

The men glanced at one another. Burris looked down, sighed, and reached under the counter. Sunny tensed—gun? writ?—but Burris brought up a stamp pad and a wooden stamp, the kind that had been used to ruin lives since stationery was invented.

“Sir,” Burris said. “You’re fixin’ to incur a violation. I’m prepared to stamp this ticket ‘Escalated’ and tack it on your permanent record.”

Sunny blinked. “I have a permanent record?”

“We all do,” Burris said sadly. “It’s the only permanent thing in Pecos County.”

Something in the ridiculousness of it all should have cooled Sunny down. In a better town, it might have. But Fort Stockton has a rule about momentum: once you start, you’re halfway done and the rest is gravity. Sunny stepped forward—and that’s when the absurdity tipped into chaos.

From the cottonwoods beyond the causeway came a sudden blare of trumpets. Not metaphorical. Actual trombones, trumpets, and one oboe that sounded lost. A high-school marching band (such as it was in 1940; they were more enthusiastic than educated) burst onto the shoulder and deployed into a lopsided chevron. They were practicing for Homecoming on account of being told to by a woman who’d confused “cheer” with “military training.” At the head marched a drum major in borrowed plumes, baton spinning like a helicopter that had married a snake.

They struck up “Deep in the Heart of Texas” with an ambition that murdered key signatures. Everyone, including Sunny, forgot to breathe long enough for the oboe to find a note and fail it.

“Now!” hissed a voice from the brush.

Barzón’s men—who had been instructed to perform a tidy intervention, full of stern looks and fines—panicked at the music, the sudden audience, and Sunny’s hat at war. They surged. Hay hooks rose. Branding irons flared. Burris banged his stamp like a judge with a temper and a paper problem.

Sunny did what Sunny always did: the immediate, ill-advised thing. He stepped, slipped on a fallen program (HOMEKOMING SPEKTAKULAR!!!), grabbed the nearest thing for balance (Shorty’s belt), and discovered that Shorty’s pants were both loose and loyal to gravity. Shorty yelped, the oboe squealed like it had found religion, and Burris, misreading the scene, stamped Sunny’s lapel as “ESCALATED” in red ink big enough to be read from a zeppelin.

Someone screamed “FIRE!” which is never helpful. Someone else screamed “PARADE!” which was accurate and also unhelpful. Meanwhile, in town, Conchita—watching the causeway through a spyglass borrowed from the Bijou Theater props—gasped, clapped, and declared the whole thing “grande cinema” before remembering she was supposed to be fainting.

In the scrum, one of Barzón’s men yanked the Lincoln’s handbrake thinking it would do something theatrical. It did: the Continental rolled—slowly, majestically—kissing the booth with a wooden thunk like a polite knock from a large gentleman. Burris leapt aside, his stamp smacking his own forehead so that for the rest of the day he looked certified.

“Stop!” boomed Barzón at last, stepping out where all could see his immaculate shirt. It was not a voice used to shouting; it was the voice of a ledger that had discovered a discrepancy and decided to growl about it. “Back to your stations! This is a civic engagement, not a barn dance!”

Everyone froze—the band, the men, the oboe (which had been frozen since March)—and the wind took the opportunity to remind them that dust exists and has rights.

Sunny, adjusting his hat and his attitude at the same time, turned to face the man who had ordered a nickel where there had been nothing.

“Señor Barzón,” he said. “I believe I owe you an apology.”

It is possible that angels tilted their heads in confusion.

Barzón lifted an eyebrow shaped like a very expensive parenthesis. “Do you?”

“I meant to pay your nickel,” Sunny said. “I truly did. But I was overcome by brotherhood, and your man here scuffed my fender, and I forgot that civilization’s last line of defense is the fellow in the booth with the stamp.”

Burris puffed up like a parson on Sunday.

Barzón studied Sunny the way a banker studies a man asking for a loan in spurs. “You are a menace,” he said evenly, “and an advertisement for the virtues of structured finance.”

“Sir,” Sunny said, “you may be right.”

Barzón was not prepared for consensus. It robbed him of his righteous posture, caused his tie to relax into something like mercy. “Pay the toll.”

Sunny pulled a nickel from his pocket, held it up like a communion wafer, and dropped it into the cigar box with a clink that could be heard at the Cattle Baron if the windows were open.

“And another nickel,” Sunny said, “for damages to your poetry-reading hut.”

Burris embraced the cigar box like a newborn ledger.

“And another,” Sunny added, “for the band, who have given us a memory and possibly a lawsuit.”

The drum major bowed, nearly decapitating a clarinetist.

Barzón exhaled—very slightly, very privately. “Go, then,” he said. “Rescue your sister from whatever theater she is producing today. But understand this: there are tolls, Mr. Calderón. Always.”

Sunny nodded. He walked to the Lincoln, ran a thumb gently over the fender’s silver kiss, and decided to call it a scar earned in a war of manners. He slid in, started the V-12 (which started like it had been waiting for a cue), and eased out onto the causeway, the band striking up a march that might someday resemble music if taught by a forgiving saint.

He crossed the creek in a sweep of black paint and red upholstery, sun flashing off chrome as if the car were winking at the day. On the far side, he leaned on the horn—not rudely, just with enthusiasm—and the sound carried to Conchita’s porch, where she scrambled to her feet, smeared her fake bruises in a panic, and tried to look like a woman rescued rather than a girl caught.

Sunny pulled up, killed the engine, and stared at her. The rouge, the cabbage scent, the way her eyes slid sideways to see what he believed—all of it fit together like dominoes in a pride parade.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I am now,” she said, putting a hand to her temple like a silent film star freshly educated in headaches.

“Melo?”

“In the kitchen,” she said. “Making remorse.”

They went inside. Melo stood at the stove, stirring pinto beans with a wooden spoon as if the beans had opinions.

“Brother,” he said. “I was swept away by my passions and my ignorance of your sister’s basic rights under God and Texas.”

“Were you,” Sunny said.

Melo nodded, eyes on the beans. “I am a changed man.”

Sunny considered this. He looked at Conchita, who mouthed I’m sorry in a way that said she wasn’t, not really, but she would be later, maybe, if reminded. He looked at the beans, which were bubbling like a compromise.

“Good,” Sunny said at last. “Keep changing. It’ll make you interesting.”

He kissed Conchita’s forehead, upsetting a bruise that smudged like a cloud, and left before truth and apology could get into a slap-fight.

Back at the causeway, Burris carefully stamped “PAID” on the day’s ledger twice, just to feel the clean order of it. Shorty found a belt that believed in its vocation. Barzón retreated to his office to consider whether the town would pay for a second booth labeled “PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRIES.” The band marched home, their instruments held high like surrender flags in the war against silence.

And Sunny? He drove his black Lincoln down Elm slowly, the wind braiding the edge of the convertible top, the red leather catching the afternoon light like it had been painted by someone who admired cherries. He felt the anger leak out of him in small, non-toxic amounts. He turned the radio dial until it found a station broadcasting a preacher who sounded like he had never been angry at anything that weighed less than a bull. Sunny smiled, tipped his hat to no one in particular, and let the V-12 whisper him back toward town.

At Grounds for Divorce, Lucinda saw him pass and put a fresh coffee on his usual table. She looked out the window at the causeway glinting white in the distance and muttered to herself, “Tolls and fools,” which is practically poetry in Pecos County.

That evening, Sunny returned to the causeway with a bucket of black paint, a brush, and a bottle of apology that made Burris’ eyes water. He stooped, touched up the booth where the Lincoln had kissed it, and then, underneath the sign that read PLEASE HAVE YOUR NICKELS READY, he added in neat, careful letters: AND YOUR DIGNITY TOO.

Burris watched, nodded once, and stamped the air as if to approve.

“Sir,” he said, “I believe you have settled your account.”

Sunny smiled. “Until next time.”

“Until next time,” Burris agreed, and for once in Fort Stockton, that didn’t sound like a threat or a promise—just an understanding between men who had both learned, in their different ways, that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line…unless there’s a tollbooth, a band, and a sister with a flair for the dramatic.

(All violence in this parody is theatrical; Conchita’s “bruises” are rouge and cabbage cool compresses—because West Texas will always choose absurdity if offered a menu.)

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