Page 84 of Tito

“Yes,” I said. “I do. I really do love you, too.”

She kissed me. “Speaking of rituals.” She broke our embrace. “It’s time for another.”

* * *

“I don’t buyinto all that shit,” Hap growled. “I think they lie to us about a hell of a lot more than we know. I’ve been eating pork fat since I was a kid. Contrary to what they’d like you to believe, there’s not a damned thing wrong with my heart. I’m not fat. My cholesterol is good. My blood pressure is good. The fruit farmers get politicians to manipulate the media to say pork is the devil’s work. That way, they can sell more fruit to the tree hugging hippies.”

“Exactly!” Reggie said excitedly. “Finally, someone who agrees with me.”

“Pork fat’s good stuff, isn’t it?” Hap asked.

Reggie winced. “I don’t know if I’ll agree to that, but I’ll agree to your theory. The food people lie to us. Organic cream, for instance. It’s nothing but cream out of a cow. That’s it. No additives. No preservatives. It had a date on it that says it’s no good after May 5th. Well I have personally used such cream well into June, and it isn’t spoiled. They put that date on there to get us to buy more cream. Before we actually need it.”

“We could choose not to listen to what it is they have to say,” I said. “Then, we wouldn’t be disappointed by their lies.”

Hap scowled in disagreement to my statement. “There’s no escaping them,” he complained. “They’re on the news, in the newspapers, plastered all over the magazines at the checkout aisle, and on the news ticker on my computer. There are far too many entities in our government. They’ve got their fingers in everything. I look at is this way, if it makes you happy, you should be able to do it. Too many laws, too many hands kneading the bread dough, and too goddamned many people with power that damned sure don’t deserve it.”

“What about our president?” Reggie asked.

I braced for the imminent explosion. Hap’s opinion of the president wasn’t a favorable one. Personally, I preferred not to talk politics with anyone. It seemed to be the one subject that would cause friends to promptly become enemies.

“That dumb son-of-a-bitch,” Hap snarled, leaning forward in his seat. He locked eyes with Reggie. “Did you know that he met a top-secret Navy SEAL team last year while they were deployed? The dumb prick wanted a picture with them, so he could brag to his underlings about where he’d been and who he’d met. So, some lieutenant snapped a picture of everyone, with POTUS standing in the middle of the clandestine team with his pearly whites glowin’ and his hair piece a blowin’. When dipshit got back to the White House, he tweeted that picture, just to let everyone know he was buddies with a team of Navy SEALs. There’s one problem. Leaking out that photo made the team’s identity known to the entire world. So much for secrecy. Now, every angry villager, ISIS member, enemy combatant, and wannabe thirteen-year-old sniper has a clear digital picture of the members of SEAL team Five.” He shook his head in clear disgust. “Our POTUS is dumber than a bag of hammers.”

“That’s enough about the POTUS,” Braxton demanded. “Your good blood pressure is going to be bad blood pressure if you keep it up.”

“I can talk about what or whoever I want,” Hap snapped back. “It’s my God-given right.”

“Every time you talk about him, you get wound up,” Braxton argued. “One of these days you’re going to have a heart attack.”

With his empty beer bottle dangling loosely from his fingertips, Hap stood. He gave Braxton a cold stare. “And, one of these days, you’re going to wake up and be a single, miserable, controlling prick.” He nonchalantly tossed his beer bottle across the porch. As always, Braxton plucked it from the air in mid-flight, set it aside, and blindly reached into the cooler for another.

Still glaring, Hap sauntered across the porch. He plucked the full bottle from Braxton’s grasp. “Oh, wait,” he said in a sarcastic tone. “You already are all of those things.”

In a clear display of defiance, he twisted off the lid and threw it into Braxton’s lap. Wearing a prideful smirk, he turned away.

“Fuck you, Old Man,” Braxton said, not meaning one word of what he said.

Hap sipped his beer while he meandered past Reggie and me, and then took his seat. “Back to the matter at hand. The POTUS is a POS.”

“I’ll agree, wholeheartedly,” Reggie said.

Hap leaned forward and looked at me. He raised one of his wiry brows. “Well?”

“No comment.”

His eyes narrowed. “We all know what that means.”

“It means no comment,” I said.

He gave me a flippant look. “It means you don’t have the guts to speak your mind.”

“It means no comment.”

“If you agreed with Reggie and me, you’d chime in,” he argued. “You don’t, therefore you’re preserving your status with the group by keeping your POTUS-loving mouth shut.”

I shook my head in frustration. “I don’t love the POTUS.”

He gave me a quick once-over. “From my vantage point, it sure looks like it.”