sneezing bullets

Ron and I arrived in Chapel Hill in the middle of the night exhausted from the drive. Ron, who had showered three times, called up the lumberjack to see if we could crash at his place. The lumberjack agreed, gave us directions, and within minutes we were there. The "house" was nothing more than a large van parked at an IHOP. I asked the lumberjack if the IHOP was cool with him staying there, which resulted in some serious lumberjack contemplation. After a minute or five, the lumberjack decided that the IHOP was real cool with it, and he cracked open a beer. Ron asked for a shower. The lumberjack thought about it for a while before letting out a lumberjack laugh. Yep, he said. Ron headed towards the IHOP, leaving me with the lumberjack who was drinking a lot faster than he was talking. The more he drank the slower the conversation became.

Ron and I knew the lumberjack from college. We were on an intramural basketball team together, although the lumberjack never showed up to many games. When asked why he missed so many games, the lumberjack would sometimes shrug. Other times he would just laugh, creepily. Eventually we stopped asking and eventually he completely stopped showing up. He had a decent jump shot though.

I asked what brought him to North Carolina and he responded with a shrug and a comment that alluded to his sister having a baby. I asked if he was helping his sister with the baby and he drank two beers before responding that he was. He said he was watching the baby while his sister worked during the day. The inquiry on the whereabouts of the dad was answered with another shrug and an "Iraq I think". These details are unneeded for a lumberjack and after a couple of more questions I decided that my need for the answers was not that important either. The important thing was we were only in North Carolina for a couple of days and we knew where to find pancakes.

Ron came back from IHOP with a large grin on his face and stumbled into the van. I asked what the smile was for and he told me that he met a girl. This seemed to get the lumberjack interested, so he decided to ask who he met. Ron then went and talked about how he met a waitress, which after a few minutes was discovered to be the lumberjack's sister. This resulted in lumberjack rage which then resulted in Ron and myself running through the parking lot to our stupid little cars. From the road we saw that the lumberjack appeared to be shooting at us. Or sneezing. We never knew for sure. The only thing we knew was that we needed to get to Nashville by morning.