El Bandito Grande grins through broken teeth when he sees my Desert Eagle. "Ha! They let you carry a pretty-boy gun in your gang?" He pulls out his dragoon revolver, spins the cylinder: "This gun, she is a weapon for men! Rocket boost. Smart chip. Sub-munitions." I feign self-consciousness: "My gun has a smart chip..." He just laughs.
We're crouching together, along with a couple other toughs, in a fairly dark bolt-hole on the hillside. Below us, the dull-red plain stretches to the horizon, its surface torn in places by the eroded rivers of rust that run each spring off the Old God Machines, way up in the mountains. The bandit chief grunts: "Where are those bastards? They were supposed to ride through here before noon." All the gangs in the area have gathered around this valley, today, putting aside their petty differences and mutual suspicion to bond over the one thing they can agree on: the two regional marshalls, North and South, need to be ambushed and killed. Though none of them can be seen, there are scores of hidden bolt-holes like ours, camouflaged on the hillsides, full of the wasteland's toughest.
"What time is it?" I ask. Grande looks at the gears turning in his palm: "Quarter past eleven." Shit, I think, it's later than I thought.
"I'm gonna go scout them out," I say, as though I'm impatient for the action to commence. Grande tries to talk me out of it: "If they spot you, they'll gun you down before you even see them. You're no match for the Marshalls." I tell him not to worry, I'm not afraid to die and, honestly, if they go all morning without seeing a single Waster, they're going to start suspecting something is up. The old lizard grins again with his ugly mouth: "You are a brave fool. I will regret not having come to know you better in the future. Good luck with your pretty-boy gun." I point out to him that my pretty-boy gun holds twelve bullets. He admits that his only holds five. We shake hands and I wish him luck if I don't return.
Half an hour later, I stroll into the Falling Down Saloon. Is that Marshall South in the corner, playing the old upright game machine? No, just some transvestite assassin type. "Seen South around?" I ask the bartender. He says he ain't. I fish through the coins in my pocket and order a half-pint of beer-- the good stuff from across the chasm, not the local brake fluid. South strolls in about halfway through my drink, saddle over one shoulder. "You're late," I tell him. "They're all waiting out on the Rust Rim."
"I've never been late in my life, North," he says. "Someone's watch is fast. Did they make you?"
"Hell no," I say. "They may be organized now, but they'll never be smart." I finish my beer, put the glass and the coins down on the bar, pull out the steel star and pin it to my hat. "Let's go wipe us out some Wasters."
Outside, the sun is hot and the wind is cold. Some things never change.
(South was being played by Paul Newman; I was acutely aware at the end that this must mean I was being played by Robert Redford.)