Once, long ago, I was a bouncer. I’m not naturally intimidating because of inherent goofiness so I developed a deep voiced, guttural type, throat thump. It made me sound like my testicles were larger than my head. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. At “the club” as I’ll call it, I was bad about getting up on the catwalk and “hoddy popping” to a song or two because the women folk up there were half naked and “danced” all over one other and that was better than the sweaty nut sack smell of the main dance floor. There wasn’t an inordinately large amount of “bouncing” to do up there, but there were women mouth kissing one another, as well as in the bathroom stalls (I also “bounced” in there a great deal). There was a stripper that came to “the club” and once I went to her place of employment and watched the nice lady leg lock around the top of an eight-foot pole with her body extended and drop an inch at a time down to the ground and it took her forever to get to the bottom. There were three of us on the front row crying because that shit was beautiful. I think we actually hugged one another after sharing the moment together. I was thinking about her one time while driving out west in the snow and ice through an area that was free range for cattle. No fences. No impediments. I stopped to pee on the side of the highway. There was a blanket of snow on the ground and the road was completely empty. I saw a blood spoor and some footprints in the snow like someone had cut themselves and then begun walking across the range into the foothills sloping upwards from the highway. You could see the drops of blood on the snow because there was nothing to see but snow on that vast wasteland of exclusion. I followed. I put my feet in the gray footprints and walked as he had walked. I knew what type of boot he was wearing and about the size of his body. He was going away, not to it. The sun was winterized and hanging there, but it wouldn’t hang for long. I followed the droplets for about a half-mile through the pasture in that white. The snow was deep for most of the walk and in places above my waist. When I arrived at the initial upslope I paused. He had carried on, but I didn’t. I turned around towards the highway to sit on a rock and a truck like mine was sitting by my own and someone was standing beside it. They were looking through binoculars at me. That’s the most frightened I’d ever been and the source of the fright was the emptiness, the space between him and me. Then he got in his truck and left.