"Shall we?" I asked Andrew, gesturing towards the driver's seat with one hand and waggling the keys with the other.
"I suppose I should revoke your driving privileges for the rest of the day, on account of you hitting a turkey and all." Andrew tipped his bandanna back on his head at a jaunty angle and snatched the keys out of my hand.
"He jumped right out in front of me!" I mock-protested.
"You're getting slow, in your old age," he teased. Us being a year apart made my "old age" a constant topic of ridicule.
I made a show of walking sulkily past him, towards the passenger side of the truck, and then, halfway there, spun quickly and punched him in the arm, hard.
"Ow." It seemed an appropriate response.
"Who's too slow now?" I said with the same smile I'd probably had on my face when I broke off the arms of his Ninja Turtles when I was five.
"Get in the truck, old man."
There is something about having a truck that makes you obligated to say "Get in the truck" instead of "Get in the car". No one ever says "Get in the wagon", or "Get in the sedan", or "Get in the SUV", but dammit when you're driving a truck it's important to make a point of referencing the fact that the truck you're driving is in fact a truck, as frequently and as loudly as you possibly can.
I got in the truck, and thunder rumbled again in the wake of my slamming the rusty door closed.
"Shit, dude," Andrew emoted, pointing at the sky ahead of us. In the time it had taken us to stop and donate our hood ornament to the soil, the sky ahead had graduated from a brewing storm to a first-class cauldron of malice.
It was a black wall of clouds, hanging a little too low on the horizon, seemingly always flashing with lightning somewhere along its length, and looking angry about being so full of rain and not being able to find a suitable target to drop it on yet.
"Shit dude, indeed," I said, jabbing an index finger in the general direction of Utah. "Onward!"
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