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Last Night At Home

It was November 2002. The sun was just about to slip below the horizon, painting the sky shades of gold, red, and purple. My father came up to me as I was watching the last few rays of light disappear and we talked about my leaving for college. I was just about to depart   for Nashville, Tennessee to begin my career as a future diesel technician. I had decided to follow in my father’s footsteps. He’d been a mechanic for twenty years and, at the time, that decision seemed for the best. As darkness consumed the earth, we decided it would be the perfect night for a ride in the strip-down Ford we had sitting in the pasture.
The old Ford had been robbed of the doors and bed to repair what I had done to another truck a few years earlier.   The truck’s blue paint was oxidized to the point of looking a dull purple. The seat had holes and the dash was cracked beyond repair.   The fuel gauge hadn’t   worked in years so we headed out to it with a five gallon jug full of gasoline, anxious to start our journey. While I poured the fuel in the truck, Pops turned the key to start it. The starter just clicked when he turned the key.
We ended up having to jump it off because it had a dead battery, but after a few turns of the starter, the engine spit and sputtered to life billowing black smoke out of the tailpipe. We pulled it up in the yard, loaded up the gun and some beer, and headed on down the road.
There was never any planned destination that night, so we took the first dirt road down from the house. It led back in to a massive pecan orchard. One, in which, we had been exploring most of our lives. There had to be thousands of trees back in there.   The silent sentries of the land stood with bare branches in the moonlight, pointing their skeleton-like appendages toward the sky.
Once in the orchard, we knew exactly where we were headed. There was a stand of pines back in one of the corners. I looked over to Pops and said “There’s got to be an armadillo or possum over by that...