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By Root 405 0

and Sundance and Etta make their way to Bolivia, where the duo, aided by Etta’s lessons in Spanish, resumed their bank robbing ways. As Milo sat and looked on, the desire to see the film end differently and the resulting pressure of anticipation grew as Butch and Sundance drew closer and closer to their fate. But even if the universe had wanted to change the ending of the movie, allowing Butch and Sundance to survive this one time, he doubted that it would happen on this day, when he was in the presence of two other people. To witness a miracle alone seemed entirely possible to Milo. It had to be possible for the incessant demands to watch these films over and over again to make any sense. Though it ran contrary to everything he believed, Milo was certain that someday, his persistence would pay off. Butch and Sundance would survive, Mace Windu would strike down Palpatine, Quint would dodge the jaws of the great white shark, and Jack would climb on that goddamn door with Rose. But to witness one of these miracles in the company of another seemed highly unlikely.

In Milo’s mind, one of the key components of a miracle was the ability of the majority to discount its having ever taken place.

Nevertheless, as Butch and Sundance took jobs as payroll guards in an attempt to go legit, Milo felt the pressure building more and more, knowing that if they could just save the mining boss, Percy Gather, and protect the payroll that he was transporting up the mountain, they could have a chance at a normal life. Milo had argued more than once with Andy, another fan of the film, over the merits of a normal life for Butch and Sundance. Andy’s contention was that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were not meant to live a normal life, and that they should instead be admired for their chosen path. “Butch and the Sundance Kid were bank robbers,” Andy had said. “Both the real and fictional versions of them. And they were damn good ones at that. That’s more than most of us can ever claim of ourselves.”

But for someone who craved normalcy as much as Milo did and understood the difficulty in being anything but normal, he suspected that if given a chance, even the Sundance Kid would’ve taken a wife, three kids, and the life of a rancher over his chosen profession.

Normalcy, in Milo’s mind, was consistently underrated by the normal.

“I love this guy,” Lily whispered, seeming to unconsciously adopt the same movie-house etiquette as Eugene. She was referencing the mine boss, Percy Gather, who was seconds away from being shot in the chest by Bolivian bandits—unless the universe decided to intervene.

“That old guy?” Eugene asked. “Are you crazy?”

“I love him too,” Milo said, and he meant it. Percy Gather was someone to whom Edith Marchand might refer as a character and whom Arthur Friedman would surely call a goddamn idiot; a wild-eyed expatriate who couldn’t spit tobacco straight but never stopped trying and who described himself to Butch and Sundance with six words that Milo had clung to during his darkest moments:

I’m not crazy; I’m just colorful.

It was easy for Milo to fear that the demands placed upon him were a symptom of insanity, and though he had learned to live with them and almost accept them as part of his life, his greatest fear was that they were simply the tip of the iceberg, the beginning of something more, the first steps in his descent into madness. So far, this had not been the case. The demands had changed over the years, some falling by the wayside while others took their place. Overall, the demands had increased in variety and frequency, but they had remained the extent of his insanity, its only symptom. And whenever Milo began to think of it as insanity, he would think of the old expatriate prospector Percy Gather, who was not crazy.

Just colorful.

The universe did not choose to intervene in Percy Gather’s fate today, and so he was once again shot in the chest and the movie went on. Perhaps because Lily and Eugene were sitting beside him and the chances that the ending might change seemed even slimmer than usual, Milo