That evening, Jones joined the commune for dinner. Mad Crab was a hot topic at his table. Several of the other diners had been at the scavenging raid in Searchlight. As they gossiped, he admired his dinner plate, a handmade disk of green blown glass.
“Fuck em,” said one woman, her mouth filled with cornmeal mush and spiced beets. She speared a piece of braised beef from the side of her plate. “They’re getting too close. We gotta set boundaries.” She wore dozens of leather bracelets around her wrists.
“They were the ones who tipped us off to the truck outage,” another woman pointed out. “We’d ask for a cut if it was the other way around. This is delicious! Who made this?” She looked around, gesturing at the mixture of black beans with onion, red peppers, and meat.
“Megan, that was me. The peppers are from the south balcony,” someone at the table offered.
Megan closed her eyes in bliss. “It’s incredible. I love meat. Nopales are great, but I love meat.”
Jones leaned in, trying to join the conversation. “How often do you eat meat here?”
Megan finished chewing and wiped her hands on a handwoven napkin. “We got lucky. A refrigerator truck broke down on Route 66.”
“A lot of trucks break down around here,” Jones observed.
Someone else at the table snorted. Megan rolled her eyes. “It’s the desert. Hostile terrain.”
“They took all the good stuff first,” the woman with leather bracelets said, turning the conversation back to Mad Crab. “We shouldn’t be giving them a cut for the dregs.”
“What good stuff?” Jones asked. His plate was empty. He hadn’t realized how much he loved beets.
“What is this, feudalism?”
Megan leaned forward on the bench, eyebrows narrowed. “A finders fee is not feudalism.”
Hassan appeared at Jones’ elbow, another full plate in hand. He pushed it towards Jones. “What do you think? Seconds?”
Jones reached for it, but Hassan pulled it away. “Come sit with me,” he said. “This table is all shop talk.” Reluctantly, Jones got up and followed Hassan. He’d been about to learn something.