Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (32 page)

Several Harley-Davidsons are parked along the side of the tavern. Loud rock-and-roll blasts from the rusty window screens. Gordon and Jimmy stand on the porch near the open doorway, unnoticed, breathing in the rank atmosphere of mildew and corruption (smells of cigarette butts in drained beer bottles, unpainted lumber, spilt whiskey, old popcorn, and stale sweat). They search the interior for MacDuff. He isn’t there.

A man with a giant rust-red afro glances up at them from the pool table as he’s leaning over to line up a shot. His face is so white that he looks scarily like an albino, but the scary effect is modulated somewhat by stoned blue eyes and a goofy, Howdy-Doody grin. “Hey, little dudes!” the albinoid man says, waving his cue stick at them. “You here to shoot some pool?”

“We’re looking for Duffy,” says Jimmy.

“Oh! I know who you are! The little fisher dudes! I had one of those trout you gave MacDuff for lunch. He’s not here yet, but hang out. It’s cool. My name’s Corky.”

Gordon decides there’s very little that’s intimidating about Corky, aside from his skin tone. Although Corky is wearing a Hells Angels jacket, the rest of his clothes look like they once belonged to Jimi Hendrix: tight bell bottom pants with purple and orange stripes, a cigarette-burned T-shirt advertising Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax, and a blue silk scarf knotted around his scrawny neck. The other Hells Angels standing over by the bar look much tougher, but at the moment Corky seems to be their leader–or maybe not so much a leader as the Hells Angels equivalent of a court jester.

“Do either of you guys shoot pool?” Corky asks again.

“We both do,” Gordon says.

Corky hands Gordon a cue stick. “I’ll rack,” he says. “Should we play for bets? Like, two dollars to start?”

Gordon and Jimmy just nod their heads.

Back in Kingsburg, Gordon and Jimmy–
especially
Jimmy–have reputations as pool sharks. They’ve been shooting pool at the Kingsburg arcade since the fifth grade (individually at first, and more recently as a team) and at this point in their lives they practically own the table. Even high school seniors can’t beat them on it. Both of them can run through all the balls several times before missing a shot. For Gordon it’s simple geometry, but when Jimmy picks up a cue stick, it’s like he’s
possessed
. Both of them are pleased to see that the pool table at the Trail’s End looks very similar to the table they’re used to shooting on. They hope to win some easy money–and earn the Hells Angels’ respect.

Gordon’s break is fast and hard, the cue ball bouncing a little after it sends the other balls caroming around the table. Four balls land in the pockets, three of them solids. Gordon sinks another solid in the side pocket, making sure to set up for his next shot. The noise of the room fades away as he concentrates. The next three balls go in without much trouble, and then he lucks out with a long bank shot and sinks the eight ball.
Two dollars.

Corky congratulates him and racks again. The stakes go up higher. Although Gordon’s break sends balls careening everywhere, nothing goes in the pockets. Corky gets a turn. He runs three balls, then blows the fourth shot on a miscue, trying for too much backspin. Jimmy gets his turn and runs the table.
Five dollars.

Corky offers to buy Gordon and Jimmy a beer.

Two hours later, Gordon and Jimmy have drunk five beers apiece, but they’re still winning. The atmosphere inside the tavern has turned rowdy, with Hells Angels crowded around the pool table shouting and laughing, all of them in line to win their money back just as soon as the two junior pool sharks get drunk enough to lose.

“You guys feel drunk yet?” Corky asks Jimmy, shouting to be heard. There’s a hopeful look in his dazed blue eyes.

“No fuckin’ way!” Jimmy shouts back like a young pirate, clanking his can of Coors against Corky’s Budweiser.

“This stuff goes down like water!” Gordon yells, feeling a powerful buzz as he chugs a Löwenbräu.
I could take Corky in a fight right now
, he thinks.
Maybe
I
should be a Hells Angel.
Feeling invincible, he gets a little fancy and puts the cue stick behind his back, then sits on the table and drops the eight ball dead-bang in the corner pocket.
Fifty dollars.

A sort of incoherent cheer rises up through the crowd. At first Gordon thinks it’s for his fancy shot, but then some leather jackets move aside and MacDuff steps up to the pool table, looking grimy but regal–a bandit king down from his high mountain fortress. Gordon and Jimmy fall all over him.

“MacDuff!”

“Hey, man! Where were you?”

“We missed you, man!”

MacDuff gives them a big smile–
such beautiful teeth!
–and high-fives them both. “You boys up for another game?” he asks, racking the balls.

“Hell yeah!”

“We haven’t lost yet!”

“How much’ve you made so far?”

“Five hundred and thirty-three dollars!”

“You’re shittin’ me!”

“You Hells Angels can’t shoot pool worth a crap! We’re rich!”

Shaking his head with a grin, MacDuff points a finger and says, “Have you two fellas met up with Francesca yet?” Two barrel-chested Hells Angels with matching Fu Manchu mustaches stand in front of the bar where MacDuff is pointing. A “Free Sonny Barger” bumpersticker is pasted on the mirror behind them. At MacDuff’s signal the two men uncross their bulging arms and step aside, revealing a gorgeous girl sitting on top of the bar in a leopard skin bikini top and cut-off jeans. She has long, wavy red hair, perky breasts, and a wide, full mouth with a witchy grin. Best of all, she’s only around fifteen–young enough for Gordon or Jimmy to date, although she’s
way
out of their league.

“Holy shit!” Jimmy says.

“What a fox,” utters Gordon.

“Aw, ain’t she
purty
…” Corky says, pretending to drool.

Francesca hops down off the bar and makes her way over to Gordon and Jimmy. She’s adorably barefoot. “I hear you guys are pool sharks,” she says. “Win this one for me and I’ll show you my tits.” She cups her hands under her breasts and squeezes them in front of Gordon, just to give him some idea of what’s in store. Gordon feels his arms going weak at his sides.
Please, God, don’t let me pass out now,
he prays.

At the same time, Jimmy’s brain is going into synaptic overload as he checks out Francesca from behind. Peach-shaped, perfect butt cheeks peek out from under the fringe along the bottom edge of her cut-offs. Embroidered on those cut-offs, between the two pockets, is a depiction of the red-bearded cartoon character: Yosemite Sam, with six-shooters pointed east and west, blazing.
I’d trade my life right now to be Yosemite Sam
, thinks Jimmy, not thinking very clearly.

“Okay,” MacDuff says, “so who’s gonna break?”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Being drunk turns time and space into a smeary blur. At least that’s Gordon’s perception. One minute he’s bending over his cue stick lining up a shot at the far end of the table; the next minute, he’s standing near a bonfire at the Hells Angels’ camp–with Jimmy and Corky and Francesca–feeling like a depraved Boy Scout. In-between, he had a vision of the pool table elongating to an impossible distance–too far for the cue ball to travel–and a song on the jukebox started skipping on and off, so that Gordon feared he was going deaf and psychotic all at once. Then he stood up and remembered:
Oh yeah, I’m drunk.

(He and Jimmy also had contact highs from all the pot smoking going on in the tavern, but they didn’t know that yet. Corky, in fact, had been taking tokes off a hand-rolled cigarette and blowing smoke right into their faces, but neither Gordon nor Jimmy had any idea it was Humboldt sinsemilla. That was the key to the mystery of Corky’s acceptance among the Hells Angels: he was their drug dealer.)

Someone has set up a guitar amp near the bonfire and a trippy song is coming from the speakers–soaring, psychedelic guitars sounding like the swimming patterns of deep sea fish in slow motion; drums that must have been recorded in an echoing cavern full of stalactites. Above it all, a plaintive male voice sings about a woman in blue jeans and how he wants her,
like a kangaroo.
It’s the best song Gordon has ever heard and even though he doesn’t know who’s singing it (Alex Chilton, fronting the band Big Star) or what it’s called (“Kangaroo”), he’s absolutely sure he’ll remember that song forever because it somehow perfectly captures his longing for Francesca.

She’s like a wood nymph glowing in the firelight and that song has doomed him. Every time Gordon hears it in the future, he’ll think of Francesca and remember how desperately–how drunkenly–he longed for her. No other moment in his life will ever seem as passionate, or as pure, because everything that comes after will be tainted by sexual experience and love’s myriad disappointments. For Gordon, Francesca is the last embodiment of the ideal, archetypal girlfriend. No other woman in his life will ever be able to live up to her.

“God! I can’t believe we lost all that money,” Jimmy says, staring at Francesca’s ideal, archetypal ass.

“I think you guys got distracted,” Corky says, blowing smoke.

“I think they got wasted,” says Francesca.

“No way,
José!”
Gordon shouts, doing his best to impress.

Jimmy yelps, “I’m not even buzzed yet!”

“Really? Prove it.” Demonstrating as she goes, Francesca says, “Lean your heads back as far as you can and touch your noses.”

Gordon and Jimmy dutifully do as they’re told. Corky follows their lead, just to practice for the next time he gets pulled over by the Highway Patrol.

“If you fall down,” Francesca informs them, “you’re drunk.”

Gordon and Jimmy, of course, fall on the ground. Corky staggers backward and crashes against the bonfire, setting his afro ablaze. For a moment he just stands there swaying like a burning dandelion seed, not even calling for help. Then he drops to his knees and starts rubbing his head in the dirt, trying to put it out. Suddenly MacDuff is right there, unzipping his pants. An impressive golden geyser rains down on Corky’s flaming head, extinguishing it in seconds.

“Sorry about that, Cork. But don’t ever go sayin’ I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire,” MacDuff says in his gruff voice.

Corky rolls over flat on his back and looks up at MacDuff through stoned but grateful eyes. “Thanks, man,” he says. “You’re the best.” He reaches up to touch his still-smoking scalp. A charred hunk of afro breaks off in his hand like a piece of burnt toast. “Oh dude…” Corky laments, “how am I gonna score chicks without my ‘fro?”

“You’ll always knock ‘em dead no matter what, you albino jackass….” MacDuff zips up and pretends to boot Corky in the head, then he strides off into the darkness.

“MacDuff’s so cool,” Jimmy says as he stands up and brushes himself off.

“Yeah, he’s definitely the big dog around here,” Francesca says.

“Nurse…” Corky croaks. Francesca looks over at him as he sits up and puts his fingers in front of his lips as if smoking a tiny, imaginary cigar. His hair is a black, knotted mess–he looks like a lightning-struck Rastafarian, actually–but he doesn’t seem to be burned anywhere else.

“So–” Francesca says, “you guys wanna smoke some hooter?”

“What’s that?” Gordon asks from the ground, where he’s decided to stay, because the world seems less blurry down there.

Francesca pulls a joint from her leopard skin bikini top. “You know…. Grass. Pot. Mary Jane.”

“Oh, the Devil’s Weed!” Jimmy grins. “Sure. Hell yeah!”

“I’ve got asthma. I better not.”

“This is supposed to be great for asthma. You should try it.” Francesca fires up the joint with a chrome Yosemite Sam lighter. She passes it to Jimmy, who takes a toke, coughs, and blows out all the smoke. “You’re supposed to hold it in,” Francesca says. She takes the joint back for another hit, then passes it to Gordon.

Gordon can feel everyone watching him. His eyes are on the joint. One end burns, staining the rolling paper a nasty yellow-brown; the other end is twisted and mashed, wet with saliva–Francesca’s saliva (
and a little of Jimmy’s, unfortunately…
). Putting the joint in his mouth would be the next best thing to kissing her, thinks Gordon. So who cares if he turns into a dope fiend or loses his mind in a drug-induced fit of paranoia? He’ll do anything to impress that girl. Trying to act nonchalant, Gordon puts the joint to his lips and takes a long puff.

As smoke wafts out of her delicate nostrils, Francesca says, “Gordon’s got it down. See?” He’s holding it in like a pro. It’s not all that different from inhaling asthma medication, after all.

“Let’s not Bogart that…” Corky says, taking the joint from Gordon. He takes a baby puff to fire the little coal at the end brighter, and then he inhales twice, fiercely. The joint crackles and pops. Holding the smoke in his lungs with great effort, Corky passes the joint back to Jimmy.

“No thanks. That stuff’s too raspy for me.”

“Get out,” Francesca says, snatching the joint from him. “This is top-grade Humboldt sinsemilla. I only smoke the best, right Cork?”

Smoke explodes from Corky’s throat. “Right,” he croaks, wiping his reddened eyes. “I should know. I sold it to her.” He puts his head down in his lap and coughs like a yogi with emphysema.

Francesca places the joint between her witchy lips and takes a long toke. Then she passes it to Gordon.

“This hooter seems okay to me,” he says, regarding the joint like a fine cigar. “Better than Primatene, by a long shot.”

“You’re my man, Gordon,” Francesca says, making him glow.

Actually, Gordon feels like he may be glowing a little too much. Something odd is definitely happening to him. He’s losing contact with his body, as if he’s sitting under an icy waterfall. He also thinks he can see auras. Everyone is shimmering with color. Corky’s aura is mostly blue with hints of green and a black spot where his afro should have been. Jimmy is all reds and yellows, with an angry cast of pink across his forehead. And Francesca is beautiful, like a rainbow, with a fount of purple gushing from the top of her head and transforming into fireworks of the most brilliant pure white light Gordon has ever seen.