Strays (21 page)

While Bran the Man and the remainder of the BTB were sitting in the roadside diner in Cheyenne, playfully flirting with the weary waitress they secretly found repulsive, the Chevy Impala was almost 50 miles south on I-25, rolling off the exit ramp in search of fuel.  It found what it was looking for at a Kwik Stop, with two rows of gas pumps under a green-and-yellow awning.  There were three other cars scattered in strategic locations, and Kyle had to maneuver the banana boat called Impala in and about before he could line up his gas tank with one of the pumps.  In the end he made it.  

He killed the engine, and Molly stirred.  Ever since her transformation back in Kansas, when they had stopped on I-70 just east of Wakeeney, she had remained in her human form.  She did not speak of what had happened, and she seemed less at ease as a person.  It was obvious that she longed to crawl in the back seat, eradicate her constraining clothes, and curl up once again as a cat on the floor, but for reasons known only to her, she maintained the form that had first appealed to Kyle when he saw her on the streets of his paper route, standing under the lamp and smiling like an angel.  She stayed close during the drive as well.  Kyle liked the way she sat in the middle of the Impala’s front bench seat, like a girl on a date when she really likes the guy.  When she was sleepy, she laid her head on his thigh, a soft hand resting on his knee.  He could feel her hot breath through the fabric of his jeans. 

She had been sleeping like this when Kyle took the Fort Collins exit, and now her head rolled and turned gently in his lap when the engine died.  She rubbed her eyes against his leg to arouse herself and then sat up in the car, blinking.  “Where are we?”

“Just outside of Fort Collins.  Stopping for gas.”

“Oh.”  She yawned and leaned over to kiss his cheek.  Kyle smiled and patted her leg.

“You want anything while we’re here?” he asked.

“Just a little air,” Molly said.  “Why don’t I pump while you go in and pay?”

Kyle kept his hand on her leg and squeezed it.  “Deal.”

She slid across the seat and opened her door on the passenger side.  Kyle opened the driver side and got out as well.  It was a cool evening for August, a light breeze coming from the west, and he stretched and took it all in, raising his arms above his head.  His walk across the parking lot was tight at first, and he stopped at the door of the C-store to support himself against the building, bending each leg back, taking it with a free hand, and stretching until he felt a gentle pop.  This had been the longest he had sat behind the wheel of his car, and his muscles were not used to it. 
That’s it
, he thought. 
Soon as we get to where we’re going, I’m going to start working out.
 

He glanced back across the lot at Molly.  She was leaning back against the car and stretching herself before fumbling with the rear license plate to expose the gas cap beneath.  She glanced over at him and smiled, and Kyle smiled back.  For a moment he was overwhelmed by a wave of something warm and simple and profound.  He wondered if this was how it felt to be in love.

He entered the C-store, nodding at the balding gentleman with glasses who sat behind the counter.  “She’s filling up,” he said.  “Need me to pay in advance?”

The counterman shook his head.  Kyle had wanted him to look out the window, wanted someone, anyone, to see the amazing creature who accompanied him on this journey.  It wasn’t so much that he needed to tell anyone what she was doing; he just wanted to let the rest of the world know. 
She’s with me,
he wanted to scream. 
Will you look at her already?  That girl is here with me.

He went back to the cooler and searched the shelves until he found what he wanted.  There were sodas in 20-ounce bottles, and he grabbed four Diet Cokes.  Cradling them in his arms, he strolled down one of the aisles and grabbed a small bag of chips, and then over to the sandwich cooler.  He wondered what kind of sandwich Molly would like.  It dawned on him that he had never seen Molly eat in all the time they were together.  What did her kind eat anyway?  He thought about going to the pet food aisle and getting a bag of cat treats, and at first this made him laugh until he realized it might hurt her feelings.

The bottles of soda and bag of chips were awkward in his hands.  He juggled them around and took them over to the counter, setting them next to the register.  “Be right back,” he told the bespectacled counterman.

“She gotcha about fifteen dollars in the tank,” the counterman said.

Kyle nodded and went back to the sandwich cooler.  He grabbed a couple of ham sandwiches for himself and stared at the other foodstuffs the cooler had to offer.  Somewhere off to his right, he heard the jingle of the bells on the front door as another customer came in.  He was thinking how he would have to ask Molly what she ate, which felt like an awkward conversation in the making, when he heard the heavy clomp of boots across the C-store’s linoleum floor.  The steps grew louder as something made its way toward him.

“Ooh-wee,” a medium voice with a half-hearted bit of Midwest twang muttered next to him.  “Y’see that fine piece of flesh out there pumping gas?”

Kyle turned and came face-to-chest with the awfulness.  The stranger stood about six inches taller and was wearing a dark denim shirt with the top buttons undone.  A puff of wiry hair peeked out over a sweat-stained wife-beater undershirt.  A vest of black leather with red-and-green threading was tossed over the shirt, and just above the left lapel of the vest was stitched a matching leather patch with the stranger’s name in pale gray letters:

JACK

Kyle glanced down for a moment, taking in the stranger’s faded jeans and black engineer boots and then up into the stranger’s face.  His skin was russet and spattered with road dust, and an overgrown mustache curled over his lips and down along the sides of his jowls.  His eyebrows were bristly and in need of a trim, and his flyaway hair, roughly the color of old wicker, hung about his face and down to his collarbone. 

Kyle forced a grin and looked into Jack’s eyes, and something made all the coursing blood in his body stop in its tracks, freezing him down to the smallest cell.  The eyes were like two shiny drops of tar, bulging without whites or irises, empty and yet somehow hungry like the eyes of a shark Kyle once saw on a Discovery Channel show.

“You deaf or something?” Jack asked.

“No, sir,” said Kyle.

“Answer my question.  You see that fine piece of flesh out there pumping gas?”  The black eyes glistened and almost boiled, twin pools of raw sewage, and it seemed that black maggots were drowning within them.

“Which?”

“Out there,” growled Jack.  “You can’t tell me you missed that, unless ya blind or faggot.  That it, boy?  You faggot?”

“No, sir, I just—”

Jack’s shoulder flinched, and his hand shot up from his waist.  Kyle snapped his head away and took a step back.  Jack’s gloved fist stopped inches from his face, and the black-eyed biker snorted and cackled, his fist poised in the air, a snake ready to strike.

“Made ya flinch,” he said.  “Ya know what that means?”

“No,” Kyle said, but he knew very well what it meant.  He’d done his share of flinching in gym class back in high school, back when Bran the Man or one of his cronies got right up in his face like this hairy biker, who smelled, Kyle realized, of tar and rotted fruit.

“Mean’s I get to hit you,” said Jack.  “Anywhere I want, as hard as I want.”

“If you excuse me, sir,” Kyle said, realizing how pathetic the repeated
sir
was sounding, “I have to go.”

He tried to move around, and Jack took a step to cut him off.  “Just where you think you’re going?” he asked.  “Where you think I’m gonna
let
you go?”

“Look, I don’t wa—”

“Don’t want any trouble?” the Jack barked with a snarl.  “Yeah, ‘course you don’t want any trouble.  All you little faggots don’t want trouble, don’t have the sack for it, and yet here comes ol’ trouble, looking for you all the same.” 

Jack took a step forward, his thick boot rapping on the linoleum floor, and Kyle moved back in reflex.  His butt pressed against the edge of the short island in front of the Coke machine, which housed condiments as well as sugar and creamer for coffee.

“Trouble come looking for you,” muttered the Jack.  “You don’t want none of it, and you ain’t ready for it, but cancel Christmas, boy, ‘cause look what Santy left in your stocking.”  He clapped his hands in front of Kyle’s face, and they popped with tiny bursts of dust.  “A whole heap of trouble, waiting on Christmas morning, and all you little faggots got to say is, ‘
I don’t want none of this!
”  His voice rose half an octave, and he took on a mocking nasal lisp.  “‘
I didn’t want none of this trouble!  This ain’t what I asked Santy Claus for!
’”

“Look,” Kyle said, feeling an adolescent whine in the back of his throat.  “Did I say something to offend you?  Because I’m sorry, I’m just trying to get some food here and be on my way.”

Jack’s wiry eyebrows bent inward like a pair of mangy caterpillars touching feelers.  The pitch-colored shark’s eyes continued to pucker and bubble.  He took a step back, then another, and crossed his arms.  “So you didn’t see that fine piece of flesh out there pumping gas,” he said.

“Which?” Kyle asked, but he already knew the answer.

“Black jeans, white shirt, puckered little teats.”  Jack smiled.  His teeth were the color of slate.  “Long black hair.  Wanna know what I’d like to do with something like that?”

“Not really,” Kyle admitted, swallowing hard to force the whimper back down.

“Grab her by the hair like this,” growled Jack, and with his right hand he grabbed an imaginary girl whose head came about to his sternum judging from the height he held her hand.  With a quick snap, he bent his elbow and twisted his arm back, lowering his face to his fist, and Kyle knew he was imagining the girl’s face there, eyes pinched shut in agony as this monster tugged at her hair. 

“Got her right like this,” said Jack, “and then with this hand—”  He lifted the left hand and wiggled the fingers and then thrust it down, just below his belt line, curling his fingers against something invisible in mid-air.  Kyle knew well enough where that hand went, and what the fingers were doing.  It made him ill.   

“How you like that?” Jack purred, his face still turned to the girl’s—to Molly’s—imaginary face.  “How do you like that one, baby?”  He cocked his head, turning the shark’s eyes at Kyle.  “I think she likes it, boy.  I think she
looooves
it, don’t you, baby?”

“She’s with me!”  The words had burst out of his chest before Kyle could contain them, and he pressed against the edge of the island behind him. 

Jack’s eyebrows wrenched toward each other even harder, and the shark’s eyes seemed to flatten.  “What did you say?”

“That girl out there,” Kyle said.  He felt his voice shaking, and he swallowed to steady it.  “The one you’re talking about.  She’s with me.”

Jack smiled wider, and those slate teeth seemed longer, sharper.  “I don’t believe you.”

“Believe it,” Kyle said.  “It’s the truth.  We’ve been together for the last 500 miles.”

Something like grunting, sexual and primal, seemed to crawl out of Jack’s chest.  Kyle realized that this was laughter, but more dreadful than anything he had heard either awake or in dreams.  “What’s a fine piece of flesh like that,” Jack sneered, “doing with a low-rent, half-built little faggot like you?”

“She’s with me,” said Kyle.  “That’s all you need to know.” 

He felt his feet take a step forward and to the right, making their way around the dreadful man with the black pools for eyes.  He expected Jack to make another move to cut him off, but Jack held his place.  Kyle took a second step and then a third, giving Jack a wide berth.  The sweaty creature’s arms looked long, long enough to dart out and snatch him, and Kyle kept his eyes locked on Jack’s shoulder, waiting for the flinch.  It was something his father had told him, he realized, way back when he was a child, to watch the shoulders of a bully because they gave away when the blow was coming and allowed you an extra moment to dodge it.  Kyle wished his father was there now.  Dad would not have taken this kind of talk from any man.  Dad had too much respect for a woman to allow it.

At last Kyle was past and made his way to the counter.  He pulled out his wallet and offered the counterman a $10 and a $20 for the gas and the food.  The counterman put the sodas and chips in a paper sack.  Kyle could hear Jack’s boots clocking the floor somewhere behind him in the store.  He grabbed the change and the sack and scurried to the door, pushing it open and stumbling out onto the pavement.  Molly was there by the car, having finished pumping but waiting, frowning.  Kyle moved toward her, and the clocking of the boots was still there, having followed him out of the C-store.

“Hey boy!”  Jack’s voice, from somewhere in the early evening behind him.  “What if I kill you, boy?  What if I kill you and take that pretty little piece for myself?”

Kyle felt an itch in the space below the back of his neck, right between the shoulder blades, as if sensing a sniper’s rifle.  He opened his mouth to speak, and Molly raised a hand.

“Don’t listen to him,” she said.

“Get in the car,” Kyle whispered.  “We need to make a run for it.”

“Don’t run,” Molly said.  “And don’t listen to him.”

“You hear me, boy?” Jack shouted from behind him.  “Know what I’m going to do to you?  I’m going to break everything about you.  Everything.  Break you so hard you can’t move, and then the real fun starts.”

“Don’t listen,” said Molly.  “Don’t move, and don’t listen.”

“You be lying there, crying and begging like the little faggot you are, and I’ll be taking my big old hunting knife and skinnin’ you ‘live like an old ten-point buck.”

“Don’t.”  Molly again, locking eyes with Kyle.  “Don’t say anything.”

Kyle could feel the cold creeping up on him, all around him in the late August heat like being smothered in a block of ice.  He opened his mouth, longing, pleading, but Molly silenced him with a stare.