The Bare Bones (The Bare Bones MC) (21 page)

I nodded sullenly. In fact, someone’s stupid boots were sounding authoritatively down the inner hallway now. No matter how free and independent Dominique claimed to be, she stiffened visibly at the sound, and stood erect to face the door when Cropper came bursting in.

The sight of Dominique seemed to startle him, thank God. “Oh. Hey. Listen, sweetbutt.” He still liked to call me that, though he knew a thousand times over that I’d been claimed by Ford. “We need you in the billiards room, but not until Clara’s brought you your dinner.”

“Fine,” I said apathetically.

Dominique made a strained face while jerking her head in Cropper’s direction. He looked at her as though she were having a grand mal seizure. I think she was trying to tell me to be more polite to him.

I sighed deeply. “Sure. I’ll be there soon.”

“Good.” He stormed out, his stupid boots clomping down the hall.

“You need to do better!”

“Oh, Dominique. I don’t feel well, can you blame me? That motherfucking asshole kicked me in the stomach today. I’m bleeding.”

“Bleeding…from your gash?”

That was an interesting word choice. “Yes. My period’s overdue, that must be it.”

“Are you cramping?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll bring you some tampons later on tonight, how does that sound? And a boatload of Ibuprofen. You can’t rely on that shitty, slutty Clara for anything.”

Clara came in then with some Campbell’s soup she’d heated up, but only barely. She was extremely interested in me drinking the entire cup of 7-up. Of course, it’s only in hindsight that I became suspicious. She poured me a giant glass of Jack which I gladly drank, eager to blot out whatever might happen.

In trying to come to terms with what happened next, I’m really hampered because I was in such a foggy haze. I had felt like that only once before—when I’d been under sedation for an abortion in my early twenties.

I was already groggy when Clara walked me down to the billiards room. My head felt so light it floated near the ceiling, and I immediately suspected the use of Rohypnol, or roofies. In a way, I was glad. It would mean I might even forget some of the events later on, after the fact. That would be nice.

“How many forget-me-now pills did you give me?” I was heavily slurring already, but could still detect Clara’s smirk under the bare fluorescent overhead bulbs.

“What are forget-me-now pills?”

“Roofies.”

She didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t know nothing about any roofies.” She pulled open the door to the billiard room.

“How much booze did I drink?” I asked as Clara shoved me in and shut the door behind me.

“Here she is!” cried Cropper happily, as though I were a contestant who had just “come on down” from the audience. He took me by the wrist and displayed me to maybe three unknown men who wore cuts of a different club. I tried to laser their club’s name onto my brain in case I needed the information later. That’s how I know the club was Baal’s Minions. I kept thinking of “onion.”

Onion. The Onion. That hilarious online newspaper. Onion. Minion.

“Here’s my little slut.” Cropper twirled me around like a ballerina, which made me even dizzier. He slapped my boobs that protruded from the shelf of my underwire bra, stiffening the nipples, much to the delight of the onlookers, who fondled their own hard-ons. One “up” side was that Riker was absent. It was a sad day in hell when I was glad for that omission. People in desperate straits do desperate things.

“Like the boobies? Nice and plump, just full of fat. Fat in all the right places!”

“Take off the dress,” said one Minion. He squeezed his hose so tightly I imagined I could see the outline of the corona through his jeans, and I laughed.
I laughed!
This seemed to confuse him, for he dropped his knob and looked around defensively.

In that second I realized it was the one and only Gregg Allman, the sunburned negative raccoon biker who had accosted me in this very hangar during the rally.
The one that Ford had beaten the shit out of.

This guy had every reason to be pissed, to want payback. Abruptly I stopped laughing, and leaned back on the pool table for support, all melty like a boneless chicken. By now, though, both the other men were chanting “Take it off, take it off,” and Cropper was making a big show out of taking each sleeve down over my shoulder while smearing some kind of oil all over my boobs, focusing on twiddling with my nipples, a hobby Cropper especially liked.

I knew by now he had some dysfunction in that area. I felt confident he wouldn’t try to violate me vaginally. I wasn’t so sure about the Minions.

Mack, the negative raccoon, stepped up to fill in for Cropper’s hands, smearing them all over my boobs as though admiring bowling balls. “Oo. Big giant knockers, my favorite kind.”

“Mack tried to hit that during the rally,” said Slit. “Then that son of yours whooped his ass.”

“Hey!” yelled Mack, taking one hand off one boob. “Fuck you!”

It was odd how I could view all of this, detached. I’m sure the roofies helped. Dominique’s words kept circling around my head.
Think of how much tougher you’ll be once you go through this trial by fire.
I liked that she’d called it a “trial by fire.” It made it nobler, somehow, that I was submitting myself selflessly for the improvement of my brother’s life—of my own. It almost made me feel like a maiden, sacrificing herself for her fair knight.

Once I went through this, Cropper would leave me alone. I would emerge tougher, stronger, and steelier than other old ladies. Viewing it this way was the only way to make it palatable to me, to make me endure.

I was feeling so groggy now my head lolled on my neck, and I prayed for sleep. Then I really wouldn’t know what was happening. But Cropper kept slapping my tits, my ass, encouraging the others to do the same. I’d twitch a little at each slap. Soon they were slapping me so often I was jumping like a frog in a sock.

My laughter seemed to piss them off. There was a lot of growling and shouting. A metallic flash, and I thought I saw handcuffs materialize out of nowhere. I laughed even as Cropper yanked my hands behind my back. They liked how this made my tits jut out, and someone upended a bottle of oil over my chest. Soon they were smearing their hands around like kids finger painting, and I couldn’t tell the difference between the ceiling and the floor.

Was I upside down? My head banged against something, but I couldn’t feel any pain. The phrase
cross-eyed and painless
kept going through my head. Men were fighting. I saw upside down items on the walls, like one of those beer signs where the waterfall moves. A six-foot leather sign, RED ROCKS ORIGINAL, was tacked to the wall like a saddle. Someone grabbed one of my feet—I think they were trying to tie my ankle to one of the corner pockets of the pool table.

“You’re a perv, Cropper,” said someone, Slit I think. “You get off on fucking your daughter-in-law.”

“No fucking allowed, I told you that,” said Cropper. I wondered why not. He had done everything else. It must’ve been his sexual dysfunction. He couldn’t stand watching anyone else do what he couldn’t.

“I’m doing her anyway, Cropper,” said Mack, and that’s when I vomited.

The Jack mixed with the soup must’ve just not sat well in my stomach. I took about as much notice of it as a fly on the wall, but these prissy clean freaks were sure grossed out by it.

“Eyew,” cried Slit. “I’m not gonna hit that.”

“Good,” said Cropper. “More for us. Fatboi, there’s a roll of paper towels over there.”

“Why do I always have to clean up the mess?” whined Fatboi. “Toreador always makes me do it at home, and I haven’t been a prospect for years.”

The last things I remembered were someone wiping vomit off my face and hair—not doing a very good job, as expected—then a whole blurry array of disgusting naked noodles being jacked off over me. An upside down Cropper gripping his own johnson brought the bile back up in my throat. I remember thinking how unsafe it was to vomit while lying on your back.
That’s the way Jimi Hendrix died.

Little shocks of someone slapping my mound were the only thing keeping me awake. The only time I remember crying out was when the warmth of a bearded face scraped my inner thigh. Now I was disgusted that someone actually wanted to tongue fuck me when I was bleeding. My struggles only riled the gross pigs higher. They jacked their tools enthusiastically. Only when I saw all four of them standing over the pool table, their arms pistoning like a Datsun engine, did it strike me that someone else had come into the billiard room. Whose face was between my legs, lapping away as though I were a soft cone machine? I could feel the pressure of the tongue and the bristle of facial hair, but the nerve endings that regulated pain or pleasure were dead.

When the first splash of prick juice hit my chest, I mercifully went out like a light. I just wanted to wake up at the other end of this horrifying, nauseating tunnel, safe and alive.

The last thing I later recalled was someone going, “Oh, nasty, Riker. You look like you’ve been having the Cuntino Filet with Red Sauce.”

Seriously doctor, I know I heard that.

And I’m almost entirely positive I felt the bearded man lap up puddles of spunk from my tits and stomach.

FORD

“She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me passionately—a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us, and we in each other’s arms oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks—a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.” ~ Henry Miller,
Tropic of Cancer

F
ord had never been so excited to return home.

Dominique had called him to tell him Madison’s phone had fallen into the toilet or something. Madison had asked her to call him just to let him know she was fine. There was also going to be a party for Speed the following night, to celebrate him patching in, but Ford didn’t really listen to that part.

“Did she finish doctoring the sweetbutts? Where’s she staying?”

Dominique sounded tired. “She finished the job, but it was rough on her. All sorts of crotch crickets in that crowd you’ve got at the Citadel. She’s resting up at my house. I’ll take her back to get her car so she can go to the party tomorrow night.”

I have a family
, he kept telling himself.
I’ve got a family
.

Never had an old lady felt so much like his wife as Madison. They knew each other so well, but now were discovering each other all over again in a thousand different ways. They had removed all the obstacles in their way. All Madison had to do was obtain a job at a P&E hospital, but she said she had some good referrals and connections there.

His work done, all Ford had to do was set up the party tomorrow at his house. Russ Gollywow and his group of spinning, finger-snapping guys in matching suits would perform on the deck. Ford called the caterer he used all the time then chose from a menu selection online which dishes he wanted the chef to prepare. He sent his housekeeper to get the beer keg. He usually sent a sweetbutt to do that, but eerily enough, there
were
no sweetbutts anymore. Entire suites were left empty, being vacuumed by the maid.

Ford was so happy he was even playing air guitar as he counted how many drinking glasses he had left that hadn’t been broken at previous parties. Just one nagging thing prodded at the back of his brain.
Why hasn’t Madison called me?

He didn’t get ahold of her until eleven o’clock. Her normal bedtime was ten, so that might’ve explained why she sounded so unbelievably exhausted. Still, the whole exchange gave him a sad, suspicious feeling.

“Hi, Ford.” She sounded like a little girl in bed with her teddy bear.

“Hey, sugar cookie.” Why did he feel her tense just at that endearment? What had happened? He plowed ahead. “I haven’t talked to you all week. I feel like Samson without his hair. Or Green Lantern getting weak when he’s around wood.”