THUGLIT Issue Four (10 page)

Rex had had women, but only the type with faded tattoos down their thighs and skin sun-colored to the likes of a penny. Biker Bitches, that’s what they were called. Those types of women were always around, and neither Rex, nor anyone else in the club, wanted a Biker Bitch as a girlfriend, significant other, or wife. Maybe as a pet, but that’s about it.

Vickie was different though. He didn’t think she’d ever been with a biker before, and he imagined her coming to his apartment after a long night at Snow White’s. And when she came home from work, he’d ask if she had enough energy to go for a ride. She would. She’d put on her helmet and jacket he had bought for her and sit behind him on his bike. He’d feel her breasts on his back, her leather-sleeves wrapped around his leather-torso like a nut and a bolt. And he’d go fast, but they’d do it together, so fast that the gravity tried to pull her away from him, her arms trying to slip off his waist while the motorcycle’s speed pulled faster and stronger than gravity could take and
---

“Here y’all go,” Vickie said, pulling the tab for each of their beers. The can’s lip made a hollow sound when it cracked. “I'll check back in a bit.”

But it wasn’t long after Vickie served the beer that everyone heard “Hey! Hey, hey!” coming from the pool tables. Rex turned and saw T-Boy, Big Cody, Endless Frank, and the rest of the Souls grabbing the Young Boys’ shirts, throats, and arms.

Without thinking twice, Rex went straight into the thrall of youthful muscles and biker tattoos. He pushed and punched until he squared evenly with one of the younger Young Boys. The showdown didn’t last long because Rex went off first, slamming his tattooed fist into smooth chin. The Young Boy fell like a shoddy bomb. But it wasn’t just the punch. It was the way he smacked against the floor too. On the way down, his arms, legs, and spine were already stiffed by the blow, so when the Young Boy hit ground, his hands didn’t break the fall. His head sounded like a baseball hitting a field made of concrete. Rex had heard rumors of people dying like that.

*****

“So you’re telling me you don’t know anything about a fight?” Jerry asked.

“That’s what I’m telling.”

“Okay then.”

“Don’t believe me? Hell, take me to Snow White’s. Get what you call an I D,” Rex said.

“Think I don’t know how it works up there? All of you, the Dollared Souls, the bartenders, the patrons, thicker than
a tribe. Ain’t worth the time.”

Rex knew he didn’t have to worry about the Young Boys either, too c
ocky to report an ass-whooping.

“Looks like my partner’s getting out of the car now though,” Jerry said.

Tip walked towards the two, staring at Rex and shaking his head. Rex was reminded again of Tip’s last name—Carrington. Once more he tried to grasp where he knew it from, the name clear in his head. He saw it spelled perfectly clean, yet it was like the bottom of the letters had roots. Roots that went deep, but eventually connected together in the deepest of layers. He’d have to dig get it.

“Cheryl looked. Nothing on him,” Tip said, handing the information back to Jerry.

“We’ll see.” Jerry studied the driver’s license and said, “Rex Fowler? I do know you. When you were younger, you tried to steal a Corona from the store on Huntingdon that ain’t there no more.” He turned to Tip. “I remember because it wasn’t liquor, wasn’t cigarettes, and out of all the beers in the world, a single Corona. I still think about it every now and then. Why didn’t you say anything, Rex?”

“Who said I remembered you?”

Jerry gave a laugh. “True.” He went back to the license. “Got a birthday coming too. You’ll be what, twenty-six?”

Rex nodded his head, looking off somewhere.

“Tip, what you think of all this tattoo and biker stuff?”

“Oh hell, Jerry, I don’t know,” he responded as if scared of giving the wrong opinion.

Disappointed in Tip’s response, the older officer went back to Rex. “So when’d you join this rag-tag crew of yours?”

“Eighteen” Rex said, a year after he dropped out of school. BeBe had tried to set him straight. She told him what an education could do, talked about actions and consequences, tried saying that life’s a slot-machine and there’s only so many quarters. BeBe said all these things to Rex, but he paid her no mind. Destroying school property led to fistfights at the ballpark, and fighting turned into stealing beers from the Little General. Indian-ink tattoos started showing up on his forearms. BeBe couldn’t do anything fo
r him. She got tired of trying.

A little before joining the Souls, Rex got a job as a dishwasher at Bailey’s Southern. He still lived with his mother and had no bills to pay, so he saved every paycheck. BeBe thought it was a good sign
—responsibility. And four months later, he scoped the BuySell section of the newspaper and saw an ad for a 91 Honda Nighthawk. Black. Only one rider before. Great-shape. $2000-FIRM. Rex got the bike for $1,500, his first motorcycle. He quit his job the next day.

Rex dedicated
every minute to learning how to ride the bike, how to lean with the curves and bend his body against the wind. He wasn’t afraid to try and pass the 110 mph marker either, where the speedometer quit counting because it was scared of going beyond. He mostly rode at night when the back roads were deserted. He’d come home early morning, get a bite to eat, and go to sleep.

Once he had a dream he was pulled over on the side of the road with nothing around him, no trees, no dirt, no ground, just the road with yellow lines that glowed a little bit, the only light. And then something in factory overalls with a black ram’s head appeared. It may have been there the whole time. It had tall jagged horns that curved at the top. It pointed at Rex’s bike and said, “That ain’t gonna cut it,” sounding like something that came from another dimension. “No American Muscle,” it said. Then it went away, but the bricks on the road kept glowing.

There was more of nothing in the dream until his father’s GTO appeared. No one was behind the wheel, but Rex could feel the car hating him. It let him know by the way its spark plugs, pistons, gears, rods, and belts exploded in single moments of combustion, moving together in a melody of infinite violence. It got so loud, Rex thought he’d go deaf. Finally, the car blasted forward, leaving him on the side of the road with his Nighthawk, watching the taillights go deeper and deeper until any semblance of the Goat completely disappeared, the dream ending.

Some nights while driving around, he’d pass Snow White’s. He knew it was the home of the Three Dollar Souls. They’d been talked about and mythologized as long as Rex could remember. However, he heard conflicting reports about the motorcycle club. Once riding with his dad as a boy, they drove by the bar, and when his father saw the motorcycles, he said, “The Souls wouldn’t know manhood if it punched them in the ass.” But when Rex was still in high school, his classmates said the opposite. They’d claim the motorcycle club wa
s a bunch of fighting badasses; “I know a guy that got stabbed by one over a card game,” they said. So when he had his own bike and saw the flock of motorcycles in Snow White’s parking lot, he believed his classmates.

Rex went inside Snow White’s one night and walked up to the first leather jacket he saw, Big Cody, a biker with a forehead proportionate to a pit
bull’s and shoulders like a professional wrestler.

“Who do I need to talk to about joining the Three Dollar Souls?” Rex asked.

Big Cody looked at Rex from the tip of his boots to his long black hair and said, “Boy, this barstool’s older than you.”

“Who do I gotta talk to?”

“Talk to me, talk to him,” he pointed at T-Boy, “talk to Pettin, talk to any of us. Hell, there ain’t no leader in the Souls. But they all going to laugh at you like I’m about to if you keep at it.” Big Cody turned away, but Rex kept standing there, making it awkward until the member asked how old he was.

“Eighteen in two months.”

Big Cody sniffed something invisible. “You even got a bike?”

“A Honda Nighthawk,” Rex said.

The biker gave a thunderous honk of a laugh that got everyone’s attention. “It’s best you learn that loud pipes save lives,” he said. “And I guarantee your Honda sounds like a cat farting, but a Harley…” Big Cody got up from the table and into Rex’s face with a quickness that had scared many men and women. He made the noise of a fiendish motorcycle engine, screaming like a hungry bear. While yelling, he shook his whole face and let beer-slobber slap against the collar of his jacket. Atoms of it touched Rex’s cheeks, but he didn’t flinch or wipe it off.

When Big Cody was done shaking his face, Rex said, “I’ll get one when I can.” And he kept standing there.

*****

“I want to say there used to another Fowler around here,” Jerry said, “a little younger than me. He had a Pontiac that raised hell. You kin to him? Can’t think of his name.” Just as Jerry said that, Rex’s memory sparked like a match. In that moment, he dug straight to the spot where all the roots connected into one piece below the surface. He saw it fully, comprehending it at all
angles.

Carrington.

Carrington.

Ignoring Jerry’s question, Rex turned to Tip and asked, “You know a Marcie Carrington? Up in Dyersberg?”

Tip said, “Yeah, she’s my aunt. Mother’s sister,” spooked that Rex seemed to know her.

“What’s that got to do with anything I’m asking you?” Jerry said.

“Just wondering,” Rex replied. It had something to do with it. After joining the Three Dollar Souls, the entire club began treating Rex like an older son or younger brother. They introduced him to women. They tattooed him with homemade guns. They told him to remove the exhaust baffles and front fender off his Nighthawk. “You can get the shit-stock off at least,” Big Cody said. “Make it louder. And it’ll lose weight.” They even got him a job.

“You want to deal?” Pettin had brought Rex over to his apartment. In a corner of the living room were two plastic storage-containers filled with pills in plastic baggies. “Am-fet-uh-means, can’t sell them fast enough.”

“I could do that,” Rex said.

“Stay here then. I got an extra room. I’ll make sure you get run-around money.” Rex was in good.

He didn’t go around his mother’s that often, bored with the place and the parent he grew up with. But a week before turning twenty-two, he got a phone call from her, saying he needed to swing by.

BeBe sat in the kitchen, holding a letter. “Heard you pull up,” she said. Rex slumped in the chair beside her. “Got this letter in the mail.” She put it on the table and scooted the pages toward her son.

Rex didn’t glance at it. “What is it?” he asked.

“You going to read it, or you want me to tell you?”

“Looks like you already read it.”

“It’s a letter from a woman named Marcie Carrington.” BeBe got up from the table. Before she said anything else,
she got herself a glass of ice water. “She lives in Dyersburg and says your father’s dead.” She sat back down at the table, drinking from the glass. The ice and the water jingled like a chime when she put it to her mouth. Rex watched light go inside the cup and come out in a prism of colors.

“He didn’t go nowhere,” Rex said.

“What?” his mother said, confused.

Rex shook his head and moved his hand as if back-handing a fly. “Okay then, I came out here for that?” he asked.

“Yeah, you did. But that ain’t it.” She took another sip. “This Marcie says Richie left you the GTO. It’s at her house and wants you to come get it.”

Rex made a sound with his voice, a beat of sound that came out cynical. He looked at his mother’s hands wrapped around the sweating glass of water. The air-conditioner kicked on. He thought about what the Ram’s head had told him in his dream. Rex stood up, grabbed the hand-written letter, and mashed it in his jacket pocket.

“What’re you going to do with it?” his mother asked, tired of waiting for a response.

“I suppose I'll sell it.”

*****

“Well, Rex, I think you need to hop off that Harley of yours,” Jerry said. Rex got off the seat of the 883 Sportster. “Now turn around, spread your legs, put your hands up. There you go. Tip,” Jerry pointed to the tree
line, “look around over there. Make sure Mr. Fowler didn’t drop something.”

Jerry patted Rex down, his hands landing in sync on Rex’s sides. “You got anything in your pockets? If it’s pocket knives, pencils, or pills, I need to know about it.” Rex shook his head. He watched Tip move his flashlight in frontward and backward lines. Rex thought it was difficult to see leather at night. The officer got closer and closer to the tree
line while Jerry dug in Rex’s jacket and pants. He went into each pocket, hoping to find something. Tip was at the tree line. Rex watched his hands. He hoped the flashlight wouldn’t stop moving, that the officer kept going as if giving paint strokes of light to the ground. “Well, ain’t nothing in your pockets.” Rex thought about saying I told you so, but he hadn’t told the officer anything. Rex watched Tip instead. Officer Carrington was right there, moving the slither of light against the ground like playing a game with a cat. Rex knew what he’d do if he was Tip.