When Pigs Fly (9 page)

“I should have you both arrested,” the Unfriendly guy said, “and I will if I see you again.”

“But we need to—”

“Shut up. Get out.”

Ace and Frosty stood by the curb as taxis and vans picked up passengers and dropped them off, leaving exhaust fumes behind them. They were lucky to have their bags and licenses back, Ace supposed. A dozen buses pulled up and left before Frosty said, “Do you suppose any of these things go to Arizona?”

Bingo! Sometimes Frosty came through in the clutch. The sign on the next bus said, “Downtown Boston.” Ace remembered seeing a bus station not too far from the Combat Zone.

Pincushion

Juanita’s boyfriend Zippy had almost killed Mack Durgin—yeah, that was his real name—and the failure left Zippy with mixed feelings. Pain sucked, and since he understood that others might share that opinion, he was glad to have left the Durgin guy’s brains intact. On the other hand, when Juanita came back from her night with the guy, she looked like she was staggering off the mother of all roller coasters. Durgin was serious competition, and he couldn’t bear to lose Juanita.

Zippy sniffed a little coke, then lay on his back and looked up at the sky, buck naked on a twin mattress that smelled of old weed and sweaty wrestling matches. It was Juanita’s room, and she had sprinkled the ceiling with stars that glowed in the dark, a hundred to a package from Wal-Mart or iParty, she must have bought out the store. She had arranged the stars into constellations like the Big Dip—
named after you, baby
—and the Little Dip, which he could pick out pretty easy. The other ones didn’t make any sense to him, like Leo and Orion for example. Anybody who could get a lion or a guy with a sword out of those stars was smoking better weed than Zippy was, and maybe they’d like to share.

Juanita formed a silhouette against the night light shining out of the open bathroom door. Her shape alone was exciting, never mind the body that filled it. She climbed onto the bed and straddled Zippy, and his tongue stroked the lemon frosting off her nipples. Outside, a group of boys laughed and played hip-hop music on their boom box. These were the words:

Gonna do the deed

Gonna spill my seed

You know what I mean

I’m a sex machine

—Which pretty much summed up Zippy’s feelings at the moment. They don’t make lemon frosting like they used to, Zippy thought. He wasn’t angry about this, not at all. In fact, the tattoo on his head was test—testicle—no, testament, that was it. Testament to how open-minded he was. The zipper opening up to the brain was an act of genius on his part, his special brainchild.

“Baby?” He said, and she didn’t answer right away, because she was cruising at about thirty thousand feet. In fact, she didn’t answer until they both exploded in mid-flight and settled back to earth with satin parachutes.

“What, baby?” He began noticing his surroundings again: the purple lava lamp, the confining apartment, the shades they had neglected to close all the way, so the boys must have gotten quite the peep show.

“What was in that frosting?”

“Lemon. Didn’t you like it?”

“I know about the lemon. It was something else.”

“I made it with NutraSweet. Refined sugar is bad for you, baby.” She kissed him with lips soft as butter, which was pointless now as he was ready to talk business.

“The old guy you were with?”

“Which one, baby?”

“You know, my gun didn’t go off?”

She stroked his hair. “Your gun went off just fine,” she said.

“I’m talking about the old guy who hassled you here for money and I tried to blow his brains out.”

Juanita pursed her lips and let out a soft breath. “Mack Durgin. Yeah-h-h-h. A jalapeño, that one.”

“Tell me where I can find him. I’m gonna kick his ass.”

Tombstone, Arizona

Mack stepped into a shop in Tombstone, grateful to be out of the brutal heat for a few minutes. He bought himself a brightly colored tote bag, thinking of the ribbing his fellow cops would have given him for walking around with an item like that. It did feel silly, so he bought a Stetson hat just to balance that feeling. “I’ve always wanted one of these hats,” he told George, whose urn he’d slipped into the canvas bag. That was a lot easier than carrying it under his arm or in a cumbersome box. Later they watched a pay-per-view fake shootout staged for the tourists, but Mack was underwhelmed. “We’ve seen the real thing, George, haven’t we? Hell, we’ve been
in
them.” His thoughts turned melancholy.

The drug bust had been almost ten years ago. Mack and George had burst in through the front door, more cavalry in the back way. A glassy-eyed woman stretched out on a ratty couch while a toilet flushed the evidence, an infant crawled on a filthy carpet in front of a blaring television, older kids screaming, smells of tobacco, stale garbage, burnt pork chops, urine, the place one big bacteria factory. Three cops collared the perp while Mack scooped up the baby, chalk up another one for the good guys. Then a closet door flew open and the thug named
el Diablo
aimed directly at Mack and the child in his arms. Apparently from nowhere, George Ashe conjured himself into the line of fire and took two in his Kevlar vest and one in the shoulder. At the same time, Mack sheltered the baby with his body and leveled his .38. A dozen rounds silenced the closet shooter, and the wall behind him looked like it had a sloppy paint job. The woman looked at Mack through dilated pupils.
Whass happenin’?
she wanted to know.

Mack drove over to Boot Hill, an old cemetery where they’d buried the second-place finishers in gunfights of yore. It was an odd place, not quite a honky-tonk cemetery, but the only place Mack knew of where women in straw hats posed for pictures among the dead. One of the tombstones stood out like an ancient tongue depressor. It said:

Here lies Swifty Durgin

One lead slug beats four of a kind

“My dad used to say that his grandpa was buried here, shot in the heart over a game of five-card stud.”

A woman looked directly at him, an uncommon enough occasion that Mack straightened his back a little. She was a tall woman with a lovely face and black hair, a most agreeable figure and no wedding ring. “This is your great grand-dad?” she said, apparently thinking he was talking to her. “That’s such a shame.”

His heart skipped a beat, if hearts really did such things, and he tipped his hat the way he’d seen in John Wayne movies. “Oh, I don’t know. Old Swifty left his wife and six little Durgins to fend for themselves. He died cheating at cards, and she died working at a bobbin. Worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week until she wore out.”

“You have an accent,” she said. “Boston?”

“Lowell. Your accent’s a little harder to place—mid-Atlantic, I’d guess.”

“Concord, Massachusetts, actually. Just a few miles from you.” She gave Mack a radiant smile and extended her hand. “My name’s Cal, and that’s where I’m going. Is it hot out here, or is it me?”

“Mack Durgin. It’s a hundred and five degrees, but it could be you.”

They chatted for a few minutes about Lowell and Concord, the textile mills turned to condos and small businesses, the “rude bridge that arched the flood,” and the Concord River that joined the two towns—well, Lowell was a
city
and Concord was a
town
, if you wanted to get technical about it, Mack said, but Cal didn’t. Lowell was hardscrabble and known for its resilience, like a fighter getting up from the canvas, the birthplace of textiles and Jack Kerouac. Concord was wealthier, the birthplace of the Revolution and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A loud bang came from the parking lot, like a firecracker or a gunshot. Cal flinched and looked around. Mack felt bold enough to brush her arm. “Backfire,” he said. “The gunfire’s long gone from this town.”

She laughed, apparently relieved. She had dark brown eyes, smooth skin with no obvious makeup, and a smile that was the loveliest he’d seen since—well, the loveliest he’d seen in a long while.

“Where are you going in California?” he asked.

“Don’t know, I’ve never been there. I’ll alight where the spirit tells me.”

“What do you do for work? May I ask?”

“Certainly. It’s a fine question that I ask myself daily. A writer, a waitress, a department-store clerk, an actress, an English tutor, a clown for birthday parties, a driver for a delivery service, a teacher’s aide and a few other forgettable things. Do you detect a lack of focus?”

“I detect a survivor,” Mack said. “And if you’ll pardon my brashness, an attractive one.”

“Thank you. I like how you slipped in that non sequitur. Are you single?” she asked.

“I’m widowed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Is your great-grandfather really buried here?”

Mack nodded. “Not universally mourned. Can I buy you a cold drink?”

A half hour later, Cal poked at a lime with her straw, making the ice clink at the bottom of her glass while he told her about the urn in the tote bag. She told him her full name, Calliope Vrattos.

“Calliope. What a gorgeous name,” Mack said.

“As a kid I hated it. Keep talking, though.”

“I have great memories of carnivals, sneaking under tent flaps to see the bearded lady or the eight-foot-tall man, sauntering down the fairway, tossing rings at milk bottles, eating cotton candy, riding The Whip and the bumper cars and the roller coaster while the calliope played and the merry-go-round gave the little kids the rides of their lives.”

“My dad was thinking more along classical Greek lines. It’s a word meaning beautiful voice—he must have liked the way I screamed as a newborn.”

Overhead, a ceiling fan rearranged the air that lifted heat from Mack’s skin. His eyes traced the contour of the tanned shoulder he thought would be so soft to the touch. She noticed his gaze, glanced at her shoulder and shrugged. “You’re staring at me,” she said.

“I’m busted.” Mack’s face warmed with embarrassment. “I was thinking along classical Greek lines.”

“And I assume Mack is a nickname for—?”

“Mackenzie. Scots-Irish heritage from way back. My mom called me Mackenzie when she caught me smoking or picking on my sister. To my friends I’ve always been Mack.”

“Then Mack it is. It’s sweet that you plan to spread your friend’s ashes over the Grand Canyon. Would you show me the urn?”

He held up a white ceramic cylinder with ornate red roses and gold trim painted around the circumference and on the lid. The design was definitely not George’s choice. He would have picked a manly motif, like a hunter in a duck blind. “Sweet? No. George Ashe didn’t do sweet, and he wouldn’t want sweet done to him. Seeing Arizona was his final wish.”

She touched the container. “I’ve never seen one of these before. This is beautiful.”

“Let me take you to dinner tonight,” he said.

She puckered her lips and whistled. “Nice segue,” she said.

Back East

Just after midnight, Ace and Frosty bought their round-trip tickets to Tucson and boarded the Greyhound bus in Boston. The driver stowed their bags in an underneath compartment, no questions asked, already a plus compared to flying. They shuffled down the aisle and sat in the back of the bus where there was extra room and they could be near the john, which was important for a three-day trip. The bus was nearly full with people who mostly sat in their seats and read magazines or leaned their heads back to sleep. Ace and Frosty both scratched, and Ace wondered how long before the rash went away on its own. The itching drove him like totally bughouse.

This was their first big bus trip, in fact their first trip anywhere out of the state if you didn’t count sneaking up to New Hampshire to dodge the sales taxes. Ace felt he saved even more money by stealing from a tax-free establishment, though he wasn’t altogether positive that logic worked. It was Frosty’s contention that stealing in New Hampshire was how you saved the five percent sales tax.

Frosty closed his eyes, and the lights from the bus station shined on his face. Ace remembered the old family arguments when he was growing up, when Dad used to ask Mom if Frosty was really his kid, or if she had been knocked up by the dumb, ugly bagger at the Food Mart. Ace sighed, stretched his feet on the space next to Frosty, and closed his eyes. It had been a long day, but now they had a plan. They still both itched like a pair of mangy dogs hosting a flea convention, but sleep fell over them like a baby blanket as the bus began to move and the engine hummed a steady lullaby.

After a while, he felt a hand lifting his leg, and he dreamt that Britney Spears was trying to get in his pants. She’d have to ask nice, he thought, as a girl with a cute ass and pouty lips danced across his eyelids. His foot thumped to the floor, and he just moved it out of the way without waking.

There was a heavy whoosh as somebody sat down between him and Frosty, and Ace thought that Britney needed to see Jenny Craig real bad. A couple bars of Irish Spring wouldn’t hurt either, that or some Formula 409.