Wild Horses (15 page)

And something about the man’s voice began to touch Boyd like a chilly finger. He’d periodically heard voices like this in the casinos, and they would unnerve him with the prospect of whatever activities their owners might have in mind for the rest of the night. They sounded like people who placed a lot of importance on freezers and shallow graves. When he hung up, he didn’t know which he was more grateful for: the lead, or to be rid of that voice.

“Looks like we finally got a possibility,” he told Krystal as she returned from her meditations. “But I think the nutjob who gave it to me must’ve had a rough time growing up. I mean, what kind of parents would’ve named their kid Marshall Dillon, anyway?”

CHAPTER 8

The air conditioner in Dickory Doc’s wheezed like a horse ready for a bullet in the head. The place was beginning to smell as though its patrons were sweating out their drinks as quickly as they could pour them down, a smoky distillation of stale beer and tequila and sour gin. Close-walled, the bar felt charged with reckless passions and volatility, the wrong night to be stroking hair-trigger tempers.

This afternoon, at Coyote’s Paw Harley, they had told Thomas St. John that he’d picked a bad day to roll into the Ridge, some freakish weather pattern folding the heat in upon itself to stew the town in its own gritty juices. Even the normally cool desert nights offered little relief, just more of the same.

For nine days on the road out of Panama City, Thomas St. John had been drinking down the miles the way others here drank their whiskey: hard, fast, and relentlessly. His van filled with new leathers to be delivered in a great southwestern loop — Florida up to Oklahoma, across the Texas panhandle, to New Mexico and now Arizona — he had left home with a sense of ghosts at his back and a burning need for open road. During yesterday’s journey down a two-lane highway between magnificent red buttes that scraped the sky like the humps of stone bison, he knew there to be something therapeutic about traveling in their shadows, and in the smells of gasoline and bad coffee.

Ordinarily, he was surrounded by the smell of leather, soft and malleable. Leather, his stock in trade — cycle jackets and longrider dusters, chaps and vests, hats and caps, belts and slacks and skirts. He alone designed, with two dozen employees to cut and stitch the patterns into life. Not quite mass production, but he’d never been keen on the idea of upgrading himself into facelessness.

It was this craving for human faces that compelled him to schedule road trips twice a year, personally delivering samples of new leathers. Northern states every spring, southern and southwestern states in early autumn. Pointless, strictly from the accounting ledger’s perspective — wholesalers and UPS delivered more efficiently than he could manage in his van. But nothing could replace the benefits derived from seeing where his labors would hang, from talking with those who stocked them, from meeting the people who looked them over, tried them on, paid their money, and wore them home. Isolate yourself from this, Tom was convinced, and you make yourself lesser for it.

The label, ST. JOHN’S APOCALYPSE. The motto,
Clothing for the End of the Road
.

“See those two?”

Tom felt a nudge at his elbow. Teddy Serafino owned the cycle shop, had insisted they come to Dickory Doc’s before Tom turned in back at the bed-and-breakfast. Teddy was the son of a mixed-race couple, one parent white, the other black, and on the barstool at Tom’s right he sat as hard and compact as a stone wall. A wiry goatee darkened a face the color of caramel. Loose black spirals of hair brushed his shoulders, strayed onto one of the new leather vests Tom had brought to town.

“Those two, down at the end,” Teddy pointing at a blond barmaid and a redheaded customer who squabbled across the bar. The subject of their mounting aggravation was lost to the general din. Tom tried to read their lips for a sense of what it was all about, but couldn’t. Just didn’t like breathing each other’s air, maybe.

Teddy waggled his finger at the bar in front of himself and Tom. “Next round says those two’ll be scratching eyes out inside of five minutes.”

“You’re on,” Tom said, mostly to prove to himself that faith in a total stranger could still go rewarded.

Teddy activated the stopwatch feature of his wristwatch and they settled in for the duration. They mopped sweat with napkins already soggy from the bottles and their foreheads, the tension like a loaded gun at the other end of the bar. The others paid it no attention — desert rats and cowboys and bikers, and the women who attracted them, or were attracted by them. They converged like the symbiotic breeds that frequent a watering hole on the African savannah, obeying a universal law: Drink, for drink you must, but drink knowing you run the risk of turning into another’s meal.

As much a charm school dropout as the redhead already looked, she grew meaner still over some new insult volleyed across the bar. She tried to get in the last word once the blonde’s back was turned by flinging a pickled cherry at her.

“Maybe I should’ve told you before we bet that this has been building up awhile,” Teddy said. “That blonde’s new around here, been here about a week. Me, I wouldn’t’ve minded knowing a little more about her, you understand, see if she’d like to straddle the hawg someday, but she got this definite ‘Do not disturb’ sign hung on her, you know what I’m saying? Thing with the redhead, I don’t know what’s up with that.”

“Just the heat, is all,” Tom said. Ever the optimist. “Now if we were in Canada, say, this wouldn’t be happening.”

“If we were in Canada, that redhead, she’d be throwing a moose pie instead of a cherry.”

“I beg to differ. Cool climates lead to cool heads. Eskimos? In their native language, they don’t even have a word for war.”

“Yeah? How ‘bout bashing the brains out a baby seal’s head, they got a word for that?”

“Capitalism, I think.” Tom rubbed the edge of Teddy’s new vest between thumb and forefinger. “I should talk.” Then he paused with his bottle before his mouth. “I still say another ice age might go a long way towards world peace.”

Teddy shook his head. “Vikings. You forgot about Vikings. There goes your whole theory right there.”

“Well, I tried,” he said. It was no easy thing, figuring out how to save the world.

“Vikings fascinate the hell out of me,” said Teddy. “I read up on those bad motherfuckers all the time. Sailing around in those wicked-ass longboats? Very first one-percenter-breed bikers, far as I’m concerned. And fearless? I read about this one, got captured in battle, about to get beheaded with an ax. Well, my man wasn’t about to go out on his knees, bent over no block of wood, so he told them take that ax and hack him straight across the face instead, so everybody could see he didn’t go pale in the face of death. They obliged … and so did he.”

“That’s one tough Viking!” Tom marveled. “Four years in the Marines and I never saw anything to compare with that.”

“Yeah. Bygone age, though.” Teddy shook his head sadly, then sat upright on the stool, pointing at the other end of the bar. “Looks like we got us a winner!” He clicked off the stopwatch.

“Time?”

“Three minutes, twelve seconds. You never had a chance. No one ever went broke betting on human meanness.”

Tom nodded, truly sorry as he watched the stewpot of bad blood come to its inevitable boiling head. Harsh words led to a shove, the shove to a slap, and the slap was the pin on the grenade. The redhead decided to try using the blonde to wipe down the bar, and glass went crashing while drinkers grabbed whatever they could salvage, then cleared aside to give them room. Dickory Doc’s roused with a mighty roar by the time the blonde landed a solid clout to the redhead’s jaw and scrambled across the bar.

Tom glanced up at the big, grizzled man at their own end of the bar, a gray ponytail tied back with a red bandanna. Given the air of deferment to him, obviously whatever he said was law.

“You’re not going to stop this?” Tom asked.

The man shook his head. “Nah. When a storm’s been blowing up for this many days, you just got to let her blow herself out.”

Tom had never yet seen a catfight that was not a spectacle of awe and horror and hilarity. There wasn’t the brute strength of men out to break a head, and there was often even less finesse, and so they were almost comical, with uncontrollable roundhouse swings and the faces that can only be made by enraged women. But then there was the pure animal viciousness of tooth and claw; a dark, red-eyed bloodlust that few men ever achieved.

They kicked and they gouged, tore loose flaps in each other’s clothes, bit when they could. When they weren’t grunting in fury, they called each other names. In time they flung each other out the door to land beneath the stars above this desert town where dreams and old dogs came to die.

“I don’t guess anybody calls the sheriff, do they,” Tom said.

Teddy lifted one eyebrow. “Friday night, no high school football, now what do you think?”

Cheers met every move as the four mean little fists pummeled away, or yanked out a dangling lock of hair and whipped it aside like a puny scalp. Locked in a deathgrip, the sweaty women went rolling across the gravel lot, through an oil slick left by some drizzling engine.

When the blonde gave her rival’s head a good knock against the lot, Tom thought she might be able to snatch victory from what was looking like defeat. But then the redhead reached up to bum a lit cigarette from some burly truck jockey, and went to work on the blonde’s shoulder. She burned in one hole after another, through the tattered T-shirt, then skin, and the blonde began to yelp. For the redhead it was as good as scenting fresh blood. Her fingers jabbed forward, going for one wide green eye but missing, grinding out the cigarette on the blonde’s cheekbone.

The lot erupted with roars of admiration, while Tom’s gaze lowered, downcast. There was no comedy left now, only tragedy. He remembered when he used to try to intervene at such times as this, playing the peacemaker, before being taught the real value of a smile and an empty hand.

It didn’t take long for the redhead to finish, with open-handed slaps and bitter bloody grins. Two final kicks in the ribs, and the blonde curled up like a question mark at the end of her life’s sentence. She lay in the gravel and the dust and the oil, not moving except for the labor of ribs as she tried to breathe. The redhead was up and swaggering back into the bar to nurse her own wounds, drink her just rewards, celebrate victory. Something to tell her grandchildren about someday.

The sated crowd was swift to break, following its champion, like chickens with their pecking order, strutting away to leave a bird-sized heap of feathers and blood. To the rest, she didn’t exist anymore, barmaid or not, and Tom found that peculiar.

“Hey, you coming?” Teddy asked. He glanced through the open door that he held.

“I don’t think so. I’m rolling early tomorrow.” He peeled two dollars from his wallet to pay off. “Spoils of war. Cheers.”

Teddy tucked it into one of the new vest’s slash pockets. He slapped his hand into Tom’s for a soul-shake, slipped back into interlocked fingertips, then fired his index finger like a pistol. “Next year, then.” He rubbed an admiring hand down the vest. “Got a real
Road Warrior
feel happening with these, should be moving like a cheetah on crystal meth, so keep my racks full, jah?”

The door shut on the voices and music, the lot empty now. Tom stared with a moment’s trepidation toward where the blonde lay in her pain and defeat, deciding that if no one else cared to, then it fell to him to see if she needed help, or was even conscious.

*

A week before his first day on the road had been the 31st of August and the hottest day of the year, summer in the Florida panhandle saving up for a final blistering hurrah of sweat and tears. On that day Thomas St. John buried his mother.

The passing of Lorelei St. John had left him all but bereft of family, none remaining now save for Aunt Jess, down from South Carolina to mourn her sister’s passing. Thin and arrow-straight, white hair knotted into a wispy bun, Aunt Jess poked along with a cane she did not need. Whenever he looked at it, Tom wished that he’d known more of his forebears. The cane had been handed down from some great-grandfather of Tom’s who’d distinguished himself by bootlegging whiskey during Prohibition, and by bribing and conniving his way clear of any threats from the law.

Both Aunt Jess and his mother had, for as long as Tom could remember, claimed the man with a scandalous pride, defying the rest of the family who’d just as soon have locked his memory away in some musty closet. These two women had understood the grand old man even if no one else had: There was the law, and there was you, and, through no fault of anyone, sometimes the two of you just could not live with each other.

Cemeteries made fine places to nurture regrets, and certainly his family had their share. Here it was too easy to recall his mother under stage lights, pretending to be someone else, from the mind of Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill. Dreaming, perhaps, of bigger, brighter stages onto which she had never walked, films she had never had a chance to star in. She pretended it didn’t bother her, that Broadway’s and Hollywood’s loss was community theater’s gain, but Tom had always known otherwise. While she’d been a fine actress, she couldn’t carry off such a charade twenty-four hours a day. And it was for this that Thomas St. John grieved, as much as her death. The world had never been a particularly kind place to most mothers, especially those who had to try their best in spite of all they were inside, before their children, and all they ever wanted to be.