by Dick Croy
Three-stockings was not getting enough attention, and the Unicorn, who was getting far too much, was about to learn something of jealousy. You couldn’t say there was real fire in Three-stockings’ eyes; a mischievous scowl would be closer to the truth. He laid his ears back and bared his teeth. The filly squealed as Ram turned just in time to see the colt nip her on the rump.
“Hah! That’s not the warrior’s way!” he said gruffly, barely suppressing laughter. The filly sprang a few steps away, finishing with a belated kick for practice.
Laughing now, Ram remounted and walked the appaloosa evenly over to Jebel Druze, who stood apart from the others. It was time to do what he had come for. “Today you have a visitor,” he said. The stallion didn’t move as Ram slipped the halter over his proud head. When he brought the snorting animal around past the harem, the stallion’s commanding guttural whinny told the mares he had surrendered nothing. They rounded up their foals to follow him. Ram checked to see that all were ready around her and then they were off. From a distance, as the Arabians streaked across the meadow beneath the rising sun, they were like stones in an Indian necklace shimmering against a piece of brilliant green fabric.
Chapter 5
They were nine in number, and twelve. A dozen motorized nomads on nine powerful machines for wandering, plundering, acting or maybe just spitting out impulsive, violent lives on the road. They were pirates, gypsies, Bedouins of a soulless wasteland. But unlike the fierce desert people, pride was not their lot nor courage. Nor was the course of their restless driven wandering dictated by the location of oases for freshening body and spirit. Desolation was what they sought and brought with them, creating and confirming the cultural climate which made them outlaws. If any pride was theirs, it was this: to be outside the law…beneath the contempt of society…and beyond possible redemption from a belief in anything greater than themselves. They were committed to the denial of the human spirit.
Forming their customary wing at the rear of the pack, rode the mechanic, the vet and the vet’s buddy. The mechanic had the usual wiry build and grease-stained hands of his trade, and his long stiff hair and the black creases in his leathery face were testimony to the practice of lubricating metal against metal. His appearance, in fact, seemed not just to reveal the nature of his work but to be a function of it as well: his caked clothes and all the skin that showed had the look and feel of a grease rag. Like anyone with a well-developed skill, he was his own best tool; he could reduce the friction in a bearing almost by looking at it, as if by the time he got his hands on it the damn thing had lubed itself. He rode impatiently, as if he could hardly wait to get at some funny noise or vibration in one of the gang’s bikes and had already torn it apart in his mind. He could fix anything and never said a word he didn’t have to.
The vet—some called him “Vet-nam”—had never really come back from the war. He showed up one day, in the little town that had sent him over there, but not all of him, the best of him, returned. He’d planned for almost two years to go down and blow the brains out of any member of the draft board unlucky enough to be around when he got back; but when the time finally came it had no longer seemed that important. He figured he’d lost enough already. He got himself a bike and left town instead. Never been back since. Never would go back. He’d ride with these guys for awhile, till something else came along.
He got these headaches. And sometimes he’d blank out—do things he wouldn’t remember later. He didn’t mind that so much, but the headaches were driving him crazy.
So was the third member of this motley rear guard: a mean little boy in a young man’s body who idolized the psychopathic elements in the vet’s personality. The weirder the trip, the more violent the binge he was on, the more worshipful his devotee became. This was raw power, man. Never mind that civilized bullshit that keeps most people prisoners. Even the Leader was boring and pale compared to this unpredictable human volcano.
No one in the gang could quite recall when the vet’s buddy started riding with them. For a while they just saw him around, then one day there he was on the road with them. No one knew what his name was or had cared enough to remember it. He was tolerated because he was little more than the vet’s shadow—and so mean and sullen he could be entertaining sometimes, especially if the vet was off somewhere or in a mood himself to make his shadow the butt of the gang’s sense of humor. Once they’d had a dope-grab—where everyone had thrown a joint, an upper, a Quaalude, whatever they had, into a paper bag. Whoever got to it first got to keep everything.
The little guy with the hard dead eyes was the loser who thought that for once in his life he’d won something. But someone had switched bags on him. Ramming his hand inside it, he found only a thick warm turd to remind him that that’s all life was: shit.
Pretty Boy, and his woman of the moment, Helen, were next in the gang’s pack order. Everyone said Pretty Boy looked like James Dean and of course he cultivated the image. He always had a woman in tow and a cigarette dangling precariously from between his finely wrought lips. He couldn’t satisfy a woman any more than a chick could possibly gratify him, but they were constantly being attracted by his looks and manner.
He’d picked up the latest in a bar in Little Rock three weeks before. She was a little different from the rest—neither as hard as some nor as captivated by his James Dean routine. Maybe she just needed the ride west—she and the kid, Jerry.
A combination of street toughness and, in his eyes and frequent smile, a childish sweetness, Jerry had been on the road now one way or another for most of his ten years. Leaning back against the bitch-bar on the bike in front of his mother, he looked like a little Buddha. There was a contentment, a serenity about him at times that some people mistook for feeble-mindedness. But he was sharp. He’d been in and out of half a dozen schools, where he’d managed to stitch together his own unique version of public education. But it was out among people and having to rely on himself—even keeping an eye on his mother so she didn’t get too depressed or weirded out—that was his real schooling.
For all his laid-back acceptance of life, he could be ornery enough. Though most of the gang thought he lacked spunk, that was because they didn’t allow a damn thing for the 15 to 20 years each of them had on him. On the one hand, most of them had no idea how to relate to a kid and, on the other, Jerry made you forget he was one.
It wasn’t Pretty Boy’s doing that a kid had been allowed to ride with them. He had no say whatsoever in what went down with the gang. Of course the Man had the final word, but it was the Fool who had spoken up for Jerry. It was the Fool’s bike he was on now. They got along great together. The big man carried a lot more weight than showed—all the more so because he was smart enough to keep it that way. He was as big and loose as a lumberjack but played it all down. Although he’d been known to break a few heads, most of the time he was just a good ol’ boy playin’ the fool.
The gang pulled off the road into a wide gravel riverbed. Cottonwoods provided a canopy of shade over a narrow trickle of water meandering down the middle of the dry and shrinking channel. They’d been on the road for an hour and now it was time for breakfast.
“Hey Loose-Lips! Put the rest a that beer over here in the water. Keep it cool!” the vet yelled to Chris, Fu Man Chu’s dusky lady.
“Screw you!” she growled. Her eyes constantly smoldered; she’d been angry all her life. The vet loved teasing her and she feared and hated him. Her chin was raised now like a shield over which her eyes blazed.
The vet guffawed. “You like yer beer warm, do ya? Stick one a them up the gulch then, that’ll keep it nice an’ warm. It’s sure t’ fit.”
“I spect she could git a whole six-pack in there,” added the vet’s sidekick, his eyes narrow as gun slits. His hero didn’t welcome the intrusion. He was standin’ in the line of fire. Nam had the chick pinned down like a fiery brown butterfly. He coulda mussed her wings a little. Now here came the gook.
Long braid and all, Fu Man Chu eman
ated evil. If the gang had needed a hit-man, he’d have been it. The difference between him and the vet’s buddy was the difference between slime and venom—between your common everyday snake in the grass and a cobra, ready to strike at anything that moved. What the little guy only demonstrated he’d like to do, given the chance, Fu seemed to be still remembering, with pleasure.
“I told ya before, man, t’ leave my woman alone. She don’t like ya, an’ I don’t like ya. You lookin’ for the exit visa they shoulda give you in Nam, you just keep hangin’ around botherin’ her, y’understand?”
Those eyes of Fu’s could make the vet stutter.
“Y’-yeah I understand, man. I understand that some day you an’ me’s gonna finish what we started over there.”
“Yer a little confused ain’tcha? I wasn’t stupid enough to’ be over there in no goddamn jungle. The day I start somethin’ with you, I’ll finish it.”
The women were expected to gather firewood. Helen was glad for the chance to be alone for a while, but she noticed that Chris wasn’t doing a damned thing. She’d end up doin’ all the work herself, as usual. As for Becky, considered the Leader’s lady by everyone but herself, she was not one of the “women”. She rode her own chopper and took orders from no one. Despite the hardness in her face and in the way she held and carried herself, she was a striking creature. Her long hair looked like rapids in a wild river, except that it was as black and shiny as a raven’s wing. She seemed aloof but her cool green eyes missed very little of what went on around her. Her crimson mouth was compressed tightly at the moment, the beautifully sculpted lips turned down at one corner in a familiar expression of irony and contempt. The Intellectual was “entertaining” her again, unceasing in his attempt to impress her with his literary knowledge.
His bike had a book-bag strapped to the sissy-bar, and there were few libraries in the country that hadn’t contributed to it at one time or another. He wore round wire-rim glasses which were always filthy, often with bugs spattered across them in crusty starbursts, and his scraggly, matted beard looked like a tablecloth in a skid row mission.
While Becky experimented with a mental discipline intended to convince her that this jerk was not really sitting here beside her but was in fact some kind of illusion, the Intellectual was holding forth on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, which he peered at through the nearly opaque glasses.
“‘The sickness unto death is despair…Despair is a sickness in the spirit, in the self, and so it may assume a triple form: in despair at not being conscious of having a self—(despair improperly so-called); in despair at not willing to be oneself; in despair at willing to be oneself.’ And this is just a chapter heading. The guy’s fantastic!”
The Fool walked over to where Pretty Boy sat propped against the trunk of a cottonwood, his knees up and spread not so much in sensuality but as if he’d forgotten for the moment that the legs existed. His eyes were narrowed against the smoke rising from a cigarette clenched between white even teeth. “Where’s the kid?” the Fool asked him.
“How the hell should I know,” he said without looking up.
“I thought you was gonna watch him while Helen was gettin’ firewood.”
Pretty Boy chuckled without mirth, still not looking up or changing focus with his eyes. “Shit.”
The Fool’s face flushed suddenly and hardened. He took a breath to say something but snorted in contempt instead. Why waste the energy? Chris watched the whole thing with a smile; Fu watched her watching. She got up and sauntered over to the big man. “What’s the matter, baby?” The Fool glanced at her, bored. “I thought we might see some a that good right arm you keep under such tight control.” The mocking expression in her eyes took nothing away from her look of frank admiration. He knew she’d love to see him bust the guy, then later play turtle: have him roll her onto her back so’s she could just lie there kickin’ till he was through with her.
Fu missed none of this either. His expression darkened and disintegrated like summer storm clouds. Noticing, the Fool suddenly grabbed the willing lady impulsively and bent her beneath him, kissing her long and deeply. Her buttocks tightened under their tight denim skin, Fu’s jaw working in dissonant accompaniment.
His eyes laughing, the Fool straightened her up and glanced at the dude the gang called the yellow peril or, usually, just the peril. The desired reaction was there. Chris thought it was funny too. She shrugged an expression of feigned helplessness in Fu’s direction and then burst into laughter as she encountered the Fool’s sense of the ridiculous again in his good-humored eyes. That’s what it all boiled down to: turning the joke that was life back onto itself, catching it at its own game and giving it one better if you could.
Meanwhile, overseeing not just what was twisting Fu’s insides into tightly braided rope but his reaction as well—and anticipating what he’d do when the rope got tight enough…watching, as well, all the others milling about the riverbed, as if seeing not just the individuals themselves but their histories, inter-relationships and the probable outcomes of all the interactions occurring among them—his eyes hidden so profoundly behind perpetual sunglasses one had the feeling they’d prove to be nothing but holes if he ever slipped off the shades—was the Leader: a virtuoso in determining who will do what to whom, and when. It was obvious that he felt the whole scene to be under his absolute and ineffable control. The slightest movement of his hands enmeshed in the invisible strings tying all these people and events and possibilities together, and the whole crazy cat’s cradle could collapse in a tangle of knots.
Even now he noticed before anyone else the pathetically thin and dirty little mongrel slinking around the periphery of the gang’s encampment and rose without haste to deal with what he could see coming. Now Chris saw the dog too. “Aww, lookit the poor little thing—starvin’ t’ death. What the hell’s it doin’ way out here?”
“Some asshole all-American family traded it in on a new model. Probably started gettin’ a little tacky. Shittin’ all over itself, rotten breath from bad teeth.” The Fool stooped and held out a hand to the scrawny, bedraggled creature, while Chris rummaged in her backpack for something to feed it. “Christ, if it held its tail any tighter it’d squeeze its balls off.” The cur was afraid to come closer. It circled the group of bikers as if leashed to the Fool, sniffing the air with forlorn desperation, its soulful eyes full of some kind of rheumy discharge.
“Hell with it.” Dismissing it contemptuously, the Fool stood up and stretched. Here came Helen and the kid. She was chewing him out unmercifully, and Jerry was absorbing the harangue with his usual composure. He had learned how to ignore his mother’s verbal abuse without appearing disrespectful enough to enrage her further. He looked as if he were facing into a chill autumn wind, sniffing the approach of winter.
Suddenly the dog shrieked and the Fool whirled to see it tearing off into the underbrush, flashing a red blaze that was unmistakably blood.
“Goddamn! He cut its tail off!” The vet’s buddy whooped and pointed to Fu Man Chu. The Chinaman stood there with his Buck knife in one hand and the dog’s dripping tail in the other. The Fool went berserk.
Moaning, not in anguish for the dog but in his desire for vengeance, the heat of blood-letting, he charged. Fu set himself, grinning coldly, brandishing the severed tail in his face. The Fool grabbed it in his big left hand and almost jerked the much smaller man off his feet. But not quite; Fu was a master of the knife fight. He let go of the tail and the Fool flung it to the ground, feinting with his arms, hands, hips—looking for an opening.
“Chinaman!”
The word erupted like a clap of thunder, and Fu pivoted in a blur. For an instant the Leader simply stood there, lightly poised, his eyes in utter command of Fu’s. Then his right leg lashed out like a snake’s tongue, catching the hand holding the knife at the wrist. It sailed into the air. Grabbing him by the shirt, the Leader lifted him in one smooth powerful motion and stepped between the two adversaries. He turned his eyes
on the Fool and smiled, not the sort of smile designed to win friends though it had a definite influence.
With an act of will the Fool averted his gaze to seek out the eyes of his antagonist. “One a these days I’m gonna take you outa here, ya hear me you sonofabitch?” His voice quivered with rage and loathing, but it was obvious that he would wait to take revenge. On such postponements of inevitable bloodshed had the Leader’s absolute authority been erected.
Chapter 6
That’s the first cry we’ve had together for a long time. I think we needed it.”
Catherine’s wan smile was noncommittal.
“You know,” Bill said, “you’re the one who taught me how again, I’ve told you that. I hadn’t cried since I was a kid until that time at Idylwild. Remember?”
She nodded, still harboring that weak smile. Bill tried to read it. They were lying together on the foot of the bed beside the armload of clothes, still neatly intact on their hangers. Their eyes were wet. Bill liked the feeling; it was rather a mark of accomplishment. He hadn’t really tried to dry them beyond wiping his lashes so he could see into Catherine’s a foot or so away. His had a frankness which was difficult for her to confront; they were almost demanding. She kissed him beside the mouth and sat up, rubbing her own eyes vigorously. Her deep sigh was the period at the end of the sentence.
Don’t be so goddamned defeatist, he told himself irritably. He turned over on his back and with one arm tucked under his head, placed his left hand lightly over Catherine’s spine. With the fingers outstretched, it spanned almost the entire width of her back. It felt good to her there—warm. But then, again, she began to get the feeling that it asked something of her. She fancied she could almost detect a question mark, like a raised scar across his palm. Oh good God, woman; freaking out’s not going to get you off the hook!