by Adam Howe
I’d been back at work almost a month now. Light duties. Business as usual, you could say. Walt sure as hell did.
Walt seemed happy to have me back. He never said as much, of course. That wasn’t Walt’s style. But every so often, I’d catch him looking at me with misty eyes, and then he’d gaze away across the barroom, like Alexander the Great in Die Hard, weeping ‘cause he had no more worlds left to conquer. Except for the recipe for his Skunk Ape cocktail. Walt was still working on that.
The men’s room was still out of order following my tussle with Otis, which felt like it’d happened another lifetime ago. Walt had casually suggested I might sell my new truck—she was parked out front—to pay for the damages. I laughed in his face and told him like hell.
The Smokey and the Bandit pinball machine had not been replaced, or even moved from the corner where it had collapsed, lying there shrouded in tarp. I figured Walt was waiting for my leg to fully heal, then he’d have me lug it to the junkyard to sell for scrap. I’d been robbed of the chance to earn back my high score. But with the machine out of action, I was actually saving a little money. All those quarters sure added up. And the extra money came in handy because Sue and me had been courting since I left the hospital.
Who’s Sue? you ask.
Well, I’ll tell you anyway.
Sue was the one ray of sunshine in the otherwise gloomy forecast of my life.
You may recall that my landlady, Mrs. Gowran, who ran the thrift store below my flophouse, had been threatening to match-make me with her niece.
While I was laid up in hospital, I’d had no choice but to indulge her.
Her timing was impeccable; I was taking a leak into my pisspot when Mrs. Gowran bustled into the room with a cheery “Yoo-hoo, Reggie!”
I said, “Jeez, Mrs. G, could I get two shakes here?” I’ve never been one of those clever dicks who can stop pissing once he’s started; that’s like magic to me.
Mrs. Gowran had brought me a fresh change of clothes from home, and some men’s adventure novels—literature, she called it—to help pass the time.
She’d also brought her niece with her.
My fears that Sue would resemble her brother were quite unfounded; I could only assume one of them was adopted. She was pocketsize-petite, with a heart-shaped face, a cute button nose, a bob of blond hair, and bush-baby-big blue eyes.
She worked as a bookkeeper, and since her divorce, had volunteered at a shelter for victims of domestic violence. Maybe that’s why Mrs. Gowran thought we’d get along? Sue and me, we’re both protectors. ‘Course, helping battered wives was a sight more noble that protecting strippers from stage invaders, or randy jackasses. But still … Same ballpark.
“Reggie,” Mrs. Gowran said, “I’d like you to meet—” Then she saw I had my hands beneath the sheets, and that I was gripping what appeared to be an Enrique-sized phallus. (I wish.) “Oh!” she cried, getting the wrong end of the stick completely. She started herding the girl from the room. “Out, child, out!”
Squeezing out the drips, I said, “Wait! It’s not what it looks like.”
Of course, what it actually was wasn’t much better. I snatched the sloshing pisspot from under the covers, and raised it aloft like I was making a toast.
To cover my blushes, all I could think to say was, “Good to meetcha.”
Despite this inauspicious start, Sue agreed to see me again.
Our first date, we went to the pictures in Ayresville, where Damn Dirty Apes was playing at a midnight movie house. The movie was Sue’s choice. I’m not that big a hotdog. But I guessed a little of that ole Nicolas Cage magic couldn’t hurt. After the show, Sue asked me, “Did it really happen like that?”
“Pretty much,” I admitted. “Apart from the scene with the bear cub.”
“Did you meet Nicolas Cage?”
“I wish. But he’s a good guy. Even sent me a watch as a thank you.”
Of course, she asked to see the watch.
I told her I’d lost it during that nasty business at Grabowski’s, which was half-true. Sue didn’t have to know the full story. That was between Enrique and me. What happened at Grabowski’s Gas & Zoo, would stay at Grabowski’s Gas & Zoo.
Since then, Sue and me had seen each other a bunch more times. It was still early days, but fair to say I was smitten. I’d started shaving semi-regular, quit drinking before noon most days; I even bought myself a whole new snazzy wardrobe from the Wal-Mart. Walt had voiced his concerns at the new and improved me, and accused me of putting on airs. I didn’t care. This ole Rocky might’ve finally found his Adrian. Life was about as good as I’d known it. I even stopped checking over my shoulder for the fugitive Mitchell Coogler.
That, I would soon discover, was a mistake.
2.
* * *
Walt slammed a cocktail glass down in front of me, using my new copy of Ring magazine as a coaster. “Think I finally nailed the recipe,” he said. I glanced along the slab at the barfly lab rats who’d been rendered unconscious by Walt’s previous attempts. I took a cautious sip of the cocktail. “Not bad, huh?”
“Nope,” I said, gagging. “Plain ‘bad’ ain’t the word for it.”
Walt flapped a bar towel at me. “What the hell do you know? Sue’s ruined your palate with that fancy French wine she makes you drink.” Walt was suspicious of wine-drinkers, and France in general. As far as Walt was concerned, even Thunderbird was ‘fancy’ and ‘French.’ Not that Sue and me caught the Night Train on our dates. Sue’s a little classier than that.
Before I could retort—
The barroom started shaking. Bottles rattled on the back-bar shelves. One by one, the barflies awoke from their Skunk Ape-induced comas, their heads snapping up like startled lemurs. Marlene hugged her dance-pole like a sailor clutching the mast in a tempest. The Hank Williams record on the jukebox started skipping; it sounded like Hank was rapping. One of my framed news cuttings fell from the wall, the glass frame shattering on the floor.
My first thought: I was experiencing the aftereffects of Walt’s Skunk Ape cocktail.
My second thought: Coogler.
“What is it?” Walt shouted above the noise, “Damn earthquake?”
“Not in Bigelow,” I shouted back, with an ominous feeling.
Then the chopper swooped down from the sky. It hovered above The Henhouse like a giant black wasp, before slowly descending, skids raking the parking lot asphalt as it touched down. The blast from the rotor blades rattled my new truck and the other parked vehicles. The rear passenger door slid open … And then a familiar, shapely, blonde-haired, blue-eyed vision leapt out.
“Mr. Walt! Mr. Levine!” Eliza squealed, in her June Carter-on-crank voice.
We hadn’t seen Eliza Tuttle since the skunk ape thing, after which she’d upped stakes for Hollywood, and found fame as a B-movie starlet in the Damn Dirty Apes movie. She waved at us, and we winced, seeing how close she’d come to sticking her hand into the roaring rotor.
Eliza came rushing inside and threw herself on me. My bum leg buckled under her weight, but I was so glad to see her, I hardly even noticed the pain.
Then it was Walt’s turn. He gave her a paternal pat on the fanny, and then somewhat less paternally—unless you’re Josef Fritzl—left his hand there.
Before we’d recovered from the shock of seeing Eliza, a second passenger climbed from the back of the chopper.
“Holy shit!” Walt gasped, when he saw who it was.
The face was vaguely equine: A prize stallion. The nose: Roman. The eyes: Heavenly blue. The Hollywood smile required a welder’s mask to admire. He was wearing his Damn Dirty Apes hairpiece: A long gnarly mullet that made his Con Air-‘do look like a buzzcut. Maybe he expected me to be wearing my hair the same way, and the hairpiece was to put me at ease? Or maybe he’d just grown fond of the style? As he crossed the parking lot and entered the Henhouse, the regulars fell into an awed silence. He extended his hand towards me, and I reached to shake it, reminded of the pai
nting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. “Reggie Levine …” His voice was the velvety drugged-out drawl we all know and love.
“Mr. Cage,” I breathed, star-struck as I shook The Man’s hand.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he told me. “You’re tougher to get on the phone than my agent.”
“That was really you calling?” I said, mortified. “I—I figured it was one of these jokers jerking my chain. Hell, Mr. Cage. If I’d known it was really you, I never would have called you none of that stuff. I actually like the bee movie.”
Walt cleared his throat loudly.
“Mr. Cage,” I said, “I’d like you to meet—”
Walt thrust his hand at Cage. “Walton Wiley: Proprietor.”
“Nice place,” Cage said, frowning at the bloodstained pool table. He glanced at the Damn Dirty Apes poster Walt had signed in his name. “I see we’ve met before?”
Walt chuckled sheepishly. “Wet your whistle, Mr. Cage?”
Beaming with pride, Walt mixed a fresh Skunk Ape cocktail and passed it across the bar. Cage picked up the cocktail, raised the glass to his lips, caught a whiff of the foul concoction, put the glass back down and said, “A cold beer will be fine.”
Cage turned towards me. “Reggie, is there somewhere we can talk?”
I motioned to an unoccupied booth. “Let’s take a pew … Walt, bring us a pitcher of Coors, would you?”
As I led the way, Cage said, “You’re not wearing the watch?”
“That’s quite a story. I’ll tell you all about it.”
Cage and me slid into the booth next to the shrouded corpse of the pinball machine. Walt brought us over the pitcher of beer, giving me the stink-eye for making him wait on me. I gave him a grin. “Thank you, garcon.”
Walt saw the crowd watching us. “Mind your business,” he told them. “Carry on with your carryin’ on. You’re all acting like you never seen a Hollywood superstar in The Henhouse before.”
Cage cocked an eyebrow at that. I told him, “Steve Guttenberg was doing dinner theater in Ayresville. He got lost on the way, come inside for directions.”
“And then stayed for a week,” Walt cut in. “That damn Gutty’s an animal.”
“That’ll be all, Walt. Thank you.” I dismissed him with a regal roll of my wrist.
Walt gritted his teeth and glared at me as he returned to his post behind the slab. But Eliza cheered him up; asked if she could dance, for old times’ sake. Walt eagerly gave her a quarter from the register, which should tell you how keen he was to see her dance again. Eliza skipped across the room to the jukebox and chose a record. Bad Company’s Feel Like Makin Love started booming through the speakers. Marlene, who in Eliza’s absence had become the Henhouse’s dancing queen, surrendered the stage with strained good grace. She went and sat with Lou, feigning interest in his photos of Enrique, she’d seen ‘em all before.
As we watched Eliza shimmy out of her clothes, I asked Cage how she was getting along out in Hollywood; I hated to think she was being exploited by those seedy showbiz types. Cage assured me she was doing fine. I was happy for Eliza. Unlike me, she’d managed to turn her fifteen minutes of fame into a career. She’d sure come a long way since her days as a comfort nurse, attending to the needs of the mongoloids.
We watched Eliza dance awhile longer, but it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before—nor Cage, judging by his nonplussed expression—so I said, “So what can I do for you, Mr. Cage?”
Then, in one of the proudest moments of my life, he said, “Call me Nic,” and raised his glass to me. “Reggie, I’d like to make a sequel to Damn Dirty Apes.”
“No shit,” I said. “About the Backseat Strangler thing?”
“The Showdown at Harry’s Pre-Owned American Auto thing.”
“Made the news out in Hollywood, huh?”
“No, I caught it on America’s Dumbest Criminals.”
“Right …”
“I want to buy your story rights, Reggie.”
He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a check. I’d never seen so many zeroes before. Apart from my bank balance, that is; except these zeroes had a number in front of them.
This was it, a second chance …
All right, a third chance.
“There’s just one problem,” Cage said. “The ending.”
“What about it?”
“We don’t have one,” he said. “The bad guy got away.”
“Well, shit, Nic. I tried my best—”
“No one’s saying you didn’t try, Reggie. But a Hollywood movie can’t end with the bad guy getting away. It’s what we call in the biz—” He made finger quotes in the air, “A downer. And while we’re on the subject of downers, the dog can’t die of a cocaine overdose, either. Or any other thing. That’s another rule set in stone.”
“So what are you saying here? You want me to catch Mitchell Coogler? ‘Cause I’ll tell you right now, Nic, I don’t know I’m up to that.”
Cage chuckled at my naivety. “Of course you’re not. No, no, no. We’ll just invent a dramatic climax. You remember the showdown between me and Malkovich in Con Air?”
“How could I forget?”
“It’s not like real life; in Hollywood, a satisfying ending is essential.”
I took a chug of Coors and thought about the ending I’d like to see …
It starred Sue and me. I’d put a ring on it, and we were living together in a nice little house in a goodish part of town, Sue had a bun in the oven and I was the baker. I’d jacked in my job at The Henhouse, but still drank there weekends, in moderation. With Sue’s help, I’d opened my own boxing gym—The Hit Pit—and was giving back to Bigelow the best way I knew: By teaching her children how to roll with the punches that life was gonna throw at them. One of my kids, I called him The Kid, coached him all the way to a title shot. The pinnacle of my boxing career had been fighting Boar Hog Brannon for the state strap at light heavy. ‘Course, that had also been my boxing rock bottom, because Boar Hog damn near killed me. But The Kid, with me coaching him, all my years of experience and wisdom, he’d go all the way. And me? Hell, there was still a little life in the old dog yet. I’d have a beef with The Kid’s rival’s coach. Like Mr. Miyagi and that Cobra Kai cocksucker in The Karate Kid. Yeah, that’d be sweet. The kids’d be slugging it out in the prize ring, while the coaches went at it in the parking lot. Do I even have to tell you who’d win? The movie would end with a rousing freeze frame of The Kid and me with our arms raised in victory while a power ballad wailed on the soundtrack … It sounded like a surefire hit to me.
But before I could pitch my preferred happy ending to Cage, another ending presented itself, as written by the devil his ownself.
3.
* * *
After faking his suicide at Beetner’s Leap, Mitchell Coogler had not, as Gooch and the law believed, skipped town and sought sanctuary among his neo-Nazi brethren. With Coogler’s dreams of a new life with Billy/Billie reduced to ashes along with Harry’s car dealership, perhaps he actually had contemplated hurling himself to his death from the bluff? But, no …
Instead he had fled into the vast sprawl of woods beyond town, the Sticks. There, like a fairytale ogre, he’d taken refuge in a cave. Digging Shelby’s bullet from his shoulder, he’d cleaned and dressed the wound, foraged the forest for food and water, and slowly nursed himself back to health. And all the while there was only one thought burning in his brain … Revenge.
One morning, Coogler was awoken by gunfire, and drunken laughter, echoing over the Sticks. Fearing, at first, that the law had discovered him, he stealthily investigated the noise, and spied a pair of yokel yahoos, Eddie ‘Clusterfuck’ Clutterbuck and Toby Muntz—Henhouse regulars, you bet—out there blasting squirrels with Eddie’s new toy: A fully automatic M4 assault rifle. About the only thing missing was the mounted grenade launcher. Even Coogler thought it was overkill for squirrel.
But it was perfect for the big game he planned on hunting. This was the opport
unity he’d been waiting for. Almost like Billy-boy was sending him a sign from up in heaven.
Biding his time until Eddie was reloading the rifle, Coogler blitzed the drunken oafs with a tree branch, bashing their skulls until what passed for their brains was leaking from their ears. He requisitioned the rifle, plus the dozen mags of ammo in Eddie’s combat vest. Then, that very same afternoon, loaded for bouncer, Coogler emerged from the Sticks like a vengeful wraith …
And descended on The Henhouse to have his revenge.
4.
* * *
There was a thunder of automatic gunfire. The windows exploded in a blizzard of glass. Bullets tore through the room, devouring the furniture like a plague of lead locusts. Walt dove to the floor behind the slab. Bottles shattered above his head like targets at a carnival shooting gallery. Booze rained down over him; he was wearing his Skunk Ape cocktail like a reeking cologne. One of the barflies bolted for the fire door and was scythed down, dancing to Eliza’s music in a bloody jitterbug of death. The guy’s buddies hit the deck, ducking and covering like they were in an old A-bomb infomercial. Eliza leapt down from the stage. Bullets pinged off the dance-pole with flashes of sparks. She cowered beneath Lou’s table with Lou and Marlene. Marlene took up most of the room, but her bulk provided an ample body shield for Lou and Eliza.
Bullets ripping the room apart, I dragged Cage from the booth, pulled him down behind the pinball machine, and we took cover.
Walt shouted at me from his foxhole behind the bar slab, “Kinda wish I had my shotgun!”
“Get everyone out back!”
“The hell with that, I ain’t moving!”
“Eliza! Get everyone out back!”
Shamed into action, Walt fetched the fire extinguisher from behind the bar. He smashed the nozzle against the floor. Fire retardant billowed from the cylinder like steam from a pipe. He lobbed the fire extinguisher over the slab, and it skated across the room, fogging the bar with fire retardant, and creating a smokescreen for Eliza and the others to flee. “You’re good to go!”