Helmet Head

by Mike Baron

  “You heard Doc. They took a pledge. They take this thing very seriously. Doc and Curtis are original Mad Dogs. They started the club along with Bill’s dad Ed back in the seventies when they got back from Nam. It all goes back to Nam.”

  “Doc, Curtis and Ed Hedgecock were in Vietnam together.”

  “That’s right. Ed died in a motorcycle accident when Bill was fourteen but by then the die was cast, as they say. Bill waited six years to make his move then declared himself president. Some of the other Road Dogs bitched about it but Bill whipped them into line, so to speak. Doc and Curtis didn’t give a shit. They’re not in on the drug running and so forth.”

  “What are they doing here?”

  “I don’t think they knew this was a drug run.”

  Fagan found her proximity extremely disturbing. She wore some delicate animal scent, small high breasts tapering into a slim waist. He shifted around to hide his erection. He hadn’t had a woman in months, not since before the incident. He sucked it in until she finished taping then stood half turning away.

  “Is there a shower back there I can use?”

  “Sure. Through the door on the left.”

  Fagan moved stiffly to take a cold shower.

  ***

  CHAPTER 14

  The Applicant

  The interview took place on March 13. Fagan arrived at the Bullard County Courthouse, which also housed the sheriff’s department, at nine-thirty sharp wearing a new suit from Men’s Warehouse, bright and eager as any young FBI hopeful. He wore a tiny American flag in his lapel.

  He waited in the antiseptic-smelling reception room for twenty minutes. The magazine selection included Law Enforcement Weekly, a Farm & Fleet catalog, and a six-month old issue of Entertainment Weekly with Johnny Depp on the cover. Depp was made up to resemble Betsy Ross in a new movie about the American revolution. Fagan didn’t know it was Johnny Depp until he read the fine print.

  The sheriff opened his office door from behind the divide and leaned out. “Fagan?” he boomed.

  Fagan stood. “Yes sir.”

  “Come on in.”

  The middle-aged receptionist buzzed him through the gate and he followed Fullerton into the office, which looked out on the back parking lot. Fullerton was six-four, handlebar mustache, wore a Stetson and affected a good ol’ boy style. His .44 revolver lay in its leather holster on a sideboard.

  “Have a seat,” he said, sitting behind his gunmetal desk and picking up Fagan’s resume and file. He looked and he looked. He used silence as an interrogation technique.

  Fagan waited patiently.

  “You ride a bike?”

  “Yes sir, all my life. Right now I have a Yamaha 1100.”

  Fullerton resumed his perusal.

  “Says here you and the Duke County Sheriffs’ Department agreed to part ways. Doesn’t way why. You want to fill me in on that?”

  Fagan stifled a sigh. “It was political.”

  “Ahuh. I called Sheriff Gruber and he told me he was not at liberty to discuss it. We’re a small department, Pete. It only works if we all work together. You’ll be off on your own most of the time but I need someone who knows how to be a team player.”

  “Sir, I think my military record speaks to that.”

  “So it does and I appreciate your service to our country. Thing is, I’m wondering why a guy with your experience would even consider working for a Podunk outfit like ours for the magnificent sum of $48,000 a year.”

  Fagan smiled and spread his hands. “I love the open road. I love to ride. I love all the twisty turny little farm roads you’ve got down here.”

  Fullerton peered at him squint-eyed for awhile. “I get the feeling there’s something you ain’t tellin’ me. That’s all right. We all got secrets. Fact is we need a man who’s independent, who can talk to country folk, someone who understands that the produce has to get to market on time. Someone who knows the difference between a star high school athlete who’s maybe had a little too much to drink, and some no-account trash looking to get high and steal some citizen’s wheels.

  “I guess you know we got a meth problem. Some of these kids break into abandoned structures and use ’em for meth labs. Sad to say, there are quite a few abandoned structures in Bullard County. These past ten years ain’t been kind to us. Some folks are growin’ marijuana. I know Zeke Elkins is doing it but damned if I can find the grow. Some folks are buyin’ cigarettes off Injun reservations and running them up here to beat the tax. We get a lot scammers through here every time there’s a tornado, offering to fix roofs, houses, etc, taking old folks’ money. My rural dep has got to get to know these people and understand them.”

  “Sir, I’m gregarious and I understand folks. My father was a Rabbi.”

  “I wondered about that. You left your religious affiliation blank.”

  “I’m not much of a Jew, sir. My father was a reform Rabbi. I was adopted.”

  “Well I ain’t much of a Christian to tell you the truth. I try to be. A man’s faith is his own business. But that’s interesting. You have a religious education?”

  “Like I said, my father tried. Faith is a gift.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Fagan thought back to all those Saturdays and Sundays spent at Temple school learning about the great Jewish scholars, the history of Judaism, the Old Testament. Like a caged animal, desperate to bolt that den of stultifying boredom. Looking back on his childhood Fagan reflected it was long stretches of boredom punctuated by seconds of stark terror. That was also pretty much a description of war or police work.

  How could he explain what had been on his mind for those seemingly endless hours? He was deeply ashamed of his childhood obsessions. While his father taught of God he dwelled on evil. When his father pointed to the great spiritual leaders, he conjured monsters in his head. He entered a period of darkness where he could easily have gone either way. It lasted until his enlistment.

  He stalked women. He was a peeper. He vandalized property.

  Fullerton weighed Fagan’s application in one hand. “Son, ever now and then I play a hunch. Now you and I both know there’s a lot unsaid here about why you left your last job but I’m not going to press you on that. For some reason we didn’t get a whole lot of qualified candidates and I need someone now. Will you be ready to start by June 17?”

  “Sir, I’m ready to start now.”

  “Make any difference whether I use the Old Testament or the New Testament?”

  “No sir.”

  Fagan reached behind him to a bookshelf beneath the window and placed a red Rosicrucian’s Bible on the desk. Fullerton stood and took off his hat. Fagan stood and placed his hand on the Bible.

  “Do you solemnly swear to serve the citizens of Bullard County, the Constitution of the United States, to uphold the law without fear of favor?”

  “I do.”

  “So help you God?”

  “So help me God.”

  Fullerton pumped Fagan’s hand. “Welcome to the force. Now there’s a few things you need to know.…”

  ***

  CHAPTER 15

  Traffic Stop

  It was really the Rabbi’s own fault Fagan became a biker. The Rabbi took young Pete to the annual Memorial Day parade and hoisted young Pete to his shoulders. From this vantage point Fagan watched the baton twirlers, the Homecoming Queen and King in their borrowed Sebring convertible, the Mayor in a borrowed Corvette, the 4H, Junior Achievement, JayCees, Boy Scouts and Girl Scout floats, local radio and TV personalities. And then came the Shriners on their mini-bikes. A bunch of fat old men in purple fezes zipping in and out of traffic, performing breathtaking chicanes and not acting their ages.

  From that moment on all the Rabbi heard was, “Can I get a mini-bike?”

  To which the answer was an unequivocal no.

  However, the Rabbi’s neighbors the Thompsons had just such a mini-bike, and young Ralph Thompson was not shy about burning up and down the block. Fagan sat on the curb
and stared intently. He wanted to ride that thing so bad he was seriously considering knocking Ralph off his perch and just taking it.

  Fortunately Ralph was a generous boy. He showed Fagan how to work the controls and turned him loose. Fagan ran out of gas forty-five minutes later down by the tracks. Ralph soon followed on his bicycle. Fagan ended up pushing the mini-bike two miles home. He was thirteen.

  No matter where he rode his one-speed Huffy the wind was against him. It was against him as he pedaled to school in the morning and it was against him when he pedaled home at night, the weight of his backpack pressing between his shoulders.

  Someday, he vowed, he would own a motorcycle and not have to do all this fucking pedaling.

  In his fourteenth year Fagan grew four inches and stopped thinking about mini-bikes. Now he wanted a motorcycle. The Rabbi laughed.

  “After you’re on your own, you can get a motorcycle. But not while you’re living under my roof.”

  Fagan haunted the local dealers: Suzuki, Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki. The town wasn’t big enough to have a Harley dealer. He became a paperboy for the Chesterton Bugle Courier, rising at five a.m. each day to deliver the paper with a thump to door stoops all over town, seven days a week. He told the Rabbi and Esther he was saving for his college education. He wasn’t sure they bought it, but they were pleased with his discipline. In the summers he took jobs mowing grass.

  On day he was mowing the Sanderson lawn on Lake Wyandotte. It was a lazy Sunday morning with water skiers and sail boats out on the lake. The mower sputtered and died by an old elm. Out of gas. In the sudden silence Fagan heard chirping and noticed a distressed robin hopping on a branch, taking off, doing little loops and landing in an agitated manner. He looked down. A hatchling had fallen from the next and was squirming in the grass.

  Fagan’s first impulse was to crush it with his heel. But something about the desperate mother’s exertions attracted his attention. He’d heard somewhere that the scent of human flesh on a baby bird would doom it to abandonment so he trekked back to the garage for a can of gasoline and a roll of paper towels. Back at the tree, he gently picked the baby bird up in the paper towels and deposited it among its mates in the nest, which was eight feet off the ground.

  He hopped down, fueled the lawnmower and resumed his job.

  He didn’t realize until much later that it had been a tipping point.

  Fagan turned fifteen on August 15. The Rabbi wouldn’t let him get a learner’s license. “Do we look like farmers to you?”

  For four hundred dollars Fagan bought a well-used 250cc Yamaha dirt bike, no title. No license. Couldn’t ride it on the road. Did anyway. He kept it at his friend Josh’s house. There was so much junk in the Peterson garage no one noticed.

  All went well until Fagan did a one and a half gainer off a hidden log in the woods and planted his face in the earth. He came home with a huge shiner, limping. Somehow he convinced the Rabbi and Esther that he’d had a mishap swinging on the rope which hung over the lake.

  One evening in September the Rabbi had a speaking engagement at the First Evangelical Church of Spartanville, about fifty miles away. He asked Fagan to accompany him and help lug the audio-visual material. The topic: “The Survival of Israel and the Chances For a New Holocaust in the Middle East.”

  They were running late. The Rabbi stepped on it, pushing the old Volvo station wagon to seventy-five on the state highway. Out of nowhere, lights and sirens appeared behind them. It was like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the UFOs show up at Terri Garr’s rural home. Whamo!

  Chagrined, the Rabbi pulled over to the side of the road. Fagan stared in awe as the trooper got off his big police Harley and sauntered over, book in hand. The Rabbi wore a black suit and tie. The rear seat was jammed with Bibles, Torah, research materials. There was a Support Your Police sticker in the rear window.

  “Sir, do you know why I stopped you?”

  “Yes, officer. I was exceeding the speed limit. I have no excuse.”

  “You in a hurry?”

  “I’m late for a speaking engagement at the First Evangelical Church in Spartanville.”

  “This your boy?”

  “Yes sir. Say hello, Pete.”

  “Hello, officer.”

  “You clergy?”

  “I’m a rabbi.”

  The cop examined the Rabbi’s license and registration. He handed them back. “How about I escort you into town, and after this, you stay within the speed limit, Rabbi? That all right with you?”

  “Yes sir. And thank you, officer.”

  Fagan lit up like a Saturn booster launch. His eyes had seen the glory. The seed was planted. If the Rabbi had any idea his son wanted to be a cop, let alone a motorcycle cop, he might have moved them all to Israel.

  ***

  CHAPTER 16

  Hot Dog

  Fagan’s only friend and partner-in-crime was Josh Peterson. They met in the 7th grade, phys ed pariahs. Josh was the Fat Boy. Fagan was the concave-chested wraith. Josh was the original gun nut. His father was an avid hunter and Josh knew all there was to know about guns. He had access to his father’s rifles and pistols. With the bullying Josh endured, it was a miracle he didn’t pull a Columbine. He never expressed a wish to blow his tormentors away.

  They would borrow Josh’s father’s rifles, go into the fields and blast away at anything that caught their interest. One day Josh loaded dum-dums into his father’s scoped 30-06. Rifles over their shoulders they hiked through the fresh April fields to a tree line. Josh sited down on a crow in a tree.

  “Watch this.”

  He squeezed the trigger. The crow exploded like a feather bomb and the sudden report launched a dozen others into the air cawing. Josh handed the rifle to Fagan.

  “Here. You try it.”

  They walked down one side of the windbreak until they spotted a squirrel sitting in a tree. Using the crotch of another tree to steady the rifle, Fagan sighted in. The fat squirrel loomed large in the cross-hairs. Fagan squeezed the trigger and the squirrel exploded into fur and flying meat. Birds took to the skies.

  “Gimme the rifle!” Josh enthused. “I see a barn cat!”

  Josh’s most prized possession was the Waffen SS dagger he got from his grandfather who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. The boys would huddle in Josh’s basement bedroom poring over pictures of the Third Reich, goose-stepping around and yelling in bad German accents. Fagan knew well the horror of the swastika. Maybe it was his id crying out, I am not a Jew!

  Fagan worked at a local country club as a caddy one year. Myron McDonald was the Head Caddy. He liked to punch Fagan in the arm as hard as he could.

  “Levi!” he roared. The other caddies roared with him. It was the height of wit.

  Fagan and Josh watched horror movies. Fagan’s taste ran toward Godzilla, Gojira, Anaconda, Tremors. Josh favored torture-porn: Saws I through V, Hostels I through IV, Last House on the Left. They sneered at Star Wars and referred to their adherents as “stookies.”

  It was Josh who turned Fagan on to comics. Fagan had always regarded them as silly. The only ones he’d seen were Archie and Richie Rich. Josh showed him what was happening at Marvel and DC, characters like the Punisher or Hellblazer. Ghost Rider in particular intrigued him. The idea of a flaming motorcyclist. If Fagan had to be a superhero, he would be Ghost Rider. From there it was but a hop skip and a jump to the EC crime comics of the fifties, which Josh owned in hardbound. He bought them himself from money he earned from his paper route.

  Fagan could not believe the lurid tales of suffering and vengeance and they fired his imagination in all the wrong ways. Josh showed Fagan his father’s secret stash of Playboy and Oui. The only reason Fagan didn’t start his own collection was fear of the Rabbi. The Rabbi was the personification of kindness, but his disapproval was like a lead blanket.

  Josh had a younger sister named Adrian who was a brainiac and ran interference for him at home. She was plain, wore glasses and had an insti
nctive sense of how to cruise under the radar.

  Josh’s parents gave him a Volkswagen Beetle on his fifteenth birthday. Farm kids could get a permit at fifteen. Josh and Fagan would drive around looking for small game to blast.

  Once when Josh stopped the car to take a shot at a barn cat in a barnyard, the farmer saw him and rushed out of his barn clutching his own shotgun. Fagan hadn’t thought a VW could burn rubber like that.

  After that he declined Josh’s hunting trips. They still spent plenty of time together. Despite his predilection to shoot animals, Josh was a good friend, kind and generous. His size disturbed him but he couldn’t control himself. He ate like a starving dog. Saturday night’s they’d cruise to the Dog & Suds on Main Street and park in the shadows to watch the cool kids flirt, blurt, roll and testify. Fagan usually got the meal from the pick-up window as he was less likely to attract attention.

  “Hey there’s Faggot with his friend Big Pussy!”

  “Hey Faggot! How you two love birds doin’?”

  Fagan often wondered why they subjected themselves to that ordeal. He was aggressively, obsessively heterosexual but like most boys his age didn’t have the slightest idea how to score a girl. Silently acknowledging each other’s hopes and longings, Fagan and Josh never discussed girls except to express their disgust when someone they liked started dating someone they didn’t.

  Fagan kept his peeper phase to himself. Staring through blinds, saving the images up for when he was home alone in his basement lair. With the monster models and torture devices.

  The Rabbi wouldn’t permit video games in the house but Josh had plenty. He loved Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty. He’d sit in front of his computer for hours blasting away with remarkable accuracy. He was the only person Fagan knew who trained for video games on real firearms.

  They ate together in the school cafeteria. Once a week the school served hot dogs. When this happened, the muscled and mulleted Myron McDonald, a thug who fancied himself a wit, would lay in wait for Josh, swoop down unexpectedly, pluck the hot dogs from Josh’s plate and stuff them into his face like a wood chipper. All the time smacking his lips and spraying spittle.