Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  Virgin Bruce looked down at his hands and cleared his throat. “Yeah, I used to be from there,” he said. “Outside of it, actually. Little town called Wentzville, right outside the county line.”

  “You were with a bike gang there, weren’t you?” Joni prodded.

  “Uh-huh,” he replied slowly, and paused. “Satan’s Exiles. I used to ride with Satan’s Exiles.”

  Joni nodded. “I heard of them,” she said. “I went to college at Washington University.” She pointed at the tattoo on his left bicep, the dagger stuck through a heart, with the words “Virgin Bruce” written underneath. “Is that where you got the tattoo?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said without looking at her.

  Joni leaned forward in her chair towards Bruce. “How did you get the name?” she asked teasingly. “Are you a virgin?”

  Oh, my God, I thought. I glanced around the table and saw that everyone’s eyes were as wide as mine. If there was ever a question which was guaranteed a punch in the mouth from Bruce, it was that one, as a few unsuspecting green crew members had learned in the past. “Lowenstein, you like to live dangerously, don’t you?” I murmured. Someone had to warn the poor girl, after all.

  To my surprise, Virgin Bruce shot me a dirty look. “Clam it, Sloane,” he said in that calm but ever-so-deadly voice he used to intimidate people aboard Skycan. Then he smiled and looked back at Joni. “You want to find out for yourself, babe?” he replied in a soft, challenging tone.

  Now I thought it was Joni who was going to punch him in the mouth. She turned beet red for a moment. But then she apparently decided to up the ante in this psychological poker game. She shook back her blond hair, leaned back in her chair, and lifted her long legs to place them across each other in his lap.

  “Tell me about it, Brucie,” she said. “Tell me your life story, and we’ll see about that.”

  For a moment the beamjack and the communications officer stared at each other, while the rest of us tried to make up our minds whether to move our chairs closer or duck for cover under the table. To this day I still haven’t decided if Joni Lowenstein really knew what she was doing, playing with fire like that. Maybe she was just bored like the rest of us and was looking for amusement. Or maybe she secretly had the hots for Bruce after all—as Tom Rush once said in a song, ladies love outlaws—and wanted Virgin Bruce to do something to prove himself to her.

  Whatever her motivation was, it worked. Bruce clasped his hands together and rested them on Joni’s ankles—she didn’t move her legs—and began to talk about himself.

  It wasn’t his whole life story, of course; he skipped the Charles Dickens routine of starting with his childhood, and picked up the story with him being a helicopter pilot in Nicaragua, mainly flying as an ambulance pilot supporting the 514th Medical Company. He left the service with a Purple Heart and a couple of citations for bravery under fire, and went back to his home state of Missouri, no longer the green, innocent eighteen-year-old kid who had been drafted shortly after leaving high school.

  He didn’t say how he fell in with the Satan’s Exiles except that he had been riding motorcycles all his life. “A lot of the guys in the outfit were Vets also,” he said, “and after getting back from Central America I wasn’t ready to put on a suit and tie, go work for an insurance company, y’know, act like nothing had happened. I used to wake up nights, still flying in with rockets zinging all around the cockpit. I needed something more real than a desk and a home in the suburbs and ten kids, if you know what I mean.”

  By his account, the Exiles were relatively tame for a bike club. Although they had all the regalia and attitudes of a “one-percenter” group—their colors on the back of leather vests, the customized Harley Davidsons, the crazy women who hung around with them, and the disdain for helmet laws—they weren’t in the hard-core class of the Outlaws or the Hell’s Angels. “I mean, we weren’t pseudo-bikers either, like the weekend bikers who had straight jobs Monday through Friday and wore Nazi helmets Saturday and Sunday,” he said with a sneer, “but we weren’t into the badass stuff that the big groups did.”

  Joni had to prod him some more before he finally told how he got his handle of Virgin Bruce. He seemed reluctant to let that loose. “It was during the initiation,” he said at last. “One of the things we had to do was go out to this whorehouse which operated in Callaway County off 1-70. There were lots of nice chicks there, y’know, and some of the boys who weren’t hitched seriously to their old ladies would hit the place frequently. But there was this one fat old lady, the one who ran the place. Her name was Cecilia, and man, she had a face that could stop a clock. Never bathed either. She was bad news, man…”

  “Let me guess,” Popeye said. “You had to lay her, right?”

  “Uh-huh. But with all the gang watching.” Everyone laughed, and Bruce shook his head. “Oh, man, it was bad,” he said ruefully. “The boys would get you drunk and stoned downstairs first, with all these good-looking women with hardly any clothes on walking around acting like they were waiting for you, y’know, and the boys would be promising that all you had to do was satisfy this one woman, right? And then, when you were about ready to pass out, they’d march you upstairs to this little bedroom and open the door, and there she was, lying on a bed which looked like it was ready to break under her. ‘There she is, Bruce!’ they yelled. ‘Go for it! She’s all yours!’”

  I laughed, and so did the rest of the guys sitting around the table, but I glanced over at Joni and noticed that she wasn’t smiling. She gazed at Virgin Bruce with an expression that suggested she was not at all amused. However, she didn’t remove her feet from his lap, and she didn’t say what was on her mind at that moment. As if I couldn’t guess. No one else seemed to notice, however. Least of all Bruce, who kept on with his story.

  “So the whole gang, y’know, is standing around watching and drinking beer, and what can you do, man? I got nekkid and climbed on top and started to do my best, right? And I got to admit, she was pretty good, as long as I kept my eyes shut…” That brought on more laughter, except from Joni, who at least smiled. “And there she was, stroking my ass and breathin’ in my face, and I could tell what she had eaten for dinner that night….” Laughter. “And then she… she…”

  He stopped and took a deep breath. “What?” Chang howled. “Tell me, you sonuvabitch, or I’ll break this goddamn chair over your head!”

  Virgin Bruce looked down at the tabletop for a moment. “She said, ‘Oh, Bruce!’” He turned his voice into a feminine, breathy snarl. “‘Ohhh, Bruce! You make me feel… like… like a virgin again!’”

  It was then that we saw Popeye Hooker do something we had never seen before. We watched him crack up and lose it. Or at least I did; the rest of the guys, and Joni as well, were busy losing their own cools. Popeye split his so badly that he fell over backwards, keeled over in his chair, hitting the deck so hard that the wind got knocked out of him. “Virgin… virgin… virgin…” he gasped.

  It took a few minutes for any of us to recover ourselves. “So, ah, the name stuck,” Dave Chang said at last, wiping the tears from his eyes.

  “Yeah, it did,” Virgin Bruce said, red-faced. “That became my handle. The next day they took me to a tattoo parlor in St. Louis and had it put on my arm.” He lifted his left bicep to show us. “And that’s how I got in the gang.”

  “So how did you end up here?” Joni asked, once we had all quieted down again. “I mean, it sounds as if you were doing all right with the Satan’s Exiles. What put you up here?”

  Bruce gazed at the tabletop for a few silent moments, a frown on his face. We all realized that the funny stuff was over and if we wanted to hear any more, we had better stop laughing. We stifled our lingering giggles and sat quietly, waiting to see if Virgin Bruce would tell us the rest of the story. I figured out at once that if there was anything that he didn’t care to expose, it wasn’t a tall tale about a whore in the backwoods of Missouri, but something much deeper and not as amusing.

  �
��This doesn’t get beyond this room, okay?” he said at last, staring at each of us in turn. We nodded, and he let out a sigh and continued:

  “I didn’t get along so well with everyone in the gang. When I was initiated into the Exiles, the Treasurer was a guy everyone called the Fish, and don’t ask me why, except that he sorta looked like one. The Fish and I didn’t like each other from the word go—no real reason, I guess, just that we rubbed each other the wrong way—and he was the only one who voted against letting me in, but the majority ruled and I was let in. He still didn’t like it, but he stayed outta my way and I stayed outta his.

  “The Exiles weren’t entirely clean. We all paid monthly dues, but most of the money we used for booze and gas and pot came from a kitty the Fish was responsible for, as Treasurer. He managed to keep it full by selling dope, dealing all sorts of shit to wholesale dealers in St. Louis. He’d skim off a percentage for himself, of course, and we all knew that and let it go, because it kept us in the money and the guys in the gang who did drugs had a constant, reliable source.” He paused, and added, “Not me, though. I smoked a little weed, but I didn’t have any use for coke or crank or any of the other heavy shit.

  “About two months after I was initiated and started running with the Exiles, the Prez, whose name was Rodney and who everyone called Big Wad ’cause of—ah, never mind—got killed. He was coming back from a bar on the Landing in St. Louis one night on Route 40, probably drunk, and the semi he got in front of too fast wiped him off the road. Anyway, an emergency election was called under the club’s constitution, and guess who got elected?”

  “The Fish,” I guessed.

  Bruce gave me a shooting motion with his right hand. “Bingo. He had seniority, and he had lots of blow, which made the snowheads in the group happy, and so he got elected. And guess who was the only guy who voted against him? No, don’t even bother to guess.

  “I was surprised, though. I thought the first thing President Fish would do would be to kick me out of the gang. As the Prez, he had the autonomous privilege to do that, no vote necessary. But he didn’t. In fact, he even started to chum up to me a little. I was edgy about his sudden friendliness, ’specially since I was the sole dissenting voice in his election, but after a few weeks I thought, well, what the fuck, maybe giving him some power has mellowed him out. So I stopped looking over my shoulder, y’know?”

  Virgin Bruce stopped for a minute. He got up and walked to the refrigerator to get another can of fake brew, saying nothing until he had popped the lid and settled back in his chair. I could tell he was thinking over his words, and wondered again why he was telling us this story. Perhaps everyone has to lay down his or her particular burden sooner or later, because I had the sense he wasn’t telling us this solely to impress Joni.

  “Then, a few weeks after he got elected, Fish came up to me during a party at his place, with a couple of his closest cronies at his side,” Bruce continued. “He comes up to me real casual and says, Bruce, there’s a job I need you to do. Yeah? I says, and he says, there’s a shipment which is coming in for me from down South, which arrived yesterday in Illinois. It’s a bunch of coke which is worth a few grand, and I need someone I can trust to go get it for me. I asked him why he couldn’t go make the connection himself, and he told me that his bike was in the shop and that was why someone else had to make the run. So I said I would do it.”

  “You didn’t question him?” Mike asked. “You just said, ‘sure, I’ll do it’? To someone you didn’t like?”

  Bruce glanced over at Webb with a condescending expression. “In this club, pal, if the Prez gave an order, there was no question about it. You did it. That was why he had his friends with him, to back him up and to act as witnesses in case I disobeyed an order from the Prez. Besides, like I said, I had stopped worrying about him. I really didn’t think he was going to screw me.

  “So the next day I got on my bike and headed for a little town just across the Mississippi called O’Fallon, about twenty-five miles from St. Louis. Out in the farmland sort of near Scott Air Force Base. I followed Fish’s directions to a little broken-down place just off the I-64 ramp, where this skinny guy whose name I don’t remember was waiting for me with the stuff.” I wondered if Bruce really didn’t recall the name of his connection, or if he was simply covering up that point. “He was nervous, but so was I, so I didn’t think much of it. I handed him the roll of bills Fish had given me, and he gave me the stuff—two big plastic bags of white mindfuck, which I squeezed into a pair of saddlebags I had lashed over my rear wheel’s mudguard. Fish had told me that he would take care of the testing when I got back but that this guy was usually dependable, so not to sweat it. He and I had a quick beer together, then I hopped on my bike and away I went, back down a short stretch of highway to the interstate.”

  Virgin Bruce rapped his knuckles on the table. “That, my friends, was when the shit hit the fan. I had barely hit the westbound lane of 64, doing the speed limit, when I looked in my mirror and saw an Illinois state trooper coming up behind me, coming off the exit I had just left. I barely had time to check my speed and start to sweat, when his lights came on and he started to speed up.”

  “A trap,” I said.

  Virgin Bruce nodded slowly. “A trap. The dealer in Illinois was being watched and I guess Fish knew it, and that was why he sent me. If I made it through, fine, he’d get his coke—and if anyone got popped, it would be me, not him. All that went through my brain as I gunned the throttle and took off down the highway with that trooper right on me.

  “I knew I was in big trouble. Doubtless the trooper would be radioing ahead for reinforcements, and if there weren’t cops waiting on the Poplar Street Bridge into St. Louis, then there would be someone on the Illinois side, like in Centreville or East St. Louis. I thought, maybe if I can make it to East St. Louis, I’ll be okay, because the area around the interstate and the river was a combat zone and even the cops didn’t like to go in there because some nut might blow their car away with an Army surplus grenade launcher. If I can make it to East St. Louis, I figured, I’ll be fine, they’ll lose me in that ghetto.”

  He shook his head. “Then they started firing on me. I heard the shots, and looked in my mirror to see that they had opened the sun window and one of the cops was braced in it and trying to line me up in his gun sight. I started to zigzag but there wasn’t any traffic to duck behind. It was in the middle of the afternoon and no one else was on the road.

  “So I said to myself, Bruce, you’re in trouble. You’re holding enough dope to send you to jail for life, the exits ahead are probably blocked, and the cop on your tail has opened fire on your ass, so you’d better take radical measures real quick. I don’t really recall how I made up my mind, y’know. I guess it was just reflex.

  “I twisted the bar to the left, gunned the gas, and went right across the median! Right across the left side of the road, in front of a truck, getting on the far shoulder. An overpass came up and I saw, in a second, what I knew I was looking for, a break in the wire fence along the road, near the top of the overpass. I gunned that mother and went off the road, into the weeds, up the embankment, and hit the hole in the fence doing maybe thirty-five.

  “I hit the fence hard, man, scraped the side of it with my bike, and my Harley laid down on the road on top of the overpass. Scraped the shit out of my leg, but I got up, got on the bike and tore the hell out of there. Didn’t even look back to see what the cop was doing, just got the fuck out of there. I saw a little dirt road come up and I took off down it, kept right on going till I stopped about fifteen miles away and looked to see if anyone was still behind me.”

  Virgin Bruce took a deep breath. “Well, I’d lost the cops, but that wasn’t the only thing I had lost. The saddlebags. I’d lost them too. They had torn loose when I laid the bike down, I guess. They were gone, with the coke in them, but I wasn’t about to go back and look for them because I knew the area would be crawling with cops by now. I’d gotten out of there with my sk
in, but a couple thousand dollars in cocaine was the price I’d paid for my escape.”

  “I guess the gang wasn’t happy about that,” Joni said.

  “Yeah, but how could they blame you?” Chang threw in. “You were only trying to get away from the cops, so…”

  Virgin Bruce shook his head. “They did blame me, thanks to the Fish. I can’t prove it, but I think I know what happened. The Fish set me up for the bust. If I got busted, he knew that I wouldn’t rat on the rest of the gang.”

  “But it wasn’t your coke!” Joni said. “You just said you didn’t even use the stuff! Why wouldn’t you have…?”

  Then she stopped. Like the rest of us, she knew how seriously Virgin Bruce took being loyal to his “gang,” whether they were bikers or beamjacks. We had all seen how he had risked his own life, not to mention the ire of Cap’n Wallace and Hank Luton, to attempt to rescue Webb and Honeyman when the hotdog on Vulcan had blown out. Fish had picked his mule well. If Virgin Bruce had been busted by the Illinois state troopers, bamboo shoots under his fingernails or the rubber hose treatment wouldn’t have forced him into betraying his friends. Some might call it criminal. I called it being damned brave.

  “I had on a wristphone so I called the clubhouse,” Virgin Bruce continued. “As my luck would have it, Fish picked up the phone. There must have been others in the room, because even as I told him what had happened, he began to threaten me, saying that he knew I had stolen the junk and that if I didn’t get it back to him in five hours, the gang would kill me. I have no doubt that he told the others that I had split with the coke. I didn’t even bother to argue. I just clicked off. That was the last I ever heard from them.