When Pigs Fly

by Bob Sanchez

  Chapter 11

  Back East

  Luckily, the tampon hadn’t blinded Elvis Hornacre. He sulked in his hospital bed and sipped ginger ale through a straw as he wondered where Cal Vrattos was going. Where she was didn’t matter because he’d already equipped her car with a brand-new, state-of-the-art GPS tracking system from ElectroShak, where he worked as an assistant manager. You wanted the latest cell phone, police radio, tape deck, just about anything you could plug in or run on batteries, Elvis was your man. And if you liked listening to the King as much as he did, you ranked right up there with the finest, most intelligent music critics. Just like he did.

  Not like Cal. The GPS tracking device he’d set up in her car was supposed to set up a chance meeting, blossom into a date. But then she’d dissed him, and she’d dissed the King. Forgiveness wasn’t going to be easy, but they were so right for each other.

  If you wanted his guess, she was lead-footing it on the Pennsylvania Turnpike right now, but she was welcome to a good head start. Maybe she was driving to California, where he hadn’t been for a while. Hey, he could fly out there, hotwire a car and go meet her along the way. Fancy meeting you here, Babe. Then she would realize how much she wanted him. His broken jaw and tamponed eye would feel the healing power of her kisses, and her body would shake like an earthquake while he loved her tender and she loved him true. The brush of his sequins would light her breasts on fire, and they would have sweet nicknames for each other—she would call him King, and he would call her Hammer Hips.

  A nurse had just come by with enough codeine to drive away the buzzards that chomped at his brain. He thought he might as well check himself out and get on with business, so he dressed back into the Elvis costume he’d worn on his arrival in E.R. A nurse told him he was in no shape to leave the hospital, but leave he did—wanting to say thank you ma’am, but I am a man on a mission, no one can stop me because I know my God-given rights as an American citizen. All of this was hard to say without moving his jaw, so he finally just walked right out the front door and down the street, where he crossed the Merrimack River and hoofed it another half dozen blocks to his home. There he reinforced the codeine with a couple swigs from a pint bottle of brandy while he tried to remember where the hell Calliope lived.

  Chapter 12

  Pincushion

  “It’s for the best, baby girl,” Sally Windflower heard her father say as he steered the pickup truck far down a desert road. “Poindexter was born to live in the wild anyways.”

  “Was not,” she snapped. She draped one arm around the javelina’s neck and fingered the laminated identification tag that read, “Hello. My name is Poindexter.” It was fastened around his neck with a plastic strip. One day when Sally had children of her own, she would wander out this way and find her sweet pet’s bones with the name tag still in place.

  `The engine coughed to a stop, and Sally’s father pushed back his dusty hat. “This is far enough,” he said. “It’s time.”

  “This is so mean,” Sally said. “I’ll never ever forgive you.”

  “Oh darlin’, that hurts me so much, but he belongs out here with his own kind.”

  “Does not.”

  They stepped out of the cab, and Sally’s father let down the back of the pickup, opened the pen and eased Poindexter to the ground. He grunted and rubbed his rough hide against Sally’s leg. Her father tried nudging him away with little luck. “Shoo! Go on! Git!” he finally had to say, and Poindexter disappeared into the barren desert. Sally had lost her first love, and she was inconsolable.

  Chapter 13

  Back East

  Frosty scratched his neck, the backs of his hands and behind his ears. He gritted his teeth while he rubbed a shoe on his ankle. “Mmmrrrggghhh!” he said, sounding like he was sitting on the can and having a tough go of it.

  “Quit that,” Ace said. “You’re making me itchy.” Ace scratched his private parts (his own, not Frosty’s), a potential embarrassment since they were picking up a few things at the Shop ‘n Save, and rule number one of shoplifting was don’t get noticed.

  All this itchiness might have been from the poison ivory they stood in yesterday, behind the house they robbed where the guy got the living crap kicked out of him. They stood in the aisle with the toothpastes and the enemas and the ointments people used for wicked bad rashes. Frosty picked up a blue plastic bottle and slipped it inside his shirt just as an old lady came around the corner and glared at them.

  “You’re stealing,” she said. “Put that back!”

  Frosty sucked in air between his teeth. “Mind your business, you old bag.” The lady weighed maybe eighty pounds including her purse, but her jaw went tight like fast-setting concrete. Ace wished his brother hadn’t said that. They really needed that calamine lotion so they could treat their rashes and concentrate on planning their trip.

  “Ma’am,” Ace said smoothly, “my brother would apologize if he could. He’s got this turret syndrome where he scratches and says rude things. It’s out of control.”

  “Hmph. I never heard of that. I’m getting the store manager.”

  “Bitch!” Frosty’s eyes went wild. Ace slapped his arm and took the bottle from his belt.

  “I’m so ashamed, Ma’am,” Ace said, his eyes beginning to water. “This was supposed to be Frosty’s last outing before we had him committed. Trust me, I have every intention of purchasing this item.”

  The old woman shook her head and pushed her cart past them. She must have been fifty easy, though her legs weren’t bad-looking except for those very close veins. “Your brains are fried,” she mumbled. “What a disgrace.”

  A couple minutes later she stood two people ahead of them in the checkout line, and she looked back at them with suspicion. Ace smiled and waved the bottle—See? We’re paying. He tried not to let on, but he itched like hell.

  When it was their turn to check out, Ace reached down on the floor and came up with the bottle in his hand. “That old lady just dropped this,” he said. “I better go bring it to her.”

  “What is it?” the clerk asked. “Let me see.”

  Ace flashed it quickly. “Old lady. Fixed income. Gotta catch her.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “She can’t afford to lose this. Be right back!”

  Later, Ace and Frosty were back at their apartment, a little winded from running. Frosty took half-melted Hershey bars from his pockets, then opened the bottle and started putting lotion on his face. Soon he’d gotten all green and minty-smelling, like a Saint Patrick’s Day mud bath. Ace flipped through a Rand McNally Road Atlas, looking for the best way to Arizona. The book was really set up stupid, because Arizona was in the front, Massachusetts was in the middle, and the places they had to go through were all over the damn place.

  “I see how it works,” Frosty said, pointing. “I think that’s Connecticut there.” He took a pair of scissors and some tape, cut the pages out and taped Connecticut to Massachusetts so Route 84 lined up on both pieces. “Next is New Jersey, I think.”

  Ace wasn’t too sure about Frosty’s approach, with all these pages taped together like a kite’s tail. How were they gonna fold it?

  “We could stop at Graceland,” Frosty said hopefully. “Catch the King.”

  “On our way back we’ll do that. Yeah, we will.”

  Next to last page on the kite posed a problem.

  “New Mexico,” Ace said, picking up the bottle. “What if we get stuck there, our car breaks down or something? We don’t speak New Mexican.”

  “Plus the passports we don’t have,” Frosty added. He traced a fingertip across his forehead, and a green drop splatted on Arizona. “Isn’t this stuff supposed to dry on the skin?”

  Ace just noticed that Frosty had stolen mint-flavored milk of magnesia, but he didn’t think he should upset his brother when they had decisions to make. “We should probably fly,” Ace said. “Get this job over with.”

  Logan Airport in Boston was just a hotwired Honda away
, and eventually they found themselves at a ticket counter. The cute ticket agent looked at them like they had just dropped in from Pluto for a week in Disneyland. Ace scratched his crotch whenever he figured nobody was looking, and Frosty scratched everywhere all the time—his neck, his forehead, both ankles and all four cheeks, pretty much all the body parts known to man.

  “Sir,” the agent said to Frosty, “are you gentlemen able to fly?”

  Ace said, “If we could fly, we wouldn’t need an airplane, Miss.” To that, Frosty nodded and the agent smiled.

  “Neither of you looks very well. This is a long flight. You might want to get your rashes treated before you fly.”

  “Thank you for your consideration, Miss, but we have to get that flight. Urgent business. Our mother is terribly ill, and we have to go see her.”

  “I’m so sorry. Will this be MasterCard or Visa?”

  “We’re strictly cash people.” Ace laid out four hundred-dollar bills on the counter.

  “May I see a picture ID, please?” They handed over their driver’s licenses. The ticket agent inspected them but she didn’t return them. Instead, she called over some guy in a blue airline suit who looked like a pilot for the Unfriendly Skies. He looked into their duffel bags. Maybe it was the knife he found sitting on top of the clothes, or the roach clip with the beaded tassels. Either way, airport security whisked them out the door.

  “I should have you both arrested,” the Unfriendly guy said, “and I will if I see you again.”

  “But we need to—”

  “Shut up. Get out.”

  Ace and Frosty stood by the curb as taxis and vans picked up passengers and dropped them off, leaving exhaust fumes behind them. They were lucky to have their bags and licenses back, Ace supposed. A dozen buses pulled up and left before Frosty said, “Do you suppose any of these things go to Arizona?”

  Bingo! Sometimes Frosty came through in the clutch. The sign on the next bus said, “Downtown Boston.” Ace remembered seeing a bus station not too far from the Combat Zone.

  Chapter 14

  Pincushion

  Juanita’s boyfriend Zippy had almost killed Mack Durgin—yeah, that was his real name—and the failure left Zippy with mixed feelings. Pain sucked, and since he understood that others might share that opinion, he was glad to have left the Durgin guy’s brains intact. On the other hand, when Juanita came back from her night with the guy, she looked like she was staggering off the mother of all roller coasters. Durgin was serious competition, and he couldn’t bear to lose Juanita.

  Zippy sniffed a little coke, then lay on his back and looked up at the sky, buck naked on a twin mattress that smelled of old weed and sweaty wrestling matches. It was Juanita’s room, and she had sprinkled the ceiling with stars that glowed in the dark, a hundred to a package from Wal-Mart or iParty, she must have bought out the store. She had arranged the stars into constellations like the Big Dip—named after you, baby—and the Little Dip, which he could pick out pretty easy. The other ones didn’t make any sense to him, like Leo and Orion for example. Anybody who could get a lion or a guy with a sword out of those stars was smoking better weed than Zippy was, and maybe they’d like to share.

  Juanita formed a silhouette against the night light shining out of the open bathroom door. Her shape alone was exciting, never mind the body that filled it. She climbed onto the bed and straddled Zippy, and his tongue stroked the lemon frosting off her nipples. Outside, a group of boys laughed and played hip-hop music on their boom box. These were the words:

  Gonna do the deed

  Gonna spill my seed

  You know what I mean

  I’m a sex machine

  —Which pretty much summed up Zippy’s feelings at the moment. They don’t make lemon frosting like they used to, Zippy thought. He wasn’t angry about this, not at all. In fact, the tattoo on his head was test—testicle—no, testament, that was it. Testament to how open-minded he was. The zipper opening up to the brain was an act of genius on his part, his special brainchild.

  “Baby?” He said, and she didn’t answer right away, because she was cruising at about thirty thousand feet. In fact, she didn’t answer until they both exploded in mid-flight and settled back to earth with satin parachutes.

  “What, baby?” He began noticing his surroundings again: the purple lava lamp, the confining apartment, the shades they had neglected to close all the way, so the boys must have gotten quite the peep show.

  “What was in that frosting?”

  “Lemon. Didn’t you like it?”

  “I know about the lemon. It was something else.”

  “I made it with NutraSweet. Refined sugar is bad for you, baby.” She kissed him with lips soft as butter, which was pointless now as he was ready to talk business.

  “The old guy you were with?”

  “Which one, baby?”

  “You know, my gun didn’t go off?”

  She stroked his hair. “Your gun went off just fine,” she said.

  “I’m talking about the old guy who hassled you here for money and I tried to blow his brains out.”

  Juanita pursed her lips and let out a soft breath. “Mack Durgin. Yeah-h-h-h. A jalapeño, that one.”

  “Tell me where I can find him. I’m gonna kick his ass.”

  Chapter 15

  Tombstone, Arizona

  Mack stepped into a shop in Tombstone, grateful to be out of the brutal heat for a few minutes. He bought himself a brightly colored tote bag, thinking of the ribbing his fellow cops would have given him for walking around with an item like that. It did feel silly, so he bought a Stetson hat just to balance that feeling. “I’ve always wanted one of these hats,” he told George, whose urn he’d slipped into the canvas bag. That was a lot easier than carrying it under his arm or in a cumbersome box. Later they watched a pay-per-view fake shootout staged for the tourists, but Mack was underwhelmed. “We’ve seen the real thing, George, haven’t we? Hell, we’ve been in them.” His thoughts turned melancholy.

  The drug bust had been almost ten years ago. Mack and George had burst in through the front door, more cavalry in the back way. A glassy-eyed woman stretched out on a ratty couch while a toilet flushed the evidence, an infant crawled on a filthy carpet in front of a blaring television, older kids screaming, smells of tobacco, stale garbage, burnt pork chops, urine, the place one big bacteria factory. Three cops collared the perp while Mack scooped up the baby, chalk up another one for the good guys. Then a closet door flew open and the thug named el Diablo aimed directly at Mack and the child in his arms. Apparently from nowhere, George Ashe conjured himself into the line of fire and took two in his Kevlar vest and one in the shoulder. At the same time, Mack sheltered the baby with his body and leveled his .38. A dozen rounds silenced the closet shooter, and the wall behind him looked like it had a sloppy paint job. The woman looked at Mack through dilated pupils. Whass happenin’? she wanted to know.

  Mack drove over to Boot Hill, an old cemetery where they’d buried the second-place finishers in gunfights of yore. It was an odd place, not quite a honky-tonk cemetery, but the only place Mack knew of where women in straw hats posed for pictures among the dead. One of the tombstones stood out like an ancient tongue depressor. It said:

  Here lies Swifty Durgin

  One lead slug beats four of a kind

  “My dad used to say that his grandpa was buried here, shot in the heart over a game of five-card stud.”

  A woman looked directly at him, an uncommon enough occasion that Mack straightened his back a little. She was a tall woman with a lovely face and black hair, a most agreeable figure and no wedding ring. “This is your great grand-dad?” she said, apparently thinking he was talking to her. “That’s such a shame.”