Jack barely spared the guy a glance. “Well, I’ve never been in trouble with the law, if that’s what you mean.”
The waitress bustled by, taking an order from a couple of Clark County sheriff’s deputies who’d wandered in. Damn. The place was full of cops. Getting the woman to talk about her ex-con ex-husband in front of this crowd was probably going to be a real stretch.
“I didn’t figure you for a con.” It was the lieutenant again. “What I meant was, didn’t you used to be . . . well, someone famous?”
Jack nodded.
“Jack ‘Battle-ax’ Baddalach.” The sergeant, who seemed to speak only in monosyllabic Jack Webb-ese, nudged his buddy. “Former light-heavyweight champion of the world. Five title defenses. Lost the belt to Sugar Ray Sattler by KO.”
“That’s me,” Jack said, keeping his eye on the waitress. “You look pretty good,” the lieutenant said. “Maybe a little husky. You a heavyweight these days, Jack?”
“I’m retired.”
“Hey, maybe you should make a comeback. I mean, have you seen the guy who’s got the heavyweight title now? Jesus. He makes Primo Camera look like Muhammad Ali.”
“Guy couldn’t box oranges,” the sergeant said. “Lives high on the hog, too. Mansion by the golf course. Lamborghini sports car. Showgirlfriend.”
Jack laughed. Showgirlfriend, that was a good one.
“No exaggeration,” the sergeant said. “None at all. Guy has big appetites. Big problems.”
Jack shook his head. “Man, you know everything.”
The sergeant nodded gravely. “I read the tabloids.”
“You should think it over, Jack,” the lieutenant said. “Why, a guy who can jab the way you can—”
“Like I said, I’m retired.”
The lieutenant rattled on. Jack tried to ignore him. If this stuff kept up he’d be signing autographs for every cop in the joint. He’d never get a chance to talk to the waitress with the anaconda tattoo.
She headed his way, a fresh carafe of coffee in her hand. Jack took a quick gulp from his cup, nearly burning his tongue.
“Miss,” he said, holding out his cup. “How about a warm-up?”
“Sure.”
“Hey, Maria,” the lieutenant said. “You know you’ve got a celebrity in the house?”
The waitress smiled as she refilled Jack’s cup. “No kidding? You’re famous?”
“Well, I used to be—”
The lieutenant cut in again. “He only used to be light-heavyweight champion of the world, is all.”
“Oh.” The waitress’s voice was a little wary and a little flirty at the same time. “You’re a boxer.”
The last bit came out like a dirty word. “Used to be,” Jack said. “I’m retired.”
The lieutenant laughed. “You got to excuse Maria, Jack. She’s not crazy about boxers. See, her ex-old man used to be cell mates with the guy we were talking about. The heavyweight champ. Tony ‘The Tiger’ Katt.”
“Tiger?” Maria spit laughter. “That’s not the way I heard it. The way I heard it, they should call him Tony ‘The Pussy’ Katt.”
Anger flared in the waitress’s eyes. Jack could see it. He had to take his chance right now.
“Katt’s not that bad,” he said. “I saw him win the title. A lot of people say that he won the fight with a lucky punch. I don’t know about that. If you knock out the heavyweight champion of the world, it’s got to mean something.”
Maria shook her head. “I don’t know about all that. I only know that Harold—that’s my ex-old man—knew Tony Katt in the joint. He used to write about Tony in his letters. He said that Katt was always getting grief about his little pecker—”
“Don’t hold back, Maria,” the lieutenant put it. “Give it to him straight, the way you gave it to me: Tony Katt was mostly kitty. Without Harold Ticks protecting him, Tony the Tiger would have been spreading his sweetcheeks for every fudge-packer on the cellblock.”
Maria nodded.
“You’re kidding me.” Jack laughed. “Your ex . . . what’s his name again?”
“Harold Ticks.”
“This Harold Ticks,” Jack went on. “In the jailhouse, he was Tony Katt’s sugar daddy or something?”
“Harold didn’t swing that way,” Maria said. “Or if he did, I didn’t know about it. But he used to say Tony Katt was hung like a mosquito. He said Katt couldn’t find his pecker with a pair of tweezers.”
The donut shop rang with laughter. There was nothing better than a perpetrator dick joke to get a roomful of cops howling. For her part, Maria practically burst. She helped herself to one of the lieutenant’s devil’s food donuts, and that finally got her calmed down.
Jack pushed the plate of donut holes across the counter and sidled off his stool. “I guess I’d better leave these alone. Maybe I should make a comeback.”
“You do that, champ.” The lieutenant grunted as he rose and shook Jack’s hand. “Then maybe Maria and me can make back the money we lost betting against Mr. Mosquito Dick.”
The waitress blew the lieutenant a kiss. “See you later, honeybunch.”
“Sure, angel cake.” The cop leaned across the counter and gave the tattooed waitress a peck on the cheek.
Playfully, she shook a plump finger at him.
“Kiss Mama’s snake, you bad boy.”
He did.
***
Freddy said, “How’s it goin’, Jack?”
“Taking your advice, boss. Taking it easy.”
“Great. Hey, I’m kind of busy now. What do you need?”
“Wondered if you had any news on our problem.”
“Nothing yet. My guy’s still working on it. He couldn’t find a trail in LA. Checked the limo company and got nothing. Anything new on your end? Anyone show up on your doorstep with another ransom note?”
“Nope. Nothing much here. I went out for breakfast, is all.”
“Okay, Jack. Let us know if you hear anything. You gonna be around?”
“Well, I kinda got cabin fever. Thought I might try something different.”
“Like what?”
“Like golf.”
A YEAR AGO, IN THE SUMMER, EDEN LEFT HELL'S HALF ACRE FOR THE BRIGHT LIGHTS OF LAS VEGAS.
That summer Daddy realized the Russians weren’t going to drop an atomic bomb on Nevada after all. The world had changed quite a bit since he first came to Hell’s Half Acre in 1966. What with the Berlin Wall falling and that glasnost stuff and all. Daddy had to face reality. Still, it was hard to let go of a dream.
He had watched the signs for years. They seemed so clear. Like Gorbachev, the Russian leader with that birthmark on his head. Daddy took one look at that big purple smudge and figured it for the mark of the beast. When Gorbachev took power, Daddy battened down the hatches and kept the family inside the bunker for a full month.
But Gorbachev didn’t last long. Once his butt met Boris Yeltsin’s boot, the prospect of an all-out nuclear holocaust seemed pretty bleak.
Not entirely bleak, of course. Yeltsin was a loose cannon. It was rumored that the Russian president was a drunk who pissed on airport runways. There was no denying that the New Russia was a mess—a crazy-quilt of separate states, each one with a vodka-swilling strongman whose finger was poised on his own private nuclear trigger. Imagine Alabama and Idaho armed with fat ICBMs.
It was a volatile situation. Daddy was sure that Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” had arrived at last. The pot was boiling. The end was near. And in a bomb-proof cement and lead sanctuary on a small scab of Mojave Desert called Hell’s Half Acre, a new beginning was at hand.
But nothing seemed to happen for the longest time, no matter what George Will said on This Week with David Brinkley. Still, the conservative commentator kept Daddy’s hope alive.
Daddy was nothing if not a patient man. “Sometimes the wheels of progress turn mighty slow,” he’d say. He lay awake many a night imagining some cash-hungry Soviet general selling an atom bomb to a bunch of r
ug-headed Middle Eastern terrorists or a swarthy Panamanian drug lord, but that kind of stuff only seemed to happen in Tom Clancy novels. In real life the bombs never seemed to make it out of Russia. All they did was rust.
Daddy’s faith kind of rusted right along with those bombs. He had always been a man of strong conviction, but that summer he was troubled. Because if there wasn’t going to be a nuclear war, then the new beginning he’d prophetized so many years ago wasn’t going to happen, either.
And Daddy had seen that prophecy so clearly.
He’d told Eden the story many times. The story about the night he’d met Mama on the Las Vegas Strip back in 1966. A go-go dancer and a preacher sharing a mescaline and neon high. Both of them walking the streets in 1966, but one of them seeing the future.
In his vision, the preacher saw himself as an old man. His go-go girl bride became an old woman. They stood together, in the desert, with their children.
A blinding blast in the distance. A rushing tsunami of nuclear destruction. Atomic thunder and sharp slivers of neon rain. The Las Vegas Strip, cracked and scalded, a fused mosaic of broken glass. Gamblers bursting into flame as they yanked slot machine handles for the last time, keno girls exploding like ripe sausages in the wild apocalyptic heat, lounge singers radiated to a crisp as they wailed the closing notes of “Volare.”
The true believers would be spared. Daddy and Mama and their children, the lone survivors of nuclear Armageddon. They would stand together and listen for the sound of hoofbeats on that fused glass highway.
They would watch Him claim the earth for His children.
The Lord from below. His Satanic Majesty, Lucifer.
Daddy had served the dark one for many years, preaching His unholy gospel, converting those who had walked too long in the light. And though his faith had been shaken many times, he still believed in Satan, even if he could no longer believe in the prophecy.
The prophecy had come a cropper. Daddy could see that. All that glasnost and perestroika, and then Reagan with his Star Wars, and before you knew it Ronald McDonald was hawking Big Macs on Red Square.
Daddy had to rethink things. Night after night he meditated in the little chapel he had built to honor Satan. Night after night he stared down the old mine shaft behind the altar, the shaft that ran straight to hell.
Night after night he waited for a sign.
Some nights he’d make a sacrifice—a jackrabbit, a prairie dog, a hitchhiker, a coyote . . . something like that. Other nights he’d channel demons through his rattlesnakes. And every now and then he’d get his mind right with a shot of strychnine. Daddy believed in taking a good shot of strychnine now and then. Do that, he said, and you could almost feel Satan nipping at your behind.
Of course. Daddy’s people back in Appalachia had been handling snakes and drinking poison since forever, only they were Christians. They claimed to channel the Holy Spirit, but Daddy always said his people were a little mixed up on that point.
Satan, after all, was a serpent. And a serpent in the house of God was still a serpent. Once you turned one loose, there was no looking back. It was like trying to close Pandora’s fabled box or trap the snake that tempted Eve in Eden.
Eden. That was the name her father had given her. And it was Eden who provided her father with a new vision of the future.
On a hot August night he stepped forth from his little chapel and told Eden that Satan wanted her to find a serpent, because an Eden without a serpent was an Eden unspoiled.
The time had come for his daughters to leave home and honor the dark provider through their carnal appetites. Daddy sent them into the desert with only the clothes on their backs. He told them not to return until they had become as worldly as the whore who gave them birth.
Tura and Lorelei were delighted with the news. They longed to leave home. They dreamed of Las Vegas—the neon kingdom that lay to the east. But Eden was frightened by the idea of leaving Hell’s Half Acre. She read books and magazines and watched television, but there was much she didn’t know about the ways of men.
The three sisters walked through the desert, following those forty miles of bad dirt road that led to the highway. Tura and Lorelei looked like a couple of innocent flower children from Daddy’s day—their complexions a dark nutty brown, the soles of their bare feet toughened from years of desert living.
But Eden was not so tough. She had always clung to the safety of the bunker. Her skin was the whitest shade of pale.
And she could not travel the desert unshod. On her feet she wore a pair of Mama’s old white go-go boots. It was, in fact, the same pair Mama had worn on the night she met Daddy back in 1966.
Soon Tura and Lorelei left Eden behind. She stumbled along, all alone, feet kicking up feeble dust devils that were no stronger than a dying man’s cough. The sun burned down, and her skin turned red, and the wind stuttered through the dry leaves of the yucca trees with a sound like wild castanets.
The first night had nearly passed by the time Eden found the highway. Sunburned and thirsty, her white go-go boots dusted with white Mojave earth, she put out her thumb.
A trucker stopped almost immediately. Eden said she was headed for Las Vegas. The trucker smiled genially and told her to climb aboard.
Eden did. She felt comfortable around truckers. She’d helped her sisters hijack enough big rigs to know what they were like.
This one liked to sing. Cowboy songs, the ones from TV shows. He knew all the words. “Bonanza,” “The Ballad of Paladin,” “Rawhide”—he sang them all as the big truck headed east.
The trucker drove toward Vegas and through it. He didn’t so much as pull over until he reached an empty valley of towering red sandstone. He parked near a trailer. To Eden it seemed incredibly fragile and somehow tragic, nothing like the concrete-and-lead pillbox in which she’d spent her life.
The trucker dragged Eden inside by her black hair. He didn’t even give her a glass of water. He stripped her of everything save her go-go boots and beat her. Eden didn’t know why he did that. He didn’t have to hit her to hurt her. Her sunburned skin was so raw that the slightest touch was agony.
He took her virginity with his fingers, promising that he would do far worse, and do it very soon.
Eden could not bear the sight of him. Mama had told her about the serpents men carried between their legs and the pleasures that they could give a woman, pleasures as gratifying as a rattlesnake bite. But this man was not like the men Mama had described. The serpent between his legs was weak. Eden soon realized that she had not a thing to fear from it. The trucker’s snake cared not a whit for his threats or promises. It did not strike; nor did it bite, no matter how much he coaxed it, no matter how hard he cried.
The trucker tied Eden to a bed that stank of loneliness and despair. He coaxed his serpent through the long night, but it only nestled small and defeated in his big hand.
In the morning he untied Eden’s hands and ankles. He gave her an olive-colored work shirt with randy stitched over one pocket. She washed herself and dressed. He opened the door when she was ready to go, and when she was gone he shot himself in the head.
She walked to the highway and stuck out her thumb.
It was early and there weren’t many cars on the road. She had to wait a while. She sang some cowboy songs. “The Rebel—Johnny Yuma.” “Maverick.” “Davy Crockett.”
She was singing “Happy Trails” when an old Chevy pulled over.
The car belonged to Harold Ticks. He took her to Las Vegas. He put lotion on her sunburn and bought her clothes and let her eat anything she wanted.
He did not show her his serpent. Not at first. But he taught her to satisfy the serpents of other men. He took money from those men, and sometimes he watched the things they did with Eden.
Sometimes Harold filmed the men with a video camera. Other times he would take Eden to a warehouse owned by another man, and the other man would make movies while Eden handled serpents of every description.
Once
her sisters joined her for a movie. Eden was happy to see them. It was good to have family around.
But mostly she was on her own. Eden tried to enjoy the other men. She wanted to revel in carnal pleasure to please Daddy and Mama and Satan. But this she could not do.
Eden knew it was wrong to want only one man. It went against everything her parents believed. But she only wanted Harold. She only wanted his serpent.
One night Harold charged a wizened gambler an especially high sum to enjoy Eden’s company. When the old man was gone, she confessed her secret desires to Harold. She did not tell him about Daddy and Mama or Satan, because she never spoke of these things with anyone.
Harold gave her his serpent that night, and for the first time Eden understood what Mama had meant when she spoke of pleasures as gratifying as a rattlesnake bite. Eden surrendered to those pleasures, and it was not at all like it had been with the other men.
Harold said it was the same for him. No woman had ever taken him to the places he visited with Eden. He promised that he would never again sell her to another man.
“I have another plan,” he said. “A way we can make a lot of money.”
“I’ll do anything,” Eden said, “as long as I can do it with you.”
Eden knew it was wrong. Mama and Daddy would not approve. The lone desire that coursed through her veins went against the laws of nature and the drives of the flesh and the teachings of the Dark Lord.
One man and one woman . . . together . . . forever.
It was horrible.
Eden was in love.
THE BADDEST MAN ON THE PLANET STOOD ON A TERRA-COTTA PATIO outside a palatial mansion. A scarlet towel was wrapped around his trim middle, as was the heavyweight championship belt once owned by Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson, Larry Holmes, and Muhammad Ali.
The champ’s name was Tony Katt, but he always thought of himself as the Tiger. In fact, he often referred to himself as such when speaking with the press. “The Tiger trained for this fight with unparalleled ferocity,” he’d say, or “The Tiger sprang upon his opponent in an effort to devour the motherfucker like a jungle beast.”
The Ten-Ounce Siesta Page 8