“You’re not dressed,” she says and sashays past me and throws her things down in front of the sofa.
“I guess not,” I reply. “I was sort of waiting for you. Following your lead. We going to a club? The Break might be in lock-in by now.”
Loren is in the kitchen and then returns to the main room and peels off her vest in something close to glorious slow motion.
“Not going to The Break,” she says and moves around the other side to the dilapidated wardrobe, her back to me, no tan lines, hair brushing the delicate grooves in the small of her spine. She pulls the leather coat and everything else dangling from the hanger and throws them onto the bed.
“Put this on,” Loren says.
She gives a coy look over her shoulder, suddenly the exotic dancer again with her hand and forearm cupping her breasts and a wink before turning away and pulling her own maroon leather costume free of the closet.
I look at the leather gear and feel strangely lifeless for a man whose heart is galloping at a hundred miles per hour. It’s only a couple of steps and then I have the ballistic vest in my hands, slowly bending the dark grey material.
Loren kicks off her boots one at a time. She shucks down to a black thong as I stand undecided. When I break free of my coma, she is pulling her hair back from the dark red leather bodice and slipping the face mask into place.
“Did you think of a name yet?”
*
SO WE STUDY the photos Loren has taken and then we slip downstairs like ring-wraiths and remove the plates from the Triumph and I am astounded they speak so openly about their business in the club, but as Loren assures me, the other dancers aren’t exactly held in high regard and the drug dealers almost seek validation by being so open before the girls. The throttle on the chopper is loud and entirely pleasant in what I would hesitate to call the balmy evening, the leather coat sticking to the inside of my arms, and I’m glad I followed Loren’s advice, foregoing the jacket beneath the coat and simply wearing the vest over a black tee, arms cut off, the weight of the metal in my gloves and sewn like chainmail into the knees of my leather strides almost as comforting as the indecorous baseball bat strapped between my shoulder blades. Loren – Lioness, I should say – holds on to my hips and lets me ride even though she says her daddy was letting her ride these things when she was eleven or twelve and we glide like true night creatures through the clearing, post-Witching Hour streets and briefly collect a police tail we lose just as swiftly among the junk-strewn alleys of the waterfront as we narrow ever closer to MacGeraghty’s Bar.
Minutes from the rendezvous, Loren rests her head against the upper part of my back, cheek to the black leather, and I can hear her words through the vibrations of my spine and into my chest.
“This is for you, Joe. Please. This is for you.”
The metal across my knuckles tighten as I open the throttle and we roar along the pier and then turn back into the network of run-down streets perilously close to where we now call home, two creatures of Fairyland patrolling the night, but still lost in the day-lit world all the same.
*
ON THE BED, arched back after great sex, the roach smoldering between thumb and forefinger, I laugh again and Loren, sitting demurely with the sex-stained bedcovers against her chest, continues to survey my expression for any betrayal of remorse.
“It doesn’t work,” she says, far too serious.
“I’m Batsman,” I repeat.
“It doesn’t work.”
“I have a baseball bat. You saw that, I think.”
“Shame the other guy didn’t,” Loren replies. “But we call them batters. Is it a cricket bat? No.”
“Okay,” I say and laugh, amused at the ease of my torture. “How about . . . Night . . . Master.”
“That’s a little B&D.”
“Night . . . hunter.”
“Isn’t there a Nighthunter already?”
“Not sure supers from Salt Lake City count.”
“I like Marauder,” she says with special emphasis on the name.
“Isn’t that what bad people do?”
“You can be bad,” Loren laughs.
“Only for you.”
“Others, then?”
“I’ll have to sleep on it. What’s the time? Is that the sun?”
“Don’t ask,” she says and I drop the joint into the ashtray and exhale the last of the smoke. “You always want me to play devil’s advocate.”
“Do I?”
“You do.”
“That’s good,” I tell her.
“Actually, it sucks.”
“No, the name,” I say and then say it again. “Devil’s Advocate.”
I can hear her running it over in her mind.
“Long,” she says. “I’m not sure you can do that. Two words?”
“Sure. Why not?”
A pause. “What about the baseball bat?”
“I’m keeping the baseball bat.”
I roll over and glance toward the grey skyline over the water which I can’t actually see from this angle, just the big container ships and the distant spires of the wharves. Although most the port noises are banned these days, there’s still the occasional horn and one sounds now, low like the lowing of some huge celestial calf, and I take Loren by the sweet flesh of her upper arm and pull her back into the bed with me. She tastes like a piece of fruit.
Later, Loren asks, “Was that good?”
“The best, baby,” I reply.
As we trundle off to sleep, the thought occurs to me I’m not sure what the question was, though the answer remains true all the same.
Zephyr 7.13 “A Few Layers Of Skin”
THE CROWD IS thicker than any dirty-assed strip club has a right to boast, but I pay my five dollars to see my own girlfriend naked and move across the sticky floor to a tall round table I share awkwardly with some guy apparently called Travis because that’s the name on his dingy grey shirt. On the poorly-lit stage, some country girl is flashing her pimply chest and getting her leg over the black-and-yellow striped bollards with safety lights on them that I can’t tell if they are part of the set design or the stage itself has just been condemned as an occupational hazard. The crowd, not entirely guys, but scarce for good-looking women, is edgy and impatient and when Loren steps out from behind the right stage curtain my worst fears are confirmed as some of the dudes cheer, revealing themselves as repeat offenders.
Perhaps it’s only me who can detect the uncertainty in Loren’s routine. She knows how to use the pole and grabs onto it early like a good friend in a storm as she gently loses her cowboy girl vest and britches, tipping back the big white hat and causing her thick, honey-colored braid to swing like there should be a noose attached under the capsicum-hued light. Her light brown eyes glide over me like I’m any other punter and then return, the corner of her mouth upturned in a knowing smirk I swear to Christ I’ve never seen before and an aquarium of live eel turn over in my stomach as my cock hardens and I curse under my breath and shake my head, an ironic laugh not far away, but something I’m not quite able to conjure.
This is a tasteful establishment or maybe it’s just when you look as good as she does and you decide you’ll settle for twelve bucks an hour for showing your girlie bits to strangers, management isn’t going to argue that she ends the act cavorting around the pole causing heads to spin, but with her pink thong still intact. A back bend and a slow reverse somersault and one final twirl, a double-jointed show for the audience and then a demure wave and Loren’s gone, the men around me drawing slow retarded lungfuls of air smoky with the perfume reek of the club and each other’s aspirations. The guy in the shirt turns to me and nods, the expression slow and abusive as his hand smooths across his stomach and I decline the urge to stab my fingers into the first five or six pressure points that present themselves.
Instead, a doorman the size of a small Micronesian atoll taps me on the shoulder and indicates the unseen door to the backstage area. To the envy of the oth
er punters, I pull the dark curtain aside and descend the metal catwalk to the subterranean offices of the dancers, brightly-lit cubicles beneath the stage with little padding to prevent them being the Kafkaesque metaphor they appear. A girl with a blue Mohawk covers herself as I pass and then I am easing into Loren’s booth with a downcast smile.
“I can’t stand this,” I say to her, again, nothing rehearsed in my demeanor or delivery, just raw emotion I’m not accustomed to letting free.
She has already slipped into the second-hand kimono she keeps for between shows, the white of the cowboy hat emphasizing the near invisible spray of freckles across her tan face, the one tiny chip of imperfection in her farm-girl front teeth.
“Joe. . . .”
“I’m serious. Please, Loren. This is busting me up inside.”
“I seriously doubt that,” she replies.
“Fuck. Are you turning into my ex-wife already? I mean it, God damn.”
The passion speaks volumes, the thump of the sound system overhead momentarily relegated. Loren pauses and examines me like any predator-shy fauna might when something big and dumb and noisy stumbles into the rainforest.
“So what do you want me to do?” she asks. “Quit?”
“Desperately.”
“You’ve got enough for the rent?”
I don’t say anything. I owe Tessa twenty dollars. The silence decides for us and a shadow passes the door and a smaller, shaven-headed guy with fake Celtic tattoos on the side of his skull is there, saliva spraying as he grabs me by the collar.
“You want a fucken blowjob, you can meet up in the alley outside, alright cocksucker?” he bawls in a blighted Cockney accent and I spin about and grab the door frame of the small booth and look back at Loren and imperceptibly she shakes her head and I gasp a sigh and allow myself to be escorted out, a few less people on the floor of the club, the man-mountain from before now looking away.
It is cold in the street. An ambulance is across the road with two tired women in uniform dealing with a man with a cut hand and clown make-up on and a t-shirt that reads IF I WASN’T GAY YOU’D TOTALLY BE MINE. Without the sirens wailing, the emergency light bathes the street in a strange, rotating calm at the same time as the kebab shop pulls down its shutters and a hooker in a fake leopard-skin coat swaps promises for a hot pretzel from a Sikh guy with a little white van.
In the doorway of the Wild Horses, the agro doorman glares at me and his piercings jingle as he turns and strides back with a midget’s gait into the club and two more doormen in black who I know are carrying Glocks simply let their eyes glide over me and I mentally check where their gear is stashed before I return to the bike and then home.
*
ON MONDAY WE roust a bunch of no hopers making the old brewery their own, crashing in on the bike and dodging fire from one of those automatic shotgun thingies. I put three guys in traction and nearly fatally disembowel another and then I dance like Joe DiMaggio to the sound of cracking skulls. Loren as Lioness is no slouch either and we only hear the sirens once the breaking glass stops.
Tuesday night sees us dropping through the skylight of a clandestine drug den on Opal and Hay, the tribal tattoos of the punks at the long, powder-covered tables doing little to paper over the fact these are borderline child molesters, peddling drugs to kids and the city’s desperate, an ugly feral quotient to the already ramping crime rate in the poor quarter. Loren catches a guy by the wrist just a split-second before he opens her up with a serrated combat knife and the look of violent intensity on her face mirrors the passion we share on our broken bed in the evenings so much so that I give a great yell as she puts her elbow into the guy’s throat and collapses his windpipe and we simply watch him squirming on the ground until one of his buddies scurries over to give mouth-to-mouth.
A day later and we follow up more info from the strip club on a suspected pedophile lurking in a basement apartment near the Kidz Klub daycare on Horowitz and Rye. There’s plenty in the serpentine hovel to suggest guilt, so we torch the place and tie him to a streetlamp naked and it’s only the do-gooders from the Hare Krishna soup kitchen who save him a few layers of skin. The morning TV leads with the blaze and I sulk in the shadows, in civilian guise that owes more to St Vincent de Paul than Armani and watch Imogen Davies take three tries to nail her so-called live cross. After quick sex at home, Loren heads off to the club and I take to the rooftops, forsaking the Triumph as I roust a mugger with a needle filled with HIV and later break the thumbs of a junkie dealer outside the Sip-and-Save. It’ll be a while till he can shoot up by himself.
The list goes on and on. We’re a classic four-color team-up, heavy on the darker shades as we sweep through the waterfront’s riff-raff like the broom of the God of the Old Testament, though we can only break bones and throw people out of windows rather than turn them into pillars of salt, though more than once we do a pretty good impersonation of the Lord’s fiery sword.
In the evenings I fuck Loren until I have rope burns down the side of my glans, nasty-looking scars that resemble the things people do to cars to make them more badass. Then I succumb to my weird, quasi-dreamless sleeps where I wake to images of my father and a tired conviction we’ve spent the night arguing philosophy and pop music, though I can’t dredge anything to the front of my daylight mind. Meanwhile, Tessa tells me Beth has returned from England with photographs of a “darling” townhouse in snowy Manchester and the Post runs a retrospective on Zephyr’s greatest hits, the city is shaken by meteorites that prove to be intelligent transforming robots, and it’s the villain Metropolitan rather than any heroes who bring matters to a close. The date for Paragon and Jocelyn’s wedding looms ever nearer and the New (New) Sentinels are profiled in GQ and the FBI stops harassing my phone and I am aware we’ve stepped onto some kind of timeless merry-go-round barely keeping my sanity at a low ebb and the smooth momentum of everyday life from crumpling in on itself like a stale gingerbread house.
It can’t go on like this.
Zephyr 7.14 “Hide And Seek”
THE MOTORCYCLE FEELS like a super-power of its own, the engine a bass thrum between my legs as I turn it off the street and ignore the stares and the onlookers who stop to point at the masked figure in black as I kill the engine and flick the kick-stand and check the baseball bat is in place across my back as I push the bar door open and walk in and the biker types playing pool lift their long-mustached faces from the felt, but don’t make a move as I eyeball them and keep going down the end of the room.
On the other side of the counter, a cute guy in a leather cap with a chain connecting his ear to his nose finishes drying a wine glass that he puts down between two fingers, and then he begins to pour for the peroxide blonde in the leather chaps waiting patiently and close to me.
In Loren’s leather gear I certainly fit in, Tessa’s words returning to haunt me like the very best vintage karma.
“Barkeep,” I say in my best mock John Wayne. “Looking for Streethawk.”
The guy smiles with gold front teeth and indicates with his gaze around the corner of the bar to where clove cigarettes and the smell of cum waft from a half-dozen booths. I nod and the barman gives a fey little bow and I walk stiffly, imagining the eyes on my ass as I round the corner and the guy in the denim vest and dirty Mohawk stands from a discussion with two other men.
“Who are you?” Streethawk asks.
“Name’s not important,” I reply, emphasis on the graveled voice to help mask any similarities in appearance.
Streethawk looks at the two other fags and sniffs and they dismiss themselves as the veteran crime-fighter hooks a thumb into his belt and shifts his boxer’s feet slightly further apart, an expression of readiness on his hard face. There’s nothing queer-looking about the guy except his undeniable appetite for cock. The aquiline nose has been busted one time too many and pale blue eyes, free of any mask except Adam Ant-style Indian markings, scan me up and down for threats rather than the chance of promiscuous sex.
�
��You’ll need a name if you want to speak to me. Otherwise, fuck off.”
“I’m looking for Hawkwind,” I say just before he turns, his back to me the biggest insult to my own perceived threat level.
Obviously the name is a big hook. Similarities begin and end with the shared bird of prey motif. Hawkwind is about as gay as I am, which is just as well since he’s the guy who taught me how to fight when I first started out in this business.
“It’s a long time since I heard that name,” Streethawk says. “How do I know you’re not gunning for him or something?”
“No need to worry about that,” I reply. “I’m on old friend trying to get back in touch.”
“I guess I’ll just have to trust you on that,” Streethawk says and looks away slightly and I know he is accessing the data on me available through his uncanny rapport with the room, the building, the city around us.
“You’d know if I was lying,” I say.
“We’d be fighting by now rather than talking if I thought it was any other way,” the other veteran says. “What do you want the old boy for?”
“Call it nostalgia.”
“He’s not in the city. Last I heard he was working the homeless scene around Washington,” Streethawk says.
“Homeless scene?”
“The homeless are people too. They need protection. More, maybe, than everyone else.”
“A homeless superhero,” I say and sigh and realize in a parallel universe that could well be a definition for myself. “Great. He always did have some pretty far out ideas.”
“What, like training young punks with more firepower than brains in how to kick ass without getting caught?”
Streethawk eyes me up another time and sniffles and shifts slightly.
“Get yourself a new name, Zephyr, if you don’t want the old one to give you away. You’ve left your mark all over this city. It doesn’t just go away when you do. Now get out of here.”
Zephyr II Page 38