Now They Call Me Gunner

by Thom Whalen

  * * *

  “The cops are closing in on me. I can feel it.” Randal looked grim.

  “I haven’t heard anything,” I said.

  “Albertson went around to Gwen’s neighbors a couple of days ago. Took him long enough, but he finally figured out that maybe they knew something about Billy and Gwen. I expect that he heard plenty. Especially from the old lady next door. She thinks that there’s no soap opera better than her own front window. She’s got to have seen me hanging around with Gwen. And she must have heard the row between Gwen and Billy just before he got killed. Even Albertson can add small numbers like that and get an answer. Wrong answer but he won’t care as long as it’s enough for a lawyer to make a story out of it. He’ll arrest me and call Billy’s murder closed. I know how it works. No man on earth is lazier than a small town cop. He’ll stop looking for the truth long before he’s found it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We gotta get back to Oak Falls and find out what the Road Snakes know. Really pump ‘em this time. They know more about Billy than they let on. I guarantee that. We’ll be more familiar now so they’ll be a little more open to us.”

  I didn’t know if I was up for another biker party. The last one had given me enough experience to last a lifetime.

  “We’ll get up there on Wednesday again.”

  I was going back to Oak Falls whether I was up for it or not. “Katie’s been asking me about last Wednesday,” I said. “I think she’s trying to hint that she’d like to see a biker party for herself.” She hadn’t said anything specific, but hanging out with bikers had caught her imagination and she’d mentioned it a couple more times in passing.

  Randal shook his head. “You keep her away from the Snakes,” he said. “Unless you want to share her with the whole club.”

  “She’d be with me,” I said.

  “Don’t kid yourself. If you got something that the Snakes want, they’re going to take it away from you. You get between them and a delectable little thing like Katie and Friendly’ll break you in half and use your bones for toothpicks.”

  I remembered how the giant had righted my bike. “I wasn’t going to take her. I was just saying what she’s been saying to me.”

  “Yeah. Well, you tell her flat out, ‘no way.’ Don’t beat around the bush. You don’t let her even think about getting near the Snakes.”

  “I won’t.” I was a little confused. “What about the other women? The ones that were with Wasp and Jimbo. Nobody shared them.”

  “Candy and The Doll? They’re insiders. Special cases. I don’t know their arrangements but it won’t be as simple as it looks. Candy’s with Wasp, but she’s been around the block with the other guys for sure. The Doll, I don’t understand. She’s not with Jimbo, just got a ride to the party with him. Near as I can see, she doesn’t mix it up at all. Not with Jimbo or anyone else. Maybe she’s someone’s sister or something. I don’t know.”

  Randal had gleaned a lot more information about the Snakes than I had. “You know a lot about motorcycle clubs,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Were you a member of a club somewhere?”

  He looked surprised, then laughed. “Nope. I’m not a joiner. The only thing I ever joined was the Army and that didn’t turn out so well.” His face turned grim and he stared past me at nothing. “I had a buddy in ‘Nam whose brother was a full-patch Diablo. We had a lot of time on our hands, Eldon and me. A lot of time. He spent hours telling me about bikers. It was like an obsession with him. It was something he could talk about to keep him from thinking about where we were.”

  “I see.” I didn’t, really. It was just another piece in a puzzle that kept growing. The more I learned about Randal, the more questions it raised. I feared that I was never going to get all the answers. “I wonder if Eldon knows anything about the Road Snakes.”

  “The Snakes? Naw. Five guys out in the middle of nowhere trying to be a club? They aren’t on anybody’s radar. Calling them small time would give them more status than they rate. Besides, it wouldn’t matter if Eldon had heard of them or not. He died in ‘Nam.”

  Gwen called an order and he looked relieved. It was clear that Randal would rather not talk about ‘Nam.

  “You better get prepped for lunch,” he said. “I’ll get that fish and chips down.”

  We did double prep on Sundays because those lunches were always big. Half the town came to Elsa’s after church, the other half came instead of church, but everybody arrived at the same time because the non-goers slept in.

  Julie worked with Gwen on Sunday lunches then she took the supper shift with Katie so that Gwen could go home early to be with her kids. Sunday suppers were slow. It was the only night of the week that Elsa’s closed at eight instead of ten.

  Later in the evening, Katie caught me at the order counter and asked if I’d like her to wait around after her shift and then we could ride out to the A&W for root beer.

  That sounded wonderful. I knew no greater thrill than to be on my bike with my girl clinging to my back. Because, at that time, I was still a virgin.

  “I’m going to order some twine from Sears,” she told me over our icy mugs of root beer. “I’m going to learn to make macramé plant hangers. My friend, Shirley, told me that it was easy. You just tie knots to make it like a net around a pot. You can make a planter in nothing flat and a tourist will pay a lot of money for it.”

  “That sounds good,” I said. “My mom likes plants. I’m sure that she’ll buy one.” I figured that I wasn’t risking much by committing Mom to that. I estimated that the odds of Katie finishing even one macramé planter was comfortably close to nil.

  “I’d like it if your mother was my first customer,” Katie said. “I’ll sign the bottom of the pot for her.”

  “She’d like that.” I grinned.

  Katie grinned back and sipped her root beer for a minute.

  I wondered if she were smiling at the same joke as me. Then I was chilled by a new thought. Maybe the joke was on me. I saw her as oblivious but maybe I was the oblivious one. Maybe she knew exactly what was going on. Maybe she’d been having me on since the day we met. Maybe she had been laughing behind my back all the time that I thought that I was laughing behind hers.

  If I were oblivious, how would I know?

  I stared at her intently, trying to see through her façade but she stared back equally intently and I couldn’t tell which of us was the butt of the joke.

  To break the deadlock, I said, “The movie showing at the Paramount this week is called MASH.”

  “What’s it about?”

  I hadn’t done my research yet, so I didn’t know for sure. I tried to remember the poster outside the theater. “I think it’s about the war.”

  She made a sour face.

  I didn’t especially want to see a war film, either, but there wasn’t much else to do on a date in Wemsley. Not when the date had to be on a Tuesday night.

  We did go to the movie on Tuesday, but neither one of us was impressed. I thought that it was cruel, the way Hawkeye and Trapper treated Major Burns. Since then, I’ve seen the film many times and think that it’s a brilliant movie on every level. That I didn’t like it the first time I saw it is an indication of how unsophisticated I was when I was eighteen.

  Katie liked it. That was yet another clue that she was more sophisticated than me. At the time, I was too oblivious to see that, either.

  Afterward, we went back out to Makeout Hill, but Katie didn’t let me get much further than the previous week. As I was slipping my hands under her bra, she said, “I’ve been curious about what a biker clubhouse looks like.”

  I had hoped that she’d have forgotten about that by now. She never kept any other thought for more than a day. “Nothing fancy. It’s an old garage beside a house that’s practically falling down. It’s kind of dirty inside.” My hands tingled when I moved them across her breasts.

  “I’d like to see it.”

 
I stopped massaging her. Randal’s advice was sage. “No,” I said. “Never. It’s not safe for a girl.”

  “You said there were girls there.”

  “Not girls like you.”

  She dropped the subject, but she looked pouty. It was a cute pout but not conducive to heavy petting and I soon gave up and let her reassemble her clothes.