The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  “Hey there,” said Gil.

  Robin almost didn’t recognize him without the Hunter S. Thompson glasses. “Hi.”

  Gil wore an ancient Molly Hatchet T-shirt under a black leather vest with a LOS CAMBIANTES patch over the heart. On the other side: VIETNAM VETERAN. The dim fluorescents made him look leathery and dignified, like the Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis commercials. When she saw that he was actually drinking Dos Equis, she couldn’t help but snort. “Fancy runnin’ inta you out here,” he said. “Awfully far out from the Hills for lunch, ain’t it?” He gestured to an empty seat with his beer bottle. “Mind if join you?”

  “Not at all,” Robin said.

  Marina Valenzuela watched him with anxiety. Carly could have been looking at a rattlesnake; the girl’s dewy complexion turned a little gray.

  Gil sat down, his old-man pot belly straining at his T-shirt. “Hey, soldier.”

  “Hey … Gil?” Kenway said, brightening.

  “Ayup.”

  “Nice to see you again.”

  “Likewise. So, they built this place back in ’82, when the airbase between here and Keyhole was still running,” said Gil, as if he were resuming a conversation. “South Gate comes out half a mile from here. They got a lot of business from the Air Force guys, but then there was some kinda downsizing initiative a few years ago—can’t rightly remember the acronym now, BRAC, I think—and they closed the base. Sold the land to developers. Now they’re just the unofficial neighborhood VFW.” He peered through his eyebrows at Carly and Marina. A wry, chiding look. “Hi there, Marina.”

  “Hey, Gil.” Marina produced a cigarette, and she obviously wanted to smoke it but no smoking in Heroes. Instead, she twiddled it in her fingers like a pen. “You having a good day? Weather’s nice.”

  Gil shrugged. “Can’t beat it.”

  Marina gazed at the cigarette in her hands so intently, it was as if she were trying to light it with her eyes.

  Unable to abide the awkwardness, Gendreau said, “I take it you two know each other.”

  “Used to run around with her husband,” said Gil. “Didn’t know you folks knew each other. You friends visiting from out of town?”

  Before Robin could launch into a lie, Marina said, “No.”

  Silence hung over them for a moment. Gil sighed and took a drink of his beer. “What are you doin’, hon?”

  “Getting lunch, Gil,” said Marina. “It’s lunchtime.” She hesitated as Gil’s question lingered in front of them, and then she lifted her chin to advertise the bruises on her throat, quietly letting the evidence of Santi’s subtle brutality speak for itself.

  Perhaps she was afraid that if she spoke, she’d break down. That was the impression Robin got.

  A few moments of quiet company passed, and then Gil spoke up again, pointing at Marina and her choked neck with his beer hand. “You know he’s going to do worse than that when he catches up to you, yeah?” The old man swirled his Dos Equis and took a sip. “He’s been goin’ over the Hills with a fine-toothed comb, Marina. His sister said he’s got Tuco, Alfie, and Max with him. He’s pissed.”

  “Well, he can be pissed,” said Marina. “I’m done.”

  “Broke Isabella’s nose for letting you leave.”

  Marina turned red.

  Gil leveled a tired eye at Robin and absently stroked his beard. “Hon, I don’t know you from Eve, but … can I give you a piece of unsolicited advice?”

  “Only kind of advice I’m familiar with.”

  He blew through his nose in ugly amusement. “Get Monica to put your lunches in doggie bags and hit the road. Leave Marina and Carly here. You don’t want to be on the premises when Santi and Max show up.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Robin.

  Gendreau’s head tilted in confusion. “How does he even know they’re here?”

  Twisting stiffly in his seat, Gil gestured toward the bar. The creepy guy with the Innsmouth Look and undercut eyed them, his face underlit by the screen of his smartphone. “See that guy right there?” Gil asked. “That’s Joaquin Oropeda. One of them Los Cambiantes. Bet you a cool grand he’s texting Santiago right now to tell him you’re here with his wife and daughter.”

  Leaning forward confidentially, Kenway asked, “The hell is goin’ on?”

  “Just givin’ you and your girlfriend some friendly guidance.”

  Robin growled, “I ain’t afraid of some bag-of-dicks wife-beater. I don’t care if he shows up with the Hell’s Angels and the ghost of Adolf Hitler, I’ve put down worse than his ass.”

  Gil took out a toothpick, unwrapped it contemplatively, and stuck it into his mouth. Then he stared at Robin as if he were reading a menu. “Hon, I doubt that very highly. Can you not see I’m trying to save your life? If Santi shows up and you’re still here, he’s goin’ to drag you all out by the hair of the head, take you into the dark of the desert, and straight-up kill your ass, and there ain’t a soul here that’s gonna do shit-all about it.” He scanned the rednecks at the bar. “Everybody in this place is scared of Los Cambiantes. And the Cambies ain’t scared of Joan Jett, Peg-Leg Pete, and a queer with a three-hundred-dollar haircut.”

  Gendreau darkened.

  “Why are you in here, then?” Robin jabbed a finger at the wolf patch on Gil’s vest. “You’re evidently one of ’em.”

  “I founded Los Cambiantes. I’m the old man. Pops. Lame-duck president, you know? Started it when I got home from the war. Santiago was just a baby back then. He was V-Z’s boy. V-Z probably knocked up Santi’s mama the day he stepped off the bus.”

  “What does Los Cambiantes mean?”

  “The Changelings,” said Gil. “I started the bike club for myself and the other local vets that came back from the war. Came home to a country that’d moved on without us. We didn’t belong here anymore. We wun’t Texans anymore—hell, we barely rated as Americans. We just wun’t part of this world no more. We was ghosts.”

  “Yeh,” Kenway grunted, his face pinching. He folded his arms in what was ostensibly supposed to be a grim, authoritative posture, but he was hugging himself.

  “You know what I’m talkin’ about, son,” said Gil.

  “Wolves in a land of dogs,” Kenway said, softly, monotonously, as if in a trance.

  “So, what’d you do, anyhow? Baghdad?”

  “A couple tours in Afghanistan. The first one was a year, but I only got about seven months into the sandbox before I got hurt and had to fly to Germany.”

  “Hate to hear that.”

  Kenway shrugged: It is what it is.

  “Anyway,” continued Gil, “I wanted a symbol of our fish-out-of-water state of existence. Something that would stand for our newfound displacement. So, I run across the word ‘changeling.’ Friend of mine up at the church, Father—” He paused to search his mind. “—Castellanos, he told me about it, he was in the theological seminary or … something. A changeling is when a mother believes her baby’s been stolen by fairies and replaced.”

  “Right,” said Robin. “It’s got a second meaning, too. Los Cambiantes, that’s also a phrase in Spanish meaning money-changers, or money-lenders, or something like that, ain’t it?”

  “Did your homework. We been known to do a little loaning and laundering on the side. I’d be lying if that wun’t the second reason why I chose that name. Guess I’m a sucker for names with a lot of meaning. When Father Castellanos told me about it, I was just wild over it. Don’t reckon the youngbloods know about the changeling idea—they think it’s about the money thing.”

  Marina exploded into hysterical laughter.

  Gil blinked. “The hell you laughing at?”

  She couldn’t answer; she was laughing too hard, haw-haw-hawing at the ceiling, her head tilting back. “It’s just—it’s just—” Her sunglasses slid down the top of her head and she caught them before they could fall off. “If only those pendejos knew they’re all a bunch of fairy babies.”

  Everybody at the table erupted, all of t
hem laughing so loud, the guys at the bar turned to shoot dark looks.

  Joaquin Oropeda got off his bar stool and went outside.

  “Anyway, I reckon I’m startin’ to age out, ch’know?” said Gil. “Half the boys I started the club with are dead—two of ’em ate a gun, one of them took too many pills, one of ’em died of a heart attack. That only left four others, and the youngbloods muscled them out eventually. Now it’s just Santi and his friends. Technically, Maximo outranks him by seniority; Max is Lonnie Cabral’s boy, Lonnie’s the one’s ticker went out on him, too much steroids, too much chorizo, who the hell knows? Man had bigger tits than his old lady. But Santi’s the kind of kid that’s so good at bein’ an asshole, he makes you wanna be a asshole, too.”

  Gil checked his watch, a brushed-steel piece of Walmart shit. This did not escape Robin’s notice.

  “I’m still not afraid of him,” she said.

  “She’s killed bigger guys than Daddy,” blurted Carly, but then she seemed ashamed of what she said and withdrew.

  Gil’s watery yellow eyes searched Robin’s face, and he seemed impressed by what he saw. “Maybe there’s a little steel in you, hon. But it ain’t gonna save you when Santi gets his claws into you. ’Cause I’m here to tell you, he’s got claws. And they are long and sharp, amiga. They’ve all got claws. And teeth.” He finished his beer. “What did I tell you when you walked past my house?”

  “Not to go to the other end of town. There’s folks—”

  “Folks you don’t wanna run inta. Well, that’s who I was talkin’ about. Santi and his boys. They’re … weird.”

  “Weird?” asked Robin. “Weird how?”

  As if he’d rather run away than talk about it, Gil took a sharp draw of breath and looked around like a trapped animal. He leaned forward and dropped his hands on the table as if he’d presented her with an invisible shoebox. “Mega weird. Weird with a capital W.”

  “Like, cannibal weird?” asked Kenway.

  Gil stared at Kenway and wiped his mouth with his hand. “Around Valentine’s Day this year, about … one in the mornin’—I’m an old man, y’know, never did sleep good, ’specially after the war. Went for a walk and ended up down at the dump. Part of the river goes by the dump, so there’s a lot of trees growin’ down there that can’t really take root up here in the highlands ’cause it’s all dry and shitty.” He went to take a drink of beer and remembered the bottle was empty. “Been down there probably a thousand times in the last ten years. Ain’t but a fifteen-minute walk from my trailer. Like to go down there when I can’t sleep and just sit on one of them sandstone rocks in the moonlight and listen to the river talk. Soothes me. Helps me settle down in a way this moose piss can’t. Helps me sleep.

  “Well, I went down there that night, and I’ll be damned if Santi and six of his boys wun’t down there by the water, butt-ass naked in the dark.”

  Track 12

  The entire table fell quiet, as still as a painting of dogs playing poker. “When you said weird,” noted Gendreau, “that’s not quite what I was expecting.”

  “Didn’t say they was porkin’ each other in the butthole; I ain’t sayin’ that at all. Santiago and Tuco and probably half ’em kids are as warped as wax windows, but as far as I know, they don’t play hide-the-pickle. Nuh, well, I’ll tell you, Santiago had his old Royal Enfield down there, and he was sittin’ naked on that thing like he was Lady Godiva. Pecker everywhere, sausage fest if I ever saw one. But that wasn’t even the weirdest thing about it.” He licked his lips. Not a lascivious gesture but the nervous habit of a man with secrets. “They had on these headdresses.” Gil mimed a giant helmet with his hands. “Big-ass headdresses, like animal heads, like some kind of Indian ritual, you know? All of ’em had on wolf heads ’cept for Santiago. He had on a tiger head. Most realistic damn mask I ever saw.”

  Ice slid down Robin’s spine. “Wolves? Tigers? The hell were they doing?”

  “Search me. Didn’t get to find out either, ’cause one of ’em musta saw me back there in the trees watchin’, ’cause all of a sudden, every damn one of ’em turned to look in my direction. I about-faced and hauled ass out of there. Ran the whole two or three miles home. Ain’t ran like that since my days with the outfit. My leg was fuckin’ screamin’ at me, and my heart was doin’ barrel rolls, but I ran ’til I thought I would die. I could hear them kids comin after me, the whole way—laughing, snapping, their bare feet on the road behind me.” Gil took a deep breath and let it out with his words. “When I got home, I went straight into my trailer, locked the door, and fished my old Mossberg out of the closet. Sat up and watched old westerns on cable and drank coffee ’til the sun came out.”

  “Wild story,” said Gendreau. “That why you don’t have anything else to do with them? Because of … whatever they were doing?”

  “That, and I don’t really know any of ’em. Not no more.”

  “Do you think it’s Santeria, Gil?” asked Marina.

  He shrugged. “Santeria? Voodoo? Deal with the devil? Halloween masks? Who knows? What I know is, they’re crazy, and they’re dangerous.” Gil sighed, and took the toothpick out of his mouth. “Glad to see you get out of there, Marina, but … shit.” He looked around as if he’d just realized where he was sitting, and pushed his chair back, standing. “If you’re gonna get out of here, y’all go. Get.” He spoke with an exasperated resolve. “I’ll do what I can to stall Santi.”

  Carly spoke up. “Robin’s fought witches. Killed witches. She can handle those guys. I know you have, haven’t you? I’ve watched the videos.”

  “Witches, yes,” said Robin. “Biker gangs, no. There’s a certain protocol and expectation that go with fighting the supernatural, but I have no idea what to do about these guys. Bikers that run around naked in headdresses? Sounds more like they need psychiatric help.”

  “Don’t matter if they hang bells from their ears and paint their assholes blue,” said Gil. “There’s a whole society of them sons-a-bitches, and they’re packin’ heat.”

  At that, Gendreau stood up and gulped down his Dr. Pepper like he was in a drinking contest. He put the cup down on the table and belched so loudly and deeply, the men sitting at the bar stared at him. One of them took the Lord’s name in vain. “I agree with Mr. Gil,” he said, wincing as he fished a fiver out of his wallet and tossed it on the table. “We need to split. We’ll worry about getting the Valenzuelas something to eat once we’re out of the county, at least.”

  “Smart man,” said Gil.

  “Dammit,” fussed Robin, and she stood up as well. Kenway and the girls took this as their cue to get up too.

  Monica came out of the kitchen as they headed for the door. “Where you-all going?” she asked, confused. “Food’s only got a couple more minutes.”

  Gil jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s Santi’s old lady. They gon’ get her somewhere safe, I suspect.”

  “Oh,” said Monica, peering over at them. “Ohh. Does he know?”

  “Thanks to Joaquin, he does. Probably on his way here.”

  “Oh, shit.” All of a sudden, she was as enthusiastic as Gil, if not more so, sweeping them out the door with her order notepad. “Yeah, go. Y’all better get out of here while the getting is good.”

  * * *

  When they stepped into the oppressive Texas heat, Robin was pleasantly surprised to not hear the approaching snarl of motorcycle engines. Gil followed them outside, putting on his rosy Fear and Loathing sunglasses.

  “Ay,” someone said in a thick accent, stepping out from behind one of the pickup trucks. “Where you goin’?” Joaquin Oropeda, a smartphone in his hand. “You gonna wait right here.” His other hand had a pistol in it, a boxy little black thing—a Glock, maybe? Intense eyes protruded from his ruddy face. “Santiago gonna be here any minute, puta. You gonna be right here waitin’ on him. Uh-uh,” Joaquin said, pointing the Glock at Gil. He’d been slowly reaching for the 1911 he’d put in his waistband. “Don’t even think about it, old man.
Give it here.” Gil swore. He lifted the 1911 out with a pincer grip and put it on the ground.

  While they were all focused on the drama of Gil’s surrender, Kenway punched Joaquin in the face.

  This had the unexpected consequence of causing the biker to fire the Glock under the veteran’s arms. The pistol’s report sounded like a hand grenade going off in the dry stillness of the Texas afternoon.

  Kenway doubled over. “Urrgh!”

  “You shot my boy!” screamed Robin, heart thudding.

  As if in reflex, she kicked off from the pickup’s rear tire and launched a Superman punch into the man’s eyebrow.

  The impact threw Joaquin flat on his back, and the Glock clattered across the ground. He scrambled to his hands and knees, started to run for the gun, but Robin was already on top of him—she locked her legs around his waist and hooked an arm under his chin, tightening it around his throat. Rear naked choke. “Bitch—?” Joaquin grunted, saliva spattering her forearm. He rolled over and slammed her against the parking lot.

  Sun-baked pavement stung through her shirt. Sweat rolled down her face. Joaquin coughed. Robin tangled the fist of her choking arm in her shirt to anchor it, freeing her other arm to punch him savagely in the ear. Joaquin shouted, bucking and wriggling.

  Ka-chak!

  Sound of a pistol’s slide being pulled. “Let’s be copacetic, hon,” said Gil, pointing the 1911 at them.

  “Call me ‘hon’ again and you’re gettin’ some of this, too,” Robin told Gil, her mouth muffled by her shirt sleeve. She let go of Joaquin and shoved him off. Asphalt burned her hands as she scrambled up.

  The fish-eyed biker glared at them, reaching up to touch his ear. His fingertips came away bloody. “Busted my eardrum, puta.”

  Robin ignored him, going straight to Kenway’s side. He sat next to the truck, his back against the tire, cupping a hand over his stomach. Blood ran down his side, dripping on the hot pavement. The smell of it cooking was like a fuse-box fire doused in barbecue sauce, sweet, salty, metallic, electric. Dizziness came over her—not at the sight of blood itself but to see so much come out of this man.