Like ants, the bikers were moving into a wad around something, and since the pickup was parked near where they were gathering, I had an idea what it was.
“That doesn’t look like a welcome-home committee,” Leonard said.
“Thinking on it,” Jim Bob said, “I can’t see Frank coming out here to party. She’s a little too high-class.”
I had my palm against a sweet gum. I looked up. The bottom limb was well above my head. I put my shotgun on the ground, said to Leonard, “Brother, give me a boost.”
Leonard put his shotgun down, cupped his hands. I put my foot in them, and he lifted me up. I grabbed the lowest limb and pulled myself higher into the tree. I could damn sure feel those extra pounds on me. Normally I’d have been up that tree like a young squirrel. That night I was a plump old squirrel, and less spry.
I climbed up higher, going slow. When I found a limb high enough and big enough for me to stand on, I did that and put my hand against the tree for support. It wasn’t a great view, but I could see who was who.
It was Frank. She was in the middle of a circle made up of the biker gang, men and women. For her, things didn’t look so good.
28
The circle closed around Frank. She was being shoved, felt, and snatched from all sides. Even the women were giving her hell. Pack mentality, wolves with a single lamb, and the wolves were hungry.
I started down. Leonard grabbed my legs when I dangled from the lowest limb, helped me onto the ground.
“It’s her,” I said. “And she’s not here for a hootenanny. She’s meat. Someone gave her to this bunch for whatever reason, and I think they are planning a series of festivities that she won’t enjoy.”
“How many of them did you see?” Jim Bob asked.
“I didn’t count them,” I said. “But it’s more than before, and not just the ones who rode in a while ago. Trailers must have been full. I think every man in that group has plans to wet his wick in Frank’s handmade doohickey, and the women might have something special in mind as well. There will be no get-well-soon cards.”
“That clears up our plan,” Leonard said. “We go in.”
“It’s already too late to help her,” Jim Bob said.
“I think it’s only going to get later,” Leonard said.
We gathered our weapons and started hurrying back to the Cadillac. It took a full fifteen to twenty minutes, tearing through the brush. The roar of those beasts back at the compound filled the night.
* * *
In the car, Jim Bob driving, me riding shotgun, Leonard in the back, we took off.
“We have the element of surprise,” Jim Bob said as he drove the Red Bitch onto the road and gunned it. He had yet to turn on the headlights.
“More like the elephant of surprise,” I said. “I think they’re going to hear us coming.”
“Then we’ll give them plenty of noise,” Jim Bob said. He had laid his shotgun on the floorboard, at my feet. He had his revolver in his lap.
“Can you shoot left-handed?” I said.
“Hell, I had to, I could shoot left-footed and reload with my dick.”
No wane in confidence there. I had to say that for him.
“You think the boys in the trunk are enjoying the ride?” I said.
“I hope not,” Leonard said. “The boy here on the floorboard is a little wiggly.”
“They should all go ‘Whee,’ ” Jim Bob said.
“They’re gagged,” Leonard said.
“Oh, yeah,” Jim Bob said.
“Hap,” Leonard said.
“Yeah.”
“Brother, in case things go wrong, it has been quite a ride.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. I jacked a load into the twelve-gauge and prepared to hang my body out the window. My hands were shaking.
“Can you actually see the road?” I asked Jim Bob.
“Not really,” Jim Bob said. “I’m guesstimating.”
Jim Bob let out with a cackle and floored the Red Bitch.
Man, that motor did howl.
29
Situations like that, it’s like you and time are frozen in amber.
And then the amber breaks, and you’re not frozen, but everything moves for a time in slow motion. If it’s your first time or two doing something like that, going into the midst of danger and uncertainty, you have tunnel vision. You see what’s in front of you as if looking down the length of a tunnel. Everything to the right and left of you is a black wall. But if you’ve been there before, it’s not that way. On some level, like the samurai of old, you have accepted your death. You are neither there to win or to lose. You are there to be in the moment. Things may be slow, but they are viewed wider with experience, not inside that fearful tunnel of the neophyte. That’s how it was with me. I could see clearly. I could feel clearly.
I might add right here that I say fuck the samurai. I planned to win. I planned to go home. And I knew that plan had about as much chance as a slug in a salt block. I knew, too, I had survived worse situations. And as that thought galloped through my head, another less pleasant thought showed up.
Sometimes your luck runs out.
So on we went, the car seemingly hanging in time, moving slowly in my mind’s eye, but in actuality barreling down on that crew at a rate of at least sixty miles an hour. We came off the road and hit the pasture with a bumping motion that jarred my teeth. The Red Bitch went hopping over that rough ground like a metallic rabbit, and then everyone in the camp turned to look at us just as Jim Bob hit the headlights and put the pedal to the floor. The pasture in front of us was flooded with gold light. I glanced at the speedometer. I could see it because Jim Bob had turned on the lights and the dash light had lit up. The Bitch jumped to seventy and was growling as the needle on the speedometer swung wide to the right.
Jim Bob hit the horn and didn’t let it go, guided the car by using his other hand to precariously hang on to the suicide knob. If that thing snapped we’d end up in a ball of hot metal and shredded tires rolling along the countryside.
I was partly out the window now, and Leonard was hanging out in the same way from the back driver’s side window.
Now, let me tell you, a big red Cadillac bearing down on your ass will do one of two things. It will cause you to stick to your spot like a tree, or you will attempt to spring away like a deer. The ones who stick to the ground like a tree are not going to turn out well, and the ones who spring away like a deer, well, truth is, a deer is quick, but a big red Cadillac going over seventy miles an hour is far quicker.
When the Red Bitch hit into them we discovered that the old adage is wrong. Men can fly. So can women and motorcycles. Jim Bob hit the brakes as we came up on them, but not completely; just a firm tap and a turn of the wheel. We slid into that circle and hit three or four of those fuckers and knocked them into the air, slammed a bike so that it went skidding past Frank as close as a foot. Had our luck been off by a hair, had the bike hit her, we could have just backed out and yelled a polite “Sorry” and gone home.
Way we hit caused a stocky woman with short ragged hair to do a sort of cartwheel that whirled her past Frank and a big man in the middle who was clutching Frank’s shoulder. Frank was wearing only a bra and fragments of blue jeans, which had been cut or ripped off of her.
Frank and the man, the mighty Samson himself, watched the biker bitch twirl by, performing a dynamic cartwheel. Samson seemed calm, like a paying customer observing a circus trick. I hung out the window, fired the shotgun, and blew a tire out on the El Camino. Leonard slithered out the window on his side and blew the leg out from under a big blue-jean-wearing guy with no shirt and a belly big enough to have contained a few cases of beer and a Thanksgiving turkey. The man’s kneecap went flying out of his torn pants, and then he was on the ground. Those blue jeans were ruined.
“Oh, goddamn it,” the man said. I could hear him clearly as I hung out the window, and then his forehead went to the ground and his shot-up leg extended behind him. He had passed
out from pain and shock. The air smelled of burning rubber, and it made my eyes water. I wondered how they stood it, standing near that fire. Besides, the night was too warm for a fire. It was too warm for a cup of coffee. I guess devils like those don’t mind a little heat.
All of a sudden I was out of the car and into the crowd, which was no longer a circle but instead a clashing mass of flesh. A big woman next to me, wearing a bandanna with bits of hair hanging out from under it, reached for a little gun that was hanging out of her baggy pants pocket. I hit her with the stock of the shotgun hard enough to see teeth fly. I was all out of chivalry. I would have gunned down Minnie Mouse had she pulled a pistol, a pocket knife, or a too-large comb.
I heard one of the shotguns go off behind me and didn’t realize until later it had been a warning shot by Leonard, a blast over the crowd’s head.
I had the shotgun to my shoulder, and I knew there were people closing in behind me. A shotgun barked again and I heard someone scream and then there was a rustling as people ran for it, knowing now we weren’t fucking around. I walked right up and took Frank by the elbow, said, “Come with me.”
Samson let her go. I turned with her then, knowing Jim Bob and Leonard had my back going in and had it as I walked out. I pushed through a few bikers who wanted to be tough but were a little weak in the knees from our arrival; I could smell shit where some of them had crapped themselves.
Directing Frank to the car, I noticed that the Bitch’s front tires were pretty deep in grooves of dirt they had plowed. I was hoping in the back of my mind the Bitch would back out of there without a snag, because if she didn’t, our moment of shock and awe was over with, and all that was left was us being thrown in that ditch with those poor dead dogs. Our elephant of surprise was near over.
Frank got in on the backseat passenger side of the Bitch faster than the snap of a whip. “There’s a man here,” she said.
“Put your feet on him.” I said.
Jim Bob, who was holding a shotgun, tossed it through the window onto the front seat, got in behind the wheel. He had left the motor running. In the car lights the crowd had begun to clutter up like moths before a porch light. Leonard and I stood with our shotguns, pointing them, moving them from side to side, trying to take it all in, hoping no one moved. It was so quiet you could have heard houseflies fucking.
Leonard got in the backseat, closed the door, and dangled himself out the open window with the shotgun. I stayed where I was for the moment. If we lived through this, I would tell Leonard later that with him hanging out the back window he reminded me of a black Labrador with a shotgun.
Samson moved forward, close to the car. He yelled out, “Jim Bob, I’ll get you, you son of a bitch. You are mine.”
Jim Bob stuck his head and arm out the window, pistol in his left hand. He said, “Samson, it is so nice to see you.”
He shot Samson in the throat. Samson dropped to his knees as if in need of sudden prayer, then rocked forward on his face.
Jim Bob said. “Hap. Get in the fucking car.”
I swung the shotgun from side to side, but no one asked for a load of buckshot. I got in, and before I could close the door, the Red Bitch was in reverse and we were flying out of there backwards, spinning dirt so hard it flew up and over the front of the car. By then the biker assholes had their brains back and had found guns. Bullets popped around us. One, a rifle shot, I’m sure, hit the windshield and went through it like a hot knife through butter. It zipped between Frank and Leonard and took out the back windshield. The front windshield merely had a hole in it, but even as we bounced along that pasture in reverse, Jim Bob looking over the backseat, eyes squinted, trying to see what was behind us in the red taillights, the front windshield collapsed like a Baptist deacon’s morals at a strip club.
We were really being fired at now. One of the headlights went out as we backed up, and I could hear little impacts as shots popped the Caddy, but it didn’t slow us and we didn’t lose a tire, and none of us gathered up a bullet.
Jim Bob, soon as those tires hit the road, jabbed the brake and whirled the wheel, still holding on to that stupid suicide knob, and all of a sudden we were turned completely around and roaring down the blacktop, shots snapping in the air and some of them still hitting the Red Bitch. But she kept running, and away we went, our visibility based on one headlight. There was a kind of rumbling from the back of the car. Something was rolling around in the trunk.
Oh, yeah. Now I remembered.
30
The Red Bitch was rocking along, that one remaining headlight punching the night like a Cyclops with a heat beam. Through the busted-out windshield the air was smashing into us like a fist. The little hula girl and the plastic Jesus stuck on the dashboard of the car did the shimmy-shimmy-shake in overdrive. I think even Jesus was worried how all this was going to come out. My hands were trembling.
Jim Bob saw a little cutoff into the woods, about bicycle wide, shot past it, braked hard, burned rubber, backed into it, and kept going in reverse. Limbs scratched the Caddy, bent the aerial. Jim Bob bounced the Bitch along quite a ways until the limbs grew closer and began to brush over the car as thick as shadows. He turned off the one remaining headlight.
“Let’s get out of the car,” Jim Bob said.
We all had shotguns with us when we got out, except Frank, of course, who paused long enough before getting out to wipe her feet on Wishbone. Got to stay tidy, even if you’re barely wearing pants.
Outside the car we’d at least have a fighting chance. We moved to the back of the Caddy, pushing through the tight mesh of limbs and brush. There was tapping going on in the trunk. There was a bullet hole in the trunk.
Jim Bob snapped the stock of his shotgun down on the trunk, said, “Quiet in there.”
The tapping ceased.
“At least one of them is alive,” Jim Bob said.
“I’m sorry,” Frank said. “This is all my fault.”
She stood there shaking in fear, dressed only in the fragments of her jeans, bra, and shoes.
“I was thinking it might be,” Leonard said. “I was thinking that a lot.”
“Save it for now,” Jim Bob said. “I’m pissed off enough right now without having to hear something stupid. We’ll hear stupid over a cup of coffee or some such later.”
I don’t know exactly how long we stood there at the back of the Bitch, but finally we heard the roaring of motorcycle motors. I wondered if the burned-rubber smoke and smell was still in the air, that they’d notice there was probably half the Caddy’s tires on the road out there.
“They come down this way,” Jim Bob said, “is it every man for himself?”
“Nope. Musketeer way,” Leonard said. “All for one and one for all.”
“Suits me,” I said.
“Done,” Jim Bob said.
“I’m out,” Frank said. “They show up, I’m into the woods like a goddamn rabbit.”
The roar of the motorcycle engines grew louder, and then we saw headlights from the bikes striking the road. The bikes came flying by. One, two, three. After a bit I lost count. But a lot of bikes shot along that road and past us.
We stayed there for a while, not moving. Then Jim Bob took his keys, found the right one by lighting a match, and opened the trunk. He held the match in such a way we could see inside. No one had turned to smoke and slipped through the cracks. A bullet that had gone through the trunk had passed above them. Later, Jim Bob would tell us he found that it had passed through the trunk, split the backseat between Leonard and Frank, and had killed the radio on the dash. As for the two in the trunk and the one lying on the floorboard, they were all alive but uncomfortable.
We waited a bit. No one came back for us. We pulled Wishbone out, dragged him to the back of the car, and laid him out on the ground.
Jim Bob reached in the trunk and pulled a little bag out. Leonard and I picked up Wishbone and put him in the trunk with them. Tight fit. We bumped some heads pushing the trunk lid down.
> “I figure they’re all right for a few more hours,” Jim Bob said.
“They’ll get pee-pee in the trunk of your car,” Leonard said. “May have already done it.”
Jim Bob opened the bag from the trunk and got a dark western shirt out of it. He gave it to Frank. “Put that on.”
She did. It fell down over her thighs, giving her a little more dignity than before.
Another twenty minutes passed, and it was a good thing we waited, for during that time a couple more bikes roared along, having gotten into the mix late. After a while, though, we decided we’d pull out. We did that and went along in the direction the bikes had taken, and then when we got off the back roads and onto the main highway, we tooled right on into town. No police pulled us over for having one headlight, a broken aerial, and three thugs in the trunk.
“They could be waiting at your place,” Jim Bob said. “The three in the trunk know where you live; so may the rest of them.”
“Good point,” I said. “And since Frank is with us, I’m going to guess they know where the office is.”
“They do,” Frank said. “I fucked up.”
Frank started to cry. I wondered if she cried like that when she was a man. I was her right then, I would have cried. Hell, I wanted to cry, and I wasn’t her.
31
Well,” I said, “at least one of the bikers out there is dead for sure, unless he has been resurrected. Maybe more. Depends on how hard the car hit them and if the guy without the kneecap died. The one I know is dead is named Samson. Jim Bob said his last name is House. Like in Son House, the blues guy. Jim Bob shot him in the throat.”
“Ah, shit,” Marvin said. “Is there anything you didn’t do? I mean, you might as well add you got through shooting folks, you dug up a corpse, fucked it, and named it Dixie.”
“I can honestly say we didn’t do that. We named it Ethel.”