Chimp said, “Yo, Brains,” which was his personal nickname for me. “How they hangin,’ brother? Hey, I gotta ask you to step out so I can wand you down.” After I had climbed from the truck, Chimp produced a metal detector and, in a brisk and businesslike way, he passed it over every part of my body. When the machine found my folding knife, my change, and the antique silver cigarette case in which I carried some of my product samples, he asked me to take them from my pockets and put them in a basket, which he then set on a nearby table. After that he wanded me again. On the second pass he inadvertently brushed my crotch with the antenna, and I joked, “Do that again.” Chimp laughed and bobbed his head in appreciation.
“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll call them and tell them you’re here. Park right in front of the house; when you get to the door, knock four times and Fat Harold’ll let you in.”
As I was getting back into my truck Chimp, in a suddenly plaintive tone, said, “So, dude, you got anything for me?” I turned back to him, smiled, and drew a joint from the cigarette case, which I had not yet returned to my pocket. As I placed it in his hand I parodied the medical warning from the Viagra ads on TV by telling him, “Remember, if this gives you an erection lasting longer than four hours, you need to seek medical attention.”
Chimp laughed again and said, “Fuckin’ Thumb. I’m still on duty for a while, so I better save this till later, then.” He added, “Thanks, Brains. Always good seeing you.”
On my way to the front door, I took a better look at the house. It was apparent there would be twenty or more rooms in there, along with an attic like a cave and a cellar like a sinkhole. I could also see what a lot of work the place needed; most of the all-too-many windows were visibly rotted, a good third of the black shutters were either broken or missing, and the white paint everywhere was flaking away as if the building had a disease. Even so, the roof looked to have been recently reshingled, a long section of soffit had been replaced with new, not-yet-painted boards, and there was a scaffolding set up for some work on the highest line of windows. In spite of myself, I had grown a little nervous by then, and I found it somehow comforting to learn that the Blood Eagles were fixing up their place just as any normal family would do.
I was let into the house by Fat Harold, a three-hundred-pound albino dude with shoulder-length hair so blond it was almost white. His station was a small room to the left of the entrance hall that contained a desk, a chair, and, fastened against one wall, a pair of large televisions that served as split-screen surveillance monitors. On another wall was a gun rack that held a pair of pump shotguns, one a short-barrel job with a pistol grip, and an AK-47 assault rifle. From pegs at the bottom of the rack hung a holstered revolver with a six-inch barrel and a MAC-10 machine pistol on a green strap.
Fat Harold wanded me all over again, agreeably parrying my complaints about having to go through the process twice. When he was done, he hit me up for a joint. Then, in the middle of my repetition of the gag about the four-hour erection, something on one of the monitors caught Harold’s eye. “Just a sec,” he said, before stepping to his desk and picking up one of a half-dozen cell phones spread across a blotter.
That was when I turned my own attention to the monitors. Each television displayed six rectangular screens, three of which were empty and gray, with the rest relaying different scenes either within or just outside of the house. The only movement in any of those rectangles came from a pair of girls dressed in what looked like bathrobes who were sitting at a picnic table on a lawn, smoking cigarettes and sipping from plastic cups.
Speaking into the phone, Fat Harold said, “Hey. Them two bitches are hiding out by the barbecue pit, drinking I don’t know what. You might wanna have a word.” Then he closed the phone, which looked like a toy in his huge, pink fingers, and he grinned at me.
He said, “Scratch got something to take care of. He’ll be right up to take care of you in just a minute.”
A minute later, as Fat Harold and I reminisced about the last time we’d seen one another, Scratch appeared on the screen we’d been looking at, and the girls immediately stood up from the table and began stubbing out their cigarettes. I saw then that both of them were pregnant, one of them looking to be maybe seven months along—although I’ve never been a good judge of that. Harold and I stopped talking and watched.
Scratch, his cut-clad back to the camera, abruptly spread his arms, and the less heavily pregnant of the two girls scrambled away immediately; the other tried to follow her, but Scratch caught her by an arm and then, when she seemed to speak, gave her a hard, backhanded slap across the mouth which, witnessed even without sound, made me wince. Fat Harold shook his head as Scratch released the girl and she staggered beyond range of the camera.
“Drunken whores,” Fat Harold said.
When I had recovered enough to talk, I said, “Are those … uh, whose kids are those babies going to be?”
Fat Harold narrowed his colorless eyes. He said, “So, dude, what the fuck were you telling me about a twenty-four hour erection?”
A door opened then, and Scratch appeared behind me in the entrance hall, startling me in spite of the fact that I’d know he was coming. I imagine that Scratch’s own mother would have been startled by the sight of him, no matter if she was expecting his arrival: He wore the Blood Eagles insignia not only on his back, but also inked onto his face. His cheeks were illustrated with a pair of blood-red eagle’s wings that began at the inside corners of his eyes, and which were connected by the white stripes of a human rib cage that rippled across the bridge of his nose, his upper lip, and his chin. The skeletal eagle’s claws curved beneath his chin to grasp a sword that seemed to slice into Scratch’s own throat just above his voice box, sending “blood” streaming down to the collar of his t-shirt. The grinning death’s head component of the insignia peered out from the middle of Scratch’s forehead with bulging blue and bloodshot eyes and, touching the top of the white skull as if to make certain it would not be overlooked, was the tip of a lightning bolt that had been sculpted and styled from his dyed black hair. Except for this zigzagging Mohawk, which divided his scalp from nape to hairline, Scratch’s head was shaved as naked as a newborn rat. A final cosmetic detail, and one with no apparent connection to Blood Eagles lore, was the set of pointed extensions he’d had permanently bonded to his eyeteeth. With these fangs he looked ready, at any moment, to bite a chunk out of somebody and swallow it whole.
I had heard gossip that even the highest-ranking Blood Eagles back at the club’s national headquarters in Chicago had been awed, and maybe even unsettled, when Scratch returned from a trip to California sporting the club emblem indelibly imprinted on his face, and that he owed his presidency of the new Maine Chapter to the fact that he had been willing to demonstrate his loyalty in such a public and permanently disfiguring way. But I never believed it; broad at the shoulders and standing at a height of around six feet, five inches, Scratch cut an intimidating figure even without the tattoos. Also, he was smart and ruthless enough to have risen quickly in the Blood Eagles ranks no matter what he did, or did not do, to his face. He had replaced his own face with a demon mask because that was the way he wanted to look, and for no other reason.
After giving me a scare by coming up behind me, Scratch made no move to shake my hand. He simply said, “Thumb. Follow me.”
The entrance hall opened onto a room, big as a cavern, which was just beginning to undergo renovation. The gray ceiling was badly stained and even buckled in a few places from water damage—at one time, a pipe must have burst on the floor above—and, at the center of it, a wild nest of wires sprang from a gaping hole where a heavy light fixture once had hung. The legs of a tall stepladder positioned beneath the wires were surrounded at various distances and in no identifiable arrangement by a dozen or more pieces of furniture, all of them draped in white sheets that made them look like lumpy ghosts. The innards of a couple of partially disassembled motorcycles rested on beds of greasy towels; other paint-s
pattered sheets and towels also were spread here and there on the wide-boarded floor. As we crossed the room, every one of our footfalls not muffled by a swath of cloth echoed like a gunshot.
Without turning to me, Scratch lifted his arms and, in a mocking tone said, “This is called the Great Room.”
On the far side of a shrouded sofa we passed three pit bull terriers lying shoulder to shoulder on the floor. These were fairly large, extremely muscular dogs of roughly equal size—perhaps only twenty pounds apiece lighter than Tigre. The outside two were a shiny, obsidian black, while the middle one had a coat of unbroken, snowy white I had seldom seen before on a dog of this breed. As we went by, the animals made no sound, but merely lifted their heads to fix me with eyes as cold as stones at the bottom of a river.
“Fine looking animals,” I said to the grinning death’s head on Scratch’s back.
“They do their job,” Scratch replied, again without turning.
In the middle of the far wall was a closed double doorway, with another couple of single doors to the right, and two more to the left. I followed Scratch to the right and through the door closest to the outside wall, which led us to a much smaller, freshly painted room so decently furnished it looked like the family room in a normal person’s house. He closed the door behind us.
“Go ahead and grab that chair, right there facing the fireplace, Thumb.” I could locate the fireplace only by the ridge that the mantle made in a heavy nylon tarp that had been tacked along the entire wall opposite the doorway through which we had just walked. Where it reached the floor, the green tarp curved away from the wall and the hidden hearth and spread partway across the room to touch the feet of the padded leather chair he had told me to take.
I sat and immediately noticed that the tarp, obviously fresh out of its package, was giving off the strong odor of an automobile straight from the factory. Scratch pulled two sweating bottles of beer from a small refrigerator next to the door. As he handed one of them to me, he pointed to the wooden coffee table that lay within reach between my chair and a matching leather couch, and he said, “Make sure you use a coaster.” Then he sat down on the couch and, after a moment, kicked his booted feet up onto it as well.
After we had both taken a few sips of our beer, Scratch said, “So, what brings you around here, Thumb?” This annoyed me, because he and I had already discussed our agenda during the same conversation in which he’d invited me to visit him at the clubhouse. Nonetheless, I smiled and played along as if I this were the first time I was making my pitch.
I said, “Well, I thought it might be a good idea, since we’re all operating out of the same town, for my group and your club to maybe figure out some ways to put our heads together. Business wise, I mean.”
“Yeah? How do you see that working? Aren’t we competitors?”
I said, “Symbiotic. There would be advantages to both sides. For instance, it seems to me that you Blood Eagles are trying to blanket the area, if not a good chunk of northern New England, with your distribution, and that’s just not what my guys and I are about—at least not when it comes to weed. What we’re into instead is creating a high-end, designer product targeted to a specific sort of client. Small quantity, unique quality—stuff that a certain sort of person is going to brag about, like, ‘Hey, you need to try some of this shit.’ Stuff they’re going to pay a little extra for, because it was custom grown, and it’s got that touch of magic to it.” Scratch bared his fangs at me—though in what I believed was a friendly way.
“Magic. Yeah, I have to admit, your shit’s pretty good. But then, a lot of people make that kind of magic, Thumb, and in larger quantities, too. In fact, it must not be all that hard, because I haven’t run into any really disappointing smoke in a long time.” It was a struggle to keep my irritation from showing.
But I kept smiling, and I said, “There’s a big difference between ‘not disappointing,’ and something that’s an actual experience—an event between your ears.”
Scratch threw back his head and laughed, those ghastly false fangs chopping at the air. “An event inside your skull,” he said. “I like that. Thumb; you’re hilarious. Your talents are wasted in a business like this.”
“Hey, marketing is important,” I said. “No doubt about it. But you also have to have the quality to back it up. Speaking of which, I bet you could probably do with a little reminder of what my product is all about.”
At this invitation, Scratch shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” He sat up and reached behind the couch to produce a bong that was already filled with water. As he set it on top of the coffee table, he said, “I’ve got a fresh head right now, so it’s a good time for demonstration. Go ahead and load her up.”
I took out a glass medicine vial containing a partial bud of some of my best material. As I was packing the bowl of Scratch’s pipe, I worked him with my salesman’s patter about this particular strain of smoke, which I called “Uma” (Thurman) or sometimes, “First Violin.” I told him, “You’re going to find this is somewhat different from what you’re used to. It’s an energizing high, rather than one that just dumps your ass in the dirt.”
“Oh, an energizing high,” he echoed, and grinned his predatory grin. After I applied a flame, he sat up to reach for the pipe and we smoked in silence, content to let the gurgling bong do all the talking. Then we both settled back to assess the results. I remember thinking that one benefit of getting high just then was that the smell of the dope covered up the odor of that damn green tarp.
His voice hoarse, Scratch finally said, “Uma Thurman. First violin. An energizing high. To tell you the truth, Thumb, I don’t exactly feel like running a fucking marathon right now.”
“A fucking marathon,” I echoed. We both laughed long and hard. Helpless tears sprang to my eyes and I wiped them away with my sleeve. I said, “You need to just relax and let yourself be permeated by the spiritual quality of the smoke.”
“Well,” he said. “I am pretty permeated.” We laughed again and I told myself that things were going well. It seemed to me that he and I were forming the same kind of bond that I enjoyed with Chimp and some of the other Blood Eagles, but which until now I had been unable to build with Scratch. At the same time, I found myself having to avoid looking directly at his face, because his tattoos had suddenly begun to seem cartoonish in a way that made captive laughter boil in my belly. Instead, I stared straight ahead at the shrouded fireplace and gnawed my lip. I remember thinking, What an awesomely ridiculous life I’ve blundered into. I can’t wait to start writing about some of these things.
I said, “So, to get serious for a minute: You can see that we’ve got what some might call a ‘boutique product’ here—Hell, it could even help you get acquainted with a whole new clientele and start circulating in those sorts of circles. Opportunity is what I’m talking about. It’s a whole thing, like they can brag that they got this special smoke from a Blood Eagle … it gives them something to say, something risky and sexy they’ve done … that they can talk about with all the other assholes. And it doesn’t take away from your existing business, it only adds to it.”
But Scratch waved that thought away and said, “What about the shit your fat boy, Chef, cooks up? Your little meth business, there?”
“Well you know, that’s something separate to think about. To tell you the truth, working out of a trailer, we can’t really produce a competitive quantity of that stuff anyway—and anyway, I don’t even like the meth business all that much. It’s filthy in a bunch of different ways. I’m sure we could come to an agreement about it.”
“Yeah? Doesn’t that leave Chef out in the cold? How’s he likely to handle it?”
I thought about Chef’s relatively subdued reaction when I’d taken Cricket away. I shrugged. “He’ll be okay. We’ll work something out.”
At that point Scratch took a cell phone from his pocket, thumbed a message, and put it away way again. Then, seemingly out of the blue, he said, “Hey, you’re a scien
ce guy, Thumb. A college dude. You can talk about symbiosis and shit. I hear you’ve even got a special place in your heart for woodpeckers. You know anything about coyotes?”
I started to laugh, but when I took a sideways glance at him, I saw that he wasn’t smiling. “Coyotes; you mean, the animal?”
“I’m from Wyoming originally. A lot of people don’t know that about me.”
“I didn’t know that about you, Scratch.”
“Yeah, well, anyway, we got coyotes out there. And they can be a real problem if you’re running a sheep farm.”
“A sheep farm?”
“They’re so hard to get rid of, coyotes. Guns, poison, traps—the faster you kill them, the more often and abundantly they reproduce. Literally; it’s shoveling shit against the tide.”
Impressed to be hearing an interesting natural fact that I hadn’t known before—from a biker, no less—I said, “So, what do you do?”
“Well, there is a fail-safe solution, but most people where I come from are environmentally unenlightened and they don’t want to hear it. But the solution is”—at this he bared his fangs again—“wolves.”
“What do you mean?” I was starting to feel confused; I struggled to recall why we were discussing canine predators in the first place, but was having no luck.
“They’re natural enemies,” Scratch said. “You want to clear a hundred coyotes from a hundred square miles, you bring in two fucking wolves. That’s all it takes.”
“I get you now,” I said. At the least, I understood the concept.
“Yeah; the wolves will either run the coyotes down and kill them outright, or else the coyotes’ll get the message and leave on their own. Then the wolves have free range of those hundred square miles, with everything on it belonging to them. And in the long run, having a few wolves around is a lot healthier for everyone concerned than a whole shit-load of coyotes. Healthier for everyone but the coyotes, that is.”
American Ghost Page 7
