The partners came down the steps, the backlighting from the porch transforming them into black, featureless silhouettes. As they approached on the front walk Kerri saw them clear again. It was much like the Wolfman movies, the way Everett’s face had mutated back to normalcy. She could almost convince herself she’d imagined that hideous expression.
It felt even more surreal when she noticed the bystanders’ response. All these slangers and bangers pretended Everett and Rolly weren’t even there. Every gaze was averted from the two as they ambled to the car.
These street people knew who and what Everett was even if they’d never met him before, and wanted to make sure he didn’t think they were witnesses. Somehow that was even worse than the black kid running away with his teeth spilling out.
Everett and Rolly got in the car. Everett held a briefcase on his lap bulging with whatever. In the rearview Kerri watched Rolly put away a slapjack, his eternal sunny smile absent until he felt her eyes, then he pasted on a phony grin for her benefit.
Neither Everett nor Rolly said a word. Not because she was there or because they were still preoccupied, but as if they needed to morph back into a semblance of normalcy. Kerri bit her own tongue as she dropped Rolly and briefcase off at his house.
By the time they got to Baylands, they’d already missed the first heat. Everett unbuckled his seatbelt in a relative hurry, eager to get out and watch the sprint cars roar round and round their tiny clay track.
Kerri just sat behind the wheel, her mind racing. Everett saw the look on her face, and settled his weight back into his seat
“It was just business,” he said, going for a mollifying tone which infuriated her with its implied condescension. “Timeliness issues. Couldn’t wait. Penalty clauses in place for late delivery. Sorry.”
She’d imagined a defter buildup, thought she could wait until he was happily rapt by the race before dropping her bombshell. But he’d earned nothing but bluntness tonight, and she was out of patience.
“I’m pregnant, Everett,” she said, with a scowl on her face instead of the smile that should’ve been there. “I was going to spring it on you gently, but here you are. We’re going to have a baby. Doesn’t that change anything for you?”
Everett went even blanker than usual as he wrestled with this news, just as she’d known he would. He avoided her eyes, instead scanning the parked cars surrounding them.
“Bad line,” he said. “Shouldn’t have involved her. Should have gone without her no matter what.”
“Damn right, bad line,” she shouted, she verged on furious now. “Are you trying to force me to leave you?”
Kerri was gratified at how Everett’s eyes widened. She maybe penetrated some of his defenses. “You can’t be putting us in the middle of it like that, Everett. You have to choose: this thing you do, or your family.”
The big block sprint cars on the other side of the fence howled a bone deep subsonic that Kerri knew from experience would make her lungs vibrate like twin bass speakers once she was in there watching the race. But their guttural snarls were semi muted as her man’s mind spun, like the slick tires of those unseen sprints.
She took Everett’s hand and placed the palm against her lower abdomen, covered her hand with his. He instantly relaxed as he felt Raymond’s pulse.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s going to be all right. I’ll quit, I swear. I’ll get out as soon as I can.”
Despite her lingering anger and terror at this entire surreal evening, she’d clung to his words as a shipwrecked sailor clutches at flotsam. But Everett still focused on what was going on around them in the parking lot, giving her only part of his attention. Even with Raymond burgeoning in her womb, Everett was still turned half away, focusing on what might creep up on them.
Kerri considered Everett’s eternal vigilance as the sprint cars continued their snarling race to nowhere on the other side of the fence. He listened to the storm thunder of the sprints as he stood guard.
Chapter 10 : Homecoming Interruptus
In the here and now, the Christmas decorations were up and Raymond’s presents stacked under the tree. Kerri sidled up to her easel and became one with her pallet, brushes, tubes of paint, and other accouterments of her painting. She’d only been taking a break from imposing her dreams on the world.
She turned on the Bose stereo and went to work. When they first met, she’d been partial to Mozart’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ and Debussy’s ‘Claire De Lune’ when she painted. Now it was Nine Inch Nails playing while she worked, or Bartok – fitting stuff to inspire the dark paintings she excreted.
“Brother Rick and Brother Norm were asking about you,” Kerri said as she picked up her brush and studied this latest piece with a dominating scowl. “They wanted to say ‘hi’ when you got back.” She reached out to make a microscopic change in a detail of the painting.
Everett’s attention was arrested as ever by her skill. Things stopped when he watched her work, though he observed from the side or behind so as not to be a distraction.
As Everett left to respect her privacy, Kerri continued her painting trance. The vision flowed from her and through her brush onto the canvas, as if this creation was the one to make everything whole.
Kerri’d already had several feature spreads in Juxtapoz Magazine. Other San Francisco gallery owners called her all the time with commissions from wealthy, influential clients. The hoity-toity New York crowd was sniffing around, sensing up-and-comer edgy bargains. Every canvas she painted was sold long before she even finished it.
Her income was what fed them. She knew that they’d escaped the darkness and were bulletproof forever. They’d never have to touch any of Everett’s stashes of illicit cash buried around the property like a squirrel’s nut hoards, or a hungry child’s desperate caches of food.
Chapter 11 : Cowboy Pimps
Rick and Norm were Kerri’s big brothers. They were quite a bit older than their little sister, who’d been a late baby. They were the ones who raised Kerri after their parents were killed by a drunk driver when she was four, and she thought the world of them.
The three siblings were third generation pot growers even though Kerri turned her back on the family business long ago. The brothers were good old boys, hunters and outdoorsmen. Self avowed rednecks through and through, though they forgave Everett for being a city slicker on every possible occasion.
They tried to put Everett through the wringer when Kerri first introduced him to them. The brothers cleaned out the odd bar together from time to time, and they were confused that Everett wasn’t intimidated at all upon their first meeting.
They’d tried a few practical jokes and ambushes that Everett had no trouble boomeranging back on them. But that was all right. Kerri was lucky to have them, and they were tolerable enough.
The access road to their place was narrow and over grown, with lines of Mayten trees to both sides. Everett crept the car through the tunnel of overhanging willow branches, toward the brothers’ home.
Rick and Norm’s house was a sprawling, weather darkened one story cabin that had never been painted. Its roof was in such disrepair, Everett envisioned the brothers doing a juggling routine with pots and pans to catch the leaks when it rained.
If they didn’t seem to care much about their house’s exterior condition, the interior was bursting with expensive, useless crap, and their vehicles betrayed the money they had to burn from their farming endeavors.
Rick had a huge green Ram truck in the driveway with jacked up over sized tires on custom rims. It was 4 WD, and the truck didn’t have door handles; he needed a remote on his key ring just to get in and out.
Norm was devoted to his blue restored 1957 Land Rover I 107 pickup, smaller but much more elegant than it’s over sized cousin. It was an electric, running off an array of batteries rather than serving the Arab Oil Moguls. He had a bumper sticker on his rear fender reading ‘Death to the Petro Traitors.’
Norm also had a big array
of halogen lights on top of the cab, facing backwards. He enjoyed blasting them in the eyes of anyone driving behind him at night rude enough to shine their high beams up his ass.
The brothers owned all the latest and top flight in hunting gear: halogen spots for jack lighting and ‘out of season’ work, matching Weatherby Mark V hunting rifles with Leupold scopes, GPS locators, the whole shebang.
They made a big deal about being off the grid, all their electricity coming from solar panels on the rotting roof of their house. They’d tried to talk Everett into going that route, but Everett wasn’t sure it was desirable for PG&E to tell the Man he might be running an indoor grow operation. Didn’t need CAMP or the DEA kicking in his family’s door even if they were clean; it would disturb Kerri and Raymond.
The brothers also had a well equipped workshop stocked with a full array of machine tools, specialized for weapons modification and gun smithing. Rick and Norm’s water came from a well and, in addition to a septic tank for their sanitary needs, they’d let slip that they had another big plastic tank buried somewhere on the property for a fallout shelter. If civilization collapsed, the brothers had announced their intention on more than one occasion to retreat a step or three, then come out as warlords when American society finished its death gurgle.
Everett figured they had other caches scattered around the property. But they didn’t ask where Everett had all his Bay Area money buried and he didn’t ask if they had access to, say, an RPG or an M 60 machine gun. Just like down in the East Bay, people up in the piney woods minded their business.
It was only after Everett parked the Escort that the brothers’ lazy if fecund pack of hunting dogs vomited forth from whatever shady nooks they’d been taking their afternoon siesta in. They swirled around the car baying protest at Everett’s intrusion on their nap time.
Norm appeared in the doorway with a smoking bong in his hand. Norm was a tall, strapping example of the lumberjack genetics that prevailed in Northern California. Although in his forties, he couldn’t get past the bygone days of his sexual peak: his brown hair was cut in a late 70s style waved pageboy, his bolo string tie had a gold Playboy bunny clasp and his jeans were tight enough that you’d see the wrinkles in Norm’s scrotum if you cared to aim a glance at that portion of his anatomy.
Norm made his haphazard way to the Escort, favoring a few of the dozen odd mongrels with good natured kicks from his metal toed cowboy boots, shooing them out the way. Norm gave Everett a stoned red eyed grin.
Wet noses rammed Everett’s crotch and ass as he still exited the car, one dog after another snuffled and slobbered on him. The surrounding pack of waist high hounds orbited the two men as they walked toward the entrance of the brother’s posh pad.
One of the dogs – a startlingly muscle bound muttley cross between a Beagle and a Rhodesian ridgeback – latched onto Everett’s heel. Everett was forced to an abrupt halt by the gentle, playful, inescapable power of a mouth that could rip off the Achilles tendon if the dog bit down.
“Good boy,” Everett said. The mutt let go and faded into the pack with his cropped tail wagging at this little joke.
The inside put the lie to the house’s deliberately deceptive exterior. It was a rock solid pussy palace, filled with assorted bric-a-brac the brothers purchased at head shops: black light posters, lava lamps, cylindrical ornaments encircled by dangling arrays of fishing lines with oil tears weeping down them.
Rick sat on the tiger striped velvet couch, as stoned as Norm. His blond hair was cut in the same style as Norm’s, and his attire identical. The only real difference between the two brothers was that one was dark and one was light.
Rick chuckled at a Three Stooges skit on the home theater projection TV, which stood in front of an unpainted plank wall. The brothers had just about every channel in the world; their TV was pirated satellite run through a series of home made decoder boxes.
A tall stack of stroke magazines teetered next to the couch. The brothers scrambled to hide them when Kerri or Raymond came to call, but the rest of the time the porn was right out in the open: The brothers were dedicated bachelors despite Kerri’s infrequent efforts at domesticating them.
Their ‘cowboy pimp’ living quarters should’ve given potential female playmates a heart attack. At first glance, it looked like any girl they picked up for a one night stand stood a good chance of dying from some heinous skin contact disease. However, the brothers were successful players on the local redneck meat market circuit
Norm proffered the bong, but Everett shook his head. Pot just made him even more taciturn and paranoid than he already was.
“How’d things go down south?” Norm asked. “You get everything done?”
“Pretty much,” Everett said.
“If you’d taken a load down with you, you know you’dve have made some bank. Kerri wouldn’t need to ever now.”
Norm was a broken record. How many times had they had this conversation? As many times as Larry had asked him to bring some sensemilla down to him.
But market savvy Larry hadn’t asked in a while. He’d mumble about market conditions and investment-to-profit ratio if you asked him why.
“Norm,” Everett said. “Prime sens is down to a grand a pound, Oaksterdam is killing your prices. It’ll be decriminalized and your kind of operation will be a dinosaur.”
“Bullshit,” Rick said, not taking his eyes off the TV screen. As Moe was just commencing to poke Curly and Larry in the eyes, Rick’s preoccupation was understandable. Rick said, “The Emerald Triangle will never die. SoHum will bury your East Bay indoor grows.”
Norm said, “What we wanted to tell you was, there’s been strangers asking around about you, up to town. City slickers, three of them, real well dressed and real out of place.”
“Foreign, y’know?” Rick said, and favored Everett with a malicious chuckle. “They weren’t buyers, they weren’t bandits and they sure in hell weren’t lost tourists. Should have seen it, the street cleared out like it was High Noon or something, everyone figured they were CAMP or some other branch of the bad guys.”
Everett’s scowl intensified a little more. “Thanks for the word, but just ‘cuz some one’s beating the bushes, don’t mean I have to jump through their hoops. Don’t like attention this close to home, though.”
“What’s to like about attention from strangers?” Rick asked, and then both the brothers stared at him, the good natured hick charm shedding from them like water from a pair of surfacing orcas. “You can wipe your own ass, brother in law. But you best not be dragging any of your big city shit up here to trouble our sweet little Kerri.”
They thought they were double-teaming him, but there was nothing to say back to that one. When you’re right, you’re right.
A Road Runner cartoon came on as Everett took his leave. The tiger striped couch creaked with strain as Norm plopped his ass down next Rick and they commenced uproarious laughter at the Coyote’s doomed scheming. The bong gurgled merrily behind Everett as he left to brave the gauntlet of the dog pack again.
Chapter 12 : Blood & Media
That night Everett was watching the tube in the wee hours. Some cheesy ‘70s cop show, a real piece of TV Land crap. But he just couldn’t seem to turn it off, or surf to something closer to educational.
Kerri was asleep, but Raymond had gotten up and tottered out to join Everett on the couch. He was accustomed to his father’s insomnias. Sometimes Everett wondered if Raymond didn’t come out to comfort his Father instead of the other way around.
Raymond lay on his daddy’s broad chest, asleep. Everett could never sleep well at all, sometimes propelled from bed to patrol the house, the yard, or when back in the East Bay, the ‘hood.
Kerri got full marks for putting up with his inability to relax. That kind of hyper vigilance must’ve been irksome for her at times.
The TV crime drama he watched was lame; some kind of synthetic story arc erected by the Citizens to shield themselves from the howling chaos of reality
and the cold winds of disillusion. It had nothing to do with Everett’s own experience, or reflect the street life at all. But maybe the Citizens could only handle reality if it was shrink wrapped, ‘sanitized for your protection.’
The Hammer Studios were the only ones that portrayed violence at all well. Their fake blood was a red corn syrup that wouldn’t fool even a small child. But it was a fitting symbol for the crazy clown, evil funhouse mindset that overcame when large quantities of blood flowed.
Blood wasn’t shy about spilling. It always meant something to somebody when people leaked.
Everett remembered, as a 15 year old, discovering his business associate Chopper’s murdered body after he’d been killed in a drug rip-off:
The door to Chopper’s hotel room was ajar. Everett took his straight razor out of his sock and held it knuckle duster style so he’d embed the blade into whatever he punched. He pushed the door inward with his knuckles so as not to leave fingerprints and stepped inside. Chopper lay on the floor with his head beaten in, a pool of blood soaking the cheap hotel carpet in a wide expanse around his ruined cranium.
The hemoglobin had even sloshed up on the baseboards a little. Everett remembered being surprised at the time that there could be that much blood inside somebody, it being the first time Everett had seen that extensive of a bleed out. Chopper hadn’t died right after taking the blow; he’d drained for a bit before his heart stopped.
But that was one constant: No matter how many times you saw, it was always instructional just how much of the red fluid the body contained.
Bags of blood, that’s what humans were. Also fear machines and pain generators. Raymond squirmed in his sleep, and Everett’s eyes were drawn to him.
In Chopper’s long ago hotel room the blood had already clotted to the consistency of pudding, and Chopper's eyes were glazed and empty.
The Storm Giants Page 4
