The cowboy’s vocabulary is pretty good as long as he’s talking about perverse sexual acts or describing his penis. He knows the exact length of it—like every other man on the planet earth—and according to him it’s exactly what Mona needs to bring her back over from the dark side.
What would he say if he knew my girlfriend is a virgin? A virgin who’s had a baby, something like Jesus’s mother, only Mona went to a sperm bank in Tulsa.
Without asking me.
When I wasn’t looking.
I wonder if that would make her an a-bomination in the cowboy’s eyes after he stopped thinking about how she’d look naked.
I’d bet anything his imagination’s not that good. Nothing about him is good enough for a girl like Mona. I’m not good enough either, but she loves me just the same.
Homemade beer and thoughts of Mona soften me up for a second, and I’m ready to walk out of the bar, but I don’t want to turn my back on the cowboy. I don’t want to walk out backwards, because that would build him up for the next time he gets drunk and starts thinking about how he backed a dyke out of a saloon.
So I say, “Look partner, I don’t want no trouble.” I use the double negative so we’ll have some common ground. I try my best to look ignorant and bigoted, like I hate everybody he hates except for people like me, so maybe he can overlook it for the time being. “Let me buy you a drink. While the money’s still good.”
That comment brings a smile—evidence of his tobacco habit and poor dental hygiene.
“E-conomy sucks,” he says. It’s the biggest word he knows except for A-bomination. He names all the minorities that messed things up for people like him, and doesn’t mention lesbians once. He extends a hand. This time it’s not pointing an accusing finger, but I don’t really want to shake it, because I’ve seen where it’s been.
Mona nudges me.
“Man up,” she whispers in my ear, close enough so the cowboy can’t hear. Close enough so the warm air reminds me how much I want to go home with her without cuts and bruises and regrets.
I resist the urge to do one of those complicated handshakes with fist bumps, hand signals, and high fives. I press my palm against the cowboy’s, and wince when he closes his fingers in a grip that’s been strengthened by years of masturbation.
I figure it’s Mona’s whisper that did it. I had the cowboy won over until then, until he decided the pretty lesbian was whispering something bad about him in the bull dyke’s ear. Probably something about his penis—what else could girls like us have to talk about?
The bones in my right hand grind against each other like the gears in a society that’s run out of transmission fluid. The pressure in the room changes like it does before a tornado. All the insults I’ve heard since junior high school pump up my arms and shoulders like a bodybuilder’s muscles—only these muscles aren’t just for show. They’re lesbian, cowboy-butt-whuppin’ muscles wired into a brain that’s turned all the way up to kill.
The cowboy says something about AIDS and herpes and some other venereal diseases he’s certain lesbians invented. He doubles down on his power squeeze and talks about the New Flu that started out in Tulsa.
He says, “Tulsa’s a homo-town.”
He says, “Jesus loves cowboys, but he can’t stand queers.”
He says, “Queers ruined the whole damned world.”
People gather around us now, gays and lesbians, rednecks, unemployed blue-collar people who came here to get too drunk to worry. They can’t watch football on TV anymore, but they can watch a boxing match between a low estrogen woman and an obnoxious redneck.
Maybe the cowboy would quit trying to break my hand if he didn’t have an audience. But he has an audience, and he has ahold of a bull dyke’s hand, who’s stronger than he thought she was. His free hand goes behind him, where he’ll have a knife or a gun, or some little something that’s just right for detonating an A-bomination.
So I catch him in the nose with a solid left hook.
The cowboy doesn’t know how to fight, but he doesn’t understand that yet, so I give him a couple of quick, almost feminine jabs in the solar plexus—just enough to let him consider the possibilities.
Mona doesn’t like for me to fight, but even she can see I’m going easy. I take a step back, give him the chance to walk away, but now the cowboy has decided somebody has to die. He finds a crappy little revolver in the back of his pants. A .22-caliber Saturday Night Special good for killing copperheads and lesbians.
He points the weapon at me and recites a list of pretty good reasons for pulling the trigger.
He says, “Get the picture sweetie?”
Blood and snot from the cowboy’s nose give him sort of a New Jersey accent and he takes the time to wipe it on his sleeve.
“Get the picture sweetie?” More East Texas in the accent now. Suitable words to say before a shooting. He closes his left eye, as if he has to take careful aim from five feet away. He puts the tip of his tongue between his teeth, but pulls it back when he tastes blood.
“Mister.” Mona walks beside me with her hands on her hips, the way she talks to her boy, Joseph, when he annoys her. “Think about what you’re doing.” She takes a graceful step and kicks the cowboy in the balls.
Mona used to be a forward on her high school soccer team. One kick is plenty for the cowboy. Some girls would have kicked him again, just because he deserved it. Not Mona. She’s Choctaw, one of the civilized tribes.
“Let’s go, Chris.” She takes my arm like she’s the homecoming queen and I’m her escort to the throne.
The cowboy doesn’t say anything while we head for the door. He just massages his testicles and watches us get smaller.
• • •
“I could have handled it,” I tell Mona.
It’s really dark and there aren’t any streetlights. We have a flashlight, but batteries are hard to get, so we won’t turn it on unless we really need to.
“That cowboy wasn’t going to shoot.” It hadn’t felt that way back in the bar, but now I remember how he hadn’t cocked the hammer back. Cowboys always do that, tease every bit of drama out of a murder before they actually pull the trigger. It makes the story sound better when they tell it to their buddies who haven’t killed anybody yet.
Mona kisses me on the cheek. We can do things like that now that the electricity is gone. Two romantic lesbians trading kisses in the dark, the way they used to do a thousand years ago before the world got illuminated.
“You don’t know anything about men,” Mona tells me. “Even though you sort of look like one.”
She’s right, of course. Girls like Mona know everything there is to know about men, but girls like me only know about the ones who hate us.
I ask her why she kicked him and she tells me, “To preserve his dignity.”
According to Mona a man without dignity is as dangerous as an injured wolf—sure to bite somebody.
“What’s that got to do with kicking a cowboy in the balls?”
“It’s more dignified to be kicked in the balls by a pretty woman than to be beaten up by a dyke.”
I guess Mona’s right. I don’t know anything about men.
Even without cars, or humming electrical wires, or police sirens, the night is full of noise—insects, catfights, feral dogs trading songs with coyotes. You don’t hear people noises often, but when you do, hiding is the best option.
It’s easy. Slip into the darkest place you can find and quit moving. Sane people always take cover, so crazy ones are all you see. There are lots of crazies in the street since the New Flu came to town. Religious crazy. Jonestown Crazy. Jehovah’s Witnesses with machine guns crazy.
Some scientists say it’s a retrovirus that drills into the religious centers of your brain. Somewhere in the temporal lobe. Others say New Flu is just a lame excuse for going batshit. It’s one of those questions people make up their minds about and then don’t worry about the facts, like global warming, or whether life begins at conception, or
if Coca Cola in bottles tastes different than Coca Cola in cans.
It really doesn’t matter when you are out at night and hear people sounds. You slide behind the closest abandoned car and wait until the danger passes. That’s another reason not to use a flashlight, even if you have batteries. You can see fairly well for twenty feet, but crazies can see you from miles away. They know exactly where you are long enough to plan an ambush or just shoot you and be done with it.
So, Mona and I stand as still as lawn statuary and wait until the owners of the footsteps walk by us in the middle of the street. Twenty people at least, some of them men, some of them women, none of them gay or lesbian or Native American as far as I can tell. The scientists don’t say why New Flu doesn’t infect Indians or homosexuals. Mona says it’s because we’re already crazy in another way.
The New Flu people are going somewhere they all know about, so they don’t have to talk. The last time something like this happened, Christians hung witches in Salem and burned Jews in Spain.
Everybody gets together and starts killing everybody else, until almost nobody’s left—in this case nobody but homosexuals and Native Americans.
The New Flu people have noisy feet. They aren’t afraid of anybody because everybody is afraid of them. When they are about a block away they start singing all at once. The song they sing is “Amazing Grace.”
“Pretty good,” I tell Mona. “Perfectly in tune. Perfectly synchronized. A capella.” That’s everything I know about music.
Mona doesn’t want to talk about “Amazing Grace.” She says, “We’ve got to get out of town, Chris. I have to think about Joseph.”
When Mona starts thinking about her son, she stops thinking about everything else. I’m sort of Joseph’s mother too, except in the biological sense. Biology means all final decisions about Joseph belong to Mona.
“What about his school?” I ask.
“Closed.”
“What about his girlfriend?”
“Karma’s in the hospital.”
“Yeah.” I’m wondering if that might give us a little more time in OKC, just in case everything works out in the end.
“Joseph might want to wait until she gets out.” I know that’s not going to work for Mona. Karma has already been in the hospital for a month. Shot by one of the growing population of crazies.
Mona wants to go to the Choctaw part of the state, where people aren’t as likely to kill us. But she forgets I’m not Choctaw. She forgets I’m a really obvious lesbian and Choctaw aren’t too keen on people like me.
“They’ll get used to you. I did.”
• • •
Long walks in the dark used to be romantic, but now they give Mona and me time to talk. It’s dangerous when lovers talk. The conversation bobs and weaves like Muhammad Ali used to do when he floated like a butterfly. At first the argument looks like a conversation, but then Mona gets down to business. She talks about the time I left her, right after Joseph was born.
“That was thirteen years ago,” I say. She doesn’t like my tone.
“It seems like yesterday.”
So I explain how all couples go through rough patches, and she tells me how abandoning your wife and child is more than a rough patch.
“We weren’t exactly married,” I tell her. “And Joseph’s father is some anonymous sperm donor, and you didn’t even tell me you were pregnant until it was too late to back out.”
Oops.
When Mona starts crying logic gets put out for big trash day.
“Please don’t,” I say a little too loud. “Please don’t.” Softer this time, but she couldn’t pull those tears back now, even if she wanted too. Big saltwater drops spill over her Native American cheekbones, perfectly visible in the darkness. Tears work on dykes about as well as they work on men.
Mona’s tears burn my heart like sulfuric acid. The only thing I can do is walk away before I say something else that she’ll remind me about for the rest of my life. So I walk her into our rental house and make sure she’s safe and then I leave.
Joseph asks me, “Where are you going?” He has eyes exactly like Mona’s so I can’t ignore him. Joseph is only fourteen years old and doesn’t understand how easily beautiful lipstick lesbians like Mona can out-argue muscular butch girls who box with rednecks in taverns.
I’d do anything for Joseph except fight with Mona in front of him, so I say, “Got to take a walk,” calm and rational, like anger is an emotional cramp I can cure with exercise. “Be back later,” I tell Joseph, loud enough so Mona can hear it from our bedroom where she’s waiting for me to come to my senses.
Joseph hugs me—he’s the only boy who ever did that—and I feel a bubble pop inside my chest. He’s the reason I’ll always come back, no matter how angry I am with Mona. I’ll always be there for Joseph, except for the next few hours.
Angry walking was easy before civilization collapsed. You don’t appreciate things like police cruisers and security cameras until law and order is so much rubble in the street.
One day obnoxious construction workers shout insults at you, and the next it’s Visigoths throwing spears. I move through the darkness like a rabbit in a world full of carnivores, fueled with secretions from supersized adrenal glands that make me faster and more afraid than everything that wants to eat me.
Feeling fear more than anger is what civilization’s all about, so after fifteen minutes I’m pretty civilized. I’m about a mile from home, and ready to go back and whine about leaving Oklahoma City and living with a bunch of Choctaw who never liked me all that much. I have it all worked out. Exactly what I’ll say so Mona will feel guilty enough to owe me something for the sacrifice.
And she thinks I don’t know anything about men.
It’s important to go back a different way, because someone might be watching. Someone with a knife, or a pistol, and a license to kill issued by the New Flu God.
I hear the motorcycle before I see it, puttering along the moonless night under stars that hadn’t been visible in Oklahoma City since World War II. The biker has long hair, no shirt, and posture like a wild cat that’s just about to spring. He drives down the middle of the street with a siphon hose draped around his neck, looking for abandoned cars that nobody’s set on fire. His headlight is turned off, but his eyes glow—or seem to—as he turns his face my way.
I remember all the things I left back home—Mona, Joseph, and the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver I used to carry when I was an EMT—just in case. There are no sidewalks in this part of town, so I move out of the street, into somebody’s yard full of weeds. They are tall enough to hide behind if I get onto my hands and knees, but all I manage is a stoop. I hold still as a tree, in case he hasn’t seen me yet, but of course he has.
I take off running through the weeds as he revs up the bike and heads my way, faster than a man should ride through a weed-infested yard.
Broken bones heal. Chicks dig scars. Glory is forever. He doesn’t care if he dies tonight because pretty soon there won’t be enough gasoline for motorcycles and who wants to live after that?
I climb over a rotten stockade fence, thinking that’s the end of it, but the biker crashes through. So I climb over another one, into an alley where trash hasn’t been collected since city government collapsed.
When he crashes through that fence, I lift a trashcan filled with the leftovers of society and use it like a battering ram against his chest.
The bike speeds past me, but the biker doesn’t. He lands on is back with a sound like a wet drum.
My EMT training kicks in, and I take a step his way, but apparently he’s breathing and has a pulse, because he also has a gun.
It’s one of the boxy-looking Glocks that holds a lot of bullets and doesn’t have a safety. I’m too close for him to miss, so I kick the gun out of his hand just as he pulls the trigger.
The three-foot flame lights up the alley, like a fireworks show on the Fourth of July, and by the time I can see again he is on his feet.
/>
Limping, so he can’t chase me, but he’s limping toward his motorcycle. I think I should surprise him with a little one-on-one combat, but I don’t know what else he’s carrying. Guys like him always have backup weapons.
“Later dude,” I tell him, as I run down the alley.
“Asshole,” he shouts at my back.
It occurs to me he still doesn’t know he’s been knocked on his butt by a girl. I think maybe I should tell him, but by the time I make up my mind, he is on his bike again.
Maybe he’ll give up if killing me is complicated. I duck behind an abandoned car, and he roars by me, not at all worried about using up the last gasoline in the world.
He makes a skid-circle in the street, as artistic as a stunt man in a motorcycle movie.
I head through another overgrown yard, jumping over a Big Wheel and a sandbox and a dead German shepherd. I jump a three-foot chain link fence, and almost stumble into a swampy swimming pool before I regain my balance. There’s a gate into the neighbor’s yard standing wide open, so I run through and close it behind me.
Through an abandoned house.
Cross the street.
Jump another fence, then another.
This goes on so long, I think the biker must have given up, but when I stop to catch my breath, I hear his engine idling as if it’s sniffing the air, trying to catch my scent.
The house I’m in has no broken windows or locked doors. It’s pristine except for spider webs and dust. Every dish in the kitchen has been washed and put away. Every knife and fork in its proper place, even the high-dollar cooking knives on their magnetic rack, so shiny I can see them in the dark.
I take the longest, strongest, sharpest butcher knife and carry it into the backyard where maybe I’ll be able to use it and maybe not.
It is a big backyard but with almost no grass. Everything is pressed concrete and dried up water features, well maintained except for the cable I trip over as I head for the back gate. Coaxial cable—all the news and movies in the world used to come into the house over this little wire, and now it’s fallen from wherever it’s supposed to be onto the cement deck that keeps weeds and disorder at bay.
Sacred Alarm Clock Page 9
