by Jessica Pine
"I'm really, really sorry."
"Clay, I told you - it doesn't matter."
"I know you wanted to talk..."
She shook her head. "The conversation I was gonna have assumed a whole different complexion when vegetable bongs entered the equation. Don't sweat it. I'll manage."
God. Great. "Please," I said. "It's bad timing, I know, but this is Steve. He's like my brother. My other brother. The one with criminal tendencies and a brain like a laboratory maze. I think he may be into something really bad this time."
Lacie folded her arms. "How bad?"
"It's not imp..."
"No," she said. "It is important. You owe me this much information if you're gonna take off now. How bad?"
"I'm so sorry..." I edged towards the door. She elbowed past me and opened it.
"Talk on the way," she said.
"No way."
"Tell me now or I'm coming with you."
"I don't have time to..."
"...then I'm coming with you." She closed the back door behind us. "Your car or mine?"
"Mine, I guess." The last time she'd rode in this car with me had been a disaster. That car ride back from the Heather Incident was one of the longest and most painful of my life, Lacie sat there like an ice-sculpture beside me, waves of cold rage just radiating off her like stink-lines off a cartoon character.
"Bikers," I said, hoping to put her off.
"Bikers?"
"Hell's Angels. I think you should seriously reconsider what you're doing."
She pulled the seatbelt across and snapped it home. "Pfft. Have you met bikers? They're not like they used to be. Most of them are weekenders. They're like fortysomething bankers who put on leather jackets with Live Free Or Die painted on the back and then roar around all weekend fantasizing about setting up a capitalist libertarian collective somewhere in New Hampshire. The worst they're going to do to you is try to make you read the collected works of Ayn Rand - which, admittedly is pretty bad but it's not like they're going to beat the shit out of you with motorcycle chains, not like they did to Hunter S. Thompson back in the late sixties."
I caught her eye in the rear-view mirror. "No. Get out."
"Why?"
"Because I don't want you to meet Steve. Ever. I have a terrible feeling you might elope with him."
"Is his dick bigger than yours?"
"God no."
"Then you're quite safe."
"Huh. And there was me thinking you loved me for my brain."
"More fool you. I'm very shallow."
She wasn't getting out of the car. I figured it couldn't hurt just to drop her off at Steve's mom's place. Psycho Bob may have been a psycho but since he wasn't currently serving twenty-five years in some state pen I guessed he wasn't dumb enough to invade suburbia and come after mothers. "You give yourself away," I said, starting the engine. "Only someone who was deep would admit to being shallow. It's like how only really dumb people think they're smart. And did you say you loved me?"
"No. You were the one who left the implication hanging there."
"You didn't contradict it."
"Refute. Better word."
"Whatever, English Major. You didn't say you didn't."
"No, but I didn't say I did. Where are we going?"
"You're going to Steve's mom's place. I fucking told him - time and time again. Do not get involved with Psycho Bob, I said."
"Do I want to know about Psycho Bob?" she asked.
"No. No, you don't."
"Too bad. Tell me anyway."
"Okay," I said, figuring she wasn't about to quit asking. "You know when we...in Burlington?"
"Unlikely to ever forget it," she said, with so much emphasis that I was flattered.
"Really?"
Her gaze turned chilly. "Really. Believe me, this is no reflection on your sexual prowess."
"Are you sure? Because you gotta admit I'm..."
"...Clayton!" Wow. Okay. Hadn't heard that tone of voice before. Hoping to never hear it again.
"Long story short," I said. "Steve talked me and Bog into helping him move some weed for Psycho Bob. We took our percentage and kicked back to Bob, right?"
"I'm with you," she said.
"Well, Steve was cutting the shit with catnip."
She was silent for a while.
"Say something," I said.
"Like what? What do you want me to say? Never enter into illegal business dealings with someone who has the epithet 'Psycho' hanging off their name?"
"That's exactly what I said. Although with like, less dictionary words."
"Your friend Steve is something of a genius, huh?"
"He kind of is," I said. "He had IQ tests out the wazoo when we were kids. All kinds of assessments and shrink profiles. They did this one called the Machiavelli Test - you heard of that? Based on this Italian guy who wrote a book about how to be devious."
"The Prince. Yes. I've heard of it."
"Yeah well, the test result came back and said he was Machiavelli. Maybe it's genetic. He is Italian, after all." I glanced at my phone, hoping that he'd answer one of my texts, but the screen stayed dark and silent. "I've been thinking," I said. "That this whole mess, this and the Heather thing - this is maybe the universe's way of telling me to grow up and get my shit together."
"Hmm," said Lacie. For some reason she was radiating ice-waves again and I didn't know what I'd said to piss her off.
Steve's Mom said the last time she'd seen him, he said he was going to Burlington. That was five days ago. He hadn't answered his phone for three days. To make my life even more difficult, Lacie refused to get out of the car. "I'm not going anywhere," she said. "You can get murdered by bikers after we've had a serious talk about our relationship."
"Relationship?" I said, trying to unclip her seatbelt. She swatted my hands away time and time again and eventually made me give up by lightly toasting my knuckles with a disposal cigarette lighter.
"So we have a relationship now?" I said, blowing on my singed fingers. "That's sweet. Maybe one of the cornerstones of that relationship could be not trying to set fire to parts of me?"
She pulled the car door closed and glared at me through the window. "You're not making this easy, you know."
"Me? I'm not making things easy? What am I not making easy? You want to get murdered by bikers right along with me? Is that it?"
Lacie shrugged. "Beats sitting around with my thumb up my butt. If there's one thing I've learned lately it's that you can't waste your life on indecision."
"What?"
"Hamlet."
I gave up and got in the car. I was no closer to understanding whatever it was that was eating her and she was no more helpful in throwing me even the tiniest bone that might help me to get it.
"Where would we find Psycho Bob?" she said, as if Psycho Bob was some kind of reasonable human being that could be talked to.
"Excuse me? Why would we want to find Psycho Bob?"
Lacie looked at me as if I were the one who had apparently had the 'do not get killed' part my brain removed with a melon baller or similar scoopy kitchen utensil. "It seems to me," she said, slowly. "That if you think Steve is currently face down in a ditch somewhere, courtesy of Psycho Bob, we should just find Psycho Bob and ask him."
"You do know why they call him Psycho Bob, don't you?"
"Of course," she said. "But the alternative is that we infiltrate the biker bar where he hangs out, win over a bunch of Hell's Angels to the joys of amateur dramatics and then stage a play in which someone named Steve is foully murdered by a pot dealer named Mentally Unstable Robert. Then we closely observe Psycho Bob's reactions for signs of guilt."
See? Weird women. What the fuck?
All the same, her brainvomit was ringing distant, rusty bells that hadn't clanged since High School English class. "Isn't that part of the plot of Hamlet?" I said.
"That," she said. "Was my point. Yes."
"Still with the Hamlet thing, huh?"
&
nbsp; "I find it's thematic. Post-modernist, even."
"I don't know half the fucking words that fall out of your mouth."
"I know. Now drive. I'm guessing he hangs out at that metalhead place off of Larch Street, right?"
"No," I said. "No way. Fuck you. Not gonna happen."
She batted her eyelashes and smiled an evil, evil smile. "Do you like your job?"
So it was blackmail now. "Yes," I said. "I also like my liver. And my kneecaps. And my teeth. And I would be very, very unhappy if anything happened to them."
"Fine," she said, and unclipped her seatbelt. "Then I'll walk."
And she did. "But it's twelve miles back to Westerwick," I said, crawling alongside her.
"I know. I could use the cardio."
"Lacie, it's getting dark." I was conscious of the stream of traffic building up behind me. Barely September and the tourists were descending like Mongol hordes already.
"I always carry a flashlight."
"Lacie, get in the fucking car."
She got in the fucking car. "Fine," I said. "You win. I'll go and get murdered by bikers. Is that what you want?"
"No," she said. "Nobody's going to get murdered by bikers. Don't be so dramatic, Clayton. We're just going to ask that nice Mr. Bob if he's seen your friend Steve. How is this so difficult to understand?"
The Fuzzy Duck was a small, fake-English style pub halfway between Westerwick and Tadley. It had opened about fifteen years ago as a potential tourist trap and closed shortly after when it finally occurred to the owners that tourists didn't come to New England to be reminded of Old England. It stood empty for maybe five years, until one night a bunch of bikers broke in, got drunk and allegedly held some kind of Babylonian orgy on the moth-eaten baize of the pool table. There were a whole lot of pearls clutched the next morning, let me tell you.
Naturally the place's fearsome reputation was nothing short of a dare to teenage boys like me and Steve, so from the age of about twelve to seventeen the whole meaning of our lives was 'to get into the Duck'. We had planned everything - from where to get our fake ID's to how many sweaters to wear under our leather jackets to give us the illusion of bulk. At seventeen I was a six foot two, hundred and sixty pound stringbean and the kindest description Steve could hope for was 'stocky', that is after three fisherman's sweaters and a pair of shoulder pads filched from his Mom's old blouse.
So naturally we were kind of sweaty even before the nerves set in. We thought we'd got away with it, despite our swampy state. The huge Cro-Magnon bartender even accepted our fake ID's and we were about to get served with our very first illegal Duck beers when a Hell's Angel spotted us, swiveled on his bar stool and said the thing no teenager in a bar ever wants to hear. "Hey," he said. "I know your old man."
The joys of living in a small town - everyone knows your old man, your date of birth and how old you were when they got your first set of booties bronzed. We didn't even stop to grab the beers we'd ordered.
I'd never been back since. Nothing had ever made me want to go back. The threat of violence is exciting when you're seventeen. When you're twenty-five and your brother has no feet and that nice little nurse you used to date used to tell you thrilling stories of guys from the Duck coming into the ER with pool cues up their asses, violence no longer seems quite so much fun. In fact, I was thinking of making it my life's work to avoid violence as much as humanly possible. Maybe even make a religious point of it. Did you need some kind of certificate to become a Buddhist?
Lacie was right - we did need to talk. If we had any kind of future then she needed to know just how much this whole non-violence thing meant to me, like right now. Unfortunately before I could even open my mouth she had opened the door and was walking across the Duck's bike-cluttered parking lot like it was a pleasant day on Main Street.
I was pretty sure it was bad manners to leave a lady to get murdered by feral lunatics, or at least my legs did, because they were the part that went running off across the parking lot after her. The rest of me had little or no say in the matter.
When we got through the door I swear the jukebox stopped, like in an old Western when the piano stops playing the moment the gunslinger walks into the saloon. About a dozen pairs of eyes fixed on us and bored through our skins. They were not nice eyes, set as they were in crazed wrinkles caused by screwing up the face against the wind and the rain. Some of them had straggles of dirty gray hair hanging in front of them. Others had old blue teardrops tattooed at their corners, teardrops Steve had once told me marked prison time served.
Lacie walked up to the bar. The bartender did not look friendly. "I wonder if you could help me," she said. "I'm looking for Bob. Is he around?"
The bartender frowned. "Over there," he said, pointing to a video game in the corner. There were three men standing staring at the screen and the tallest was at least seven feet high. I knew in my gut that he had to be Bob.
"Thanks," said Lacie, and headed over to the corner.
"Wait!" said the bartender.
"What?" she said, turning on her heel.
The bartender shook his head. I'm sure for a moment I saw actual fear in his eyes. Oh holy shit. "Don't interrupt Bob when he's playing trivia," he said. "You don't even know how much Bob loves his trivia."
Lacie shrugged. "Really?" she said. "He loves it so much he'd hit a pregnant lady? I don't think so."
I hadn't time to process exactly what she meant by that, because it all happened so fast. She went over to the video game, coughed a couple of times and waited. The three men turned round to look at her. Oh my God - they were fucking huge. Huge and craggy, with muscles like old knotty oak. They looked like psychopathic versions of those tree dudes from Lord of the Rings. Lacie looked about the size of a hobbit.
"Excuse me for interrupting your game," she said, her voice only trembling slightly. "But I was wondering if any of you had seen Steve?"
They looked blank and hostile.
"Lady," said the tallest biker. "Unless you know which Shakespeare play features the Queen Mab speech, you'd better get the fuck out of my face."
I took a step forward - again, I think my legs were responsible for this brilliant decision. My brain said otherwise.
As I moved forward I saw the screen of the game they were playing - one of those Who Wants To Be A Millionaire quiz games. There were four options flashing and by the looks of things Psycho Bob was all out of lifelines.
"I know the answer," said Lacie.
Psycho Bob narrowed his eyes.
"She does," I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "She's an English Major."
"I just need to know if you've seen Steve," she said. "His mother's kind of worried."
Psycho Bob's frown deepened. "Yeah," he said. "I've seen Steve. And if his mother's worried then maybe she should take a look at herself and ask why he's making her worry. If she don't know then that's a problem."
"Do you know where he is?" Lacie asked.
Psycho Bob folded his enormous arms. Banners, bikini girls and crying American Eagles rippled as he flexed his biceps. "I dunno," he said. "Do you know which Shakespeare play features the Queen Mab speech?"
"Romeo and Juliet," said Lacie, with no hesitation at all.
"You sure?"
"Absolutely."
"You mean that?"
"I do," she said. "Act One. The Montague boys are all chilling waiting to crash the Capulet's masquerade ball, Romeo's lovesick for Rosaline and Mercutio runs his mouth off in the Queen Mab speech. It’s Romeo and Juliet – no question."
"That your final answer?" said Psycho Bob.
"It is," she said.
Psycho Bob turned to his left lieutenant. "Hit it, Clyde," he said.
Clyde hit the touch-screen. The machine did a kind of little electronic fandango and the screen filled with fireworks. Psycho Bob looked pleased. I exhaled.
"Steve's off with Trey," said Psycho Bob. "If you don't know why it ain't my business to tell you. You might wan
t to take a long hard look at yourselves, though."
"Okay," said Lacie. "Thanks. We'll definitely do that. But he's okay?"
"Yeah. He's okay."
"Thank you very much," she said.
My legs had finally figured out what they were supposed to be doing - they were all too eager to make for the exit. Lacie was out the door when I felt a hand on my shoulder. "Hey man, wait up."
Sure. Sure. I could wait up. Not sure I wasn't gonna throw up, but I could wait. I turned around. Psycho Bob loomed above me. "Listen," he said. "We've got a little quiz team action going on Friday nights. Think you could see your way to bringing your little lady sometime? Could sure use a brain like that."
I nodded like one of those plastic dogs in the back shelves of cars. "Yeah. Yep. Yup. Okay. Yes. Yes. I can try. She's not really my...you know...it's complicated."
A hand the size of a dinner plate descended on my shoulder. "I hear you," he said. "Loud and clear. And quit shaking, would you? I'm not gonna hurt you. I got anger management therapy - part of my bail conditions."
Chapter Nine
Lacie
My head felt like it was about sixteen different places at once. It hadn't been clear since I'd seen those two little pink lines grinning up at me, but with the adrenaline still sloshing around my veins I was a dozen times more muddled.
Clayton tore around the side of the car and opened the door for me. "Slightly late to play macho now," I said.
He groaned. "Oh God. How bad was I?"
"On a scale of what? Ichabod Crane to Scooby-Doo?"
He sloped round to the driver's seat and got in. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry. I suck. I know. Look, I know I'm probably a million miles from the tattooed sex god of your dreams..."
I held up a hand, but he kept talking.
"...and I know I'm not some kind of edgy brainiac who likes it bare knuckle and runs a fucking Fight Club out of his basement..."
I shook my head. "Forget it. I don't need a hero. I especially don't need a Tyler Durden clone in my life. Jesus, Clay - I read Fight Club; Tyler Durden was a dick."
He leaned back against the seat and exhaled. "Is it worth explaining I have a kind of post-traumatic thing with the Fuzzy Duck? And fishermen's sweaters. Also shoulder pads."
