“Dead. Sickle Cell,” Charles said matter-of-factly, almost as an emotionless data point. “No point in goin’ home when there ain’t nobody to go home to.”
“So what’s up with Dale?” Warren responded, more to change the subject, but curious nonetheless. “He quit writing and calling four or five years ago.”
“Third wife… or was it his fourth? Drove him to drinkin’, plain and simple. Spends all his time in the Little Cowboy,” Charles stated flatly.
“And what’s the Little Cowboy?” Warren replied quizzically.
Charles laid his head back on the seat and laughed loudly. “It’s Teddy’s bar. You remember: Teddyjekeddy.”
Warren ’s face broke almost involuntarily into a broad smile. “No kidden’? Teddy has a bar now?” he asked of their classmate, Teddy Jack Eddy, who they always referred to in the deepest, nearly single syllable, unintelligible Okie slang as Teddyjekeddy.
“Where you been, Lew? Teddy’s always had a bar! One burned down. One went bankrupt and then the city fathers got rid of the place that was down by Uncle Simon’s old ice plant. The latest version is a modified trailer house out near the water plant. Just outside the Haskell city limits, and Muskogee County could care less.”
“So why’s Dale hanging out there?”
“Alcoholic, drunk, sot, elbow bender, soaker or rummy - you choose.”
“How can that be? He was the smartest man I ever knew… besides myself. I hear he quit his doctoral program at OSU because the classes were too easy. He must’ve snapped or something. His wife caused this?”
“Well, let’s just say he can really pick ‘em.”
“I thought I heard he was a San Francisco businessman not that long ago,” Warren offered.
Charles lay his head back on the seat and laughed loudly, his baritone voice echoing throughout the RV, which caused Marbles to growl again from beneath the couch. He wiped a tear from his reddened eyes and looked over to Warren who was smiling despite himself. “Yeah, and by the time the story got back to Haskell, the rumor mill had it that Dale was running a string of gay bathhouses in San Fran. The truth of the matter was that he was in charge of a series of telemarketing ventures out there that went under with the national ‘don’t call’ list. But it didn’t matter what he was doin’; the rumor had a life of its own. By the time poor old Dale got back in town, he might as well have been the Devil’s own shoeshine boy. He was lucky to be able to buy a bottle of pop out of a coin operated vending machine. Hell, I heard they wouldn’t even sell him coffee down at the quick stop. He came into Haskell with his skinny California wife and by the time the town got done with her, she left in a huff - and it didn’t take long, either.
“Then, two months later, on the rebound, Dale married Merci Lynn Oliver. You remember her from school? She was a couple of years behind us. Well now, let me tell you about little Merci Lynn – she grew up and became a dancer at Bare Assets but got fired because she got too fat, then conveniently married Dale just about the same time her food stamps ran out.”
“No way!” Warren replied, enjoying the sordid details.
“Yes, way. And last I heard, she was still hanging in there, even though she doesn’t see much of his sorry rear.”
“He was the single smartest guy I ever knew,” Warren said, wistfully recalling earlier days.
“Yeah, and everybody had high hopes for him – Student Body President, Best Dressed - won just about every award they had. Founder and Editor of the Haystack School Newspaper and Most Likely to Succeed. He had it all.”
“And I hope he still does,” Warren said almost under his breath.
“Huh?” Charles asked, his face outlined as a perfect question mark.
“Never mind,” Warren replied, losing his smile, his hands gripping the shaky steering wheel of the old RV as it plowed its way across the bridge spanning the Arkansas River and into the Oklahoma darkness. Less than half an hour later, they arrived in Warren ’s boyhood hometown of Haskell. As he pulled into the stark Midwestern municipality, he was stricken as always by its barren, simplistic plainness.
Haskell was the classic old town, born in the hopeful boon days of an early oil rush and fueled by an expectation that it would someday become something. But it never rose above a pair of schools, its proximity to Tulsa and a lonely wire strung high across its main street that seemed to wait in vain, decade after decade, on the unrequited promise of even a single stoplight. Haskell never really died, it just hung in year after moribund year. To the uninitiated and uninformed, the town never seemed to change, never seemed to get any better, always looking just a little more worn on the outside, a little more anachronistic, a little more left over from the world that always seemed to be running the other way. On the surface, it appeared that while the world around it got better looking and experienced countless seasons of refreshing makeovers, Haskell just maintained its tired old face, lined by its crumbling brick boulevards and street after street of slumping structures that bordered her few main avenues, perennially inching their way to decrepit and worse.
But that view was shallow and ignorant of the underlying reality of the town. Warren had not driven 1,245 miles of dangerous highway to sightsee. He had come to Haskell, Oklahoma for a good reason – to stay alive. He came here on purpose to tap into the strength of the heartland, found not in its old buildings or its crumbling streets, but in the energy and in the minds and hearts of her people. Just as Haskell’s closest neighbor, Coweta, had given up more of her sons than any other American community in the Vietnam War, so it was that this extraordinary place on God’s earth held up more than her share of the burden, underwrote more of the nation’s losses and fused more common genius and energy into every square inch of soil than any other place on earth. Haskell may have had only one high school, but behind its walls more brain power was forged student-for-student than in any first class university on the face of the earth. Warren was no fool. When things got really tight, he knew just where to go and exactly who it was he needed to talk to. He just never dreamed he would find it coming into focus at, of all places, the Little Cowboy Bar.
They had already passed the only so-called high-rent district, Snob Hill, on Highway 64, and transited Haskell’s Main Street. Just past the rusty city limit sign on the south end of town, Warren made a sharp left turn onto a dirt road. Another half a mile later, they pulled into a large, dusty parking lot outside a ramshackle business establishment sporting a hand painted sign on a four by eight plywood sheet. It read simply: LITTLE COWBOY.
While the tapestry of most small towns in America was one principally overlaid with shade after wearisome shade of poorly contrasted and emotionless greys, the one unusual splotch of color across the fabric of Haskell was the place known as the Little Cowboy Bar.
The bar itself was a roughshod coalescence of two mobile homes joined by a wooden shack in the middle. It used to have a large front window, but a piece of plywood was duct-taped to its front through which some large object – almost certainly a patron - had recently made an unexpected passage. Several neon beer signs glowed under a tin lean-to porch roof in the front. The door to the bar stood open and hanging half off its hinges, its round glass window leaning precariously sideways and reflecting a shaft of purple neon light onto the littered ground.
Without hesitation, Charles opened the door of the RV and stepped out on the lot as if he was on his home turf. Warren paused and looked the place over before he opened his door. His eyes swept the parking lot filled with cars of every shape and description, and a fair collection of motorcycles, including more than one fantastic looking Harley. But Warren ’s eyes were scanning for a quick getaway route. In his estimation, the mood of the average human was no longer stable, and while it looked very much like party time at the Little Cowboy, the festivities could abruptly end without appreciable notice.
With that thought, Warren gunned the RV’s engine and, in a pall of thick smoke, turned a wide arc in the lot and aimed it at the exit before
shutting the engine off and stepping slowly outside. Just before latching the door and locking it, he tucked his boxy Glock 9mm under his belt so that it was clearly visible sticking out. If he remembered his old friend Teddy, it would not matter much in his establishment whether he came in with a .40 caliber Desert Eagle sticking out of his underwear or a knife between his teeth.
“Marbles, you got the watch, killer,” he said, latching the RV door behind him as the black dog leapt up into the driver’s seat to take up his duty.
“I thought you was changing your mind, buddy,” Charles said walking over to him with a half grin hanging on his tired face.
“Strategic parking,” Warren replied cryptically, not taking his eyes off the loosely hanging door.
“Just a bunch of good old boys in there,” Charles said, eyeing the conspicuous Glock. “Teddy takes good care of his friends, don’t you worry about that.”
“So do I,” Warren stated coolly, tapping his fingernails on the weapon’s cold, black handle.
“Gee, I feel better already,” Charles responded without a trace of a smile. “I gotta have a beer…”
Warren followed Charles through the broken door of the hovel-cum-back-road-bar. His eyes darted back and forth quickly, memorizing the scene carefully, eyeing the patrons sitting in the dark recesses of the makeshift porch, their glowing cigarettes offering the only hint of their presence. As he entered the bar, Warren watched Charles saunter up to a round table in the middle of the floor and sit beside a passed out drunk whose head lay face down on its scarred surface. Warren stopped and saw the bar was filled to overflowing with all manner of humanity from a few well dressed, suited businessmen, to women of all shapes and inclinations, as well as a troop of leather and denim clad bikers.
As Warren sat down beside Charles and the drunk, Charles yelled at a huge, well built and muscular man standing behind the bar, “Hey Teddy! Look who I drug in!”
Warren immediately recognized his boyhood friend, Teddy Jack Eddy, commanding the bar in his sleeveless shirt, with black wavy hair and the same old sparkle in his eyes that had somehow survived the trip through a rugged 50 plus years of manhood. Eddy stood all of five feet six inches tall and was built like a fleshed out, sawed-off stump with huge arms and legs.
“Well I’ll be a sonofa….,” he said with a wide smile. “Just when ya think the world’s about to slide into hell’s kitchen, look who comes walkin’ in! I thought you was a swabbie,” he said, moving to the table.
“Not any more,” Warren admitted. “Retired.”
“Well what brings you to the Little Cowboy?” Eddy asked Warren with sincere curiosity.
“He does,” Charles replied, lifting the drunk’s head off the table by his hair.
Warren was horrified as he looked into the face of his boyhood best-friend, Dale Wattenbarger. Mercifully he was completely unconscious and in a alcohol induced sleep as Charles let his head drop back onto the table with a loud bang.
“What ever do ya want with my little fairy boy?” Eddy asked with a chuckle, sitting two full, frosty glasses before them.
“From what I hear, I don’t think he’s gay,” Warren responded.
“Whatever,” Eddy responded with the typical resistance demanded by small town gossip that has no half-life.
“He’s comin’ with me - tonight,” Warren stated resolutely.
“Suit yourself,” Eddy said, turning and walking back to the bar.
Warren glanced over to Charles whose eyes were glued to a ceiling mounted television.
“Damn!” Charles swore as he looked intently at the scene of a riot engulfing New York City live on Fox News. His first glass of brew was already half drained.
Warren’s own eyes became transfixed on the bloody scene of the National Guard’s tanks rolling into the middle of Times Square.
“Ain’t you heard? This is a no nigger zone,” a deep voice said from behind them. Warren looked up into the face of a huge biker who hovered over their table, glaring at Charles. Warren ’s hand reflexively gripped the cold handle of his Glock just as a loud crack resonated throughout the bar. Splinters of wood, hair and blood sprayed across the table as Eddy swung a pool cue across the back of the biker’s head. Then Eddy gripped the battered biker by the collar and rear of his pants and with a grunt tossed him through the plywood covered front window. On his way outside, the biker took out even more of the glass and rode headlong across the face of the plywood, surfing it into the darkness.
“Ain’t you heard? This is a no asshole and no faggots bar,” Eddy spat in the direction of the man he had just tossed through his front window. Eddy was obviously a man well practiced in the fine art of ousting patrons through exits other than the front door. He then lifted Wattenbarger’s head off of the table by his hair and laughed, “No offense, fairy boy,” then abruptly released him and let his face fall back down again with a thud.
Two of the biker’s friends gripped a set of pool cues and took a single step toward Eddy just as the unmistakable sound of the ratcheting of a 12 gauge shotgun reverberated in the bar’s rancid smoke and beer filled air.
“One more step and your momma’s gonna have to ID your body by the tattoos on your ass,” said a husky woman’s voice from behind the bar.
The bikers stopped and considered the thin woman aiming a sawed off shotgun in their direction. Even through their fog of obvious drunkenness, they knew she was probably right and she was most certainly very serious.
“That there’s my woman, Cherokee. Blow your head right off,” Eddy proudly said to Warren by way of a personal introduction, pointing at the shotgun-brandishing woman with a smile.
She looked back at Eddy and winked slyly, then turned her attention back to the bikers who were now lifting their hands in surrender and shaking their heads, backing slowly out the door. Her long black hair, dark eyes and uplifted cheeks proclaimed her French-Indian ancestry. “You alright, sweetie?” she asked of Eddy as the bikers disappeared into the darkness.
“I take care of my friends,” he said nodding to the table where Charles was once again calmly engrossed in the images on the television screen and absentmindedly picking wood splinters out of the foam still riding high in his glass.
“I’ve gotta get him out of here,” Warren said, eyeing Wattenbarger, who was still face down on the table. “Where can I find his wife?”
“He don’t have one,” Eddy said as he walked behind the bar and lifted up a white envelope. “She left this last week for him to sign - divorce papers. Hell, she’s already shacking up with Dale’s lawyer! I told her I’d make him sign ‘em, but only after she paid his bar tab. When she found out how much it was, she left in a big hurry. Don’t suspect we’ll see her again. I take care of my friends - even the little fairies.”
Warren followed Eddy to the bar and said, with obviously exasperated frustration, “He’s not gay!”
“Whatever,” Eddy responded with a laugh and a discernible twinkle in his eye. “Why so much interest in Dale?” he asked, absently twisting the fat envelope between his fingers. “Hell, he’s a worthless drunk besides bein’ a San Francisco fag.”
“Will this cover his tab?” Warren asked, sliding a gold coin across the bar.
“Damn, son! A Kugerrand! You know how much this is worth since the big announcement?” Eddy said, obviously surprised. He picked the coin up and considered it for a long moment, then slid it back across the bar with his eyes locked into Warren ’s. “His bar tab ain’t that much. Besides, I take care of my friends.”
“Fine,” Warren replied, and slid the coin back across the bar. “This is for the bar tab and delivering those paper’s to his wife. You’re buyin’ the beer, I’m buyin’ the divorce.”
“Fair enough,” Eddy replied, tossing the coin through the air to Cherokee who caught it expertly and tucked it into her bra.
“So, whaddaya gonna do?” Warren asked Eddy somberly. The whole world had come to know exactly what that question meant.
Eddy laug
hed and looked over to Cherokee. “She says her witchdoctor told her it was all just fake white man lies to steal more land. And the smartest man I ever knew – well, I can’t ask him his opinion.”
“Why not?” Warren asked in nearly a whisper.
“Because he’s passed out on your table over there and you’re about to haul his sorry butt away,” Eddy replied with a wink.
Warren laughed a single, quiet laugh and looked over to the table where Wattenbarger lay motionless, face down on the table as Charles sat nursing his beer, his eyes still glued to the television. “Will the change from that coin buy me a case of Coors Light for the road?” he asked.
“Cherokee, load ‘em up with three cases of Coors Light,” Eddy ordered his petite companion. “I take care of my friends,” he said with a sly wink. “That’s one case apiece. But you’d better hide yours as long as he’s around,” Eddy said, pointing his finger at Wattenbarger’s motionless body.
16
A pair of high speed NASA Rotor Systems X-Wing helicopter jets sat side by side on a pad just outside the main tunnel of the Middlearth complex. They awaited Seven and his team, departing at sunrise for the 4,600 mile voyage to Pacifica. Inside the massive cave, in an apartment suspended from the high ceiling by cables, Seven lay alone in his bed, half conscious, but much too wired to sleep soundly. The anticipation of tomorrow’s trip to the planet’s only underwater city and his leadership designation there weighed heavily on his mind. Seven was a leader at heart and never backed away from a challenge, but most men also know their weaknesses and recognize well their highest potential failure points. On this night, it was Seven’s own private devils keeping him awake. Suddenly, a voice in the darkness startled him fully awake.
“Something tells me you can’t sleep,” Serea said in a barely discernable whisper.
Seven’s head turned on his pillow and saw her standing form as a shadow against the darkness of the room, faintly illuminated by the muted lights from the vast cavern complex outside. “You’d be correct,” he admitted quietly.
Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven Page 11
