Bad to the Bones

by Layla Wolfe

  He let Lytton take point in questioning the bum. The guy really did look like a transient. His unkempt beard and scraggly hair weren’t just the result of an enthusiasm for the tarot and rebirthing. This guy shook with some serious DTs, and his hands scrabbled for Wild Man’s cigarette.

  “It’s the knockout pills,” he kept muttering. He could barely light the cigarette, he was shaking so badly. In October the daytime temperature were in the low sixties, hardly cold. “The knockout pills, man.”

  “What knockout pills?” Lytton asked gently. “Those cult guys give you knockout pills?”

  After spewing a lungful of smoke over the men, the bum cried, “They give it to us every night with our beer! Two beers a night we were promised, and now I don’t even get that! I mean, look at us. Look at us! Kicked out like the Jews from Visigoth Spain!”

  Lytton, Wild Man, and Knoxie shared looks. Was this bum an actual historian?

  Lytton probed farther. “Listen man, you can trust us. We’re businessmen from Pure and Easy, downtown. This guy lives over a bar. We don’t like your guru any more than you do. Why don’t you come with us? We’ve got more than two beers a night, and we won’t put any knockout drops in them.”

  “What’s your drink of choice, man?” asked Knoxie.

  He instantly regretted it. The bum went into a long tirade about the various benefits and bummers of Cisco—“liquid crack”—versus Night Train and Wild Irish Rose wine. “They came out with a new Wild Fruit with ginseng, but I prefer to stick with what’s tried and true. Some people say that White Label smells like rubbing alcohol, but I think it’s got a leathery bouquet…”

  Knoxie started looking around for other bums to corral. Lytton had the current bum well in hand, so Knoxie started walking out toward the cliff’s edge. This was a fuck of a thing, that Swami booting out all the people he had no use for. Knoxie supposed he could relate. His own father had kicked him to the curb for not getting a job—at the age of sixteen. Sixteen, seriously? Weren’t teenagers supposed to finish high school before being told to get a job? The ensuing rage had fueled his determination to work out, train in the martial arts, particularly Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He may never be able to beat the crap out of his father but he wasn’t going to let the bastard get him down, either.

  So he did actually feel for these poor assholes wandering aimlessly in the desert. There were rumors the swami had bussed people living on the fringes from all states of the union to swell the voter rolls. That was especially blatant voter tampering. Knoxie and Lytton went to the annual policeman’s ball and paid their taxes on their legitimate concerns just like any other businessman. Having their choice of men in office was their right. What was weird was, the election wasn’t until two weeks from now. Why had the Swami risked throwing out his muscle before the election?

  There was another lump, another body. This one was dressed in the lavender shade Knoxie associated with the cult. Sprawled on his side on the ground, the “knockout drops” must’ve gotten to him. Knoxie didn’t need more disabled unskilled derelicts hanging around the downtown area, but maybe they could find a way to get these guys back to their original cities, at least. After pumping them for intel, of course.

  Knoxie was almost jogging by the time he reached the body. This was no man. Her long legs were covered in skintight violet leggings, her tiny skirt hiked up to reveal the rise of a nicely-shaped butt. Knoxie was ashamed these were his immediate feelings. But when he squatted and turned her to face the sky, he saw she was quite a stunning young lady. Her satiny eyebrows were black slashes, her nose kind of Middle Eastern. This one clearly didn’t belong in the group of bum wine enthusiasts.

  She was obviously drugged. Knoxie could tell by the way her eyes rolled up inside her skull. She wasn’t unconscious, just sleeping the sleep of the dead. She wore one of those asinine photo necklaces, and Knoxie felt like tearing it right off. She couldn’t give him any decent information in the state she was in, but maybe she could later on.

  Knoxie carried her back to his cage.

  He talked while he walked. He felt manly, more virile and fully alive than he had in a long time. Finding this girl had instantly taken him out of his comfort zone, forced him to look at his life from another point of view. For the first time ever, he understood why a man would want to join forces with The Bare Bones. There was strength in numbers. You automatically had hundreds of other brothers who’d go to the wall for you in any given situation. There was power and toughness in having rugged men like the Boners behind him. “Why’d he dump you with those bums? Where’d you come from? Why are you wearing that creep’s picture around your neck?”

  Her tight tank pressed her breasts from their bra cups. Knoxie was actually stirred by the sight of those mounds jiggling as he walked. You’re not a damned necrophiliac. Wait until she wakes up. Wait to hear her story. She’s probably as bad as the rest of them. I’m sure her belt doesn’t go through all the loops either. Oh God, she’s waking up. She’s gonna think I’m kidnaping her.

  She stirred and opened her bleary eyes. He was stunned by the cornflower blue vitality, the intelligence behind them. Wild Man saw him carrying the girl, and like a good former Prospect, he leaped to open the Mustang’s back door.

  “What the fuck?” Wild Man was in awe. “They kicked out this girl?”

  “Exactly my thoughts,” said Knoxie as he placed her onto the seat. She went willingly, without so much as a whimper, as though accustomed to being ordered around, and maybe even physically directed. He crouched next to her, covering her torso with his, his eyes questing over her face.

  The transient was still droning on and on to Lytton, going in-depth about his favorite wine varieties. “They call it Night Train because it makes you drowsy. Some say it’s the Clorox flavor that knocks you out…”

  Knoxie didn’t want that to be the first thing this poor lost angel heard. So he talked. “Who are you?” he murmured. When he brushed a lock of her dark auburn hair from her eyes, she blinked. Her eyes were wide open now, the pupils dilated like a lunar eclipse. “How’d you come to be living with those whack jobs? Where are you from?”

  She was going to speak. Knoxie held his breath as he felt her body stirring to life under him.

  Her voice was girlish and whispery, like many of the gashes he worked with. Her words were almost as strange and awful. “Oh, Master. Is it time to be penetrated?”

  Whoa. He was right. This one was a few sheep short of an orgy.

  “They kicked us out!” the alcoholic was now raving. “Just like the Jews out of Hamburg!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  BELLAMY

  I’d been told that I “lack insight into my condition.” Over at the ashram we did a lot of therapy, deep introspection, meditation, study into ourselves. My Master always told me I had some kind of borderline personality, that I lacked empathy. He said serial killers have the same sort of disorder. Their inability to feel the pain of others—or their own pain, I gather—is what allows them to kill without sorrow or remorse. He said I had that. This made me afraid that I might accidentally kill someone and not know about it.

  I do remember feeling a lot of pain and angst as a teenager. For a couple of years my mother did nothing but scream at us kids. I knew from talking to my friends that it was pretty common to have a screaming mother. Teenagers seem to bring it out in them. But Virginia and I, somehow we knew that our mother screamed more than usual. She was constantly on some kind of emotional rampage, bursting into tears at the drop of a hat, like when the roofer unintentionally disconnected her cable TV. Oh man, that was a major rampage. I’ll never forget the sight of the poor tar-covered workman, his blank, shocked face as Carol raged at him. He meekly tried to explain that her TV would only be out for half an hour. No, that wasn’t good enough. She would’ve written a bad Yelp review on him too, if she’d had a computer she knew how to use.

  Eventually, our father got sick of it and left when I was thirteen. The pain was unendurable. Thinking th
at my beloved father didn’t love me anymore psychically damaged me. He could’ve stayed in town like so many divorced fathers did, but he was a banker, so he moved to Los Angeles. I started spending more and more nights sleeping out at Coyote Buttes with my friend Maddy. I hardened my heart. I “acted out.” We made out with boys, smoked weed, and drank. I felt bad about leaving little Virginia behind to deal with Carol’s wrath, but at least I escaped for a while.

  I learned that to be cool you had to literally be cool. Unemotional, blasé, too hip to respond to anything. Maddy and I became so hip that nothing could affect us, you know? We were such juvenile delinquents we laughed with glee when the local Cottonwood paper mentioned us as “frolicking” on the buttes, setting off fireworks, and leaving beer cans and “marijuana butts” lying around. As if we’d leave a weed roach on the ground.

  So I’m sure it was this indifferent, callous condition of mine that led me to sleep soundly in a stranger’s bed.

  I must have slept one whole night through because when I awoke, this definite morning light poured in through the slats of the blinds. You know that “morning light” feeling? It’s a sort of sunny, yellow, bird chirping feeling that reminds me of childhood, before everything got fucked. I’m too smart to know everything could ever be that good again, though, so I was instantly skeptical. I remember sitting up in the strange bed, clutching the blanket to my chest, glancing around suspiciously. My Master used to always be on my back to trust people, situations. “Not trusting means you can never live fully, never experience life in all its glorious multicolored hues.”

  He was probably right. But who wouldn’t be suspicious waking up in a strange apartment that smelled of stale bong water? There wasn’t much on the walls to tell me who lived there, only I knew it wasn’t an ashram apartment because black T-shirts were draped from furniture. I heard noise, traffic outside, so I wasn’t out in Merry-go-Round Canyon anymore. I tried to piece together what had happened. The minivans, the daimyo shooting at us, the sterno bum screaming about mashed potatoes and knockout drops, it all seemed like a distant dream to me now.

  Incredible as it sounds, I shrugged it off. I shrugged off many experiences. It had taken me many painful years to learn to stuff down my emotions. I wasn’t about to let any of them out of the hat now. I felt my thighs. I was still wearing the leggings I’d worn while working on that carburetor, but my purple knit skirt was gone. Dropping my hands to my lap, I saw that I was still wearing my violet tank top. So whoever had taken me hadn’t penetrated me. Or, if they had, they were meticulous about replacing my clothes.

  I had to pee, so I clambered out of bed and staggered to the can. While peeing a giant stream, I stared at an AC/DC poster on the wall. A lightning bolt replaced the slash in the band name, and the tagline “Lock Up Your Daughters” blared out. That didn’t give me a secure, cozy feeling. I also noted men’s shaving materials littering the vanity. These things, and the fact that no one had washed the sink in approximately nineteen months, let me know a man lived there. A man who wouldn’t be fussy about replacing clothes on a woman he’d just bonded with, so I knew nothing had happened.

  Had some deprogramming zealot run me out of Bihari? The Master had warned us that might happen. “The Arizonans don’t like us because we represent freedom. They are threatened by us, and will wish to change us to be like them. They are not happy with anyone who is different from them.” Were the minivan drivers on the payroll for a zealot who wished to make us more like him? Was Bulsara in cahoots with some Pure and Easy fanatic, a hater of all that was free and uncomplicated, like us?

  I peered beyond the bathroom door frame. The muffled voices of TV actors came from behind the next wall. A sort of excitement crept into my lungs as my breathing quickened. You’d understand this if you knew I hadn’t seen a TV in years, aside from the ones playing in bars as I walked by during town runs. The list of things we weren’t allowed to own or do out at Bihari had been getting longer. The more the townspeople and local authorities hated us, the stricter the Master became. It was his way of saying we needed to focus only on him, to learn to funnel out negative distractions.

  So actually, I was paying more attention to the activity on the little television than I was to the man…at first. I crept past the bedroom door, almost tiptoeing up to the screen that seemed to be playing a hunting show. Yes, there were guys in safety orange and camo walking around with crossbows. And whispering. “There’s a nice six-pointer.” I stood for a few moments with my hands folded in front of me, obediently watching. I know it sounds unbelievable to most people. But I was enthralled with the men’s whispered discussion about how to approach the deer for the best shot.

  “That’s a damned big buck for Nebraska.”

  “Look at that rack.”

  “The wind’s in our favor.”

  “It’s so cold there’s ice on my bow case.”

  I was aware someone was on a couch, shuffling around, clinking a coffee cup. I know I often have inappropriate reactions to things, and it’s something I’m working on. But it took me several minutes to turn and look at the guy. For all I knew, the guy could’ve been a whacked-out captor, one of those serial killers the Master is always telling us about. Well, either way, he was a captor, because he’d somehow captured me from that mesa, and was now holding me in a little apartment.

  But he didn’t look like a psycho killer. Even shirtless, with a red jewel piercing decorating his nipple on the plane of his juicy pec, he didn’t seem too threatening. A glorious, colorful tattoo decorated his buff chest—a woman’s feathery eyes, someone holding a giant black and white skull in their fingertips, and a skeletal rattler like something from a 19th century lithograph, all bordered by waves and some crazy thistle plants. It was all so beautiful, although I didn’t see why the beautiful man needed a beautiful tattoo. He had closely-shorn light brown hair and a five o’clock shadow. His eyes glittered with intelligence, and his luscious mouth bowed angelically above his lower lip pin. A hoop through his eyebrow told me he’d led a rough life, like I had. He wouldn’t mess around, but I also didn’t get the feeling he’d hurt me.

  He was calm, a burning cigarette between his fingers. He regarded me without expression. “Sleep well?”

  “I did. Thank you very much. Now, I’ll just be on my way—”

  A flash of movement. Jamming the cig into an ashtray, he leaped to his feet, standing between me and the doorway. His hands fluttered around my shoulders as though afraid to touch me. “Not so fast. Do you even know where you are?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t care. I’ll find my way home eventually.”

  The guy snorted with disgust. “You don’t care. You wake up in a strange bed and don’t care where you are. Not interested in the slightest.”

  “Not really. I’m used to it.”

  He frowned even fiercer. “Used to waking up in stranger’s beds?”

  “Not so much that. But strange places, yeah. I drink my bhang lassi and who knows where I’ll wake up? Now, if you could just hand me my skirt—”

  Again, he stepped between me and the door, making sure not to lay his hands on me. He was actually a strikingly handsome older man, around forty, and his body heat slammed into me like a wall. I giggled. I know, I always have inappropriate reactions. Maybe I was nervous.

  “Look, why don’t you just sit down for a while? You’re in no condition to go anywhere. Do you know that we found you lying drugged on some butte out of Slide Rock?”

  This confused me a little, and I let the guy lead me to the couch.

  “Do you drink coffee?” Without an answer, he vanished into a little kitchenette, giving me time to look around. A drafting table was bathed in the venetian blind pattern created by the sun. Many designs for what looked like tattoos littered the table. A file cabinet supported cups of pencils and airbrushes splattered by paint. The table looked extremely well-used, even loved. I had a passion like that for fixing motorcycles. Repairing bikes to me meant freedom. If a bike was in g
ood repair, it purred like a hummingbird and rode just as smoothly. I always said, “Don’t ride faster than your guardian angel can fly.” I couldn’t bear to see a Harley smashed. I was one of the few allowed to own her own bike at Bihari. I sorely missed my Sporty now.

  On top of the TV was a photo of two children, a boy and girl in their early teens. I had always liked teenagers. Teens were innocent victims of twisted, warped adults. That is, until they became twisted and warped by the same nasty minds that were supposed to mold them. This man obviously loved his children, though. Leaning forward, I shuffled some envelopes around on the coffee table. I saw that the beautiful, inked man’s name was Knox Hammett, he lived at 4926 Bargain Boulevard in Pure and Easy, and he owed seventy-nine dollars on his power bill.

  Going to the front window, I yanked open the blind. We were across the street from a business named The Hip Quiver—a bar, I imagined. A few cafes and the slow traffic told me I was in downtown Pure and Easy.

  “Here.” I took the coffee cup from Knox. “Do you know where you are?”

  I looked him levelly in the eye. “Pure and Easy.”

  “Okay. Do you know who you are? ‘Cause I sure would like to know. You had no ID on you.”

  Knox had a voice like the Viewer Discretion narrator, low, resonant, syrupy. It was a voice that could hypnotize, like my Master’s. “My name is Asanga, and I live up in Bihari. I’d like to get back there as soon as possible. My motorcycle repair shop is there.”

  His eyes lit up. “You fix bikes?”

  “Yes, I do. That was the worship chosen for me as the way I could best awaken from my sleep.”

  Understandably, he looked skeptical. “Your…sleep?”

  “Yes.” I know I recited like an automaton, but that’s the way I spoke. We all did, when reciting truisms. “Most humans live in a state of ‘waking sleep,’ but it’s possible to transcend to a higher state of consciousness.”

  He frowned. He was incredibly handsome when frowning, too. “Listen, if you want to call it a higher state, fine, but we found you running from automatic weapons fire on that butte. You were drugged and fucking abducted from your Bihari and it appears to be an inside job.”