by Layla Wolfe
My heart nearly stopped. A wave of weakness washed over me and Maddy clutched at me to keep me upright. The room was becoming black. I was blacking out with shock and panic.
I found myself sitting on something solid. It wasn’t until later I realized someone had shoved a kitchen chair under my ass. I used every ounce of fiber in my soul to breathe, breathe deep! There was a fine line, I knew, between deep breathing and hyperventilating, so I tried to regulate it as the Al Pacino guy got into it with Brian.
“Listen, you fucking juicer. You’re on our turf, you play by our rules. We’re only letting you stay here because you’re helping us with a job, but we’d kick you to the fucking curb in a second with your balls in your mouth if we didn’t need anything from you.”
“Duji,” Lytton said warningly. “Can it. Mr…Brian here is welcome to stay as long as he wants.”
Duji backed off, but not without rattling his pool stick menacingly. “Keep your fucking mouth shut around ladies.”
“It’s all right,” I panted, trying to clear the bubbles from the air around me. My forehead was dripping wet, rushing like a waterfall right down my face and neck. “I can handle the truth. I’ll just believe it when I see it, Brian.”
“That’s fine!” cried Brian. “Live in fantasyland all you want! All it takes is one little call to my buddy Rick and—”
Lytton snapped, “Enough, you fucking inebriated dipso.” To me, he said soothingly, “We’ll find out a lot more tonight, Bellamy. I’ll let you know if there’s another mechanic working in your shop. Just leave it up to me. In fact, I’ve got to go. Duji, keep an eye on this…Brian. Don’t let him call anyone else until we iron this out.”
But it didn’t iron out. It remained totally crinkled, crumpled, and confused the entire night. Neither Lytton nor Knoxie called, and Maddy and I had several too many QuiQuis. I’m not sure if they helped or hastened the onset of an even bigger breakdown.
In retrospect, this was the breakthrough I needed, not a breakdown. I couldn’t possibly have gone on denying what Shakti had done to me. Only a true delusional wingnut would do that, and I was neither. I was just a seeker trying to save herself. And I had found a twisted, wicked man to believe in. No one could tell me that until I saw it myself.
He had thrown me out along with those other hammered juicers. And I was old enough to vote.
I did manage to fall asleep in Maddy’s guest room. Her rooms were so spacious, airy, and full of the night stars, it was pretty much impossible to feel bad there, but I did. I just could not get Brian’s fucking pronouncement out of my head.
Not one of The Bare Bones denied that Brian had talked to this Rick. Not even Duji tried to claim that Brian was lying. Duji only told Brian he’d be rubbing his own lucky charm if he kept talking about Rick and the phone call.
It must be true. I was nothing to Shakti. Or he was enacting a new form of therapy where I might find enlightenment by reliving my abandonment issue—oh, fuck that! He’s just a nasty, selfish bastard. He was the narcissistic, self-involved user looking out for Number One!
In a half-asleep state, over and over various flashes came to me. Shakti urging me to sit in his lap. “Only through penetration can you achieve an acceptance of who you are, a higher awareness of your true one-ness.” Contrary to his reputation as the “sex guru,” he wasn’t a terribly potent guy. Hundreds of times I had seen him with a limp dick. He seemed unashamed that he’d be sitting there with his stupid Buddha belly, letting it all hang out, his trouser snake looking more like a snail, all curled up placidly while young naked women romped and exercised. To make up for this physical lack, this is where I think he got off “manipulating” women’s genitals, massaging their chakras or whatever godforsaken shit I had taken as the word of God for so long.
If he wanted to get rid of me, if he had tired of me as a chosen one, why didn’t he just tell me? I’d seen him replace plenty of chosen ones over the years. Never me. The outcasts just went back out onto the farm and into new jobs. There was no shame in it. Maybe they were just too old.
I tried to shake these nauseating images. Strangely, I found myself replacing images of Shakti’s limp noodle with an image of Knoxie Hammett leaning back on his couch. His hand holding the cigarette lay across that taut six-pack, and his eyes were so clear and topaz-blue, I knew he could never lie to me. When he stabbed out the cigarette his pec rippled richly, and I remembered my mouth actually watering. I’d been responding to him, and hadn’t even known it. Now all I wanted to do was twine my fingers around the back of his neck, taste his sweat, and run my tongue down his clean-shaven throat.
That was the last thing I needed. Another man.
Now I was stuck with these delectable images. I might have even been getting sexually aroused—I wouldn’t really know, not being that in tune with my own “chakras,” my own cravings. I gave up trying to sleep. I got out of bed and went down the hall. There were so many damned halls in Maddy’s McMansion, I still got lost even when completely sober, which wasn’t the case now.
I wound up navigating like a juicer on a cruise ship, going from cabin to cabin, feeling doors and knobs. My goal was vaguely the kitchen where I thought one more tequila drink—maybe just a shot or two straight this time—would help me. God fucking damnit. If I ever assimilate back into mainstream society I’m going to become a fellow alkie like the ones on my bus.
I headed toward a light like some sudden heart attack victim. That had to be the kitchen, as I felt I’d gone up and down the right amount of steps. However, as I drew near the open door, I saw the corner of a polished wooden desk. Bookcases told me this was the den of an educated guy, a man who had gotten his high school diploma, unlike me.
This was Ford’s office, and he was back from his border run. Oh Jesus, he had Maddy on her back on his desk and he was fucking her till the cows came home.
I should have left immediately, of course, but for some reason I was transfixed. I guess I wanted to see how others “penetrated.” I clung to the doorjamb holding my breath. There was no way they were going to hear me anyway, but I held my breath in shock.
It was absolute assault, the way Ford was fucking her.
With great swings of his hips, he slammed his cock inside her. Not only was she not fighting him, she appeared to accept or maybe even like it. Her bare feet were cinched around the backs of his thighs, and she was wide open for him, her arms flung around his wide, dark-skinned, tattooed back.
But all I could see was assault, violation.
They grunted in tandem. Every time Ford would slam his muscular hips into her, air would be expressed from her lungs. He jolted the huge, heavy desk with his thrusts, almost moving the big piece of furniture with each jab. The only time I’d seen such violent fucking was during one of my therapy sessions, and it all came flooding back to me.
Shakti had been the first on top of me. He’d pounded away at me while I lay like a defenseless blob of jelly, because that was the way to acceptance. “I am here to wake you up!” he shouted joyously while stabbing my dry vagina with his spear. “You are awake in every sense of the word, accepting my body unto yours!”
But after pounding for about ten long, agonizing minutes during which I am sure he scraped off flesh from the inside of my canal, Shakti leaped off and encouraged some other men. “Go for it!” he urged joyously. Horrified, I watched as a three-hundred-pound disciple eagerly whipped off his dashiki. His tiny little tool bobbed nearly invisibly beneath his hanging gut, and I didn’t know how he was going to complete the act, but he did—by pressing my ankles down on either side of my neck.
I felt I was being split in two from the previous onslaught and now this. I could not scream or cry out, of course. That would only encourage Shakti to spur the men on. It would show I was resisting, not breaking down my inner psychic walls. So I gritted my teeth so hard my jaw was sore for days afterward. The huge man grunted just like Ford was now grunting, and I suppose my brain made an association between the two. The h
uge man pounded away at me, and I allowed myself to sob with relief when he apparently expended himself fairly quickly. He reeked of baby powder, probably just having come from some massage. He writhed greasily against me like a barrel of lard. I fought to keep my meager breakfast—probably of oatmeal—down in my stomach.
There were more waiting to take his place.
There was actually a line forming of men willing to put effort into enlightening me. “Step on up!” Shakti cried happily. “She’s just an empty vessel waiting to be filled. You don’t need to worry about birth control with this one. She’s an empty urn, open to all comers. Help beat away her defenses—bring her to a state of complete surrender, like a newborn babe.”
I remember even holding my breath when a grossly smelly man mounted me. A hot, thick trickle flooded my ass crack, and I put my fingertips to it. I remember rubbing my fingers against the prickly carpet. Blood. I was fucking bleeding from the pounding I was receiving, and no one cared. It was cathartic. It was life-changing. That was for sure.
Of course I didn’t question it at the time. But now, holding myself up by Ford’s office door, it all came rushing back to me. Shakti, squatting there in his fucking soft angora cap, his sinister eye patch slung around his skull. A seeker had lashed out at him when he’d attempted some therapy, some said when he had attempted to reenact a sodomy trauma from the guy’s childhood. The seeker had grabbed a pen and stabbed Shakti in the eye, thus the patch, to remind him that not all humans could be redeemed.
Shakti, urging the men on. “Another one! She hasn’t reached the point of truly yielding, true submission! Thump her with your spiritual reality. Padmi! You ready for a try? Bulsara! Get on up!”
I was cleaved in two like some cut of meat hanging from a butcher’s hook. Not only was I being raped into submission, I would never be able to put the pieces together again.
I found myself in a puddle of limbs on the floor, gripping the doorjamb, sobbing. Real tears now poured down my face. I had not cried since my father had flown away one last time to LA. It was not a sensation I cared to feel ever, ever again. The tears were hot as burning lava because they’d been pent up for so many years, boiling inside my head.
I wasn’t angry at my father for leaving. Not anymore. I was angry at Shakti for having allowed me to be violated in that way.
And oddly, I felt healthier, more fully whole, than I had in years. I was reclaiming those lost parts of myself, tying some of the remote sections of myself back together.
And I bawled like a baby. “Knoxie! I want Knoxie!”
I remember Maddy suddenly appearing on her knees next to me, trying to hold together the open side of her shirt, not doing a good job of it. Her ample boobs spilled forth, and she was like a comforting earth mother as she pulled my hands away from clawing at her wood.
“Bella? What’s wrong? Why do you want Knoxie?”
Ford was standing somewhere up there, stuffing his cock into his jeans, cinching his belt. “I’ll get Knoxie. She wants Knoxie, I’ll get Knoxie.”
“But why Knoxie?” Maddy asked softly. “Honey, why Knoxie? What’s wrong? How can Knoxie help?”
I really had no idea why I was literally sobbing for Knoxie. I barely knew the guy. It took me days, weeks maybe, to figure that out.
But when I did, that’s when I really started to regain my sense of self.
CHAPTER EIGHT
KNOXIE
It was a bad enough fucking job, trying to pull that fucking Safeway truck over.
Highway 17 was a big slab and it wasn’t easy to run a big-ass eighteen-wheeler off onto the shoulder without causing a few spin-outs of other cagers. Whoever the driver of the Safeway truck was, he was on the defensive from the get-go and determined not to let any bikers stop him from his appointment at Bihari.
Knoxie Hammett was going to stop him.
Riding point, Knoxie had to cane it, lane splitting like a motherfucking arrow. As he stitched a line between cagers, someone driving a metallic blue box nearly spun out, but Knoxie kept flogging it, sneaking in front of the grocery semi and showing the driver his wheel. Little by little, the driver had no choice but to slow down. With Lytton and Turk as tail gunners flanking the truck’s rear axle, Ziggy Fulton driving the chase cage behind them, eventually the guy had to pull onto a soft shoulder.
But man, was he pissed.
As Knoxie removed his brain bucket, he could already tell the driver—a beaner with a Virgin of Guadalupe statue swinging from his rearview mirror—was fuming and swearing to his co-pilot in the passenger seat. In the side window, the hayseed naco driver even had his last name, Presención, in metallic lettering next to the usual Tweety bird and Mexican flag stickers. Dumb fuck. Announcing he was, or worked for, the Presención cartel via a sticker was a pretty lame brained stunt to start with, so Knoxie was already predisposed to hate the guy.
As Knoxie approached, his hand on the Glock stuck into his waistband at the small of his back, the guy unrolled his window about one and a half inches to yell, “Gabacho! Why the fuck are you forcing me over?”
Turk and Lytton were each coming around a side of the truck, Lytton on Knoxie’s side. Lytton made no bones about showing his iron menacingly, but the naco didn’t look any more afraid when he glanced in a mirror and saw it.
“Queremos inspeccionar su carga.” We want to inspect your cargo.
“¿Por qué? ¿Quién te ha enviado?” Why? Who has sent you?
“Nadie me ha enviado. Soy un ladrón de caminos.” No one has sent me. I am a highway robber.
The naco threw up his hands and swore some more about pendejos and gabachos and people’s mothers being whores. Knoxie tossed his head at Lytton to indicate he should go and throw the latch on the rear truck doors. Knoxie didn’t want to get into it with the beaners, but he needed to make sure they didn’t reach for their pieces either. Mild-mannered Safeway drivers wouldn’t need to run with semiautomatic hardware, but this naco with his cartoon Calvin pissing sticker and his virgin statue wasn’t mild or well-mannered. He even had metallic lettering telling the whole world he was from Sinaloa state, home of notorious gangsters and, more recently, poppy fields as far as the eye could see. Lytton had been telling Knoxie for years how, since the increasing legalization of marijuana in the States, the Mexicans had been ripping out their pot fields and replacing the plants with heroin poppies. It was the only profitable crop these days.
Knoxie hoisted himself up on the running board, the better to glare at the naco. He was wearing one of those powder blue polyester shirts that made the wearer resemble a member of a mariachi band. Knoxie noted a crushed, empty box of Tylenol on the console between the naco and the other courier. When he saw it was PM, he couldn’t resist shooting,
“¿Toma pastillas para dormer y maneja?” Do you often take sleeping pills while driving?
“Sólo para evitar idiotas como usted.” Only to avoid seeing idiots like you.
Suddenly something hit Knoxie.
Bellamy, bitterly saying, “I was hardly in any gutter snorting cheese heroin.” Suspicious, Knoxie had recalled that cheese heroin was made of this Grade A-1 horse from Sinaloa, usually drenched in pesticides, and mixed with powdered Tylenol PM.
He banged on the window glass with the barrel of his Glock. Cars zipped past on the highway, but he knew from experience that drivers rarely paid attention to anything going on around them, even bandits with guns. “Lower the window. You got any more of those sleeping pills?” He tried to sound casual, even friendly, when he really wanted to put his barrel to the naco’s temple.
It worked. Some of the anger fell from the idiot’s face and voice. “Yes. We got a whole box from Costco in Phoenix. You want a bottle?”
“Yes. Hand me one.”
The naco had to slip his hand under the curtain of his sleeper cab. Knoxie made a big show of sliding back the action on his Glock to chamber a round, and angling the barrel at the guy’s brains. No funny business would be allowed in here.
The curtain was knocked ajar just enough for Knoxie to briefly glimpse a fucking Bible, of all things. This irritated him beyond belief. He was already cynical of the crass hypocrisies of Catholicism. For this naco to be toting a Bible while transporting some sort of illegal drugs for a cult that enslaved and suppressed vulnerable women, well…
Knoxie snatched the stupid box of OTC drugs he didn’t even want from the moron’s hand just as Lytton strode back up the side of the truck toward the cab. Knoxie didn’t remove his barrel from the naco’s head while Lytton approached, his own Glock readied alongside his thigh.
Lytton lifted his chin. “You wanna ask this cholo in Mexcrement language why he’s transporting approximately twenty keys of Sinaloa White, not-so-swiftly hidden underneath a pallet of garbanzo beans?”
Through clenched teeth, Knoxie told the naco in Spanish, “I’m gonna need you to get out now.”
The naco swore under his breath to his partner while Turk, at the other window, motioned for the passenger to disembark, too. So the granola, the “knockout drops” the Bihari vagrant had rattled on about, was some form of heroin they’d been dosing people with, no doubt cheese heroin from the looks of the PMs. Rage flooded Knoxie so acidly he literally saw red. The scarlet-orange color rose in his field of vision like some theological flood, tinting everything he saw with the angry filter.
So when the naco started his slow-mo reach for the door handle, it was as though in a bad “south of the border” porno duro film. Knoxie smashed his torso flat against the door so he could control how fast the naco exited the vehicle. Lytton, too, warily pressed himself flat against the tire while gripping his Glock near his ear with the barrel pointed skyward.
“Despacio, naco, despacio,” Knoxie warned the hayseed.
But fatefully, the naco did not heed Knoxie. Maybe being a Presención, he had to do things the gangster way. Maybe he wasn’t going to give up his truckload of horse without putting up a fight. But the odds were already stacked against him, and when he made a sudden lunge for the console between the two seats, Knoxie was faster. He’d hadn’t killed a man since Special Ops, when he’d had a few confrontations with high value targets in the Persian Gulf. It was a no-brainer, anyway, at this point blank range—the guy was going for his iron, so Knoxie rested his wrists on the edge of the truck’s window and squeezed the trigger.
