by Les Edgerton
“Let’s call the cops,” Bud said.
“We can’t,” I said, the voice of reason.
“What? Why the fuck not?”
“Think about it, Bud. I broke parole. You think that’s a wise move, calling the cops? Cops like to check up on people, even victims. They got these computers they love to use.”
“Well, fuck. You mean I got to lose my money just because you did a stupid thing like break parole? You think that’s fair?”
He was just mad. I gave him a couple of minutes to think about it and calm down. He knew what being partners meant when it come down to it. He drank down the rest of his beer and mugged at the wall for a couple of minutes and then he said, “You’re right. We can’t call the cops. Wouldn’t do much good anyway. Guy’s long gone by now. He’s a pro.”
The bartender came up.
“Got a problem?”
“Yeah,” said Bud.
“No,” I said. “Everything’s fine and dandy. ‘Cept I need a job. Need another bartender?” One thing you learn when you outlaw for a living, you get a loss you cut it loose and go on. Nothing’s gained by crying about what might have been. Time for that shit when you’re old and sitting in a rocking chair and don’t have nothing else much to do ‘cept think about couldabeens.
Bartenders they was flush with, the guy said, “but you might could get on as a swamper. Guy we had quit just last night. Boss’s running an ad today. He’s in the back. Hang on, I’ll ask him.”
Turns out I was in the right place at the right time. The boss, Mr. Fryin Pan-ee, sounded like, one of those French names, hooked me up with an apron on the spot and a locker in the kitchen, gave me the lowdown on the job, which didn’t take five minutes. Roll over the tables, clean ‘em off when the parties leave, take out the garbage for the cooks, help out on the service bar when things got busy, any kind of shit work cook needs done, or the waitresses. Everybody’s your boss. The Black Angus was a steak and dance place, got busy at night when the families cleared out he said, the bartender nodding. Every time Mr. Fryin Pan-ee said something, the bartender, name of Joe, nodded his head up and down like the bossman was Elvis and he was one of the roadies.
“This is the hot spot in town,” the boss said. “We got us a killer band here, plays a lot of Seger stuff. You get minimum wage and the waitresses give you part of their tips. I catch you stealin’ I cut your nuts out. Don’t be fucking with the waitresses and definitely don’t be fucking with the customers. I catch you fucking with the customers, I cut your nuts out.”
There was some other general rules and regulations, same as you get anywhere and the penalty for each transgression seemed to be, “Do that and I cut your nuts out.”
I looked at Bud and he at me and I know we was both thinking the same thing—this guy’s got a thing for balls.
Going out the door—I had two hours before I had to report back for the night shift —Bud said, “You think he’s queer? He sure talks a lot about dicks and stuff.”
“Nuts, Bud. He didn’t say nothing about dicks. Just nuts.”
Bud grinned. “Oh, he’s a bisexual.”
Going back to the doctor to see if I had the clap was out of the question now. He’d expect to be paid and I didn’t want to chance what he’d do if we didn’t take care of the bill, being strangers and all. And Yankees.
First night we slept in the car out along the Dismal Swamp. We were both broke-dick dogs. Me from working my ass off, cleaning greasy plates and generally running around like I was in training for the Kitchen Olympics and Bud from the tenseness of his condition.
His condition put work on the back burner far as Bud was concerned. He looked, sorta, but couldn’t find anything. Almost got a job in a warehouse but the straw boss smelled booze on him and that was that. To be fair, he didn’t feel much like working. It was about all he could do, anticipating the next time he had to take Willie out. That kept his mind off employment, minor things like that. I told him, quit drinking beer like the doc said, you don’t have to go as often. It was all right, though. I was making enough for us both to get by.
The first day I sold my Mossberg and rifle to the night manager, Mexican guy named Jose, at the Angus and got us enough to get a cheap motel. Jose musta took a shine to me ‘cause he took me aside and told me he’d pay me cash every night first week, so’s we could get set up. It was tight, but it worked out and we began to settle in. I was going to go for a barber’s job as soon as we could get Louisiana licenses, only I had forgot about the parole violation thing and happily remembered it before I did something stupid like apply for one, have my ass show up on the Crime Computer Network, whatever they called it.
One thing I did, soon as I knew we had a place to stay and a few bucks. I went down and bought a postcard at a drugstore. It was a picture of Lake Charles—there was a lake in the middle of town that had the same name as the town—it was a picture off this bridge going over it and water-skiers and folks doing family shit like that down below—and I sent it off to Donna.
I wrote on the back: “Dear Donna, How are you? I am fine, down here in the Deep South. I have got a position at a fine restaurant and night club. They made me an assistant manager right off. You’d be proud of me. I miss you. I tried to kill myself. Ha. Ha. I have been thinking about you and still love you, Donna. I hope we can still have a future.” I signed it, “Best Wishes and All My Love, Jake.”
I thought a minute, sucking on the ballpoint top, then added:
“P.S. You shouldn’t have done that to the baby.”
CHAPTER 9
Dumb, dumb, dumb!
First rule of scoring with the ladies: Don’t make the first move.
Second rule: If you break the first rule, forget the lady and go on to someone new. She’s got you by the short hairs and you’re in for a long, rough ride of heartache and misery.
I didn’t care. Try as I could, I just couldn’t shake Donna, get her out of my mind. I had to face it, she owned me, my mind anyway and whatever else you got will follow what goes on upstairs. Time after time, I thought on it and kept coming up with the same thought. I’d rather be miserable with or without her than be happy with someone else. Dumb? Sure. But your dick ain’t got an I.Q. and neither does your heart. Maybe they’re one and the same, sometimes I guess they are, and sometimes they aren’t. I mean, I think that thing everybody calls love is maybe just more than sex, although sometimes that’s all it is but there were times, like with Donna, I could just lay there looking in her brown eyes and not even be thinking about sex with her, just wanting to smell her breath. She has this little chip on one of her front teeth that drives me crazy. I’d lay on the floor staring at her, both of us stretched out and just mug for hours into those eyes, the whole time aching for a peek at that tooth. I knew all I had to do was crack a joke and she’d smile and I’d see it but I’d play it out forever, holding back the jokes, whatever, until I couldn’t stand it any longer and then, man! I couldn’t hold back any longer, would say something funny and she’d grin and there was that tooth with that tiny little chip in the corner. In some ways, that kind of stuff was ten times better’n sex. Man! Sometimes I don’t even understand my own screwy self.
“Who you sending that to?” Bud said, when I got back in the car. “That broad’s got you all fucked up?”
“Sometimes you got a big nose,” I said.
“Good thing I ain’t got big tits,” he came back with. “You’d be mailing me love notes alla time, then.”
I got home the next morning there was a dog in my bed. A fucking German Shepherd, big as a sofa.
“Get the fuck out of there!” I yelled at him and grabbed the skin on his neck and pulled him off. He didn’t want to come but I got him down.
“Where the hell did this dog come from?” I screamed at Bud, laying on the other bed. He was smoking a doobie. I didn’t ask him where he got it or where he got the money for it. Should have figured he was holding out on me but for some reason it didn’t piss me off. That dog did though. I hate fr
iggin’ dogs. Ever since that time at the Out of Towner Motel in South Bend when the cop sicced his mutt on me after I was cuffed. Fucking dog bit my back through a jacket, a wool shirt, a t-shirt and I lay on my stomach for two days in the cell before they sent me over to the hospital for stitches.
“I don’t know,” Bud said, staring at the TV where an old Lucy show was going on, Lucy and Ethel on some kind of production line, dressed up in white chef’s hats and aprons and the cupcakes or whatever they were supposed to be icing, going haywire, falling off the line all over the place. “He was outside the door and seemed hungry so I let him in. He likes beer.”
Plus, he’s got the radio on. Some Top Forty bullshit. I hate Top Forty. I’d rather listen to country, hillbilly shit than Top Forty. Talk radio. I’d rather listen to talk radio. I turned it off and Bud didn’t even seem to notice.
The goddamn dog was stoned, I could see that in a second, and kept wanting to sniff my crotch. I hate that, stupid dogs.
“His name’s Spot.”
I looked at the dog and gave him the knee as he was trying for my balls again. I didn’t see any spots on him. He was mostly dark brown with a gray ring around his neck and he had one blue eye and one brown one. Fucked-up looking dog if you ask me. Now he was trying to lick my face. Disgusting things, dogs. First they lick your balls and then they try to lick your face. Makes you really want to hang with a dog, you know?
“Hey, don’t hurt him,” Bud said, when I kicked Spot in the slats. The dog didn’t even whimper even though I cracked him pretty good. Must have been used to being kicked. Bud whistled, or tried to, it was a pretty sick whistle and the dog came over to him. He scratched his ears and talked baby talk to him. It’s disgusting, the way some people are with dogs. This dog smelled too. He was making my stomach roll.
“Dogs are better’n broads, Jake, you know that? You gotta talk to broads after you fuck them, entertain ‘em. You talk to dogs, they don’t talk back, give you any shit, they listen to you like you’re God. Hey, wouldn’t it be great, find a babe like that!”
I thought about saying, Yeah, well you got a dog already, name of Kimmie but I didn’t. Say that, that is. It was true though. Bud’s girlfriend kind of looked like this dog. I wondered if he scratched Kimmie’s ears, talked baby talk to her. Maybe I’d ask him sometime. Sometime when I wanted a black eye.
“I hate dogs,” I said and went into the bathroom to get a beer. We still hadn’t got a cooler although we’d talked about it. Just kept the beer in the sink, got ice for it every once in a while from the motel ice machine down the hall. I saw there was something blue on the ice and then figured out Bud must have brushed his teeth. I rinsed the can of beer a long time before I popped the top.
“I had a dog just like this once,” Bud was saying, still slobbering over the mutt, kissing him back on the muzzle. Yech!
“Belonged to Marty Simmons.” he said. “You know Marty? He was the inmate librarian at Pendleton when we was there. We got cut loose the same time but Marty didn’t even last a day on the streets.”
He was wrestling with the dog now which I didn’t appreciate much. It made him smell even worse. The dog, not Bud. Well, Bud too. Bud went on about Marty Simmons.
“We get off the bus in Fort Wayne and Marty’s not there five minutes he swipes a newspaper from the stand. ‘Course, with his luck the lady behind the counter spies him and calls the cops and there musta been a coffee shop just around the corner ‘cause they were there in twenty seconds flat. I offer to pay for the paper but they must have had a hard-on ‘cause they say fuck no, we’re taking him in. Get us another ex-con off the streets says the other one, his partner. ‘Bud,’ Marty says to me, they’re leading him away in cuffs. ‘Go by my old lady’s house and get my dog. She says I don’t show up and get him she’s taking him to the pound.’ Well, I did what he said, went by his old lady’s house—it was only three blocks away like he said—and sure enough she had this German Shepherd she was taking care of till Marty got out. He was right too—she said he didn’t come by that very day she was shipping him off to the pound. I got the dog and took him home. Great pet. Had that dog for almost six months before he got hit by a bus.”
“So how come Simmons didn’t get him when he got out?” I couldn’t believe stealing a newspaper would keep Marty behind bars for long.
“Oh, he got whacked. In the jail. They were just about ready to cut him loose—they just wanted to fuck with him a little on account of him being an ex-con. When I went down there to see if he was getting cut loose, the cop who’d busted him, the little one, was there. He was laughing. Said Simmons was dead, wouldn’t be snatching any more newspapers. Seems he got iced by a big fag-junky who got offended when Marty didn’t want to get romantic. Cut his throat with a double-edge razor blade match-welded onto a toothbrush.”
We’d both seen that little trick plenty of times.
“You know how it is in city lockup, Jake. Jail’s fucking worse than the joint, kind of trash you get in there.”
He was right on with that statement. The problem with jails, city, county, it don’t matter, is that lots of the guys you run into have just been thrown in there and are still drunk or high or whatever. In the joint, most of the guys have settled down, got the chemicals out of their system. Plus, there’s ways to avoid trouble, better than there is in most lockups where everybody’s put together in one big bullpen.
“So anyway, I end up keeping Marty’s dog. His name was Spot too. I seen this dog and it was like déjà vu. Maybe it’s the original Spot, looks a lot like him. You think dogs get reincarnated like Hindus do?”
I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I couldn’t say much though. The room was half Bud’s.
“Just keep him the fuck away from me,” I warned. “And give him a bath. He stinks.”
There was something on Bud’s mind he wanted to talk about, it seems. He was getting antsy. Unable to find work, unable to work even if he did find something, he laid around the motel room all day. He couldn’t even drink beer with the dose he was getting over. Only he did. The doc had said the symptoms might last a couple or three days. He drank anyway or tried to. Swig down two, three swallows and then he’d be in the john, sweat popping out on his forehead when he tried to squeeze a few drops out. I was getting tired of his bitching and moaning all the time. Now, if it wasn’t Bud whining, it was the dog. Picture all this in a room not much bigger than my cell back in the joint. I guess I was getting testy.
“You an alcoholic, Bud? Just lay off that stuff another day or two and you’ll be fine. Wise up. Listen to what the doc told you. Take your dog out for a run, make you feel better. A good long run, maybe for about a week. See if you can lose him maybe.
“Fucking dogs, anyway. My first bust a dog fucked me up. We’d just hit a bar—I think it was the fifth or sixth place that night and we’ve got TVs, cases of whiskey, rolls of quarters, all kinds of shit in the car. That was a great car, too.” I stopped my story for a minute thinking about that car. It was a ‘62 T-Bird, burgundy with a white leather interior. Class machine.
“It’s about four in the morning and we decide to call it quits. I’m taking Rat and DuWayne home and I was stopped at a red light at the corner of Ironwood and Lincoln Way, going south.
“This car comes around the corner behind us, back where Martin’s Supermarket is and the light is flashing. It could have just been a taillight out or something like that but with all the stuff in the car I didn’t feel like taking a chance. Besides, this was when the South Bend Police Department had all the Larks. Remember that?”
Somebody sapped the South Bend P.D. into buying these Studebaker Larks for patrol cars. Anybody remembers the Lark remembers they were total dogs on wheels. Six-bangers that could get up to fifty with a good tailwind maybe so long’s they had twenty minutes to unwind. Outlaws all over town, professionals and amateurs, had a field day with those pooches. Kids would squeal their tires in front of one of them and pull away in second gear. The cops hated t
hem. Couldn’t catch a bicycle with more than two speeds. The chief of police that okayed buying them got laughed out of office next election and they just scrapped the whole entire fleet, bought Fords with Police Interceptors under the hood. It was nice while it lasted, though. Sweet.
“I took off from this turkey and hit the railroad track across the street—you know where it goes almost straight up?—and went airborne on the other side. I got a look at the speedometer just before we hit the top of that hill and it was already pegged over a hundred.
“We come down and all you seen was sparks but I kept my foot on the gas and we’re going down the street at one-twenty, although it coulda been faster—that’s just what it said on the speedometer.
“Ironwood narrows down there because of the residential neighborhood, stop signs every single block but I run them all.
“That’s when DuWayne—he’s in the back seat—starts screaming, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ I look back and he’s got tears running down his cheeks and I said, ‘Hey, DuWayne, there’s the door. You want out go ahead.’
“I tell Rat and him to get down on the floor and DuWayne hits it so fast I thought he went out the door after all but he only fell to the floor crying and sobbing like he probably did when he was two and somebody stole his lollipop. I think he peed his pants too. There was something in the air wasn’t burning rubber.
“All this time we’re smoking down Ironwood. I got the peg buried and the cop is so far behind us I can’t even hardly see his lights anymore. Just then I see red lights up ahead of us, reflected in the sky.
“‘They called ahead,’ Rat says, like I can’t see the same thing he does. ‘This is close to my house,’ he says. ‘Turn there! I’ll get us out of here.’ Only it’s not the right street—it’s a dead end which we find out at the end of a very long block and now we can see the flashes of the cops’ lights and they’re close.
“We got to hit it on foot,” I said. “Grab what you can.” We all hit the silk. I grabbed a money bag had rolls of quarters and took off across a lawn. I could see a woods behind it. Where Rat and DuWayne went I didn’t have a clue. Time like that it’s every man for himself.
