Love and Other Wounds

by Jordan Harper

  “Don’t go.”

  See, there was some of that honesty she showed me on the floor last night.

  “Why not?” She hugged herself tight again.

  “I need you. I need shelter, don’t you see?”

  “You hiding from a man?”

  She laughed.

  “I suppose you could say it that way. I prefer calling him a low-down son of a bitch.”

  “And what’s this son of a bitch want with a pretty little lady like yourself?”

  “Can’t you guess it?” She stood up in all her glory. “The dummy thinks we’re still in love.”

  She’s right. It’s a story I can believe. That don’t mean I do, just yet.

  “This dude got a name?”

  “Cole.”

  “Cole? Just plain old Cole? Like Slash or Cher?”

  “That’s all I know to call him.”

  “That’s all you know? And you’re his woman?”

  “Was. As of last night, I’m all my own again.”

  She’d met him in Tulsa, she said, and picked up with him and his boys. Bikers—called themselves the Iron Horde. That name meant something to me from stories I’d heard from some of my meaner customers. Oklahoma boys who moved Nazi dope up and down I-44.

  “Cole weren’t a Nazi,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m not saying the boys are Nazis. The dope is. You ain’t never heard of Nazi meth? Some good old boy from around these parts, around twenty years ago, he went over to the library over at the local college and found the recipe that the Nazis had for cooking up amphetamines back in World War Two. It’s the premier recipe for Ozarks meth. Our little contribution to that world.”

  She nodded, like something in her head just clicked. She pulled her purse close to her and then stood up to pull on her leather pants. It pained me to see her do it, even if it was fun to watch.

  “I don’t know about Nazi dope,” she said. “What I do know is I’ll take a whole lot of lip off a man if he’s as much fun as Cole was, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let him put his hands on me. Last night, Cole had a little bike trouble; the ride had gotten real bumpy. We were all pulled over on the side of the exit, just where the highway is up the road?”

  I nodded to let her know I knew where she meant. That was only a quarter mile from here.

  “Well, I asked Cole when we’d be heading back to Oklahoma. Now, I’d ridden with him long enough to know that I came in a weak second place to that bike of his. But I guess I never saw it in him to smack me around like that.”

  She touched the side of her face, turning it toward me to examine. It looked flawless to me.

  “And that was that, huh?”

  “I jumped the guardrail and marched through a couple of yards and then saw your place and grabbed that there barstool and figured I’d start up a new life right then and there.”

  “Is that what you figured? You didn’t walk into here like a woman on the run. You walked in like a goddamn cannonball.”

  She smiled.

  “Ain’t you ever cut free of something and it made you feel wild?”

  Not for a while, would be the truth of it. Not since I walked out of the life and into this bar. But the way she said it, and the way she looked, made me think that maybe I could do it again.

  “Think that motorcycle man is still looking for you? That why you don’t want for me to leave?”

  She stepped closer, put a hand on my arm. The whiteness of her made my skin look dirty.

  “You ever dump a mean son of a bitch?”

  I pushed her hand away and grabbed onto the bar.

  “Is he coming? Is that why you’re here?”

  “I figured if he was coming, he’d come right away. It wasn’t until I thought it was safe that I made my move with you. You see?”

  I did. I saw that Jackie Blue’s was on a back road, and while it might be the first place you’d find on foot, it’d be real easy to miss from the road, especially if Springfield weren’t your town. And I saw that she knew that, and that she hadn’t given that fellow near enough time to give up on her before the two of us got busy. But I also saw that it’d been near fifteen hours since she came through the door, and even as fine as she was, fifteen hours is longer than a man could look for a woman with his buddies in tow.

  “If he were coming, he’d’a been here by now,” I said. “So there ain’t no harm in me running to get us some breakfast. You can keep laying low here, and then the two of us can sit and figure out what the next part of your grand adventure is going to be once you leave here.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  I wanted to run across the room and mash myself to her. I wanted to sell the bar and buy a bike and see how far across the planet it could get us. I wanted to shave the gray out of my hair and step back into my old boots and stomp and steal for enough money for us to last forever.

  “Yeah,” I told her. “That’s what I want.”

  I drove over to the Pancake House and ordered up some grub. I picked up a paper and took a seat, turning straight to the editorial page to read the letters from the loonies. There was one about how abortion stops a beating heart, one about how the school board was trying to teach kids evolution, or, as the letter put it, “from goo to you via the zoo.” The last letter was about how the Ten Commandments needed to be posted up in every school. All three quoted the Bible in the first paragraph.

  “Jackie?”

  I looked up and there was Pinkle. Don Pinkle, that is, looking every bit the methed-out redneck that he was. He stood there dope skinny with a sad, scraggly goatee and bags under his eyes that looked like full-grown slugs. If he’d slept in forty-eight hours, it had been forty-eight hours ago. He flashed me a smile, but that isn’t the right word, because there wasn’t nothing flashing in that meth mouth of his. Teeth yellow and orange and brown like dry dog food. He came by the bar some nights with some of the boys, every once in a while getting on a construction crew to get an honest dollar, which must have felt lonely and out of place in his wallet. He never tipped on a drink, not once.

  “Pinkle,” I said like it was the whole conversation, and tried to get back to my newspaper. But he wasn’t having it.

  “Went by the bar last night.”

  “Did you now?”

  “Wasn’t open.”

  I dropped the paper, seeing as it was clear he wasn’t going away.

  “Now, Pinkle, don’t you think I know that?”

  “Knocked on the door and everything.”

  “Trust in your senses, son. We were closed.”

  “Thought I heard voices,” he said, scratching a scratched-up face. His nostrils stood out bloodred and ragged against the trout belly of his skin. “That’s why I knocked, see. But nobody answered.”

  “Heard voices? You? You can’t tell me that hearing voices is some sort of strange occurrence in your life. Not with the shit you’ve got floating in that lump of gristle you probably call a head. I bet it sounds like happy hour in there most times.”

  “I thought maybe you were in there with someone, is all,” he said, trying to give me a saucy look.

  I stood up fast and took pleasure in how he scurried back a few steps. Sometimes folks forget just how big I am, or what I used to be able to do. Sometimes I forget myself.

  “And I thought,” I said, “that what I do in there or don’t do is exactly one hundred percent none of your goddamn business. Care to tell me how I got so misled about that?”

  Just then a waitress called out, saying Pinkle’s food was ready and that mine was getting bagged up.

  “That’s a whole lot of food for a body,” he said as the waitress put my two bags on the counter. “Got yourself a tapeworm?”

  “Got something to plug that hole I’m getting ready to stomp into your head?” I asked back.

  “Not meaning to aggravate you,” he said, holding up his palms.

  So I took a few deep breaths and told myself that the dumb twidderpated
motherfucker was too stupid to barely breathe, much less know when to leave well enough alone.

  I was wrong, it turns out. Pinkle really is stupid, just not as stupid as I gave him credit for. Not that I figured it out by his next move, which was to try to pay for his breakfast with a hundred-dollar bill. It was early yet and of course the joint couldn’t handle that, so I groaned and paid for his while mine was still being put together. I didn’t even ask where he’d gotten the hundred. I didn’t want to know.

  “Could you throw in a dollar extra?” he asked me with a sheepish grin. “I need me some quarters.”

  “You need to be laying off that dope,” I told him, but pushed the quarters across anyway. “And you need to not think about setting foot in Jackie Blue’s until you’re ready to pay me back, hear?”

  He grabbed his food and hotfooted out the door. I went back to the waitress, who was kind of cute, and gave her a wink. Well, the goat had really woke up, hadn’t he?

  “Some dude, huh?”

  “Yeah, people suck,” she said. “Bank on it.”

  “Rosy disposition.”

  God, I wish I knew what it was about girls with too much eyeliner and a bad attitude that got to me. Then I thought of Jolene grabbing the brass pole that ran under the bar and I knew that I was good to go again.

  “Mister,” she said, pushing my bag of food over to me, “work the night shift at a diner some time, and then you can tell me about how great people are. Especially people like that one.”

  I was about to tell her about how I worked a bar and knew how people could be when it struck me that there was something strange in the way she’d said “like that one.”

  She stressed the that like she could still see him, so I turned around, and there he was at the gas station across the street, jabbering into a pay phone. I didn’t like that. And then I remembered that hundred-dollar bill, and I liked it all even less. There was plenty of ways that a man like Pinkle could get some cash money, none of them nice. But to have a fresh hundred to spend on breakfast at the end of a binge, that didn’t set right. It was probably nothing, I thought, but decided I’d walk over there and see what he had to say. And then he looked up and saw me crossing the street and dropped the phone. A piece of paper fluttered to the ground in his wake.

  A big semi rolled past the road and by the time it passed, Pinkle had a good head start, and besides, I wasn’t going to win no footrace with a meth head. I stopped at the phone and picked up the paper scrap. Then I dropped the breakfast. There was an out-of-town phone number scrawled on it, with one word under it.

  Cole.

  The chopper was a beauty, all silver fire and wheels. It slouched in front of the front door of Jackie Blue’s, which hung open. The wood around the doorknob was splintered like someone had kicked it open. He couldn’t have been there long. Less than ten minutes had passed since Pinkle made his call. In fact, when I climbed out of the truck I could still hear the bike’s engine ticking. Then that sound was ripped out of my ears by a scream coming out the door. I ran inside, my fists balled at my sides, hoping he didn’t have a gun.

  He probably had a gun.

  The inside of the bar looked like someone had picked the whole place up, turned it upside down, and given it a shake. The register was popped open and the cash drawer hung crookedly out, the shelf lifted to search out the underneath. Bottles had been shoved off the shelf, some of them breaking on the floor. A cloud of booze stung my eyes and plugged my nose. All this came to me out of the sides of my mind. Right there in the foreground was a big old boy with an arm inked with jailhouse tats wrapped around Jolene’s throat. His other hand muffled the screams with his palm. Jolene’s eyes bulged out over his hand, and her own hands didn’t fight his but instead clutched her black leather purse.

  “Just stand back there, pops,” he said with an Oklahoma twang. “Keep a cool head and we can all walk out of this.”

  “Funny words coming from a man just trashed my bar.”

  He barked a little laugh at that.

  “Brother, I just got here. This little bitch,” and he gave her a shake for emphasis, “is the fucking source of all our troubles, yours and mine. I don’t know how she’s been playing you, but if I had to guess, I think I could. I know how she suckered me.”

  He took his arm away from her throat and cupped the crotch of her leather pants. She tried to say something through his other hand, but it kept it muffled.

  “Played me but good, brother, and now she’s playing you. When I came through that door she’d done cleaned your register out.”

  I took a step forward. The place was cleaned out, all right.

  “You really Jackie Blue?” Cole asked.

  For the first time in a long time, I said yes.

  He shook his head sort of sad like.

  “Well, that’s what I get for opening my big fat mouth. I done told this cooze enough stories about Jackie Blue back in the day to fill her head with ’em. See, my pops used to ride through here, and he always told me that back then the hardest man in the hills was Jackie Blue. And so when we’d ride by, I’d always have to tell this bitch here about it. I guess I might have oversold you and made Jolene here get some mighty bad ideas.”

  She tried to shake her head, but I could see it was true. She’d known just who I was the moment she’d walked through the door. Makes sense. Lucky is just what you call someone when you don’t know how smart they are.

  “That may be,” I said, “but still all the same, if a gal wants to take her leave of you, it’s best to let ’em go without a fuss. What do you say?”

  He laughed and yanked Jolene’s purse out of her hands. He shook it and it dumped out on the floor, and first out came all my money that she stole and then came pinkish-white bricks, one two three.

  “Brother,” he said as I watched the Nazi dope pile on the floor, “it ain’t the leaving so much as the stealing that bothers me.”

  Well, damn.

  “All right,” I said. “I see it now. She done played you and then she played me. Figures. So you take what’s yours and get on out and we’ll call it a day. How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds fine,” he said, then turned to Jolene. “Scoop that shit up—leave Jackie Blue’s money—and let’s get going. Let you have one last ride before you get yours.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t get it. The lady stays.”

  He looked at me like I gone plumb crazy.

  “Jackie, I know she’s got a snatch like hot butter, but come on—this bitch is pure poison. You can’t want her to stick around after she tried to rob the both of us.”

  That’s so. But as much as I might like to see it, I can’t let him hurt her. See, even if it was partway, or even in total, a lie, that girl made me wake up last night—she made me see who I am.

  “Sorry, son,” I say to him. “But one way or another you’re taking your hands off her.”

  The fear hit his eyes and I thought it was going to be easy, but then the fear went away. At first I wasn’t sure why, but it’s that his young ears heard it before mine did. The sound of a group of motorcycles rolling down the road.

  “Now Jackie, I got all sorts of respect for you, but I got to think of my own rep too. Can’t let my boys think I got taken by a slut and a geezer.”

  He reached behind him and pulled a little flat pistol. He moved the girl in front of him, as a shield like. His boys were rolling into the lot. I had about fifteen seconds to make it right.

  I walked in stepping to the right, putting Jolene totally between us. That suited him fine, he thinks, as I’m not going to hurt the woman. But also it meant he can’t see me clear to shoot me. I took Jolene’s head in my hands—our eyes met and I laughed—and I slammed her skull straight back into Cole’s nose. He dropped and just for a second I stood holding Jolene by the head like I was getting ready to lay a Hollywood kiss on her. But instead I tossed her to the side so I could stomp Cole while he was down. Three times did nicely. Then I picked up the pistol w
ith my right and his shaggy greasy hair with my left and I dragged him to the door, just in time for his three buddies to come to full stops on their bikes. The dust swirled up and their engines roared and I stepped into the storm of it all, dragging Cole behind me. By God, I felt good.

  “Welcome to Jackie Blue’s,” I said.

  PLAN C

  Shit.

  Shit.

  Shit.

  Five people, plus me, here in the lobby. I’ve ushered the tellers from behind their stalls. One hot number in a green dress, one cow-eyed woman with a cat on her coffee mug. So that’s two. Three is this wrinkled old fart in a sweat-stank security guard uniform. Four is the lone customer, some kid wearing a leather jacket, black like mine. Number five is Mister Suit, Mister Push the Button, Mister Brains All over the Fucking Floor. I told him in and out in two minutes and no one gets hurt.

  I told him. Maybe he was a little hard of hearing. Don’t push the button. He pushed the button. So I swabbed out his fucking earwax with a Q-Tip of the gods. If he’d listened, there wouldn’t be the five cop cars outside and I wouldn’t be playing eenie-meeny-miney-hostage. He pushed me to Plan B.

  The two teller women sob, the young guy looks like he wants to bad, and the old man sits with a look on his face like I got up every day of my life for this?

  “I don’t want to die,” the teller in green, the pretty one, says. She says it again.

  “Anybody here who does want to die?” I ask. “A show of hands. No one? Okay, we’ll just consider that a given from now on, so there’s no use saying it anymore. Behave and we all go home tonight.”

  The cop cars all face us, the doors open like wings and the cops crouching behind like baby birds. Baby birds with guns. And one’s got a bullhorn and he says something but the alarm is still ringing and there are glass doors between us so whatever he says comes out wah-wah-woh-wah like Charlie Brown’s teacher. It’s okay; I know what they’re saying: come out with your hands up and forget about that bag of money and we’ll overlook that capital murder charge puking blood on the floor behind you.

  Wah-woh-wah is right.

  All right, eenie-meeny-miney-moe to the green-dress teller. The cow-faced one looks relieved, like finally, not having a man look twice at her is paying off. Like every stay-at-home Saturday and second of loneliness was worth it. Because now she gets to have more of them.