She Rides Shotgun

by Jordan Harper

  “I guess you do,” she said.

  “I get the feeling they know that we’re coming, I get the idea you said a word to anyone about this, I come back to see you,” Nate said. “And you won’t see me coming.”

  “I say a word about this to anyone,” Charlotte said, “and dude, the line to get me will be long.”

  They let her go in front of her house. Polly watched her walk back to the door. How Charlotte looked back over her shoulder. How he looked back at her with that same hungry face of his that made Polly grab the bear tighter in her arms.

  “When you go rob them, you’re taking me, right?”

  “It’s not pretend, Polly. It’s men with guns who won’t stop themselves from hurting a little girl.”

  “There’s men with guns anyway. If you’re doing it I want to do it. I want to help.”

  “It’s dangerous,” he said.

  “You said it was dangerous everywhere for us. So we should be together. I want to help.”

  He didn’t talk for a while. He shot sideways eyes at her, breathed out a long slow breath.

  “Then you help.”

  “Okay,” Polly said. “But you have to tell me what to do. I never robbed anything before.”

  23

  SCUBBY

  SUN VALLEY

  Up until the moment the girl with the cherry soda hair and crazy blue eyes came to the door, Scubby considered himself a lucky man. At least for a suckmouth son of a bitch such as himself. Someplace in this wide world maybe there was a better job than official crank taster for the L.A. Nazi Dope Boys, but whatever that job was, Scubby didn’t want it. The way Scubby saw it, he was sitting prettier than the pope in Rome. Sure, that pontiff motherfucker had silk drawers and a billion people under his thumb, but he had to wear a silly hat and go to church every day. Scubby? He was doing what he loved.

  Check it out: Three lines of crystal lined up on the table. See how each one was a little different shade of white? This one paper white, this one snow, this one bone. Scubby had an eye for the little things. That was his job.

  A-Rod stood next to Scubby rubbing his row of blue thunderbolt tattoos. He liked to let his hands linger over the bolts when he thought Scubby was getting out of line. Just his cute little way of reminding Scubby that one of them was a killer and one of them wasn’t. Scubby knew A-Rod didn’t want him around. He knew that while A-Rod was king shit of the Nazi Dope Boys, he was just another peon in the Aryan Steel army. He knew A-Rod didn’t think he needed a crank taster but had been overruled by the boys inside. He knew A-Rod didn’t know all the angles. Scubby knew the angles.

  When the crank was cranking at the base of his spine, Scubby read everything. He read every article in the newspaper and then he read the ads, and the backs of cereal boxes and shampoo bottles, and the ingredients on the back of the kitty litter. He’d read about the War on Drugs, and methamphetamine, and how there was a three-way arms race afoot in the Southern California drug trade. The cops, the cartels, and the peckerwoods. Used to be back in the day, meth was a pretty easy cook. There were a couple different recipes, regional differences mostly. Then the government started cracking down. The feds outlawed ephedrine. Two things happened because of that. One was that down in Mexico where ephedrine was an easy find, they started cooking more meth. The other thing that happened was that the peckerwoods started finding other ways to cook. Back in the day there’d been smurfing. That’s where you’d go from gas station to gas station, grocery store to grocery store, and you’d buy every scrap of decongestant or antihistamine they had.

  Then the cops would change the laws again, and the cartels would shift their recipe, and the peckerwoods would shift theirs, like some sort of arms race. The Nazi Dope Boys moved major crank through Southern California. They brewed it out in the desert, outside Hangtree, where the law smiled on dirty whiteboys. He’d heard about slabs of concrete left in the desert by an army base, a town of RVs and Quonset huts, a desert meth plant to rival those of Mexico. They called it Slabtown. It was all under the thumb of some crazy sheriff named Houser who took a big bite to keep the Mexis out and keep the labs cooking. Houser was a dream come true for the whiteboys. Not even the cartels would consider hitting a cop, not on this side of the border.

  The meth came in from Slabtown through Odin’s Bastards. The bikers moved it into L.A., to A-Rod and the Nazi Dope Boys. They brought it to the Depot, the house in Sun Valley where Scubby at this moment was letting these thoughts run wild. From here the Nazi Dope Boys packed the dope and moved it up and down Southern California. To Fontucky, San Bernardino, up north to Ventura, all the way up to Bakersfield.

  Odin’s Bastards, the Dope Boys, everyone in the game, they all kicked up to Aryan Steel. A-Rod here carried two passports. He was a big-time shot caller for the Nazi Dope Boys, but he was a mere soldier for Aryan Steel. So if the Steel told him to employ a taster to figure out which cook out in Slabtown had the blue-ribbon recipe, that’s what he would do. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

  Scubby took down the paper-white line. Jagged broken glass up his nostril. The pain was a good sign. The First Law of Meth: for each burn, there is an opposite and equal rush.

  “Legit,” he said as firecrackers pop-pop-popped in his brain.

  The snow-white line was barbed wire pulled down his throat. Tears sheeted his eyes. He sang a snatch of “You Dropped a Bomb on Me.” A-Rod’s face killed the chorus half-sung.

  Scubby shook his head, made cartoon noises, picked up the bill to try the last line—

  Knock knock knock.

  A-Rod pulled up his shirt, showing a flat black pistol. Scubby gripped the table like the tornado was about to hit. Ghost cops flickered in the corners of his eyes. A-Rod waved the pistol like go on, get the door. Scubby spelled out fuck no with his face. A-Rod stopped waving the gun. He pointed it at Scubby. Looking down the barrel of a gun, you don’t see the tip of the bullet. You just see darkness, like a preview of eternity. Scubby went to the door. He pressed his eye to the peephole.

  A one-eyed teddy bear looked back at him.

  Methamphetamine psychosis. Too much crank piled on adrenaline had turned his brain into a fried candy bar.

  He went back to the peephole. Got a different angle. Looked down as far as he could. Saw the bear was stuffed in a backpack, its head sticking out the top. Saw the top of the head of the person wearing the backpack. This girl with Kurt Cobain eyes and hair like cherry soda.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s a girl,” Scubby said.

  “The hell you mean a girl?”

  “Like a teenage girl.”

  “That shit has turned your brain to snot,” A-Rod said. He pushed Scubby aside. He peeped the hole. He whistled. He said, “I’ll be damned.” He undid the four locks. He swung the door open, the gun behind his back.

  “Hello there, little lady,” A-Rod said. The way he said it made Scubby think of a honey-dipped knife. It must have been that way for the girl too, the way her face changed.

  “My dog ran away,” the girl said in a singsong. A-Rod tossed his pistol out of sight.

  “Oh no,” A-Rod said to the girl. “Your dog. He’s your buddy, I bet. Maybe I can help you.” Sirens went ahooga in Scubby’s brain as A-Rod undid the chain and swung the door open for the little girl.

  The world went action movie.

  The girl stepped aside and out of nowhere came this badass. Jailhouse swole, jailhouse tats, same crazy blue eyes as the girl. He had a sawed-off in his hands.

  A-Rod moved toward the badass. The badass swung the sawed-off so A-Rod and the shotgun butt smacked like a head-on on the highway. A-Rod’s nose burst. An arc of blood splashed itself across the coffee table, crisscrossing the last line of meth.

  The little girl pulled the bear out of the backpack. It fucking waved at Scubby. Methamphetamine psychosis still seemed viable as an explanation.

  A-Rod lay on the floor, his face a red mess. The badass moved to Scubby. Scubby saw himself reflected in t
he man’s eyes—no muscle tone, nostrils as red as a prison punk’s ass from all the rails he’d gakked down, the spreading patch of piss in his jeans—and knew the words no threat might as well be tattooed across his head.

  “What’s your name?” the man asked.

  “Scubby.”

  “Where’s the stash, Scubby?”

  “Don’t you tell them,” A-Rod said through a mouth full of red stew.

  “Coat closet,” Scubby said, nodding to it. A-Rod spit ugly words and broken teeth.

  The girl handed Scubby something. He looked at his hands and saw the girl had given him a roll of duct tape.

  “We got to tie you up,” the girl said. That singsong to her voice again. Scubby placed it now. She’d memorized her lines. “It’ll go better if you help us.”

  Scubby taped A-Rod’s hands behind his back. When he was done he looked up to see the girl holding the bear like a puppet, the bear nodding at him. Behind her, the badass had the grocery bags with the dope in them.

  “This all of it?” he asked Scubby.

  “Yeah.”

  The man placed the sawed-off’s barrels to his head. Scubby could feel every metal bump where the shotgun’s barrels had been sawed-off—whoever’d done the job hadn’t done it well, and it still had splinters. Scubby wondered, if his brains wound up on the wall behind him, would the little pieces keep thinking for a minute, all alone, the piece of meat that held the words to “Shook Ones” just singing to itself while it cooled on the wall?

  “Are. You. Sure?” the man asked.

  “Uh-huh. Ought to be about ten bricks. That’s the whole load.”

  The man studied Scubby like he was doing a pro/con list on killing him. If there was a drop of piss left in him, Scubby would have let it out right then. But there wasn’t, so the muscles down there just did a painful squeeze instead.

  “Don’t hurt him,” the little girl said. “He doesn’t have any blue lightning. This one does.” She nodded at A-Rod, at the blue lightning bolts on his arm. The way she said this one splashed Scubby like icewater.

  “I know who you are,” A-Rod said, rocking himself up to his knees. “You’re the zombie. And this little cunt—”

  The badass shut A-Rod’s mouth with his boot. He went backward. With no hands to catch him, his skull hit the floor full force.

  The girl moved the bear’s paws to cover his eyes. The bear shook his head like oh no this is terrible. The girl was a hell of a puppeteer. But from the light in her eyes Scubby wasn’t sure the girl agreed with the bear. She didn’t think it was terrible at all.

  The badass tapped blood off his shoe against the coffee table leg like a man knocking off snow.

  “You tell them it was Nate McClusky,” he told Scubby. “You tell them to pass it down the line. I’m not going to stop till they lift the greenlight on my girl. Now who am I?”

  “Nate McClusky,” Scubby said.

  “And Polly too,” the girl said. And the man looked over at her and he smiled and the girl smiled and Scubby felt for sure that none of this was real and he was staring at a white wall someplace where they only served you food you could eat with a spoon.

  “And Polly too,” the man said. “You tell them.”

  And then they were gone and Scubby sat back on the couch, still not sure what was real and what wasn’t.

  “Cut me loose,” A-Rod said. Scubby thought about it. The way he saw it A-Rod was going to have a lot of frustration to work through when he got untied. And there was only one stress ball in the building.

  “Naw, man. Sorry,” he said. “But I think I’m just going to moonwalk the fuck out of here.”

  “You fucking think about this.”

  “I will,” Scubby said. “From a great distance.”

  “When I find you—”

  “Yeah, I know. I sure hope you don’t.”

  The final line of crank from the test batches on the table was freckled with red dots where the blood from A-Rod’s nose had splattered it. Fuck it, Scubby thought. Who knows how long it will be before I find a new hookup? He gakked the line, A-Rod’s blood and all. Inside him volcanoes erupted. He tasted battery acid and sewage. He tasted A-Rod’s blood. Maybe A-Rod passed on a little bit of his spirit, cannibal warrior style.

  “For what it’s worth,” Scubby said on his way out the door, “that one’s the winner-winner chicken dinner.”

  He hit the air a free man. Sun Valley smelled great for the first time ever. Free air smelled great, even when it was filthy.

  24

  POLLY

  SUN VALLEY/NORTH HOLLYWOOD

  The girl was a bandit now, and she knew a bandit’s pleasure. She could tell her dad felt it too. He drove fast. He took lefts and rights that seemed random, but Polly knew it was all planned out. Polly powered down her window and stuck her head into the wind like a dog. She tasted the night. Her body was a single thing, from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair dancing on her skull.

  They passed an SUV with a woman behind the wheel and kids in the back, their noses pressed against the glass so Polly could see the boogers. The bear mooned them. Polly laughed. Her dad laughed. The light changed. He gunned it. Polly shrieked wild noises of joy. She tumbled back in her seat.

  “Come on back,” he said. “Come on back to earth.”

  She came back slow. She wondered what Madison Cartwright was doing just then. How small she seemed now, how pinched and ratlike her face was, that same face that had seemed impossibly pretty to Polly before.

  “I never thought it would be so fun,” she said.

  “It isn’t always,” he said. “Now put on your seat belt. Last thing we need right now is to get pulled over just for having a kid with no seat belt.”

  “I’m hungry,” she said as she buckled up. “Can we have pancakes?”

  The bear rubbed his stomach like yum.

  “The bear votes yes,” she said.

  “Funny how he likes all the stuff you like.”

  “He likes you,” Polly said. The bear leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “See?”

  Polly pulled open the paper bag. Plastic bricks of white powder. She held it gingerly away from her, like it might explode.

  “This is meth?”

  “It’s bad news,” he said.

  The bear walked down her lap to peer into the bag. He stuck his head into the bag. He came out shaking like he was electrified.

  “Oh no,” Polly said, laughing so she worried she would pee. She threw the bear up in the air like jumping. He bounced off the green monster’s ceiling and crashed to the floor. Her dad laughed and laughed.

  “Drugs are bad,” she told the bear. She rubbed stomach muscles sore from laughing.

  “For real, what will we do with it?” she asked.

  “Dump it,” he said. “All we want is for them not to have it. We don’t need it.”

  “Do you think it will work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will they quit?”

  She wasn’t sure what the answer would be, or what she hoped it would be. She wanted to be safe, to sleep through the night without waking up at the slightest noise. But when it was done, she didn’t know what their lives would be. He had told her one night about a place called Perdido. A town in Mexico where everybody was somebody who’d run away from the world. A beach town that wasn’t on any map. An outlaw resort, a place for them. Because she was an outlaw now. Would she be the only girl?

  “No,” he said. “They won’t quit just yet. We’re going to have to hurt them a lot worse than that.”

  She didn’t know if she was happy or sad. But she knew she had to feel that feeling again, that bandit joy.

  The white powder was bagged up in little plastic bags, the kind kids at school used for carrot sticks. When they got back to the apartment, after diner pancakes, Polly opened the first package, dumped it in the toilet. She thought the toilet would maybe bubble like witch’s brew, but the powder mostly just disappeared. She grabbed a s
econd bag.

  “Dump it slow,” Nate said from the door. “It eats pipes. We don’t want to have to call a plumber.”

  “It eats pipes?”

  “Told you it was bad news. I’m going out,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Just out,” he said. “Want me to bring you something back?”

  “Candy,” she said.

  “You already had pancakes,” he said.

  “So?”

  “You’re in training,” he said back.

  “Just a little piece,” she said. “One piece of candy.”

  “All right then.”

  She flushed the toilet, grabbed the second bag, and dumped it in.

  “Put a towel over your face or something,” he said as he left. She pulled her T-shirt over her mouth. She kept dumping. When she was done she moved over to the sink, her shirt still over her face so she looked like a bandit.

  She was a bandit.

  She pulled the shirt down. She looked at herself in the mirror. The bright red hair, the color she’d picked for herself, the hair almost boy-short. The way the man with the blue lightning on his arm had looked at her when he’d opened the door came back to her, ruined her good mood. She struggled to find the right words for what had been in that gaze. He had looked at her like she wasn’t a person exactly, more like she was a roast chicken on the plate and he was trying to figure out which piece to eat first.

  She touched the glass. She was glad that her dad had hurt the man who had looked at her like that, and she felt bad for feeling good. It seemed when she was a kid she only ever felt one thing at once. She could be happy or sad but she’d only be that one thing. Now she never felt only one thing. It was like walking wearing two different-sized shoes. Nothing was ever level or smooth.

  “Maybe I should dye my hair back normal,” she told the bear. The bear shook his head no. He reached forward and stroked her hair. He gave her a thumbless thumbs-up.