by Pete Hautman
Digging in his pockets, he came out with a handful of loose change and reached over to drop it into the ashtray on his bedside table, but he did not complete the motion.
The ashtray was empty. That was wrong. He was sure he had left a small collection of coins there. Not much, a few dollars’ worth, maybe, but it had definitely been there the last time he’d left his room.
He stood up, feeling naked, a trickle of cold inching down his neck. Someone had been in his room. His eyes went to his crates. They looked different, not in the right order. Someone had been messing with his stuff. He checked the bathroom. Whoever it had been was gone. Feeling none of his earlier weariness, Axel dropped to his hands and knees and reached under the bed, feeling for the slit in the muslin bottom of the box spring. There. He reached through the opening, pulled out a waxed-tissue-wrapped bundle that had been wedged in a spring. He unwrapped it, sat and stared at yesterday’s receipts, about thirty-five hundred, most of it in twenties and tens. The chill of fear warmed, coagulating into anger. Axel forced it back, forced himself to stand up, breathing deeply. This wasn’t an emergency. Nothing bad had happened. His money was safe in Sam’s backyard. They hadn’t gotten anything. He needed to take time, to think.
The alarm clock beside the bed read 12:17. He thought, I can deal with this tomorrow. Images of the bald monkey rooting through his crates. With Carmen? He couldn’t be sure. Had he had anything in those crates that they’d take?
Crate by crate, he went through a mental inventory of his possessions.
A few minutes later, he started dismantling his wall of Coke crates. He found what he was looking for on the third row from the bottom: a khaki-colored canvas sack. He lifted it out of the crate. The weight was gone. Loosening the drawstring top, he looked inside, to discover three pairs of his black nylon socks.
Bill Quist thought that Chuck Woolery, the leering host of Love Connection, had one of the best jobs on TV. He’d read someplace that all the women who appeared on the show had to give Chuck a private audition. Or maybe he’d made that up in his head. Quist was very good at making things up. He thought he should have been a writer. Write those miniseries, get to meet the actresses. One of the women on Love Connection looked like a red-haired Heather Locklear. Now, there was an actress he would like to meet.
The redheaded Heather recrossed her legs. Quist thought he could hear the sound of nyloned thighs rubbing together. Or maybe that was the hydraulic closer on the lobby door, hissing air.
The chrome bell on the counter dinged.
“Okay, okay,” Quist said, spinning his chair around. It was Axel Speeter. “Mr. S., how you doing?”
“Can’t complain, Bill. How about you?”
“Just fine, just fine. What can I do for you?”
Axel rested his forearms on the counter and leaned into it. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you know anything about this kid, this bald kid I’ve seen hanging around. Kid about yea high, with no hair and a little tiny nose?” He pointed a thick finger at his eyebrow. “Used to have these rings in his head.”
Quist contorted his brow to show he was thinking, looking away from Axel’s asymmetric green eyes. Inside, he was panicking. Never should’ve given the bitch the key. Damn, damn, damn! He didn’t know what to say now. Didn’t know if he should lie or just half lie.
“Wears army boots?” Axel prompted.
Quist nodded slowly. If he told Mr. S. that he’d never seen the kid, it would look like he hadn’t been doing his job. It couldn’t hint to just have seen him. What did that have to do with anything? Nothing. It was safe. True, but safe. “Uh- huh,” he said, nodding faster. “Uh-huh, I think so. A couple times, I’m pretty sure. Last couple of days. What about him?”
“He staying here?”
“Well… he’s not a registered guest, if that’s what you mean. What I saw was, I saw him a couple times. I figured he was just passing by, you know?”
“You sure he isn’t staying here?”
“Like I say, Mr. S., he’s not a registered guest. But he might be staying with somebody else. I mean, I’d have no way of knowing.” Quist waited, his eyes on Axel’s chest, hoping that the interview was over. Laughter from the TV made him turn his head, but as soon as he had the screen in view, Axel asked him something about a key.
“What? What’s that?”
“I asked you who else has a key to my room.”
Quist shook his head rapidly. “No one! Nobody goes in your room, Mr. S. Not even the maid, just the way you want it.”
Axel raised his eyebrows, as if he was waiting for more. Quist didn’t know what else to say.
Axel said, “Okay then, Bill, if you say so. But I’m having the lock changed tomorrow.”
Quist said, “I don’t know about that, Mr. S. I’d have to talk to the office on that.”
“That’s fine, Bill. You talk to them. Tell them how somebody’s been going in and out of my room. Somebody with a key. In the meantime, I’m getting myself a lock.” He turned and left.
Quist watched Axel’s broad back receding. That was easy, he thought, returning his attention to Chuck Woolery. The redheaded Heather Locklear had been replaced by a guy with a ponytail. Quist changed the channel, hoping to stumble across a late-night rerun of Baywatch, something good like that.
James Dean pulled into the Motel 6 parking lot and backed the Maverick into the parking space opposite room 3. He was about to shut down the engine, when he saw Axel coming out of the motel office, walking funny, his chest pushed out like a marching soldier’s. Dean stayed in his car, waiting for him to pass, but the old man looked up, saw the green Maverick, and stopped, not twenty feet away from the front bumper, looking right at him.
Dean thought, I could just step on the gas.
Axel stood with his feet apart, staring at him through the windshield. Dean remained expressionless and motionless, trying to think what to do. If he ran over him, someone would see. The guy in the office, or somebody passing by.
After a few seconds, Axel started walking toward him.
Dean thought, Shit, he knows we were in his room. He dropped the car in gear and hit the gas pedal. The old man didn’t move. Dean cranked the wheel, missing him by a few feet, and sped out of the parking lot. Once on the street, he let the air rush out of his lungs. He felt weak and shaky, as though he had just survived an accident. Something about the old man scared him. He was two blocks away when he remembered that he had the .45 under his front seat, remembered that he had nothing to fear.
The Tonight Show was just ending. One thing that Axel missed these days was Johnny Carson. Axel didn’t care for the new guy, but things changed and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it. He sat on the edge of his carefully made bed and clicked through the cable channels. He watched a few minutes of a war movie, identified it as Pork Chop Hill, which he had seen already. That was okay, he didn’t like the war movies anymore. What had once looked like heroic men fighting and dying now looked to him like children fighting and dying. He switched to channel 2, where he found a show about Australia. Herds of kangaroos bounding across the outback. Axel untied his shoes and placed them at the foot of the bed. He propped the pillows up against the headboard and settled back to watch the kangaroos. Axel liked animal shows, especially the ones about Australia. Maybe this would calm him down.
That little prick. He was the one who’d been in his room, all right. The way he’d driven off proved it. He might’ve slipped the lock somehow, but more likely that sleazy clerk had something to do with it. Should bounce his face on the counter a few times, make him own up. Feeling his rage mount, Axel forced himself to jack down and watch the show. He didn’t like himself when he got mad.
He liked kangaroos. Most people didn’t realize how tough they were, how hard it was to be a kangaroo. Two males—boomers, the narrator called them—were clinched like boxers, kicking at each other with their big hind feet. Then the boomers broke apart and started making these flying kicks at one another, ripping at each other
’s abdomens with kangaroo claws. The big red boomer with the torn ear, according to the narrator, was the alpha male, the aging ruler and protector of a group of fliers, or female kangaroos, and their joeys. The fliers could be seen watching the battle from a shady eucalyptus grove a few yards away, waiting to see who would lead them. The challenger, a smaller but much quicker boomer, mounted a relentless attack, leaping again and again without pause, pounding the alpha male backward, shaking off return blows without apparent effect. Axel, no longer smiling, rooted silently for the alpha male, willing him to repel the smaller boomer’s assault. The narrator noted that for the aging alpha male this was a fight to the death, that if he lost he would be forced out of the group, weakened and bleeding, forced out to die alone in the desert.
As Axel watched, the alpha male, looking as if he had just remembered another appointment, turned away from his challenger and loped weakly out of the grove onto the arid Australian plain, pursued for a few hundred yards by the kicking, biting challenger: the new alpha male.
He could have won, Axel thought, upset. The big ’roo could have stuck it out, used his greater size and experience to defeat the invader.
You could learn a lot from watching animals.
The scene shifted to a group of wallabies. The wallabies were smaller than the kangaroos, and they were grazing peacefully. Axel shut off the television, undressed, and got under the covers. He turned off the light. It seemed like a long time before sleep came for him. He couldn’t stop thinking about the goddamn kangaroos.
Chapter 19
Dean pumped another quarter into the DeathMek machine in Tony’s East Side Lounge. The machine was against the wall at the back of the bar, directly between the doors marked GALS and GENTS. Dean played the game automatically, his mind wandering as he destroyed one attacker after another, keeping his cyborg alive.
He was thinking about what to do next. Except for Carmen, he didn’t know anybody in this town. All he had was about twenty dollars—the last of the money he’d got from Mickey. It wasn’t enough to rent a room, and he wouldn’t be able to get his donut money until the next night. What lousy luck, the taco guy seeing him. He’d been looking forward to telling Carmen about his plans for the donut guy. He should’ve just run the taco guy over.
He supposed he could use the gun to get some money, knock off a gas station or something, but he’d never done anything like that before. Walking into a lighted business and robbing it, that was not his style. Basically, he was a nonviolent person. Besides, robbing a gas station for fifty or a hundred bucks contradicted his new philosophy: the fewer transactions, the better one’s chances of getting away with it. Only the big scores were worth the risk. What he’d do, he’d play it smart, sleep in his car tonight. One more quarter in the machine, then he’d head out to the Maverick and crash. He wished he had some speed. He should’ve picked some up before he left Omaha. A few leapers, and he wouldn’t need to sleep at all.
Dean had just disintegrated another mechanical dinosaur, when he felt someone breathing on his neck, watching him play the machine. He put up with it for about five seconds, then faked like he was giving the machine a little body English and brought his heel down hard on somebody’s toe.
“Ow. Motherfucking ow!” The voice was whiny and nasal.
Dean looked over his shoulder. A narrow head, as hairless as his own.
“You stepped on my fucking foot,” the skinhead said. He was young, no more than seventeen, and blade thin. Pimply hatchet face, pale-blue eyes, a faded and shredded T-shirt over a sunken chest. Beltless gray jeans, slung low on his narrow hips, puddled over a pair of disintegrating snake- skin cowboy boots. One of the boots was held together with a wrapping of silver duct tape.
Dean let himself relax. This skinhead cowboy was no threat. Just another punk kid. Reminded him of himself a few years earlier. He was about to come back at the punk with some really nasty crack, when he noticed another nearly hairless head coming toward them from the bar, carrying two bottles of beer.
The second skinhead was older and larger by about two hundred pounds. His eyes were set a few inches back inside his skull, little pig eyes, and he was wearing a black leather jacket that must have used up three cows and still looked a little tight around the shoulders. Dean, wishing he hadn’t left the .45 in the car, grinned and held out his hands. “Sorry about your foot, man,” he said. “You want I should buy you a beer or something?”
The kid stared at Dean, taking his time, letting the giant arrive with his beer.
“Where you from, man?” he finally asked.
“Chicago,” said Dean. It was better to be from Chicago than from Omaha. People knew where it was. “Name’s Dean,” he added.
The kid said, “They call me Tigger, man.” He reached out and gave Dean a complicated handshake, a sort of wrist- grabbing routine that reminded him of a biker handshake. Dean faked it. Tigger seemed satisfied.
“This here’s Sweety.” Tigger jerked his head toward the giant. “We’re from here in Frogtown, man. Whole bunch of us.”
Frogtown? He thought he was in Saint Paul. Dean looked around the bar. There were some factory-worker types, all white with small eyes, and a few horsey-looking women to match, but not other skins. Tigger sucked at his beer like he hadn’t had a drink in days. Sweety stared down at Dean, looking at him as if he were a bug.
Dean said, “How’s it going, Sweety?”
Sweety shrugged and looked away. The bottle of beer almost disappeared in his massive fist.
“So what the fuck you doing in Saint Paul?” Tigger asked.
“I thought I was in Frogtown,” Dean said.
“Frogtown’s in Saint Paul,” Tigger said.
Dean scratched his chin. Three guys in a bar, drawn together by their mutual hairlessness. But these two were not your typical skinheads—not the Aryan Circle type, banded together to protect themselves from the other minorities, nor your garden-variety neo-Nazi skins with an unemployed-working-class hard-on—and that was fine with him. Dean had never cared for political agendas, with or without hair. Guys like these, they wouldn’t even be looking for jobs. They had to have something going. They’d paid for two beers, and the money had come from somewhere. Maybe they knew where he could find some uppers. If nothing else, he might get a free place to crash.
Tigger waited for him to say something. Dean still wasn’t entirely sure whether he’d found a friend or a fight. He pointed at Tigger’s empty bottle. “How about I buy you another one?” he said.
A dull blue light flickered in Tigger’s eyes. “I could see that,” he said.
Dean said, “How about you, big guy?”
Sweety was out there someplace, not listening, glaring at the wall. Dean had seen guys like Sweety in Lincoln. You either got real close to them or stayed the hell away.
Tigger said, “You better get him one.”
Dean bought the next round too. One more, and he’d be out of money. They were sitting in one of the booths near the back. Sweety, on the opposite side of the booth, was digging into the tabletop with a short, spade-shaped blade that he’d pulled out of his belt buckle, concentrating hard, his forehead red with effort, carving letters into the Formica surface. Tigger was bragging about some friend who had a Harley.
“So what’s this guy do?” Dean asked. He couldn’t figure out why Tigger was talking about him.
“Do? He don’t do nothing. He deals.”
“Deals what?”
“Whatever the fuck you want. Pork’s connected, man.”
Sweety said, “Fuckin’ Pork.” Dean tried to read what Sweety was carving.
“You want to score, I can get it for you. Pork and me, we’re like this.” Tigger crossed his fingers.
Dean shrugged. He didn’t have any money left. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “Can this guy get any speed?”
“You kidding me? Pork’s got this crank, man, you wouldn’t believe. Crystal meth, man. He knows a guy fuckin’ makes the shit in his bathtub. Like
I was telling you, he’s connected.”
Dean had never tried crystal meth before. In Omaha, it was not common on the street. Omaha was a weed and acid town, although lately it was becoming a crack town too. “Is it any good?” he asked, thinking if the price was right, he could maybe buy some weight, haul it over to Sioux Falls, and sell it to a guy he knew there. Double his money; maybe even triple it. The real question was, were these guys for real? The kid with the taped-up cowboy boot was a punk, showing off and trying to act tough. And the big one, the cyborg, looked like he had the walnut-size brain of a tyrannosaurus.
“It’s fucking dynamite,” Tigger was saying. “Right, Sweety?”
“Huh?”
“Pork’s crank.”
“Fuckin’ Pork,” said Sweety.
Chapter 20
Axel seemed different the next morning. Even through her morning fog, Carmen could sense the difference. He was acting sort of crisp and nasty, and he took off the second she got in the pickup.
“Whoa,” she said, slamming the truck door closed.
Axel pulled out of the parking lot onto Larpenteur Avenue without stopping, prompting a horn blast from a passing Honda.
“What’s going on?” Carmen asked, wide awake now.
“You have a good night’s sleep?” Axel asked. He hunched forward over the steering wheel, like a little kid trying to make his car go faster.
“I slept okay,” said Carmen cautiously.
“Have a little trouble waking up?”
Carmen considered her answer. “No.” It was safest, when the correct answer did not suggest itself, to lie.
“I was sitting out there almost five minutes.”
Was he mad because she’d made him wait? Carmen was confused. She had made him wait plenty of times before. Suddenly she was afraid. Maybe he’d noticed someone had been in his room.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.
Axel pushed back from the wheel. “I’m fine,” he said, not looking at her. “I just wish you’d be a little more responsible.”
