AHMM, September 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "What you got under the hood?” Mickey asked him.

  After a long minute of silence, Lefty shook his head. “Not sure. Just liked the look of it. I fuel ‘em up and drive ‘em, even straight-wire ‘em. Don't know motors."

  Lefty and I were talking country by the time we got to Canute. Mickey liked Elvis and little else. I was a blues and rock man myself. As a kid, I hated it when my daddy would play Ernest Tubb on the jukebox. Still, country was roots, like the blues. Lefty was an expert, knew the words to every record KVOO spun. When I pointed to the tattoo on his shoulder, he laughed, said he used to pick a little but lost his guitar in a card game. He turned up the volume when Hank Williams came on with “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive."

  "Lefty, who's the next Hank Williams?” I asked, already feeling the Coors, making a mental declaration that it was the best beer I'd ever drunk even if it wasn't iced down like I like it.

  He thought about it, took a deep swallow. “A guy named Waylon Jennings. Used to play with Buddy Holly. He could be the next Hank Williams."

  The name was familiar.

  "Saw him once down in Lubbock,” he said, putting his beer between his legs and pulling a Camel out of his pocket. “He's above all that Nashville crap, just like Hank was. To hell with ‘em. No damned orchestras in his music. This is a man who cheated death."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He was supposed to be on that plane that killed Buddy Holly. Took a bus instead. Shit like that happens for a reason."

  As Hank faded, the disk jockey began reading the local and state news—a shooting here, robbery there, a report from Ft. Sill that we never heard because Lefty flipped off the radio.

  Just west of Canute we spotted a big sign with a red arrow and barelegged cowgirl with ruby red lips and blonde curls. She pointed toward Andy's Roadside Inn down the road, a place to “Eat, Drink, Cut the Rug, and Sleep.” Less than a quarter mile later we saw it, a restaurant and dance club with a motel in back, and weaving around both buildings, a parking lot jammed with eighteen-wheelers, pickups, Harleys, and hot rods. On the flat metal roof was the blonde cowgirl again, this time a dozen feet tall, holding a lariat that wrapped around the name andy's, all of it except the letter n lit up in glowing neon.

  We were tired and hungry, so we stopped. Lefty parked the truck in the deepening shadows among a patch of trees in the back and suggested we get our bellies filled and brains slightly plastered. I offered to pay for a room, but Lefty shook his head, said he was too pressed for time, that maybe we could catch an hour or two later in the truck, us in the back with our sleeping bags, him in the cab.

  * * * *

  Andy's looked bigger on the outside than it actually was. Between the lunch counter to the right and the tables at the far end was a stage and a small dance floor full of couples shuffling shoulder to shoulder to a ragtag cowboy band doing a wobbly, half-hearted cover of “Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On.” We made our way through the dancers to look for a free table. Most were surrounded by loud-talking, beer-drinking cowboys, truck drivers, bikers, and their women. Some were busy carving big chunks of sizzling steaks. Most just swilled beer. We spotted an empty table near the back and grabbed it. A couple of tattooed, leather-jacketed bikers sat at the next table. I insisted the meal was on Mickey and me, and the two of us ordered burgers. Lefty ordered steak and a round of beer and vodka. The waitress, a barrel-armed brunette with a hairy mole between her nose and cheek, and a dangling cigarette in her mouth, told us to settle in. The cook was taking a crap.

  We had finished our third round by the time the food arrived. “I could play better than that bunch of yahoos,” Lefty said, his face half-hidden under his hat, mouth a straight line, his voice dark and brooding. He ordered a fourth round. By the end of the fifth, he was catcalling the band. “Play some damn music for a change!” he hollered with a disgusted shake of his head.

  "Hey, shut up, sugarfoot,” growled one of the bikers. Gray bearded and flat nosed, he gave Lefty a malevolent grin that exposed a row of black stumps for teeth.

  "What'd you say, you ugly son of a bitch?” Lefty popped back. “D'you know you got a mouth like a gook? Squat down, Stump, and I'd swear I was back in Vietnam."

  Stump lunged at Lefty with a wide-swinging right that just missed his chin and put the biker at such an angle that Lefty was able to uppercut him hard to the chest and follow with a sharp left jab to the face. The other biker backed away, eyeing us, ready to jump in if we did. Stump came back hard, grabbing Lefty around the neck and wrestling him to the floor. They twisted back and forth between the tables, punching and kicking while a crowd gathered around us.

  "Get off my floor!"

  The voice came from a bare-armed giant in a grease-stained apron pushing his way through the spectators. Tattoed from neck to wrist, Andy glowered at the wrestlers. In his hand was a carving knife large enough to dress a bear. “You're in my place, and I'll slice you into little pieces if you don't get your asses up and out of here!"

  He stepped between the two, and Stump and Lefty pushed themselves up off the floor, exchanging narrow-eyed looks as they brushed off the dust and dirt. Stump's right cheek was red and swelling. Mickey reached down and grabbed Lefty's hat from under the table.

  "All of you get the hell out,” Andy barked, waving the carving knife at us. “Take care of your business somewhere else.” Then turning to the crowd: “Clear ‘em a path."

  Everyone edged back as the two bikers walked through. We followed, eyes shifting along the rows of onlookers.

  Stump and his friend disappeared into the darkness outside, making the walk to the pickup long and tense as we scanned the alley between the restaurant and the motel and the narrow paths between the parked cars and trucks. Just as Lefty reached the cab door, they stepped out from behind an eighteen-wheeler. Other biker friends had joined them. Lefty reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a .38 as they approached us. He slipped the gun under his shirt.

  Stump, leading the pack, swaggered up to Lefty and put his hands on his hips. “Like the man said, we need to take care of business.” Reaching into the back pocket of his jeans, he pulled out a switchblade and popped it open. Holding it flat in his right hand, he waved it in front of Lefty's face. “Come on, sugarfoot, I want to hear more ‘Nam stories."

  Lefty met the ugly grin with the pistol pointed directly at the man's face. “Drop the knife."

  The biker flinched, and I thought for a second he was going to rush Lefty, but he did as he was told. Still pointing the gun at Stump's face, Lefty reached down and picked up the open switchblade. Without warning he sliced it across Stump's neck, a deep and clean sweep just under the Adam's apple. The biker fell into Lefty then slumped to the ground, where he twisted in agony, hands to neck, trying to speak but only managing a sickening gurgle. Lefty waved the gun at the other bikers as he closed the bloody knife and put it in his pocket. “Who wants to be next?” None of them moved. Lefty motioned toward the truck, and Mickey and I, caught between the bikers and our new murderous friend, climbed in the cab.

  Careening out of the parking lot and onto the highway, Lefty took the first side road, then crossed over to Interstate 40. He crisscrossed back and forth through the dead of night, with hardly a car anywhere, just the occasional big truck. Eventually he found 6 and followed it to 152 in the direction of Sweetwater. No one said anything. Lefty was covered with blood. Mickey and I looked at each other, and I started to speak but Mickey shook his head. This was terrain Mickey understood better than me, so I let him take the lead.

  But deep inside my brain, I felt like I was entering a black cave, and it got deeper with every tree, shrub, and road sign we passed.

  Lefty scanned the roads and roadsides for cops and bikers, but our eyes never met. Spotting a lone gas station that had shut down for the night, he pulled over and stopped in front of the restroom. “We're going to need gas, but I got to clean up first,” he said, grabbing a bag from the truck bed. After picking the
lock, he turned with a grin and patted the gun in his belt. “You can run but you can't hide, amigos,” he said. He went in, leaving the door ajar.

  That might have been our chance to run, but I was still figuring escape routes when he came out, the blood washed off, wearing a fresh black denim shirt.

  * * * *

  After we crossed the Texas border, we took the backcountry roads south past the Red River and toward Shamrock. I kept drifting off into a fitful sleep that was broken with each sharp turn or bump in the road. Mickey stared out the window and sucked on a Lucky. By now, Lefty was rubbing his eyes and stretching them wide to keep his focus. “We got to stop,” he finally said, his voice barely a whisper.

  Eventually we came to Megiddo, a ghost town that must have died in the Dust Bowl. The pickup cruised down its lone street, past boarded-up storefronts, a broken streetlight, a rusted-out Conoco sign in front of an abandoned gas station. Next door was the Please-Drop-In Cafe, and thirty years must have passed since the last customer dropped in. Lefty pulled into an alley behind the cafe and parked. “Safer here than in the open. Ain't been no coppers here since Billy the Kid."

  So Mickey and I climbed out and onto the bed of the truck, where we unrolled our sleeping bags. Lefty stretched across the cab seat. The night was cool, but the mosquitoes soon found us. I shut my bag over my face, leaving just enough room for my nose so I could breathe. “We got to get out of this,” I whispered. Mickey, on his side with his face toward me, leaned close to my ear. “If he goes to sleep, it's over."

  But nobody went to sleep. I tried, but the mosquitoes kept waking me. At one point I woke up from a disjointed dream about my ‘61 Comet with the glass packs to a skin-crawling howling from somewhere out in the Texas night. Under a full moon, I saw Lefty sitting on the back porch of the Please-Drop-In, dragging on a cigarette, the smoke spiraling up above his head, the mosquitoes apparently leaving him alone. In his sleeveless undershirt and without his hat, he was as white as a dead man. I noticed he was balding. Leaning forward, back curved in a bow, legs crossed like a woman's, he reminded me of a picture of Hank Williams I once saw.

  I slipped out of the truck and walked over to him. “Can't sleep, huh?"

  He shook his head, took another drag off his Camel. “Lost my damned dog tags."

  I noticed for the first time the missing tags around his neck. “The fight?"

  "Yep."

  "You wantin’ to go back?"

  "You never go back, amigo. That's the one thing you don't do. You just keep going."

  He went back to his thoughts, and I walked back to the truck. Mickey's eyes were wide open. “The guy's wacko,” he whispered. “Just gotta wait for a break."

  * * * *

  No break came the next day. We crossed the Texas Panhandle, through a flat, snake-bitten land of reptile ranches and dead armadillos. Lefty didn't want to risk 40, so we stayed with 66—the Mother Road, the Stones, Tom Joad and his Hudson, Todd and Buzz and their Corvette, Kerouac. But this was no song, book, or show on television.

  Somewhere across the line in New Mexico, the sun became an angry, swollen boil at the edge of the horizon. The road narrowed, and on either side were barrens of sagebrush and cactus. With the sun's last rays came a golden shimmering, long shadows stretching from the telephone lines and piaon trees, and I broke into a cold sweat. A sickening sensation came over me that I had been here before, that this was what I'd hallucinated the night my dorm mate spiked my beer with acid and sent me into another cave without an exit.

  "This is Comanche land,” Lefty said without looking at us. “You ever meet a Comanche?"

  We shook our heads.

  "Really spooky people, man. Warriors."

  He said nothing else, nor did we, until we saw the first scorched-red plateau. “Albuquerque, amigos, just ahead,” he announced. “Lefty's golden city."

  * * * *

  We drove down the neon corridor called Central Avenue, past a hundred motor courts and burger palaces, and into a Mexican section where Lefty found the Sancho Panza Motel on a side street between a garage and a warehouse. The sign over the front office featured a mustachioed Sancho wearing a red sombrero. It was close to midnight.

  Leaving us in the truck with the windows down, he walked into the open, well-lit lobby and up to the front desk, where he spoke to a skinny Mexican with long hair combed straight back and hanging down past his shoulders. They spoke in Spanish. In a few minutes he returned, grinning, with a freshly opened bottle of El Viejito tequila.

  The Sancho Panza was a ratty row of adobes that featured a tiny plastic red sombrero on each door. Ours stunk of stale cigarettes, spilled beer, and tacos, but Mickey and I didn't care. We were so tired we crashed as soon as we spread out our sleeping bags. Lefty sat at the foot of the lone bed for a long time, taking turns sucking at his tequila and a long chain of Camels.

  I woke up with Mickey shaking my shoulder and someone outside banging on the door. It was still black outside. “Got a cop out there, man, and Lefty's split,” he said.

  I saw the unmade bed, then the flash of a badge outside the window.

  Mickey stepped to the door and barely had the knob turned before the cop pushed his way in. Following close behind was the skinny Mexican with the long hair.

  "Need to ask you hombres some questions,” said the square-jawed officer, a man in his fifties with iron-gray hair and a drooping mustache. Resting his hand on his holstered revolver, he smiled benignly as he surveyed the room. “Didn't introduce myself, did I? Name is Lance."

  Lance looked back at the Mexican, who had a lazy eye that gave the impression he was looking at us and checking out the opposite end of the room at the same time. “These the ones?"

  The Mexican nodded.

  "Diego here says you checked in around midnight and that you were driving that stolen black Ford pickup out there."

  Mickey gave me a weary, knowing look, and I turned to the cop. “That truck belongs to a man named Lefty, same man who checked us in. This guy knows that."

  "Where is Lefty now?"

  I looked at the table by the bed, saw the keys to the truck but no other sign of Lefty. Even the ashtray was empty of butts.

  * * * *

  We told the cop our story over and over that night in the little precinct jailhouse where he took us. We told him about the stabbing back in Oklahoma, too, but Lance wasn't buying any of it. He'd already figured everything out. We'd stolen the truck in Tulsa, were taking it to California to sell it. We were probably AWOL from the Army, and there was no Lefty. We gave him names and numbers from back home to call, but he waved them away and locked us up anyway. No search, no fingerprints. He didn't even sign us in. The lone deputy at the jail, with his bloodshot eyes and kerosene breath, just laughed when we asked for our phone call.

  We got a cell together, seven-by-ten with sheetless bunk beds, graffiti-covered walls, and an open toilet with a broken handle.

  "You know what's going on here, don't you?” Mickey said to me later, speaking in a low voice, leaning over the bed, smoking his last Lucky. “Lefty's a runner who just made a delivery."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Comes to a hotel where he knows the guy in charge, gets a bottle of tequila and a direct line to this asshole Lance. Lefty disappears, and we're stuck holding the bag."

  "Why did he bring us into it?"

  He sucked the last drag off the cigarette. “Lefty's a loose cannon. Maybe he was lonely."

  He let me pick up the thread. “Maybe we were good insurance. After what he did to the biker, he couldn't dump us till he got to a place where he knew the cops. But you don't pick up hitchhikers when you're running stolen trucks, and you don't get in fights or knife people at a crowded roadhouse."

  Mickey nodded. “He's a loose cannon, so they're covering their tracks."

  "And Lefty?” I asked him.

  "Could be floating down the Rio Grande right now. Maybe he's buzzard food out in the desert."

  "Is that what we
're going to be?"

  Mickey shrugged.

  I stood up and walked the length of the windowless cell. Mickey dropped his cigarette onto the floor, rubbed it out with his foot, and stretched across the bed. “I was on to this guy the minute he opened his mouth. Didn't know what kind of motor he had. And this Vietnam shit. That dude ain't never been in Vietnam."

  "How do you know that?"

  "You hear the places he said he'd been to over there? Names off a map, out of a newspaper. R&R weekends. I figure he's AWOL himself. I guarantee it."

  "You saw him handle that biker."

  "So he's a street thug. He ain't no soldier."

  I studied Mickey's face, the guy I'd known since the eighth grade, wondering if I really knew him at all. “So why did we ride with him?"

  "We made our pact, and you thumbed him down."

  * * * *

  The next morning Lance released us. We even got a police escort to the outskirts of town, and a good riddance warning. “You bums better have some luck catchin’ a ride,” Lance told us, toothpick bobbing under his mustache, eyes hidden behind dark shades with silver rims. “I'll check back in an hour. If you're still here, that's when I bury you under that goddamn jail."

  Lance spun out onto the highway, leaving us in a cloud of dust. As he swung down the first exit, I stuck my thumb out so far the first passing car had to move to the centerline. Mickey smiled. “Don't worry, my man. Mr. Big Shot ain't coming back."

  I nodded like I understood. Maybe I did. Lance was glad to get rid of us. He figured nobody would believe our story, and what if someone did? Where was the proof? I pulled in my thumb, and we walked the next half-mile to put Albuquerque as far behind us as we could. At the crest of Nine Mile Hill we could see the city below and the desert in front of us.

  We weren't out there long before a west-bound white Cadillac with tinted windows cruised up the road and pulled over a hundred yards or so ahead. I looked back at Mickey, wondering what else Route 66 had in store, and ran toward the car. I noticed it had no tags. Mickey walked slowly behind me. I was just a few feet away when the window slid down. Hank was moaning the blues.