Charlie chuckled, watching Mad Dog cross the room. Shorty’s mouth opened like a black hole in his flushed bald head. The women—Honey and Meryl and Selene—shifted their bottoms in their chairs, excited at what was coming. The stranger, still casual, turned to look over his shoulder.
Mad Dog was striding toward them. Truly, it was like watching some kind of thunder titan come, some kind of mythical giant who makes the earth tremble and the crops die. Legs the size of tree trunks, arms the size of legs. The right limbs swinging out in unison, then the left ones, as if it took the momentum of arm and leg together to keep his great bulk shifting forward. He was still wearing his leather, the zippers rattling. And he had a hammer clipped to his belt that tapped against his hip. His long dirty hair hung down into his short dirty beard, and those angel-dust eyes of his beamed out of the tangle.
He smiled his broken smile at the sight of his friends. He didn’t even seem to see the stranger. It was as if the stranger weren’t there. As if the stranger couldn’t possibly be there, by all logic, because…well, because who would sit where Mad Dog was supposed to sit?
With a final thudding footstep that might well have shaken the roadhouse walls, the enormous biker was standing directly over the smaller man, and he still didn’t so much as look down at him.
And then Cobra said, “Hey, Dog, this hole says you gotta sit somewhere else tonight. He’s taking your chair.”
At that, Mad Dog did look down. He gazed dumbly at the stranger. Some kind of practical joke, he figured. He cocked a knowing glance up at Cobra and Charlie and Shorty, but they all had their poker faces on—they sure could be wily when they jived him. Well, he didn’t want to be a fuckhead about it, but he hated to be made a fool of. So finally he just gave a good-natured snort, grabbed hold of the back of his chair with one hand, and flicked the stranger out of it.
As the stranger slid across the floor and smashed into the base of the bar, Mad Dog chuckled, shaking his head at the way his friends were always goofing on him.
“You clowns,” he said.
He resettled his chair and sat down. With a quick sweep of his beefy arm, he brushed the stranger’s beer and cigarette pack off the table. The shattering glass caught the attention of the barmaid. Mad Dog crooked his finger at her. Her face was a mask of terror and loathing as she scurried off to squeeze him a fresh brew.
“So hey, what’s happening?” Mad Dog asked Cobra.
The bikers and their women cracked up. That Mad Dog. What a character. Mad Dog drank in their admiration with a big goony smile and a bright twinkle in his lunatic eyes.
Then the stranger kicked him in the head.
It was that quick. No one had even seen him coming. No one had even bothered to keep an eye on him. They figured he’d just crawl away.
Instead, the stranger had scrambled to his feet. He’d come in low and fast before anyone caught sight of him. Now he unleashed a vicious side snap of his leg that sent his heavy motorcycle boot smack into the bridge of Mad Dog’s nose.
This genuinely annoyed Mad Dog. He had been a good sport up to now, but that just wasn’t funny. He clutched the bottom half of his face and he could feel the blood coursing out of his nostrils over his upper lip. Plus the stranger continued to attack, standing over him, grabbing his hair, looking for all the world as if he were planning to drive his thumb down into Mad Dog’s eye.
Mad Dog’s famous chair fell over backward as he erupted to his feet. At the same time, he threw his massive arms out and knocked the stranger away. The stranger went dancing back a few steps, stumbled, and dropped hard onto his ass.
Mad Dog stood a moment. He waggled his head, trying to clear it. When he looked around, the stranger had gotten up again, had drawn himself up into a fighting stance.
A low rumble started in Mad Dog’s unfathomable depths, and in another instant it had risen through him and burst from his mouth in a ferocious bellow of rage. He charged at the stranger, three hundred pounds of psycho biker intent on ripping the smaller man to shreds as if he were a paper doll.
The Outriders were out of their seats on the instant. They may not have been an official gang, but they followed the biker code. If one fought, they all fought together, right or wrong. Even as Mad Dog cannonballed into his enemy, they were up and ready to join the battle.
Then the battle was over. The Outriders gaped. Cobra, Charlie, and Shorty stood frozen in their places. Honey, Meryl, and Selene looked on from their chairs with their jaws hanging slack.
Mad Dog was now lying curled on his side. He was motionless except for his heaving breath. Spittle dribbled out between his broken teeth, and the blood from his nose made a spreading puddle on the floor.
The stranger stood over him, pulled back again into his stance. He bounced on his toes, watching the rest of them, waiting for the rest of them to come.
Cobra looked at him. Lifted one eyebrow. Cocked his china little, frowning with appreciation. “Pretty good,” he said.
“Thanks,” said the stranger.
“No, I mean it. That was awesome.”
“Hey, well, really, thanks a lot.”
“Of course, we still have to beat the shit out of you.”
“Sure.”
“It’s a biker thing.”
“I understand.”
But the bust-up that followed was hardly the stuff of song and story. Most of the drinkers at the other tables quit spectating about halfway through. The band—the guitar and harmonica boys—never even left off rehearsing, and there were a couple of offbeat moments when the brawl was accompanied by a riff of rollicking bluegrass music just like the brawl in that western movie might’ve been.
The three bikers rat-packed the new guy, jumped him all together. It was quick and ugly—but not entirely one-sided. The stranger really was tough. Outnumbered as he was, he still managed to put some definite hurt on his opponents. He dropped Charlie and all his muscles with a knee kick, and drove the wind right out of Shorty with a solar plexus blow. He even blackened Cobra’s eye with a quick piston of his elbow. In fact, he gave all three of them such a workout before they brought him down that by the time they were circled around his balled-up body aiming kicks at him with their steel-tipped boots they didn’t have much energy left for it.
After a while, the stranger, his arms protecting his head and neck, managed to wriggle himself under a table where they couldn’t get at him. The raging Charlie hurled the table away, but the stranger then managed to scoot under another one, a booth this time that was fastened to the wall. The bikers’ kicks didn’t reach him too well under there, and though Cobra climbed onto one of the booth seats and shot some punches down at him, those didn’t do much damage, either.
Finally, the bikers were just exhausted. They figured fuck it, they’d made their point. They left the stranger lying where he was and swaggered away.
They went over to Mad Dog, tried to revive him. The three of them working in concert got him sitting up, propped against a wall. Mad Dog’s eyes opened, kind of rolled around at them for a second or two. Then he vomited. Beer and tacos mostly, a couple of undigested bennies. The other bikers let him go, disgusted. He slid down the wall to lie on his side again.
Angrily slapping the puke off their jeans, the Outriders walked back to their seats and their women. They sat down again and took up their beers.
“That was good,” said Shorty.
“It was,” Cobra said. “A nice change from drinking. Sometimes you need a little break like that so you can come back refreshed.”
“Uh…yeah,” said Shorty, clueless.
“Oh, he elbowed you in the eye,” said Honey, brushing her fingertips over Cobra’s darkening bruise.
“Y’know, I noticed that, too,” he told her. “In fact, overall, I’d have to say he had a very hostile attitude.”
She was about to answer, but she didn’t answer. She stared instead. Cobra followed her stare, and then he stared. And then Shorty and Charlie and their women stared. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
The stranger was climbing out from under the table. Standing. Coming toward them. One eye swollen shut. Blood running from his brow all over the side of his face. Lips all mashed up. Legs unsteady. Walking tilted over, clutching at his side.
The bikers kept staring, and he kept coming. Then he stopped. Reached down. Lifted Mad Dog’s chair off the floor. Set it at the table. And plunked himself into it again.
At that point, the barmaid brought over the beer Mad Dog had ordered.
Now, the barmaid was a lady in her thirties and, maybe on account of her unhealthy habits, she was not as pretty as she once had been. But though her features were growing coarse, she still had a glamorous cascade of dyed blonde hair, and her tight T-shirt and tight jeans showed off massive round breasts, long legs, and a tight backside, all of which, she made sure, were jutting and shivering and swaying like a gelatin cuckoo clock as she approached. The whole way over, she squinted through her mascara at the fallen Mad Dog. She didn’t bother to hide her satisfaction at the sight of him down there, either. Once, not that long ago, the barmaid had made the mistake of dancing with Mad Dog. He had forced her out into the back alley and raped her. He’d given her a couple of grams of coke to keep her quiet, but it was really fear that shut her up—she knew he’d have killed her if she’d ever even thought about going to the cops. Anyway, the point is, she hated the fat bastard. She gave him a hard time whenever she dared, as much as she dared. And now, with a flourish, she plunked his beer down in front of the stranger.
And she said, “On the house, baby.”
It obviously hurt the stranger to smile at her with his mashed-up lips, but he tried. He wrapped his bloody hand around the glass.
The barmaid gave a bold glare to the others at the table. Then she clocked her way back to the bar.
They paid her no mind. Cobra and Honey, Shorty and Meryl, Charlie and Selene. They were still busy staring at the stranger. They’d stopped talking. Stopped drinking. They didn’t even have any expressions on their faces. They were just sitting there, staring at the stranger.
The stranger took a careful sip of his beer. Cobra blinked. It was another second or two before he could gather his thoughts, get his head together. Finally, he made a gesture toward the glass in the stranger’s hand.
“Y’know,” he said, “that’s Mad Dog’s beer.”
“Is it?” said the stranger thickly. He lifted the glass to his busted mouth. Tilted it up. Drained the contents to its foam.
He clapped the glass down on the table. He laughed.
And Cobra laughed. And the rest of them started laughing, too.