CHAPTER 4

 

That wasn’t the end of it with those good ol’ boys we’d run into earlier back at the Blue Pony. I shoulda known better. About an hour after we put the girls out, said our goodbyes, I just got my peepers quieted down when this soft rap rap rap came at the door.

Bud was snoring away, or at least putting a good show on to make it look like he was, so this looked like another job for Super Sucker, which would be me. At first I tried to ignore it, but the knocks got louder and I thought I heard a woman’s voice. Being as the girls had been gone awhile and this was a vacation, meaning all the pussy I could get was one of the main goals, I padded over in my skivvies and opened the door a crack.

It was that bleached blonde from the bar. The one who waited on us.

“Yeah?” I said. “I bet you got a case of beer in your car and no opener. Come to borrow a church key from your friendly visiting yankee? How close am I to a right guess?” She giggled, which was the effect I was after. Lots of guys got the wrong idea about how to get in tight with the women. Most of them think it’s got something to do with looks or money or some horseshit like that. I’m not saying those things don’t help, but what really gets a woman to lay down with you is to tickle her funny bone. You hit that bone on her and she’ll take care of the bone on you. That’s why I was never without a wisecrack. Lots of prettier dudes than me didn’t get half the poon I ended up with by accident. A woman who laughs feels generous and there’s only one thing of value any of them got and they know it. That’s the biggest secret there is on making it with the opposite sex. Look at the gals cracking up when the bars close and I’ll lay any odds you want that the guy they go home with is the guy making ‘em giggle. See, a guy who has the right kind of humor is going to be a fun guy in the hay. Why? Because he’s confident and that’s the trait they’re really crazy for. A guy who hasn’t got the right kind of attitude about himself is going to go around acting all kind of serious-like. Women sense this, just like they can also sense that a guy who’s loosey-goosey and keeps ‘em in stitches is one cocky, sure-of-himself sonuvabitch...and that’s the guy they want to have over to their double-wides.

I don’t think all this, except in kind of a shorthand way, when I see her standing outside our door, but I’ve been down this road so much I kind of already feel all this between us and it doesn’t take but a second for this knowledge to kick in and show in the way I act.

Mostly, that’s a feeling you can take to the bank, brother, but this time I got to say I was wrong.

“I happened to see you boys come over here a while ago. Think I might come in?”

That was a question that only had one answer that fit.

“You come right on in, pretty lady,” I said, swinging the door wide open.

Next thing I know, I’m lying flat on my back and the blonde’s in my room...along with two guys who looked kinda familiar. I don’t know which one was the one who kicked the door into my forehead and like to split it in two, but I’d bet even money it was the brown grizzly we’d been talking to earlier. Along with his little greasy partner.

The noise woke up Bud only Bud wasn’t much help. The big guy had a pistol in his hand and it was aimed right where it would really hurt if it went off accidentally. At Bud. I wasn’t in any imminent danger unless he took a forty-five degree tack.

“G’night, Ruby,” the little one said. She gave me a shrug like she was almost sorry for setting me up and took a hike, shutting the door behind her.

Well. This was cozy. Just us four fun-lovin’ young bucks in a motel room in Bumfuck, Tennessee admiring Doofus’s shiny gun. I don’t mind admitting I was a little nervous. Bud, though; Bud was cool. Acted like this sort of stuff happened all the time.

“Hey, fellas,” he said, swinging his long legs off the bed and rubbing sleep from his eyes like this was a couple of our poker-playing amigos come to roust us up for a game of draw poker.

“Get dressed, cowboy,” the big one said. “We’re going to take a ride.”

“We’ve seen your fair city,” Bud said, stretching back on the bed, folding his arms behind his head. “And I don’t think we’d be all that interested in the tour you got in mind.”

You could see this flustered the moose. I guess he was figuring on me and Bud acting like a couple of sissy-boy yankees and rolling over for him. Truth is, if it had just been me, I’da probably had my clothes on already and been opening the door politely for these guys. You could see Paul Bunyan kind of getting it together in his little pea brain, trying to figure out what to do next, what with this unexpected hitch in his master plan—his eyebrows going down in that little mad V some folks get when they’re upset. Before he could come up with a wrinkle on the plan Bud had just tweaked, Bud eliminated all that brain activity for him. He just kinda reached behind him under the pillow and brought out his own gun. I’d seen that gun before but I had no idea he’d brought it with him. It was a Smith & Wesson Police Special .38 he’d bought off some cop a long time ago in South Bend.

Mexican standoff.

The other guy reaches in his pocket and brings out a knife, a move I don’t like all that much as I don’t happen to have a gun under my own pillow. Not that I didn’t think I could take him. The guy looked like a true weenie, following around his big, ugly friend like he was bad his own self, when it was plain as the nose on Barbra Streisand he was not.

The moose started to open his mouth to say something when Bud just popped him.

Boom!

Fucking bullet started whizzing all over the place, skipping first off the guy’s noggin and then the wall and then it ended up in the bathroom, smashing the mirror. Made one hell of a lot of racket for one little ol’ slug.

When I peeked up over the side of the bed where I’d sort of thrown myself, I didn’t see anybody but Bud who was just lying there on his bunk, looking more pissed off than anything.

Oh, fuck, I thought. We done killed some guy and the jury’s gonna be all his cousins and brothers-in-law and the like. Our new cellmates were all going to be named Bubba and need extensive dental work. I’d just seen the movie Deliverance and I had a good idea what we were in for. I’d never done time in a Southern prison, but if the movies I’d seen were halfway true to life, I’d take Pendleton any day. Better practice up on my squealing pig imitation.

Only the guy wasn’t dead. Had blood all over him. All over him and half the room, but he wasn’t dead. He started moaning and trying to sit up and Bud walked over and took the piece out of his hand which he was still holding onto. His partner just lay on the floor where he’d fallen—fainted, I think—and bawled like some woman just found out General Hospital’d been canceled.

“Here,” Bud says to him and throws over a towel to the guy. “Your mascara’s starting to run, sweetie.” The guy picked it up and actually thanked Bud!

“It just bounced off his thick skull,” Bud said to me. He was down on his knees over the other guy, wiping the blood off his face. Sure enough, that’s what it had done. Tore a neat little divot out of his temple, just in front of his ear, but that was it. It was weird how so much blood came out of such a little skid mark.

“What we gonna do with ‘em?” I asked. I went over to Snidely who was down to a few sniffles and some wide eyes by now and took the knife from him. Polite little cuss. He not only handed it to me without my having to ask, but he turned it around and gave it to me handle first. I tiptoed over to the window and peeked out the curtain. “You suppose the cops are on the way?”

“Naw,” Bud said. “We made more noise than that when we was banging these guys’ girlfriends. Little ol’ gunshot ain’t gonna raise any eyebrows. They hear stuff like that all night.” Which was true. Seemed like every half hour since we’d been there we’d heard either firecrackers or .22s popping, amongst the burning rubber left by cars smoking out of the parking lot. This was an active little town. “But, I do think it’s time to move on. You never can tell when the local Smokey might decide to earn his pay and take a look. Especially when the car out front has plates that say ‘Wander Indiana’ on ‘em.”

Turns out Bud had a heck of a plan. Made both boys take off all their clothes—that was a look the little one gave me when he told them to do that! He musta seen Deliverance, too. That wasn’t what Bud had in mind though.

He wadded all their clothes up while I packed our gear and checked under the beds to be sure we weren’t leaving anything. We weren’t too worried about the motel owner identifying us, since we’d already taken the usual precaution of using somebody else’s name on the register, along with a license number probably didn’t exist. And this wasn’t a big enough deal to go to the trouble of getting an artist’s rendition out on the APB wires. Long as we could get out of the county, we’d be all right. Unless the big guy died, which didn’t look too likely, as he was acting frisky and all kind of grump by now, telling us under his breath what he’d like to do to us if we’d just give him his gun back.

About five miles down the road, Bud pulled over and picked up their clothes from the back seat and flung them out into a field of some green stuff that looked like short corn on steroids. Right after them, he threw their car keys. Last thing to go sailing was both the guys’ billfolds, but not until after he took out the cash, which wasn’t much. Eleven dollars in the little guy’s wallet and six in the other one. Bud kept the odd buck, saying since he was the genius who’d masterminded this robbery, he deserved the extra. It wasn’t hardly worth arguing over, so I didn’t.

All the way down the road we kept laughing until our cheeks hurt, imagining different scenarios the two naked guys back at the motel might be involved in. Especially since they couldn’t just sneak out to their car and drive off. Not only had we taken their keys, but Bud had decided he needed a spare distributor cap and thought theirs might work on my car.

The good thing about all that business was that our fun with those boys, plus the earlier fun with the girls had pretty much taken my mind off Donna.

For a while, anyway.