Burn Down The Night (31 page)

Spence jams his
top hat further down on his head and just glares at Chris. "She isn't my chick! I never even
touched the maggoty piece of jail bait! And dropping her on her head, man, I don't have to put up
with—"

"Laws!"
says Chris, and he
starts hauling the chick away. She's still zonked, not even close to being in this world. "I
mean, Jesus! Who can afford to get arrested!" says Chris, and he's standing over a green metal
trash barrel with the girl. "I mean the penalty in this state for
littering
is no frigging
joke!"

He up-ends her in
the wastebasket and she sinks in. She's like a jellyfish and she slops down into the gar­bage can
so far only her bare feet are sticking out of the barrel.

Spence leans out
of the cab window, opening another beer. "Jesus!" he says and he puts his hand over his heart.
"You've saved me from a life of crime!"

Chris dusts off
his hands. "No need to thank me, son. Doing the deed was its own reward."

"Balls," I say.
"Holy Christ!"

Spence turns and
looks at me. "What's wrong with you? Ain't you got no sense of humor?"

"Not anymore. It
just got arrested." I point at the rearview mirror on the side of the truck. Parked right behind
our truck is a state highway patrol car and a fat lady in a dirty blue convertible with bent-up
fenders. I've seen that dirty blue convertible before.

So has Spence. It
looks suspiciously like the one he pissed on. It is.

I take the keys
out of the ignition. "Looks like my truck driving days are over."

"Spence," says
Chris, aware that we are tits in the wringer, "you see, I warned you about that littering!" His
face is white in spite of the joke.

Spence hurriedly
downs the beer he's just opened. "Anybody got a suicide kit?"

That's not a
half-bad idea. Suicide sounds very tempting. We've got maybe five pounds of weed in the truck,
assorted miscellaneous dangerous drugs including cocaine, acid and all kinds of speed, an
underage chick in the garbage can, which is carrying a minor across state lines, which is some
kind of superheavy federal crime number, and so on and so on. And leav­ing the scene of an
accident, causing one, public urination (which may be assault with an undeadly weapon) and you
are talking about enough flight time in the slammer to make us all old and gray.

If you count all
the crimes, the list is probably endless.

Like me,
innocently driving the truck even though I'm only fifteen and my driver's license is fake, fake,
fake. The picture on it doesn't even look like me. It shouldn't. It isn't me but we have the same
color hair. The resemblance stops pretty much right there.

"The shit," says
Spence, "not only hit the fan, but some of it has gone into the wall socket too."

The state trooper
gets out of his car slowly, like his car is giving birth to him. Some birth! The trooper is maybe
ten foot tall and looks like the kind of guy that will either have only one eye in the center of
his forehead, or raised eyebrow ridges, hairy knuckles, and when he walks, his hands will drag on
the ground, gorilla style. A real intellectual with raw meat on his breath.

This is a high cab
we're sitting in and I swear, without even bending over, he's leaning directly on the window
frame of the truck cab.

"You fellows see a
bunch of long-haired faggots that maybe pissed out of their truck window?"

He smiles and he's
got maybe three or four thousand teeth, all rotten. "Hell! I'm sure you boys have seen these
freako perverts."

The trooper puts
one hand the size of a basketball on my shirt collar and kind of gathers me like a handful of
potato chips. I sound very crispy as my bones crack. He yanks.

I go out the truck
window. I am glad the window is rolled down. Real glad. It's less painful that way.

Before my feet
barely touch the ground, he has my head up alongside the truck and he's pushing his hand against
my face so hard I can feel the metal of the truck door bending out of shape around the back of my
head.

"All you faggots
out of the truck!" roars the cop.

Nobody disagrees.
At least nobody conscious. Sheila and Snowflake are in cloud cuckoo land and they don't come out.
Everybody else pours out fast, like ants out of a burning anthill.

The cop lets go of
my face so my nose can bleed freely, which it does. Morrison comes and stands beside me. He looks
like he's in a controlled rage.

"Get your faggoty
butts over here and lean up against the side of this truck!" the cop yells in his best SS
stormtrooper voice.

We rush to obey.
All except Spence. He's a little too drunk to move quick. The cop helps him out by giving him a
shove that puts his head into the side of the truck as hard as a baseball gets hit by a
bat.

Spence slides down
the truck, nearly knocked out cold.

The fat woman is
sitting in her car. I can see her clearly. She's shaking her fist at us. Muttering curses under
her breath. I can tell she feels safer inside the car than outside with all us hippy, long-hair
freako perverts.

The cop goes
through the motions of slapping us down for weapons. Some motions. His idea of a frisk is short
vicious jabs with his nightstick to see if he can hear the sound of metal, knives or
guns.

He puts everybody
on the ground, holding their stomachs and sides, all except Spence, who's already down on his
knees. Spence is lucky in a way. He's built like Tarzan's foster parents and can take quite a
beat­ing.

Me, I'm tough as a
crate of eggs. The first chop of the nightstick puts me away. Morrison and I end up to­gether on
our knees, our faces against the side of the truck.

"Some fun," says
Morrison under his breath.

Chris turns
around, faces the cop. He digs his hands into his pockets, stares at the cop defiantly, pissed
off. "Hey, man! Like this ain't cool, you know."

"A smart-ass,"
says the cop, delighted to meet some resistance.

"Yeah," says
Chris. "How do you know? Did you see it doing tricks?"

The cop draws
himself up to his full height. He looks very pleased with himself. "I'm gonna love kicking your
fucking teeth in!"

Chris starts to
say something else, something sarcastic, and the cop swings, lays him out with his billy club.
Really lays him out. A vicious shot to the kidneys, and then, when Chris bends over double,
another smash of the club against the back of Chris's head so hard he is driven head first
between the cop's legs.

"Who's next? Who's
gonna be next?" The cop's really excited. "C'mon, you faggots! Let's see somebody else shoot
their fucking mouth off!" He slaps his billy club against the palm of his hand.

There's a noise
inside the truck and I clearly hear Sheila saying "Don't be like that." She sounds frightened. I
hear Snowflake growling. A bad sign. Some-times Snowflake gets a little crazy, gets a little
vicious from the drugs, and two hundred pounds of bummed-out St. Bernard can really be hard to
take. Even Sheila isn't safe from him.

"Who's in there?"
The cop slams the side of the truck with his billy club. Snowflake growls, upset.

The cop turns and
stares at us, hate flashing in his eyes. He pulls out his gun, holds it in his right hand,
switches the billy club to his left hand. "I'm going around the back," he tells us. "Anybody
moves gets his fucking head shot off."

The back doors are
standing wide open but it's dark in there and I guess he can't see who's in there.

I see his legs
from under the truck where I'm still on my knees. He's standing square in front of the
door­way.

"You better come
out of there, you dumb son of a bitch!" snarls the cop. "Or I'll shoot the fuck out of
you!"

Something's moving
inside the truck.

I hear the cop
banging something with his nightstick. There's a loud slap. It's a mistake.

I hear a frenzied
growl and then something smashing inside the truck. I'm there beside Morrison, holding my aching
sides, watching the cop's legs.

I hear the cop
scream, then a gunshot, and suddenly the cop is flat on his ass with two hundred pounds of
enraged St. Bernard dancing on his face. The gunshot's driven the dog mad and he's biting into
the cop's chest like the cop is made out of dog food and Snowflake has been on a diet too
long.

I hear the massive
jaws snapping, biting, tearing. It's like a lion at the zoo at feeding time.

Morrison and I get
up, run around the back. The cop is bleeding from a big wound in his chest and he's out cold, his
head slammed into the concrete, driven hard by two hundred pounds of dog. The cop looks seriously
damaged. He looks more than that. He looks dead. There's lots of blood and the dog's jaws are
still tearing at him.

Morrison kicks the
dog in the side and Snowflake turns, enraged, forgetting about the cop, and starts for Morrison.
That is Morrison's idea all along, but as soon as it works, he regrets it.

The dog leaps at
him, begins chasing him, his muzzle red with blood. Morrison flies around the truck, running for
all he's worth, the St. Bernard snapping at his heels.

The only thing
saving Morrison is the corners as they race around the truck. The dog's so frigging big he can't
make the sharp corners.

The rest of us are
standing behind the truck, staring at the body of the cop, except for Chris, still lying face
down.

"He looks dead,"
says Mick, looking genuinely scared.

Spence comes up
and stands beside me. Morrison thunders past us, the dog yowling at his heels, leaping over the
cop's body, tearing around the truck again. It's comical but nobody's laughing.

"What do we do?"
says Spence, staring at the cop.

The woman in the
blue convertible roars out of the parking lot at high speed, looking horrified, probably thinking
we're gonna attack her next or something.

"Change the
license plates and let's split," suggests Mick. "They 
kill
people for doing in cops
in this state! We got to get the fuck out of here!"

Nobody
disagrees.

Mick starts
changing the plates. Morrison leaps into the back of the truck, somehow gets the doors slammed
before Snowflake can get at him. Spence and I are clumsily putting Chris, as gently as possible,
into the cab of the truck. He's maybe got a concussion.

Mick finishes
changing the front plate and goes to the back to change the rear plate.

We hear a snarl, a
scream, and then Mick comes bolting full speed toward the front of the truck, Snowflake hot on
his ass.

Mick dives into
the cab, falling across Chris's body. Snowflake jumps for him, his jaws just missing his
legs.

The dog leaps up
against the door in a frenzy, teeth snapping against the door.

"The fucking dog
is insane! He's turned killer!" says Mick, wild-eyed, freaked out of his mind.

There's a crash in
back of the truck, Sheila screaming, Morrison yelling. Sounds like a fight going on. Maybe
Sheila's trying to get out, trying to get to Snowflake, and Morrison's not letting
her.

The cab is
sardine-can tight. Mick, Spence, Chris out cold and me, all trapped inside by two hundred pounds
of maniac gunshot-freaked-out St. Bernard.

Mick's still got a
license plate in his hands. "I couldn't change them! That sucker turned on me! He's gone
mad!"

"Get us out of
here!" says Spence.

I can barely shift
the gears. Spence is sitting where the gear shift has to go.

"If we leave that
dog, Sheila will murder us in our beds!" I say.

"Drive! That dog
is flip city! We can't bring him in the truck! He's gone killer. Just get us the fuck out of
here!" says Spence. "If another cop comes, our asses are grapes."

The dog keeps
leaping up the side of the truck cab, trying to get at us. The whole thing is a dream, an
out-of-focus comedy that happens to someone else, and that nobody finds funny.

I get the truck
rolling and the dog, foaming at the mouth, chases us up the ramp, following us back onto the
freeway.

I watch the dog
running behind us, watch cars slow down, trying not to hit him. The dog runs behind us maybe a
mile before I lose sight of him.

Nobody says
anytbing for a while. It's too unreal.

There's a crash in
the back, sounds like somebody got his face popped hard. There's a thud, like a body falling
down. Maybe nobody notices that but me.

We are so
supercramped nobody can move. Chris is still gone, maybe seriously injured.

"Did that really
happen?" says Mick, shaking his head. "Was that real? I think I'm tripping." Nobody answers him.
The whole thing was like a film. Once it's gone by, it's gone, lingering like the memory of a
very insubstantial dream.

"Maybe he'll get
lucky," says Spence, meaning Snowflake. "Maybe when he calms down, somebody will adopt
him."