The Mortal Nuts (13 page)

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.”

Carmen settled into her seat. If he didn't want to talk about it, that was fine with her. The first Saturday of the fair was going to be a long, hard day. The sky was bright blue, and the air was warming quickly. In most ways she dreaded the long hours ahead, but a part of her was looking forward to the energy and focus the day would bring. Responsible? The word had a strange flavor. Did he think he was her dad, or what?

The Daily News, official newsletter of the Minnesota State Fair, predicted a new attendance record that Saturday. As many as a quarter of a million people were expected. The weather looked like a perfect eighty-degree high, the sky appeared cloudless for two hundred miles in every direction, and Garth Brooks was scheduled to play the grandstand.

As usual, Sophie already had the front of the Taco Shop open and the deep-fryers heating by the time Axel and Carmen arrived. Ever since Axel had given her the title “manager” and promised her a bonus, Sophie had been putting in heroic hours. It was hard for him to believe that she was stealing from him. Nevertheless, as soon as she left the stand to visit the rest rooms, Axel took a careful look at the tortillas in the cooler. The flour tortillas came from Garcia's in plastic bags of one hundred, and the smaller corn tortillas in pouches of six dozen. He moved some of the bags aside and found eight ten-count pouches of Zapata tortillas, a grocery store brand, tucked in behind the regular stock.

So Tommy was right. Sophie was H.O.'ing. It was the only possible explanation. Eighty extra tortillas, assuming they were made into Bueno Burritos, would translate into over two hundred dollars. Over the course of the fair, that would add up to $2,400. Axel replaced the tortillas. So much for the five-hundred-dollar bonus he'd planned to give her. He would have to do something about it. But not today, not with a record crowd pouring through the gates. When Sophie got back from the john, it would be business as usual.

They had a line by ten that morning, and in the rush and bustle of business, Axel quickly purged his mind of Sophie's tortillas, the bald kid in the Maverick, and his missing .45. The day flew by without the usual midafternoon slump. Sophie, Carmen, Juanita, Kirsten, and Janice, the weekend gill, hardly stopped moving all day. By early evening they'd run out of cups, and Axel had to go begging from other concessionaires, none of whom were eager to dip into their supplies to help a competitor. He finally coaxed half a case out of the Orange Treet guy by promising to give him free tacos for the rest of the fair. At seven o'clock, Sophie told Carmen to start skimping on the cheese. At seven-thirty, they ran out of corn tortillas; and shortly after nine o'clock, they ran out of the flour.

Twenty years in the business, and Axel had never run out of tortillas. Elated by record sales but distraught over the business he was losing, Axel ran to each of the three other Mexican food concessions on the fairgrounds and tried unsuccessfully to buy more tortillas. He thought about making the run to Cub Foods, but by the time he got back with them it would be too late to do any good. Garcia's truck would show up the next morning with Sunday's supply of fresh tortillas, and they could start all over again. He returned to the stand empty-handed but feeling better knowing that he had at least tried.

An exhausted Sophie stood proudly at the serving window, offering refried beans to each new customer. Axel stopped and watched as she actually sold some. A bubble of pride expanded in his chest; the woman really and honestly cared about his business. He had planned to talk to Sophie about the grocery-store tortillas that night, but he didn't have the heart to hit her with it after such a killer day. He told her to go home, told her he and Carmen would close up the stand. Wearily, Sophie agreed. Axel watched her walk off toward the parking lot, thinking she was worth every penny he paid her. Maybe even worth every penny she stole.

Carmen and Kirsten, with little to do in the way of food preparation, sat on folding chairs by the side of the stand, smoking cigarettes. Kirsten was just getting started with her first pack of Virginia Slims. She watched Carmen carefully, trying to emulate her stylish smoking technique. Carmen had a way of taking the smoke into her mouth, then letting it stream out over her upper lip into her nose. She called it a French inhale. When Kirsten tried to do it, she sneezed and started coughing.

“First you got to learn to inhale regular,” Carmen said. “You got to start a little at a time.”

Kirsten nodded, her eyes watering, and took a tiny puff from her Virginia Slim.

Juanita was perched on a cheese carton, chewing on a fingernail. Carmen offered her a cigarette.

“No, thank you,” Juanita said.

Carmen said to Kirsten, “Juanita is very polite.”

That cracked them up, all three of them. It had been a long day.

James Dean stood between the railroad tracks at the back of the forty-acre parking lot, tossing stones up in the air and trying to hit them with an old broom handle. He was a lefty. Because it was dark, he could only connect with about one out of every four or five swings, and most of those he drove straight into the ground. Now and then, though, he got a good piece of one, and the rock would go sailing out into the parking lot. He caught this one rock perfect, listened, heard the sharp crack of stone on safety glass.

Last night, he'd closed up the bar with Tigger and Sweety.

They'd been on the sidewalk, just leaving, when Tigger had suggested that Dean stay with them at “Headquarters.”

That had sounded good to Dean. Tigger had an aging, oil-burning Cadillac Fleetwood, about a '76, rust-spotted black, with tinted windows and a peeling black vinyl roof. Dean got in his Maverick and followed the smoke through a tangled neighborhood, parked on the street, then accompanied his new friends down an alley, over a fence, and through the broken basement window of a dark, boarded-up house. The air smelled of spray paint, mildew, piss, and cigarette butts.

Tigger lit a candle, then said he had to go grab the juice. At first, Dean thought he was going for a bottle, but Tigger crawled back out through the window trailing a long orange extension cord. A minute later, the work lamp at the end of the extension cord blinked on.

“Headquarters” contained two mattresses on the floor, a torn vinyl beanbag chair, a few hundred beer bottles, an old TV. Empty spray cans were scattered among the beer bottles. Spray-painted slogans and drawings covered the walls. Heil Hitler. White Power. Fuck Off and Die. A few scattered swastikas, crosses, and skulls. One wall bore an enormous stylized vagina, fluorescent pink labia stretching from floor to ceiling. A pile of well-thumbed magazines—
Soldier of Fortune, High Times,
assorted skin mags—sat atop an upended cardboard box.

“This is, like, our meeting place,” Tigger explained as he climbed back in through the window. “A bunch of us hang here.”

“What's the deal with the light?” Dean asked.

“The guy next door has an outside outlet. We just plug ourselves in. He don't miss it.”

Dean nodded. A real four-star operation, this. He'd have been better off sleeping in his car. “There a bathroom here?”

“Yeah. What they used to call the furnace room. The toilet paper's on top of the water heater.”

Despite all that, he'd slept pretty good. The mattress wasn't bad, and nothing ran over him or bit him during the night, although he had heard some scurrying

Tonight things would be different. Tonight he'd get himself a real room, and tomorrow, if Tigger could be believed, he'd be scoring himself a chunk of very pure, very cheap, very marketable meth.

Dean tossed a rock into the air, swung the broom handle as hard as he could. He hit the rock low. It went up in the air, came down a few feet away.

Enough. He decided to quit before he dropped a rock on his head, or before some guy with a busted windshield came looking for him.

Axel bought Carmen a bomb pop on the way to the truck. Carmen liked bomb pops. She liked to bite away the ridges, feeling the red, white, and blue ice cold on her front teeth. Twelve hours of action had left her numb; she sucked the bomb pop and listened to Axel chatter about what a great day they'd had. The day's receipts were inside his burlap shoulder bag Axel patted the side of the bag affectionately.

“A great day,” he said. “You did a great job, Carmen. You're a great kid.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If the rest of the fair is good—hell, even if it's not good—I'm going to be giving you a nice bonus. Buy yourself some new clothes.”

Carmen bit the tip off her bomb pop and looked at the money bag.

“That would be great.”

“You worked hard. You deserve it.”

“I sure do.”

Axel gave her a sharp look. He unlocked the passenger door and opened it, then circled the truck and let himself in the other door.

“You stick with me, Carmen, and you'll do all right.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm not kidding you. Hang in there with me, Carmen. I'll take care of you. I really will. We're a team.”

Carmen pulled the bomb pop out of her mouth and looked at Axel. He was staring at her, looking right into her eyes. He looked like he was going to cry.

“Okay,” she said, looking away. She hated it when Axel got maudlin. She thought about the six-pack of canned martinis waiting in her room, wondering whether they would still be cool from the night before. Not that it mattered. They went down just as fast warm.

Two hundred yards away, James Dean sat against the back of Tommy Fabian's Winnebago, playing with Axel's .45, feeling the checkered wooden handle, smelling the tangy odor of gun oil. He had never fired a pistol. Cocking the hammer, he sighted along the top of the barrel. The gun was heavy. He uncocked it carefully, set it in his lap. The long wait had diminished much of his excitement. He was getting hungry. To pass the time, he played the scene out again in his mind, seeing Tiny Tot's face when he showed him the gun. He wasn't sure what he would do after that, but whatever it was, Tiny Tot wouldn't like it.

He gripped the gun and listened. He could hear footsteps.

The footsteps passed. It was still too early.

He let his head fall back on the rear bumper of the RV and watched the moon, not quite full. A faint ringing sound wound its way through the RV camp—someone's mobile phone, perhaps. Dean thought, It tolls for thee, Tiny Tot.

What he would have to do, he had decided, was show him the gun about two seconds after he got to the door. Take charge of the situation before Tiny Tot could figure out which key to use. Come around the side of the Winnebago fast.

Nearby, someone in one of the RVs turned on a radio. Some old disco music from the seventies, before his time. Dean closed his eyes and listened, breathing deeply.

Something jarred him awake, a movement of the Winnebago's bumper against his head. He jumped up, heard the gun flip off his lap, hit the ground. Shit! He looked around the corner of the motor home.

Shit! The donut guy was there, already standing on the fucking step, turning the key. Where had the gun fallen?

No time. Tiny Tot had the door open. He was stepping inside. His plan forgotten, Dean ran straight at him, caught the door just before it closed, tore it open. He saw Tiny Tot turn toward him, mouth open, then twist away, reaching for something. Dean grabbed him by the ankles, jerked. Tiny Tot went down hard, the RV shaking, then twisted around with something in his hand, bringing it down on Dean's shoulder. Galvanized by a shock of pain, Dean threw himself backward out the door, dragging Tiny Tot with him, hurling the little man hard against the wheel of the Peterbilt. A baseball bat flew from Tiny Tot's hands, thudded to the gravel a few yards away. His cowboy hat fell forward onto his lap. He sagged against the big tire of the semi, his eyes bugging out, gasping for breath. Dean ran for the bat, scooped it up as Tiny Tot drew a loud breath, started to rise, saw Dean coming at him with the bat, and raised his arms.

Dean swung the bat, a downward chopping motion, hitting the donut man's forearm. Tiny Tot howled and fell back against the tire. Dean struck again, the bat glancing off Tiny Tot's skull. The little man's face went slack, his eyes pointing in two different directions, blood curtaining over his right ear. The sight of blood made the earth tilt; Dean dropped to his knees and closed his eyes. His ears filled with a rushing sound. He swallowed. The sound in his ears abruptly ceased. Voices. He heard someone shouting something. He pushed aside the dizziness, dropped the bat, and jumped up into the Winnebago, searching frantically for Tiny Tot's money bag. Everything was so bright, so in focus, it was hard to see, like a television with the contrast set too high. There, on the floor. He scooped up the bag in one hand, jumped out. The donut guy was moving, crawling away. Dean kicked him twice in the ribs till he curled up, his hands over his bloody head, fingers glittering. A flashing horseshoe snapped into hard focus. Dean kicked again, and again, until Tiny Tot's arms flopped away from his head. He ripped the horseshoe ring from Tiny Tot's slack fingers.