The Storm Giants (5 page)

Chapter 11
: Cowboy Pimps

Rick and Norm were
Kerri’s big brothers. They were quite a bit older than their little sister, who’d been a late baby. They were the ones who raised Kerri after their parents were killed by a drunk driver when she was four, and she thought the world of them.

The three siblings were t
hird generation pot growers even though Kerri turned her back on the family business long ago. The brothers were good old boys, hunters and outdoorsmen. Self avowed rednecks through and through, though they forgave Everett for being a city slicker on every possible occasion.

They
tried to put Everett through the wringer when Kerri first introduced him to them. The brothers cleaned out the odd bar together from time to time, and they were confused that Everett wasn’t intimidated at all upon their first meeting.

They’d tried a few practical jokes and ambushes that
Everett had no trouble boomeranging back on them. But that was all right. Kerri was lucky to have them, and they were tolerable enough.

The access road to their place
was narrow and over grown, with lines of Mayten trees to both sides. Everett crept the car through the tunnel of overhanging willow branches, toward the brothers’ home.

Rick and Norm’s house was a sprawling
, weather darkened one story cabin that had never been painted. Its roof was in such disrepair, Everett envisioned the brothers doing a juggling routine with pots and pans to catch the leaks when it rained.

If they di
dn’t seem to care much about their house’s exterior condition, the interior was bursting with expensive, useless crap, and their vehicles betrayed the money they had to burn from their farming endeavors.

Rick had a huge green Ram truck in the driveway with
jacked up over sized tires on custom rims. It was 4 WD, and the truck didn’t have door handles; he needed a remote on his key ring just to get in and out.

Norm
was devoted to his blue restored 1957 Land Rover I 107 pickup, smaller but much more elegant than it’s over sized cousin. It was an electric, running off an array of batteries rather than serving the Arab Oil Moguls. He had a bumper sticker on his rear fender reading ‘Death to the Petro Traitors.’

Norm
also had a big array of halogen lights on top of the cab, facing backwards. He enjoyed blasting them in the eyes of anyone driving behind him at night rude enough to shine their high beams up his ass.

T
he brothers owned all the latest and top flight in hunting gear: halogen spots for jack lighting and ‘out of season’ work, matching Weatherby Mark V hunting rifles with Leupold scopes, GPS locators, the whole shebang.

They
made a big deal about being off the grid, all their electricity coming from solar panels on the rotting roof of their house. They’d tried to talk Everett into going that route, but Everett wasn’t sure it was desirable for PG&E to tell the Man he might be running an indoor grow operation. Didn’t need CAMP or the DEA kicking in his family’s door even if they were clean; it would disturb Kerri and Raymond.

The
brothers also had a well equipped workshop stocked with a full array of machine tools, specialized for weapons modification and gun smithing. Rick and Norm’s water came from a well and, in addition to a septic tank for their sanitary needs, they’d let slip that they had another big plastic tank buried somewhere on the property for a fallout shelter. If civilization collapsed, the brothers had announced their intention on more than one occasion to retreat a step or three, then come out as warlords when American society finished its death gurgle.

Everett
figured they had other caches scattered around the property. But they didn’t ask where Everett had all his Bay Area money buried and he didn’t ask if they had access to, say, an RPG or an M 60 machine gun. Just like down in the East Bay, people up in the piney woods minded their business.

It was only after
Everett parked the Escort that the brothers’ lazy if fecund pack of hunting dogs vomited forth from whatever shady nooks they’d been taking their afternoon siesta in. They swirled around the car baying protest at Everett’s intrusion on their nap time.

Norm
appeared in the doorway with a smoking bong in his hand. Norm was a tall, strapping example of the lumberjack genetics that prevailed in Northern California. Although in his forties, he couldn’t get past the bygone days of his sexual peak: his brown hair was cut in a late 70s style waved pageboy, his bolo string tie had a gold Playboy bunny clasp and his jeans were tight enough that you’d see the wrinkles in Norm’s scrotum if you cared to aim a glance at that portion of his anatomy.

Norm made his haphazard way to the Escort
, favoring a few of the dozen odd mongrels with good natured kicks from his metal toed cowboy boots, shooing them out the way. Norm gave Everett a stoned red eyed grin.

Wet noses rammed
Everett’s crotch and ass as he still exited the car, one dog after another snuffled and slobbered on him. The surrounding pack of waist high hounds orbited the two men as they walked toward the entrance of the brother’s posh pad.

One of the dogs –
a startlingly muscle bound muttley cross between a Beagle and a Rhodesian ridgeback – latched onto Everett’s heel. Everett was forced to an abrupt halt by the gentle, playful, inescapable power of a mouth that could rip off the Achilles tendon if the dog bit down.

“Good boy
,” Everett said. The mutt let go and faded into the pack with his cropped tail wagging at this little joke.

The inside p
ut the lie to the house’s deliberately deceptive exterior. It was a rock solid pussy palace, filled with assorted bric-a-brac the brothers purchased at head shops: black light posters, lava lamps, cylindrical ornaments encircled by dangling arrays of fishing lines with oil tears weeping down them.

Rick sat
on the tiger striped velvet couch, as stoned as Norm. His blond hair was cut in the same style as Norm’s, and his attire identical. The only real difference between the two brothers was that one was dark and one was light.

Rick chuckled at a
Three Stooges skit on the home theater projection TV, which stood in front of an unpainted plank wall. The brothers had just about every channel in the world; their TV was pirated satellite run through a series of home made decoder boxes.

A
tall stack of stroke magazines teetered next to the couch. The brothers scrambled to hide them when Kerri or Raymond came to call, but the rest of the time the porn was right out in the open: The brothers were dedicated bachelors despite Kerri’s infrequent efforts at domesticating them.

T
heir ‘cowboy pimp’ living quarters should’ve given potential female playmates a heart attack. At first glance, it looked like any girl they picked up for a one night stand stood a good chance of dying from some heinous skin contact disease. However, the brothers were successful players on the local redneck meat market circuit

Norm
proffered the bong, but Everett shook his head. Pot just made him even more taciturn and paranoid than he already was.

“How’d things go down south?” Norm asked. “Yo
u get everything done?”

“Pretty much
,” Everett said.

“If you’d taken a load down with you
, you know you’dve have made some bank. Kerri wouldn’t need to ever now.”

Norm was a broken record.
How many times
had
they had this conversation? As many times as Larry had asked him to bring some sensemilla down to him.

But
market savvy Larry hadn’t asked in a while. He’d mumble about market conditions and investment-to-profit ratio if you asked him why.

“Norm
,” Everett said. “Prime sens is down to a grand a pound, Oaksterdam is killing your prices. It’ll be decriminalized and your kind of operation will be a dinosaur.”

“Bullshit
,” Rick said, not taking his eyes off the TV screen. As Moe was just commencing to poke Curly and Larry in the eyes, Rick’s preoccupation was understandable. Rick said, “The Emerald Triangle will never die. SoHum will bury your East Bay indoor grows.”

Norm
said, “What we wanted to tell you was, there’s been strangers asking around about you, up to town. City slickers, three of them, real well dressed and real out of place.”

“
Foreign, y’know?” Rick said, and favored Everett with a malicious chuckle. “They weren’t buyers, they weren’t bandits and they sure in hell weren’t lost tourists. Should have seen it, the street cleared out like it was High Noon or something, everyone figured they were CAMP or some other branch of the bad guys.”

Everett
’s scowl intensified a little more. “Thanks for the word, but just ‘cuz some one’s beating the bushes, don’t mean I have to jump through their hoops. Don’t like attention this close to home, though.”

“What’s to like about attention from strangers?” Rick asked
, and then both the brothers stared at him, the good natured hick charm shedding from them like water from a pair of surfacing orcas. “You can wipe your own ass, brother in law. But you best not be dragging any of your big city shit up here to trouble our sweet little Kerri.”

They thought they were double-
teaming him, but there was nothing to say back to that one. When you’re right, you’re right.

A
Road Runner cartoon came on as Everett took his leave. The tiger striped couch creaked with strain as Norm plopped his ass down next Rick and they commenced uproarious laughter at the Coyote’s doomed scheming. The bong gurgled merrily behind Everett as he left to brave the gauntlet of the dog pack again.

Chapter 12
: Blood & Media

T
hat night Everett was watching the tube in the wee hours. Some cheesy ‘70s cop show, a real piece of TV Land crap. But he just couldn’t seem to turn it off, or surf to something closer to educational.

Kerri
was asleep, but Raymond had gotten up and tottered out to join Everett on the couch. He was accustomed to his father’s insomnias. Sometimes Everett wondered if Raymond didn’t come out to comfort his Father instead of the other way around.

Raymond lay on his
daddy’s broad chest, asleep. Everett could never sleep well at all, sometimes propelled from bed to patrol the house, the yard, or when back in the East Bay, the ‘hood.

Kerri
got full marks for putting up with his inability to relax. That kind of hyper vigilance must’ve been irksome for her at times.

Th
e TV crime drama he watched was lame; some kind of synthetic story arc erected by the Citizens to shield themselves from the howling chaos of reality and the cold winds of disillusion. It had nothing to do with Everett’s own experience, or reflect the street life at all. But maybe the Citizens could only handle reality if it was shrink wrapped, ‘sanitized for your protection.’

The Hammer Stud
ios were the only ones that portrayed violence at all well. Their fake blood was a red corn syrup that wouldn’t fool even a small child. But it was a fitting symbol for the crazy clown, evil funhouse mindset that overcame when large quantities of blood flowed.

Blood
wasn’t shy about spilling. It always meant something to somebody when people leaked.

Everett
remembered, as a 15 year old, discovering his business associate Chopper’s murdered body after he’d been killed in a drug rip-off:

The door to Chopper’s hotel roo
m was ajar. Everett took his straight razor out of his sock and held it knuckle duster style so he’d embed the blade into whatever he punched. He pushed the door inward with his knuckles so as not to leave fingerprints and stepped inside. Chopper lay on the floor with his head beaten in, a pool of blood soaking the cheap hotel carpet in a wide expanse around his ruined cranium.

The hemoglobin had even sloshed up
on the baseboards a little. Everett remembered being surprised at the time that there could be that much blood inside somebody, it being the first time Everett had seen that extensive of a bleed out. Chopper hadn’t died right after taking the blow; he’d drained for a bit before his heart stopped.

But that was one constant
: No matter how many times you saw, it was always instructional just how much of the red fluid the body contained.

Bags o
f blood, that’s what humans were. Also fear machines and pain generators. Raymond squirmed in his sleep, and Everett’s eyes were drawn to him.

I
n Chopper’s long ago hotel room the blood had already clotted to the consistency of pudding, and Chopper's eyes were glazed and empty.

The overwhelming scent
from that much blood got his
instant
attention. The hackneyed odor of copper or hot metal, along with whatever pain or terror induced pheromones were laden in the congealing mess that Everett was picking up on.

The child in
Everett scanned his environment with every sense on overdrive. With blood spilled by person or persons unknown like that, he’d checked the surroundings in frantic paranoia, to make sure he didn’t fall prey to the same unseen threat.

W
hen the phone rang in the depths of Chopper’s room, Everett’s younger self jumped, both feet leaving the floor. When he landed, he’d whirled and ran as fast as he could from that room of death. No shame, Everett had been a teenager after all; he’d never over react like that again.

In the here and now
Everett was glued to the boob tube, and sleepless in the bleak. Raymond snored his little boy snores on his chest, arms too short to reach all the way around as he hugged his daddy in his sleep.

On the tube
, some random disposable character had just bitten the dust. Some snitch tossed screaming from the roof of a parking garage. The murder was antiseptic, no blood, no emotional response by any of the show’s main characters, but it punched Everett in the gut like he never would have allowed it to in real life.

Everett
lay on the couch crying and crying for the first time since he was a child. The tears flowed silent from his expressionless face, Everett was unable to stop and not understanding why, keeping still so as not to awaken Raymond.

What was this?
Everett asked the self in wonder, analyzing this pointless grief as if it were happening to someone else. What did it mean?

How ridiculous
for a man like Everett to be crying in the night. Crying in response to this cheesy flickering television conduit. Crying for some throwaway fictional character in a two bit piece of period dreck.

L
ater, Everett tucked Raymond into bed and lay down next to Kerri. He reached out a hand and laid it on her hip. She turned to him and flowered.

As the loving hit high gear she remembered
when she was a little girl, and her brothers taking her to the San Francisco Zoo, visiting the Cat Kingdom. She felt a thrill when she realized those big beautiful flat eyed beasts would make a meal of her if the bars weren’t in the way.

She felt that sam
e thrill with Everett, when they made love. When she was out with Everett and people walked by without paying any especial attention to him, she thought ‘If only they knew.’

She
knew. Or rather she thought she knew, which is enough for most people.

“My own private panther,” she whispered. “My secret wild thing.”

She smiled wide open at the ceiling, believing she had Everett wrapped around her finger. She bit her lip to keep her moans of pleasure and release from waking Raymond. Maybe it was the other way around, and Everett was the one who had her under his thumb.

They slept, after, and there
was peace for a bit.

A
t one point during the night lightning flashed outside, bright enough to light up the bedroom. Thunder rumbled as Kerri awakened gasping and sat bolt upright in bed. Everett stood naked at the window as lightning flashed outside a few more times. As Kerri watched, he listened closely to every mumbling roll of thunder, as if to a conversation.