Larry Goes To Space (4 page)

If the little fox-like alien was going to sleep the day away, Larry needed another beer. Racine’s Bar and Girls was reasonably close, although the girls on the shift were homely enough to cause a blind man to poke his eyes out. Not that Larry visited Racine’s all that often, but he visited often enough to know that the middle of the day, middle of the week would mean that Merrie and Terrie, the Huckleberry twins, would be manning the pole and the stage.

Larry knew the rule of thumb about area strip clubs: the farther away from the Wichita airport, the less attractive the dancers were. Racine’s Bar and Girls was as far from Wichita as you could get without hitching a ride with Scooter and Betty. Larry told himself he was just going for the beer, not the ogling.

Thankfully, the drive to Racine’s was short. Larry’s previous two beers weren’t on his head as much as they were working hard on his bladder. The work was exactly like the road crew fixing the potholes out on Route 47, the potholes always got filled in quickly, but there was always another hole nearby. Larry’s bladder filled quickly, but there was always another beer nearby. Beers always seemed closer than bathrooms, not that his cows minded when he relieved himself in their field. The tractor never seemed to mind it either, except when Larry used one of his big back tires as a target.

Larry almost changed his mind when he saw the Rickenhauser Plumbing truck in Racine’s parking lot. Not that he had a problem with the truck. The big double cab truck was nice enough as such trucks go, never really making fun of Larry’s beat up fifteen-year-old farm truck.

The Rickenhauser brothers were a different matter all together. They normally behaved themselves when their sisters Mindy and Mandy were on weekend night dancing duty, but the sisters never danced midweek as they both had good paying post office dayshift jobs.

He was sure Jeff and Doug, the brothers, weren’t officially at Racine’s. He would bet three-to-one odds that they were actually laying pipe for Donnelly Construction, or at least, that would be what their timesheets would show when they submitted their invoices to Jill Donnelly for working on her most recent house flip. Still, Jill wouldn’t know because her day job as the city swimming pool manager kept her too busy to check on the remodeling project during the day. Larry wondered briefly how Jill expected to flip a house since the population in Fredonia had been dropping faster than cow patties from the back end of a tall cow and had been since the ADM Mill closed its doors years ago.

Jeff and Doug were nice guys — except when they were drinking. Strangely enough, Larry had never been around the Rickenhauser brothers when they weren’t drinking. He couldn’t think of too many other reasons to go into Racine’s in the middle of the day during the middle of the week, unless you had a thing for watching what the Huckleberry Twins called dancing.

Naked or not, bright shiny aluminum pole or not, carpeted stage with subdued lighting or not, Merrie and Terrie managed to look exactly like the dancing hippos from the Disney movie
Fantasia
. At least, they did before someone complained about that movie section being racist and Disney removed it. They removed the dancing hippos, not Merrie and Terrie, though Larry would swear in court they got their removal orders reversed. It wasn’t that the Huckleberry Twins were racist in the least, but then Larry could only see where the hippos had been racist by squinting his eyes at the screen and throwing his imagination into high gear.

After Larry emptied his bladder in the dirt parking lot, he headed toward the front door. The truck didn’t have the same set of values as Larry’s tractor when it came to getting urine on its back tires. The beat up old pickup was happy with any attention it could get. Old trucks were like that — sometimes. Larry’s truck knew it had a choice of attitudes about such things, however, it had long since decided that happy acceptance was preferable to being grumpy about something it had no control over.

Racine built her strip club so the front door faced the back of the building. It allowed her customers with delicate sensibilities and/or sensible wives to park behind the building where their car, truck, or tractor couldn’t be seen from the road. Larry didn’t have any delicate sensibilities or a wife, not that Nancy would have minded if Larry went to a strip club. No matter what her other foibles had been, Nancy had been a good wife that way, probably because she went to school with Merrie and Terrie and had seen them naked in the showers after gym class.

Larry kept his eyes averted away from the stage as he bellied up to the bar, ordering a draft beer and a six-pack to go. The bartender pulled up his shirt, exposing his rippled abdomen, and said, “I’m ready to go whenever you are, sweetie.”

Larry sighed. He didn’t mind being propositioned and wasn’t homophobic or gay, but everyone knew the bartender wasn’t gay either, or at least his wife and four kids didn’t think so. The man just thought the joke was too funny to not repeat — and repeat — and repeat, just like a shampoo bottle’s instructions without the rinsing part.

“Bag the bottles and keep it cold until I finish my draft.” He tried to keep his eyes averted from the stage while watching the Rickenhauser brothers watch Terrie attempt something like a moonwalk. Larry was still working on the vision of the little strawberry blond fox Betty and her four tits, so Terrie wasn’t presenting any entertainment value.

The brothers hadn’t spotted him yet, so he ducked into the back poolroom, admiring the ten-year-old carpet. The blue carpet would match his drapes perfectly, but he wouldn’t scrounge this carpet when Racine redecorated, since the crime scene cleaners had used bleach on the carpet to clean up the blood last year and Larry couldn’t figure how to place his furniture to hide the bleached out spots and the pool table dimples.

He grabbed a pool cue and tried to break the triangle of tightly packed balls quietly, so as not to disturb Terrie’s sense of rhythm or Jeff and Doug’s boogie viewing experience, but the noise was too much, catching the brother’s attention.

Doug leaned his heavy frame against the backroom’s doorframe, framing him like a picture with Terrie trying a lone tango in the background. “Well, Jeff, look who got dragged in by a cat.”

“What the cat dragged in,” Larry corrected.

“That’s what he said,” Jeff replied.

Doug asked, “Yeah. Yeah. Say, Larry, seen any flying saucers lately?”

From anyone else, Larry would have wondered about mindreading, but Jeff and Doug always used UFOs as an opening line ever since Larry had stopped fighting after one of Doug’s particularly strong right punches to Larry’s head. He’d stopped fighting to point at the UFO hovering over Racine’s parking lot. Pointing at something that didn’t exist earned him a second punch from Doug, giving him the opportunity to lay down and nap for a while.

“Actually, gentlemen, I saw another spacecraft just today.” Larry wondered why he was prodding the two brothers. It could only end one way. Giving a mental shrug, he knew he enjoyed a good tussle, just for the tussle’s sake. Win or lose, he was ready to wade into a good fight at the drop of a hat—or the mention of UFOs.

Doug furrowed his brow. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No. No,” Larry said, holding his right hand up in surrender, or as if he were testifying in court, since the gesture was much the same minus the Bible. Larry shrugged, knowing that somewhere he had a Gideon Bible he’d rescued from the motel on Highway 74 back when he and Nancy were still dating. He knew the Bible was somewhere in the house, doubting that Nancy had taken it as a souvenir of their dating days, he just couldn’t remember what drawer he’d dropped it in.

“I saw them. They weren’t UFOs, because I could identify them right away, even though they were flying and definitely objects.”

“You’re crazy,” Jeff said.

“I thought so myself, at first. I wasn’t seeing flying saucers this time. You remember what they looked like last time, right? Exactly like the special effect from a bad fifties sci-fi movie. The spacecraft I saw today were more like square buildings without windows or a porch.”

“I think you’re making fun of me,” Doug said.

“No, but I should. There’s so much to laugh about. Why aren’t you out laying pipe?” Larry asked.

Doug grabbed his genitals and squeezed. “Never you mind. I lay enough pipe for all of us.”

“That’s not what your wife said—” Larry decided not to finish the retort from his new resting place on the floor. He held up his hands in the T formation, requesting a time out. “Come on, fellas. You know Racine’s rules against fighting inside. We don’t want to get our entry authorization suspended again, do we? Let’s take it out back — again.”

On their way out the front door, to the back of Racine’s, Larry stopped at the bar and picked up his beer to go. The beer at Racine’s was expensive. The six-pack and the draft beer cost twenty-eight dollars. Four dollars a beer was expensive, but less than he’d paid the last time he went to Kansas City for a professional baseball game. Still, Racine’s was closer than anywhere else was and convenience had its price.

He dropped two twenties on the bar. The bartender gave him twelve dollars in change, two ones and two fives. Not one to be stingy, he left the two ones as a tip for the bartender, indicating one of the fives as a tip for Terrie and Merrie. He kept the other five wadded up in his left hand.

Doug was ready to waltz as soon as Larry’s feet hit dirt. His fists were up and he danced around like every boxer since Ali did the rope-a-dope. Larry thought he looked more like Merrie Huckleberry than Ali and waved him away, pointing at the beer in his right hand.

“Dammit, Doug. I’ve got a fresh six pack of bottles here. Let me put it in my truck first.”

Nodding, dropping his fists, Doug followed along behind Larry, Jeff docilely pacing alongside his brother. Larry opened the front door of his truck, the hinges creaking in genial greeting. He dropped the five-dollar bill near the truck’s half-open front door and set the beer on the middle of the front seat.

Doug whooped. “Finders Keepers.”

Instead of bending at the knees and keeping his back straight like every instruction manual said when picking up something from the ground, he bent at the waist, stretching his fingers around his ever-expanding waistline to grab the money before a Kansas breeze laid claim to it.

Jeff laughed, pointing at the fiver as if Doug might lose track of it once his head dropped and some blood finally rushed to his brain.

Larry grunted as he grabbed the truck’s door with both hands, slamming it into the top of Doug’s head. Swinging a heavy farm boot, Larry connected with Jeff’s testicles, or at least one of them. Larry didn’t have any intention of checking or even asking Jeff about his cajones.

Admittedly, they always checked on him when he lost a fight with either or both of them, but he did have a houseguest to check on. At least, that is what he told himself as he steered his pickup truck around Jeff and Doug’s writhing bodies laying in the dirt.

The drive home from Racine’s was short, but still long enough that Larry managed to finish another beer. Drinking and driving wasn’t a recommended activity, even on the rarely used dirt country road leading to Larry’s house. Larry didn’t like to do it, but it was too far to walk and no one would ever get a taxi to come this far from town. He could have called Dad or Mom, but Dad would be in the fields and Mom would have her hands full with Grandpa’s shenanigans. His next closest relative was his cousin Kenny, but he didn’t like to catch rides with Kenny since his cousin smelled too much like sheep — even after a long hot shower.

Larry’s pickup truck did enjoy the added challenge of a short drive with a slightly impaired operator, though. Old pickup trucks were often that way. The newer fancy models were much more politically correct, not liking anything that even hinted at impropriety, or rust for that matter.

Scooter was still asleep in Larry’s living room, not having moved, snoring softly. Larry grabbed a fresh beer and plopped down next to Scooter’s feet on the ottoman. He gently stroked the fur on Scooter’s arm. The little fox-like alien was softer and smoother than he looked. His pelt would make some rich woman an exotic fur coat. Larry knew that in some parts of the world a fur coat would be exactly what would happen if Scooter and his associates had landed there. It probably wouldn’t happen in the United States, unless they landed near his Cousin Mel’s place. Most American’s were so wasteful—that after they strapped the little alien down for an autopsy — what fur wasn’t used in DNA testing would probably be thrown away as useless scrap … or sold on the internet.

He wondered if Betty’s fur was as soft as Scooters. It if was, it would be a real waste to autopsy — Larry realized he had let his mind wander again. The afternoon had turned warm and the house was a bit stuffy.

Chugging the remains of his fourth beer and pushing himself to his feet, Larry picked up Scooter. He was surprised that the little alien was heavier than he looked. He also didn’t feel as delicate and breakable as Larry had imagined. As he grabbed Scooter under the shoulders and the legs, he felt the muscles on the legs tense like coiled steel ropes. He grabbed the leash to the translator and banged out the screen door, walking steadily toward the back pasture and the hovering spacecraft.

The walk back to the cow pasture wasn’t a long trek. He was happy the spacecraft hadn’t landed in the bull’s forty acre field. That was the farthest pasture from the house. He had steers in both forty-acre fields next to the house. Both of those pastures edged the dirt country road. Only a little traffic ever passed by Larry’s place, but there was enough traffic that fourteen spacecraft would have drawn some notice. He was glad they had landed far enough afield that they couldn’t be seen from the house, the road, or the neighbors.