The Scarred Man (9 page)

    She grinned and said, "Look all you want, baby. Tiny don't give a damn."

    "No?" I remembered the boot going into Moore's ribs. Whatever else he might be, Tiny did not give the impression of a man who did not give a damn.

    "Where are you from, Shaw?"

    "Oh, around."

    She grinned again, showing small white teeth curiously pointed like those of a biting animal. "Like all of us. I mean you're not with no special club or nothin'?"

    "No."

    "Tiny says there's something funny about you."

    "Does he?"

    "He can't figure you out."

    "Why does he bother?"

    "It's just Tiny. He can't stand to be bugged. When some-thin' bugs him, he gets his teeth into it and won't let go. Not till he's bit whatever it is at least in half. Like now. He says you're too old to be a rider. And your clothes look like maybe you haven't had them very long. I mean they're just too clean, man. And your bike. He says he knows that bike, and it ain't yours."

    "It is now. I bought it in Boston. If he wants to see a bill of sale, I might just show it to him. Might, that is, if I thought it was any of his damn business."

    "Oh he can make it his business if he wants, baby."

    When I didn't answer she looked at me appraisingly over the thread of marijuana smoke and said, "I don't know why you give him such a wild hair. Personally I like the way you look."

    "Thanks. You wouldn't happen to know a guy named Soldier, would you?"

    She hesitated just long enough to convince me that the name had rung a bell. "What club does he ride with?"

    "Well I don't know exactly who he's riding with now. Maybe the Deuces. Last winter he was down south for a while, and he was riding with a small club out of Hialeah called the Beaks."

    "Does he have a scar on his face?"

    "He might have. I mean last winter he didn't, but he might have since."

    She stuck out her little pink foxlike tongue and licked her lips suggestively. "You know him real well, don't you, baby?"

    "Not all that well. Just a guy I ran into."

    "Well, if there is ten thousand riders here like they say, I wouldn't be surprised if you could turn up quite a few Soldiers. I mean it might or might not be the guy you're lookin' for."

    "Sure."

    She said without any change of inflection, "Do you like my boobs?"

    "What?"

    "My boobs, dummy. You been looking at them long enough. What do you think?"

    "Great."

    "Sure," she said complacently. "That's what everybody says."

    "How old are you, Pearly?"

    "Guess."

    "Eighteen."

    The cornflower blue eyes with their drug-dilated pupils sparkled with amusement. "Sixteen."

    "How long have you been going around with Tiny?"

    "Like about a year, man."

    The image of her delicate childlike body absorbing the full thrust of Tiny's masculinity was too much for me.

    "Don't you have a chick of your own, Shaw?" she said.

    "Not right now."

    "In between?"

    "Sort of."

    "I could maybe fix you up if you wanted…"

    "Well thanks. Pearly, but right now I'm a little beat."

    "You want I should go away?"

    "I thought I might get a little sleep for a while."

    "Are you puttin' me on? You come
here
for sleep?"

    "I'm an old man. Pearly. Old and gray."

    "I like them old and gray, Shaw. I've got a kind of a hangup that way."

    "We'll talk about it sometime."

    "Are you giving me the brush?"

    "Not exactly."

    "You scared of Tiny?"

    "Who wouldn't be?…"

    "Tiny's all right He don't beat up on me only so often."

    "That's decent of him. He only outweighs you by a hundred and twenty pounds."

    "I'll tell you something about Tiny. Chicks aren't that important to him. Now his bike, if you touched his bike that would be different. He'd kill you for that. Guys like Tiny, they really groove on all that iron. It's like when he gets all that horsepower between his legs it's more to him than any woman could be. It's like the rider is nothin' by himself, and the bike is nothin' by itself; but when you put the two of them together, they really groove. I mean you never see them start to roll in just an ordinary way. You watch Tiny come out of a bar sometimes so bombed he can hardly stand and without two dimes in his pocket, but when he gets on that bike he's a really
big
man. I mean he doesn't just start up and roll off. He does a wheel stand or somethin' crazy with enough noise to break every window in the place. It makes him feel good. He's on a real trip every time he's ridin'. And when he gets to where he's goin' he takes that hog to bed with him. I'm not kiddin'. He takes it inside with him and spends half the night shin-in' the goddamed thing. Sometimes I see him that way, and it's so quiet you could hear a flea fart; and he's got this like you know freaked out look on his face, and that's when I know he's really in love with that fuckin' bike. Now with you it's different. I don't get that kind of feelin' at all about you. I guess to you maybe a woman would be more important than a bike."

    "You might be right."

    "Tiny is maybe a little sick, if you know what I mean. He does crazy things on that bike. I don't like ridin' with him. He's always on some kind of high, and even when he isn't on pills or dope, he's just trippin' on the bike itself. Sometimes he's doin' like a hundred miles an hour in the rain or fog, and I know he's gonna kill both of us. It's like he maybe
wants
to die on the bike. Like that would be the biggest trip of all. You know what I mean?"

    She had her arms crossed and was hugging herself as if the sudden prospect of death had chilled her.

    "Why do you ride with him then?" I said.

    "Well I mean you've got to ride with somebody, don't you?"

    "Why?"

    "Oh come on man. Do you want me to sit home with my shithead father and watch him drink beer and tell me how good Channel 13 is comin' in tonight? 'Pearly, we're gettin' Channel 13 real good tonight. For a while there it wasn't near as good as 8, but now we're getting 13 real fine. Look at that there color, Pearly. You ever seen 13 with such real good color before?' Shit, man, there's got to be more to life than 'I Love Lucy.' He's seen them all ten times before anyway."

    "Does he know you ride with Tiny?"

    "He don't know nothin'. He thinks Lawrence Welk is pretty hot stuff and Spiro Agnew is maybe some kind of Greek wrestler. He thinks his fuckin' daughter is some kind of
virgin
, for Chrissake. Not that he'd particularly care if I was peddlin' my ass in the next room, just so it don't interfere with his goddam reception. If he walked in on the middle of some gangbang, it would only be to ask if anybody seen the teevee schedule."

    "Well if you don't want your father and you don't want Tiny, what do you want?"

    She pondered the question for a moment. "I'd like to get away from the whole scene. Just split to someplace where it's kind of like clean and new. With some guy who was straight but not too straight, you know. Maybe out west. You ever hear of a place called Jackson Hole, Shaw?"

    "Yes, it's in Wyoming."

    "That's the place," she said in a dreamy voice. "Some kids who were out there told me about it. It's like the mountains go right up to the moon, they said. And you can see the snow all year long. And people are ridin' horses instead of bikes. And you can trip out just from the air up there without any dope. We could make it, Shaw."

    "We?"

    "You and me."

    "Are you putting me on, Pearly?"

    "Why would I be puttin' you on?"

    "You'd take off for Wyoming just like that with a guy you never saw before?"

    "Sure. Why not?"

    "Maybe when you're sixteen it's okay. I don't think it's okay when you're forty."

    "Why are you so hung up with age, Shaw? I could make you young."

    "For a week? Two weeks? A summer? The winters are long and hard and cold in Wyoming."

    "Well what do people do there in the winter?"

    "They sit around and watch the reruns of 'I Love Lucy.' "

    "Oh Jesus, you're gettin' to sound more and more like my old man."

    "That's what I told you."

    "What's the matter with you anyway? Is there another chick or somethin'?"

    "There was."

    "What happened to her?"

    "It's a long story. Too long for here and now."

    She put out her fingertips and touched my cheek. "Where did you get that scar? Did you crack up or some-thin'?"

    She was the first woman who had touched me since Stacey. Her fingertips were very small and cool, like kitten paws.

    "Yes," I said. "I cracked up."

    "On a bike."

    "Yes."

    She thrust her breasts out at me provocatively and smiled at me with her cornflower eyes. "Come with me to Wyoming, Shaw."

    "Not this time, Pearly. Not this trip. But thanks anyway."

    "Oh go screw yourself," she said and walked away down the hill.

    

    

    A freaked-out gangbang tart. A lost child in a nightmare world she'd never made. Yet she had gotten to me. I could still feel the touch of her fingertips against my skin and the way she had spoken of Wyoming. She had reached me.

    Oh, I don't mean I had any great yen to get into her hot little pants and go bouncing off to Wyoming with her. Or did I? Those cornflower eyes and firm little breasts. Childish innocence and depravities beyond imagining. The little-girl-lost quality was in a way reminiscent of Stacey. Ever since Stacey's death I had held myself locked into a single-minded motivation. Shooting Stud had not required any moral resolution because I had felt indifferent to the broader questions of life and death. But it wasn't really indifference-it was a sort of plastic coating, a gigantic Baggies bag which shielded me from all emotion. Now this child had poked a finger through the coating and touched my flesh.

    She had given me pause for thought. But a hound on a hot trail cannot afford to scratch his head and wonder why he is doing what he is doing.

    As if to underline this resolution, I was jerked back into the present by the shrill whine of a siren. It was Sheriff Kranski battering his way back up the trail, siren going and angry red eye blinking. He jerked the prowl car to a stop and leaped out with his bullhorn.

    "Now I want to make one thing clear! A man has been assaulted here this afternoon, and if you think I'm gonna take that kind of crap from you bastards you're crazy! I want the man who beat up on Mr. Moore, and I want him now!"

    For a moment there was no answer, and then a mighty Greek chorus rolled down from the hills. "Fuck off! Up yours! Screw you, pig!"

    I looked around for Tiny but there was no sign of him. At the first sound of the siren, he had melted into the crowd. The sheriff seemed bewildered. His red face got redder, and his hand went to his gun. His grandstand play was backfiring badly, and he was alone in a cageful of tigers who didn't give a damn for his whip or his gun.

    "I'm warning you men for the last time!"

    His voice was drowned out by further obscenities, which were followed by a barrage of empty beer cans. Kranski's broad-brimmed, western style hat was knocked off. He stood revealed as totally bald. The spectacle brought on new torrents of abuse and more debris. I saw Pearly standing up throwing with the others. Stones were beginning to batter the Plymouth, and the windshield was starred across its full width. Kranski had pulled his gun and was firing shots into the air. He still had sense enough not to fire into the crowd; they would have torn him to pieces.

    We were all standing up throwing stones and clumps of mud. I was heaving clods of earth along with the rest. I had decided that if I was supposed to be an outlaw, I had better behave like one. Kranski gave up the unequal struggle and ducked back into his half-wrecked car. He threw it into gear, spinning his rear wheels on the loose earth, and scuttled down the trail. A well-placed rock smashed his blinking red light just before he disappeared from view.

    The riders went wild, pounding each other on the back. "Oh man! Oh sheet, man! Did you see that mother run? And that frigging heap. Jeez, they can tow it to the wrecker now, that's about all it's good for. Stick us up on this shitheap and try to sell us warm beer. What are we, a bunch of wild animals or somethin'? What we ought to do is go into town now and really show them mothers!"

    Like some many-legged beast, the mob began to pour down the hill toward their bikes. They were looking for trouble, and from what I had seen of Kranski's face before he disappeared, they would find it. The sheriff and his hick deputies and forest rangers would be whirled away like so many leaves in a windstorm. If he had any brains at all, he would be on the phone by this time asking the governor to call out the National Guard.

    We hit our starter pedals, twisted the throttles, flipped up the kickstands, and bombed down the road to town with the avenging roar of an invading army. Despite the fact that I was only a spectator at the proceedings, I could feel my blood stir. I suppose the Cossacks sweeping down on the huddled peasants of some little town on the Polish border must have experienced the same thing as they raced along to the drumbeat of pounding hoofs.

    Cavalrymen have long since gone to dust the world over, but we were the new cavalry, each of us mounted on a hundred plunging, roaring, chrome-plated horses.