When Pigs Fly (8 page)

The guy didn’t resist, which Diet thought was wise. He also didn’t see Diet’s face, which saved them both a lot of trouble. “Keep your back to me and take your pants off. Shorts, too. Hell, take off everything.” Diet reasoned that the guy wouldn’t run for help if Diet was driving away with the fellow’s Levi’s and BVD’s. Then he found the wallet and keys, tossed the clothes into the guy’s car and drove off with it.

The idea seemed to work well enough. As he glanced in the rearview mirror, he imagined he could see the terror in the poor bastard’s eyes.

A couple of miles down the road, he stopped next to a Dumpster. He went through the wallet and found a license, a string of credit cards and a crappy thirty bucks in cash. The clothes went into the Dumpster, but the leather wallet was too nice to pass up. The credit cards would leave a sticky trail, so he tossed them too.

He’d worked up an appetite again, so he stopped at a pizza joint. As he snacked on a large pepperoni pizza, two bags of chips and a Diet Coke, he began to see flaws in his plan to fly to Arizona. One, he didn’t have enough money yet. Two, he wouldn’t get through airport security with all the metal he had in his duffel bag, stuff he wanted to bring. Three, they’d refuse to let him fly on looks alone. He had one long eyebrow that curved like a fat centipede over both eyes. His nose was flat from having been on the receiving end of a fast-moving two-by-four, and he had a mouth that no girl had ever kissed except at knifepoint. His eyes didn’t even look like they belonged together, one looking smaller with a droopy lid. When he looked in the mirror, he even scared himself.

He left the pizza joint, found an ATM building, then parked nearby where he could watch and make sure the place wasn’t busy. Then he walked over as a car pulled up. Diet needed more cash, but now he was on a roll.

So he checked out the chick who got out of the car: slim, pretty and alone, the perfect combination. He got to the door just as she opened it, and she gave it an extra push and a smile, a small courtesy to let him in without using his card. This was too good; naïve women gave him a hard-on.

She stood at the glass counter and picked up a pen to make out a deposit slip. He reached for her purse, but she looked alarmed and quickly moved it away from him. He grabbed her wrist. She screamed, for all the good that would do. Through the glass walls he could see that nobody was nearby. There were hardly any cars in the street, for that matter. As he reached for her purse, he got close enough to smell the soap on her skin, the perfume on her neck.

“Three hundred from the ATM and you get to live,” he said.

Next thing he knew, he doubled over with a shooting pain where her knee had made intimate contact with his balls. Suddenly the pizza wasn’t sitting too well in his stomach, and acid burned through the various canals and byways of his body. He bent over and reached for her waist just to regain his balance. She had nice ankles.

Then her knee jackhammered his nose
one-two-three
, and his brain filled with blue and yellow swirls, car alarms, church bells and a fast
beep-beep-beep
that when you made a phone call meant all the circuits were busy.

“Don’t—you—fucking—
touch
me!” The woman stood in a crouch, both hands aiming the bank’s ballpoint pen at him like a .357 magnum. What she expected to accomplish with it, he wasn’t exactly sure, but he was in no mood to find out.

“You got a mouth worse than my mother’s.” He ripped the purse off her shoulder, breaking the strap, then emptied the contents on the table and scooped up the cash and her cell phone. Then he hobbled out of the ATM building and found the car he’d stolen. Inside his gullet, some dude must have turned on a welding torch, but at least it took his mind off his damned headache. He blinked and refocused on his mission: Mack Durgin had to give Diet Cola the ticket and then die. He eased the car into traffic, thinking,
Diet rich, Durgin dead. Diet rich, Durgin dead. Diet rich…

Back East

Luckily, the tampon hadn’t blinded Elvis Hornacre. He sulked in his hospital bed and sipped ginger ale through a straw as he wondered where Cal Vrattos was going. Where she
was
didn’t matter because he’d already equipped her car with a brand-new, state-of-the-art GPS tracking system from ElectroShak, where he worked as an assistant manager. You wanted the latest cell phone, police radio, tape deck, just about anything you could plug in or run on batteries, Elvis was your man. And if you liked listening to the King as much as he did, you ranked right up there with the finest, most intelligent music critics. Just like he did.

Not like Cal. The GPS tracking device he’d set up in her car was supposed to set up a chance meeting, blossom into a date. But then she’d dissed him, and she’d dissed the King. Forgiveness wasn’t going to be easy, but they were so
right
for each other.

If you wanted his guess, she was lead-footing it on the Pennsylvania Turnpike right now, but she was welcome to a good head start. Maybe she was driving to California, where he hadn’t been for a while. Hey, he could fly out there, hotwire a car and go meet her along the way.
Fancy meeting you here, Babe.
Then she would realize how much she wanted him. His broken jaw and tamponed eye would feel the healing power of her kisses, and her body would shake like an earthquake while he loved her tender and she loved him true. The brush of his sequins would light her breasts on fire, and they would have sweet nicknames for each other—she would call him King, and he would call her Hammer Hips.

A nurse had just come by with enough codeine to drive away the buzzards that chomped at his brain. He thought he might as well check himself out and get on with business, so he dressed back into the Elvis costume he’d worn on his arrival in E.R. A nurse told him he was in no shape to leave the hospital, but leave he did—wanting to say thank you ma’am, but I am a man on a mission, no one can stop me because I know my God-given rights as an American citizen. All of this was hard to say without moving his jaw, so he finally just walked right out the front door and down the street, where he crossed the Merrimack River and hoofed it another half dozen blocks to his home. There he reinforced the codeine with a couple swigs from a pint bottle of brandy while he tried to remember where the hell Calliope lived.

Pincushion

“It’s for the best, baby girl,” Sally Windflower heard her father say as he steered the pickup truck far down a desert road. “Poindexter was born to live in the wild anyways.”

“Was not,” she snapped. She draped one arm around the javelina’s neck and fingered the laminated identification tag that read, “Hello. My name is Poindexter.” It was fastened around his neck with a plastic strip. One day when Sally had children of her own, she would wander out this way and find her sweet pet’s bones with the name tag still in place.

`The engine coughed to a stop, and Sally’s father pushed back his dusty hat. “This is far enough,” he said. “It’s time.”

“This is
so mean
,” Sally said. “I’ll never ever forgive you.”

“Oh darlin’, that hurts me so much, but he belongs out here with his own kind.”

“Does not.”

They stepped out of the cab, and Sally’s father let down the back of the pickup, opened the pen and eased Poindexter to the ground. He grunted and rubbed his rough hide against Sally’s leg. Her father tried nudging him away with little luck. “Shoo! Go on! Git!” he finally had to say, and Poindexter disappeared into the barren desert. Sally had lost her first love, and she was inconsolable.

Back East

Frosty scratched his neck, the backs of his hands and behind his ears. He gritted his teeth while he rubbed a shoe on his ankle. “Mmmrrrggghhh!” he said, sounding like he was sitting on the can and having a tough go of it.

“Quit that,” Ace said. “You’re making
me
itchy.” Ace scratched his private parts (his own, not Frosty’s), a potential embarrassment since they were picking up a few things at the Shop ‘n Save, and rule number one of shoplifting was don’t get noticed.

All this itchiness might have been from the poison ivory they stood in yesterday, behind the house they robbed where the guy got the living crap kicked out of him. They stood in the aisle with the toothpastes and the enemas and the ointments people used for wicked bad rashes. Frosty picked up a blue plastic bottle and slipped it inside his shirt just as an old lady came around the corner and glared at them.

“You’re stealing,” she said. “Put that back!”

Frosty sucked in air between his teeth. “Mind your business, you old bag.” The lady weighed maybe eighty pounds including her purse, but her jaw went tight like fast-setting concrete. Ace wished his brother hadn’t said that. They really needed that calamine lotion so they could treat their rashes and concentrate on planning their trip.

“Ma’am,” Ace said smoothly, “my brother would apologize if he could. He’s got this turret syndrome where he scratches and says rude things. It’s out of control.”

“Hmph. I never heard of that. I’m getting the store manager.”

“Bitch!” Frosty’s eyes went wild. Ace slapped his arm and took the bottle from his belt.

“I’m so ashamed, Ma’am,” Ace said, his eyes beginning to water. “This was supposed to be Frosty’s last outing before we had him committed. Trust me, I have every intention of purchasing this item.”

The old woman shook her head and pushed her cart past them. She must have been fifty easy, though her legs weren’t bad-looking except for those very close veins. “Your brains are fried,” she mumbled. “What a disgrace.”

A couple minutes later she stood two people ahead of them in the checkout line, and she looked back at them with suspicion. Ace smiled and waved the bottle—
See? We’re paying
. He tried not to let on, but he itched like hell.

When it was their turn to check out, Ace reached down on the floor and came up with the bottle in his hand. “That old lady just dropped this,” he said. “I better go bring it to her.”

“What is it?” the clerk asked. “Let me see.”

Ace flashed it quickly. “Old lady. Fixed income. Gotta catch her.”

“Wait a minute—”

“She can’t afford to lose this. Be right back!”

Later, Ace and Frosty were back at their apartment, a little winded from running. Frosty took half-melted Hershey bars from his pockets, then opened the bottle and started putting lotion on his face. Soon he’d gotten all green and minty-smelling, like a Saint Patrick’s Day mud bath. Ace flipped through a Rand McNally Road Atlas, looking for the best way to Arizona. The book was really set up stupid, because Arizona was in the front, Massachusetts was in the middle, and the places they had to go through were all over the damn place.

“I see how it works,” Frosty said, pointing. “I think that’s Connecticut there.” He took a pair of scissors and some tape, cut the pages out and taped Connecticut to Massachusetts so Route 84 lined up on both pieces. “Next is New Jersey, I think.”

Ace wasn’t too sure about Frosty’s approach, with all these pages taped together like a kite’s tail. How were they gonna fold it?

“We could stop at Graceland,” Frosty said hopefully. “Catch the King.”

“On our way back we’ll do that. Yeah, we will.”

Next to last page on the kite posed a problem.

“New Mexico,” Ace said, picking up the bottle. “What if we get stuck there, our car breaks down or something? We don’t speak New Mexican.”

“Plus the passports we don’t have,” Frosty added. He traced a fingertip across his forehead, and a green drop splatted on Arizona. “Isn’t this stuff supposed to dry on the skin?”

Ace just noticed that Frosty had stolen mint-flavored milk of magnesia, but he didn’t think he should upset his brother when they had decisions to make. “We should probably fly,” Ace said. “Get this job over with.”

Logan Airport in Boston was just a hotwired Honda away, and eventually they found themselves at a ticket counter. The cute ticket agent looked at them like they had just dropped in from Pluto for a week in Disneyland. Ace scratched his crotch whenever he figured nobody was looking, and Frosty scratched everywhere all the time—his neck, his forehead, both ankles and all four cheeks, pretty much all the body parts known to man.

“Sir,” the agent said to Frosty, “are you gentlemen able to fly?”

Ace said, “If we could fly, we wouldn’t need an airplane, Miss.” To that, Frosty nodded and the agent smiled.

“Neither of you looks very well. This is a long flight. You might want to get your rashes treated before you fly.”

“Thank you for your consideration, Miss, but we have to get that flight. Urgent business. Our mother is terribly ill, and we have to go see her.”

“I’m so sorry. Will this be MasterCard or Visa?”

“We’re strictly cash people.” Ace laid out four hundred-dollar bills on the counter.

“May I see a picture ID, please?” They handed over their driver’s licenses. The ticket agent inspected them but she didn’t return them. Instead, she called over some guy in a blue airline suit who looked like a pilot for the Unfriendly Skies. He looked into their duffel bags. Maybe it was the knife he found sitting on top of the clothes, or the roach clip with the beaded tassels. Either way, airport security whisked them out the door.