Chapter 13

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Chapter 13

Mike's truck smelled like biological fluids had been deposited or exchanged, and this became a source of anxiety as he made the short drive to the Cornudo Cafe. Was it possible that Tony had sweet talked Lisa into repeating the Hooters truck bed incident, the one that was forever burned into his retinas? Why should he even be worrying about a girl who had left him stranded in a desert shithole prison? Wasn’t Lisa out of his life forever?

Still, this was among the questions to throw by Tony that might make the post-Lisa transition easier. Who was he kidding? It would probably make the transition more difficult - who wanted to think about his fiancé getting banged by a flabby old man that had bigger tits than she did? But now these questions, and whatever action he intended to take in regard to his mayonnaise-munching zookeeper for desert rejects, had been put on hold by the arrival from out of the brush by another abandoned waif, human this time. Well, at least that was not going to last. Some branch of the local authorities would arrive any minute to pick the kid up, then Mike could get back to his regularly scheduled woes.

A trio of unnaturally dirty trucks were parked in the huge cafe lot - lacking only goal posts to be a football field, but Mike gave them short shrift as he got out of his truck and made his way inside. His eyes casually wandered to the back of one of the trucks, where lay a black tarp, rolled up and duck-taped shut, looking like a human-sized mock up of a cigar. This rather incongruous spectacle didn’t penetrate very far into his conscious mind, because when you are a single man in your mid to late twenties, the only thing that penetrates is penetration. This mindset does not improve until the latter stages of matrimony, when female menopause completely emasculates a man. This is why men who survive the horror to rise to the top of their profession are generally older ones, like Dustin Diesel. Such men are not thinking exclusively with their dicks anymore, so their brains are free for useful observations, like why is a human-shaped lump rolled up in a tarp in the back of a truck?

Mike’s obsession with Lisa took a reprieve when he entered the cafe and saw Linda Lloyd leaning seductively against the register, wearing a tight yellow T-shirt. Linda had seen him coming, and thought it was her duty to remind the young man why he should never go gay.

"Morning, lemon drop," she said sweetly, with a delicious, candy-coated smile.

"Morning," Mike reciprocated awkwardly, spellbound by the enormous lemon drops trapped in Linda’s shirt.

“Did you come down to see me, or do you have other business in mind? Please say you came to save me from those ass-grabbing apes over there."

Linda gestured to three men sitting in a booth behind the register. Eddy, the man in the big hat who made him think of the yellow bonneted guardian of Curious George, gave Mike a girlish grin and a little wave. The two men with him in the booth looked dirty and ragged, as if they had been up all night burying their turds in a sandbox. Mike tried to smile politely, but the tips of his lips just wouldn’t turn the corners.

"So how's your little vacation going here in our fair burg?" Eddy asked. "Our desert hospitality must appeal to you, because you decided to stay a while with your...Uncle."

Mike shrugged it off and turned toward Linda to order his stuff, but Eddy wasn't ready.

"Linda here was just telling us a charming story about how she got her lovely name. Why don't you continue with your engaging little tale, dear, so the young man can hear it.”

"Shut up Eric, you big noisy fuck," she barked at him. "That's way before his time. It won't mean anything to him."

One of Eric's henchmen, a man of bony, almost skeletal features, with a permanent scowl eroded into his face and a three days growth beard that looked like it would resist removal by razors of all human manufactured alloys, leered in Mike's direction. "Well, if he don't like it he can just crawl back to his hotel with the rest of the creepy crawlies over there. Just tell it."

Linda bent over seductively, at an angle where only Mike received an ample view of the Valley of the Shadow of Death between her two luscious lemon drops. The goons in the booth bristled with envy. “Well fellas, if you boys can stop being assholes long enough, I'll go ahead and tell you the story. As some of you know, I have a twin sister named Louise in San Diego, who we call Lou-Lou around here. Unlike me, a natural blonde, my sister is a ginger."

"How can we be sure you two are naturals?" laughed the third creep, who was wearing a dirty John Deere cap over a dirty John Denver T-shirt. This was his idea of a pickup line.

Linda ignored him. She thought he was cretin, and cretin was a very high bar for her indeed. She had been naked with just about every swinging dick that ever walked through the door of the Cornudo Cafe, Eddy included, though that had been a disappointment.

“My Daddy was a big fan of Lynrd Skynrd, to the point of being delusional about it. Charles Manson thought the Beatles were talking to him through Helter Skelter, but my Daddy thought Gimme Three Steps had some kind of hidden, prophetic meaning. In that song, the storyteller is cutting a rug down at a place called The Jug with a girl named Linda Lou. My Daddy was expecting a boy who he would name Ronnie after the band’s singer Mr. Van Sant, and that boy would carry on the proud redneck tradition of whiskey drinking, wife – beating, and cow fucking. In the disappointing event it was a girl, once he was done beating my Mama for negligence he was going to name her Linda Lou, like the two-timing slut in the song. But when he beheld, to his grave chagrin, that he got two little tramps for the price of one, he decided to name the blonde one Linda and the Ginger, Lou. And that's how I arrived at my lovely name."

“And it is a lovely name," Eric agreed, tipping his coffee cup. "For a lovely woman."

Linda nodded her appreciation. Eddy's goon growled, "I still say I've never seen a real God-given blonde or ginger around here, and I'd like some proof."

Linda draped an arm around Mike's midsection and softly tapped out the beat of Dixie with her fingers on his ribcage. "I'll tell you what. Next time Mike here goes to visit his folks in San Diego I'll go along. Then me and my sister will tag-team him so he can bring you back a full report. Does that sound fair?"

Eddy laughed himself red. Mike's face turned the approximate color of Lou-Lou's fabled ginger patch. The goon’s face was an ugly purple.

Linda shuffled Mike over to a table on the other side of the restaurant.

"How you feeling, gummy bear?"

Mike was not one to share his feelings. He came from a long line of stone-faced introverts who wouldn’t even talk about the weather to strangers. Nonetheless, Linda seemed the type who might say something honest, not just meaningless and sappy.

"Shitty," Mike answered. "Everybody ditched me over there in Nogales, except for one fat dumbshit. The dumbshit was the only one who stuck around. All the people that I counted on bailed."

Linda sat down next to Mike and took his hand. "You have to realize something, my little Milk Dud. This sounds ridiculous, but I'm sure Tony didn't mean anything by it. He might even have had good reasons for leaving you back there. The politics in the Gadsden Purchase are complicated. Tony is like those critters in his cages. He does what needs to be done at the moment without thinking about your emotional reaction.”

Linda leaned in closer and lowered her voice to a whisper that melted through Mike's skin. Her lemon drops hugged up close against his skin. "Let me tell you something sugar plum. If you intend to stay here in Cornudo for a while, and I don't know why the hell you would, I suggest you keep Tony around. Yeah he's a lazy pain in the ass freeloader and he eats a lot, but he's a lot better than the alternative. The alternative is sitting right over there. Tony is the only one keeping them degenerate a-holes from moving in on your motel."

“Why do they want to move in on my motel? How is that going to happen? How is Tony stopping that?"

Linda squirmed languidly in her seat, and either accidentally or on purpose gave Mike another titty shot. "There's a lot of things you don't know about this town. There's a lot of dirty secrets your real estate agent didn't tell you when she was selling you the Brooklyn Bridge over there. Hell, there's a lot of things I can’t see the complete details on, but I can smell the generalities. Just take my advice that you better keep Tony around if you intend to stay here, no matter how much of an asshole he turns into."

Mike thought it peculiar how the uncensored form of asshole had been applied liberally to Tony, but the goons in the booth had been discretely christened a-holes.

Green Army helicopters flew over at that moment, buzzing dead east like perturbed hornets. When the rotor noise died down, Linda said "There’s more than your coffee brewin', here in the Gadsden Purchase."

Mike got Tony's burger, cream of wheat for the kid, and a half gallon of milk. He walked out half forgetting why he had come here. Who was all of this food for? Distracted by his own thoughts, he was staring straight at the black tarp in the back of the truck when a rough, calloused hand fell on his shoulder.

"See something you like?" said an equally rough, calloused voice, like a rusty pinball bouncing around an empty machine, with no lights or bells going off.

"Not really," Mike said. He wasn't trying to be clever.

The goon literally huffed and puffed like the big bad wolf. Mike had never heard anyone do that before, he thought it just happened in fairy tales. "Well, if you don't like it," said the goon, “just keep walking."

Mike did that. He walked to his truck, then drove back to the motel. He didn't think much about unsanitary goons in the process, or the tarp rolled like King Kong's blunt in the back of that truck.

Tony was there feeding French vanilla creamer packets from the Keurig to the boy, who lapped them up greedily, thimble size plastic cup by thimble size plastic cup. The kid already looked cleaner. Tony had bathed and wrapped him in clean towels, making him look like a mini-Gandhi.

"What took you so long! The little fucker is hungry!" Tony scolded, but he sounded happy.

Mike handed over the Cream of wheat, which the boy immediately devoured. "The way he's eating, he's going to need some diapers fast,” Tony said.

“I think that will be somebody else's problem soon," said Mike. "Did you call the police?"

“The police? What for?"

“What do you mean what for? A lost kid showed up at our door."

The kid was now drinking milk straight from the half gallon carton, and getting half of it in his mouth. "The police are the last people you call in these kind of situations." Tony said these words with authority, as if a lot of stray kids had wandered up to his door in the past. In the Gadsden Purchase, this was entirely possible.

"Well, we need to call whoever the appropriate authority is."

"Let's not get hasty," said Tony. "Let’s think this over."

"Think it over! You can't just keep lost kids. This is not one of your critters. He's a human being!"

The kid put down the milk, belched loudly, farted twice and began to yawn.

"True enough,” Tony admitted. "But he's been through a lot. Maybe his parents got picked up or killed in the desert. Maybe he had to escape some really bad people."

“He doesn't even look Mexican!" Mike protested. "He's obviously a white kid. Maybe his parents got into a car accident. People are looking for him!"

"Oh, so now you're playing the beaner card. You're saying it's okay to keep lost little Mexicans, because nobody cares what happens to them, but just because he's white we gotta call out the national guard. I see how you are."

Mike made hair pulling motions at the sides of his head, then let out a long, frustrated sigh. "Just a few minutes ago you told me I could let the M-word fly whenever I wanted, and now you're getting all butt hurt about it."

“It's because I'm pissed that you're right, goddamit. I mean you're right, but you're wrong."

Trying to argue with Tony was like trying to exercise logic on Lisa when the new moon provoked her menstrual tides. "What does that mean?”

"What it means is that he sure as hell looks white, which means they mobilize the army, navy, Air Force, Marines, maybe even the goddamm girl scouts to find him. Just a minute ago I saw some helicopters flying hell bent east, but they didn't look like they were stopping to search anything here. So they weren’t looking for the kid, which makes you temporarily wrong, unless they think a baby who doesn't walk could have crawled to Tucson by now. By the way, when I undressed the little fucker to give him a bath, I found these in his pants.”

Mike took the objects from Tony's hand. "Holy shit," he said.

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Photo by Ragtimedorianhenry2010 Bernard, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons