He offers her his arm and she takes it, seeing his old leather jacket with the worn elbows, imagining his forearms bulging with thick, ropy veins between the ridges of hard muscle, wanting to feel his big hands touch her again.
In the car the vision's tousled hair is the colors of brandy and champagne, streaked with highlights, lips glossy and desirable, and as she turns, the skirt rides up on her legs—which he tells her are “still A-one.” She is in the front seat with Royce, in her cognac-colored wool jacket with the stone white poorboy turtleneck, and she watches him not look at her thighs.
Fear-shackled, tragedy-pinioned guilt speaks to her in a familiar man's voice.
“Mary?” She turns and looks for Sam, treading water, doing her best not to drown in the dizzying, unexpected waves of whatever this emotion is.
Royce wanted to open up to Mary. That was a problem. He couldn't. Not right now—the way things were hanging. Too much was going on. There was too much at stake. He was carrying too much baggage.
How could he ever begin to explain it to her—about the dope? He knew that she knew he'd fallen into the cracks, somewhere along the line. Royce could see it in her eyes sometimes, that how-did-you-let-yourself-get-this-way stare. Where does one start trying to explain a life? Your weakness and your vices and your mistakes look so easy to control when one is on the outside looking in.
He'd grown up in Waterton, just as Mary had. Born in 1962, in a hinterlands bump in the road that hadn't changed since the Second World War—Waterton, Missouri, was an American ghost town. The only thing good about it was, a kid could drive across the river to Tennessee and get illegal schooners of cold beer, vodka-laced watermelons, or home-grown reefer that just about everybody tried at one time or another when they were in their teens.
Grass was no big deal. Some kids smoked wacky-tobacky and some drank. Some—like Royce—did both. It was something to do. You fired up a joint, got in somebody's ride with a half dozen close friends, and cruised.
He'd been withering away. He'd have died if he hadn't gotten out of Waterton. He'd wanted all the sex there was, all the high times he could find, and he'd wanted out. Mary'd had a marriage jones that he felt snaking out for him like a hangman's noose. He'd run. Things had happened. He'd met women. Fast-lane types. Big-city junkies who'd taught him how to get his nose open. He'd never been that crazy about weed anyway. One thing had led to another. No biggie—hell, George Washington had been a hemp farmer.
Royce had gotten jammed up in the worst way and had taken the only way out left to him. That's how he'd got himself inserted into this king-shit jackpot. He knew he was going to have to open up to Mary about it soon. She deserved to know. No. That was bullshit. She most certainly did not deserve any part of his act. But he'd already used their friendship—just because she was there, and handy—and he owed it to her to run the whole thing down. He had to make it right.
He locked the car, a study in pensive concentration and gloomy dope-fiend rumination, his mind far away, as he headed for the door of his cabin. He was not alert.
There was a huge presence in the shadows. Hulking. Silent. A man standing very quietly waiting for Royce Hawthorne.
The man was good. Very quiet. As Royce walked by the large trees, the shadows moved. Like a gigantic animal, the watching man stepped out from this hidden nocturnal post, and moved behind Royce.
It was only as the man stepped heavily on a dry twig that Royce realized there was someone behind him. He flashed on the massive apparition he'd seen out on Willow River Road. The presence chilled him and dried his throat. He was frightened to the bone. He'd let all his powers of concentration become lax—what an idiot!
He froze, barely containing himself as he felt fingers of steel grip him from behind.
They say you see your life flash before your eyes. He did not. He only saw huge fingers, a hand, the long arm, squeezing his shoulder and pulling him around. Nearly scaring him to death, as he looked into a frightening scowl. The menacing, bearded face of the ex-boxer, Luis Londoño.
“Hey."
“Jeezus! Man, don't do that!"
“Come on.” The massive head jerking to the side. Body like a small car standing on end. An immovable object.
“Yeah. Sure.” What was he supposed to say—no? I have to take a piano lesson first?
He didn't recognize the car.
“What's Happy been up to?” he said, trying to make conversation. Luis only grunted and drove. Royce was aware of the little toy knife in the holster taped to his leg. He could feel it. He let his knee move slowly, inching his left pant leg back just a bit with the weight of his left hand. No way. First, he would never get it out fast enough, and if he could—what then?
The heavyweight was as tough as nails. He'd picked up both his purple and green wings when he'd been a biker. The green was for having oral sex with a dead woman confirmed as having active gonorrhea at the time of death. Royce had never asked what the purple wings were for. Royce might get his little toad-sticker out and take his shot, and while Luis died, he'd rip his face off and wipe with it.
That had never been the idea. The last thing he was going to do was get into some physical conflict with Happy Ruiz or his goon. The idea was to buy weight. And that was what he would do, or die trying, he thought—humorlessly.
Being summoned by Happy was somewhere on the pleasure scale between eating road kill and struggling with a bad yeast infection, but he had to put the danger completely out of his mind. He wanted to look anxious to talk with Happy when he got wherever they were going. And there'd be no reason for him to be apprehensive—after all, wasn't he the man's business partner? He calmed his mind as they bumped along in the direction, presumably, of The Rockhouse.
He remembered parking in front of the bikers’ “cantina” where Happy and the guys like to hang. Standing between them. Reaching for the money. Louis, again, on his left.
He tried to recall the signs over the back-bar. Carnes Finas—something like that. Some kind of beaner faro game or whatever going on in the corner. Remembering him telling old Fabio he was for real, and getting the jefe treatment. Walking on very thin ice again. This time with megaserious weight in the balance. Killer weight.
They stopped. Got out. He went in first. Vandella not at the bar. The place “after hours” now. Closed sign out front. Junkies and dealers and degenerate gamblers—the clientele.
Once upon a time nookie and sports had been his whole life, and not in that order. He wished it could be like that again, that he could turn back the clock and live it over with the advantage of that twenty-twenty hindsight.
Right now he was going to have to summon up his wits and dazzle Happy with some real fancy broken-field running.
“Yo. Where the fuck you been, amigo?” Happy was decidedly unhappy.
“Hey, dude. I was gonna ask you. We gonna do a thing or what?” Bluffing like a bandit. See if those head fakes still worked.
Brown. Slot. Motion. Two. Jet. On One.
No pain, no gain. No first and ten—no win.
Gut up, Burt, and play through the hurt. Pray for those key blockers.
“Who the fuck are you to ask me if we gonna do a thing?” Happy had his lapel in hand, and he was whispering his burrito breath in Royce's face. “I already told you twice we had it set. You said go ahead and do it. I do it with my people. I overextend based on your word. The word of a trusted amigo. You gonna carry the big time, you say. I got to come looking for you for my money now? What is this bullshit?"