Page 62 of Road Refugees

Okay, sure, Bard was on shrooms. We all were. It was a shroom party at our ranch to celebrate our new species of magical mushrooms—the Flying Saucers. Bard had been working on his Cinderella Complex issue. His desire to please the Friends of Distinction had created a sharp separation in his mind between what he was doing, and what he truly wanted to do. They had tortured him into luring me with the box of puppies—that was the turning point for him. He still had nail holes in his hands. He found the Friends repellant but simply could not stop looking for their crumbs. Women usually had the Cinderella Syndrome. It was a fear of independence.

And, because he was a Vietnam combat veteran, I hooked him up with the VA for counseling. Since he was too old to deal with his sheep anymore, he’d sold off a lot of his land that reminded him of the horror of dogs. He had shown us the septic tank where poor George Fell decomposed, but since it was on his land, we simply moved the corpse up to Riddlesberger’s rental house and Tobiah made an anonymous call to the cops. We didn’t like working with cops but, well, Tobiah wasn’t officially a club member. The remaining Friend, Mumbles, had been taken in and charged with the murder of Fell as well as Riddlesberger and Stomach.

But I had my PROSPECT patch, my middle back patch sporting the skull and crossbones of the Bare Bones, the bottom rocker specifying the Pure and Easy Chapter. I’d have to wait until I was fully patched to earn my top rocker which would state The Bare Bones MC. Right now, I was just a dumb flunky, and treated as such. For instance, this was my party, but I was tasked with filling the dishwasher with dirty glasses and bringing out clean ones. Not to mention the toilet. I was just lucky no one had yet made me go to the store to buy tampons. Heaven had been joshing that I’d taken away a lot of her chores, lightened her burden. “Just for today, sweetheart.” Tomorrow I’d be back at the clubhouse doing the same.

Bard sat atop a picnic table we’d rented for the holiday party. Heaven had strung lights between trees, we’d blown up snowmen and deer, and Knoxie had been DJing, now playing Fingering and Praying, yes a real flute album by someone named Loretta Fudge. Ol’ Loretta was noodling away between the overhead twinkling bulbs and snow-laden tree branches.

“Good scene, Bard,” I commended.

Bard regarded me with watery eyes and a jutted jaw. His teeth were corroded, and not from meth. He’d been in the Au Shau Valley in Vietnam, in the mess of Hamburger Hill, and had gone secretly into Cambodia. They took away all his IDs and said his mother would not be notified if he didn’t return. The VA owed him a lot. “This gal’s come a long way since I used to feed her corn. This new fresh food is doing wonders for her skin. Another puppy mill up in Braxton is going the corn route. I know the owner, Buckner Fanning, has fallen on hard times since the U.S. Department of Agriculture won’t license him. He’s a good man at heart. He just needs to spend a little more money taking care of those dogs.”

“Feeding corn, eh?” growled Baron Funkhauser. “We’ll see about that.” Funkhauser had become very involved with the correct breeding of dogs. Some millers had gotten around Arizona’s new laws by cutting their breeding stock down to four females. Then they could still sell to pet stores. It was a complete crock of shit because the four females still usually suffered.

“Yeah,” agreed Tanner. “Let’s dig into this Buckner Fanning moron.”

Darcy said, “I know nothing about him or his situation.”

Tanner knew the drill. He slid a fresh twenty from his wallet and fingered it over to Darcy.

Mr. Bard took the bill, looked both ways, and said, “He’s located at 2420 Western Drive. Take the turn after the Greyhound bus stop. I don’t need to mention, don’t drive a BMW.”

“We won’t,” vowed Funkhauser.

Bard continued, “He was hit by a BMW once when in his forties. Left him with a permanent limp.”

Sock Monkey said, “Unlike yours, Cap’n Spiro. You’re walking perfectly fine.” Under his cut, he wore a T-shirt that proclaimed, “If you can read this, the bitch fell off.”

However, my grin still remained crooked. “Yeah. I had the vertebrae fused . . . at the VA,” I mentioned, with a particularly dark look at Darcy. He just grinned impishly, a new expression for him.

Then Ford Illuminati yelled at me to get fresh beer glasses. Linus followed. He was very good with Mickey Finn. This was Mickey’s first Christmas as a free woman, and she’d welcomed the Bare Bones, old ladies and children with tail wags and kisses. Heaven had bought Christmas presents for all Bare Bones children—yes, all thirty of them, even the teens and twentysomethings belonging to Faux Pas and Duji—so there had been a giant pileup of wrapping paper and gifts under an outdoor awning. I was proud that this endeared her to the old ladies, but Heaven was already a shoo-in. They adored her, her hardworking ways and sweet disposition. And Mickey Finn just lay there panting, letting metallic bows and shreds of colorful paper rain down on her.

Since public awareness grew after the discovery of dead bodies—and dead dogs, since invariably there were dozens of them or their bones throughout the property—people had been rushing to the cops to report mill perpetrators and save dogs. Heaven was over the rainbow with joy. She had started her online law school, helped by the likes of Tanner and Slushy, and in her few moments of spare time she painted her landscapes. Tuzigoot promised to hire her as their only construction lawyer at the Citadel.

She was all I’d ever wanted in a wife. We’d been married in Vegas, unable to take much time away from the shrooms—or the cabin for that matter. Slappy of course came with us, leaving Crybaby to handle everything. Sock Monkey and Gunther from Puppies Behind Bars made it out. If Heaven were to spend one night in town with her brother, you wouldn’t believe the dishes and general crap that piled up. It was as if men simply didn’t see the mess. I used to clean my condo when drunk just to give myself something to do. Now it was as if I didn’t even see the frozen Atkins beef merlot box on the kitchen floor, or the jigsaw puzzle pieces Mickey Finn kept knocking off the dining table with her wagging tail.

Slappy was here to stay. After the accidental group text regarding Heaven’s ass, his wife Chloe had begun to see things in a different light. I gathered there had been many such incidents involving his admiration for female body parts. After losing the baby and Slappy’s retirement from the armed forces, they had never really gelled again, found a new path to follow together. Really, since Slappy had lived with me for so long, the only change was that Chloe put all his crap in a storage unit. Slappy had some shit shipped to our cabin, mostly a big screen TV that took up one whole wall of his bedroom, an NRA plaque, and a trophy for shooting wild turkeys that named him the Biggest Gobbler of Beards, 2012. I gave him the tribal bow and arrow he was accustomed to passing out on top of back in my condo days. It comforted him.

Slappy was banging hell out of the swinging glass door to the kitchen. “Cap’n, Cap’n sir!” he yelled. He even shook me by the shoulders, causing me to rattle all the glasses I already held. “You’re not going to believe who I just met!”

Putting a hand to his chest, Slappy looked wistfully at a snowy tree branch. He even began to sing a Queen song. “’Love of my life, don’t leave me. You’ve taken my love, now desert me.’”

I bashed on past him, and he followed. “Still upset about Chloe?”

“Not Chloe! Tracy! I just met the love of my life, and she said she’s spoken for by someone else!” He practically pressed his nose to the bay window. “See? Right there, talking to Tobiah. Ah, what an ass. What a shapely rack! I don’t know which one of these burly bruisers I’m going to have to fight for her love, but I’m willing to do it. She said she’s not married. But spoken for!”

“Oh God, no, Slappy!” I yelled as I poured the armload of glassware into the washer. It was beyond time to run it through a cycle, but I just slammed the door mostly shut. “You don’t want to get involved with Tracy. She’s the last one you want.”

“Why, Cap’n?” Hands dangling, Slappy pleaded like a kindergartener who wanted juice. “She’s the only one here who isn’t an old lady or a lamb, and she’s banging hot!”

I had to use a tray to carry more than five glasses, I already knew. I emptied the overhead cabinet, jamming the glassware upside-down onto the platter. “Slappy. I hate to tell you, but—”

“Darling!” cried Heaven. She also bashed the kitchen door open. She came like the madwoman I loved—sincere, eager to please, worried about everyone other than herself. “Your brothers are complaining that the eggnog doesn’t have enough rum in it. Do we have another bottle?”

“Yeah,” I said, almost ashamed that I knew the answer. Rum had been my thing back in the day, and now it didn’t even register with me. “In the pantry. Hey, can you believe this jackpatoot? He wants to blow a hole through Tracy.”

Heaven gasped. “Seriously, Slappy? Do you know what you’re getting into?”

Slappy held his palms wide apart. “Why? What’s wrong? Is she psycho or something? A malignant sociopathic narcissist?” He had been talking to Darcy Bard too much.