The speed with which he jammed the bucks in his jeans told me Aryan catering units weren’t used to tips. I walked away pulling strands of oversweet and undercooked pork from my teeth, thinking maybe the gratuity was premature.
Night was almost full and the fire was growing. The fire committee was three beer-swilling behemoths feeding the blaze from a stack of applewood and oak. They’d grunt in unison and launch six feet of log on to the fire, sparks cascading into the purple sky.
The growing crowd was mainly males, only about ten per cent female participation. Most of the women in attendance were biker chicks, demoiselles of denim and leather, some looking hard and some looking lost. The young girlies had punked-out spiky hair like it was the eighties, the older mamas had hair hiked high – prom night in Waco, Texas, circa 1975. The older ones all shared the same voice, a graveled purr, like buttermilk laced with broken glass. The younger ones tried to emulate the effect, failing because it was the voice of No Way Out, and they hadn’t learned that yet.
A band was playing, four skinhead types in risers in front of a wall of Hi-Tone amps. It was headbanger speed metal, distorted power chords punctuated by shredding guitar leads. The musical structure was strident and anthemic, the skinhead lead singer in a white tee, torn jeans rolled to mid-calf, hightop Doc Martens. He was curling around a microphone stand, his mouth a rictus of agony, less singing than screaming.
“Fuck the watermelon-eating niggers…” he howled.
“FUCK ’EM!” the crowd roared in response.
“Fuck the tortilla-eating spics…”
“FUCK ’EM!”
“Fuck the goat-eating A-rabs…”
“FUCK ’EM!”
It was sad and small and it wasn’t all that long ago the singer might have called out the potatoeating Micks or the spaghetti-sucking wops. I waved my beer in the air and shrieked out the response with everyone else, using the time to scope out the crowd. I figured, given my years on the force and Mobile a half-hour distant, there was probably someone in there who I’d rousted or arrested. I pulled my ball cap lower over my eyes.
After ten minutes I needed a break from the noise and the smell of sweat and the constant Heil Hitlers and other tribal salutations. I wandered a couple hundred feet from the fray to the woods, walking into the trees until the brush softened the sound. It was almost peaceful, the moon high and bright.
I startled at the crack of branches breaking and heavy breathing and spun to see a tall, wide-shouldered guy in a black shirt pushing from the brush at my back. His arms were marbled with muscle. He was talking to himself, in the clutches of something potent, meth, acid, ecstasy, or some ugly hybrid of any or all.
He saw me, narrowed his eyes.
“They’re coming.”
“Hunh?” I said. Normally I say Pardon? or Excuse me? but among this crowd, Hunh was the word.
“They’re coming, brother. We got to stop them.”
I decided to play along. “I know. They’re right over the horizon.”
He wiped his face with his hands, shook his head. “They’re breeding them like tomatoes, using different strains.”
“You lost me.”
He looked from side to side, like there were informants in the trees. He waved me closer, leaned to speak in a whisper.
“Super niggers. They’ll be able to fly. I heard it from a guy who heard it direct from Meltzer.”
“Hunh?”
“Won’t really be flying, but they’ll have legs so strong they’ll jump like bullfrogs. They’ll be bouncing all over the fucking ghetto and cops’ll have to build big nets to catch ’em.”
I couldn’t help chuckling at the inanity. A mistake. He grabbed me by my shirtfront and rammed me into a tree.
“Don’t laugh at me,” he rasped. “I’ll goddamn kill you.”
His trip was turning ugly. I said, “I’d never laugh at a man who knows what he’s about. If you took me wrong, I apologize.”
He blinked at me so hard I could tell I was little more than a hazy shape in his addled mind. His grip fell loose and he patted my arm.
“You’re OK, dude. I thought you were laughing.”
“No man, I was listening. You heard from a guy who heard it from Meltzer.”
He stumbled backwards a step, rediscovered his chain of thought. “The guy was s’posed to keep it secret but got drunk and told me ’bout this crazy doctor who’s doing a Frankenstein act with…I dunno, that cell shit.”
Frankenstein. Flying people. Crazy doctors. I backpedaled slowly away, making a note to be careful about laughing.
“Gotta head back to the rally, brother,” I said. “Nice meeting you.”
“We all gotta hold together, man,” he called after me. “Some mad scientist grew a special baby. They’re gonna make clones outta it. We gotta fight for our own.”
The word baby had been much in my life of late. I turned back to the guy.
“You know anything more about that baby the guy was talking abo—”
“Spider, you there?” A voice from the far side of the trees cut me off. Feet were pounding through the underbrush, approaching fast.
“You out here, man? Yo, Spider?”
Spider’s mouth dropped in fear. I spun and disappeared into the woods, stopping and crouching behind a clump of briar. I heard a commotion and looked back. Moonlight revealed four guys circling the druggie.
Someone said, “You gotta learn to keep your mouth shut, Spider –” and I heard a fist smack into flesh.
I ducked away, re-emerging two hundred feet distant in the light of the meadow. The bonfire was raging. The fire crew had stripped off their shirts. Sweat glistened on their torsos as they humped logs into flames licking twenty feet into the night sky.
I passed by a lone biker chick leaning against a tree, pushing back loops of fake-blonde hair, sucking a beer. Her eyes sparkled with amphetamine.
“Hey there, handsome,” she purred. “How ’bout we go back in the bushes and crank off a quick fuck?”
“No thanks,” I said over my shoulder.
“Don’t like to fuck girls?” came the taunt.
“Don’t like to fuck quick,” I said, putting more jump in my steps.
I heard a roar at my back and turned to see a dozen bikers thundering into the parking meadow, cranking accelerators on straight-piped Harleys to announce their arrival. A roar arose from the crowd, three hundred voices howling at once. Bodies parted for the biker escort, a large white step van following the Harleys. The growling phalanx entered the field and I saw fists raised in salutes of joy.
“He’s here,” said the hulking man behind me, so softly it sounded like prayer. Someone else said, “Praise God.”
Arnold Meltzer had arrived.
I watched the step van pull in front of the stage. A ladder allowed access to its roof and two rangy guys scampered up like monkeys, unrolling a carpet across the top and setting up a microphone and PA horns the diameter of truck tires. The crowd tightened around the vehicle and I was pressed toward the front.
“Arn-old, Arn-old…” rose in a chant from the crowd, all eyes aimed toward the van. It was a scene of tumult and exultation. A woman beside me was crying with joy.
“Arnold, Arnold…”
A cheer filled the air as a man slipped from the rear of the van followed by four others. The quartet climbed the ladder with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, took wide-stance positions atop the van, eyes staring into the crowd. Dressed in black pants and blue shirts, they had wide black belts of shiny leather holding holstered sidearms.
I blinked, looked again at a man atop the van, close to the edge. It was the deputy from the scene at the burned house, Briscoe’s man. What was his name?
Briscoe’s voice yelled in my memory: “Baker! Git to the car and you git calm.”
I filed the name away as Meltzer ascended the ladder, the crowd deafening in its adulation. He was a small man with an imperious, military bearing, hair short and neat and black. He moved as though lighter than air, a pixie. His perfectly tailored white suit seemed an improbable choice until I noted how much it stamped him as different from the rabble below; it was, in effect, a uniform.