Gator A-GO-GO

She joined her friend, staring daggers across the counter.

Tommy wandered over. “Serge, looks like you’re winning another popularity contest. Some history here?”

The blonde pointed again. “That shit-eating bastard left us stranded on the side of the road!”

“What?… I… Huh?…” Serge tapped his own chest. “Me?…”

“It was the middle of the damn state,” said the other. “Hot as fuck!”

The Hawkeyes leaned as a group, digging the babes’ dirty talk.

“Huge misunderstanding,” said Serge. “I thought you were tired of being around me.”

“Bullshit! You peeled out of the parking lot…”

“… And you looked back as we chased your car down the street. I was combing dust out of my hair for hours!”

“Ouch,” said Tommy.

“That was years ago,“ said Serge.”Life’s too short. You should focus on all the laughs we had.”

“I can’t believe I actually sucked your dick,” said the blonde. Hawkeyes adjusted their bulging pants. Serge squinted at a blue butterfly. “See you got a tattoo.”

“Don’t try and change the subject!”

Then a crash next to Serge as a stool went over. Coleman pulled himself up from the floor. “Yo, Serge. Sorry I’m late…”

“Who’s that boob?” asked the blonde.

Serge put an arm around his buddy’s shoulders. “Coleman, this is a special day! I’d like you to meet a couple of dear old friends, City and Country.”

“What happened to Lenny?” asked Country.

“Still living with his mother. Probably grounded again… Coleman’s the original: Lenny, beta version, initial glitches intact.”

“We’re still going to kill you,” said City, glancing at her boss. “Just not in the bar.”

Tommy saw this could go one of two ways, and he couldn’t afford to lose his best meal tickets. Plus he’d grown fond of Serge. “Let’s make peace.”

He gave them the afternoon off, placed a few calls and tended bar himself until reinforcements arrived.

The foursome grabbed a corner booth, and Tommy set them up with sweating metal ice buckets of Rolling Rock.

Electric tension around the table. The women steamed with crossed arms, cats ready to claw eyes out. Then alcohol began oiling conversation. Two hours in, empty green bottles scattered everywhere. The women switched to Jack Daniel’s.

Coleman awoke and lifted his face off the table. Serge brought him up to speed, making an extremely long story USA Today-short.

City and Country. From the blue-collar side of the usual town-gown friction at any university. Both ingenues back then, which was a decade, sweet as pie before the highway life as fugitives. Bogus murder case. Never should have gone into that student bar. Trash talk about them being trash. The ringleader was a sorority president from a prominent donor family. Then, in the restroom, the coked-out sister fell on the knife she’d been using to cut rails in one of the stalls. Country tried first aid but lost the patient and her future. Only one thing to do when you’re outside the local power structure, uneducated and panicking with blood on your hands and fingerprints on the knife:

Florida road trip!

Before entering that fateful saloon, they barely drank, didn’t smoke, definitely didn’t do drugs and had no legal scrapes of any sort. Since then, shit. Anything went. Anything. A ten-year mountain of petty and not-so-petty crimes. Never caught. Whatever it took to get by. Prison didn’t turn them out any tougher.

With almost anyone else, the lifestyle ushered a downward spiral. In rare cases like City and Country, it sharpened survival skills to a fine, glinting edge and, all things considered, allowed them a half-decent existence in the gray margin of society.

“Some story,” said Coleman.

“Sucks,” said Country, expertly rolling a joint on the table. “Jesus!” Serge glanced around. “Trying to get us pinched?”

“Fuck it.”

“Cool,” said Coleman.

Country lit the number and passed it under the table to City.

She passed it back. “On three…”

They did shots.

The Hawkeyes were turned around on their stools with backs against the bar.

In love.

So was Country; her altered blood chemistry drooped eyelids and formed a coy smile at memories of old times with Serge. She got up, whiskey hips swaying, and, without intention, couldn’t have caused more drooling on her way to the jukebox.

Her right hand braced against the domed glass; her left pressed buttons, mechanically flipping miniature album covers. Flipping stopped.

B-19.

The bar echoed with the slow, immediately recognizable forty-year-old cadence of a cowbell. Charlie Watts joined on drums. A single guitar chord.

Country sauntered to the middle of the floor, giving Serge a bedroom smile and making a naughty “come hither” motion with an index finger.

Serge could dance, but it wasn’t a smooth prospect. He had only one speed: open throttle. Duck-walking, backflips, jumping jacks, sliding across the floor for imaginary home plates. Country told him to just stand still.

“… I met a gin-soaked barroom queen…”

She did all the work. Her back to him, slithering up and down against his chest, running hands through her wild, curling hair.

Over in the corner booth, Coleman raised his eyebrows toward City and nodded toward the dance floor.

“Are you retarded?”

Coleman strained to think.

She hit her joint.

He reached for it.

“No.”

Back on the dance floor, Country continued grinding into Serge, shifting tempo perfectly with the music. The chorus came around again and she flung her head side to side, that blond mane whipping back and forth in front of her face.

“Honnnnnnnnky-tonk women…”

At the bar, six Hawkeyes with outstretched arms pointed cell phone cameras.

Chapter Fifteen

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Snow fluttered.

Big, thick flakes clumped before they hit ground. Accumulation reached three inches on the steps of the Dimond Library. Inside, toasty and empty.

Only four students. Three on the main floor and another in archives.