The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

“Hell no. I’ll grow the dope. You grow the babies.”

Laughter splashes dry redwood walls. The waitress and the truck driver, both of them laughing hard while his hand strokes her flat young belly.

His fingers find a piercing there. That’s no surprise. After all, the waitress is one of Jerry’s kids. Garcia himself would have admired the silver belly button ring that twinkles in the saffron light, and the trucker is of the same mind. His thick finger flips the fragile hoop up and down and the waitress doesn’t do anything but laugh some more.

The man’s head tilts back as he eyes the waitress. Light spills from the redwood chandelier above, misses his face, bathes his neck…

Jessie shivers.

There’s a swastika tattooed over the man’s carotid artery.

Quickly, Jessie slides out of the booth. It’s time to go. No one’s looking at her. Everyone’s looking at the waitress, at the truck driver, at his hand on the young woman’s belly.

Everyone’s looking at that little silver ring.

Jessie wads the six-bucks-and-change check into a ball and stuffs it into the pocket of her leather jacket, the same pocket that holds seventy-six hundred and seventy-seven bucks. Twenties and fifties pinch her toes as she passes by the unattended cash register, jilting it cold.

She slips through the door. She squints against the storm. Almost looks back. Doesn’t. Her face is suddenly cold. As cold as the face of a dead man Jessie used to know, his heart splattered slick purple by shotgun fire, his dead eyes staring up at a man with a swastika tattooed on his neck.

Inside the restaurant, no one is laughing anymore.

The man with the tattoo smiles at the waitress.

He says, “Now about this girl we’re looking for… ”

Raindrops lash Jessie’s brow. The sour taste of coffee is gone from her mouth, but the taste of blackberry jam is heavy on her tongue.

Crossing the parking lot, she digs the unpaid check out of her pocket and drops it in a puddle. It wouldn’t take much to square things. Six bucks and change. Maybe a buck tip.

If the waitress was lucky — really lucky — she might pass those greenbacks to a customer when she made change. But on a day like today, when the rain comes in buckets, business is sure to slow down. That money could sit in the till for hours, until the cafe doors flew open and the storm blew inside, and a man with skin the color of a rainy sky burst into the cafe, and the little waitress took one look at him and screamed.

Because that man’s heart is a gleaming blackberry tangle in his tattered chest…

He’s a dead man who’s still alive…

A man Jessie can see in her mind’s eye…

The highway is a river. Jessie stares at the dark forest on the other side. Wet in there, sure. But not as wet as out here. She’ll crawl into the dark, wait until the man with the tattoo and his buddy hit the road —

A voice from behind.

“Hey.”

Jessie doesn’t want to hear that word so she walks faster, but a hand drops on her shoulder and spins her around. The guy with the swastika tattoo smiles at her. His buddy smiles, too.

“What do you think, Smitty?” Tattoo says.

“I think sixty miles haven’t changed her all that much.”

“Yeah,” Tattoo says. “But maybe we should make us some changes now, though. The kind she won’t forget.”

“You’ve got the wrong woman,” Jessie says, dropping her head so her long hair hides her face. She shrugs the guy off and digs her hands into her coat pockets as she turns.

Tattoo grabs her again. Spins her again, harder this time. “I don’t think you could forget me,” he says. “The name’s Larry Oates. I’m the guy who shotgunned your boyfriend, remember?”

Jessie remembers, all right. Raw hatred boils inside her. She spits in Oates’ face, and he shoves her, and she stumbles back and ends up behind one of the mobile homes.

Even if they were looking, the people in the restaurant couldn’t see her now. But the tourists aren’t the only ones missing out on the action. Oates is missing out, too. He takes hold of Jessie’s leather lapels and pulls her so close that he doesn’t even see the butterfly knife in her hand.

Chinkchink. The knife spits blade and Jessie jams it into Oates’ gut.

“Shit,” Smitty says. “Shit!” But Oates doesn’t say a word. All he does is grunt, staring straight into Jessie’s cool gray eyes, holding tight to her black leather lapels as she drives the blade deep and he grunts again —

Scarred knuckles bang the side of Jessie’s head and her knees turn to jelly. Smitty’s fist pounds another hard shot to the temple as she sags. Oates just stands there, trying to hold Jessie by her black leather lapels, but her legs are gone now and she’s real heavy for such a little chick — she’s just dead weight, Oates thinks, oh is that a laugh, this chick’s dead weight and my guts are washing away in the rain — and wet leather slips through his fingers as Jessie sinks away and he has to let her drop and the last thing he sees is a tight roll of bills squirming from the ripped seam of her left lapel, coaxed free by one of his fingers.

Oates opens his mouth, but pain strangles his words. The money squirms loose and he can’t close his fingers around it and the whole roll slips away and falls along with the girl and —

Smitty’s panicking. Oates knows that’s the wrong thing to do. He tries to focus, looking down, searching for the money —

But all he sees are the chrome grips of the girl’s butterfly knife sticking out of his belly. Then he’s down on his knees face to face with the girl — who’s also on her knees — but her eyes are blank slate and he knows she can’t see him.

Smitty’s fists have seen to that. The chick is out like a light. She falls backward and her head thuds against the pavement. Oates falls forward, on top of her.

The split butt of the butterfly knife jams against the hard ridge of the girl’s ribcage and the hilt of the knife follows the blade into Oates’ belly.

The point of the blade drives through his guts and nips his spinal column on the way through his backside.

The girl’s warm breath washes Oates’ cheek. It tickles — even through the pain it goddamn tickles — and Oates almost has to laugh.

He doesn’t. He manages to restrain himself, because right now laughing would hurt way too fucking much, like losing the goddamn money. Instead, he tries to rise. Blood drips from his lips, splatters the girl’s forehead, washes away in the rain —

The wad of bills rolls along the sloping pavement, carried across the yellow lines that separate empty parking spaces by a rippling stream of rainwater veined with Larry Oates’ blood.

Oates crawls after the money, but his buddy grabs him.

“Don’t try to move, man!” Smitty says.

Pain clamps Oates’ jaws. Smitty doesn’t see the goddamn money… and Oates has to tell him about it… but he can’t even say a word.

So he starts crawling after it himself…

.. .but it’s too late for that.

And that’s just what Jessie’s dead lover tells her as she lays unconscious in a parking lot, raindrops washing her all the way to dreamland.

Joe Shepard’s dead lips part and he says, “It’s too late, Jessie.”

“It’s never too late,” she says. “Unless you believe it is.”

“That’s the way you see it.”