“You should tell Art what’s been happening, Blue. He deserves to know.”

“He doesn’t deserve anything except what he’s getting. But I guess it wouldn’t hurt. That’s Gourd and Weasley keeping you company, Art. I killed both of them. I was going to kill you next, but all kinds of shit happened.”

“My Moosesie. He kind of messed things up.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Gourd’s skeleton had a key on it. Turned out to be the key to a safe deposit box. There was a million dollars in it. And a blackmail picture.”

“Moose found the picture,” Frisbee said.

“Not that one,” I said. “One of the other ones.”

“Whatever,“ Frisbee said. “He used your fax machine to try to blackmail the same guy twice. Moose’s my boy friend, by the way. Was my boy friend.”

“You following all this, Art?”

Art nodded vaguely. “What’s this have to do with Leonard?”

“I’m getting there,” I said. “Okay. So, anyway, then Paul and Brickhead followed your fax machine number to you and that’s when they kidnapped Leonard to force you to tell them where the money was. Which, of course, you couldn’t do because, as usual, you didn’t know shit about anything. I had the money.”

“We saved Leonard, Art. Me and Blue. Mostly me.”

“Tell that to my beat up face, Frisbee.”

“What about my face?”

“That was Moose, though. It wasn’t connected to saving Leonard.”

“Okay. So you get some credit. But we couldn’t have saved him without me.”

“You were great, Frisbee. Too bad you never got to know Frisbee, Art. She’s a hellava girl. You’d have had a million juicy fantasies in your screwed up brain over her.”

Frisbee kissed me on the cheek. We had another drink. So did Art. A very healthy slug type of drink.

“Where was I?” I said.

“Saving Leonard,” Frisbee said. “We brought him home, Art. But he didn’t want to stay there. He ran away. They didn’t hurt him or anything. He just didn’t want to live with you anymore.”

Art hung his head.

“I forgot to mention we had all that fun screwing around with you,” I said. “But you knew it was me. I had a long distance microphone on your house. I heard everything you and Margie talked about. Queasy, Art. You guys are sicker than I could possibly have imagined. You should thank me for killing you. I never told you before, but after Nevada City I really didn’t like being around you and Marge any more. You guys are really creepy.”

Art pursed his lips and wiggled his shoulders like he was putting up with a trivial idiot. God, he made me sick. He couldn’t even die right.

“Then Brickhead and Paul came back and found Moose,” Frisbee said. “So we had to save Moose, too.”

“Only we didn’t.”

“Poor Moosesie. We tried. He wouldn’t come, though.”

“He tried, Frisbee. He just tripped over his stupidity.”

“Can’t we call him something nicer? Stupid is so mean.”

“How about mentally challenged. Art would go for that. Right, Art?”

Frisbee was wiping a tear off her cheek. I put my arm around her shoulder, gave it a squeeze, and told her a lie.

“Moose died saving us, Frisbee. He was a hero.”

She gave a sad, little laugh. “Thanks, Blue. But he was just stupid, let’s face it.”

“Well, anyway, Art, Paul killed Brickhead after I shot his nose off. Brickhead’s nose, that is. Then Paul made me tell him where the money was and left us to drown.”

“But we got away,” Frisbee said. “Me and Blue, anyway. Moose didn’t. He drowned. Then Blue wanted to come kill you by himself, but I made him let me come, too. So here we are. Nothing personal, Art. Blue’s my partner, though. We’re Funeral Rose and The Derringer Kid. You’re our first assassination together.”

Art just looked at us. He didn’t seem to know what to say or what to think. It was great to see him speechless. Mr. Glib, all glibbed out. Sizzling in the grease on the griddle of life.

“I forgot to tell you the best part, Art,” I said. “The safe deposit box had nine other keys in it. There were nine other boxes. All told, it came to ten million dollars. Paul got a million of it and we spent some, but there’s still about eight million left.”

I let him digest this for a bit. I knew it would kill him to think I had ended up making more money in life than him. Just flat kill him. And then I was going to actually kill him, too. It was overkill, no doubt about it.

“I guess I’m a multi-millionaire, Art.”

“Me, too,” Frisbee said.

A tear rolled slowly down Art’s cheek. I had never seen him cry before. I didn’t think he even knew how if he wanted to. His shovel didn’t dig that deep.

He worked his jaw carefully and whispered through clenched teeth. “They’ll catch you. They’ll put Gourd, Weasely, and me together. You’re the only suspect they’d have. They’ll catch you.”

“Hate to disillusion you, Arthur face. The cops think Gourd’s alive. The guy who kidnapped Leonard was Gourd’s son. His son had police connections. He sold the cops on Gourd being alive and well in Portugal with a young honey. That only leaves Weasely as a connection point to you. He was only a receiver, though. We weren’t even one of his cases. We were always nobodies to him. I doubt if we’re even on his books. Even if we are, it wouldn’t draw attention. All he did was collect money and disburse it. Why would we have a grudge against him? I bet a lot of his cases have grudges left behind, though. Maybe all of them. That’s where they’ll look. Already have, actually. It happened last summer.”

“They’ll know you hated me,” he clenched out.

“The Nevada City police? That’s a laugh. Marge’s weird, paranoid story about me? They’ll think no wonder you split. She’s a fruitcake. Maybe you got the itch for a better bed and breakfast. Nobody’s ever going to find you, Artie boy. Ever. You’re evaporated. Even Marge will have her doubts. The world don’t care about you, Art. It’ll roll over you like a ripple in the ocean. You spent your life turning out to be nothing. A dork ass fucking zero. End of story. Wasted molecules.”

“It’s getting warm, Blue. How long do we have to watch Art die?” Frisbee asked.

“I’m ready to go now.”

“Great.”

We finished our drinks and got to our feet. Frisbee gathered up the blanket.

“Sorry about this, Art,” she said.

She went to Mr. Wheels and got in the passenger seat. I looked at Art for a few moments. He wouldn’t look at me. Brave to the end.

“Drink up, Art. End of the line time.”

He drained the rest of his drink and looked up at me, a pleading, desperate look in his eyes. He moved his mouth just enough to whisper. “Please, Blue. C’mon. We were friends.”

“Right. Friends. You and me. Babble Software. Friends to the end. I’ll tell you what Art, you convince me you are sorry for what you did and you tell me how you could possibly do that to me and I will let you go home.”

“I just did what I thought was best.”

“You fucking asshole. You killed Teresa. You killed my life. ”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Drop dead, Art.”

I re-taped his hands and stood over him. Famous last words time. I had decided on W. C. Fields.

But then I had a feet paralysis situation crop up. They wouldn’t move. Mr. and Mrs. Steps were not responding. They were forcing me to keep looking down at Arthur Asshole Tweed. I didn’t know Weasley and I didn’t know Gourd, but I knew this worm at my feet.

He was my friend. And if he could have, he would have always been my friend.

Oh, Lord, what a tragedy.

Fuck. Leonard was still out there, too.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

I untaped Art’s feet.

“Get up,” I said.

I marched him to Gordo and made him get in the back. Then I taped his eyes shut.

“I’m going to take you back to Tahoe and set you free. Don’t ever make me hear about you again. Mr. Art Fucking Friend. Or I most certainly will find you and this time I will not let you go. Leonard‘s out there, Art. Go find him.”

“Blue?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. You were the best friend I ever had. I’m sorry.”

“Me, too, Art. Me, too.”

I joined Frisbee in Gordo’s headquarters and we drove away.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Letting him go. I can’t kill him.”

“Leonard, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Me, too. Right?”

I gave her the sideways glance that meant “you dinghead, wise and aware fruitcake.”

“And Art,” I said.

She leaned across the seat and kissed me on the cheek. “Teresa would be proud of you.”

“Sure.”

“It was fun killing him, though, I have to admit.”

“You’re a natural born killer, Frisbee.”

“I’m a natural at everything, Blue. Except finding Mr. Right.”

“Your Achilles Heel.”

“I don’t own any of her shoes.”

“Frisbee?”

“What?”

“You want to go to Nairobi?”

“What the fuck for? Where is it?”

“It’s in Africa.”

“You must be kidding.”

“No. We could build a lot of hospital type stuff there. Teresa told me about it. They need a lot of maternity wings there. You can buy them for really cheap. What do you think? It ain’t all that safe around here now, anyway.”

“Blue?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve definitely decided I probably like you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I think so. Let’s go to Nairobi. I’m tired of killing people, anyway.”

“You haven’t killed anybody yet.”

“I did in my mind.”

“Haven’t we all.”

The End

Frisbee lured him out. The rest was easy.

We waited till Art made one of his nighttime Sacramento runs. It wasn’t a long wait. That night, actually. He was at it again with that daily insanity. Scouring late night Sacramento in search of some hot juice. It was a lot easier not being his friend any more. I could just hold him in contempt instead of overlooking his weirdness.

We had Gordo parked across the street from Teresa’s old house when he got home in the dark and parked on the street. The house didn’t have a garage or a driveway. Frisbee had Gordo’s rear end cap door up and was standing there fussing, her hands tossing around inside it. Naturally, he came over immediately. You didn’t have to hint much for his imagination to start cooking up some exotic juice over a truck bumper. It was too dark for him to recognize my truck as the Gordo it was.

He recognized Frisbee immediately when he got up next to her.

“Frisbee,” he asked, sort of surprised like.

Before he could say anything else, though, I stood up from where I’d been hiding around the other side of Gordo.

“Hello, Art,” I said.

His face went around opening all the drawers of panic and confusion. “Blue,” he said. “Frisbee? What are you two doing here?”

“We thought we’d drop by and kill you,” I said.

Before he could react, Frisbee shoved a pillow case over his head from behind. I took a big windup and hit him in the face with everything me and the roll of quarters in my hand could wallop him with. He crumpled to the street like a marionette with no strings.

I looked at Frisbee. “God, that felt good.”

“That was a real Mooseroosie, all right. He might already be dead.”

“Then I guess we better escort him to the graveyard.”

We dumped him in the back of Gordo and taped his hands and feet and mouth. Same old taping areas as always. Just for a change of pace, I taped his ears to his hair also. Then we put the pillow case back over his head and took off.

I drove Art’s car and Frisbee followed me in Mr. Wheels. We drove east on Highway 20 till it looped back and connected with 80 going east to Reno. Near Truckee, we turned off south on Highway 89 and drove to South Lake Tahoe along the west side of the lake and left Art’s car in the parking lot of Harrah’s. Then we drove Gordo up 50, along the east side of the lake, and on towards Reno.

“Last chance to get off the bus,” I said to Frisbee as we drove along in the dark.

“I already told you. I’m in. I’m going all the way, Blue.”

“I thought your kid was moving in with you.”

“He didn’t want to.”

“Why, Frisbee? It doesn’t make sense. So far, you’re hardly guilty of anything. Not murder, for sure.”

“Get real, Blue. I’ve been an accessory for a long time. I know about Gourd and Weasley. I’m living off stolen money. Evading the IRS. Brickhead‘s dead. Moose’s dead. Who cares? It‘s too late to stop.”

“You ain’t killed anybody, though. That was me. And you don’t know where the evidence is. Not yet.”

“You think I’d rat on you if they caught us? Take a deal to screw you?”

“If it was the difference between life in jail or five years, it would be tempting, wouldn’t it. Heck, I would be tempted.”

She laughed. “No you wouldn’t, Blue. I know you. You wouldn’t give the cops the hair off your ear hole.”

“I sawed that stuff off last week.”

“You missed a few.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to kill him.”

“I don’t.”

“Why help me do it then?”

“I can’t stop you. I already tried. It’s the Moose in you.”

“I still say you shouldn’t do it. Once you do, there’s no way back. I’ll drop you off in Reno and pick you up on the way back.”

“I told you I’m in. All the way. End of discussion.”

We drove on up through Reno and pulled into a truck stop east of the city. There was no sense driving up to the burial ground in the desert just yet. I wouldn’t be able to find it in the dark. It was three in the morning, so we decided to just kill some time till the sun came up.

There was an all night café there, so we went in and pulled up a booth and ordered breakfast. The place was half-filled with truck guys talking truck. It was some special language lingo like all the other lingo rooms in America. We were kind of out of place being assassins.

That was the nice thing about being an assassin head if you liked to work alone, which I always had. It was a solitary kind of career. Underneath it all, I was kind of happy old Frisbee wanted to be my partner. Good outlaws always had a partner. They were called sidekicks. If you were bad enough or famous enough, you got to be called a Gang. The newspapers decided these fine lines.

“If we’re going to work together,” I said to Frisbee while we were hardening our arteries with bad cholesterol, “we need to invent some nicknames for ourselves.”

“What for? I already have one.”

“You mean Frisbee?”

“Yeah.”

“You still never told me your real name.”

“Yes I did. I don’t have one.”

“I think I’d like to be The Derringer Kid.”

“That’s real, real impressive.”

“How about you? Who do you want to be?”

“The Bewitching Beheader.”

“C’mon. Get serious.”

“Okay. How about The Deadly Diva.”

“It sounds like a Perry Mason story.”

“Who’s he?”

“Raymond Burr.

She shrugged. A trucker at the next booth slammed his fist on the table and cursed out, “That bitch. She’ll be the death of me yet. Next thing you know, she’ll be puttin’ flowers on my grave if I don’t get rid of her.”

Frisbee looked at me and smiled. “I think I want to be Funeral Rose.”

“Funeral Rose and The Derringer Kid. That sounds pretty good, Frizz. I like it.”

“Me, too. This is kind of fun.”

“Okay, Rose. Let’s go unload the meat.”

“Spoken like a true blue boy, Blue. I mean Kid.”

# # #

The day was new and the sun was a big fat yolk on the horizon. It was cool with no wind. The sky was clear and blue. The ground was dirty and brown. It was a panoramic view in all directions for one hundred miles and four and three-eighth inches.

Gourd was all skeleton by now. So was Weaseley. They had fallen over and were nestled against each other, skull to skull, their teeth smiling grotesquely. Chums forever.

“Which one’s Gourd?” Frisbee asked.

“The big one. On the left.”

“How’d you find this place?”

“I just kept driving from one empty road to the next emptier road to the emptiest road and then drove toward that mountain peak way off there to the north until I couldn’t see anything anywhere anyhow.”

“You always were a guy for intricate plans.”

I opened Gordo’s rear end. Tweed was still alive. We hauled him out and carried him to a spot next to Weasley. Frisbee carried his feet, I carried his shoulders. Fortunately, he didn’t weigh much. He was still a stork butt.

When we had him seated, I took off the pillow case and ripped the tape off his mouth, trimming his moustache in the process. He batted his eyes furiously to comprehend his situation. He was also in a lot of pain. It looked like his jaw was broken. He tried to open it and say something, but it hurt too much. He looked at Frisbee. He looked at me. He looked around at what there was to see. Nothing.

Then he noticed Gourd and Weasley and lurched back against the rock we’d parked him against. Jumping Jupiter eyeballs.

“Welcome to your funeral, Art,” I said.

Frisbee fetched a blanket from the back end of Mr. Wheels and spread it out on the ground. She sat down on it and leaned back on her hands. I sat down next to her. We stared at Art. He studied his knees.

“He looks pretty miserable, Blue.”

“He looks like a piece of shit.”

“What do you do now? This is my first time.”

“It’s sort of a wing-it deal. You got any ideas you’d like to do?”

“Not really. This is kind of boring, actually. I thought it would be more exciting.”

“I got a knife in the car. You could cut off his toes or something.”

“Funeral Rose wouldn’t act like that. Too sleazy.”

“How would she act?”

“Cool. Calm. Smooth. Sleeky smart. Silent but deadly.”

“That’s what we used to call my sister’s farts.”

“Shit. You have to ruin everything, don’t you. I was just getting into my character here.”

“Sorry. So how would The Derringer Kid act?”

“Well, he’d have to be a cocky smart-ass, I guess. Sort of like you, but not so gross and slobby. You’d have to get nicer clothes. Maybe a cool hat.”

“Maybe I should just be The Homeless Kid, then. Funeral Rose and The Homeless Kid.”

“No way. You’d sound like some brat I picked up off the streets. I think we should have a drink. You bring anything to drink?”

“Does a car have wheels?”

I went over to Gordo and fetched out a fifth of J&B I kept in the back with the camping gear. For emergencies. All I had for cups were a couple of metal jobs with wire handles. Camping cups. Lip burners if you didn’t wait for the coffee to cool.

I brought everything back to the blanket and poured us both a drink.

“Here’s to Rose and The Kid,” I said.

We took a slug and she said, “That’s better. Now it feels like fun. Should we give Art a drink?”

I looked at Art. He had some hope twitching around on his face. What the hell. One last drink with my life long friend. I went back to Gordo and got another cup and brought it back and filled it. Then I untaped Art’s hands and gave it to him and sat back down on the blanket with Funeral Rose.

“Cheers, Art,” I said.

He took a long swallow and sighed. He still didn’t have anything to say.

“I wonder where Leonard ended up,” Frisbee said.

Art leaned his head forward. Curious and nervous. “Whab aboud Leonard?”

“He’s not dead, Art,” I said. “He ran away. Last I saw him he was heading to San Francisco.”

“He said that was a good start,” Frisbee said.

“My guess is Los Angeles. Kids like to go there.”

“They kidnabbed him,” Art said. “Whab are you togging aboud?”

“You should tell Art what’s been happening, Blue. He deserves to know.”

To be continued Monday, with the Concluding Chapter . . .

Frisbee blamed me.

Then she blamed herself.

Then she blamed me.

Then she blamed Paul.

Then she blamed me.

Then, after about a week, she ran out of blame.

“Moose got his own self killed,” she sighed. “By being stupid. How fitting is that? Why didn’t he just swim out? Why?”

I didn’t tell her he couldn’t swim. He could have hop-bobbed over to the door, though. At least tried. Frisbee was right. Moose was Moose. To the end. If I’d tried to help him, he’d have gotten me killed, too.

We were in the kitchen, as usual, sitting around the table, which had been rescued from the roof. There was nice comfortable furniture in the living room, which Moose hadn’t destroyed, but we hardly ever used it. It was too much like waiting in a dentist’s office. There was nothing to stick your elbows on. We’d rescued a couple of chairs from the backyard.

Frisbee had been bawling. She’d been bawling all week. She looked like shit. She’d worn the same clothes all week. Hadn’t combed her hair. Slept on the couch all fetaled up in a ball. Whimpering with grief.

“Ah, Moosesie. He was a true horse’s ass. I loved that shithead, though. It was love, wasn’t it Blue?”

“If you say so, Frisbee. It looked a little different from where I sat.”

“I suppose it wasn’t Romeo and Juliet type.”

“No. Only one of you croaked. The right one, fortunately.”

“Don’t use that word, Blue. It hurts.”

“What word?”

“Croak. It’s so swampy.”

“He demised, then.”

“Thanks. I just can’t get used to him being gone. Forever.”

“Me neither. I still get queasy thinking he’ll show up at the door.”

“You didn’t like him, did you.”

“We clashed. I’m blue. He was sewer sludge gray.”

“Don’t call him names anymore, Blue. Please?”

“Sure, Frizz. I’m sorry.”

“Is Paul going to come back and kill us?”

“No. He thinks we’re dead. He never knew about this house, either. All he knew about was the trailer court. You should never go back there, just to be safe. He got his money. That’s all he cared about.”

“How much money is left?”

“Around eight million. Give or take a couple hundred grand.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to give it all to you.”

“God! I can’t take all of it, Blue.”

“Good. I was just kidding. I thought you could keep the house and the Rolls. Miss Princess. They belong to you. And I’d give you a million to live on. Your ten percent like I promised. Does that sound okay?”

“Maybe my boy can move in with me. He never could before.”

“I bet he’d like that.”

“You’re going away now, aren’t you?”

“I still have unfinished business. I don’t want you mixed up in it.”

“Tweed?”

“Yeah.”

“Haven’t enough people died already?”

“All but the one who matters most. To me, anyway.”

“He’s gone, though. You don’t know where he is.”

“I’ll find him. I think I know where he went.”

“Why don’t you just stay here. We get along okay. Let it go with Tweed.”

“That’s what Teresa always said. Let it go.”

“She was right, Blue.”

“I know. She was always right. But I’m doing it anyway. I made up my mind a long time ago. I won’t feel done till he is.”

“When are you going?”

“A couple of days. You seem okay now. Okay enough anyway.”

“You’ve been staying here for me?”

“I love you, Frisbee. Get a clue.”

“Not like you loved Teresa, though.”

“There’s only one of her.”

“Then don’t go.”

“I have to.”

“You really love me?”

“Yes I do, Frizz.”

“That’s sweet. I wish I loved you, too.”

“You’re too smart for that.”

“No I’m not. I’m not too smart for anything. I just know what I feel.”

“That’s smart enough.”

“You didn’t think so when Moose was alive.”

“It was probably some jealousy thing.”

“No it wasn’t. You thought I was stupid.”

“I guess so. About him, is all. Not anything else.”

“You hate to admit anything, don’t you.”

“I do?”

She let out a big sigh. “I think I’m going to go take a shower and clean up.”

# # #

It had been a while since I drove trusty old Mr. Gordo Wheels, but he started up right away. Old faithful. What a guy.

I drove east through Santa Rosa and down to Sonoma and through the hills toward Napa. The same route Moose and Frisbee and I had driven when we followed the Tweeds to Tahoe. As I passed the Clover Stornetta dairy, I noticed a new billboard. Clo the cow, dressed in a judge’s robe, holding up a carton of milk with one hoof and pounding a gavel with the other. The caption: “Supreme Quart.”

You da cow, Clo.

I wasn’t going to Tahoe, though. I was going back to Nevada City. I knew that’s where Tweed had gone. He had no where else to go. It was far away from Brickhead and Paul and the infamy of Sebastopol. And far away from me. It was the one place he could still pretend to be Arthur Asshole Tweed.

It wouldn’t take long for him to con the locals into believing he was a successfully retired entrepreneur, moving back to the simple life. The life before he became a traitorous shitbag. Margaret would fit right in where she left off.

As I drove north out of Auburn and up into the mountains, I thought about TellingWays riding out of the gold infested hills on her pinto pony, hair flying in the wind, leading the way for GoingBlind.

“We had a great life, didn’t we?” I said to her.

“We sure did, Blue,” she said.

“I wish you hadn’t died,” I said.

“Me, too,” she said. “Will you do me a favor, Blue?”

“Sure, TW. Whatever you ask.”

“When you’re done killing Art, would you drive back and take me out to the ocean. I haven’t been there for awhile.”

“Absolutely, sweet heart. Absolutely. The beach or the Head?”

“I think the Head, this time. We can hike up the hill and sit at the top. It’s quiet there and the view goes forever.”

Nevada City hadn’t changed at all. It couldn’t. It had to stay the same or the tourists wouldn’t come. Europe was probably full of towns like this that couldn’t ever change. They were trapped in history.

I wonder what it’s like to live in one of those places that don’t have any history at all. Those little islands out there in the ocean where hurricanes plow through them every year or two and wipe everything out right down to the sand. Except for the palm trees. They bent all over hell but never broke. Everybody hid behind them till the wind died down. Then everybody got up and ate a coconut and started up history all over again. Interesting. What kind of brains went on in there with no history to take up headsville with. What did they put in the old noggin bean instead? Bottles from the ocean? They were always washing up in there on the beaches with messages in them that nobody could understand. I think I could finally see what went on in eternity. God would be answering a zillion dumb questions all day long about what the hell He was thinking with this creation thing.

I stopped at the Deer Creek Inn and had a beer on the patio where I’d first seen Teresa. The river was cackling away below the deck, roaring along with the oncoming of spring that melted all the snow in the mountains. Once in a while, if you watched closely, you’d see a skier roar by who had been caught in a melt down and would wash up against a tree downriver, all busted up and broken apart, impaled on a ski pole.

It had been almost a year since I’d thrown my hat in the ring to become a killer. A revenger. What a year.

I sat at the same table as before. Twenty years ago. Off to the side in the back by the railing. I took a long deep glug and lit a cigarette. It was early and the air was chilly. I was the only one on the deck. There were a few drinkers inside where it was warmer.

Frisbee suddenly walked out onto the deck and looked around and spotted me. She waltzed over and sat down with a big smirk on her face.

“What in the fuck are you doing here?” I said.

“Hi Blue. I snuck into the back of your truck. Gordo, I mean. Thank God there was a sleeping bag in there. I’d have jostled my ass to shreds otherwise. You drive too crazy. And you ought to wash that bag once in a while. Pee-yew!”

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I repeated.

“You’re glad to see me. I can tell. I knew you’d need me. So I came.”

“I told you I don’t want you mixed up in this.”

“Blue, you ought to know by now I don’t listen to nothing you say. I’m here. I’m in. Get used to it.”

“Frisbee, I’m going to kill Tweed. You don’t want to see that. You ain’t the killing type.”

“You got that right, Blue. But I’m your partner and that’s just the way it is. You weren’t the killing type once, either. I can learn.”

“Partner! What the hell are you talking about?”

“You said you loved me. That makes us partners.”

“Jeezus, Frisbee. I can’t kill Tweed with you standing around watching.”

She smiled. “Now you’re getting it. What are partners for?”

“Fuck you. I’m killing him anyway.”

“Suit yourself. Partner.”

A waitress came out. Frisbee ordered two shots of Cuervos and two bottles of Corona.

When the waitress left, she said “That’s what you and Teresa drank, right?”

“Right. It was our feisty drink.”

“So let’s get feisty then. I’ve never tried it. It’s on TV all the time now. And in the Enquirer. All kinds of beautiful people are into it. It’s called doing shooters. You find out they been doing it when they get out of rehab and promise not to do it any more.”

“You don’t need it. You were born feisty. It comes natural to you.”

“I’m trying it anyway.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Good. I need to get used to it. You can’t go around killing people and drink orange juice. It’s in the movies.”

The waitress dropped off our drinks.

“You’re crazy, Frisbee. This is nuts.”

“Shut up and show me what to do.”

I poured us each a shot and explained the ritual. We licked the salt, drained the shot, slammed down our glasses, bit into the lime, and drank the beer.

“Wow!” she said. “That was fun as hell. Let’s do it again.”

“Whoa,” I said. “You got to let the first shot settle down in there. It’ll get real warm in a second or two. Then your face will get all hot and laughy and your eyes will get misty. Your forehead might sweat a little, too.”

She sat there looking at me. Then she drummed her fingers on the table. Then she tried whistling. Nothing came out but a swoosp sound.

“Shit,” she said. “I used to whistle good. Before that asshole busted out my teeth.”

I smiled. She smiled. I laughed. She laughed.

“Now we can have another,” I said.

“I see what you mean,” she said.

We had two more and finished our beers and left. We walked around town a bit. She was a little wobbly and had to hold on to my arm while we walked. Everything I pointed out to her seemed funny as hell.

“So this is where all the gold is, huh?” she said.

“Was,” I said.

“It looks like any other mountain type place. Why’d the gold come here?”

“Beats me. They say it’s where you find it.”

“Who found it?”

“Some guy taking a pee in the river.”

“Yuck.”

I took her to the Posh Nosh and we had a sandwich in the back patio where I’d met Teresa the second time. They still put a big fat juicy pickle on every sandwich plate. Twenty years of big fat juicy pickles. How many would that be? Two million? Ten? Lot of dead cucumbers, that’s for sure. Frisbee didn’t want hers. I gobbled it down.

While we were eating I remembered Teresa and the great way she had of walking down those stairs and the great way she had of doing everything.

“You’re thinking about Teresa, aren’t you?” Frisbee said.

I nodded. “It’s hard not to.”

“Is this where you met her?”

“Sort of. The place where we really met was at the river. Just north of town.”

“Let’s go there. I want to see it.”

“It’s a nude swimming place.”

Frisbee shivered. “Nice try, but nobody will be nude today. It’s too cold. I can’t even stay drunk. Let’s go.”

We walked back to Mr. Wheels and I drove to the river. Deja vu smoke was getting in my eyes the whole way there. I parked and we walked down to the river and stood on the bank watching it do its flowing.
Nobody was there. No clouds slipped under my feet. Fish did not leap out of the water and skate on their fins. Birds did not dance on the shore holding their wings outstretched as they warbled Moonlight Sonata. Squirrels did not swing from limb to limb doing triple somersaults in midair. No fawn tiptoed across the water without causing a ripple.

It was funny. I had noticed these wonders once before. And I still could see them, even though they weren’t there anymore. Because I had spent one second of time here with the girl of my lifetime. A second I would never forget. I realized that my life would always be perfect because of that one little second.

“You’re crying, Blue.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. This is a great place to fall in love. I’d know the feeling if I ever had.”

We drove back to town and decided to get a room at the National Hotel under false names. I figured Art and Margaret would show up there sooner or later. For the Happy Hour. I drove past Teresa’s old house on the way, to point it out to Frisbee. There was a sign swinging over the porch.

Tweed Typography.

It was like stomping on her grave.

To be continued . . .

Trouble in River City was no understatement.

The water was bubbling up through the hole in the floor before any of us had so much as mmmpphhhed. We were sinking fast.

Quickly, I elbowed my face into Frisbee’s so we were nose to nose, mouth full of pillow case rags to mouth full of pillow case rags. We started smooching around like crazy, rubbing the rags back and forth trying to dislodge them. I was smooching around anyway. Frisbee was trying to get away from me like I’d gone mad. After a particularly glaring glare from me and a pithy mmpphh, she finally got the point and mooched into the fray with a frenzy.

It wasn’t working. I moved my nose down and used it like a crowbar to dig at the rag in her mouth. She rolled her eyes up like she couldn’t stand to watch what I was doing in her mouth with my tobacco infested nostrils. It was about as personal as two people would ever want to get, I guess. But hey, what’s a little gross behavior when the only alternative is drowning your guts out.

Whatever. I nosed and nosed in there like mad. Finally, I got my whole nose into the side of her mouth and started nudging out the rag, bit by bit. It was slow work. Her saliva was getting into my nostrils and cutting off my air. I had to take four breathe breaks before the rag finally slid all the way out and her mouth was free.

“That is the most disgusting thing that ever happened to me,” she queased. “Why do you always come up with solutions that are disgusting?”

She started spitting and pittooing in case there were any of my nostril contents stuck on her tongue. I could see she was going to overdo the spew cleaning for about six hours, so I interrupted her and shoved my rag into her mouth and motioned for her to take a bite and pull it out. She backed her head off a couple of times, not reading my motioning correctly. Finally, she got what I meant.

“Oh, God,” she muttered.

She chewed hold of the rag and we gawked back and forth like a couple of geese heads beaking it up on the shore line while she pulled the rag out bite by bite. There was only a little nibble left at the end and our lips found themselves touching. We looked into each other’s eyes. I winked. She yanked out the nibble with a fury and spit it off of her.

“Don’t ever try this again,” she warned. “And don’t ever mention this to anyone. You hear me, asshole?”

“My nose feels all horny,” I teased.

“You’re sick,” she said.

Back to the business of not drowning to death. “We’ve got to lean down to our knees and get our teeth on that fucking rope,” I said. “We’ve got to get it loose so we can stand up. Otherwise, we’re going to drown right here on our butts.”

She looked at the water spreading out across the floor. “Got it,” she said.

We left the rag in Moose’s mouth. Nothing he ever said was worth a shit anyway. Even Frisbee could see that. And we didn’t have time.

We leaned forward and down as far as the three of us would go. Not enough. I was too pot bellied to get my head down to my knees any more. I could do it a long time ago, I remembered. Not now. Another example of the disheartening side effects of living too damned long and getting stuck in a fat, wrinkled, old container.

“Fuck,” I said. “I’m too fat.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I can get there. You and Moose slide around to the back of my shoulders so I’m squeezed to the front.”

We did as she said. It was a smart idea. When we leaned over this time, she got far enough down so she could get her teeth onto the rope knot. Paul had tied it kind of carelessly. It had some looseness to it.

Frisbee went to work gnawing and pulling at it. As she moved her jaw around, Moose and I flopped this way and that on her back like a couple of knapsack heads. We exchanged a few eyeball daggers during the process. The water was halfway up our legs. Frisbee would drown chewing in a matter of minutes.

“Go, Frisbee,” I said. “C’mon girl. You can do it. Hurry.”

Just as the water started pooling over our legs she reared back up with the rope in her mouth. We were free.

“You did it!” I said.

“That was the worst breakfast I ever fucking ate,” she said. “Yuck. That fucking rope had salt and fish guts all over it.”

She sounded a little funny. Then I saw why. Her bottom teeth weren’t there. They’d popped out when she yanked the rope free.

She suddenly noticed this interesting tidbit herself. “Oh holy fucking crap,” she moaned. “Where’s my goddamned teeth?”

We looked around for them. They were lying between my legs. Underwater.

“We gotta get up,” I said.

“I’ll lose my teeth if you stand,” she said.

She plunged her head into the water and tried to grab onto her teeth. I could feel her jaw working around between legs. My thighs, actually. Shit. Mr. Unmentionable started creeping down my pant leg.

She came up gasping for breath. Without the teeth. She looked at me. “I felt that,” she said. “You did that on purpose.”

“Did what?”

“You know what, asshole.”

I shrugged. “I couldn’t help it. Your jaw was sliding around on my leg. It’s just an automatic thing. Honest. I don’t run the show down there.”

“Bullshit.”

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s get up.”

Moose had nothing to say so far. A whole lot of angry mmmpphhing, though. Especially when Frisbee was digging around with her face between my legs. I could see his eyeballs blowing geysers over that one.

We pulled up our feet and braced ourselves against the wall and started inching ourselves upward, back by butt by feet. Somehow, without any previous training, the three of us instinctively knew how to perform this rarely attempted pressure based lever and fulcrum maneuver which produced a geek commodity called torque. Or maybe not. It was probably whatever they called it when a worm humpbacked along the ground, sliming his feetless butt forward, which pushed his feetless guts upward and allowed his feetless head to slime forward a couple of millimeters as he roared across the earth at .000000000000000000001 miles per hour. Whoops. Excuse me. Kilometers per hour. Worms were on the metric system, for some reason. Something the Mayflower brought over, I guess.

We were on our feet, backs against the wall.

“Now what?” Frisbee said.

I looked down at our hands. All three sets were dangling in front of her lap, right down there inches from you know where land.

“Don’t get no fucking ideas with any of those fat fucking fingers,” she said, following my gaze down to her lap.

I noticed she didn’t give the same exhortation to Moose. Fat fingers weren’t all the same, obviously.

“Jesus, Frisbee. Is that all you ever think about?”

“Me? You’re the one with the boner.”

Moose wriggled around furiously, almost knocking us over.

“Stop it!” Frisbee yelled at him. “Cease this fucking minute you moron!”

He tried to wrench our hands up to his face to pull out his rag. We resisted. He couldn’t overpower us. The rag stayed.

The water was up to our knees.

“We have to chew off the rope,” I said.

“Your teeth this time,” she said.

We pulled our hands up to my mouth and I went to work. My wisdom teeth had been pried out years ago, so they were no help. Why they were called wisdom teeth when they never lasted long enough to get out of high school had always puzzled me. Whatever. My molars weren’t any help, either. One was gone, the other three were capped. All of the capped ones were sensitive to pressure and temperature. I could barely grind a steak to shreds or eat an ice cream cone with them.

So it was up to my premolar, canine, and incisor teeth to do the job. Fortunately, my canines lived up to their name. They had nice little points to them. Not vampire pointed. Cutely round tipped pointed. They didn’t snag upon extraction. I used them to pry into the knot and the other teeth to yank at it. Pry, yank. Pry, yank. It was slow work. Almost as slow as scritching.

The water was up to our waists.

“Get a move on it, Blue,” Frisbee said. “We’re drowning here.”

The water was up to our chests when I finally tore the knot loose. Our hands were free. Of each other. They were still tied together per each, though. I’d only gotten the three-in-one rope untied. We were only three-in-one tied together now by our feet.

Moose immediately yanked out his rag. The peace was finally shattered. Before he could speak out his ass-face, though, Frisbee stifled him. Good thinking, Frisbo. “Stuff it, Moose. Not a fucking word. Untie my hands.”

It was going to be two against one now, I could see that. Tarzan and Jane. Vine swinging it up and down the playground of their black hole paradise. My hands would be the last to be set free, if at all. I decided to get our legs free in the meantime. Nobody was going anywhere as a six-legged onesome.

I took a deep breath and bent down under the water and undid the all three of us rope. It took three dunkings for old tobacco lungs to get the job done. Now we were finally individually free of each other, even though all our feet were individually still tied up. They had their hands free, though. I didn’t.

The water was up to our necks. Mine and Moose’s anyway. It was up to Frisbee’s nose. I had a brief wondering whether it was more accurate to say we were drowning or the boat was sinking. Very brief.
Moose ducked underwater to untie his feet.

“I’m getting out of here,” Frisbee said. “Screw my feet.”

“What about my hands?” I said.

“Shit,” she said. “You’re gonna get me killed.”

The water rose up over her head before she got me untied and she had to hold herself up by wrapping her legs around my neck. It was kind of an interesting moment, as you might imagine, even though I was now officially drowning. The water was over my head and Frisbee was holding me down. Here I come, Teresa. Catch me when I fall. I know I’m biting the big one with my face in another woman’s personal hygiene area, but it doesn’t mean anything to me, I swear it.

Then suddenly I was free. Free hands. Free of Frisbee. I launched up out of the water gasping for air.

“Thanks, Frizz,” I choked.

“I’m out of here,” she said.

For some reason, Moose was still dunking up and down trying to get his feet untied. Well, there was probably a reason. He was terminally stupid.

Frisbee swam over to the doorway, feet tied and all, and pulled herself out through it onto the walkway. I couldn’t see her after that. I swam over after her. The doorway was almost completely submerged now. I paused there for a moment and looked back at Moose. He was still hopping up and down.

“I can’t swim,” he begged as his head bobbed up.

I looked at him. “Gee. What a fucking shame,” I said.

He bobbed down and then bobbed up again.

“Help me, Blue.”

“I’d rather help Frisbee.”

Down he bobbed again. Try bobbing over to the fucking door you brain dead idiot, I ruminated. Well, you die like you live, all those they heads said. How was I living, I wondered. Not particularly well, I suppose. It seemed a good enough way to die. Dying smart and healthy seemed like a waste.

I swam through the doorway and crawled up onto the walkway. Frisbee had freed her legs and walked onto the dock and was sitting there, her head between her knees. I untied my legs and went over and sat down next to her.

We sat there in silence. Drip dropping on the dock. All wet, pooped out, and numb. Then Frisbee jerked up her head and looked around. “Where’s Moose?” she cried out. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

Panic.

I faked looking around frantically for him. “I thought he got out before you. He was the first one out. While you were untying me.”

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

Shit. She was stuck on a three track mind.

“Take it easy,” I said. “I’ll go look for him. He’s got to be somewhere.”

The boat deck and the cabin room were underwater and going down fast. I walked out on the walkway and looked down at the doorway. I slid off and eased down onto the deck, neck deep. Then I took a deep breath and dove down and swam through the doorway into the submerged room.

Moose was sitting on the floor, his feet still tied in front of him, his arms floating around next to him. His dead eyes stared vacantly out through the water at me, through me, focused on some far off point in eternity. Gone to the other side. No longer with us. I tried to imagine where he was now. What he was doing. What he was thinking. What he looked like. Casper the Friendly Ghost? No luck. So long Moose head.

I turned to swim back out, but caught a glimpse of Frisbee’s teeth lying over on the floor by his feet. I swam out and got another lungful of air and dove back down and swam over and retrieved her teeth.

I swam back out.

“Was he in there? Was he in there? Was he in there?” Frisbee was still three tracking it.

“Yeah,” I said. “He was in there. And he ain’t coming out. I’m sorry, Frisbee. He didn’t make it.”

Hamlet said it best. “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I. A dull and muddy-mettled rascal. I am pigeon-livered. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain.”

The boat shuddered one last time and slipped beneath the surface, settling its slow way down to the ocean floor, however far down there that was.

“Where’s Waldo?” would never be asked again.

“I found your teeth,” I said.

To be continued . . .

I felt bad for Frisbee.

It was a long night with two guys scrunched up against her and breathing down her blouse. If we weren’t tied up, maybe she wouldn’t have minded it so much. But we were and she did. I couldn’t blame her. It was one of those things which was not fun for girls but would have been fun as hell for a boy in the same situation.

She had a nice shoulder for being kind of bony. She was laying her head over against Moose’s head, so her neck was stretched out for me to push the side of my face against it and give myself a nice pillow.

The floor got pretty hard on my butt, though. It was one time it would have been nice to be a really big ass fat guy who had some very sensible cushions on tap at all times. Instead, I had to keep inching the flab around to keep my butt bone from killing me.

Boys butts were about their only parts that women ever admitted giving the ogle to. I tried to see what they saw and maybe get an idea of what a good looking boy butt looked like. There wasn’t a whole lot else to do during the night except think about dumb things like butts. Once or twice, I’d studied guy’s asses when I was killing time on a park bench or maybe a bar stool. Carefully, of course.

Most guys seemed to either have flat butts or big old wad butts. There were some exceptions. I guessed that the exceptions must be what a good butt looked like. It was hard to judge a turn on butt when butts didn’t turn you on, though. Well, boys butts, anyway. I obviously felt differently about girls’ butts. Still, it seemed that a hot boy’s butt was about the same as a hot girl’s breasts or butt. Round and firm. Size really didn’t matter so much as round and firm. God’s most perfect eye-appealing molds.

I almost got to wondering if guy’s ever got silicone implants in their butts to make them look rounder and firmer. Probably not. You had to sit on the damn things, so turning them into rocks wouldn’t be an acceptable choice.

A lot of weird ass things could occur to you if you couldn’t sleep much and were tied up all night next to a girl and you couldn’t get your hands on her.

Hands were kind of underrated as hot looking body parts, in my opinion. You could tell a lot about somebody by looking at their hands. You could cover up the whole rest of their body and only see their hands and you could tell pretty much what they were going to look like when you actually saw them. Whether they were neat or slobby, rich or poor, lazy or energetic, soft or hard, fat or thin, weak or strong, old or young, prissy or cool, you name it, it was all there in the knuckles and fingers and palms.

The only thing you couldn’t tell about hands by looking was how they felt when they were rubbing around on you. The way a hand felt then told you more about love than all the smooching in the world. In my opinion, that is, which was dinosauric supposedly. Good old dinosaurs. The big old reptile heads got laughed at for everything. Maybe they hadn’t gone extinct. Maybe they just got tired of being laughed at and the whole species curled up under a giant redwood and died of sadness.

At any rate, it was dark as hell all night and seemed forever till the sun came up. Maybe for the last time.

Frisbee, Moose, and I were awake before Paul. I whispered Frisbee into getting Moose to join the idea of the three of us doing a wave like movement back and forth to get some circulation happening. It was kind of fun. Like you would want to break out into singing “Twenty bottles of beer on the wall.”

Then Paul woke up and said, “What the fuck are you guys doing?”

So we knocked it off and watched Paul rise and shine.

He sat up with his legs dangling off the bed and went through some yawning and stretching stuff. Then he rubbed his hands through his hair. Over his hair, actually, since it was short. And scratched around on it, spewing dandruff molecules into the air where his cigar smoke had been last night before it drifted around and eventually glued itself to all the walls and furniture and Frisbee’s clothes.

Finally, he got up and went around looking in the cupboards. They were all empty. He slammed all the doors to indicate his displeasure.

“Shit,” he finally said, after finding all the cupboards were bare.

Then he walked over and sat down on the bench and started drumming his fingers on the table top. All of a sudden, he jumped up and looked in horror at his hand and then wiped it furiously on his pant leg.

“Yuck,” he said. “Goddamit! Fucking slobs!”

He walked back to the bed and fetched Brickhead’s gun from under the pillow where he’d put it before going to sleep. He’d already tossed overboard the two I had. Now he had a gun in each hand.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to throw these overboard and you’re going to tell me where the bank is. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Okay. You got a deal. If the money’s where you say it is, I won’t be coming back and you’re on your own. If you’re lying, I come back with a chainsaw.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

He walked over to one of the port holes and opened it. He tossed one gun out, then hesitated. “What the hell,” he said.

He walked over to the bathroom and put three more sploinks into Brickhead. “So long, Sylvester, I never liked you anyway, you fucking dickhead.”

Sylvester? Sheesh.

He went back to the port hole and tossed the last gun out, then walked over and looked down at me.

“Where’s the bank?”

“Cotati.”

“Which bank?”

“There’s only one.”

“Who’s the box registered to?”

“Me. Blue Monona.”

“You better not be fucking with me.”

“I’m not. It’s there.”

“Okay. You better hope I don’t come back. You saw the movie. A chainsaw ain’t a pretty thing.”

“What movie?” Frisbee asked.

Paul looked at her. “Dumb fucking uncultured broad.”

He went to the bed and tore the pillow case up until he had three pieces that would fit in each of our mouths. He stuffed them in. Then he ran a rope around our wrists and legs so we couldn’t move our arms up or down. They were pinned to our legs and we couldn’t stand up, either. He surveyed his handiwork, nodded approval, and left.

Frisbee glared at me. “Mmmph mmmph,” she said.

“Mmmph, mmm mmmph mmph,” I responded.

The door flew open and Paul stood there holding an axe. He was grinning. “Just kidding,” he said. “Fooled you, huh?”

It’s not like I was totally surprised that he had figured out a hole in my plan where he could kill us some other way than strangling. I knew there was a big risk in trusting a homicidal maniac to keep his word. But I’d figured it was the only chance we had, so why not give it a shot.

Still, I was very disappointed in him.

A huge round of mmmmpphhing broke out among the three of us. Paul just stood there grinning. He cocked a hand behind one of his ears and grinned even more, motioning at us to mmmppphhh a little louder, like he couldn’t quite hear us. It was a pretty tawdry attempt at humor, in my opinion.

Finally, he walked to the center of the room and started hacking away at the floor with the axe. It was a wood floor of some kind. I’d never learned much about trees other than climbing them and occasionally falling out of them, so I didn’t know what kind of wood he was hacking his way through.

Eventually, he got a nice big hole chopped open. Big enough to step down into and do some more axing. He was working like a lumberjack on speed. Really enjoying himself. The wood hacking noise suddenly changed to a metal thonking noise. It wasn’t a comforting sound.

Finally, the thonk sound turned into a thonkgawoosh sound. Paul stepped up out of the hole in the floor and stood there looking down at his work. There was a loud gurgling sound coming up out of the hole.

Paul looked at us. “So long, suckers,” he said. “You should have brought your swimming trunks.”

To be continued . . .

Paul sat on a chair in the middle of the room, his legs crossed, a gun in his lap.

Frisbee, Moose, and I were sitting on the floor, our backs against the wall, our hands tied in front of us with the rope Brickhead had used on Moose. Our legs were tied individually and to each other. Same with the hands. We were pulled together like a bundle of twigs.

It wasn’t particularly comfortable. At least Frisbee was in the middle so I was rubbing shoulders with her and not Moose. The pressure of being wedged together made her blouse poof outward in the middle. I could see down in there. So could Moose. She had on one of those side holster bras with a strap across the bottom that pooshed out most of her breast meat toward the middle for cleavage effect.

Frisbee kept turning her head back and forth to me and him, trying to catch us ogling the view. Giving us the look. The way we were tied, though, pulled us inward so our heads were practically forced to stare down in there. There was nothing we could do. She was pissed. She had some cute freckles in there, I couldn’t help but notice.

Paul had lit up a cigar. A big fat, smoke-gushing one, unfortunately. It was stinking up the room pretty bad.

“Do you have to smoke that awful thing?” Frisbee said. “Isn’t tying us up like sardines enough to charge your batteries?”

Paul smiled and took a big puff and blew it at us.

“Way to go, Frisbee,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth. “Why don’t you ask him if he knows how to use that gun while you’re at it.”

“Screw you,” she said.

“Screw me?” Paul said. “That’s not very nice. Or is it?”

“In your dreams,” Frisbee retorted. “I was talking to this creep on my right,” she said. “But as long as we’re discussing it, screw you too.”

I rolled my eyes. Moose started laughing.

Paul got up and came over and stuck the barrel of his gun down Frisbee’s blouse. He rubbed it against the side of each breast. “Nice tomatoes,” he said.

“Fuck you, pervert,” she said.

There was a groan from the bathroom. Paul walked over and looked in. He reached over and grabbed Brickhead’s ear and yanked up his head for a look. “Jesus,” he said. “What a fucking mess.”

He dropped the head back down into the toilet and put two sploinks into Brickhead like he was spraying weed shoots in a crack on the sidewalk.

He came back to his chair, turned it around, and straddled it, the gun in one hand, the cigar in the other. He looked at the cigar, gauging its remaining smokeability like it was the hourglass of our lives burning down to the butt before he stubbed it out.

“Where’s the money?” he asked.

“What money?” Moose said.

“Gourd’s money. The money you stole from his safe deposit box. After you killed him. He was my dad, by the way.”

“Shit,” Frisbee said.

“It wasn’t me,” Moose said.

Everybody looked at me. Paul took a drag on the cigar and smiled.

“So,” he said, looking at me, “where’s the money?”

“Why should I tell you? You’re going to kill us anyway.”

“There’s killing and there’s killing. Know what I mean? See, the money ain’t going to be any good to you anymore. You can’t take it with you, right? All you can do with it now is buy some choice in how you die. How long you suffer. You tell me where it is, I pop you quick and painless. You don’t tell me, I torture your asses for the next week.”

“Tell him!” Moose whined.

“Fuck him,” Frisbee said. “Don’t tell him squat, Blue.”

We looked at each other. Frisbee smiled proudly. I gave her a little bonk with my forehead against hers. She had her moments, I had to admit.

“Okay Paul,” I said, “let’s dicker.”

“You ain’t got no dick to dicker with.”

“Maybe. Let’s suppose I tell you.”

“No suppose to it. You’ll tell me. One way or the other, you’ll tell me.”

“Humor me, amoeba brain.”

“That’s telling him, Blue,” Frisbee said. “Damn, I love your vocabulary.”

We forehead bonked again. Maybe dying wasn’t all bad, after all. Besides, I’m coming to join you, Teresa. I’m coming. Get my seat warm. Break out the Corona and Cuervos. It’s party time.

Frisbee didn’t have no Teresa to look forward to, though. I felt lousy for her. Moose? Fuck him. But her? Shit, I had to get her out of this alive. I wished I was over in the booth so I could study the table top.

Paul sploinked a hole in the wall just above my head. Then he flicked a cigar ash on the floor. Time was burning out.

“Here’s the deal, Paul. I’m going to tell you where the money is and you’re going to give us a slim chance to survive. After all, once you have the money, what do you care about us? I can’t do anything to you without getting myself arrested for killing Gourd. Besides, it’s your money anyway, now that your dad’s gone. You’re safe. We can’t touch you.”

“You could try to kill me for it.”

“Get real. You’re the killer. Not us. We’re just nincompoop citizens.”

“You killed my dad. I’m a little pissed about that, by the way.”

“No you’re not. He was an asshole.”

“I hate to say it, but you’re right. I hated the bastard. But you killed him and you might try to kill me.”

“No thanks. Killing you wouldn’t get us any of the money back. And none of us really hate you or anything. Right, guys?”

“Right,” Frisbee and Moose said. Frisbee added, “I can’t say I like you, but I don’t hate you. Not yet. If you kill me, though, I’ll hate you good. I’ll haunt your ass forever. But if you don’t, I’ll just be glad you’re gone. I guarantee I’d never want to see you again.”

Paul took a drag on his cigar and mulled us over.

“I don’t trust him,” he said, pointing his cigar at Moose.

“Well, you can kill him then,” I said. “He don’t matter to us.”

“Fuck you,” Moose yelled.

“Blue! Don’t say that about Moosesie.”

“Don’t call me Moosesie, damn it.”

“Shut up you two,” Paul said.

“Paul,” I said. “Don’t worry about him. He couldn’t tie his shoes if you did it for him.”

“I got ten thousand out of you,” Moose crowed at Paul.

“Yeah,” Frisbee said. “He whipped your ass.”

“Look,” I said. “You want the money or not? You can’t possibly be worried about Moose. Or Frisbee. Or me. You’re a tough guy. We’re not.”

“I’m listening,” Paul said. “Where’s the money?”

“It’s in my wallet.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m not kidding. It’s in my wallet in my left front pocket. It’s a safe deposit key.”

Paul came over and dug into my pocket. He had clumsy hands and while he was digging around in there he was bumping against my stuff. It was pretty queasy. At least I hope he was just clumsy. It felt even queasier thinking he wasn’t clumsy.

He fished out the key and looked at it. Then he sat back down. It was the key to the safe deposit box in Cotati. Where I’d put the first million dollars. I’d never got around to taking it out. I’d almost forgotten about it, to tell you the truth. That’s how crazy my life had become that I could forget about a million dollars. I hoped Teresa was getting a bang out of all this. It sure wasn’t anything like our life had been.

“Where’s the key go?”

“In a keyhole, dumbo,” Frisbee said.

I gave Frisbee a look. A please shut up type of look. She smirked at me. She was one crazy lady. Even if she got us killed, though, I couldn’t hold it against her. She had a lot of weird balls for a nutcase girl.

“I’ll tell you where it goes when we agree to a plan. There’s a million dollars in that safe deposit box.”

I was praying he didn’t know about the other nine boxes. Or the other nine million. I was counting on Gourd to be a secretive shithole to him about it.

“There better be,” he said.

“Well, I spent a little bit of it. Not much. Ten thousand. Maybe twenty. I can‘t remember.”

“What’s your plan, Mr. Blue fuck?”

Everybody looked at me. I winked at Frisbee. She smiled.

“Okay. We’re all tied up, right?”

“Right.”

“So we can’t get away, right?”

“Right.”

“In fact, if you just left us here, we might even starve to death.”

Paul smiled. “Right.”

“Or maybe by some miracle we’d free ourselves and go home. A slim, slim chance that would make us happy with hope for a few days. Even if you tied us so tight it was impossible to escape. We could at least die trying.”

Paul frowned. “Right.”

“So here’s my idea. You take that gun and Brickhead’s gun and throw them overboard into the ocean. Then you can’t shoot us. We’ll have to trust that you won’t strangle us, but if you try, we’ll bite you. Won’t we guys?”

“Damn straight,” Frisbee said.

“Yeah,” Moose said, drawing it out like he was dying to sink his teeth in.

It was Moose I was counting on to protect us. I don’t think Paul trusted that Moose didn’t have rabies. I was hoping it wasn’t worth the risk for him to take a chance. Moose would bite him, he had to be sure of that.

“After you toss the guns overboard,” I said, “I’ll tell you where the bank is.”

Paul got up and paced around the room. He stopped by the table top and looked down at it. It was a nervous moment. Suddenly, he bent down close and looked at the table top very intently. “Jesus,” he said, “some asshole squashed a bug right on the table and left it. Fuck, what kind of slob would do that? You can’t eat here anymore.”

He shook his head in disgust. Maybe it was reminding him of Moose’s fangs ripping into his arm and spreading bug rabies into his blood stream.

He resumed pacing. He stopped at the bathroom door and looked down at Brickhead for a few moments. Then he put two more sploinks into him and came and stood over us.

“I’ll think about it. The banks don’t open till tomorrow morning. I’m getting some shut-eye. Don’t go anywhere,” he laughed.

“Just for curiosity,” I said, “how did you know to come to the trailer park and follow me around?”

“We didn’t. We just followed a lot of guys. You, Tweed, a dame in San Bruno, a guy in Pleasanton. Anybody who had an axe to grind with dad. Most of them were in jail, so it narrowed the scope quite a bit.”

“Why didn’t the cops check up on me?”

He laughed. “They don’t think dad’s dead. They think he’s in Portugal with a sweet young honey.”

“Why would they think that?”

“I got connecs, dope. Through dad.”

He walked to the bunk bed and laid down on the bottom bunk. Five minutes later, he stuck his head up and looked at me.

“Where’s my dad?”

“He sleeps with the fishes.”

“Good idea,” he murmured, and laid back down to sleep.

To be continued . . .

“Good shooting,” Frisbee said.

“Good plunking,” I said.

After my gunshot had removed Brickhead’s nose, he staggered around looking for it and cussing up an X rated streak. Some of the streak had scandalized my ears on the way through the doorway. He found a piece of nostril over behind a leg of the pot bellied stove. When he bent down to retrieve it, Frisbee had flattened him with a two-handed blow from the frying pan.

He was bleeding all over the floor. The blood was burbling out of his nose cavity like a heartbeat. Blurp. Blurp. Blurp. Et cetera.

Anyway, it was making a mess. I dragged him across the room by his feet over to the bathroom and stuck his face into the toilet so the blood would go down the sewer. He was knocked out cold.

Frisbee was untying Moose. Which I wished she wasn’t. He was tied up to the bunk bed. If we just drilled a hole in the boat and walked away, life would be a lot simpler.

“Oh, Moosesie. Are you all right?” she cooed.

Gag me. My finger itched on the trigger. A good sploinking was just what Moose needed.

He sat on the edge of the bunk bed, rubbing his wrists to get his circulation improved. Making faces like a bull does before stampeding at you. She was lolled around his neck, kissing his fucking ear and stroking his fuzzy head.

Gag me. Frisbee’s black hole was open wide and ravenously sucking down her sanity. It was ugly to watch. Fawning all over a complete asshole who had just finished beating the shit out of her and nearly getting all of us killed. I had one of those feelings like I was on the wrong planet or something.

He shrugged her off like a strand of spaghetti. She fell backward and conked her head against the wall. That’s it. I’ve had it.

“Hey, you stupid fucking moron. She just saved your worthless ass. Get on your knees and say thank you.”

He looked over at me. I was pointing the gun at him. He sneered at me. Wrong choice. I walked over and clopped him across the face with the gun. A forehand stroke. Not too hard. Just to get his attention.

His head snapped sideways and he yowled. I grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him off the bed and shoved him into the stove. He bounced off it and landed on his hands and knees. When he looked up, I gave him a backhand stroke. He sat back against the stove, drooling blood.

“Say thanks,” I said.

“Thanks,” he spit.

“Thanks what?” I said.

He looked at me. Clueless. He shrugged. “Thanks, sir.”

Hopeless. Utterly hopeless retard scrap of humanity. No one home in the lighthouse. Dead CPU. Empty gas tank. You name it. It was missing.

I looked at Frisbee. She was up and rubbing the back of her head.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Don’t hurt him, Blue. He’s just a boy.”

“I ain’t no boy, you bitch.”

Christ. They’d be humping on the floor any minute now.

“Shut up. Both of you,” I said. “Just shut up.”

I sat down on a chair. Frisbee sat on the bed. Moose sat on the floor. The waves lapped at the boat. The room was filled with the silence of three brains sinking in quicksand.

What to do with Brickhead? What to do with Moose?

Brickhead had now seen all three of us. And seen us together. We were an item. An item that involved Gourd and his money. If we left him alive, he’d keep looking for us till he found us. Again. He had to go. There was no other way.

On cue, there was a groan from the bathroom. I got the rope Brickhead had used to tie up Moose and took it to the bathroom. Brickhead had pulled his face out of the toilet and was sitting on the floor, leaning back against the wall. Blood still oozed from his face.

He was a mess. His face wasn’t totally flat, like it first looked like. The tip of the nose was gone, but shreds of the rest of it were still there. The blood oozed out of the hole in the middle of the shreds. It looked like the ragged edges of the top of a volcano after an eruption.

His eyes were fluttering around trying to focus. I pulled him off the wall and onto his stomach and tied his hands behind him. He wiggled trying to resist, so I clubbed him on the side of his head with the gun. He let out a droopy sigh and went back to dreamland.

I hauled him up and stuck his face back in the toilet. Maybe, if I farted around long enough trying to decide what to do with him, he would just bleed out on the crapper and I could shrug it off with an “Oops.”

There was a table in the main room with two booths. I sat down in one of the booths. Frisbee was over mopping the blood off her Moosesie. I could see their life together. The domestic dispute lights would be twinkling in their windows every night. Sooner or later, one of them would die or one of them would escape. She was both ones. It wasn’t much of a future. For her.

I was tired of both of them, I suddenly realized. Even Frisbee. Tarzan and Jane. If I was smart, I’d sploink them both and walk out of here a free man. Mob hit. Fuhgeddaboudit.

I was a wimp killer, though. I couldn’t do it point blank. I had to leave the scene of the accident while the victim was still alive and could be saved by a miracle. Good odds. I didn’t have to see them die. Disgusting. No balls. Chicken shit, white collar bad guy. Barf.

“What are we going to do?” Frisbee asked. She was sitting on the floor next to Moose.

“What are you doing here, Moose?” I asked.

“He brought me, asshole. What does it look like.”

“How’d he find you?”

“They came to the trailer park. Looking for you. We’re all getting fucked because of you.”

“Why’d he bring you here?”

“They knew you’d be here. Having dinner.”

“How’d they know that?”

“I told them.”

“How did you know?”

“Frisbee told me. She tells me everything, cocksucker. Get a clue.”

I looked at Frisbee. She wouldn’t look back at me. How much else had she told him. Fuck. What an idiot I was. What a blithering, knackered, bloody fucking idiot.

“Don’t kill us, Blue,” she said, looking at her lap. “We won’t tell anybody.”

“Maybe,” Moose laughed.

“Shut up,” Frisbee said. She finally looked up at me. “I only told him about dinner. I wanted him to be jealous.”

Moose snorted. “Jealous? Of him? Get serious. Fucking old man. That’s a laugh, Frisbee. A real fucking laugh.”

“I’m sorry,” Frisbee said.

It was probably stupid, but I believed her. It sounded too true.

“Why don’t you two just get out of here. Go away.”

“What about Brickhead?” Frisbee said.

“I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.”

“Are you going to kill him?”

“Sure. Why not. Who cares.”

“Don’t do it, Blue. He ain’t worth it.”

“Don’t worry,” Moose said. “He don’t have the balls.”

I looked at Frisbee. “Get him out of here before I put a slug in his stupid fucking head. Get a motel room or something.”

She got up and helped Moose to his feet. He pushed her away. They walked to the door. Moose opened it and left. Frisbee turned back to me.

“I didn’t tell Moose anything, Blue. I swear it.”

“Right.”

She left.

I lit a cigarette and looked down at the table top. Decisions were always lying around on table tops. You just had to look to find them. Sometimes they were in grease spots, sometimes in scratches. Coffee cup rings were a popular place for them since the ring was a dark circle. Dark circles stood for life chasing its tail around endlessly in the clueless zone.

There was one on the table top. I looked inside it where the answers would be. A tiny little bug of some kind was standing there poking its head around. Every now and then it would move forward a couple of legfuls. Then it moved back a legful. After about ten legfuls, it reached the dark circle edge. It stuck a feeler down to feel around in the dark. Indecision wracked its abdomen. Finally, it scurried back to the middle of the circle.

The answer snickered over me. If you got to the edge, take the leap. If you stayed in the circle, there was only one thing that could happen.

I pushed my finger down on the bug and its abdomen popped open with a little cracking sound and bug innards squished out on the table top. I left them there as a warning to the next person who sat down here for decisions.

I picked up the gun and went to the bathroom. Brickhead was still cooped up on the floor, his head wedged over the toilet. His nose blood had coagulated to a dripping faucet level. Plop. Tick, tick, tick. Plop. Tick, tick, tick. Plop.

Sorry, Brickhead. You’re ticking days are over. I cocked the gun and stuck it up against the back of his head.

Moose suddenly flew into the room and staggered across the floor trying to get his balance. I stepped out of the bathroom doorway. Frisbee walked into the room.

Behind her was Paul, with a gun to her head.

To be continued . . .

The dock was the creaky kind that groaned and sighed while the water Hula-Hooped around its wooden legs. Maybe all docks did. Like I said, I wasn’t much of a boat guy.

The creakiness was good and bad. Good because it hid the sounds of Frisbee and I sneaking down it. Bad because we had to stop after a few feet while Frisbee coped with seasickness. Reefer heads had this problem, but boozers like myself didn’t. We were used to nausea and motion sickness.

After depositing most of the fish she’d had for dinner back into the sea from whence it came, slightly altered by chewing and digestive juices, she seemed to be okay.

We snuck on.

After a brief argument on shore, we had decided that crouching made for better sneaking than standing upright while sneaking. Crawling was probably the best way to sneak, but we both had old knees that didn’t like to be used as feet anymore and Frisbee didn’t want to chip the paint off her toenails if they dragged over a splinter.

“You wouldn’t have that problem if you wore sneakers,” I’d told her.

“Ugh. Sneakers start stinking the second you put them on. Your skin starts gagging for breath and sweating. No way.”

So, we crouched our way down the dock. There were five boats tied up to it, inside little boat driveways with walkways along the sides where you could tie up your boat and walk to the dock. The boat with Brickhead and Moose was the one in the middle, the third one. The name on the side of it was Boat from the Blue. These fisher fuckers were fanciful.

All around us lights twinkled in the houses of the Bodega Bay folks who were staying up late tonight. I couldn’t help wondering how many domestic disputes were raging behind all the twinkles. You could never be sure because everyone knew how to comb their hair and put on a smile if you knocked on the door to visit. Nowadays, you didn’t even have to comb your hair. Morning seaweed was a legitimate hair style.

Good old domestic disputes. They had quite a history. In the confederate south, hunkered in the old plantations, domestic disputes all had large vitriolic vocabularies with old fashioned English terms like mendacity that had razor sharp edges that could slice up your face over a drink that had an orange slice skewered on the rim of the glass. In the cowboy states, there were just brief punch arounds where everyone fell over the kitchen furniture and rolled out the front door into a cactus and then laughed on the ground while blood oozed through their teeth and cactus stickers stuck in their butts. In the eastern states, the disputes were carried on in separate bedrooms with maids and butlers passing nasty notes from one disputer to the other. In the great Midwest, people had their disputes over yawns during the ten o’clock news when the kids were in bed and the disputes ended when the first disputer fell asleep over a bowl of ice cream. In the great Northwest, people disputed by ignoring each other for several long painful lifetimes while they stared out the window at the dark, lonely rain that never stopped coming down.

If you watched TV, of course, you would never know how popular domestic disputes were. The Cleavers never had them. Neither did the Nelsons or the Waltons. The Bunkers treaded dangerously close, but the whole family was too dumb to get beyond Groucho Marx eyebrows. Even now, when TV family environments consisted of dysfunctional idiots who lived in apartments and made everyone laugh uproariously every time they concocted a phrase, domestic disputes never got further than a ten second smirk down.

But out there in the twinkling real world, the domestic disputes were going on. I was convinced of it.
Not here among the boats, though. These were boats where everyone went home at night. Fisher guys never worked at night and wives weren’t allowed on the boats to domestically dispute with, anyway.

We reached our destination at the third boat and sat down on the edge of the dock to gather our courage, from whence ever courage was gathered from. The house lights were twinkling on the water and I had a brief distraction wondering if the fish down there were having any domestic disputes tonight. Nibbling away at each other. An occasional fin in the eye or a brutal tail whack.

Frisbee restructured my focus by hauling out one of the guns she’d stolen from Paul and Brickhead. I had the other. I pulled it out. They were fairly big pieces. And they had silencers. Very superb. I loved the way they sounded when you shot them. Sploink! Without them, it was Prraackkowwrring! Which always produced twinkled lights in homes.

Using dialogue we had learned in Navy Seal movies, we released the safeties, then locked and loaded so we were cocked and ready to rock.

Then we kind of sat there.

It was too dark to see what Frisbee was thinking. Maybe she wasn’t. Hard to tell. It would be like her to leave me with all the thinking to do. So I thunk around a bit and thought up that Waldo Moose wasn’t worth getting killed over. Especially since I wanted to kill him myself and he wanted to kill me. Maybe I could slip a note under the door. “Please call when you have killed Moose. Then we’ll come and kill you. Fair enough?”

Frisbee dug me in the ribs with an elbow and pointed at the second boat. She snuck over to it and went aboard. I followed her.

We snuck across the deck and into a room with large windows on each side and a big wheel with spokes sticking off all around it in front of a dashboard type thing with lots of dials on it. The driver’s room, obviously. The big windows were a little disappointing. It was easier to be dangerous when you were peeking out port holes. This felt more like we should have a glass of wine and break out some crackers and cheese. Excuse me. Water wafers and brie. Tasteless, unsalted crackers and goopy cheese. Oat Queasing.

We crouched by the window, which was kind enough to have a little two foot wall at the bottom to crouch behind, and ogled over the edge at the third boat. Light shined through the port hole down around the water line. There were two port holes, actually. The light shined out from the other one, too. I couldn’t see anybody in either hole. Just some bunk beds in one and a toilet in the other.

“What are we doing here?” I whispered to Frisbee.

She whispered back. “I thought we should see if Brickhead might stare out a port hole. Then we could just shoot him in the face.”

Anything that avoided the inevitable was fine with me. I lit a cigarette and imagined it was the last smoke I’d ever have. Dead man smoking. I wondered if they let you smoke in heaven. You could in hell, obviously.

I watched Frisbee. She didn’t smoke. It must be tough killing time if you were a nonsmoker. You had to scratch yourself here and there or straighten your clothes or drum your fingers while you got impatient.

“We can’t crouch here all night,” she said. “I’ll cover the port holes. You break in the front door.”

“Real fair,” I said.

“You’re the boy, asshole. Get boying.”

“Brickhead doesn’t know you, though. You could get in easier without getting shot. Plus, you’re a girl. You’ve got boy distracters. He’d be tempted to think you were just his lucky night. You could maneuver him around the room until he was in line with a port hole so I could shoot him.”

“I knew you were gutless.”

“I went into Gourd’s place first. Besides, he’s your Moose, not mine.”

“Fine. Have it your way.”

She gave me her gun, then poofed her hair around and walked over to the Brickhead walkway and down to his boat door. I could see her knock on the door. She was only about five feet away from me. The door creaked when it opened. Then it closed and I couldn’t hear anything but muffled voices.

I couldn’t see anything, either. I moved out of the driver’s room and crouched by the wall along the deck of the boat, so I wouldn’t have to shoot through two sets of windows. I still couldn’t see anything moving around in the port holes.

Then Frisbee appeared in a port hole. She was talking to someone. While she was talking, she leaned one of her eyes out the port hole at me. The big eyeball. A little obvious, if you asked me. I knew she couldn’t see me, so it was probably just a signal that she wasn’t dead yet and was in the process of maneuvering Brickhead into a port hole window so I could shoot him.

She backed up out of view. Then a nose appeared from the other side of the port hole. It stayed there for a second and then backed up out of view. Then Frisbee’s nose appeared and left. Then the other one again. Then her. Then it. Again. The old ring around the nosey deal.

It would be a dicey shot, about five feet across the walkway to the port hole. No sense being heroic. I climbed over the edge of the deck and out onto Brickhead’s walkway and snuck over to the port hole with all the dancing noses in it. I got right up next to it, about six inches away from the glass. I aimed carefully and waited for the appropriate nose to appear. When it did, I squeezed the trigger.

Sploink!

I ran up to the door and pushed it open. It was a pull it open door. I peeled my face off it and pulled it open and jumped into the room, my gun extracted and ready for more sploinking. Brickhead was lying on the floor on his stomach. Frisbee was standing over him with a frying pan. Blood was gushing out his nose.

Where his nose used to be, that is. It was long gone now. Flat face city.

To be continued . . .

A day that started with everything looking ugly and phony had somehow been rinsed out so everything was memory lane where the magnolias grew along the street and the snow had melted and spring was in the air. Making one stinking decision and suddenly it was bright sidersville. Who could take life seriously? Walter Cronkite, I guess. But he was retired.

Next stop: Splitsville.

I had just come to the end of the long walk along Pleasant Hill Road and emerged from the orchard land at the back edge of town. I was standing on the corner of Bodega Avenue where it left Sebastopol, became Bodega Highway, and meandered off through the hills and trees toward Bodega Bay and the coast.

To the right was the cemetery, where I’d recruited Frisbee to be my partner. Across the street and down it a bit was Ragel Ranch Park, where I’d sprung my Babble Software idea on Tweed during the Apple Blossom Fair almost twenty years ago. To the left was an old cowboy bar where I’d gone to feel out of place and drown in the lonely suds after Teresa died. Behind me was what I’d left behind. An old Joni Mitchell song. Circle Game. “We can’t return, we can only look, behind from where we came.”

I cut through the cemetery, past all the tombs and skeletons and forgotten lives summed up by a beginning and ending date, and wiggled through the small back streets of town, up and over the hill back to Main Street, and walked back to the motel.

Frisbee was prancing with glee when I got back to our room. Clothes and stuff were spilled over her bed like Queen Elizabeth had cleaned out her closets. She was taking this Princess Diana stuff seriously. Over on my bed were two polite little stacks of cotton threads. Not a polyester particle to be seen.

“God, this is fun,” she squealed. She whirled around showing off one her new skirts, one of those wraparound handkerchief kinds she was so fond of.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Nice. Beige. Short.”

“How about this one?”

“Nice, too. Red. Very short.”

“Aren’t they cute? And this one?”

“Wow. Very nice. Green. Short don’t describe it.”

I turned on the TV while she modeled all her new clothes. Some were actually pants or shirts. Several pairs of shoes, of course. All the clothes basically fit into three distinct categories. Short. Tight. Short and tight.

I looked through my T-shirts. She’d done pretty well. Good even. Maybe as far as nice.

“Thanks,” I said, holding one up. “Good job. I’m impressed. This color’s kind of neat. What is it?”

“Kiwi pulp green.”

“Right. Of course. One of those birds with dud wings that they grind up for hamburger in Australia. I didn’t know they had green innards.”

“Kiwi fruit. It’s green inside.”

“Oh. Right. And this color. What’s it?”

“Kiwi fuzz brown.”

“Some related thing like green and red apples?”

“No. The outside of the fruit that’s green on the inside. And they don’t grind up those little birds for hamburger.”

“Fucking Australians. What is this? Some kind of national holiday over there?”

“New Zealand.”

“Even worse.”

“Shit,” she panicked. “I forgot to get hangars.”

“Oh, no! It’s nuclear war. Let’s jump under the bed and pray.”

“Very funny.”

“It was?”

“No.”

I turned off the TV. Time to begin the end. “Let’s get out of here. I feel like a drive to the coast. Bodega Bay. You want to come? We can have an early dinner. We need to talk.”

“The coast? It’s all salty out there.”

“So what.”

“It’s bad for your cholesterol.”

“Breathe through your nose. The stuff in there filters it out.”

“You’re lying.”

“So what. I want to buy an official Bodega Bay jacket.”

“You’re going to buy a jacket?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’d better come then.”

# # #

The salt air was always a lungful of pleasure to me, cholesterol or not.

Frisbee and I were sitting in The Sandpiper restaurant, finishing dinner. I had my new lightweight jacket on. White-ish with a blue Bodega Harbor logo on the front. Fairly dapper, in my opinion. Frisbee had picked it out. I would have, given the time. I just got caught up for awhile over in the hurricane weather rain gear. That shit was amazing. There was one that had fifty-six little pockets and was supposedly harpoon proof. Some salt head’s yarn, if you ask me.

Frisbee had fish. I had a burger. She had salad. I had fries. She had water. I had a beer. Three, in fact.

I didn’t trust fish. People were always choking to death on the bones when they ate at restaurants where nobody knew how to Heimlich. Hamburger never had bones. There might be an old shoe lace or a chef’s finger in the grind, but never sharp sinister little bones that always swallowed horizontally and got lodged half way down.

Teresa said my fear of fish was a lot of hog wash. Frisbee said it was a lot of bullshit. Semantics. They were both wrong. It was Fear of Fish, plain and simple.

It was still light out and the boatsmen were unboating in the harbor, calling it a day from fishing around out there in the salt. Embedding their hooks in the roofs of little fish mouths, yanking them up in there but good, dragging the fish heads out of the water and then clubbing the poor sonofabitches to death on the deck. Grisly, inhumane, brutally cruel work. What’s wrong with a net and some instant poison?

“If salt air is bad for cholesterol,” I remarked to Frisbee, “then how come you never see fat boat guys?”

“This is a nice place,” Frisbee said. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Teresa and I used to come here.”

“Naturally. Every place you’ve been, you were with her. You couldn’t find a place on your own.”

“Was that a fleck of jealousy flicking?”

“In your dreams.”

“I’ve never been to Rhode Island. Neither did Teresa. We could go there. A brand new place that I’d never been with Teresa to.”

“Who said anything about we? Why don’t you go?”

“What fun would that be?”

“Broaden up, Blue. You can’t keep following Teresa’s memories around all your life. You’re going to have to get your own now.”

“I went to the Cayman Islands.”

“You didn’t take me. Thanks a whole bunch.”

“I would now.”

“Gee. I’m all knocked out.”

A lady came out of the kitchen and stood by the cash register. She looked familiar. Right. The lady who owned this place. Teresa would know her name, but I couldn’t remember it. I gave her a little wave when she glanced our way.

She puzzled up a bit. Who’s that guy? Where do I know him from? Then she smiled and came over.

“How’s the food?” she asked.

“Great,” Frisbee said.

Sheila. That was it. “Hi Sheila. This is Frisbee.”

I turned to Frisbee. “Sheila owns this restaurant.”

“No kidding,” Frisbee said. “Nice to meet you, Sheila. You got a great place here.”

“Thanks,” Sheila said. She looked at me with a strange smile. “Did you know that your face is really bruised?” She looked at Frisbee, too, but didn’t include her.

“Yeah. I noticed. Guy beat hell out of me. Have to watch my mouth, I guess.”

“My fucking boy friend,” Frisbee said, pointing at her own bruised face. “It wasn’t Blue. He ain’t my boy friend. We just live together. My boy friend’s Moose. He’s the one who clubbed me.”

“I see,” Sheila said.

She didn’t believe either one of us. Nobody believed you when you told the truth. We small talked around and Sheila left. Frisbee couldn’t wait to grill me.

“You were cheating on Teresa, weren’t you.”

“Jeez. Hold on, Frizz. I only met Sheila when I came here with Teresa.”

“I don’t believe you. My antennas are twitching.”

I imagined two little feelers peeking out of her head with little eyes on the ends, scouting around the room. It made me laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“I saw your antennas. They were naked as a jaybird.”

“See. Sex is the first thing she plants in your evil little brain.”

“Whatever you say, Frisbo.”

“You stinking bastard. How could you?”

“I didn’t. I told you. I hardly know the woman.”

“Men.”

I changed the subject. Here we go. “I guess we ought to talk about our living arrangement. Now that the Tweeds are gone. What do you think?”

“I wish I was back in my trailer and you were back in yours.”

“You’d want me around?”

“Don’t let it go to your head. I’ve gotten kind of used to you, that’s all. Besides, if you’re there, Moose can’t move in next door to me. Or somebody even worse. I can live with you around. It’s tolerable.”

“I’m really touched. I don’t think I could be around Moose anymore, though. Not only is he a dangerous lunatic, but he’s a dangerous lunatic.”

“Yeah. I’m kind of bummed out about him myself.”

“You could go to a different trailer park.”

“I suppose so.”

“Or buy another house.”

“Do we have to talk about this right now? I ain’t ready to decide. We can stay at the motel for awhile, can’t we?”

“Or go our separate ways.”

Thud.

“You want to get rid of me, don’t you?” she said.

“Actually, Frisbee, no. I don’t. I like being around you. It’s been pretty lonely since Teresa died. But . . . .”

“Well, I have to say one thing, Blue. I sure don’t have to put on any airs around you. It’s kind of comfortable. I never had a brother, you know. You ever have a sister?”

“Two.”

“Where are they?”

“Off having families. One’s in Alaska. One’s in Germany. They both married Air Force guys.”

“You ever see them?”

“Just at funerals and weddings.”

“That’s sad.”

“Not really.”

“Why?”

“They don’t like me.”

“I can understand that.”

“I’m sure you can.”

I paid the check and we walked out on one of the docks. The boats were all pretty old and beat up. Fishermen were like farmers. They didn’t care how they looked.

“You could live on a boat,” I said.

It was a romantic kind of idea to me, anyway. Always had been. I didn’t know anything about boats, though. Supposedly, there were barnacles and crud that overpopulated on the bottoms and had to be scraped off all the time. Plus, you could get too drunk and fall overboard and drown. That’s about all I knew. Some had motors. Some had sails.

“There’s too much boat language I’d have to learn,” Frisbee said. “All the salt, too. I couldn’t stand it.”

“There sure are a lot of boats.”

“Somebody’s got to bring home the bacon. It don’t just flop into the frying pan.”

I started to say something, but while I was looking around at the boats I saw a guy walking down a dock. Actually, two guys. They went aboard a really old boat. The boat was so old and beat up it seemed like a miracle it could still float.

Frisbee was looking the other way. She didn’t see them.

One guy was Moose.

The guy behind him was Brickhead.

To be continued . . .

“How about a little smooch, cutie?” I said as we drove home.

Frisbee and I laughed as hysterically as our faces would allow. Hers was puffed and pummeled from Moose. Mine was black and blue from Brickhead. We looked like two people whose car had flown off a roller coaster and bounced on its head ninety-four times in the parking lot.

Leonard was in the trunk, blindfolded, so he couldn’t tell Arthur Asshole Tweed who had rescued him. We had put paper bags over our heads when we blindfolded him, took him from the room, and then placed him in the trunk.

“I wonder what the Tweeds think is going on,” Frisbee said.

“Yeah. Me too. They know there are important photos somebody wants badly. They probably know about missing money, too. They don’t know about Gourd, Moose, or us. So it’s just the photos and the money. And they don’t know why somebody thinks they have them.”

“Brain fry. They’ve spent a day and night not knowing where Leonard is and not able to turn over anything to free him, either.”

“I’d say the Tweeds are having a bad hair year.”

“Just like you wanted.”

“Yeah. Just like I wanted.”

What I wanted was Teresa. Making every day of my life a great place to be. Even if it was an extremely shitty day. Even if she was throwing plates at me and I was steamed as hell and threatening to wring her neck. Even then I wouldn’t have traded anything in the world to not be with her.

“You’re getting gloomy, Blue. I can see it. Your eyes are sinking.”

“Teresa.”

“You loved her quite a bit, didn’t you.”

“I sure do.”

“Nobody ever loved me quite a bit. It must be nice.”

“What about your ex-husband?”

“He wasn’t my husband. He was a chicken shit.”

“What about Moose?”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

She laughed anyway. “Fucking stupid Moose. What an asshole. I sure know how to find them.”

“The swinging door to your heart is gonna open someday, Frisbo. And Mr. Right will walk right in, sit right down, and steal your heart away.”

“You talk that kind of crap with Teresa?”

“She called it the malarkey on her tree.”

“No wonder. Anybody tries to swing through my doors, I’ll knee him in the nuts.”

“You can’t hide forever, Miss Toughie.”

“Wanna bet?”

It was past midnight when we dropped Leonard off in front of Tweed Typography. I sat him down on the stairs and told him to wait. It was a ruse so Frisbee and I could drive away without him seeing our license number.

Before I left, I told him, “You and your parents better disappear fast. Those two guys will definitely be back.”
We drove two blocks and made a U-turn. As we came back down Fourth Street and neared the Tweed Typography building, I pulled into the curb to watch the big reunion. I couldn’t believe I was actually bringing joy to asshole Art.

There wasn’t going to be a reunion, though. Leonard took off his blindfold and used his teeth to get the tape off his wrists. Instead of going up the stairs to mommy and daddy, he just walked away down the street.

Down Fourth Street, all the way to the Mall at the end. On B Street. He jaywalked across the intersection and a block later turned right on Third Street and walked under the freeway. When he came out the other side of the underpass, he crossed the street over to the freeway onramp which led south.

We pulled into a parking lot under the freeway, just across the road from the ramp. Leonard was holding out his thumb for a ride. There weren’t many cars this time of night. Finally, some guy in an old El Dorado pulled over.

“Where you headed?” he said to Leonard.

“Anywhere but here,” Leonard said.

“I’m going as far as San Francisco.”

“That’s a good enough start.”

Leonard got in and they drove off.

Frisbee and I looked at each other.

“Shit,” I said. “It looks like Leonard just ran away from home.”

“That’s what it looks like,” Frisbee said.

“Why the fuck would he do that?”

“You never ran away from home?”

“Nope.”

“I did.”

“What for?”

“Duh. I didn’t want to be there. What else?”

“He’s only eighteen. What the fuck’s he going to do?”

“Anything he wants. Join the fucking Army. Be a beach bum. Shit, Blue, are you so old you don’t remember being young at all?”

“He’s just walking out on his parents and not telling them anything about where he is or how he’s doing?”

“Of course. That’s the point. They’re why he’s leaving.”

She gave the thumbs up sign. “Go get ‘em, big guy.”

I looked at her. “What if your kid ran away?”

“He don’t have to. I don’t breathe down his neck on his life.”

“Tweed will think he’s dead. They killed him.”

“Better for Leonard. They won’t have the cops out looking.”

“Poor old fucking Tweed. Guess Leonard got tired of moving.”

“Yeah. Funny, ain’t it. Leonard’s hurting him worse than you ever could.”

“For now, maybe. Five years from now, though, it’ll be different. He’ll come home and patch things up and everybody will live happily ever after. Sorry. Tweed killed Teresa. I’m not forgetting that. Not by a long shot.”

“Let’s go home. I’m beat.”

“We can’t.”

“Why?”

“Moose. He’s on the war path.”

# # #

Fucking stupid dangerous Moose.

I didn’t confide my plans for him to Frisbee. They hadn’t completely formed yet, anyway. I had to get rid of this guy, that’s all I could think of. Maybe he should take a seat next to Gourd and Weasley in the desert. Frisbee was pissed at him now, but couldn’t be trusted to remain that way. When it came to him, there was a black hole in her head that sucked all intelligent life from her solar system.

“That crazy asshole,” she said. “I ain’t got no clothes to wear. I feel all grungy. My hair’s snarled up. My face looks like hell. Shit.”

It was morning. We had checked into the Holiday Inn, at the edge of Sebastopol on the Gravenstein Highway. Two double beds.

“Your Moosesie. The guy’s a fucking hazardous waste.”

“You don’t have to call him names.”

Christ. Here we go.

I stood at the window grrring under my breath. I didn’t say anything. It was better to just wait it out. The old eat shit and die trick.

I was in a very black mood. I felt old, tired, beat up, and seriously pissed off. Getting involved with Frisbee and Moose was crazy. What was I thinking! I was the lunatic, not Moose. Moose was just Waldo.

“If I hadn’t gotten involved with you, none of this would have happened,” she said. “Everything was fine till you started killing everybody.”

I stood at the window and grrred under my breath.

“Now everything’s fucked up. I’m screwed. Moose’s screwed. The Tweeds are screwed. Everybody’s screwed. Everybody but you, asshole.”

I stood at the window and grrred under my breath. Bring it on, Frisbo. I looked out the window at the bright and cheery day. Fuck you, I said to it. Stick your cheery brightness up your cheery dark asshole.

“You got enough revenge yet? If Teresa was here, she’d dump your ass. She wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of you.”

And while you’re at it cheery bright day, eat smog and choke.

“Fucking two-time murdering asshole. Where do you get off pissing on Moose?”

“I’m getting some coffee,” I said.

“Fine. Get some fucking coffee.”

“You want some?”

“Sure. Bring me some fucking coffee. That’ll fix everything.”

“You want milk or arsenic?”

“Fuck you.”

She threw a pillow at me as I opened the door. It hit me in the back.

I walked down the hallway to the lobby and off into a room where you could get coffee and some of their “signature hot cinnamon rolls.” Give me a break. Like the rolls were imported from an Austrian dough maker with a carefully guarded secret ingredient his family had protected for six hundred years.

It was one of those days where everything looked ugly and phony. Which was how things really were anyway, let’s face it. We all learned how to make the world look like it was on the bright side, when in fact it was a dump. Stupid looking clothes. Cheap shit furniture. Pukey wall paper. Hideous curtains and bedspreads. Idiot hairdos. Makeup and paint slopped over everything. Insincerity dripping from every pore and mannerism. An honest person an extinct species. You couldn’t even take a nice deep breath any more The whole frigging atmosphere was polluted scum. Some fucking bright side world, all right.

I had to wait while a middle age couple made a five act play out of pouring two coffees. Definitely bright sider types. Where do these people come from?

The he part of them was wearing a light blue hat which the manufacturer had pre-rumpled to look seafaring. His shirt was a lemon colored polo type that was pre-faded to look like forty rounds of golf in the hot sun. His shorts were ghastly knee-length khaki bloomers that made his legs look like a stork. White crew socks and white tennis shoes. Immaculately white. Not a sweat stain or grass stain or dirt scuff anywhere.

She wore a white blouse with big red polka dots and pink shorts with perfect pleats and a wide-brim straw hat that bumped into things when she turned her head. Bright red patent leather sandals.

“Caffeine or decaf, dear?” the guy asked.

“I think decaf today. I’m a little edgy away from home.”

“Milk?”

“Of course, Phil. I always have milk. You know that.”

“Just checking, dear. Sugar?”

“Not with decaf.”

“Here you go.”

“Could you get me one of those napkins?”

“Here you go.”

“You forgot the little stirring straw.”

“Here you go.”

“You know, Phil. I’m not sure I want coffee today. Would you take mine?”

“I want the caffeine.”

“Darn. I hate to waste this. But I really can’t drink it. I think I’d prefer orange juice. Can you get rid of this somewhere.”

“Sure, dear. Just set it down there while I pour my own.”

“Don’t forget my orange juice.”

“You can pour it yourself, you know.”

“There’s no reason to snap at me, Phil.”

“I’m not snapping.”

“It sounded like snapping.”

“It wasn’t. Here. Here’s your orange juice.”

“You spilled some on the tablecloth. Hand me a napkin. I’ll sop it up.”

“You’ve got a napkin.”

“That’s for me. Not for sopping up.”

“Excuse me,” I said.

They turned around to notice I was there waiting.

I pushed between them and sopped up the orange juice with my shirttail. I took her decaf and heaved it in a trash can. I poured two coffees, added milk, put on the plastic lids, and grabbed two packets of sugar in case Frisbee liked it that way.

“Thanks,” I said, as I walked away.

“How rude,” she muttered.

A tall vase with long stem red roses sat in the middle of the table where the signature rolls were laid out to yummy your tummy with. I copped one of the roses and took it back to the room along with the two coffees. It couldn’t hurt.

I had to knock on the door, since I hadn’t brought the key card with me. Frisbee opened it and I handed her the rose. She looked at it, frowning. Then she gave it a sniff. Then she shook her head and frowned some more. Then she looked at me.

“You sonofabitch,” she said.

# # #

Frisbee took the Rolls, or should we say Miss Princess, and went to the mall to buy some clothes and stuff. I was no idiot. I didn’t ask her what “stuff” was. It would take all day to explain. I told her I was paying and asked her to pick me up a few things while she was loading up her stuff bag.

“Sure. Like what?”

“Eight T-shirts. 100% cotton. No logos or messages, no pink or yellow, extra large. Stripes are okay. But no checkerboards or polka dots.”

“Extra large? You ain’t that big. Yet.”

“I don’t like the shoulders to pinch after they shrink. It makes me look like some guy trying to show off muscles that don’t exist.”

“Why eight?”

“One for laundry day. Eight jockey shorts, white.”

“Daring.”

“Eight pairs of crew socks, white. Two pairs of Levi’s. One blue, one black. Thirty-six waist, thirty-two length.”

“Moose’s thirty-two waist.”

“I was too when I was his age. I’m actually thirty-five, but they don’t carry that size.”

“What else?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Meat and potatoes wardrobe. God, Blue, you are so boring. We’re staying here awhile, ain’t we?”

“Till we figure out what to do with Moose.”

While she went to the mall, I took a long walk around town. The motel was on Gravenstein Highway a half mile before it split into two streets, one going west and one coming east. The road came back together on the other side of town.

I didn’t go that way, though. I walked up Elphick Road into the apple orchards countryside, taking the long way around town. It was a three mile walk this way. But a lot more scenic and conducive to picking through brain debris for some form of intelligent life.

Elphick Road took me by the house where Teresa and I had lived in our halcyon years together. Elphick went uphill and turned into Watertrough Road at the top of the hill. Our old house was at the end of a short one lane gravel road off Watertrough, just below the top of the hill as it started to go downward from Elphick.

I walked down the gravel road, crunching along it with the missing footsteps of Teresa haunting along beside me. I hadn’t been out here since we’d moved into the trailer. What a great spot to live. I couldn’t imagine ever having a better one.

An old pickup, a Mazda, and a minivan were parked in the carport, reminding me that somebody else lived here now. I was just a guy on the street who would make them nervous if I stood here too long.

Sigh. Double sigh. Life never stood still long enough to hold it. Relentless tomorrows becoming todays and turning into yesterdays, leaving you asking yourself, “Where did it all go? I was holding it in my hand just a second ago.”

Till we meet again, TellingWays. I am lost without you.

I waved good-bye to the house and walked back up Watertrough and west along Pleasant Hill Road. Out among the apple orchards again, row after row of them, making little apples and who gives a shit.

I was not the same guy any more. It was hard to believe I had once had wrestling wars with my conscience over killing Gourd. A lifetime ago. I didn’t give a crawling asshole about it now. Good riddance and who cares? My eyes had been opened. Killing jerks was as natural as all of history. We were all brainwashed to think it was bad. That civilization would collapse. Right. Bad for business. Cops, lawyers, judges, wardens, and white collar thieves would all be out of work. Weasley? Sure, let him screw over five or ten or twenty people’s lives every year for the next twenty years. Wring my hands. Eat Rolaids every time I thought of him. Do nothing. What right did he have to be a cruel jerk all his life? The right people gave him who didn’t have the nerve to stop him. Hiding behind his law degree committing legalized atrocities at will. For the fun and profit of it. I didn’t feel bad killing him. I felt pretty damn good about it. He wasn’t helping society. He was perverting it. Good fucking riddance. I didn’t fear hell any more. I didn’t fear karma, either.

No, I was not the same guy any more. I had finally wised up.

Paul and Brickhead would be coming for me. And Moose. All of them with one relentless quest in mind – wasting my bony ass. And how was I dealing with this threat to my humanity? Holed up in a motel room with Frisbee the Flake who was off on a shopping spree to take care of the horrors of grungy clothes.

Shit. What a fucking mess.

Wait a minute! I’m a fucking multi-millionaire. I kept forgetting it. What the hell am I messing around with all this happy horseshit for? Get on a plane and get the fuck out of here. Get my ass in the wind. Heave this mess in the dumpster. Go back to Iowa and sit in the mud. Squeeze it between my toes. Drink beer and throw twigs. Out of this horseshit California. Back where you could fall down drunk on Main Street and nobody gave a crap. Back where PC meant Public Crapper. Back where nobody cared what you wore or how long you lived or what spoon you ate it with. Back where my cap gun was still in the weeds where I’d lost it some forty years ago . Back where I belonged. Back to my roots.

Back to the future.

Shit. Who was I kidding. I hated it back there. I was a multi-millionaire, though. I could get on a plane and get out of here.

Yeah. That’s what I would do. That’s exactly what I would do.

To be continued . . .