At 11:00 A.M. Gator paced on the front porch in his Carhartt parka, hunched against the drizzly mist, sipping a fresh cup of coffee. He was a few drags into a new Camel when he saw the gray Pontiac GT’s low beams poke through the gloom, sweep across the Fordster on display next to his sign, and swerve into the drive.
Sheryl.
Just like she was supposed to, she drove the car into the open sliding door on the lower level of the barn, so it was out of sight. The locals, stir-crazy with cabin fever, noticed a new car in the neighborhood. Would drive clear into town and tell everybody at Lyme’s Cafe, “Hey, I seen this strange Pontiac going out Twelve, near the big woods…”
Sheryl came out and struggled, hauling the wide wooden door shut. She turned toward the house.
Sheryl Marie Mott.
They had met in the visitors’ room at Stillwater. He’d agreed to make a pickup for Danny T.’s organization, to pay his tax to stay in population. So they put her on his list. She walked up to the table in the visitors’ room like some improved hippie dream in a beige pantsuit. Leaned over the table and planted this open-mouth kissed on him, expertly ramming a tiny balloon full of cocaine down his throat with her tongue. Then she patted his cheek and whispered, “Hey, you’re kinda cute; now swallow, don’t spit.”
One look, and he knew he had to see her again. Kinda cracked her up when he asked for her phone number, like it was a blind date.
Gator had read this story in the joint, and he figured her secret was like in the story; some Dorian Gray deal with the devil that enabled her to keep all the debauchery of her life compacted inside so she looked so damn good on the outside. Couldn’t even begin to guess her age. Older than him.
Sheryl had deep indigo eyes, flared cheeks, and long black hair down past her shoulders; the kind of dusky looker who coulda played a blue-eyed Indian princess in 1950s Hollywood, alongside Sal Mineo.
An East Side St. Paul street kid, somewhere around seventeen years old she’d discovered she liked really bad white guys who rode fat-boy Harleys even more than real bad black guys.
Biker chick. Rode with the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, the OMG.
Central to the hard-core OMG ethos was the injunction, You must know the difference between good and evil and choose the evil. She traded in her patched jeans and tie-dye for greasy leather and denim. She’d done it in the dirt, pulling the shaggy biker trains at bonfires in the woods with the predatory relish of an MBA trying to make the cut on Donald Trump’s Apprentice. In two years flat she went from anybody’s groupie to briefly becoming a fixture on the back of Danny Turrie’s chopper.
Always thinking. Mind-Fuck Mott. The story was, she’d moved Danny out of weed, and almost convinced him to sidestep the urban crack drama with its well-armed gangbangers. Got him into the suburbs, into coke. Then Danny shot those two North Side jigs and went away forever. Gang bangs were one thing; gangbangers and real bullets were another.
Sheryl split the cities, moved to Seattle during the great meth awakening, and shacked up with a guy who owned a perfume company. She took some chemistry course at a community college, learned her way around chemicals, dabbled in designer drugs, learned to cook meth, and socked her money into a lot on the beach in Belize.
Then her Seattle boyfriend had a weak moment and couldn’t resist buying List I chemicals in bulk from a firm going out of business. Except the firm was a DEA cover operation, and Sheryl beat the battering ram coming through the door by half an hour. With just the money in her purse and a credit card, she took a cab to the airport and arrived back in Minnesota with thirty-four bucks.
When Gator met Sheryl she was marginally connected, but out of the loop. Burned, paranoid; she cooked a few batches of meth for the OMG, didn’t like the flaky level of the operation, and wound up muling dope into Stillwater Prison to help make her car payments.
Gator heard the stories about her in the joint. When he got out, living in a halfway house, taking a tractor mechanics course at Dunwoody Institute that he could have taught better than the pencil-neck instructor, he asked her out for coffee.
He had this idea, see, that he’d been refining for a year behind bars…
Waiting tables, barely paying the freight on her apartment and the GT, Sheryl was ready. They started out in a Starbucks and conducted the second round in her bed, where his performance had lagged considerably.
This was before she understood Gator never really could get it going in a bed.
Gator grinned. Sheryl in high-heeled boots taking little bird steps through a foot of soggy snow. The biker-girl duds were long gone. Now she was more into business casual-designer jeans, the Donna Karan sweater picked up at Goodwill, the fancy hip-length leather car coat, a joke in this weather.
“What the hell is this?” she protested, kicking the snow off her footwear, coming up the steps. “It’s the end of March.”
“Your memory is impaired by global warming. This is old Minnesota normal. How you doing, Sheryl?”
She walked up to him, shrugged her shoulders, and went up on tiptoe. “Here I am. What’s so urgent?”
He shied away from her upturned face. “Not yet.”
She furrowed her brow, studied him. “Aw shit, aren’t we done with that routine yet?”
“Let’s go inside,” Gator said firmly.
Sheryl followed him, shaking her head. “I forgot, isolated up here you didn’t get the word how when the apes climbed down from the trees they invented these things called beds…”
Gator ignored her, knowing how much she really dug the weirdness of it. He walked through the kitchen, down the hall into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.
“Aw, jeez, what you got better be good.” She grimaced. “I was up at six, been on the road for almost five hours driving straight drinking coffee. Man, first thing, I gotta pee.” She wiggled out of her coat, unzipped the boots and kicked them off, and headed for the bathroom. When she returned, she drew herself up, knit her brows, and pointed a finger. “No gas, understood.”
Gator nodded. “Agreed. No gas.”
“Good. I can do weird. I draw the line at fucking crazy.”
“C’mon, humor me,” Gator chided, his voice wide, stuck in his throat. Maneuvering her back into the bathroom.
“Been missing it, huh?” She slithered out of the sweater, elbows out, hands back in that contortionist trick chicks do, unclipping her bra. Then she peeled off the jeans and panties. “I don’t suppose you got a shower cap?”
Gator didn’t hear. He was staring at her. Sheryl and her tattoo. Not like the twisty flowery bullshit the girls these days get, curled around their waists and back. Uh-uh. This was from the old days when tats were the exclusive domain of crooks and GIs. This pair of red Harley wings spread out two inches below her navel. Hip to hip. Framed just so in her bikini bottom tan marks. Gator didn’t trust his voice. He pointed at the shower.
“Okay, okay.” She reached her hand past the curtain and tested the water, adjusted the handle, and stepped into the tub.
Gator let it build for about a minute, then threw back the curtain. She stood face to the nozzle, drawing her hands through the dark glistening stream of hair. He reached out and clamped his hand on her wrist, pulled her.
“Hey.” She stumbled over the side of the tub, banging her shin. She collided into him, slick, shadowed, her ribs tiger-streaked with tan fading from the beach in Belize. He spun her and forced her forward over the sink, his left hand straight-arming her, pressing on her neck. His right hand fumbled with the buttons of his jeans.
She always resisted, at first; like now, rearing at his rough grip on her neck, swinging her head around, dark eyes flashing, the long wet hair swinging round like black whips. “Christ’s sake, Gator; can’t we work this out a little?”
“Shut up, face forward. Stand.”
Pouting, she turned back to the sink and muttered, “Too damn old to get fucked flatfooted…” Then she broke out of her brooding stance, hips warming up in a slow canter. “…then again, maybe I’m not…”
“Shush,” he said hoarsely.
“There…you…go…”
He finally got his angles working and hit the rhythm. Unsteady on his feet now, jeans around his knees, he leaned forward, forcing her head down with both hands so all he saw in the mirror was the top of her dark hair and the water beaded up glistening on her back, jiggling where her smooth ass…
Oh, yeah.
Shower running, little chain hanging down from the lightbulb got to dancing as she grabbed the sides of the sink with both hands to brace against the thrust of his hips.
“Ain’t you slippery.” He groaned.
He watched the muscles in her arms and back tense, corded, popping sweat; her voice a throaty chant: “One a…these days…gonna…tear…this sink clear outa THE WALL!!!”
When her cherries lined up, she just paid and paid-ca-ching-ca-ching-the coin coming in a hard hot rush handled endlessly, loaded by the sackful…
Gator just holding on now; ears plugged with blood, other parts of him getting away, runny with his sweat, her sweat. Panting, staggering back, he watched the cannibal gene seep down the inner curve of her thigh. Only way it worked for him. Worked really good. Here in this damn moldy room with the floor joists rotting out under the crummy linoleum. Sheryl, thinking he had potential, patiently went along. All year they’d been starting like this, here in the bathroom.
Breathing not quite returned to normal, Sheryl rolled to the side and sat heavily on the toilet seat; hair tangled, arms down straight between her knees like a spent runner.
“So much for foreplay,” she said, getting her breath.
Gator grinned, wiping off, doing up his jeans.
The real sex happened out in the shop, where everything was clean and in its place.
Where they talked about the plan. And where he would reveal his find.