HE WON’T STOP UNTIL EVERY ONE OF THESE NAZI BIKER SCUMBAGS IS DEAD.
Hal Taylor thought his life was ready for the good ol’ junior college try. But as is always the case when he thinks things are looking up, a fly lands in his beer. This time, the fly in question is a Nazi piece of trash who walked into Hal’s favorite bar and started picking fights. Yeah, maybe Hal punched that bigot right off a moving motorcycle, but let’s be honest here: the Nazi bastard had it coming.
The problem is that guy had buddies, and when they take their revenge on one of Hal’s closest friends, what was a minor stand against racism becomes a mission of survival. Hal quickly finds himself embroiled in conspiracy, blood, and violence that stretches far beyond one fascist motorcycle club and all the way to the movers and shakers in the rich part of town.
Falling back into his two-fisted ways–maybe a bit too easily–Hal has to risk everything he’s earned to defeat a veritable army of evil, clear his name, and extract vengeance without becoming the very thing he hates the most: his old self.
THEY CAME TO TAKE HIS SOUL. HE’LL GIVE THEM THE BEATING OF THEIR LIVES.
An excerpt:
THE WHITE POWER’S OUT
Okay, maybe I got a little drunk and punched a guy off a motorcycle.
Hooray for half-helmets.
The man stops. The bike continues. It rolls down the Last Shot’s gravel parking lot and disappears through the bushes lining the property. Some say it rides west to this day, down the 80 toward Sacramento.
Our displaced rider rises, spitting blood, his leather creaking. He tears off his brain-bucket and spikes it. Double spikes it, I suppose, given the pointy thing up top.
“You are one dead motherfucker,” he says.
I shrug.
This all seemed much smarter back when I had half a foot on this guy and work muscle he lacked. Beer degrades my introspection. Yes, he is a flabby weekend warrior of middle intelligence and age, but now, friends, he is also decked head-to-toe in body armor.
My flannel, tee, and jeans, conversely, cannot stop tit dirt.
The switchblade clicks. He starts for me.
There is a fighter’s response to this. Close fast, secure the hand, pray you don’t get cut. That’s a bad response, though. Prayer has a lousy success rate. Instead, I run a post-and-slant.
He huffs and puffs behind me as we semicircle the lot, two runners in a shitty relay race. He keeps trying to hand the baton to the inside of my abdomen; I keep waving it off. I’m a bad team player when I’ve had a few.
We pass the front of the bar. Delta watches from behind the glass, shaking her head at me. Yates too. Normally my shenanigans draw a larger crowd, but it’s past closing time. I kind of prefer it. Who wants to die in front of an audience?
Well, actors. But I don’t see any around here right now.
Delta is a nice trucker lady I know who comes to the Last Shot bar every Tuesday to celebrate the end of her week. She’s sarcastic, but a real peach. I love her to death. She says she hates me, but she continues interacting with me, like most women in my life, so I have no idea what the truth of the matter is.
Motorcycle Guy called her a big fat dyke when he stumbled over her stool. I took issue.
To be clear, Delta is a lesbian. She is also monstrously tall. One might even call her overweight. But the thing is, you have to say those things in a particular way if you want to keep your human being card. This is common sense.
And Delta, hell, she tried to calm things down. She bought the guy a beer, even after he was so rude. Yates handed it right over without spitting in it, even. And yet, Motorcycle Guy had to go and sip it, spit it out, and pour the rest of it on the bar while saying it tasted worse than a gash’s cooze.
To be clearer, Yates doesn’t stock the greatest beer, most of it is all fancy and has micro right in the name, but to repeat, you say a thing in a certain way if you don’t want to be an asshole. Also, cooze doesn’t taste that bad. Seriously.
So I followed him out, like you do, waiting patiently while he rev-bombed everyone who needed sleep and rode right at me, daring me to punch him off a motorcycle. The rest is history.
Shit, he’s gaining.
We come up on the spot where we both started running. He’s probably wondering what the hell I’m up to. I throw a hand at the ground, scoop, and slide his half-helmet over my hand. A shield.
I close. His stab forward is awkward, hasty, a sword thrust more. He doesn’t knife-fight. Goodie. The blade still rakes up the helmet and my forearm, leaving, ironically, a gash. My right elbow, clearly smarter than my left, clearly, collapses the vein in his neck with a nice meaty snap-slap.
Loose fingers drop the switchblade. Fuckwit lays down to wait for the electric company to come turn the lights back on.
It’ll be a few hours. Always is.
Yates leans out the door while I wrap flannel around my bleeding arm.
“Need an ambulance, shitbird?”
“I need beer.”
The door shuts.
Yates never comes out when hell climbs up. Something about indemnity, self-preservation, laziness. I never ask, lest I jeopardize my source of quick beer. We’re friends. He’d take a bullet for me, but there would have to be a reason beyond my own stupidity getting me in trouble.
He’s never taken a bullet for me.
I have. For me. Not him. Nobody shoots at Yates. People like Yates.
The helmet has a weird circle on it. I’m examining it when Delta meanders over. She trips before she gets to me, her foot accidentally hitting the unconscious homophobe in his ribs. To a cynic, it might look like a sharp kick, but like I said, I know Delta. She’s nice. She’d never do a thing like that, nor would I testify she had.
She shakes her head, taking the helmet. “You know what this is, Hal?”
“A circle drawn by someone with Parkinson’s?”
“It’s a Sonnenrad.”
“Ah. Yeah. Of course. Now that you mention it—”
“It’s Nazi bullshit. And don’t pretend like you knew what it was. It’s not a good thing to know about unless you’re a historian or a reporter.”
I swallow. “Shit.”
“He’ll have friends. The kind with guns. They always do.” She hands it back to me.
I throw it into the bushes without looking. “How many?”
“Statistically? A marginal few. Realistically? Enough to stomp your head.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Me?” She arches an eyebrow.
“Well, you know, you made him mad.”
Delta laughs, a deep throaty husk from too many cigarettes. “Oh, darlin’. They won’t even look at me. I made peace. Bought him that drink. Assuaged his petty, insignificant male pride. That’s why I did it. Didn’t matter none to me. His life is its own punishment. You, on the other hand…”
She mimes blowing her own brains out before turning back to the bar.
“Yeah, well. Okay. Great.”
The Nazi groans, holding his side. Other than that it’s real quiet out here. Real dark. There’s a lot of stuff a guy could hypothetically do to solve this problem. I kind of choose the worst. It’s the way of my people. I may be the last of them, but it is our way.
I squat down next to the Nazi.
“Hey.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Hey, shitass.” I pull on his ear.
That doesn’t work, so I pat his cheek a few times. They might look like slaps, you want to get technical.
His eyes crack open.
“Get the feeling you might want to come back here. Maybe start some shit with me over what just happened.”
“Bet your ass,” he croaks.
“That’s fine. You go on, bring every last one of your fascist fuck friends. It’ll save me the trouble of hunting them down.”
I punch him in the throat. Out he goes.
***
Yates throws a bar towel at me when I walk in. “Idiot.”
It smells of nothing but water. His towels are impossibly clean. Impressive.
I toss it back. “Thanks. I’m fine. Already ruined the flannel. Beer me.”
“Pay me my money down.”
I saddle up on my stool, the one with the burnt-out bulb overhead. Yates unscrewed it to piss me off a while back, so to get back at him, I unscrew it when he screws it back in. Eventually he gave up.
I win?
“I didn’t earn one drink for that?” I shake my head in disgust. “He was a Nazi, and he called your beer cooze.”
“Delta already told me you didn’t know he was a Nazi before you hit him. Beyond that, this is America. People are entitled to their shitty opinions. They are not entitled to free beer.”
“How about credit? That’s real American.”
“Not right before you’re beaten to death by rabid Nazis,” Yates says. “That’s what you call a bad investment.”
I fold my arms and turn to Delta. “Lady fair? A token of your favor?”
Delta taps the bar twice and doesn’t look over.
“See, Yates? Lesbians are cool. I told you.”
“I’ll twist your neck, Taylor,” she mutters into her glass.
“If only.” Yates pours and drops. “If. Only.”
I pull the glass over. He knows I prefer bottles. He’s fucking with me. “Son of a bitch.”
Yates shrugs. “My mother did the best she could with what she had.”
“I’m stealing that. That’s good.” I disappear half the glass. Beer magic.
“You’d steal it even if it were bad.”
“Listen,” I say. “I have a theory.”
“Nope,” Delta stands. “No fucking way. No philosophy. Not tonight. Goodnight, Yates.”
She heads for the door, patting her breast pocket for smokes. Stopping in place, a low growl rumbles from deep within her chest.
“What?” I ask.
“There’s still a Nazi out there. He didn’t run off yet.” She turns back.
“Excellent. A captive audience.”
“I regret purchasing your beer.”
“Okay, hear me out. Most people, they get tailgated, they pull over and let the guy pass,” I begin. “They avoid the confrontation. Better Safe Than Sorry would be a fitting epitaph for their tombstones.”
Delta puts a cig in her mouth just to work it. “Safe sounds real damn reasonable to me.”
“And while you, the hypothetical tailgated mook, might be safe, consider the consequence. The asshole in the wild has learned what? Anyone?” I look from Yates to Delta, Delta to Yates.
No answer.
“That he can get away with bad behavior.” I emphasize the last five words with a small fist to the bar. “He conflates abuse with freedom and individuality, remaining unaware that he is an asshole, because it is never pointed out to him in a way with any force behind it. And no, the internet does not count.”
Delta looks up. “Dear Jesus, save me from this imbecile.”
I hear the patriotic music starting behind me. Bless you, beer.
“In a society so afraid of confrontation,” I continue, “we collectively get taken advantage of, by forces from the richest corporation to every racist bastard who can’t comprehend that Hitler died a monster for a reason. When anyone stands up to that, people point at him. They say, ‘He’s crazy. He’s confrontational. He’s an idiot.’ ” I glare at Yates.
Yates glares right back. “Do you realize that you’ve been stabbed? With a knife?”
I’d forgotten. I look down at my soaked, ruined flannel. “Yes. I know. A small price to pay.”
“You didn’t teach that man a single lesson. Not one.” Yates reaches down and rips the flannel off my arm.
“Ow!”
He applies a warm, clean towel, cinching it tighter than he has to.
“Someone has to kick against the pricks, Yates.”
“They’re called police,” Delta says.
“Ah,” I wave a dismissive hand. “They’re great for immediate threats. What of existential threats?”
“Two weeks of community college,” Yates says to Delta. “This is the new status quo.”
Delta shrugs. “Offer him beer to shut up.”
“No deal!” I swallow the rest of what’s in front of me before I can be cut off.
But he’s not cutting me off. His eyes are wide. I’ve turned down beer.
“Dear God.” He continues to stare. “You’re really committed to this.”
“I am!” I thump my chest twice with a fist. Don’t even know what that means, but it feels right. “Ever since I got shot, I’ve been thinking. I could have died, you know, in service to a cause. When I woke up in that hospital bed, when I thought it through, I realized maybe that’s not such a bad thing, you know?”
The pealing thunder of arriving motorcycles shakes the building.
I frown. “I’ve suddenly and inexplicably changed my mind.”
Delta moves around me to get behind the bar. “Any part of this building made of brick, Yates?”
“Stick built.”
“You got a tub?”
“Nope. And the freezer’s too thin to stop bullets, before you ask,” Yates ducks down with her.
It’s like I’m alone in the bar. I look at the tap.
“Don’t you even think of it,” Yates says, from below.
“I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
“But I wouldn’t have done it.”
“Not Safe, Not Sorry, am I right?” he asks. “For the tombstone?”
“Oh ye of little faith.”
I stroll for the door.
***
I count fourteen motorcycles.
Shotguns on saddlebags. Pistols on hips. Bats. Chains. Knives. They look quite intimidating as a group, but I can’t stop thinking of the scene in that Pee-Wee Herman movie and almost laughing. Something is broken deep within in my brain.
Tequila!
That symbol from earlier is all over. Others have straight-up swastikas. One wit has the flag of Nazi Germany poled on the back of his bike. Unsurprisingly, there are some scratches on the side and big dents, like some people may have tipped it over.
A leader comes forth, a man with a face like someone tanned it on a rack and stapled it back over a skull. He’s got a three-day growth of beard, and wrinkles for miles. Probably was an American Nazi way back when they just called them Henry Fords. He’s got one of those clubber vests, they all do. I forget what you call a motorcycle gang Nazi. I know it’s not a one-percenter. I’ve known cool one-percenters.
Oh yeah.
Assholes.
You call motorcycle gang Nazis assholes. Sorry, forgot. Half-drunk here.
The club name on the top rocker is The 88 Risen. Sounds Christian, unless they’re all bragging about the ability to get an erection to racism or something.
“You’re about to have a very bad day,” Leader Man says. No emphasis or threat, really. He says it like stating a fact.
“You should ask how my day was before making a claim like that.”
He cocks his head like I’ve got something up my nose he could see if he got a better angle. Or maybe he’s saying I’m crazy.
“See, the day’s ninety-five percent over, and I spent at least ten percent of it punching a Nazi off a motorcycle and beating his pathetic ass,” I say. “Even if you tie my balls to a motorcycle and drag me around or whatever it is you want to do, you can’t really say it was a very bad day if that’s only five percent of it. You could say I had a shitty capper, but all in all, today’s a win.”
“We’ll see.” He reaches into his vest.
I point up. Quickly. “You’re all on camera, by the way. Stay where you are, and be subject to additional mockery. Fair warning.”
The leader’s eyes move to the blinking red light and lens below the bar neon. His hand comes out. “Got a name, dead man?”
“Hal Taylor. What’s yours? Ashley? Shelby? Brandon? Chad? It’s always one of those.”
His other hand dips, into the other side of his vest. I tense, but it’s a cell phone.
“Shit,” I say. “Don’t call Mom. She never had any children that lived.”
Leader Man hands the phone off to another biker, who walks off, punching numbers.
“You hit a man for expressing his opinion in a way you don’t like. That’s assault,” he says, pointing up past me. “And it’s all on camera.”
I pfft. “You want to send me to jail for hitting a Nazi? I’d wear that like a badge of pride, chuckles. Everyone from miles around would buy me beer for life. That the best you got?”
He smiles. “Well, I do have many, many friends in prison.”
I frown.
***
The sign on the back of the door flips from OPEN to CLOSED. I take my stool.
“Hal?” Yates.
“Yeah?”
“What happened?”
“I told them they were on camera. They decided not to kill me.”
“That’s…”
“It’s good, Yates, you can say that it’s good.”
“I’m thinking.”
“Don’t think too hard. Anyway, they don’t know the camera is fake.”
“I should tell them.”
The Nazis are all staring at me through the window, possibly baffled that I am talking to myself. “You’d lose your best customer.”
“I wouldn’t think of it as losing a customer. I’d call it gaining a liability-free establishment.”
“Hell, invite them in. Expand your base.”
I hear a thump. That’d be Delta’s fist hitting something. “That’s it. I’m smoking. You want to ban me from the bar, you do it. I’ve had enough.”
When she flicks the lighter it sounds like she’s thumb-wrestling for the world championship with the flint. It takes three or four attempts before a plume rises from behind the bar.
Yates doesn’t stop her.
I look at the tap.
“Don’t even,” he says.
“I wasn’t.”
###
Punk mews and threads between my legs into the single-wide trailer. I hold the door so it won’t slap shut, flicking on the lights. My poverty is thrown into stark relief.
Someone has tossed the place.
The couch is missing most of its stuffing. Springs poke out. The broken tube television cants at an odd angle, like someone kicked it in frustration. There are food wrappers strewn all over the kitchen counter. Someone stuck a knife in the dining area table, which now has only three legs. Empty beer bottles litter the floor.
I’d be worried, but I’m the guy who tossed it. I suppose you could call it living.
There’s some carpet remnant on the back of the couch where most people keep an afghan. Good enough for sleeping on. It keeps the springs from poking too bad. The couch didn’t use to be busted, not until I threw a guy into it. Dale Shavers. He owed a guy I used to work for a bunch of money, then he skipped town. I got the couch, the trailer, and some back pain. Cost me a song and some mechanical work. Mostly mechanical work. I have a terrible singing voice.
Those two cops were all right. A baldie who kept sticking his hands in his vest for boredom and who clearly couldn’t give a fuck if I had murdered any one or three of those guys while shitting up the tailpipe of their bikes. He knew more than half of them by name. The other gal, with her severe bun and good muscles, was far more determined to get to the bottom of things. Young. Green. I liked her too.
With no footage, they had few options. Yates and Delta swore the biker threw the first punch, and that when I fought back, the Nazi drew a knife. The bikers demanded justice for me punching a dude off a motorcycle, but Officer Baldie insisted that punching someone off a moving motorcycle was physically impossible, that my hand would be in a million pieces.
I had a problem like that once before, where I punched a guard dog and no one would believe me. People don’t want to believe the impossible can happen.
Me, I’m a dreamer.
In the end we were sent to our respective corners with the promise that an arrest would come if they had to return, along with an admonishment that if anything happened to me, the police would know who did it. That didn’t stop Leader Man from promising he’d see me, and soon, even with the cops right there.
Punk comes up and kneads my chest, oblivious to the potential hell incoming. Or maybe she knows and doesn’t care, like me. Mostly. That would make sense. After all, she came from a box of nails.
On the other end of the park, one of the old nightie ladies, Barb, has a hoard and a half. She’s arthritic, so someone has to bury all the animals that die on her property for her, or they go in the trash. She knows I won’t call the city on her, so she asks me first. It’s not great, but it’s a solution.
When I got home from the hospital after I got shot, there was a note asking for some help in finding a home for a whole litter of cats. They’d nested in a box filled with rusted metal of all kinds, mostly nails, before Mamma Kitty (that’s the name Barb gave her, though she swears it’s not her cat) trotted off to find her next beau, abandoning her kittens.
By the time I got there, they were all dead. Barb didn’t know, or didn’t want to. She just lit a cigarette and shook her head, swearing that they were alive last she checked. She thinks that was recently, but realistically, it might have been four days ago. Hoarding is sad. It also makes me angry.
It’s complicated.
Her damned shovel was full of splinters and half-broke, and so was I by the end of the night, save that I was full-broke. It took twice as long to dig the hole as it should have. My hands are rocky bullshit from physical labor, but even they can only take so much. I was resting on my hams between hucks when I heard a sound come from the box like someone stepped on a broken squeaker toy. I’d already duct-taped everything shut for the burial. Almost didn’t hear it.
There Punk was on the nails when I ripped to box back open, huddled up next to her dead brothers and sisters, eyes gummed shut, her fur matted in piss and shit. The stickiness gave her an inadvertent mohawk, thus the name.
When she didn’t run away or die while I buried her siblings, I took her home. Since then, she’s nothing but trouble. Scratches the bejesus out of my furniture, and by that I mean the one couch, now in shreds. She claws me randomly. Yowls at the moon at night like it stole her boyfriend. Her pursuit of invisible creatures at four in the morning kills what little sleep I get. When I do want to find her, she hides, usually in a cinder block below the trailer’s skirting, or on top of a door, some impossible place you wouldn’t think to look.
I roll my hand over her head and down her back. She bites my wrist.
“Yeah, I know.”
Hissing and planting her paws, she leaps, getting one last dig in. The fur behind her legs pushes up as she walks away. Once she got clean, which cost me many a laceration, her ass started to look like it had old-time bloomers. Almost called her that, Bloomers, but I liked Punk better. Fuckball was my third choice.
Sigh.
Cuts hurt. I should have known that by now, but I learn it anew every time. I close my eyes, but I can’t sleep. The more I toss and turn, the more the reality of tonight comes home to roost. Beer wears off. Realizations occur. I may have put Yates and Delta in some real danger. The park, even. Nazis could burn the bar. Maybe they’re outside right now.
The kind of thoughts that keep a guy up, you know?
Punk doesn’t care. She patrols. Every now and again she’ll have herself a seizure. Not tonight, I guess. The inbred runt of the litter. Figure she’ll last three more weeks before I bury her, too. Or she’ll live to be twenty. I don’t know. I never really know anything anymore. I certainly have no idea what to do about any of this Nazi shit, outside of fighting.
The more I live, the less I know. A true cliche, but true, this cliche. When it comes to hitting things, I get a continuing education that’s more pragmatic than what they’re teaching me in community college. Doesn’t matter. Either way, learning has a cost.
And me, like I said, I’m full-broke.
***