Helmet Head (8 page)
CHAPTER 17
Motor
Storm clouds turned Milton’s Hollow chiaroscuro as the five bikes cruised in tight formation. Wild Bill led followed by Chainsaw, Mad Dog, Doc and Curtis. Chainsaw frequently rode side-by-side with Wild Bill oblivious to the threat of oncoming traffic.
Doc and Curtis hung thirty yards back, also riding side by side. Each carried a first aid kit and Doc also carried a medical bag. He wondered what the fuck he was doing there. Wild Bill had told him that it was just a beer run, hang out with Fred for a few days maybe run over to the river and do a little gambling.
Then when they got there, they had to wait for Larry who was bringing down a couple ounces to tide Wild Bill, Chainsaw and Mad Dog over until Curtis’ friend Terrell from the Aces of Spade showed with two keys.
Neither Doc nor Curtis did hard drugs. They smoked a little reefer and drank a lot of Jack. When Doc asked Curtis how the fuck he could sanction a two key deal, Curtis shrugged and said he had nothing to do with it. Wild Bill went over his head.
The Road Dogs met the Aces of Spade in Biloxi the previous year. Curtis had gone to school with several of the Aces in Memphis where he’d grown up. By the time he reconnected with them he was already a Road Dog.
Doc and Curtis met in Nam where they were both medics. After they got back Doc went to medical school on the GI Bill and worked a series of small hospitals in the Upper Midwest until he found a secure berth at Our Lady of the Redeemer Hospital in Vermillion, SD. It was a good fit. Doc was raised Catholic. Those nuns used to kick the shit out of him. They were some tough babes but he learned reading, math, and science. He may have learned critical thinking. The jury was still out.
Nothing like a six-foot Nunzilla with buffalo breath and a steel ruler to inculcate young minds in the sciences.
Doc hadn’t been to confession in fifteen years. He didn’t miss it. Bikers had zero sympathy for whiners or hand wringers. If you couldn’t put the past behind you you had no business riding with the pack.
He’d done bad things in Nam. So had Curtis. But they’d changed. They weren’t the crazy young studs they used to be. An Army priest brought Doc through one of his blackest times. If it hadn’t been for Father Darby he probably would have eaten his gun.
Doc’s first wife was certifiable. He had the worst luck with women. The better looking they were the crazier they were. The break-up with Astrid was brutal and dragged on for months. His lawyer was bleeding him dry and still he could not come to a settlement. She thought she’d married a lifetime paycheck. But as an itinerant physician working on contract at mostly Native American hospitals he was barely able to keep pace with his school loans. Finally, one day, his lawyer said, “Whatcha got left?”
“My pick-up truck.”
“Give me the pick-up truck.”
So Doc gave the lawyer his pick-up truck and just like that the divorce was final.
He’d had two marriages. Both ended in smash-up, but his daughter Brigid by his first wife loved him and ran her own business in Seattle. His old lady Doris was watching Doc’s two mutts. They were so old they croaked.
Doris was a stacked, forty-something realtor in Midlothian specializing in industrial properties. They’d met at a bike show at the McCormick Center. She rode a Shadow 750. It was love at first sight.
His father George had been a physician. Also an abusive prick. His mother Lucille drank herself to death. Astrid herself died of a combination of booze and oxycontin, which she took for her fibromyalgia. There were always a million things wrong with her. As a physician, Doc couldn’t get to the bottom of any of them.
His second marriage wasn’t much better but at least the woman lived.
Doc took Zoloft, Flomax and a half dozen other prescription drugs because he was a stupid old man who couldn’t shake his biker habit. As long as he could remember it’s all he wanted to do—belong to a cycle gang. It was a genuine miracle that he’d achieved this without killing or maiming anyone, or being killed or maimed himself. Of course the night was still young.
Doc was a founding father.
He and Curtis and Ed and Davis.
Doc was drafted. Curtis, Ed and Davis signed up.
Davis was a scrawny Crip from Compton. He’d enlisted to get out of the hood. He’d never ridden a motorcycle but after seeing
Wild Angels
in the mess the idea took hold like a visit from Jesus. He walked around with his hands curled around invisible grips making motorcycle noises. When the sergeant called him over, he said, “Just a sec, Sarge!”
“Ring-ding ding ding,” he down-shifted through four gears before coming to a complete stop with a salute. They called him Motor.
They’d been working together up country for two months and on one crazy hot raining night punctuated with thunder and gunfire they’d promised each other that if they made it back to the world intact they’d form a biker club called The Mad Dogs, after their company nickname. This was before Ed became a tyrant. Ed was Olaf from
The Blackhawks
. Ed was Dum-Dum from Sgt. Fury’s
Howling Commandos
. Ed was Bulldozer from
Easy Company
.
It was called “Operation Thunderbolt,” a guerilla-like raid to disrupt supply lines going to North Viet regulars who were already in the south at division strength. M Company, aka “Mad Dogs,” consisted of twenty-two men, Lieutenant Grazio in charge, four sergeants and the rest grunts. They set up camp on top of a rocky knoll near Pharpang, a village of several thousand that had fallen under VC control. The VC lined up the mayor’s entire family and machine-gunned them to death for cooperating with Saigon.
Late in the day Grazio sent six sappers including Motor to booby-trap the trail with Claymores and fougasse drums.
Doc and Curtis thought Grazio was a punk and made the wrong call. Grazio was a glory-hound. Grazio wanted medals. Grazio thought he was T.E. Lawrence. The sappers should have waited until morning. It was a mistake to send them out that late in the day. They ran into a VC patrol and got bogged down in a firefight. Grazio compounded his mistake by sending ten men to pull the sappers out, including Ed, Doc and Curtis.
Technically they weren’t required to bear arms but they weren’t about to sit around while their buddies were getting chewed up. Ed split the patrol into two groups of five. He led the one with Doc and Curtis. Sgt. Hoyt took the other squad. Ed led them a difficult route just below a ridge that ran north/south and stuck up like a dorsal fin. The land was mostly vertical, sharply creased green valleys formed via ancient volcanic action followed by receding ocean. Snakes and poisonous insects lived in the rich green fur of the tropical rain forest.
Curtis, who fancied himself a chef, developed several snake recipes. He talked about opening a restaurant in New Orleans, Snakes Alive, that would serve snake, alligator and other reptiles, along with more traditional fare. “You put enough hot sauce on it, anything taste good.”
It rained. Like walking under a warm waterfall. Doc and Curtis concentrated where to place their heavy jungle boots. A mistake could send them plummeting to the bottom of the ravine collecting every plant, bug and snake in the way. They’d heard about a corpsman in Tango Company who’d slid down a ravine and been bitten in the crotch by a pit viper. His testicles swelled to the size of softballs before he died.
There was also the killipede, a millipede the size of a hot dog with a bite so poisonous it made your eyes explode.
Ed wore camos and a campaign hat, his vast green bulk nearly invisible in the rain. Suddenly he raised his hand. The column stopped. He motioned Doc and the rest forward. They huddled on the treacherous path as the rain poured down, ten feet beneath the knife-edge summit.
“There’s something down there,” Ed whispered indicating the crevasse. “See that flash of red?”
The boys squinted through the rain. Doc caught a glimpse of an unnatural crimson and winced. “I’ll go,” he said.
Rigging a line to one of the wiry little trees, Doc rappelled down the steep incline using gloves, thirty feet to a small plateau jutting over the rushing stream. His boots sank into the red mud. Davis sat with his back to a tree, his head in his lap. The flash of crimson was his neck.
***
CHAPTER 18
Ed Steps Up
Doc froze. The body could be booby-trapped. He tapped his radio. The Cong would have difficulty pinpointing the patrol in this weather, even if they knew where he was.
“I found Motor,” he said when Ed answered. “They cut off his head.”
“We’ll be right down,” Ed answered.
“Hang on. Let me check it out.”
On hands and knees Doc examined Davis’ body looking for trip-wires or anything that didn’t belong. Davis’ dog tags hung from the white bone tip of his spine. Someone had placed it there. Doc examined them minutely before deciding they were unconnected. He scooped them up and put them in his pocket. Thank God he didn’t have to write the letter. Everyone liked Motor. He sang Smoky Robinson in an uncanny falsetto.
The rain eased. Hell broke loose. Slugs ripped the riot of undergrowth inches above Doc’s head. He recognized the distinctive whine of AK-47s. VC patrol laying in wait. Maybe they got tired waiting. Maybe they couldn’t see through the undergrowth and rain. Doc hit the ground flattening himself as much as possible. Bullets ripped through his rucksack, each a hammer blow to the soft pack but missing his flesh. He was trapped in a fire zone.
From up above fire rained down. The boys were shooting blind. They couldn’t see shit in this weather and the Cong were using flash suppressors. Doc couldn’t stay where he was. He slithered forward and down, following the contour of the narrow valley as it broadened and flattened slightly near what had once been a creek and was now a fast-flowing river. Doc became one with the rich black mud. It was in his hair, his nose and his mouth. He welcomed it. The mud helped conceal him from his assailants.
Due to the fact he had not been hit Doc concluded the Cong were guessing. There was no way he could rejoin the team. They were up there. He was down here. He just hoped they didn’t get suckered into a cross-fire.
Muffled reports exploded like Lady Fingers all around him but mostly up the slope. Doc got his back against a tree and slowly got to his knees, scanning the hillside for heroes and villains. He wished he had one of the new infra-red night scopes even if it did weigh five pounds. By now it was evening and the natural light was fading. A nerve-grating bird shrieked with metronomic regularity. Doc wanted to shoot it.
He saw a flash of gunfire high on his left. Cong in a tree. Fixing the place in his head he raised his M-16 to his shoulder but did not use the sites. He triangulated hand, muzzle and eye and fired thrice at the place he thought he’d fixed. There was a grunt and the sound of something heavy crashing to the earth. Score one for triangulation.
The firefight intensified upslope where he’d left the patrol. Someone grunted and the shooting stopped. Doc heard a babble of Viet. The VC were closing in. In the rain and jungle he couldn’t tell from what direction or how far.
Sweat rolled down his back in rivulets. He pulled out his canteen and drank greedily. He set the M-16 down and pulled his .45, standing with his back to the tree, both hands wrapped around the handle.
Dear God get me out of this. I swear I’ll live a Christian life. I’ll devote myself to the less fortunate. I will sing Your praises ’til I die
.
He thought about the bike he planned to get. The new 1200 Electra Glide. Fifty-eight horsepower. Four-speed transmission. It was his rocket ship to freedom. Doc spent almost as much time dreaming about motorcycles as he did about pussy. He’d mount a windshield and leather saddlebags and ride that sucker to Alaska and back. Just thinking about it made him feel better—the cool breeze, the endless vistas. Moose. Alaskan Thunderfuck.
He’d get an old lady—one of those Minneapolis ice princesses—a skater—she’d sit pillion and rub her titties against his back mile after mile. Just thinking about it gave him a boner.
Hard metal poked him in the side of the head as a steel gun butt smashed his hands causing him to drop the .45. Two Cong had sneaked right up on him, one on either side. The one with the AK jabbed him in the guts with the butt and pointed for him to get down on his knees. Shaking, Doc complied. The other grabbed Doc’s gun, held it up smiling, kissed it, stuck it in his black canvas pants which were held shut by a bungee cord.
The Cong couldn’t have been out of their teens. They looked like children. One of them wore a Cap’n Crunch T-shirt. The other wore a Boston Red Sox shirt. They grinned and chattered fast and soft in Vietnamese. He knew they were going to kill him.
An iron fist squeezed Doc’s heart. He lost control of his bladder, grateful that no one noticed. A terrible sucking void opened in his chest. This was it. He wasn’t ready to go.
Dear God not yet.
Grinning, one punk drew a Makarov and leveled it at the center of Doc’s forehead.
The explosion was louder—much louder—than Doc expected. He waited to be dead. A second explosion and the other teen Cong dropped to the ground, swinging his rifle.
Ed separated himself from the fronds holding a smoking .45 in one hand, covered with mud, face filled with still intensity. He’d slid on his ass down the side of the mountain.
“Motherfuckers,” he spat drawing his machete. Doc watched while Ed hacked the heads off both the VC. He switched the heads and looked from one small corpse to the other. “Still can’t fuckin’ tell ’em apart.”
***
CHAPTER 19
Terrell
There were times Doc missed Ed. Wild Bill didn’t become such a dick until after Ed died. Not that Ed was a bed of gardenias. He should have stayed in the military. He would have lived longer.
Once they got the club going—charter, clubhouse, constitution, original members—Ed embraced the biker image until it was only a matter of time before he killed himself. He drank more beer, snorted more meth, chased more pussy, administered more beat-downs and rode faster than anyone else. He declared himself a flaming wreck not long before he became one.
The charter
: “The Mad Dogs Motorcycle Club is hereby formed for the purpose of fermenting (sic) brotherhood, camraderie (sic), and motorcycle riding. We, the undersigned, constitute the Founding Brothers of this MC.”
The charter went into 37 pages of details regarding name, trademark, by-laws, prospects, new members, responsibilities and chapters.
The boys pooled their money and bought a defunct Texaco station in Midlothian, IL. There were nine original members: Ed, Doc, Curtis, Tony “Numbnutz” Nunzio, Tommy G, Arlen “Iceman” Shrum, Donnie Downer, Ricardo Z, El Indio and Larry “Red Rocket” Rodell. They furnished the place in Student Cast-Off. Some of the sofas had to be fumigated. No prob. Ricardo Z worked for Orkin. They put the sofas in giant plastic bags and gassed them.
They used the engine bays to work on their bikes and the occasional car. They gutted the office and sat around an old conference table Ed bought from a start-up that went belly-up. The place wasn’t so much decorated as filled with the junk and whimsy of its members. Rat Finks,
Hustler
spreads, pictures of bikes, newspaper clippings and tiki dolls decorated the walls. The place reeked of beer and cigarette smoke.
Ed knocked up his old lady Beatrice in 1980. Beatrice was inked like a boxcar. She worked in a bar. She was on the heavy side but then so was Ed. Wild Bill was born April 2, 1981. Everyone assumed he’d changed his actual birth date so as to avoid ridicule.
Now Ed was in the earth and Wild Bill led the club. No one knew what happened to Beatrice, not even Wild Bill.
Ed died on June 29, 1997. He crossed the centerline on Illinois State Highway 51 around eleven thirty at night and ran head-on into a Mack truck carrying a load of Leinenkugel. It was ruled a righteous death.
Ed was returning from scouting out a possible charter club in Paducah and had been riding with the Pounders when he got a call from his current old lady Tiffany claiming to be pregnant. Turned out to be a false alarm.
Speed and alcohol may have been involved.
The old days. They had some good times, too. One night they were all sitting around drinking and smoking reefer. The joint passed to Numbnutz, who sat in an old overstuffed chair claimed from Student Moving Days. After awhile Wild Bill looked up and said, “Where the fuck’s that joint?”
Everybody looked at everybody else. “Numbnutz had it last,” Doc said.
Numbnutz looked around in surprise. His hands were empty. The seat cushions began to smoke. The seat cushions burst into flame. Numbnutz rose up and out like a Titan booster. “Fire!” he cried.
Everybody tossed their beers on the chair dousing the fire.
The old days. Doc shook his head.
Wild Bill, Chainsaw and Mad Dog disappeared around a curve and Doc and Curtis instinctively slowed down. They’d always enjoyed riding together. With the others, not so much. Especially when they got to snortin’ and drinkin’. Doc playfully goosed his modified Road King and surged ahead. Curtis was about to do the same when a vibration, the merest flicker of movement, stayed his hand.
A deer bounded from the trees. Curtis automatically squeezed the front brake and pushed the rear brake with superb control so as to avoid locking up, stopping a foot short as the startled creature gave one frightened look and bounded into the trees on the opposite side of the road.
Doc saw it in his rearview and immediately pulled over, shutting off his bike and getting off. He approached Curtis grinning.
“Need to change your underwear Curtis?”
Curtis pulled over and got off. “Mother
fucker
! I almost T-boned that sumbitch.”
Doc pulled out a cigar. The forest was silent as if the Road Dogs had disappeared into a tunnel. Silent save for the distant rumble of thunder.
“If you had, we’d be eatin’ venison for supper.”
Curtis stomped into the ditch, hands on hips, mad at himself. He gazed into the woods. Old habit. He did not merely gaze, he saw. There was something unnatural about the silhouette of a tree about fifty feet in, as if it were occupied. He parted branches with his hands.
“Where you goin’?” Doc said.
“Back here. I see something.”
Muttering and smoking Doc followed Curtis into the brush. A green curtain of
déjà vu
settled on his shoulders and he shivered despite the warm weather. He never suffered from PTDS but he knew guys who had. He often dreamed about Nam but not when he was awake. He wasn’t one of those guys who had “flashbacks.”
He was having one now.
That shape, that fucking shape in the tree. He pulled the five-shot.
“What?”
Curtis didn’t answer. He stood stock still staring up. Doc pushed wet branches out of the way and joined Curtis in the clearing. A man hung upside down from a branch to which his ankles had been bound with his own shoelaces. The body faced the tree, lifeless black arms hanging down, upside down Aces of Spade patch. Memphis.
The corpse was headless and a large brown stain covered the ground where it had exsanguinated.
A bare-bones Knucklehead with a rigid frame and bobber fenders lay on its side as if it had been casually tossed there, leather saddlebags partly splayed, clothes and toiletries spreading.
“Terrell,” Curtis said. “I knew this was a bad deal.”
***