Fatboy -3- Slutch

Everyone forgot about Slutch. "Story a' my life," the man muttered after zipping himself up. He'd walked out to the entrance of the small, graveled parking lot and pissed on the signpost that held up the crudely painted directions, "Turn here - Dance - Cafe - Pool." It was a tiny and misdirected revenge since as much of it splashed on his boots as discolored the signpost -- and the roadhouse did not actually belong to Fatboy.

Being forgotten really was the story of his life. His mother had more than once gone home from grocery shopping, carried all the sacks of goods into the house and left him strapped into his carseat asleep in the back. She never seemed to miss him until dinner was on the table.

His last trip to prison had been the result of his partners in crime driving off in the getaway car, leaving him standing in front of the just-robbed liquor store with a .38 revolver in one hand and six stolen Slim Jims in the other. The cops who arrested him ate the Slim Jims and didn't even offer him one.

Unwilling to return to the roadhouse, where he imagined that the other bikers were still laughing at him, Slutch wandered around the edges of the parking lot. The bikers inside, true to Slutch's life story, had instantly forgotten him in the interesting lead-up to the nine-ball game.

***

"Gents," said Fatboy mildly as Del and Sharky chose cues and chalked them up, "we ain't settled on stakes for this here game of nine-ball."

"Money?" suggested Woody.

"Hunnerd a ball," said Del.

"Big whoop," said Fatboy. "I ain't got that kind of cash, and I don't know if you fellers do either."

"Hunnerd a rack," said Del.

"No," said Fatboy. "First to win eleven games is the winner."

Sharky and Del nodded.

Fatboy looked at Woody, as far as he was concerned, the leader of the Shithouse Bugs. "Your boy wins, a six-pack of beer for each of your guys. If I win, you fellers clear out without breaking nothing and no hard feelings."

Curiously, Woody looked at his watch before answering. "Fair enough," he said. "We just came in to get cooled off and waste a little time."

"All right then," said Fatboy, smiling. "Nine-ball is an excellent waste of time." He motioned toward Del and Sharky.

Del borrowed the cue ball from the table where the punks were shooting caroms, and he and Sharky shot at the same time. The balls kissed the far bumper and rolled back briskly, Del's ball stopping eight inches from the line. Sharky's rolled about seven inches further.

***

Inside the office part of the kitchen, back near the walk-in freezer, Maylene sat in front of several small television monitors. Early in the spring, she had bought three sets of video surveillance equipment from the Home Shopping Network. Each set came with a monitor, three security cameras, and various switches and wires. Her son Rutherford, Fatboy, and a friend of Fatboy's named Royal (who knew something about electronics) had installed the system with four inside cameras and five outside.

Three of the inside cameras were above the doors, one over the big double front doors and one each above the emergency exit signs at each end of the hall. The fourth inside camera was in the service area of the kitchen. Outside, cameras were high on each front corner of the roadhouse, each back corner of the kitchen and one on a pole in the front lot near the entrance. She could see most of the big hall and the counters and a great deal of the parking area.

Each monitor had a switch that allowed it to cycle between six different cameras, a joystick to repoint the cameras on their swivels and various knobs to adjust the picture.

Maylene tried to watch the game at the pool tables, Slutch wandering around outside, and the road where she expected Deputy Weathers to arrive in his black and white cruiser any moment, all at the same time. It kind of stressed her out so she had gotten a beer from the cooler in the back and her reloading equipment. This time she intended to know which shells had buck and which ones had birdshot; she had a felt tip marker to write a capital B on each buckshot-loaded cartridge.

***

Sharky was a shark, Fatboy decided. The man with the hammerhead tattoo had won the lag, sank two balls on the break, two more, then the nine ball to win the first rack without Fatboy even touching a cue. "Good shootin' there, Sharky," he said. "You tryna make the Fatboy look bad?" But he grinned his yokel grin, and the bikers laughed.

Del and Woody watched from a couple of the tall parlor stools against the wall. They liked seeing their boy win and had done fist bumps each time he sank a ball.

"Looks like you pay again, Snakedick," said Sharky.

Fatboy held a hand up while everyone laughed again. "We got kind of a house rule here," he said. "See, the table lets down all fifteen balls, even for a game of nineball. So what we fuckin' do is play a game of sixball in between racks of nineball. Loser of the nineball rack breaks on sixball, sixball winner breaks on the next nineball rack. Loser of nineball still pays for next letdown."

"Huh?" said Sharky.

"It's sort of like sixty-nine," said Fatboy and got them laughing again. He explained more carefully while he racked the six balls unused in the nineball game. He held up the fifteen for a moment, "Money ball," he said.

Sharky nodded. "We played something like this in Stumptown when I was a kid."

"You wanna bless the rack?" asked Fatboy.

Sharky reached out and moved the triangle a hair and pushed the balls back into the front corner. "S'fine," he said.

Fatboy broke, sinking all six numbered balls.

"Sumbitch," said Del, Woody chuckled, and Sharky shook his head once to the side like he'd been slapped.

Fatboy smiled as he paid the table to let all fifteen balls back down. "No sir," he said. "I'll say it again, it don't pay to get in a pissing contest with a python."

***

Outside, Slutch continued his useless circuit of the parking lot, examining the detritus in the bar ditches and the leavings of years of careless parking habits. The commonest things were food wrappers, drink containers and the remains of clandestine, undoubtedly awkward, romantic encounters. He found a few discarded needles and pill bottles, too, and other such trash.

He also found various parts of cars, as if a leper colony of automobiles had once been in residence. Two whole bumpers, a radiator, several mufflers, a set of ragged car seats, assorted starter motors, a broken steering wheel, three fenders, a UFO fleet of wheel covers and hubcaps -- he even found a full headlight assembly for a 1951 Hudson, still in the box from the manufacturer of replacement auto parts for defunct brands.

That last item he picked up and carried with him under his arm; he knew a diner called the Hudson Grill decorated with pieces of such cars and imagined that they might pay him ten dollars or so for an authentic headlight.

In the ditch beside the alfalfa field just east of the roadhouse, he saw a lizard sitting on a half-cinder block looking back at him. It wasn't a Gila monster; there are no Gila monsters in the Ouachita. Residents might dispute this on any particular summer day, but southwest Arkansas is too wet and cold for such beasts. An ordinary collared lizard, brownish-gray with a black-edged red-orange collar around its neck and shoulders, it didn't really look anything like a Gila monster, except maybe for the colors, but it convinced Slutch. "Sumbitch," he said. "Maybe he really does have a pie-thong in the john!"

He gave the lizard a wide berth. Nothing else caught his interest until he had completed a half-circle of the lot and saw the two cars parked near the back entrance of the roadhouse, where the add-on construction of the kitchen and office stuck out like a square wart on the galvanized roundness of the big hall. An apron of asphalt wrapped around the extension on two sides, making a dry place to park when the big dirt and gravel lot turned to chunky mud every time it rained. The two vehicles nosed into the shaded angle, protected from the sun on both the south and west sides.

One of the cars was Fatboy's '76 El Dorado convertible with the top up; the other was Maylene's little bright blue Volkswagen Beetle. Slutch peered in the windows of both cars. In the back seat of the Cadillac lay a stuffed catamount, very lifelike, and Slutch dodged away from the sight. "Got to belong to that fat blowhard," he muttered after determining that the big, snarling cat could not be alive. For one thing, it was attached to a five-foot-long hardwood stand with a brass plate that read, "Ol' Yaller-Eye, 1993-2007, Lover, Hunter and Friend".

In the back seat of the Beetle, Slutch saw a patterned scarf, a green straw hat with a round crown and a purple hatband, and a catalog for someplace called Catherine's. In the front seat, a floral-decorated thermal coffee mug sat in the cupholder, and several colorful pens and pencils lay in the coin tray. A diet Mountain Dew can shared the floorboard on the passenger side with a pair of pink flip-flops.

Slutch looked up at the back of the roadhouse. "Sumbitch," he said, "there's a woman in there somewhere." Fatboy’s woman, he decided.