Fatboy and the Nineball -2- Deputy Dan

Maylene back in the small office behind the kitchen did not call the Sheriff's Office in De Queen but dialed instead the direct cell phone number of Deputy Dan Weathers whose responsibility was the communities along State Line Road in the northwest corner of Sevier County.

"Eyuh," Weathers answered after digging his cellphone out of the little holster on his uniform belt. He was parked in the shade down by the lake, sitting on the hood of his cruiser, bending the metal with his fat ass and watching some teenagers enjoying the water. Half of the kids were girls, and that was reason enough for Dan to watch.

Weathers was a large man whose oversized head indicated some Choctaw ancestry. Part of the rest might have been African-American, but mostly his people came from a long line of mean. His skin was the shade of old saddle leather that's been oiled and taken care of, even though it's been sat on every day.

"Deputy Dan?" said Maylene.

"How's it, May?" He recognized her voice, as well as the number showing on his phone screen and wondered vaguely what the hell would cause Maylene to call him midweek in the daytime. "If it's a skunk again, I tole you that you should call the Humane Society. All I kin do with a skunk is shoot it, and that don't do you, me or the skunk no good at all."

"It's a whole passel of skunks this time, the kind that ride hogs and smoke meth," said Maylene.

A most colorful mental image passed through Weathers' mind before he deciphered what she meant. "Bikers," he said, not asking.

"Outlaw bikers," said Maylene. "If that ain't too accurate. I'm locked in the back with the money, and Fatboy is out front keeping them occupied."

"Lordy," said Deputy Dan. "He ain't broke no skulls yet, has he?"

"No, no. They're just drinking my beer, so far, I think."

"Fatboy there sniffing around you again," said Dan. "I oughta run him off."

"Never you mind about the Fatboy, Deputy Dan," Maylene said, a little exasperation in her voice. "Just come he'p us get rid of these cah... peckerwoods."

Dan chuckled. He knew what Maylene had almost said. Something occurred to him. "They got any insignia on their bikes or their jackets? Or notable tattoos?"

"Notable, huh?" Maylene thought a moment. "Yes, I believe I did notice an emblem on a couple of the jackets. And they got 'nuff tattoos to start a platoon of notaries."

"What were that emblem?" asked Dan.

Maylene laughed. "It was actual kind of funny..." she began.

###

Fatboy had noticed the emblem, too. It looked like a burning toilet seat with three green pieces of paper sticking out of it, each marked with a dollar sign. Above the cartoon, flaming initials spelled "F.S.B." complete with the periods. Fatboy felt aggrieved by the rebus which he had no trouble decoding.

The initials puzzled him a bit. "Fat Stupid Bikers," he said silently. "Fuckin' Slimy Bastards. Future Shithouse Bugs." He liked that last one a lot and thought of the bikers as Shithouse Bugs after that. A rocker below the cartoon read Folsom CA on eight of the jackets. Folsom Shithouse Bugs worked fine, too, thought Fatboy.

He made a decision. He had intended to get rid of the prison pukes and their dolly-boys as quickly as possible but changed his mind. Anyone who would disrespect one of the heroes of Arkansas needed to be taught a lesson.

"Wanna 'nuther beer, Woody?" he asked. He'd learned all their names just from listening. Woody was the leader, the tallest, the one with the most scars and the apparent 'boyfriend' of the lisping, eyebrow-pierced punk who was called Porky, though he was the slenderest of the bunch.

They'd sucked down the first round pretty fast, using it to clean out the road dust in their mouths. They all nodded, grunted, frowned or simpered at him, and he sat up twelve beers this time, one for himself.

"You boys play pool, don't you? We got tables," he gestured toward the three big coin-operated tables in the north end of the long hall.

"Sure," said the biggest peckerwood, the enforcer probably, Del, the others called him. "I was weaned on a pool cue." Del wasn't as tall as Woody, but he might have outweighed Fatboy by a pound or two. Shadow, the other punk, who seemed to belong to Del, stood behind him and made a mouth like he was sucking on a pool cue, but only Fatboy, Woody, and Porky saw him.

Fatboy refrained from making any suggestions about what the putative mother should have done with that pool cue. "We play a lot of nineball here," he said. "Arkansas rules, breaks got to move least three balls above the line or into pockets, and Texas pushouts." He made his way to the big middle table.

The leader of the bikers nodded; these were familiar rules.

"It's my place," Maylene would forgive him for the lie, "so I'll defend 'gainst you gents. Who wants to lag to see who breaks for me?"

Woody motioned that Del and another ex-con called Sharky should lag. Sharky wore only a tattered denim vest above the waist, the better to show off a genuinely artistic chest tattoo of a hammerhead shark whose eyes were just below the man's nipples. His tight muscles added to the air of menace the shark image lent him. When he gets old and fat, the shark will go blind, Fatboy mused to himself.

Porky and Shadow took cues and started shooting caroms on one of the smaller back tables. Three other bikers took the big front table and lagged for who would play and break. Woody settled himself, sitting on the third table where he could see the center action with his feet on a chair seat. The last biker, called Slutch, made his way toward the restroom sign.

Just for the hell of it, Fatboy called out. "Use the ladies’ there, Slooch. I'm keeping my python in the gents’." Slutch frowned at him and hesitated.

Fatboy turned the crank a notch. "One thing you don't want to do is get in no pissin' contest with a python," he said. The hog riders all laughed.

"You don't got no pie-thong in the gents’," Slutch accused.

"Fact is," said Fatboy. "I got two pythons, feed them jackrabbits once a week. Brought them back from Thailand with me. One's a Burmese Python, big fucker, eats two jackrabbits at a time. The one in the gents is a 'Ticulated Python, called a Net Python, a bit smaller. But he's feeling a mite poorly. That last jackrabbit kicked him in the eye, so his temper ain't too good. You'd best use the ladies', Slooch."

"I don't believe you," sneered the ex-con, but he didn't move toward either of the bathrooms.

Fatboy smiled. "You ain't calling Fatboy a liar in his own place, are you, Slooch?"

"No, but my name ain't Slooch. It's Slutch, and you ain't got no pie-thong."

"Slutch, clutch, Slooch, cooch," said Fatboy. "It's all the same to me, but you best use the ladies'. I don't want you upsettin' my snake."

Slutch wavered a moment. Then stalked toward the front doors. "I'll just go piss outside," he muttered. Some of the bikers were still chuckling, but there were no outright laughs. Everyone could see Slutch was rattled and might do anything.

Just as he got one of the front doors open, Fatboy called softly. "Watch out for my Gila monster. Likes to sun hisself on the rocks."

And then the ex-cons did laugh, hooting and guffawing. Fatboy only smiled. Slutch tried to slam the door behind him on the way out, but the hydraulic cylinder above the door wouldn't let him.

"Where's that other snake, the big one?" asked Woody, still laughing.

"In my pants where I always keep him," said Fatboy. The bikers hooted and howled again.

###

Deputy Dan Weathers had recognized the insignia Maylene had described. There'd been a bulletin in the Sheriff's Office about a gang of bikers busting up a small town in New Mexico. Their emblem had been described as a flaming toilet seat, and now they seem to have wandered up to Arkansas. He was sort of thankful they weren't actual Peckerwoods with a capital P, which was the name of a motorcycle club in San Diego. These guys sounded similar, though, ex-cons with a reputation for violence. He wondered vaguely what FSB stood for.

Dan put his phone away but did not get up from his seat on the hood of his cruiser. Ten or a dozen bikers weren't nothing Fatboy shouldn't be able to handle, he thought. He'd mosey on down that way after the heat of the afternoon had passed to see if anyone was killed.

Fatboy and he went a long way back. Dan had grown up in Oklahoma where the local Choctaws had given him a tribal name that translated to Mud Man Running. He'd grown tall before he got big and when he was in high school, he surely could run. Mud man is a mild insult, implying ugliness, about equal to calling someone fat boy. So they had that in common. What they also had in common was the championship game in the State Line Football League Tournament decades before.

When the Mud Man ran up against the Fatboy, something had to give on that long-ago day. And Deputy Dan Weathers remembered—so he was in no hurry to answer Maylene's call for help.

If the bikers killed Fatboy, he'd buy himself a $5 stogie to celebrate. And if Fatboy killed one or more of the bikers, well, then he'd have the pleasure of taking the sonuvabitch in and charging him with murder, wouldn't he?