Fatboy and the Nineball -1-

One time, Fatboy played nine-ball for his life with some outlaw bikers from California in a roadhouse on the Oklahoma line. A woman named Maylene Wheeler owned that roadhouse and she was maybe Fatboy's cousin and maybe his ex-wife or maybe both.

The roadhouse sort of put one in the mind of Maylene herself--sturdy, roomy and handsomely curved. The original building had been a No. 4 military surplus Quonset hut, thirty-two foot wide and eighty foot long with a seventeen-foot ceiling in the middle. A square twenty by twenty foot kitchen stuck out the back, midway down one long wall, with a walk-in freezer and enough deep-fryers to reduce the chicken population of the county by one-third in a single night.

Up top and visible for miles sat a neon sign that said, "Eat Pool Dance" and a lot of people thought that was the name of the place. A smaller painted sign had the right name, State Line Casino--even though it weren't on the state line and weren't no casino, neither.

This palace of terpsichore had gradually fallen on harder times, located as it were a mile or so outside Cheatham about halfway to Kellum, just east of where two county roads crossed, smack dab in the middle of practically the only flat land in the Ouachita--a hot, dusty place on a good day or a cold, miserable, muddy one on a bad day.

Either way, Maylene sold an amount of beer in a supposedly dry county and not much else, having fired her cook and filled the piano full of birdshot on account of having missed the piano player--but that's a different story.

On this one Thursday, Fatboy was amusing himself sucking down cheap beer and shooting pool--or shooting the cue ball in complicated caroms off the cushions, anyway. It cost 75 cents to get the pool table to drop the numbered balls for a real game of pool and Fatboy wasn't going to spend that kind of money on no idle amusement.

He played on the big green ten-foot table in the middle of one end of the long dance hall. The two tables on either side had better rub and more cushion left but they were only nine-footers with red felt, and Fatboy purely detested billiard-type games played on any sort of felt except green, and he liked a big wide table. Fatboy was a traditionalist when it came to some aspects of his pool game.

"Maylene," he roared after making a four-cushion carom that left the cue ball sitting right where it had been. "Maylene, Fatboy is getting mighty dry out here."

Down at the far end of the gymnasium-sized main room, Maylene puttered and fussed around the stage. Friday and Saturday were coming up and there would be a band both nights with music and real dancing. Stubby Noones and his High Noon Fiddles and Guitars would play country music on Friday, and then Alla May Glascock and her band, the Glascockettes would play their version of Rock'n'Roll on Saturday night. There really wasn't much to choose between them, but both bands were loud and could hold a beat.

"Get it your own damn self, Fatboy," snarled Maylene. "And leave two dollars on the register, them beers cost me money, you know." She fingered the holes left in the piano by a load of twenty gauge birdshot but a job done with wood putty wouldn't put the instrument back in tune. She regretted having shot the innocent piano, but if the load had been buckshot as she had intended, the piano would be dead instead of just wounded.

"Nag, nag, nag," said Fatboy. But he smiled and fetched two beers, longneck Coors, from the cooler behind the bar along the middle of the long wall in front of the kitchen. He popped the tops, each with one big calloused thumb, and carried them the length of the room to where Maylene knelt scrubbing at some stain on the front of the stage.

"That's blood," said Fatboy, handing her the beer. "You'll have to paint over it."

"It ain't blood, it's chili," said Maylene. She took the beer and held its welcome coolness to her forehead briefly, then sat back on the wood floor and looked up at her cousin or ex-husband or whatever it was that Fatboy was to her. She sipped beer and seemed to consider the man as a work of art.

He stood over her, about six-foot-two of redneck Renaissance Man, dressed in denim bib overalls and a chambray work shirt, the sleeves rolled up to display biceps as big as some women's thighs. Fatboy could break a horse, rebuild an engine, shoot a deer at two hundred yards, slaughter a pig, drive an earthmover, cook eggs over medium every time and tell you the words to any country song he'd heard more than once. He could do all those things well and if he had a mind to, he would. He had a wide, simple-looking face with no-color eyes and a head of rusty black curls that looked almost red in the sun peering in through the eight big skylights in the curved roof.

She smiled up at him, showing a mouthful of pearly white, and his own smile widened into a grin, though he wasn't looking at her teeth. Maylene wore a pair of khaki slacks and a red halter tee that did a good job of setting off her blond hair and displaying her curves. She moved a shoulder and turned a cheek to show her profile.

They sipped cold beer and savored the heat between them until they heard the engine sounds on the road outside.

"Son of a bitch," said Maylene.

"Motorcycles," said Fatboy. "Harleys from the sound. And they're stopping."

"Sons of bitches," said Maylene.

Fatboy laughed. "Customers, you mean, don't you, Maybelline, the Roadhouse Queen?" He winked at her, offered a hand to help her up then sauntered over to look out the big windows on either side of the four doors in the long edge of the room.

He saw seven, eight, nine bikes, all Harleys and all ridden by the sort of men who ride such hogs on a long trip through the middle of the country on a July afternoon -- thirsty men, but stupid and probably dangerous.

"Maylene, how much you got in the register?" asked Fatboy before finishing off the last of his beer.

"'Bout seventy-five dollars, not counting change," she said.

"Go put the cash drawer in the safe." He looked at the way the bikers had parked near the doors, but with the front wheels all pointed toward the road. Two visible license plates were from California and one from Nevada. There were nine machines and eleven men which meant two bikes had carried double.

Enough crude tattoos showed on necks, bare arms and shaved heads to cover-up all the graffiti in the Fort Smith bus station. The two slenderest men with the longest hair looked to be the likeliest road punks. One of them had a pierced eyebrow and lower lip. The other punk had two earrings and seemed to be wearing eyeshadow.  A few of the bigger men wore single earrings.

Maylene disappeared into the kitchen with the cash drawer in her hands. The safe was under a wooden grating in the walk-in freezer.

"Fuckin' prison gang on wheels," Fatboy said to himself. He spotted brass knuckles tucked into one belt and a couple of handles of what had to be large knives. "What the fuck are these fugitives from a righteous God doing on my country road ten miles from the nearest highway?" He rolled down his shirtsleeves and buttoned the cuffs, then put a broad idiot smile on his face as the doors opened.

"Dan Weathers," he called out for Maylene's benefit. Weathers was the Sevier deputy assigned to the rural northwest corner of the county, the little communities between Cheatham and Kellum—including the State Line Casino roadhouse.

"What?" said the first biker coming through the door, a burly individual about Fatboy's size but with a beer belly like a stolen watermelon in his black t-shirt.

"Damn fine weather we're havin' iffen you like it hot," said Fatboy. "You gents thirsty? We ain't open, but I can sell you a few beers."

"Sign outside says you're open," whined the pierced eyebrow punk, showing a tongue stud, too.

"Damn right we'll take beer," said another big man. The others rumbled a surly agreement.

"Idiot sign don't know nothing, but come in and get out of the sun. It's coo-ool inside," said Fatboy. It wasn't that cool, Maylene wouldn't run the A/C all out on a weekday afternoon with just herself working and Fatboy hanging around. But even fifteen degrees cooler was better by far than the Arkansas sun in a Ouachita July.

Fatboy gestured the biker gang toward the booths between the bar and the pool tables and walked around the herd behind the bar his ownself without ever turning his back on one of them. "We got Coors, and Coors Light for the ladies," he said. "Longnecks or tall cans."

Cans would be better, they might take them on the road with them instead of drinking them in the roadhouse, but the cooler had a glass front, and the curtain used to conceal the beer when the law came calling was not pulled. Fatboy could not hide what was available. The consensus was for longneck Coors, though one of the punks actually asked for a Coors Light.

"And one Silver Bullet," said Fatboy as he served up the bottles. He did not do his bottle-opening stunt with his thumbs but let the outlaws twist, pry or gnaw off their own caps.