Most of the people at Jackie Blue’s the night Joe
McClure earned the name Mad Dog didn’t know the whole story. So I
guess to them, when they saw Joe come up from the floor and open up big
bad Mike Lewis’s head with the claw end of the hammer, it might have
looked shithouse crazy. The way Joe turned the hammer around and gave
Lewis a few more whacks on the way down might have looked like overkill.
So it makes sense that one of them decided to stick that name Mad Dog on
the boy. But I’m here to tell you they were wrong.
When the night started, Joe was just Joe, a good old boy
with a job sticking rebar in concrete. The guy was a metal head, with
shaggy hair and usually wearing some black tee shirt, but that’s not
that strange in these parts. He was good for shooting pool, matching you
shots of Jack -- that was about it. A big fellow, almost as tall as me,
but it was in a way you wouldn’t notice. No jailhouse tats, nothing in
the world that would have made you think that this fellow was going to
become one of the most feared men in the hills.
To tell the truth, the only guy with a rep that night at
Jackie Blue’s -- except Jackie himself -- was me. See, I’m a
watchdog. We don’t have no mafia or big crime families around here to
keep the peace between operators, or to police ‘em when they try to
run games on each other. So if you want to make sure your deal goes down
without a hitch, you call on me, and I’ll come along to watchdog the
deal. People see my face coming their way and all their thoughts of
double-crossing and dirty deals just dribble out their ears like creek
water.
I was drinking double Crown and Cokes and talking to
Jackie about what Mike Lewis had done last week in the back lot. The
Friday before, old Mike Lewis came straight from a seven-year bit for
armed robbery to Jackie Blue’s to drink away his gate money. About six
Wild Turkeys later, Lewis bumped into some square john who’d just
walked into the wrong bar looking for a place to watch the Cards game.
Now, understand, when a man walks out of a seven year stretch he’s
different than when he went in. In this case, Lewis done swoll up like a
tick and covered his arms in dirty gray tats, and he developed himself a
bit of an attitude problem. He started screaming at the poor fool. The
square fellow just kind of bobbled some vowels out of his mouth like his
lips couldn’t catch no consonants. Even Lewis knew not to start shit
inside Jackie Blue’s – Jackie’s retired but he likes to stay
active -- so he drags this little square john outside and gives him an
old-fashioned Ozarks ass-whipping. And when he’s done he pulls out his
pecker and takes a leak using that fellow’s mouth for a piss-pot.
Like I said, seven years inside will do strange things
to a man.
###
So the next weekend, Jackie and I are hashing the story
over and trying to guess how long it will be before Lewis ends up back
in the pen. While we’re telling the story back and forth neither one
of us pay any mind to Joe McClure at the other end of the bar.
Well, maybe twenty minutes later, who walks in but old
Mike Lewis himself, looking like a week out of stir hasn’t done a
goddamn thing to take the edge off his crazy. He orders three double
Wild Turkeys in three minutes and pays for each one with a twenty as
fresh and clean as a new-snowed field. It doesn’t take Magnum PI to
figure that Lewis ran out of the gate money they gave him when he got
set free and that he’s robbing gas stations again.
Joe McClure had moved away from the bar and was sitting
at one of those little tables with Mrs. Pac-Man built into the table
top. He was one of those people who could play that game for twenty
minutes without getting bored out of their tit. Well, he’d been at it
for a while, I guess, and then I guess he made a dumb move just as the
song on the jukebox dies.
“Cocksucker!” Joe yelled at the machine. But since
the music just died, it comes out louder than Joe meant it to. You know
how that is. For some reason no one will ever know, Lewis gets the idea
that Joe went and called him a cocksucker. Like I said, prison can
change a man, and sometimes things happen that you don’t ever tell no
one about. So Lewis walks from the bar and shoves Joe right out of his
chair, just like that.
Joe’s hammer spilled out his tool belt of its own
accord. He didn’t fish it out like you’ve heard it told. Maybe you
think that’s a small detail compared to the way he swung that hammer
so hard that he had to yank it free from Lewis’s skull. I disagree.
Well, Jackie Blue’s cleared out pretty quick after
that, and I left along with everyone else, not needing that kind of shit
in my life, so I can’t tell you what Joe’s face looked like while he
watched old Mike Lewis drip blood onto the scummed-up carpet. But I’ve
often wondered on it.
Here’s what I can tell you, though. Mike Lewis didn’t
start life with a full share of brains, and Joe’s claw hammer knocked
enough of what he did have onto the floor so that Lewis wasn’t fit to
dress himself or feed himself, and is today a ward of the state, unless
somebody loves him enough to wipe the shit from the crack of his ass
each morning -- which I sincerely doubt.
And it wasn’t but a week later that I heard someone
call Joe McClure Mad Dog for the first time.
###
"You hear about old Mad Dog, what he done last
night?" Bill Houser wiped chaw spit off his flavor saver. Houser is
one of those good old boys always has a plastic cup with him half full
of black sputum. Makes me sick. The cash he was paying me to sit in a
holler and watch some fellows move bales of weed from one truck to
another made it more tolerable.
"Mad Dog?" I sliced a bite off an apple, ate
it and wiped off my knife. Down at the bottom of the blade is carved a
cross, followed by the word "white," the signature of the old
boy who made it for me. Crosswhite's a good blade, and the old hardass
who made 'em died a few years back, so I keep it sharp and clean.
"Who the hell is Mad Dog?" I asked, pushing the knife back in
my boot.
"That dude what put the hurt on Mike Lewis. Mad Dog
McClure."
"Yeah, I know him. Just never heard him called
such."
Houser shook his head incredulous -- Geat Mashburn out
of the loop? "I ain't ever heard him called anything but. Anyhow,
last night I guess he was over at the Pink Lady, shooting Jager down on
pervert row. He'd gotten himself a favorite -- a slice by the name of
Sunshine, and not a bad choice neither. The meth ain't reached her face
yet like most of the scags down there. Anyhow, Mad Dog's throwing his
money on the table and getting a face full of fish in return, and some
dumb son of a bitch who'd drove down from Monet" -- Good Lord
forgive us, we say it Mo-net around here -- "starts bitching about
how Sunshine isn't giving him the old tuna special. Guess he got mad
enough to go ahead and call that stripper a whore, which ain't exactly
like calling the Virgin Mary one, but still I guess --"
A bang shook us both from the story. I had my sawed-off
up off the bumper and raised before I could see that it was just a
fellow who dropped the plastic-wrapped bale he was hauling. I sat back.
Houser laughed.
"You alright?" he asked me. “Seem a might
bit jumpy.”
"Just tell the story. McClure's stripper gets
called a name, and ..."
"Well, what do you think happens? Mad Dog gets out
that hammer of his he carries like he's just some dumb construction
worker --"
"Well, that he is."
Houser waved this off, rolling his eyes like I'm the
stupid one. "Sure he is. Guess that's why he took that hammer and
turned that boy's front teeth to fairy dust floating in the air."
He mimed a tomahawk chop. "Then he went after the dude's friends,
all three of 'em at a time, and I heard he had two of them on the ground
and the third one balls-out running by the time the bouncers got to
him."
Houser shook his head and swirled his spit cup.
"Can't believe you ain't heard it yet -- a mean
hombre like yourself ought to know about what the other hardcases are up
to."
###
To tell the truth, I didn't give much credit to the
story -- chaw juice isn't the only type of shit known to dribble out
Houser's mouth. But over the next couple of months the hits kept coming.
Stories about Mad Dog -- and it was always Mad Dog in the telling, never
Joe -- trickled down and around. Mad Dog smashed the window out of a
fellow's truck and dragged him out to stomp him in the parking lot at
Remington's. Mad Dog and Sunshine -- who I guess got smitten when he
pulverized that fellow's incisors -- smashing empties against the wall
of the Dew Drop with no one there brave enough to say boo about it. Mad
Dog cracking the arm of some rent-a-cop down at the Ozarks Empire fair
-- he got pulled in on that one, but I never heard nothing coming of it.
All this time I didn't see the fellow, as Jackie banned
him from the bar after that action with Lewis. But one night I ended up
at a little roadhouse just outside of town on account of having just
watchdogged a meth deal out on a farm. It wasn't the biggest deal I ever
saw go down -- just a bunch of trembling suck-mouthed peckerwoods each
scared of their own shadow -- but work had been slow as of late.
I didn't recognize him at first, and might not have at
all if he hadn't been sitting with some other fellows from the life that
I knew. I shook a few hands before I turned to this fellow in the black
tank top.
"Hello, Geat."
He must have looked a hell of a bad-ass to those who
didn’t notice small details. He had a pit-bull tattoo on his bicep,
but it was still wet-looking, like he’d just had it done. And that
bicep, and all his muscles in fact, had grown. But they were gym and
juice muscles, big puffy things -- they always remind me of a flower
grown in a hothouse that looks big and strong but would die if you
replanted it out in the real world. Sunshine was a pretty little thing
all right, but she looked at me with that half-lidded kind of look that
I’ve learned to stay away from. Both of them looked pretty tricked out
with diamonds and clean clothes. Mad Dog McClure wasn’t hauling rebar
for his scratch no more, that much was clear.
"Hello, Joe," I say back.
"It's Mad Dog these days," he says back,
twisting his truck so that the tattoo faced me.
"Course it is," I say, and take out my wallet
and turn to face the bartender. "How about a round for everyone
here -- and let's get some shots with that."
So we did our shots and drank our beers while people
played pool and stuck quarters in the jukebox and played those songs
that I guess it's required by law that you hear every time you step into
a bar out here: "Gimme Three Steps,"
"Thunderstruck," "If You Want to Get to Heaven,"
shit like that. I mostly sat back and watched the rest of the table
slobber all over Mad Dog's ass. He tried to play it cool, but I could
see it plain there behind his mask – he was stone hooked on being Mad
Dog. After a while he got up to piss. A minute later I went over to the
jukebox like I was thinking of playing a song. When he came out the
pisser I waved him over.
"What can I do you for, Geat? If you're looking for
good music on that juke, forget it. Just that same old redneck shit in
there."
I didn't have no idea how to do this. None at all. But
it had to be done -- somebody had to try to save this boy's life.
"Look, Joe --"
"Call me Mad Dog."
Shit. I'd blown it already.
"Mad Dog, look man, I just -- shit. You need to cut
this shit out, amigo."
He laughed like he didn't know what I was talking about,
but I could see it in his eyes. "Cut what shit?”
"You need to get back to your crew and haul some
motherfucking rebar and quitthis 'Mad Dog' shit. You are not … this
isn’t you, man.."
He laughed – that’s all it took, but he went on.
"Aw, fuck all that. You think I'm going to sit back
and let y'all have all the fun? Think I want to keep getting to the job
site at five in the goddam a.m.? Come on, Geat I'm not Joe McClure
anymore. My name's Mad Dog, see?" He tapped his fingers on that
hammer head on his tool belt.
I looked back and saw that the table -- his boys all --
were staring at us. I turned back palms up -- chill out, the hands said.
"All right there, Mad Dig. Look, I understand, I
do. But I always thought you were a good fellow back at Jackie Blue's,
and I don't really want to see no harm come to you. You keep pumping
yourself up like this and some shark is going to come by and take you
down just so they can have people say 'he's the one what killed Mad
Dog.' You just think about it, okay?"
"No hard feelings, Geat. But when you next see old
Jackie, you tell him that I don't take to kindly to being banned,
hear?"
"Now that's a message that you can deliver
yourself, if that's what you want."
###
A few weeks later I got a call from Ricky Beal. He told
me that him and Bill Houser were planning up "a big ole swap."
I knew what he meant -- they'd trade a couple of ounces of meth for a
bale of Houser's weed, simple as can be. They did it every once in a
while, and they'd done business enough that they mostly didn't even
bother with me riding along.
"Well, I don't mind it," I told him,
"just so long as you know that I do all of Houser's watchdogging
and that's not a problem for you. Either way, no one's going to rip no
one off on my watch."
"Yeah, well, that's the thing here, Geat. I guess
you ain't heard yet, but Houser done found himself a new watchdog, much
as I hate to tell you. And seeing as how I don't know his new guy, I
thought I better bring you along."
Now that I thought about it, I hadn't heard from Houser
in a few months. I hated to hear he'd found someone new, though -- he
was good for quite a bit of my green. It happened every once in a while,
though, when someone thought they could save a little money by going
outside of my circle. Never bothered me none, as those folks usually
ended up getting ripped off on the other guy's watch -- one way or
another.
"Geat? Geat, you there?"
"What? Oh, sure. Sure, I don't mind coming along.
Say, what's the name of that new fellow Houser got?"
"Shit, man, it's Mad Dog McClure. See why I want a
little muscle on my side?"
###
Bill Houser's place sat on a couple of acres just
outside Busiek state park. Houser didn't grow his weed on his land -- he
grew it on the government's. More than that, the weed he grew he didn't
sell here. He bought Mexican shit weed off the I-44 pipeline and sold
that around here, and moved his bud north up the pipe where he could get
real money for manicured smoke. The trade was some of his homegrown for
some of Ricky Beal's Nazi dope -- so called because some smart fellow
back in the 70s went to the Missouri State University up in Springfield
and found himself the formula that the Nazis used back in the day to
keep the storm troopers goose-stepping through the war. That little bit
of book-learning is what's made a generation of Ozark folks some of the
biggest meth kings in America -- and it's one of my pleasures in life to
hear two-tooth fellows who can't hardly tell you if the Earth circles
the sun or vise-versa use words like "anhydrous ammonia and
lithium." Ricky Beal's got more than two teeth, seeing as how he
don't touch his own product, but I still wouldn't make him one of my
lifelines on that game show.
Mad Dog arrived late -- I knew he would -- and me and
Ricky and Houser leaned against the house, playing with the dogs. They'd
each brought two men with them for doing the heavy lifting and for just
a little more comfort. I turned down the beer Houser offered but those
boys had several.
You could hear Mad Dog coming before you could see him
-- that kind of frog-throat heavy metal that he liked came roaring up
the driveway, like he had some kind of devil choir announcing him. The
car was one of those little Japanese things with a spoiler on it, red
with black flames crawling up the hood. He parked it next to my old
truck and got out with a pump shotgun in his hands and that hammer still
hanging from his belt. He nodded and swung the shotgun up on his
shoulders as he walked our way. I bet the others saw what he wanted them
to see, the bad guy making his entrance to the movie. I saw the joy
kid-like behind his eyes. It was his finest moment.
"Evening, boys."
"I told you eight-thirty," Houser said.
"And I ain't but ten minutes late, so what?"
Mad Dog gave Houser a glare. Houser might have asked what the point of a
watchdog was if he wasn't there before the merchandise, or he might have
said how I had been there almost an hour already. But all he did was
look down and give that cup of his a little more spit. I pushed one of
the dogs away from me and stood up.
"Hey there, Mad Dog. Good to see you."
"Same, Geat." He just tossed a little nod my
way.
"Boys," I said to the rest, "before this
goes down, me and Mad Dog are going to step inside the house and go over
a couple of ground rules.
"Ground rules?" Ricky asked. "What all is
that? I don't recall nothing about there needing to be ground
rules."
"And I don't remember you ever being around when a
swap's had two watchdogs. It ain't the normal way, and I know an old
hand like Mad Dog can see it clear enough.
I took the pistol out of my waistband and tossed it in
the gravel. Mad Dog took the hint and laid his shotgun up against the
house as he followed he inside. I turned around once we were inside so
that Mad Dog had to shut the door and lean against it to face me. Once
we were inside, he gave me a smile.
"Man, this is a fucking rush. You've got the life,
Geat, for real."
"That I do."
"You ain't really got any ground rules, right? I
mean, look Geat, if this is about that night in the bar, my buddy was
being a jerk. I told him off. I'm awful sorry about the whole thing.
Friends?" And he held his hand out to me.
"I'm awful sorry too." And then I kicked him
in the chest. My boot hit him flush; he went back and took the door
outside with him.
"Holy shit!" someone yelled as I came through
the empty doorway. The dogs started up howling. Mad Dog looked up at the
stars struggling for breath. He fumbled his hammer out of his belt. I
mashed his hand against the gravel. He screamed. I went down on his
chest and pulled out my Crosswhite blade. I looked down at his face and
there wasn't a Mad Dog there. Just Joe McClure. I put the blade in
behind his collarbone and pushed down until you couldn't see the cross
on the blade. I locked eyes with him. First there was fear and then
there was pain and then there was knowing and then there was nothing.
I wiped the blade on his shirt as I stood.
"Boys, we've got a deal to do, then I got a piece
of trash to dump out in the forest."
Houser dropped his spit cup so the brown gunk splashed
out. In the moonlight it looked a lot like Joe's blood.
"He killed Mad Dog. Geat Mashburn killed Mad Dog
McClure."
That's what he said. And I knew that pretty soon that's
what everyone would be saying. I am sorry that they named that boy Mad
Dog. But I don’t blame you if you don’t believe me now.
Copyright 2008 by Jordan Harper
Jordan Harper is a Missouri-born
writer currently living in Brooklyn. His work has been nominated for a
Derringer and will appear in the upcoming Best of Thuglit anthologies.
This is his second contribution to Demolition. He can be reached at author@jordanharper.com
