Page 63 of Road Refugees
Heaven made a lip fart and continued on to the pantry. I jerked my head in the direction of the party, and bumped the door open with my ass. We were assailed by the clanging chanting of the vinyl Knoxie was currently spinning. As we passed his DJ station, I saw he had displayed Beat Your Breasts by the Ovarian Sisters. Roman, a former rock star himself, was arguing music theory with Knoxie, waving an LP cover at him.
I told Slappy, “You don’t want to go there, my friend. You’d be crashing the most intense and renowned ménage that ever existed.”
Slappy gaped. “Ménage?”
“Prospect!” yelled Ford. Former prospects had regaled me with stories of the feats they’d been forced to undergo. I kept watching and waiting with bated breath for Ford to send me into the desert with no food. Like Maddy’s brother Speed, I dreaded being forced to beg from an orgy of Furries—actual people dressed in actual wolf and fox costumes, doing it in the middle of nowhere. Speed had thought he was hallucinating from lack of food.
“Hurry your ass up!” bellowed Ford. I’d considered him a good friend before becoming a prospect, but now, I wasn’t so sure. “People are dying for their Christmas punch!”
It was funny—the way this burly, swarthy Prez yelled “Christmas punch” was frightening. It was rumored he’d murdered his own father, the first Prez, in the desert near Phoenix. Only a former member named Turk was witness, and he’d started his own club in western Arizona.
“Here!” I shouted, hustling the tray full of glassware to the table. One by one I stacked them mathematically, precisely as a soldier would. Almost as quickly, hands reached to grab them.
Duji shouted, “Where’s the fucking rum? Who made this eggnog, a fucking Mormon?”
His wife Dominique tried shaking him by the shoulder. “Sweetheart. This isn’t good for your heart. Drink punch instead.”
Duji shrugged her off and yelled some more. “This stuff is weaker than the eggnog at the farmer’s market!”
“More scorpion bowls!” blathered Funkhauser.
Meanwhile, Slappy was rattling my arm. “Tell me about this fucking ménage!”
Lytton perked up at the mention of “ménage.” “Who’s having a fucking ménage?”
I told Lytton, “Tracy, that’s who! Get this guy. He’s hot for Tracy.”
“Whoa, ho, ho!” shouted Lytton and Ford simultaneously, as fraternal twins would.
Ford said, “Don’t let Tobiah hear you say that.”
Slappy enquired, “Why Tobiah? What’s he got to do with it? He doing her taxes?”
At this, everyone roared. Some guys even doubled over, leaning on the table for support.
The brothers gasped at each other. “Doing her taxes!”
I roared along with them, as a normal brother in arms would, not a lowly prospect. I even ladled myself a glass of the punch. Ford’s phone must’ve buzzed, because he raised it to look, still wheezing with humor.
However, his face darkened right away. “Wolf again,” he told Lytton.
“Wolf Glaser?” asked Faux Pas, his French accent thick and fluid. “Did he ever extract himself from that plane crash in Bogotá?”
“Wolf was in a fucking plane crash?” asked Slappy. He turned to me. “Who’s going to make our fucking compost?”
I was more concerned about the plane crash. I asked Ford, who wasn’t answering Wolf’s call, “Why did his plane crash?”
For the moment, he didn’t regard me as a prospect. “It was one of those twin engine Cessnas, and Wolf loaded it with eleven-hundred pounds of coke.”
I guffawed. “Hell. Even I know that’s way too much weight. Is he OK?”
Ford shrugged. “As far as I know. His next plan was to stuff a bunch of shipping containers with the blow.”
Faux Pas said, “Not a bad idea.”
Ford’s phone dinged, and he read a text. “Not normally. But Wolf just texted, HELP. All in capital letters. HELP. I’m stuck inside a shipping container in Cuba. HELP. It’s a hundred and fifteen degrees in here.”
Everyone looked blankly at each other. Only Duji moved to glug more rum from the new bottle into his mug. It sounded like a very dire situation, but it wasn’t my place to say. Everyone seemed to be waiting for Ford to make a move.
