The Third Magic (7 page)

Emily was still staring at the portrait, transfixed.

"Ms. B?"

"I know him," Emily rasped. "His name is Arthur."

PINTO

H
e had been born John
Stapp. That was the name on his school and prison records, but everyone knew him as Pinto. He liked the name: Pinto. It was a kind of horse. He didn't know much more than that, even though he'd grown up in Montana, but he'd always liked the sound of it.

Pinto wasn't in Montana now; hadn't been since he broke parole in '94. He doubted if anyone was still looking for him there, but he wasn't going back. He never stayed very long in one place, anyway. His longest stretch, outside of doing time, was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he'd hung with a gang called the Vandals in a bar called the Mad Dog Cafe.

A succession of owners had tried to take over the Mad Dog, make it into a respectable place, keep out the bikers. But no one could keep out the Vandals.

The Vandals were a righteous gang, with colors and discipline, almost like the army. Pinto felt at home with them. He liked the discipline. If somebody had to get whacked, he'd whack them. He did what he had to do, and if people didn't like it, they could leave. Or else he'd kill them.

He'd ridden his first motorcycle with the Vandals. Now, heading westward on Route 40 out of Ohio astride a Harley Hell Bound Pro Street Custom which he'd taken off some jerk kid outside of Tijuana, Mexico (he'd found nearly four hundred dollars taped to the jerk kid's inside thigh), he felt as if he'd always known how to ride. And he was wearing Vandal colors, purple and green.

He didn't always wear colors; just when he wanted to. He wanted to now because colors would give him status at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, where every biker from the Atlantic to the Pacific spent the first week in August. A lot of the bikers were stone fakes, doctors and lawyers who went to Sturgis to pretend they had dicks. But there were some there who knew what was happening. They knew what it meant to be a Vandal. They gave the colors respect.

But still, he didn't wear them all the time. That would be too much like following a rule, and Pinto didn't follow anything. Once a fellow Vandal named Banger had criticized him for not wearing the colors. Pinto had responded by cutting through the man's nostril with his pocketknife.

Pinto didn't like rules, he'd explained to Banger after the wound healed and they were tight again. He liked the discipline, he'd whack whoever needed it, but he wasn't about to follow anybody's dumb-ass rules. Sometimes he was a Vandal, okay? Through and through, purple and green, down to the hair on his ass. And sometimes he'd just as soon take these guys' heads off with his teeth. He'd said he hoped Banger understood that point.

That was why he hadn't hung around Montana after doing time. Too many rules. Well, what did those parole geeks expect him to do, get a job at McDonald's? Or how about selling shoes down at the mall, yes, ma'am, I'll see to little Junior's footsies right away, yes ma'am. Shit, he was on the road an hour after he got out of the joint.

Never got stopped either, until that last thing in Pittsburgh at the Mad Dog. It had started out cool, nothing serious, just smashing some bottles because the latest owner was this righteous asshole, said he wouldn't serve them, had his finger on the alarm as soon as the Vandals walked in the door. So they knew the cops were coming, and they would have been out of there in a couple of minutes.

There was just Banger—he and Pinto were tight again by then—smashing a few bottles around, and Metalhead kicking the jukebox, and Fisheye, he was feeling up this girl, some slut probably liked it anyway, when this asshole bartender who owned the place decided he was like the Lone Avenger all of a sudden and pulled out a shotgun.

That was when things started to get serious as far as Pinto was concerned, because the shotgun was pointed right at him, even though he wasn't doing anything except trying to get a beer from the cooler. He only defended himself, pulling out a knife and throwing it so that it landed,
thwuck
, right in the bartender's eye, and then Pinto grabbed the shotgun out of the guy's hands while he was still standing even though he was dead, and then Pinto shot the girl. Then Fisheye, the Vandal who was feeling up the girl, started to get belligerent, so Pinto shot him too, nasty mother, and then the other two were all over him like white on paint, so what could he do.

He shoved his hand, straight-arm, into Metalhead's throat. He'd learned that in prison. Saw some big black lifer from Alabama do that once in the latrine. The lifer had probably been paid for whacking the guy, since he didn't seem pissed off while he was doing it. He'd been a Marine in Vietnam, Special Forces or something like that. They taught those crazy bastards all kinds of shit. Anyway, this one wasn't young, must have been pushing fifty, but he was one strong inmate. He'd shoved his hands into that white guy's gullet so easy, it was like he was fixing the dude's collar.

And so Metalhead went down, which left only Banger standing. He started to back away with his hands making that motion that people do when they're scared shitless, like "there, there." It made Pinto laugh.

"Think I'm going to kill you, too, Banger?"

Banger forced himself to smile, even though his face was all white and he was probably taking a righteous dump in his pants at the time, and he said, "No, no, man. You're not going to do that. We're friends, okay? Like brothers. And the cops are coming. Come on, we got to get out of here, you know?" And then he looked at his hands and saw that they were shaking, so he balled them into fists like he was ashamed to look at them.

It was that gesture, that little shame thing, that tipped the scales against him in Pinto's eyes. He took two steps over to where the dead bartender lay with the knife sticking out of his eye, and he pulled it out. "Yeah, okay, let's go," Pinto said, and he watched Banger grow a couple of inches shorter as the breath sighed out of him with relief. Pinto wiped the blood off the knife with a cocktail napkin. Then he grabbed a handful of yellow goldfish crackers and ate them while he took the cash out of the register.

"Come on," Banger said. He was getting bigger again. Pinto had always liked Banger. He came from Utah or Colorado or something, one of those pretty states. And he was pretty himself. He had long hair down to his waist. Girls always liked how he looked. If he'd wanted to, Banger could have been like those guys in TV commercials. He had all his teeth and was really good looking. But he didn't really have any balls.

Pinto knew that now. So he walked slowly and deliberately in front of Banger when they got to the doorway because he knew Banger wouldn't say anything, even about Pinto taking the money and not offering him any, and then he turned around in a quick, graceful movement and sank the blade of the knife between Banger's ribs, right into his heart.

Their faces were so close that it was almost funny. Banger must have been eating candy or something, because his breath smelled like peppermint. When Pinto pulled out the knife, some blood dripped onto his hand. It felt hot.

Pinto walked out of the Mad Dog Cafe" singing Foreigner's "Hot Blooded," chuckling at the clever play on words as he wiped the knife off onto his jeans. Six hours later, heading west on Route 40, two days away from the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, he was still singing the song, steering with one hand as he strummed with the other, playing air guitar against the blood-caked denim along his thigh.

STURGIS!

E
very year during the first
week of August, some four hundred thousand motorcyclists from every state in the union descend upon the small town of Sturgis, South Dakota, for a seven-day nonstop party on two wheels.

It began in 1938, when a local businessman and enthusiast of the new sport of motorcycling invited a few of his friends for a retreat away from their day-to-day lives. Now, six and a half decades later, the principle still holds true. Once a year, all manner of people from every walk of life— farmers, accountants, dentists, drifters—shed their quotidian skins to become Bikers, with a capital B.

Enroute to Sturgis, Bedwyr, who had made a lifelong mission of the study of motorcycles and their owners and had painstakingly taught himself the vocabulary of the American road, shared his newfound knowledge with the other knights. According to his theory, there were six main categories of Bikers: Tourists, Old Greasers, Clubbers, Colors, Doc Bikers, and Hot Dogs.

The Tourists were, generally speaking, family men. They traveled, often in packs, on large road machines loaded with camping gear and food. Often they were accompanied by wives or girlfriends of long standing as they made their way around the country during their precious vacation days from work.

Old Greasers, more often than not, did not work, except for occasional odd jobs when making a living became absolutely necessary. Even then, as their employers would soon learn, their work was secondary to their biking plans. For a Greaser, a weekend of hunting in northern Minnesota or the last fine day of fall in Kentucky will supersede all deadlines.

Clubbers belonged to organized groups, with laws, bylaws, and sublaws. They funded scholarships, brought Christmas toys to orphanages, helped out in soup kitchens, and formed glee clubs.

The Clubbers' evil twins, the Colors, had no laws, and their idea of glee often involved terror. These were gang members, tribesmen who adorned themselves with the colors of their tribes. Their main lines of work were drug dealing, theft, and hired murder. It was universally acknowledged that when Colors appeared, the party was, for the most part, over.

Doc Bikers, by contrast, were the aristocrats of the motorcycling population. These were professionals—doctors, lawyers, college professors. While others of their ilk were flying airplanes or pursuing other expensive hobbies, the Doc Bikers took pseudonyms like "Spike" or "Broadway" and zoomed off on their forty-thousand-dollar handmade vehicles in butter-soft leathers to enjoy their weekend identities.

The worst combination of Bikers possible was the Doc Biker/Colors mix. Egalitarian though the Sturgis Rally may be, there was an unspoken law, especially among Doc Bikers, to stay as far away from Colors as possible.

Finally, Bedwyr explained, came the Hot Dogs, or as the nation's young people referred to individuals of this stripe, Wieners. They were generally young, generally good-hearted, generally foolish, occasionally stupid. They loved speed. Their main ambition in life was to impress girls. They liked to drink beer. Most Hot Dogs were robbed of their bikes and other possessions at least twice during their first decade of biking, after which they usually settled down to become Tourists, Old Greasers, or bus riders.

Whatever their category, though, the Bikers at Sturgis were, almost always, men. Men with their women, perhaps, or men alone, or men bonding in an unmistakably heterosexual way with other men. However they combined, men were at the core of every activity in Sturgis. The Rally was a male function, a tribal gathering as ancient in its underlying principles as a Roman battalion or an Aztec priesthood. Because Sturgis was not about motorcycles, not really. It was about Machismo.

Here the trappings of civilization, the masks of social evolution, were cast aside. Money, position, academic degrees, family pedigree ... These were of no consequence in this place at this time in the testosterone-heavy summer of the year, when the measure of a man could be found only in the strength of his arm and the power of his will. The usher in church with the clean fingernails and a smile for everyone transmogrified during this week. He became one of the Bikers, wild and dangerous men who challenged one another in contests of strength and skill and the ability to hold one's liquor, men whose motorcycles were symbols of their own raw and potent sexuality.

And their women, displayed like spoils of war, were proud to belong to them, for they, too, had shed their skins. Stripping off the veneers of housewives and mothers, of career women and pink-collar workers, of sweet girls and sensible women, they transformed themselves into babes, biker chicks, sex machines, objects of desire to be displayed and coveted. They wore their hair unbound and flowing, their clothing tight. They enticed. They lifted the atmosphere with their beauty and charged it with their ripe sexuality. The very air became an incendiary mixture of gasoline and leather, alcohol and heady perfume. The women sent out a signal: Try and win me. And their men sent another: Touch her and you're dead.

Most of the time, no one tried. That restraint, too, was part of the macho mystique. No one but a true Hot Dog would openly invite disaster from men covered with chrome studs, fueled with confidence and beer.

Unfortunately, all of the Knights of the Round Table, after their miraculous transfer from the Middle Ages to the first years of the twenty-first century, became Hot Dogs.

Hal first knew that something had gone wrong when he saw one of his charges walking down Lazelle Street with a woman slung over his shoulder. It was Lugh, carrying the spiked mace with which he had nearly attacked the neighbor's Holstein back in Jones County, and for which he had been arrested and temporarily jailed. Never overly bright, even in the days of King Arthur, Lugh's transition to the present time had perhaps been among the more awkward. He simply did not understand, or care, that one should not take what one wanted just because one was physically able to do so.

Lugh, of course, was physically able to take just about anything. But he was an honorable man, at least according to the mores of the ancient and semibarbarous Celts, and so would never have stolen anything of real value. A man's horse, for example, was utterly safe with Lugh. In fact, had anyone attempted to steal a horse (or motorcycle, as Lugh did understand that they fulfilled the same function), he would certainly have killed him, and in as bloody and painful a fashion as the gravity of the crime warranted.

But to take liquor or food when there was plenty to be had? Why, this was nothing resembling a wrongdoing. Indeed, for a man to deny these necessities to his fellow was, as far as Lugh was concerned, a mark of ill breeding, and hence deserving of at least a strong thump on the nose.

And as for women... Well, there were certain things a man just couldn't help. It wasn't as if they were good plain women minding their spinning; no, these were beauties with red lips and clothes that let you know just what they had to offer. The one slung over his shoulder, for example, was wearing a pair of black jeans with two ovals cut out of the rear. Her cheeks, plump and rosy-white as pillows, had caught Lugh's admittedly limited imagination and had not let go.
Come to me
, they taunted. And he had answered their call.

The woman in question did not appear to be particularly displeased with the situation. She even smiled as the crowd parted to let them through. It was a warm day, and the sun bounced off the white perfection of her buttocks. There was many an appreciative comment as they passed. Lugh beamed with pride and satisfaction.

"What are you going to do with her?" someone called out.

Lugh only grinned while emitting a low rumble of anticipation.

"Oh, no," Hal muttered as he took in the scene, trying to think of the course of action that would result in the least amount of pain and injury. As he was deliberating, a cadre of motorcycles revved up less than a block away and peeled out toward Lugh and his captive.

Hal felt his heart sink. The bikers were all, to a man, wearing red bandannas. Not colors, exactly, but there was no doubt in Hal's mind that they were decidedly not Hot Dogs. "Put her down, Lugh," he shouted as he ran to place himself between Lugh and the bandannas. "Do it now," he added softly, "while we can still walk away."

"Why would I want to do that?" Lugh answered, genuinely puzzled. Then he saw the men approaching and grinned, his smile breaking the black bushy expanse of his beard with a row of broken brown teeth. He gave the woman's bare rump a lusty pat.

"Aye, and a beauty she is, too, Lugh," chimed in Curoi MacDaire, rubbing his hands together in anticipation of a rousing bare-knuckle fight.

Although MacDaire was considerably smaller and smarter than Lugh, he was still more a fighter than a thinker. The two of them, come together from Ireland, could cause more trouble than all the rest put together.

"Cut it out!" Hal shouted above the noise of the gathering crowd. "Get him out of here, MacDaire!"

"Ah, you'll be jesting now," MacDaire said. "This is nowt but a little exercise to work up a thirst, don't you know."

The woman on Lugh's shoulder giggled. "You talk cute," she said.

MacDaire cocked his head. "How could we disappoint the lass, I ask you?" Then he ducked, just in time for Hal to take the first blow square on the jaw. He missed everything that happened after that.