The Feet of God

56 - A FRENCH LEAVE

“Ready to go?” I asked my new friend.

“Mais, oui.”

“May we what?”

He explained, “Oh, it is just a little French.  I speak the language from time to time.  I am originally from near Baton Rouge in Louisiana.  Mostly Cajun and a little French-Créole mix.”   He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes.  “Let’s go.”

I turned and headed over to the vomiting driver with the bloody nose.  “Hey, dude, I’m leaving now and I gotta get my shit outta your car.  Gimme the keys.”

Without looking up from the ground the boy reached in his pocket and tossed me the car keys.  But a tanned hand reached out and snatched them before I could.  Olive green eyes fixated on me.  “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”

“Huh?”

“We need a ride to the airport,” he casually shrugged.  “So I am simply borrowing their automobile for the moment.  I am the designated driver.”

The injured boy crawled to his feet.  “Hey, gimme those keys back!”  He turned to the other dudes and shouted, “Bra’s, they’re stealing our wheels!  Fuck it, let’s get the pricks!”  The three other boys quickly joined the driver and charged at us, and in a flash I saw the glint of four switchblades out and ready to slash away.

“Easy, now, easy,” I tried to reassure them while backing up.  “We ain’t jacking your car.  We’re just getting my stuff so’s I can get the hell outta here.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the stranger holding the keys to see what he was up to.  To my surprise, in a silky smooth motion he reached under his jacket to pull out the biggest gun I’ve ever seen.  He pointed its long, black barrel directly at the teenage attackers.

“I wouldn’t advise it, punks.”

One by one the dudes put their knives away and retreated back to the bar.  With his huge pistol still aimed at the boys, my friend opened the driver’s door of the car and slid inside.  I ran around to the other side and jumped in.

This guy was good.  He could handle a weapon, stare down four furious hopped-up teenagers, and still get the key in the ignition and start the car without seeming to break into a sweat.  His glare was focused and intense.  The car’s engine roared, and bald tires squealed as the rubber met the road.

The dudes raged with rude and offensive shouts from the safety of the bar’s front door while we departed.  The last thing I thought I heard was one of ‘em yelling something about a shit sandwich.  We paid them no mind, speeding under the cover of night toward the future, which I figured was a nearby airport, a plane, and a one-way ticket out of Nebraska with an armed French-talking stranger.

The greenish glow from the dashboard cast an eerie shadow across the long face and sharp nose of my green-eyed companion, making him look even more mysterious as we raced down the dark backroads.

I lit a cigarette I’d bummed from Nancy the swamp donkey back at the bar.  “You seem to know your way around,” I said in admiration.

“I have been here before.”

“Ain’t you worried we’ll have cops on our ass?”

“Oh, not to worry, we’ll be in the air tout de suite.”  He paused and gave me a sidelong look.  “You know, you are very fortunate you escaped before you were beaten and likely set on fire.”

“What?”

The golden stranger eyed me.  “You do not know?  Those are the Dudnik brothers.  I have had, shall we say, occasional business dealings with their father.  The children are known hell-raisers around these parts.  They get high and drunk, and for fun, they attack homeless men and drifters such as yourself.  They beat them to death and dump the body naked on the side of the road.  Sometimes the bodies are set on fire, other times desecrated by spray painting the corpse with graffiti.”

“No shit.  How do you know all this?”

“Oh, it is what you might call an open secret.  Their family has a lot of power and influence in the county,” he rubbed his thumb and two fingers together in the international sign for money.  “They are also politically well-connected.  The police always say the individual was just another unfortunate victim of suicide.”

Five minutes later we pulled off onto a dirt road then down an embankment, and then out onto a paved field.  At the end was a windsock on top of a street light standing over a little blue biplane.

“Nous sommes ici,” my pilot friend looked at me, “if you’ll pardon my French.”

“No problemo,” I nodded.

We climbed outta the borrowed GTO.  The stranger got up onto a section of the wing and opened a hatch cover.  I grabbed my stuff and walked over.  “Toss me your backpack and I’ll stow it in here,” he said.  I did as he asked.  Then he reached into another compartment near the back of the plane and pulled out some tubing and a gas can.

While he was doing that I noticed some writing on the side of the plane.  Well, more than just writing, there was a picture of a black cat, distinctly a tomcat.  I could tell it was a tomcat because it was a picture of a male cat presenting his Cheerio looking over his shoulder with a wink and a knowing grin.  Above the cat was the words, “Spraying My Territory.”

He caught me looking.

“C’est moi, Yeller Tom.”  He proudly pointed at the picture.  “I was baptized Thomas Michel Alexandre Poiré Dubois, but everyone knows me as Yeller Tom.”

He flipped the lid on the car’s gas tank and removed the cap.  “Hand me that hose,” he commanded.  He stuck one end of the hose into the tank, then he handed me the other end of the hose.  “And now,” he stifled a wicked laugh, “we will borrow some petrol, mon ami.”