Do Wah Diddy Die

Chapter 3

3

The hot air hit Luci in the face like a wet towel. She caught her breath, but it wasn’t catchable with air that thick. Memories stirred. Old, happy memories of long slow days under shaded trees with...Stu? She examined the name from all sides. It seemed to fit within the memory, which returned in a sudden rush. Stu, like Seymour males large and small, had been an utter weenie, but he’d also been someone to play with who took orders well. He got a dragon when she got the pig. Yeah. Luci gave the pig a fond pat, tried out another breath and found it was a little easier, as if her lungs were already adapting to the slower pace and water level in the air.

“Luci, you’re not in Wyoming anymore,” she murmured.

“Wyoming?” Mickey looked at her. “I know someone from Wyoming.”

Everyone, Luci found, knew someone from Wyoming. And expected you to know them, too. Granted it wasn’t an over-populated state, but Wyoming people liked a large area of personal space. Miles large.

“What—”

“Butt Had,” Luci said. No one ever knew anyone from Butt Had. If they did, they wouldn’t admit it.

“Butt...Had?” Mickey blinked, getting that shell-shocked look again.

“I’m afraid so.” Luci sighed. “You see, when they filed for incorporation, there was this broken “e” key on the typewriter—”

The white around the blue got larger, not smaller, and she decided to give it up as a bad job. “My mother won’t live there, which is far more important to my piece of mind than a few missing ‘e’s’.”

“Uh...huh.” Despite his words, he kept looking at her like she was from Mars instead of a small town in Wyoming that should have been called Butte Head. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the pig start to slip. She reached for it at the same moment as Mickey and ended up almost lip-to-lip with him.

He had nice lips.

She reined in her errant lips before they could take a taste. While he dealt with the pig, she stuffed her unruly libido firmly back in the box marked don’t open and slammed down the lid. This was not the time to find she had something in common with her mother besides a last name.

Mickey settled the pig and tried to keep his gaze away from Luci, but it kept straying back. Questions about her bubbled across the surface of his mind. He happened across one he could ask without being rude.

“What do you do in Butt—there?”

She stopped. He did, too. The underpass didn’t make the best backdrop for her, but it didn’t seem to matter. There was something so...so...he didn’t know—siren. That was it. She was like those mythical siren girls that called to men to crash on the—

“I’m a Do Wah,” she said.

—rocks. He felt the impact, but the pity in her eyes blunted the pain. He choked a couple of times, then managed to croak out, “A what?”

She licked her red lips, the tip of her tongue pink and moist as it traced the curve. Lucky tongue—

“I’m a Do Wah.”

Another crash against the rocks, but it didn’t hurt as much as it should have.

“What the—” he struggled for a moment, managed to snap almost politely, “exactly what is a do wat?”

“Do Wah, not do wat.”

“What is a do wah?” He squeezed it out through gritted teeth.

“A hummer with a bit of vocal thrown in.” He swallowed three times and his eyes bugged just a bit from the sockets, but he didn’t lose it. She was impressed. When she did “Seymour,” men cried for their mothers.

“A—is that in a dictionary?”

“No, a club.”

To aid in his understanding, she sang the first chorus of “Do Wah Diddy.” His eyes widened in horror. They didn’t narrow when she stopped, so she added, “I don’t actually sing that, you understand? I hum until the do wah diddies.”

She opened her mouth to sing some do wah diddies for him but he cut in, “Don’t—I get the picture. You sing backup.”

She gave him a pleased smile. He stared at her, and she counted four heartbeats before he said, “My car is over there.”

Fern donned her joke glasses, the smell of plastic filling her nostrils with cloying force as she helped Donald with his. They perched crookedly on the thick end of his real nose. She sat back, wiped a sweat-wet hand on her dress, then reached for the key and fired the engine.

Donald rolled down the window, his shoulder bumping hers at the end of each rotation. Humid gas-fumed air oozed inside, increasing, rather than decreasing, her rising claustrophobia.

“You ready?”

“Yeah,” she lied through dry lips. She rested her hand on the gearshift. The seat belt that had attacked her when she closed the door now rubbed against her neck. She looped it behind her back and flexed her arms, trying to ease the tension in her shoulders. A river of sweat ran down between her sagging breasts and pooled in the clump of polyester fabric at her waist.

“Hit the gas and the brights at the same time, Fern,” he directed, like she didn’t know. He wiped his hands down the sides of his pants, then dabbed at the silver circlet of sweat that beaded around the edges of his hair. “And try to swerve in as close as you can get to the curb so’s they can’t see the gun ‘til too late.”

The man trundled the pig-laden cart closer, pulling their target—the Seymour woman—into their line of fire. Fern eased the car from the curb, and let it set its own pace toward the man bending to fit his key into the trunk. The woman walked behind him, looking around her as interestedly as if she were looking at a New Orleans tourist spot instead of a gritty underpass.

For one long unnerving moment, it seemed the woman looked right at her, the expression on her face so like the photo Fern had studied this afternoon it sent a chill that didn’t cool down her back. She sucked the thick air in a hiss through the gap in her front teeth and opened her mouth to beg Donald to call it off, but he spoke first.

“Hit it, Fernie!”

Old instincts took over. She stamped on the gas. The engine revved, but they didn’t speed up. She took her foot off the clutch. It popped, bobbing both their heads and killing the engine.

“Damn it, Fern—”

She didn’t try to talk, just cranked the engine over and tried again. The car jerked, but this time it went forward.

“Headlights!” Donald ordered. “You want they should see us?”

She reached for a knob. Wipers scraped dryly across her view. She hit another button and Waylon Jennings poured out the speakers.

“What you doing? Give me some damn light!”

Fern used her free hand to pull every knob she could find on the dash, biting back a muffled cry as Donald lifted the AK-47 free of the blanket, jabbing her in the ribs in the process.

Icy air blasted her face. The trunk popped open, cutting off her rear view. A soapy jet of water blanked out her forward vision. Then, when she’d almost given up hope, the lights came on at the same moment the car lurched up the curb.

She heard the rifle clatter against the metal frame of the window as the right side tires went up, a clunk as they came down. Donald howled. Fern joined him when the butt came down on her hand on the gearshift. Donald’s joke glasses sailed off his nose and landed in her lap.

Fern stepped up the pressure on the gas, adjusted the clutch and shifted up. The butt of the rifle pulverized her fingers again. The wipers cleared her front view. They were weaving, but going toward their prey—who was already disappearing from sight, just bare seconds before Donald found the trigger and depressed it, releasing a deadly hail of lead outside the car and a painful rain of hot spent casings inside the car.

They might still have been able to do the job if Donald had been able to control the gun, but Teddy’s AK-47 had its own agenda.

It bucked in Donald’s grip, first tracing a line of fire up across the concrete roof of the underpass. Then it moved down to explode the pig into a pile of fluff. Donald cursed, wrestled the gun down, over-corrected and narrowly missed shooting out their tires. An erratic pattern of bullet holes appeared in the tarmac.

The AK-47’s distinctive sound in the enclosed space of the car was something Fern would never forget. Her driving, already below standard, worsened with the unending pelting by the casings and her attempts to dodge the gun butt as Donald struggled to regain control.

She scraped past a parked car and almost crashed into a concrete support. Gritting her teeth, she managed to thread the wavering Yugo through cars and people the full length of the underpass, taking the final turn with a near flourish from sheer relief.

Behind them she heard the thunder clap of an exploding gas tank. In her side mirror, she saw a belch of black smoke surge out, clutching at them with vast dark hands, then the road curved to the left, carrying them out of sight.

Unbelievably, they were driving towards the freeway. Neither spoke until the car, now smoothly obedient, made the run onto the freeway entrance ramp.

After a long silence, Donald said, “I think we should have bought the Uzi.”

It was a generous admission. Fern offered her own, “I think we should’ve stole American.”