Herman Reno was behind the bar when Flamber Aigle walked in. The two hadn’t seen each other in at least twenty-five years, but Herman recognized him right away. There weren’t too many human-sized birds whose feathers looked like flames around those parts. Around anywhere, probably. Flamber was an anomaly, forged not by the machines that form most bodies now but by some freak occurrence of nature. What Herman couldn’t figure out, though, was why Flamber’d just walked into Reno’s Icehouse. Everyone knew the only people welcome there these days were members of Mad Jack’s biker gang or people there for black market body mods in what used to be the pool room. It’d been a fucking shame, Herman thought, to get rid of the tables. Used to be the best-maintained ones in Linn County. Even got them re-felted every couple years. But people don’t have time to shoot eight ball these days. Least, not that kind of eight ball.
“Flamber, you old mother fucker,” Herman said. “You’re looking good.”
“Reno, my man,” Flamber said. “I thought you were dead.”
“Why’d you think a dumb-ass thing like that?,” Herman asked.
“I just assume everyone’s dead.”
“Fair.”
“Looks like something got you at some point,” he said, motioning to Herman’s bionic arms. He’d lost the real ones in a car bombing, but Mad Jack had given him top-notch replacements, the best he had, in exchange for the use of the back room. It was a deal Herman didn’t like, but he’d had to say yes. It’s hard to serve beers when you ain’t got arms.
“We’ve all been through some shit, haven’t we?” Herman said. “What can I do you for today?”
“You still serve Lone Star.”
Herman glanced over at the wall, where three bikers were plugged into VR headsets. They were gone to the real world, and he figured it’d be a while until they got unplugged. Mad Jack’s brother Pete usually handled that—bringing the men back into real life—but he was out of town on business, so Herman was in charge of it that day. He’d get a call at some point, when the men’s time was up, and then he’d bring them out, and as long as he got Flamber out of there before that moment, maybe no one would ever know his old buddy was around.
Still, he wondered, why the fuck was his old buddy around?
“We serve some homebrew shit that the Fielder boys make. The real shit’s way too expensive. That good enough?”
“That’s good enough,” he said, and he slid him the beer, then cracked one open for himself as well. They clinked the bottles together and then toasted the faded poster of Toby Keith on the wall. He’d come in once, years before the stomach cancer got him, and got properly sloshed, signed the poster that was already hanging there, and after his death, it’d become a tradition that you toasted Toby with your first beer.
“Some things never change,” Flamber said, and Herman laughed.
“You’re gonna have to get out of here after this beer,” Herman said. “I mean, I fuckin’ hate to do this to an old friend, but it ain’t safe here for you.”
“Why’s that?”
“We’re a biker bar now.”
“You were always a biker bar.”
“We’re only a biker bar now.”
He took a sip of the beer. “This is good stuff. The Fielders make it? How’s old Becky doing?”
“She’s gone.”
“Dead?”
“I don’t know. Missing, so if I had to put money on it…”
“Damn shame,” Flamber said. “I loved hearing her sing. No one did a meaner ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter.’”
He downed his beer, then took his wallet out of his pocket.
“You’re all good,” Herman said. “That one’s on me.”
“You’re really fuckin’ trying to get rid of me,” Flamber said.
“If I could let you stick around, I would.”
“What if I say I need something?”
“Then I’d especially urge you to get the fuck out of here. Ain’t nothing worth getting involved with…well, I ain’t gonna say it, but it ain’t for you.”
“My wife,” Flamber said, but Herman cut him off.
“She’s a good woman. Whatever she needs, it’s not here.”
Flamber stood up and pushed his stool in. The bikers plugged into VR over in the corner of the room were still just as motionless as ever, dead to the real world, but Herman knew if something went wrong there, if the power flashed off and the generator failed, bounced them out of the cyber world, that they’d take one look at Flamber and they’d have their guns at their hip. It was good he was getting out of there.
“Fare thee well,” Flamber said. It was an old Townes Van Zandt reference that the two of them would make at bar close, back when Flamber would close a different bar down at least three times a week, when he was just a good-for-nothing mother fucker with a drinking problem. Back when people still looked at him and got terrified, before everyone was a little changed, a little fucked up.
***
The Marouli brothers had been the top officers in the Linn County Mechanized Calvary, a motorcycle enthusiast club for people with Confederate heritage. They weren’t bad guys, back in those days. There were charity runs and fundraisers, Toys for Tots, barely any illegal shit, but then everything changed, and they changed too.
Jack Marouli, the oldest, was 6-foot-7 and bald as a tire. After he got hooked on steroids, he started going by Mad Jack. Now, he ran the whole Texas Gulf Coast. You wanted any drug stronger than weed, and you were going through Mad Jack. He carried a staff with him with diamond-plated longhorn horns on the top of it, shaved to so sharp a point that it’d go right through a man. Herman had seen it once. This ex-cop had been snooping around the bar, trying to tease out some information. About a week later, Mad Jacks walked in the front door with the man’s head suspended from the end of the staff. That was when the suggestion that only gang members could drink at Reno’s became something stronger than just a suggestion.
***
It was some time after 1 a.m. when Herman knocked on the door of what he hoped was still Flamber Aigle’s house. He’d been drinking behind the bar, all night until close, drunk enough that he risked paying a visit to his old friend. The door opened.
“Herman?,” he said, and Herman could hear the sleep in his voice. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry,” Herman said. “It’s late, I know. I hope I didn’t wake your wife.”
“You didn’t. She lost her hearing three years ago.”
“Well, shit.”
“Shit.”
“I just…,” Herman said. “I just…”
“What is it?”
“I know you didn’t just wander into my bar for the first time in a quarter fucking century just because you needed a beer. Something’s up.”
“Herman,” Flamber said. “Nothing’s up.”
“Bullshit.”
“I just…I’d heard some things. I’d heard your place was where to go when you were desperate.”
“I hope you ain’t trying to score Blitz X. That stuff fucks you the hell up, Flamber. It’s a ticking time bomb.”
“I’m not looking for drugs. I’m looking to save Tiff’s life. She’s falling apart, man. Fucking rotting from the outside. We don’t know what it is, but…”
“I fuckin’ get it, man. You think Mad Jack’s got some way to save her.”
“Look at your fuckin’ arms, man. They’re magnificent. I know he gave ‘em to you, and I thought he might be able to stop whatever’s happening to her. Build her a new body. I love her, man. I’d fuckin’ do anything for her.”
“You don’t know what he’d take from you. This house, for one. Every fuckin’ cent you got. He’d have you working security detail for him. He’d kill you if you even breathed wrong. I get you want to save her, but you’re a fucking idiot for coming into the bar.”
“I’m a fucking idiot in love,” Flamber said. “I can’t lose her.”
“You try making a deal with Mad Jack and she’s gonna be the one losing you.”
“I don’t know where else to turn.” He started crying then, big, wet tears dripping from his eyes to his beak, pooling there until they overflowed and dropped to the floor. Herman put a hand on his shoulder. The feathers felt like a gentle breeze.
“I’m risking a lot of shit by being here,” he said. “By even comin’ to warn you.”
“So, why are you?”
“Because you’re a good man, and seeing you, thinking about the days when all I had to do was pour beers and not be the receptionist for a fucking racist biker syndicate. It just got me in my feelings.”
“Can you help me, though? If not Jack, where the fuck am I supposed to turn?”
Herman sighed. “I don’t see how I can help. Jack hated you back then. He sure as hell ain’t going to have time for you now.”
“I want to talk to Pete.”
“Mad Pete? He’s just as fucked up as his brother. More, probably, because he ain’t got nothing left in his head but a bunch of metal spikes. “Mad” ain’t just a moniker with him.”
“We used to be friends, or something like friends. He owes me one.”
“Whatever you might have done for him back then, I can guarantee you it ain’t enough to get any reciprocity. He’ll kill you just like Jack would.”
Pete Marouli always lived in the shadow of his older brother. He was almost a foot shorter and still almost weighed as much, his whole body round from beer, nachos, more beer, so he’d used the money they brought it to make himself unrecognizable—eyes fused together, spike implants all over his skull. He handled most of the out-of-town business for the gang. Jack was too big a target to leave Linn County, and Pete looked so fucked up that no one dared mess with him. There’d been that incident out in Sacramento, but that was the closest he’d come to getting whacked.
“Please,” Flamber said. “I need to talk to him. I can get through to him.”
***
Two weeks later, when Mad Jack was staying at one of his girlfriend’s places out at Bowie Beach, lying low for a little bit, which was a thing he did from time to time when he started feeling any level of heat, Flamber was back at Reno’s Icehouse, this time for a clandestine meeting with Mad Pete. It’d taken a lot of liquid courage for Herman to even bring up the possibility of a discussion. He figured even bringing it up would get his ass killed, but he was an old man now, close to death’s door, so if Pete accelerated it just a bit, it might have been a relief. He was surprised when Pete said yes to a meeting. Just the two of them. But Pete was running late that day, and Herman was getting real fucking nervous about it.
“Maybe you should get going,” he said. “I don’t like the feel of this.”
“I came here to talk to Pete. I’m sticking around until I can.”
The bar was empty, save for one biker thug who was plugged in. It was like a reward, getting to go into VR, an escape from this world into something beautiful. Herman didn’t like thinking about what the men had to do to earn that reward. It usually involved a lot of blood.
“I’ll pour you another beer then,” Herman said, and he pulled out a fresh bottle and emptied it into Flamber’s glass. “I can’t even get a clean one?,” Flamber said, and he started laughing, and Herman started laughing too, and the both of them were just cracking the fuck up when the door swung open and Pete stepped in, flanked by his usual two-man security detail, both of ‘em holding hunting rifles that had been rigged up to shoot enough rounds per second that they could take out a whole room before you could blink. For a moment, Herman thought this was the end, this was the fucking end of it all, that Mad Pete was just going to mow him and Flamber down, that everything he’d built, this bar, this life, everything was about to go away in a sea of gunfire, and he realized he welcomed that—more than welcomed even, he longed for the bullets to rip him apart. But Pete just walked up to the bar and asked for a whiskey. Two of them, one for him and one for Flamber, and the two of them took the shots, then retreated to the back, alone, his security goons left to linger by the door, and Herman closed his eyes. He hadn’t been sleeping well, the tension of this meeting playing over and over in his head, and he drifted into a dream, right there, standing at the bar, a dream where Pete walked back out into the bar holding Flamber’s disembodied head. He hoped it was a dream. He was sure—almost sure—it was a dream. He hoped he’d never wake up to find out if it was real or not.
— Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press, 2024). Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, he currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer.