Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(11)
“Breakiron!”
He weaved his way over, although he was only on his second Bud. He’d probably been self-lubricating since earlier, although hell, so had I. “Elizabeth Reed!” he bellowed, fist in the air. “Reed Smoot!”
Bronson laughed. “Who the hell is Reed Smoot? Sounds like one of those polygs inside the gate.”
“You hit the nail on the head,” I said. “Although I’ve yet to figure out exactly who he is.”
While Breakiron was confirming that the book bindery indeed had no windows, the dusty kid from the street wandered in. He sort of hugged the wall with his back like an old west outlaw expecting to get shot. It sounds corny to say, but he was so dark the whites of his eyes shone like crescent moons. He inched over to a round table that belonged to the pool players. Quick as a dog can lick a dish, he’d snatched up a bottle of beer, chugged it, then swiped the plastic basket of nachos, cradling it to his chest like a baby. He made for the exit, but the old miner was apparently quicker.
Pressing the barrel of a Winchester rifle to the dusty kid’s chest, I couldn’t hear what the miner growled, but I was on it.
The old man snarled, “I’ve seen you hanging around here the past week or so. I don’t give a good goddamn if you’re one of them lost boys from the compound. They kicked you out for a reason and you’re continuing your thieving ways here in my establishment and I won’t sit for it. I’m holding you here until the sheriff arrives.”
He was trying to dial his cell with one hand while keeping the kid at bay with the rifle, so I said, “Listen, let me help.”
Oddly, the bartender let me take the rifle. I just held it at my side, butt on the ground like that American Gothic guy and his pitchfork. I could actually see the kid trembling, the fabric of his Puma jacket shaking like a windsurfer’s sails. “What’s your name?” I said gently.
The kid muttered something I couldn’t hear over the twang of Duane and Dicky’s guitars, but suddenly Breakiron was on top of us.
He whipped the bartender’s phone from his hand. “You’re not calling no one on this kid! All he did was take some f*cking nachos! In my book, that means he’s hungry. Have you ever been hungry?”
The bartender seemed to be leaking blood from his eyes, he was so irate. “I’m sick of these goddamned kids kicked out of the compound hanging around here. They’re like goddamned dingos lurking around back alleys waiting to swipe babies!”
And that was how Jonah Garff became known as Dingo.
“Look,” I said, “we’ll give you back your rifle and your phone if you just let this kid go. We’ll take care of him.”
“Yeah,” asserted Breakiron, his lower lip sticking out. I guess he had some good qualities, some of the time. “Here’s forty f*cking bucks.” Handing the barkeep two bills, he strode behind the bar where the nachos had been congealing under warming lamps for god knows how long. He gathered as many checkered boxes of the vile things as he could and we all left the bar.
We went around the corner to the smoker’s bench and the kid munched away. He had orange blobs melting in the corners of his mouth, but at least he wasn’t hungry anymore.
“I know what it’s like to be hungry,” said Breakiron.
I said, “The bartender said there are a bunch of young men like this being kicked out of Cornucopia. Young men, not women.”
“Well, naturally,” said Breakiron, wise for once. “They want all the young women they can get. More boys are just more competition.”
“Dingo,” I said, because that name was easier to remember, “why are the young men being kicked out of the compound?”
Before Dingo could answer, that salesman Carradine was on us. Now that irritated me. We’d saved the kid from certain doom, not him. He’d just sat there, apparently freaked at the sight of a firearm. Now that the coast was clear, he wanted to be the lion of the day. The guy was starting to annoy me.
“What’s this? Yeah, kid, why are they kicking people out of Cornucopia?”
Dingo made one last, hearty, dry swallow, straining with the effort of the scratchy corn chips. He panted, “We are not wanted. They try to say we’ve stolen something or watched some bad movie, but the truth is, they just do not want us.” He spoke very formally, as though English wasn’t his second language. He, too, looked Navajo to me. Maybe he’d been adopted somehow into the compound.
“I’ve heard of this,” said Carradine. “They call them The Lost Boys. Poor damned kids. They take them outside of city limits and dump them on the side of the road. Did that happen to you, too?”
Dingo nodded enthusiastically. He had that wide-eyed fear that would melt the heart of a savage. “Yes, to me and many others. I was exiled for wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Another boy for playing a video game.”
Carradine fumed. “They’re excuses, just excuses! Made-up bullshit to strike the fear of God into the boys so they don’t complain about being tossed away for being surplus bodies!”
Carradine could be right. I did the math. “Why do you hang around, then?”
Dingo said, “Many of us go up north to Salt Lake, because around here all the officers of the law are in the pocket of Allred Chiles. But I have been too afraid to leave Cornucopia. They keep telling me I’ll fail out there. They kept telling me I’ll be ground up like a native dirt worshipper. I’ll be whipped like all maize munchers have been.”