The judge banged the gavel and ordered the bailiff to shove in the next bunch of misfits. I faced 10 years for an accident deemed involuntary manslaughter along with perjury for claiming the girl wasn’t riding with me. She was riding with me.
I had hoped to avoid trouble for her but Sheriff Dick Folsey slapped her confession on the oak table – she faced 3 years as an accomplice to my crime. Only there wasn’t a crime; just a heated argument.
Sheriff Folsey’s dickhead obese brother was dead. He drove his Ford sedan drunk on the wrong side of the road as I rode in from the opposite direction. I braked and pulled off the road to my right, revving my pipes. The straights woke him up, and he swerved off the road into a massive umbrella of a Pepper tree. It wasn’t over; he jumped out with a shotgun to air his views. I was out of control in the weeds and slippery leaves. He aimed. I aimed and ducked slamming him into his Ford quarter-panel. Then the bastard had a heart-attack. I wasn’t about to resuscitate him but dialed 911 – that was my crime. Sheriff Folsey showed up to incriminate me.
The Sheriff and his two brothers were the only criminal types in town. They ruled the place like they had inherited it along with the badge from their upright father. The dead brother, Sammy, and the youngest, Jake, were hooligans with enough extortion beefs to put them in hardlabor-time in most jails. But so far they had the free Western rural justice pass.
“Don’t worry about me; just have faith”, Mandy whispered as we left the courtroom.
I knew what lay in wait for me; worse still I knew what the Sheriff planned for her. My fragile, sensitive Mandy would be a battered trophy for the learing Jake.
“We will be fine.” I assured her.
Driven in separate vehicles, we were taken back to the Sheriff’s lock up till the trial and the penitentiary bus gave us our enforced trip to hell. Mandy was in the back seat of a Jake’s patrol car, with a junior officer at the wheel. I bumped along a gravel road in an old prison bus, a loose bumper rattled me awake. I opened my eyes from deep meditation, contemplating my desperate options. No money for bail till trial. No money for a decent lawyer either. And no, this wasn’t the road towards the Sheriff’s office.
We were on a deserted trail. I sat up dead straight. There would be no costly trial to allow me a shot at justice. Up ahead Mandy was jostled in the back seat of the patrol car. She wasn’t alone. We were to be given a farewell to ensure our departure was as inauspicious as our earlier arrival to hell. Distant hum of traffic slowly thinned away. The cars suddenly stopped in the middle of nowhere. I sensed a movie, based on a story from the ‘50s. Young immigrant punks murdered in a distant field by cops.
“Hrrmph!” The Sheriff grunted as he pulled me out of the car by my hair. Jake was in the other car with Mandy. As a deputy opened the door, she scrambled out hurriedly, still handcuffed, wearing just her sports bra and unbelted jeans. Jake crawled out behind her still groping as she cried.
“Come to Daddy dear” Jake growled and reached out as Mandy stepped behind the skinny gutless deputy. The drunkard lost footing and fell. “You bitch! You will be sorry but sexy sorry; HEEhehehee.” He continued on all fours.
Unlocking my handcuffs, another officer in hate training held me by my arms as Sheriff Folsey worked out on my abs, then knees and then gave me a nose job with his nightstick. I crumbled to the dirt floor.
“Punks like you…deserve every…bit of slamming,” Sheriff Folsey spoke with forced breaks; the overweight pig couldn’t speak over three words without gasping. He kicked me, or tried to, only flicking more dirt on my face.
Mandy stared blindly at me. I wished she didn’t have to see me like this. She was all broken up inside. She called me the other day. “A ride on the Highway,” she said, “would set her mood to move to the city with me. We rode and ended up here.”
Jake hauled his fat ass to his fee and moved menacingly towards Mandy. The officers chewed tobacco and spat at the dusty deck. I remembered the words of an old biker, who cross the country many times alone. He constantly coached me on being observant on the road. He told me of repairs made with old coat hangers and parts made of road junk. He explained how to avoid accidents by watching for the hidden path, and he mentioned fights including street weapons. I was locked in terror but looked behind me to the loose bumper hanging by a nail fastener, a long, bent rusting dagger.
Jake shoved his scrawny counterpart aside and ripped Mandy’s sports-bra away from her young buoyant boobs. The Sheriff turned and I felt my imprisonment slacken. I had to do something, and I stood abrubtly as Jake fondled Mandy’s massive boobs roughly. The officer behind me stumbled and I drove him backwards into the bumper’s edge. I spun behind the squealing deputy and yanked the 6-inch rusting nail from the hole in the bumper. To my surprise it came free and I ran around the dusty black bus and directly at Jake.
Folsey gladly reached for his gun as I drove the corroded hunk of steel in his brother’s neck down to the hilt. It split his caratic artery and throat. He started gargling blood immediately. The skinny deputy rushed ahead, but I kicked his groin hard enough to sterlise him. I pushed Mandy down in front of the patrol car as the first bullet split the fender.
I pulled Jake’s .38 from his Holster as he clawed at his throat for air, leveled it as the Sheriff and unloaded all six rounds over the fender of the patrol car. His eyes widened is disbelief and he stumble to his death.
“Guess I am the rebel you considered me,” I picked her up by the waist; she was about to faint. The other deputy crawled for the tall weeds in the distance.
“What will we do Cain? They’ll electrocute us.” Mandy still had tears rolling down her soft cheeks.
“Something tells me justice died here. Maybe integrity will return.” I seated her in the police cars. “Don’t worry about a thing, we will be together, free and happy.”
I drove off the main road and parked behind shrubs. We hitched a ride in a trailer-truck to town and retrieved my bike. With the clothes on our back, my savings, her leather, we rode off on my Ironhead 1960 Sportster never to look back at the filth we left behind.
“Told ya we’d be fine!” I whispered in the wind as we crossed borders.
Copyright Ujjwal Dey 2007
