Atu (3)
“Hey!” Gabby turned towards our voices then back to the phone, “No, mister not you, I –” “Watch it, Rueben!” Tony hissed at me in a fiercely, “You’re going to sack me who had to drive for you for two months with a fractured wrist?!” “Your wrist was fractured before you started here – you said you fell climbing over a wall get into a pub.” “I still had to drive.” “To get your banjo, wasn’t it?” “My friend’s banjo.” “Can you still play with the wrist?” “Fucking Christ, Tony I said it wasn’t my banjo – can we stay on point here Tony, do you think? – You’re not really going to fire me are you, Tony? And hire her? She’s nuts. Look at the way she’s dressed.” At first Tony was giving me a sympathetic and pitying shake of the head but then his expression went blank as if in consideration. He looked down at my boots, scanned up to my belt then came to rest his eyes on my hat. He looked over his shoulder at her and then turned back urgently, looking at me carefully for just a second more…He looked down into the air to think and as he did I watched the strained look of suspicious uncertainty in his eyes grow slowly bigger, widening into a gaze that was now anxious as the connection was being made…he began to straighten up nervously, and looking deeper still into his mind I could see him understanding something for the first time, holding, as it were, in his hands some horrific truth that he should have realised some time ago, something about some fundamental difference between himself and I and the overt similarities between myself and this woman he had just hired. Terror was unfolding in his mind. His fingers clutched the desk involuntarily and his body went rigid. His lips were curled trembling at the edges and his nostrils were flaring in and out as he plunged the depths of that dark fjord of realization. He seemed to be visibly sinking, paralysed like a man turned to stone, through his chair, through the floor. I was starting to get offended and changed the tone to something more upbeat. I clicked my fingers in front of his face a few times. “Hey Tony, snap out of it. Here, look at this.” I took out his smartphone. Look, Tony this Tornado hit in South Dakota Wouldn’t like to get in tha way of that, right? no shit ha –ha Looks like a big…uh, well, shit makes you think, right about all the… nevermind Did you know you could download this shit on your phone? – Here check this one – Jamie Lee Curtis, right? Man she was hot Tony’s eyes darted sideways to me as he sat frozen upright in his seat. He began to carefully lean back into the chair, bracing himself with his hands on the armrests as if it were a painful thing to do although the chair looked comfortable enough. I spotted a bead of sweat on his forehead and his left eye seemed to be starting to go lazy. “You can’t fucking fire me, Tony.” He sighed. “Not fire you Rueben, ‘let you go.’ I explained it. Someone has to go, and at this point it comes down to you. Look this happens all the time in companies when money gets tight. Don’t take it personally, mate. I’m sorry.” “I’m taking it pretty personally, Tony.” “Well I’m sorry to hear that, but…that’s,” He shrugged and looked down. He turned back up to me with a look of resign and apology, his eyebrows raised high making wrinkles in his forehead, lips pursed and nostrils flared. “What more can I say really, Rueben? I’m sorry. Really. I am, but…” A moment passed between us. “Okay.” I put my hands up in the air. “I get it. I’m not going to try and argue anymore. Whatever. Okay.” The truth was, I knew what Tony saw in me. The boots, the chaps, the pistol, the fact that I was getting a horse – he could see them and he knew what they meant ¬¬– even a child would know from looking at me that I was born to roam the open plains, a mercenary renegade who cuts his own path in life: sometimes an opportunist, taking from the mouths of the hungry to feed himself, turning a blind eye on the suffering of others, other times filling their cup to abundance and cutting the chains that bind the oppressed like Clint Eastwood in that classic mov – “I’ll need the van keys, Rueben.” “I was right in the middle of something, Tony.” “You were just standing there.” He said irritably. I took the van keys out of my pocket, took my flat keys off the ring, put it in my pocket and threw the rest that were his on his desk. “Well, Tony, I guess that this will be the –” I began to say my final words but Gabby had come to the end of her conversation at the same time, only louder and so both Tony and I paused to listen to her round things up. “Well that suits me just fine, buddy,” She was saying, “ I’ll see you – I’ll, uh-uh, yeah, yeh – I got a pretty good lawyer as well don’t you worry about that – I’ll see you in court, oh, and by the way if I don’t get a chance to say it before your lawyer gets here, I just want to say ‘fuck you’ and thanks for all your calls. Huh? I’m glad you’ll stop calling now. See you soon! Bye Bye! Bye! Bye. Bye.” She put down the phone. “Do we have a lawyer, Tony?” “You know what?” Tony sat up in his chair and smiled strangely. “You’re both fired – both of you. It’s not working out either Gabby, Sorry. Rueben, I’m sorry. Both of you. I just can’t deal with you people.” “What?” Asked Gabby. “You’re both…” Tony switched from looking at me to her at different sides of the room. Gabby took her boots off the desk and swivelled her chair towards us. “What? What are you saying we are? You’re firing me?” “I’m sorry, it’s just that you two are the same, I see that now.” “Us two? In what way God damn it?! I’m nothing like him! Look at me! I’m svelte, I’m toned, Christ, I’m a woman – ” “No, in a different way – I mean, you guys are unprofessional. You have that kind of dick-about attitude that does nothing for my company, or yourselves. ” “You know what, Tony?” “You know what you are? Both of you are loose cannons.” “Loose cannons?!” She took out her gun. I moved out of the way. BAM After that memorable day when our paths first crossed in Pasadena – where I later met Gary and started following the herd – It was reinforced to me empirically that she had a destructive and anti-social manner occasionally and I also heard numerous sexual rumours including one that she was a dyed-in-the-wool nymphomaniac and probably lesbian as well. Far from denying it, one day without any prompting at all Gabby told me that if she didn’t have so much constant sex she would have to masturbate all the time which she said wasn’t healthy and would make you go crazy – this is a common misconception –– to which I felt it my duty to correct and re-inform her just like I had to with like the poo molecule fiasco – she nearly shot Gary for that – I said that it was untrue that it had negative side-effects such as the ones she was describing, and that in fact modern opinion on the matter is quite the opposite and purports that it is a natural and healthy thing in most every sexually matured person’s life but I sometimes wish that I hadn’t because now as a result of that talk she now does it any time she wants and is very open about it. You might think that Carl, Harlan, Bill and I would consider us lucky to be lost in the plains of wherever-we-were with a good-looking frustrated nymphomaniac who could possibly own property in South Dakota but I don’t believe that any of us guys except Bill have ever really seen Gabby as much of a sexual object. Harlan said that he believed that she was a pseudo hermaphrodite and had a karyotype with a y chromosome. He implied that she had an SRY gene coded for a transcription factor, leydig and sertoli cells and gonadal tissue but yet showed no outer physical signs of maleness. You know the type. Whether that was true or not, none of that really mattered because she was now a member of the herd. Well, not the herd – you know what I mean. And possibly a little bit against her will. When I told one guy about the herd he called us a cult. We’re not a cult because cults don’t have cows. Anyway I had some strange compulsion to help Gabby because she is a mess of neuroses and the victim of a host of troubles. Presently us men had other troubles other than gratifying our basest of impulses all the time and had learned to ignore Gabby’s enthusiasm for self-gratification and her enthusiasm for violence and drinking – we were all fine with it so long as it didn’t cause any problems for us. The wall I have to get my horse up is extremely sharp and actually higher than I had expect it would be and so I try to find at least a slightly wider gap, some chance – looking at the wall on my left as I ride past it I see a few possible places that are tempting but ominous so I keep on going until I finally find one I am convinced I can take – the horse doesn’t like it but I coax and swear at it the whole way up and finally after a few desperate lunges and a frantic clambering of hooves he gets over the top and regains his composure on the flat ground with clear irritation and equine snorting and huffing. I look at the vista ahead of me. I am back on the green grass-plains that roll on and on for miles, an enormous plain in all directions, a few hills far away after another that eclipsed the one behind it and so on and barely discernable mountains in the far distance. . Withoutwasting any more time I re-orientate my horse and make again for the perpendicular, spurring the animal on with a good few kicks of my heels to his haunches and soon I am back on the gallop while cursing Harlan under my breath – starting to think that he just said the first thing that came to mind – after 5 whole minutes, the first thing – fucking perpendicular – but at least I knew if I was going in the right direction I’d be gaining on Gabby because she would no doubt have to stop riding or at least slow down every 20 minutes no doubt busy munching away on that damn Datura. She liked the seeds especially I don’t know why; they were the most potent bit but anyway she seemed to have taken faster to the high than all of us except of course Bill who didn’t even register a change, the mad bastard – the rest of us had to deal with the hallucinations, the lack of balance, the fragmented thoughts and the intense cottonmouth. A Blue and Orange tinge emanated for a millimetre out from all surfaces like particles of two colour leaving and coming into everything on earth. I had been been looking at something on the horizon for a while – It looked like a person but with Datura anything can look like a person, even very close up. You could stand and talk to a tree or a wall for half an hour believing it was a person, you could even hallucinate a group of people. I had resisted believing was a real object but that wouldn’t disappear like the normal hallucinations, or that caterpillar that we all saw from time to time, this definitely looked like a real person. Was it Gabby? There was no horse with the figure in the distance but I knew full well that Gabby could have lost hers or more likely shot it in a moment of irritation as was her way with horses – her current horse Muffy had it coming in particular we could all tell – it had started out fine but ever since she gave the horse that name there was an undeniable tension between them. I suspected that it was because the horses’ previous name was Goliath (which was given ironically by his previous owner as he was not a large horse by any means) and when she started calling him ‘muffy’ he began to resent her instantly – horses aren’t smart creatures but they take themselves very seriously and know how to bear a grudge real good especially small horses like Muffy who have a chip on their shoulder to begin with. As I drew closer I realized that this could not be Gabby. This person was wearing a long light-Brown dress and had jet-black hair subtly adorned with Hawk feather. It took me a while to get to her but when I did she turned around to watch my approach and she turned out to be a very beautiful Native-American woman. I dismounted and tried to speak to her. I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, but it was soon apparent that she was a talented communicator – she had a way of gesturing expressively with her hands but more so seeming to indicate things with her eyes and expressions when she talked, things that I truly believed I could understand… after a while I established that she was hungry, disorientated and horny – which was a coincidence because so was I – so after trying to speak to her for a while in the simplest way I could think of I gave up and we screwed on the grass, her saying things in her native tongue that I didn’t understand, never opening her eyes to look at me the whole time until we were finished. Then she lay with her back to me afterwards until I re-opened the lines of communication in another attempt to work out exactly what was her problem and if she needed any other help. Her eyes and crazy native speak told me that she did in fact need some assistance since her horse was shot but a few hours ago by some sex-crazy devil-woman with skin like mine who had also given her some Datura before they got to having sex as well which made me feel odd but at the same time excited because I had discovered that there were other Americans out here in the wilderness although the ‘white-devil bitch’ thing sounded ominous. The hunt for Gabby was pressing but ‘Pocahontas’ as I dubbed her was such a damn fine-looking lady and a great lay on top of it that I was compelled to lend my authoritative energy to her plight instead, and in my fiery resolve and in the midst of one of my passionate orations which she understood only parts of – I could tell by the way she looked at my hands when I expressed something obvious in a very physical manner – I became hard yet again and had to hitch her dress up above her waist and take her again from behind purely because it was convenient since we were pressed for time and I couldn’t be bothered taking all of her clothes off again which she didn’t really seem to mind either so long as something was happening and when I had finished up and wiped myself off on her dress I helped her up onto the saddle and got myself up in front of her and spurred the horse into action while she held onto my shirt and rested her cheek on my back exhausted, and by now no doubt twigging to the whole Nightshade scene and beginning the obsequies for her life of rational thought. I felt her squeeze her arms around my stomach and in an expression of female desire for comfort and safety press her breasts up against my back I could feel her pelvis move behind me in synchrony with the rhythm of the horse’s unrelenting gallop and I got hard again but couldn’t stop now because it would be getting dark soon.
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