Part One

The light comes on and I hear someone behind me chambering a round. I don't need to be told to freeze.

"Turn around slowly," she says.

When I do, I'm staring down the barrel of a shotgun. She has it tucked under her arm with the stock braced against the back of her wheel chair. If the gun goes off, the recoil will send the chair flying backwards to slam against the wall, a comic effect I won't be able to appreciate.

She's holding a twelve gauge. The barrel looks about as short as the law allows. From the set of her jaw, I'm guessing that she is spiteful enough to have it loaded with double naught. She isn't aiming it. She doesn't need to. If she decides to touch the trigger, I won't just die. I will come apart.

"Who are you?" she demands.

I'm Hung Low-that's the handle the Sisters of Satan gave me. My real name is Miko Macarthy. My dad is Scottish-­Italian. My mom is Filipino-Japanese. They met while he was on R&R from 'Nam. I speak English with a Castilian singsong and Japanese with a brogue. I gesture a lot while I speak. I guess you could say I'm a typical American kid.

Mom gave me almond eyes and lustrous black hair that grows long and thick down my back. I could sell off my braid for a battleship hawser. If you're starting to imagine some frail Japanese flower-erase that. I have Daddy's bones. I teach aerobics. Nobody fucks with me.

At least-it's been that way up till now.

I've been riding with the Sisters ever since I decided to drop out of college and come out of the closet. It was no big change, really, just a decision to stop trying to be something I couldn't. Maybe it was when my boyfriend Jack proposed, and I realized that saying yes would mean spending the rest of my nights staring at the ceiling and pretending that Sharon Stone was between my legs instead of some smelly guy.

Maybe it was when I realized that a degree in comparative linguistics was worth zip out there in the real world.

Maybe I just got tired of being called a "cunning linguist".

Maybe it was when Mom and Dad told me that they had decided they didn't have to stay together for the sake of the children anymore. I couldn't honestly say that it was any surprise to me. The angry whispers that had drifted through their bedroom door when my sister was still home had grown in volume after she married. I had been wrapping a pillow around my ears at night, muffling the sound enough to make sleep possible. I didn't want to stay with Mom and hear her rag on Dad, and Pop's new squeeze made it clear that I sure as hell wasn't welcome in their little love nest. When they split-I split.

So one night I was getting quietly drunk in some rathole bar downtown when the Sisters of Satan came in. They were blasted as usual, and being obnoxious just to see the solid citizens blanch and turn away. I looked them over, wondering if they were as butch as they seemed. They were pretty intimidating in all that leather and steel, pierced, tattooed, and stoned out of their skulls. Still, a couple of them looked as though they might be cute if you cleaned them up a little. They weren't much of a gang, as gangs go.

Sheena was de facto leader. She was a leggy red head who used to be a stripper, but now sang for a local rock band. Honeytwat was her bitch, a sweet little number who seemed out of her depth among all those greasy Huns, until I got to know her and found out she had done some hard time for assault. Furpie was bi-polar, bi-sexual, and, like me, bi-racial. In her case she was black and Vietnamese. Gypsy was a space cadet who kept everyone supplied with grass and did tarot readings on the side. Bonny was just plain mean.

It was Bonny who saw me watching and snarled across the room.

"Whateryalookinat?"

When a biker challenges you, the best response is a mumbled apology and a hasty retreat, but I was drunk and depressed and feeling suicidal enough to flip her the bird.

She should have squashed me like a bug, but my chutzpah surprised her and she laughed instead. An hour later, I was buying beers all around. Two hours later, I was in bed with Sheena and Honeytwat. I was pretty much hanging with the gang off and on after that.

Mom said I was in bad company, and only bad would come of it. I said fuck that-her life was no American success story. We had a big fight, and after that I pretty much lost touch with the whole family.

I never moved into the gerbil warren they called a clubhouse, but we rode together in the evenings. I got a bike of my own. I started wearing more leather. I had a snake tattooed around my arm. The transformation from co-ed to stud bull dyke took about a month. Gypsy said that it really wasn't necessary to open the closet door with an axe, but she understood. Sometimes you get tired of hiding in the dark.

I enjoyed looking as butch as I felt. I would slouch down the street in full kit-leather jacket, biker boots, chaps, keys jangling from the chain on my trucker's wallet. There's nothing scarier than a dyke with an attitude. I got a secret thrill from watching young mothers take a firm grip on their daughters' hands and scurry across the street when I approached. Sometimes they threw a quick glance over their shoulders, and the tight, disarming smiles they flashed at me would reveal a secret longing.

Back in my Connie Co-ed days, I got more approval and less grief from the straight world, but advertising pays. The sweet femmes who needed my kind of rough trade liked my package. Then I met Sophie, and Sophie liked the girl inside-huge difference.

I didn't get exclusive with anyone until Sophie came along. The rest of the gang had nothing to offer really. They worked enough to qualify for unemployment. Their hobbies included getting high and picking fights. Their conversations centered around bikes, beer, and balling.

But Sophie had been places and done things. She was educated and well read. She thought about stuff that mattered. The first time we bunked together, she warned me not to get serious on her. I should have listened. I was half in love when she hooked up with a congresswoman and was off to D.C. with a hug and a wave.

For a while, I nursed fantasies of going up to Washington and crashing one of those famous black tie parties. I would roar up the marble steps and through the French doors on my Harley, wearing my baddest colors, and slide to a halt right in front of Sophie and Ms. Legislator. I would roll a joint one handed, put it between Sophie's lips and light it for her; then share the smoke around a kiss before roaring away.

I never did it-of course. Outing a congresswoman wouldn't have done anything for La Causa, and I still wanted Sophie's respect. Anyhow-revenge is petty. All I did was send Sophie a cheerful little postcard and remind her that she always had a friend. I really had no

reason to feel hurt at all. When I was still feeling wounded after a couple of weeks, I said fuck it. I took a week off from the aerobics gig, packed a tent into my saddlebags, and hit the road.

I know-licking your wounds in the cave is a guy thing. I was supposed to turn to my Sisters and let them share my pain. Fuck that-Hung Low grieves alone. A road trip beats the alternatives, like binge drinking, or climbing a steeple with a seven millimeter magnum and a nine power sniper scope.

I took the two lane, leaning over the handlebars to let the slipstream toy with my braid and wipe my tears away. I pushed her hard, savoring that frantic heartbeat between my legs.

If you head due north from most cities, out past the strip malls and used car lots, beyond the trailer courts, industrial parks, and abandoned farms, you come to the ratlands. The ratlands go by many names, but they are all the same. This one is called Bear Lake, but there aren't any bears there, and the lake is a mudhole too small for water sports. The soil is too poor for farming and the factory closed after the war. It's a shabby place. No one sets out to live there, and the people who end up in Bear Lake know that they probably aren't going anywhere better. They like to be left alone, and extend that courtesy to strangers. I love the place.

Any road off the main highway becomes a cow path after a couple of miles. No urban adventurer wants to get his SUV all scratched and muddy on those trails, but they are no problem for a bike. I have explored these back roads until I know them well enough not to get seriously lost. It's the place beyond the end of everything. I go there when I need to be by myself.

 

***

 

She isn't as old as I first thought-maybe fifty-five, and the bulk of her arms and shoulders suggests strength. Whatever it was that left her legs wasted and skeletal under her lap robe had no effect on her general health. I remember the grab bars in her bathroom and imagine her moving from wheelchair to bathtub with the grace of a gymnast on a vaulting horse.

Deformity has always repelled me. I look away when I see crutches or wheelchairs. Blind beggars hear my footsteps quicken as I pass, and the change that clatters into the cup is a blackmail payment to my conscience.

So the gaunt shanks that I see before me make my stomach roil. I can only imagine the atrophied muscle and pale skin hidden by the robe.

She is a handsome woman, though her nose is a bit long, and her gray eyes too narrow and flinty. Her long mouse-colored hair is wound up and pinned back, emphasizing her high cheek bones, strong jaw, and pointed chin.

"What are you doing in my house?" she asks.

I'm at a loss for words. She wouldn't believe the truth. I consider telling her that I'm a rapist, but it's only in the movies that people stare down the barrel of a shotgun and say flippant things.

 

***

 

I studied them through binoculars, sitting on the ground with my back against an old beech. Its bark was as smooth and grey as an elephant's leg.

Like many old beeches, this one had gone hollow inside. A mother squirrel had moved in. She kept poking her nose out of the hole to tell me how much she didn't want me there. From the chittering and rustling going on inside the tree, I had already guessed that she had a family to protect. When I got tired of her lip, I dug a bag of peanuts out of my saddlebags and ate a few. Then I leaned back against the tree and put a peanut on top of my head. The squirrel shut up while she weighed risk against greed, and I was free of distraction while I steadied my elbows on my knees and watched the house.

My tent was pitched just over the hill. I had set up camp the night before, thinking that I was alone in the depths of the forest. Morning revealed a fenced meadow, and a house hidden in the valley below.

Real houses were a rarity in this part of the country. Out here, five miles from the main road, it was a real curiosity. Most of the locals parked their doublewides closer to town. I thought it was abandoned at first, until I saw the light in the upstairs window.

It was a stone monster, three stories high. The doors were recessed under arches. The mullioned windows barred with ornamental iron. I counted three chimneys and four second-floor balconies. The stone had been quarried from the limestone cliff behind the house. There were veins of iron running through the rock. From my point of view, it seemed that the cliff had given birth to the house, and the rust stained rock still bled. Formidable though it looked, I thought it would be a soft target.

I like to break and enter. Call it a vice.

I take only one item from each place I visit, a souvenir, nothing of great monetary value, nothing dear. I prefer something the owner has touched or worn; a drinking cup, a used lipstick, panties, a personal vibrator. It's a sort of benign stalking, I suppose, a way of counting coup, more delicious when I know the victim first. Nibble, nibble, little mouse. I know locks; I know alarm systems; and nobody's home when I go in- usually.

Okay-it's the adrenaline rush, the childhood hide and seek thrill. I have to get in and make my selection and get out fast before I get caught.

Like now.

Nibble, nibble, little mouse . . .

The woman in the wheelchair has a phone in her hand, and I'm trying to console myself with the thought that getting busted beats the marble slab and the toe tag.

Who's that nibbling at my house?

Her eyes never leave me, even to dial. The gun doesn't waver either.

"Sam," she says into the phone, "are you on your way home, Dear?"

Her dialect is pure New England, Boston, I'm thinking. Her final "R" is as soft as a sigh. Her vowels come out of her nose. Grandpa made a fortune on whalebone corsets before moving west, that's my guess.

"Were you able to find the sherbet I like? Excellent! Do hurry home, dear. I have a surprise for you."

Why does it frighten me to see her so calm?