“The problem with pillows,” Cristy tells me, “is that they’re like mite motels. They sit around and eat the bits of skin you shed and drink the oil your skin secretes every night. Thousands of them. Maybe even millions, right there in that pillow next to you.”
“But at least they’re your mites,” I say, although the very thought of having thousands - maybe even millions - of mites sharing my pillow is absolutely disgusting.
“Maybe,” she nods, “but try to imagine the kind of mites you’d be sleeping with on a motel pillow.”
I think about it for a moment, then begrudgingly pull myself up and throw my mite-infested motel pillow across the room. I’m dog-tired and she has to pull shit like that.
Cristy doesn’t sleep with pillows, which is why she can say all that and get away with it. I, on the other hand, need at least three. I’m not expecting a good night’s sleep.
Three days ago, Cristy took my car and drove. “To nowhere,” she said, “just because.” That I happened to be in it at the time was a non-issue, apparently.
Now, we are nowhere, my car has been totalled, and my pillow is six feet away on the floor. But that’s Cristy for you.
“Come here and look at this,” Cristy is hissing at me. I squint at the string of diamonds flaring out between the Venetian blinds. It’s morning already.
“Get over here,” Cristy hisses again, insistently. Groaning, I roll off the bed, and onto the floor; a poor lost meatball in a motel in the middle of nowhere.
Cristy is crouched by the window, peeking outside. “What is it, for chrissake,” I say.
“Look,” she says. My fists are at my eyes, wringing the sleep out. Outside the sun is already sweltering (which isn’t to say that it’s exactly cool in our room). After we wrecked the car last night, we pushed it down the road and parked it in front of the motel.
“Who are those guys?” I ask, squinting. There were three of them, all greasy. Two guys shirtless, and one with a Lone Star giveaway that he had cut the arms off of. They were trying to jimmy open the car door.
“Who do you think they are,” Cristy says. I look around and see her moving around the room quietly. I could see their pickup parked near the motel’s reception area, and wondered if there was any way we could take it without being noticed.
“What are you looking for?” I ask, as she goes into the bathroom. I hear a metallic clang and she comes back out with the curtain rod from the shower. “Jesus, what are you doing?” I ask again, but I already know what she’s doing.
“Hey, will you slow down a minute?” I say, getting in front of her. She just shoulder-charges me out of the way and I don’t even see the door close.
I pull on my pants and can’t seem to get my foot in through the leg. I have to skip towards the door.
I can already her yelling outside. The men are looking around and she’s walking right towards them as if she could actually do something to stop them. By the time I’ve skipped my way outside she’s already on top of them.
She swings the curtain rod and I watch it wrap around the Lone Star guy’s back. When she pulls back, it’s bent all out of shape like one of those elbow pipes underneath a sink. Shirtless One is backing off slightly, probably trying to figure out why Lone Star guy is flat on the ground and moaning. Shirtless Two is quicker though, and gets his arms up just as Cristy swings at him.
He catches the curtain rod/elbow pipe and grabs Cristy by the arm, shaking her. She gets back her leverage and kicks him in the groin with an animal yell. They both topple over and join the moaning Lone Star on the ground. Shirtless One is still processing all of this and I see that he still hasn’t let go of the tools Lone Star was making him hold. One of them looks pretty sharp. I get my jeans on with a final, ripping sound, and start running towards him.
I am just four feet away before I remember to cock my fists, but it’s too late. I end up slapping him really hard on the back of the head before my momentum carries me past him and I trip hard over Lone Star. My knee falls on his teeth, and I feel a warm gushing, snapping sensation as it invades his mouth like a rocket.
Cristy has already wriggled out from under Shirtless Two, and is reaching for her elbow pipe when everything finally falls into place for Shirtless One and he starts moving. My knee is still in Lone Star’s mouth, and I’m afraid to just yank it out. I’m afraid to even look down actually. I crawl forward and grab Shirtless One’s leg, wrapping it between my arms and chest like a lover in a freefall. He ends up dragging me and Lone Star across the dirt. Underneath me Lone Star is whimpering.
I look over at Cristy and see that she’s reshaping the elbow pipe over Shirtless Two’s head. He isn’t moving anymore, and each blow kicks up dust and red mud from where his face meets the floor. I feel myself falling to the ground and realize slowly that all I’m hugging is an empty pants leg. Now my face is in the dirt and when I look up, I see Shirtless-and-heretofore-Pants-Less standing naked in front of Cristy. Dimly I wonder why he isn’t wearing any underwear.
Cristy looks at him dumbly for a long time before breaking out into insane laughter. From where I am on the ground I can see his buttocks clenching convulsively as they turn slightly red. I’m pulling myself up on my free knee when Shirtless/Pants-less drops what he was holding and makes a run for it. He’s clear across the parking lot and down the street before Cristy can stop laughing.
I swallow hard and wrench my knee away from Lone Star’s mouth, trying not to look at the gaping hole. I am reminded of the Sarlacc Pit in Return of the Jedi, as I turn toward Cristy. She’s already on her feet, helping me up. “Hurry up,” she says, looking worried for the first time. “Look for their keys.”
I turn the jeans Shirtless/Pants-less leaves behind inside-out, and some candy wrappers float to the ground. I’m bending over to see what they are when Cristy says, “Let’s go!”
She’s already jogging towards the pickup truck, elbow pipe in one hand and keys in the other. I limp along behind her, wincing. “Why the hell are you following me?” she yells back. “Get our stuff!”
I grunt, and change directions for the room. Most of our clothes are on the floor and I don’t know how to get them all back into the bags in time. Finally I use one of the bed sheets as a sack and stuff everything in there.
As we pull out of the parking lot, I look back at my car and at Lone Star and Shirtless Two. There are haloes of bright crimson around their heads, and neither of them are moving.
We’re almost ten kilometers away before Cristy speaks. “That was cool, wasn’t it,” she says. A statement, not a question.
I’m too busy picking bits of Lone Star’s teeth out of my pants knee to reply.
[ Note: Cristy is an old character that I resurrected recently when I found that I actually had time to write again. The first Cristy story is at the Ramblings section at CLS if you want to see it. ]