I had come down from Caspar after parting ways with Consuela. She wasn't hispanic, as the name might suggest, but a pure blooded German who had married a GI. Divorced, she lived with a succession of losers, male and female, until I met her and redefined the meaning of the term.
She liked me plenty. But in the end she liked her girlfriend better. For a short time the three of us shared an apartment. We often shared the same bed, and though the nights were so incredibly erotic that nothing like regrets or scruples entered my mind, in the mornings I felt soured and empty. Two weeks of that was enough when I found myself locked out of the communal bedroom one night. I was gone in the dawn before the garbage truck showed up.
My destination was south on the 25 to Cheyenne. But as often happens a whim took me off on a lonesome highway. This one angled west and gradually south through Great Plains country and down past the backdrop of the Rockies, following green-banked creeks and old wagon trails. Altogether I went about two hundred miles and rolled into Laramie in the early afternoon.
I was not familiar with the town. I found myself on 2nd Street, rejecting the first bar and grill I came to, the Crowbar, as too refined for my taste. The Buckhorn was more like it; the walls thorny with antlers and busy with dead moose heads. There was a general dirtiness lying around that apologizes by way of cheap beer prices.
I came in with a young woman in appropriate buckskin and embroidered denim, her butt-length raven hair in a thick braid. Her name was Squaw. I met her when I pulled in to a parking place out front of the green building and she was bending over a saddlebag of an old school Harley. I jerked the key out of my rat's ignition before I had come to a complete stop, my right foot on the ground at the same moment I braked hard; this, because I had glimpsed a squad car turning the corner up ahead.
I fully expected to see a dried up prune of a face as the woman turned to greet me, a typical biker moll. No, this one still had dew on the blossom; a round rosy-dark face with intense bright eyes and finely sculptured lips. I guessed her age to be maybe 30.
She commented on the rat and smiled with genuine appreciation at the tramp gear tied to the sissy bar. She asked with a perky enthusiasm, "What parts you headed for?" My answer was a shrug and an invitation: "Any ideas?"
I don't want to give the impression that I was always bumping into damsels ready to jump off the parapet. Before Consuela I had languished through a long dry spell of strictly masculine company and usually no company at all. Meeting the Squaw Woman so soon after leaving the dubious affections of the semi-lez Consuela was something of a novelty; especially so at that time, when I had been on the road for only four years. This girl's personality was the type that erased bad memories. I was almost desperate to get a grip on her, though I didn't show it. I didn't have to. When she asked if I was a clubber or a loner, and I said the latter, she nearly burst out crying for joy. Well, I exaggerate; but as I was shortly to learn, her club was in bad need of prospects. I could tell that she didn't want me getting away either.
Squaw was anxious to take me over to a table near the pool hall and introduce me to a couple members of her club, but I forestalled her at the bar to order my standby, a cheeseburger with horseradish, onion rings, and the cheapest beer on tap. It gave me a breath strong enough to knock over a bank teller; so potent, in fact, that I have the habit of turning my head a little to the side when I speak to someone up close. I asked what she and her buddies were drinking. (My wallet was fat from a three-week stretch of work in Caspar.) She carried the bottles over to the table as I waited for my order, talking to the bartender, a glitzy blond butterball.
The place was friendly. At night, I was told, it got rowdy. But if I was still there by nightfall I wouldn't be in a condition to mind how rowdy it got. The two guys at the table, in their colors, matched the rowdy description. Best of all they had tramp written all over them. There was none of the polish that lingers in the carefully contrived roughness of the weekend warrior type. These two bucks lived on their bikes. It was their kickstands that staked their property for the night.
They eyed me narrowly at first, as I came up with my plate and mug, but one good whiff of me and what Squaw had told them about me was accepted. "Have a chair, brother," said the one called Whitey. I sat across from him. Bone white skin was stretched tautly over his skull face and frizzy silver hair had at some point exploded from his rotting brown bandanna. He was a smiler. He never ever stopped smiling. He jerked his head toward the younger man to my right, who sat with his chair tilted back at a precarious angle. "This here's Johnny Bee," Whitey said.
I sensed right away that the Bee Man was going to be a problem.
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