Br’er Robert
They had a good thing going, Frankie and Decker. Drive around the Midwest, have a little fun, drop off the littlefuckers and collect their cash. “Life’s a pleasure when you like your work,” Frankie’d say every once in a while. Sometimes Frankie liked to imagine what happened to the littlefuckers after they dropped them off; he didn’t know for sure. Maybe they got sold to rich bastards, Arabs or something. Maybe they went down to Mexico and made movies, maybe even snuff flicks.
He used to bug Decker, when they’d go through a big city, Des Moines or Minneapolis or something, to hit the backrooms of some of the cumshops, see if any of the movies had faces they recognized. Decker’d never do it, said the cops always watched those places, and once he’d caught Frankie coming out of one and dragged him into an alley and beat the shit out of him. Frankie hadn’t brought it up again.
These days Decker just drove the van, and Frankie’s job was to keep the littlefuckers from banging on the walls or something when they went through towns. He was good at it. He scared the piss out of them. Stephen King couldn’t scare littlefuckers better than Frankie.
Frankie worked his mouth as he spiderwalked toward the Patch kids, getting up a good load of frothy spit. “You been bad,” he gurgled, right up in Bobby’s face. He pushed a little of the foam onto his lips with his tongue and twitched his head like a rabid dog. “You been BAAAAAAD.”
He laughed softly, a moist gargling chuckle and let a little of his drool dribble down onto Bobby’s cheek. They both stared at him like rabbits caught in headlights. Get ‘em scared enough, they can’t even think about moving, let alone making noise.
The van slowed and yellow streetlight swept the interior. Frankie made like he was going to turn away, then jumped back at them like a cat pouncing on a wounded squirrel. He ran his hands over them, light brushing on their wet cheeks, a sudden pinch on a tiny nipple, a quick twist of his hand on the zipper of their dirty Levi’s. He bugged his eyes and cocked his head over sideways, froth sliding out the corner of his mouth. “I gotcha,” he slavered. Bobby closed his eyes and turned his screwed-up face away, but the little one, Brian, just stared. Frozen. “Gotcha gotcha GOTCHA!”
“Shut up for Christ’s sake.” Decker glared at him in the rearview. “We’re comin on a red light and there’s cars around.”
