He turned a checkered flag into a game of tic-tac-toe and still wasn’t satisfied, so he drew a black flag that meant it was time to pull into the pits, and he felt a chill creep up to the roots of his hair. He was getting somewhere. Possum erased areas of the black, forming white eyes and a grinning mouth that gave the morbid impression of a smiley-face skull. He crossed the skull with two possum tails instead of bones, and clamped a lit cigarette between the teeth, smoke rising in swirls. A smoking skull, he thought, getting increasingly excited as the Tweedy Circus ran out of money and had to pay Hoss and Little Joe with an elephant that they closed up inside the Ponderosa barn. Ben Cartwright wasn’t happy when he opened the barn door and discovered his new livestock.
Possum sadly thought of the late Dale Earnhardt’s number 3 black GM Goodwrench Services Chevy, and decided to honor the dead racing hero. Jolly Goodwrench, Possum wrote in block letters beneath the smoking skull flag.
“Hey look!” he exclaimed as he ran inside Smoke’s bedroom and held up his themebook.
“You come in here one more time without asking and I’ll blow your tiny dick off!” Smoke yelled as he sat up in bed and lit a cigarette.
“We got us a pirate flag, Smoke,” Possum explained. “I can make one that look just like this and we can fly it at the race and make people think it’s our NASCAR flag. We can take Popeye, too, and make sure them two cops show up, right? They never suspect no pit crew might be carrying pieces and are gonna blow their asses away. Then Cat can show up with the helicopter and fly us outta there and nobody can catch us. Then maybe we can ‘scape to Tangerine Island, since everybody there’s already in trouble and we could hide out with them ’til things chill, you know?”
Smoke sucked on the cigarette and shook several nearby beer cans. All of them were empty.
“Go get me a beer,’ he said to Possum. “Make sure that fucking flag’s finished by Saturday. And get Cat on the cell phone and tell him to make sure we got that helicopter for Saturday. Tell him to tell that big black momma that the famous driver and his pit crew are gonna need it to get to the race and then afterwards to be dropped off at a big party on an island. Once we get there, we shoot that cop, too, and the helicopter’s ours, and we got it fucking made in the shade.”
Sixteen
Black wrought-iron gates crept open and a stern capital police officer looked on through the glass window of his booth as Andy approached the governor’s mansion.
“Where do I park?” Andy inquired, because the circular cobblestone drive was crammed with the governor’s fleet of black Suburbans and limousines.
“Just pull it off on the grass,” the officer replied.
“I can’t do that,” Andy protested as he gazed out at the recently manicured lawn and sculpted hedges.
“No problem,” the officer assured him. “The inmates will clean it up tomorrow. It’s good for them to keep busy.”
Pony was watching all this through centuries-old glass. The butler was not in a good mood. In the past hour, the mansion’s kitchen help had snapped at him repeatedly because the Crimm daughters–Regina, mostly–had protested the notion of a light supper, which typically meant trout or blue crabs freshly flown in from Tangier Island. Regina had a nasty habit of stalking the kitchen and peering under pot lids, and when she discovered a trout and several dozen blue crabs in the agonal stages of death in the sink, she pitched a fit.
“I hate fish!” she declared furiously. “Everybody here knows I hate fish!”
“Your mama told us the menu,” said Chef Figgie. “We just following her instruction, Miss Reginia.”
“My name is not ReGINIA!”
Chef Figgie resisted the impulse to tell her that she might be better off if her name were Reginia instead of the other. He stared at the trout in the sink and wished it would hurry up and die. It had a hook in its mouth and he couldn’t understand why it was still flapping around after all this time. The blue crabs kept trying to climb out and were banging around in the huge stainless steel sink, making a racket and training their periscope-eyes on him with resentment and fear.