Warren Ellis - Crooked Little Vein

Have you noticed how telling yourself all that shit never actually helps?

Aobpicked us up outside our hotel, wearing his Same Old Bob face, not a hint of his earlier breakdown. I decided not to push it, and Trix read me. She was wearing tight black things: still very much her, but covering her tattoos, and had traded her boots for kitten heels. “You know he’s going to be looking to see what anyone thinks of him,” she’d said to me. “Why make it hard for him? It’s not like I’m swapping my brain for a Stepford Wife’s. You need his help, right? So let’s not give him anything to freak out over.”

For my part, I was just hoping for a quiet night.

The steakhouse was called Ma’s Place.

“Take it easy,” Trix whispered as I tensed up. “Just a coincidence.”

“It’s a sign from God that he’s going to shit on my dinner.”

“No such thing as God. You relax, too. I don’t want to have to manage two freaked-out men tonight.”

“I’ll have the Special.” Bob grinned at the waitress, spreading out in his chair.

“You sure?” said the waitress, eyeing him dubiously. With one eye, as the other was under an eyepatch. I saw Trix looking at the tattoo on the waitress’s forearm, which, in blotchy bluish letters, read SKEETER.

“Hell, yes.” Bob laughed. The Texas in his accent got stronger. “Been a busy day, and a man needs steak.”

“If you’re sure,” she muttered, and turned to Trix and me. We were still working our way through the menu. “Any vegetarian options?” Trix asked. “I don’t eat a lot of meat.”

“This is a steakhouse, ma’am,” the waitress hissed. “If it don’t come off a cow, we don’t sell it.”

“There’s a ladies’ option,” Bob said, trying to be helpful.

Trix caught a swearword in her mouth before it came out. Swallowed it and gave up a “that’ll be fine. Medium? With a salad?”

“No salad. Cows only shit salad, ma’am.”

Trix laughed. “Okay. The small portion of fries, then. Mike?”

“Jesus.” I scanned the menu hopelessly. It was all dish names, rather than useful descriptions. “Um…Rump steak? Well done. Some fries?”

“So that’s one Special, one Ma’s Dainty Plate, and one Cattle Mutilation, ruined. Drinks?”

“Ma’s Dainty Plate?” Trix scowled as the waitress rolled off. “I should’ve had the Special.”

“The Special’s for men only. Says on the menu,” said Bob, flapping the damp cardboard pamphlet at us. “See? ‘The Special—For Men.’”

“You get a club to kill it with, too?” Trix said, deeply unimpressed.

“I wish!” Bob laughed. The waitress returned with drinks. I reached for beer like a drowning man. Not that drowning men tend to want beer. You know what I mean.

Bob was given a veritable pot of iced tea. It was so full of sugar that the straw stood up. You could see Bob’s chest laboring to suck the stuff up into his head. The surface of the drink moved in slow viscous waves, like a lake of tar.

Bob sighed and belched. “I tell you,” he smiled, “when you find a place in this town that does good iced tea, you stick to it like glue. So. Let’s talk about your case.”

Again, I gave him the lightest details—missing book, handed around all over the country, collector wants it back but isn’t sure where it ended up, paper trail leading to the Roanokes. “What we need to do is talk to the Roanokes and find out if they still have the book. All I need to do is confirm that I can turn it over to the client afterward.”

“So we need to get you inside the ranch. Mano a mano, eh?”

“Something like that. Just a conversation.”

“You don’t just turn up on the Roanokes’ doorstep, Mike.”

“Well, this is why I’m talking to you, Bob. You’ve got the local knowledge. How do we get in to talk to them?”

“Heh. That’s the one Regis used to ask for the million-dollar prize.”

“Just the conversation. Not trying to deliver legal documents on them. It’s a five-minute thing. How do we get in the door?”

“The Roanokes… They’re not big on people, Mike. Especially since the whole politics thing blew up in their faces.”

“Yeah,” Trix said. “I was wondering about that.”

“The Roanokes don’t understand why they’re not the Bushes, is the short version. They’re old oil money, older than the Bushes. Old Man Roanoke spent some time in Joint Special Operations, deep spook stuff, has all kinds of weird friends. They figured they could jump right over building a power base in local politics and go right for the brass ring. The Old Man took a shot at kingmaking in the eighties, and that went wrong, so all his hopes were pinned on Junior.

“But what you need to get, Mike, is that the Roanokes are not normal. I mean, this isn’t just ‘the very rich are not like you and me.’ There are stories.”

“Uh-huh.” I busied myself with beer.

“What kind of stories?”

“Oh, you just had to, didn’t you, Trix?”

“I want to know. I couldn’t just leave that hanging in the air.”

Bob snorted.

“What’s so funny about that?”

“Well, one story says that’s how the Old Man was conceived. See, when guys are hanged by the neck, when their neck breaks they usually ejaculate. And apparently when the Old Man’s pop hanged himself, his mom scraped up his spooge and, well…shoved it up herself. So, you know, ‘hanging’…it just made me laugh, I’m sorry.”

There was a clanking of cutlery on ceramics. The middle-aged couple sitting next to us had stopped eating, and were looking at Bob like they wanted to unload six-shooters in his face.

“See?” Bob rasped, leaning over the table. “They’ve got friends fucking everywhere .”

The doors to the kitchen banged open. The waitress emerged behind a long steel trolley, which she pushed with much pantomimed effort toward our table.

On it was a horizontal section of a bull. As if someone had taken a steer, chainsawed the sides off, and chucked the middle part on an eight-foot-long steel platter on wheels.

It still had a horn sticking out of it.

It was served blue; cold, basically, just seared to seal it and slapped on the plate. If it had still had both sides, a good vet could’ve gotten it up on its feet in an hour or so.

The waitress parked it at the end of the table, and gave Bob outsized, sawtoothed cutlery. “Message from chef,” she growled. “He said to tell you that if you don’t eat it all—again—he’s going to take you outside and kick your nuts up into your lungs.”

Bob laughed nervously. “What does he mean, again? I was sick last time. And the time before that, I ate it all, and neither you nor he were working that night. I ordered the Special, I’ll eat the Special. Get me some steak sauce.”

Trix and I must’ve been staring. Bob looked at us as he sawed off a chunk of microcooked steer and forked it onto his plate. It oozed clotted blood from the thick veins sticking out of the meat. “This is real Texas food,” Bob said. “This is what we eat. Great fucking country, Texas.”

I thought Bob was going to start crying again as he chewed the raw meat.

“Delicious,” he mewled.

We sat there for five, ten minutes, silently watching Bob painfully shovel raw beef into his big, crushed face. Thankfully, our own food arrived at that point. A pound of meat on a flowery plate for Trix, and a huge chunk of rump for me. I turned it over with my fork. The skin was still on it. The skin’s brand was still intact. A big R.

“Your fries,” the waitress announced. A metal pail of fries with what looked like a gallon of melted cheese poured on top.

“I asked for the small portion,” Trix said.

“That is the small portion,” the waitress said.

Trix gave me a little smile. “I guess I know how they justify serving fries in a place that only serves stuff that came out of a cow.”

“You got to eat it all,” Bob muttered stickily. “It’ll look bad for me otherwise.”

Trix gave him her sweetest look. “Bob, I like you. I’m trying to make you feel comfortable. But, honestly, if you think I’m going to eat all this shit, you can just suck out my farts, okay?”

The middle-aged couple got up to leave. Bob choked back a sob and went back to his hideous dinner.

Trix met my eyes. “What? I’m only human, Mike. Though I might not stay that way if I eat all this. They’ll be pulling cholesterol out of my veins with a bulldozer.”

“Quit moaning. My dinner’s still got the skin on it.”

“You’re kidding me.”

I lifted up one cheek of my pan-fried ass to show her the brand.

“R ?”

“Roanoke.” Bob coughed. “They’re in the cattle business, too. It’s a sign. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

He forked another squirting chunk of beef into his mouth, looked up at the ceiling fan, and started yelling as he chewed. “Look! I’m eating it, you bastards! I’m eating it all!”

Bits of meat flew out of his mouth, hit the fan, and were evenly distributed all over the restaurant.

Bobate the entire damn thing, but was paralyzed afterward. After some cajoling, we arranged to briefly borrow a wheeled office chair from the restaurant’s back room, and trundled him out to the parking lot in it. He was still sucking scraps of flesh off the horn, and bellowing that he’d showed them, he’d showed them all. Oh, and that the chef was a whore.

“Fuck this,” I said. “Get the keys from him. I’ll drive. We’ll dump his crazy ass in front of the hotel and pay someone to move him or kill him or something.”

“This is how you treat your friends?”

“He’s a nutbag, Trix. Look at him.”

“Whooooores,” said Bob.

“There you go. Get the fucking keys.”

Trix patted him down and found the keys in his inside jacket pocket. “Thank God,” she groaned. “I wasn’t up for checking his pants.”

Bob studied her with one eye, oddly drunken. “Mike never had the pretty girls before. How does he get the pretty girls now? I’m a goddamn Texan.”

“You always talk to your buddies’ girls like that?” she frowned, tossing me the keys.

I nearly dropped them.

“That’s how I get into trouble.” Bob teared up. “I’m so lonely.” And, just at the point where we softened, he added, “Whooooores.”

I opened up the rear door and tipped him into it.

“What about the chair?”

“Leave it here. They called that rump well done? If I’d poured my beer on it to wake it up it could’ve skated its way home in that damn chair. Get in.”

“Oooh. Masterful.”

“I’ll spank you right here in the parking lot.”

“Promises.”

“Just get in the car.”

As we pulled out of the parking lot, Bob seemed to pull out of his meat fugue a little. “Left at the lights. Something I want to show you.”

“Whores?”

“No. Roanoke.”

I looked for Trix’s take. She shrugged. “It’s what we came for.”

I took us left at the lights, and a handful more directions took us out of town. The dark came in hard. Trix looked up out of the window. “Stars,” she said. “You don’t see so many in New York. You don’t realize.”

“Kill the lights,” said Bob, “and pull over here.” We did, by a low wooden fence.

“Get out and look into the field.”

“What are we looking for, Bob?”

“You’ll see.”

The night air was warm. The fence surrounded a large field littered with sleeping cattle. We wandered to the fence, put our feet on it, and waited.