.....Among the ladies, that was. The men would have preferred a little something by Hank Junior or George Strait from that year.
.....A large butcher paper banner served as a wall to the side of the to-do, a detailed Coors logo diminishing the dot matrix sentiment that surrounded the bucking bronco school mascot:
.....WELCOME BACK CLASS OF '86!
.....An odd sentiment, in that most of them had never left. Over the years, the folks that had hated each other back in high school had learned to get along like rats in a small town maze, and the ones who had been best friends in the day had found reasons to become mortal enemies over the next two decades.
.....But in the rarefied air of the big reunion, animosities were temporarily put aside. Enemies mingled together and friends joined in, and as the liquor that had been smuggled in by pocket rocket and purse flowed on into the night, alliances would shift as they inevitably did during alcohol-fueled gatherings of people not used to drinking in public.
.....But it was still early and the drama could wait until after the meat had been served.
.....Clouds of greasy smoke curled up into the sky and noses turned to the smell of searing flesh. The meat had just hit the grill on the Mother of All Barbecues, a workhorse of utilities that stretched the length of a cafeteria table. A butcher’s Whitman’s Sampler of various cuts of meat began to cook; cow, pig, and chickens alike were represented, showing up on wing and hoof to do their duty.
.....As the meat cooked, large women in semi-formal mumus began to crowd the potluck table for their celebratory share of mayonnaise-laden pasta and potatoes, biding their time until the main course.
.....The menfolk separated themselves off and gathered in small groups, sporting expensive cowboy hats and cheap suits, with battered boots shined for the special occasion. Coors longnecks were uncapped and drained with vigor.
.....A few adventurous souls paired off to dance awkwardly in the small patch of dust reserved for such. They shuffled in a self-conscious way that made them look as silly as they most likely felt.
.....It’s not a pleasant thing to see or be someone on the downside of their thirties trying to look hip while dancing to Kenny Loggins. It was of no help that to a all-but-one, the Harding High alumni all looked a good decade older than they really were.
.....The Wyoming sun is not a good friend to the skin.
.....Off to a side, Wolfe nursed a Coors Light and tried to play wallflower. After enduring a few attempts at renewing old acquaintance and an awkward amount of exchanging equally awkward amounts of long pauses, he had finally retreated to the sidelines. He figured that they were really no more interested in what he’d been up to over the years than he was of them.
.....He was frustrated in his attempt at playing invisible by a barrel-bellied gladhander, a mustached lump wearing a cheap Stetson knock-off, a denim shirt with pearl buttons, a black suede jacket and a belt buckle the size of a greeting card. It sported a bas-relif of a bucking bronco.
.....His name tag had scrawled on it in block letters: CARL.
.....“Happy Twentieth!” the lump nodded with a grin, blinking at Wolfe as he tried to remember the teenaged version of the face.
.....“Same to you,” acknowledged Wolfe, clinking the offered Coors bottle in toast. They both pulled from the bottles and sighed, Carl making an effort to provide a bigger show of satisfaction.
.....He licked his lips. “How you doing tonight?”
.....“Good,” Wolfe nodded. “Good.”
.....The thought that he’d be doing a whole lot better after he got away from the reunion was left unsaid.
.....“What do you think?” Carl prodded, oblivious to the fine art of body language and Wolfe’s barely concealed posture of Fuck Off.
.....“I think one of our alumni has connections to the local beer distributor.” Wolfe held up the bottle of Coors Light. “Not much variety.”
.....Carl pulled a self-effacing grin from his sales bag. “That would be me...”
.....He leaned in to read Wolfe’s name tag. “... Dan,” and threw out a hand.
.....“Carl Steinman. Remember?”
.....Wolfe met the greeting, then shook his head. “No.”
.....“Which Dan were you?”
.....“I’m still Dan Wolfe.”
.....“Oh yeah,” Carl laughed. “The Lone Wolfe.” He made quote marks in the air as he said it, almost dropping his beer in the process. Wolfe wanted to break those fingers, even more than he usually did when some one made air quotes.
.....“Sigh,” Wolfe sighed.
.....“Still antisocial?” Carl asked.
.....“I was never antisocial,” Wolfe countered. “I just wasn’t pro-social.”
.....Carl nodded and took a break to figure that one out.
.....More beer was sipped.
.....The sun had finally set behind the silhouette of the high school, and the big lights reserved for the big night games came on with a slam. As the artificial lights flooded the field, the temperature inexplicably seemed to drop by ten degrees. A mosquito buzzed by Wolfe’s ear and he swatted at it with his free hand, the whine of the damned thing louder than the hum of the lights.
.....His smile hanging on despite the lull in conversation, Carl looked about casually. Shaking his head, he cocked an eyebrow at Wolfe. “Twenty years... where did it all go?”
.....“Yeah.” Wolfe smacked himself in the face as the skeeter alit. He drew back his hand and it was smudged by a streak of bright blood and the dark ruin of mosquito. He wondered if the blood was his.
.....There was another insistent whine as the bloodsucker was replaced by another one.
.....“Those damn’ things can suck a cow dry in minutes ‘round here,” Carl noted in sympathy. “For some reason, they never seem to bother me.”
.....That’s because their damned stingers would have to be three times as long just to make it through all the lard, Wolfe mused as he smiled back at Carl.
.....The two nodded at each other some more, watching the dancers. The beer that Wolfe had been nursing finally went dry. He considered it thoughtfully, as if it might hold an answer to Carl’s earlier question. Where did all the beer go?
.....He eyed a nearby beer cooler, and Carl followed his gaze and his smile went wide. He retrieved a longneck from the inside pocket of his blazer.
.....“Have you tried this?” he asked as he handed it to Wolfe, who marveled at the coldness of the bottle. He considered Carl’s jacket.
.....“You got a cooler in there?”
.....“Special lining.” Carl winked. “Company swag. One of the perks of the trade.”
.....Wolfe inspected the label of the bottle. “Coors Lightning. I’ve seen the ads, but...”
.....“You must have seen them around here, ‘cause we’re doing an exclusive test run of the product in this market.”
.....“What’s special about it?” Wolfe asked as Carl wielded a bottle opener with a flourish and uncapped it for him. He took a sip. It tasted like ass, but he held his reaction down to a noncommittal nod.
.....“It has the great taste of Coors Light,” Carl quoted, but with the lack of using air quotes he took the description as his own. “...but infused with guarana, ginseng, and a special extract from Columbian botanicals.”
.....On the last ingredient, he winked.
.....“Sounds like a speedball.” Wolfe faked another sip.
.....“I’ll swear by it,” Carl added, hand upheld in testimony. “I’ve lost five pounds since I switched over.”
.....“I’ll bet.” Considering that one wouldn’t be in a hurry to pop a second one, weight loss for a steady beer drinker was a given.
.....The music faded out to a sub-treble hum, and Wolfe and Carl turned to the soundbooth as the deejay leaned in and keyed the microphone. There was a wince-inducing squawk of feedback, and everyone stopped what they were about and gave the deejay a narrow-eyed glare.
.....Happily, he accepted their attention. “1986 was a great year for music, am I right? Billy Ocean... Whitney Houston... Mr. Mister... Lionel Ritchie... Survivor?”
.....“Woo,” a few members of the crowd managed.
.....“Freebird!” some jerk called out. Carl looked at the jerk and frowned.
.....Wolfe shrugged. “Hey... it’s tradition. A knucklehead tradition, but tradition...”
.....“But some songs are timeless... remember this one?” the MC continued, then began to chant. “We are the Broncos...”
.....The crowd fidgeted, looking at one another. Finally, one of them called back: “We are the Broncos...?”
.....The MC forked the devil horns, and a few members of his audience mumbled to each other in disapproval.
.....“The Mighty, Mighty Broncos...” he continued.
.....A few more voices joined in the call back. “The Mighty, Mighty Broncos?”
.....Carl almost dropped his beer in epiphany. “Holy crow... that’s our fight song!”
.....“We had a fight song?” Wolfe blinked.
.....“Everywhere we go-oh...” the deejay continued.
.....Nodding happily, Carl joined in: “Everywhere we go-oh...”
.....A couple of the former cheerleaders tried to bust some old moves. It was pretty sad, really. Wolfe almost felt embarrassed for them.
.....Almost.
.....And at least they had showed up, unlike most of the other former cheerleaders from the Class of ‘86.
.....The remainder of faded royalty were probably scattered throughout town in darkened living rooms, taking up couch space and fueling their regrets with a gallon of Baskin-Robbins Rocky Road and a tablespoon. With some Hershey’s Chocolate as a chaser. Straight from the can.
.....“People want to know-oh...”
.....“People want to know-oh...”
.....“Who we are-are...”
.....“Who we are-are...”
.....The MC paused dramatically and the lights went out. In the abrupt darkness, there were a few frightened gasps from the ladies in the crowd.
.....An amplified drumbeat began to pound in a 4/4 beat. A guitar riff followed, cadged from a pop hit of an earlier decade. Ram Jam’s ‘Black Betty’.
.....The crowd held its breath, expectant.
.....With a hiss, a fog machine cached by the side of the sound- booth began to pump out a toxic-smelling mist.
.....The proto-fog rolled out to coil unseen amongst the crowd, setting the stage for the coming need for atmosphere. The last riff from the guitar faded off, repeating itself in echoes that soon faded off themselves.
.....From behind the darkness, a chorus of girlish voices picked up the chant:
.....“We are the Broncos... the Mighty, Mighty Broncos...”
.....The menfolk smiled knowingly amongst one another and began to move forward.
.....“Everywhere we go-oh... people want to know-oh... who we are-are... who we are-are...”
.....There was a pause... then multi-colored spots sliced through the darkness and exploded against the Coors banner.
.....“...AND WE TELL THEM!”
.....The Class of ‘06 cheerleaders burst through the banner in a flurry of taut flesh and snapping hair, flashing teeth as yet untainted by bad habits, sixteen-years-old each and wearing the school colors the way they were meant to be wore.
.....The band kicked in again and the girls hit their marks with a precision that would have made a veteran drill sergeant weep with pride.
.....“We are the Broncos...”
.....The moves were straight out of an old Britney Spears video, limbs moving in ways that would kill anyone but a teenager that tried them.
.....As the girls snapped through their moves, the men in the crowd moved closer, breathing through their mouths.
.....Breathing shallow. Eyes unblinking.
.....The women quickly put aside their paper plates, the sidedishes discarded as the disregarded wives turned away from the buffet table and moved their way through the mix.
.....Arms were taken, linked. Breathing returned to normal.
.....Custody was reestablished.
.....“Shit.” Carl had arrived stag that night. His mouth was open, his eyes wide. “I don’t remember girls moving like that back when I was...”
.....Wolfe did. “I do.”
.....With the fog machine action and the diffused lights highlighting a sheen of girlish sweat, Lolita looked a whole lot like Tanya did twenty years before.
.....Untouchable.
.....Ten minutes later the show was over, the loudspeakers hic- cupping a Cyndi Lauper oldie. The music segued into some- thing that used to pass for heavy metal. Christ, Wolfe smiled to himself. April Wine. He hadn’t heard that band in years. The cut was “Rock Myself to Sleep” and it seemed like it was a welcome change of pace for one of the few remaining dancers.
.....The rest of the people had moved on to fall on the freshly served meat while the woman began to stomp about the nearly-empty dance space, thrashing her arms and snapping her hair in something halfway between headbanging and go-go dancing.
.....The video, Wolfe realized. She’s doing the routine that chick did for the video that had been in rotation on MTV. And she was doing a pretty damned good interpretation of it, if memory served him well. Not that he reserved to much of his memory for stuff like that.
.....“Mary...” an aggrieved voice spoke up from behind him.
.....Wolfe turned and the speaker shook his head ruefully as their eyes met. The name on his Welcome tag read Steve Ziegler. Wolfe remembered him enough and they shook, although Ziegler’s eyes stayed on his wife as she continued to flail across the turf.
.....“She shouldn’t really be mixing booze with her medication,” Ziegler apologized. “But then, it is sort of a rare occasion...”
.....Suddenly, it hit Wolfe who the middle-aged woman was, the former schoolmate who was currently only one Whitesnake song short of crawling all over the hood of the nearest car: Heavy Metal Mary.
.....He couldn’t remember her last name, but he had definitely remembered Heavy Metal Mary.
.....There wasn’t all that many headbangers floating around Nor’ Central Wyoming back in the mid-eighties, and Mary had had the uniform of nonconformity down: fried-out big hair, the eyeliner, red leather half-jacket, leopard skin spandex and heels that would have sunk the Bismarck. She and her long-haired boyfriend with his obligatory Judas Priest concert tee were a couple of the more spectacular freaks in the high school, too cool for class and always exiting the parking lot early in a cloud of diffused rubber layed down by oversized mags roiling beneath the wheel wells of his cherry ‘69 Camero.
.....But that was then...
.....Only a few days before graduation, that Camero had taken a corner too fast with the wrong girl’s face buried in the driver’s lap and 350 roaring cubes had imbedded itself to the rear axle in the side of a 7-Up truck. It took hours of slogging through the slurry of blood and carbonation before the EMTs could figure out that what was left of the girl wasn’t who everyone was assuming it was. One set of parents’ grief was passed on to another and Mary’s folks had set about using the second chance that had been granted to set the girl straight. Wolfe split town well before he had seen how well that effort had turned out.
........and this was now.
.....A wave of melancholy washed over Wolfe as he watched Ziegler try to pull his wife away from her momentary respite. She didn’t seem too happy to be interrupted and Wolfe caught the vibe that it was about to get ugly fast.
.....He set out for his car. The music faded behind him as he weaved through the cars in the parking lot, trying to find the Valiant among the mountains of SUVs.
.....He rounded a battered white Ford Econoline and passed the passenger-side window without glancing in. If he had, he would have caught an off-duty Clyde Kehoe sharing a couple of rails of methamphetamine with the driver, an alumni of the Class of ‘86.
.....Wolfe dodged an Escalade and passed Pierce, Debbie, and Lolita perched on the tailgate of the monster truck that was parked across from the Plymouth.
.....He nodded and moved in to unlock his door, ignoring the stinkeye Pierce had thrown him.
.....“Nice ride,” Pierce offered.
.....Wolfe wasn’t sure he liked the boy’s tone. “Thanks.”
.....“You don’t see many of those around anymore,” Pierce continued. “At least not in that kind of shape.”
.....They locked eyes, and Wolfe climbed in, fired up the 306 and pulled out.
.....Pierce spit after the taillights. The car eased out of the parking lot and mounted the main road, pulling away as it headed back towards the town.
.....Pierce nudged Debbie. “Did you see the way he was looking at you out there?”
.....“So?” Debbie muttered. She was intent on restoring her toenail polish and not happy about having her stroke jostled.
.....“So he’s fucking old enough to be your old man.”
.....“I couldn’t see shit with all those lights,” she replied, dabbing a dot of red on a chipped spot with the brush. “I could feel ‘em though. All those old man eyes looking at me. It was like I was out there naked, not like during a game or something.”
.....She looked up at Pierce. “I don’t know how strippers do it...it’s icky.”
.....“I liked it.”
.....They looked at Lolita.
.....“What?” Debbie scrunched her nose.
.....“At the games I feel like we’re interrupting the real...”
.....They jumped as Scot T pounded on the side of the truck. “Word up, dawgs!”
.....“Easy on the ride, asshole!” Pierce snarled.
.....Smelling of the grill, Scot T pulled his apron off and tossed it in the back of the truck. He retrieved his baseball cap from hip pocket and screwed it back on his head, cocking it just so.
.....He sidled up and his hand crept down, resumed control of Lolita’s ass. “Ready to roll?”
.....Pierce eyed Scot T’s free hand. “Did you score any of the...”
.....“It’s behind the shed, Homie.” Scot T smiled. “Four cases.”
.....“It’s not that new shit they’re pushing, is it?” Pierce asked.
.....“Coors Lightning.” Scot T shrugged. “It’s all that was left.”
.....“Shit,” Debbie muttered. “We’ll be wired all night.”
.....“Yeah,” Scot T grinned. “Which means we got all night to drink.”
.....Pierce tossed homie his letterman jacket from where it had been coiled atop the wheel well, and Scott T shrugged it on. Her ass free of Scott T’s hand, Lolita perked up.
.....“Guys?” She tapped her watch. “Before you start in, could you drop me off at work?”
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