Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [12]
Willy has roots in the great Dakota Badlands which gives him a Rooseveltian sort of aggressive optimism, so he assumes a rough and tumble approach to everything from doing the dishes, to scrubbing the bathrooms, to working with clients, to drinking and driving.
At night, after dinner, we pile into Willy’s Jeep, the one that he parks in front of the Stodgy Old Bank every day, like a horse in front of a saloon, and hit whatever bar the band is playing in. His Jeep, a ragtop CJ-7 he has named Tatonka, the Lakota name for buffalo, suits him perfectly. Sam and Sylvia, an actress buddy from our recording sessions, love to tag along for the fun of picking up strays.
With Willy at the wheel, we tackle the night. We tackle our foes. We tell ourselves we are on a crusade from which there is no turning back. Sometimes we believe it.
Willy is a workaholic, but on those nights when he is able to break free and join us with the band at a club, we always manage to save him a seat or a table front and center. After two drinks, he falls sound asleep, as a hundred decibles roar. Alvo, the gregarious band leader, standing center stage directly above Willy’s table, will in the millisecond between beats cry into the microphone, “C’mon Willy, wake up!”
On hot summer nights, Willy stows the doors of the Jeep behind the tire rack on the back. One night, I yell at him to slow down while rounding a curve. We are nearing a woman’s house where I hope to spend the night. When he doesn’t respond, I look up to see that he is no longer behind the wheel. Sam and Sylvia, riding in the back, grab me in time to keep me in the vehicle as we go up on two wheels, but we lost Willy out the door. Seat belts? What are they?
“How’d you stop the Jeep?” he asks incredulously when he comes running up a few moments later.
In answer, I point to the trees, the lawns, torn-down fences, and decimated suburban flower gardens in our path. The Jeep is halfway up a big old tree trunk.
The next morning I will wake to his familiar voice outside my girlfriend’s open window. We can see Willy Harper. He is standing there in a most serious three-piece suit and cowboy boots, coolly explaining to the police and a consortium of neighborhood residents, in the one-hundred-degree heat, that he can’t possibly be charged with reckless driving. He wasn’t even in the vehicle at the time of the accident. He assures them that he can produce witnesses. Damned if they don’t let him go.
“I want to write his speeches when he runs for president,” I say.
Across the street from us on Huidekoper lives The Mad Painter. Charles Winston Young is a tall, dark, and handsome Minnesotan, who has rejected his parents’ generation’s stultifying uptight Germanic religious mores to become an uptight recluse artist in, of all places, Washington, D.C. His friends call him Cy. He has replaced Jesus with Art, ritual with discipline. No one and nothing is good enough for him. For some reason, he has adopted us and become our self-appointed conscience, a sort of cultural quality control expert. His greatest fear is the corruption of his aesthetic. And the most potentially dangerous heretics and