Elmore Leonard: Freaky Deaky

"I bet I do too. But see, we hardly ever use that kind of high explosives. They were at Mario's in midtown Detroit, waiting for their dinner order among white tablecloths and oil paintings of southern Italian villages: Skip drinking vodka, eating the breadsticks with a pat of butter stuck to each bite;

Robin smoking, sipping red wine, watching Skip through tinted glasses.

"War scenes, like mortars and shells exploding? We use black powder, squib it off electrically. For the kush shot, or any time you see a car go over the cliff and explode? We put three or four gallons of gasoline inside in plastic bottles wrapped in primer cord and then fire it by remote control.

Push a button, like you open your garage door."

"I park on the street," Robin said.

"Like you used to. I remember there was Daddy's garage door and Mommy's garage door and Miss Robin's garage door, side by side attached to a big house in Bloomfield Hills."

"Did you know Mother drove me to prison?"

"I didn't think you could do that."

"All the way to Huron Valley. She bought a gray pinstriped suit for the trip. She and the judge were hoping I'd be sent to Alderson-Christ-West Virginia, but Daddy talked to somebody in the Justice Department."

"That was nice," Skip said, "had you close to home."

"I was hoping for Pleasanton, in California. Get some sun."

"You see your folks?"

"Daddy's gone to heaven, he had a coronary. Mother, I hardly ever see, which I'm sure you can understand. She's on a round-the-world cruise. That's what she does now.

She takes trips."

"Your mom was a trip," Skip said, "had that sarcastic way of speaking.

You do it better."

"Thanks a lot," Robin said. She blew her smoke at him and took a sip of wine.

"I rode a government bus down to Milan," Skip said.

"I don't know where my mommy was. This bus had heavy wire over the windows in case we got loose of our handcuffs and leg irons. Me and a half a dozen Hispanic brothers with needle tracks up their arms. I thought, The fuck am I doing with these dudes? Man, I'm political. I should be going to one of those country-club joints like where they sent those Watergate assholes, but I guess they thought I was ba-a-ad."

"You were," Robin said.

"I think it was blowing up the Federal Building that pissed them off."

"Yeah, but hell, the money they kept when we jumped bond, it would've paid to fix up the damage, wouldn't it?

Some of it." Skip was chewing on a breadstick, crumbs in his beard.

"Man, when they brought us up that second time, if they'd known even half the gigs I was into… I mean those years living underground."

Robin said, "Living out there with the great silent majority. I know why they're silent, they don't have a fucking thing to say. I got into shoplifting just for something to do.

One time I even stole a bra."

Skip said, "I was living in a commune near Grants, New Mexico, with these leftover flower children bitching at each other, bored out of my skull. I went up to Farmington and got the job as a TV repairman 'cause, you know, I always had a knack for wiring up shit. This one day I said to myself, Man, if you're a wanted criminal then how come you aren't into crime? That's when I moved to L.A. the first time."

"You ever look for your picture in a post office?"

"Yeah, but I never saw it."

"I didn't see mine either," Robin said. She leaned in closer, resting her arms on the table.

"When I finally got your number, and your service said you were in Detroit…"

"Couldn't believe it, could you?"

She said, "You know, you haven't changed much at all."

Skip said, "I may be a half a step slower, but I still have my hair. I lift weights when I'm home and I think of it."

"I like your beard."

"I've had it off and on. I first grew it when I was over in Spain.

That's where I went soon as I got my release.

Started as an extra in the picture business and worked my way into special effects and stunt work. This guy Sidney Aaronson was doing a big epic called The Sack of Rome. But what it was, it was a sack of shit. You know how many times I got killed in that fucking picture?"

Robin watched him reach out to stop their waiter going by with a tray of dinners. Skip ordered another drink and a bottle of Valpolicella.

The little fifty-year-old waiter said with an accent, "Just a minute, just a minute, please," and hurried on.

Skip winked at her.

"Time him. He gets one minute."

"You haven't changed at all," Robin said.

Skip Gibbs smiled, a thirty-eight-year-old kid: dull blond streaked hair tied back with a rubber band in a short ponytail, bread crumbs in the beard that grew up into his cheeks; Skip the Wolfman wearing a black satiny athletic jacket that bore the word Speedball across the back in a racy red script: the title of a film he'd worked on handling special effects, blowing black-powder charges and squib bing gunshots.

He said to Robin, "You still look like you can hit and run"-crinkling his light-blue eyes at her.

"Man, there's something about a thin girl with big tits." Staring at her beige cotton sweater, three wooden buttons undone at the neck.

"I notice they're still in the right place."

"You put on Jane Fonda 's Workout, " Robin said, "all you have to do is sit and watch it, you stay in shape."

Skip said, "I knew you'd be into something. Just don't tell me you've become a women's lib vegetarian lesbian, okay? I have beautiful memories of us in bed-and on floors and in sleeping bags, in back seats …"

Now Robin Abbott was smiling, sort of, agreeable without admitting anything: calm brown eyes gazing through the tinted glasses set against a pale fox face, her brown hair sleeked back into a single braid she would sometimes finger and stroke, a rope of hair, holding it against her breast in the cotton sweater.

"Your hair's different," Skip said, "otherwise…" He squinted at her and said, "The first time I ever saw you, Lincoln Park in Chicago, man, that was a long time ago. We were only-what, nineteen years old?"

"You were. I was still eighteen," Robin said.

"It was the Saturday before the start of the Democratic National Convention, August twenty-fourth, 1968." She was nodding, seeing it again.

"Lincoln Park…"

"Thousands of people," Skip said, "and I picked you out right away:

Why, there's a little Wolverine from the University of Michigan. Though I hadn't seen you at school before. You had on a tank top and you were holding up a poster that said, real big, FUCK THE DRAFT, waving it at the cops. I kept looking at you, your little nips showing in that thin material, your hair real long down your back. I said to myself, I think I'll score me some of that."

"Your hair was longer too," Robin said.

"Cops kept grabbing it, trying to hold you. We got away and I tied it up in a ponytail."

Skip said, "You think I don't remember that?" Touching his hair.

"I don't ordinarily wear it like this, but I did this evening."

Robin said, "I'd know you anywhere. Remember the first night? In the guy's car?"

"The cops pounding on it"-Skip grinned-"whole bunch of them wearing those baby-blue riot helmets. I look up and see these pig faces staring at me. Cop bangs on the window.

"What're you doing in there?" I go, "What's it look like I'm doing?

I'm getting laid, man." That's when they started beating on the car.

The guy comes along that owned the car, remember? He couldn't believe it.

"Hey, what're you doing to my fucking car?" He tears into the cops and they club the shit out of him and throw him in the wagon. Oh, man."

Skip rubbed his eyes with a knuckle.

get tears thinking about it."

Robin said, "You remember the last time we were here?"