Breakdown

onny kicked the damn truck. The last thing she wanted to do

on this hot fall day was walk up this particular driveway in this particular county and ask this particular jive white man for help. Where was her diplomatic Chick when she needed her?

The rain had dried up for a few days, so she'd taken Jeep fishing at dawn and was heading back to Natural Woman Foods when the truck died. She and Jeep had taken up fishing soon after the breakup with Katie. Fishing was her therapy and she'd thought it might help the kid, who acted so lost. Hell, maybe Jeep would be better off going back where she came from, but Chick acted like the kid was her firstborn, so Donny had set out to bust up Jeep's melancholy. It had paid off. When the sheriff wasn't available to go with her out to Sweet Creek, which was most of the time, Jeep made a tolerable fishing companion even if she did throw back what she couldn't eat.

The road was on an incline here, with shoulders eroded from runoff. The best they could do was to coast into a driveway.

"You want me to come with you?" Jeep asked her.

She laughed aloud. "'Cause you're a white girl? A crew-cut city dyke in a leather jacket isn't going to hack it. Maybe I look like a backwoods drag king, and maybe I've been butting heads with Mr. Homo Phobe for years, but at least he knows this enemy. He might shoot you on sight."

Jeep looked worried. "So he's like, one of those militia crazies?"

"He's one of the fools messing with this anti-gay shit around here. You know what bumper sticker I want? 'I Don't Brake for Bigots.'"

Donny grabbed the lavender bandanna from her back pocket-she owned seven plus a purple for dress up-and kneeled to rub a new scuff mark off the white-tooled violet boots a local shoemaker custom made for her little feet. Donny still owed him another year of birthday cakes for his entire family.

"I thought your ballot measures were ancient history?"

"Not to me they're not. Or to this guy." She let a panting Loopy out of the cab on her leash and led her to a patch of scrub for a quick pee. "Every big election there's some bullshit to fight. We almost always win, in the courts at least, but these organizers got the taste for power. They send out mailings and make appearances in little towns like Waterfall Falls to stir up the angry laid-off mill workers and the retired California Republicans like these jerks who think they've found white het paradise in the Northwest. The purses and wallets open up, and cash falls out to do the Lord's work. Well, if that isn't an insult to the Lord, acting like He can't do his own work, it's an insult to be saying He made a mistake by inventing queers in the first place." She peered along the road in both directions. Was this a damn hot flash coming on? She hated the things, but not as much as she'd hated her monthlies. "Where are the logging trucks with the CBs when we could use one? Come on, Loopy, get in the truck."

"You don't carry a cell phone?"

"What am I going to do with a cell phone-lug it everywhere in case I break down once a year? I'm not on the internet either, and I can't be bothering to learn to operate Chick's remote control. I'd rather walk across the room to change the channel or, better still, read a good western novel."

"You read westerns? Zane Grey? Bill Crider?"

"I'll take any of them. If I lived in the olden times, I would have been the first black lesbian sharpshooter in the West." She took a gunfighter stance, pulled invisible six-shooters from holsters at her hips and spun them, shot each toward the sky while she made popping sounds with her lips, blew smoke from the barrels, and slid them back into the holsters.

"Oh my god, oh my god! Aren't you the notorious Donny Derringer?"

"None other, my good woman. How can I be of service to you?"

Jeep swiveled her baseball cap forward and shaded her eyes from the sun with its brim, then brought an imaginary fiddle up to her chin. She sang,

"There was a villain in Waterfall town, Puttin' all the gay folk down."

Donny stomped one foot to keep the beat.

"The faggots and the dykes all lived in terror

Till out of the sunset appeared Donny Derringer!

Bigots, they ride over Waterfall Pass,

And here comes Donny to kick some ass!"

Donny hooted with laughter, and Jeep joined in with her unexpected hee-haw of a laugh. Loopy, excited by the sounds, balanced on the edge of the truck bed as if hopeful that someone might be calling her.

"You're a keeper, kid," Donny said. "We're going to have to find a way to tempt you to stay around." She held up a hand. "Car coming."

Jeep's worried look returned. A shiny black Blazer cruised into view around the bend from town. He already had his blinker on to turn into his driveway-the driveway Donny blocked.

She sneezed from the road dust. "Looks like we caught us the big one. Mr. Homo Phobe himself. Whatever it takes, we have to get going. It's delivery day. Without me at the store when the grocery truck gets there, Chick's a one-woman show. You keep a low profile and let me handle this."

"No problemo. Is he going to get, like violently mad that we're in his driveway?"

"He's mad that we're alive and breathing his air. Damn, I wish I knew something about cars. I never had one in the city or I'd out-mechanic any ten lazy-ass men."

John Johnson advanced on them chewing a toothpick and adjusting his Exxon cap. He was a big bent-forward hulk with white hairy shelves for eyebrows, nostrils and ears frothing with surly white hair. He'd sold his gas stations in southern California and built this showy retirement home right near her favorite fishing spot on Sweet Creek.

"What's the trouble now, Donalds?" Johnson asked in an irritated tone, eyes traveling from her purple cowboy hat to her black Henley and faded overalls, to her boots.

She wondered what the big deal was-she always dressed the same. Long ago she'd decided if she was going to be about the only black person in town, she'd do it in style. A few years after her arrival, the most radical of the high school girls took to wearing bright leather boots and fringed vests. Now such outfits were a common sight in town, and she'd noticed a postcard at the Thriftway Market of a horsewoman wearing Donny drag. A white woman, of course. Although she was nervous around horses and had no more fondness for cows, she liked to think of herself as a cowdyke.

Fists on hips, too aware that while he was older, she was half his bulk, she glanced at her raggedy red Datsun pickup, its hood gaping open in what would be clear to the stupidest man on earth was a gasp for help. "I could use a phone."

He adjusted neatly pressed work pants under his hanging belly. "We can use my bag phone. You want a tow truck?"

"Like I'm made of money. I was going to call a friend," she said, thinking she'd ask Chick to look up Hector White's number. She pulled off her hat and gave it a punch. Chick would be able to suggest something.

Johnson glanced toward the Datsun's tailgate where Jeep sat, one arm around the dog, as still as the nine-mile marker across the road, her eyes comically big. "You girls check the battery?" he asked with sour-faced contempt. "If that is a girl you're with. I can't tell with you people."

She ignored his baiting. "The battery's charged."

A big mocking grin spread across his face. "Anything in your tank?"

Back in Chicago Donny and the gals she ran with would have torn off his head. "Full up," she said.

She didn't know whether he was condescending to her as a woman, as a person of color, or as a dyke and decided that her color would put her at the bottom in his world. This set off all the usual alarms in her and she felt her blood heat up. She was angry at the racist white world, and she knew she would always be angry at the racist white world. How dare they think they were better than her because of an accident of color? Yet even as that old tape played in her mind, she knew she had to get into doing something about this instant rage, even if it meant changing herself inch by inch, because she took it out on people she loved when the anger had nowhere else to go. When it did have someplace to go, like at this critter, there was no longer a gang and she wasn't in Chicago. Her head-tearing-off days were over. She tore up nothing but herself.

She could see Johnson wrestle with his bad old self too. His foot was tapping like she was some cockroach he itched to squash, but these boys, they liked to show off. He'd owned gas stations-he knew something about cars.

"I'll take a gander at her," he announced.

"Twist my arm," she said and smacked her hat back on her head.

A mud-spattered two-ton pickup sped past with a bearded longhair at the wheel. Sheriff Sweet was on his tail in her cruiser, red roof light blinking, but Donny saw her take note of their little tableau on the way by. The sheriff would circle back to see what was going on, but who knew how long that would take. Once Sheriff Sweet was in pursuit, she was In Pursuit and nothing much would take her attention away. Donny imagined the sheriff felt like she had to prove herself with every incident-prove that a woman could do the job as well as it could be done. Loopy let loose a series of low hoarse barks. She heard the sheriff whoop her siren once in the distance.

Jeep gave Donny a smart-ass look as Johnson bent his big be-hind to peer under the hood. "Maybe," Jeep called to her, "I should hitch a ride to work?"

Johnson straightened. "You stay put, little lady. Hitching's a damn stupid thing to do with all the weirdos around here."

Donny guffawed. "Say what?"

Johnson glared. "There's weirdos and then there's weirdos. She may be one of your kind, but she's still some mother's daughter."

Loopy was straining at her leash and whimpering in the back of the truck. Donny knew better than to let this fool get her going and tried to summon up Chick to calm her down, but she couldn't stop herself. "We're every one of us somebody's child, Johnson. Why don't you treat us all with that kind of decency?"

His jawline looked like it had turned to stone, leaving his lower lip jutting aggressively and foolishly out. She had him. He'd treated one queer like a human being for one second, and she'd caught him at it. She felt like she'd grown a foot in height.

His eyes backed away from hers and he muttered, "I never said to go out and kill homos."

"No?" Donny jabbed back. "Whose talk stirs up the sickos?"

"You people bring it on yourselves."

Don't jump all over his case, be gracious, Chick would say. He's going to fix your truck, and he knows he showed himself up. Chick would never advise going in for the kill, although if there was any joy in these exchanges that would be it. "Not your fault our store window got smashed the night you lost the vote on your anti-gay ballot measure? Not your fault somebody tore up Clara and Hector's garden for backing us? You're innocent as a newborn when you say people are going to get AIDS at Natural Woman Foods?"

His hand was a fist, twisting back and forth against his other, open palm. "It's plain wrong what you people do," he said and turned to prod the truck.

Her voice was sounding tinny to her, like it did when rage took her over. "It's nobody's business but our own what we do and you know it!"

She jumped when Jeep touched her elbow. "Chill, Donny. Delivery day, remember?"

Johnson held up a hose. "Here's your problem, girls," he crowed.

She'd been about to light into Jeep. Damn, this temper would drive away everyone yet. "Say what? I just put in new hoses!"

Johnson smirked. He was top dog again. "Like I've been saying, you don't have the right equipment." He paused. "Here, you need a clamp to hold this on. Reach me some duct tape from the back of my Blazer."

"I carry my own. And I guess I can manage the tape job, thank you."

He ambled away while she stomped to the toolbox in the bed of her truck and clanked through her rusty screwdriver collection to fish out the tape. Why hadn't she spotted the loose hose and saved all this trouble? Goddamn if her mind wasn't going down the tubes. Sweat beaded on her forehead and dripped onto the motor. She needed the deodorant stone pretty badly. The damn flashes always came at the wrong time. She wanted to take off her hot vest, but it covered the fact that she didn't wear a bra. It was none of this lowlife's business that at this age she was too big to go without one. Damn body made her feel soft as her grandma, though come to think of it Grandma Donalds had a fighting spirit. Till the day she died of the sugar she chased junkies, gang boys, and drug dealers out of the store with a broom. Donny had to stop herself from chuckling at the memory.

She hated to owe the man-and Chick would have her head for making things worse. Breathe, Chick would tell her. She added a skirting of tape around her first seal and signaled Jeep, who gave a cheer as the truck started right up. Johnson, leaning on his Blazer, arms folded, looked smug.

Relief replaced anger. "Thank you," she told the man, which should have been enough. Why couldn't she leave it alone? "Duct tape," she laughed. "Think we could mend this little town with duct tape?"

He started jiggling his foot again. "It's not the town that needs mending."

Donny wiped her hands on her lavender bandanna over and over, looking toward the heavens for gumption without anger, because she knew she was nothing but a coward unless she was spitting mad. "Tell you what." She dredged up words from some deep pocket of hope, maybe channeling Chick. "I appreciate your help. You and the little woman stop by the store for some of the best coffee and pastries you ever tasted. On the house."

His eyes said, "That'll be a cold day in hell." As she drove away he got smaller in her rearview mirror, but he never budged.

CHAPTER FIVE