Page 12 of Virago

Yep. They were going to get bugs again, and then they’d call him to fix it.

His parents were homeowners, free and clear. They both had full-time jobs, and they’d kept those jobs for years now. They were grownups, finally. But if they lived to be a hundred, they would do it like unattended fifteen-year-olds.

Muttering under his breath about still having to parent his parents, Zaxx stood and got busy cleaning up.

He’d have to get Zelda going so he could clean her mess up, too. He had to help her get her car out of impound, and then he had to see about teaching that fucking cop a lesson about feeling up women he’d pulled over.

It was shaping up to be a fucked-up kind of Saturday.

~oOo~

He was washing dishes when his mother shuffled from the bedroom. She wore one of Pop’s decomposing Nirvana t-shirts and absolutely nothing else. Zaxx noticed but thought nothing of it; in this house, nudity was no big, and he’d never understood why it should be. Bodies were bodies.

“Hey, Zeeber,” she muttered sleepily, dragging her hands through her messy auburn hair and stretching so the hem of her tee rose up to about her waist.

“Mornin’, Mom.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She patted the side of his head.

Nodding at the sink, she said, “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know.” It was a bit they did, where Mom pretended like she was just about to do the chore he was doing. Usually he added I wanted to to his response, but this morning his family situation chafed his brain. Too many needs pulling on him at once, he supposed.

“You didn’t start coffee?” Mom asked, with the faintest hint of accusation or disappointment in her tone. With that, the chafe finally drew a little blood.

Normally, he’d have simply said No, sorry. This morning, irritated, he turned off the tap and faced her. “No, Mom, I didn’t start coffee. I didn’t think about it because I don’t drink coffee. I don’t drink coffee because I’m on Adderall, and coffee makes me too jumpy.”

“You shouldn’t take Adderall,” said his mother, the decades-long daily weed user. “All those chemicals are unhealthy. If you need a pick-me-up ...”

“Mom. I have ADHD, remember?” He’d been diagnosed about eighteen months earlier, and getting on meds had been a fucking revelation. Maybe if he’d been diagnosed as a kid, his life would have made more sense. Maybe he could have focused both on his family and on himself, and he’d have done better in school. Maybe he could have gone to college.

He’d wanted to be an astronomer when he was a kid. In high school, that dream had gained some nuance, and he’d wanted to be an aeronautics engineer. Something to do with space; all those star charts and talk of planets in retrograde had captured something in his head, though he’d never quite believed in the astrology stuff, at least not with his mom’s confident fervor. He’d been interested in the actual science.

But kids who’d barely graduated high school didn’t get to be astronauts. Or engineers.

His mother waved him off and began making the coffee her son had neglected to prepare for her. “Oh, Zaxxon. ADHD is something the government made up to turn free spirits into mindless worker bees. You don’t need drugs. You’re perfect just the way you come.”

That was his parents: gentle and supportive, but never in the right ways. There was no point in trying to argue, so he simply ignored her.

He hung the dish towel on its hook. “I’m gonna wake Zelda up. We need to get her car back.”

“Okay,” Mom said, already distracted, digging in the cupboard above the coffeemaker. “Oh, look!” She dangled a yellow plastic bag, wrinkled and about two-thirds empty. “I’m gonna make chocolate chip pancakes! Don’t that sound good? Do we have eggs?”

Zaxx wondered how long that butt-end of a bag of chocolate chips had been up there. In the mood neither to eat petrified chocolate chips in burned pancakes or to get wrangled into mooching eggs from the neighbors down the road, he left his mother to her culinary plans and headed down the narrow hallway to his sister’s bedroom.

~oOo~

Claiming Zelda’s Honda from the impound lot was a matter of paperwork and patience. It took a while, and Zelda spent that time huffing and snarking at a rhetorical volume about the uselessness of cops. But Zaxx kept the process rolling nonetheless. They didn’t encounter Sergeant Bill Danvers and his roaming fingers, fingers Zaxx planned to break at his earliest opportunity.

When Zelda finally had her car, they went their separate ways—Zelda to derby practice in Springfield, and Zaxx back to Signal Bend. He needed to talk to his president.

~oOo~

It was Saturday afternoon, none of the SBC jobs was on an overtime schedule, and the Horde had no club work on the books for the day, either. Zaxx came into a clubhouse popping with life. Metallica thumped over the sound system. Len, Bart, and Double A sat at the bar, yakking. Isaac and Showdown were playing pool. Thumper and Darwin, draped in club girls Angie and Kalina, were co-opping the latest Halo game. Saxon was playing bartender, while Izzy, another club girl, played waitress.

Angie, Kalina, and Izzy were the only club girls Zaxx saw; that would change as the afternoon turned to evening. When more single patches were around, more girls appeared. Zaxx didn’t know quite how that happened; probably somebody sent word out, but to him it looked like they picked up a vibe in the atmosphere and knew to show up.

And eventually, everyone still in the clubhouse would head over to No Place. That old honky-tonk was the real Saturday-night spot in town. Unless they were throwing a party, the clubhouse was a pregame/after-party destination.

Though there were only three club girls around now, as Zaxx crossed the Hall on his way to Badger’s office, he saw another woman and pulled up short. Gia Lunden, Isaac’s daughter, had a pool cue. It was her and Show playing; Isaac was only watching, and his ridiculously huge body had blocked Gia from view until Zaxx had crossed the room.

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