They pulled up in a ring of four vehicles in the parking lot of a local elementary school. Apparently one of the cops coached a little league team at this facility and had access to the lighting controls, because soon after they arrived the football field was bathed in bright light and a bullet-shaped ball was being passed around by the cops. Charlie, the five women, the five cops, Randy, Bruco and Jay all met in a circle to discuss the contest. The cops were all huge, except for one extremely athletic Black man about Jay’s size. A bald light-skinned cop did most of the talking, addressing himself to Randy, as the obvious team captain for their side. “Any requests old man?”

“Yeah, no arrests for assault or any of that cop bullshit. We jus’ wanna play.”

“Alright old man, nobody dies, nobody gets locked up.”

Randy then produced his hash pipe and lit up right in front of the cops! The lead cop burst out, “Are you fucking kidding me!?”

Randy took a mighty drag and then blew the smoke into the cop’s face. “Well bro, you said no arrests for anything short of manslaughter. Besides, would you rather arrest me or kick my ass on the gridiron?”

The cops nodded in agreement as their spokesman continued, “Point, point. I gotchyou White-boy. We’re playin’ rough right?”

“Right you are Officer Milk-dud.”

“Aright Skelator, we play to fourteen—run the extra point in. Anything goes until the ball is dead. This is our home field so you start with possession, but you skins—we shirts. You take off dem shirts. Losin’ team gives up dey shirts, deal?”

Arlene was holding his arm and shivering slightly in the cold as Randy stood smoking hash in front of five cops.

“Deal motherfucker.”

Arlene whispered, “This is going to get ugly,” as her friends began cheering.

Jay stepped up to his brother as Bruco stood proudly posing for the women. “Yo Randy, how d’ya play?”

Randy than began coughing spastically as the cops laughed deeply and slapped one-another on the back. The older brother then recovered and addressed Jay as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, “Bro, yer the fuckin’ jock in the family. Don’t you know how ta play?”

“Well I saw a game on TV once, I kep’ fallen asleep watchin’ all dem fat dudes standin’ aroun’ arguin’.”

“Jesus Bro, what-the-fuck!”

Just as Randy appeared ready to slug Jay, the large light-skinned cop intervened, “Okay son, what I suggest is that big dude hikes the ball off the ground to your brother, and then he hands it to you, and you run it down field past us. If you cross the line in front of the goal post you score six points!”

Jay and Randy looked at each other and nodded. Then Jay shook the cop’s hand. “Thank ye sir.”

At this point the tallest woman, a handsome dark-skinned black girl with tracks and a frighteningly athletic body, clapped her hands and chanted, “Shirts en skins, shirts en skins, wooowooo!”

Randy began taking his shirt off and the short petite blonde pointed at his lean tattooed torso. “I knew it, that’s the Arуan Rock guy, look!”

As the woman stepped up and pointed everyone got a look at the swastikas, iron crosses and WHITE POWER tattoos on the man’s body. However, the most offensive tattoo was an arrow in the form of a syringe pointing down to his groin, crowned by block letters that read ARYAN INJECTOR.

Charlie looked down at Arlene in shock and she smiled insightfully. “Tammy works for the ATF. She’s an expert on hate groups and criminal organizations… The secret life of Charlie must be interesting indeed.”

Bruco then stepped forward and stripped off his shirt, handing it to the Latino woman. Charlie nudged Arlene, “And her?”

“Oh, Selene is a PG County cop. Try not to panic. I promise I won’t have you busted unless you turn out to be a lousy lay.”

Selene stepped back, admiring Bruco’s extremely hairy rock-hard physique. Arlene was dismissive. “You’re kidding me girl. What would you do with a rug like that?”

Selene was nearly as gruff as a man. “Lay it down in front of the fire place. And when it gets dirty just tell it to go get a shower!”

The tall black woman then began cheering Jay on as he took his clothes and his shoes off, leaving nothing but his jock-strap on. Their barbaric little world soon turned dreadfully quiet as every man and women looked at a formerly perfect body that should have been dead; scarred and pitted with wounds from bullets, arrows, blades, shrapnel, and fangs?

Arlene looked up at Charlie with accusation in her eyes. “You’re one of those blood-sucking military contractors aren’t you?”

“No, not at all, I can explain—”

“You better Charlie.”

They all followed the big beefy cops and the crazy half-naked primitives onto the brightly lit field. As the girls began to cheer and the men lined up and began shouting Charlie was overcome with a compelling urge to let Arlene know that he wasn’t some kind of capitalist war-monger. But nothing brief and convincing came to mind. As the shouting and cheering intensified and the slapping, smacking and crunching of bodies filled the background like the drumbeats in some old, old movie, he grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her to face him and just looked deeply into her eyes. Then he kissed her; long, deep and wet. She did not push away. After a long mind-numbing embrace he put his hands on the side of her face and forced their lips apart so he could look into her eyes again…

The world was suddenly quiet except for the moans and groans of men and the gasps of disbelief from the women on the sideline. He and Arlene turned their heads as one and saw a scene that was not going to make the local police captain happy at roll call tomorrow morning. Bruco and Randy were holding Jay up on their shoulders as if he had just scored the winning goal at the World Cup, and were approaching him proudly as the five cops lay and squirmed in various dysfunctional positions. The shock of seeing these five big cops laid out so brutally on the cold January ground was soon overshadowed by something even more inappropriate: Bruco singing his favorite war song, the one he swore that Cortez’ men had sung when they routed the Tabascans. Selene, and Arlene, both fluent Spanish speakers, looked at him in disbelief as the lyrics sunk in. Arlene, a woman that he somehow knew would always have the last incisive comment in any debate, squared up to Charlie, “Who sings a song about sodomizing the Mother of the God of War on a battlefield in an archaic colonial Spanish dialect?”

Charlie did not have a good answer, and if he had, it would have been ruined by Bruco, who broke off midway through his song to honor Charlie. “Lord Prester, Lord Cortez would have liked football battles. With your crazy Englishmen by my side I’ll need a stiffer test. You should get me an audience with the commander of the Death Bird Company.”

He returned to his song as he and the others got dressed. One of the cops provided a rhythm section as he cried while trying to straighten out his broken fingers and Bruco belted out a line about the breasts of the Mother of War being full of blood that tasted like wine...

Arlene dug her nails into his ribs and spoke to her friends, “Hey girls the party is moving to my place. Charlie and his friends are coming too. “

He walked back to the Lexus with Arlene, arm-in-arm, as she announced her intentions. “Charlie, I don’t know who you and your crazy friends are. But whatever you do has got to be better than sitting around arguing with a bunch of fat geeks and selling the results as analysis. I want in—Selene too.”

“Arlene, I c…”

“Yes you can Charlie. Don’t worry. You’ll feel better about your decision in the morning.”

Yes Brother, you are putty in this woman’s hands. I wonder if she will eat me in the morning.

The ramifications of this scene figure prominently in the novel Seven Moons Deep Tackling An Epic Novel, and will be revisited from Randy's and Officer Milk-dud's perspectives. For another piece of free fiction available on this site, which features Charlie, Jay, Randy and Bruco a few hours earlier on the same day, read This Design Is Called Paisley.