LIKE A BUNNY TAYLOR SONG

By Rick Hartford

Ran Cyphers left the state highway for the back roads on his Low Rider on the way to Taylorville. It was July, and hot.

This was bumpkin country. Farms and gas stations and derelict mansions sharing space with rusty mobile homes and RV Parks.

Ran motored down Taylorville’s Main Street, stopping in the center of town to read the plaque in front of town hall. “Taylorville, birthplace of the great country western singer Bunny Taylor, who we are mighty proud to call our own.”

A town named for a crooning cowboy, Ran thought. Did they give him he keys to the city, or did everybody just leave their doors unlocked?

Taylor’s songs were about yearning for love, settling for one night stands, cheating hearts and running from the law.

Those songs could have been written about Ran, especially the ones about running from the law.

Ran was a wanted man.

Ran: Who used to be a conservative with a crew cut behind the wheel of a Ford Police Interceptor, now a longhaired biker with a Marlon Brando Perfecto, a tight fitting wife beater and blue jeans under black leather chaps.

Ran yawned as he started the big bike to look for a place to stay for the night. The clerk at a gas station directed him to a motel about five miles down the way.

The shadows of trees stretched ahead as the sun handed the day over to the night.

He was almost at the five mile mark when he saw a ghostly face in a window on the second floor of an old victorian home with chipped paint that had once been white but now looked like a yellowed newspaper.

The girl who looked at Ran with panicked eyes disappeared into the darkness of the house. Ran pulled over and killed the engine. He dismounted and put the kickstand down and walked quickly to the front door.

He rang the doorbell and waited. No answer. He pounded on the door with his fist. Nobody came. He tried he door. It was unlocked. Entering the foyer Ran was surprised when he saw a man coming down the stairs toward him. The man was holding his chest, a red stain on his shirt spreading fast past blood soaked fingers. The man reached out as he fell down the remaining steps to end up with his head face down at the tips of Ran’s silver-tipped rodeo boots.

Ran turned the man over and bent over him, feeling his neck for a pulse. He was gone, his eyes staring into eternity.

Ran looked up. At the top of the stairs stood the young woman he saw in the window. She had long blonde hair and wore a torn white silk nightgown.

She had a faerie’s face with white skin like a vampire’s date, her gown flowing in the night breeze. She looked like a ghost, Ran thought, stolen from her youth by the grim reaper and condemned to haunt the old house forever.

“Thank God for you,” she said. As he reached the top of the stairs she threw herself into his arms, tears streaming down her face.

“What is going on here,” Ran demanded. “Who is that man?”

“He was going to kill me,” she said, gripping Ran even more tightly.

Ran held her until her trembling stopped.

“We have to go to the police,” Ran said.

“Oh no! No!”

“I can’t let anyone know that I am living here alone. They will take me away. Can’t you help me, please?”

She looked up Into Ran’s face, pleading.

“Pretty please?”

He had a shock when she rose up on her toes and kissed him hard on the lips, running her hands on his back.

“Stay with me tonight,” she said.

She pulled him along down the hall to her bedroom.

Ran didn’t resist.

How far had he fallen.

Ran awoke the next morning to the sun streaming through the window. He blinked and raised himself on his elbows.

The girl was already awake In bed next to him. She ran a hand over his muscular chest and then rose up and kissed him gently on the lips.

“Who’s house is this?” Ran said.

“It’s mine. My mother put it in a trust for me before she died. I don’t even know who my father is, or was. It was just Ma and me. She passed away just about a year ago, but I keep writing checks and answering mail in her name to keep me from declared a ward of the state.”

“How old are you?” Ran said.

“Old enough,” she said as she ran her right hand down his body under the bed covers.

He sat upright and caught her hand.

“Nobody has to know about us,” she said. “You can live here. If anybody comes around we can say you’re my older brother.”

Ran looked out the window to his bike parked on the front lawn. He had a strong desire to mount up and split.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Your eyes betray you. But before you go, please help me get rid of that bad man.”

“Who was he?”

“He was a lawyer who was going to take my home away from me. He dropped by yesterday and said that he was looking for Ma. I told him she was out shopping. He said he’d wait for her.

I said I wasn’t comfortable with that and that Ma wouldn’t like it either, me being a young woman alone and all. That’s when he tried to rape me. He was so strong and he pinned me down onto of the bed. When I saw his gun in a holster on his belt I knew what I had to do. I started coming on to him. I told him I wanted to undress him and that he could undress me afterward. He said OK. That’s when I got hold of the gun. I pointed it at him and told him to leave, but he just laughed at me. He went to pull the gun out of my hands and it went off. I hadn’t meant to shoot him. It just happened.

And then you showed up like my shining knight.”

“Where did you put the gun?” Ran said.

“It’s in his car, out back in the barn. Sugar, I need you to help me. We have to put that evil man into the trunk of his car and drive the car down to the river landing and send him back to hell where he belongs. She caught the darkening look on Ran’s face.

“Anyway, you don’t want anybody to know we’ve been together, do you? Me being 12 and all,” she said.

Ran was speechless for a minute. And then he said, “let’s get going then. And when we’re done, I’m out of here, understand?”

“Sure, sugar. You can drive. My feet barely touch the pedals,” she giggled.

They went to inspect the body at the bottom of the stairs. Rigor mortis had set in, so getting the body rolled up in an old oriental rug they found in the barn took forever. They had to stop once when a mailman dropped some letters through the mail slot. Then came the ordeal of dragging the body through the hall to the kitchen and then out the back door, the dead man’s body thumping down the steps. They dragged the rug to the barn, where she opened the door to reveal a grey Crown Victoria.

Not a car a lawyer would normally drive, Ran thought. Ran searched in the car and found the pistol. It was a snub nose Colt Detective Special. A cop’s gun. Ran knew these things because he was a former cop. A former cop now running from the police. His partner, Arvis, had been a well respected member of the police department. Ran felt lucky to be with him. One day he had taken a ride in his cruiser out of town with Ran. He pulled over to the side of the road and told Ran that he was on the take with a Mexican drug cartel. He needed money to pay for the medial expenses for his thirteen year-old daughter, Sue, who had come down with a rare form of cancer. She was being treated with an experimental drug that the insurance company wouldn’t pay for. So Ran went along with Arvis. He thought that it was ironic that the two of them were dealing illegal drugs to junkies in order to get legal drugs to save Arvis’ daughter.

Things went well for a while until Ran and Arvis got caught in a sting in a warehouse outside of town where the Mexican gangsters stashed their drugs. In the gunfight that ensued, Arvis killed a police officer. He grabbed a suitcase full of drug money as they ran.

Now they were now both on the run, gone their separate ways, marked for death by the Mexicans and the police.

Ran sat down on the bed to think. He knew there was something very wrong about this situation. It was a cop’s instinct.

He came down to the kitchen to find her at the breakfast table drawing with red crayon on a piece of white paper. He came around to see what she had made.

“It’s my heart,” she said. “I’m giving it to you.”

It was getting dark when Ran at the wheel and the girl in the passenger seat drove the Crown Victoria to the river landing, the water churning like black lava. There had been a heavy rain during the previous night and there was still runoff from the melting winter snow. Some young lovers were in the parking lot in the front seat of vintage Chevy Nomad station wagon. They left as soon as they saw the Crown Vic. They knew a cop car when they saw one, Ran thought, grimly.

Ran drove the car down by the landing. He found a heavy rock to put on the accelerator. He started the car and made sure the wheel was straight. Then he put the stone on the pedal and put the car in drive, leaping aside as it roared into the river. It sank within seconds, disappearing in the inky black water.

Ran knew he had just helped this girl cover up a murder, a girl who claimed that she wasn’t even old enough to be a teenager. He had let her seduce him.

“Black sin,” Ran said to himself. “Dragging your soul into a cold black river to meet the devil.”

And what about the dead man? He was a cop, obviously, whose department didn’t know where he had gone, or why.

Did he really did try to rape this girl? Ran would never know.

He decided he would leave this place as soon as they had returned to the house.

Neither of them talked until they reached the front porch. Ran turned to her under the overhead lantern, a cloud of moths swirling around the lightbulb like a dirty white tornado.

“Don’t go,” she said. “I need you.”

“Like you needed the man you just killed?””

“He asked too many questions.”

“How about your mom. Is she in the river too?”

“”She’s out back, tending her garden. Just stay for the summer. I could even go with you, if you still wanted me.”

Ran thought about his lonely life on the road, dark bars filled with cigarette smoke and smelling like stale beer. He turned to the girl. She was still wearing that flimsy night gown.

“I’m leaving, Ran said. He went into the house to get his saddlebags. When he came back to the porch she was sitting in a glider, swaying back and forth and humming a Bunny Taylor tune.

“Where did you put my wallet,” he said.

“It’s in the trunk of the car you just pushed into the river,” she said, smiling up at him. “If the police ever find it, they will be wondering why it’s in there with a murdered man. And then your fingerprints are on the gun.”

“Sorry babe,” Ran said, taking the snub nose revolver out of his pocket.

“Its going to be your prints on the gun when the cops show up here, which they eventually will do, finding the gun on the floor next to you, a bullet in your heart and a confession on the breakfast table. Murder suicide. Something that lovers do.

I think Bunny Taylor wrote a song about that,” Ran said.