Curse You, Red Barron (Patreon)

Another unfinished story found hiding in the back of one of my drives, this one a tale of crime and punishment....

Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more,

The lucky Red Barron is keeping a score 

Eighty chicks cried and eighty chicks sighed...

But Red gave them all a very good ride!

Red Barron looked around the bar to see if he knew anyone. That was the real point of coming to a place so far from home, to get away from his current entanglements. A bar on a narrow side street near the barrio northwest of downtown Long Beach seemed like a good bet not to contain anyone from Newport Beach on a midweek afternoon. And Red needed some place to think where he wouldn't be disturbed. Quiet neighborhood bars were good for that, you could take a beer to a back booth and nurse it for hours.

Except for the blonde bartender, the place was empty. The woman behind the bar was a good bit better looking than he expected in such a place but for once, Red was not on the hunt. "Tall Molson Draft," he said. She filled the glass and pushed it toward him without a word. He lay a ten on the bar, saying only, "Bring me another when this is through." She nodded and Red went to find his back booth.

He took a pewter dish of roasted and salted in the shell peanuts with him. The floor was littered with the empty shells along with some red sawdust that smelled of cedar. Underneath, a good oak floor showed, polished by thousands of strokes with a broom and dustmop. Even the grime caught in the corners and layered in the cracks had the character of a good bar.

Red decided he'd have to remember this place, Hannah's Horn it was called. The sign had shown a horn of plenty, instead of some other kind of horn. That seemed more appropriate for a restaurant, he thought, but no, it was just a bar. In this neighborhood, it might have easily had a Spanish name but it didn't. Not too odd, Long Beach was a pretty mixed community, not like some parts of Los Angeles. He wondered if Hannah were the name of the bartender; she looked like the capable sort of woman who might own her own bar.

He slid into a red leather booth with his back to the rest of the room, easing his long legs around the single chrome support. He cracked a few peanuts and sipped some beer. Spanish peanuts instead of the usual Virginia goobers, he noted. He liked this place more and more. Hannah, if that was her name, kept a right good saloon.

He had a truncated view of the hallway leading to the bathrooms. Two women emerged, young, curvy and dressed to kill. The first week in December was not that cold in Southern California and no one had to put on layers and layers of clothing just to stay warm. And these girls weren't worried about taking a chill.

What was it, when Red wasn't in the mood, sexy women just seemed to come out of the woodwork? The one stood tall on boots with heels, brunette hair down to the middle of her back, short red leather mini, black silk blouse, pale skin, grey eyes and expert makeup. The other was shorter but almost made up for it with towering heels and a P.H.D. blonde bouffant hair-do. She was stacked, too, with a yellow blouse open almost to her navel and a black vinyl dress so tight it made a noise when she walked. Whup-puh, whup-puh, as the plastic fabric stretched and came taut across her ass. She flashed baby-blue eyes at him as she passed.

Red shook his head. This was not what he'd come to the bar to find. He had problems. Problems that would not be helped by picking up a girl in a bar on the wrong side of town. Another girl really was the wrong thing to be thinking about.

Three, count'em, three. He already had problems with three different girls. Tahne Elggenstein with the long straight hair the color of moonlit snow wanted to take him home to Denmark to meet the family. Brittany Maccaran with the chocolate skin and the Carribbean accent had started apartment hunting for the two of them. And little Heather Park had told everyone they were engaged.

How could three different girls all have their birth control fail in the same semester? And why was it his problem?

Well, in a way it was; since he was pretty sure no one else had been boffing soft little Heather; the kid, if delivered, would be his and he would end up paying child support. On top of paying off his student loans after he graduated. Not going to happen. And Tahne had been a virgin when he popped her about three months ago. Brittany, well, Brittany said it was his, and him being white and poor -- why would she lie?

He took a bigger drink of beer than he had intended. What if they all delivered their kids and kept them? He'd be paying three rounds of child support for the next 18 years. It would be the end of his life and he was only 23. Good God! It wasn't fair.

He'd tried to talk to them, persuade them that the right thing to do was, well, stop the pregnancies. But they were all three religious girls, a Catholic, a Seventh Day Adventist and a -- uh? What was Brittany? Presbyterian or Methodist or something she said. But they were all looking forward to having their kids.

He knew he'd make a terrible father and he told them so. What did he know about being some kid's dad, he'd never had one of his own? Well, technically, yes, but Vernon Hillman had disappeared before he was born and left his mother to raise Red alone.

That's what he'd have to do, he knew it. Six months short of his degree but he'd have to chuck it and leave town. Maybe somewhere in South America. Though he knew a nearly six-and-a-half-foot redhead would stand out in such a place. Make him easy to find if the girls came looking. Or if their fathers hired someone to come after him. 

What were their fathers like, anyway? Were there such things as Korean ninjas? A Jamaican underground? Danish mafia? He took another big swallow of beer and realized he had finished it.

He turned to look toward the bartender, holding the empty stein up, and here she came already, another tall Molson on her tray. But what was going on -- the bar had almost filled up while he was feeling sorry for himself? Six-eight-ten, twelve people, besides the bartender. And all of them dynamite looking women dressed to kill. They filled the tables and booths near the front of the tavern; short skirts, high heels, jewelry, makeup, perfume.

"What's going on?" he asked the lady bartender who turned out to be even better looking than he thought, once she was out from behind the bar and showing off her legs. Hannah, he remembered her name being, forgetting that it was the name of the bar and perhaps not the bartender.

"Ladies' night," she said as she set down the full glass and moved the empty to her tray.

He blinked. Ladies' night usually meant free or cheap drinks for women and a crowd of men trying to score. Usually on a Tuesday or a Wednesday or whatever was the slow night for the bar.

The bartender said something.

"Pardon?" he said.

"You don't need any penis?" she asked.

"What?" He must have looked startled because she laughed.

"Penis," she said. "Do you want penis?" She picked up the nearly empty pewter bowl and waved it at him.

"Peanuts?" he asked.

She smiled at him.

"Uh, no, no. No more."

She moved away, her butt swishing enticingly.

He could have sworn she said penis, three times. He laughed, keeping it quiet although with the noise of a dozen girls all talking at once, he doubted anyone would have heard him. The bartender, though she looked thoroughly American must have a slight accent. What kind of name was Hannah? Common enough in America, it might be almost anything. Israeli, perhaps. And what did an Israeli accent sound like, he wondered?

He had a weakness for girls with an accent; foreign women usually had a freer attitude about sex than American chicks. At least, that had been his experience. His first time, back in high school had been with the exchange student from Chile, Linda O'Keefe, a year ahead of him but interested in the big red-headed junior on the Varsity football team. He'd been fascinated with the Irish sounding last name and the hot Latin beauty that went with it. She'd said that a lot of Chile's early settlers had been Irish, English or French. In fact, the George Washington of Chile was a man named Bernardo O'Higgins.

He'd laughed and she hadn't been offended. She'd been a lot of fun and he'd learned a lot from her. Then she went back to Chile and he was free to date another foreign girl, Irena Something, from Bosnia. There'd been a lot of girls since. He smiled to himself. He was tall, good-looking, well-spoken and he stood out in a crowd, which was both good and bad.

Good when he was trying to get the attention of some girl who had sparked his interest but bad now when what he wanted to do was disappear. He really didn't have any idea how to do that, just some half-baked plans based on things he had read in books. Writers always made it sound easy but he had no idea how to get a fake I.D.

Suddenly, the room filled with a dozen different melodies. Startled, Red turned around to look back at the room. All of the women were pulling cellphones out of purses and jacket pockets. The bartender even pulled a phone from under the bar and answered it. The sight of so many women all answering phones at once struck Red as ridiculous and it was all he could do to stifle his laughter. To avoid embarrassing himself, he stood up and headed off down the hallway to the Men's, a place where he knew none of the women would follow.

Behind him he heard the bubbling, tittering chatter of female voices, all of them talking at once so he could not understand one thing any of them said. And that of course, was like a punchline to a joke.

In the Men's Room, he laughed, he roared, he chuckled. It amused him beyond reason that the women had looked and sounded so silly, answering their chirping phones. He used the urinal to dispense some rented beer, zipped himself up and washed his hands, still chuckling. He waited, in fact, an extra two minutes to be sure he could go back into the bar and not burst out laughing if the girls were still talking on their phones.

His booth being nearest to the hallway, he thought to slip into it with no one seeing him re-enter, if they had even noticed that he was gone but instead when he reached the arched doorway to the tavern, he paused. All of the women were looking his way. A few of them smiled, one or two frowned; Hannah, the bartender winked -- but they were all looking at him.

Hannah said something to the other girls and they all laughed, a wave of titters and giggles and one or two hearty guffaws.

They were laughing at him? Offended, Red sat down again with his back to the room, all of his own humor forgotten. Worse, his beer had gone flat. He drank it anyway, taking four large gulps and draining more than half of the remaining liquid. What the heck had he come in here for? It puzzled him for a moment then he remembered; he'd sought out a quiet bar where no one knew him in order to plan his disappearance.

He sipped the remaining beer; flat as it was, it was still beer. He needed to disappear because of the three women who had all decided to bear him children. They wanted to marry him. He couldn't marry all three and in fact, he wouldn't marry any of them. Marriage involved a promise to be true to one lover and Red could not see himself ever doing that.

But how to manage the severing of his life attachments, how to disappear? And he'd need money, almost immediately and over the long haul, too. Where would he get that much money or be able to make money in the future? If he dropped out of college to disappear it would certainly affect his future earnings.

Hannah appeared beside him, bearing a fresh stein of beer. "They bought you a drink," she said, gesturing at the room behind her. "An apology for the laughing; they thought it was funny that while talking about men, a man should suddenly appear." She smiled and put the beer down in front of him, taking away the flat dregs of soldier number two.

Red knew his manners, he stood and turned toward the room. "Thank you, ladies," he said. They clapped. He half-bowed, took a swallow of the beer, brandished the stein toward them, then he turned back and sat down, not pausing even to admire Hannah's rounded, retreating, rump. He blinked several times before sipping again at the beer. He didn't think he'd seen a room full of such lookers since he'd watched the cheerleader tryouts his first year in college. He smiled, remembering.

The girls were laughing and talking behind him. He wondered if he were part of their conversation. He didn't know whether to hope that he was or hope that he wasn't. He wondered what it would be like to bed them, each and everyone of them, starting with Hannah. Not more than two at a time, though, he wasn't a satyr.

What was he doing here again, he wondered?

Before he could work that out, one of the girls plopped into the booth opposite him. A small perky blonde with pixie bangs and the pseudo-uniform of an office worker -- pink blouse, navy skirt, pearl choker, french nails, wrist watch on the left, charm bracelet on the right. She giggled. "I bet you just wish you could disappear," she said.

"Well, maybe not right at the moment," he admitted.

"I'm Genevieve," she said.

"I'm Red," he told her.

She giggled again. "Just Red?"

He smiled. "Just Genevieve?"

"Oh!" she said. "It's Genevieve Tallant. Of Talented Office Help. My mom's company, but I'm the office manager now."

He gestured at the rest of the room. "Is this an extended office party?"

"Oh, no! None of these girls work for me. Most of them have their own businesses or are self-employed or.... You didn't tell me your last name."

"No, I didn't," he said, taking a sip of his beer and smiling at her expression.

She grinned. "Well, what is it?"

"If I tell you," he said, "you'll have to make a joke. It's required."

She giggled again. He kind of liked her giggle. "Tell me," she said.

"Barron. I'm Red Barron."

"The Red Barron?" she squeaked.

"Lame," he said. "Is that the best joke you could come up with?"

"But I've heard of you!" she said.

"Sure."

"No, really." She leaned over the table a bit."They say you've broken the hearts of eighty women, all over the countryside."

"Better," he said.

"Hey!" Genevieve leaned out and called to the women at the other tables. "It's really him, the Mighty Red Barron himself."

The booth suddenly got crowded as two more girls joined them. A bigger blonde, busty and well-upholstered played bump-ass with him until Red moved over and let her sit beside him. A willowy brunette slid into the opposite side of the booth next to Genevieve.

"Red," said the petite first blonde, "this is Sylvia," gesturing at the brunette, "and that's Dondee next to you."

"Dondi?" said Red, a bit startled. When did he lose control here?

"Dondee," said the big blonde, emphasizing the second syllable. "I'm a stripper -- with a difference." She took a sip of his beer.

"A difference?" said Red like a well-rehearsed straight man.

"Uh-huh, I take other people's clothes off before I take off mine. It's more fun that way." All the girls laughed and Red managed a chuckle. Dondee's generous thigh pressed against his was having an effect as did the implication of future nakedness.

Hannah approached with a tray bearing drinks and a pewter platter. "I bring your drinks, ladies," she said, placing a margarita in front of Sylvia, white wine for Genevieve and an old-fashioned for Dondee. "And for the Red Barron, a shot of best bourbon, to go with beer."

"Uh, thanks," he said.

She put down the platter which seemed to contain tiny cocktail weenies impaled on toothpicks in some sort of tomato sauce. "We're all out of penis," she said before disappearing.

The girls all choked back giggles and Red widened his eyes and tried to swallow his upper lip.

"I just love the way she says penis," said Dondee. And then everyone did laugh.