46. Sugar, Sugar

Not far outside every US military establishment, from Andrews Air Base through Gitmo to Whiteman AFB over by Knob Noster, there is a bar. Most feature live entertainment, often country and western acts, sometimes pole-dancers and peelers wearing just cowboy boots and a hat. Sometimes there are two bars because the Earthbound have strange ideas about the packaging of items. A few think the outside of something matters more than the inside. Even when it comes to themselves. These bars change their names but they always stay the same.

Inside the Three Bean Sambuca, Margarita Cansino and I sat in a dark-wood booth, the table scarred with burns from long extinguished cigarettes. She had a mimosa in front of her and I had a scotch and scotch.

‘How’d ya do it?’ She lifted one eyebrow and I figured she’d make a good interrogator. No water required, boarded or otherwise. Even so, I tried out ‘Do what?’ for size.

‘Strawberry blondes aren’t dumb, Sugar.’

‘You’re a red-head, Miss Cansino, you and that dress you were wearing when I woke up on the floor let me check.’

She blushed red as poppies, so at least I knew she hadn’t been stinging her thighs with Clairol.

She took a sip of the mimosa, ‘Here’s what I think happened. The jarheads came in, I remember that. J-Rod was standing, next to me. The big guy, looked like a Fed, he sprayed some aerosol with ketamine, roofies or something that like that. Must be something new though, cause I woke up standing exactly where I was before the freeze-spray, whatever it was. The big Fed might have carried J-Rod out over his shoulder. I was gone 10 minutes, I checked my Tag. Only thing is, that doesn’t explain where you sprang from, Sugar.’

I looked at her over the rim of my glass. ‘You call everybody, Sugar? What if I felt sexually harassed?’

Her teeth looked white as a toothpaste ad while she laughed at that. ‘No, Sugar, I don’t.’

She looked down at the table and traced a finger over the one of the rings a thousand glasses had left on the table’s surface. Then she took a jumbo slug out of the mimosa.

‘Are you going to explain where you came from in the ten minutes I was in limbo?’

‘You wouldn’t understand. It’s complicated.’

‘I like complicated. Simple is boring.’

‘How about you tell me why you were at Groom Lake?’

‘Get me another drink first, Sugar, and I’ll think about it.’

I passed Calamity June taking her first air-borne spin around the pole and figured she was lucky the boots didn’t come off, never mind her hat.