My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire Read Online Free Page B

“You take ’em and let me drive you out there. If there’s nothing there, you keep the five hundred.”
    “Sure,” I said. “And then you drive me out somewhere and it’s bye-bye Danny.”
    “What for?” he snapped back. “It’s my five hundred in the first place and you don’t look like you’ve got anything worth rolling you for.”
    That was true. Damn! An offer like that had to be bogus, it just had to be. However, I was starting to run short of cash and those bills on the table were very inviting. I accepted his offer by scooping them up, proof that even if Angel had not had too much to drink, I had.
    We went back to Angel’s Jeep and drove off. Not too long after that, I fell asleep in the seat. I awoke to bright sunlight and a headache. My mouth felt like it usually did after a late-night party; there seemed to be a layer of slime over my teeth and a piece of carpet over my tongue. Angel was still piloting us down the highway.
    “What time is it?” I asked with a groan.
    “A little after noon.”
    I had been out cold for eleven hours. “You’ve been driving the whole time?” Angel nodded. “Christ, where are we going?”
    “South Dakota.”
    “What’s in South Dakota?”
    “I told you,” he said with a trace of irritation. “You think they’re going to put a spaceship in downtown Chicago?”
    “I suppose not.” Neither of us spoke for an hour or so after that. Tough guy or not, Angel had to be tired and he totally ignored me and stared ahead at the road. That suited me fine. From my perspective, the situation didn’t look promising. I was stuck in a Jeep, going seventy-five miles an hour, with a crazed biker who thought he was taking me to a spaceship somewhere in South Dakota. The prudent thing to have done would have been to give him back the five hundred dollars and beg him to let me out. What stopped me? Not the five hundred dollars, I hadn’t been broke long enough to be that mercenary. Probably playing along in someone else’s acid dream seemed to be a better bargain than going back to deal with my own reality.
    Eventually, I decided, in the sunlight and sober, that I was going along for the ride. I tried to coax Angel to tell me more about himself and his imaginary pirate friends. Angel didn’t claim to be any kind of extraterrestrial himself. On the contrary, he said he was a native-born American biker. He didn’t say how he became involved with these “pirates” or, in fact, anything about them.
    He did tell me that he’d left the ship’s base after convincing his officers that he knew several men who would be good recruits, although he had actually planned to desert. He was not clear about why he changed his mind; maybe the brawl at the first bar had something to do with it. Regardless, he had decided to go back, and he figured he’d better have at least one recruit to show for his time. He was also in a big hurry because he didn’t remember precisely when the ship was supposed to leave.
    It was an interesting fantasy.
    I wondered if that last detail was Angel’s mental escape hatch. When we arrived at our destination and there was nothing there, would he be able to preserve his dreamworld by claiming we had missed the boat? Would he expect his five hundred dollars back? To be honest, I was more interested in the latter question. Maybe it really was the money that kept me in the Jeep.
    Shortly after nightfall, Angel’s iron determination ran thin and he pulled over at a rest area.
    “I hate to lose time,” he said, “but I have to sleep, at least for a while. Anyway, I might miss the turnoff in the dark.”
    With Angel asleep in his reclined front seat, I could easily have stolen away, but I didn’t.
    Angel awoke and started us off at dawn. Before too much longer, we had left civilized America behind and entered the Dakota badlands. The terrain there is spooky, a lot of bare rock for the most part. The twisty secondary road Angel took passed through a few tiny