by Adam Howe
In short, if it walked or crawled, slithered or flew, it was walking and crawling and slithering and flying through the filling station store. About the only creature I couldn’t see was a Chinese crested terrier cum chupacabra.
The floor was sheeted with old newspaper dating back to when the first Bush was President; the newspaper was covered with cat- and dog- and bird- and I don’t know what else- shit, a large pile of which I had stepped in as I entered the store. “Don’t tread that mess through here!” Grabowski barked at me. Like it would have made any kind of difference. I scraped the shit off the bottom of my shoe on another fossilized dog turd. Then I just gazed around the store in horror.
“Nice place,” I said. “You, uh—get many visitors?”
“It’s been a little slow lately,” the old man admitted.
He nodded at the advertising flyer I was using to fan the air.
“But I’m hoping the chupacabra’s gonna change that.”
“How long you been open?”
“Since after the ‘Nam.”
Great, I thought. A Vietnam vet. That’s all I needed.
“Thank you for your service, sir.”
“A howler monkey saved my life in the war, you know,” he added casually.
A crazy Vietnam vet. Thanks a fucking bunch, Harry.
“No kidding?”
“Son,” he said. “One thing you’ll learn about me right quick: I don’t kid around.”
He shuffled behind the store counter, shooing the possum away from the register. He opened the cash drawer and peered inside and then glanced at the possum as if he suspected it was skimming his profits. He put my ten bucks in the register and slammed the drawer shut.
“We was deep in-country,” the old man said. “I was on point, leading my squad through the boonies, when this voice from the trees above me yells ‘Grabby!’ Grabby being short for Grabass. Which is what the fellas used to call me on account of what happened one night in a Saigon go-go bar. Used to, I oughta point out. You get the urge to call me Grabass … don’t.”
“The thought never even crossed my mind, sir.”
He nodded. “So, I wheel around towards the voice, looking up in the trees where it come from, and I see this howler monkey looking down at me. I think, Huh? Cuz as far as I know, howler monkeys don’t talk. Next thing I know a VC bullet comes whizzing past my head, close enough it nicks my earlobe. My head wasn’t turned to look at the howler monkey, I woulda been a goner for sure. I yell to the squad, ‘Ambush!’ And everybody hits the deck and everything goes loud …”
The old man’s eyes misted over. I could tell he was back in the jungle again.
Finally he said, “It wasn’t for that howler monkey calling my name when he done, me and the whole squad woulda been fish-in-a-barrel for Charlie.”
I nodded respectfully, hearing the Twilight Zone theme in my mind.
“What happened to the howler monkey?”
“Killed by friendly fire,” he said, in a choked voice.
He crossed himself and gazed to the heavens with watery eyes.
I couldn’t help wondering if he’d been the friendly who pulled the trigger.
“Anyways,” he said. “Thanks to that howler monkey, I made it back home in one piece. Figured I’d pay the favor forward, started taking in strays. At first it was mostly just cats and dogs. Not much chance of seein’ no howler monkey here in Bigelow … Just skunk apes, right?” He winked at me slyly. “But before I knew it, folks was sending me critters I didn’t even know the name for. First time I seen a kangaroo—part of the tour, by the way—I thought someone was funning me, searched him for the zipper and he socked me in the jaw and knocked out three teeth. Well, in the end I had to open the zoo to the paying public, just to keep ‘em all watered and fed.”
He reached beneath the counter and fetched up a rifle. Saw my expression and chuckled. “Relax, son. I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Rifle’s just a precaution.”
“For what?”
“Tibby.”
“Who’s Tibby?”
“Tiberius,” he said. “He’s my Bengal.”
I swallowed hard. “You—you’ve got a tiger back there?”
Grabowski grinned, missing three teeth courtesy of that kangaroo.
“This way for the tour, sir.”
5.
* * *
When I saw Tiberius, I realized I needn’t have worried. The mangy old Bengal was all skin and bones, lying slumped in his cage like a terminally ill Frosted Flakes mascot. One hearty cry of “Grrrrreat!” would finish the poor bastard off.
Grabowski loaded his rifle and aimed at the tiger. Thinking the old man meant for me to witness a mercy killing, I grabbed the barrel before he fired.
Grabowski frowned. “Want your pitcher took with him, don’t you? You’re welcome to put your arm around him without me doping him up first. Just don’t expect to get your arm back.”
I realized the rifle was a tranquilizer gun. “Is a photo included in the tour?” A picture of me with the tiger would sit nicely on the wall next to my Rocky poster.
“Hell, no. Five bucks.”
“Then I’ll pass,” I said, reluctantly.
“Might’ve told me that before I loaded the tranq gun,” he muttered.
He slung the rifle strap over his shoulder and we continued the tour.
Such as it was.
The zoo yard was a teeming favela of hutches and pens, and cages cemented to cinderblock slabs. Shabby-looking petting animals, and disheveled barnyard beasts, wandered freely about a yard that was little bigger than a baseball diamond. For most of these wretched creatures, it had been a choice between Grabowski’s Gas & Zoo or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.
I looked around for Gizmo, but still couldn’t see the chupacabra enclosure.
What I did see was a jackass, hitched to a post inside a pen alongside the filling station store. He had a bluish-gray body, a white ruff of belly, and a gnarly black mane that was part Flock of Seagulls, part mullet. His tall, wonky ears reminded me of the antennae on an old TV with bad reception. He also had five legs.
Then I did another count of his limbs and said, “Holy shit!”
Grabowski followed my gaze and nodded, “It’s something, ain’t it?”
I said, “Holy shit!” again.
The jackass had what looked like a thick black anaconda snaking out from his undercarriage.
“Enrique’s new here,” Grabowski said. “Before he arrived, I never fully appreciated the term ‘donkey-dicked.’ I was tempted to advertise him on the flyer along with the chupacabra, but I couldn’t figure out how to phrase it right.”
I shook my head in awe. “Where’d you find him?”
“Doc Dubrow had him brung here from Mexico,” Grabowski said.
As I’ve mentioned already, Edgar Dubrow was Bigelow’s disgraced former veterinarian, and Shelby Boon’s predecessor. With his round wire-rim glasses and beady black eyes, his toothbrush mustache, and his oiled and severely parted hair, Dubrow even looked like a Nazi bureaucrat; few people in town were shocked when the Bugle exposed him as a closeted Aryan Brother. Mrs. Gowran once told me that watching Dubrow operate on her beloved cat Bootsy was like watching Laurence Olivier take a dentist’s drill to Dustin Hoffman’s pearly whites in Marathon Man. I thought it strange that Dubrow would find sanctuary for any jackass; given his political views, especially a foreign jackass. Maybe he was trying to atone for his sins.
Grabowski said, “The doc said he’d been performing in shows down in T.J.”
“What kinda shows?”
“The doc didn’t say. The circus, I guess. Haven’t seen him do any tricks, mind.”
He could’ve been a wirewalker, I thought, using his own schlong for a tightrope.
A moth-eaten blanket was draped across the donkey’s back.
Written on the blanket was a hand-painted sign:
DONKEY RI
DE—$5
I pictured the jackass with a kid riding on his back, walking laps around the yard with his freakish johnson snaking through the dirt in their wake.
“You don’t actually take kids for rides on that thing?” I said, appalled.
“They got five bucks, I do. Shit, son. They gotta learn about the birds n’ bees sometime. Now are you quite finished eyeing Enrique’s meat? I thought you was here to see the chupacabra?”
6.
* * *
Grabowski led me to a tall, dome-shaped cage with a dropcloth draped over it.
A crude illustration of the chupacabra was painted on the cloth, a beast with blazing red eyes and grossly exaggerated fangs and claws.
“As read about in the Weekly World News,” Grabowski announced, “Mexico’s notorious goatsucker … I give you—” Grabowski whipped away the cloth like Norman Bates surprising Marian Crane in the shower. “The chupacabra!”
Gizmo started in fright as the sunlight hit him like an interrogator’s lamp. He was huddled in the back of the straw-strewn cage. His tail was tucked and his yellow snaggleteeth were chattering with fear. He looked up at me with watery eyes, seemed to recognize me, or maybe my foot, and gave a little yip of relief. He scuttled to the front of the cage and started scratching his claws like a convict raking his mess cup across the bars of his jail cell. The past few days must have been tough on the poor bastard; Grabowski’s Gas & Zoo was a long way to fall from his life of luxury as a pampered ex-show dog and stud.
“Careful, son,” Grabowski warned me, “don’t get too close.”
He’d taken the tranq gun from his shoulder and was pointing it at Gizmo.
I eyed the gun warily, wondering how to break the news to him gently.
“I hate to say it, Mr. Grabowski, but that ain’t a chupacabra.”
The old man gave a snort of derision. “Says the fella who mistook an orangutan for a skunk ape …” But I’d planted a seed of doubt in his mind. “What is it, it ain’t a chupacabra?”
“It’s a Chinese crested terrier.”
“Chine-ee what?”
“It’s a dog.”
“You expect me to believe that ugly fucking thing is a dog?”
I nodded. “With an owner who misses him terribly.”
“Owner? Christ, they’d have to be blind.”
Before leaving Harry’s office, I’d taken the photo of Harry and his wife and their ugly fucking dog. Covering Harry’s face with my thumb—I remembered Harry telling me there was bad blood between him and the old man—I showed the photo to Grabowski. The old man winced at the sight of Mrs. Muffet.
“Jesus wept! That is one severe-looking woman. Who’s the lucky hubby?”
He pulled the photo from my hand and suddenly saw who had sent me. “Muffet.” Spitting the name like a curse. “Did that cocksucker send you?” He whipped the barrel of the tranq gun towards me. “Send you here to strong-arm me?”
I flashed my palms. “Whoa, hey. Nothing like that. He just didn’t want to get the law involved.”
“The law?”
“Dognapping is a serious crime.”
“Dognap? I didn’t dognap shit! I was working in the yard when this ugly sumbitch just sprung outta nowhere, started humping my foot.”
I nodded sympathetically. “He does that.”
Careful not to make any sudden moves, I slowly raised the leg of my pants to reveal the dog’s faded semen stain on my shoe.
Grabowski glanced at a similar stain on his own shoe. “Huh …” Realizing I was telling the truth, the old man lowered his gun and kicked the dirt angrily. “Well, goddamn it! I just wasted a week’s pension on getting them flyers printed.”
“I’m sure Mr. Muffet will compensate you for your trouble.”
“By check, I suppose? Maybe he’d like to compensate me for the piece-of-shit truck he sold me too? Cocksucker told me he wasn’t responsible once it left the lot. Can you believe that? All the trouble he caused me, I’m tempted to keep his ugly fucking dog.”
“Mr. Grabowski, what would that howler monkey say if he knew you were keeping this here dog against his will?”
Grabowski frowned. “Oh, you’re a rotten sonofabitch using that against me …” He gave a long sigh. “The hell with it. Take the ugly fucking thing. It’s been putting the other critters off their feed just to look at him anyway.”
He unlocked the cage and opened the rusty gate.
Gizmo sprang from the cage and into my arms, started licking my face. I recoiled from his breath. “What the hell have you been feeding him?”
Grabowski waited until the dog had slathered my entire face in stinking slobber. Then he gave a wheezy chuckle and said, “Nothing he enjoys eating as much as his own asshole. He’s hardly had his tongue outta hisself the whole time he’s been here.”
Resisting the urge to dropkick the fucking mutt, I yanked Gizmo away from my face. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
“Now, I’m gonna need you to sign for him,” Grabowski said. “I’m not risking that Muffet cocksucker suing me for disfiguring his dog. He was ugly like this when I found him.”
I didn’t put that past Harry myself. “Fair enough.”
Tucking Gizmo under my arm, I followed Grabowski back inside the store.
7.
* * *
Grabowski set the tranq gun down on the counter and searched for a scrap of paper. He found an empty paper peanut sack, and shot an accusing glance at the possum, as if the sack hadn’t been empty when he left it. The possum scuttled guiltily through the window behind the counter.
Grabowski was scrawling a receipt on the peanut sack, when an engine roared outside—sounded like Tiberius must’ve done in his glory days. Then a badass-black Toronado swooped to a stop on the forecourt. It was towing a horsebox trailer. Two men climbed from the car.
The first fella was a wiry young dude with shifty eyes and the downtrodden demeanor of a battered housewife. His mop of blond hair was buzzed to the scalp at the sides and grown into a scraggly rat-tail at the back. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off. A loveheart tattoo on his bicep read PROPERTY OF MITCHELL COOGLER. Under the shirt he wore a tight white tee shirt, knotted above his navel like a loose gal’s midriff top.
The second guy was a monster. Six-five, and heavyweight, at least, ripped to the bone. With his clean-shaved skull and jet-black mustache, waxed and twisted into curlicues at the tips, he reminded me of an old-time circus strongman, minus the leotard. He wore black leather jeans and a skintight black muscle shirt. His huge muscled arms were sleeved with Aryan Brotherhood and jailhouse ink. The sides of his neck were tattooed with SS lightning bolts like a Nazi Frankenstein’s monster. His HGH-bloated gut ballooned over a gleaming chrome death’s head belt buckle. I guessed he must be Mitchell Coogler; why he’d brand his name on the little fella, I had no idea, nor did I want to know.
Grabowski saw them and sighed. “I hope they’re not here to see the chupacabra.”
Somehow I didn’t think they were.
FOUR
A FISTFUL OF DONKEY-DONG
1.
* * *
Grabowski pushed the peanut sack and pen across the counter towards me.
“Sign that, I’ll be right back.”
I watched as he shuffled outside to welcome his visitors with his standard greeting: “Grill’s broke, I don’t got no gas, and the zoo tour’s ten bucks.”
It was hard not to like the ornery old fart.
The big guy—Coogler—gave a laugh like a rumble of thunder. “We ain’t here for no zoo tour, old man.” Grabowski bristled in offense. “You got something that belongs to us.”
“Take that tone with me,” Grabowski said, “you’re damn right I got something for you: A foot in your ass. Go on now, git. Before I set the tiger on you.”
It was a toothless threat, literally.
But Coogler wasn’t to know that, and he just laughed.
These boys had my Spidey sense a-tingling
. I thought I’d better head outside and see if Grabowski needed help. The cranky old coot would likely resent my assistance, but things seemed pretty heated out there. But I couldn’t just swagger outside with a Chinese crested terrier tucked under my arm. That wasn’t going to intimidate anyone—though it might defuse the situation if the big guy and his wiry wingman started laughing at me.
I looked around for somewhere to stash the mutt. Surely Grabowski had an empty box or crate I could use. Best I could find was an empty grain sack. I stuffed Gizmo inside it—which he didn’t like much, yipping furiously—knotted the top, and then placed it on the counter next to Grabowski’s rifle.
I was about to turn and head outside—
When a shotgun roared, and Grabowski came crashing through the storefront window in a spray of glass and guts. Grabowski’s animals, panicked by the shotgun blast, stampeded through the store; the flock of parrots escaped through the shattered window. Grabowski thudded to the floor and skidded to a stop at my feet. Bloody scraps of newspaper were glued to the ragged red hole punched through his torso. His eyes were wide, his teeth bared in pain.
There’d been no howler monkey to warn the old man this time.
In shock, I looked out the shattered window and saw Coogler clutching a stumpy Mossberg pump gun. Wraiths of smoke lassoed from the barrel.