Onion Songs

by Tem, Steve Rasnic

  Mark was halfway up the stairs when Lucas snapped out of his reverie, panicked, and raced screaming after him.

  But too late... the Rifleman could see already that he would fail. Already the young men in their red pageboy costumes were trumpeting at the top of the staircase. Already spiders, lizards, and snails were creeping out of the ruined masonry. Somewhere bands were playing, women dancing in their fine robes, great stallions pawing the pebbles atop the stone walls. Already The Pilot, that career intruder, was standing haughtily next to his gigantic saddled alligator, whistling, and cheering Mark on to the top of his stairs, into The Pilot’s waiting arms.

  And already The Rifleman knew his son would soon leave North Carolina, would never till the family lands, own the cancerous cow, or build the family mansion of many vistas on the primeval hardwood floor.

  The Rifleman, formerly known as Lucas McCane, collapsed at the Swedish Memorial Hospital staircase, and wept bitterly over this failure of his imagination.

  JUNGLE J.D.

  You can keep on mockin’, but I can’t stop rockin’...

  Tony couldn’t believe his luck. Here he had himself a bad girl. Joy, the baddest girl he’d ever known, and not only was she with him, but she was with him in a stolen Chevy making it ninety miles an hour cross-country on Route 66, and how’s that for some kind of rock ’n’ roll legendary-type road trip? Halfway between Las Vegas, New Mexico and Santa Fe now, give or take a few tumbleweeds. The sky wide open for dreams. It was like some kind of goddamned movie! The gang was going to shit, if he ever saw the gang again. Maybe he’d send them a picture postcard, with one of them hotdog stands shaped just like a coney on it, send it to Carson’s Drugstore so they all could read it. Cool, man.

  “Long as nobody got hurt.” That’s what his grandma woulda told him. Long as nobody got hurt—like that was the answer for everything. And maybe it was. But sometimes the answers run out, Grandma, and people, well you know people do get hurt. And deep down, Tony knew he much preferred it be the other guy what got hurt.

  Tony turned his head once again to moon over Joy, and he was so excited, and it felt like maybe his head went a little too far, and he liked the feeling, so then it was like his head was spinning around like a record, but unevenly, so that every song played had a roughness to it, his head playing some angry song like Link Wray’s “Rumble” over and over again. He could still see Joy through his dizziness: sitting all pretty in her yellow Capri pants and pink sweater, wearing his black leather jacket—his—even though he’d only had it about a week he didn’t mind—she just looked too cool sitting there with her pink-framed shades, puffing on another Kool and moving her butt slow with the rock of the car, making that crisp vinyl snapping sound in that rollin’ rhythm like they were maybe doing it on his grandma’s bedsprings.

  Course they hadn’t done it yet, even though she was so damned hot she was too cool, in charge like, but they would do it, Tony knew, he could tell by the way she kept her tongue in his mouth longer than any bad girl ever had before.

  Tony had been in love four times in his life for sure, but this time it was the best, the very best, the coolest, the wildest. Lots better than when he was in love with plain Jane Atkins, and her daddy had to drive them places, and she didn’t like it that he smoked, said it made him taste bad, not that there was that much tasting going on, what with her old man hanging around all the time. And miles better than the Thompson twins—when they slapped you, well, you knew you’d been slapped.

  “Goddamn!” Tony shouted out the window, then howled just like Wolfman Jack, just like Lon Chaney having an orgasm. He turned to Joy to catch her cool reaction and she smiled this thin, cool smile at him and blew a smoke ring. Goddamn, he wished he could blow smoke rings like Joy.

  And that was about the time it happened.

  The its in Tony’s life were always different, and always big. The last it was when he decided to blast out of New Jersey and head west, taking Joy with him and using whatever transportation he could find, having it somewhere in the back of his head that they would make it to California somehow and the Beach.

  It was old man Perkins’s car he took, who’d just happened to have put a new tune on the vehicle, and was sitting there at the time drinking a brew with just the happiest look on his face. Tony had had to knock that smile off him when Perkins tried to stop him from taking the car. That was too bad, really it was, because Tony much preferred nobody getting hurt. That was his one rule, which was saying a lot, given how Tony felt about rules. But even that rule was a preference, because above all else Tony wasn’t going to be stopped. It was only natural, the law of the jungle and everything. Ungawa! A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. He wondered if he could wrap his mouth around Joy’s pink and slippery tongue and still maintain a steady ninety miles per. Hell, nothing ventured; nothing gained.

  But right then Tony thought about his grandma, and that took a little bit of the fire out of him. Hell, she’d raised him and bailed him, and that had to count for something. Maybe at least she’d have a good funeral to attend someday, let her be the center of attention for once, everybody feeling sorry for this old lady who’d been saddled with this J.D. from hell when his own momma, her daughter, died on that sleazoid boyfriend’s motorcycle. Anybody could have been the daddy, and that meant no daddy at all, which was just fine with old Tone. Tony had left that sweet old grandmother of his all alone in their apartment. She was practically blind and she could hardly walk, so he knew it wasn’t a very nice thing to do. But what else could a fellow do? A guy just couldn’t be thinking about his grandmother all the time. It was like living with dead people.

  Which he almost was, a couple of times, maybe three. He had a round scar the size of one of Joy’s smoke rings on his forehead from that last fight with the Seventh Street Slashers. He’d open his eyes sometimes while he and Joy were kissing and he’d catch her with her eyes open, staring at it. Bad girls kept their eyes open when they kissed—he’d concluded that a long time ago.

  Tony kind of wondered sometimes if maybe that scar was one reason he and Joy hadn’t done it yet, her being grossed out or something, when he realized he was right in the middle of another big it because the goddamned car was rolling over and over and Joy had this funny look on her face—still cool—but her mouth was wide open but no sounds were coming out, just smoke ring after smoke ring.

  It was then Tony realized what tune was playing on the radio. “Runaway,” by Del Shannon, one of his absolutest favorites, but he had a feeling he might miss the end of the song. Things were spinning pretty good now, and there were little green alien types, like huge frogs, clinging to the windshield even as the car turned over and over: little green men looking in on him and Joy.

  *

  Tony woke up hot and wet like he had his head stuck to Carson’s fry grill. Meat was popping and sizzling, smelly enough to make his mouth water.

  He opened his eyes and salt sweat washed down from his forehead and everything went blurry. Then he remembered what had just happened and he tasted some of the stuff at the corners of his mouth expecting blood, but it was sweat like he thought, but a little heavier than he’d expected, almost like oil. He wiped the crap out of his eyes with the back of his hand.

  Green surrounded him, bent down and hugged him, smothering him in tits and hair all green. He breathed it in and tried to lick it in and out of his mouth, unable to get enough. Then the green cleared a little and he could see more: the Chevy’s radiator steaming and hissing, lying on top of a dead hippo whose meat was roasting in the shape of that very same radiator. Roast hippo meat wasn’t a bad smell, but it was too early in the morning to be thinking about hippo burgers, so pretty soon his belly was spinning just like the car. Which there was no other sign of. But then he realized “Runaway” was still playing, although a much rougher version than he’d ever heard before, like they’d overlaid a new track with a lot of fuzz pedal in it. He looked up to find where the soundtrack for this dream was coming fr
om: there was the radio, just the radio, all lit up but with no visible source of electrical power, sitting in the lower branches of a big palm tree. Now playing the opening to “Surf City.”

  “Here we come,” Tony mumbled, “Sweet Buddy Holly.” Then he threw up.

  *

  Tony looked up into a sky full of green and hair. He could hear his grandmother crying in the distance. He could hear the preacher man speaking to a milling crowd he could damn well hear but could not see.

  “He hath lived fast. He hath died young. He hath delivered unto us a good-lookin’ corpse.”

  Tony opened his eyes wide. The preacher was looking down from heaven right at him, and he looked like an ape. He was an ape. Then there were other ape heads right up there beside the first one: a row of smiling, goof ball coconuts.

  “Ah, jeez...”

  One of the apes covered Tony’s face with a leathery palm and pushed him back against the ground. Then they were dragging him faster and faster through the jungle, his head bouncing off fallen trees, rocks, and hardened lion crap. Tony had visions of being nurtured and raised by these apes, learning their ape language, becoming skilled in their jungle ways, being part of a jungle gang that roamed and hunted and killed, that did pretty much whatever they pleased. Then they came to a sudden stop before a hillside, and headed back to the trees, leaving Tony there with his head spinning. An animal looking something like a cross between a dog and a very sick housecat stuck his head out of a hole in the embankment. Then there was his twin brother, and another, another still, until the hole was filled with about a dozen of those identical ugly animal heads. One of them squirmed out of the hole, came over to Tony, sniffed him, then raised his leg and pissed on him. Then he yipped to his brothers—they all came out and pissed on him, and then they snared his clothes with their teeth and commenced dragging him through the jungle at breakneck speed again.

  That entire day Tony was passed in similar ways to the tiger clan, the elephant clan, even the goddamned wildebeest clan, but he wasn’t kept anywhere longer than a few sniffs and a lot of good peeing. By sunset he was bone-sore and stank to high heaven, and he’d pretty much given up on the idea of becoming intimate with any clever jungle ways.

  That’s when his last potential adoptive jungle family—a ten-yard-wide black mass of no-nonsense army ants—deposited him face first in front of a small jungle dwelling—a jigsaw puzzle of branches, fronds, and mud. Tony shook the jungle debris off him and climbed unsteadily to his feet. A few broken sticks had been stuck to a door crudely fashioned from some salvaged crates. A small bald head appeared in a hole in the hut wall. “Vot iss this?” the head asked him.

  Tony looked at the door again with sudden understanding. The handful of broken sticks formed a swastika.

  *

  Over the next several weeks Tony was schooled in the clever jungle ways of the expatriated Nazis. They weren’t such bad guys, really, although maybe just a bit intense. They liked injecting him with strange things or feeding him indescribable crap and seeing how he reacted. Mostly he reacted by throwing up.

  After a while they let him inject the blacks they kept in a large pen in a nearby jungle clearing. That wasn’t too bad, kind of interesting really. The stuff he injected the blacks with must have been a lot stronger than the stuff the Nazis used on him because the blacks would scream for a long time after he injected them, roll their eyes and stick their swollen tongues out sometimes until they bit their tongues in two or choked, sometimes both. It was actually kind of funny, sometimes, if they jumped around rubbing their balls or crapping all over themselves, say, or they screamed over and over until it was like this loud, crazy song. Now and then he’d feel a little nervous about being alone in that pen with all those crazy, naked blacks, what with just the hypo to protect him, and what with them knowing what he’d been doing to their buddies. But the Nazis had armed guards just outside the fence carrying these huge tommy guns, and guard dogs with heads the size of watermelons. When the dogs crouched by the fence and growled, showing their long, sword-like teeth, even the bravest of the blacks moved to the center of the compound. Tony figured these dogs were some kind of special Nazi jungle breed—he’d never seen anything like them in any of the pet stores in New Jersey.

  He never could figure why the Nazis were injecting the blacks with all that crap, but then he figured it wasn’t any of his business either. His grandma always told him, “People have their reasons.” That was her other bigtime saying. “Long as nobody got hurt.” Yeah. But blacks don’t count. Even grandma would’ve agreed with that. It was too bad really—Tony loved their music. It wasn’t fair, but it was the way it was. It was nature, and half of them living in the jungle like they did, the other half in some filth-hole of a city somewhere, they had to know that.

  *

  After a few months the Nazis must have given up on the blacks though—figurin’ they’d never change—and they started injecting stuff into Tony again. Or maybe it had more to do with the fact that most of the blacks they had penned up were dead by then, except for a couple of near-giants, Jo Jo and Kang, who had always been a pain to mess with.

  Or maybe they were done with their animal tests, and now they were ready for the real thing. Ungawa.

  Actually, Tony didn’t mind particularly. Life in the jungle had proved to be a lot less interesting than in the Tarzan movies. It was hot, it was steamy, and, other than poisoning the blacks or playing poker with the Nazis, there wasn’t much to do. He’d tried to swim the local river once, but what with the alligators, hippos, and eels it was a lot more crowded than your average Jersey pool, and almost as nasty.

  He tried making friends with some of the local animals. “We’re of one blood,” he’d say as a sure-fire junglecratic opener. “I am a cub of the... the Nazi clan. And you?”

  But they either ignored him, shit on him, or tried to eat him.

  So he let the Nazis shoot him up with practically everything in their mad scientist pharmacy, as well with whatever they could find crawling around on the jungle floor that could be jammed into their giant Germanic steel Mixmaster.

  And some of it wasn’t all that bad. After one particularly good jolt, Tony decided that the lead Nazi, a guy named Fritz, looked pretty good in leather. Tony’s leather jacket, in fact.

  And, as they say only in the movies, that brought him to his senses.

  “Joy! What have you done with my Joy?”

  “Ya, ya. Der jungle be a sad place sometime. Iss not Fritz’s fault, however.”

  Tony was staring right at Fritz when the Nazi’s head disappeared into a cloud of blood. The rest of the Nazi’s body stood upright a moment, long enough for the mist to form its first blood drops on Tony’s leather jacket, before it toppled forward, revealing the two giant blacks, Jo Jo and Kang, massive blood-stained stones clutched in each of their massive hands.

  Tony’s bowels suddenly filled with wet, jungle heat. But he couldn’t move.

  Jo Jo dropped his stones, which bounced unnoticed off his foot and a knee. He reached over and stripped the jacket off the Nazi’s back with a single offhand gesture. He brought the jacket up to his nose, sniffing loudly with nostrils that looked like bowling ball holes. “Hmmmm... white jungle princess,” he declared.

  “Joy? You can find Joy?”

  The giant Jo Jo slipped his arms into the jacket, apparently oblivious to the numerous splits he was creating throughout the leather. “We take you... her place.”

  “Ju Ju!” Kang shouted excitedly, jumping up and down, feet thundering on the jungle floor.

  Leave it to a black to get even his best friend’s name wrong, Tony thought, but he nodded and smiled anyway. After all, the guy was humongous.

  Jo Jo slapped Kang across the face and the giant immediately stopped his gibbering. Then the two of them headed away from the Nazi compound with strides so long Tony choked on his spit trying to keep up.

  Tony heard the drums starting up shortly after they lost sight of the Nazi huts.
Kang started squalling “Ju Ju! Ju Ju!” again, and Jo Jo had to slap some calm into him yet again. Actually, Tony kind of liked the accompaniment. He thought it was kind of Bill Haley, and what better omen than that?

  A few things happened along the way, but something always happened when you had to take a long jungle road trip. Jo Jo jumped into the river and rolled around with a croc for a while, but it was a little like watching some fat broad in a bad porno flick making it with the black stud, so Tony lost interest pretty quickly. Kang kept running away and Jo Jo kept dragging him back, until finally the lions got Kang, which was kind of a good thing since Jo Jo seemed to be getting pretty pissed off the way Kang kept mispronouncing his name.

  The distant drums never let up, though, and Tony was getting pretty tired of that, and now that they were in the swamp country the mosquitoes were about the size of Fender guitars and just as mean. Things kept sliding over Tony’s shoes down in the mud, and more than a couple of times Jo Jo had to pull something off him, but Tony couldn’t see much detail down there in the swampy dark.

  Then finally they were out, and they were in this sunny place, and there was a car radio up in every bright yellow and pink palm tree, and each radio was playing a different Beach Boys tune, “Surfin’” and “Surfin’ Safari” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Surfer Girl” all blending together into this crazy, hypnotic cacophonic medley that made Jo Jo gyrate and kick up the sand, and made Tony desperate to follow his every single move, which he could not possibly do, what with being a white trash punk from Jersey.