Aftertaste

by Andrew Post

  Galavance leans back from the phone, as if the barrel of Patty’s thirty-ought-six might spring from the answering machine.

  “—I completely understand if you were the one who called the police. Or if it was one of the other people staying in the hotel, or the management. Either way, you really put a bee in my bonnet, making me have to hide my rifle and try to make it seem like the shot came into my room’s window, not out of it. Got me so frazzled I barely slept a wink, and I was nearly late for work this blessed morning! Imagine, me, late! Please pick up, Galavance. Let’s talk this mess out.”

  “What do we do?” Galavance says. “She’s going to come here.”

  Zilch hits the button to end the recording, cutting Patty off mid-sentence. “Let her.”

  After giving the harpoon gun to Galavance in case Jolby shows up before Patty does, Zilch heads back out to the garage and rolls up the overhead door. In the early afternoon light, Chev’s dead eyes have developed a milky cataract. His mouth hangs open. Zilch pulls a drop cloth off one of the shelves and covers the wreck Jolby made into his best friend, feeling a bit bad for the guy. Chev had trying to be a good friend, and look where that got him.

  He faces the garage wall. The inside isn’t finished. Between the studs are exposed nail heads keeping the plywood sheets in place. He imagines head-butting the nails, driving one into his brain, killing that particular portion of gray matter where all his self-doubt is stored. Or maybe he’ll aim for the part storing all the times he screwed up in crystal clear high fidelity. Or the little cottage in his mind where Susanne lives.

  A shadow forms next to his on the cement floor, not drawing itself long as if someone just outside the garage has come up the driveway, but forming from the chest-out, growing arms and legs and finally a head. It’s a silhouette he recognizes but he can’t bear to look up and see nothing there, so he keeps staring down at his feet. He can almost smell her standing behind him.

  “What do you want?” he says.

  I like what you told Galavance before. Didn’t really sound, at first, like something you’d say. Color me shocked—you sound like a real-life adult-like person now.

  “I do try,” Zilch says, looking at the many nail-points jutting out at him. “Forgive me if I don’t turn around, hon, but I don’t really think that’s you.”

  Believe what you want, babe.

  He puts his palm up to one of the nails and presses until he can feel the tip nearly pierce his skin. “I’d ask you if you’ll forgive me,” he says, “but I figure we’re way past that.”

  Sorry to disappoint, but no, I don’t forgive you. But that shouldn’t matter. Right now, you need to forgive yourself. And quit trying to give yourself the stigmata, that’s not how it works.

  “Is that the lesson?” He stops pushing the heel of his palm against the nail. He looks at the tiny red shallow indent he made and rubs with his thumb until it vanishes. “Is that the goal of working off my moral bankruptcy, then? Self-forgiveness? If so, I gotta call bullshit.”

  The shadow moves closer until its head begins to slide up the wall next to him, among the nail-tips, wooden studs, and the mosaic grain of the particle board. He holds his breath. He can hear the swish of her loose clothing as she moves, the soft padding of her bare feet on the cold cement floor. One small intake of breath through his nose and he can smell Susanne’s shampoo. But despite all the small details screaming at his brain, telling him that it’s really her, he still won’t turn around.

  Fix this for her, Susanne says, and move on to the next. You’re much easier to like when you’re busy. You can’t stand to be bored. Keep your hands full.

  “I’m sorry for what happened,” he says, throat tight. “I really am.”

  I know you are. Help her. Stay busy. This can end.

  Suddenly he hears music playing somewhere—and getting louder—and he turns around to look and Susanne’s gone, her shadow vanished.

  Heavy bass punches the air in slightly delayed harmony with the rattle of a loose bumper. Patty, based on Galavance’s description of her, didn’t sound much like a hip-hop fan. Zilch stands in the open garage, hands in pockets, and watches.

  Coming up Whispering Pines Lane, a single car approaches at a crawl. It’s painted candy apple red and the windows are tinted black. The driver threads between mud puddles and bumps that might make the vehicle bottom-out. When it turns into the driveway, Zilch can see through the windshield; behind the wheel is Beefy Ben, and he has his boys with him.

  “Great,” Zilch grunts to himself.

  The music, muffled to a tooth-loosening rumble with the windows up, dies. Every occupant in the car is looking straight ahead, right at him—so he moves out into the orange afternoon sun, regretting that the harpoon gun is with Galavance.

  Beefy Ben steps out of the car but doesn’t approach, yet. “Fuck are you doing out here again, crackhead?” he calls. “Chev musta got you to the hospital right quick.”

  Six other occupants exit the vehicle. They’re all carrying paper bags from a recent fast food run, and set them on the roof and hood of the car. They’re dressed pretty much the same as before, except their jeans aren’t ripped from work but ripped for fashion and their yellow hard hats are all replaced with matching white baseball caps, all uniformly backwards. Ben, burning holes into Zilch, is crushing French fries by the wadded handful, fried potato crumbs tumbling down the front of his shirt.

  “You chuckleheads should piss off,” Zilch says. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Do et ageen,” one of Ben’s cronies say with a drawl so thick and his mouth so full of takeout he’s nearly incomprehensible. “That thing ya deed, bo. Scarf. I toll these other guys and they dun be-leeb me.”

  “I’m from the South,” Zilch says, “but still I have to ask. What?”

  Beefy Ben plays translator. “Rip your guts out, dickhead.”

  The wind turns and on it, Zilch smells the booze on them. “Seriously, guys. Fuck off. I’m sure there’s a Klan rally somewhere you could attend.”

  Beefy Ben sets his most-likely-spiked orange soda aside and snaps open a pocket knife. He moves forward and Zilch forbids his feet from shuffling back in a slow retreat. The extended blade trained at Zilch’s chest, its tip hovering an inch away.

  “Do it. Or I’ll do it for you.”

  Suddenly, it sounds like a huge rubber band has been pulled back and released. There’s a whistling buzz and then a solid thunk. Everyone pauses—Beefy Ben, Goatee Darryl, the remaining idiots, even Zilch. They turn and see a tiny silver harpoon buried into the front tire of Beefy Ben’s car.

  Galavance stands on the front porch of the house with the harpoon gun held in both hands, still trained on Beefy Ben, the single-shot weapon reloaded.

  Zilch can see it in Beefy Ben’s eyes that he’s not the type to be shown up in front of his buddies—especially by a woman.

  “Sugar, you really should not be pointing that at people,” Beefy Ben says, approaching her slowly but steadily. Galavance remains still, standing on the top step of the front porch. She keeps the business end of the harpoon gun trained on Ben. Her hand doesn’t shake.

  “Why are you always being so ugly to Jolby?” she says.

  “He told you about that, huh? Came crying to his girlfriend to fight his battles? I give him shit ’cause he ain’t a real man.”

  “And you are, peckerhead?” Galavance says. “That’s a laugh.”

  “I ain’t seen Jolby around in a while—maybe he’s hiding someplace? Call me your secret admirer,” Beefy Ben says, all butter, now within arms’ reach of her. “I seen you, girl, bunch a times, coming by here to call on your boy. I seen them itty bitty shorts you wear. Ain’t for his eyes only, I reckon. I’ve been with girls like you,” he says. “Tell you what. Gimme a kiss and I’ll forget you did that to my car.”

  “Leave,” Galavance says, but Beefy Ben, quick as lightning, snatches the harpoon gun away from her. The trigger guard snags her finger and bends it at an unnatural angle. Sh
e yelps and Zilch moves to help, but Ben’s gang of hayseeds swarm to block his path.

  With one more twist, Ben wrenches the harpoon pistol from her. “Shoulda just let go of the damn thing. Only got yourself to thank for that broken fanger.”

  “Ben,” Zilch shouts. “Leave her alone.”

  Beefy Ben turns and with one quick jerk, pulls the pistol’s cable back without needing the winch, and loads another bolt. He storms across the yard and angels the readied bolt at Zilch’s face.

  “What you gonna do if I don’t?” Ben says, grinning.

  “Put it down and get the fuck out of here, now.”

  “Oh? Is that a demand? Scarf Boy’s making demands?” Beefy Ben turns over his shoulder to Galavance. “Some friend you got here. Not even your boyfriend and yet, here he is doing what Jolby never fucking did—taking a stand.”

  “This is between you and me, you hillbilly piece of shit,” Zilch shouts at the back of Beefy Ben’s beefy head. “And unless you want a bullet in you, I’d suggest getting back in that ridiculous thing you call a car and going, now, while you’re still able.”

  Ben turns slowly back to face Zilch, his massive head rotating as if it’s on a rusty lazy susan.

  “Now, I know you didn’t just fucking call me a hillbilly.”

  Zilch groans. “Enough of this chest-thumping alpha male crap,” he says, reaching out to both pull himself free from Ben’s goons and grab the harpoon gun. Ben, startled, pulls the trigger.

  Zilch feels the wind come off the rubber bands as they contract, snapping against the air. The harpoon moves so fast he doesn’t even have time to flinch. He can see Beefy Ben, and Galavance, both gasp, their eyes turning enormous. Galavance gasps so hard that it takes her a moment to gather the wind necessary to actually scream. Zilch turns and Beefy Ben’s friends all go, “Damn!” in a collective sympathetic wince so synchronized it looks practiced.

  Zilch reaches up and feels that the harpoon has been driven into the corner of his left eye. He can see it, like one can see their own nose by crossing their eyes.

  “You shot me in the face,” Zilch says, genuinely insulted.

  Galavance slaps Beefy Ben’s shoulders, the back of his head, the side of his neck. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  One of Ben’s buddies say: “Goddamn, bo. That thing’s probably in yer goddamn brain. Ben, we probably oughta scoot.”

  “Give me that fucking thing,” Zilch says and grabs the gun out of Ben’s startled hands. “Go.”

  “Okay, man. I mean, you’re not going to press charges or nothing? We’re cool? You can still see out of that eye, right?” Ben is saying, walking backwards to his car across the yard. “I don’t really got much money. I mean, I could give you a few bucks now if you want, we were just about to go down for a beer run—hey, yeah, let’s do that. You like beer? We could drink this over, nothing like booze under the bridge, right?”

  “Get lost,” Zilch shouts, pointing the harpoon gun at him. The back of his head starts to ache—a small pinching sensation that swells to a throbbing, blinding pounding in half a breath.

  Cradling his head with his free hand, still pointing the harpoon gun with the other, Zilch watches Beefy Ben and his friends all pile back into his purple car. It’s like Ben has forgotten to drive and fumbles with the keys, turning on the windshield wipers, the high-beams, before the engine actually starts.

  A sound erupts from the swamp. Gurgling and broken-sounding, something stirring the water, coughing to life, possibly mechanical, possibly alive.

  Zilch and Galavance wheel around in the direction of the approaching grumble of a revving engine …

  Streaking across the swamp comes a hodgepodge of a vehicle, all patched together in varying bright colors and crisscrossed, incongruent racing stripes. The driver cannot be seen as a dozen fog lights all mounted to the front end and lined across the top of the windshield throw out 800-candlepower eye-melting shine. There’s some music playing, a riff that triggers something in a part of Zilch’s mind he still has left and it stings him to think about. The pain compass comes roaring back, momentarily blotting out the agony of being shot in the face with a harpoon. But it’s nagging at him; he knows the song, but can’t place the title, not until Galavance says:

  “What is that?”

  “That would be ‘Flirtin’ with Disaster’ by none other than Molly Hatchet.” He pauses. “Or did you mean that thing driving up out of the swamp?”

  In time with the music swelling in volume, the car begins to climb, ascending up out of the swamp water, liquid pouring off its dented sheet metal. The cab is lifted up on stilts of some kind, a custom metal frame that stretches far beneath the water. It keeps climbing out, more and more emerging from the swamp. Soon a set of four enormous wheels are visible, wrapped in chain. The patchwork car is set atop stolen construction equipment wheels, making it into a tuner monster truck. The backhoe’s tires. That’s where they went, Zilch realizes, chagrinned.

  “Wild guess. That’s the thing Chev was talking about,” Galavance says.

  “Yep,” Zilch says. “He was building a goddamn monster truck.”

  Galavance sighs. “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.”

  With one grunt of the accelerator, the Frankenstein truck frees itself from the swamp mud and roars across the cul-de-sac. Beefy Ben tries to back them out of the driveway but his car’s tires just throw smoke, spinning in place. Too late. The massive wheels are on them, easily climbing up over the hood and crushing the windshield down with a spack. The roof, as the truck eases the back wheel up onto the purple racer, crumples onto its passengers. There are screams, but they are mostly drowned out by the slapdash car-crusher’s thunderous engine.

  As “Flirtin’ With Disaster” peaks, the vehicle pauses on top of Ben’s car. The truck locks its front wheels and the rear right one, as tall as Zilch, begins spinning. The roof of Ben’s car is flung away, slick as a tablecloth being ripped out from under a place setting. With his car roofless, Ben has a moment to escape. In a panicked scramble, he tries to climb up over the hood, but the truck thumps into reverse and backs up over him, pinning him to the hood. He screams. And the truck matches his bellowing with a few angry grunts of acceleration, in preparation of something awful.

  “Jolby, stop!” Zilch shouts over the noise.

  The front of the truck remains stationary, but the back wheel—set to a mighty roar of the engine—spins. Beefy Ben, with just a few quick revolutions, is rendered into pink porridge. Screaming, then not. A man, then paste.

  Through with that task, the truck rolls down over the remainder of the car, leaving Beefy Ben’s ride a flattened slab of wrinkled purple sheet-metal. Blood from the other men trapped inside flows freely under the doors and puddles on the asphalt.

  The monster truck moves with surprising elegance, out across a few of the other lawns and makes a slow circle as it turns around.

  The vehicle rumbles past, taking a second pass at Ben and his friends for good measure, slowly, as if Jolby is savoring it, and for a moment Zilch can see inside the passenger window. There’s the outline of a large, angular head. Then, closer, massive brown eyes, the green pallor and face of Jolby, completely transformed.

  “Is that what he looks like when he … ?” Galavance stammers.

  The truck hesitates in the front yard of 1330 Whispering Pines for a moment, Jolby’s frog face filling the side window, its eyes trained on Zilch and Galavance. Its darkly speckled eyes move around, scanning them, then slowly drift down toward their feet. Its eyes, if possible, go wider. A line of drool visibly cascades from its mouth, syrupy and long, reminding Zilch of a dangling shoelace. He looks down, and sees a spilled bag of Ben’s takeout. Something yellow—melted cheese possibly—is smeared in with the mud and blood, partly crushed in amongst the smooshed remains of run-over French fries.

  Quickly snapping up the bag, Zilch holds it overhead like one would showcase the freshly disembodied head of a fallen enemy. Jolby’s eyes grow unmistakably hungr
ier. But when the bag’s soggy underside splits and its contents splatter out back onto the ground, the frog-man seems to snap to, disappointed that the prized meal is sullied. It gives Zilch and Galavance one last withering glare, faces forward, then mashes the accelerator, the engine booming in immediate reply.

  Zilch and Galavance both yell out at the same time. “Jolby, wait!”

  The vehicular abomination roars across the cul-de-sac and back into the swamp. The bog is kicked out in front of the tires in a wall of stirred white water. The vehicle sinks in and rumbles along, exhaust billowing out from the redirected pipe jutting up out of the trunk of the car—a black cat-tail trailing up into the sky behind it.

  Zilch breaks into a run, going to the edge of the water. “Five second rule! Don’t be a snob, come on back!”

  He fumbles with the harpoon gun, trying to get it reloaded.

  Galavance rushes him. “What are you doing?”

  “What we bought this thing for!” The thing feels poorly made in his hands; a lot of parts that should be tight are loose, and he could probably break the thing over his knee.

  Zilch faces the retreating monster truck, the massive back end bobbing as it hits the water and momentarily loses speed.

  He takes aim but, down an eye, knows he’ll be about as accurate as if he threw a rock in the dark, but squeezes the trigger anyway. The bands snap and the harpoon sails through the air, lodging itself into the glass of the rear windscreen.

  The vehicle presses on as if nothing happened, a bee-sting to an elephant. It gets out far enough into the swamp that soon it’s just the chassis gliding across the top of the weedy surface of the water—out to the islands, where it moves into a grove of willows. the lights cut out, and the thing is completely invisible. A few tree tops in the distance shimmy, then go still.

  The drilling sensation in Zilch’s skull fades, then stops altogether. “Fuck.”

  When he turns around, Galavance is standing at the edge of where the cul-de-sac and swamp overlap. She’s holding her hand, favoring it, her finger now swollen to double its size and bleeding.