by Wilbanks, David T. ; Norris, Gregory L. ; Thomas, Ryan C. ; Chandler, Randy
Still and all, I didn’t say a word. Instead I dropped down into that ditch on my haunches and drew back the knife to stab the damned thing. Those tentacles all of a sudden started squiggling, like they were shaking and dancing in fear. Or in—and I know this sounds crazy— erotic excitement, like those tentacles were all atremble and sexed up for some Wolf Girl cooze. As you can imagine, I’ve had some vulgar acts done on me and all manner of things stuck in me but what that thing did to me then was the worst of all.
First, one of those tentacles whipped out and cracked me between the eyes. I never knew what a tender spot it was until that snakelike thing hit me there. It stunned me. Surprised me. Froze me. Then the vile thing assaulted me everywhere I had a hole. One went into my mouth, one went in each ear, up each nostril. They tried my eyes too but couldn’t get in there, thank God.
They all pulled me down on top of it so that its ugly mouth hole and fanglike teeth were inches from my face. I felt one of the snaky whips slip under my panties and past my pussy’s lips while another forced its way up my bum. I couldn’t breathe. I was choking on the long one worming down my throat. The stink and taste of the things were awful enough to kill me on their own. Then they all started swelling up, thickening horribly, so that I would suffocate in short order if I didn’t do something. I did. Do something. I worked up close. I stabbed the monster with underhanded thrusts. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Wet stuff came out of its wounds. Wet but not wet, like the mercury from a broken thermometer. It felt wet but it didn’t really wet you. Cold and wet. If I was going to die I was taking Squid Face with me.
I stabbed and stabbed until the tentacles slid out of me and I could breathe again. Stinking air.
Then Theo said, “What in hell’s wrong with you, girl?” and I was snatched up by the scruff and set down rudely on the edge of the ditch where the thing lay down in it dying.
I looked at him like he was six kinds of crazy. Hadn’t he seen what the thing had done to me? That it had raped my every hole with those horrible feelers? I looked down in the ditch at it. It was a lifeless mess. I’d done good damage with my boot knife.
I’d lost my little chalkboard somewhere in my excitement. I opened my mouth to speak, to ask Theo hadn’t he seen what the thing did to me but my mouth didn’t remember how to make words and I said nothing.
I thought then that Squid Face had once again fucked my mind and made me think it was tentacle-raping me. Either that or I was bughouse crazy to begin with. Not to even mention dangerous to anything with a dick.
Right about then I saw myself jabbing my blade into Theo’s soft belly and then working the blade into his privates to deprive him of his cock and balls, the family fruit.
I saw it in my mind. I didn’t actually do it. But the urge was there and it scared hell out of me. I’m not sure now if the thing was even alive when I first saw it. But I’m convinced that it was haunted, that it haunted me.
In the long years since, I’ve had the counsel of mentalists, fortunetellers and whore-hopping headshrinkers and the general consensus is that Squid Face was where I projected my rage and killing instincts. That it was nothing more than a dummied up sideshow thing in a jar. I never believed ’em. That thing was in my head, I was never in his. Even after Theo and me burned it to ashes and bone, the thing haunted me. It’s with me still, all these years after. But I’m the boss. I don’t do its bidding. It works for me.
Moses the German midget and his brother the golem joined Americana in the summer of 1937. His real name wasn’t Moses. It was Max Munk but he didn’t go by Max. (I suppose he didn’t want to hear dumb jibes about a maximum midget.) He and his brother slipped out of Berlin to escape the Nazi persecution of Jews and other undesirables. Being a dwarf, he figured he was doubly cursed in his homeland. I didn’t know it then but the Munk brothers would help me find my voice. It’s funny that a couple of Krouts were the ones that helped me learn to talk again but that’s what happened. Actually, it was a real golem that got me talking again, which is pretty amazing when you stop to consider that a golem is a mute monster made of clay.
It turned out that I had a lot in common with the golem. We both cut our teeth on vengeance and we were both unnatural creatures.
After they got off the boat in America, the Munk brothers started out with another mud outfit, Biddle and Baxley Carnival of Wonders. They did their golem routine with them until a fire of suspicious origin gutted the whole shooting match and shebang. Biddle and Baxley bit the dust and Moses Munk and his six-foot brother Yaakov signed on with the Americana Carnival. Moses spoke better English than the average American and his accent made him sound like an educated man. He surprised everybody when he struck up a hot romance with Viola the armless midget who played a mean violin with her feet. Some of the freaks used to joke about what else she could do with those little monkey toes to keep a man like Moses Munk in her bunk. I thought she was pretty sexy for a girl with no arms. And I loved to hear her play her instrument. The way she held the bow with her toes and bent the strings with her other toes truly was marvelous.
Yaakov played the part of the golem. The monster made of clay had been sculpted to resemble Yaakov. In fact, he had modeled for it. The Munk brothers’ act was simple. And effective. Moses was the talker, a little man in the round Jewish cap and with a big silver-handled walking stick which he used as a pointer to direct the rubes’ attention to the lifeless clay man in an upright pine cabinet meant to call to mind a coffin. Then Moses told the legend of the golem.
“In the European city of Prague hundreds of years ago, enemies of the Jews spread the blood lie that Jews were stealing Christian children to kill them and use their blood to mix with water and flour to make Passover bread. The whole city turned against the Jews and the threat of bloodshed was great. An angel of the Lord came to Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and told him to make a giant man out of clay to protect the Jews. The rabbi knew the legend of the golem, he knew that only a righteous man, a tzaddik steeped in the mystical secrets of the Cabala, could bring the golem to life. And so he did. He wrote a magic word on the clay man’s forehead, whispered a secret incantation and brought the monster to life. He commanded the golem to protect the Jews of Prague. The golem obeyed. But eventually the clay giant became too fond of life and the rabbi lost control of the creature and the golem went on a rampage, destroying much of the city and killing innocents. Finally the rabbi got control again and erased the first letter of the word on the golem’s forehead, changing ‘emet’ which means truth to ‘met’ which means death. The golem once again became a lifeless statue of clay and the rabbi locked it up in a secret room of the synagogue.”
At this point in his spiel, Moses Munk would open the big pine cabinet to reveal a scary-looking seven-foot man of clay. It was the spitting image of Yaakov, who hid beneath a trapdoor in the small stage. Moses would then carve the special word the statue’s clay forehead, mumble something or other in Yiddish and then shut the coffin lid. Then Moses rapped his cane against the box and shook it violently as if to wake the thing inside, but what he was really doing was allowing Yaakov time to slip the statue out of the box and to hoist himself into it. Then Moses opened the door to reveal the golem come to life. Yaakov was quite the makeup artist and he always looked almost exactly like the clay version of himself. Yaakov’s golem would come stomping out of his box on elevated shoes like a zombie made of stone. Then he would smash small stone columns with his bare hands. The rubes didn’t know that the columns had already been broken into several puzzle-like pieces and designed to fall apart with a sharp blow. Next the golem would grab a woman out of the small crowd and make as if to carry her away. The woman was of course a plant, a carnie dressed like a typical townie. In the nick of time, Moses would erase the first letter of the mystical word from the golem’s forehead with the tip of his walking stick (which had a tip like a pool cue).
The golem would drop the woman and become a statue and the rubes would applaud and cheer the little Jewish hero.
Moses ignored them the best he could. He talked louder. He had a squeaky voice anyway and when he got loud he got shrill, which made him sound scared. This made the brown-shirted Bund boys bolder and things went from bad to worse in a whorehouse minute. Those homegrown Nazis were suddenly like sharks smelling blood in the water. They swam in for the attack, braving smelly waves of rustic townie rubes, men with jingling pockets and women with change purses that looked like wrinkled scrotums and snapped like snapping turtles when they shut them.
There were six of them. All but one had pencil-thin moustaches like Adolph Hitler himself. The one with the bare upper lip was a handsome blond-haired boy with pretty blue eyes. The smirk curling his lip was a hint of the evil in his heart. He was the one that grabbed Moses by the seat of his pants and snatched him off the little platform that passed for a stage for the low drama.
Yaakov the golem saw what was happening to his brother and he set Zelda down and turned to help Moses. He grabbed the one that had hold of Moses, freed his little brother and pounded that Nazi with his huge fist, smashing his nose so bad you couldn’t even see his lack of a Hitler moustache.
One of the brown shirts recognized Zelda as a cooch dancer from earlier in the week and he snatched her glasses off her nose and shouted, “Hey, this whore’s the strip dancer! She’s not one of us! She’s a phony. Hootchie cootchie cunt!”
Zelda shot back: “Keep your hands off me you toy soldier shit head.”
The rubes were not sure if this was part of the show or not. Either way, they were getting more than their money’s worth. Some of them, I’m sure, had no idea what a brown shirt was or who Hitler was. (I knew because Zelda made me read a newspaper at least once a week.) I was in the back of the crowd, cloaked in my mask and flop hat. When I saw the bastard lay hands on Zelda, I just about went ape-shit crazy. I drew my boot knife and pushed through the crowd to get to Zelda. I could see myself jumping on the guy’s back and jabbing my knife into the side of his neck. And that was exactly what I intended to do. I would have too, if a pistol-packing off-duty sheriff ’s deputy and his pal hadn’t stepped in to restore order and make the brown shirts leave. I slipped my knife back in my boot.
Moses and Yaakov stood together with their fists balled up, spitting mad. I don’t believe they had any idea how ridiculous they looked, giant golem and shrimpy midget side by side and ready to go down swinging against Jew-hating Nazis. There were threats thrown back and forth as the brown shirts departed, the kind of bluster you would expect. Everybody thought that was the end of it. Except me. I figured those Nazi thugs would be back for some payback. I didn’t know how right I was, or how bad things could get. I found out two nights later.
The golem was quite the ladies’ man. Yaakov was handsome in spite of his big crooked beak and close-set eyes. And he was big. His kosher sausage drove the women wild and he could always get it up for seconds and thirds. I know this because we had our moments in the sack. He was so big I thought that circumcised beast would split me wide open but he was so gentle with me that it hardly hurt at all. I’m telling you this to explain why I had feelings for the big Jew. You could say I loved him. Zelda did too, in her own way, though more like a sister loves a big brother. Knowing this, you can understand better why we did what we did after those phony Nazis left Moses for dead and took Yaakov the golem out into the hinterland to torture and kill him.
They must’ve been watching the carnival with a spyglass from the dark surroundings. They knew right where to find the Munk brothers when they turned in for the night. The six of them busted in on them and beat them bloody with ball bats and chains. They left Moses on the floor of the jungle buggy with his head cracked open and they chivvied bloody Yaakov out and away in chains. Zelda just happened to see them leaving when she got up to go pee on account of another bladder infection. She came and yanked me out of bed and we piled into the flivver and tore out after them. Zelda raised the alarm before we went but we were the only carnies with a ready car, except for Boss Bizzle, and there was no time to wait on him to get up and moving his pork chops.
I sat with that Thompson machine gun across my lap. We had taken it out in the desert to see if we could shoot it our first season with the Americana so we knew how to use that Tommy. It used .45 slugs so we had no problem keeping the round drum full of ammo. Zelda was pretty good at hitting things with it. But she couldn’t beat me. I was a natural Tommy gun gangster with that baby. I could’ve given Machine Gun Kelly a run for his money, except that he was already doing time in Alcatraz for kidnapping some rich oil man.
Zelda drove like a maniac and caught up with them on a back-country road. She had the headlights off so they wouldn’t know we were on their tail. We knew no one else from the carnival would be coming because they wouldn’t know where we were, so it was up to us to rescue Yaakov Munk.
It was a clear night and the moon was fattening up to full like a big yellow tick feasting on rich blood. Zelda didn’t have much trouble keeping the car between the ditches. She had to slow down some when the Nazis turned off onto a dirt road that snaked through wooded landscape but she was able to hang far enough back to keep from being seen in their rearview mirror. We could see their taillights but they couldn’t see us. Unless the goons were leading us into a trap.
I had a pretty good idea how evil Nazis were on account of the tales Yaakov and Moses had told me. I didn’t think American brown shirts would be much different from their German brothers when it came to Jew-hating cruelty. I was not going to let these assholes hurt the man I loved. I was prepared to use the Tommy gun without hesitation. Somewhere in my head old Squid Face’s ghost was egging me on to do murder. Not that I needed any egging.
We followed them to a little hilltop where they popped out of their auto like the brown shirt clowns they were. All six of them and my beloved Yaakov in chains. There was a single tree on that hill and I saw right away it was a hanging tree.
Zelda had cut off our motor when they first stopped so they couldn’t hear us.
Two of the men had flashlights. One of them lit up a torch. Only thing missing was a pitchfork to make it like one of those monster movies Zelda for some reason loved.
When one of them threw the hangman’s noose over a low-hanging limb, Zelda said, “My God, they’re really gonna kill him. You ready to jack these goons up?”
I nodded and patted the Tommy.
“Let’s go then,” she said. “Kill ’em if you have to. Any one or all.”
We were at the bottom of the little hill, about forty paces away from the hanging tree. I glided up the grassy slope, moving fast and as silent as a gentle breeze. Zelda lagged behind, being plumper. Her ass was great for shimmy-shaking the cooch but it made her bottom-heavy and slow for uphill work. Didn’t matter because I had the machine gun and murder in my black heart.
Yaakov started talking in German. It sounded like he was cussing them but then the German tongue often sounded that way to me, harsh and pissed-off. That was when I saw the rifle. One of the Nazis shouted something in Yaakov’s face and then butt-stroked him under the chin with the rifle. Yaakov went to his knees and never said another word.
They put the noose around his neck then. And one of them came out with a gas can and started pouring gasoline over Yaakov’s head and shoulders,
drenching him. They aimed to hoist him up and set him to burn.
By this time I was nearly to the top of the hill but they hadn’t seen me because I was outside the glow of their torchlight. I wanted to yell at them to stop, something like Stop or I’ll shoot but I didn’t trust my mouth to remember how to say words.
So I let loose with a Wolf Girl howl as I leveled the Tommy gun at the man with the torch.
Behind me, Zelda came through like a champ and yelled: “Stop! Right now! Or we’ll shoot you!”
Startled, the Bund boys all froze and then turned toward us, peered through the gloom to see who’d dared to call them out. Flashlight beams found us and half blinded me. If I fired a blind burst I might hit Yaakov. Zelda must’ve been thinking the same thing because she said, “Get those lights off us. She’s got a Tommy gun and she’s already pissed off. She hates bright lights.” I didn’t but it was the right thing to say because those lights left us in a hurry. They’d been on us long enough for the assholes to see Wolf Girl with a machine gun. I figured a sight like that would pucker any sonofabitch’s asshole a little. Even a Jew-hating Hitler ass-kisser’s.
“Fuck you, you wolf-ass freak!” said the one with the torch. “This Jew boy’s goose is cooked.”
And with those words, he touched his flickering fire to my Yaakov and Yaakov went up in flames, writhing and screaming and cursing in German. The torchbearer laughed and poked his torch into Yaakov’s groin because it hadn’t yet been engulfed in flames.
I cut his laughter off with a long angry burst of Tommy gun fire. The man’s laughter died with him. I cut him in two at the waist.
Two of the other Nazi pricks bumped into each other as they tried to run away in panic and they both ended up on the ground. I shot them where they sat and they flopped over dead on that little hilltop.
Yaakov was burning brighter so I had plenty of light to shoot by. I tagged another target as it made a dash for the Nazi clown car, just cut his legs out from under him and then put a three-second burst into his noggin as I walked forward, slow and in control, feeling the Tommy gun bucking against my shoulder each time I tickled the trigger. Shooting men down was a lot like working a loud-as-hell meat grinder. And those .45 slugs were damn good at grinding up living meat. I chopped those punks down and ground them up.