Midnight Echo 8

by AHWA

  There were fifteen people besides him and the owner Ernie in the Bar-None Bar and Grille, and Mort knew every one of them. Paulie over there had a jones for Bernice. Paulie was five-four, pockmarked and wafer thin and Bernice was Captain America. Wally must have weighed in at three-fifty-plus these days, his arms in the teeshirt like sacks of meat. Billy Bob fancied himself a cowboy right on down to the stetson and big silver belt buckle. Billy Bob was from Hoboken, New Jersey and his real name was Leslie. Eddie, Loreen, Phil and Joey all worked at the plastics factory with Harold. Eddie dealt bennies and downers on the side. Other than that he was the sweetest guy in the world.

  The mood in the bar was jovial. They were playing with Ernie’s new toy.

  Ernie was an electronics freak. He’d bought himself a speaker-phone at Radio Shack the other day and hooked it up to the jukebox. So whenever somebody called in or he called out the music switched off and everybody in the joint could hear.

  He had the phone in his hand right now.

  Everybody shushed everybody.

  Ernie dialed. Joey answered.

  “Hullo?’

  “Hello? Is this Joey?”

  It was a bad imitation of a woman’s voice. Ernie was a baritone. To Joey it didn’t seem to matter.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I heard something about you, Joey.”

  “Yeah? What do you think you heard?”

  “I hear you have the smallest dick in three counties.”

  Joey didn’t miss a beat.

  “Yeah, and I use it a whole lot too.”

  They’d all been holding it in from the start because of Ernie’s silly voice but now they came unglued. The place was howling. Beside him Loreen spilled her vodka tonic.

  “What the fuck is that?” said Joey.

  “Speaker … phone!” said Ernie. He could barely get the word out.

  “Ernie, you bastid! Next pitcher’s on you!”

  “Ah, we miss ya, Joe. Miss your jokes. Got any new ones?

  “This foot heals up, I’m gonna put it up your butt.”

  “Okay, okay. Next pitcher’s on me. Give us a couple.”

  “Shit. All right. Lemme think.”

  The laughter died down accordingly. Joey was thinking.

  “Okay, so this high-class broad sits down next to some drunk at the bar. Guy’s shitfaced, can barely sit up. Woman’s disgusted. She gives him this look. ‘Fuckin’ loser,’ she says. ‘If you were my husband I’d poison your drink!’ Drunk looks up at her and says, ‘if you were my wife, I’d drink it’.”

  Good one. But Joey was on a roll. You couldn’t stop him when he was on a roll.

  “What’s black and blue and hates sex?”

  “WHAT?” A choral response from the patrons of the Grille.

  “The little kid in the trunk of my car.”

  That did it. People were slapping the bar. People were rolling, groaning.

  Nasty.

  The phone started beeping. Call waiting.

  “What’s worse than being in the Special Olympics?”

  “WHAT?”

  “Hold on a minute, Joe,” Ernie said. “Got someone on the other line.”

  A choral groan. Ernie switched off the speaker and answered.

  “Bar-None. Uh-huh. Yeah, all right. Hey Mort?”

  Mort set down his glass of bourbon-laced milk. He believed in his product.

  “Ernie?”

  “Phone.”

  “Who is it?”

  “May I ask who’s calling, please?”

  Ernie listened. Covered the mouthpiece with his hand and whispered.

  “It’s Squirrely Shirley.”

  Mort grinned.

  “Shush, everybody. You never know. This could be classic.”

  They shushed. Ernie hit speaker and handed him the phone.

  “Hey, Shirl. ’Sup?”

  “I’m gonna kill that fucking Harold next time I see him,” said Shirley. “That’s what’s up. Come over here. I need a dick that ain’t crooked.”

  He could see faces reddening. Cheeks puffing.

  “Oh, really? What’d he do now?”

  “Sonovabitch broke the junk off my new statue. I’m gonna break his goddamn neck, I swear it. He’s a dead man. But he’s not here right now and I don’t see him comin’ home anytime soon. So let’s fuck.”

  Eyes were bulging. Fat Wally expelled air like a whoopee cushion.

  “What was that?”

  “Somebody opened a shook-up can of beer.”

  “Oh. So, you wanna fuck or not?”

  “I dunno, Shirl …”

  “You telling you got better options over there? Come on!”

  He didn’t. Bernice was being bird-dogged by Paulie and Loreen’s tits were staring at the ground. Had been for years.

  Mort looked to Ernie for guidance.

  “I’d settle up if I were you, Mort,” Ernie whispered.

  Mort considered. Bartenders were known for their wisdom in such matters.

  “Okay, Shirl. See you in a few.”

  “Copy that, honey. See you in a …”

  He handed Ernie the phone and Ernie hung up.

  The bar erupted. Laughter and applause, catcalls and whistles. Pats on the back. He placed two tens on the bar and high-fived and smiled and waved his way out of there.

  Outside on the street in the warm summer evening he realized that they’d forgotten all about Joey, who was presumably still on the phone. He wondered what was worse than being in the Special Olympics. He’d have to.

  * * *

  He parked the milk truck out in front and not five minutes later was slamming her ass down hard on the plaster-and-newspaper-strewn kitchen table.

  Plaster billowed.

  He slid up her skirt and slipped off her panties and started to unzip. She cupped his face in her soft dusty hands.

  “I like a man with a well-manicured nose,” she said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. Harold’s looks like vegetable garden. He never …”

  He stuck it to her.

  “Fuck!” she said. “Straight as a goddamn arrow!”

  He swept some headless statue and a bucket off the table and thought briefly of that scene from The Postman Always Rings Twice with Nicholson banging a gorgeous Jessica Lange on the breadboard. But that was flour flying through the air all over the place and this was plaster dust.

  Mort sneezed.

  * * *

  From outside on the lawn Harold watched a black man dressed in spotless white fuck the living daylights out of his wife and occasionally sneezing.

  The milkman.

  He could hear her through the kitchen window. It sounded like she was speaking in tongues. It was possible.

  It was disorienting seeing them upside down though blades of tall grass and gnomes’ legs. Disorienting too because he was aware of something happening in his body, something gradually slowing down. His breathing growing more and more shallow, his vision slowly dimming. He felt a kind of sadness at this. It was a little like a night at the bowling lanes when you couldn’t get a strike to save your life. He felt like he was letting down the team.

  He heard Shirley shriek once, twice.

  Then silence.

  He had a sudden sense that this wasn’t fair, the very last image that came to him.

  Snow White. Seven Dwarfs.

  Not fair.

  * * *

  Nice of Mort, she thought, to ask to see her handiwork. He hadn’t up to now, though they’d been fucking almost every afternoon for nearly a month. Maybe the fact that he’d gotten some twice in one day was making him feel expansive.

  “
The early ones are turds,” she said. “Used oil based paint. Plaster just soaks that shit up without the right sealer and sealer ain’t cheap.”

  She flicked on the flashlight. The back porch light was out again and Harold, the lazy twit, hadn’t seen fit to bother changing it. They stepped off the porch into the grass. The lawn needed mowing too.

  “What you using now?”

  “Acrylic. Cheaper and it sticks. I started my little village here after I figured that part out. But there was still bubbles in the molds so they look a little weird. Now, thanks to you, sweetie, no more bubbles. What the fuck?”

  She almost tripped over a Santa head.

  “What the FUCK?”

  Her village! Her village looked like a goddamn twister had passed through. Cherubs flattened. Reindeer shattered. Gnomes reduced to shapeless heaps of wire and powder. Motherfucker!

  And there in the middle of it all, Harold. Passed out on the grass.

  At least that’s what she thought at first.

  On closer inspection the angle of his neck was more or less inconsistent with what one normally expects from a drunken passed-out human. His neck was draped over one of her gnomes like somebody’d tossed a sweater over it.

  “Jesus!” Mort said. “Is he … ?”

  She leaned down and pressed her fingers to his neck. She knew her anatomy.

  “Yep. Dead, all right. Hell, I told you I’d break his neck and look at this. He went and did it himself! Shit!”

  “Um … Shirley?”

  She didn’t like the tone of that um, Shirley somehow. She turned the flashlight on him.

  Was he eyeing her suspiciously? Her? Was he freakin’ nuts?

  “What? Hey, I wasn’t serious. You know I wasn’t serious. This is just a real bad coincidence. Poor Harold. I guess we better call the cops.”

  “Shirley?”

  “What? I was just mouthin’ off on the phone. You know that!”

  What the hell was that look on his face?

  “Wait. Mort. You do believe me, right?”

  “Yeah, Shirl. I believe you, but the bar …”

  “What about the bar?”

  He had that kid-in-the-cookie-jar look men would get sometimes. Harold got it too. Like they did something bad and mama’s possibly going to swat them.

  “Well, Ernie, he has this thing …”

  “What? What thing?”

  “Speakerphone. I shouldn’ta told him to put you on, Shirl. Sorry.”

  “Speakerphone. What the hell are you talking about, Mort?”

  “He’s got this speakerphone that’s piped into the jukebox speakers. Uses it for crank calls to crack everybody up. Says it’s better than Karaoke. It kind of is. When you called, I let him …”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Who heard us?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Everyone? Everybody down at the bar, all of them?”

  “Yeah. You said you’d break his neck and sure as shit …”

  “They knew I was kidding, right?’

  “Gee, Shirl, you didn’t sound like you were kidding. I gotta say. Not really.”

  She considered this. This was not good. Not good at all.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “We can handle this. Listen. I got a saw with some good teeth left. We cut him up in foot-and-a-half-long pieces, they’ll fit right inside my old gnome molds. No one’ll ever know.”

  “What? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You’re helping me. Everybody knows you’re dickin’ the dead guy’s wife. You got motive.”

  She could see it coming. See it in his eyes. See him start to back off.

  It was too bad, she thought. He was such a good lay.

  “You really are squirrely, Shirley. I’m callin’ the cops …”

  Which was when she swung the flashlight up in a wide arc from her left knee to his esophagus. It was a good sturdy Maglite. About a pound and a half of weight with the batteries included.

  Mort made a wheezing, choking sound. He looked confused. His hands went to his neck like he was trying to pry something loose there.

  It occurred to her that was a bad night for necks.

  He fell on top of Harold and shuddered. Then went still.

  The flashlight shuddered. Then it died too.

  “HEY BOOTSIE!”

  Bootsie poked her head out the kitchen window.

  “What’s up, doll?”

  “Got any twelve gauge shells?”

  “Case of double-ought. Why? Watcha doin’ out there?

  “Dump those shells in the back of my Miata, will ya? No, dump ‘em in the back of Mort’s truck. Then be a lamb and keep a lookout out front, okay? Oh, and throw your high-capacity nineteen-eleven in there too. It loaded?”

  “And one in the chamber. Can I drink the rest of the Panther Piss? I’m thirsty.”

  “Sure thing. Can I borrow your wheel-barrel?”

  “Have to air up the tire.”

  “Not a problem.”

  * * *

  Here is how things stood at the Bar-None Bar and Grille an hour and a half later when Shirley, having temporarily deposited – and not without regret – the earthly remains of her lover – and without regret at all – the considerable bulk of her husband in the garage amid flower pots and garden tools and molds, pulled up in Mort’s milk truck and turned off the headlights.

  Wally was in the men’s room pointing his equipment in what he hoped was the approximate direction of the urinal. He couldn’t see a damn thing down there, not even his belt.

  Billy Bob was leaning low over his fifth bottle of Old Speckled Hen Beer musing what it would be like to drink the stuff on the porch of his very own farm. Red dog in the yard. Cows in the pasture.

  Eddie was attempting to talk Phil and Joey into popping one of his black beauties and downing it with a shot of tequila laced with pepper. He’d even invented a name for it. Punch-Out Punch.

  Loreen was flipping through Ernie’s month-old Victoria’s Secret catalog and had switched from vodka tonic to screwdrivers.

  Air-brushed, perfect breasts assaulted her.

  The jukebox was playing Tennessee Waltz and Paulie was dancing with Bernice, who thought that even though his head barely cleared her collarbone he was kind of sweet in a homely, dopey way.

  “Just outa curiosity,” he said, “what’s your favorite sexual position?”

  “Dick inside me,” she said. “Anybody ever punch you out for asking a dumb question like that?”

  He smiled. “Think I got this face bobbing for apples?”

  * * *

  Bootsie’s .45 with the high-capacity magazine was stuffed in Shirley’s smock pocket. The shotgun she held at left-shoulder arms. Had Mort been there he’d have bolted for the rear door.

  As it was, except for Patti Page the place just went silent. Nobody moved.

  She leveled the gun at Ernie and sauntered to the bar.

  Ernie essayed a botched smile.

  “Hey there, Shirley. Drink?”

  “Hey Ernie. No thanks. Had some Gatorade on the way over. I hear you got a speakerphone. Where is it?”

  Ernie pointed to the speakerphone rig two feet to his right behind the bar. Shirley pointed the shotgun at the rig.

  “Now Shirl, let’s us just have a few drinks between friends and …”

  She’d shot the damn thing a few times just for fun and she’d got the angle right. Ernie’s chest exploded a couple of feet from where she was aiming just as Wally walked out of the john zipping his zipper.The sound was pretty big in there. She could barely hear all the screaming.

  People scattered. Wally raised his hands in surrender. To hell with the zipper. She aimed two feet to the left
of him and pulled the trigger. Suddenly Wally was all flying fat and bloody intestines.

  She racked a third round and scanned around to the skinny little guy – whatsisname – and that Amazon bitch Bernice clinging to one another on the dance floor, aimed at the jukebox to their left and they both went down together.

  Some cowboy made a dash for the door. Tripped over his chair. Shirley had a bead on him but the damn gun jammed on her. She held back the bolt and pried the round out with her fingers. Racked again and fired. Cowboy’s hat hit the door along with most of his head.

  A group of four people she didn’t know were all huddled together at the bar and that was good for Shirley because one shot took care of them all. One neck, one forehead and two faces, gone.

  She saw Harold’s co-workers Joey, Phil and Eddie hiding behind a table by the juke and reluctantly racked another. Eddie was such a nice guy and she loved his downers. But the damn thing jammed again so she tossed it on the bar and pulled the .45. By now she could hardly hear herself yell sorry Eddie! there was so much echo in there but she walked over and delivered a coup de gracias to each of their heads.

  Loreen was the last one she remembered shooting. Her and some guy in a booth who was holding a glass of what was maybe scotch out in front of his face like the glass was a shield or something. When she came to herself and counted there were two more dead. One guy was splattered all over a beer poster. The other was lying on the floor in a fetal position. He might have been a passed-out drunk, she didn’t know.

  She felt dizzy. Her ears were playing white noise inside her head.

  Somehow she’d ended up standing to the rear of the bar. She didn’t know exactly how she’d got there. She glanced to the right and saw the speakerphone rig nestled amid a row of bottles. The goddamn speakerphone. The reason for all this carnage.

  She lifted the bar gate and stepped behind the bar over Ernie’s sprawled body and yanked it free. Tucked it under her arm. Then she eyed the bottles.

  Bootsie would kill her if she didn’t.

  She found two bottles of Woolly Mammoth Russian Vodka – one full and one mostly – and tucked them into her smock beside the .45.

  She scooped up Harold’s piece of shit shotgun from off the bar. That thing was going in the river.