Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed

by Lance Carbuncle

  “Armadillo?” Buddy laughs. “We’ve been eating fucking armadillo?” I notice that Buddy’s facial hair has grown out to a full-on mountain-man beard in a matter of days. In the borrowed camouflage he looks remarkably like Arnette and Pervis. One would be surprised to discover that Buddy is not related to them.

  “That’s right,” Arnette seems to be smiling beneath his mouth-obscuring whiskers. “Possum on the half-shell, Texas bar-bee-que style. It’s some pretty tasty shit, huh?”

  “You’re darn fuckin’ tootin’ it is!” Buddy hollers. Me and Pervis join in with yee-haws and long drawn out wooooos. Spencer tries to fade into the wall as paranoia sets in for him. He is whacked on swamp weed and has just realized that he is cooped up with a group of madmen.

  Arnette returns with another tray of armadillo and eggs. Buddy hands him a beer and the water pipe. We hoot and holler and laugh and guffaw until our lungs, voices and hearts hurt.

  We turn on the television to see what to expect from the storm. At the edge of the Everglades, miles from civilization, these boys have high-definition cable television and a 56-inch plasma set. They don’t have air-conditioning. They don’t have a dishwasher or a garbage disposal. Obviously they don’t have beard trimmers and the washing machine on the back porch doesn’t seem to work. But they have cable television and a badass plasma boob-tube.

  We turn on the Cable News Channel mid-story. The attractive Asian reporter says with an unwavering smile: “and now Muslims worldwide are protesting and issuing death threats against Mr. Hayman for his commentary in which he stated that Muslims are easily goaded into protesting and issuing death threats. Back to you, Rusty.”

  “Thank you, Suchi Punani,” says the anchorman. “And now more on the terrorists who blew up a roadside tower in South Carolina. The three fugitives who committed this horrendous act, seen here . . . ” Arnette starts to laugh and Pervis joins in as pictures of me, Buddy, and Totem and our names are posted on the television screen “ . . . appear to be on a crime spree. Security cameras in a Florida rest area captured images of them leaving the men’s room where a security guard was later found unconscious in a bathroom stall. The security worker, Officer William Holly Sleestack, has reported that the terrorists seemed to be on some sort of a mission and are determined and dangerous. A manhunt for the suspects has been delayed due to the imminent landfall of Hurricane Angus on the Florida Gulf Coast. We’ll keep you updated on these events as they develop. And now to our meteorologist, Lumpy Rutherford, with more on Angus.”

  “Thank you Rusty,” the meteorologist cuts in. “Angus is bearing down on the Gulf Coast of South Florida. Angus is a category four storm. That means wind speeds of up to 155 miles per hour. The eye of Angus is well defined and should make landfall within two hours just below Naples. It’s going to be a bad one. Not since Andrew has South Florida seen a storm of this magnitude. The eye is slow moving and that may be problematic as it passes over the bottom tip of the Florida Peninsula. Luckily Angus is going to hit a relatively unpopulated area and most of the residents have evacuated. Hopefully the storm will break up some before it hits the other coast. Otherwise, damages will be extensive. Back to you Rusty.”

  Hurricane Angus will clear a path through Florida straight toward our little shelter, and we love it. Arnette and Pervis are impressed with the way the Sombrero Tower exploded. They see us as anti-establishment heroes. They ask to see our manifesto, whatever that means. Once the storm passes, the brothers want to take us out into the swamp in their air boat to blow things up and shoot at beautiful animals with automatic weapons.

  • • •

  Pervis brags about his “critters.” He walks around the room. I limp on my sore leg and Arnette hands me one of his hand-carved walking sticks. Pervis limps too and uses one of the sticks to help him hobble around. “This ’un here,” Pervis points with his staff at a mounted fish with razor sharp teeth and soft white fur, “he’s a fur bearing trout. I caught him while ice fishing in a lake in Canada. The water there is so cold that the fish grow thick fur to help keep ’em warm.”

  I watch in amazement and slight discomfort as Pervis tells the stories of his taxidermied chimeras, not sure if he believes what he is saying or if this is all just a performance. “And this little feller,” Pervis picks up a leathery looking beast about the size of Idjit, “is a baby Chupacabra. That means goatsucker in Mexican talk. He was clearing out all of the livestock just west of here. They called me in to trap him.” The creature looks like a shriveled dog with tiny forelegs, small ineffectual wings, sharp spines down the back, and enormous jaws. His underbelly was ripped in a zigzag and crudely stitched up with something that looks like a guitar string. “These things used to just be in Puerto Rico, but a mama Chupacabra musta stowed away on a ship and ended up in South Florida ’cuz these nasty little fuckers been showing up and slaughtering livestock all over the place. I was called in to catch this little guy. I pretty much vaporized one of his friends with a load of buckshot and then was lucky enough to lay this ole’ boy out with a tranquilizer dart full a Special K. Shit,” Pervis sighs, “even tranquilized, the little feller ripped right through two leather duffle bags.”

  “Why would somebody call you to catch these guys?” I ask, halfway taken in by Pervis’s creatures. Maybe I’m high. Maybe the creatures look real. Maybe they are real. “I mean, why would you be the one to hunt down the chooba-choppa?”

  “Chupacabra,” Pervis and Arnette correct me simultaneously.

  “Chupacabra,” I correct myself. “Chupacabra. Anyway, are you some sort of hunter of bigfoots and mythological creatures?”

  “Well,” Pervis slips his thumbs under his suspenders and stretches them in front of his substantial belly, “as a matter a fact, I am, and the best one in this state prob’alee.”

  “Umm-Humm,” Arnette grunts in agreement.

  “No shit!” I laugh and light up another toke. “Those little choopa-choppas . . . ”

  “Chupacabras . . . ”

  “Chupacabras,” I correct myself, “look like some mean little fuckers. I wouldn’t want to mess with ’em.”

  Buddy has been drifting in and out of sleep. The current conversation catches his interest. “If you know so much about these crazy-ass creatures,” Buddy says to Pervis, “why don’t you tell me a little about that fucked up thing I saw out on the road?”

  “What’d you see?” Pervis swings around to look at Buddy, his eyes lit up, large and beaming.

  “I don’t know,” Buddy tries to explain. “It was tall and lanky like. It looked like a big, hairy monkey with an erection.”

  “Hot damn!” Arnette and Pervis share the words.

  “That could be one of two things,” Pervis explains. “Either it’s that politician lady that used to be a prosecutor wanderin’ around naked again . . . I think her name is Remo or sum’thn . . . or it’s the fucking skunk ape. Chances are good that it’s the skunk ape ’cuz we ain’t seen Ms. Remo in some time.”

  “What the fuck is the skunk ape?” Spencer materializes from his crack in the wall.

  “It’s the meanest motherfucker south of the Mason-Dixon Line, that’s all, says Pervis. “Ya ever hear of Bigfoot?”

  “Yeah,” we answer.

  “He’s a pussy!” shouts Arnette.

  “Ya ever hear of the Yeti?” asks Pervis.

  “Yep.”

  “A Goddamn pussy!” shouts Arnette.

  “That’s right,” says Pervis, dropping his voice. “The Skunk Ape smells like a bag of ass soaked in cat piss. It has a perpetual hard-on and will use it on gators, stumps, buzzards, tourists, you name it. You see one coming and you best cover your bunghole and run as fast as you can. To the best of my knowledge there are sumwares between ten and twenty of those bad mothers in this area, and most of ’em are males with big forearm penises.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I saw,” Buddy agrees. “It looked like a forearm with a big fist on the end.”

  “Yep,” answers Buddy, “the sc
arcity of females makes ’em fuckin’ crazy ’n horny. And the fact that the males smell so damn bad, well it scares off the females that are around. They’re crazy-ass bat-shit insane for any kind of female attention. Couple a-years back, some French-Canadian women were carried off by a group of horny males. We sent out a rescue team and found the ladies. They didn’t want to come back, sent us away. Since then we ain’t seen the Skunk Apes.”

  “Yeah,” agrees Arnette, “and we ain’t been allowed to hunt for them big hairy bitches, and I mean the Skunk Apes, not the Canadian ladies, any further because our government won’t let us.”

  Arnette nods his head sadly. “Yep, I don’t know what’s goin’ on. But we ain’t even allowed to get out in the swamps anymore. You know the Everglades restoration program?”

  “Uhhh . . . ” Buddy answers, unwilling to say he doesn’t know what Pervis is talking about.

  “Yep,” says Pervis, “the restoration program. Uncle Sam is spending two-hunert-fifty-billion dollars to close off big tracts of the Everglades. They’s closing off big portions of a swampy, mucky mess. Why in tarnation would they do that? Huh?” Pervis’s face stretches tight with consternation.

  “It’s them big smelly monkeys,” chimes in Arnette.

  “Bingo!” shouts Pervis. “The big smelly monkeys! And do you know why they smells so God-awful shitty? They sleeps in the airpockets under alligator dens. All that is down there is lizard shit and rot. What do you think? A big sweaty, hairy monkey living in those conditions. No wonder they stink.” The big bong is passed to Pervis and he hits hard on it, coughing, choking, and clearing himself up with the asthma inhaler. “Goddamn monkey. I’m gonna get me one a them and hang his head over the door.” It turns out that Pervis and Arnette have been hunting the Skunk Ape most of their lives. As children they would go in kayaks with their father, searching the saw grass for traces of the elusive beasts, occasionally finding large heaps of scat and knots in tree trunks that had been bored out. Arnette claims that he caught one on some grainy video from hundreds of yards away and shows us the film. To me it looks much like Oprah Winfrey in a bath-towel, lumbering through a campground in search of the bathhouse. To Arnette and Pervis it was, so far, the most exciting experience of their lives. “I’m gonna get me one a-those smelly monkeys,” promises Pervis as we all settle in around the fire and carry on with talk of Skunk Apes.

  Sleep evades me. I nod off, in and out of consciousness, but not in a full slumber. I want to see Idjit. Every time I find myself slipping toward dreamland, Pervis or Buddy will break into a death-rattle coughing spasm from the swamp weed and drag me back to consciousness. I hear snippets of their conversation. Pervis asks why we were traveling right into the face of a hurricane. Buddy explains about Idjit as best as he can. He says Idjit is like my girlfriend, except there’s no sexual relationship or romantic love (as far as he can tell). In that space between awake and asleep I sit and listen. Pervis is impressed; he understands the sweet platonic love of a good hound. He’s lost several of them to skunk apes, he says. I feel comfortably numb thanks to the big bong and several shots of leadschlager. Eventually my high blood alcohol content and general road weariness prevails.

  Presleep visions of Idjit flash before me, warmth emanating hypnagogic hallucinations. Idjit invites me to sit down on a cushy red velvet loveseat. He sits in front of me at a small table lit by an accountant’s lamp. The green glass lampshade throws a soothing emerald glow onto the table. Idjit holds the glass jar that I won in the poker game of my last dream. Putting on a pair of reading glasses and a green celluloid visor, Idjit sits and pulls out the wadded up papers out to read them.

  “Shopping list. Things to do before you die. I notice that none of these are checked off. By the way, is intercourse with Marie Osmond a realistic goal?” Idjit continues to review the papers and look at me judgmentally over the edge of his glasses. “Hmm, order form for something called a pulsating pocket-pal . . . a list of Spanish curse-words. Oh,” the sad basset hound eyes light up, “a recipe for beer-infused bacon-stuffed deviled eggs. We need to try those.”

  “That’s right, Pendejo,” I tell him.

  “Ah, here we go,” the soulful hound looks at me over the top of his reading glasses, “one contract for the purchase of beer in exchange for your soul. You need to get this back.”

  “But that was a joke. I’ve got more important things to do than chase down a piece of worthless paper. I’ve got to get back to you.”

  “This was not a joke. Ramona is a succubus, a spiritual parasite.”

  “She didn’t seem all that bad. A succubus? Like a demon you mean?”

  “She is not malevolent,” Idjit explains, “not like that. She’s a pranic vampire—an energy leech. She’s like a . . . a soul-collector. She has the ability to entrap the spirits of others and she does so to fulfill some sort of emptiness, a void in her own soul. And that crazy bitch has your soul in a mason jar on her kitchen counter.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask, confounded by my dog’s outrageous claims.

  “Ramona was a soul guide.” Idjit explains that Ramona is supposed to help lost souls find their way to their final destination, whether it be heaven, hell, or Hazard County, Kentucky. Somewhere along the line she changed. Instead of helping lost spirits, Ramona began collecting the essence of the living and keeping them like betas in fish bowls for her own fulfillment. “You’re her favorite. She keeps your soul on her kitchen counter like a prized gold fish and feeds it a pinch of collard greens, black-eyed peas and hoghead cheese[19] each morning. It is doing well under her care, but you need to retrieve it.”

  “This can’t be,” I argue. “That was just a joke. I do not believe that my soul is gone. What? Am I just a husk of flesh walking around with no spiritual essence? Has she robbed me of that?”

  “She didn’t rob you. You sold your soul to her in an arm’s length contractual agreement. It has all of the legal requirements to make it legit.” Idjit holds up the wrinkled paper and studies it under the green light. “Let’s see: offer, consideration, acceptance. Yep, she got your soul fair and square. In fact, she probably overpaid.”

  “Can’t be!”

  “It’s true. Have you noticed that your body is falling apart? More and more injuries that aren’t healing?”

  I scan my beaten and bruised person. “Yeah, I guess it does kind of seem as if I am disintegrating. Why?” I grab an eyetooth between my pointer-finger and thumb and wiggle it back and forth, feeling it loosen even further.

  “You cannot heal yourself. Your spirit is a well of healing power. Although it was a weak flicker when you actually did own it, at least you could draw upon that power to cure yourself. Now it’s like your body is running on a battery that cannot recharge itself. Eventually, and maybe even soon, it’s just going to go ka-put. Your energy source will be gone for good. You’re running on fumes right now. What it boils down to is that you are dying on the inside, but your physical being doesn’t realize it yet. It just keeps going and sustaining more damage until you fall apart, literally. Just get up to see Ramona and get that soul back. Then you can come to get me. By the way, I think I love you.” Idjit pulls the chain on his green lamp and all goes dark.

  • • •

  My eyelids slowly raise, like a garage door opening to the early morning. I’m seeing double. No, triple. Three bearded redneck, camouflage jumpsuit-clad lunatics are inches from my face. I smell their armadillo-barbeque-morning-breath. I vomit just a little bit into my mouth and swallow back the sour bile. Buddy is virtually indistinguishable from Arnette and Pervis.

  “Hey dude,” Buddy greets me. “It’s passed us by. Angus has blown through and we’re still here. Get up, you’ve got to get moving. You know, dogs to catch, people to do and things to see. Miles to go before you sleep, yadda yadda yadda.” Buddy’s beard has grown out to what would be two month’s worth of facial hair for most men. “Get up. I’ve got some shit to show you.”

  “Yeah, come on,” say
s Pervis, or maybe Arnette. I can’t tell. “You need to get moving. Buddy here has told us about your hound dog. You need to get back to that old fleabag.” The brothers each grab an arm and haul me up. “Here you go,” one of them says as he pushes a pistol into my hand. “This is a Luger 9-millimeter. Our granddaddy pried it from the hands of a kraut he killed during World War Two. He passed this down to our daddy and he passed it to us. Ain’t nothing that handles better than one a-these bad boys. You’re gonna need this as you pass through hoards of looters and other desperate folks on your way up.”

  “What are you talking about?” I look at the gun. It’s so cool. I had a Luger cap gun as a kid. Not one of those plastic pieces of shit they make now with the orange tips on the end of the barrel. My cap gun was a heavy, metal, full sized replica of the real thing. It was solid and weighty. And so is the Luger these old boys have given me. “Why are you giving me a firearm?”

  “You need to get moving,” Buddy says. “I don’t know why, but you need to get to your dog now. We all agree. And Pervis and Arnette here . . . well, they’re gonna give you everything you need. You’ve got the gun. Take this.” Buddy helps me strap on a heavy backpack. “It’s filled with provisions. And you’re gonna be able to travel better than anybody else, come on.” He tugs at my arm, dragging me outside. I tuck the Luger into the waistband of my pants.

  Palm trees, gnarly messes of something Arnette calls melaleucas, and uprooted palmettos litter the front yard. A small circle has been cleared and in the middle of it sits a Honda 350SX. The thing is a fucking brute. A three-wheeled monster with nubbed balloon tires, several feet of ground clearance, and suspension that looks like it would soak up all forms of rough terrain.

  “Weren’t those things outlawed because they are so dangerous?” I ask, itching to try it out anyway.

  “Yep,” mumbles Pervis.

  “And weren’t people tipping them over, rolling them, wrecking them and dying in every way possible?”