Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed

by Lance Carbuncle

  “You’ve done a fine job.” Mr. Eshu is now in Daddy’s chair with Idjit at his feet. “Nobody else was able to help me with Jasper. Did you know that that stubborn old coot was 102 years old and would have kept on going if it hadn’t been for your help.”

  “You shittin’ me?” I ask.

  “I wouldn’t shit you, son, you’re my favorite turd,” says Mr. Eshu with a grin. “For your help, I am going to grant you a favor. You don’t realize how close you are to joining your Daddy and Clubfoot Jasper. You don’t have the life force to carry you through to getting back to Erwin. I’m gonna give you a little boost. Just enough juice to get you there . . . if you don’t fool around, that is. And do me a favor when you get there.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Get a rag and some Windex and clean the glass door on the front of the Brahman Bar.”

  “You got it.”

  “And don’ forget yo’ mojo boogie-bag,” adds Jasper.

  “It looks like it’s time for you to wake up now,” interrupts Idjit. “Otherwise you’re going to get poked with a sharp stick.”

  “Huh . . . ”

  “Okay people, I want you to take a look at these two gentlemen over here.” The pedagogical voice floats above me, like the background noise of a television or radio, not enough to wake me up, but enough to become part of my dream. I am too exhausted to move or even open my eyes. “These two must be new. One Caucasian, one Negroid. This old black gentleman appears to have mummified. And they are both clothed. This must be some of Richard Keith’s research. He is studying how clothes affect the decomposition process. Does anybody want to take a guess at how long this unfortunate gentleman has been deceased?”

  Another voice, male, younger, and less confident suggests: “Well, the Caucasian subject appears to have been in a nasty motorcycle accident and then chewed on by a pack of sharp-toothed wild animals. He’s barely recognizable as a human. Just going by the smell, I’d say he’s not fresh. And, hmm,” the voice hesitates, mulling something over, “clearly putrefaction is right around the corner. He has a distended, taut belly, thoroughly bloated. Like it’s about ready to tear open and drain.”

  “Why the bloat?” asks the pedagogue.

  “The bacteria in his system that normally feeds on proteins . . . breaking down a steak dinner or whatever . . . well, they are now feeding on him. There’s a ton of them. He’s like a giant hamburger for the bacteria.”

  “And . . . ” says the pedagogue.

  “And the bacteria produce gas in the process. But his sphincter[28] doesn’t work. His stomach muscles don’t work. The small intestine has probably sealed itself off. The gas has nowhere to go. So his stomach bloats. And his is really bloated.”

  “What if we push on his stomach?” asks another voice, this one female.

  “Give it a try,” directs the teacher.

  I feel a warm hand gently prodding my gut and I let out an enormous burst of flatulence. The kind that stays warm in your pants on a cold day. A chorus of oooohs and uuugghs follows, mixed with nervous laughter.

  “Yes, people,” says the pedagogue with a hint of humor, “cadavers can fart with a little prodding. Now somebody unbutton the pants and let’s look at the genitals. The penis and the testicles are another area for high bacterial activity. Often the genitals will also suffer bloat and become overly enlarged . . . hmm . . . ” I feel ventilation. “I would have guessed by the putrid smell of the intestinal gas that this one has been dead for three or four days. But, obviously no bloat has occurred in the penis and scrotal area. In fact, this unfortunate fellow’s genitalia appear to be underdeveloped. I do note that there are insects and larvae gathering in that area though, which would indicate that he has been decomposing for perhaps a week. Given the lack of scrotal bloating, one would think he is very fresh. Quite interesting and perplexing.”

  “Can we prod the belly a little bit more?” asks the female. “I am curious about the apparent advanced stage of the bloating.”

  “Give it a good poke,” says the pedagogue. “Let’s see what happens.”

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHHH!” I shoot into an upright position, screaming. A stabbing pain pierces my gut. I look down to see a stick . . .

  It looks like it’s time for you to wake up now. Otherwise you’re going to get poked with a sharp stick . . .

  . . . a sharp stick, parting the skin of my fleshy gut. “AHHHHHHHHH! AAAAAAAAAAH! SOMEBODY STABBED ME WITH A FUCKING STICK! AHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  A pale old man in a white jacket clutches at his chest and drops to the ground. A younger, tanner man, also in a white coat grabs the elder and quickly drags him away. Other younger white coated men and women run, one of them shrieking something about zombies and the undead. One man, dark skinned with a head of thick wiry black hair, stands in front of me and stares. The wide nostrils flare. One eye looks as if it had been stitched shut long ago. His face is badly scarred. He smiles in a way that makes me feel like his friend. “You’re not dead,” he says.

  “I don’t think so,” I grimace as I pull the stick from my gut. My Worlds Best Dad shirt sops up my blood. “No thanks to whoever skewered me with this. Are you a doctor?”

  “Not exactly,” he smiles sheepishly.

  “What about the white jacket?”

  “Listen, let’s get out of here,” he says swiveling his head around suspiciously, like a bobble-head Jimmy “Superfly” Snooka, scanning the forest. “I will get you to a hospital. But you need to get out of here now. You’re trespassing and I suspect that security will be here any minute. And I don’t exactly need to be around when they start investigating this.”

  “Okay, help me up.”

  “What about your friend, the mummy?” The man nods at Jasper. “Is he still alive too?”

  I look at Clubfoot Japsper. He looks much older. But the smile on his pruny face says it all. The man is finally at rest. “No, he’s gone. Let’s get out of here.”

  The man helps me to my feet and walks rapidly through the woods, obviously familiar with the territory. The woods still smell like death. When I was a kid we had a garbage disposal that broke when Mom was trying to grind up some rotten vegetables and a rainbow trout that sat in our fridge for too long. The disposer locked up and we had to wait a week for the repair man to show up. Mom wouldn’t let anyone try to put their hands or anything else down in the disposal to try to clear the jam (it’ll cut your fingers right off, let a professional take care of this). By the time the repair man arrived, the kitchen was so fouled up with the funk of dead fish and rotten vegetables that we couldn’t even use the room. The repair man said that the smell would knock a buzzard off of a shit wagon. The odor of the woods reminds me of the garbage disposal, but worse.

  As I run/stumble behind the man, I think I may still be dreaming. Out of my peripheral vision I think I see a bony hand reaching up from out of the ground. Further along I see a form slumped over the steering wheel of a rusted-out, abandoned car. I randomly think of a painting called Waiting for AAA. A dense cloud of flies buzzes in and out of the car’s windows. “Hey, am I crazy, or am I seeing dead bodies all over the place out here?” I ask the man as I run behind him.

  “Yeah. Yeah. You see dead people, alright Haley Joel Osment. You’re seeing dead bodies. Just follow me and I’ll explain later. We both need to get out of here right now.”

  We end up at a locked gate on the wooden fence that me and Jasper crawled under. The man ditches his white jacket and underneath he is wearing a pair of grey coveralls. The patch stitched on the coveralls says that his name is Chip. With his wide flat nose, kinky black hair and Polynesian features he looks as much like a Chip as much as I look like a DeShawn.

  Chip pulls out a giant ring of keys and unlocks the gate. “Through here. Move it.” Chip leads me to his car and tells me to get in. He wants to get away as badly as I do. “I’m going to take you to a hospital outside of this area. You’re going to need medical treatment. But you don’t want to stick around here
.”

  “I don’t want a hospital.” I put my hand in my pocket and hold my mojo bag. Maybe it’s all psychological. Maybe a bag full of boogers and poo doesn’t give me good luck. Maybe it doesn’t have healing powers. Maybe. But squeezing that smelly little bag sure as shit seems to make me feel stronger. “I need to get to Erwin. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yeah, I live up in Lickskillet, just across the lake. I can get you to Erwin. Do you have any gas money?”

  In the car Chip tells me that his real name is Mae Pake. He prefers to go by Chip. I don’t blame him. I understand what it’s like not to like your name. Chip says he’s from the Hawaii. I notice fingers missing on his right hand as he steers the car. Chip notices me looking towards his hand. “Yeah, I know. The hand looks kind of fucked up, huh?”

  “No. I wasn’t looking at . . . ”

  “Hey. It’s alright. You look worse than me. I’m only a little scarred up and missing some fingers. What the heck happened to you?”

  “It’s a long story. I doubt the ride to Erwin is long enough.” I ask about the corpses in the woods.

  Chip tells me that the woods are owned by the university there. The bodies in the forest are part of a government-funded study on the decomposition process of the human body. It’s supposed to aid law enforcement agencies in determining the time of death for dead bodies they find. “It’s like, hundreds of cadavers strewn about in all different positions and predicaments. They bury them in shallow graves, hang ’em from trees, put ’em in garbage cans. I’ve seen them dismembered and scattered about. Once they painted one green to see how paint would affect the decomposition process. I’m not really sure why that would be a concern, but they did it . . . ”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit, Brah. And they used to do shit that didn’t seem so scientific to me. One Kalohe used to work here, he used to set them cadavers up around a picnic table when he was eating lunch. He’d just sit there munching on his submarine sandwich and carrying on conversations, laughing like those cadavers was the funniest people he ever heard.”

  “A forest full of dead people.” I ponder it. “So that explains the smell.”

  “Yep.”

  “What are you, like a scientist or something?”

  “No,” smiles Chip. “I’m a maintenance man. That’s why I have keys to the woods.”

  “Well, what’s up with the white jacket?”

  It turns out that Chip has worked as a maintenance man for the university for the past twenty years. During that time he has taken almost every class the university had to offer. Chip’s cousin works for the registrar’s office and has managed to insert his name into the roster for whatever classes he wanted to take, free of charge. Although never officially a student, Chip has managed to sneak into enough classes to have a PhD in science and hygiene, a master’s in popular culture, a bachelor’s degree of liberal studies, and an associate’s in interior decoration. “All of it was possible because I kept things low key. Never any incidents, never any attention. Your little stunt may put me smack dab in the middle of an investigation. I mean, everybody thought you were a zombie. You were supposed to be dead and then you started screaming like you’d just been stabbed in the gut.”

  “I was stabbed in the gut.”

  “Regardless. I can’t be around when they start asking questions about this. I’m this close . . . ” Chip holds his forefinger an inch away from his thumb “ . . . to becoming a certified crime scene investigator. I’m not going to let your little display ruin things for me.”

  As we drive Chip tells me about his degrees. He’s the smartest custodian I have ever met. I ask about Hawaii. I’ve always thought it sounded cool with luaus and volcanoes and topless girls in grass skirts. Chip tells me he used to live on an island called Molokai.

  “Molokai.” I say it out loud and mull it over. “It sounds beautiful. Tell me about it.”

  “Okay,” says Chip. “Molokai was the island where the government imprisoned people who had leprosy.[29] I was one of those people. Imagine a community full of sick people with lesions, bloody noses, loss of vision and general physical deterioration . . . ”

  “Sounds like Pittsburgh.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the upscale area of my village.”

  “So that’s why your fingers fell off? You’re a leper?” I ask as I make an attempt at inconspicuously sliding further away from Chip.

  “I prefer to call myself a person affected by Hansen’s disease. I don’t like the negative connotation of being called a leper. And by the way, my fingers didn’t fall off. It doesn’t happen that way. It’s not like you just fall apart. You don’t sneeze and your face falls off. Your hands don’t just drop off of your arms. You don’t jump into a whirlpool and turn into oatmeal.” Chip chuckles softly, bitterly. “And you don’t have to hug your door like that. Relax, I’m not contagious. Most people can’t even contract the disease anyway.”

  “So what happened to your fingers, then?”

  “I cut them off with a hatchet while chopping wood. Couldn’t feel a damn thing. Just kept on chopping. And then I saw my fingers scattered about on the ground. Did the same thing with my toes, and I didn’t feel a thing. That’s what happens. You’re shit doesn’t just fall off. You usually end up lopping it off while chopping wood or food or something.”

  “So, you’re, like, cured?”

  “Yeah, I’m cured. You’re more likely to catch leprosy from an armadillo than from a person nowadays.”

  At the mention of armadillos my mouth begins to water. Arnette’s possum on the half shell was damn tasty. “Are you serious? You can get leprosy from armadillos.”

  “Damn straight, Brah.” Chip laughs. “You know them fools down in Texas, always having armadillo barbeques, eating the Hoover Hogs. They’re feeding their faces with meat that has been known to carry one nasty bacterium.”

  “Hmm. I bet a lot of people don’t even realize that, huh?” I say. My ear starts to feel funny, like it’s going to fall off.

  Chip keeps on driving. I hold one hand to my ear and grip my mojo bag in the other. Chip tells me that he read a story in the newspaper about a high school football player in Texas who would practice his tackling by diving on wild armadillos. “He caught an armadillo social disease,” says Chip. “The fool ended up infected with lepromatous leprosy.” Chip chuckles to himself and shakes his head. “Well, we’re passing through Lickskillet now. I’ll have you in Erwin in no time.”

  Just after Lickskillet, Chip turns left onto Electric Avenue and tells me we’re taking the ferry across Norris Lake. He says it’ll be quicker that way. The old cable ferry looks to be barely seaworthy. Chip eases the car up onto the rusted-out punt and it feels as if it’s sinking. We are the only ones on the boat besides the ferryman.

  “Halloo there boys,” says the ferryman. “Name’s Charon. I’ll be ferrying you across the lake. We’re gonna wait around a little bit to see if anybody else wants to come along.”

  The ferryman is immediately likeable. With his black Greek fisherman’s cap, wind-chapped cheeks and closely trimmed white beard, Charon looks like he may have been a model for one of those fisherman-head ceramic mugs. He looks us over, me looking like the walking dead, and Chip with his missing digits and sewn-up eye. “Well dang it, as my granddaughter would say, ‘you two are tore up from the floor up’. Are you boys alright?”

  “We’re fine, Brah,” Chip flashes that friendly grin and the cloud of concern hovering above Charon’s head dissipates.

  “Yeah,” I agree, “I look a lot worse than I feel.” I squeeze my mojo bag and actually feel much better than I have in days despite my obviously worsening condition. My ear still feels like it’s going to fall off if I sneeze or something though.

  We chat with Charon and wait for other passengers, making the kind of small talk that strangers make while waiting in line or for a bus: weather; the water; hey, how about that local sports team. But the feeling underneath the talk goes much deeper
than the superficial conversation. Charon is comfortable for me, familiar, like a kindly grandfather type. When it appears that no other passengers will be joining us, Charon clangs the gates on the end of the boat shut and we shove off, still gabbing, still enjoying the company.

  “This is a beautiful, lake,” I say as I take in my surroundings. The water is clear and looks cold. I look over a side-rail and see a school of large brown fish swimming beside the boat, escorting us to the other side of the lake.

  “Yeah,” grunts Charon. “It is beautiful. I love it like a child. I love to look at it, listen to it, smell it. I learn from the water. One can learn much from water.”

  The thick diesel fumes from the boat gag me and make it hard to breathe. I try to hold my breath until the wind blows the fumes away from me. I breathe deep and quick whenever the wind shifts and diverts the exhaust. I start to feel nauseous and dizzy, either from the fumes or the alternating hyperventilation and holding of my breath. My vision starts to tunnel and Charon’s face blurs. As I begin to consider either fainting or hurling over the side of the boat, we approach the opposite shore. The wind blows the fumes away from me again and I breathe fresh cool air in, deeply, slowly. The oxygen clears my head. The school of fish breaks away from the boat, maybe waiting just offshore to escort Charon back to the other side.

  “Um,” Chip pats at his pockets and shrugs his shoulders at Charon, “I left my wallet at work. I’m afraid I don’t have anything to pay you with.”

  “That’s okay,” Charon smiles at us, “I kind of had a feeling. I didn’t really expect any payment from you. You will pay me back sometime.”

  “Really?” Chip smiles again at Charon. It seems that the two men also sense the newly established friendship.

  “Really. I have learned from the lake. Everything comes back. You fellows will come back through, one way or the other. For now, may your friendship be my payment.” Charon laughs as he pats me on the back. “Now, farewell. May you think of me when you sacrifice to the gods.”