He coughed again. The dildo, if that’s what it was, pushed out a little further from his mouth. While that was happening above, a similar lengthening was going on below. The apricots were mutating.
Damn.
It turns out the bastard was hung like Secretariat.
I was disgusted, standing there hanging onto to some guy’s bone-hard mud snake, but I wasn’t about to let go. If I let him go now there was no telling what the bastard might do.
I hung on to the Moby of dicks like I was Captain Ahab in a leather Lone Ranger mask.
This guy’s meat harpoon kept extending, stretching my hand out until it felt as if my tendons might crack. My hand was way beyond cramped. This iron bone would have given Stretch Armstrong a run for his money.
Forget about hung like a horse, this bastard’s giggle-stick felt more like something along the lines of a SWAT team’s battering ram.
Up top it was way worse. His lips were pushed forward about a hand span and the hollows in his cheeks were stretching out like he had bungee cords for facial structure. He kept coughing that dogwood dildo up out of his mouth and now I could see what it really was. It was a policeman’s night stick.
The bastard was bringing up a billy club.
I let go of his rapidly expanding pecker. It was either that or run the risk of having my hand broken from the strain.
He reached out and caught hold of my throat.
His hand felt hard and rounded, like a horseshoe.
I looked down and I saw a hoof, instead of a hand.
I looked up just in time to see that spit-stained nightstick swinging down and then everything went black.
* 2 *
I love building sand castles.
“Just hold still,” C. Garry said to me. “If you wiggle too much you’re going to get sand jammed up your trouser trout.”
Only it wasn’t a police officer any more. Not even close. All that was left of C. Garry was a heap of abandoned skin that lay upon the dirt beside me like a pair of flaccid pink overalls and a smear of something that looked as if it had been defecated by a herd of incontinent South English pygmy cannibals.
Oh, excuse me. Did I say the dirt beside me? I should say the dirt upon me. The horse-dicked bastard asshole had heaped beach sand and rocks and debris upon me. As far as I could tell from the feel of the damp ocean breeze, there was nothing poking through but my face up top and my one eyed zipper fish down below.
Oddly enough, my full blown Stallone bone was standing ten-hut erect, as if I were staring at a sky-wide three dimensional pin-up of Esther Williams. I’m not sure why that was happening. Being buried prematurely beneath a heap of oil-slicked beach jetsam was definitely not my idea of a steamy wet dream.
“Once I get up out of here,” I promised. “I’m going to pull you apart limb from limb.”
“I’ll beat you to it,” C. Garry said.
Only it wasn’t C. Garry anymore, like I said. It looked more like Mr. Ed the talking horse. Or maybe Frances, the talking mule on really bad loco weed. The self-centaured bastard was a definite example of Equus caballus or your everyday wild horse only this definitely was a horse of a different color. He looked a weird kind of blue/gray/green color, like nothing I’d ever seen before.
And that was just for starters.
“Ha,” he gave me a horse laugh. “You ought to see how funny you look with your pump-handle periscoped up out of the dirt like that.”
I didn’t find it funny at all.
“You remind me of a joke about this fellow who shits in his bathing suit and buries himself in the sand and then while he’s lying there looking up the skirt at the collective land clam of some wandering tribe of beachside nymphomaniacs, old Mr. Happy Helmet pokes up out of the dirt. Only while he’s busy raising his love flag the tribe of nymphomaniacs wanders off with a dude who looks suspiciously like Charles Atlas. And then while he’s laying there in the dirt bemoaning his beach-buried blue-balled fate this old petrified blue-haired octogenarian notices him lying there. Oh my, she says, all those years I spent looking for something like this and here it was growing wild on the beach. Then she popped out her false teeth and knelt down and gave him a big sloppy wet…”
“Stop,” I said.
He gave me another horse laugh. His teeth were large and irregular and stained a marvelous shade of verdigris. His breath stank of dead fish and worse things.
“So what the hell are you?” I asked.
“Kelpie,” he said, barking out the word so it sounded a little like a gulp and a choke squeezed and drowned together into one guttural noise.
“Do you want to grind that out a little finer for me?” I asked. “I seem to have some beach mud stuck in my ears.”
“Kelpie,” the horse-thing repeated. “Don’t they teach you modern people anything in school?”
Actually most of what learned in school amounted to a twelve year long over-glorified Pavlovian brain-washed obedience session.
Too bad I mostly flunked.
Only I didn’t want to bother saying all that to him so I settled for “Fuck off, Trigger.”
I kept trying to push free.
“Don’t bother,” the Kelpie said. “I’ve packed the dirt in extra tight.”
He wasn’t kidding. I could barely breathe. In fact I thought I could see the ghost of a few oil-tainted sea gulls drifting overhead of me. I blamed it on oxygen deprivation. I had read Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and new dead seagulls didn’t usually stick around.
“A kelpie is a sea horse who haunts the coastline for anyone dumb enough to climb on top and try to ride him,” the Kelpie said. “That’s what Constable Garry did. He was down here investigating your friend’s death. He saw me and he thought he’d take a ride. You wouldn’t know it to look at him but he used to be a hell of a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman.”
“So what about Jerrod?” I asked.
“Him?” the Kelpie sneered. It was an interesting experience watching a demon horse sneer. “He was nothing but fun.”
I wondered how much fun it had been for Jerrod. While I was wondering the Kelpie squatted over my face.
“He had a ball,” the Kelpie said. “You will too.”
I looked up and began to panic.
The Kelpie had a mammoth nut-sack, all blue and dangly, hanging down above my nose like a pregnant suffocated coconut. I could see Jerrod’s face squirming beneath the Kelpie’s ballocks, pushing out from the azure-veined befurred lovesack like a man drowning beneath a life-sucking mask of blueberry Jell-O.
And then the bastard pissed on me. A great sizzling splash of ammonia and spoiled aftershave that damn near drowned me on dry land which might have been the point.
I’ve never had a horse piss on me before and certainly never a demon horse but let me tell you it was anything but fun. The Kelpie bastard drained his big swinging poke-liver down on me like I had the mother-goddess of all urinals sitting upon my face. I could hear the piss hissing about my ears like a bucket full of whispering rattlesnakes. There was seaweed and semen and tiny blue sea serpents wriggling through the whole entire deluge, swimming into my nostrils and ear holes and around the cracks of my tightly sealed lips.
Like I said, it wasn’t fun.
“I’m going to leave you here for the high tide to drown you under,” the Kelpie said. “And later tonight I’ll graze on what’s left of your bones.”
I felt myself being possessed by the spirit of an oil poisoned sea lion. I smelled the tattletale odor of root beer schnapps and Dr. Pepper.
I pushed upwards. The gushing fire hose of horse urine had washed some of the dirt away from my head and throat and shoulders and I nearly pulled free when all at once I heard the blast of a blaring car horn and the squeal of tires screeching over dirt.
The Kelpie looked startled.
I twisted my neck and grinned as a blood red Buick LeSabre came charging across the dirt. S’dhintzski was riding to the rescue, steering one handed with the prayer beads clenched in
his gritted teeth and his All American Louisville slugger brandished out of the driver’s window like a timber-whacking tulwar.
I took advantage of the distraction and sat up suddenly, raising my head up as if I were trying to go for the one thousandth sit-up of a feel-the-burn work out. I couldn’t pull myself free of the dirt but I raised up just high enough to catch hold of Jerrod’s face, buried beneath the Kelpie’s balls.
I bit down hard like a war horse fighting a rusted bit.
It was a little like chewing on an Indian Rubber Tree hackey sack but I hung on just as hard as I could. The Kelpie reared up and I felt my left lower molar threatening to abandon ship and then all at once I felt myself pull free from the dirt like a jet-propelled zombie rising up from the grave.
The Kelpie’s momentum tore me loose from the beach dirt. A yard and a half of road rash graveled out across my six inches of skin flute and I think I successfully depilatated my dangling baggage, quicker than a sudden rip of duct tape, hot wax and nuclear powered Krazy Glue.
I got my hands up and free and reached around the Kelpie’s gut, linking my legs high. The bastard’s hooves were coming down like cracks of lightning. I locked my legs and took as many shots as I could, working right and left hooks up into the Kelpie’s gut like the beast’s belly had mutated into some kind of a horizontal heavy bag.
Meanwhile I kept gnawing down as hard as I could on the big bastard’s bannocks. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. They tasted like something that had been scraped from off a slug’s belly and smelled even worse. They had a rubbery texture that defied all descriptive similes.
I felt degraded. I felt despair. I felt like I was doomed to give Pokey a blowjob forever.
Meanwhile, S’dhintzski was out of his LeSabre and swinging that Louisville Slugger for all he was worth. He had the prayer beads wrapped around the handle of the bat and was giving it his all like a roid-raging Barry Bonds.
Meanwhile the Kelpie was screaming like God was dragging the world’s largest set of fingernails across a shrieking blackboard in the center of the Kelpie’s soul.
I’d like to say we beat the bastard but life doesn’t always have those neat kind of happy endings. Things on the beach have a way of coming back, like last night’s burritos.
The Kelpie tore himself free and galloped into the surf and was gone before I could do anything.
“Did we kill it?” S’dhintzki asked.
“I don’t know if we could,” I said.
“Will it be back?”
If he did come back, I thought, he’d be whinnying soprano.
I spat out what was in my mouth and formed a grin around the bad taste that was left behind.
“Would you come back after what we dished out?” I asked.
“You might be right,” S’dhintzski said.
“You mean you believe me?” I asked.
“I believe in Nothing,” S’dhintzski said.
“Me too,” I agreed.
The waves rolled in and rolled on out and didn’t say a goddamn thing.
Saint Valentine’s Massacre
There’s not too many downtown bars that will let a man in a stitched leather mask sip a beer in peace but Armand’s is one of the few.
Armand is a big guy that looks like he might have lived off of steroids and power lifting. Depending on the day of the week you ask him he will tell you that he used to be a lumberjack, a caber chucker, a stevedore or a professional wrestler.
These days he just stood behind his bar, wiping up the residue of careless drink stains, elbow sweat and the random bits of spilled conscience.
I sat there at the bar and I listened to Armand’s story.
He was telling me about this girl.
“So what did she do?” I asked.
“First she hit him with the soup,” Armand told me.
“What kind of soup?”
“The red kind. Does it matter? She hit him with the soup and the salad and a steak smack-dab in the eye, faster than you can say arugula, topping the whole massacre off with a half a pitcher of beer broken squarely over his head.”
“What’d she do next?”
“Next she was up and out the door; stopping only to goose a waiter in the vestibule,” Armand went on.
“I guess he wasn’t waiting for that.”
“I guess he wasn’t. He dropped a tray of spaghetti trays onto a table full of Baptists, anointing them Bolognese-style. It was something to see. He nearly started a one-man pasta jihad.”
“So what did the waiter do then?”
“He didn’t bat an eyelash. He threw a napkin on the floor, motioned imperiously for a bus boy, blessed the Baptists in the name of the Sect of Saintly Spaghetti Pastafararians and called out aloud to the gods – is this love?”
“So was it?” I asked.
“Was it what?” Armand replied.
“Was it love?”
Armand shrugged.
“Don’t ask me - ask the expert who stomped through the vestibule and out the door after wasting a perfectly good half pitcher of beer.”
I bowed my head in memory of good beer.
“Better yet,” Armand concluded. “You should ask the waiter who brought the beer-baptised basher the bill from the Baptists and the lady he’d wronged and his own phone number – just in case.”
“Now that is love,” I admitted, poking a tube of tobacco in my grin.
I lit an unfiltered cigarette and puffed on it thoughtfully.
Fire like that deserved a little smoke.
The Tracks We Leave Behind
Every good comic book needs a bang-up splash page opening scene. Two spandex wonderballs slugging it out in a fortuitously abandoned warehouse isn’t a bad way to begin. Maybe a long shot of the hero standing in the rain, praying that his velour cape doesn’t shrink. Or possibly even a shot of the master-villain – pensive and angst-ridden - swearing vengeance over the grave of his beloved pet iguana Pete.
I don’t know about that. I’ve never lived such a scene. My days are painted in the humbler hues of rust, shadow and regret.
Who am I?
I’m Captain Nothing – champion of the terminally depressed. More powerful than a Clydesdale’s best Sunday hay-fart. I’m able to leap tall curbs and cross dead-end streets without leaving a single footprint to track.
Trademark pending.
Some of us are born with a sense of identity. Some of us take years to uncover the truth.
The truth is, I have tried on so many masks I’m no longer sure just who I really am.
I was always good at hitting people but never good enough to make it as a professional fighter. So I tried my hand at being a policeman, only that didn’t work out. I kept getting my left hook mixed up with my victim’s rights.
So I settled for becoming a superhero which is just another way of saying “a cheap thug in a cheaper mask”.
It makes for an interesting tax return.
Do you want me to draw you a picture? It’s not my job but I’ll do the best I can. Here I am - just a big guy, a little thick in the belly and even thicker in the head. A pair of army boots with the toes turned up from too many roads turned under. A mask that was made to never come off.
I look like some kind of a freak of unnature.
A wannabe backyard wrestler who never made it beyond the tool shed.
A trick or treat freak show gone sadly to seed.
Now where was I?
Oh yeah.
That splash page.
My splash page starts out in the shadows of a hotel room, handy to the rail yard. There’s a fly jittering hopelessly against the window pane. You look out through that window pane and you can see the yard hogs hauling empty boxcars back and forth.
We’re not talking four star living.
“You were the best, Magma,” I told him. “The freaking best.”
“Was I? What’d I do?”
“You took them all on. The Flaming Underpants League. The Cosmic Wedgie. You even went to
e-to-toe with Dr. Destiny.”
“I was a fighter, wasn’t I?”
“Nah. You were better than that. You were the thinker. The smartest man in the universe. Magma-Brain, the guy with a computer cerebellum. Stephen Hawkins called you up whenever he needed to brainstorm?”
I opened the scrapbook.
There wasn’t much to see here.
A few random drive-by paparazzi photographs.
A bubblegum trading card, still reeking vaguely of that hard pink slab of sugarfied chicle.
Three issues of the Magma-Brain comic book, signed by the artist.
It never made it to issue #4.
Lastly came a Crayola sketch scribbled by a kid who Magma-Brain had caught falling out of a burning high school window. The kid grew up to sell designer drugs out of a neon briefcase.
I threw him out of another window, briefcase and all, two years ago.
Too bad there was no one around to catch him this time.
Magma-Brain still stared at me blindly, looking a little like a man who has lost sight of the path in the middle of a deep dark woods. That’s how it is sometimes. Life is nothing more than a ball of twine. You unwind it until you get the end and then you just start to fray.
So I hit him with the shoebox.
I had been gathering up every clipping I could cull from the public archives and tucked it all in a Dr. Scholl’s orthotic shoebox. Every newspaper article I could find. Every police record and anecdote. Even a thesis that some wannabe psych major had written on the possible motivations of the smartest evil genius in the entire mega-universe.
I had all my bases covered.
I was organized.
I had researched out every step in Magma-Brain’s long and checkered criminal trail.
It was the best detective work I’d done in a decade of bad decisions.
I had a copy of the story of how he hacked into the interweb and transferred an entire Swiss bank into his Credit Union account. The Giza Pyramid Scheme. Or the time he seized the identity of the entire nation of Nigeria and Ponzied Bill Gates out of his controlling interest in Microsoft.
One by one I laid out the newspaper clippings upon a tired bedside tray.
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