I wonder how me being here has anything to do with him being able to listen to music until I notice that his hands are nailed to the steering wheel. He catches me staring.
“Keeps ’em from slidin’ off,” he says. “I got that sweatin’ disease? Gets damn slick. My wife, great woman she is, nails me down every time I go for a drive. She usually puts some tunes in too but, well, I been drivin’ around for a long time.”
I press the EJECT button on the stereo and the remains of a disc spill out. It’s melted and runny. I hesitate before putting the next disc in. This one is plain white with strange markings on it. Maybe it’s gibberish or maybe it’s how people write things here.
“I’ve never heard of them,” I say, more or less to make conversation.
“Me neither,” he says. “Some whore left it in the car. I like to stop off in The Alley and pay for sex favors sometimes. That one, as I recall, gave me an exquisite blow job. Dropped that out of her bag.”
I slide the disc into the player.
“Thank god for automatics,” he says, peeling out into the road, speeding through a series of residential suburbs, each one the same as the last.
The music is at top volume. It is very discordant. No vocals. He rocks his head and shouts made-up words as though it’s some arena rock anthem. He burns to a stop in front of a small white ranch house. I guess this is home. I start to get out and he tells me to take the disc with me. “I don’t know what the fuck that is. It ain’t music in my book. Sounds like listening to a TV test pattern through a box fan.”
“Thanks,” I say, ejecting the disc and putting it back in its paper envelope.
I walk up the cement path to my house. He speeds two doors down, whips the car into the driveway and then just sits there. I reach my door and look over at him, sitting there in his quiet car.
“Hey!” I shout. “Do you need some help getting out of the car?!” It must be difficult with his hands nailed like that.
But he seems to be enraged. He shouts violently from his car. “Get the fuck in your goddamn house and don’t you ever say another fuckin’ word to me! If I catch you so much as lookin’ at my house or my car I’ll come out and fuckin’ slit your throat! Got that! SLIT YOUR FUCKIN’ GODDAMN THROAT!”
Reaching my hand out to turn the doorknob to my house, the door swings open and a clothed inflatable doll stands in the doorway.
“We’re through,” she says, pushing her way past me. A giant bag is slung over her shoulder. It’s nearly as large as the house. I have no idea how it fits through the door. Even though I have no recollection of ever being here, I know all of our possessions are in that bag. “There’s a note for you on the floor,” she snarls through her O-shaped mouth. Then she lifts up her foot, flicks open an air stopper protruding from her heel, and goes shooting into the blue sky, carrying the bag with her.
The note on the floor says:
THE FLATS
FIBE A.M.
Five in the morning, maybe? I don’t really know. Knowing this is where I’m going to my death, I go into a rage, running around the bare room, kicking holes in the unadorned walls. I go into the kitchen and rip the cabinets from the walls, tip over the refrigerator, yank out all the drawers, piss on it all. Exhausted, I spiral into the living room and collapse but the silence is deafening. I remember the disc Necrophiliac gave to me and, for no apparent reason, take it from my pocket and lick the underside of it. I hear snippets of the music way back in my brain. I lick it again and, again, I hear the music. The house, with no source of light anywhere, is plunged into darkness as afternoon slides into night. I lie on the floor with the disc clamped between my teeth, my tongue touching it, until the music fills my skull. This is my last night to live and I make the most of it by falling asleep.
I wake up. The disc has fallen out of my mouth. It’s covered in drool and I no longer want to touch it. I go outside and trudge across the yards until I reach my neighbor’s house. He’s still in the car, rocking to and fro, growling. I kick the passenger-side door. “Hey!” I say.
He stops growling and whips his head around. “I told you never to get near me again you fucking shitsucker! I’m gonna open you up! Come on over here and I’ll fuckin’ rip your neck open you FATHERFUCKING SHEEPLEG!”
“Look, I need to go to The Flats.” I throw my stupid note into the car. “You have to take me.”
He growls. “I ain’t got no lights. No lights at all.”
I hurl myself into the car, plopping down in the seat next to him. “I’m sorry but we have to get going. The note said five ... I think.”
He manages to turn the key with his knee, truly fascinating, it has little fingers. Rather than backing out of the driveway (the sick little hand can’t reach the gear shift) he just guns the accelerator and swings the wheel with his gruesome-looking hands until we are back on the road. I get hungry and rummage through the debris on the floorboard. I hold up a white triangular object and say, “What’s this?”
“Think that’s a guitar pick,” he says, keeping his eyes focused on the dark road. We leave the suburb and cruise along in the inky blackness.
“I’m gonna eat it,” I say.
“Go right ahead.”
I put the guitar pick on my tongue like a communion wafer and swallow it down. Amazingly, my stomach begins glowing and, once again, I hear music in my head. This time it’s really loud and I’m surprised it’s not leaking out.
“You hear anything?” I say to the driver.
“Nope. Nothin’ but the road,” he says.
I concentrate on the music and the glow filling the car. It’s so bright it drifts out of the car, illuminating the countryside around us. Only it is no longer countryside. It is a flat, cracked-earth desert.
“Here we are,” he says. “The Flats.”
“I think this is where I’m supposed to die,” I say.
“Best get out then.”
I clamber out of the car, feet smacking onto the hard earth. I’m like the moon, sending out all this light. I watch the driver drive back toward the neighborhood. I can see him for quite a ways. I stand there and wait. Dawn comes up pink and golden. I feel myself growing weaker, the light from my stomach dying down. I collapse onto the scraped and scarred earth and know that I will not rise again.
The Ohio Grass Monster
“I ain’t gonna let you butt fuck me,” Karen said.
“You would if you loved me,” Todd said.
He sat on his couch, shirtless, wearing tight cut-off blue jeans, the portable phone pressed to his ear.
“’Sides, I thought only fags did it that way.”
In the background, he heard someone laughing.
Todd shouted into the phone, “I just wanted to do it that way so I didn’t have to look at your FACE!” Then he clicked the off button and tossed the phone onto the floor. He unbuttoned his jeans and slid his hand into the moist warmth of his crotch. His cell phone rang and he picked it up. It was Matt. Todd flipped the phone open and said, “You comin’ over?”
“Yeah.”
He flipped the phone shut and lodged it into the couch cushions. He grabbed the remote control and unmuted the television. It was that show where the guy goes out and survives in the wilderness. Todd wished he was that guy. He sat and waited for Matt. Todd was only fifteen but the determined expression on his face made him look thirty-five.
A half hour later he met Matt at the door. Matt was a little overweight and breathed heavily. He wore a black sweat suit.
“You ride your bike over?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go out back.”
Todd shut the door behind him and walked around the house, Matt breathing behind him. The air was cool and the sky was gray. The trees were still bare. Cars whispered by on the Interstate but it wasn’t visible from back here. No other houses were visible either. The smell from a distant trash fire hung in the air, burning plastic and maybe some rubber.
They walked out to a makeshift wrestling
ring, an old king-size mattress with canvas over it. Metal fenceposts stood at the corners with three strands of clothesline wrapped around them. An old couch, its stuffing and springs popping out, sat to the side.
“I figure this summer,” Todd said, “we can get some more couches out here and start chargin’ admission. You know Darren? From Fink’s? He wants in on it too. We had a match a couple days ago. He’s pretty tough. I won though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Okay, you get in there first.”
Matt stepped into the ring. Todd announced him with his special voice. Then he announced himself as the reigning champion. Todd stepped into the ring and made a sound like a bell. He said he would buy one as soon as he found the right kind.
Matt wandered out into the middle of the ring, his arms to his side. It was hard to walk on the mattress. Todd approached him, flipping his hair back off his shoulders. Matt stuck out his hand and pushed him in the chest. When he brought his hand away there was a red mark on Todd’s pale skin.
Todd moved in again, real quick, and got Matt in a headlock. He took him down to the canvas. Matt outweighed Todd by at least fifty pounds. He put his hands in the sweaty backs of Todd’s knees, lifting him up and flipping him over. The headlock broke. Matt threw himself onto Todd, pinning him down.
“One!” Matt said. “Two! Ow, fuck!”
He leaped off Todd and stood up.
“You can’t do that.” Matt’s eyes teared up.
“Do what?” Todd rose to his feet and approached Matt. Matt held out one hand to stave him off and rubbed his neck with the other.
“You bit me on the neck.”
“I did not.”
“I can feel the teeth marks, Todd.”
“The match still has to go on.”
“No it doesn’t. I quit.”
“Then I win.”
“You’d be disqualified.”
Matt left the ring.
“Disqualified?”
“For biting me on the neck.” Matt sat down on the sprung couch. Todd left the ring and sat down next to him. Matt rubbed his neck, suppressing sobs. Todd pulled a notebook out from between the couch cushions.
“I been doin’ some drawings.”
“Drawings?”
“Yeah. Of our costumes and shit. We can’t just be us.”
Todd flipped through the pages. Matt caught a glimpse of the design for Todd’s costume. He had a long robe and fabulously styled hair. He stopped when he came to Matt’s.
“I think this’ll be pretty cool,” Todd said.
“What is it?”
“You’ll be called the Ohio Grass Monster.”
Matt looked at the drawing. It was done from several different angles. The figure in the drawing had on a skintight black suit and something like a gorilla mask.
“See? It’ll be just like your sweat suits only tighter and thinner so you don’t sweat so much.”
“What’s that on the back?”
“That’s just some grass or hay or somethin’. You won’t wrestle in it. You’ll take it off before you start. Like a cape or robe or somethin’.”
“Oh.”
“Now we need to work on your finishing move and then I thought we could go in and get started on the costumes. Maybe we can get into the state fair next year.”
Matt stood up. He pulled up the waistband of his sweatpants. “I gotta get home.”
“You just got here.”
“I know. I forgot somethin’.”
“You comin’ back?”
“I don’t know, Todd.”
Matt was already walking away. Todd closed the notebook and headed back inside. The television was still on. He continued to watch the show about the survival man and wanted him to get eaten by something. Anything. It didn’t matter as long as there was blood.
The Cover-up
I’m sitting on my bed reading Extreme Gynecology when my father barges into the room. His face is red and sweaty. He sits on the edge of my bed, breathing heavily and twisting his hands in his lap. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing,” he says, standing up from the bed and walking across the room, headed for the door. He stops and turns around, comes back to the bed, sits down again. “Look,” he says, “you gotta help me.”
“What’s wrong?” I repeat.
“It would be better if I show you.” Some of the nervousness seems to have left him. His eyes go blank and he stands up, walking slowly over to the window. He points out. I sigh heavily, fold up my book and toss it to the other side of the bed, stand up, and approach the window. My room is on the second floor and has a pretty good view of the neighborhood.
“What? I don’t see anything.”
“Look over there.”
I look across the street, a couple of houses down, into the Robinsons’ yard. A boy lies face down at the edge of the sidewalk.
“I threw a rock at his head.”
“Jesus, Dad!” I’ve never known my father to be violent and this action surprises me. “That’s Benny Robinson. I go to school with him.”
“I’m afraid I clipped him a good one. He might be dead.”
“Jeez!” I clasp a hand to my forehead, massaging my temples.
“I couldn’t help it.” My father throws his arms to either side, begging me to argue with him. “I was picking the rocks out of the garden and he came along and just started ... plodding through the grass.”
“So you threw a rock at his head?”
“Well, no, Mr. Smartass, I didn’t just ‘throw a rock at his head.’ I asked him to stop it but he just kept trampling and trampling.”
“Then you threw the rock at his head.”
“It was right there in my hand. It happened before I even knew what I was doing but ... well, like I said, it clipped him pretty good. He made it all the way down there before he collapsed.”
“How am I supposed to help you? This is definitely not my problem.”
“I just need you to help me move the body. He’s kind of fat.”
“All the kids at school used to call him fat.” I sit back down on the edge of the bed. “I guess they won’t be calling him fat anymore.”
“Come on. We have to do it before your mother gets home. If she finds out ...”
“She’ll what? Call the police?”
“Probably. You don’t want me to go to jail, do you?”
“Maybe you should. Throwing rocks at kids is ... ghoulish.”
“Look,” he says, fishing his heavy wallet out of his back pocket. “I’ll make it worth your while.” He riffles the bills inside the wallet.
“What are we gonna do with him?”
“So you’ll help me?”
“Yeah. Do I really have a choice?”
“We might have to bury him.”
“Jesus.”
“We need to hustle up. Before anyone sees him.”
Together, we go downstairs. “You go on over there,” Dad says. “I’ll go out back and get the wheelbarrow.”
Reluctantly, I cross the street. Closing in on Benny Robinson I wonder if he’s dead or not. He looks dead. But that doesn’t always mean anything. Standing next to the probable corpse, I hear a door open and see Benny’s mother stick her head out. She screams in horror, passes out, and lands half in and half out of the door. Sirens scream in the distance. Looking over my shoulder, I do not see my father. I debate running and then think maybe it would be better if I just stand there. I think of the reward for taking the rap for Dad.
There’s no sign of him, even as the police fold me into their car and take me away.
Lost
Lon spends three weeks growing a thick, dark mustache.
One day he invites his girlfriend, Tina, over.
It isn’t long before he is performing cunnilingus on her. She laughs and tells him she likes the way the mustache feels. Within a few minutes, she reaches a shivering climax. Afterwards, Tina giggles and leaves. It isn’t until the next morning, when Lon goes in
to the bathroom to shave, he notices his mustache missing.
“That bitch,” he says between clenched teeth.
He tries to grow another mustache but it isn’t the same; the symmetry is all wrong, the thickness subpar. It has an odor.
Lon tries to call Tina but she won’t pick up the phone. He can’t leave a message. What would he say?
Many months later, Lon rents a porno, it being a long time since his last sexual encounter. Midway through the porno, after Lon has masturbated three times, he notices Tina. She is calling herself Glenda Bummings now. He doesn’t want to watch, he’s so angry with her, but her image sparks memories of being with her and Lon is, once again, aroused.
Soon, the male actor in the porno enters Tina. Lon remembers the days when that was him. The man slides his penis out and Lon is flabbergasted. He scrambles to kneel in front of the TV. Attached to the man’s penis is Lon’s mustache.
“That bitch,” Lon thinks.
Captivated, he watches as his mustache rumples up against her vagina and then disappears inside once more. There are times when Lon thinks he can see it peeking out, nearly taunting him, whispering softly, “Remember when I used to be on your lip?”
Dog in Orbit
A woman comes home and discovers her dog is missing. It is an ugly mutt with a face like a leathered wino but, nevertheless, she misses it. She goes back outside. A thin old man is collapsed face down on the sidewalk in a puddle of drool. She nudges his skeletal shoulder with her foot.
“Whu...?” He squints up into the sunlight.
“Have you seen my dog?”
“Can you help me up?”
The woman bends down and grabs the man beneath the arms. It’s a struggle but he makes it to his feet. He sits down on a retaining wall and pulls a cigarette from his shirt pocket. The woman sits down on his left and he puts a hand to the side of his face, pretending she can’t see him. She stands up and walks in front of him. “Have you seen my dog?”
The man silently points to a house across the street. He throws his cigarette out into the road and slides back down onto the sidewalk. The woman crosses the street to the house the old man pointed to. It’s pretty dilapidated. She didn’t even know anyone lived there. Once she’s in front of the house, the old man shouts from the sidewalk: “Hey, lady! Think you can help me up?”
The Driver's Guide to Hitting Pedestrians Page 6