Uschi!

by Tony Ungawa

  She opened her purse, produced a pair of fives, and slid them over the counter to Gator. Her painted fingernails were green like pistachio almond ice cream. “That’s enough to get me a full tank, yes?”

  “We’ll let it make do, sure.”

  The boy was leaning his little head back a far ways so he could look out of the big football helmet and up at Gator. Behind the facemask was a grin on his mudpie plain face that was one those so ugly it was kind of cute jobs. “We’re adventure driving,” he informed in a breathy, high-pitched voice.

  “Y’all are? And what exactly is all that about?”

  She answered that. “Here we are on a lawn mower with a dang near empty gas tank, we got for company them giant dump trucks hauling gravel and trash that travel this road at like a hundred miles an hour roaring past us every other minute, and it’s all happening in the pitch black middle of the night. Lord, if you can’t call that adventure driving, then I don’t know what you could.”

  Gator chuckled. “I hear you on that.”

  “I’m thirsty, Momma. Can I have a soda pop?”

  “I tell you what, I’m thirsty myself. How about you go and fetch us a Big Red and the two of us will share it.”

  “Okey-doke.” And he did his best little military salute, his hand going thock when it bounced off the side of the Cowboys helmet, and then he was off in a hurry to the soft drinks cooler.

  With her little boy out of earshot, the woman next told Gator, “I’ve left my husband. I promised him I would if he was ever to come at me drunk and fists doubled up again.” She said that without an ounce of shame or reservations concerning sharing this information with a complete stranger. A convenience store clerk was a lot like a bartender that way—people always eager to come along and spill their life’s story to them. “Tonight he decided to one more time take his frustration with how he thinks the world treats him so shitty out on my face. That’s it. I’m done. I’m all out of forgiveness.”

  This quiet pall then happened between the two of them. It was awkward and uncomfortable. Gator didn’t rightly know the proper way to respond to something like this. Finally, he went with what first came to his mind.

  “Why a getaway on a mower?”

  “When my husband’s arms got tired and there was no more beer in the house, he cut out to his favorite bar in the one car we got. My mind was made up. I wasn’t going to spend another night in that house no matter what. I promised I’d leave him and I am come hell or high water determined to hold myself to it. I woke my baby and fetched my purse and we hightailed it out of there on the only means of transportation available to us.”

  “I see. Makes sense.”

  “Now, I may not look it to you,” she continued, “but I do actually have this thought out. Well, mostly thought out. I got a friend, and she doesn’t live too far off from these whereabouts. She should be willing to put us up for at least one night. From there I can make arrangements to skeedaddle out of state. I have family in Arkansas. They’re good people. They’ll help; they’ll look out for us. I’ll get me a divorce and start fresh. We’re gonna do okay. Just need some gas, then we’ll be set to rock ’n roll.”

  The boy returned to the counter, bottle of Big Red in his hands. His mother handed it over to Gator and he rang it and the gas up together on the register. He bagged the Big Red and gave it back to the boy before reaching under the counter and switching on the pump.

  “You ever pumped gas before?” he asked.

  This big sigh came from the beaten mother. “Nope. This is about to be my first time at it.”

  “Tell you what, let me walk out there with y’all and show you how it’s done.”

  “I don’t want to put you out any.”

  “Aw, you ain’t putting me out. Don’t worry any about that. In fact, I appreciate the something to do. I’ve been too complacent around these parts lately. This gives me the chance to shake off the cobwebs.”

  All good country boy charm and manners, Gator came around the counter’s corner and began heading down one of the Get It Quick’s shopping aisles. “I’d hate for y’all to get out there and get stuck with a problem and have nobody close by to help you.” He stopped beside the pyramidal display of canned dog food he needed to reprice, turned around and waited while they fell in step and started to follow him. “The three of us working together ought to get it done right.”

  She was smiling and ignoring the pain this brought to her abused face. “It’s really kind of you to do this.” She looked at her son and gave him a slight nudge along the shoulder. “What do we say to the nice man?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Just trying to satisfy my customers.”

  One of those cans of dog food then all of a sudden found its way off the display and into Gator’s hand. It was a 13OZ. can, thick and heavy and its contents a mixed chicken and rice recipe that guaranteed right there on the label to help give your pet’s coat a healthy, shiny luster. When, hand in hand with her child, she stepped in reach of the kind convenience store clerk, Gator whacked her as viscously hard as he could upside the head with the can.

  There was this short but memorable dense kunk! of a sound that visited every corner of the Get It Quick.

  The woman screamed once and collapsed. She hit a shelf and did a rattling good job of knocking over cans of condensed milk and chopped black olives before lying in a fleshy heap on the floor. A split in her scalp started to bleed, quickly painting one half of her face red. She remained conscious, but deeply pain shocked and unresponsive to all around her. The hold on her son’s hand slipped away and was lost. They would never touch one another again.

  “MOMMA!” screamed the boy.

  There’s something special about a child’s scream. Like no other sound imaginable. It was impossible not to have an ounce of humanity somewhere lurking inside you and not be affected by it. Not wanting to immediately forget all else and reach out and do something to help.

  Gator put a swift kick to the kid’s belly. That shut him up and left him thrashing on the floor next to his mother. Then, nonchalant as lifting the lid on a commode, he put his fingers through the slots in the facemask’s grill and removed the helmet from the boy’s head. His expression quite neutral, he raised the helmet and brought it down like a medieval executioner’s axe, fast and savagely on the crown of the young customer’s skull. It was a killing blow. The blood that flowed from the boy’s head wound was enough for a Brian De Palma movie, and merged together with his mother’s own spilled blood and collected in a large pool around the both of them.

  A silent Gator behaved like a caveman in love and dragged the woman by her hair along the floor and deposited her at the doors to the beer and wine cooler. She tried to move in an attempt to sit up. It was not the smartest thing she could have done right then, what with Gator standing over her and watching with a detached cold stare as she struggled to rise. Another solid kunk! from the can of dog food ended those shenanigans.

  The beer and wine cooler’s six doors were glass; five metal frame shelves behind each door, and the variety of alcoholic beverages it appeared stocked with vast and plentiful. Gator opened one of its doors and pushed back and to the side the shelf rack. It was on wheels and moved smoothly and with not too much effort required. Bottles and cans softly rattled and clacked together.

  There were no lights on inside, only impenetrable blackness. It would seem logical to anticipate an icy blast of air to strike as the door opened, something just above freezing and sure to put gooseflesh on exposed skin. That didn’t happen with this cooler. Instead the air that wafted out was a tropical climate, dank and warm, with an earthy and ripe vegetation stench about it.

  Under half a dozen tentacle-like appendages with brown bark scaled skin and covered in green leaves squirmed and slithered from out of the cooler and coiled around the woman’s limp form. She was effortless and silently but for the occasional leaves rustling together lifted off the floor and carried inside the cooler.

 
Gator fetched the boy, dragging him by one leg back to the cooler. More sinuous vegetable matter reached for the dead kid and took him. Very soon there were eating sounds, noisy and gurgling sucking like a straw hitting the empty bottom of a strawberry milkshake.

  (You have performed well.) The strange voice that telepathically communicated with Gator seductively oozed and slithered amongst his brainwaves. (I am proud of you. Continue to serve me like this, and soon all of Earth will be at your feet.)

  The Master was pleased with his meal. The adrenaline rush satisfaction of knowing he had done well for the one he served pumped through Gator as if it were a really excellent drug. All felt right with the world.

  The shelf rack was returned to its place and the door closed. The riding lawn mower parked by the gas pumps he could take care of shortly. He knew some people to telephone that would take it off his hands with no questions asked, just like they had done with all the abandoned cars left here.

  He went to the stock room in back of the store and got a bottle of Pine Sol and a mop and bucket and set to work cleaning up the blood. He labored hard, generating sweat that dripped from his face and a burn in the muscles of his arms and back. He wiped down each can of condensed milk and chopped olives and placed them on their correct space on the aisle shelf. The price-labeling gun was unholstered from his slacks’ pocket and a $30.00 tag Gator slapped on the Dallas Cowboys football helmet. He set it on a shelf between jars of salsa and bags of pork rinds.

  Gator mounted back up on the barstool behind the sales counter. He turned the volume on the TV set up and learned he was just in time to watch a post Beverly Hillbillies Buddy Ebsen turn a pre Barbary Coast Bill Shatner over to the police. He resumed scrutinizing the pages of the fatty pornography magazine.

  In the beer and wine cooler, a thing not of this world continued to feast.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hondo was in the front yard of his trailer home and playing Frisbee by himself. Shirtless and in blue jeans, he tossed the plastic disc up in the air at a sharp forty-five degree angle toward the morning sky, lot of muscle behind it so it’d really take off and soar high. This wasn’t actually an authentic made by Whammo Frisbee, only the lid to a can of Folgers coffee. But it worked as well as a real Frisbee, giving Hondo a lot of fun.

  He watched as it reached the peak of its ascension and commenced to descend. He scrambled to position himself under it before it was too late and the Frisbee could hit the ground. His legs were pumping through the yard’s unkempt grass, footfalls squishy when they struck the saturated and muddy from last night’s storm ground, the wind blowing in his Allman Brothers’ hair and Jesus beard. A lit cigarette was going between his lips as he was at play, puffing away. The ash from the end of the smoke dropped on him and mixed with the sweat coating his bare chest and speckled him like runny bird shit clods on the windshield of a car. His eyes never wavered from his spinning quarry, face rigid in locked concentration. It was going to be close. He looked like he might be a step behind this one. He stretched out his arm and was just in time to catch it by his fingertips.

  About that time was when a pimp’s suit purple El Camino with a rubber shrunken head dangling from the rearview mirror and Chewbacca action figure glued to the top of the dashboard pulled in the drive and parked behind the up on cinderblocks Impala. Hondo watched with the coffee can lid absently spinning on the end of his finger as the car came to a stop and the engine shut off. He put a hand over his eyes to block the sun and recognized the girl in the passenger seat—the titties and green darling who came by yesterday morning shopping for weed.

  Uschi told Denny, “I just want to pop in here real quick and tell everybody howdy and kill them.” The barbed wire sewn into her assembled like a jigsaw puzzle figure was looking especially sparkly in the bright sunlight of the day. She was perfumed in an entire can’s worth of Black Flag ant and roach killer spray. “Then we’ll hightail it from here for good, okay?”

  “Uh, okay. I suppose. If that’s what you really care to do.” Denny was in jeans and a Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! T-shirt that flaunted much Tura Satana cleavage. A fresh Jerry Lewis as Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor varnish of hair pomade was in the psychobilly hairstyle his homemade zombie girlfriend now insisted he maintain.

  They weren’t done with Li’l Bocephus. Uschi intended to keep him close by so she could continue eating on him for a while yet. Dormant these daylight hours, he was in the bed of the El Camino, rolled up inside a bed comforter as tight as the meat in the center of a tamale, sealed in snug with duct tape to keep the damaging rays of the sun away from him. Dozens of miscellaneous blessed pages from The Watchtower were glued in place over nearly every square inch outside the comforter to prevent an escape after sundown.

  “Hey, Queen Gazongas,” said Hondo at Uschi’s exiting the El Camino. “Good to have you back on the Ponderosa. Needing some more pot? That’s cool. Or maybe this time around I can interest you in something stronger? What can I help you with?”

  Uschi was wearing a quite saucy original Fredrick’s of Hollywood fetish red and black latex nurse’s costume. The short skirt hugged her hips as tight as the skin on a copperhead snake and squeaked like a dog’s chew toy whenever she moved fast or sudden. The neckline was cut low and provided access for a bonanza of Ziploc implants augmented breast exposure. The hosiery on her legs streetwalker fishnets and on her feet cha-cha shoes hot enough to make Dawn Davenport homicidal with jealousy. Finishing out the ensemble was a little retro nurse’s cap on top of her long and lustrous locks of platinum blonde hair.

  “You can help me,” she informed the Big Kahuna Trailer Park Oasis’s top drug dealer, “by acting like a top-notch sweetie and allowing me to murder you ninja killing cool wise.”

  The Frisbee/Folgers’ can lid stopped spinning and fell from the end of his finger and dropped forgotten to the grass. “What the fuck sort of talk is that?” he demanded with lips separating wide enough for the cigarette to loose its perch and also plummet to the ground.

  Smile on her rancid spookshow face, she stepped up to the driver’s side of the Chevy Impala and put her fist through the window glass. She took hold of the steering wheel roughly somewhere around the ten o’clock position and tore it loose with no more than a quick yank accompanied by the unmistakable sounds of metal tearing and plastic snapping apart. She brought the wheel out and held it up in front of herself. Uschi did all of that as easily as if she were fetching a done meatloaf from the oven.

  Hondo’s .38 Smith & Wesson was in a back pocket of his jeans. He went for it. But Uschi was quicker.

  She was on him before the gun could clear denim, swinging her arm out with the Impala’s steering wheel on the end of it as if it were a scythe. Made this great whoosh of a sound as it sliced the air and went towards Hondo’s head at a horizontal angle and hit the skull around two inches above the eyebrows. So quick and with such inhuman Satan made force behind the swing, the steering wheel cut clean and effectively through the bone and brain.

  The top of Hondo’s head popped off of him as flawlessly as the removal of a bottle cap. The skullcap, fuzzy on one side with a thick tuff of hair and now perfect on the other side to work as a breakfast bowl for a kid to eat his Freakies brand cereal from while sitting in front of the television set and watching Saturday morning cartoons, flew a decent distance, spinning around and around during its flight as good as Hondo’s Frisbee, and became lost in the weeds and grass when it landed somewhere in the shaggy lawn. The amount of brain cut loose and sent sailing from the cranium the same moment the skullcap departed was the size of a porkchop and was able to reach the cement walkway leading to the trailer home’s front door. It crashed with a wet splatter and puddled like chunky dog barf.

  And now there was one less drug dealer to trouble the world.

  Denny saw the kill go down from the comfort of the El Camino. “Thunder clitoris,” he whispered to himself. That was an act of extreme termination worthy of one of the more quality practical effe
cts Tom Savini would do in any of the better Friday the 13th movies.

  The small smattering of neighbors that witnessed the creatively different and in broad daylight murder quickly averted their eyes and made themselves scarce. Nobody at the Big Kahuna Trailer Park Oasis ever wanted to get involved with other people’s affairs. Especially the criminal ones.

  The gore that poured down dead Hondo’s face and drenched his beard was a textbook example of what the professional wrestler’s commonly call in the business a crimson mask. The body fell forward and into Uschi’s waiting arms. She reached inside the skull and filled the hollow of her hand with the remaining brain and scooped it out. As Hondo’s corpse was cast aside and dropped to the ground, she crammed the choice cut of meat in her mouth. Jaws laboring, her food was slowly chewed as she stood there in the front yard and admired her fingernail polish. She had to swallow twice to get it all down her throat.

  That was some capital brain eating. Made Uschi hungry for more. Got to have more.

  From there she went to the cement walkway and put herself down on all fours in front of the last remaining portion of Hondo’s brain. The ants had already found it and were swarming. No biggie, they’re supposed to be high in protein. Invoking the five-second rule, she slurped the puddle up and enjoyed.

  Attention then turned to the trailer home. Uschi could sense a number of warm and alive human beings inside, waiting to receive her company.

  “Hey there, good Americans!” She yelled that out as she entered Hondo’s trailer home so everyone inside would be aware Uschi was here and taking charge. The living room carpeting had never been cleaned and was sticky from years of accumulated filth; each footstep Uschi made on it made this tearing sound quite similar to strips of Velcro being separated. The place smelled like burnt hair and unsanitary toilet water and the vile fluids that collect at the bottom of a full kitchen trash bag and long time unwashed human beings.

  There was this dude on the sofa, dirty and unwholesome, splayed across the cushions as if he were growing on them like some renegade mutant fungus. He wore a wash faded Cradle of Filth T-shirt and piss-stained boxer shorts. His dick was out, poking through the flap in the shorts. The head of his tallywhacker was almost walnut-sized and was adorned on top with a tattoo no bigger than a thumbprint of a blue and green butterfly. He ate a taco and watched a movie on TV. He seemed inclined to hardly acknowledge Uschi’s presence. He finished his taco and drank chocolate milk from an old pickle jar.