Mondo Crimson

by Andrew Post

  Goddamn. I like that. Poet and don’t even know it.

  Problem was, securing that ideal scenario would require having a steady supply coming in to keep him stocked. Otherwise, it’d be marching into the end of days stone sober or, worse, nursing a mondo hangover and there was little worse than that – this coming from a guy who’d gotten divorced from wife number one, learned his mother had been killed, and got hit by a car all in the same week.

  He was aware he was still chasing that initial high, but he didn’t care. He was loaded. Being loaded meant having the means to get anything you want. So fuck it, right? Before we all get knocked back to the Stone Age and have to use shiny pebbles or literal clams as a monetary system, why not have some fun with this green paper while it still has value? It’s not like he could take it with him, right? Downside being that when it comes to something as exotic as mondo, it’d take some thinking outside the box, maybe sacrifice a few things, some people, possibly even some friends. But that’s sometimes what it took to get what you want: to not be afraid to be industrious, to be opportunistic. Just like those maggots in his sink. Which, not to toot his own horn or anything, was exactly what Felix had in the works.

  Friend Five made Felix’s left ear ring, shouting into their end, demanding to know what this good news was he had to give them. He still hadn’t said.

  “I hope you’ve been good this year,” Felix said around the finger in his mouth. “Because a little birdy told me that come Christmas, Santa’s making sure we’re going to be seeing nothing but red.”

  Chapter Seven

  Before Now

  Mel only realized after she’d broken it that she used her right hand for just about everything while on shift at the diner. She was also still getting used to taking a shower with one arm sticking out and struggling to not feel like she was being fed by a stranger when using a spoon with her left hand. She managed to get through the past week’s dinner rushes without incident and, tonight, now that it was nearing close and she didn’t feel she needed the dexterity, she cleaned the counters holding the rag with her left hand, listening to a podcast.

  Around her earbuds, she heard the string of bells on the front door jingle – not in that far-flung jungle compound carpeted with dead bodies but right here, in the Northside Diner, ten steps to her left.

  “Sit where you like, I’ll be right over in a second,” she said without looking up.

  She yanked out her earbuds and tossed the cleaning rag into the bucket of soapy water and turned around to wash her hands – well, her left hand in its entirety and the fingers of her right poking out of the end of the cast. Behind her, she heard the telltale squeak of stool ten being turned, the diner having a seat at the counter. It was the only stool in the place that made that ear-splitting sound. The rush of cold air that’d entered with the patron was now reaching her, and carried with it a smell – a few, put together, telling her who would be sitting behind her when she turned around. Menthols. Clubman Pinaud. Gun oil. She froze at the sink, trying to remember how to breathe.

  Deciding that if it had to happen she’d rather be shot in the front, she forced herself to turn around and look at Felix Eberhardt seated on stool ten, as she’d divined by its sound.

  “Evening, Melanie. How’s life?”

  Looking worse than she’d seen him at his office a week prior, Felix now resembled a diseased owl – his face had further narrowed; every small operation of his throat was visible, along with the tubes and cords that jumped in his neck, sinewy and pronounced. Sadly, Felix’s deterioration reminded her of Uncle Craig’s, and how he looked the last time she flew out to see him on his birthday – that hand that used to dwarf hers, callused and grease-stained but at her last visit, weightless and colorless as new paper, so much of him drawn away by sickness. She’d never ask but wondered if Felix had something growing roots inside him as well. It was wrong to wish a poor turn of health on anybody, but if he wound up receiving a well-deserved, slow and excruciating demise, Mel would not argue with fate.

  “Need something?” she said and folded her arms – which the cast made it hard to do and still come off relaxed and in no way afraid. He must’ve taken it as her showing him the cast, inviting him to ask about it.

  “Yikes. What’s the other guy look like?”

  “I didn’t hit anybody.” But I’d be more than glad to hit you with this thing, knock those cheese-colored teeth down your throat.

  Maybe her eyes were more expressive than she realized, but it seemed Felix had yet again snatched the thoughts right out of her head. His laugh had changed as much as his appearance. A brittle sound now, making Mel think of a bird nest, tissue paper origami, a rust-eaten fender one good kick could turn to dust.

  Apparently thinking it’d help quell the coughing jag that followed his laugh, Felix fired up a cigarette. “Anybody else here?”

  “Ron and Beth are in the back trying to fix the fryer,” she said. “And in case you weren’t paying attention, they made it illegal to smoke inside restaurants in Illinois years ago.”

  “Well, they made misappropriating funds illegal a long time before that, so I guess that makes us just a pair of common outlaws.” His glasses were bent, and with so many fingerprints on them they were nearly opaque. But the hateful beads behind them, staring out from twin dark wells in Felix’s face, slid away from Mel to the door to the kitchen and then back to her again. “Sounds pretty quiet back there to me. Sure you’re not the only one on the clock tonight?”

  “What do you want?”

  He pointed his cigarette at her. “For you to quit playing fucking games. Are we alone or are we not?”

  There was no use. “It’s just me.”

  “You know, you’d save yourself a lot of time just being up front about shit. Maybe think about making that your New Year’s resolution. Just saying.” Felix leaned to get something from his back pocket. Mel recognized the shade of blue on the Greyhound ticket before he’d set it down. He slid toward her and tapped it with his finger. “That’s for you. Merry early Christmas.”

  She did not uncross her arms to pick up the ticket. “Thought that wasn’t happening for another two weeks.”

  “Things got moved around and this got pulled up,” he said. “You’ll be departing for the land of ten thousand lakes this coming Friday, 6 a.m. I’m waiting on the final details about the fresh whip you’re to boost, but you’ll get them as soon as I do. You still have that lockpick kit and slim-jim I gave you, right?”

  Mel nodded. She kept them in the back of her bedroom closet where Dani would not find them so easily and ask questions. Of course, that was when Dani was still staying over most nights. She’d come by for the last of her things the day before yesterday. Now, it didn’t matter if Mel made her tools for breaking into cars into a centerpiece for the dining room table.

  Felix’s blinks went languorous, his lips worming in the overgrown silver thicket on his face like he was processing a bad taste. It seemed to take every ounce of strength to keep his head up. “All right, the suspense is killing me.”

  Mel’s brow clouded. “What are you talking about?”

  “Go on, give me a hard time about me changing the timeline on you. Lay into me with the third degree about how you need to ask for the time off, what you’re supposed to tell your pretty little girlfriend, and everything else. Sock it to me. Get it out of your system.”

  Mel could not recall ever mentioning a girlfriend to him but at the same time, she was not the least bit surprised he knew she – up until recently – had had one.

  “Sorry to let you down,” Mel said, “but I don’t really see the point. You want me to go earlier than planned? Fine. I’m the assistant manager here now, I make the schedule.”

  “Well, check you out. Belated congratulations on the promotion to queen of the greasy spoon. Should’ve said something. I would’ve sent an edible arrangement or some shit.”<
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  Mel, her expression dead, said nothing.

  “I got to say, I like you amenable,” Felix said.

  “We done here? Because I got shit to do.”

  “Something wrong?” Felix said, grinned, and batted the lashes over his horrendously bloodshot eyes. “You can talk to little old me. Tell Uncle Felix your troubles.”

  “I’m tired,” Mel said, and tried to leave it at that – but couldn’t. Her pain meds had run out earlier today, she was on day two of this new attempt to quit smoking, and now she had to deal with this shit? “What’s wrong is that I got to be up at dawn to catch a bus to go somewhere that’s even colder than it is here and do something illegal I don’t really want to do. So I’ll have to ask you to forgive me if I don’t want to burn up half the night bullshitting with your freaky old ass. If this has a point, Felix, I’d implore you to get to it and fucking make it.”

  And for a second there, the way he was looking at her, she thought: Yep, I’m fucked.

  But Felix threw back his head, his laugh making no sound but showing every yellow tooth in that weird-ass head of his. He thumped his fist on the counter and shook his head, emitting this shrill wheeze about as grating as that sound stool ten made. “There she is,” he said, hooking a shaking finger behind his glasses to wipe a crusty eye. “There’s the Mel-Mel I know and love. Girl, you got a fire in that belly, don’t you?”

  He coughed one last time into his hand, looked at it, and wiped whatever his lungs had painted onto his palm on a paper napkin from the nearby dispenser. When he looked at her, there was something different to it, something she hadn’t seen him throw at her before – gone was the hostility and impatience, replaced with not remorse exactly, certainly not guilt, but a warped cousin of empathy perhaps. “You know,” he said, “I’ll be sad when the day comes you get in the clear. Because, no shit, I’m really going to miss this.”

  That’ll make one of us, Mel thought.

  “But you’re absolutely right,” he said, “I should get out of your hair so you can go home and get packed for your journey west.” Felix pushed himself to standing, knocked twice on the counter, and started toward the door, his gait shuffling and pained-looking. The bells rang as he pushed his way out, but he stopped halfway out and looked back at her, that strange mote of empathy still there in his eyes. “Happy trails.”

  Through the front window she watched him go across the street and struggle to pull himself up inside his Escalade. He made a sharp U-turn, the icy blue of his headlights sweeping across the inside of the diner, blinding her. The rumble of his engine, audible through the wall, faded and the paper napkin on the counter slowly opened like the petals of a flower, revealing the dark red stain nestled deep within.

  * * *

  Every breath filled with the bitter tang of industrial refrigerant and moldering cardboard, the standard perfume of the grocery store, Merritt stood at register thirteen waiting for someone to ring up, watching the clock on the wall. He could take his dinner break in thirty-eight minutes ten seconds.

  Nine seconds.

  Eight seconds.

  Movement outside the front windows caught his eye. Cut to a silhouette by the streetlights, occasionally lost when the dark shape moved across the backdrop of the empty parking lot’s blacktop, he saw the headless man. Walking like he was in no rush to get anywhere, a straight-backed stride, arms swinging, what would be a perfectly normal sight – a drunk on his way home from the bar, a man out for a late-night stroll – except for the whole lacking-a-head aspect about him.

  The automatic doors parted and a group of teenage boys moving in a close pack entered, laughing, ribbing each other. Among the shaggy mops of hair, Merritt spotted one he recognized at once. But Skyler did not notice Merritt. The boys, sneakers squeaking on the polished floor, made a beeline for aisle ten – candy, energy drinks, and soda.

  Merritt licked his palm, smoothed down his cowlick, and straightened his vest and waited, tracking the boys’ location within the store by the sound of their hushed laughter and generous use of the term homo. Merritt remembered being that age, though it was usually just him and his brother, Winston, who wandered the suburbs at night, going around raising hell. Dare each other to eat a cricket. Play ding-dong ditch. Drag a cat behind their bike, ‘make kitty stripes,’ as they called the activity. You know. The usual. Kid stuff.

  Neither of the Plains boys had been good at making friends, really. Most schools nominate one kid to be the pariah, the stinky kid, the poor kid, the one it was commonly accepted that it was A-okay to harass to no end. But where Merritt and Winston attended, their classmates had two at their disposal. How convenient.

  There were rumors – that no one tried that hard to prevent the Brothers Plains from hearing – about how, allegedly, Merritt and Winston had sex with each other all the time and how their father was a child molester and blood-related to their mother, who was a drug-addicted hooker, and all of them walked around the house naked and ate dinner out of dog bowls and watched pornos on the couch together. Merritt remembered when one of his fellow students asked him, straight to his face, if Merritt and Winston ‘butt-fucked each other into oblivion every night’ and whether their ‘pervert daddy’ had taught them how. Merritt, having already endured many similar questions that long and terrible week, got up from his desk, went over to the classroom’s window, and put a fist through it.

  Twenty-eight stitches, almost losing the pinky – which, to this day, had not regained total feeling or full range of motion.

  He thought the principal would commend him for directing his frustration to an inanimate object rather than inflict grievous bodily harm on a fellow student, as much as Merritt had wanted to, but instead he was handed a month of in-school suspension (expulsion, he’d been told, had been considered) and he’d also be responsible for paying for the window to be fixed. Every afternoon when he got home from sitting in a room in the school’s basement, where uttering one word would earn him an additional day of suspension, Merritt would spend the remainder of the day waiting until his dad got home from work, sick with dread. Because before Joseph Plains would even so much as get himself a beer from the fridge, he’d give Merritt a lengthy session with the belt. The cost to repairing the classroom window, it turned out, was more than Joseph Plains pulled down in two weeks at the mill. Merritt had no idea glass was so expensive. The beatings continued until his brother messed up somehow and the nightly lashes shifted over to Winston. It made Merritt ashamed to be so relieved. The brothers sat in the bathroom together after their father had worn himself out, Merritt passing tissues for Winston to cry into while Merritt carefully daubed Preparation H – that’s all they had – with a finger, tending the red latticework of welts across his brother’s back, just like Winston had done for him.

  Presently, at register thirteen, forty-some years later, fatherless and brotherless, Merritt looked down at his hand in the buzzing fluorescent light of the grocery store and studied the web of pale scars across the knuckles of his right hand. No matter how much sun he got, they’d never take any color – they just got more pronounced, milky-white on lobster-red, look at me and remember.

  After the incident with the window, the rumors changed. That dumpy little house the color of baby shit over on Cherry Street wasn’t where a family of sex-crazed, orgy-having weirdos lived anymore, but where that psycho Merritt Plains laid his head. They didn’t even try to keep their voices down.

  Did you hear Merritt Plains buries stray cats up to their necks and then runs over their heads with a lawnmower? Well, I heard Merritt and his brother Winston killed Billy Faudet down by Four-Mile Creek with a rock. No way. Yeah, they said it was an accident but it was Winston and Merritt so who can say really? But when Winston’s conscience started getting to him, Merritt killed Winston too and made it look like an accident, the same as the two of them did with Billy Faudet. Even did it out at Four-Mile Creek, damn near the same ex
act stretch where they murdered Billy Faudet. Then Billy Faudet’s dad, who never believed Merritt and Winston’s story about what happened to his son? Merritt turned on the waterworks real good and told the cops he’d seen him kill Winston out of revenge I guess and that’s why Mr. Faudet got sent to jail. Holy crap, I hadn’t heard that one. Yeah, and then after that, I heard when Merritt’s dad took Merritt camping to help his son clear his head about what happened to his brother – because Merritt’s dad didn’t want to believe Merritt had done it – but Merritt thought his dad had brought him out there to get him to confess about killing Winston so Merritt goes and shoots his own old man in the face with the deer rifle right there in his sleeping bag and went and found the park ranger and put on the waterworks again and said that his dad did it to himself. You’re full of shit, all that’s too messed-up to be true. Maybe, or maybe it’s so messed-up it has to be true.

  “How much is this?” one of the boys standing before him said, holding up an economy-sized bag of Smarties, a straggler from the Halloween order. Skyler, standing at the back of the group, only made brief eye contact with Merritt – clearly recognizing his neighbor and just as clearly not wanting to be called attention to.

  Merritt didn’t need a price check. “Two eighty-nine.”

  Skyler’s friend slapped a five-dollar bill on the counter, ignoring Merritt’s open hand. Merritt would take this from the old folks because they were from an age where treating cashiers and waitstaff like shit was your right as a paying customer, but he didn’t like it when kids did it – most of whom were being raised, nowadays, to treat everybody they encountered like they were their best friend. But, then again, these were a group of teenage boys, friends still figuring out their pecking order, and what better way to win a few points than being needlessly disrespectful to a stranger?