Mighty Unclean

by Cody Goodfellow

  Yogi threw himself at Thor, tripped on his bound feet and jerked short on the end of a choke chain. He gagged and vomited in his mouth, sagged against the desk in the warden’s office.

  Red and blue lights bled in through the windows. Helicopters circled overhead. Outside, the world turned on, never to know the name of Dale “Yogi” Hollis. None of it mattered. None of this was so he could escape, he figured. All of this had been to deliver him to Thor with this new gift, to even the score, even if – no, because – it would kill him.

  Thor shucked off his bloody prison blues and stepped naked into the light from the windows. The power was cut, so harsh pools of darkness squirmed with ranks of Aryan Brothers, white trash Vikings getting psyched to storm Valhalla, and the hooded bodies of cons and guards trussed up as hostages.

  Thor stood over Yogi, looked at him looking, and smiled. Thor was stupendously ugly, with a cleft palate someone clumsy must have tried to repair with a staple gun. But he towered over the other cons, and stayed ripped on steroids and gladiator battles in the yard, and his beautiful golden hair hung in plaits down to the root of his spine.

  Tattoos: undead Nazi stormtroopers, hammers, wolves, lightning bolts, ravens and runes, and on the steel-belted washboard of his abdomen, just above his semi-erect cock, a hot barbarian bitch crouching, prowling, presenting her perfect heart-shaped ass and slyly winking. Far too sophisticated for prison ink, and so artfully shaded you could hardly see the name hidden in the whore’s hair at first glance: HOLLY.

  Thor got sent to juvie at fifteen for making a skinhead traitor bite the curb. He took to it like Disneyland, and especially to Yogi, who was just Dale, back then, a thirteen-year old runaway and already hustling, sent up for peddling crushed No-Doz as crystal meth.

  Thor branded Dale, rechristened him as Holly, made him wear a wig and makeup. Thor seemed to think it made him seem less queer, or maybe he just liked to humiliate Dale to get off harder. Forever after, no matter what town or county he got pinched in, going back to jail was going back to Thor.

  “After all we been through together,” Thor rumbled, “you sent me that nasty she-male as a peace offering? Was that supposed to go off on me? What the fuck, Holly?”

  “Nobody had to cut her. Nobody had to hurt anybody…”

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do? Slocum’ll fuck anything, so I passed it up the chain.”

  “You killed Shy Girl!” Bucky moaned. He was chained to the desk, too. Blue and bloated, he lay on his side and wept into the brown indoor-outdoor carpet. They’d worked him over hard, but they were careful not to break the skin.

  “You fucking liar!” Yogi roared. “You ass-raping faggot liar, I never pimped my brothers! Don’t listen, Buck —”

  “Your bitch killed the main man, Holly, but you made me the goat.” Thor teed off and chopped Yogi in the gut, lifting him off the floor and dropping him to his knees.

  Yogi vomited again, spat it at Thor, who flinched – yes, and the rest of them, too, because they feared him, now, a little.

  He couldn’t get his hands up to his face, but he could still burn them, or get Bucky to do it. He should do it himself for Thor, the motherfucker who turned him out.

  “Yeah, you’re smarter than the average bitch, alright,” Thor chuckled. “You had a hell of a plan. But now the plan is, we all walking out of here, with you exploding sissies in the front. And then we gonna settle up, traitor.”

  “Let’s do it now, punk-ass!” Yogi strained at his leash, hanging from it but not choking. The cords of his neck stood out like rubber bands in a slingshot. “Do your friends know how you like it in the ass, you switch-hitter faggot?”

  Thor whirled and clapped his big broad open hand across the side of Yogi’s head, cupping it over his ear so the blow sucked Yogi’s brains halfway out.

  The crowd said, “Ooh,” but Yogi couldn’t hear it. He spat at Thor, who lunged at him and throttled his skinny neck.

  Nose to nose, Yogi could hear Thor very well through his undamaged eardrum. “You maggot, I fucking loved you, you fucking queer race-traitor cocksucker, I would’ve done anything for you, and you fucking tried to burn me. You made me do this, Holly, you made me—”

  “Liar,” Yogi whispered like a gas leak. “You loved my mouth, and you loved my ass, but you never loved me—”

  “No, Holly… don’t… please—”

  On the floor, Bucky choked and sputtered and barfed out his gag. His barf was red. A fat pink goldfish flopped across the bloody rug.

  Thor jumped back and shouted, “Fire extinguisher!” The blood leapt up and wrapped red dragon garlands around his legs and up his torso as he riverdanced across it.

  Bucky rolled over and sprayed a jet of red napalm across the office from the stump of his tongue. Crackling splatters washed the papers off the warden’s desk and sparked in mid-air into tracer-rounds and bouncing betty mines.

  The brothers and their hostages scattered for the exit, but though they trampled the hostages and each other, they all got caught, consumed and fused in the deluge from Bucky’s blowtorch of racial equality.

  But the hungry fire traveled just as eagerly up the jet to Bucky’s face. His chubby cheeks and lips peeled back, blackened teeth cracked, but he kept playing the tongue of voracious flame across the office, until only charcoal danced.

  Thor tried to swim upstream to get at Yogi. Bucky’s aerosolized jet fuel cremated him on his feet, oiled golden braids blazing, Viking tattoos curling up like the pages of a comic book, but he kept coming.

  Yogi looked from Thor to Bucky and saw the same sick, crazy gleam in their eyes, all eyes on Yogi, until they melted away.

  Thor collapsed and shattered on the floor.

  Whimpering, eyeless, Bucky tried to clamp his jaws shut, but his mouth was a cracked chimney, leaking freshets of incendiary gore down the front of his chore jacket.

  Bucky reached out for Yogi to hold him, to make his big halfwitted ass feel small and safe in this horrible day care center, where Mommy was never coming to pick him up, because he killed Daddy. Daddy was God, and Yogi was Daddy, now—

  Yogi ripped his chains free of the incinerated desk and ran for the door.

  Bucky lurched up like an elephant seal, throwing his arms out in Yogi’s path. When he gasped, the sound of the blood filling his lungs was like a pilot light switching on.

  Yogi dove through the doorway, ran down the hall, knee-deep in Aryan barbecue, scrambling on all fours… and still Bucky didn’t go off.

  Yogi could hear an amplified voice from outside saying, “Prisoner Hollis, Prisoner Walters, Prisoner Dickson, there’s a man here from the Army, who wants to talk to you – “

  Yogi ran across the lobby. With his good ear, he still heard Bucky sobbing and drowning from the inside out, “Yogi, save me—”

  Yogi almost got to the doors when Bucky exploded.

  The whole prison disappeared.

  The shockwave hurled Yogi through the plate glass, flensing his skin off down to the bone across his back and neck, driving thousands of needles of glass and wood and stone into and through him. He hit the ground running and didn’t even notice his wounds for all the lights and cops and National Guardsmen, waiting just for him.

  Yogi staggered out of the chorus of secondary explosions that flattened the remaining façade of the prison and hurled debris over the Mexican border, two miles away.

  He almost tripped and fell when he saw his left hand was two fingers shy of what it should be, and smeared with volatile blood. He wobbled, but jogged across the rock garden and the staff parking lot, into the sights of the army of cops and media.

  This was all he’d ever really wanted. From the first days of school, when big boys beat him because they could, and made him do things when they got bored with hitting, and he sat in the office, waiting for another paddling and lecture about his temper, what burned him up the most was how, outside his bubble of flaming rage, everything else ground on, oblivious, as if to mock him.

 
The sun still shone, clocks still ticked; the secretaries still breezily answered the phone like there was no emergency. The principal laughed and joked with a teacher, as if his problems didn’t matter, as if nobody felt his pain.

  Now, at last, Yogi saw the impregnable ranks of the police arrayed around the prison, the helicopters slicing up the night sky, the firemen too scared to come in and fight the raging inferno at his back, and the child in him was finally satisfied. The world felt his anger, his rage, his frustration, and the world finally got it.

  His blood began to tingle inside him, and he felt as if he’d sprouted wings, and was going to lift off any second and fly away over them, they could do whatever the fuck they wanted, but they couldn’t run away, they couldn’t ignore. At last, he was not afraid to throw himself into the wind. He flung out his bloody arms and ran.

  It was not for him to escape, but only, perhaps, to escape this life a bigger man than he came in. He was bigger than all of them, inside, a master of other men. The doc saw that, when he chose him for his role in the experiment.

  Far more important even than the biochemical breakthrough of this new procedure, is the impact of the psychological data collected. It should put paid, once and for all, to those naysayers who claim that Westerners are too individualistic, too egomaniacal, to serve as – I shall not demur to use the proper term – ‘suicide bombers.’ The perceived obstacles are, in fact, the triggers, which, with socio-engineering of the kind already mass-produced in the American penal system, make one willing to volunteer as a vindication of their selfishness.

  The ultimate proof of this phase of the experiment should come to fruition in Subject 001©, whom I, as a precaution against his volatile nature prematurely setting off the experiment, pre-selected to be the Control. Acting only on the cues from his subordinate inmates and the mildly psychotropic placebo “treatment” in his system, 001© should demonstrate the true potential of egocentric fanaticism.

  Yogi knew nothing about science, or what a control or a placebo was, so he never stopped feeling the fire yearning to blossom out of him as he charged at the barking guns. When Yogi exploded, he took the whole world with him.

  The Wet Nurse

  By Cody Goodfellow

  he awoke, and the phlegm in her chest was a brittle ceramic glaze that shattered with the first coughing fit. Deanna rolled over in bed and lit a smoke before she opened her eyes. She could finish the pack, and nobody could say shit. She’d paid for her crime, and now, all alone in her body, she answered to no one.

  Not that they came to check. They got what they wanted, and she left what they still needed at the door for them to pick up every morning, like a dutiful cow. It was like her mother used to joke after she threw out Deanna’s father: when you get the good stuff out, you throw away the wrapper, right?

  She found the TV remote bolted down on the nightstand, thumbed it on and flipped through the early talk shows. Prescription bottles rolled off the edge.

  She still had plenty of money. She wouldn’t have to do anything harder than phone sex again for a while, if she kept her wits, but she wouldn’t be able to get good, legal shit like this, so even though her womb still oozed blood and her muscles felt like the floor had been torn out of her, she denied herself another pill, for now.

  She would get through this. Dr. Ramos said there would be depression. She explained it like Deanna was an idiot, but it made sense. Her body had been put to its ultimate test, the task for which it was made, and for a while, it was going to try to do that job, until it sunk in that there was no baby.

  It still hadn’t sunk in to her mind, either. She was free. She had money, more than she’d ever make at any kind of real job. And all because she’d sold something that she would gladly have paid someone, anyone, to scrape out of her. Dr. Ramos, who steered her away from the door of the Planned Parenthood clinic, had shown her a better way.

  It hadn’t been easy, but Deanna had made the most of the time. Sitting in this room for six months, she’d worked as hard as the baby inside her, to grow and change. She had made plans, but she couldn’t remember them right now. All she could think of was sleep, and the dream.

  She rolled over in bed and muted the TV, treated herself to a bonus pill she found in the folds of her pillowcase. It stuck and slowly dissolved in her throat like a tiny glacier. The leaden morning light melted into trippy haloes around the pharmaceutical nativity scene on her nightstand, and she melted with it.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful,” everyone said, and they were right. She could see the baby rising like a bloody sun from the valley between her legs. Her vision was all oily trails from the tsunami crash of pleasure-in-pain, flying high above her body, watching herself. And then her baby was in her arms, and she glowed in that eternal, perfect moment, anchored for the first time to her own life, to all life, to the wisdom that ran in her blood, that told her just what to do. She tugged down her hospital johnny and lifted the baby’s mouth to her nipple.

  Her beautiful child sucked eagerly, and she gave a sigh of relief as the unbearable pressure in her turgid breast gave way to a tickling of pure contentment, as all that she was, and all who came before her, flowed into her newborn. She forgave the world and everyone who’d made life hard on her – from her stepdad to JT Barnhardt, and all the other boys and men who might have fathered her child, then drove her out of town. She forgave them unconditionally, and begged the pardon of all those she’d ever hurt, and knew true peace.

  Her heart’s desire fussed and nibbled at her drained breast, twisted in anticipation as she lifted the hungry newborn to suckle at the other one. Eagerly, tiny jaws working, it fed, and all the untapped pain and promise stored up in her flowed out.

  She floated out of herself again. Light gushed out of her, and she had one of those things like an orgasm that saints had in those paintings, where they looked like God was goosing them up the ass with an electric toothbrush – but these were only the unworthy words she used to try to describe it, afterward. For now, she was transported, transformed, into a mother. She would be a wonderful mother, she would clean up for good, she would change—

  Cold rubber hands lifted the baby out of her arms, and she was like smoke trying to claw at the nurse who turned and presented her baby to the skinny lady and the balding man who talked on his cell phone throughout the birth. They thrust a pen into her crabbed hand and she made a mark on some papers, and then they were gone. Tears smeared the ink on her check.

  She rolled out of bed, arms reflexively cradling her deflated belly.

  Dr. Ramos said she’d have dreams. Postpartum depression. Pills. Her hand went up under her sweat-slick T-shirt. Her breasts were slack, not engorged like they’d been for months. She hissed in surprise and pain as she touched her outraged nipples. They felt chewed, but they resonated, rang like nervous chimes with the echo of feeding her baby. It had felt so right, so real—

  In real life, she never got to touch it. She did not know its sex, had never seen a sonogram. They told her only what she needed to eat or avoid during the pregnancy, and trained her to pump her breasts and leave milk in a Styrofoam cooler outside the door.

  She only saw its shadow as they lifted it out of her, heard a single thin wail as they took it to be weighed. But when she touched her nipples, she knew that somehow, somewhere, it had been real. She hugged herself, to hold in the last fleeting traces of joy.

  Deanna’s mother didn’t raise an idiot. Taught her to know smart from stupid, if not right from wrong. Her father kicked in little of value to her blossoming maturity, though he did nothing to queer it, either. She knew him as a nice but busy man who worked hard to pay for a house he didn’t live in.

  Any talk show therapist would zero in on Deanna’s slut act as a function of Dad’s absence and Mom’s indifference, but her motives were simpler. She just enjoyed sex as much as boys did.

  When her period went missing, she could only curse her mother for telling her always to be smart, and not forcing her to be good. W
hen JT Barnhardt dumped her by way of punching her in the mouth, she stole money from Mom and hitchhiked to the next state to get an abortion on her sixteenth birthday.

  She told herself she was not just smart but brave, taking care of it before she started to show and the procedure got even more expensive and gross; but then the little Filipino lady from the nameless adoption agency bird-dogged her and made her an offer.

  The clients set her up in the motel room and paid all her expenses, but she plugged away studying for her GED, and socked away a lot of extra cash doing phone sex. It kept her too busy to fall back into doing speed, and the damned hormones had her masturbating all the time, anyway.

  Fuck it. Fuck motherhood, and fuck you, too. She had done a job, the finest form of piecework, and she got paid. She could afford to lie back and wait for something to tell her what to do with her life, and until then, there were plenty of diversions to numb the nagging ache inside her that tried to tell her life had just passed her by.

  She wasted half an hour trying to squeeze milk out of her breasts. The cold plastic suction cup wrung her out, but collected only a few drops of white-gold Deanna-juice. Had she milked herself and forgotten about it? Stupid cow…

  The Styrofoam cooler was empty. Dr. Ramos would be pissed. She scribbled a note and left it on the door, changed into fresh clothes, and went outside.

  She went to the bank and deposited her check, pulled back cash for snacks and smokes, polished off a lumberjack omelet with raspberry jam on it at Rudford’s. Dr. Ramos said the cravings would stop any day, now.

  As she walked down the sun-blasted sidewalk, she avoided the stares of street trash, dirty old men and tattooed weirdoes ogling her angry tits and flabby ass, hid her flushed face that betrayed how badly she longed to take one or all of them home.

  She had to get off the street and fill some bottles, lie down and rub one out; she had a hole burning in her, and if she didn’t get to safety, it would suck someone in with her.

  By the time she got back to her room, her billowing, maternity-sized T-shirt was plastered to her chest, and not with sweat. She peeled it off and wrung it out over the sink. Cloudy mother-of-pearl rivulets of oily human milk dripped from her fingers and circled the drain.