by Edward Lee
But he did decide to have one more beer before he left. His ruminations, however, stalled him before he could go back inside. Nancy having a sexual dream about him last night was disturbing, of course, because he'd had one about her as well. But that was coincidental, and, as good-looking as she was? Who WOULDN'T have sexual dreams about her? The bull's head on the baby? Now that duped him; the Writer hated Greek Mythology. But it was the hallucinotic phone-voice that puzzled him more. It came from MY subconscious so... how come I don't get it? It was clearly a reference to Joseph Conrad, the acclaimed English writer whose Heart of Darkness proved perhaps the greatest fictional work of applicable modern nihilism ever written, not just the dark heart of Africa but the dark heart of Man.
What could that... have to do with...
Then the Writer recalled his own personal favorite of Conrad's: "The Secret-Sharer."
The story of a merchant sailor, and the man sleeping in the bunk above him... is himself...
His better half...
THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK! he heard next, and jumped at the start.
It sounded like someone kicking a metal door, and beside him, indeed, was a metal door which appeared to be a walk-in refrigerator room for beer. But—
THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK!
It wasn't coming from there. It's coming from... , and the Writer turned his head toward the back lot.
That U-Haul?
Gravel crunched as he walked over, measuring careful steps to off-set his drunkenness. Probably another hallucination, he deduced, but he almost shrieked right after he tapped on the U-Haul's door and was immediately answered by:
THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-THUNK! and also a muffled squeal.
Someone gagged, kicking and screaming...
He jerked around at the sound of more crunching footsteps. It was Lud, carrying a shuck-and-jive smile.
"There ya are. I was wonderin' where ya got to, son. And can ya believe it? My carry-out burger still ain't ready! Thought I'd come out fer some fresh air whiles I wait—"
"Sir!" the Writer exclaimed. "I think there's someone being held against their will in the U-Haul!"
The wise old man chuckled. "An ab-duck-sher-un, huh? Son, you been watchin' too much'a the news all 'bout that crazy homer-sex-shul fella up north. Ain't nothin' in the U-Haul ‘cept a billy goat I'se driven up ta my sister's place in Crisfield."
The Writer's heart beat down in relief. "Oh, thank God, Lud. Guess I'm a little drunk now—I thought sure I heard a human in there."
"Looky here, son. I'll'se show ya," and then Lud withdrew a flashlight and opened the U-Haul door.
CLACK!
PART three:
ACTUALIZATIONS
(I)
Dicky and Balls returned from their run for Clyde Nale at about 10 p.m. that night. They drove back from their Kentucky distro point with silent smiles on their faces—smiles not so much stemmed in the fact that they'd earned solid money but instead in the knowledge that tomorrow at this time—with any luck—they'd be sitting on much more money. They had no way of knowing that the most paramount actualization of their lives was about to unfold—in fact, they didn't even know what actualization meant.
They stopped back at Dicky's house briefly for a beer, then got back on the road. It was a Van Gogh night blooming overhead. Moonlight dusted the winding asphalt like queer frost. Eventually Dicky broke the content silence as the ‘Mino barreled onward.
"What time ya figure we should get ta Crafter's house?"
"I reckon we'd best wait till midnight," Balls said and, of all things, he'd pronounced the word midnight as "mid-nat." "I'se like that time. The witchin' hour'n all."
"Shore. It ain't far ta Governor's Bridge Road, so's what'cha wanna do fer the next two hours?"
Balls rubbed his hands together. "After a hard day'a runnin' shine? I'd say we'se could use a coupl'a cold ones at the Crossroads."
Dicky nodded and drove on. It sounded cool to him, and why not? After transporting illegal liquor across state lines and laying a momentous "ruckin'" on an innocent woman... that's Miller Time.
Ah-ha...
Attentive readers will recall Ida, the unfortunate and very pregnant volunteer at Clyde Nale's Hock Party, and they will likely be curious as to what happened to her (while less attentive readers or, more regrettably, readers now interminably bored by a convoluted narrative structure, won't care), but as previously conveyed, poor Ida was dragged naked and barely conscious from the ‘Mino before Dicky and Balls had proceeded to Kentucky. After all, she'd called Balls an "asshole," and this was not a prudent thing for a woman to call him. So Dicky had pulled into a convenient wooded clearing—as were rife in these parts—and Balls wasted no time restricting her mobility. Her wrists he'd Flex-Cuffed together and then lashed to the base of a tree while her ankles had been separately cuffed and tent-staked to the ground in a manner which forced her legs apart. The naked woman was now an awesome sight to any practiced sociopath: skin white as proverbial parchment and beaded with cold sweat, eyes bugging, black pubic thatch strained and pushing outward below the five-months-pregnant belly. Balls took several more chugs off those swollen breasts, marveling at the flavor and texture of the sweet, liquor-tinged milk.
"Dang that's good!" he celebrated. "Dicky, you needs ta take a hit. Ain't nothin' like it."
Reluctant as ever, though, Dicky declined but did find the attendant imagery stimulating enough to extract his member and masturbate.
Meanwhile, Balls weighed some thoughts. So taken was he by Ida's milk-gorged breasts and conical nipples that he knew he just had to give her a good old fashioned Tittie Fuck, but, alas... .
Her stomach was too big to accommodate the required position.
Dicky's face twisted up as his own belly jiggled during his act of masturbation. He stomped his heels twice, grunted "Uh!" once very loudly, and ejaculated onto a tree. The viscid emission seemed to resemble a proofreader's mark for New Paragraph.
It was a satisfying climax for Dicky. He shucked the last of it out, then flapped some spillage off his hand. When he looked toward Balls, however—
"Aw, come on, Balls! Ya don't need ta be pullin' more'a that crazy shit! We gots ta get on the road!"
Balls wouldn't hear of it. "Just keep yer shirt on, Dicky. This tramp's set'a knockers are just so primo, I ain't gonna be happy till I have me a Tittie Fuck. So that stomach on her's just got ta go... "
See, while Dicky had been slaking himself, Balls had gone to the car to fetch the Stanley-brand manual brace-drill that he'd used so effectively on that scarecrow with tits at Spit McKully's not too long ago.
When Ida caught her first dazed glimpse of the tool, her semi-consciousness broke and then she heaved against her bonds to scream so loud every bird within a quarter mile lifted off from the trees.
Balls was horny—a "gittin' right down ta business" kind of guy. No drama, in other words, no drawing out the anticipation like taffy just for fun. He knelt and promptly put the end of that 8-inch long double-twist auger bit right into the little kernel of Ida's popped-inside-out navel and began to crank on the drill...
Her screams corroded to deep, annoying howls as she watched the bit's barber-pole-like action. Balls twisted fast and hard, and in only seconds the bit had churned down to the chuck.
"See what'cha git fer callin' me a asshole?" he pointed out.
Ida shuddered, back-arching as if to snap. Only one simple line of blood leaked out of the wound, running straight down one side of the tremoring belly. When Balls reversed the long bit back out—
"Holy Moly, Dicky! Would'ja lookit that!"
—Ida's vagina expanded spectacularly and then her womb spontaneously miscarried, expelled a five-month-old bloody mess right out onto the ground between her legs. Balls glanced uninterested at the glistening pile of fetus, umbilicus, and placental mass.
The obstructing stomach, now, was gone. Balls yanked off his jeans, straddled Ida's vibrating chest, and got down to the task...
/> So much for the flashback. In a movie, for instance, the ploy would be much more effective than when executed in narrative prose. As for Ida and her gored child—it was a boy!—their corpses were left as they lay, food for the night varmints that would surely be along. And Balls' orgasm?
It had proved just dandy.
But the event was long behind them now, at 10 p.m. All Balls could ponder was the loot that surely awaited in the house they would soon be breaking into. Not just cash and jewels, but priceless antique furniture and old paintings and sculptures, a veritable treasure trove. But then—
"Fuck me and my dead Daddy ta boot!" Balls cursed and smacked his thigh in anger.
"What, Balls?"
"Aw, shee-it, I plum fergot! We need a blammed U-Haul ‘fore we'se knock over Crafter's house."
Dicky scratched his gut. "Uh... yeah, I'se guess yer right, less'n ya wanna just go fer smaller stuff'n put it in the back. We'se'll cover it with the tarp."
"Naw, naw, Dicky. There's ‘spensive furniture'n shit in the house. That's what Bud Tooler tolt me."
"Well... maybe we'se should just say ta hail with the furniture, just go fer the jewels'n silver. Furniture's a pain in the ass."
Balls shook his head, disgusted. "Naw, naw, Dicky, ya don't understand. This ain't just reg-lar furniture. It's hair-looms. We'd make a killin' hockin' it all to the antique dealer's."
"Wow. Hair-looms... "
"Yeah, man, but—damn. Where we gonna find a U-Haul ta pinch at this hour?" Balls asked aloud just as Dicky pulled the ‘Mino into the back lot of the Crossroads...
They both stared astonished at the object now lit up in the ‘Mino's headlights: a beat-to-holy-hell red pickup truck with a U-Haul hooked to the back.
Dicky said in a hush: "Dang, Balls. You must be cyclic."
"Dang straight. Now you just pull right alongside that pickup... while's I hitch that U-Haul up ta our back bumper... "
««—»»
It was a shame about the fellow in the white shirt. Lud had enjoyed the man's conversation to no end. Not quite sure what to do with him now...
But ole Lud knew he'd think of something that would help the man find his true purpose in life—his Kantian actualization of self and the Godly heart within his existenz.
Lud finally did get his carry-out burger (which, by the way, was composed of fifty percent ground beef and the rest a combination of ground possum and deer), and now it was time to get back up to Maryland and return to the business of his work for God on High. He paid his tab amongst the tavern's riffraff and exited out the back door with his bagged burger.
Well ain't that a fine how-do-ya-do? Lud thought, stopping in his tracks. His beat-to-holy-hell red pickup truck was still there, but the U-Haul connected to it was missing.
Indeed, God worked in strange ways. Lud was not thwarted, for the U-Haul could not be traced to him. But I wish I could see the look on the face of whoever stole it, once he opens the back.
Lud got in the truck and drove away.
(II)
Was it a dream? The Writer wasn't sure, rocking and becloaked in spongelike blackness. He was dreaming of a stench—something gone to rot—and the stench, somehow, was proof of existentialism's utter failure as a true philosophy. There was no Kierkegaardian "leap of faith," no confrontation of existence to unveil essence. It was all just rotten meat...
In the dream the Writer struggled against bindings at his wrists and ankles, and could only make choking sounds when he tried to call out, for a gag had been tied through his teeth. All the while the darkness jostled around him. He considered his symbolic function in the dream: he the human intellectual unit straining against the strictures of a naturalistic environment. Can't move, can't see, can't speak. My God, I'm like Kafka's "Hunger Artist!" My free will has been suppressed!
And, hence, so had his innate impulse to seek actualization. In the dream, the Writer, now, was a living symbol.
Which, of course, was all bullshit. There was no philosophical symbology, for God's sake. There was no meaning that existed behind objective truths. Nor was the Writer in the grip of a dream. He was in the back of a stolen U-Haul and he'd been knocked unconscious and tied up by a psychopath who, in years to come, would be dubbed by the police as "Mr. Torso." This, however, he could have no way of knowing yet, nor could he know that said U-Haul, by an ironic happenstance worthy of Jean Paul Sartre's "The Wall," had been stolen yet again by two more psychopaths named Balls Conner and Dicky Caudill.
The Writer would find out in due time what the rotten smell really was...
(III)
"Dang," Dicky complained at the traffic light that would take them onto Governor's Bridge Road. "What's that fuckin' smell?"
Balls leaned his head out the ‘Mino's window and sniffed. His lips puckered within the redneck goatee. "Shee-it, Dicky. Damned if I know." He narrowed his eyes through a rumbling pause. "You thank it's comin' from the U-Haul?"
"Naw. Probably a deer're somethin' died in the woods. But nows that ya mention it... I wonder what's in the U-Haul... "
The light changed, then Dicky turned the ‘Mino onto a forest-lined road which seemed to plummet.
"Didn't feel like there were much in it when I'se hitched it up ta our ball," Balls offered. He sniffed the air again and made a face in the dashlight-tinged dark. "But it don't make no difference what's in it. We'se'll dump it all at Crafter's house ta make room fer what we pinch."
"Yeah," came Dicky's sophisticated concurrence.
The narrow road could've been an abstractive esophagus which was swallowing them into darkness that just kept getting darker. The night was digesting them. Balls snuck a crotch-squeeze when Dicky wasn't looking. For some reason the recollection of cranking the manual drill into Ida's pregnant gut still had him all hot'n bothered. I'se gonna have to do that again, he told himself. Drillin' pregnant chicks in the belly's a damn sight more fun than playin' cards. "Man, Dicky, I'm chompin' at the bit ta see what Crafter's got. How far ya thank his house is?"
The ‘Mino slowed at the conclusion of Balls' query. The headlights illumined a barely visible turn-off, and there stood a mailbox peppered with buckshot holes. E. CRAFTER read the little sign atop. Dicky grinned. "Here we are, brother."
They pulled in to find themselves driving up a steep incline through woods even more dense. An owl hooted, and they could see fireflies dotting the forest on either side. Finally, then, the road emptied at the top of a massive hill, and there sat the house. Dicky idled the car toward the front door, then cut the big engine.
The nightsounds amplified, engulfing them. Balls and Dicky stared upward.
"Shee-it," Dicky muttered.
"You got that right."
The house stood as a narrow, three-story ruin that looked like it might fall over. The paint had long since blistered off its plank walls, showing only weathered gray wood. A front porch, if you wanted to call it that, had actually collapsed at one end, while the screens that had once enclosed it hung in tatters. The many trees around the house were gnarled, overly twisted, and appeared to be dying.
Balls shook his head. "This place makes my Daddy's shack look like fuckin' Graceland. What a dump."
"Ain't no one been livin' in there fer years by the looks of it. Your buddy Tooler was pullin' yer leg."
"Guess yer right but—shee-it—Bud Tooler? Man, he was a straight up guy, had his head on straight. Ain't no reason fer him ta lie or git his info so fucked up."
Dicky smirked. "Head on straight? I thought you said this guy raped a chick in a Good Humor truck'n got caught 'cos he went back ta steal ice cream cones."
"Tastee-Pops," Balls corrected. "You know, the things that push out the cardboard tube? But, yeah, I guess Tooler's full'a shit."
They both got out before the monstrosity of a house. The moon glowed a sickly mucus-yellow right behind it. Balls passed Dicky a flashlight. "We gots ta have a look anyways, I guess."
"Cain't hurt."
Balls looked over his s
houlder. "Aw, but let's empty the U-Haul first."
"Shore."
When Balls unfixed the latch and swung the U-Haul's door open—
"Holy fuck!" Dicky yelled, gagging at the stench.
It slammed Balls in the face like tear gas. "Smells worse than a pile'a dead buzzards in there—"
The first thing they noticed was a woman's leg right by the door. Balls grabbed it, expecting to pull out a dead woman.
Instead, all he pulled out was a leg.
They he pulled out two severed arms and another leg. All of the limbs were beginning to decompose.
"That there's some fucked up shit, Balls!" Dicky exclaimed.
"Ya gots ta be shittin' me... "
Then Dicky gulped. He shined his light into the back of the haul. "Balls. Ain't just arms'n legs in there."
"Huh?"
