PIGGS - A Novel with Bonus Screenplay

by Neal Barrett Jr.

  "We'll get right on it," Grape said.

  "I appreciate that."

  "You going to call Mr. Ambrose, you still thinkin' on that?"

  Cecil didn't answer. He slammed the door in Grape's face.

  Jack heard the pair move back down the stairs, a great deal slower than when they'd come up.

  Cecil opened the fridge, shut it up again. Sat down, turned up the TV. It was still Ben Hur. With all the commercials, that was a real long show.

  Jack climbed down, got to the floor before the numb went out, didn't care about the pain, he was too full of anger to care if he broke a leg.

  Son of a bitch, fucking Cecil Dupree! He wasn't happy embarrassing people, making them crawl buck naked with an underage singer on their back. Now he had to kill Ricky Chavez, take that away from Jack too.

  That's the way people were, the way they'd always been, as long as Jack could recall. You want something, someone else wants it too. They get there first, there's nothing left for you.

  "Well fuck you, Cecil," Jack said aloud. "I hope you miss the end of Ben Hur, I hope you choke on your fucking Dr Pepper too..."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Jack woke with scratchy eyes. Bloodshot, gritty eyes, glued up tight. Eyes stuck solid with some kind of shit your body made just for that effect.

  Why? Jack wondered. Why would it want to do that? Your body made lots of other yuck. Little white things at the corner of your mouth. Snot for your nose, wax for your ears.

  Snot was okay if you were six. It wasn't any fun after that.

  Wax was okay, it could help you pass the time. You could bend a paper clip, stick it in your ear. See how much you got. Sometimes you got a little, sometimes you got a lot. Guys in the joint would bet on wax. Not the same guys who bet on Ben Hur. This was a different bunch of guys.

  Jack rubbed the crust out, sat up and looked around. Ahmed sprawled on bags of rice across the storage room. Ahmed was asleep or maybe not. It was hard to tell if you didn't close your eyes. Where he came from, Ahmed said, you keep your eyes open all the time.

  Jack hoped the raghead was dozing now. It was almost light, and Jack knew he'd only had half an hour's sleep. If Ahmed had seen him come in, he'd ask where he'd been all night. Jack would make something up and he wasn't good at that. Everyone he knew could lie like a dog, but it didn't work for him. One look and you knew. This was not a good trait for someone of the outlaw persuasion, but there was nothing Jack could do.

  Ahmed didn't ask. Rhino did. Rhino walked in with a chicken from the fridge. First thing he said was, "What the fuck you up to, Jack, you was out all night."

  "Woo-woo," Ahmed said, and shot Jack a nasty wink, "I t'ink Jhack, he is getting heem a little, this is what I t'ink."

  "Anybody asking you, Ary-fat?" Rhino peered around the kitchen with his ball-bearing eyes. "Anyone ask this sand nigger something, I didn't hear?"

  Rhino split the chicken down the middle. Jack twitched as the cleaver dug wood. Ahmed was good with a cleaver, but Rhino had arms as big as Ahmed's waist.

  Ahmed found something to stir. Ortega found a broom and swept his way out the back door.

  "I couldn't sleep," Jack said. "I walked around a while."

  "Uhuh. An' where'd that be?"

  "Nowhere. Walking is all."

  "All night. Walking somewhere."

  "No sir, not all the time. Sometimes, sometimes I sat down a while."

  "Not all the time. Sometimes, you was sitting for a while. Sometimes–"

  "Rhino, that's what I said, I was walking, that's all, I was just–"

  In the dread, awful silence, Jack could hear a fly fart on the screen door, hear the paint peeling off the wall.

  Rhino looked at Jack. Looked at his hands. Wiped chicken on his apron, looked at Jack again.

  "That was a shameful thing to do, what Cecil did. Isn't no way to treat a white man, don't care what he done. What the fuck you looking at, Sodum Hoo-sayn? All you mothers get moving back here, I got a Chink restaurant to run..."

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jack thought he ought to feel bad, but he felt a lot better than he had in some time. You lose a little sleep, you can do without that. But it wasn't every day you could hear Rhino say something bad about Cecil R. Dupree. That was something else, and letting you smart off a little, too.

  "I am glahd I live to see these t'ing," Ahmed said. "Dhis is like you standin' in the strit, a comit is falling, the comit don' hit you, hit ever'body else. It is like you peekin' in the window, there is a naked movie stahr. There is Jhulias Robers, she got no close on at all. Both of these t'ing, you never be t'inkin' they goin' to hoppen to you."

  "I don't want to talk about this," Jack said. "I don't want to discuss it, so just get it out your head."

  "Hey, I don' blame you for thees. I am jus' saying, mahn–"

  "Yeah, well don't. Don't say nothing, that's all I want to hear about that."

  "If I was you," Ortega said, "I'd put the incident out of my head, and never look at it again."

  Ortega's eyes were slightly out of whack. He'd seen Jack's encounter with Rhino the day before as a miraculous event, and had not expected to see it again. He had gone to his car and downed a half pint of El Escorpion, a brand of mescal so bad it was scorned by vagrants on the street.

  "Dhot is no makin' any sense," Ahmed said. "Once a t'ing is being in you haid, it is stickin' in dere, man, is not comin' out again."

  "This is what the Ay-rab people are thinking," Ortega said. "The Ay-rab and the Jew. No one else is thinking that."

  "Ha! A Mescan, he is tellin' me this? I am listen to a Mescan who is drinkin' cactus piss? I am not be listen to this."

  "An ay-rab is the flea on the dick of the dog. You insult country, you don't even have the good sense to eat a pig."

  "Pig is for the Satan's people to eats. God is tellin' you that. You don' know, you don' know thees?"

  Jack didn't hear any more, he was out of the kitchen, out the back door and down the street, the fire inside him heating up again, the pipes pumping battery acid so fast he could scarcely stay on his feet.

  He clutched at his gut, the agony pulling at his features, soaking him with sweat. Shit, it hadn't been that bad since–what? Not even the horsie business had hit him like this. It was those two gabbing, is what it was. The whole country was full of assholes from foreign lands. What were they doing here, why didn't they go the fuck away?

  Jack walked out past Wan's and sat beneath the big live oak where Ortega parked his car. It wasn't even eight or nine, but the sun was hot enough to start the insects buzzing in the trees.

  He knew it wasn't Ahmed or Ortega or Rhino either that had set his belly on a spree. What it was, was what you call your relayed reaction, which meant your emotions and shit were catching up with your bodily parts and giving 'em hell.

  He had tried to shove all that aside, what happened, what he'd done. It had scared him so much he could hardly believe it was him that had done it at all.

  Ahmed didn't know it, but was dead right about that. Once you had stuff in your head, wasn't any way to shove it out again.

  It had happened, and it wouldn't go away. Just like all the other crap he'd done in his life: You can't take anything back. It's always there, whether you like it or not.

  He got through the morning, doing all the things he'd put off the week before. When he had to go in the kitchen, Ahmed and Ortega pretended he wasn't there. Rhino was out front yelling at the guy from Tex Savallo's, who'd brought the wrong meat the second time this week.

  Wan's never opened 'til five, and there wasn't any crowd at Piggs. Only two dancers were on, Laura Lick and Whoopie LaCrane. Both of them shuffled around the stage like the girls in Naked Zombie Wives, which Ahmed had rented six or eight times.

  Cecil was nowhere in sight, and neither was Grape or Cat. In a way, Jack was grateful for that, but it was sort of like waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it didn't help the fire in his gut.

  You never know wh
en something's going to happen, when you're going to know something you didn't know before, when it's going to pop right into your head.

  Which is why Jack was so startled when it happened, he almost dropped a case of Shiner Beer. It hit him right there, out of nowhere at all. He knew, at once, exactly what the money in Cecil's stash was for, and couldn't imagine why he hadn't seen it clearly before.

  The thought brought such a happy grin, he was glad nobody was around. It wasn't an ordinary stash up there, it was money put aside, money for the dope buy from Ambrose Junior, and that meant Jack would be a whole lot richer when he stole it, richer than he'd dreamed about before...

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Jack had a box he kept in the corner, back behind the ten-gallon drums of Lotus Dream Soy from Wichita, Kansas, and the Shanghai Noodles from Maine. There was very little in the box except Tylenol and Xanax and Pepcid-AC and wintergreen Tums, and half a dozen other remedies he'd tried. None of them stopped the rage in his belly, even if you took the whole bunch at one time.

  There was a pretty nice tie some dude had left at Wan's. A letter, he'd found in the street, from someone in France. Jack couldn't read it, but with the letter was a photo of a middle-aged guy in nothing but a Panama hat, so Jack guessed what the letter was about.

  There were two other things in the box, paperbacks he'd found in the Greyhound station in Ada, Oklahoma. Jack had never read either one, but he was certain the books, found together like that, held some meaning he was meant to understand.

  He took all the Pepcid-AC and the Tums and the rest of the Tylenol, and went to the kitchen, where Ahmed had orders waiting for Piggs. Recyled egg rolls, and buffalo wings with the Chef's Special Sauce. Ahmed put certain desert powders in the sauce he said would sterilize the Caucasian race. As soon as everyone in America ate at Wan's, that would be the end of that.

  Jack's gut had been hurting all day, hurting all the night before. Now that darkness was on him again, primal magma spewed from the earth, churned, burned and boiled at such a fierce and awesome heat, it was all Jack could to keep from dropping everything, writhing on the ground.

  He was frightened, scared out of his wits. The thing he'd set in motion now filled him with dread. Some other Jack must have done it, not him–some Jack who'd lost his fucking mind.

  "The best thing to do," he told himself, spilling egg rolls in his wake, "is to walk out back and down the road, get to 35 and hitch a ride, and don't come back again."

  Someone said hello. It might have been Laura, it might have been Minnie, he couldn't tell which. He had to see Gloria, had to talk to her, and he couldn't do that. She'd see the whole thing, see it in his face, plain as the ten o'clock news.

  Halfway through Piggs, he saw the college dudes again. The trucker guy, the one who'd been a horsie the night before, had brought along some friends.

  From the shadows near the bar, he risked a look at Cecil's table. Cecil was alone, no one else was there, just Cecil R. Dupree, no shirt, no shoes, just bib overalls. He was bent nearly over the table, tearing at a rib, ripping off the meat, spitting out the gristle, tossing the bones on the floor. Now and then he drew a thick hand across his face, wiping the sauce on his pants.

  As Jack stood in shadow, stood there and watched, Cecil stopped and froze, a rib in midair, jerked up straight, so fast, so quick, Jack was certain those razor-black eyes had caught him, found him and pinned him to the wall.

  Then the eyes shifted, found a target to the right, squeezed into tiny little slits. The lavender mask turned purple, then solid bloody black.

  Grape and Cat came through the door that led to Wan's, three feet from Jack. They didn't look at Jack, didn't know he was there. Didn't look at Cecil, either, and Jack knew why, knew where they'd been, why they were back.

  He was caught, in that moment, somewhere between desperation, diarrhea, and the exquisite sense of being totally alive. He was either James Bond or fucking Peewee Herman, and, for an instant, his belly didn't hurt at all...

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  "The greaser wasn't home, Mr. Dupree, that's what I'm saying, that's the God's truth, we was there all night, the guy don't come, the fucker's not home."

  "He wasn't home," Cat said. "Fucker's not home."

  Cecil looked at Cat, looked at Cat a while and gripped the table till his fingers turned white.

  "You tell me somethin' he's telling me, you tell me somethin' twice, you do that again I'm burning your dirty magazines, I'm cutting off your cable TV."

  "I'm sorry. I'm real sorry, Mr. Dupree."

  "You're sorry as you can be, Cat. You're no good for nothing I can see."

  Cat wanted to cry. When Cecil got after him for something, he was scared he might crack, shatter into little pieces like they did on the cartoon shows sometimes. Cat wondered how they did that, how you could do that and be okay again.

  "How you know he wasn't in there," Cecil said, making the two stand, like you make kids do, they go to see the principal, showing these clowns he was too pissed to let them sit down.

  "You go in, you check the place out, the guy's not hidin' under the bed somewhere?"

  "They got alarms, Cec– Mr. Dupree. It's all wired up, it's a nice part of town."

  "They got a garage?"

  "Every condo, they got a garage, it's built in."

  "The Mescan got a car in there?"

  "You can't see in. You gotta have a beeper you want to get in."

  "Fuck, you dropped it, Grape, that's what you did. I ask you do somethin' easy, you fucking drop it, you come back to me and feed me shit like this. A guy, he's got a security thing, he's got it so it whoopas you come inna door, it isn't on every fucking window, guy's got a half-ass lock on the door out back.

  "You dropped it, Grape. I am very disappointed you are dropping somethin' like this. The taco, I'm thinking he's up in his bed, his car's inna garage, you and the dummy here are riding round the fucking block, you're eatin' burgers and fries."

  "We didn' have no fries," Cat said.

  "Mr. Dupree," Grape said, "I got to say, an' I'm saying this in all respect, you're not being fair about this. It isn't right, the guy's not there, I'm not wrong about that, the guy is not in the house–"

  "Get me a couple Coors. Get 'em from the back where it's cold. Don't open them or nothin', bring 'em here."

  Grape didn't argue, didn't let it show, knew why Cecil was giving him this gofer job instead of Cat. Didn't give a shit, now, didn't care. You want a couple beers, asshole? Fine, good old fuckin' Grape, he's bringing you couple beers. Fuckin' Grape don't forget about that...

  "You can sit," Cecil said to Cat, "sit, don't talk, you talk you drive me fuckin' nuts."

  "Okay, Mr. Dupree."

  "You hear what I said?"

  "Yes, sir. Don't talk, you drive me fuckin' nuts."

  "I give up, forget it. Shit, you already forgot, right?"

  Cecil looked around the room, checked the list he carried in his head, checked the crowd, checked the bar, knew, in a blink, which bartender was sweetening a drink for a friend, what girls were letting some big spender cop an extra feel. He could tell, to the nickel, to the dime, who was goofing off, who was stealing him blind.

  "What's wrong with Grape? Why's he acting like that? I chew the guy out, he's giving me a look. I don't like it, he's giving me a look like that."

  He was talking to Cat, but Cat didn't hear. Cecil had told him not to talk, he was off on Neptune somewhere.

  Thinking on it now, Cecil wished he'd held off on Grape for a while. He counted on Grape, and Grape knew it, and he'd hit him heavy on the Chavez deal, because he was pissed Grape hadn't pulled it off. Fucking beaner in his fancy clothes, hitting on Gloria all the time, that shit had to stop. The girl was hard enough to nail without some Mescan feeding her a lot of crap.

  Now he was going to have to tell Grape he was wrong on something else, that a call to Ambrose looking like a good idea. Not a good idea, fuck that, but something maybe had to be done to get t
he buy off the ground.

  The thing was, he wanted to work with this bunch because they had the connections, had the merchandise, and were smart about the business, in spite of this moron Kenny or Hutt or whatever the fuck, and Cecil had the outlets, knew how to make money on the stuff without getting close to the street end himself.

  Okay, the two stiffs in the trunk, the Ambrose guys could maybe take offense, you had to give 'em that. It wasn't on purpose, and didn't mean any disrespect, but you could take it like that, which Cecil figured was the reason these assholes were holding up the game.

  So they made their point, and that's enough of that. Now, the disrespect's the other way, it's coming at Cecil R. Dupree, and Cecil isn't sitting still for that.

  "I'm not sitting still for that," he told Grape, as Grape delivered the beers, bringing two for Cecil and two for himself.

  Cecil acted like nothing had happened, like he always did, you had to go along with that.

  "I'm calling, I'm telling New Orleans get a guy up here, get him here tomorrow, day after that, or forget it, we're buying from somebody else."

  "That's the thing to do," Grape said, "I gotta agree with that. Those guys are messing with us now."

  "You think I'm right in this."

  "Yes sir, I surely do."

  "Good. I'm glad you're not saying this because I'm pissed about the greaser thing. You make it right, I'm okay with that."

  "Consider it done, Mr. Dupree."

  Cecil looked at Grape a long time, waiting for Grape to look away, but Grape held on, didn't look funny in the eye or anything, he looked okay.

  "I got no grief on this, we're okay, you get the thing done."

  "I appreciate it, Mr. Dupree."

  "Cecil. You can do Cecil again, I don't tell you something else."

  "Me too, Mr. Dupree," Cat said.

  "Me too what?"

  "What he said. What Grape did."