Aftertaste

by Andrew Post

  “Glad to be of service,” Galavance says, pale-faced.

  He has his shirt open, chin to chest, looking down into the sagging gash in his belly and picking out flecks of the parasite like a chimp inspecting itself for fleas. Galavance shivers again, then again. She has to look away. Her butt always goes numb when looking at unsettling things. She never understood why—a physiological reaction to mental trauma she never really could grasp the usefulness of.

  “Should we be worried people were taking pictures in there?”

  “They’ll take care of that,” Zilch says, unconcerned. “How’re you holding up?”

  “I feel like I’ll never be able to take enough showers. But all things considered, pretty okay.” She nods to herself. “Hanging in there.”

  “Sure, but … no sudden compulsion to steal car parts?”

  “No.” She looks over at him. “Should I?”

  “Dunno. Maybe yours is taking longer to take root.”

  “I think I’d know if I was turning into a were-amphibian,” she says. At least I hope I’d know, she thinks.

  “We should do a test when we get back to the house. Old wives method I remember my mother using on me when she thought I’d gotten worms,” Zilch says. “I wasn’t what you’d call big on washing hands. Not until I went to cooking school, where they practically cane you for forgetting.”

  “What kind of test?”

  “I’ll explain when we get back to the house.” He bums another smoke.

  Galavance sparks one up too. “Do you ever think that maybe forgetting about her entirely might be for the better?”

  “Who?”

  “Your wife.”

  Zilch sits looking at the cigarette burning between his fingers. “I’ve considered fucking up on purpose to just let them take the rest of her, but isn’t that just giving them what they want? Without needing to dangle anything anymore—and I’d just be a robot doing a job, to them—then I’d be the perfect employee. But believe it or not, I liked my wife. Even if I can’t remember everything, I’m willing to go through hell to hang on to what I still have.”

  “Even though you cheated on her.”

  “I wasn’t doing so hot at that time. Made a lot of bad decisions.”

  “And that forgives your cheating? If anything, that makes it worse.”

  “Are we still talking about me here? Or someone else?”

  Galavance sighs.

  “Because,” Zilch continues, “if you’re trying to find excuses to let me kill Jolby, I can give you one. And this saying applies the same as it did back in my day, same as it does now, same as it did a thousand generations ago: once a cheater, always a cheater. We fix him this time, he’ll probably be really thankful. He’ll think you hung the moon. But give him enough time to get comfortable again, he’ll repeat his mistakes.”

  “Stop,” Galavance says, “I don’t want my boyfriend to die. Until I hear it from him directly, until he looks me right in the eyes and I hear him say he cheated on me with eleven different women, I can’t make any decisions. And you telling me he’s ‘not worth it’ and I’m better off without him and all that horseshit is just you trying to make yourself feel better. Play the martyr in someone else’s car, not mine. I don’t give up on people that easy.”

  “Funny,” Zilch says, “my wife said the same thing in her vows when we got married. Then look at what happened. She died rushing to get to the hospital where I was recovering from an OD—with my mistress in tow.”

  “That’s completely different.”

  “How?”

  “Jolby’s a good guy.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “No, sorry, I meant … I meant Jolby’s mixed up now, fine, yes, agreed, and I won’t break my neck trying to save him if what you say is true. I still have to know. I still have to hear it from him, if what he did is true. Maybe the parasite makes him lie, makes him screw up his relationships so it can have him all to itself. Ever think of that? Well?”

  Zilch, in the passenger seat, says nothing for a moment. “No, I didn’t think of that. I just know what he told me and I remember it clear as day, he said—”

  “I don’t care,” Galavance says. “I won’t make your job easier. I’m sorry if that annoys you, but I can’t give up on him.”

  “Because you’ve put too many eggs in that basket, is that why? It’s never too late to have an egg withdrawal. Cash out, while you still have a shirt on your back.”

  “Let’s not talk for a little while, okay? Let’s just get to the house and figure out how to fix him.” She glances down at the shopping bags in the floorboards, one containing the offspring borne of her boyfriend’s mutation, and the other, a harpoon gun. “Hopefully nobody will have to get hurt.”

  “I think it’s too late for that. Chev’s no longer with us, remember?”

  “Anybody else get hurt, I meant. Can we just be quiet now, please?”

  Traffic thickens as they continue along. Churches have let out all over, and cars full of well-dressed people are pouring out onto the highway. Zilch does a good job not saying anything until they leave the interstate for the two-lanes, then the dirt roads. 1330 Whispering Pines Lane, now under a cloudless early afternoon sun, is as they left it.

  The deck behind the house could very well be considered a dock. The bog is almost even with the planks, one corner dipping under. A tiny brown lizard skitters along the railing. Out in the farther-off reaches of the swamp, obscured by a hanging gray haze, Galavance watches one of the closer mud islands for any indication of movement, any jiggling tree limb, but there’s nothing but birds and the occasional ripple in the water as a snake or a frog—the smaller, regular kind—goes under. She turns to see how Zilch is coming along.

  “Try not and shoot yourself with that thing,” she says, noticing he has the harpoon gun out of its package.

  Attempting to load the gun—referencing the user’s manual spread out on the porch railing next to him—Zilch works a small winch on its side to draw back the cable, each turn more difficult than the one before. He’s sweating again. He’s even paler than the day she hit him with her car, licking his lips a lot, his blinks are slow.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah. It’s just hot is all. Are we talking again?”

  Galavance nods. “I just needed some time to think.”

  “Completely understandable.” Zilch, with the harpoon loaded, takes aim across the bog, down the plastic gun’s sights. “I’ve been told I’m not good at shutting up. But spend as much time alone as I do, and the minute you get within range of another person with working ears, it tends to become a challenge not talking them deaf.” He lowers the harpoon gun and sets the safety on and off with his thumb, getting used to doing it until it becomes second nature.

  “So you said we were going to test me, see if I have one,” Galavance says.

  “Right,” Zilch says. “Go inside and see if you can find some bread.”

  Inside the house, the air has grown stuffy and stale. She opens the beer cooler to find not one but two dead parasites, both bagged and still, among the few remaining ice cubes that haven’t melted. She can’t help but look at them and think, Those are kind of like Chev and Zilch’s babies, and it makes her stomach twist. Finding no bread, she drops the lid, replacing the paint can to weigh the lid down, then steps into the kitchen. There’s nothing but stoner food in the cabinets. Cheddar-flavored this and bacon-flavored that. She doesn’t find any bread but decides on the closest thing: a bag of fried corn puffs dusted with nuclear orange cheese powder. She brings the bag back out onto the deck where Zilch is standing, hands cupped around his eyes, looking out into the bog.

  “Feels like we’re being watched,” he murmurs. “Think he has a pair of binoculars out there?” Zilch waves and hollers out over the water. “Jolby, come out to play-ay.”

  “So it’s not bread,” Galavance says, presenting the bag of cheese curls, “but will these work?”

  Zilch tucks the harpoon gun
through one of his belt loops. “Worth a shot. Put your head back and open your mouth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is how Mom did it.”

  He didn’t ask her to, but she closes her eyes when she tips her head back, because otherwise she’d be staring up into the noon sun. She lets him place one of the cheese curls on her tongue. “Just let it sit there. If there’s anything inside, it’ll come up to get it.”

  “This will actually work?” she tries to say, tongue out. She can feel the cheese dust swirling down her throat every time she breathes, but fights down the desire to cough.

  “Apparently.”

  She can still feel the sun, even with her eyes closed, can feel the rays baking her cheeks and forehead and bridge of her nose. She can feel the cheese curl getting sodden by her saliva, collapsing slowly into a soggy, gross mass on her tongue. She doesn’t feel anything slither up her throat but the longer she holds the position the more she struggles not to gag.

  “Okay,” he says after what feels like an hour. “I think you’re in the clear.”

  She spits the saliva-soaked cheese curl off the side of the deck, into the swamp water. It floats for a second, then a dozen small fish dart up out of the brown murk to pick it apart. She has spots in her eyes and she’s mildly dizzy from having her head back for so long. The fish nibble and devour the Cheeto until there’s nothing left.

  “I still think I have one,” she says.

  “Are you feeling like you’re gonna go froggy on me?” Zilch says, hand slowly curling around the grip of the harpoon gun.

  “No,” she says. “I think Jolby’s my parasite. Feels shitty to talk about him like that when he’s not here, and going through what he is right now—” she puts up a hand to cut Zilch off before he can even respond to that “—but for the longest time it felt like we had a partnership. Like if I ever needed him to pick up the slack, if I got sick or was fired out of the blue or something, he’d do everything he’d need to so we’d stay afloat. But I think he was just saying all that.

  “Honestly, I think he’d probably just bolt the minute he had to do for me what I’ve been doing for him. I mean, look at this house. This place should’ve been done months ago. And the parts of it that are done are all fucked up and wrong. He can’t do anything right. I blame my dad for being like this.”

  “I blame my dad for just about everything wrong with me,” Zilch says, “I think we all do. But what do you mean?”

  “I can’t give up on anything. I’ve been trying to finish reading the same book for two years. If there’s a stain on the carpet, I’ll scrub it until the rag I’m using has disintegrated in my hand. Back when I was little, anytime Mom did something Dad didn’t like—before she eventually left him, I mean—you know what he’d do? He’d make me and Mom stand on chairs in the living room and he’d put that song ‘Stand By Your Man’ on the stereo, on repeat, and make us sing along with it until he was satisfied. It was usually sometime after the fifth beer. It was like that fucking programmed me, I think. Didn’t even hit me until now, but here I am, despite everything Jolby’s done, and I’m still standing by my man.” She knuckles her forehead. “Jesus, I’m such a fucking cliché.”

  “When you love someone,” Zilch says, “you hope—even if they aren’t at that moment—they’ll eventually become the person you need them to be. Or that they’ll see what you need and learn, when you need it, to be that person for a while. But sometimes it’s hard to notice when someone’s in trouble. And men—not to talk shit about my own gender—can be pretty goddamn thick sometimes. Present company included.”

  Galavance turns to look at Zilch, unable to keep the look of shock from her face. “What, do they make you listen to self-help tapes when you’re not hunting monsters?”

  “Like I said, I spend a lot of time alone.”

  Hours pass. Zilch goes in and pulls out two chairs from inside, and they both sit. He tries to angle himself under the awning, chasing the elusive shade. Soon, he’s reduced to standing, since sitting won’t get the sun off his face. And ten minutes after that, the sun has moved west far enough that he’s left with no shade on the deck at all.

  “Should we have gotten some kind of bait?” Galavance says.

  “I was kind of thinking that’s what you’re here for.”

  Galavance smacks him. Zilch laughs.

  “Seriously, though. He can probably see us, or hear us,” she says. “And he’s probably got more than one way out of the swamp than through the cul-de-sac.” She takes off her sunglasses to peer out at the mud islands and beaver dams and gnarled twists of drowned trees. “He may not even be out there.”

  “Or maybe he’s sleeping off a food coma, still full of Chev.” Zilch winces having suggested it, and changes the subject. “You said Jolby really likes the stuff you bring home from the restaurant?”

  “Yeah, but now that we know what that sausage really is, there’s no way in hell I’m ever going back there.”

  “Do they deliver?”

  “You really think Jolby wants Frenchy’s? I mean, that sausage is … his other were-amphibians, right? Isn’t that fucked up that he’d be hungry for his own were-people?”

  Zilch shrugs. “He liked it before, right? The stomach wants what the stomach wants.”

  “Frenchy’s. May I take your order?” It’s her boss. Not Patty—her everyday boss. Galavance realizes now she hasn’t actually seen him in months.

  “Yes, hello my good sir,” Galavance says into the cordless phone, trying to mask her voice but ending up sounding like Marvin the Martian, “I’d like to place an order for delivery.”

  “Galavance?”

  Shit. “Yeah.”

  “What the fuck? You were on the grid to open today.”

  “I know, but I had a family emergency.”

  “You didn’t call,” he says, and mouth-breathes, fast. “I could write you up, you know.”

  “Is Patty there?”

  “Yeah, she’s right here. She told me you two had a heart-to-heart and she saw a lot of potential in you. Before you pulled a no-call no-show, that is. She might make me fire you.”

  “But she’s there? In the restaurant?”

  “Either she is or I’m looking at a really good impersonator. Do you wanna talk to her about this? If you can’t respect me, maybe she can straighten you out.”

  “Nate, look. You’re two years younger than me. Don’t act like some big-dick hotshot just because the regional manager’s there. You know what? Fuck this. Here’s a message. And you can CC this to Patty as well. Fuck Frenchy’s, fuck the both of you, I’m done.”

  She breaks the cradle slamming the cordless phone back onto it, a few numbered keys spraying out from under the receiver.

  Zilch folds his arm. “So when can we expect the order?”

  “Sorry.”

  “We still need bait. And we know Jolby likes Frenchy’s.”

  “I know. But Patty’s alive. That should be our main concern right now. She can probably trace the call back—”

  The phone rings. Zilch and Galavance hold their breath, saying nothing, as if Patty can hear them even if they don’t pick up.

  “She’s caught others,” Zilch says at a whisper. “Maybe if we asked real nicely, she might offer a few tips …”

  “She tried to kill me.”

  It rings again.

  “I can’t say for sure they’ll send me back. They’ve hinted they’re prepping another employee to take my place.” Zilch had been coughing the entire trip back to the house. Raising his hand, he shows Galavance all the dead pinhead-sized scarabs, dried to his palm in a black scattershot. “I’m pretty sure the next guy won’t be so patient to hear out your Plan B.”

  The phone rings again.

  “I don’t want her anywhere near here,” Galavance says.

  “I don’t think there’s much we can do to stop that. She knows this place. I saw her, in her shrub costume, just across the street. You know she knows this place. I k
now she knows this place. So you either answer that phone and tell her we need her help, or she’s just gonna come by on her own.”

  “I can’t do that. She’s cooking people.”

  “Were-amphibians, but I get your point.”

  A fourth ring.

  “Do you? I ate some of that. People, Saelig. I ate people—because of her. I may not have one of those … things in me, but I’m still a fucking cannibal.”

  “You’re not a cannibal. You didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “Is that what defines a cannibal—actually knowing you’re eating people? Because I feel like a cannibal.”

  He hikes up his shoulders, drops them. “Then you’re a cannibal. What do you want me to say? But, regarding your homicidal regional manager: what other fucking options do we really have? Waiting for Jolby to come to us isn’t exactly working like gangbusters.”

  Beep. “Hey, this is Jolby and Chev,” Chev says from beyond the grave via the voicemail greeting. “If you’re interested in the property, please contact the realtor.”

  “Galavance, it’s Patty,” sounds from the tinny answering machine speaker. Patty’s speaking low, barely audible over some droning machinery. Galavance recognizes the rumble of the Hobart dishwasher going and she can picture her, in the far back portion of the restaurant’s kitchen, huddled around her phone, far from being overheard by the others. “I apologize for our misunderstanding last night—”

  “Misunderstanding?” Galavance says to the answering machine. “Bitch, you tried to shoot me.”

  “—but I think perhaps we can come to a middle ground, if you’d be willing. See, in full disclosure, I would really appreciate it if you keep what you and I spoke about last night at the hotel under your hat. I’d even be willing to tell Nate to forgive your little no-call no-show slipup today. We’re only human, as imperfect as God made us. Please pick up. I know you’re still there—you only called a moment ago, sugar. Please. Let’s talk. I need your help and you need mine, I reckon. Otherwise, why would you have been trying to place an order for delivery? You must need it, right? Please pick up, sweetheart.”