by AHWA
MF: An ‘uncut’ version of Off Season was released a few years back. How close was this version to your original novel submission? How important was it to you that it be published?
JK: I got the original ending back in, which is much darker than the one Ballantine forced me to use. And restoring that was very important to me. I got to restore some of the recipes for humans-as-cuisine too, which was fun. The uncut version is very close to the first-submitted one, though I think I may have lost a little bit here and there. Nothing major.
MF: Stephen King once honoured you with the title of the Scariest Man in America. Jack Ketchum who, or what, scares you?
JK: Alzheimer’s. After that, all the crazies in this wonderful world. And after that, snakes.
MF: I have read that Christianity gave you your first true sense of horror. Certainly a guy/god being nailed to a piece of wood that holds his weight is scary, but does religion in general also scare you?
JK: Religion doesn’t so much scare me as disgust me. After all these years of science and enlightenment, most of the population still believes in some half-assed afterlife like something out of a children’s book and an omniscient humanoid patriarch in the sky. Certainly zealots are scary, but all those liberal, live-and-let-live types should be ashamed of themselves too. They’re part of the problem. I’ve said this before—the world won’t be a safe or sane place to live until all our modern gods go the way of Zeus and Loki. Instructive historically but useless and destructive in the modern world.
Squirrely Shirley
Jack Ketchum + Lucky McKee
The refrigerator wasn’t completely empty.
There was an ancient box of baking soda – possibly the source of more odors by now than it was absorbing – a half-empty bottle of Coke Zero and a one-short six-pack of Panther Piss Beer. A few plastic-wrapped sticks of celery that looked like they were gathering rust. Mustard and ketchup on the door.
Harold stood there just home from a long hard day’s work in his dingy Dickies coveralls and gazed incredulously inside.
“You ate the last piece of raisin bread?”
“No,” Shirley said.
Shirley was his wife of twenty equally long years. She sat at their formica kitchen table mixing water and gypsum in a crusty five-gallon bucket, stirring it with a wooden spoon. The table was strewn with strips of burlap, modeling clay and newspaper. There was white dust over everything, including her dirty smock.
“Well then, who the hell else ate it?”
“Bootsie.”
“Bootsie.”
He had fucked Bootsie back in high school. Now he couldn’t imagine why.
“She was hungry after drinking all your …”
“All my beer. Right.
“Then she felt bad about it so she brought over the stuff she had at her house.”
“Why didn’t she do that in the first place? She had to drink all my fuckin’ beer?”
“It was hot. We were hot. It was there.”
She wasn’t the only one who was hot. Her attitude burned his ass. He slammed the refrigerator door back against the wall. A Morton’s salt box and a roll of paper towels tumbled from up on top to the floor.
“Hot? You were hot? Look at my hands, Shirley. Burnt ‘em all to hell knocking flash off plastic gas-cans all day long in a shed that’s hotter than a prom-queen’s snatch and it was too hot for your wooly-ass friend to walk ten yards to get her own Panther Piss?”
He’d been sitting in front of his machine since eight-thirty this morning watching it spit out red gallon cans, grabbing the cans and knocking away imperfections. Stacking them on palettes. Noise and stink and brute monotony.
Shirley didn’t seem to be hearing him. Didn’t seem to notice. She just kept mixing.
He considered his wife’s indifference.
“Oh, what the hell.”
He reached inside the refrigerator, tore a can free and popped the top, upended it and took a swig.
He spit it in the sink.
“I tasted better puke,” he said.
Still she wouldn’t look at him.
“Go take a shower. You smell like a goat.”
He could feel his eyes boiling.
“All I ask of you on a Friday, Shirley, is a cold eighteen-pack, a couple pieces of raisin bread and some leave-me-the-fuck-alone-time with my programs. That’s all. You ain’t got to do shit else.”
“I was busy.”
“Busy with what? That empty bottle of Woolley lyin’ by your chair in the yard?”
“That was mostly Bootsie. I just had a few.”
“Yeah, and what kept you so goddamn busy you couldn’t take fifteen minutes to walk to the store and get me my beer?”
She put on that voice. The one he hated.
“Well, if you must know, darling, I was making molds outside and Bootsie came over and she wanted a drink because Van pushed her into the stove and took off without leaving her a nickel’s worth of drinking money. Asshole just left her that six-pack of …”
“Panther Piss. Yeah.”
He had the feeling he was now the color of a honey-baked ham.
Shirley rattled on.
“She needed a girlfriend to talk to and I had the vodka so we had a couple drinks and then the milkman came and we bullshitted with him for a bit, and time just sorta’ slipped by on us.”
“Milkman? What milkman?”
“The milkman. Our milkman, Mort. We’ve built what they call a rap-port.”
This was news to him.
“Shirley, who uses a fucking milkman anymore? Who pays a milkman when it’s a fifteen-minute walk to the store?”
Clearly he wasn’t getting through on any level. She was all concentrated on her stirring.
“Almost ready,” she said.
“So we got a milkman. There ain’t even any milk in the ice box, Shirley.”
“Bootsie drank it.”
“Bootsie drank it. Well, don’t that beat all.”
He regarded the woman in front of him. For thirty-six she still didn’t look half bad. Even in that stupid smock. They’d had no kids so she’d kept her figure. Mostly. She had a little pot belly but that was from drinking. You couldn’t deny a woman her drink. Besides, his own belly overshot his belt at church Sunday mornings by three or four inches.
Shirley looked pretty good in fact. Not like that slob Bootsie. Nice legs. Tits still holding their own against gravity. She wasn’t a candidate for Botox yet. And lately she’d been whaddycallit, dilapidating or something. Pussy as hairless as a baby’s tush.
Then it hit him.
“You’re fucking the milkman.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You are. You’re fucking him.”
She sighed. “You really are dull, Harold, you know that? No. I am not fucking the milkman. He’s actually pretty knowledgeable, ese.”
He hated when she did that. She was about as Spanish as bread pudding.
“He is. He taught me how to keep the bubbles out of my molds. So I’m finally doing something I always wanted to do. I’m doin’ an Elvid.”
“Elvid?”
“Yeah. Look under that newspaper there.”
He stepped over to the table and peeled the Sunday funnies off a three-foot-high pyramid kind of thing and when they fell away what was under them was this statue. It took him a moment to identify what it was. Then it clicked in. He’d seen the image in a pamphlet in church promoting some organized field-trip to Rome.
Michelangelo’s David. Junk and all. Only instead of David’s head it was Elvis’ head – from his Vegas period, long sideburns – glued on top. Sculpted in paper mache.
Elvid.
And another, decapitated, lying beside it.
The two Davids’ heads were nowhere in sight.
He remembered looking at the pamphlet and thinking what the hell? Wasn’t David supposed to be a kid with a slingshot? A teenager maybe? So what was with this pretty-boy twenty-something with the perfect abs and the knee bent and the hip cocked flaunting his basically insignificant junk like he was looking to sell some poor john a blow-job?
It wasn’t a bad likeness of The King, he had to admit. So that now it was Elvis who looked like he was peddling his perfectly sculpted ass.
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“It’s art, Harold. I don’t expect you to understand it.”
“Where’d you get the statues?”
“Grocery store. Gardening section. I been eyeing them for a while.”
She lifted the wooden spoon. Gunk dribbled.
“Oh, yeah. This is perfect,” she said. “Just like a milkshake. You’re one smart fella, Mr. Milkman.”
“You went to the grocery store?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t think to buy me beer?”
“Needed Elvid supplies.”
“Right. How much were those statues again?”
“Fifty-four dollars once you count in the tax.”
“Fifty-four dollars! I work almost an entire day for …”
“It’s a drop in the bucket, Harold. I get this mold right, these things are gonna fly off my table at the swap meet. You should be thanking me.”
Unbelievable. He needed a drink. There was only the Panther Piss so he took another swig. Spit it right back out again.
“You don’t have to make some big show for me, Harold. I know you don’t like Bootsie’s beer. Once I get this mold set I’ll go and get you your stuff. Now run off and watch your programs like a good little boy. I’ll only be a couple more hours. And … take … a … shower! You smell like a beagle’s bottom.”
He snorted. His nose-hairs startled in the sudden breeze.
He’d fucking had it. Fifty-four dollars. For shit that wouldn’t sell any more than any of her other so-called art out on the lawn. Fifty-four dollars and no beer and no raisin bread and her with the balls to tell him to shower.
He upturned the beer into her bucket and watched it foam.
“You really are a useless milkman-fucking money-hole of a heifer-cunt, you know that, Shirley?”
With satisfaction, he watched her go ballistic.
“You asshole! Now I have to start all over again! This shit isn’t cheap, you know. I could fucking kill you!”
“Clean this crap up. I’m gonna go get my own beer. I’ll be back, or I won’t. Oh, and one more thing.”
He turned the can around and slammed the bottom into Elvid’s junk. There wasn’t much to it. A small explosion of white powder.
Now Elvid had a pussy.
Her screaming followed him through the screen door and out into the yard past the garden hose and lawn chairs and the empty bottles of Woolly Mammoth Russian Vodka lying in the grass and into the land of Shirley’s Shitty Garden Sculpture – diseased-looking gnomes, elves, cherubs, Santas, reindeer – and by the time she fell silent inside and he heard the phone ring next door he was already engaged in the sweet business of destruction.
* * *
Shirley and Bootsie had been phone-buddy girlfriends since the eighth grade. Talking well into the night about boys and hair and that phony bitch Beverley or Jane or Rachel until their parents told them to shut the fuck up and get to sleep or no more appointments at Lil’s Hair Salon for a month. Back then they’d lived across town from one another. But then Bootsie’d married Van, who lived ten feet away.
They saw no reason to stop being phone-buddies, though.
“’Lo,” said Bootsie.
Shirley was into full rant right from the start.
Bootsie munched on her raisin bread toast and puffed on her joint and listened.
“That fucking shithead Harold! He dumped beer in my milkshake and smashed Elvid’s dick! I swear I ought to shoot his balls off with his stupid homemaker curve-barrel of his! Why anybody would want to bend the barrel of a perfectly good shotgun is beyond me. Who’s he think he is? Black Bart or something?”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Bent the thing drunk. Another one of his drunken projects. Remember the chicken-wire snake farm? Have to aim two foot sideways to hit anything. It’s useless. Puto gringo!”
* * *
Outside on the lawn Harold murdered gnomes. He considered that he should have done so long ago. Even the reindeer were an eyesore.
He could see his wife on the phone through the kitchen window. Pacing back and forth, shaking her fist. Was Shirley calling the cops on him?
Nah. It was dark. She couldn’t possibly see him out here. Tearing her whole world apart. He looked in the kitchen window next door. At Bootsie on her phone. Figured.
His heavy workboots came in handy. You could kick a cherub to dust in no time. He punted Santa’s head clear across the yard. Stomped an elf into oblivion.
This was fun!
* * *
Bootsie buttered another slice. Took a poke on her joint.
She’d heard all this before. He never clips his nose hairs. There’s fur growing out of his ears. She listened anyway. What were friends for.
“He sleeps with his mouth open,” Shirley said. “I know. I’ll pour plaster of Paris down his goddamn throat once he passes out.”
“We’ll have to hold him down.”
“You’re sweet, but this prick is all mine. Maybe I’ll rub Crisco all over the bathroom floor. He slips, there’s all sorts of things for him to break his neck on. You know that shitnugget accused me of fucking the milkman?”
“You are fucking the milkman.”
“I’ll slice off his goddamn man-tits, I’ll …”
* * *
Harold was working up a sweat. Two of the reindeer were done for. He hauled off at another Santa. One of the older ones. His size twelve went straight on through the thing and he hadn’t expected that, hadn’t expected such little resistance. So his balance was off. And the next thing he knew he was in the air and the next thing he knew after that he was flat on his back with what felt and sounded to him very much like a broken neck.
The grinning elf he landed on was solid.
He’d toppled the little bastard in his fall. At present his neck was draped across the elf’s belly at an angle even Harold knew was unfortunate. From where he lay he had a perfect – if upside-down – view of his kitchen window. Of Shirley pacing back and forth.
He should have been staring at the sky. At the moon. At all those pretty stars.
Instead he got Shirley.
Shirley and the remaining gnomes and cherubs who seemed to gaze down at him like gawkers at a five-car pile-up.
He could hear his wife faintly through the open window. Something about his dick. Or Elvid’s.
Suddenly he had the mother of all headaches. Pain that leapt back and forth from his head and neck to his arms and shoulders like some crazed little girl playing hopscotch. He tried to move his legs. No go. Tried to move his fingers. His fingers told him to forget it.
Shouting was out of the question. He could barely move his lips.
He knew what he looked like. He looked like a fish in a bucket.
And just like that fish he was having trouble breathing.
* * *
Shirley was depressed. It was two hours later. They were still on the phone.
Bootsie was going on and on about some reality TV show. Some woman who was getting divorced through the mail because her husband had fallen in love with the Domino’s Pizza delivery boy. She was trying to cheer Shirley up. All Shirley could think about was her ruined Elvid.
“O
h, and girl?” Bootsie said. “Seventy per cent off at Shoe Circus. Count my ass in. They got all the good Spanish stuff. Audley’s, Agatha Ruiz, Pura Lopez, even got the new Tous. Shit, I’m gonna get two pairs of Tous.”
“Yeah. Two Tous. Why not.”
She knew how she sounded. Now that she’d vented her anger she sounded morose.
“Elvid’s dick is totally destroyed,” she said.
“Make a cast of a baby carrot and two brussel sprouts. I dunno.”
“Nah. I want him to have real junk.”
“Harold still not back? Maybe you could guilt him into letting you mold his. And I could use a beer.”
“He’s probably down at the ballfield drinkin’ and hitting flies. Either that or at the bar hitting on skeezes. He’s on my shit-list, Boots. I wouldn’t stoop to even touch his junk. Besides, his dick’s crookeder than that shotgun of his.”
“The milkman?”
“Mort? No …”
“Yeah. Why not? Call him over. After he balls you, you can get him to give up his junk for your art.”
“I don’t know. What if Pisshead comes home? Afternoon thing’s working pretty good. I wouldn’t want to spoil it.”
Still, her heart lightened at the thought.
“You get caught, you know who’s gonna win that showdown. Seriously. Call the bar. Mort’s always there on Fridays. Probably still in uniform. You do love a man in uniform.”
“Yes.” She sighed. “Yes I do.”
* * *
Mort sat in his usual place at the far-end corner of the bar, where he could see the front door. Wild Bill Hickock got shot and killed with his back to a door in Deadwood. So did President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. Joey Gallo got ass-and-back-shot facing the wall at Umberto’s Clam House in New York City.
That wasn’t going to happen to Mort.
As the only black man in an all-white bar, much as he liked most of these guys, he always felt a little vulnerable.
Especially with a name like Mort.
