by Steve Vernon
*
Which brings me round-about back to that Greyhound bus, bound for Garden City, Texas or bust.
It was Brenda’s idea to take the bus, no matter how much I tried to convince her to just rent a car. She figured we couldn’t spare the cash, and even though we were heading for the reading of granny’s will I didn’t want to tip my hand just yet about the inheritance, so I had to play along. I insisted on paying for the tickets, and when she said she wouldn’t hear of it, we settled for half and half, only Brenda forgot her purse at home so I ended up paying for the tickets - lock stock and ham hock all by own self. That didn’t matter. I just kept counting those seven or eight kind of zeroes in my mind, figuring that I was going to get what was coming to me, sooner or later.
“It’s all right,” Brenda said. “I like buses. You get so close to so many people, it’s just such an interesting way to travel.”
Now I never said that Brenda was stupid, but you can probably see for yourself that she was dumb enough to try and kill a fish by drowning it in the river.
“I like buses, too,” chimed in Jenny, as if I had asked the little snot nosed brat.
Whoops.
Did I let that slip out?
You see, the only time me and kids get along any better than house cats and coyotes, is when there are seven or eight kinds of zeroes tacked to their diaper pins – and even that is a short-term relationship at best.
Anyways, things played out just the way I planned them. Brenda and little Jenny were travelling to Texas for the old grandmother’s funeral. I was riding beside her with a big cubic zirconium ring in my pocket, waiting for a moment of emotional weakness on her part to drop down on one knee, pull out the wedding ring and take aim.
I should mention right about now that I had Brenda sitting behind me, so I could manfully share the responsibility of keeping little Jenny amused. I figured the more grateful Brenda was to me, the more likely she’d say yes to my proposition.
Once I got her to say “I do”, it’d be apple pie and ice cream easy to grab the power of attorney and hop a fast jet to Mexico with cash in hand, leaving Brenda and Jenny back in the trailer park where I’d found them - no harm, no foul.
*
The trouble really started when I first laid eyes on that god damned thalidomide reject from a carnie freak show, sitting in the seat ahead of us.
I probably would have noticed him before I did, except I was too busy telling little Jenny the story of Bre’r Rabbit and the Tar Baby.
You know that one where Bre’r Fox and Bre’r Bear built this sticky pie poppet to catch that rabbit, only once he’s stuck he talks them into throwing him into the chollo patch. I always liked that part of the story, you understand, on account of me and Bre’r Rabbit being sort of what you’d call kindred spirits.
The way my grandpa Jake always told the story Bre’r Fox and Bre’r Bear struck them a match to that tar baby once they’d caught Bre’r Rabbit, and had themselves a mess of southern style blackened hasenpfeffer.
I didn’t find out until high school that the story ended any differently than that.
Anyways, I was right in the middle of Bre’r Rabbit’s best “Puh-lease don’t you dare throw me in that there chollo patch”, when I noticed that this freak show reject had moved in to the seat directly in front of me and little Jenny.
“Boy, are you ugly,” I said, just as soon as I caught a look at him.
Now normally I’m a little more tactful than that, being the cultured man that I am. I mean, I might have thought it, and maybe even whispered it to little Jenny and Brenda, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have said it right out loud like I did, not so anybody else could have heard it.
But he sure was ugly.
He kind of reminded me of a runt pig, all pinkish and blotchy and ugly in a fatty-skinnish kind of way.
The thing that you noticed most about him was his arms, or rather his lack of arms. Nothing but little stumpy pink seal flippers, with just the beginnings of fingers poking out from his palms. Just stubs you understand. Sort of like he’d run arm first into a brick wall five or six thousand times, and you could tell from the angle of his fingers that some of his hand muscles got started somewhere back behind his shoulder meat.
His feet, too. They were tiny things, tacked on to the ends of legs that were no longer than little Jenny’s. Only his torso was full sized, and that had made up for all of his short comings. It was about the heft of a full size sack of feed, all lumpy and extra long in the belly like he had to have a lot of room for swallowing.
His head was worse.
He didn’t have a neck to speak of, and his mouth was buried under wobbly folds of sickly pink flesh. All in all, what with the way his finger stumps and his stumpified head poked out he looked like a man trying to crawl out from underneath a giant pink slug.
Well sir, I took one look at him and I had to go and say what I did - “Boy are you ugly”, and I figured we would have ourselves some kind of ugly scene going on when he lost his temper and started squealing like a runt pig, only he did not say a word.
He just sat there, saying nothing.
Little Jenny giggled, and I wanted to give her a slap to improve her manners, but Brenda was watching so I figured I’d save it for later. So instead I played along, nodding at `ugly’ and grinning at little Jenny like it was some sort of a joke, and come to think of it, it was kind of funny.
“Don’t stare,” whispered Brenda from behind us. “He’s just the same as us, inside. We’re all God’s children.”
Like I said, Brenda was dumber than ignorant dirt. He didn’t look like any child I’d ever seen. I stared anyways, no matter what she said. In fact I made it a point to get out of my seat to have a good long look. No particular reason, just honest to cat-killing curiosity.
“Well you know what they say, nobody buys beer, they just rent it,” I said in a louder than usual voice, trying to cover up my curiosity. “It’s time to drain the old lizard.”
Brenda glared at me and I guess she knew what I was up to, but hell she’d get over it.
I just had to have a better look at this here freak.
So I got up.
I made like I was going to take a walk to the back of the bus to the washroom, only while I was getting up I leaned over and caught a good long look at what was sitting ahead of me and little Jenny.
I saw a pair of eyes, the colour of those yellowed strips of flypaper that hang from the beams of the butcher shop, only they were kind of panicky, like he was having a hard time breathing, and maybe he was because his nose was sort of humped in around where his mouth had been buried. It made me wonder how he ever managed to eat.
There was something about this little freak that reminded me of my uncle Thad, the one who loved to come to birthday parties and do that magic trick where he pulled a silver dollar out of your ear, only he’d always make it disappear too, even though there were a half a dozen empty pocketed kids staring him directly in his yellowed-out whiskeyed-over bottle beady eyes.
I’m tired from all this remembering.
I think I am just going to stop thinking for a while.
A car drove by.
A big old Lincoln.
Somebody in the back threw a beer bottle at me.
The bottle was empty, and it wasn’t even my brand.
I just kept on staring at that armadillo skull that was keeping me company.
An ant dropped by to visit the skull, just in case there was a nugget of brain meat left.
I smile inside myself and say - hi ant.
The ant veered away, like I’m so bad he can sense me smiling at him. He crawled off the skull and was just about to head for home when the sand spilled away beneath his feet and he seemed to sink like one of those explorers in those Tarzan movies who step in quick sand.
I know that it is an ant lion that’s been lying there under the dirt all this time just waiting for an ant to come along. Now it’s got him, reaching out with a pair of long st
rong ant chomping jaws that are part arm and part teeth and he is sucking him right down to the bottom of its pit to where he will suck him dry and chew what’s left.
Lucky ant.
*
Which brings me right back to where I shouldn’t have been, when I did what I did what got me into all of this.
By this time I’d got back from pretending to go to the pee hole, and little Jenny had fallen asleep on my right arm, holding onto my right hand. She’d been like this for nearly an hour and my arm was beginning to get that pins and needles feeling that always feels as if there are a half a thousand fire ants crawling underneath your skin, nibbling away at your nerve endings with their burning little nips; and my arm pits were getting sticky from the heat.
On top of that she’d begun to drool. Stinking kid drool, puddling up stickily about the hairs on my right forearm.
So I ask you, what man in his right mind can put up with this kind of abuse? I figured I had to do something about it.
That’s when I thought of something funny.
Something so god damned funny I still ain’t laughing over it.
I reached over with my left hand and gently, oh so gently reached over to little Jenny’s arm and slid it loose from my right hand.
Then gently, oh so gently, I hoisted her hand up until it was almost touching the little thalidomide freak’s left handlet.
If his hands hadn’t been growing out of his shoulders I never would have managed the trick, but they were, and there I was.
Wait’ll she wakes up holding hands with this, I thought.
That’d teach her to put my arm to sleep.
The funny thing was as I got closer to touching their two hands together, Jenny’s and the little freakazoid’s, it seemed to get easier, like somebody was helping me. I felt this strange kind of magnetic pull. Like when you put your hand in a fast flowing creek and the current pushes at your flesh until you can feel your skin flapping against your bones and such.
And then the hands touched, and the little thalidomide freakazoid began to move.
Not move like get up and walk, not move like cough or sneeze or wriggle. He just sort of slimed up along the seat, somehow stretching himself out and up and along little Jenny’s hand.
Her eyes flew open.
I could hear panic fluttering in her chest like one of those big old Luna moths that you sometimes see on a hot summer night, flapping crazily against the window pane.
And all this time he kept on moving.
Have you ever seen an amoeba feed?
That was how it was with the two of them, little Jenny and that god damned freak, him oozing his body up over hers, from his shoulders on down, somehow sucking her in to him, like he was some kind of a human jelly fish.
At the same time that it was sucking on to little Jenny, its head and arms kept pushing out, like there was something inside that big fat pink slug trying to climb up and out and over her. It was like drowning in a dream, it happened real slow and real fast, both at the same time.
First I was there, staring at this pink thing sucking little Jenny in.
Then Jenny found breath enough for one short sharp scream, that stopped all of a sudden like somebody had slammed a door.
Then Jenny was gone.
The next thing I saw was this little man that crawled out of the sucking pink thing while it was pulling little Jenny in. He looked like a scared to death life insurance salesman or something. He had that look about him you understand, only he was sitting there without any pants on, like he’d just come out of a burning building and hadn’t had time to dress.
Then everything was back the way it was, only instead of his original face it’s little Jenny’s hands and head that are just barely poking out of that pink sucking thing’s body, right around where its shoulder meat ought to be.
At the last instant Brenda shouted “My God Harry, pull her out”.
If I had been thinking I wouldn’t have done any such thing, but right then all I could think of were those seven or eight kinds of zeroes vanishing in hospital bills and court costs and the jaws of life and god knows what else, and Brenda being so angry with me that she wouldn’t marry me if I were the last man on earth except for that pink sucky thing, and then I reached out and grabbed little Jenny’s hand, figuring I’d pull her out.
It was the last stupid thing I did on earth.
Do you remember a game we used to play when we were kids, called sticky tag? Whoever was It would do his best to nab somebody, and then like those two convicts in that old movie they’d be handcuffed together where ever they touched and the two of them were It, and then they had to try and catch the next person, all the time hanging on to each other’s hand.
Well that’s how it was.
I grabbed little Jenny and tried to pull, but it was too late. She was gone, and I couldn’t pull loose of her hand even when I tried to, and that sticky pink slug thing kept reaching its body out around me, reaching and reaching and pulling me in.
“Help!” I yelled.
Only nobody was helping on account of that scared to death life insurance salesman kept yelling, “Don’t touch him! Don’t nobody touch him!”
So nobody touched me.
Well to hell with all of them, I thought, there’s no way this little Indian gum rubber man was going to suck me in.
I kicked, and my foot started sinking.
“Don’t struggle!!” somebody shouted, but by then it was too late. I was pretzelled up like your grandmother’s folding chairs that have been stored underneath three steamer trunks up in her back attic, in back of a thousand photo albums and a half a ton of cob webs.
Next thing I know my face is going under. I can smell the pink freak’s body, it reeks of sweaty gym socks and horse piss and that flat pink bubblegum that you used to get with baseball cards. And then I am inside him and I try not to breathe but it’s no use. What ever he is made out of I can feel sucking into every pore of my body.
The ext thing I know I’m staring out at little Jenny. She’s sitting next to me on the seat, right beside that scared pantless life insurance salesman. They’re both staring at me. I try to say something. My mouth feels like it’s stuck full of a thousand wads of chewing gum and I can’t scream.
Then the bus screeches to a halt on the side of the road. I hear the bus driver clomping down here, only I’m too busy trying to wobble to my feet to get a good look at Brenda’s face. She’s standing there hanging on to Jenny, so she must have reached around me and picked her up while I was trying to stand.
I try and say “Help” only the sticky chewing gum feeling in my mouth won’t let me speak. I try to make my eyes say help but they’ve gone yellow and all I can say with them is being poured through a sheet of sticky piss stained cellophane.
“What’s going on here?” the bus driver asks. “Is this freak causing any trouble?”
I try to turn around to look at him, but moving this great ungainly shape is a little like trying to walk around inside a bowl of puke pink jello.
So instead of looking at the bus driver I’m looking at Brenda when she says “This flipper handed son of a bitch tried to molest my little daughter, and I think he raped the hell out of this poor man as well.”
And she’s pointing at the scared to death life insurance salesman, who must have caught on to what she was up to, because he’s nodding his head up and down like one of those stuffed puppies that you see in the back of old Oldsmobiles.
The hell of it was, all this time while she’s pointing at me she’s staring with a look that I think she might have been wearing when she ran old Harry down. The kind of look you might wear while you’re stomping on a big old nasty bug.
By this time I’ve wobbled around to face the bus driver. He’s a wide bodied old boy who probably played front tackle for his high school football team, and he’s just dying to relive old times.
Good, I think. Grab me and I’ll suck you in like a chigger through a straw in a windstorm.
“Don’t touch him,” Brenda yells. “Do you want to catch Aids or something?”
Now she’s definitely wearing that look, and from the way I see her hanging on to little Jenny, I don’t think Brenda is going to miss me at all. I wonder if things would be different if there were some way I could offer her the ring.
When Brenda said Aids she said the magic word because I felt the bus shift from the weight of everybody, bus driver included, taking two quick steps back but Momma Jones didn’t raise any fools. I just sat back down as quickly as I could manage to. Just let them try and move me.
Tar baby sit, don’t say nothing.
Only next thing you know I’m staring down the barrel of a pistol that makes Dirty Harry’s magnum look like a pissant. I am talking big iron, the kind of gun that makes you feel like you’re staring down a double sized sewer pipe. The sewer pipe cannon was held by the bus driver who jerks a thumb in the direction of the door.
I don’t even know if that horse sized hawg leg can hurt this pink blob I’m stuck in, but I’ve got a plan and I figure I’ll take my chances with it.
So before he even gets a chance to say the word “Out”, I’m heading for the door.
Like I said, I’ve got a plan.
Just as I reach the door, and he leans over to work the crank to open the door, I bend over and grab at his hand with my finger tips, hoping to suck him in instead of me, only when I do he doesn’t switch.
I guess it doesn’t work that way.
He has to touch me, not the other way around.
Then I hear something real close and real loud. The gun in his other hand goes off. The bullet slams in to the top of my head that’s bent over so my hand could touch his.
The next thing I know I’m flat on my thalidomised butt on the side of a Texas highway in my brand new big pink jelly booger body bag and the only barrel I’m staring down is that bus’s exhaust pipe chuggering off in to the distance.
Which brings me around to where I started.
Sitting here on the side of the road.
