The Good Humor Man

by Andrew Fox

“Hud?” Trotmann chuckles. “He’s not feeble-minded. Not at all. But he knows which side his bread’s buttered on.”

  A loud, wet popping sound rises from the pit. The fat is beginning to bubble. Waves of shimmering warmth, visible in the dusty air, envelop my knees. The doors at the back of the auditorium open. About a dozen women file in. My only chance for survival is if Margo is among them. It’s hard to see — but that tall one, it’s got to be — Yes. It’s her.

  She stops walking. Our eyes lock. I can’t read her face. For a half-second, my stomach plunges — was she Trotmann’s confederate all along?

  But her body language is easier to read. She visibly stiffens, then looks quickly from side to side, sizing up my predicament. She must’ve realized something was amiss. She lets the women behind her in the aisle pass her.

  Margo, please be as clever and cunning as I think you are. She backs toward the entrance, her body still stiff. Then she swivels and slips through the partly open doors.

  She’s plotting my rescue.

  Or she’s panicked and can’t bear to watch me die.

  Be brave, Margo. Be cunning. Be loyal.

  To me.

  White smoke rises from the pit. A carbonized bacon stench hits my nose as some of the fat at the bottom begins burning. The women climb the ramp to the circular deck. Do they have any idea what’s going on? They stare at me like I’m a squid in a tank, then glance nervously, questioningly at one another.

  The deck quivers as the man who claims to be Hud Walterson ascends the ramp and stands next to Trotmann. We form a rough triangle atop the circle of the deck — the women at one corner; Trotmann and “Hud” to my left; and me facing both the Elvis and the doors.

  “Today is a great day!” Trotmann announces. “Great are the workings of Heaven and the surprise blessings they bring! I know you all are wondering why I’ve called you back so soon after our service earlier tonight. Wondering why the cleansing fires have been lit when the Day of Joyful Banishment is still two months away.”

  He points at me. “There is your answer! The Anti-Elvis himself has been delivered into our power! That man is Louis Shmalzberg, son of Walter Shmalzberg… yes, the wicked Reductionist who tricked Elvis and then slew our blessed forefather with his poisoned cannula. The son has proven his own wickedness. He was caught in the blasphemous act of stealing the holy remains. He was prevented from carrying out this heinous deed by our blessed Exemplar, Hud Walterson. And very soon, in a display of Heaven’s righteous vengeance, Hud will cast this Anti-Elvis into the cleansing fires.

  “Hud, your followers call upon you to smite thy enemy in thy righteous rage!”

  I search the faces of the women. Two wear expressions of thrilled anticipation. The others appear acutely uncomfortable; one is pale white and trembling. But peer pressure, the herd instinct, will keep any of them from intervening.

  The popping in the pit grows louder. The lumpy giant walks slowly toward me. I’ve got to buy time for whatever Margo is planning. If she’s planning anything… “Hud, you don’t want to do this,” I say. “Listen — you’re no murderer. I remember you from your first incarnation. You were a sweet, gentle man. A man who went out of his way not to harm anyone —”

  “The words of the Anti-Elvis are honeyed and smooth,” Trotmann says. “But they drip poison.”

  The giant doesn’t seem to hear his master. He stops and stares at me, his beautiful eyes full of a hope he’s almost afraid to express. “You… you knew my father-mother?”

  “Hud, be quiet!” Trotmann barks. “Do your duty!”

  Father-mother? I have no idea what that means, but it’s a lifeline I eagerly grab. “Yes, I knew him, I knew your father-mother,” I say. “He devoted his life to other people’s welfare. All the fast food restaurants and factories he burned, he burned them after hours, when no one would be trapped. The only man he ever killed was himself”.

  “So he was a good man? A good man?”

  “Hud, shut up!” I hear Trotmann’s cane break on the giant’s back.

  “Yes, he was a good man, he inspired the whole country; he inspired me. Maybe some of the things we’ve done in his name have gone too far. But that wasn’t his fault. He was a good man, who sacrificed himself for other people, people he didn’t even know. He wasn’t a murderer. Do you understand, Hud? He wasn’t a murderer. And you aren’t a murderer.”

  “Hud, goddamn it, PUSH HIM IN!”

  A shroud of peacefulness descends on the giant’s tortured face. “My name… my name is Benjamin,” he says. “Benjamin Walterson. Not Hud. Benjamin.” He steps, not toward me, but toward the edge of the pit. What —?

  A sharp blast, painfully loud. Flecks of plaster — from the ceiling? — hit me in the head. The door in the back. It’s open. A second blast. Gunfire. Trotmann screams. Some of the women scream.

  Benjamin, face blissful, totters on the edge of the pit, then falls forward in slow-motion like a dynamited obelisk.

  The lights go out.

  Benjamin hits the bottom of the pit. The sound is like rubber slapping jelly. Specks of boiling fat hit my legs, my chest. I shout in pain, but Benjamin — there’s not a sound from him, no crying out in his agonizing death.

  Another shot hits the ceiling, raining plaster. This third shot frees the women from paralyzing shock. Their shoes beat a panicked rhythm on the deck as they run for the ramp.

  I hear Trotmann moaning. Then I hear someone bounding up the ramp. I hear her tight, excited breathing and feel her presence behind me.

  “Don’t move your hands,” Margo says, “or you might lose them.”

  She clicks on a flashlight, which casts my elongated shadow across the deck, the pit, and Trotmann, writhing in a small but spreading pool of blood that leaks from his shoulder. My shadow touches the Elvis, which gleams, jewel-like, in the flashlight’s beam.

  I feel a sudden heat at my wrists; Margo is using my hand laser to cut the ropes. “Did you shoot Benjamin?” I ask. I feel guilty asking her this. But I have to know.

  “Shoot who?”

  “The giant. Hud.”

  “No. I shot the ceiling twice. I shot Dr. Trotmann. But I didn’t shoot Hud. He jumped, didn’t he? Or fell. Horrible way to die. I’m glad it didn’t happen to you.”

  He jumped. But why? Did he sacrifice himself to save me, emulating the real Hud’s death?

  I’m suddenly able to move my hands. “There,” Margo says, a fierce satisfaction in her voice. “I’ll have your feet free in a minute. Thank God I found your things in time.”

  She’s saved my life. How do you thank someone for that? “You saved me, Margo. You came back. I don’t know what to say, except… thank you.”

  “You’re my Reductionist,” she says quietly.

  The ropes grow slack around my feet. I take the flashlight and shine it into the pit. Benjamin’s body, face down, covers the bottom like a huge plug. His only movements are involuntary shudders and ripples, caused by the pent-up fury of the boiling fat beneath him. There’s nothing to do for him now. Except remember him.

  His veneration of the Elvis gives me one more reason to do something healing and hopeful and miraculous with it. I step over Trotmann’s writhing body to reach the relic I’ve crossed the country to reclaim. His eyes, squeezed shut with pain, snap open. His good arm moves like a striking rattlesnake, and his hand clutches my ankle. “Not… yours,” he says. “We’ll regroup. Hunt you down like a dog.”

  His wound doesn’t look too serious; as best as I can tell, the bullet exited his shoulder cleanly, just beneath the collarbone. Still, the loss of blood could plunge him into shock. “Tell me who Benjamin was,” I say. “Tell me, and I’ll take you to a hospital.”

  His eyes narrow. “Fuh… fuck you. Not telling you a… goddamn thing, you son-of-shit.”

  I yank my ankle loose, then stomp that grasping hand as hard as I can. The hand that’s guided his terrible cannula, that’s violated Margo.

  Then I turn away, blocking out his cries, ash
amed that I’ve let him push me into striking a ninety-five-year-old lying in a pool of his own blood. The shame only lasts a few seconds, though. Because the Elvis is waiting.

  Margo, who went the other way around the pit, reaches it first. She kneels down and picks up the engraved jar. She’s beautiful… a priestess returning a lost relic to its rightful place in the order of creation.

  “Here,” she says, handing it to me. “This is yours.”

  Mine. Mine again, after twenty-seven years and more strangeness than I thought possible. I grasp the jar, sensing the etchings of Elvis’s image with my bruised fingertips. Feeling the weight of those eleven pounds of him.

  Margo stares at me expectantly. I wait for something to happen, some bolt of lightning to crash through the ceiling and transform me. Elvis adored the adventures of Captain Marvel Jr.

  No lightning bolt strikes. I’m not transformed in the slightest. God help me, this isn’t the finish line. Because now I’m forced to answer the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question:

  What do I do next?

  PART III

  Viva Lost Vegas

  CHAPTER 15

  The equipment in this lab I’ve rented is top-notch. I’m about to uncloak a mystery: which drugs were in Elvis’s system during his last week on earth. The jar containing the Elvis is inside an isolation box, sheltered from dust, pollen, even air. I begin opening it, slowly, with thickly gloved hands, my arms encased in plastic sheathes built into the sides of the box. Margo, wearing a starched white lab coat, watches wide-eyed from atop a stool, her expression a mix of anxiousness and trust.

  Two days have passed since I recovered the Elvis. My physician’s credentials and the Ottoman’s money have proven indispensable again. We’ve rented this lab from the University of South Florida’s biochemistry department.

  Nearly have it open now… exasperating, having to work within these constraints, almost like making love while wearing a suit of armor. The last seal finally comes loose. I pick up a long-handled sample extractor from the floor of the isolation box, cut a tiny piece of the fat, and place it in an examination dish. Then I scrape away about half a gram of the stomach contents, distinguishable from the fat by its different texture and blood-red color, and set that in a separate dish.

  “How long will the analysis take?” Margo asks.

  I extricate my arms from the long gloves. “I’m not sure, really.” I dab sweat off my forehead with a sterile wipe. “The fat may not reveal as much as the sampling of the stomach contents will. The pharmaceuticals that’ll show up in the fat are those drugs that he’d been taking long-term, at least the ones that were fat-soluble. The stomach contents should reveal what he’d taken the morning of the operation or the night before. With a habitual opiate user, digestion is slowed, so not all the pills he took would have dissolved before the operation.”

  My own stomach rumbles. I haven’t eaten since—when? Yesterday? Didn’t American Indians deprive themselves of food and water before a vision quest? That’s what I’ve embarked upon: a vision quest to decipher the messages buried within the Elvis.

  I’ve got to find out what I’m supposed to do now. I’d hoped listening to his recordings would make it clear. Over the past two days, I’ve spent hours inside my car, listening to those old CDs over and over. But I’ve got to go deeper. I’ve got to penetrate the Elvis itself, force it to tell me how to simulate the man’s state of mind.

  I must achieve Elvis consciousness.

  The more sensationalistic biographies have claimed that as many as fourteen different controlled substances were detected within Elvis’s corpse. Soon I’ll know exactly what was in his system the morning Elvis offered himself to my father’s cannula. I carry the fat sample across the room to the chemical analysis unit. I place the tiny glass dish on the sample-holder tray; it’s like putting a scrap of unicorn meat on the extended black tongue of a dragon, who promises me knowledge of my future in exchange for this rare delicacy. I select the most coarse level of analysis, not wanting the computers to break down complex compounds into their more basic elements. I also request that the printout list the non-organic, pharmaceutical compounds at the top.

  By the end of the day, I’ll have the components for an Elvis cocktail. A moveable feast that will help attune my thoughts to his. So that when I partake of it in the proper place, his message to me will thrill the air like the strummed chords of a Stratocaster.

  We reach Orlando at dusk. Our trip was uneventful, except for the few sweat-inducing moments when I spotted a familiar-looking black sedan behind us on the highway. It trailed us by a quarter-mile for a few minutes, before we turned off for a recharge and some liquid fuel. When we returned to the road, the black sedan was gone.

  I check us into the Castle Towers Hotel, where we register as Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Garon. The hotel is located in the heart of what was once Walt Disney World, now MannaSantos’s Worlds of Wonder. One of the questionable “improvements” MannaSantos made to the Magic Kingdom was to build this circle of medium-rise hotels around Cinderella’s Castle. The newer buildings resemble nothing so much as a row of public housing blocks in Soviet-era Moscow.

  Late this afternoon, we purchased the components for my cocktail at the university pharmacy in Tampa. Not surprisingly, the recipe turned out to be complicated. Its base is downers: ethchlorvynol, brand name Placidyl, a sleeping pill, and secobarbital, Seconal, a barbiturate known among the abusing community as the “red devil.” Flavor is provided by two types of opiate pain pills: little yellow Percodans, and hydromorphone (Dilaudid), a narcotic seven times stronger than morphine. The cocktail will get its fizz from little heart-shaped “dexies,” Dexedrine, the orange-colored upper that perversely looks just like Valentine’s Day candy.

  My vision quest will take place in the park. Not in a desert sweat-lodge, and not on a mountaintop. I’ve thought this through very carefully. Elvis was the quintessential American. At its pinnacle, America was an amusement park, the dream factory for much of the rest of the world. And this place was the nation’s greatest amusement park. Elvis loved amusement parks. He rented out Libertyland in Memphis several nights a year for his exclusive enjoyment. Without a doubt, he spent many of those nocturnal joy splurges stoned out of his mind.

  I can’t say I’m unafraid of what I plan to do tomorrow morning. I’d hoped crawling into bed next to Margo would help take my mind off tomorrow’s dangers, but I can’t make myself relax into sleep. It seems like a lifetime since I’ve lain in a bed next to a woman. Although it’s hard for me to think of Margo as a woman, per se. She’s so coltish, so girlish; so… unfinished. My arm is around her, cradling that place where a mature woman’s breasts would be.

  Margo was open to more than just sharing warmth. Even after all those years alone, I could tell that. Maybe with someone else, she wouldn’t have hesitated being the aggressor. But she hung back, waiting for me to make my intentions fully clear, both to her and to myself.

  I feel her stir. “Are you awake?” she asks, voice husky and indistinct.

  “I haven’t been able to fall asleep yet. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine. I’m hardly sore, even when the pain pills wear off. You do good work.”

  “Thank you.” She shifts, pressing more closely against me. “Have you been able to sleep?” I ask.

  “I’ve been thinking stuff, and then maybe I drift off for a while… but whatever I dream is just a continuation of what I’ve been thinking about. So I’m never sure whether I’m awake or asleep.”

  “What have you been thinking about?”

  I feel her back stiffen. “My father. I’ve been thinking about him a lot the past couple of days.” Not so surprising, that. Her father’s probably about my vintage. I may remind her of him in a hundred different ways; the scent of my aftershave, the topographical maps age has created on my face and the backs of my hands. “He taught me how to use a gun.”

  “Really? I was surprised you were able to handle my gun the way you did
. I probably would’ve shot my own foot off.”

  “Yeah. Well, my father used to take me to the firing range pretty regularly. I shot off revolvers, automatics, deer rifles, the works. All while wearing these frilly dresses, little girl dresses like you’d wear to First Communion or a fancy birthday party. That was my whole wardrobe, pouffy little-girl dresses, hair ribbons, shiny white leather buckle-top shoes. When my mother couldn’t buy the dresses in my size anymore, she started sewing them for me. I never owned a pair of jeans until I left home, when I was twenty-three. Six years ago.”

  She stops talking for a while. “Is your father still alive?” I ask.

  “Yes.” Pause. “As far as I know.”

  “You don’t talk with him?”

  “He and my mom split about a year after I left.” She rolls out of my grasp, then turns to look at me. The lights of Cinderella’s Castle, diffused through translucent pink drapes, barely illuminate the chiseled contours of her face. “I was the glue holding them together, I think,” she says with a quiet edge of bitterness. “They didn’t want me to ever leave. They wouldn’t pay for college unless I went to Mount Carmel and lived at home. I hated it. When I finally got the balls to make a break for it, it was like I let all the air out of their marriage. And them, too.”

  I reach for her hand. “It wasn’t your fault, Margo.”

  “I used to beg my mother to have another baby. So all their attention wouldn’t be on just me. It’s not like we were poor. But they always said they couldn’t afford a brother or sister for me. So I was their everything. The baby doll. The son he took target shooting.”

  “I was an only child, too,” I say. Didn’t my own father try to bend me into the shape he’d planned for me? And didn’t he mostly succeed? But at least he didn’t specify my genetic characteristics prior to handing his sperm over to a technician. “You were right to leave.”

  She seems to relax some. “I was wondering something,” she says. ‘Are you afraid? About tomorrow?”