Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  I wasn’t quite prepared to talk about my stepsister yet. It seemed somehow indecent to bring her name up as I watched a stripper, especially in the context of whether or not she’d date—and obviously the real intention was sleep with—my lawyer. The whole thing felt inappropriate, bordering on the incestuous, like watching your aunt undress or something.

  I cleared my throat and replied nonchalantly, “She’s been working a lot of overtime lately. And I’ve been studying for finals and writing papers.” Actually, Caitlin was working overtime to pay the rent I hadn’t been chipping in on.

  Darrin chewed his lip. “I see.”

  I resented him bringing it up. I decided to turn the tables on him. “How’s my case going?”

  “It’s in progress,” he said, taking a quick chug of suds. “Judy had to take a leave of absence, so I’ve been a little behind. I’ll get to it soon.”

  That didn’t sound like progress to me. There was an awkward silence. Neither of us was happy with the answers to our questions.

  Candy danced closer. She stood before us, shaking her ass practically in our faces. She seemed to notice I was trying to read her tattoo. She turned slowly in a pirouette on one foot to accommodate me.

  No more words. I bury the dead in my belly. Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance, dance!

  I recognized that. It was by Arthur Rimbaud. We’d read his work in English lit. “‘A Season in Hell.’ Cool,” I told her.

  Candy looked surprised and then graced me with a beatific smile. Sometimes it was good to be a college boy.

  Then she turned again and began tugging on her G-string. Back to business.

  Darrin stepped up to the platform. She moved even closer to the end of the makeshift stage. He held two twenties in front of her, then stuck the bill and his hand completely inside her thong. He let his fingers linger inside for a few moments before taking them out.

  In most Dallas strip clubs, if you seemed to be groping a dancer, you’d get thrown out snap quick. But Darrin was a regular, and apparently Candy was shrugging it off. Business was slow this time of day, and it was still some quick cash.

  She then gave me a look like: you’re next.

  I reached into my pocket. All I had left from taking Monster to Gramps were a ten and a twenty. My food money for the rest of the week.

  I walked to the side of the stage, holding out the two bills as she stood right in front of me. I was going to just fold them into the side of her G-string. But I caught sight of that black car tattoo, driving like a hearse out of her pubic hair. Might have been a Cadillac. Might have been a Barracuda.

  My hand slid into her G-string without my willing it. I was mortified, so embarrassed I was sure my face would explode with shame. What could have made me do that? Correction: What could have made my hand do that? My fingers brushed no pubic thatch. She was completely shaved.

  Darrin handed me another twenty and nudged me. I gave Candy the bill, and she stuffed it with the rest of her money. She turned around so her back was to the bouncer. She pulled the G-string to her knees and slid my finger inside her. She was wet. “Oh, that’s good,” she softly moaned.

  Without willing myself to speak, I quoted another line from the same poem she had tattooed around her waist. “‘Hunger, thirst, shouts, dance, dance, dance, dance!’”

  I’d been half-asleep in that class, because it was so early in the morning. I couldn’t believe I’d memorized anything.

  Candy put on her G-string again and smiled. Her smile was atomic. She gave me a wink and asked, “Do you guys want a lap dance? We can give the bouncer a couple of ten spots, and he’ll go outside and make sure we’re not disturbed. I don’t even have to wear this G-string.”

  Darrin grinned, nodding.

  “I gotta go,” I said as I stood up. I could feel her dampness on my fingertips. I could smell her. And I imagined I saw that damned black car tattoo driving upward across her skin, bouncing in the pothole of her navel, splashing dark red water, continuing on until it was between her breasts.

  Darrin stared at me as if I were crazy. “But this is the good part. They don’t usually do lap dances in the afternoon like this.” He lowered his voice and added, “Are you nuts? She obviously likes you. And she’s willing to dance nude. That never happens.”

  I shook my head. The smell of her was a combination of red clay and motor oil. It was making me nauseous.

  “Well, try to get Cait to go out with me.” Darrin took another swig of his beer. “I’ll make those phone calls in the next couple of weeks.”

  I waved limply as I headed for the door. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”

  I felt better once I was out in the air. Before heading home, I pulled into a 7-Eleven and bought a can of Pepsi. The beer had somehow left me parched. My mouth had been sore, tongue swollen as if I’d been sipping sump water. Could the beer have been skunky?

  Maybe the bartender had slipped us some cheap beer. Maybe that’s what he always gave Darrin, and the lawyer just didn’t know the difference.

  By the time I got to the apartment, the can was empty. I was going to crush it in my hands, as I’d seen Gramps do with his Mountain Dew container. Not that such an achievement was particularly manly. The aluminum they used to make the cans was the tissue paper of metals. But thinking of how he’d used it to punctuate his comment about the state of cars in accidents made me shudder. So I started to toss the can into the trash and heard rattling inside.

  I held the can upside down over the counter.

  Out fell a tooth.

  At first, I was completely grossed out, ready to vomit, thinking maybe some factory worker with gum disease had lost a tooth while making the soda. I mean, I’d heard the urban legends about rat fetuses being found in bottles and roach colonies discovered cooked into candy bars.

  I examined the tooth closer. It had a filling.

  Was it possible this was my own tooth? Somehow that was an even worse notion than having sucked at a soda tainted with the backwash saliva and black tooth decay of some butt-scratching line worker at the bottling factory.

  I stuck my finger between my lips and began feeling around my teeth. Sure enough, the upper molar in the right corner of my mouth was missing. There was a definite hollow there, healed up and everything. My finger didn’t have any blood on it.

  That was odd. I hadn’t felt the tooth come out. There had been no soreness, no plop, no after ooze. It didn’t appear to be rotten or cracked, and that’s what disturbed me most. It resembled nothing less than a healthy tooth that should have been years away from falling out.

  But the fact was, it was now on the counter. Not in my mouth.

  I picked up the tooth and dropped it into the trash.

  PART THREE

  ROAD RAGE

  HOSTILE TAKEOVER

  as much a predator as fire

  but darker quieter more mysterious

  slithering like blind serpent

  into the passageways of your brain

  slough off sharp scales

  to cover eyes ears mouth nose fingers

  venomous sting of despair

  black liquid of despondency

  seeping slowly with inexorable pressure

  into the crevices and convolutions

  of the diseased and porous mind

  out of the damp well of depression

  oozing to freeze the throat and tongue

  for who sings with a mouthful of sorrow

  —Jacie Ragan

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ZOMBIE CHURCH

  I was in the Land of the Dead. Been there, done that. And about to do it again.

  Fidgeting, I sat in a back pew at the Lazarus Heart Cathedral. Sitting next to me was Fiona Bloom, the zombie dancer I’d met the last time. She was wearing a white wedding dress that she’d dyed jet-black. A matching black veil covered her blue-skinned face. She looked as if she were attending a funeral rather than a wedding. Her cold hands were clasped in mine.

  I scanned the d
ark church. There were no overhead lights, just candles burning everywhere, guttering in sconces and providing sour-milk pools of sickly glow around candleholders. I was glad they hadn’t done a better job of illuminating the place.

  There was also an abundant amount of incense lit, narrow trails of smoke falling instead of rising the way such smoke did in the Land of the Living. No ascension among the corpses. The smoke slipped down, running like gray serpents to the carpet, tangling on the unseen floor until it resembled a snake pit. I wanted to pull my legs up onto the pew with the rest of me rather than watch—and feel—those tendrils writhe around my ankles. And the incense didn’t help cover the rotting odor of the decomposing zombies who sat around me.

  But even so, the incense was cloying. Heavyish. I coughed as politely as I could. What was in that stuff? It sure wasn’t frankincense or sandalwood; that was for sure. It reminded me of moldy onions.

  In the center of the room hung a giant, inverted bronze cross. But instead of a statue representing the crucifixion of Jesus, an actual naked human hung there, nailed with spikes through wrists and ankles. A crown of twisted bronze tenpenny nails adorned his scalp. I noted with a shudder that his body was studded with miniature spikes, as if they were some sort of extreme nod to body piercing. Minispikes protruded in a horizontal line across his chest, bisecting both nipples. There was a vertical line of spikes that began between the eyes and ran up through the nose and chin, across the horizontal line, and then right through the navel, ending at his scrotum.

  It took me a few seconds to see that this was a sadistic connect the dots in the form of another cross.

  At first I thought, Wow, performance art from beyond the grave. Gotta hand it to this guy. He certainly had it all over those folks who just hoisted big wooden crosses onto their backs at Easter. Then I noticed he had something stuffed in his mouth to prevent him from screaming, and he was trying in vain to break free, weakly pulling with his wrists to jerk out the nails.

  A thin, ropy tail popped out from between his lips. The thing stuffed in his mouth was a rat.

  Bright red blood seeped from every spike puncture.

  It then occurred to me. Wait a minute. This was the Land of the Dead. ’Scuse me but that man was alive. Not necessarily for long at this rate, but up until that point, I hadn’t seen any other breathers but me.

  He managed to pull one flailing arm free. Sweat and blood sprayed in an arc across the seated congregation. A bony deacon jumped up, ran down a hall, then came back dragging a stepladder and a rusty, battered tool kit. I hadn’t realized that the dead were into home improvement. The deacon set the stepladder by the cross and climbed up with great determination. He grabbed the victim’s wrist and used a mallet to pound in another spike.

  The poor man tried to scream but couldn’t make any sound other than Mwhmwwhmwhphhh with every fall of the hammer.

  I cringed, sure I was going to wet myself. Fiona squeezed my fingers and gave me what appeared to be a reassuring rictus behind her veil.

  The victim’s head thrashed left and right as he struggled to breathe.

  What am I doing? I thought. Shouldn’t I get up and try to help this guy?

  As the pressure on my fingers grew even stronger, I understood that Fiona wasn’t just giving me sympathy. She was holding me back from doing anything to upset the service.

  I could see from the bulge in his throat that the breather had actually swallowed the rat—or else it had crawled farther in—and he was a breather no longer.

  Fiona whispered in my ear, “Blessed be the dead.”

  I looked away, not wanting to linger on the sight of this man murdered in the center of the cathedral.

  Gazing in another direction, I caught sight of the church’s far corner. The confessional booths were replaced with dungeon-style iron maidens. They were tightly shut, with metal spikes thrust solidly into sinners’ faces—and other places, too, I’m sure—but only the faces were visible from the little barred windows at the top. These reprobates were learning the meaning of “blind faith” the hard way. I stared at one who seemed to be looking at me, with black iron spike heads protruding from his sockets.

  “Tua culpa,” Fiona murmured. “Tua maxima culpa.”

  Her rough fingertips caressed mine, and I was nauseated to realize that her tender gesture actually made me feel a little better. Maybe she would protect me if they decided to spice up the ceremony with another breather sacrifice.

  Father Rexroth, the zombie priest, walked up to the pulpit. He was tall but as bent as the reaper’s sickle. His curved posture was also stiff with rigor mortis, and his face was gruesome—way too many teeth. It was nothing more than a bucktoothed skull covered with moldy pink slime and green-flecked gore. Not a good color combination to show off basic black.

  On both sides of the padre were zombie altar boys. Cockroaches were playing tidbit tag along the gums of one. Atop the other, a rat had given birth to furless little rat babies in the nest of the hair and was proceeding to devour them.

  The corpse-cleric picked up the Bible from his pulpit. Black blood poured out of the Holy Scriptures when he opened the book. This cadaver clergyman cleared his throat. He started hacking as if his lungs were on fire. His whole frame rattled, and he doubled over even more than he already was. If he bent anymore, he’d have been able to pick his yellowed toenails with his teeth.

  The ratchety noise he made caused bile to skitter up my throat.

  Eventually a swarm of maggots cascaded from his mouth. He brushed a few stragglers away, then scraped the last one off the back of his tongue, wiping it on his surplice.

  “That’s better,” Father Rexroth said, grinning at his congregation. He saw a maggot squirming on the open Bible and flicked it away. It landed in the hair of the second altar boy and was quickly snatched up and eaten by the mother rat. “The Bible is filled with references to the dead. You could even say the dead were the stars of the book. And there is no denying its tales are often set in the valley of the shadow of death.”

  He flipped through the pages. “In the first book of Samuel 28:3, for example, it says, ‘Now Samuel had died, and all Israel had lamented for him and buried him in Ramah, in his own city.’” He turned a few more pages. “And here’s another in the Old Testament. ‘So the Lord sent a plague on Israel, and seventy thousand men of Israel fell dead.’ First Chronicles 21:14.”

  Father Rexroth flipped through faster, giggling. “And here in Numbers 23:10. ‘Let me die the death . . .’ And again in Job 7:15. ‘So that I prefer strangling and death, rather than this body of mine.’ And, oh. Here in Proverbs 8:36 it says, ‘ . . . love death . . .’

  More pages turned, sticking slightly to his gummy fingertips. “Let’s go to the New Testament, which is almost entirely about death since it leads up to the murder of its main character. This from Matthew 8:22. ‘But Jesus told him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”’”

  He gazed at the churchgoers, and I didn’t know if it was the reflected flickering of the candles or if his eyes were actually twinkling. He paused as the congregation broke out into loud applause.

  When the audience had quieted down, the grotesque ecclesiastic continued. “This one is purely for comic relief: ‘He replied, “Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather.”’ Luke 17:37.

  “Here’s a whole string of ’em:

  “‘ . . . such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.’ Romans 1:32.

  “‘ . . . united with him in a death like his . . .’ Romans 6:5.

  “‘Because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.’ Romans 6:7.

  “‘ . . . raised from the dead, he cannot die again . . .’ Romans 6:9.

  “‘Did that which is good, then, become death to me?’ Romans 7:13.

  “‘ . . . For your sake we face death all day long . . .’ Romans 8:36.

  “Well, these Romans surely knew a thing or two,
didn’t they?”

  I thought I heard several murmur, “Amen” and “Hallelujah.” But upon listening more closely, I realized it was really, “Toga.”

  “When in Rome, Father.”

  “And now a last one,” the priest promised. “It’s from the first book of Corinthians 15:55. ‘Where, O death, is your sting?’”

  Some joker cried out, “I got your sting right here, baby.”

  Laughter broke out all through the cathedral. I watched Fiona seemingly bend double with laughter, then saw she was picking something from the toe of her shoe. It was a little rat baby that had somehow escaped the fate of its siblings. It was squirming hell-bent for leather toward the back of the church when it blindly found her high-heeled pump. Fiona picked it up, examined it, then stuck it under the veil and—I presumed from the crunch—ate it.

  “This concludes today’s service,” Father Rexroth said. “The altar boys will pass the collection baskets for your offerings. Deceased be with you.”

  I saw the baskets go from pew to pew. Finally there was one at mine. Inside the basket were eyes, fingers, noses, ears, hearts, livers . . . “What?”

  I was being poked in the ribs by a scowling Caitlin. The collection basket was in front of me. There weren’t any body parts or decayed organs, just envelopes, dollar bills, and checks. I quickly tossed in a couple of bucks and passed the basket along.

  “Still just a kid, aren’t you?” Caitlin remarked. “Sleeping through church.”

  I managed to chuckle weakly. “Yeah, well, most sermons are pretty much alike, aren’t they?”

  The tension eased between Caitlin and me. My doctor and Rochelle released me from the light-duty order, and I was able to be elevated to the lofty status of pizza cook. It gave me more work time and more badly needed money per hour.

  In return, I paid Cait some of the back rent. I was still two months behind, but it was better than three. My stepsister appreciated the effort and knew I was at least trying to get caught up again.