Monster Behind the Wheel

by Michael McCarty

  “But that wasn’t the end. The thing started rubbing its belly—working my friend through its guts—until eventually my friend came squirtin’ out of old batty-poo as a big pile of . . . batty pooh. That big pile of bat shit went bat shit, screaming and flopping, because even though it had been dead to begin with, now it was something even worse than dead. You better believe it. The Guardian took sand and mixed that into the shit—to give it a body—and then formed it into a sort of man shape before it flew off. And so there was my friend, more turd than flesh, doomed to eternity as a screaming shit man. In fact, I know where he is right now. Come on. Let’s go see the shit man. Or, as I like to call him, Mr. Brown.” The tin man began to march happily away.

  I didn’t have anything else to do, so I followed. I wasn’t too sure I wanted to see this doomed creature. But, after all, I was a teenage boy. Teenage boys are compelled to look at two things: nudity and gross stuff. Sometimes those two categories overlap, and I had a feeling Mr. Brown would be the worst possible mix of the two.

  Eventually we came to a cave, from which issued the most frenzied screaming you could possibly imagine. I suppose you might get that sort of sound if you threw a dozen people in a giant blender and hit puree.

  “Let’s go in,” the tin-wrapped cadaver chirped cheerfully.

  “Listen to him,” I said. “I don’t want to see anybody in that much pain.”

  “Well, I said he was a screaming shit man. What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know, but—”

  Something came out of the cave that looked like it had crawled out of somebody’s butt. It was brown and black and studded with broken bones and bits of teeth, and the surface of the nauseating thing was crawling with worms and flies and beetles. It moved toward me, screaming and flailing its rotting arms.

  I woke up screaming in a pile of horrible warmth.

  I had crapped the bed. The room stank worse than a pig shed.

  My dad was obviously shocked when he came into the room to check on me. His opinion was that I had a bad case of food poisoning. He asked me what I’d had for lunch at school, and when I told him a chicken salad sandwich, he cried, “Aha. Salmonella.” The next day, he called the school to yell at them. As a result, they never served chicken salad again, which was a pity, since that was my favorite thing on the school menu.

  If only I could have found some way to blame shitting the bed on bombardo. Then my dad could have yelled at the gym teacher and that stupid game would have been banished from the school forever.

  For about three months after that, I dreaded having to use the toilet, because every time I sat on the porcelain throne, I thought about that tortured, digested man. With time, the horror of the image faded away until at last it became comical. I could even joke about it to myself. Eventually I could go take a crap and think, Time to make a Baby Brown. When I’d flush the toilet, I’d imagine a tearful farewell. Kid, it’s time for you to leave the nest and start a life of your own. So long. Don’t forget to write.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I’M (NOT) A LOSER

  I woke up hot and sticky again. The apartment’s air conditioner still wasn’t fixed.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. Images of the young carjacker being dragged down the alley kept replaying before my eyes. Only in my dream it was worse. He left skid marks that were his intestines. Black garbage bags burst open, and a body looking like him climbed out of each one to join in a chase after Monster down the alley. Then every one of him fell apart at the seams, each section growing legs and skittering off. He threw up, and it all coagulated into vomit-topping pizzas that I had to box and deliver. I opened the driver’s side door, but instead of his leg bouncing out, it was my own head, giggling and crying and screaming.

  I stared into the bathroom mirror. I looked like shit. There were dark circles under my eyes. My complexion was sallow. But miraculously, my nose wasn’t bruised or broken. There was no crease in my head from being thumped by a pistol. I had a nervous tick at the corner of my mouth. My hair was standing straight up.

  Well, there was something I could do about my hair.

  I jumped in the shower and turned on the cold water. I lathered up my body with Safeguard and washed my hair with Head & Shoulders. I imagined all the blood and sin sluicing off me, just like it had sluiced off the Barracuda at the car wash the night before.

  I felt the water level rising.

  I rubbed the dandruff shampoo out of my eyes and looked down at the tub. It was clogged. But the stuff massing over the drain disturbed the hell out of me. It was my hair. And not just a few strands. The drain and most of the bottom of the tub were filled with my hair.

  I quickly shut off the water and jerked open the shower curtain. I leaped out of the tub, drying my head with a towel. I stepped toward the mirror, examining my scalp, making irritating little whining noises like a battered puppy.

  There were no bald spots. But it looked as if I’d just been given a haircut.

  Losing my teeth was difficult enough. But losing my hair filled me with dread.

  On top of everything, I was hungry, too.

  I had to get something to eat. I got dressed and drove to Wendy’s on Northwest Highway just west of Garland Road. I ordered a chicken cordon bleu. A bunch of kids from a softball team, all dining on Texas double cheeseburgers off the ninety-nine cent menu, sat across from me.

  I gagged and spit out three teeth.

  Great, I thought. If I lose any more teeth, I’ll have to start working for a carnival.

  There were choruses of “Gross” and “I think I’m gonna hurl.”

  I heard some brat mutter, “What a loser.”

  Another chimed in, “Yeah, well, duh. Look at him. ’Course, Frankenstein’s a loser.”

  The kids got up and moved to the other side of the restaurant.

  Naturally, most of the people in the place had already tagged me as a loser upon first sight. Looking but trying not to look. Feeling uncomfortable in my presence.

  The scars might have healed on my back and were vanishing on my legs, but the real visible stuff—the head trauma—was still very much in plain view. With the summer heat, I had to wear short sleeves or die, so that left the damage on my arms in full view, too.

  Folks couldn’t help but stare at someone like me and wonder what atrocities I’d committed in this life or a previous one to merit such divine retribution. Nobody ever really believed—their protestations to the contrary—that shit just happened, that bad things fell like grand pianos upon good people, or that it was the way of the world, blah, blah, blah.

  There was a joke that my predicament often reminded me of . . .

  Once upon a time, there was a perfect little church in a perfect little town in the center of a perfect little valley. One day, the perfect little congregation was gathered inside their perfect little church, their perfect little heads bowed, singing their perfect little hymns and being duly grateful to the most-high God for all their many wonderful blessings.

  Suddenly the doors swung open, and a horribly crippled freak staggered in on the stumps of his legs. As the perfect little parishioners gasped, he stumbled down the perfect little aisle to the perfect little altar. He raised the stumps of his arms to heaven and out of scarred and twisted lips, he cried, “Why? Why?”

  The perfect little congregation was overwhelmed with pity for this unfortunate man. With tears streaming down their perfect faces, they too raised their arms to heaven and wailed, “Why? Why?”

  The walls of the perfect little church vibrated with the question, “Why? Why?” The ground below the perfect little town rumbled with the chant, “Why? Why?” Soon the entire perfect little valley shook with the freak’s need to understand his arbitrary affliction in the midst of so much flawlessness.

  “Why? Why?” rang all the way to the pearly gates and to the Golden Throne itself.

  Dark clouds gathered in the blue sky above the perfect little town, and presently a wind rose and blew the
roof off the perfect little church. A giant hand descended from heaven, parting the clouds, pointing a mighty finger, down, down, down amidst the shocked members of the perfect little congregation.

  The finger struck the freak, mashing him against the perfect little floor. And a voice boomed like thunder: “Because some people just piss me off.”

  So sometimes I had to ask myself: Was God pissed at me?

  I didn’t used to be like this—miserable, bankrupt, a few commandments shy of a perfect ten. I had been an Eagle Scout. Yeah, that’s right. Me. I’d been a member of 4-H and had raised a bull on my stepmother’s farm, a Holstein that won a blue ribbon at the state fair. One summer I read books for a blind man in the area, and the next two summers after that, I drove a delivery vehicle for Meals On Wheels. I had played football, basketball, and baseball. I had a track and field trophy and two bowling trophies. Bowling, for chrissakes.

  I’d played guitar and was pretty damned good. I was even in a band called Second Banana, but none of us had the money or connections it would have taken for us to hit it big. Plus, location wise, we were out in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think record label talent scouts would have caught our act at any of those 4-H shows or Miss Bum-Fuck County Pork Princess pageants. Every county in that rural stretch had its own pork princess. Girls actually competed for the title, even though it sounded like a horrible nickname for a fat chick.

  I did my fifteen minutes of fame as a kid. More like five minutes, actually. In my early teens, I didn’t have any blemishes on my body at all. No scars, birthmarks, not even a single pimple. Then, when I was fifteen, I grew a mole. It was large and kind of dark beige on the side of my neck. Other kids joked, said it looked like I was trying to grow a second head. When it was about the size of a dime, somebody noticed it resembled the face of Elvis Presley.

  Word spread, and pretty soon people were traveling from miles away to see the boy who had Elvis Presley growing on the side of his neck. A few tabloids came out and took pictures. I was on the local news, which was picked up as a quirky human interest bit on the nationals. The guys with their monologues on the late-night talk shows joked about it.

  One morning we woke up to find our newly sowed field full of folks who’d come from as far away as England and Australia. They were burning candles and playing “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Heartbreak Hotel” on tape decks. All they wanted to do was bow before me and touch the toes on my dirty cowboy boots.

  My parents made an appointment that very day for me to have the mole removed. The doctor was pretty sure it wasn’t cancer, but my folks said thwack it off anyway. Why take chances? A boy never forgets his first scar.

  Right after that my dad bought me a guitar, and we discovered I had talent for playing it. It might sound weird, but I missed having the King growing out of my neck. At least I was the center of attention.

  Even in my late teens, I didn’t have any zits. And I had near-perfect teeth (only two fillings ever). I never had to wear braces.

  So why were my wonderful teeth falling out?

  There I was in fast-food hell, staring at three of them in my hand while the other patrons gawked at me.

  The whole tooth dealio had to have something to do with my accident. What other explanation was there? One accident could take away everything, wiping the slate clean of what it seemed that destiny had in mind.

  “You can’t fight destiny, boy,” Frank’s voice had echoed through my speakers. Maybe this was what he meant by that.

  Suddenly you might not be able to do what you’d always done before. You couldn’t be who you’d always been. And people would back off from being too enclosed within your perimeter, suspecting it might be a contagious condition. The capital L Loser state. And no one wants to be a loser.

  If my story began with my accident, it’s because it was a hell of a crash. Both literally and figuratively as it regarded the condition of my life from that moment—of true and virtual impact—onward. Slam. Bam. Thank you . . . er . . . uh . . . God. The finger of fate wrote and moved on? Hell, no. The finger squashed the horrible crippled freak.

  A few nights later, I went to one of my favorite watering holes, The Coop. The place was designed in barnyard fashion, even with chicken wire over the stage, just like in The Blues Brothers. I was there to listen to a local band called The Fabulous Boozehounds. The bassist was Joe Carpenter, a guy in my biology class. He wanted me to sit in with them and play a couple of my songs.

  I was there with three of my buds. I didn’t drink because I couldn’t play the guitar drunk, so I was the designated driver. My friends got loaded. One bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s just before we split for the evening.

  “We’re gonna pass it round,” Paul told me from the backseat. “But we’re only gonna drink half. You drink the rest when you get home. Okay, Jeremy? Our treat for your havin’ stayed sober and rockin’ for us.”

  They were also passing around a can of cold Mountain Dew. Ted told the joke about the guy sending a sample of it to a chemist to find out what was in it. Gramps had already told me that one. Yeah. Good news/bad news/nothing in it to hurt you/your horse has diabetes.

  I had to drop my pals off at their places. They lived all over the fucking Metroplex. I drove Paul to East Plano, then had to take Gary to Arlington. At least Ted lived in Mesquite, which was right next door to Garland.

  “Night, bro. Don’t forget this here half bottle o’ Jack now,” Ted reminded me. He held it up as he screwed on the top, winked, then slipped it under the seat.

  “I won’t. Thanks.”

  It was 2 a.m. by the time I managed to get on Shiloh Road. And wouldn’t you know I heard the siren and saw that ol’ double cherry flashing behind me?

  Someone once told me, “If you have to pass through a small town in Texas, fly over in a plane and pray it doesn’t crash. That way you don’t have to deal with small-town cops who take the law unto themselves.”

  I stopped and the policeman got out of his cruiser. He looked like the type who took the law unto himself. It was dark as death outside, but he was still shitkicker enough to be wearing those mirrored sunglasses.

  “License and proof of insurance,” he drawled.

  I handed over my ID.

  He sniffed through the open window. “You been drinking and driving, punk?”

  “No, sir. I haven’t had a drop. I was the designated, sir. I was playing the guitar for some friends,” I explained truthfully and pointed to the guitar case in the backseat.

  “A musician, huh,” the police officer said, his mouth full of bile. He smiled a split-mouth snake-bite grin. Apparently he’d seen the half bottle of Jack peeking out from under the seat. “That an open container I see back there? Like a smokin’ gun, boy. You won’t mind getting out and proving what you just swore to, right?”

  “Sure.” I climbed out. Did all the tests. Touched my fingertips to my nose and walked the straight line. Gasped into the Breathalyzer tube. I passed with flying colors, which really made him madder than a hornet before it stings.

  But he laughed. “Doesn’t matter, boy. You got this here half-empty bottle and you’re busted. Going to jail to be a contestant in the after-midnight dating game. How tight are them cheeks?”

  The cop opened the back door, reached in, and grabbed the bottle. He smiled as he unscrewed the top, then took a swig. His eyes bulged and he choked, spewing it out. “What are you trying to pull, you li’l asshole? This here’s nothin’ but piss.” He slammed his fist onto the roof of my car.

  I saw too late the joke that my friends had been planning. They’d drunk the whole bottle and then peed into the empty container while I was playing onstage. The cop wasn’t laughing anymore. I wasn’t amused, either.

  “Well, I know that, Officer, sir,” I said quickly. I thought about Ted’s Mountain Dew joke. “It’s a sample from one of my father’s horses. It’s sick, and I was gonna give the sample to the vet in the morning. That’s why I wasn’t worried about the open container and why I
’m not drunk.”

  “You could’ve told me,” he growled, stepping forward, fists coming up like bricks with knuckles.

  I knew from the rage rising off him in steam that he was going to mess me up.

  He had saliva on his chin. “I could kill you and get away with it.”

  Sounded like something Frank would say. Or had said, in fact, under different circumstances. All part of the law-unto-oneself manifesto, I guess. I kept waiting for Frank’s voice to drone out of the car radio, but apparently he had no desire to talk to one of his old cronies.

  A car went slowly past, the old man driving staring at us. At the same time the radio in the cruiser bleeped and a staticky voice urgently called for assistance.

  The cop ground his teeth and backed up to answer, jabbing the air with God’s own righteously pissed finger.

  A moment later, he was gone in a flurry of highway dust and grit.

  As I drove home, I ran my tongue into the gaps where my teeth used to be. There was something really nasty about those newly slick gums. It was like sticking your pinky finger into someone’s hot, fresh bullet wound and wiggling it around. I turned on the overhead light, bared my teeth, and glanced into the rearview mirror. Up until that point, I hadn’t even thought about what my smile might look like.

  Kind of like a year-round jack-o’-lantern’s.

  I guessed I wouldn’t be able to grin anymore. I flashed myself the tight-lipped bemusement of the constipated. It had all the charm of a facial hemorrhoid.

  My poor teeth. They were like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

  I heard a sound, so low and rhythmic I thought it was the wind or some stray night noise, like baying in the distance. But then I realized it was . . . a chuckle. Happy. Gloating, even.