by Steve Vernon
And now look what he’d gone and done.
It had been an accident. He’d been trying to see his way through the heart of a three day blizzard, something else he blamed on this foolish race. Goddamn global warming.
He’d just waved his hand slightly, trying to wipe a bit of snow from his vision and that’s how it had happened. It was just an accident. It wasn’t his fault he had to use this ridiculously awkward scythe. Why couldn’t they have issued him with something more practical, like a laser pointer?
Now here he was. Stuck in the heart of a three day blizzard, mounted on a headless horse. The celestial dust buzzards were going to get a big old kick out of this one. He could already here them nick-naming him Accidental Death.
Damn it.
Being immortal, the darned beast wouldn’t die, but being headless it couldn’t see where it was going. Worse than that, he didn’t have any place left to hang the reins and the horse’s bit has definitely bit the dust.
He looked down at the horse’s head lying there in the freshly fallen snow, like Marlon Brando’s irrefusable final offer.
Should he pick it up? Maybe glue it on? Krazy Glue might do the trick. It was invented originally for gluing wounds together in Viet Nam.
The Reaper almost smiled. Nam had been good times.
He shook his head to clear it of the happy memories. Then he tried to steer his headless mount with his knees but the mandatory cassock got in the way.
Damn it. John Wayne had made it look so easy.
To hell with it.
He stepped down off the headless horse.
“Yah,” he shouted, swatting its rump.
The headless horse wandered off, playing pooka-boo with the blowing snowflakes.
“Come here, you.”
The Reaper stooped and hoisted the head of the horse with both hands. Who’d have thought a brainless nag could be so damned heavy? He raised the decapitated head up over his own head. A bit of the horse’s blood spattered his cassock.
“God bless you Scotchgard,” The Reaper muttered.
He drove the head onto the blade of the scythe, jamming it down until the handle of the scythe poked snugly along what remained of the horse’s spinal column.
“Perfect,” The Reaper said, finally smiling. “I’ve killed two birds with one stone.”
“Giddy-up,” He said, galloping off on his handmade stick-horse into the heart of the three-day blizzard.
It turned out to be a marvelous plan. His new mount was easier on the Reaper’s buttocks and backbone, and the added cardiovascular activity was doing wonders for the Reaper’s aeon-old metabolism. His seratonin levels increased and in time he even learned how to grin.
It was true what they say.
Every man needs a hobby.
Once More Round The Block
I’ve been sitting behind this wheel for an awfully long time. It seems like all my life. See, I'm a cabbie. I get people from point A to point B. It's a living.
Some people do worse things.
You meet a lot of weird people in this racket. I remember this guy in Chicago, he had me drive him to five different take out joints. Seems he was hungry. I mean, he just couldn't get enough. I didn't mind. He paid me, so I drove.
Take this guy in back of me. Now he's a case if I ever seen one. Big black coat, collar pulled way up high, hat pulled way down low. And it's the middle of summer, for crying out loud. All I can see of him are his eyes. Real bad eyes. Deep set. Far away. Kind of like looking down twin exhaust pipes.
Anyways, he hands me this twenty, and I never argue with Andrew Jackson.
"Drive," he says, in a voice like the rumble of a big V-8.
"Where to, mack? Where we going?"
So what do you think, he hands me another twenty.
"Just drive," he says.
So I drive.
Maybe he needs time to think.
So I stop.
He opens the door, but he don't get out. He just looks. I look too, and I see what he's eyeballing across the street. A girl, college type, a real looker. Money, too. You can tell by the way she's dressed.
This guy is really giving her the eye. Now I got his number but I don't think he's got hers. She's way out of this guy's league. He needs a hooker, not no looker.
"Look mack, if you're looking for a girl..." I begin to say, and then I stop saying.
I feel this hand around my throat, only there ain't nothing there. I feel it squeeze, and it gets harder to breathe. I shut up, real quick, and the squeeze goes away.
He ain't moved. He's still looking at her, and now she's looking at him. We're talking bullets here. A stare like there's no tomorrow. She looks like she's listening to something, but he ain't said a word.
So she comes over and gets into the car.
"Drive," he says.
So I drive.
I'm watching in the mirror, only it's like watching television without no sound. Nobody's saying nothing. She's rubbing herself all over him like she was a cat or something. Then she's unbuttoning her coat.
I think I know what's coming, only I don't.
Now she's got her head inside his coat.
Next her whole damned body, arms and all. It's all black in there, like space. I don't see no shirt, no stomach, no nothing.
Finally he's got her by the ankles and lowering her in. She sort of slithers in, like a string of spaghetti. The last thing I see of her is a pair of fancy sneakers disappearing into his coat. I hear a wet popping sound, like a cork out of a bottle, then nothing. Then something in the car stinks like real bad eggs.
I stop the car. I want to get out and run, but my legs won't work right. I ain't sure if it's him or me. Anyways I grab my pistol and point it at him.
"Spit her out," I said.
I don't know what I was thinking, and he didn't care. He didn't blink, just grabbed the gun from me and crumpled it like a candy bar wrapper. Then the gun disappeared into his coat. Just like the girl. I sit there staring. He buttons his coat. I'm still thinking about that guy in Chicago, when he hands me another twenty.
"Drive," he says.
So I drive, and I drive, and I drive.
Jugular
The air was warm and sticky and your perspiration was as clammishly tacky as a layer of nine day old fish glue. The city park was an fetid fertile Petri dish. Behind every bush and fern you could hear the hungry slide of slow and dangerous amoeba. The kind of hot summer day that could coax a vulture to sweat.
There were people every where, searching for some kind of refuge from the heat. Pushing like panic stricken soldier ants through the wreckage of a carelessly dropped ant farm. Small children clung to their parents, fearful that the warmth would melt their bodies like a handful of plastic toy soldiers left carelessly upon a heated wood stove.
I saw the little man standing there alone in the shadow of a civil war hero whose name was carved upon an adjacent stone tablet. The tablet was smothered into illegibility with an alternating stratum of moss and neon red graffiti. On foggy moonless nights the revenential spirit of this civil war hero is sometimes seen wandering aimlessly in a gray amnesiatic fugue, muttering to himself - “Who am I, who am I, who am I?”
The little man looked positively Chaplin-esque, with his pale painted face and his baggy black suit and his chalk white evening gloves. A capacious black valise gaped by his feet. He set an inky black top hat, the kind that might have been worn by a stylish hangman, on the ground in front of him. The grass withered beneath the hat’s shadow, and a careless corpse beetle who wandered too close to the hat sizzled like the sulphur of a freshly struck match.
I assumed the little man was a street performer. He seemed too elegant for a simple beggar. I expected he was a mime or a performance artist or some other form of traveling nuisance.
He did not speak. Whether this was by choice or necessity I could not tell. He bent down and reached into the valise. I had the feeling he could have reached into China or somewhere lower had he
only bent down far enough.
A crowd began to gather and I decided to stay and watch. It was too hot to bother with being bored any longer. The little man lifted a trio of grapefruit sized objects from the depths of his valise. My understanding dawned. He wasn’t a mime at all.
He was a juggler.
I scrutinized his actions. Being an accountant by profession, the art of juggling has always held a special fascination for me. The act of suspension coupled with momentum, the dance of antigravity. It is an art practiced by accountants, jugglers and a few underground neo-beat poets. The grapefruit sized objects were as leathery and black as bat wings. String dark fiber festooned each of them.
Of course. They were shrunken heads. Like the kind you find in novelty shops, only these were real. If you looked close enough you could see the smudgy fingerprints of their savage maker. I close my eyes and imagine some bony little South Asian islander, with strangely sharpened teeth and a single red eye daubed upon his forehead, an assortment of heads hung about his hut like bunches of pickled coconuts.
“Aw, I seen that before!”
Somehow, while my eyes were blissfully closed into a macabre South Sea reverie, a strangely colored wall of tropical flowers had erected itself between me and the peculiar little juggler.
“I seen it on teevee, just last week. Guy was juggling half a dozen heads. Way more than this bozo.”
I stepped back and found a much needed perspective. The strangely colored wall was actually a large man in a Hawaiian shirt so garish as to appear frozen eternally in the act of spontaneous combustion.
“And they were burning, on fire, all of them,” The large man bellowed, drowning out the brief flutter of applause that passed through the crowd.
“What you think of that?” He turned on me and I took a half a step backwards. His face was as loud as his voice, his cheeks blurring with an alchemical combination of sunburn, blood pressure and gall.
“Aw you ain’t so hot,” He concluded, turning back to face the little juggler.
Only I knew the large man wasn’t finished. That would be too much to wish for. His brand of eternal extrovert never shut up for very long. The little juggler sighed almost imperceptibly. I noticed his soft sigh stirred the leaves of the ancient willow I was standing beside.
The little man quietly bowed and in the same movement, returned the shrunken heads to the deep valise. As he straightened up he was holding four new objects, wrapped tightly in the concealment of his baggy black sleeves. A quartet of human skulls, bleached white and grinning at us with immortal merriments. The little juggler juggled them with such fourish and abandon, showers and cascades spilling about his head like a display of bone white fireworks.
We applauded. The little juggler grinned toothily. He was just warming up. Behind the back, under the leg, over the head, culminating with the four skulls balanced one atop the other, in totem pole fashion in the cupped palm of his outstretched left hand.
He waved light heartedly and the skulls clattered staccatoed applause like a quartet of calcified castanets. The crowd clapped with equal abandon and gleefully thrown coinage began to feed the hungry hat.
“That act was old when Ed Sullivan wore knickerbockers,” Shouted the large Hawaiian clad man.
If the little juggler heard, he gave no sign. He simply resumed his juggling of the four skulls and as he did so he raised his right foot.
I held my breath in an anaerobic spasm of anticipation.
“Raise the other foot, and I’ll really be impressed,” Raucously shouted the large man.
I scowled from behind the security of his turned back. He reminded me of any of a dozen bullies who had tormented me in my younger days. I wanted to hit him but violence was only the resort of the ignorant and those of us gifted with a less acute sense of self preservation.
Instead I compensated by visualizing the large man boiling in a cauldron full of pine tar and seagull entrails while struggling in the grip of a lifetime tax audit.
The briefest of smiles flickered across the little juggler’s face as if he had been party to my colorful fantasy. I shivered quietly. There was something about the smile that suggested the glint of a straight razor on a moonless night.
The four skulls continued their circling; their empty eye sockets leering dreamily at the crowd. Slowly, the little man continued to raise his foot. Equally as slowly, he lowered it into the valise, with the air of a man lowering a valued appendage into the jaws of a nervously strung bear trap. Then, as artfully as the Brazilian soccer god Pele, the little juggler gently toe boosted a fifth head into the orbit.
The fifth head was old and blackened with rot. The stink of it made me think of my grandmother’s garden, ripe with heaps of fertile manure and a generous dollop of not-so-fresh fish guts. From the seal flipper slapping sound it made each time it contacted his open palms, I estimated that the head had been in the ground for a mere three months before the little juggler had carefully unearthed it.
Fantastic. The little juggler had some trouble handling the fifth head, as chunks of it kept falling off. He continually shifted the balance, neatly compensating for the greasiness of its festering flesh and the disturbance of the occasional lingering blowfly or maggot.
“Hey that looks like your granny, isn’t it?” The large man shouted.
The large man looked around for approval and to my horror some of the audience sheepishly chuckled their nervous consent.
The little juggler’s eyes grew a little harder, like coals glinting in a freshly stirred temple fire but he still did not appear to allow the large man’s discourtesy to bother him.
And then as if in wordless rebuttal the little juggler raised his foot for the second time. An expectant hush drowned out the embarrassing chuckle. I watched in dry lipped suspense as the little juggler gently nudged a sixth head into the hovering circle overhead.
The sixth head was freshly cut. To my eye rigor mortis had barely set in. A dramatic expression of horror was frozen upon its features and this only added an air of pungent contrast to the entire proceeding.
The crowd grew ecstatic and the hat brimmed with money.
“Boo! Boo! Boo!” The large man unimaginatively shouted. He held his nose with one hand and waving the other like a referee of a bean eating contest. It was too much, even for the masterful aplomb of the little juggler.
The juggler let the heads drop at his feet, like so many over ripened coconuts, as he stared pointedly at the heckling offender.
These actions only further fuelled the large man’s amusement.
“Haw!” He shouted. “Can’t keep it up? Try a little Viagra on the balls, why don’t you?”
The little juggler delicately picked up his top hat full of money and then with a brisk movement too quick for the eye to perceive he vanished the money into the ravenous valise.
“You’re quick enough at that trick, aren’t you?” The larger man said with a suggestive leer.
The little juggler stepped towards the large man holding the top hat out as if it were a present.
“What’s this? A hat trick?” The large man asked, slapping his beefy sides with gusty amusement.
Then, with the same brisk speed, the little man tipped the hat on to the large man’s head.
Despite the fact that the large man could have easily worn a mop bucket as a chapeau, the top hat slid down over the man’s head, down to his shoulders.
Every one waited for a fight to start but the large man just stood there, mute and looking a little ridiculous, with the top hat securely covering his entire head.
The little juggler smiled, a brief Cheshire-like grin that reminded me of a great white shark sharing a quiet private joke.
Then he returned to his juggling, picking up each of the six heads from the ground, as well as the three shrunken heads that he deftly retrieved from the valise.
All in all there were nine heads aloft, enough to thrill the heart of a jaded Barnum. The crowd quickly forgot the large man who wa
s standing beside the little man, so still and quiet in the cavernous swallow of that inky top hat.
Still juggling, the little man rose up from the earth like a ballerina on high test hydrogen, still juggling as he snapped out a roundhouse kick that would have made Claude Van Damme grow brussel sprout green with envy, neatly slapping the hat from atop the large man’s shoulders, head and all. For a moment the body of the large man stood there, headless, and then all at once it toppled like a guillotined tree.
Then, with a gentle triumphant toe kick, the little juggler promoted the contents of the hat in to top billing.
As the contents of the hat came into view the entire crowd shrieked with the child like glee of a young boy pulling the wings from a dragonfly.
The tenth head that sprang from the top hat like a catapulted melon was that of the large man, of course. Fresh cut, like a red carnation for a bride groom’s boutonniere, and slippery with the blood that spilled from its neatly severed neck. All too soon the little man’s pristine white gloves were stained in neon streaks of incardine. The crowd cheered itself hoarse, while he continued juggling. The head was screaming, of course. Full throated screams of outright terror. As I’d said before his kind never shut up for very long.
I watched, helpless in the master juggler’s spell. I could tell from the shadow of the sun upon my shoulder that some time had passed. At least an hour or possibly two. The crowd had long since dispersed but I still could not tear myself away.
The little juggler neatly lobbed each of the heads back in to his valise, still juggling as he did so. Then, when the last head was juggled away, he picked up his top hat and tapped it tidily atop his head. He gave me a grin and then stepped into the valise.
The valise swallowed him whole.
I stood there, staring at the inviting valise until the sun went down and the shadows took over the park. I leaned a little closer, bending towards the valise.
Then, before I could move any nearer, the ground sucked in once, and the valise disappeared.
