by Steve Vernon
Except for all the parts that I’ve left out.
Thelma used to be the object of my desire. Ever since I knew her I hankered to squeeze her sweet caboose.
Am I being too crude? Well excuse me for farting out loud, but twenty three years of wedlock will piss the illusions out of anyone.
Wedlock. It is funny how that word sounds like headlock. You just can’t say it without tasting that ice-cold clanking taste of a pair of nickel coated handcuffs.
The old ball and chain. The ring, worn tight around the useless finger of the ignorant hand. An eternity of one night Custer standing clusterfucks wrapped like a Christmas goose in one unbreakable golden band.
And all that empty space in between.
It was love, at first. A taste of the honey before the kill stick hit home. I met her in a church social. She was twenty one, and I was back in from serving two years in the Canadian air force, swallowing Sahara dust, shitting grit and chewing peanut brickle.
I’d come with a date that a buddy of mine who should have known better had set up. I took a look at Thelma and I was gone. Blinded by the shithouse lights, a miller moth playing kamikaze with a candle’s flicker.
I just never saw it coming.
All it took was one single blink, and she was all I could see. Dutch girl pretty, with a generous handful of bazoomas, a butt built for rocking, and a mouth made for anything but talking.
It was want at first sight, you understand. I just saw her, and I had to have her.
I wooed her with words. That always works best. Women like to know their men can talk. Not that this was any kind of hardship, you understand. I can talk until the cows come home.
Or the chickens come to roost.
But even a mouth gets tired, and sooner or later you just run out of things to say.
The next thing I knew I was staring at the business end of a bible, mouthing the last two words of freedom that I can remember – I do.
After that I didn’t say much.
***
Hell. This ain’t working out. Let me tell it to you just like the good lord laid the bible out.
Let me start at the beginning.
Roll it back, just like a film. Memory is easy like that.
So are a lot of things, come to think of it.
“Roll the window down, Harold. It’s hotter than the puckered nuts of Satan himself in here.”
That’s Thelma talking. She’s in one of her moods. I can tell it was going to be on long as perdition sort of day. Thelma’s mood ring was souring from black to blacker to blacker-than-black.
I rolled the window down, because it was easier than arguing.
“Not so far, damn it. I spent all morning trying to get this hair right.”
I knew. I’d spent the better half of two hours waiting outside the bathroom door while she monopolized the facilities. She only came out after I’d got tired of gritting my teeth and was unzipping in front of our kitchen sink.
“Harold! We’ve got to eat out of there.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten out of a kitchen sink, but I didn’t have the nerve to tell her that. Too chicken, I guess.
I just shut it off in midflow, dutifully zipped up, and headed for the can.
“I’m not done in there. Don’t you be stinking it up.”
I closed the door just before I burst. I nearly ruined my favorite pair of trousers. You ever get that way? So full that you think you’re bladder’s going to pop like a water bubble?
I zipped back up, toted the baggage to the car trunk, and we headed off for our annual summer vacation.
*
Vacations are supposed to be relaxing, aren’t they? They are supposed to be the time when you can kick your feet back, stop holding your gut in, and let it all run to seed.
Not mine.
Thelma always had plans.
Plans that usually involving her parents.
This year was a trip to their cottage. I hated that more than I hated projectile vomitting.
Did you ever do that? Did you ever have to hurl it up so hard it feels like you’re puking up your ringhole? I did it once, in Cairo. I ate something I shouldn’t have. It just kept coming back and coming back, like a year of repeating cucumbers, over and over again.
That’s the same way I feel about Thelma’s parents. We have to see them more times than I care to imagine.
It’s always the same. It’s way worse than soap opera reruns. The same talk, the same fucking rants, over and over. I’ve got to hear about what every uncle and aunt and twice removed cousin has been up to since I last heard from them. And it’s always the same. Always eating the same grub, always telling the same jokes.
But Thelma liked it and I was too chicken-hearted to tell her any different.
Me. The big war hero. The toughest pilot on the Suez, yet too fucking chicken-shit to tell his wife no.
“You sure we’re heading in the direction? I know I’ve seen that barn before.”
Only the last hundred times we rode this way. Every second weekend in the summer, out to Thelma’s parents cottage.
It was my own fault. If I’d had a bit more money, if I’d made a bit more of a success of myself than I’d be able to afford our own cottage.
As it was I was working a dead end job in a dead end industry, waiting for retirement or the grave to end it all.
Then came the chickens.
*
It keeps coming back to this one thing. It keeps rolling around to that long slow country curve. Thelma talking and I’m doing my best to stare myself to death out the front windshield.
I never saw it coming.
That truck rolled over on its side. All those chickens. We slid like under the rear axle of that eighteen wheeler, hooked out of its cradle and hung straight across the lane like the world’s ugliest roadblock, slid straight under and the Chevy’s roof collapsed like a hand had flattened it.
It happened fast, the world getting smaller, the gaps shoving in, that bayonet of windshield wiper snapping into Thelma’s left eye, the top of her skull opening up like the top end of a boiled egg.
I tried to reach out to her. My arms couldn’t seem to move. For some damn reason the steering wheel was shoved up against my chin.
I couldn’t feel anything. Couldn’t feel any pain. It was like I’d fallen in to one of those gaps in the conversation, was going straight down through like a rock down a long hollow wished-out well.
I heard a man’s voice above me, crying out to Jesus or somebody like that, and I wondered if that meant that my car-crashed soul would be saved.
Then I felt a pair of hands catching at me and pulling. I felt pieces of myself giving way, hanging on to the chunks of steering wheel and dashboard crammed into my chest, the world spun red and black and gone.
I awoke, covered in chicken blood. There was a big old chicken sitting on the top of my skull, staring down, his beady eyes like curious black pellets, head tilted or maybe that was me.
I sat up, and the chicken squawked away.
It felt like it was raining, and the teenagers I loved to hate were throwing some kind of rap rave in my skull bone.
I looked up. There was a black man standing over me, waving a throat slit chicken, its cut-through gullet gurgling out the last few spurts of a chicken stinking arterial spray, like a wineskin running dry.
He kept shouting something about damn ballers and I felt a wash of cool red peppermint freckles, like I was getting ready to faint to death.
Then I stood up, like my head didn’t want to, but my legs weren’t in the mood to argue.
“Praise him,” the black man shouted. “Praise him.”
Only to me it sounded like he was saying “Raise him.”
“Praise him. Praise that dark snake lord, praise his endless eternal skin, praise the flaking and the shaking and the regrowing of his dickbone, praise that damn baller, praise him high and low.”
I almost sat back down. I tried to catch my breath
only there wasn’t nothing left to catch.
I wasn’t breathing.
“Praise him.”
I tried real hard to take a breath. I could feel my lungs stretching, feel the muscles in my chest moving, only it was like making a muscle that you knew couldn’t stand up.
“Praise him.”
And then it all sank away. Not a whisper of breath to tickle my dried scabby lips, not a god given breeze to conjure my faith.
“Don’t sit down,” the black man ordered. “You’re in the presence of dark majesty, you got to show your thankfulness, praise him, praise him, praise damn baller.”
“Hallelujah,” I muttered, not really meaning it.
I looked at him. He looked to me to be one of the blackest men I had ever seen. I’m talking black like tar on a hot southern road; black like the pit of midnight, and forgotten dreams. He was all long boned and wiry, like he was too busy to bother carrying an ounce of fat. His jaws were like steel springs, teeth that looked like they’d been borrowed from an alligator, eyes that shined like black agate.
And then I looked at myself. I saw the bone in my left leg shoved out from my shin like the stub of a wind splintered tree branch. My head tilted sideways, and I had to concentrate to straighten it. I felt swollen and dangerously loose inside.
Damn it.
There ain’t no way I can be standing like this.
I ought to be dead.
And then I put the pieces together, as many of them as I could. He’d turned me into a zombie.
Hell.
“I’m a zombie, ain’t I?”
“That’s right,” the old black man said. “You been raised up by the power of Dhamballa, praise him, praise him high and low.”
Damn baller. It figured.
“I suppose I got to work your will, do I?”
The old black man smiled.
“Now where you hear a thing like that, hey? I raised you up because I knocked you down. It was my truck that tipped over and killed you dead outright. I couldn’t just leave you and your woman out here to fester. I’ll radio in for the police, and you just a witness. You don’t even have to stay.”
“I’m going to heal up, am I?”
“Heal up? Hell no. But you’re alive, sort of. Ain’t that better than being dead?”
I thought about it for a minute.
“Did you bring back Thelma?”
“You mean your woman? I was just about to. You want I should? Or were you in a mood for a back bumper divorce? We could bury her, right off the roadside. There’s a swamp in back there, I can smell it. Wouldn’t take no time at all.”
I thought about that.
It would sure be peaceful.
Hell.
That wasn’t what I wanted.
“How am I going to live this way?”
“Maybe you could find a trailer park. There’s all kinds of zombies living in trailer parks these days. Low rent, no nosey neighbors, man can fester away in peace and contentment, and nobody knows the difference.”
I thought about that. I thought about spending my days in a trailer park, me and the rest of the zombies, maybe having a cook out every second Saturday.
“What do I need to eat?”
“Brains,” the old man said.
Then he started laughing. He was just having me on.
“That’s just the movies,” he said. “Raw pork will do. Or dog, if you ain’t too fussy. Tinned meat if you really get desperate.”
I tried to picture a trailer park full of zombies, chowing down on barbecued Spam. Oddly enough didn’t sound that bad to me. Maybe it was just my new way of looking at things.
“Raise her up,” I said.
And I watched closely while he did it.
He said his chants, and slaughtered the chicken with a little hatchet he’d taken from his truck cab, and then Thelma stood up.
She only had a good two thirds of her skull left. Nothing but chum from her eyebrows on up.
I suppose I could have left her like that. Might have been happy, the two of us together.
Then she tried to speak.
I caught up the hatchet, raised it above my head and cleaved her skull in two. I had to hit her two or three more times, before she finally stayed down.
The old man stared at me.
I guess he couldn’t believe I’d undone his careful work.
“Raise her back up,” I said.
He waited too long. I hit him with the hatchet, and then I reached for another chicken.
I opened the chicken’s neck with my Swiss army knife, and then I rained it red down over Thelma’s carcass.
When she stood up, I used the knife on her.
It was slower than the hatchet.
Slower, and a lot more fun.
It took her a while, but she finally went down.
Until I raised her up again.
This time I dropped a chunk of roadside granite on her head.
It opened up a gap in her skull looked like a winter pothole.
Then I raised her back up again.
Why not?
There were a hell of a lot of chickens out here.
Enough to do me for the rest of the day, and then some.
I found the tire iron in my trunk.
Let’s see what kind of gap this’ll make.
Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Ale
There’s not too many downtown bars that will let a man in a stitched leather mask sip a beer in peace but Armand’s is one of the few.
Armand is a big guy that looks like he might have lived off of steroids and power lifting. Depending on the day of the week you ask him he will tell you that he used to be a lumberjack, a caber chucker, a stevedore or a professional wrestler.
These days he just stood behind his bar, wiping up the residue of careless drink stains, elbow sweat and the random bits of spilled conscience.
I sat there at the bar and I listened to Armand’s story.
He was telling me about this girl.
“So what did she do?” I asked.
“First she hit him with the soup,” Armand told me.
“What kind of soup?”
“The red kind. Does it matter? She hit him with the soup and the salad and a steak smack-dab in the eye, faster than you can say arugula, topping the whole massacre off with a half a pitcher of beer broken squarely over his head.”
“What’d she do next?”
“Next she was up and out the door; stopping only to goose a waiter in the vestibule,” Armand went on.
“I guess he wasn’t waiting for that.”
“I guess he wasn’t. He dropped a tray of spaghetti trays onto a table full of Baptists, anointing them Bolognese-style. It was something to see. He nearly started a one-man pasta jihad.”
“So what did the waiter do then?”
“He didn’t bat an eyelash. He threw a napkin on the floor, motioned imperiously for a bus boy, blessed the Baptists in the name of the Sect of Saintly Spaghetti Pastafararians and called out aloud to the gods – is this love?”
“So was it?” I asked.
“Was it what?” Armand replied.
“Was it love?”
Armand shrugged.
“Don’t ask me - ask the expert who stomped through the vestibule and out the door after wasting a perfectly good half pitcher of beer.”
I bowed my head in memory of good beer.
“Better yet,” Armand concluded. “You should ask the waiter who brought the beer-baptized basher the bill from the Baptists and the lady he’d wronged and his own phone number – just in case.”
“Now that is love,” I admitted, poking a tube of tobacco in my grin.
I lit an unfiltered cigarette and puffed on it thoughtfully.
Fire like that deserved a little smoke.
MOVING LINES
What can I tell you? I’m a gypsy, or at least the sign outside my shop says so. GYPSY FORTUNE TELLING - BY WALK-IN OR APPOINTMENT ONLY, ASK US ABOUT OUR RAINY DAY SP
ECIAL.
That’s one sign. There’s another on the lamp post outside my shop window. It tells anyone who cares to read that JESUS CHRIST SAVES FROM ALL SINS. PRAY TO JESUS NOW. OBEY THE BIBLE.
That’s as direct as a marine drill instructor. They don’t call it the Salvation ARMY for nothing. A Cosa Nostra strong arm paissano, with biceps the size of bowling balls and tatoos on each arm that read MUDDER and MURDER could not be half so explicit.
There’s a basket full of tracts sprouting from beneath the sign. The basket is refilled every couple of weeks. I don’t know who refills it. I’ve never seen anyone go near the basket.
Maybe it is refilled by night. Maybe the tracts spontaneously procreate. Maybe there is a miniaturized printing press installed inside the lamp post.
Stranger things have happened.
I never see anyone reading any of the tracts. I think winos use them to blow their noses when the weather is cold.
Underneath the basket the motif continues - DEATH, JUDGEMENT, ETERNITY, HEAVEN OR HELL, YOU DECIDE.
It kind of reminds me of those warnings the government prints on cigarette packages.
I’ve got another sign hung on the wall beside my table. Printed on a sheet of cardboard as neatly as my penmanship allowed, in bright red magic marker; and covered with a thin layer of plastic sandwich wrap.
It almost looks professional.
“The moving finger writes and having writ moves on, nor all your wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”
Omar Khayam.
Now there was a fellow who knew his lines.
I’m a palmist. I flip the tarot. I’ve got a knack for seeing what people want to see in the dreams. I can fake a tea cup if the price is right.
Some folks call me Gypsy Jack.
Ha!
I don’t know jack.
Is it a con? Sure, what isn’t? We live in concrete tombs built out of cons and promises and lies. We fill our ears with radio waves and television signals stuffed full of larcenous fantasies. We play bingo and invest in the stock market, and figure it is all the way things ought to be.
I’m an honest-to-Cheiro palmist. One of those crazy guys who actually believes in what he’s doing.
That’s rare, these days.
The believing.
Not the palmistry.
