Sloughing Off the Rot

by Lance Carbuncle

  Santiago jumped high in the air and tried to grab at the dead man. “He’s holding something,” said Santiago, and he leapt again, grabbing at the mummified hand. With his third effort, Santiago sprang high and slapped at the hand, hitting it but failing to dislodge its contents.

  “Here,” said Two-Dogs-Fucking, handing Santiago the crooked, knotted walking stick he had been using. “Take a whack at it with this.”

  Santiago stared at the stick, not sure if he wanted to accept it. Two-Dogs-Fucking did not set Santiago on edge like Crazy Talk. But still, Santiago wasn’t sure that he wanted to accept help from any of Three Tooth’s men. “Go ahead,” said Two-Dogs-Fucking. “Take it. It’s yours to keep if you like.”

  Santiago tentatively accepted the stick and found that he liked the way it felt in his hand. He gripped it and, like a kid attacking a piñata, swung it with all of his might at the mummified claw. And the stick smacked the hand, almost knocking it off of the arm at the wrist. With his next whack, Santiago knocked the hand clear off of the arm. It flew through the air and smacked down on the ground at Crazy Talk’s feet. Before Santiago could grab the cadaver-piñata prize, Crazy Talk was holding it and prying back the dehydrated fingers, each cracking and falling off as they were pried away. And from the crumbling claw, Crazy Talk plucked an oversized playing card, the ace of spades. And the artwork on the face of the card showed, in Day-Glo colors, a linen-clad, faceless body, hanging from a tree by a noose and gripping an ace of spades.

  John took the card and carried it along with him. He, Santiago and Crazy Talk left the bloodwood tree behind them and set out on the red brick road again. Behind them, Two-Dogs-Fucking sat on the ground under the tree and continued to eat the grubs he dug out of the bark.

  “I’m not really motivated to walk right now. I think I’ll take a little siesta, nosh a little, and catch up with you guys later,” said Two-Dogs-Fucking, waving the men away, unconcerned about being alone with just a sickly donkey in such active lunkhead territory.

  El Camino de la Muerte twisted and curved and rose and dropped. The challenge of the road and the searing desert heat slowed the men to a crawl. Along the way they encountered more bloodwood trees with lynched bodies dangling from them. Santiago developed a knack for knocking the hands off of the bodies with his new walking stick. And Crazy Talk snapped the dry fingers away from the cards and handed them to John. The cards depicted various images rendered in shocking hues that cast a neon glow. The second card they collected was a joker, and the fool on the image resembled Santiago with his wild hair and beard and unibrow. And the crazed look in the joker’s eyes was not new to John, as he had seen that look on Santiago’s face many times. Another card showed a man with two heads and a scale behind him. One card depicted a corpulent man with a long goatee and the curved horns of a mountain goat. And the goat-man reclined on a throne with writhing bodies at his feet. The jack of diamonds had two faces on his head, both of the faces somewhat resembling Crazy Talk’s. And the faces looked out from opposite sides and spoke, their words forming a black cloud above the shared head. On the two of clubs was a giant with a boulder of a head and stout body. And the giant fought off a gang of men who attacked him and clung to his limbs. His thick head tilted back as he screamed out at his attackers. By the time they settled down under the light of Wormwood and the two quarter moons, John had nearly collected an entire deck of the glowing cards. And he fell asleep studying the images on the cards, trying to derive their meaning.

  Sometime during the night, Two-Dogs-Fucking and Alf the Sacred Burro moseyed into John’s camp. Wormwood cast a luminous emerald glow over the desert. Two-Dogs-Fucking wandered away from the camp, and out of the protective circle of piss, to find the perfect spot to lay on his back and marvel at the beauty of the sky with its two moons and river of fire. Alf did not follow and instead elected to curl up beside John. Two-Dogs-Fucking lay back, his hands locked behind his head, and fell asleep to the shimmering streaks of a meteor shower.

  Crazy Talk shook John awake early in the morning. The sounds of a tussle and muffled grunts and groans came to him. He tried to shake the sleep off and make sense of the noises.

  “We have problem,” said Crazy Talk. “Temperature’s dropping at the rotten oasis, stealing kisses from the leprous faces.” He pointed to a spot behind John, from where the groans were coming.

  John rose and turned in the direction that Crazy Talk pointed. Outside of the protective circle, where he had fallen asleep, was Two-Dogs-Fucking, stripped of his bath towel and on his hands and knees. A gaggle of frisky lunkheads surrounded him. The lunkies groped and rubbed themselves about his body. One particularly leprous looking lunkie mounted Two-Dogs-Fucking from behind, jackhammer-thrusting his way past hirsute ass cheeks and into the fat Melungeon’s shithole. Another lunkie rounded the front of Two-Dogs-Fucking and penetrated the Melungeon’s mouth with a swollen, chancrous erection, brutally fucking his throat. The other lunkies stood around in a circle, stroking their meat and grabbing at Two-Dogs-Fucking’s dimpled flesh.

  Crazy Talk snatched up his bow and a quiver. He took his time aiming an arrow and let it fly. The arrow pierced the back of one of the lunkies and the arrowhead exited the chest, dead center. The lunkie dropped to the ground with his hand still stroking himself. The others continued their bukake session, paying no attention to their colleague spasming in the simultaneous throes of death and orgasm at their feet.

  Two-Dogs-Fucking pulled his head back from the lunkie schwanz that was stretching his esophagus. “No,” he screamed, his voice sounding rough and gurgly. “They aren’t going to hurt me if you just let them finish. But if you throw them off, they might tear me to bits. Just let them finish.”

  The front-end lunkie stopped Two-Dogs-Fucking from saying anything else by stuffing his bloated nutsack in the fat Melungeon’s mouth. And while Two-Dogs-Fucking tried to explain further, his words squished out around the puffy scrotum as a muffled “mmnmmmpppphhsssss mmmmmmnomnomnomnom manommana.”

  An arrow sat tensed on the string of Crazy Talk’s bow. He contemplated the request of Two-Dogs-Fucking. Should he shoot or let the lunkies finish themselves off? Would they just leave after they glazed Two-Dogs-Fucking with their seed? Crazy Talk could not decide how to proceed. He gazed down the shaft of the arrow at another lunkie’s back, drew the arrow tighter, and steadied his aim. But, John grabbed the arrow in his hand and stopped the shot.

  And though he did not understand it, John simply knew that he could disperse the lunkheads. He stepped over the piss circle they had sprayed the night before and approached the lunkie orgy. “Be gone,” he said with an air of authority that surprised him. “Be gone and bother us no more.”

  The lunkheads at each end of Two-Dogs-Fucking withdrew from the object of their affections and turned toward John. Behind John, Crazy Talk nocked an arrow and trained it on the face-fucker for a kill shot. Despite his dislike for Crazy Talk, Santiago stood right at his side, walking stick in his hands like a club, ready to run in and dispatch the lunkie threat.

  And the lunkheads growled at John, but they did not approach him. They stood their ground, hands still unconsciously stroking themselves, and hissed. They hissed out of anger and frustration. They hissed in fear of John.

  “Be gone,” he said again and waved his hand in front of the lunkheads, shooing them away like bothersome munkle flies. And he spoke in a manner that felt foreign to him. “Be gone or I will lay you even with the ground. I will grind you to dust. I will drink wine from your skulls and suck the marrow from your bones. Be gone and bother us no more.” As he said so, John knew that they would listen. And the lunkheads backed away from Two-Dogs-Fucking, leaving him facedown in the sand. They backed away from John, hissing and spitting at him like frightened cats. But they did back away. Once at a safe distance from John, they turned and did their best to run. Their flight was more of a low-speed, limping, zigzagging jog. And, while their pace was in no way speedy, it was the fastest John or any of the others had
seen lunkheads move.

  Once the lunkies were clear of the area, John assisted Two-Dogs-Fucking to his feet and handed him his bath towel. “Cover your uncomely parts,” John said. And Two-Dogs-Fucking wrapped himself in the dirty towel. John expected the man to be in shock or angry or humiliated. But Two-Dogs-Fucking just waddled back toward the camp with a smile on his face, as if he had just awakened from a sweet dream.

  That morning they dined on bloodwood fruit and grubs. After breakfast, Two-Dogs-Fucking leaned back against a log, thumped his palm on his taut belly, and said, “It’s been a tough day for me already. I don’t have the gumption to start walking just yet. You all go ahead and I’ll catch up with you.”

  So they left Two-Dogs-Fucking and Alf the Sacred Burro behind and set out on the road again. The rhythm of his sandals smacking the red bricks drove John forward. And that morning, John felt something stirring in him. Some sort of emotion. He couldn’t identify it, but it simmered in his stomach and radiated warmth all the way up through his chest. John thought it might be happiness but couldn’t be sure. He didn’t feel bad and he knew he felt something. So it was an improvement. He forced himself to try to feel and it seemed to be working. He thought he might feel like laughing but wasn’t sure he was capable. Instead, the slightest hint of a smile formed on John’s lips.

  “What’s got you all flighty?” asked Santiago. “You’re looking goofy, almost smiling. It don’t seem right.”

  “I don’t know,” said John. “But I think it’s a good thing.” And that’s all he said. John kept walking, slapping his feet on the bricks, and he tried to hold on to the feeling that was growing in him. Santiago walked beside him, thumping his new walking stick on the ground, questioning John with a sideways stare.

  Just before they crested a hill and lost visual contact with Two-Dogs-Fucking, John peered back into the distance and saw the rotund form leisurely ambling away from their campsite in the direction that the lunkies had fled. Alf the Sacred Burro stood on shaky old legs and walked away from Two-Dogs-Fucking, following the red brick road and heading in the same direction as John. It was hard to tell, but it looked to John like Alf was shaking his head in disgust.

  John allowed himself to be swept along in the current of the clouds above. His path stayed true to the way of El Camino de la Muerte. The others followed, content with being dragged along in John’s wake. Alf the Sacred Burro caught up with them and heeled at John’s side like a well-trained dog. As they walked, the men scratched and picked at the festering munkle fly bites. The picking and scratching only irritated the bulbous boils, popping some of them and inflaming others. The sun pummeled them and boiled the fluid in their blisters. And the men became tired, irritable, and ready to turn on each other by midday.

  The red brick road collided into a large mesa that jutted ten cubits off the ground. The edge of the mesa was ringed with grickle grass and derelict school buses sitting end to end like a rust-infected elephant chain. Fabric dyed in bright swirls of many colors hung over the buses’ windows and blocked the view of any outsiders looking in.

  “What’s up with the buses?” asked John.

  “You’re either on the bus or off?” said Santiago.

  “Those not buses,” said Crazy Talk. “Those the warm cozies where the people eat and sleep and keep their meat.”

  “Huh?” said John.

  “Those are their digs. Dig?” said Santiago. “Those aren’t buses in the sense that their wheels go round and round. There ain’t no wipers on the bus that go swish, swish, swish. Those mufuggers just sit there and give you a place to crash in instead of sleeping on the ground.”

  John looked and saw that it was true that none of the buses had tires on them. And they had no wipers to swish. The vehicles sat on stacked-up piles of flat red rocks. Tendrils of smoke crept out of a pipe that stuck out of the roof of one bus. Curtains pulled back in another vehicle and a pair of eyes went blink, blink, blink, scanning the newcomers.

  The red brick road rose to the mesa and collided into oaken doors that spanned the distance between the buses on each side. John and the others stood, staring at the doors and pondering what to do. The smell of meat cooking and the sounds of men yelling floated over the buses and dropped like a brick in front of the men.

  “Let’s go in,” said Santiago. “It sounds like a party in there.”

  “Let’s dip our heads in hot wax and glarble praises to the blue fadoodle,” said Crazy Talk.

  Alf the Sacred Burro whinnied and backed away from the door. He opined that they should circumnavigate the village and keep on keeping on. Alf’s nerves caused him to heave and seize up until he regurgitated a mess of vegetable fibers and hair all wound into a hard, blackish lump. Crazy Talk pounced on the bezoar with the quickness of a mountain lion, seizing the donkey-ball and securing it for himself before Santiago could lay claim to it.

  “Gawdamn albina Injun,” Santiago said to Crazy Talk. “Gawdamn.”

  John scratched at the itch of his thickening beard and pondered the doors before him. He wondered what was inside. The mesa blocked the path, so they had to pass through. But they had avoided the other towns and villages that they saw off of the trail. And they seemed to be better for it. John did not want to be detained or delayed. And he knew not what awaited them inside the gates. But the words of the burning bush rang in his head: He who follows the trail is at one with the trail. He who is virtuous experiences virtue. He who loses the way, is lost. When you are at one with the trail, the trail welcomes you. Follow the trail.

  “We don’t have a choice,” said John. “This is where the trail takes us and we have to follow. We have to be at one with the trail. And this village or fort or whatever it is sits on the way. We have to go through.” John grabbed the wrought iron ring of the lion-head knocker and banged it against the door three times.

  The three sharp claps on the door rang out. The sounds of feet stumbling and somebody mumbling came through the door in muffled tones.

  Someone on the other side of the door moved the cover on the Judas hole and placed his eye to it, glaring out at John and the men. The eye scanned back and forth evaluating them. An oafish voice attached to the eye said, “Go away and be gone. You’ve no business here.” The words, gloppy and gooey, poured from the doorman’s mouth like thickened honey.

  “We’re travelers and mean no harm,” said John. “Please let us pass through and we won’t bother anybody.”

  “We’re not buying what you’re selling, good sir,” said the low voice behind the door.

  “Please just allow us to pass through,” asked John again.

  “Move it along, sir. There’s nothing to see here.”

  Crazy Talk put his hand on John’s shoulder and eased him backwards. He gave John a knowing nod and approached the door. And though John had no clue as to what Crazy Talk was doing, it seemed right. So John stood back and let Crazy Talk take over.

  Crazy Talk said, “Baby talk, baby talk, it’s a wonder you can walk. Thatwise, little pig, little pig, let us in.”

  “Who is that?” asked the man behind the door. “What are you saying?”

  “I rubber man bouncing down the mushroom gravy highway. In the time of chimpanzees I was monkey. Thatwise, I now slap the dolphin forcefully in your direction.” Crazy Talk gripped the skin on his face between his thumb and forefinger and quickly moved his cheek back and forth, slapping the insides of his cheek against his teeth and making a squishy, mock-masturbation sound.

  “Come again, sir,” said the man behind the door. “Who be you?”

  “Thatwise, I dirty brown, flopping around. Puffed up and bloated when the sun goes down,” said Crazy Talk, following it up again with the squishy-cheeked sounds of masturbation.

  The doorman said, “Wait there. I’ll be back shortly.”

  Crazy Talk stood still in front of the door, waiting. All stood with him, though they had no idea why they stayed. And the sounds of movement on the other side of the portal returned. First, the
sound of something hard scraping on the wood. Then, the Judas hole opened and a milky eye, afflicted with severe cataracts, squinted out at them.

  “Who be you lewdies?” breathed a shaky, faint voice. “And why be you here? What be this chepooka?”

  “Listen, ded. I viddy your glazzies and hear your burbling slovos,” said Crazy Talk. “You need not even be a malenky bit poogly. We the sadness and madness and hope for the land. We the yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye. We be the newborn dead and the wet sloppy souls. I am a clown and I bring you Crawling King Snake. Thatwise, we inquire that you allow us to pass fluids in your presence.” Crazy Talk jumped back, placed his hand under his armpit and quickly brought his other arm down, making moist fart noises.

  “Did you say Crawling King Snake?” asked the feeble voice.

  “Yes. Crawling King Snake.”

  “He is the lizard king. Thatwise, he can do anything,” said the shaky voice. From behind the door came clicks, grunts, and the sounds of flatulence. And then, “Open the doors for these men and let them in.”

  The doors pulled inward and revealed an ancient, small man wearing a toga. Perhaps he was a tall midget, or maybe just an extremely short normal-sized person. His size presented as an optical illusion, making it hard to tell if he was a gargantuan dwarf or a diminutive oaf. A thin strip of sparse white hair ringed the man’s head, starting just above one ear, swooping down around the back of his dome, and climbing again to sit atop his other ear. And from the front of each ear sprouted a chin curtain of long white hair along his jaw line, covering his chin and flowing to just above his nipples. Frosty white eyebrows sprang from his forehead in a dense scraggly mess, as if reaching out to catch any insects that might buzz by. He held a tin ear horn that started with a tiny tapered piece that fit in his ear and then spiraled around his hand in convoluted bulbous sections that increased in size until they reached the flared bell that captured sounds at the other end. Shouting so as to be able hear himself, the man said, “My name is Chelloveck. I am the town elder. We will welcome you to our village for the night and allow you to pass through because you speak in the old tongue. That is a sound we have not heard in ages and, thatwise, it is dobby to hear even a malenky chumble of aldspeak. Now enter and what say you?” Chelloveck placed the ear trumpet to the side of his head and awaited a response.