by Borne Wilder
“Hey, stupid bitch, this is your god speaking. I command you to put a spit shine on my jimmy!”
Something was wrong. Weak-minded Martha should be curled up in the fetal position, screaming for her savior, and confessing stigmata. Maybe they hadn’t held on to the coin long enough, maybe he should have had them rub it like a genie lamp.
The cunt wouldn’t touch the coin, Nolte remembered, it came to him through his margarita memory, he hadn’t been able to get the prissy bitch to touch the coin. She had recoiled from it like it had been a penis shaped penis. She wasn’t a team player. Team Retard was down one.
“Wanna sharpen my pencil fer me, you dumb fucking hickerbilly?” he tried again, using her native drawl, willing her to hear him, but Martha didn’t flinch.
She reached under the couch cushion where Nolte always sat and pulled out the wallet he kept hidden there. Digging behind his credit and preferred shopper cards with a familiarity that unsettled the old man, she flipped up the flap to the so-called ‘secret compartment’ and removed the five hundred dollars he had squirreled away for emergencies and such.
Statutory rape was not a term Nolte liked to hear or use, in fact, he thought it to be entirely unconstitutional, but since it remained on the books, he kept spare cash on hand. In a land where justice prevails, so too, should common sense. Just because mommy and daddy didn’t want to fuck, they shouldn’t be able to deprive their little sweetheart of that inalienable right. There was a time, if memory served him, when twelve year olds were married off to the neighbor with the biggest herd or the most acreage, Nolte thought the age of consent would be best for all concerned, if left up to the young thing in question.
Fathers of almost legal pussy, almost always lacked a sense of humor, and in light of this shortcoming, Nolte often found it in his best interest to pop out of town for a few days, every now and then, and his Mad Daddy Money made it possible. How in the fuck did Sister Show-n-Tell know about it?
“You thieving fucking cunt!” Nolte exclaimed. “You snoopy, kleptomaniacal fucking cunt!” He was beside himself at the blatant larceny going on, right before his eyes. Some fucking church lady you turned out to be, he thought. “Thou shall not fucking steal, you cunt!”
Martha carefully pressed the cards back into place and slid the wallet back between the cushions. She stood and walked across the room to the phone. Glancing back at Nolte’s cold blue body on the floor, she dialed 911.
Had he stuck around, he would have seen Martha cry as she made the call, but Nolte was already on his way upstairs to check on his nest egg, thinking he’d better get there before the sticky-fingered cunt did. The tear that slowly rolled down Martha’s cheek was the only true tear that would be shed over Nolte’s death.
Atop his gun cabinet, sat a ceramic frog. From below, it didn’t look like it had been moved. Nolte scooted his desk chair over and climbed up to examine the ugly knick-knack. He had chosen this curio specifically because he thought no one would want the damn thing.
It smiled from ear to ear, with what Nolte referred to as Alabama blue-gum lips, and was hand painted in the likeness of Al Jolsen. As racist an item as one would find in any curio shop, that specialized in Klan memorabilia, but just old enough to be labeled as Folk Americana, so that blue-haired antique hunters might haggle over it shame free. Nolte knew no blue-haired antique hunters, so his most valuable item was hidden, right out in front of God and everybody.
On the bottom, under the duct tape he had used to secure it, he could see the outline of the coin, his nest egg, his ticket to eternal life. Even beneath the scuffed tape, the relief it presented was beautiful. Nolte peeled back the tape and ran his finger over the coin. A copper tasting jolt of electricity shot through him, and in an instant, he found himself, once again swallowed by thick impenetrable darkness.
Nolte screamed, the little coward screamed, the primal infant screamed, but the sound was once again, only in his head. “What in the fuck did I just do?” He tried to think of some way he could blame Martha and her thieving ways, but the metallic taste was still in his mouth, establishing responsibility. “I thought I was ahead of schedule!” His scream filled his mouth but went no further. “Fuck your rules!” He screamed at God. Now, what the fuck was going to happen to him? Was he stuck here for eternity? Where are his helpers? The shadow is going to find him; of that he was certain. Nolte felt a tug.
He popped free of the void, and again, Nolte found himself staring down at his bubble-blowing, blue corpse. “Oh thank God. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he muttered, on the verge of what most would recognize as blithering idiocy, giving thanks to the same deity he had just told to fuck off.
Nolte did a quick pat down, taking inventory of limbs. “I’m done fucking around.” He decided from then on, he would follow the witch’s instructions to the letter. Attention to detail was the order of the day. The bitch had told him, his body had to be in the ground before he could finish her spell. He had invested too much time and effort into this plan, he wasn’t going to fuck this up; in three days he would literally have all the time in the world. He could wait.
Martha was no longer in the room. “Shit!” Nolte ran back upstairs, in order to thwart the dishonest bitch from further thievery.
The frog lay on the floor at the base of the gun cabinet. Martha was absent; Nolte assumed she was in some other part of the house looking for things, with which to fill her pockets. He approached the racist, amphibian with caution. Instead of picking it up, he knelt beside it, and with the careful hands of a brain surgeon, making sure he didn’t touch the coin itself, pushed the duct tape neatly back into place. Glancing over his shoulder to ensure Martha wasn’t staking out another robbery, he climbed back up the chair and put the frog back in its place. He patted the grinning ceramic on the head, “I’ll be back my precious.”
2
Even though he had almost screwed the pooch, Nolte marveled at himself and his most ingenious plan. How God decided who goes up and who goes down, was beyond Nolte, he had assumed it was merit based, and up until a few hours ago, he had always held out a little hope, that God liked him, but that did not seem to be the case.
Televangelists, the hickerbilly sisters, even road signs, all proclaimed the availability of forgiveness and mercy, and to Nolte all that shit seemed fine and dandy, but with all things considered, his history, even in the most favorable lighting, didn’t have much of a shine to it. Though he tried not to dwell on the thought too much, it had always been in the back of his mind that the fires of hell were in his future.
It wasn’t the brightest of futures, but what was a man to do? Fall to his knees and swear fealty to some cloud king, a dude that probably had never tasted pussy? Then what? Walk around the rest of his life, grinning like an idiot, vomiting ‘Praise be’ and ‘Bless you’? Not him, he had some fucking pride, thank you very much. So what to do? What do stubborn fools, facing an eternity adrift on the lake of fire, do? They get fire insurance.
When the hooker in the French Quarter told him of a witch who could turn men into women, old men into little boys and raise the dead, a brilliant idea had formed in his head. When shitheads die they go to hell, the key word being, die, so to remedy that bullshit, Nolte decided he would live forever. If the hooker’s witch could raise the dead, surely, it was feasible she could fiddle with the infinite, perhaps, tweak his time a tad.
Nolte was always coming up with brilliant ideas and dazzling plans that boggled his mind and this one was brilliant with a capital B. It was right up there on par with sliced bread and the self-flushing toilet. Even though none of his brilliant ideas and dazzling plans had ever reached fruition, or even the drawing board, to be honest, he had high hopes for this one. However, there was one catch, though the hooker had nice tits, she was nuttier than squirrel shit.
Her story had sounded convincing enough, she had even produced a pickle jar with a dick in it, which she swore up and down, used to be hers. Nolte thought the thing looked more like two tur
key gizzards; pickled in rancid piss than a willy-johnson, but he had humored her. If it was a real pecker, it probably belonged to the last john who tried to leave without paying. Nolte had been born at night, but it wasn’t last night, nonetheless, he wanted to meet her witch.
Common sense viciously attacked his high hopes. Along with neck hair, Nolte relied heavily on common sense but was reluctant to let go of a dream without thorough scrutiny. Common sense told him, if someone had found a way to raise the dead, he would have heard about it on television, on the nightly news. The most astounding breakthrough in modern science wouldn’t have come to him, by way of a fifty-dollar prostitute who advertises her former masculinity with a dick in a jar display. No one could reverse the aging process, if someone could, Oprah would have had them on her show and Dr. Phil would have been sent packing.
Common sense was winning. It wasn’t until she showed him the room with the boy and the old man, did Nolte become convinced that at least some of what she was saying might be true.
***
An obese white man sat in a tattered Lazy-boy in the center of the room. A fat banker type, who probably ate Doritos and worked foreclosures, was Nolte’s immediate assessment. A reading lamp arched over the back of the chair, its wrinkled shade directed light through a small cloud of mosquitos and gnats, illuminating what, on closer examination, looked to be a very sick man. He was sweating profusely on account he was fat and it was Louisiana in the summer, but he appeared to be panting out a heart attack.
Fat men and N’awlins’ summers have long been sworn enemies, but it had been Nolte’s observation that the two were as inseparable as farts and black beans. Admittedly stereotypical and a full-blooded racist, Nolte was willing to bet one couldn’t fling a bowl of jambalaya in July in the French Quarter, without hitting a fat banker with a shrimp. It was even odds on whether the fat man’s suit would be white, or powder blue.
This banker was naked, whether or not he was, for sure, in foreclosures was indeterminable without further inquiry, as the fat man’s suit was nowhere to be seen. Nolte’s attention was more focused on the two black women who were tending to the fat man. One knelt between his legs with a basin of water, humming softly as she washed the man’s dome of a belly, the other combed clumps of gray hair from his scalp. Nolte wished he had known this was on the menu, he liked a bit of brown sugar now and then.
“Go look, motherfucker, see if I ain’t telling you the truth.” The hooker crossed her arms in front of her defiantly. “The only time I lied to you, was when I told you your dick was big.”
Nolte entered the room and walked over to the chair. The kneeling woman leaned to one side so he could better see what was going on. The fat man appeared to be fighting for air, his big gut heaving with each spittle-spraying gasp he took. Protruding from the man’s belly fat was the lower half of a black infant. The rest of the child, from just below the arms and up, was somehow embedded in the man.
The woman dipped her washcloth in the basin and gently washed the baby’s bottom; its tiny legs scraped at folds of flesh, as it tried to gain a foothold in the banker’s sweat slick stomach. Where the man and baby were connected, the skin was seamless and smooth. The only separation appeared to be where the different skin colors mingled and blended sharply. Nolte had seen some crazy, fucked up shit in his life, but this just topped the list.
Nolte looked from the helpless baby to the man’s greasy face; the fat fuck looked up at him.
“I think it’s working.” The fat banker stammered and formed a half-hearted smile.
“What do you think is working?” Nolte asked. “You have a fucking nigger kid sticking out of your gut, is that what’s working?”
“You should have seen that motherfucker this morning, he was eighty years old.” The crazy hooker said as she moved next to Nolte. “He start suckin’ at that baby at the crack of dawn. He’ll be done in a few more hours. The younger he get, the faster he can suck it up.”
Nolte’s eyes darted back to the baby, to look for stitches. There was no way this was real, he was born at night, but… “What in the fuck do you mean, he’s suckin’ it up?”
“He’s absorbin’ the youth of the young’un, maybe you should do this.” The hooker smiled. “Then you get hard ones a cat can’t scratch, yes?”
Had Nolte, any sense of decency, her nonchalant attitude, concerning his cock and the death of a child, would have appalled him, instead, his high hopes were back. A chill ran up his spine, this is the stuff dreams were made of.
Nolte ignored her, the sight before him had him sickly amazed. He couldn’t take his eyes off of what was happening. It was like a car crash with multiple fatalities strewn about; something deep inside you made you look and kept you looking.
He had seen his first kid being born, and had decided the so-called ‘miracle of life’ wasn’t all that miraculous, but this shit was amazing…a real miracle of life.
Over the next four and a half hours, Nolte watched the unholy spectacle, as intently as a copperhead might watch a drunken mouse stumble by. Inch by inch, the fat banker’s pus-gut slowly devoured the baby. The hooker having gotten bored and annoyed at the lack of attention she was receiving, left after half an hour claiming she’d seen the process too many times to feign interest in it again. She informed everyone, as she excused herself, that her pussy wasn’t going to sell itself.
The normality of the ordeal and the casual familiarity of the ‘attendants’ actions inspired Nolte, professionalism might have come to mind, had the room not been filthy and reeking of piss.
The two worked on the man cheerfully, dapping at sweat and periodically giving him sips of water from a sticky looking glass (that Nolte wouldn’t consider using to wash his scrotum), with no apparent empathy for the baby, who was now, nothing more than two small feet protruding from the fat banker, who was more flabby, than fat at this point. Nolte had thought about asking where the kid came from but realized he probably didn’t really want to know. However, he did ask the fat man what he did for a living.
“Exotic cars.” He said, instinctively reaching for a business card, too late to remember he was naked. He played it off by scratching his nipple. So much for the foreclosure theory, Nolte thought.
As the soles of the baby’s feet faded and the soul of the baby was recycled, a young man’s face sat atop stretched slabs of skin layered like unspooled bolts of white man fabric. The car salesman, who resembled a banker, looked years younger than he had when Nolte had first entered the room. He now looked to be in his early thirties, though his skin hung off his frame like wet towels draped over a clothesline, he no longer looked sickly. There were fresh wisps of blonde hair in scattered patches around his head. His face, except for some light stubble, was as smooth as the baby’s butt; he had just sucked into his stomach. If the man had any remorse for the child’s life he had just robbed, the youthful smile on his face betrayed it.
“I feel like a million bucks.”
“You sit tight, pretty Boss, Doc be here tomorrow to take you in, a notch. Right now, you look like you wearin’ a parachute.”
“Hey ladies, what else can this witch do?” The two women stopped washing the man in the chair and looked up at Nolte; both wore the same big grin.
“What do you need, Sugar?”
“I need a life insurance policy.”
3
Alice loved day drinking, morning drinking to put a finer point on it. She liked to get a few in her and get the warmth flowing before her other senses had a chance to completely awaken. This allowed each sense to face the day in a much better mood than they might have, stone sober.
She had just gotten started in earnest when she received the call about Nolte. She had been sipping and wondering about the buttery goodness of beer, as she often did during her first few beers when her sister had called with the disturbing news, but truth be told, being told of Nolte's long-awaited demise did nothing but enhance the buttery flavor. She did, however, feel a smidge guilty over
the momentary joy the news had raised in her. Usually, any interruptions to her early morning buttery contemplations would have immediately turned her into a bitch on wheels, but this news seemed to have a buttery flavor, all its own. With that being said, she realized she would have to mourn soon in spite of all things buttery.
Of course Alice knew there wasn’t any butter in beer, she had read the list of ingredients on the side of the can many times and butter was never listed, but she could taste it. It was probably just some magical reaction with the chemicals. Alice was no scientist, but she was well aware of magical reactions and how mysterious they could be, one of her fondest memories was a scientific wonder, a vinegar and baking soda volcano she had made in school. She didn’t understand it then, nor did she understand it today, but she respected it. She knew there was no butter in beer, but that made it all the more special in her book. Two or more ingredients not found in butter, mixed together, more likely than not, by accident, in the olden days, had created a buttery flavor. Some of the more amazing scientific discoveries of all time had been accidents, though, she couldn’t remember the details, she was pretty sure Henry Ford discovered the car on accident.
She found it odd that she was the only person, that she could name, who could taste the flavor of butter, because it was there, sure as sunshine. She knew it didn’t take a rock scientist to understand what taste buds were saying.
It gave Alice great pleasure to contemplate such mysteries, and this was one of her favorites, but now wasn’t the time for pleasurable reflection on scientific wonders and magical reactions, Nolte was dead. Now was a time for sadness and mourning. It was a time for contemplating one’s own mortality; it was also time for another beer.
“Ding dong, the witch is dead. Long live the witch!”
