Dead Nolte

by Borne Wilder

  Nolte loved the feeling of power, Goober’s greed allowed him to have over the young hillbilly, even more than Goober's wife’s absentminded pulls on his dick. She wasn’t very good at it, so watching Goober’s uncomfortable squirming was much more entertaining.

  After several minutes of being stared at relentlessly, Goober would usually grab the TV Guide and leaf through it. Nolte doubted the shithead could read, so he figured the idiot probably just looked at the pictures. Hell, he doubted the shithead could even spell his own name if you gave him all the consonants and a two vowel head start. He knew for a fact, Martha couldn’t. They could count dollars, though, and that was the crux of Nolte’s power.

  All in and the truth told, it wasn’t Nolte’s money they wanted to get their hands on, it was Mommy’s money that they really wanted. Nolte, as far as they knew, didn’t really have a pot to piss in, but he had been the sole heir to Mommy’s estate, which consisted of the culminations of the lifelong efforts of previous husbands.

  Mommy had been an expert huntress, she could smell money on a man and by the end of the hunt, she would have them field dressed and have collected all useable and spendable parts, much like an Indian with a buffalo, nothing went to waste. She harvested the skins of each of Nolte’s Uncle/Daddies as if she were removing a financial pelt.

  Mommy was a huntress, not to be confused with a black widow; she never killed for money, though Nolte was sure many of his Uncle/Daddies had prayed for death before Mommy had finished with them.

  It’s not that Mommy wouldn’t kill; killing was not beneath her at all. One Uncle/Daddy had mistakenly assumed he was a better hunter than Mommy, and the hunter briefly became the hunted. On their wedding night, Uncle/Daddy number three or four, in an unguarded, inebriated state, had disclosed that he had spent the last of his money on the ‘rock’ that decorated Mommy’s finger. Uneducated in annulments and such, Uncle/Daddy figured he was protected by the ‘I do’s’ and even though he had not planned on letting his financial cat out of the bag so soon, sometimes things slip on alcohol moistened tongues.

  There was no carnal bliss on Uncle/Daddy three or four’s wedding night, for several hours Mommy had chased him around a bed and breakfast in Texarkana, with a .38 caliber handgun. Although it concluded in a standoff with police, there were no arrests and no charges filed, on account it was their wedding night and the only person that got shot, was a cigar store Indian, which Ma Kettle, half owner of Ma and Pa Kettle’s Bed and Breakfast, had been after Pa to get rid of for years. The marriage was annulled and Mommy’s bank account, filled with the hopes and dreams of previous Uncle/Daddies, remained unmolested.

  In a way, it was blood money they coveted, Martha, her sister Alice and their idiot husbands. Blood, sweat and tear money. It wasn’t enough to make the four of them wealthy, but it was enough to keep Nolte in hand-jobs.

  It appeared that neither one of them had been able to see his Reaper when they’d stopped by, but it had watched both of them intently. It had paid real close attention to the two of them, like one or both might be on its short list. It might have been, since the ghost had come for Nolte, that it could only be seen by him. It really didn’t matter one way or the other, even if they had been able to see it, Nolte imagined, since both of them together couldn’t figure out how a clothespin worked, there was no way they would be able to wrap their minds around a supernatural fart cloud. They couldn’t find their own ass with both hands and three tries, so he was sure that matters concerning the hereafter and hypothetical thought, would have them completely high-centered.

  Goober had almost stepped on top of the thing when he had gotten up to look for the TV Guide. The entire time his wife was wearing her arm out on Nolte’s crotch, it had hovered beside RJ. Nolte had kept an even closer eye on the country boy than usual, but he seemed entirely unaware of the shit smell the thing next to him was puffing out. Creamed corn and musty trunk, it puffed, and since the smell didn’t bring any horrors to mind for Nolte, he assumed the farts were directed at Goober.

  It didn’t really matter if they had seen it. Nothing would change. Nolte was quite sure it wouldn’t be any more willing to cure stupid, than cancer.

  ***

  The last few hours, the shadow had peeped at Nolte from around the doorway, as if it were playing some idiotic game of hide and seek, where the mother hides from the baby behind her hands. The baby knows that mom didn’t really disappear; it just gets a kick out of watching her act stupid.

  Most of the time, the Reaper had the patience of a stone, letting off stink bombs at its leisure, but now, without fail, every time Nolte closed his eyes or dozed off for a second, it would make a sound like course sand being poured into a glass bowl and puff some stink out at him.

  Nolte had gotten wise. When the sound woke him, he would quickly pinch his nostrils and fan the shadow with the TV Guide. Though he could still taste the smell, it helped put the brakes on the visions. He’d seen enough of the horrible highlights of his past; the shadow could stick them up his ass. What was the point of it, anyway? The past was over and done with; there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it now. What was the point of torturing him?

  Lack of sleep was wearing him down, his head was thick and his eyelids felt weighted. He had even tried sleeping with his eyes open. as a kid, he’d heard that pirates were capable of open-eyed slumber, but Death kept fucking with him. You can sleep when you’re dead, you can sleep when you’re dead.

  “Peek-a-Boo, I see you, motherfucker!” Nolte threw the TV remote at the stink shadow when it poked out from behind the doorway. In his weakened state, the remote had barely cleared the coffee table, but it was enough to send the batteries flying and instantly piss off the shadow. The dark cloud darted over and stopped directly across from him. Up close and personal, Nolte could see that inside, it shimmered like heat spirits on a highway and there was the sound of crackling electricity coming from the center of it.

  “Half a fag cocksucker, you don’t scare me!” Nolte searched the coffee table for something else to throw. He needed to save face. His girly toss of the remote, combined with the fact that he had flinched when the thing had bolted toward him, had alerted his inner coward. “Be careful, it might hurt us!”

  He reached for the copy of Good Housekeeping his stepdaughter had left on the coffee table; Goober must have taken the TV Guide with him. It was time to man up in the face of death, instead, he went limp. The shadow had puffed directly into his face; the smell of stale shit filled his nostrils to the point that they felt stretched. It was so thickly foul he could taste it in his lungs. This time, there was no fucked-up memory or flashback. This time, the smell was just because. The shadow was trying to show him who was boss, by flexing its stink muscle.

  “You don’t scare me, Chickenshit.” He said in a half whisper. The urge to man up had passed and was quickly replaced by a tangible emptiness that seemed to flow out of the shadow, and into him. The thing had never been this close before. It had a peaceful calm inside it that Nolte could actually feel himself wanting and it scared the shit out of him. “Go back in the fucking kitchen.”

  Too close for comfort and about to puke from the death fart, Nolte pulled away from the shadow and flopped back onto the couch. Without taking his eyes off the shit cloud, he dug around between the cushions; he struggled, but he finally managed to dig out the fifth of mescal he kept hidden there.

  Old age and cancer didn’t play well together; any effort seemed to wear his ass out. He pulled the bottle onto his lap and placed it between his legs, staring at it while he caught his breath. The bottle was half full or half empty, one of the two, he really didn’t give a fuck at this point. He looked at the cap and found himself wondering how tight it was, dreading the effort it might take to get it off. If he struggled with the cap, especially after his ‘bitch throw,’ he was really going to look like a pussy in front of the Reaper. Cancer sucked. Old age sucked. He told the little coward in his head to go back to sleep. “I got this
.” He mumbled.

  He removed the cap slowly, making sure his face didn’t display the exertion he was forced to use.

  He thought about tossing the cap across the room and slugging the shit right on down to the worm, like he would have done in his prime, but the way he felt, he figured he’d be damn lucky just to get the bottle up to his mouth. He slowed his breathing and peeled the oxygen hose from his nostrils. He hung the tube on his ear and took a pull from the bottle. So much for my fucking prime, he thought.

  “Stupid bitch didn’t find this one.” He gave his shadow a knowing nod and tried to grin as he shook off the first gulp willies. “Still get the piss chills on the first swallar.” Nolte waited for the warmth of the alcohol to make it down to his belly. He had always liked that part best. His grin faded. “Want some, you stinkin’ sonofabitch?” he held the bottle out in front of him, the neck tilted toward the ghost. “Come over here and polish my knob for me and maybe I’ll let you have a taste.” Nolte tilted his face forward and motioned down to his crotch with his eyes. He looked back at the shadow from under his brow. “What? Does the diaper turn you off?”

  Nolte winked and took a longer swig, the mescal dribbled from his lip, tick, tick, ticking on the plastic crotch of his diaper. “Oopsie, alcohol abuse.” He fumbled the cap back on the bottle and made a halfhearted effort to hide it in the cushions. Hiding it one handed turned out to be harder than he expected, he could feel the shadow judging him, wondering if he had a vagina in his diaper. “Fuck it.” He said. He removed the cap and tossed it, careful not to hit the shit cloud, throwing things at it seemed to really piss it off. He took another long swallow, which bubbled in the bottle’s neck several times. As he drank, he raised his middle finger from the neck of the bottle in a New York salute to his shit cloud.

  Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand Nolte stared down at the carpet for several seconds, as though someone had discarded the answer to something important on the floor and he had stumbled across it, but had yet to decide if it was important enough to pick up.

  Sometimes, profound insights would reveal themselves to him in moments such as these. The answers to the universe could be found in these moments. Though they were fleeting, unspeakable and vanished with the moment, they remained on the tip of his mute tongue for few seconds and that felt good. To hold the answer to everything, even though you couldn’t understand it, or describe it, felt good. Several hard, semi-drunk blinks later and whatever revelation Nolte had thought he had found, was once again a mystery lost to the ages.

  He directed his attention back to the reaper. Rocking up on one cheek, he put a muffled fart into his diaper. A crooked smile crossed his lips. “Farts are funny, AND an excellent icebreaker, if used properly.” Nolte marveled at himself for the wit and bravery he displayed in the face of death. “You know what, Fuckstain?” he asked as he brought up a gnarled, unsteady finger to point at his death shadow. The warm feeling from the mescal had started to morph into liquid courage. “You know what your fucking problem is?” he hissed, as he moved his finger closer to the ghost, “You don’t know how to laugh. Pull my finger you stinkin’ sonofabitch.”

  The pain gripped his chest so hard and so sudden; it felt as though it had always been there. Somehow it had become part of him when he wasn’t paying attention and had set up shop in his chest cavity, forging large needles, sharp knives, and hot pokers. It felt old and familiar, yet brand new and blistering shiny.

  Nolte looked at the shadowy figure across from him to see if it was smiling. “It’s okay, Asshole, I found a loophole.”

  The shadow had moved directly in front of him, almost touching. He could feel how cold and empty it truly was. The calmness, Nolte had found attractive was still there, but an enormous emptiness felt as though it were just an inch away from his face, crushing huge and empty. It was as though it contained everything and nothing at all at once.

  The abyss had opened before Nolte and he could now see that fear and loathing had no end. Like the gripping fade from reality, at the onset of a seizure, it began to engulf him. He heard a distant child fearfully singing Jesus Loves Me.

  “Don’t tell your mom, don’t tell your mom, don’t tell your mom.” He repeated with tiny puffs of air.

  As the light dimmed and his last breath leaked out of him, Nolte found himself wondering if he had remembered to set the trash cans out. He pictured the neighbor’s dog digging through them.

  Dying wasn’t so bad when you had a backup plan.

  4

  The room smelled sweet and rusty. It was completely void of furniture other than a burlap sack split halfsies and draped over the windows on either side of the cramped hole. A tiny black woman, two days older than dirt, with a face as wrinkled as a root cellar potato, sat on an upturned five-gallon bucket in the far corner. She held a crooked candle in one hand and a small ball of opium on the end of a toothpick in the other. Her sucking noises and the hiss of the opium were the only sound, other than what Nolte assumed was his heartbeat. Since he saw no other upturned buckets or furniture, Nolte stood by the door and waited for her to acknowledge his presence.

  “I can smell the fear on you, ta to, you know I real—don’t ya boy?” She said finally, her voice so hoarse and grave, that Nolte absentmindedly touched his fingers to his own throat. “I ain’t no Santeria coon-ass, ta to, you know dis.” The flame of the candle danced and cast palsied shadows on the face of the old woman, as she watched Nolte from the corner of her eye. She made no attempt to hide her dislike of Nolte.

  “This ain’t for you; dis shit makes da white boys sleepy.” She sucked at the thin finger of smoke curling up from the end of the toothpick and held it in deep in the bottoms of her ancient lungs. With a rush of blue smoke, she blew out the candle and dropped it at her feet. Careful not to knock the opium from its perch, she poked the toothpick into her matted hair, until it all but disappeared. “Bring me there what you got for me, Chickenshit.” She held her crooked hand out to Nolte. Her hands looked old and worn, yet moved with a rehearsed grace.

  Nolte wondered how many children had met their end, gulping for air, wearing her hands around their neck? How many fools had those hands castrated to provide flavor and enhance the potency of eye of eel, in one of her witch’s brews?

  Nolte stepped forward warily, fishing an envelope from his back pocket. “This is a lot of money, for nothing more than information.” He suppressed the ever present little coward in his head and tried to sound fearless, but he sounded plucky at best. The look she flashed him told him he’d probably said enough, probably too much. Though she looked old and decrepit, the vibe she shared was similar to one a person might get from a dead rattlesnake. It is okay to have your picture taken standing next to it, but stroking the top of its lifeless head required a bit of intestinal fortitude.

  “You want you dick fall off, White Boy? I kin make dat happen, ta to. You da one come to me. You come to me ‘cuz you know only Mama know this thing. You know dat Mama ain’t no Santeria coon-ass.” The old woman snatched the envelope out of Nolte’s hand and quickly slapped his wrist with it, as if she’d caught his hand in the cookie jar. Nolte stepped back into his allotted space by the door, as the old woman poked her finger around inside the envelope.

  After she was satisfied with the contents, she put the envelope between her butt and the bucket she sat on. Her face pinched and she stared hard at Nolte. “This thing you need; they only be two left in da wide world. Da Pope have one and a sandman in Israel have de other.” She picked up the candle from between her bare feet and lit it with a Zippo. “C’mere White Boy, hold out you hand.”

  Nolte stepped toward her and offered his sweaty hand. She carefully pressed a folded paper into his palm and closed his fingers around it one at a time, in a manner that resembled the un-peeling of an orange. Nolte would recall the action later and label it ‘mighty cool beans’ and adopt it into his repertoire of coolness.

  “Now give me de other one, Chickenshit.” The old woma
n turned the candle to one side and let the wax drip into Nolte’s palm. He flinched at the first drip but thought it best to cowboy up for the next four. He didn’t want this crazy bitch thinking he was a complete pussy.

  “Squeeze it, Chickenshit.” She ordered.

  Nolte clenched his hand into a fist; he could feel the wax squirm like a tomato worm in his grip as it cooled and hardened. She blew out the candle and dropped it at her feet again. “Open you hand, White Boy.”

  Nolte slowly uncurled his fingers one at a time, re-peeling the orange, to find, not a tomato worm, nor wiggly wax, but an address neatly written across his palm where the witch had dripped the molten liquid. He had been told this bitch could do scary shit. Well, maybe the address thing wasn’t that scary, but he sure found it unsettling, and what he had seen at the whorehouse, the thing that had convinced him to come to the old hag, was more than unsettling. It had completely reshuffled his deck. It had convinced him, that what all he knew about the workings of this world, didn’t amount to shit.

  “You go there. Talk to the man, dat fix da trumpets. You sign da paper and you have de man send you ta git it, yerownself. If da trumpet man touch dis thing you need, he will know what it be, and what it is you be doin’. Den you done.” She grabbed Nolte’s wrist and squeezed with a strength that seemed impossible from someone who looked so frail. It made him think of strangled children again. “You want dis? You don’t tell him you talk to Mama. You don’t even think about Mama. Dis man can know de shit dat be in you head.” She paused and looked into Nolte’s eyes. “You tell him Linus Lucy from Plaquemines tell you ‘bout da trumpet fixer, den you think about baseball, or pussy, or dat fraidy cat you gots runnin’ ‘round in you head.” She released his wrist, but her grip remained as a ghost. “Iffen he thinks you out ta cheat ol’ Scratch, he call off da deal and rain all manner a shit and commotion on you head.”