by Borne Wilder
“I’m sorry, I stopped listening at fashionista.”
Nolte nodded at the bus, taking a pretend drag on his cigarette. “Back to riding the bus, eh, Loser?” He leaned closer to Charlie to blow pretend smoke in his face.
A large woman stopped outside the door of the shop and searched through her purse, her stubby arm stirred the contents. “Got a light in there?” Nolte called out, with an exaggerated wave, trying to make eye contact over the top of his too big sunglasses.
Charlie concluded, she either couldn’t see ghosts, or she knew better than to talk to Grampa Creepy. She withdrew an empty hand and pushed through the door. Nolte flicked his unlit cigarette and struck her in the ass before the door could hiss itself closed. “Unsociable bitch.” He called after her.
“Why in the fuck are you here?” Charlie had to tap Nolte in order to break him out of the ass to mouth fantasy, he was sure Nolte was working up in his mind. The simple minded motherfucker was no less fucked up and perverted dead, than he had been when he was alive.
“I’m waiting on a bus, just like you, Nancy.” He replied pointing at the grumbling beast parked in the dusty lot. “Is there an empty seat next to you?” Nolte’s expression changed abruptly. He adopted a more serious look and stared blankly out across the highway. A black kid and a homeless man in sackcloth argued beside the road. Leaning against the homeless man’s leg was a cardboard sign, “The End Is Nigh!!!” it read. “What do you think those two are going on about? That homeless guy looks familiar. That argument looks to be religious in nature.”
“How would you know the nature of their argument, did death give you Superman ears?”
“You know, I don’t know how you and your brother found out the details concerning my nest egg, but you’re not going to stop me from doing this. It’s really none of your fucking concern.”
Charlie cocked his head and stared long and unblinking at Nolte. The moment was short-lived, as the thump and pop of a Harley grew in his ears; it drowned out the sad grumbling of the bus and erased any thoughts that might have applied to Nolte. The rider switched off the engine early and rolled silently up to where they were seated, gravel crunching under the tires. The rider gave Charlie a nod as he threw out the kickstand and dismounted. Charlie was still unsure if other people could see the idiot beside him. The rider gave no indication of it, as he turned and walked into the Fast Mart.
Nolte pointed at the ignition. “What kind of a fucking idiot leaves the keys in his bike?”
The telephone poles zipped past like fence posts. Charlie rolled open the throttle, taking the big bike past eighty. Charlie loved Harleys with every ounce of his heart and soul. There is nothing like the open road and wind in your hair. He made a quick glance at the pussy pad on the fender behind him, to make sure the idiot in the diaper hadn’t somehow managed to tag along.
***
Ron eased his Mercedes up the short drive at the side of Nolte’s house and switched off the ignition. Nirvana’s ‘In Bloom’, which had been pounding the inside of the car, at full volume, fell silent. Nolte’s screaming version of ‘Jimmy Crack Corn’ instantly filled the ringing void. Swaying from side to side, he sat in the back of the car, using the headrests on the front seats as drums and in the sourest hillbilly twang, belted out the sorrowful tale of his “Massa’s” untimely death via Bluetail Fly. He’d begun singing it when Ron refused to acknowledge him in the backseat, acting the fool, during the drive. Four and a half ungodly long hours, Nolte had been crooning, howling and twanging, without any sign of tiring.
Ron had almost soiled his fruities when he first noticed Nolte in the rear view mirror. He always thought the villain popping up in the back of a dark car, was a cheap, overused movie scare tactic, but he found it to be truly terrifying in real life. It wasn’t until a rest stop later on, was he able to convince himself, that he had not caused injury, to his boxers.
Nolte hadn’t overtly tried to frighten Ron by grabbing him or shouting boo, he had just appeared, grinning like a whiskey still possum. Ron tried to ignore him. He hadn’t liked the asshole when he was alive and liked him even less, now that he was dead, but Nolte wasn’t having it.
The first part of the trip to New Orleans had been peaceful and Nolte free, the highway quietly disappearing into the mirror. Frequently checking his rearview was a developed habit for Ron, it wasn’t a good idea to allow jealous husbands and boyfriends to follow you home and find out where you lived, a valuable lesson he had learned the hard way. Jealousy always seemed to manifest itself in car and tire damage. After he had left the city, the mirror contained Nolte.
Every time he checked his rear view, there was Nolte, a big stupid grin carved into his withered face. He had positioned himself in the center, at the front edge of the back seat, so that his stupid grinning face all but filled the mirror. He wasn’t making any noise, just grinning, and that, in and of itself, annoyed the piss out of Ron. A big, stupid, toothy grin. The same expression could be seen on any dog hanging its head out of a windy car window. The man was more than a few feathers short of a duck. The old man completely baffled Ron, here he was experiencing life after death, with an apparent ability to travel anywhere at will and he chose to spend it grinning into a fucking mirror.
After several hours, Nolte had grown impatient with the mirror approach. Having failed to get as much attention from his reflection as he’d hoped for, he had torn a hole in his diaper and began tossing small tufts of diaper padding over Ron’s shoulder and onto the dash. The first tuft of pissy faux cotton had shaken Ron to his core, as it bounced around on the dash of his immaculate, showroom condition vehicle. He was instantly transported into a state of unspeakable rage, which bordered on psychotic frenzy. The second tuft had him so mad he couldn’t see straight and flooded his mind with serious contemplation of murder. He began to shake uncontrollably; idiocy at this level could not go unpunished.
Nolte marveled at the profound effect his piss wads were having on his idiot son but was caught off guard by the incendiary nature, which had developed in his once timid boy.
A small wad of damp diaper stuffing bounced off Ron’s ear, whether it was the proverbial ‘last straw’, or a perverse reminder of the ‘ear flicking’, that caused Ron to snap, but the naked dead man was completely unprepared for the full-on conniption fit which followed.
Ron slammed on the brakes, causing Nolte to fly forward between the seats, striking his head on the console. “You should have been wearing your seat belt, motherfucker.” Ron said as he jumped out of the car. No sooner was he out of the car, than he lunged back in for Nolte, who was busy gathering his marbles. Ron grabbed his arms and jerked him through the small space between the seat back and the steering wheel.
“Stop, stop, stop!” Nolte screamed, “You’re hurting me! You’re hurting me!” He cried, pretending to bawl through a fit of laughter. It was more than the old man could have hoped for.
Ron pulled him out to the center line of the road, dropping Nolte’s limp arms in his face, roughly. Nolte drew himself into a fetal position, his head rolled from side to side, in uncontrollable laughter. When he heard Ron’s footsteps moving off toward the car, Nolte stopped laughing.
“I know what you were doing in Tremé.” The footsteps stopped. “The cunt had some mojo that kept me from coming in, but I can add two and two.” The footsteps receded to the car. “I don’t know how the fuck you found out about it, but you can’t stop it. On the third day, I will be risen!” The footsteps returned quickly and gave Nolte three hard kicks to the ribs and one to the side of the old man’s head. A moment later the car door slammed and Ron speed away. Nolte raised his ringing head and looked at the crotch of his diaper. He had pissed himself.
Forty-five minutes later, Ron glanced in his rear view to change lanes and again, Nolte’s stupid face was filling the mirror. This time, he was wearing the bug-eyed women’s sunglasses and was grinning around an unlit cigarette. He held his hand up for Ron to see, he was rolling a tuft of diap
er padding between his thumb and index finger. Ron grit his teeth hard, raged and tried desperately to block the foul asshole from his mind. Nolte burst into song.
“When I was young, I use’d to wait on massa and hand him de plate. Pass down de bottle when he git dry and bresh away de bluetail fly. Oh Jim crack corn and I don’t care, Jim crack corn and I don’t care, Jim crack corn and I don’t care, Ol’ massa gone away….”
Ron slammed the car door. He could still hear the muffled strains of The Blue Tail Fly, as he walked away toward the back of Nolte’s house. He wished there was a way to suck all of the oxygen out of the interior of his car; he had been fantasizing about ways to kill the dead since Nolte had started singing.
Assuming the pink Taurus, he had parked behind, belonged to one of the hillbilly sisters, he inconspicuously dug his key into the paint as he passed it. The scraping did little to ease the state of anxiety Nolte had put him in, but it helped.
Ron barged through the unlocked door without knocking, knowing this would piss off whichever sister was in the house, both were territorial with anything pertaining to Nolte, and now that the pervert was dead, he imagined they had piss-marked everything they could squat over and had claimed full ownership. Fuck ‘em, it wasn’t their house yet, he figured he belonged here as much as those two inbreds. He knew he was lying to himself, he had never had Nolte’s dick in his mouth, and deep down he knew the sisters had ‘cocksucking’ rights to all of Nolte’s stuff, they’d earned it.
The worn linoleum floor stuck to his shoes as he made a bee-line to the alcohol. Nolte’s version of a ‘bar’ was a section of countertop next to the fridge. Two gallons of tequila, a half-gallon of gin, a fifth of mescal and a fifth of bourbon were lined up like soldiers for inspection, labels facing forward, tallest to shortest. The display screamed anal retentive. The fifth of mescal was missing; the equally distanced bottle effect was marred by its absence. He chose the bourbon.
“Wow.” He mumbled, shaking his head, the sticker price of the bottle, “Seven bucks for a fifth, the old fart had spared no expense when it came to poisoning himself.” Now the fifth of bourbon would be missing, too. He couldn’t wait for the old man to see the disarray his fueling station had become.
Not bothering with a glass, he sat down at the table to work the corn cracking ear-worm out of his head; the songbird in the back seat had given him a record-breaking headache. Though it felt like it had chemically scalded the lining in his throat, his empty stomach allowed the brown paint stripper instant access to his head.
Whoever was in the house came trotting down the stairs. The footsteps stopped somewhere toward the front of the house. Slowly, Martha, assuming the top of her head was invisible, peeked around the edge of the foyer, up to the bridge of her nose.
“Don’t you knock?” she asked, territorially indignant, slinking into full view. She held a two-foot version of a Louisville Slugger tightly in her hand. “You’re lucky you didn’t get it upside the head.”
“You don’t live here, Corn Pone,” Ron replied, refusing to answer her question. “I hope you wash that thing when you’re finished with it.” He nodded at the small bat in her hand. “What a girl does with her ‘alone time’ is her business, but God knows how many outbreak monkeys have been up in your bat polisher.”
“Already starting shit and you haven’t been here five minutes.” Martha looked past him at the back door, hoping to see no one. She couldn’t stand Ron, but she actually hated Charlie. It took everything she had to tolerate them one at a time, together, they were horrible. The things they said were unbelievably cruel. They seemed to feed off each other when they were together.
“Want some corn squeezin’s, Daisy Lou?” Her disgusted glance at the bottle of bourbon wasn’t lost on Ron. One time, when she thought her shit smelled really rosy, she had engaged him in Biblical debate on the alcohol content of wine in the Good Book. Her fine congregation at the First Holy Church of the Blessed Snake Handlers had collectively decided, that alcohol was a sin, therefore, any nectar of the vine that had crossed the lips of the Savior, had to be alcohol-free.
Armed with this revelation, they had seen fit to replace the word ‘wine’ with ‘grape juice’, everywhere it appeared in the New Testament. The congregation had spent weeks crossing out wines and writing GJ for grape juice above them. He took another swig from the bottle and smiled. Ron felt the entire herd was a ‘mark of the beast’ waiting to happen. In fact, he was quite sure, the visibly righteous were paper tigers and would tuck tail, and bend knee to whoever held the cheeseburgers during Armageddon.
Martha placed the small baseball bat on the table next to the bottle of Nolte’s varnish flavored bourbon, causing Ron to recoil in mock horror. “Careful, Daisy, are you going to make me call in a hazmat team, to bag that up?” He could feel Martha’s eyes on him, burning in judgment. Fucking hypocrite, he thought. Both she and her sister. As far as Ron was concerned, were conniving fun holes, attached to Bugtussle’s runner-ups to the Possum Queen. The fact that they had ‘found the Lord’, at the exact same time, seemed orchestrated and phony to him.
Martha pulled the chair in front of her, away from the table, sliding it further away from Ron, before she sat down. She folded one hand in the other on the table in front of her and tried her best to appear genuinely concerned. She was doing okay until her eyes accidentally made contact with Ron’s and they started to dance around like a red-handed thief’s. She decided it best to settle her gaze on her hands and ricochet her communication off her wedding ring.
Almost like she had rehearsed, she began to speak, using the calming controlled voice, she imagined Oprah Winfrey might use in a situation such as this. “My stepfather, your father,” she nodded toward Ron, almost as an afterthought, “has just passed away and circumstances beyond our control, have forced us together. We need to try and make the best of this time and be as un-intrusive to each other as we possibly can. I would appreciate it if you would convey my thoughts and feelings on this matter to your brother when he arrives.” Forcing a smile, she looked up from her folded hands to Ron’s face, so that she might measure the impact of her words.
Ron was grinning from ear to ear, looking at her as if she’d suddenly grown horns. “Did you memorize that all by yourself? Un-intrusive? You are really pushing that sixth-grade education to the breaking point, Miss Thang.” Ron couldn’t wait for her to use ‘un-intrusive’ on Charlie. That was going to be a hoot. “Well, don’t you worry, Daisy Lou,” he slapped his hand down lightly on the table. “Me and ol’ Charlie plan to intrude on the motel, and leave you hillbillies to your hillbilly stuff.” He grabbed the bottle of bourbon colored kerosene and started to stand.
“There isn’t a motel, anymore.” She mimicked his hand swatting the table. “Thus, the ‘circumstances beyond our control’, Asshole.” Martha hated cursing, especially when she was the one doing it.
Ron sat down hard. “You have got to be shitting me.” He sensed the storm clouds gathering. Charlie, as far as Ron knew, had never lifted a violent hand to a woman, so the hee-haw sisters would be safe, but keeping him from throwing an ass whippin’ on their husbands was going to be a different story. Charlie couldn’t stand for stupid; he saw it as a correctable offence that should be rectified immediately. Stupidity was not to be shared with others, or put on display. Either fix your stupid or keep your silence. Junior and RJ had never even tinkered with their stupid. They seemed to be perfectly content with their ignorance and allowed their mouths to say whatever popped into their heads, without filter or restraint. They, more than likely, didn’t even realize they were infected with stupid; Ron had pondered this possibility on several occasions. Charlie’s drinking would have to be monitored.
“You need to keep the Jethros at home,” Ron suggested flatly.
“You need to keep a leash on your brother.”
Somewhere upstairs Ron heard Nolte start to sing the beginning of Jimmy Crack Corn. He knew it was the beginning because he’d heard the son
g no less than seven hundred times in the last four hours, though, in the car, Nolte had always preceded it with ‘One more time!’
He looked carefully at the hillbilly, wondering if she’d heard it too. Martha had diverted her darting eyes and attention to the kitchen floor. She bounced one of her knees nervously. It was hard to tell. Maybe she heard him and she was trying to wish him away. Maybe she was just nervous and stupid. To Ron, she always appeared to be counting down the last fifteen minutes on death row.
8
Charlie wove the thumping Harley through the cluster of pickups in Nolte’s drive and up to the garage. He was astonished to find, none of the vehicles up on blocks and each one had all four wheels. Someone on the sister side of the family must have sold a shit load of magazines. Pulling up close to the overhead door, he let the bike thump for a few seconds before he switched off the ignition. He felt that a thumping Harley had to be among the most soothing sounds in the world.
Leaning the weight of the bike onto the kickstand, he dismounted. Taking turns with his legs, he tried to shake out some of the vibration that had collected in them. His back clamped, and told him, no, as he reached down to open the garage door, it had been a long time since he had ridden a bike. The back road route he had taken to avoid law enforcement, had kept him riding longer than he had planned, but it beat the bus. Thou shalt not steal, as a commandment, was a damn good idea in Charlie’s opinion, but he felt little to no guilt over thieving the motorcycle, had the victim of the theft ever been forced to ride the bus, there’s a good chance he would have had an understanding heart and given him the bike out of pity.
