The Brickeaters

by The Residents

  “That’s it! That’s it! Ain’t it beautiful, Storky? Let’s go check it out!”

  “Wait, Willy, hold up. We gotta make sure Beasley is gone. We’re not going anywhere for at least an hour, so take your time.”

  “An hour! What th’ fuck, Stork… that guy ain’t doin’ shit as long as we got his car.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right, Willy, but once we tell him where it is, he could be after us pronto. Let’s give him plenty of time to get away.”

  “Fuck him! Forget about the goddam car. We don’t owe him nuthin’!”

  “Yeah, I agree, but a deal’s a deal… look, this was your idea… and the asshole did deliver Millie’s precious Cadillac. Order some pie or something… drink another cup of coffee. We gotta kill some time.”

  With the old man feverishly chain-smoking and drinking coffee, another forty-five minutes goes by as the café slowly empties. Hendricks finishes his meal, opens his laptop and begins to catch up on his email. Finally, the last customer pays his bill, leaving Ted and Willy as the only ones left in the small café. Ready to close up, Hazel returns to their table, “Hey, dudes! Leavin’ is tough when we’re havin’ so much goddam fun, but I’ll be turnin’ into a pumpkin pretty soon and it ain’t a pretty sight… if you get my drift.”

  Picking up the repartee, the old man responds, “I hear you, Hazel… hell, I been trying to get this young stud outta here for a hour, but he keeps tellin’ me what a hot piece a’ ass you are… I think he’s hopin’ to get lucky.”

  “Yeah, yeah… I bet he’s got a dick the size of Texas, too. C’mon, guys, I gotta close up an’ go home.”

  As the young techie pays their bill, the ex-con drags his oxygen bottle to the door, then steps outside. Standing in the empty parking lot, Willy pauses to look around as Ted joins him. “He’s gone, Stork… just like I told you… the asshole wants his goddam car back… he’s not gonna fuck with us.”

  It’s just after ten o’clock and the night air is cool and calm as the two men approach the gold car. Peeking through the window, the old man squeals with delight. “Look at that, Stork! It’s the most beautiful goddam thing I ever saw. Millie’s gonna fuckin’ love it. Whaddaya think, dude?”

  The tech worker cautiously opens the door and looks around the large interior. The new car smell is all but overwhelming. Sliding into the driver’s seat, he notes that the car has been driven a total of thirty-eight miles. “I… I guess it’s okay, Willy. Let’s get out of here.”

  Fifteen minutes later, as the big car speeds down the highway, Willy Graves speaks up, “Uh, sorry, Stork, but my goddam prostate’s doin’ it again. Can you pull off the road so’s I can pee.”

  “Yeah, it’s okay, Willy. I guess I’ll go ahead and tell Beasley where he can find his car. I’ll use my phone to notify him on Facebook. There’s a side road up ahead.”

  The dirt road that Hendricks turns onto is so narrow, he has to drive two hundred yards to find a space large enough to turn the big car around. As he stops the Cadillac in the center of the small clearing, Graves gets out while Hendricks creates the Facebook posting. He finds the PAGWAG page and privately posts the location of the Hummer, then pauses for a minute and suddenly jumps out of the car. Willy has just finished urinating and is stuffing his penis back into his pants when he hears Ted shouting, “Hey, Willy… I gotta check something. If Beasley put a GPS tracker on my Honda, there could be one on the Escalade, too. Wait a second while I look around.”

  It’s cold and the old man is shivering, but he does as he’s told. Ted Hendricks quickly crawls under the Cadillac and examines the underside of the car with a small flashlight. “Hurry the fuck up, Stork… it’s goddam cold out here.” The chilly night air is deadly still as the old man wraps his arms around his body, slowly bobbing up and down trying to keep warm.

  “Okay, okay… this shouldn’t take too long.”

  Suddenly, without warning, as the young techie crawls out from under the car, the doors lock and the lights flash; at the same time the stereo system begins blasting a curious piece of music. It’s the William Tell Overture in all its Lone Ranger glory. With the familiar refrain echoing through the night air, Hendricks rises to his feet as he and Willy stare at each other, their faces frozen into odd and befuddled shapes. Then, after a taut and unnerving minute, the sound of Crawford Beasley’s voice, reminiscent of the recent incident at the warehouse, echoes with a sinister sneer.

  “HAHAHA! YOU IDIOTS THOUGHT YOU HAD ME, DIDN’T YOU? YOU THOUGHT I WOULD JUST FOLD MY TENT AND CRAWL AWAY LEAVING YOU WITH A BRAND NEW CAR FOR YOUR TROUBLE! WELL, THINK AGAIN NINCOMPOOPS! THINK AGAIN, BECAUSE YOU ARE CURRENTLY LOCKED INSIDE OF AN AUTOMOBILE THAT WILL BE BLASTED TO ATOMS IN EXACTLY NINETY SECONDS. DO YOU HEAR ME… THAT’S EIGHTY-FIVE SECONDS NOW AND COUNTING DOWN. I ONLY WISH I COULD SEE YOUR…”

  As the snide and condescending voice of Crawford Beasley drones on in the background, Ted Hendricks shouts at his partner, “Run, Willy, run! We gotta get out of here.” Picking up his friend’s oxygen bottle, Hendricks half-pushes and half-carries the old man back out toward the highway as Beasley’s malevolent countdown continues.

  “SEVENTY-FIVE SECONDS, DOLTS! HAS A FEELING OF SHEER TERROR TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY OVERWHELMED YOU YET? I DO LOVE THE SIGHT OF A FACE DEVOURED BY PURE UNADULTERATED PANIC! SEVENTY SECONDS…”

  Tripping, Willy’s frail body is once more seized with a spasm of uncontrolled coughing as he hits the ground. Helping the old man up, Ted urges him onward, “C’mon, Willy… c’mon… we gotta get away from that car!”

  “SIXTY SECONDS, YOU NITWITS… NOW IT’S FIFTY-FIVE… HAVE YOU TRIED BREAKING THE WINDOWS YET? THEY’RE PURE BALLISTIC POLYCARBONATE! YOU COULDN’T GET THROUGH THEM WITH A SLEDGEHAMMER! HAHAHA! FORTY-FIVE SECONDS AND COUNTING…”

  Helping Willy to his feet, they stumble along until the tube leading from the ex-con’s oxygen bottle gets caught on a twig, pulling the plastic cannulas from his nose as he falls to his knees, gasping for breath.

  “THIRTY SECONDS, LOSERS… TWENTY-EIGHT, TWENTY-SEVEN… HAVE YOU GIVEN UP YET! ARE YOU PRAYING TO SOME NONEXISTENT DEITY… A GOD THAT IGNORES, MOCKS AND HUMILIATES YOU… WHILE LAUGHING AT YOUR PATHETIC AND SNIVELING CRIES! TWENTY SECONDS, NINETEEN…”

  Bending over, Ted sticks the nosepiece back in Willy’s nostrils, picks him up and lurches another twenty feet before collapsing behind a boulder at the side of the road. As both men gasp for air, the relentless voice of Crawford Beasley nears the end of its countdown.

  “THE TIME HAS COME, YOU SLIME-SUCKING SEWER SCUM… ARE YOU READY… FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE…”

  And then… nothing.

  Silence…

  The silence of a tomb. The silence of a morgue at midnight. The silence of a cemetery occupied only by rotting cadavers, snakes and snails…

  Until… a faint sound is heard from the car stereo, now one hundred feet away. Once again, the sound is both familiar and completely unexpected. It’s the theme from Star Wars and after an achingly long thirty seconds, the music fades leaving the sneering voice of Crawford Beasley to cut through the night one last time.

  “SURPRISE!”

  The sound of the explosion is beyond ear-splitting… beyond brain-rearranging… beyond anything Ted Hendricks had experienced or knew he was capable of experiencing. The sky lights up like lightning but it’s a million bolts hitting all at once followed by a rush of air that flattens trees, eradicates bushes and reduces the Cadillac to rubble.

  Stunned, the young content screener slowly rises to his feet, scanning a scene of total devastation. Looking down, he immediately senses a void, a lack of life force in Wilmer Graves’ limp and motionless body. Crawford Beasley’s insane desecration of life was almost complete… but somehow he had survived.

  Despite the futility of the act, Ted is compelled to drag Willy’s body back out to the road but that’s as far as he can go. Dumping the old man’s corpse, along with his oxygen bottle and the huge pistol still death-gripped in Willy’s fist,
by the side of the road, he stops and stares at nothing, unaware of the tears streaming down his face or the involuntary convulsions propelling them down his cheeks and onto the ground.

  Finally, with no other choice, he looks back one more time at the lifeless heap that had become his friend and begins the long trudge back to the aging Honda still parked at the café.

  PART THREE

  BEAST-LEY

  So here I am… in jail… in Clinton, DUMBFUCK, Missouri. Lying on this DUMBFUCK cot, I can feel every DUMBFUCK bump and lump on this DUMBFUCK mattress, thinking about how many other DUMBFUCKS have laid here and pissed and shit and thrown up and maybe even croaked right on this bed… It’s been a week… or has it been more… two weeks… three… It’s all so hazy now… But yeah, Ted Hendricks’ girlfriend Margo eventually showed up, scowling, pissed off and more beautiful than ever, and took the kid home. Patty got my stuff from the motel and brought my laptop, allowing me to document Willy & Ted’s Excellent Adventure while it was still fresh on my mind…

  But that was several days ago… I haven’t seen her since.

  I think it’s midnight… maybe later, I don’t know… The world outside my cell is a void… a vacuum… a cipher. I know nothing more today than I did yesterday… or the day before… or the day before… My pal, Deputy Bodie, brings me three meals a day. I ask about a trial… and a lawyer… and Patty. The midget bowling ball gives me this little shit-eating grin, then slides the tray under the door and splits… I’m beginning to think this is what forever feels like. I mean, what’s to stop me from lying on this cot in perpetuity… like they tell you when your rich aunt dies and they want you to buy this stainless steel casket that goes in the concrete vault and protects her from the worms… IN PERPETUITY! But you don’t give a shit about the old bag, you just want the money. HA! My mind teems with these thoughts—perverse, morose, depressing, but they fade, oh yeah, THEY PALE COMPARED TO THE DARKNESS… the huge black blob of nothing that floats, shimmering like an ebony amoeba right there in front of me. Every time I close my eyes it’s waiting… amorphous, fluid and shape-shifting like a jellyfish made of mucus waiting to mold its evil malignancy to my face, my mind, my soul, my… I keep thinking ATTACK IT! ATTACK THE BLOB, FRANK! MAKE A WEAPON! TAKE THAT PLASTIC SPOON AND MORPH IT INTO A MACHETE, YOU IDIOT! SWING IT! SWING IT, FRANK! CUT THAT FUCKER INTO A MILLION LITTLE PIECES! BUT HO! WATCH OUT! IT’S CREEPING UP YOUR ASSHOLE, FRANK… OH NO! IT’S AFTER YOUR DICK NOW! IT… IT…

  “FRANK! FRANK! FRANK! WAKE UP! YOU’RE HAVING A NIGHTMARE!”

  I sat up, expecting to see, who else, Ted Hendricks towering over me, weaving back and forth, his rage tangible, but somehow the kid had mutated into Patty… what a pleasant surprise.

  “You were swinging your arms around like crazy, Frank. It looked like… well, you were about to hit your penis, so I woke you up.”

  “Uh, yeah, good call. Thanks, Patty.” Not convinced that I was actually awake, I looked at her hard then shook my head. Red flags were popping up like crazy in my sleep-addled brain. Still not convinced, I tentatively continued, “So, uh, what are you doing here, Patty… if, uh, this is really you…” Desperate for some sign of recognition, I squinted, staring straight at her, and continued, “I mean, you kind of disappeared and I thought…”

  “I know, Frank… I’m sorry… you must have felt like I deserted you. It… it’s been a rough week.” Unable to disguise the pain in her eyes, she looked away, taking a few moments to compose herself before going on, “I’ll explain later, but right now I have to get you out of here. Grab your stuff, Frank… let’s go.”

  “But wait… it’s the middle of the night… where are we going?”

  “C’mon, Frank, we have to hurry…” Projecting a feeling of urgency, Patty picked up my laptop and coat. Aggressively pushing me through the open cell door, she continued, “Look… you want to get out of here, right?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “But what?” Anxious and frustrated, the young clerk stopped, her eyes radiating a sobering combination of care and concern.

  “But… what’s going on? Are… are you breaking me out of jail? Is that what’s happening?”

  “Frank, we don’t have time to talk about this now. Bernie is trying to get you charged with domestic terrorism…”

  “WHAT?” This couldn’t be real. I had to be dreaming.

  After a short but tense ride, we pulled up in front of the house where Patty lived with her mom and brother. Stopping the car, the young woman sat behind the steering wheel for several seconds, her eyes staring straight ahead, the engine still running. As I turned and looked, attempting to read her blank expression, the emotional weight of some huge unknown burden was clear.

  “What’s wrong, Patty? I appreciate the jailbreak, but I don’t understand why you’re doing this. You’re taking a big risk here, and…”

  “My mom died, Frank… five days ago. We buried her yesterday.”

  “What? Shit… I’m so sorry to hear that, Patty. It must be horrible for you and Tommy Joe.” I reached over and tried to put my arm around her, but she just sat there, impassive and still, like a rock in a block of ice.

  “Tommy Joe is gone. He disappeared right before Mom died.” Pausing and turning around, she looked straight at me, making eye contact for the first time since I woke up in the cell. “It was him, wasn’t it… He was the one that shot Billy in the donut shop, wasn’t he?”

  Piercing my persona, her eyes were somehow searching, soft and strong. “Well, yeah, it was him… I mean, he is your kid brother after all… how could I rat him out to Bernie. The gun went off by accident. He didn’t do it on purpose. What else could I…”

  My voice trailed off as I watched Patty’s breath, slow and deliberate, in and out. The kid’s world was coming apart. As I reached over and stroked her shoulder again, this time she yielded, ever so slightly, to my touch.

  “It’s okay, Frank. It’s okay… It’s…” She paused, feeling the weight of her words as they blocked her tongue, filling her mouth with memories she could no longer control, then, suddenly, spontaneously, spilling back out into the air, “It’s not okay… It’s not… It’s not…” Sobbing uncontrollably, Patty melted into my shoulder, her chest heaving as her breath convulsively jerked in and out. “It… will… never… be… okay… again.”

  Cloaked in chaos—empty bottles, paper plates and cups, unwashed serving dishes, half-eaten casseroles, and other byproducts of social grief—Patty’s working-class home had recently hosted a wake for the young woman’s mother. Shell-shocked into oblivion, Patty left the house as it was and, frantic to restore order to an unfocused and floundering life, she had apparently hitched her wagon to my mess, a dubious decision at best… but desperation makes strange bedfellows… or something like that.

  After roaming around the disarray for several minutes, I walked into Patty’s bedroom where she was finishing packing her suitcase. “I know things are moving fast, Frank, but we don’t have much choice.”

  “There are always choices, Patty, and… Well, maybe you should give this a little more thought. I mean… you have a life here… okay, things aren’t so great right now, but…”

  “No, things are not great and they’re not gonna be great. Is a clerk’s job in a sheriff’s office great? Is marrying Duane and having his kids great? Is a dead mother and a runaway brother great? You tell me, Frank… and what about you? How will you feel buried in Leavenworth as a domestic terrorist?”

  “That’s crazy, Patty… there’s no way Bernie can get away with that.”

  “Don’t count on it, Frank… you don’t know what she’s been up to. Bernie has you and Ted Hendricks pegged as co-conspirators. She says the explosion was a plot gone wrong. Did you know the President was in St. Louis for a re-dedication of the Gateway Arch last week? She says you guys were planning on blowing up a car bomb and bringing down the arch… maybe even killing the President. She’s got it all figured out, Frank. Oh yeah, apparently you wrote a glow
ing review of something called The Anarchist Cookbook book a few years ago? Right? Well, she found that, too.”

  “But… but that was just satire… a joke… it was nothing… a joke… a…” As my voice trailed off, a foul flavor ascended from my stomach to the base of my throat, forming a fetid pool that gurgled and brayed, gleefully exuding the rancid odor of panic. Yeah, it was crazy, but what was I going to do? Hire an expensive lawyer… yeah, sure. If Deputy Dawg got a prosecutor to buy into this crap, I’d be stuck with some crummy public defender who’d probably be happy to watch the smart-ass L.A. guy sail off down the river. He and Bernie might even build the boat together.

  “Okay, you convinced me. What do we do?”

  As far as crazy, convoluted shit goes, the plan was fairly simple. We were headed back to Blue Springs, where we had to talk Ted Hendricks into taking us to Beasley’s compound. Then, after signing up Hendricks, we would somehow sneak into the whack job’s heavily guarded and fortified stronghold, gather gobs of evidence while avoiding detection, escape unharmed, and facilitate the mad bomber’s capture and prosecution… nothing to it… right? Right? RIGHT!?!

  Since Ted Hendricks would be at work all day, there was no reason to arrive at his place before late afternoon. Also we had no idea when Bernie and the authorities would connect Patty’s absence with my disappearance, but I figured it wouldn’t take long and

  Patty’s old Jeep was a dead giveaway. Staying off the freeway and using back roads, we stopped at a diner on State Highway 58 for lunch.

  “So what’s the story on your mom, Patty? It’s okay if you don’t feel like talkIng about it, but she didn’t seem so bad the last time I saw her.” I was lying, of course; for all I could tell, the old bag COULD’VE ALREADY BEEN DEAD, lying in that hospital bed, but the kid was carrying some heavy baggage and I thought she might need to unload.

  Looking at me from across the table, Patty’s pain and anguish were obvious. This time she maintained her composure, but as she spoke, the tears still welled up around the corners of her eyes. “It was a staph infection, Frank. Thanks for asking… it came out of nowhere with no warning… no warning at all. Mom was a fighter, but her health was never great… she smoked, like, two packs a day… and always seemed to have a cough… or a cold… or a sore throat…”