Zombie Bitches From Hell (6 page)

“Yeah, guess he was,” I say.

“I watched him shift the big rig with his
pudgy hand. His watch, too tight, too small and the fat on his
wrist, he had no real wrist, he was so fat, the fat on his wrist
rose up around the watch strap as if he was made of melted butter
under his pink blotchy skin. I counted twelve small pimples on the
side of his fat face, seven hairs that were long and brown on the
same side of his fat face that he missed with his razor. I try not
to count this stuff anymore. I used to do it all the time,
counting, counting, counting, looking for special numbers but in
the end, the number was always special. It was always up.”

“I know what you mean,” I say, thinking
uh-oh. But I’m watching for mountain tops or crags or some shit
thing that will tear a hole in this balloon.

“So he picked me up in San Angelo, Texas, a
crap-hole of a town with no excuse to exist. I told him I was going
to El Paso, which I was, but the lucky fat man let me out 300 miles
shy. Go west young man, go west.

“Anyway, I’m thinking I’ll just stand here in
the white light, the alum white of noon and watch the blue morning
sky putrefy into milk. I have my uniform on: a Duke University
sky-blue t-shirt with milk-white letters, neat jeans, not the
artificial ragged ones, white tennis shoes. They used to call them
sneakers, but I guess no one likes to be thought of as a sneaker. I
once saw a tennis match on TV. A tall lanky blond girl with a
ridiculous Rusky name was grunting every time she hit the ball.
Swing, grunt, bounce. Swing, grunt, bounce. Her hair glistened like
the fillings in a cadaver.”

“Yeah, I knew a guy who used to wack off to
tennis players—I’m pretty sure they were girls. Now that I think
about it, maybe not,” I say, feeling edgier than I thought I should
feel.

“I watched and watched, hypnotized by the
stupid pointless game, reflexively squeezing my knife handle every
time she grunted. Squeeze, grunt. Squeeze, grunt. I’m digressing,
Kent, but it is regret that keeps me going now and even then, more
so maybe. I mean my father was a real…anyway, I’m on the road, not
like that drunk and sloppy Kerouac, but as cute, as clean-cut, as
naïve, as collegian, as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as I can be,
which is very. It is the key to my success. I could make an
info-mercial on my art; tell you to dial 1-800-slash, 1-800-bleed,
1-800-pity me for I have sinned. Free shipping and handling. My
operator is standing by. He is always standing by.”

Where is this going? I’m thinking.

“I made it from Duke in only two weeks. I
arrived in a Volkswagen driven by a skinny girl. Girl? She was at
least twenty-five. I despise skinny people. They show their bones
to the world like a badge of honor. What honor is there in not
eating or in having a too high metabolic rate that burns everything
you feed it through a skinny mouth so fast that it does no good? It
reminds me of an old Indian movie I saw while sitting on Dad’s fat
lap when the Indians mock the white men for building a fire that is
too large. The fire of skinny people is too large, too wasteful.
They need their “Off” buttons pressed hard, real hard. This girl, I
could see her ribs hiding under her tight t-shirt. Her little dried
up skinny breasts, milkless, useless, useless, useless, “like two
fried eggs on a bread board,” my mother used to say. My mother was
fat.”

“Yeah, I guess moms can get that way,” I say
trying to have something to agree with him about.

“I’m in New Orleans; it is gloriously in
ruins. Drunken sots on every corner, whores, fags, dopey college
kids, half the houses in spectacular decay, the smell of Katrina’s
blood everywhere, the smell of mold and mildew, the perfume of
beautiful destruction. To have witnessed it, aye, there is a sight
to behold. That smell of slime overhanging the city, the Big
Mindless Easy, the smell of the mud of the Holy Ghost with wings
out-stretched hovering over the aroma of humans’ waste, of wasted
humans. All cities should meet such ends, like New Orleans, in
their own arrogance and idiocy, fighting against Mother Nature, her
huge breasts the size of mountains, her feet bigger than Ohio, her
farts the tornadoes that rip through cyclone alley and flatten
everything, shred it, defile it. I adore dying New Orleans. I had
no trouble burying the body of that skinny girl right in the front
mud lawn of a rotting church, algae and moss eating it from the
ground up. The mud is clever, very clever, that mud in the church
lawn in the Bayou section of town. Good bye, Bayou, good-bye. I
left the skinny girl’s jaw in the open guitar case of a blind
minstrel singing “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” This way I could
make sure her skinny metabolism would slow down in Heaven so she
would not need to eat more clouds than her fair share. My mother
and particularly my father ate more than their fair share. They
were fat.”

I’m suddenly aware that good old Rick is
confessing to murder. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, I’m
worrying. I’m not skinny but I’m not a fatty either. Just sorta
middlin’. Never had a weight problem either way but should I be
worrying about this now with what I’m certain is the end of the
world going on below us a few thousand feet. I’m going to let him
keep talking. Maybe he’s just having some sort of schizoid reality
break. Maybe an LSD flashback. Who wouldn’t? People are eating
people alive. That would be enough to make anyone a tad batty.

He looks at me to make sure I haven’t dozed
at the wheel. “A chubby guy in a white, short-sleeved shirt gave me
a lift from New Orleans to Biloxi. He had a tie that said, ‘No. 1
Dad.’ His shirt had yellowish armpits that matched his eyebrows and
the whites of his eyes that were not white at all. He was very
friendly but the air conditioning in his car did not work so the
wind, moist and putrid from the south swirled in the car like we
were in a sleeping bag together. I could smell the lynched Black
people ever so faintly. The odor of the dead, they say, never
entirely leaves but rises and falls with the humidity like cat piss
on the rug. It is always humid in the South.

“The driver was from the South. He sold
repossessed printing equipment and he talked about this on and on
until I went nearly crazy. Then he put his hand on my knee and
kneaded it real gentle and told me he was lonely, so lonely, even
though he was married and had children, so he said, and that he
would pay me a few dollars, he did not have much. He said he would
let me stay with him in the Motel Six just over the next state
border. I said that would be nice because I had not been in a bed
in nearly three weeks and I was tired of washing up in gas station
men’s rooms. A hot shower would be nice. He rubbed my thigh and I
got relaxed. He was chubby like a guy that sits and watched TV all
the time and eats jellybeans and Raisonettes. He said he would wash
my back. My mother and my father did that. I said, OK, that sounds
nice. It did.”

“I wouldn’t mind a bath myself right now,” I
say. Rick looks at me and then he looks at Tim who is still sound
asleep. I’m sending telepathic waves to Tim, telling him to wake
up! We got a situation here! But Tim does not stir.

“Somewhere in Mississippi, on a long stretch
of mossy-treed highway I asked him to stop by the roadside; I had
to urinate. He said he did, too. We walked a ways into the woods.
The trees were forlorn having had so many Black people hung on them
the last century. The clouds were embarrassed to be over
Mississippi. The shadows were deep and blue, lovely dark and deep,
the gray moss like Father Time’s beard hanging everywhere. He
watched me urinate. On the way back to the car, I saw that he had
three large sweat stains on his shirt and two small ones. That
number five was his number. My blade went into his neck quite
quickly, crunching in a way that reminded me of the sound of eating
a potato chip in church. I left him there under the mossy trees.
They were his mourners, more than he would have at a real funeral,
I guess.

“Thinking all these things sometimes gets me
confused but it doesn’t matter. Maybe the skinny girl drove me to
Biloxi and the chubby guy took me to San Angelo and so on and so
forth. I never liked geography. My geography teacher was really fat
and I paid her no mind, none at all but only day-dreamed of what
she would look like with those maps on the wall and her with no
skin but only yellow globs of fat and all the other kids in the
class laughing at her instead of at me.

“I drove myself to San Angelo, Texas where I
parked the car in a bowling alley parking lot. I went in and bowled
a game and half even though the lanes and gutters had crickets
crawling or hopping or dead all over them. The skinny guy behind
the counter near the cubby holes filled with old smelly bowling
shoes told me that that every now and then the town gets a plague
of crickets. It doesn’t last long and then they just up and leave.
So I had in my travels seen a flood and a plague and I’m beginning
to think biblical. But I am no Bible boy. I’m not. I killed two
people who were trying to convince me to spare them by reciting
something out of the Bible. It didn’t work for Jesus on the cross
who started reciting scripture. It didn’t work for these people
either. When my mind is made up, it is made up. I guess that’s the
way God is. He makes up His mind, it’s made up. Don’t do this,
don’t do that. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Or else. I’m now
believing that the GaGa is the Else.”

Something is making me agree with him.
Something is wishing I had never met this degenerate creep.
Something is saying “Any port in a storm.”

He goes on, “The trucker with the twelve
pimples and seven hairs picked me up in San Angelo on the road to
El Paso. He told me he was tired of seeing so many Mexicans
hitching rides, he called them ‘wetbacks,’ and befouling the
highways with their squat looks and greasiness. He actually used
the word, ‘befouling’ so I was pretty certain he was a regular
church-goer, like my father, fat like him, as well. I slept a lot
of the way, the oily sun blasting in through the bug-smeared
windshield as the day wore on. It felt like lying down in a tanning
bed the size of a barn with the dial turned up to ‘Extra High.’ He
turned the radio on and it was country music, Tammy Somebody and
Billy Rae Whoever and Jim Bob Watchamacallit and so on and so
forth. That racket bored its way into my brain like a cable guy’s
drill, the kind with the auger big enough to go through a wall. You
know the kind of bit I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“Sure. Those cable guys have great tools,” I
say, thinking I am the biggest idiot whoever drew breath.

“Well, friend, that caterwauling music and
his index finger tapping on the steering well thirty-nine times
made me tense up like when you think your pal, if you have one, may
be hiding around the next corner to jump out and startle the
Bejesus out of you. I don’t usually blaspheme or take the Lord’s
name in vain but I tensed up real tight, real tight and I could
feel the handle of my knife creeping out of my pocket toward my
hand. What is this I see before me, a dagger with its handle toward
my hand? That driver, fat as he was, saw me and asked me if I was
all right. I said yes, I was, but he turned the radio off and
commenced to telling me he was a father of twin boys and the sole
support of his two elderly parents, one of them blind, like it
would make a difference to me, which it would not. He saw a truck
stop up ahead and pulled right in with barely enough roadway to
slow down like he was relieved. He told me this was the end of the
line and I needed to get out, which I did and thanked him. He was
lucky, real lucky and real fat. Don’t you agree? Don’t you?”

“Well, sure. It’s not easy hitchhiking and
all. Sometimes you can spend all day…”

“Who gives a shit about your hitchhiking
days, Kent?”

“I just thought you were asking, is all.”

“I usually never have to stand by the
roadside for more than an hour or so. My thumb is magic and
charming and has never let me down. I’m hoping a nice girl will
give me a lift, neither fat nor skinny, someone pleasant, someone
understanding, someone my own age, someone that will not have
parents, someone that will say nice things about me at my funeral
because they are true and not because I am dead, someone who will
carve a perfect epitaph for me on a granite headstone that might
say, ‘He was a good man, neither fat nor skinny, who tried to do
right. He will be missed.’ And she will remember to bury me with my
knife in case I’m not really dead but in some sort of coma and I
can dig my way out, get back on the road and try to continue to do
right. Is that asking too much? And do I deserve to be stuck up
here with you and…”

A shot rang out and hit Rick right between
the eyes. It made a little hole like those Hindu ladies have only
theirs is make-up, not a real hole at all. Rick’s eyes focus for a
millisecond on Tim who was not sleeping at all but had stealthily
aimed his rifle right at Rick while he was blabbing his sick
confession. Rick toppled to the floor like a way full laundry bag;
collapsed more than fell.

“Fuck me,” I yell. “Holy shit! Why’d you
shoot him? Holy shit.”

“Holy has nothing to do with it,” says Tim.
“That motherfucker is a serial killer who just confessed to you.
Did you want to be next?”

“Well, shit, Tim…”

CHAPTER 9

“Hey, chief, check it out,” says Tim pointing
out and down.

“What is it?” I ask.

“Check it out.”

I get up from where I’m sitting, every joint
in my body feeling like someone super-glued them while I was
resting. Stiff as pipe. I get up slowly, like an old dude. The sun
is glinting off the balloon coloring it a morning orange. I look
out over the brim of the gondola and as far as I can see is green,
billowing waving, stippled green—yellow spots like a million
stars.