Dreams That Burn In The Night (28 page)

The old man grunted
and shook his head affirmatively. "Dirty eat! Pictures of sex! Chomp! Chomp!"

Miss Tarantella put
down her pen and glared at the old man. "Forget the goddamn dirty eat! Can you take us to
Nocka-Nocka's cave?"

"Can take," said
the old man. He dipped a handful of mud and beef stew out of the pot and slapped it on his face
and chest and vigorously rubbed it in.

"Is he crazy?"
asked Bullock, turning green.

"Filthy!" was all
Miss Tarantella could say.

They followed the
old man up the rocky trail, going slowly to accommodate the huffing, puffing fat woman whose idea
of exer­cise was taking the lid off a specimen jar.

"Tell him to slow
up! And don't follow him so close!" groaned Miss Tarantella. "You know I can't stand his
smell."

"How much farther
is it?" asked Bullock, who was getting tired himself.

"Chomp!" said the
old man, and he kept right on walking.

"Inconsiderate
clod!" muttered Bullock under his breath.

"Filthy!" added
Miss Tarantella, in case somebody had forgot­ten her opinion.

"I wonder if he's
leading us on a wild-goose chase," grunted Bullock as he tried to drag Miss Tarantella over a
huge rock that the old man had managed to climb over with no difficulty. If any­thing, the old
man was disgustingly healthy.

"I'll wring his
scrawny neck if he is!" puffed Miss Tarantella, who was having a hard time getting air. Her
cheeks bulged in and out like sails flapping in the wind. She floundered over the rock like a
pregnant whale in distress.

"Somehow, I can't
help feeling that he knows more English than he lets on," said Bullock, straining his arms almost
out of their sockets trying to get the fat woman back on her feet again. "There's something very
fishy about him."

Miss Tarantella
wobbled unsteadily on her feet and grunted. "That's just the way he smells."

The old man stood
further up the trail, motioning for them to hurry. "Nocka-Nocka!" he yelled, and
pointed.

Bullock and Miss
Tarantella staggered up to him. There in the side of the mountain was an enormous cavelike
opening under a wall of overhanging rock.

"Is that it?" asked
Miss Tarantella, flushed with excitement.

"Chomp! Chomp!"
said the old man.

"It better be or
you'll regret the . . ." started Miss Tarantella.

Suddenly, a heaving
mass as big as a semi-truck roared out of the cave. It had dozens of green eyes, hundreds of red
tentacles, and bumps all over it. It had blue eyes too and big mouthlike openings all over with
big shiny white teeth sticking out here and there. It had the shape of a ripe squash and the
general complex­ion of an overripe tomato. It swarmed and it crawled and it oozed. On what might
be the top of it, firmly resting on several white bumps, sat three pith helmets not unlike the
pith helmets that Bullock and Miss Tarantella wore.

As soon as the
creature burst out of the cave, Miss Tarantella let off a scream that made an air-raid siren
sound like silence. Bullock contented himself with letting his mouth flop open in an imitation of
the Grand Canyon.

In a matter of
seconds, the creature swooped up Bullock, Miss Tarantella, and the old man too. He held them up
in the air with his tentacles.

"Woof!" said
Nocka-Nocka.

Miss Tarantella
kept on screaming. Bullock, made of less sterner stuff, immediately passed out.

The old man,
however, was perfectly relaxed in the tentacly grip of the monster.

"Woof! A hot one!"
said Nocka-Nocka, and he wrapped a ten­tacle around Miss Tarantella's mouth, cutting her off in
mid-scream.

Nocka-Nocka pointed
all of his blue and green eyes at his cap­tives. First he looked at Bullock.

"Yum! Clean!"
Nocka-Nocka said.

He looked at Miss
Tarantella.

"Yum! Clean! Big
chomp!" said Nocka-Nocka.

Then he looked at
the old man.

"Yeeeeeech!
Filthy!" said Nocka-Nocka, and he dropped the old
man like he was a live coal. The old man landed on his feet with practiced
ease.

The monster turned
and oozed and flowed and crawled back into the cave, clutching the squirming body of Miss
Tarantella and the unconscious one belonging to Bullock.

The old man went
near the mouth of the cave and listened. He heard an enormous slurping, gulping sound and several
big crack­ing noises that sounded like dry sticks breaking.

Solemnly, he went
over to a big rock near the mouth of the cave. Taking a piece of chalk from the pocket of his
dirty shirt, he put two more marks on the rock alongside the three already there.

Then, without once
looking back, he started back down the mountain.

"Chomp! Chomp!" he
said to himself as he walked, and his face lit up with a smile, remembering.

"The thing I like
about you, Bippy Poo," said Xenex, averting his eyes, "is that you have no salivary glands and
can therefore stare at me without drooling."

Phenisia glazed her
unfocusing eyes in agreement but paused to think it over before speaking. A lizard fly settled on
her hairy forearm. Her efficient, spiky blue tongue snared the suicidal in­sect. She gulped
noisily and her teeth fell into her lap, immedi­ately dissolving. She smiled toothlessly at him,
adoration in her dripping eyes. "Nobody can go through life without at least
one
good
quality."

Xenex nodded.
"There's that."

As they were
leaving her parents' house, the fire department commandeered her mother. It seems they needed an
extra exten­sion ladder. Phenisia was attired in a ghetto, largely of Spanish descent. It was a
stylish costume, expensive, but it could not make her beautiful. Her ears burned merrily, her
face seeped a fashionable amount of wood shavings, but her essential dullness shone through her
expanse of gaudy clothes. You can't make a silver sewer system out of a cow's peer.

Xenex tightened his
personal antennae. How he wished the night were already over! Oh, she didn't look all that bad.
She was still young, still bursting with youth, several thousand pounds of it. But behind that
crowded exterior still lurked the Phenisia of old, the sideshow automobile swallower, the hired
contortionist whose career had ended in disgrace when she fell off the stage and smashed the
orchestra flatter than a long dead chorus girl's chest.

She tucked his car
under one arm and him under the other and without honking her feet and waking the entire
neighborhood (a small favor for which Xenex was undoubtedly grateful), they made their way to the
funeral parlor, specially decorated for the annual P.S. 2001 Prom.

On the way, Xenex,
embarrassed to be seen with her, insisted that she carry him upside down and hindmost part facing
for­ward. The fewer people who recognized him, the better.

At the door, Xenex
discovered, happily, that he had forgotten the tickets, but Phenisia held his arm out to the man
at the door. He tore it in half and handed the stub to her.

She hugged his arm
with her lower lip and said, "Will you carry this for me, dear?"

Annoyed and further
embarrassed, he put the arm in his back pocket, where it was sure to get badly wrinkled, and
followed her inside.

As Xenex and
Phenisia came to the door, fifty couples and half of the orchestra went out one of the windows.
With Phenisia there, it seemed a physical necessity. She apologized for this spa­tial
inconvenience by falling to the floor, killing ten couples in her immediate proximity.

By this time,
conscious of every eye being on him, Xenex was incensed. "I can't take you anywhere!" he screamed
at her.

Phenisia smiled
bleakly as the block and tackle lifted her off the floor. She tried to touch him tenderly, to
make some gesture that would show him how much she appreciated his bringing her to the prom, even
though he had not come of his own free will. His mother and her mother had arranged it, the date,
the rented accessories, everything. Xenex, he had been invited to a surprise disembowelment for
that same night and was really upset because he had to miss it.

Xenex, aware of her
gratitude, recoiled at her gentle touch and punched her in the mouth. Only after a series of hard
rights and lefts did he loosen her jaws enough to allow him to get his leg free.

"What's wrong with
you?!" he screamed at her.

"I want to dance,"
replied Phenisia, smiling up at him as he got violently sick and threw up on her shoes. "Could we
go over to the other side of the dance floor and dance with the people who are
hemorrhaging?"

Xenex shook his
head angrily. "I brought you here. I met your parents. But I draw the line at dancing with you! I
can only take so much!"

Phenisia's ears lit
up and her hair caught on fire. "Well, if you don't want to dance, why don't we go outside and
intermission."

An old friend of
Xenex's, Smolly Minudian, overheard this remark and hooted with hysterical glee down both of his
legs. The urine turned his white socks yellow and everybody who witnessed this got a good laugh
at Xenex's expense.

"This is the worst
night of my life!" said Xenex. "I'll never be able to hold up my tail again. I'm ruined! I might
as well end it all."

"If that's the way
you feel," sniffed Phenisia, wiping one of her feet on her forehead, "you might as well take me
home."

In silence they
left the ballroom, Phenisia moody and sulking. Xenex, enraged and homicidal. He dropped her on
her doorstep unceremoniously. She overlapped a good deal and managed to crush a fish pond and her
mother's prize rock garden.

"I had a wonderful
time," said Phenisia, considering her chances anywhere with anyone, and probably telling the
truth.

For a crazy moment,
for one totally mad, insane moment, per­haps out of force of habit, he almost kicked her good
night. He managed to restrain himself as the depth of his repulsion made him break out in a
series of overlapping hernias.

He drank three
gallons of kerosene, which he kept in his knee­cap for just such an emergency as this, and
staggered home. As he slammed through the door, tearing it off its hinges, his mother rose from a
vat of curdled oatmeal and rubbed her eyes sleepily.

"I waited up for
you, darling. Did Pooskins have a nice time at the prom? You can't imagine how good it felt,
knowing that my boy was finally going out with a nice, respectable girl for a change instead of
the usual floozy you always go out with."

She reached for
him. He was too tired to resist.

He sat down in her
lap.

"Tell the truth,
you really had a good time, didn't you?" asked his mother as she stroked his forehead tenderly
with a fire ax.

He committed
suicide in her arms with the sharpened edge of the fire ax and bled all over the living-room
rug.

This was fatal for
Xenex and he died. Later, things being what they were, they had to bury him.

As for Phenisia,
when not gainfully employed as a sewage treatment plant, she spent the remainder of her days
weeping sor­rowfully over the stub of his arm, which his grieving mother had given to her as a
prom souvenir. She lovingly kept it in her high school scrapbook, where, properly wired, it had
been trained to turn the pages for her.

To this day,
Xenex's mother is convinced her son died of too much happiness.

Who are we to tell
her any different?

They met in a bar,
so crowded everything was immediacy and gymnastics.

"Are you into
fertility fetishes or something?" she asked when it seemed possible that he was either trying to
undress her or order another drink. The place was very tightly packed and they each had similar
intentions.

"Excuse me. I don't
mean to be rude," he apologized.

"How unfortunate. I
was just beginning to look forward to it." She smiled at him and arranged herself in what she
hoped was something attractive on her bar stool.

He smiled back
because she had been so well arranged.

"Tourist or one of
the local treasures?" he asked. His suit was rumpled. It had the well-traveled look of diplomatic
immunity, first-class accommodations and international haste.

"Is that an insult
or a prelude?" She held out a long, slim ciga­rette for him to light. He met her halfway with a
golden lighter.

"If gunfighters
were that quick on the draw, they would have won the West." She inhaled deeply as if seeking
nutrition.

He frowned. "I was
under the impression, perhaps mistaken, that they
did
win the West."

She looked around
the bar casually. "That a fact? Or was it just something you read in the newspapers?"

He smiled at her
radiantly. "You and I are going to have a lot of fun."