Dead Nolte (14 page)

“My bidness is my bidness, White Boy.”

Ron turned to leave, but paused at the door, “Can I ask you
one more thing?” He knew he was pushing it. “Who the fuck is the Trumpet
Fixer?”

“Dat be Baal, White Boy. Stay away, cuz he will fuck you
shit up. He may not look like much now, but he will fuck you shit up, ta to. He
a dubious muffucker.” The old woman stood up surprisingly quick. “Dat motherfucker
find out dis thing be da Judas money he got fooled on, we gone pay in dis world
an dat world. He
know
how ta bend the rules, ta to.

C
harlie
hated the bus with every ounce of his heart and soul. Buses were great for
public transportation, five minutes here, fifteen minutes there, but anyone
willing to submit themselves to more than a few hours on one of these growling
bastards, as far as he was concerned, was Navy SEAL tough, or out of their
fucking mind.

Charlie knew he was on the bus because he was too
broke
for a plane ticket. A quick glance around at the other
passengers told him, that the rest of his fellow sufferers, were all out of
their fucking minds. Extended periods of boredom, at mind altering levels, had
left them all with thousand yard stares, longing for something sharp, with
which to end it all.

Having left home at seventeen, and carless, Charlie had been
forced to include the bus in his early travels. Hitchhiking, which was a
misleading word for walking, had lost its allure very quickly. Not only was the
method unreliable and time costly, but a rather unpleasant experience with a
large, armed black man with a lisp, who had requested to see Charlie’s pee-pee
at gunpoint, had opened Charlie’s eyes to the disadvantages of catching rides with
good old-fashioned stranger danger. Busses weren’t much better, and until now,
he had thought he’d sworn them off for good. A five-hour stint next to a
screaming baby, owned by a mother who was obviously trying to get every penny’s
worth out of her kid’s Pampers, had given him an entirely new perspective on
stranger danger.

He wouldn’t be making this trip on a bus unless he
absolutely had to. He could hold it together for another four or five hours
considering what was at stake. At the end of this week, he would be rich or
cursed. Rich if he found the coin before the greedy bitches. Cursed, if the bus
he was riding on persisted on stopping at every, fucking tumbleweed that
resembled a building.

The schedule told him he had four hours to go, but he was fairly
certain, cutting out the tumbleweed visits, that he could make it in three on a
good bicycle. Charlie closed his eyes, trying to force sleep; it was the only
way to remain sane, between tumbleweeds.

After Ron had called him about Nolte, Charlie had thrown
some clothes in a bag, locked the house up tight and went out to check the oil
in his ride, a piss yellow 1976 Caprice, only to find it gone. Nothing left but
a half a quart of oil that had puddled in the driveway, where he had parked it
the night before. The car was stumbling around on its last leg, and was so far
down on the “most frequently stolen cars” list, that Charlie no longer bothered
to remove the keys from the ignition. He had seen nicer cars sent to the
crusher.

“What the fuck? What kind of a depraved motherfucker steals
a two-hundred-dollar car?” He’d asked himself, shuddering at the desperation
that must have inspired the act. A quick look in his wallet and it was clear a
bus ride was in his future.

The bus ride from hell was well into its sixth hour when the
bus left the highway for the five hundredth time and bounced into an empty lot
between a McDonalds and a small dilapidated convenience store. The fading sign
across the front of the small run down building proclaimed itself to be; Fast
Mart. Judging by the standing room only traffic of Mickey D’s parking lot,
Mayor Mc Cheese was really throwin’ a fuckin’ Fast Mart’s way. It was open, but
barely.

With only one car parked out by the gas pumps, Charlie
guessed even the locals had given up shooing Ronald McDonald’s big red boot off
the hoses of Fast Mart’s life support and were now waiting for the old girl to
walk mercifully into the light.

“Thirty minutes!” the bus driver yelled back to no one in
particular. “Thirty minutes!”

Charlie waited for the nut-jobs and the crazies to thin
before he got up to leave the bus. His ass was already so numb it felt like it
belonged to someone else, so a few more minutes weren’t going to make any
difference. Charlie looked into the blank, road charred faces of the idiots
filing by him. He knew that most of these people had been wholly sane at the
time of boarding, their sanity had more than likely, had remained intact up
until the fifth or sixth hour into their trip, five or six hours seems to be a
tipping point on a bus. That’s when your inner voice, having had enough, starts
listing off reasons why you were stupid to buy a bus ticket, when you could
have easily walked the seven hundred miles and how it had told you before you
got on how bad the seats hurt, and how it never really liked you in the first
place, it had always known you were a failure, all the while, singing
Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer On the Wall.
 

Some of these people were already on the bus when Charlie
boarded, and though he didn’t remember any of their faces from when he boarded,
he could tell by their eyes, which ones had snapped inside. Several appeared to
be doing the twenty-hour shuffle. After twenty hours on a bus, all Slinky’s are
bound to kink and that’s when real mental damage occurs. Their inner voices
were probably no longer on speaking terms with them and coherent thought, at
this juncture, is utterly unobtainable. It would take these poor fools weeks,
maybe even months to suppress the memory of seeing America through the eyes of
a Greyhound.

Charlie stumbled off the bus and made his way to the Fast
Mart. Ignoring his numb ass, he took a seat on a dangerous looking bench in the
front of the store; he was too tired to stand.

Baling wire held the bench together in several places, where
the wood was too rotted for bolts and screws. Next to the bench was a
five-gallon plastic bucket filled with sand and cigarette butts, a stab to the
heart reminder, he had quit smoking two months and two weeks ago. A child-like
hand had scrawled APPELS on the side of the bucket in Sharpie. He was pretty
sure that whoever had brainstormed such an original name as Fast Mart, had also
written on the bucket.

“Got a light, Nancy?” The voice belonged to Nolte. Charlie
turned to see the old man standing next to the rickety bench, naked except for
a diaper and plastic shower shoes. Women’s sunglasses, with lenses the same
diameter as mayonnaise jars, completed his ‘look’. His hand was buried below
the elastic waistband of his diaper, his elbow working like a pump handle, as
he scratched his ass. Nolte tilted his sunglasses up to his forehead and bent
slightly to inspect the bench for anything tacky. Satisfied it was sticky-free,
he reached out and dusted the bench by fanning his hand, the other hand had not
stopped scratching. Hand fanning and elbow bouncing, he was really making a
show of it. Charlie shook his head; the idiot was even more ridiculous in
death.

Making sure not to exceed the boundaries of his carefully
prepared spot, Nolte finally sat. He grinned big around the cigarette in his
teeth. “Got a light, Nancy?” he repeated, tapping the unlit end of his
cigarette with his finger to make sure Charlie understood what he meant.

“Are you serious, a fucking diaper?” Charlie asked, ignoring
Nolte’s request for a light. “That attire doesn’t look too public friendly,
Casper. Is there a rule, you have to wear what you die in for the rest of
eternity?”

“As a matter of fact, I think there is, though I haven’t
tested that theory as extensively as I might like to. Who the fuck cares?”
Nolte said, flicking his wrist in front of him as if he were dispersing an
imaginary crowd. “I’m a fashionista, devoted to dryness and comfort, baby.” He
pulled a Bic lighter from the front of his diaper and flicked it several times.
“Damn, this one’s still wet. Sometimes I piss myself when I travel, but when I
get to where I’m going POOF, a brand new diaper, with only a few squirts in
it.”

“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.

***

R
on
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.