Grundish & Askew (10 page)

The doormat says
Welcome! The Buttwynns
, but Grundish can’t read it in the dark. Motionless and silent, he waits for the rattle and hum of the El Camino. It appears to Grundish that the Buttwynns are gone for the next three to four days. In a long-winded, rambling, and occasionally incoherent message on the Buttwynn’s answering machine, Grandma Buttwynn laid out the plans for the entire Buttwynn family’s visit to Neenah, Wisconsin. Aside from a family reunion and taking everyone to a lutefisk
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festival, Granny Buttwynn suggested that they take the whole family for a tour of the Neenah Foundry Company (
it’s one of the nation’s leading manhole cover manufacturers
, she said,
and, in fact, Grampa Buttwynn once had a job inspecting manholes
). Granny also suggested that she could drive the family to the airport on the ninth for their return flight.

Clad in silk boxer shorts, a silk robe, black stretchy dress socks held up by sock garters, and leather sandals, all compliments of Mr. Randy Buttwynn’s closet, Grundish sits motionless on a metal bench beside the front door, smoking one of Buttwynn’s cigars. Other than the glowing fireball of the cigar, Grundish is undetectable. Occasionally he moves in order to dip the end of the cigar in a snifter of Buttwynn’s cognac. Grundish correctly guesses that with the absence of an identifying band on the cigar and the presence of a creamy, mellow flavor, the stogie must be a Cuban.

Off in the distance something sounding like a gunshot rings out. Grundish recognizes the backfiring of the El Camino. As it gets closer, he reverts into the house and hits the automatic garage door button. Having already unscrewed the light bulbs so as not to draw attention when Askew and Turleen arrive, the garage is dark. Askew’s El Camino roars down the street, backfiring several times, with
Gimme Back My Bullets
blaring on the stereo. The headlights set on bright, Askew turns onto the driveway and into the garage. Grundish quickly shuts the garage door, pops open the driver side door and reaches into the car to turn off the ignition. The engine backfires one more time and spits out a puff of oily exhaust. The music stops.

“God damn!” snaps Grundish. “You trying to wake up the whole neighborhood? We’ve got four days in this house if you don’t go screwing things up for us.” And then he looks at Askew’s face in the weak glow of the dome light. Half of his upper lip, ripped and glooping a bloody ooze, hangs from the left side of his face, exposing his front teeth and looking like a smooshed slug. A cut above his left eyebrow draws a straight line over the swollen orbit of the eye. The left side of Askew’s face is inflamed and bulging. “God damn!” Grundish says again, shocked by the contrast between the perfectly intact right side of Askew’s face and the pulpy mess on the left. “God damn!” he says again when he realizes that Askew’s right leg is twisted up, knee against his chest, and his long, thin toes are wrapped around the steering wheel while his left foot is resting on the brake pedal. Askew sits uncomfortably with both of his hands in his pockets.

“Yessir,” says Turleen, stepping out of the passenger side with a plastic bag full of feminine products, “he’s powerful hurting, he is. That boy defended me against a whole gang of thugs ready to do me no good, he did. And he did it all with his feet.”

“What did the thugs do to you, Turleen?”

“Well, it’s not so much what they did as the way they were looking at me,” she says. “They was giving me the up and down, they was. Looking at me the way a hungry dog eyes a piece of meat. And that boy weren’t having no part of it. He just jumped out of the car and started putting the boots to them boys, he did. Seemed like he hurt them real bad. The boy’s got moxie, he does.”

Grundish studies his friend in astonishment. All of the time he has known him, Askew has been the one to walk away from conflict, the one to avoid physical confrontation,
a pussy
, Grundish thinks. And now he’s dishing out a bucketful of mean at the drop of a hat. “Well, let’s get inside, then,” he says and helps Askew out of the car.

•  •  •

On the Buttwynn’s kitchen table sits a spool of common thread, a needle, a lighter, a crusted tube of super glue, a bottle of single malt scotch whisky, two shot glasses and a pack of Blue Llamas. Grundish sits at the table, sipping at a tumbler of scotch on the rocks, waiting for Turleen to get Askew cleaned up. He takes a mouthful of the smoky liquid and lets it sit, warming and stinging his gums all at once. Leaning back into the chair and hanging his head over the back of the seat, he nods off and is awakened when Turleen and Askew return.

“Uh-uh,” says Askew. “Dyou er noth thewing my faithe,” he tells Grundish, the words coming out mangled as they are filtered through his torn upper lip.

Grundish shrugs, fills both shot glasses with scotch, and slides one across the table. Askew, hands in pockets, stands on one leg and lifts the other. His long toes grip one of the legs of a seat at the table and pull it out. He sits and looks down at the shot glass and then back at Grundish. Grundish picks up his shot glass and gently clinks it on the top of the glass set out for his friend. Opening his bloodied mouth and leaning down over the shot glass, hands still in pockets, Askew grabs the top of the shot glass between his teeth and sits up quickly, tossing his head back and draining the contents down his throat.

“Ahhhh,” they both grunt, as the warmth travels down their throats, spreads across their chests, and snuggles up in their bellies. Grundish pours two more shots and they repeat the ritual again. And again, and again, Grundish’s serving getting smaller and smaller each time until he stops consuming his altogether and only refills Askew’s glass.

“Now get up on the table, you big pussy,” Grundish says, “and let me take care of that lip. We can’t take you to a hospital looking like that. They will call the police and then you’re...no...make that
we’re
fucked. And this’ll make you look tough, you little bitch.”

Through the whisky haze, Askew tries to rethink the idea of getting stitches from Grundish. He nods toward the shot glass. Grundish shrugs, nods back, and fills up one more shot which is quickly downed via Askew’s shot-glass-deep-throat technique. With a flick of the head the shot glass is thrown toward the sink and shatters on the floor. Askew stands on the chair, turns away from the table and sits down on it. Hands still in pockets, he wiggles himself fully onto the table, facing up, and tells his friend “Dyou vetther noth fuggup my faithe.”

“I could do nothing to make your face any uglier,” answers Grundish as the excessive alcohol consumption pulls the shades on Askew’s consciousness.

Grundish never had one sewing lesson and never so much as bothered to stitch a patch to a pair of pants or a torn shirt. To him, Home Economics was a class in junior high for chicks and fairies. So what made him think that he was qualified to stitch up Askew’s lip is anyone’s guess. But stitch it he did. Luckily, Grundish did at least like watching surgery shows on the Health and Medicine Channel. He knew that it would be best to stitch up the skin so that the two torn pieces formed an outward ridge, and that they would heal up, tuck themselves back in and make for less of a scar. He also saw something, somewhere about super glue being used to mend minor wounds. Once the sewing was finished, culminating in a meaty, gashed seam running from mid-upper lip to just below Askew’s puffy, rounded cheek pad, a heavy layer of glue was applied on top of the gash.

At mid-day, upon waking, Askew stumbles through the house, hands in pockets, and opening doors with his feet until he finds a bathroom. He looks in the mirror. An accident victim stares back. The super glue, being somewhat over-applied, adheres the torn lip to the gum line, exposing the teeth on the front left side, giving him a Presleyesque upturn of a lip (no fool Billy Idol lip either
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). For the gash above his eye, Grundish had to shave the eyebrow in order to effectively seal it with more glue. For consistency, the other eyebrow was also shorn. In an effort to minimize the freakish browless appearance, surprised-looking and severely-arched brows were drawn in by Turleen with a brown El Marko permanent marker.

•  •  •

Reeling from a screaming headache and debilitating nausea, Askew leans against the counter and decides it is not worth it to try to pick at the wounds. He made a solemn oath to teach himself to use only his feet, and with the way he is feeling, it doesn’t seem possible to twist himself up enough to prod his face with his toes.
Later
, he tells himself,
later I’ll check it out
. He walks out of the bathroom, hands in pockets, and opens doors with his foot until he finds the master bedroom.

In the middle of the king-sized bed, snoring, dropping flatus, and drooling, is a lump of warm flesh known as Grundish. Lacking the energy and motivation to seek out another bed, Askew climbs in with the Grundish-lump, digs a knee into its back, and manages to clear himself enough room on one side of the bed.

•  •  •

Grundish and Askew sleep away the most part of the first day in the temporary hideout. But not Turleen. At sunrise, despite only having a few hours of sleep and a twisted ankle, she is up and about, working on plans for a safehouse for her and the boys. First it is half a dozen provocative squats. She takes a shower and squeezes her spots. Uses a brush on her teeth. Trims and deodorizes her twat. She looks at her house dress and says to herself,
a body can’t expect to lure a man in a get up like this, it can’t
. In the master bedroom, Turleen tears through Mrs. Buttwynn’s wardrobe, being as loud as she wants and still doesn’t wake the boys. The clothes look to be a close enough fit for her to make them work. She chooses a red dress and thinks to herself,
I would wear something like this if I were going to be on T.V.
She flings the dress over her shoulder and heads back into the bathroom.

The reflection in the mirror makes her happy. The fine red dress hangs on her slight frame just right. Mrs. Melba Buttwynn’s pearl necklace and matching earrings are perfect. Turleen’s hair, an unnaturally blinding shade of red, is pulled back and twisted up in a bun, a #2 pencil stuck through to hold it in place. She flashes a maloccluded grin, the lower jaw jutting out proudly past the ill-fitting upper plate of false teeth. A small foam of spittle nestles in the corners of her mouth. The make-up on her face is thick and garish, the rouge like berries smashed on each cheek, the eye liner thick and clumpy, the eye shadow a trashy aquamarine. Turleen takes in her reflection and feels young and vigorous again. She feels sexy.

While the boys sleep, unwittingly entangled in a tender spooning position, Turleen arranges the objects in the kitchen to her satisfaction. The way it was set up made no sense to her. Who puts the silverware in the cabinet when it should be in a drawer? Why would the dishes be under the counter when they should be in the cabinet where the silverware was placed? Shouldn’t the dish rags and towels be in a drawer near the kitchen sink? What is the purpose of this dry-rotted rubber dildo hidden back under the sink, behind the Drano? These and many other ill-thought-out arrangements are remedied by Turleen. And the boys still sleep. Turleen decides to cook a pot of beef stew and have it ready for Grundish and Askew for when they awaken.

•  •  •

The sounds of moving bowels reverberate in the master bedroom. The booming flatulence bounces around from wall to wall until the noise finds its way out of the slightly ajar door of the bathroom and wends its way to Grundish’s ears. He stirs, rolls over toward the middle of the bed and wonders why the mattress is warm in a spot where he was not lying. A smell tickles his senses – an awful, wonderful, sickening, delicious, vile and delightful aroma that disturbs Grundish. If the stink is from the evil goings-on in the bathroom, if Askew is turning the room into a bog of eternal stench, then the mephitis is one of the most disturbing and sickening olfactory assaults Grundish has experienced. On the other hand, the aroma is not unlike that of Turleen’s famous beef stew.
If it is the beef stew I smell
, thinks Grundish,
then I’m ready to gorge myself
. His stomach rumbles in anticipation.
But if it’s Askew’s ass, then I’m never going to be able to eat Turleen’s stew again.

Rubbing away the eye-cheese, Grundish rolls out of bed, still attired in the silk robe and boxers along with the socks and garters, and removes himself from the bedroom. The lovely/awful aroma gets stronger as he navigates the hallway and tromps down the stairs. The fragrance of the stew hooks a finger in each of his nostrils and drags him through the house and into the kitchen.

“Well, hey there, sleepy head. I didn’t think you boys would ever wake up,” says Turleen to Grundish. She takes in his costume from the night before, and he takes in hers.

“What’cha all dolled up for?” he asks her.

“What? Can’t a body pretty herself up once in a while?” Turleen asks, adjusting her dress, pulling down on the back in order to pull up the front and cover her exposed and pleated tit-hatch
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. Her dried lips turn up subtly into a smile and a weak glow emanates under the make up and creased skin. Somewhere in that grin Grundish sees the vestiges of a young, sweet girl, one that he would have cut off his foot to be with were he alive sixty years prior. He blushes momentarily and looks away. “And, who are you to go pecking at my clothes? You look like Hugh Heffner’s tetched little brother, you do, in your silk robe and sock garters. A real dandy, you are. Now go pour me a glass of wine, red please, while I get you a bowl of stew.”

Grundish’s stomach growls and he turns away, headed for the wine rack in the living room. Upstairs, Askew is performing intense stretching exercises in an effort to free himself from the use of his hands and arms. Downstairs Grundish uncorks a bottle of wine that is worth more than the trailer he and Askew shared. Grundish pours a large wineglass full of the maroon liquid. Turleen ladles steaming bowls full of chunky beef and vegetable sludge for the boys. For the moment, everybody feels safe.