Squid Pulp Blues (11 page)

Then Peachy saw the body.

A middle-aged man dressed in a tattered suit and a long beard lay against the wall. He had been sleeping in the fruit cart and was killed on impact when the car hit. “Oh, you must be
fuckin
’
kiddin
’ me!” Peachy looked around and saw people walking over to him to see if he was okay. He quickly grabbed hold of the body and dragged it a few feet away and covered it with the pieces of the cart.

“Are you alright?” one voice shouted. Peachy ignored him and went back to his car. He dug out his gun and then jogged down the street.

“I’m calling the cops!” another voice yelled.

Peachy kept going until he saw Scooter’s Go-Go-
Rama
. He hadn’t been in there since before being locked up and he was getting erotic stirrings despite the stress of the evening.

His stomach rumbled so clinched his ass cheeks, knowing what to expect. A wet squeak escaped followed by a spurt of liquid shit.
Should of brought an extra fucking diaper
, he thought. He walked down the alley next to the go-go bar and started to take down his pants when he saw the body.

At first his mind didn’t register it as a body because he saw the comic first. The drawings were so vivid, so bold, that Peachy couldn’t help but respect it as a piece of art and not just magic marker scribbling on the back of a corpse.

Pants down to his knees, his dirty diaper drooping with the weight of diarrhea, Peachy read the comic strip three times. He was no fan of comic strips, comic books, or art in general but this adventure of Fauntleroy
LeRoux
entranced him with a bittersweet vertigo. His head swam in an increasingly psychotic state, his brain cells screaming the apocalyptic hymns of Little Bing Bong.

Down the alley, a group of longheads watched intently. One of them grunted and Peachy looked at them. They laughed and continued pissing into empty wine bottles. Deep yellow urine filled each and every one. When the last longhead was done, they muttered words that Peachy could not hear and then as quick as it takes for one’s eye to register a snowflake falling to the ground, the urine in the bottles became deep red wine.

The longheads proceeded to get drunk while Peachy pulled up his pants, half mad with visions of jack-ass eschatology. He ran onto the sidewalk and then across the street, stumbling to the ticket booth of the movie theatre. The words
Barbara
Stanwyck
Film Festival
swirled off of the marquee and into his brain. He didn’t know what
Stanwyck
looked like but he sensed her as if she was a long-lost lover who was present in spirit only.

“How many tickets?” the teenage ticket seller asked. He gave a face, seeing the diaper sticking out of the top of
Peachy’s
pants.

“I don’t know…what are you….unveiling tonight?” Peachy slurred his speech and felt the sudden urge to wag his tail that is, if he possessed one.

The guy pointed to the sign in back of him. “A bunch of classic Barbara
Stanwyck
movies. Are you interested?”

“Give me a minute,” Peachy replied, wanting so much to take his elephant tusk gun and beat the ticket seller to a bloody pulp and then use those pieces of pulp in a display of snowy, blood-soaked divination.

He settled on buying a ticket.

“For an extra five dollars more, would you like a Barbara
Stanwyck
Halloween mask?” He held up the mask.

Peachy looked at the seductive features of the mask and felt his heart flutter a warning.

“Shove it up your ass!’ Peachy said. With a grunt and a curse, he fell backwards into the snow and crawled away from the theatre.

“
You
shove it up your ass!” the ticket seller laughed while he started rolling a joint.

Chapter 9

“Hey, pull over for a second,” Jake said. He tapped the window with his knuckles.

“What for?”
Tommy slowed the car down.

“Just pull over.”

A parking spot opened up in front of the liquor store so Tommy pulled right in. “Okay. Now what?”

Jake gave a half smile. “I’m starting to think you might’ve been right.”

“About what?”

“About this whole situation.
I mean, why are we running? It’s like we turned into a bunch of paranoid assholes all of a sudden.”

Tommy stared Jake. “What the hell is this? I told you that you were overreacting from the get-go. Christ
Almight
. I can’t believe this shit.”

“I know. It’s my fault, I’m sorry. I’ve just been on edge for a few days.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I have no fucking clue.” Jake ran his hands through his hair. “It’s this town, it’s messing with my head or something.”

“I know what you mean.” Tommy didn’t elaborate but instead looked out his window.

Jake shouted. “Oh my god, isn’t that…?” He pointed to the sidewalk where a man was pulling his hair out of his head, ranting and raving. His skin was blotched partly from the cold and partly from years of hygiene neglect.

“Holy shit, it’s Pastor Timothy. I haven’t seen him since he threw that rock through the window of the soup kitchen.” Tommy laughed. “That fucker is crazy.”

“Yeah, was he that
nuts
when he was preaching? I can’t imagine any church would put up with that shit.”

“My parents used to just say he had a nervous condition or something. Anytime he’d do something fucked-up, they’d tell me that we have to forgive him because God forgave him. I just think he’s a hateful son of a bitch.”

“Are pastors even allowed to hate anything?”

“Apparently.”

“I thought religion was supposed to make you nice.” A flash of memory illuminated Jake’s mind. He remembered a kind uncle from his childhood who used to point to the grass and say “That’s God” and then point to the sky and say “That’s God”. Before Jake could ask any questions, the man would point to a stray cat and say “That’s God, too.” Jake would then be treated to an ice cream cone which was, much to Jake’s surprise and delight, God as well.

“I don’t know. I guess for some people it’s something to make them nice and compassionate. I think Pastor Timothy just hates a lot of things, figures God wants him to. Figures if they don’t believe the same things as he does, they aren’t worth giving two shits about. He’s just miserable and thinks that he might as well be since he’s going to heaven to live in paradise.”

“That’s one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever heard.” Jake thought again of that compassionate uncle who spent most of his free time helping feed the homeless, mentoring orphans, and helping nurse sick animals back to health. All of this without having gone to church. His good deeds had outshined his lack of religious showboating.

That all ended, however, when the uncle was eaten alive by squid after being thrown into the Raritan River by an angry mob of religious conservatives. They thought that his time would best be spent raising funds for the church rather than helping the needy. After all, Jake’s uncle was the mayor and what else should a politician do but support the church?

Tommy and Jake watched as the disheveled man screamed while lighting a book of matches on fire. “The Lord your God is a devouring fire, a jealous God!”
 

Jake scoffed. He remembered his uncle reciting a scripture from the bible….
Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it is not rude…

Pastor Timothy spit onto a woman’s face, a woman he suspected of being a homosexual and, even worse, a democrat. Witnessing this, Jake thought again of his uncle…
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son.

“Ah, I guess having a son coming home a longhead doesn’t help either.” Tommy reasoned. “That’s
gotta
do some psychological damage to a man.”

Jake felt a tang of compassion. “Shit, I guess that explains some of it. But still, what’s the point of religion if it
ain’t
gonna
help you deal with shit?”

Pastor Timothy was scratching the skin off of his face, throwing the flakes of flesh into the air like confetti. “Hear what the Lord thy God has spoken! If anyone comes to me and does not
hate
,” the pastor said, gritting his teeth, “his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple, says the
Lor
-“
 
Pastor Timothy was cut short by a snow shovel to the face wielded by an elderly drag queen.

“Ah, shut your pathetic little pie-hole. The hell I’m
hatin
’ my parents for any god!” the drag queen shouted as Pastor Timothy fell backward, his yellow teeth coming straight through his lower lip.

Tears started to stream from the pastor’s eyes. “My son, my son, the pagans killed my son,” he repeated over and over.

Jake looked at Tommy. “This town’s fucking weird, man.”

“No kidding. But it’s not as weird as
Fisherville
, let me tell you. That place is a fucking zoo.” He laughed and looked at his watch. “Shit, I feel calmer now that we’re not going fucking crazy running from nonexistent assassins.”

Jake laughed, reclined his seat, and continued to look at the scene out on the sidewalk. “Man, let’s just sit here and enjoy the show. But I do think we should give Aaron a call later, like you said.”

“Sounds good.” Tommy and Jake sat for a few minutes, watching Pastor Timothy and the drag queen arguing over who got to keep the shovel.

“You hit me with it, look at my lip, I’m a wreck, I should be able to keep the shovel!” The pastor was insistent about it in between mumbling about his son and how the pagans were destroying the country with all of their talk of peace.

The drag queen wasn’t having any of it. “Oh no, you don’t. It belongs to my girlfriend and the hell if I’m
gonna
let some impotent fire and brimstone cocksucker take it home so he could shovel heavy metal albums onto his little bonfire!”

Jake laughed at the drag queen’s argument and then dug in his pocket. “I’m going outside for a few minutes, have a smoke. Want one?”

“No thanks.”

Outside the car, Jake smoked and watched the crowd that was growing around the shovel debate. Inside, Tommy leaned his head to the side and stared at Jake.
Man, he put on some weight. Should I tell him? Nah, he’ll get pissed. Maybe I’ll tell him we should join a gym together.

His eardrums crackled as a gunshot rang out. Instinctively his head went down and as he did so he saw that Jake did the same thing. Then he realized that Jake didn’t go down to protect himself. He had been shot.

Chapter 10

Tommy crawled over the seats and out the passenger side door. “Jake! Jake!” He could see that the shot wasn’t fatal. It had grazed the side of his stomach. Despite being scared and face-first in a slushy pile of what looked like snow, motor oil, and dog shit, Jake was okay.

“Can you move?” Tommy asked him, pulling him up.

“Yeah, I could. What the fuck was that? I knew someone was after us. Christ!”

Tommy held Jake and started him walking. “Let’s fucking go, NOW.” They started running, not bothering to look back at where exactly the bullet came from. They had an idea about who it was but weren’t in any sort of rush to confirm their suspicions.

Even with the snow and the screaming crowd on the sidewalk, they managed to make a good run for it. They made it to the corner and slipped up the side street.

Up the street Peachy stood clad only in his dirty diaper, brandishing his ivory gun. His thoughts alternated between thinking about those two assholes and creating new adventures of Fauntleroy
LeRoux
. Peachy created an alternate ending of the comic strip, one in which Little Bing Bong does not usher in the apocalypse and mankind does not have to learn the ultimate truth about their existence. Peachy loved ignorance and he didn’t want to know any more than he had to.

Through his quickening madness he heard Pastor Timothy and started to agree with the man. Maybe this life
was
a
shithole
. Maybe he should just put his faith in God so that he can spend an eternity in paradise. Who would want to be happy
here
and
now
on earth when you could be happy forever in the ambiguous heaven of God? “Damn straight, pastor, you have a point.” Peachy sniffed the muzzle of his gun. “I’m
livin
’ this life for my soul and my soul only. God damn everyone else.” He giggled.

Pastor Timothy looked over at Peachy. “Oh yeah, son, you smell that? Smells like the burning flesh of sinners, don’t it? Sweet smell, it is.” He looked at
Peachy’s
diaper. “Does your momma know you’re out here in the cold?”

Though his mother had been dead for over twenty years, Peachy said “Yes, she does,” and then walked down the street toward Tommy and Jake. He thought he heard police sirens but realized it was only the humming of the
Dynatox
factory down the street.

The snow got heavier and blinded him for a minute. Every snowflake became a weak hand of resistance that pushed him away from his goal. Tiny white hands, cold with rebellion, slapped Peachy across the face, across the stomach, across the legs. It melted against his skin and soothed his diaper rash.

Meanwhile, Tommy and Jake stood against a brick wall. Tommy took out his gun, opened it up and thanked God that it was loaded as he had never checked after buying it from Red Henry. With a deep breath, he cocked his gun and turned the corner.

Through the blinding snow, Peachy was stumbling toward him in the middle of the snow-covered street. Tommy quickly aimed and pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped into
Peachy’s
kneecap and it exploded like a piece of oversized ravioli. Despite the wound, he didn’t go down but instead used his good leg to stay standing like a scarecrow.

Tommy turned to Jake. “Get up! Get the fuck up! We
gotta
go!”