When Pigs Fly (23 page)

“Pull over,” Ace said. “I can fix the horn.” Diet Cola looked out at the bleak landscape with malevolent joy, pulling up next to a rock outcropping ten or fifteen feet high—a perfect screen for what he had in mind.

Ace finished the job quickly and closed the car’s hood. He had a special talent for working on cars without getting his hands dirty. Diet Cola didn’t know how he did it. “Okay, Ace,” Diet said. “You’re my man. I want you to go back behind this rock and dig a deep hole.”

“What for?”

“A latrine, man. We can’t go messing up a perfectly nice countryside.”

“What do you do with a latrine?” Ace asked.

“You fill it up,” Diet Cola said.

“Then why not leave the hole filled up to start with, that way it’s already filled?”

Frosty took Ace aside, his arm around Ace’s shoulder. Elvis sat on a rock, playing air guitar. “
Love me tender, love me too…
” he crooned.

Diet Cola lobbed a rock at Elvis. “Love me
true
, asshole.”

Elvis looked up and carefully set down his invisible guitar as though it might break. He had a disbelieving look on his face.

Elvis, Ace and Frosty went behind the rock outcropping while Diet Cola waited in the car with the a/c running. After a while, he opened a can of beans and ate them with a spoon as he wondered what was taking those lazy oafs so long. Maybe they’d just died on their own, which would be a nice coincidence. He lay back and closed his eyes, dreaming of naked women and palm trees.

When he awoke he grabbed his gun and stepped out of the car. The idiots were too quiet, and it was time to check on them. Behind the rocks the desert stretched out forever, dotted with tangled brush and what must have been a dozen kinds of cactus. Diet Cola liked the big kind, the ones with the long green arms stuck up into the air in surrender.

Elvis was alone, leaning on his shovel next to a pretty good-sized hole. “Where’s my pals Ace and Frosty?” Diet Cola asked.

“Frosty said they’ll be right back.”

Diet Cola smiled. “Oh, my goodness,” he said, pointing at the horizon. “Look at that!”

Elvis’s sequined jacket hung on the arm of a cactus, and his chest hair was matted flat with sweat. He looked toward where Diet Cola pointed. “Look at what?” Elvis turned around, caught the flat of Diet Cola’s boot on his butt and tumbled into the hole.

“Sit up.” Diet Cola grabbed the shovel and began replacing the sand and gravel around Elvis’s feet. He shoveled quickly, threatening three times to whack Elvis over the head if he so much as moved. “This is how the Indians did it in the old Westerns. Bury you up to your neck, let you die nice and slow while the ants crawl on your face and bite.”

Elvis sobbed and begged for his life as Diet Cola emptied the rest of the 32-ounce frozen slush on his head. The liquid would dry and leave a sticky-sweet residue guaranteed to attract every stinging, biting, welt-raising insect within a hundred yards. Maybe a swarm of those African killer bees would zero in and finish him off. Dumb as they were, Ace and Frosty had pretty good radar for avoiding danger, so they probably slipped away for good. There was no chance they’d have the guts or the goodness to come back and rescue Elvis, but Diet Cola scouted around to see where they might have high-tailed it to.

He stopped and pissed on a bush that gave off a smell of creosote. What did he eat to cause that stench? Maybe it was just the bush—he sure hoped so. If it was from him, his dick was going to smell like a telephone pole.

He walked quickly as he scanned the horizon for Ace and Frosty. At the edge of a gulley he tripped over something and stuck out his arms to break his fall. On his way down, he remembered what his mother used to say about watching his step and how the stupid hag always said it when it was too damn late. A small pincushion cactus caught his shirt, which Diet Cola didn’t consider very helpful, since the needles stuck into his chest like little knives. His gun went off and blasted one of the small cactuses into jelly and bird feathers. A couple of birds flew away, leaving one of their dead cousins behind. He staggered to his feet, his pierced chest in agonizing pain. There lay the thing he tripped over, a rotten pig with some of its flesh eaten away. Diet Cola looked around for living targets, saw none, then braced himself in a two-handed police-style stance and fired his weapon into the stinking corpse. Flies buzzed everywhere. What a waste of perfectly good ammo, he thought. What a waste of perfectly good ham.

Slowly, painfully, he picked needles out of his bloody shirt and tried to ignore Elvis’s pathetic moans. In the hot sun, he began to feel lightheaded and dizzy. He’d better get back to his car, because there was no other shade big enough for him for miles. Luckily, he had the keys to the car, so the bozos couldn’t leave without him.

Then he had a thought more painful than passing a kidney stone. Ace and Frosty didn’t
need
keys to start his car. Hell, Ace probably didn’t need
gas
. The thought made Diet Cola feel like crap. He walked the other way around the rocks, thinking the way was a little quicker. He jumped a ditch, but the far side didn’t hold his weight, and he tumbled in. A snake, long, gray-green and ugly, slithered away, its rattles trailing behind it. He aimed his gun and pulled the trigger, missing the snake but blasting a bees’ nest. The snake got the message and slithered away. Three or four yellow-black bees swarmed a few feet away.

Make that ten or twelve bees, or possibly twenty. They dive-bombed Diet Cola’s face, neck and limbs as he frantically clambered out of the ditch and ran. A bee kamikazed through the gauze on his injured hand, and he crushed it with his fist. He slapped at his ear and got another. The sneaky little bastards bit him everywhere from ass to elbow, ankle to scalp. His eyes glazed over and he began to swoon, but as he fell to his knees he could have sworn he saw an old woman running toward him in her underwear, yelling and swinging a pair of orange pants.

Whap! Whap! Whap!
She hit him over and over again, but he sensed through his pain that she was driving the bees away. Then two guys grabbed him and led him around the rock and to the road.

Soon he was sitting sideways inside the car with his feet planted on the ground while the old lady attended to his stings and scratches. She plucked a stinger out of a mountainous welt on his arm. “You should be in the hospital, young man.”

She looked familiar. So did her old man. What the hell were these flipping geezers doing here?

“Hold still,” she said. She swabbed his face with a wad of cotton doused in alcohol.

“Ouch! Stop that!”

“I beg your pardon, dear?” she jabbed him in the eye with the cotton ball, and he fell backwards in pain.

Zippy turned around in the front seat and smiled. “Man, am I glad to see you, D.C. We’ve got that Durgin jerk’s parents. Now he’ll have to give us the ashes.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” the woman asked. “Carrick, darling, what did the young man say?” Her husband’s eyes opened wide.

“Nothing, Brodie. Don’t worry.”

“You’re the bullwhip lady!” Diet Cola raised his bandaged hand. “See what you did to me?” The gauze wrapping was filthy and partly shredded. A dead bee hung from a thread in his palm. He hadn’t had time to change the dressing since that first day when she’d viciously attacked him back in Massachusetts. Of course he never went to the doctor either, and now the hand ached like a bastard. Without thinking, he smacked her in the face with his open hand. Pain ignited in his palm and rocketed through his arm, but he was a man about it. She screamed and fell into Carrick’s arms.

Carrick’s fist came out of nowhere and exploded like a firecracker on Diet Cola’s nose. Blood splattered onto his shirt, and now his fingertips to the top of his skull were one continual river of pain.

“You had that coming,” Zippy said cheerily. “This is a very nice lady. She saved your life.”

“No, my husband did.” Brodie turned and gave Carrick an adoring look. Carrick flexed his fist.

Diet Cola unwrapped the purple gauze and held up his hand. His whole body shook as a nasty gash with yellow gunk oozed from the base of his pinky to the base of his thumb. “This is what you did to me!” he said to Brodie.

“When did I ever hurt you, you vicious bully? We’ve never—Wait. You’re the hooligan who broke into our house and attacked my husband!”

“He’s a who what?” Zippy asked.

“A hooligan, a common criminal, a low-life.”

“Hoo-o-o-oligan. Hoo-o-o-oligan.” Zippy enjoyed the sound of the new word. “D.C., you’re a low-life! Hee-hee!
Hoo-o-o-oligan!
”

Diet Cola decided he’d had enough abuse. He closed his watery eyes and found a reserve of strength from somewhere deep within him. Then he reached out with his left hand and clenched Zippy by the throat. Zippy struggled but couldn’t release himself from the powerful grip. His face reddened and his eyes bulged like he was staring at death. After a minute he passed out, fell to his knees and collapsed onto the ground. “Better a low-life than a no-life.”

“You killed him!” Brodie said.

“Nah, but I could’ve done it easy.” Diet Cola gave Zippy a half-hearted kick in the chest. “See, he’s breathing.” Zippy sounded like a kazoo had stuck in his windpipe, but he was definitely breathing.

Diet Cola saw that his car hadn’t gone anywhere, but the Durgins’ rental car was better. Now confident of his strength, he grabbed Carrick by the arm and took his car keys, then went back and found his gun. He tucked it inside his belt, figuring it might come in handy even without ammo.

What would the King do? Elvis felt faint as he pondered the question. Buried up to his shoulders in sand, he couldn’t even wriggle his hips.
Elvis the Pelvis.
He tried to smile, but the effort hurt too much. The sun was white hot, but Diet Cola had put a hat on him, saying that way he’d cook slower. Thank goodness for his wraparound Ray-Bans and his memories of Nashville. He would have won that contest for sure if he’d remembered to pull up his zipper. Or if it was a different kind of contest. The tickle on his neck wasn’t sweat, because it was traveling up toward his chin. He looked down at the ground a few inches away where a battalion of ants marched in his direction,
hup-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight,
coming right after the syrup on his face. When they started biting, he screamed and shook his head so hard his Ray-Bans came loose and dangled from his left ear. The light was like a big flood lamp stuck right in his face, so he closed his eyes tight and kept them that way. The ants climbed and sank their pincers as they went along, like climbers sinking spikes into the side of a mountain. Some went for the syrup, and some went for his tears.

If there was an upside to all this, it must have been the visions that made him forget his pain. A big part of that vision involved a blinding light, and then his maker appeared from the sky, complete with angry face, white beard, and lightning bolts in his fist. Cal was an angel beside him, more out of reach than ever. Elvis was lower than dirt. He knew that now.
If you hadn’t obsessed on Ms. Vrattos, you wouldn’t be in this hole,
the heavenly voice said.
Give her up or give up hope.

“Oh, I will,” Elvis said out loud. “I’ll never bother her again.” He was in no position to cross his fingers as he made his promise, but it didn’t matter much anymore. No woman was worth this suffering. Not even Calliope Vrattos.

Nearby, Poindexter was enjoying another day in the desert sun, rooting up and munching prickly pear cactus, breaking down much of the vegetation in its stomach and passing the rest through his system without a care.

Then gunshots startled Poindexter and made him scurry away from the sounds, but a mutation in his genes had left him curious. He stayed away as long as he heard voices, crouching in the shade while his brain clamored for sex and food. Soon he heard only whimpering, so he scuffled back to where he could catch a look at the source of this strange sound.

Through the clearing, Poindexter saw something entirely new, a disembodied human head bobbing, shaking and blubbering. Was it going to attack him?

A wild pig slurped the cherry-flavored ants on Elvis’s face. It was the ugliest, smelliest creature Elvis had ever encountered except for Diet Cola. There were long, curved tusks and bristles on its face that would break a razor blade. It grunted soft, sweet nothings, then stuck its raspy tongue into Elvis’s ear. The gesture had a calming effect on Elvis, who thought this was the most gentleness he’d felt in a long time, even if the creature only liked him for his syrup. But when it bit his earlobe, he thought for the first time of his mortal soul and how he didn’t want his last act before dying to be romanced by another species. So he screamed, making the pig scurry backward and trip on its hind legs. Then it stood back up, shook its body and took a tentative step forward.

He screamed several more times until his wired-shut jaw ached from trying to open it. Ants were still stinging his face, and now he wished the pig would come back and finish the job. “Come here, sweetie. Come on.”

This time the pig rubbed its rump on his face.

Ace and Frosty had no idea where they had wandered off to, but sticking around to dig a hole had been Ace’s idea of stupidity. Then when Frosty whispered his suspicion that Diet Cola might not mean well, they left the job to Elvis.