I’ve got Bukowski on my mind, mostly
speaking, as I leave the liquor store and
piss on the wall on the side of the Sturgeon
Liquor. Since the decrepit old fucker’s
scorched remains have been rotting in the
ground for nearly six weeks, I don’t think
he’ll mind much.
Three years at a liberal college will do
that to you, the Bukowski that is.
It used to be once in a good and great
goddamn while that I’d remember something I
heard in class. It had to be triggered by
something. I’d get to thinking about how
much I loved screwing Bernice, or her
younger sister, and the words would
practically roll right out of my mouth.
Now it’s anything. It keeps happening, and I
don’t know if it’s stress or contamination
or the fact that I’ve been pickled for so
many days that I’ve lost track. Now it
happens when I’m looking at one of the dead
animal carcasses that litter the side of the
road from where the tanks rolled through. It
happens when I drive past the empty stores
on Main with broken windows. It happens when
I go walking near the burning church
building that none of us will confess to
torching or bother to put out. It happens
when I stare at the haunted schoolyards with
silent playgrounds and stillborn swing sets.
When it happens it’s like I’m back at Iowa
State, before they revoked my football
scholarship, before drug screenings, before
I had to work at McDonalds nights to make up
the difference in tuition. I haven’t eaten
fast food since I left, not even Taco Bell.
I can’t stomach the smell now that I know
what’s in it. Bass Note, on the other hand,
practically moved into the Golden Arches
after they dropped the leaflets explaining
how the virus works and told us not to
approach the barrier or they’d shoot us.
Some of the residents actually believed the
pills were really for water purification
like the labels said.
"There are worse things than being alone.”
I’ll be on house patrols with Frank, looking
for meds, and we’ll walk in and find a whole
goddamn family dead in the living room,
gathered around a blister pack of military
issued cyanide capsules all empty and
ingested. Somehow we’d overlooked them.
Their eyes will be open and swollen. Their
bodies will be bloated and disfigured. Their
tongues will be sticking out black as
tarpaper. The television will be blaring,
pure white noise, since there is only static
on these days. Then all of a sudden I’ll
vividly remember some line from T.S. Elliot
or fucking Flannery O'Connor or that
pervert, Vladimir Nabokov.
“If you're losing your soul and you know it,
then you've still got a soul left to lose”
Every now and then, a little of their
programming will seep out, and I’ll catch
myself reciting Shakespeare or Milton or
that faggot Truman Capote or Ernest fucking
Hemmingway. How the hell can I still recall
the Old Man and the Sea or the Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner? I can’t tell you what I
would give to burn The Walrus and The
Carpenter out of my mind.
Frank’s squirreled away enough prescription
painkillers to stay good and high for the
next decade. He’s got Vicodin. He’s got
Norco’s. He’s got Dolacet and Lorcet Plus
and Darvocet. He’s got Soma and Seconal and
thin white sticks of Xanax. None of us will
let him forget the time he took the Cialis
thinking it was Phenobarbital.
Tonight it just so happens to be the dour
words of a prolific loser that I can’t
contain inside of me. I blame Bernice for
being obsessed with his writing and giving
me all those cheap paperbacks.
Tonight I lean against the bricks, my
fingers digging into the damp fungus-covered
grout as a stream of hot piss steams out of
me, and the words roll out with everything
else I can’t recall drinking in. Bernie
would make me recite snippets of literature
back to her while we were fucking and if I
got it wrong, she wouldn’t let me fuck her
sweet asshole. She said she’d educate me
properly and get me to learn to love
Burroughs and Kerouack and Ginsberg even if
she had to wear diapers. She called it her
carrot on a stick routine. She had the
biggest tits you’ve ever seen in your life.
If we did anal, she didn’t make me wear the
condom and I could cum in her. I’m a pretty
fast learner and within a week Big Breasted
Bernie couldn’t sit right. Serves her right
for making me switch majors.
Tonight we are on our 48th day alone in this
town, the only survivors, but we are nowhere
near the end of this ordeal. I haven’t seen
anyone new come into town since the
government laid down the quarantine
perimeter. I haven’t seen a plane fly
overhead since they formed a human shield
made of Army reserves and militiamen. The
world has grown quiet here, like how I
picture Nagasaki was a few days after the
bomb dropped, wind whistling through the
sporadic elf fires left burning.
“Some suicides are never recorded.”
Corn, Piccolo Pete, and Bass Note don’t say
anything about my literary Tourette’s
syndrome. We are devolving at an alarming
rate, returning to our primal, savage roots.
Anything out of the ordinary is cause for
concern, we tell each other, because it
could be the onset of the virus. Originally
we agreed that if anyone of us got sick, the
rest of us would take him out in the woods
and shoot him in the back of the head, so he
didn’t suffer. That was before Pete got the
cough, then Corn got it, then Bass Note.
Tonight they are too busy piling into the
back of the Chevy and back out just as
quickly. Cassius Clay, Frank’s fawn colored
Boxer Pit Bull mix, has shit on the floor
again and pissed up the seats good. Frank
starts berating her and I do my best to yell
over him.
“Why do you leave the damn dog in the car so
fucking long, Frank?!”
He’s not paying attention. He hauls out a
chewed up length of rope from the trunk then
drags Cassius Clay to the front of Chuck’s
feed store, and ties her to a post. It’s
cold out and the bitch might freeze
overnight, but Frank’s not thinking that far
ahead. Frank loves that goddamn dog more
than most people love their wives, which is
why he’s so hard on her.
We’re all trying our goddamn best to act
like everything is normal. None of us know
how much longer we can go before we fucking
snap. Piccolo looks kinda green around the
edges and Corn keeps sneezing. Then again,
they might just decide to carpet bomb
Crystal Lake like they did Cedar Rapids. The
radio stopped picking up news so we shut it
off. Frank had it last I saw.
None of us want to talk about it anymore,
why we didn’t get sick right away like the
others. Frank thinks it was Al Qaeda but I
think it was an accident. Frank talked a lot
about signing up for the armed forces after
9-11, but in the end he got his contractor’s
license and forgot all about the military.
We dug forty-three plots in six days, then
the guys in hazmat suits showed up and Dave
let them use his tractor to dig one mass
grave. They burned the bodies before they
covered them. They smelled worse than my
memories of cleaning the grease traps.
Bass Note grabs a beer from the old cooler
sitting in the open trunk and Frank starts
hollering at him in a voice loud enough to
raise the dead.
“Ain’t no harm done, Dub T’s,” he whistles
out as Frank wrenches the can from his hand,
glaring at him. “Shit, I’ll just go back in
the store and grab you a case if it’d make
you happy.”
“Not from my ‘emergency only’ stash, dipshit,”
he chides, slapping him up side the head.
Bass Note flinches and Frank hands him back
the beer, cursing as he shakes the foaming
suds off his hand. “Those are my only cold
ones,” he mutters.
Cassius howls pitifully and Frank turns and
stares at her.
“Shut up Cassius,” he wheezes between a
coughing fit. “Damn worthless bitch.”
“What do you want to do about the car?” Corn
asks and Frank glares at him, pulling the
cooler out of the trunk.
In the distance there is an explosion and
the dark outline of a black plume of smoke
rises from where one of the local gas
stations is located. Odds are, it’s not in
service anymore. Half of the buildings in
town have been looted or stand open. Wild
animals roam the streets unchallenged.
“We’ve got two choices,” Frank groans. He
adjusts himself and spits out something that
looks like blood on the wet concrete. He’s
shivering from the cold and his face is red
and patchy in places. “We can either burn it
or drive it into the lake, because I ain’t
cleaning it.”
In the end we decide to burn it right where
it stands and just commandeer a new vehicle
from the sixty odd some left sitting around.
Corn and Picallo Pete grab the gas cans they
filled earlier in the day and start to douse
the Chevy while Frank barks out
instructions. Bass Note and me walk over to
the feed store and sit on the curb. I’m
drinking Vodka of the Gods with one hand and
petting Cassius with the other.
“It's possible to love a human being if you
don't know them too well.” The words fall
out of my mouth and my cock gets rock hard
in my jeans thinking about the triple B.
“Damn worthless bitch,” I mutter. Cassius
looks up and whimpers.
It was during our first summer out of school
that we had each earned our own
scatologically inspired nickname. Dave ate
six cobs at Frank’s parents 4th of July
barbeque until he made himself sick. He was
in the bathroom for nearly an hour the next
morning. He shit so much that some of it
wouldn’t flush. Kernels kept floating back
up for days according to Seanie’s version.
Frank’s got a box of Diamond Strike Anywhere
in his hands. He’s pulling one out at a
time, sparking it on the zipper of his
jeans, then flicking them at the gasoline
soaked car. The first three go out before
they reach the roof, but the fourth hits.
There is a loud whooshing sound as all the
air around the vehicle pulls in towards the
initial flash of fire. Flames shoot across
the surface of the roof, climbing in the
cracked windows and covering the seats. Bass
Note starts to cheer, then leans over and
throws up on his faded gray Chuck Taylor’s.
Seanie got nicknamed next, Picallo Pete, for
the high pitch sound the firecracker makes
when you ignite one. Everyone always said
that Seanie was way too uptight for his own
good. Before you knew it everyone was trying
to nickname each other something that had to
do with how they farted.
Silent Death Bob. Gunfire Gary. Peckerwood
Paul. Fecal Frank.
Bass Note is on his hands and knees vomiting
so hard that he loudly shits himself. From
the sound of it, he just lost half of his
organs. Frank starts laughing and laughing.
He’s just washed my grandmother’s left over
Klonopin down with half a bottle of Jim
Beam. No one knows how much longer they’ve
really got. All they know is that it won’t
be long now for most of us.
James got saddled with the moniker Bass
Note, for the long introduction he gave the
walls of any enclosed space before
commencing to shit. James is a big, fat fuck
of a guy with a special place in his heart
for cooking chili and a child’s sense of
humor. To this day, most of us believe that
James actually nicknamed himself. Shitting
himself is kinda the way he might have
wanted to go.
Frank is still laughing. Pink, blood-tinged
tears stream out the corners of his eyes. He
laughs so hard that he begins to cough and
sputter. Once he starts, it’s like he can’t
stop. Soon he is spitting up a little more
blood and I know it won’t be long until he’s
just as sick as his parents were before they
climbed into the Oldsmobile. He found them
in the garage with the car still running
looking as peaceful as if they had simply
fallen asleep and forgotten to wake up.
There is a very good reason why we’re not
taken in and examined for ninety days after
the initial exposure, but goddamn it, it’s
just downright cruel to leave us to die like
this. Everyone knows this strand of
haemorrhagic fever is weapons grade, that it
runs its course in as little as six to
twelve hours. By the time you start to cough
you’ve already got less than a day left. No
amount of morphine can numb that fact out of
your mind. Still, it doesn’t hurt to know
your options.
We call Frank the Wind Talker, or Dub T’s
for short, since he has a bad habit of
passing loud gas that, thankfully, almost
never smells like anything. Being nearly a
year older than the rest of us and
barrel-chested, there was never any question
that Frank was our leader.
Bass Note falls into the gutter where he’s
been puking but he doesn’t get back up. The
wind shifts and I can smell him. He’s got to
be dead. If I had to guess I’d say that his
internal organs have probably been liquefied
by the virus. Corn and Piccolo Pete sit down
on the ground shaking. They douse each other
with the remaining gasoline without saying a
word. Frank is eating handfuls of pills from
his pockets. He stumbles forward onto the
burning car passing out over the hood. He is
instantly consumed by fire. It’s clear that
no one wants anyone else to be responsible
for making sure they don’t suffer. No one is
taking any chances at this point.
I look up at the sky as Pete and Corn go up
in flames. The truth is that I feel fine.
I’m not sure why it’s not affecting me, why
the only virus in my head is a dead drunk’s
verse.
“You must begin all over again. Throw all of
that out. You are alone with now.”
I untie Cassius Clay and start to walk up
the street, whistling as I pass the remains
of my childhood friends. It’s been a long
day and we have several miles to go before I
can find a clean house without any corpses
in it to sleep in tonight. The stars are
bright and the sounds of the forest are all
around me, wild and raw and inimical.
There is no one left to remember my nickname
or how I earned it, which is just as well.
This bitch and I are going to be stuck
together for the next 42 days.
© 2006
This story was
originally published online @ Antimuse -
which is now defunct.
