Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (13 page)

The time is late afternoon on Thursday. The TV’s tuned to some 1940s black-and-white melodrama with Barbara Stanwyck as an ice-cold bitch, soon to be a murderer. She keeps flouncing back and forth across the screen talking nonsense.

Without warning the needle flies out of my hand.

I swear it isn’t my fault. It’s as though someone switched on a superpowerful magnet in the vacant lot next door. The needle bows outward, before taking a flying leap. The point rips through the zombie-white flesh surrounding the splinter.

“Shit!” I jam my thumb in my mouth. The throbbing subsides.

Inez looks annoyed at all this turmoil disrupting her concentration on the movie.

Gazing hither and thither across the wall-to-wall carpet, I can’t see the needle anywhere. Then again, being nearsighted I couldn’t spot a wildebeest until it’s six inches from my nose, just before it gores me in the small intestine. When I can’t spot the needle, I ease off the sofa and down onto the floor for a closer look. Next thing I’m on all fours, squinting and snorting at the orange and green shag like a trained hog looking for truffles.

Try finding a needle in a shag rug, especially an orange and green one. After five minutes I’m cross-eyed and on the verge of a tizzy.

A scream sounds. Then the loud pop of a pistol.

It’s from the movie.

Nevertheless my hand grasps Inez’s blue-veined foot in sudden panic.

I stare at her foot, count the hairs curling from the middle joint of her big toe. Lucky seven. My nose six inches from Inez’s left foot, I’ve got a parrot’s eye view of five slick toenails lacquered in dark cherry, verily the color of blood pulsing from a bullet wound. From the mantelpiece Dave’s old brass naval clock chimes four times as I wonder whether Inez would be up for a ménage a trois. Probably not. Two fingers tiptoe up one shapely ankle to a lovely calf and beyond.

“Please, Bill,” Inez says. “I’m watching this movie.”

I scrunch to a seated position. In front of me are Inez’s perfect knees. Her nougat white thighs ooze backward, connecting to fullish hips beneath the languid folds of a black rayon miniskirt. My nose suctions like a Dirt Devil hand vac up those thighs. Inez grows restive.

Rearing like Godzilla from the depths of Tokyo Bay, I fall forward, burying my face in her crotch. She squirms under my assault. But her legs open. The smell of Nehi Grape Soda and something else wafts up my nostrils.

Something primordial washed up by the tide.

In the next instant we’re rummaging around like crazy, jettisoning all remaining items of clothing. Inez gets the giggles. My skivvies go missing.

We’re hard at it, Inez puffing air like a leaky dirigible, when Inez’s marmalade striped cat, Celia, decides I’m murdering its meal ticket. Without hesitation it leaps kamikaze style from the back of the sofa onto the small of my back.

Its claws flay my flesh like a penitent beneath the archbishop’s lash. With a bellow of pain and rage, I leap backward. My dick flops loose, sags.

As my hands grasp for the beast, it leaps away in a glimmer of self-preservation. Saliva glistens on its fangs. Its claws drip blood. The high-pitched whine of a metal cutting tool escapes its jaws.

“Bastard cat!” I scream.

A glass ashtray scooped from the coffee table curves in a perfect collision course with the fleeing beast. At the last possible instant, Celia veers sideways. The ashtray explodes in a myriad of fake diamonds.

I feel Inez moving beneath me. I look down. A veneer of sweat covers her body like the glaze on a Christmas ham. When she opens her eyes, her baby blues exude that shell-shocked, why-the-fuck-did-you-stop-now look.

“What’s happening,” she moans.

But I’m totally bent on wrecking havoc upon the cat, nailing its worthless pelt to the garage door with a titanium sashimi knife.

“Yaaaaahhh,” escapes my lips as I leap after the witch’s familiar.

Celia shoots under the dining room table, its paws spinning on the slick surface of Saltillo tiles, and disappears into the kitchen. Charging full-bore, I vault a dining chair hooking one corner of the chair back. The chair spins wildly away as I collide with the kitchen doorframe. Fooomph.

When I yank out the knife drawer, it comes completely out, falls, scattering razor sharp blades in all directions.

“Don’t you dare hurt Celia,” screams Inez behind me.

I grab a knife. A long pointed one with a serrated edge.

“Fucking cat tore up my ass,” I yell. “Signed its own death warrant.”

“If you touch a single hair, I’ll kill you, Bill.”

She doesn’t really mean that
, I think. Though Inez is hard to read. She picked me up two weeks ago in the vegetable department at Piggly Wiggly where I’m checking out the baby eggplants and radicchio for the grill. Right after we fuck that first time in the bed of my pickup, she tells me she’s going to shoot her husband. She has a long list of grievances.

I’ve always been attracted to volatile women. I like the edgy feeling of never knowing where you stand.

“Don’t get all bent out of shape,” I yell back. “It’s only a fuckin’ pet.”

Slowly I creep toward Celia, where it’s backed into a corner by the trash compactor and the back door, its eyes rotating like spinning marbles. Maybe that’s what I’ll do: jam the thing into the trash compactor. Slowly squeeze it to death.

One hand wrapped in a dishtowel for protection from a swipe by Celia’s claws, knife in the other, I’m ready to pounce.

In the stillness of that moment, the ratcheting sound of an automatic weapon being armed is unmistakable, coming from the living room.

Inez has flipped out.

Celia, judging that things are at an impasse and that it’s now or never, charges directly toward me. Shoots between my legs and is gone, baby, gone.

Cautiously I approach the door leading back to the dining alcove. If Inez is armed and dangerous, I don’t want to give her an excuse to open fire. The knife is still in my hand. But my hand rests non-threateningly against the side of my leg. I realize I’m buck-naked.

Inez is standing by the couch, as nude as Eve in the garden. A stainless steel pearl-handled Taurus 9mm pistol with gold accents rests nonchalantly in her grip. She looks at me. I look at her. She laughs. Then laughs some more, until tears wash down her cheeks.

“Hey, baby,” she finally says. “Looks like you’re putting on some weight.”

I look down to where my stomach, like some old stud hog’s gluttonous belly, overhangs my dick. I’m not particularly amused. But I give Inez a wan smile anyway.

“F-ing cat ripped my buttocks to shreds.”

“Maybe you deserved it. You crazy cock.”

Beyond Inez, Celia sits licking itself in the arched hallway leading to the bedrooms. When it looks at me, I swear the bitchin’ cat has a grin on its face. Or maybe I’ve just been smoking too much hydro. I still want to eviscerate the critter, carve it up into cat jerky.

But everything is cool now with Inez, so I don’t do anything except give the cat a death threat look when Inez glances away.

The loud click of the front door lock opening splinters the stillness of our DMZ. The door swings wide. Deep shadows haunt the entryway. A figure wrapped in chiaroscuro blunders forward.

An intruder!

Inez whirls, raises the pistol. I have a broadside view of her splendid ass. Then the 9mm barks. The noise is deafening.

The home invader crumbles forward onto the slate floor of the entry. One arm falls forward out of the shadows; a thick male hand curls inward like the legs of a dying spider. Becomes still.

“Jesus, Inez!” hisses from my lips in a susurrating whisper.

Inez approaches the body. Before I take a single step, I know it’s Dave lying there, dead as a donut.

“It’s Dave,” she says. “He must of gotten back early.”

She squats down, pokes at the body with the barrel of the pistol as though he were a jellyfish washed up on the beach.

“Dead,” she says. “At least it was quick.”

Suddenly my body’s shaking with palsy, my legs are twin strands of overcooked spaghetti, my mouth is as dry as a sand trap at Pebble Beach. I can’t believe this is happening!

If it’s murder, am I an accessory? Is there a crime called not-quite-accidental homicide?

I imagine myself sitting at a poolside bar years from now recounting these insane moments to a bucktoothed blonde falling out of her bikini on the adjacent stool. It’s like one of those loopy stories you stumble across in the crime docket section of the paper I’m telling her. She nods knowingly even though she never reads the newspaper.

Then I tumble back into the present.

Dave and Inez haven’t moved an inch.

It was an accident I reassure myself as I retrieve my skivvies and scramble into them.

“We need to call the police,” I say.

“I don’t think so.”

Stepping around the body, Inez closes the front door. Then she saunters back across the room and begins to dress.

“No, really,” I say earnestly. “If we call the cops now, maybe they’ll believe it was an accident. If we wait, who knows what they’ll think.”

“Forget it. Once the cops are involved, it can go anywhere. Only the lawyers make money on that.”

“But Inez…”

“No, Bill. Listen up.” She eases the magenta bra over her tumultuous breasts and reaches behind to secure those little hooks that are so hard to open. “Whether the cops call it murder or manslaughter or something else, irregardless, we’re in the shitter.”

I want to say:
YOU’RE in the shitter
. But I don’t.

“Irregardless isn’t a word,” I say.

“Fuck you and the dictionary you rode in on.” Her forehead creases like a Vermont dirt road in a poem by Robert Frost.

“I need a drink,” Inez says.

I can’t argue with that.

She strides into the kitchen where a half-empty bottle of Stoli stands like a Kremlin guard on the tile countertop.

Inez and I suck down a few pops waiting for the sun to disappear behind the pecan and magnolia trees in the old hedgerow behind her house. We sit face to face at the Formica table in Inez’s retro kitchen, avoiding eye contact, fiddling with the ice in our respective glasses.

“I’ve always wanted to check out Mexico,” Inez says, as she sips her second vodka tonic. The perfect summer drink.

“Mexico? But they speak Spanish there.”

“I took Spanish in high school,” Inez says. “And it’s cheap to live.”

“How would we get there?”

“Drive.” Inez lights a cigarette. She always does after her second drink. I loathe cigarettes. A good reason to clear out, I think. As if Dave’s corpse in the other room isn’t reason enough.

“What about all this…” I say, sweeping my hand in an arc that includes white metal cabinets, the never-used wine cooler, the dishwasher and the trash compactor.

“Dave and I were in way over our heads,” Inez says. “We got our first foreclosure notice two weeks ago. Same day I met you.”

I think:
Who’s not surprised?

“Here’s the plan,” Inez says.

I can hardly wait.

“We clean out the bank accounts and Dave’s wallet. Pack some clothes and a few good books in the Bronco. And off we go to olde Mexico.” She stubs out her cigarette, refreshes her drink and strides into the unlit living room.

Suddenly it feels very lonely in the kitchen. I pick up my glass and follow her.

In the cave-like darkness Inez stands like a buxom cigar store Indian in the vague light coming through the big plate glass window. Out by the curb my truck has become a black silhouette against the streetlight a block away. The nearest house is three blocks away. The developer of Inez’s cul-de-sac ran out of money or went to prison or swallowed a bottle full of sleeping pills and stepped off the deep end, so there’s a lot of vacant land in the subdivision. All is still, like the night before Christmas.

“What about Dave?” I ask.

Inez’s property includes an old shed from some bygone agrarian era when the land was actually used to grow stuff. The shed has a dirt floor. Dave ends up in a shallow grave inside the shed.

Afterwards Inez wants to fuck.

Personally I’ve had as much excitement as I can stand for one evening. I convey this to Inez.

Inez calls me a clandestine poof and flips me the bird. She was a communications major in junior college.

We sleep in separate bedrooms.

I don’t get much sleep. Keep imagining the prison group showers.

At 7:00 a.m. Inez wakes me from a doze by beating on a cooking pot with a wooden spoon just outside the guest bedroom.

“Whatthefuck,” I say.

“Coffee’s ready. So move your ass, soldier!”

Inez’s first husband was career Army before his fatal fall from the rim of the Grand Canyon while they were on their camping honeymoon.

In addition to coffee, there’s toast slathered in butter and fried pork chops with grilled onions. Inez, nursing a cup of sugarless black coffee, sits across from me while I eat.

“While I’m at the bank, you need to sell your truck,” she says. “Tell ’em your mother just died and you have to pay for the funeral.”

I roll my eyes.

“But first you need to drive over to the Home Depot and buy a couple of bags of lime.” She taps her cigarette ash onto the butter dish. “To keep Dave from stinking to high heaven.”

“You sure you want to do this?” I ask. “We can still call the cops…”

“Bill. You need to do a reality check. Mexico is the only option.”

Inez wears the pearl-handled 9mm jammed in the front of her miniskirt like a threat.

“OK,” I say.

Before we leave the house Inez calls Dave’s work and tells them he’s come down with the flu.

On my way over to Larry’s Used Autos to sell my truck, I have this urge to amscray out of town; leave Inez holding the proverbial bag. Maybe catch up with my brother in Ft. Lauderdale. I even hit the gas and bolt out Route 170 into the countryside. I pull over by a fallow field that reminds me of my worthless existence. Light shimmers off the quicksilver surface of a pool of standing water in the drainage ditch beside the road.

Next thing I see Inez in the aquatic mirror, tears in her eyes, the front of her blouse half undone. In a chocked-up voice she’s telling a burley Broderick Crawford look-alike sheriff the lurid details of how I blew away poor Dave in a drug crazed rage, then forced her to perform an obscene sex act. When this vision dematerializes into the here and now, I realize that not only can’t I take a powder. I can’t let Inez out of my sight!