Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (14 page)

Later at Larry’s they rip me off. Thirty-five hundred dollars is their best and final, though I’ve got less than a hundred thousand miles on her. It’s a buyer’s market when you have to sell in a hurry.

Meanwhile, Inez closes out the joint savings account she had with Dave. Eighteen hundred dollars. When she tries to do the same with the checking account, the teller balks, says she needs to speak to the manager. Inez tells her to forget about it.

When I first shovel lime on Dave, on Dave’s face to be exact, he looks for a few moments like a dead Marcel Marceau. Then I cover the rest of him and he just looks like a cadaver covered in lime.

By a quarter to four we’re ready to roll.

As I back the Bronco out of the driveway, Inez yells:

“Stop.”

She jumps out of the SUV and scurries onto the little cement front porch where she pins a handwritten note to the door. I stand behind her reading it:
Dave’s fever is off the charts. Have taken him to his mother’s. I.

“That should keep ’em guessing for a while,” Inez says.

“Where does Dave’s mother live?” I ask.

“Moved to Taos for the air. Had a stroke eight months ago. Can’t speak. Hanging on by a thread.”

“Ah.”

I restart the Bronco.

We keep driving west until three a.m. Finally, somewhere on the Cumberland Plateau past Knoxville I tell Inez we need to stop or we’ll end up as the blackened remains of a fiery crash.

She’s as hyper as a born-again cicada but she agrees.

Pulling off into a rest area jammed with 18-wheelers, I take a much needed leak in the public facilities, then zonk out in the back seat of the Bronco. In front Inez chain-smokes and gazes at the stars through the sunroof.

When Inez shakes me awake, it’s still dark.

“What the fuck time is it?”

“I’ll drive,” Inez says.

“Then why the fuck did you wake me up?”

At the next exit, Inez swerves off the Interstate. She looks over at me, but I don’t say anything. Just raise one eyebrow.

“We needed to get off the Interstate,” she says defensively. “THEY always look there first.”

Inez is in meltdown.

“Relax,” I say. “It’ll be at least three days before someone finds Dave. Unless, of course, a hunter with a dog walks by the house.”

Inez’s month twists into a knot of strawberry saltwater taffy. She’s not buying it.

“And while we’re on the subject of second-guessing our getaway plans,” I say, “we should have taken my truck, not the Bronco. When they find Dave, they’ll be looking for the Bronco.”

“We needed the money from your truck. This piece of shit’s totally worthless.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot.”

The day is coming on, sunny and hot. Did I mention that the Bronco’s air-conditioning is broken?

Inez switches on the radio. Carly Simon belts out a plaintive tune of love betrayed. The landscape we’re passing through is rugged and heavily wooded. Inez pushes the speedometer past 70 on a two-lane county road.

“Let me drive,” I say.

“Everything’s cool, man,” Inez says.

“ I know it is,” I say. “But a cop’s going to bite our collective ass if you keep driving this fast.”

Inez squints, as if she’s trying to read the small print of a legal opinion. Then I realize she’s focused on the gas gage. Its little orange pointer points at EMPTY.

“Shit!” says Inez. “We need to get gas.”

Miraculously a lone gas station appears around the next curve.

There’s nothing else around. No houses, no trailers. Not even a body shop. At first I think the gas station’s closed. But when Inez pulls up to the pumps, a lit green neon sign that says
OPEN
hangs in the window of the darkened office.

A hand-written note taped to the single set of pumps states:
Paye afore ye pump.
Are these words meant to be a joke?  Or have we entered a time warp back to the 18
^th
Century?

“Shit!” Inez said.

Inez swears a lot.

She jumps out of the Bronco, leaving her door wide open, and strides toward the office, a wad of bills in her hand. I walk over to the edge of the woods to take a piss. I wonder if I can buy a cup of coffee or a candy bar inside.

Just as I zip up, Inez bursts from the office and jogs toward me waving her arms. I make a dash for the Bronco and climb into the driver’s seat. Inez jumps in the passenger side and slams the door.

“What happened!” I demand.

Inez is panting. Too many cigarettes. Finally she screams:

“The fucking attendant tried to rape me.”

“And …”

“I shot him.”

“O,
Jesucristo
.”

As we bolt from the parking area, leaving behind a spray of gravel and a settling dust cloud, a Dodge Viper going back toward Knoxville passes on the roadway. We shoot directly in front of him. He veers off the tarmac, horn blaring, brakes squealing. Through the rearview I watch him flail through a patch of high weeds and then swing back onto the blacktop.

“Was he dead?” I ask.

“I have no fucking idea. I didn’t wait around to check.” When she looks at me her eyes are little black currents of fear and loathing. “When I came in he was seated at a desk wearing some old work shirt. Looked like your normal hick. When he stood up he was naked from the waist down, with this huge nasty thing pointed at me. I dropped the money.”

“You dropped the money?!”

She nods.

“And you pulled out the Taurus and shot him?!”

She nods again.

I slap my forehead. “
Jesucristo
.”

“But I remembered to pick up the money. And took another eighty dollars from the cash drawer.”

“So your prints are on both the drawer and the office door handle.”

Inez sits back and crosses her arms.

“And if the guy isn’t dead, he can identify you in a lineup.”

I’m driving at a normal speed. But inside my head I’m riding a typhoon. We, repeat we, are in ultra deep doo-doo. My stomach is in fast spin cycle. Acid burns my throat. I consider asking Inez for a cigarette. Or pushing her out the fucking car door.

When we come to a four corners, I turn left. A sign for the Blue & Gray Motel points in that direction. I have no idea where we are. Somewhere between Knoxville and Chattanooga. Maybe we should check into a motel. Hide the Bronco in the woods. Lay low for 24.

In the seat next to me Inez is hyperventilating, sucking in great gouts of air and blowing them out again. Suddenly she stands up on the seat, thrusting her head and upper body through the open sunroof.

“I can’t breathe,” she croaks from above.

Up ahead a low tree branch sticks part way into the road. I swerve the Bronco and hit the gas.

Ka-thwapp.

The rest of Inez’s body flies out through the sunroof. She lands on a sandy embankment and rolls down to the edge of the road.

I pull up in front and watch her in the rearview. She lies completely still. A raven flies out of the woods and lands near Inez. He hops this way and that, eyeballing the body. When he jumps on her head and starts to peck at her nose, I open the driver’s door and scramble out. The raven takes flight.

When I reach Inez, one side of her face is a wreck of torn and bloody flesh. Her eye is missing. I kneel down, feeling for a pulse.

The sound of a tire slowing on the gravel edge of the road causes me to glance over my shoulder.

Ten feet back a Crown Vic with a police flasher on top comes to a stop at the roadside. An archetypal law enforcement moron climbs out. The officer, dressed in quasi-military khakis and cowboy boots, thick leather belt and holster, shades, regards me with keen interest.

Inez isn’t breathing.

Slowly I stand up, my empty hands held wide and open in what I hope is a non-threatening pose.

“Howdy, officer,” I say. I nod my head at Inez’s cadaver. “Woman here is in need of some serious medical attention.”

An Orphan’s Tale

I murdered my mother. Hemorrhaged to death giving birth to yours truly. Three months later my father in a fit of the Devil’s ennui drove to N.O. and got himself stabbed six times in a girly bar in the Vieux Carre. R.I.P.

Hence, I became an orphan. Name of Easter.

Up until age fifteen—my second year of high school—I resided at the Rankin County Home for Displaced Girls. That’s in Rankin County, Mississippi. My best friend was named Geneva. This is what happened.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we left school early to attend choir practice with Mr. Nesbitt at the Circle of Fire Baptist Church. It didn’t matter whether you could hold a note or not. Choir was a mandatory activity. In case you died and went to Heaven.

I could tell right away Mr. Nesbitt was a pervert. He had this way of twisting the hairs of his mustache when he got nervous. Which was whenever he looked at me.

My breasts had recently started to expand exponentially. My legs were smooth and muscular from running cross-country in middle school. I had adopted this sunburned waif look, with lots of freckles, dirty blond ragtag hair and flower print cotton dresses that left my legs mostly bare.

In fact, I was quite the little number.

On the break during our third rehearsal, Mr. Nesbitt called me into his office. He was drinking a bottle of grape Nehi. The room smelled of cigarettes and old dry rotted prayer books.

Mr. Nesbitt came around the desk to where I stood looking back though the door at my friend Geneva. He put his sweaty hands on my shoulders and turned me around, his eyes ogling my chest. I thought for a moment that he was going to touch my breasts, even though the door was wide open and Geneva was standing there, the perfect witness.

But he just stripped me down to my skin with those cottonmouth eyes of his. His creepy hands were still on my shoulders, so I turned my head and bit him as hard as I could, right where the thumb connects to the palm.

“Aaaahhhh!”

His wounded hand flew back to slap me, but I ducked and ran out of the room.

“Jeepers,” Geneva said. “You really ticked Mr. Nesbitt off.”

I didn’t say anything, but I knew there’d be more trouble.

That evening at dinner—we all ate in a big high-ceilinged hall, kind of like nuns in the Middle Ages—I got into a fight with Loretta Lee, a girl two years older than me and a psychopath. She got a black eye. I got a tanning delivered by Miss Beech herself and sent to bed without dessert. Miss Beech, an old lesbo with a buzz cut, had been head mistress at Rankin House for eons. It was whispered she wore leather undergarments on the weekends.

I cried, but only after lights out. Miss Beech would get hers.

The next day, Saturday, right after breakfast cleaning day arrived in the dormitory rooms and vast hallways of Rankin. Orphans running up and down, helter-skelter with brooms, mops, and feather dusters. In the chaos, Geneva and I snuck down to the duck pond for a smoke.

I’d just taken a first deep drag on the dried-out Lucky I’d cadged a week ago from a traveling drummer, when there was a great rustling and commotion amid the swamp milkweed and honeysuckle that loomed over the water hyacinth choked pond. Next thing the weeds parted like the waters of the Red Sea and two men broke into the spider webby clearing where we were crouched down with our cigs.

Tall and slim and as bent over as a late-summer green bean, the first intruder was tucked in faded overalls and a pale green collarless shirt. A slug-white scar slashed across his forehead. Notwithstanding the September heat wave, the other intruder sported a black wool suit, white shirt and namby-pamby tie. Both had white handkerchiefs tied across their faces like comic book
bandidos
.

Despite this attempted disguise, I instantly recognized the shorter rounder marauder as Mr. Nesbitt. Who wasn’t surprised?

I didn’t know the other man. But his scared demonic visage reminded me of the villain played by Boris Karloff in
The Body Snatcher
, which I’d seen at the cinema in Jackson on a school trip.

“Jeez Louise! Run!” Geneva shouted, dropping her cigarette and bolting for the open lawn that undulated down in front of the three-story red brick edifice that was Rankin House.

“Wait for me!” I yelled.

But I was too slow. Mr. Nesbitt’s accomplice wrapped me in his arms while Mr. Nesbitt covered my face with a washrag steeped in some sweetly nauseating chemical. Recollecting a tooth I’d had pulled the year before, even as my brain began to spin down the rabbit hole I realized the chemical smell was chloroform. Darkness met me halfway.

When I came to, I was surprised I wasn’t stark naked. After all, isn’t that the point of being abducted by a sex maniac?

Nope, I was still wearing my purple violet print dress, Sears Roebuck panties, and black sensible shoes with brown socks.

A rat poison headache pounded behind my eyes, so I closed them again. I was lying across the leather backseat of a Ford automobile. The smells of old leather and road dust danced in my nose. I felt the automobile cavort and pitch and yaw and shimmy over the rough roadway.

When I opened my eyes again, I found myself staring at the back of Mr. Nesbitt’s bald head. Little tufts of hair clung like bats above each ear. The rest was a pinkish expanse of tightly pulled skin strewn with warts, birthmarks, moles, and dimples. Ugh.

I had to escape!

Leaping up I thrust my hands in front of Mr. Nesbitt’s eyes, nails clawing into the surrounding skin. The auto lurched sideways as Mr. Nesbitt shook his head, trying in vain to dislodge my grasping, blinding fingers. In the next instant the automobile shot across the shoulder and pitched into the ditch, bouncing and bucking, oil pan scraping and sparking on the hardscrabble earth.

Desperate, Mr. Nesbitt swung his right arm backward like a cudgel, catching me in the side of the head and sending me tumbling, while his body thrust forward against the steering wheel, sounding the horn in a long plaintive howl. The automobile jerked to a sudden halt in a tangle of scrub pine, witch alder, and dwarf palmetto. Dust settled over everything.