Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (20 page)

Hingle watched as the man hauled himself up from his stool and started ambling around the counter. For a few moments he lost sight of the guy within the gloom of the store. Then the screen door butted open and he stepped outside, snapping a chamois leather from the bib of his coveralls.

“Evening, sir!” DWAYNE was stitched on the breast of the coveralls. He was a scrawny runt with a beach ball-size beer gut. BAYWATCH was printed over the brim of his cap, along with the silhouette of a ludicrously proportioned beach babe. He did something with his mouth that might’ve been a smile if he’d had enough teeth.

“Fill her up?” Hingle said, with a dubious glance at the rusted pumps.

“Yessir!” Dwayne doffed the brim of his
Baywatch
cap. “You want I should clean the bugs off your windshield too?” Hingle was about to tell him that the rain had beaten him to it, when the man snickered, said, “Clean the bugs off your Bug?” And then he threw his head back and started braying like a jackass.

Hingle wondered how many years he’d been waiting to tell that joke.

“Just the gas is fine,” he said, not smiling.

Dwayne managed to compose himself. He looked a little disappointed as he stuffed the chamois leather back in his coveralls. Like cleaning the bugs off windshields was the highlight of his day. And shit, Hingle thought, living out here in the willywags, maybe it was. Hingle unlocked the fuel tank and then moved aside to let the pump monkey start filling her up.

Dwayne worked the pump one-handed, grinning at Hingle like a garrulous drunk stood pissing at the urinal. “Where you headed?”

“South,” Hingle said.

Dwayne saw the splintered driver’s-side window. “Whoops, what happened here?”

Hingle didn’t miss a beat. “Bird flew into it. This gonna take long, buddy?”

Dwayne bristled at his tone. “Shoot, mister. Just flapping my jaw is all. Making conversation. We don’t see many out-of-towners no more. Not since they closed the string museum.”

String museum?
Hingle thought.
Shit, and I bet folks were lining up.

He sighed. No reason to raise the guy’s suspicions. Last thing he needed was this shit-kicker dropping a dime to the sheriff once he left.

He gave his most charming grin.

“Hell, I’m sorry, buddy. Been on the road too long, I guess. Must’ve left my manners a-ways behind me.”

Dwayne nodded like he understood, but once bitten, twice shy; he still looked a little wary.

Hingle glanced at his baseball cap. “
Baywatch
, huh?”

Dwayne hesitated a moment. Then he said, “
Boob
watch, I call it. Cuz of all the titties, see. Bouncing up and down in glory-us slow motion.” He puckered his lips with a wet smacking sound, sucking on the nipple of an invisible beach babe.

Hingle chuckled. “I’m guessing you’re not a leg or an ass man?”

“Mister,” Dwayne imparted, with a broad gummy smile, “you’d be guessing correctly.”

He finished pumping the gas and slotted the nozzle back in its stand.

“How much do I owe you, buddy?” Hingle said, fishing in his pocket for his roll.

Dwayne honked his nose in his chamois leather and examined the contents with interest. “Call it twenty.”

“We’ll call it twenty-five,” Hingle said, “you’ve got a pack of smokes for me inside?”

“What brand?”

Hingle was about to name his poison—

And that’s when the bitch in the trunk came to, and started screaming to wake the dead.

“For them, an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare.” —
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Magdalene Ritter was a thirteen-year old girl of plain face and plainer mind. She lived without siblings on her father, Dwyer Ritter’s farm. She had murdered her mother during childbirth, a fact which Dwyer took pains to impress upon his daughter from an early age, tilling her guilt more attentively than his land. As Magdalene blossomed towards womanhood, Dwyer grew haunted by the girl’s resemblance to his beloved late wife. He took to drinking whiskey, and to prowling the landing outside her bedroom door at night.

While feeding the livestock one summer’s evening, Magdalene was kicked in the head by an ornery mule, and knocked unconscious. When she awoke, weeks later, with no memory of what had happened to her, the girl was with child.

Some people in town, knowing no better, blamed the mule, which Dwyer put to death with a shotgun; others suspected the negro field workers, and a few likely-looking bucks were strung from trees without trial; the local preacher, seizing enthusiastically upon the expectant mother’s name, claimed it was Immaculate Conception.

But when the twin boys were born—Dwight bulldozing his way from his mother’s womb, little Dwayne slopping out behind him like hog-guts—it was clear who had fathered them. Dwyer took one look at the babes, their troll-like features the perfect likeness of his own, and knew he was finished in town. He strolled outside to the yard, kneeled beneath the old oak tree where he had laid his wife to rest, doused himself with tractor diesel, tucked a Chesterfield in his mouth, and then struck a match, scattering his own ashes to the wind.

The young mother was made a pariah by the scandalized townsfolk, and left alone on the farm to raise her sons as best she could; time would prove this was not very well at all.

In Magdalene’s defense, she had never been the same since that mule-kick to the cranium. She suffered ferocious migraine headaches, and was prone to fits of wild-eyed, mouth-frothing, flagellant religious mania, sermonizing in tongues as she instilled in her sons the teachings of the Old Testament; at other times she would plunge into pits of Stygian-black, godless despair from which it seemed she might never emerge, and punish the boys for their transgressions.

Long before reaching puberty, the Ritter brothers demonstrated a precocious fascination with sex, and voracious carnal appetites. Magdalene had no doubt that they had inherited this hunger from their—and indeed, her—father.

The boys collected pornography like other boys collect baseball cards. They’d been excluded from school, and local children, especially but not exclusively the girls, were warned by their parents to steer well clear of the Ritter house.

The brothers filled their days rutting their hands or each other or the barnyard animals; anything holey and moist would suffice, and even the tightest of holes could be moistened with Vaseline or spit and then probed.

As the boys matured, Dwight proved to be a dab hand at mechanics. He would occupy his time stripping down engine parts, and disassembling household appliances, curious to discover their inner workings. Dwayne was the intellectual brother, and developed an interest in history. His specialist subjects were the cruel and unusual punishments of the Roman emperors and the Nazi experiments conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele. The brothers soon coupled their interests, and began conducting pseudo-scientific experiments on the family’s dwindling stock of barnyard animals, and neighborhood pets.

Magdalene despaired at what would become of her sons when she was no longer able to instruct them. She never lived to see Dwight and Dwayne achieve their full potential. While preaching to them one night in the cellar, God reached down from heaven, clutched her heart in His fist, and then crushed it like a grape. She died with the warnings of the Scarlet Woman still on her lips.

When the smell of decay at last became intolerable—though that was something they’d soon become used to—the boys dragged the fly-swept carcass from the cellar and buried it beneath the old oak tree where their father had immolated himself. Dwayne, always the gabbier of the twins, said a few solemn words. Dwight raised his can of Keystone in a toast.

Then the brothers returned upstairs to their mother’s room, which they were in the process of redecorating, plastering the walls with glossy centerfold pages from their favorite issues of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
,
Hustler
and
Juggs
, getting the place all spick and span before they started looking for their first lodger.

Muffled voices in the darkness above her, like the teachers in the old
Peanuts
cartoons … Tilly dragged herself back to consciousness. Her eyes were gummed shut with tears and blood. She forced them open, crust crumbling from her eyelashes. Wherever she was it was pitch black, choked with the stench of sweat and oil and blood and hot animal fear. Her tongue was bone-dry and swollen painfully against her inner cheeks. Except it wasn’t her tongue. Something was stuffed down into her mouth. She groped upwards through the darkness to remove it. Her arms clanged against some kind of low metal ceiling. She realized her hands were bound tightly at the wrist with her pantyhose. She tried to wriggle her hands free. The hose coiled tighter, scraping the skin off her wrists. Panicking, she started to choke on the thing in her mouth. Prodding it forward with her tongue, she forced it from the back of her throat, fed it through her lips and hacked it out … Some kind of rag … Her—
oh, God
—her panties. Trying to sit, she thumped her skull against the low metal ceiling. Her head flared like a struck match and she whimpered in pain.
Where was she, had she been buried alive?
Then her eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom and she realized where she was: Betsy Bug’s trunk. Her head throbbed sickly as she struggled to remember how she’d got here. She listened to the muffled voices above her— And then she recognized HIS voice and the memory of the last few hours bludgeoned her like another clubbing blow from the flashlight. Who was he talking to? Had the police stopped him at another roadblock? Why the hell were they talking about
Baywatch
? Never mind. Whoever it was they could help her.
Oh please, help me!
She’d been an idiot to trust him. She wouldn’t make the same mistake again—

Tilly hammered her fists against the trunk lid, kicking up at it with her bare feet, screaming for help until her throat burned and she tasted blood and just choking it down and screeching and screaming louder.

When the screaming started, Dwayne wondered for the first time if maybe he’d underestimated the townie.

He’d heard the car before he saw it: That unmistakable Beetle grumble.

As the engine drew nearer the filling station, with a peevish sigh Dwayne wrenched his pecker from the rigid ‘O’ of Mrs. Crenshaw’s mouth, and returned the head to the spirits-filled mason jar. He screwed the lid firmly on the jar and then slid Mrs. Crenshaw back in her place beneath the counter. “We’ll finish up later, Mrs. C,” he assured her. Not that she complained so much these days. Never cussed, nor tried to spit no more. Happily swallowing whatever he gave her. Floating inside the jar, hair fanning around her bloated face like the fins of an exotic fish, Mrs. Crenshaw nodded in anticipation of finishing the job.

Dwayne stuffed his wilting pecker back inside his pants and listened to the Bug putter closer. He buttoned up his coveralls. Nestled back down on the stool behind the counter, unable to get comfortable with his balls aching for release.

Slanting the brim of his
Baywatch
cap over his eyes, Dwayne bowed his head and folded his arms across his swollen gut, and then made out like he was catching some Zs. He watched from the corner of his eye as the Bug tootled onto the forecourt and pulled up alongside the pumps.

Hunched behind the wheel was the kind of citified faggot who wouldn’t say shit if he was choking on a mouthful of it. Real pretty fella, too. Maybe Dwayne wouldn’t have to wait long to bust his nut after all. Old Lady Crenshaw would just have to sit tight and wait a while longer for hers. Dwayne grinned, his toothless smile hidden in the shadow of the brim of his cap.

He waited for the townie to toot the horn, and then pretended to startle awake like some damn fool who’d never heard a car horn before. As he stared out the window, Dwayne sized the man up and made his decision—though the fella’s fate was all but written the moment he pulled up at RITTER GAS & TOW.

Dwayne hauled himself up off his stool and shuffled through the shadows at the back of the store, pausing where he knew the townie couldn’t see him from outside. He fetched the phone off the storeroom wall and dialed.

When he called Dwight back at the house, Dwayne could hardly hear his brother over all the screaming in the background. It pissed Dwayne off royally that he was stuck working, with only Old Lady Crenshaw for company, while Dwight got the night off to ball with the Jarvis gal. The Jarvis gal had been all purdy and fresh when he’d left the house that morning, but Dwayne knew, a few hours in his brother’s company, and Dwight’d take that new gal gloss right off her. And getting sloppy seconds was never as much fun as breaking ‘em in.

But Dwayne didn’t bitch about it. He quickly apprised Dwight of the current situation. Dwight sighed on the other end of the phone line; Dwayne could tell he was reluctant to leave the Jarvis gal now that he’d warmed her up and she was hot to trot.

“Can’t you handle it?” Dwight whined.

“Now you know that’s not the way we do things,” Dwayne told him.

He hung up the phone before Dwight could protest any further.

The way they did things—and after so many years, the Ritter brothers had it down to a fine fucking art—when a fresh piece of meat arrived at the filling station, Dwayne would pump their vehicle with the Special Gas. The Special Gas was Dwayne’s own concoction and he guarded the recipe as jealously as the Colonel did his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices. The meat would drive off with a full tank of the Special Gas, and Dwayne waving them farethee-well and see-you-again-soon in their rearview mirror. The Special Gas would quickly work its magic. The vehicle would conk out within six short miles of the filling station. That’s when Dwight would just happen along in his tow truck. Coming to the rescue like a knight in shining coveralls. The meat was so pleased to have avoided the long walk back to the filling station (and there wasn’t no place else within spitting distance) that they rarely questioned the serendipity of this encounter. The poor bastards never knew what hit them. Usually Dwight’s tire-iron. A stunning blow upside the head. And then it was back to Casa de Ritter for some sport.