Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (4 page)

She looked at me with teary eyes, her whole body trembling.

“Sk-sk-sk-skuh-skuh-skuh—”

“Skunk ape?” I suggested.

She nodded, started blubbering.

I glanced at Walt and saw him sigh.

We watched as Lester continued pacing the bar.

“Alright, Lester,” I said, “exactly what the fuck happened?”

The greatest moment of Ned Pratt’s life was when he was picked as mascot for the high school football team, and got to wear the Boogaloo Baboon costume.

Ned was no athlete, not like his buddy, Lester Swash. But with his hunched back, long dragging arms, and his strange waddling gait, Ned was only a tail short of being simian himself. So when it came time for the Baboons to cast a new Boogaloo—after the previous team mascot graduated—Ned was a dead cert to be the man in the monkey suit. And credit where it’s due, he did the costume proud. Clad in the shag-furred bodysuit, the long stiff tail swishing about the red cushion of his ass, the heavy baboon mask bobbling on his shoulders like a dashboard dog, Ned would caper up and down the sideline, firing up the crowd and imagining all the cheers were just for him.

Ten years later, and it remained hard for Ned to let go of those glory days.

Ned’s Boogaloo suit was retired when Ned left high school, out of respect for the best team mascot the Baboons ever had; not to mention Ned had sweated inside the costume something fierce—it reeked like a real baboon, or one of King Kong’s jerk-off socks—it was unlikely the next Boogaloo would consent to wear it. So Ned got to keep his old outfit, the coach of the Baboons presenting it to him like a retiree’s gold watch.

Ever since then, Ned had worn that damn costume more than he did regular clothes, mask and all. You’d often see him doing odd jobs around town—a giant baboon mowing grass astride a Lawnboy was a common sight—or he’d come to The Henhouse with Lester, scuttling alongside him like he was Clyde to Lester’s Clint in
Every Which Way But Loose
.

After awhile, it gets so you can see something weird-as-shit and not bat an eye. It hardly registers. It’s just Ned.

But until Lester started talking, it had never occurred to me that Ned did his screwing while wearing the monkey suit. Never mind that there were guys who would actually
pay
good money to watch Boogaloo Baboon banging a gal.

“Porno movies?” I said, with a nervous glance at the video camera Lester was clutching.

“Yessir,” Lester nodded. He was perched on his truck like a hood ornament.

“Call me old-fashioned,” I said, “but who in their right mind’s gonna pay to watch a guy in a monkey suit banging a gal?”

“Oh-ho,” Lester said, “you’d be surprised, Reggie.”

“No shit,” I said.

Lester went on to explain, in more detail than I would’ve liked, that ‘gonzo’ porn was a flourishing subgenre of the adult entertainment industry.

“What’s wrong with
Juggs
magazine?” I protested.

“Nothing,” Walt said, with the righteousness of a longtime subscriber.

Lester shrugged. “Some guys like a little wackiness while they’re whacking it.”

I just shook my head in despair. It takes all sorts, I guess.

“It was my Uncle Hank gave me the idea,” Lester said. “You know Hank?”

“By reputation,” I said, and Lester puffed up with pride.

Hank Sanderson was another grade-A fucking moron like his nephew.

I’d once heard a story about Hank that damn near beggared belief; the short version was he’d nearly killed his wife’s Jack Russell terrier with an overdose of industrial strength laxative.

“Uncle Hank’s the one who sold me the camera for just fifty bucks.” Lester smiled at the outdated camera in his hands like he’d got a sweet deal on a magic lamp. “Hank says there’s good money to be made in porno, you just gotta find the right angle. Any damn fool can make a fuck-flick, he says. What you need is a hook to stand out from the crowd.

“So Ned and me,” Lester said, “we rent us a bunch of stag movies to watch for research. Taking it serious, you know. We’re doing our homework in Ned’s trailer. Ned’s wearing his Boogaloo suit, like
there’s
a surprise. The trailer’s hotter than hell and Ned’s Boogaloo suit is stinking like the devil wiped his ass with it. Smells so bad, I can hardly concentrate on the movie. And the movie’s one of them ones with a plot—
Rump Pumpers
—I need to concentrate. So I say to Ned, ‘Open a damn window! You smell worse than the Bigelow Skunk Ape!’

“And that’s when it hit me.” Lester mimed a lightning bolt striking down from the sky. “When it comes to ‘gonzo’ porn,” he said, “the Bigfoot porn market’s already pretty much cornered. But skunk ape porn? Well, that’s like an untapped oil field.”

Lester grinned.

“So now we got us our hook,” he said, “a leading man with his own ‘skunk ape’ costume.” I knew he meant Ned’s Boogaloo outfit, but Lester finger-quoted ‘skunk ape’ just the same. “All that was left was for us to find an actress.”

With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I looked across at Eliza.

She’d shrunk like a turtle tucking into its shell.

“Don’t judge me, Mr. Levine,” she said.

“I’m not,” I lied. Shit, and this was the girl I’d thought was out of my league. Bumping uglies with the village idiot. Mating with a moron in a monkey suit.

“It was just a foot in the door.”

“Of what? Hell?” I shook my head.

She looked at me like I was looking at Lester, which is to say, like
I
was the idiot. “Showbiz,” she said. “Lester was gonna edit me a showreel to audition for
Tryout Tramps
.”

“Christ, Eliza … You might’ve aimed just a little higher.”

“Hey!” Lester said.

“With all due respect to your talent as a pornographer, Lester.”

He seemed satisfied with that.

Walt was shaking his head gravely. “Moonlighting as a porn starlet,” he said. “I don’t like it. That’s the kinda thing that could give The Henhouse a bad name.”

A little late for that, I thought. “Let’s let that lie for now, Walt.”

I turned back to Lester. “So,” I said, trying to wrap my head around it, “you two jackasses took Eliza out to the Sticks to make a stag movie?”

Lester nodded. “That’s pretty much the size of it.”

“What happened next?”

Eliza started trembling again.

Lester held out the video camera towards me, shaking in his hands.

“Maybe it’s best if you see for yourself.”

I took the camera reluctantly, flipped out the viewing panel, pressed the play button, the contraption whirred, and then an image blinked starkly to life on the screen. Now I’m no prude. As a bachelor, I was even on nodding terms with some earlier volumes of
Tryout Tramps
. But skunk ape porn was a new one on me, and I might’ve liked a little foreplay to ease me into the idea. I didn’t get it.

Eliza was splayed over a log with her butt high up in the air, her fuzzy cavewoman britches teased down to reveal her bare ass. That would’ve been something to admire under normal circumstances. Unfortunately the aesthetic was ruined by Ned as Boogaloo Baboon, hunched behind her with his paws clamped to her hips, thrusting away with his tail swishing merrily and his red cushion ass jiggling like a big plate of jelly. Lester’s shaky camerawork was giving me motion sickness, like one of those found footage horror flicks; the image itself was just making me plain sick.

“Oh yeah, that’s it,” I heard Lester say off-camera. “Now slap her butt with your tail.”

Boogaloo did as directed—Ned seemed happier than he’d been since his mascot days—and Eliza gave a shrill squeal of pleasure.

Back in the bar, Lester had climbed down from the hood of the truck and was now peering over my shoulder to watch, smiling proudly at his handiwork.

“Back off, Lester,” I warned him, and he had the good sense to wipe the leering grin off his mug. I couldn’t help being pissed off that a goddamn football mascot had gotten friendlier with Eliza than I ever had. A fucking monkey, no less.

Meanwhile, old Lou had crept up on my blindside and was getting an eager eyeful. “How much did you say these videos’d be going for?” he asked Lester.

Before Lester could start haggling, Walt pushed him away. “Go home, Lou. Bar’s closed.” Looking like a scolded dog, Lou left the bar, crabbing carefully through the hole in the wall where the window used to be.

I snapped at Lester, “How much more of this shit do I gotta watch?”

“Coming right up,” Lester assured me.

Walt said, “So’s Ned, by the looks it.”

The performance was reaching its crescendo. Boogaloo was pounding away at Eliza like a giant clockwork monkey bashing an exotic drum kit. Ned was grunting and gasping for breath under the heavy baboon mask. Eliza was squealing with pleasure and adlibbing dirty talk that would’ve made a sailor blush.

“I think I know how this one ends,” I said.

“Keep watching!” Lester said.

But I’d seen more than enough to scar me for life, and I was about to shut off the camera, when suddenly Eliza gave a cry of disgust. She pushed Ned away and squirmed out from under him. “Cut, cut!” she said, hoisting up her fuzzy britches.

Lester said off-camera, “What the hell, Lizzie? This is the money shot!”

Eliza punched Boogaloo’s arm; Ned gave a little yelp of pain.

“It’s bad enough you two bozos couldn’t wash the suit before we started shooting,” she complained, “without this big dumb baboon dropping ass!”

Boogaloo held up his paws to plead his innocence. “Wasn’t me—”

Then Lester must’ve caught a whiff of it.

“Christ almighty,” he wheezed, “that smells bad enough to gag a gut-wagon dog.”

“It wasn’t me,” Boogaloo insisted.

But Lester wasn’t listening to his leading man.

“We’ll take five till the air clears,” he said. “Ned: Don’t lose that wood.”

That’s when something burst from the brush in an explosion of leaves and a bellowing roar. Lester’s camera whipped around for a split-second glimpse of a shadowy giant standing silhouetted against the sun. It had devil-red eyes, a matted shag of ruddy brown fur, a boulder-sized head and knuckle-dragging arms. With long, lunging strides that quaked the ground—Lester’s camera seemed to be attached to a paint-shaker—the giant stamped across the clearing straight at Boogaloo Baboon. Ned gave a muffled shriek as the beast picked him up like a plush toy and tossed him over its shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Then whatever-it-was turned and thundered back into the brush, bushes shaking wildly in its wake.

The camera zoomed in on the bushes. “Nuh-Ned?” Lester said.

“The hell was that?” Eliza said. “Where’s Ned?”

“The fuh—the fuck should I know, girl?”

The camera began tracking into the brush where the creature had vanished with Ned. Lester’s arm made a cameo appearance, raking branches aside.

“Ned?” Lester cried, in a panicked voice. “Talk to me, bud! Ned?”

“Slow down, Les!” Eliza called behind him. “Don’t leave me by myself!”

A hellish roar stopped them in their tracks—

And then they were running in the opposite direction.

I didn’t blame them; even on the recording, that roar chilled my blood and prickled the hairs on the nape of my neck.

The camera was still rolling. All you could see was their feet crashing through the undergrowth; all you could hear was their gasping breath and Eliza sobbing and Lester yelling at her to run faster—

Then another blood-freezing roar behind them, and Lester must have bashed the camera against something, because the image suddenly exploded in a Hiroshima of static, and I jerked my head back from the viewing screen.

“We—we made it back to the truck,” Lester said, “and hauled ass out of there …”

“And then crashed through my fucking window,” Walt said.

Lester glanced around the bar as if noticing the devastation for the first time.

“Yeah. Sorry, Walt. I was pretty shook up, I guess.”

“It didn’t occur to you to go see the law before coming here?”

Lester shrugged. “I needed to take the edge off.”

“Oh, smart thinking,” Walt told him. “A good skunk ape yarn’s that much more plausible from a fella stinking like a whiskey still.”

“But—” Lester said with a frown, “but it ain’t no yarn, Walt. Hell, you saw the video. You saw the damn thing for yourself.”

Walt folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t know what I saw.”

Lester looked at me pleadingly. “Reggie?”

“Play it again,” I said.

“From the top?”

“Just the skunk ape part,” I qualified, with a sheepish glance at Eliza.

I watched the footage again. Between the dim lighting, Lester’s pisspoor camerawork, and the speed of the creature, if was impossible to say for sure what the damn thing was. Even freezing the film and playing it in slow motion didn’t help. The one thing I knew for sure … ? Whatever it was, it had taken Ned.

Constable Randy-Ray Gooch entered The Henhouse through the hole in the window, ducking his head beneath the hanging shards of plate glass. The town lawman was a wiry little guy with the drooping red mustache and fiery temperament of Yosemite Sam. Inordinately proud of his uniform, he seemed to believe it made him not only a foot taller, but also righteous and bulletproof. His Sam Browne belt and boots were polished to a shine that would have been the envy of an Italian fascist. “Happened here?” Gooch said, when he saw Lester’s truck. “You open a drive-through service, Walt?”

Walt clenched his teeth. “You’re a real riot, Randy-Ray. Let me jot that one down so I don’t forget to laugh later.”

Gooch waited, seemed to realize Walt wasn’t actually going to memorialize his wit, and then hung his uniform hat on the wing mirror of Lester’s truck, like it was some kind of art deco hat stand. He hooked his thumbs into his belt.

“Heard you boys had a little trouble with some bikers last night?” he said.

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Walt said.

Gooch noted my fucked-up face. “Looks like they handled Reggie here pretty good.”

“There were five of them,” I told him.

“You counting the girl?” Lester said.

“Shut up, Lester.”